bonar crump

bonar crump
husband - father - reader - runner - picker - grinner - lover - sinner

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

How a Consumer Thinks

by Donald Miller
http://tinyurl.com/4s4qukk
"Rivalry is consumer thought based in dualism, the pesky habit of turning everything into this or that kind of divisions. Dualism is a way for a lesser brain to feel like it understands the world and thus feel control or security. We are taught to be for or against something rather than to understand an issue from multiple perspectives. We are taught there are only two sides to an issue. This is of course absurd.

Talk show hosts cannot afford to be objective. They must make people feel like they understand an issue and also feel like they have an enemy who is out to get them. They must take sides. They must make you believe that something that belongs to you is being taken away. That’s the fastest way into your pocketbook. You will pay them to defend you from an enemy that may or may not exist. They can’t afford to be objective. They want your money so they have to make you afraid. They must oppose a certain and named enemy, and that enemy must be evil. If they don’t do this, nobody will listen and they won’t make money. We are drawn to sensationalism."


This one's for Jamie

Breaking Benjamin - Until the End
Phobia - 2006


My Take: There’s no such thing as the Bible and never has been

By Timothy Beal, Special to CNN

 Editors note: Timothy Beal is the author of "The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book." He is a Florence Harkness Professor of Religion at Case Western Reserve University.
"Trying to save the Bible by recovering the Adam of all Bibles is as futile as trying to save the marriage by recovering the Eden of married life. There’s no such thing, so there’s no going back. Our desire for a pure, unadulterated, original Bible, “in the beginning,” is an illusion that shields and distracts us from the real, unstable, often terrifyingly ambiguous relationship with another that is the life of faith.

Life is crazy uncertain, so it’s understandable that many of us want religion and especially the Bible to offer deliverance from it. But it doesn’t. It’s not a rock but a river, not a book of answers but a library of questions. When we take it seriously, and soberly, it calls us deeper into the wilderness – away from the sunny shoreline of the island and toward the uncharted interior.

That wilderness, like the ones in which the Israelites wandered and Jesus was tested, can be a place of danger and disorientation, but also of renewal and reawakening."