September 08, 2015
Part of the Story
Prior to being arrested Kentucky
county clerk Kim Davis was grilled by reporters for ignoring federal laws on
issuing same sex marriage licenses. One shouted, “By whose authority are you refusing
to issue marriage licenses?” When she responded, “God’s authority” the reporter
shot back, “Well, your God is not my god!” I see a number of similarities between
this situation and the early church. Rather than simply reporting the news we have
Pharisees running around posing as reporters and making themselves part of the
story. “Jesus entered the temple courts, and, while he was teaching, the chief
priests and the elders of the people came to him. “By what authority are you
doing these things?” they asked. “And who gave you this authority” (Matt 21:23
NIV).
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2 comments:
Gail;
-----The reporter’s question was proper. The reporter’s response was great. It wasn’t great because of what it meant. It was great because it revealed the location of the viral infection destroying this nation God created for making some very key affects in His closure of mankind’s age of evil.
-----Social psychology still builds with the same basic block the Scottish Moralists observed in the eighteenth century. This block is also foundational to individual psychology. In fact, the way groupings of concepts, attitudes, and emotions within an individual function in forming his stream of consciousness and core beliefs is very similar to the way many individuals’ characters, personalities, affinities, and repulsions together form cultures, sub-cultures, and groups. I think the process of comparison may be the most operative one of mental life. The senses bring information into the mind on a continuous basis. But your sense of placement in and interaction with your surroundings arises from the results of numerous sub-conscious comparisons of new information to accepted memories. Resulting attitudes are then passed into the consciousness for it’s response. The Scottish Moralists theorized that by far the most commonly made conscious responses involved those learned from watching other people behave and respond.
-----Inside the individual’s mind are complex “highway systems” concepts and emotions travel in forming the perceptions which are consciousness. Realizing these “systems” are actually tendencies toward meanings (mostly directed by resistance against other meanings) rather than just neurological wiring hints at two elements affecting culture. The first is an opposite which demands, and gets, the second. There are no “highway systems” for the travel of higher thought between individuals of a culture. Thoughts and ideas fly around seemingly freely inside your own head. But thoughts and ideas must be carried from person to person within a culture by one terribly inefficient communication device or another (until modern technology, that is.) Culture’s made of a massive amount of shared concepts amongst a great number of people. Terribly oversimplifying because space constrains anything better, our culture has changed rapidly because a large portion of its people have given their trust to a media system making its business the transport of only certain ideas for reflecting and certain ideas for repulsion.
-----It would be better if this cargo of ideas were those of all the individuals comprising that culture. It would be best if the cargo were shaped by the Lord’s ideas. But either presumes the media system is a highway system only. Yes. Unbiased. In such a case, this reporter would not have dared to make any references to his own belief. His reference would have been to the people’s belief, and his mood would have been constrained to the subjunctive rather than to the declarative, because he can not speak for everyone.
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-----We are now three crops of children deep into this culture where observing community and especially family situations for behavioral cues has taken the back seat to acquiring them from the boob tube. How human nature forms culture is changing greatly, and the destroyers of godliness know it. Twenty years ago, having awakened to the enormity of sway in their grasp, psychology researchers instituted a study which turned into a program, then a goal to catalogue the normal human responses to challenges against particular cultural and personal beliefs. It aimed at forming a dictionary of actions causing particular reactions to be used as a resource. INTERACT, they call it. INTERACT brilliantly exposes how much they think the public is their project.
-----This massive media system realizes the effect individual hearts connected to the Lord might make upon the culture if heard in equal quantity with equal validation and vividness. They must not and do not ever refer to His disciples’ ideas except in derogatory and twisted terms. Thus the smarmy reports mouthful of verbal vomit. The culture-shapers -the “Lean Forward” people- broadcast through every media channel the image they want people to mimic (any resemblance to Rev 13:14 is quickly becoming less metaphorical.)
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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