Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Coptic Christians Protest in Front of Jim Cooper's Office in Nashville on Tues




A group of Coptic Christians, and their supporters protested for several hours in front of Tennessee Congressman (D) Jim Cooper's Nashville office (as well as the site of a coffee shop and the main Nashville Public Library) late morning/early afternoon on Tues. 01-19-2010. They were protesting a lack of U. S. response to the murder of Christians in Egypt and the lack of equal treatment of Muslims and Christians in there. They chanted for for "justice," "No More Christian Blood," and other chants, all while carrying signs, religious symbols, and cardboard coffins to represent those killed (who were pictured on the "coffinns". Although this observer did not here Cooper's name mentioned (granted, it was difficult to understand all the chants,) at least one reoccurring chant was a call for action from President Obama.






Posted by The Tonsured One

Friday, January 1, 2010

The 95% Dillusion

I have recently heard several "sermons" (in some cases literally sermons, in others lectures or authoritative papers, the type I give or write myself) to the effect that there are various phrases and clichés that need to be eliminated from our vocabulary. One is "thinking outside the box" and another is a form of either "we can't because we've never done it before" or "no one does it that way." Interestingly, one phrase suggests thinking and doing things differently from others, and the others suggest conformity. The lecturers consistently (something I find ironic in light of the fact that their arguments themselves seem to be inconsistent) state that when people use the phrases, they are generally being hypocritical in the one case (e.g. by thinking outside the box they mean thinking as they themselves think, regardless of how others think, not thinking in new unique ways,) or close minded regarding new approaches (as in we should do things the way we all have done it in the past.) In each case, it was not truly the phrases that the lecturers railed against but the concepts behind them.

From a logical point of view, I find this difficult to swallow. It makes as little sense to say we need to avoid both promoting thinking differently than the majority (even if we limit the scope of that difference to conformity to our own beliefs,) and always conforming to the majority, as it does to suggest we always adhere to both concepts. I do not know for sure the reasons for the arguments the homilists use, but they make little sense, at least when proposed by the same individuals in single sermons. The arguments seemed to boil down to the beliefs that we should avoid saying no to new experiences because of fear of the new, and that those who go against the stream often are just trying to do things differently for their own reasons. I suspect that there was supposed to be a middle ground argument, that it was alright to go against the stream for the right reasons, but in none of the cases I refer to was this argument ever made. Just "stop claiming to think outside the box" and "stop saying think inside the box."

The real irony for me is that the speakers/writers have all used the arguments that the criticized in their lectures as examples of undesirable attitudes in arguments (or, rather, to avoid arguments) with me. My work in cloud computing, social media, collaborative communication, history and archives has been dismissed as something that was "a fad, too much influenced by the popular culture, just going along with the crowd," on the one hand, and as something that should be dismissed out of hand because 95% of other churches/organizations/business do not do things that way on the other. In short, my ideas do not bear considering because they are both too mush the product of the way everyone else is thinking and because no one else does it that way. Back to the old quote: "Nobody goes to that restaurant anymore; it's too crowded!".

Oh, for my Christian preacher friends who tell me we do not need to institute some of these programs because 95% of the other churches they know about do not do them:

a) I have seen and experienced pretty convincing evidence that you are not up to date on such things. In more than one of my jobs and professional organization activities, I have discovered that there is a growing demand among local churches for this type of work. Those of us who work above the local church level as advisers to others have a hard time keeping up with the demand for our consulting services. The fact that such activities as records management and archives have been brought into the general world of litigation practices have increased the need for local churches to follow specific practices in history, archives, and use of the Internet. The number of churches to successfully implement these things is still fairly small, but these issues have been and are being addressed at all levels of several confessions and denominations, our own included. The statement that "95% do not do things that way" is demonstrably incorrect.

b) Should the (95% number have been correct, it is also likely that close to 95% of the churches of which I know do not have committed ministries to win disciples for Christ in their own immediate communities. Even should that number be lower, do you suggest that we use the same criterion for determining if we want to establish a more committed evangelism effort in the church? "Well, we could try to reach out to the un-churched, even those who have not heard the Gospel, in our neighborhood, but 95% (or 85%, 75%) of churches don't really do that in a committed way, so there is no reason for us to!"

Well, at least that would be consistent.

The Tonsured One