Culture according to Big Bang Theory

My youngest daughter has gotten hooked on the TV show, The Big Bang Theory.  I therefore catch snippets of reruns as I am usually cooking when it is on.  The other day they are revolving around the concept of dating and sex.  The nerdy guys are clueless, the females in question not sure having sex with them is "right".  (and she has never been on a date, so this kind of stuff does worry me!)

So, one of the guys is on date number three and learns that the female expects them to have sex since this is the important date.  Really?  Is this what the California perspective has dropped to?  See you three times and then I have to decide to have sex with you or drop you?  Really?

I know from a 1970's study they found that if you spent 50 hours in total with someone, across a short period of time, you could expect to either be in bed with them or "friended".  I remember laughing at that one.  But, I observe, make measured estimates and I would guess that 50 hours was certainly true for teenagers and singles I have seen in the church through the decades.  But near as I can tell, if you truly are a nerd, it might be closer to 5,000 hours - at which point you are friended anyways so it is all a mute point.  And if you are created hopeless, well, you will never actually understand the whole perspective even if you are made aware, because it is nonsense.

So, as I thought on this, as my numb fingers worked on loosing frozen bolts (I was having to pour hot water on the nuts to help loosen them without snapping them), I realized just how hopeless natural man really is.  And oh so much suddenly made more sense.

You go to the grocery store and the magazine racks are covered with cover after cover with sex topics that are supposed to lure you into buying the magazine.  The message?  Sex is where it is at, it is what there is, good sex is the basis of your "loving" relationship, sex is how you can find  your partner, sex is how you will keep your partner (that was the list from yesterday's visit to the grocers).  Yeah, I never quite got that message before.  This is the lie being shoved down our youth's throat, this is the lie our young adults have come to believe, this is the lie that leads to broken marriages, relationships and badly damaged people whom never should have been.  It is the lie my daughter bought into, as well as her mother, it is the lie I tried to show them without success, it is lie my son and all of "his" bought into, it is the lie my two oldest daughters bought into, it is the damage that is hard to walk away from because it is experiential and therefore more true than what reality is supposed to be.

If the above paragraph describes you, I do not have an answer for you apart from walking away from that lifestyle, repenting (for real this time), and living a life glorifying to God and not your hormones.  And yeah, that is not going to be easy because you are going to be fighting a drug called sex and an evil agent whom knows exactly how to pull your strings to make you come back into the world.

So, if the nerd gathering is a reflection upon truly natural man, if the state of man is so hopeless that sex is the only thing seen as having any real value in a relationship, then it also stands to reason that natural man can not understand the pull/lure of God because it is not based on sexual tension or allure.  (Which explains oh so much about crossed wires in 2012 for me!)  And yet, there is this thing called friendship which each of the TV show's nerds have mostly attained without sexual orientation.

But, if friendship is understood, then why is friendship no longer understood within a romantic context?  A friendship, a real friendship, seems to run about three years to define and to form the commitments necessary to form long term relationships.  The time period I mentioned is from studies done through the years, it seems to have been verified by my faithless bride.  We did not have three years, more like nine months.  We met, we "knew" we were the one, we engaged, we committed religiously and she lost it before the governmental seal of approval could be applied.  So, yeah, I like the idea of three years now.  She should have been my best friend beforehand.  (Conversely, thank you God from saving me from the disaster that one would have become!  And for the record, I was doing my best to be a Godly man - apparently my best friend was not.)

And I guess that is the point of the Big Bang Theory - friendship has nothing to do with sex, sex has nothing to do with a desire for more than self satisfaction, and self satisfaction actually has nothing to with love or you - it is all about me, my desire, my satisfaction.  Yeah, the ultimate egotism ...

Historically, we can look back to the Epicurean Movement of the ancient Greek world.  Whatever the male's desire, it is good for the body, both positive and negative.  Pursue your passions with gusto because you are only going to go through life once, so grab all the life you can!

Paul did not care much for the Epicureans, the Roman empire loved them however, and with the objectification of all females - it meant all females, any female, any time, any where, were created only for your (male) use and pleasure.  That is what this pagan trend of thought leads to and will again and again and time again!

If you are male, do you honestly love and care for the females in your life?  Do you believe they were created solely for your and/or other's pleasures?  And oh by the way, you have nothing to say about some other man taking the females in your life by force for his pleasure when he deems fit ...

If you are female, how do you feel about being valued only for your ability to be part of a sex act?  We are not talking any form of love here, we are talking violence at the hands of strangers!  That is where you are headed if this trend continues.

To disagree at this point is to disagree with history, which has repeated itself many times in this regard, in various forms!

Of course, to disagree with the culture and the way it is headed is to set  yourself apart.  To make a spectacle of yourself, to draw undue attention to yourself, to invite every form of attack.

Just as discussions over the female slave trade in our culture, the concept of a female's desire for purity or commitment is not really appreciated in this male centric western culture we have created.

Face it, your body is your body, you can do as you wish with it.  But, why you would not desire the best for yourself - simply by walking away from culture and healing, then beginning to find love in earnest - defeats me.

Where Is God?

“Night, is a book by Elie Wiesel about his experience in the German concentration camps. “One day,” writes Wiesel, “as we returned from work, we saw three gallows… The SS [guards] seemed more preoccupied, more worried, than usual. To hang a child in front of thousands of onlookers was not a small matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was pale, almost calm, but he was biting his lips as he stood in the shadow of the gallows… ‘Where is merciful God, where is He?’ someone behind me was asking. At the signal, the three chairs were tipped over… Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive… The child, too light, was still breathing… And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death… Behind me, I heard the same man asking: ‘For God’s sake, where is God?’ And from within me, I heard a voice answer; ‘Where is He? This is where – hanging here from this gallows…'

Where is God when a child is shot in Newtown or hung in Auschwitz or killed in an American drone air strike or for that matter dies of cancer? I don’t know. There is no answer.

Talk of God giving humans free will and thus allowing us to face the consequences of our choices solves nothing. If the creator could intervene personally when it came to the magic tricks in the Bible like making the sun stand still for a day in a battle, he could have done something about that child gasping out his young life. He didn’t. Theology that tries to paper this horrible fact over with explanations about why there is evil is nothing but nervous blather.

But I take comfort in the fact that sometimes a person of immense courage follows Christ to a cross. Such acts point to a God that had the empathy to share our fate. Sometimes one person’s example gives me hope that following Christ might be the path that leads us out of the hell we’ve made, even if I’ll never know why we’re here in the first place, let alone why God didn’t just make things simpler, better, faster rather than taking the slow path of gradual ethical evolution."

***

If you are Christian, if you deal regularly with the unchurched, sometimes even the churched, you will hear the wail and the anger - because there is no God, because no fair God would allow ...

And how do you answer them?

When I think of my late friend Peter, telling of me of the nun Maria's plight in a Magadan death gulag ...
When I think of the 6.5 million Jews, the 7.5 million Christians executed by my father's Reich ...
When I think of Lenin and his 19 million executions to purify the land ...
When I think of the 30 million Stalin in his paranoia executed ...
When I think of Mao Tse Tung and his 32 million deaths ...
Or Pol Pot ...
Or Rwanda ...
Or Ruby Ridge, Idaho ...
Or Waco, Texas ...
Or the assassination of John F Kennedy ...
Or a record setting typhoon ...

Where is God when the millions, or even the one is crying out in their death rattle?
Where is God in the storm, the waves, the tides, the mass deaths by nature?

How can a fair God ...

And that is the rub, God is not "fair".  If he was you would already be dead, as would I.
God is a "just" God, he does what is right, not what is fair.

When we see with human eyes, we are looking for fairness.
When we see with God's eyes, we are looking for justice.

And when we are judging God, we are judging by human standards, not God's standards.

Where is God?  Allowing man to trash and destroy His creation, even human life.  He has already provided the only standard of measure for life - the ability to stand with Him but acknowledging His son's sacrifice, at human hands.

Where is God in the storm or other natural disaster?  Perhaps judging a perverse culture, perhaps destroying false witnesses, perhaps testing the faith of His people, perhaps calling His people home because it is time.

We are not smart enough to know.  I can look at a culture dedicated to sexual vice and know God will call them to judgement.  I can look at authorities whom are ruthless or corrupt and know that God is going to call them to account for their deeds.  I do not know when, I do not know how, but anyone can read Jeremiah or Isaiah in the Bible and see that God has a standard and He was willing to use it even against His own people - to their own destruction!  How much more so for a just God, to do the same to  _____ (fill in the blank).

We are the creation, not the creator, we can not judge how He uses us, when he uses, where he will use us - we just have to be willing to be used, ready to be used and expect to be used.  The problems arise when we say, "Well, God would never work that way!"  Really?  Maybe you need to study your Bible a little more closely before you side with Western (American) Culture's beliefs about God.

The real God does not cause sin, that does not mean He can not use it to His advantage.  The real God does have control of everything and is more than willing to turn Satan loose upon a world unable to recognize much less fight against it without the Holy Spirit's intervention.

Everyday, in the world around you, in your daily life, God is there, God is working.  Can you see Him?  Can you see His handiwork?  Can you show others?

But, if you are not a Christian, well, there is no requirement that God does anything in your life or around you, other than to continually offer you the chance to make your peace with Him - through you acceptance of His son's death as the payment for your doing things your way and not His.  And then you get to be held accountable for having followed teachers of the truth ...  (hint, we are surrounded by those quite willing to lie to us and mislead us!)

So where is God right now?  Calling the hurting, the desperate to look to Him and not theirselves for the answer to their problems.  Calling you to account - right now, right here ...

That does not mean you are saved from death or punishment, but it does mean there is a better way from what you knew on this Earth.

Senior Moment

I had one of those senior moments yesterday, you know, you forget something you are supposed to know! ARGH! I hate it when it is just there. on the tip of the brain stem, and nothing.....!

Yes, I forgot the address for my blog. But, it was also a God moment, as you will shortly see.

So, I googled my address and got one hit, I did not even look, I just clicked. And up came the page for a woman in the mid-west, someone whom is an award winning photographer and writer. So, I was suddenly sidetracked - this is going to be good I thought!

But, as I looked through her photos, they were "off", something not right about them. Some nudity, nothing tastless, but it was worse "off" than the rest of the photos. They would be called artistic. They let me unsettled, no not because I am a guy, but because God was trying to tell me something and I was not seeing what He was seeing. So, I roamed through the various paths eventually ending up at a very hard to find yet painful biography.

In her words she told of how she had been raped by her uncle at 11 and the disasters which had followed in her life. Suddenly, I was seeing her as I had my daughter and I understood, the perspective all too well. I understood her damage, I understood why she had become whom she had become, I understood her photographs of the brokenness of femininity.....

And I thought to send her an email, but then stopped. No, God has not programmed me to reached out to more than just my daughter, at least at this time. Yeah, I may understand that woman's brokenness but I do not have the "answer" for her, I only know the answer for my daughter. This suffering woman I can not be a part of her fix.

So, I told my "niece" about this and my desire - yet my own frustration. I must wait, to heal the one I am supposed to, the rest are on God's list.....

And that really frustrates me.

Listen Up Guys!

Blogger has a little feature called Statistics. Its purpose is for the owner of the blog to know what it is that people are reading, how often, where are they located and then a little section called Links.

Now Links is what this post is all about. It tells me where you have come from and where referring links are located. So, what you say?

Well, a great many of my male readers come to my site, following their visits to PORNO sites on the internet. Yes, the pages you were on, before you hit your bookmark to come here, were actually then stored on my Links page. So, when I see what my readers are up to - well I find that my (probably) male readers are off in PORNO-land before coming here.

I only care from the stand point that yesterday 38 of you visited porn then came here.

Yes, the internet makes porn only a mouse click away. Porn is what will always separate you from finding happiness with a real woman. And because you males are visual, those images are burned into your memory because God made us visual creatures.

No, there is no magic eraser that God can use to remove what you willing allow into your minds. The internet is the opportunity, your mouse click the temptation, what you mind will do with the images will lead you into sin. Pure and simple. And once in, Satan will call back images at your most weakest moments, in order to lead you back into what he hopes will be your slavery to sin! Yeah, you get to suffer spiritually for a lifetime, of memories of sights you never should have had.

But, you can repent, you can ask God to bury those images in your mind, you can fight temptation, you may still fail - and then you get to start over at the beginning of this sentence - ad nauseum. But, know that with time it will become less frequent.

Okay, guys - be a man enough to just say no to porn. Do not allow it to be a part of your life. Realize that God created woman - a wife - for you to find and then experience pleasure with. Not imagines of damaged young women on the internet or in print to fill your fantasies. If you have ever known one of these young women, and I have - she was a friend in high school, whom went on to quite a lucrative career - until she woke up one day. But then she discovered too late the cost of the life she led, dying far too young last year. Why can I be strong in this one area? Because she was a friend I cared for, because I saw the cost on that young woman's life. She at first didn't care, she was damaged, but I did and eventually she did, and that lifestyle cost her, her life.

No, the porn industry feeds on the young girls damaged by events which should have never happened. It feeds the minds of males, images captured for eternity, ready to lead the curious male down a road they were never to travel either. Perhaps even damaging even more young women in the process. It causes the stain of Human Trafficking to exist and not be fought by our leaders, whom themselves are trapped by the same problems as you. The sex trade is slavery and just your visiting sites as you have will help to feed the industry more, damaging more young men, requiring more young women to be damaged in turn, so they can be used to entice more young men.....

It is an endless cycle and the only one whom can stop it - is you. Make the decision, walk away and do not look back.

Concerning Freedom

Reading in my favorite book - John (8:33-36)

I have lived under Socialism, Communism, Dictatorships and various forms of democracy.  Amazingly, Christianity works very well under all of these make believe forms of government.  As I point out to my students: the Pax Romana was perhaps the most repressive form of government ever inflicted upon mankind.  And Christianity flourished under it.  How come?

They rarely have an answer because true Freedom is not understood by this culture.

Our western culture is in denial and that denial is the roadblock to you finding true freedom.  We each have willingly enslaved ourselves by our own desires, and yet think ourselves free.

False freedom is actually true slavery!

As I have come to further understand on this subject, across the past two years, there are many forms of slavery.  Materialism, desire for position, desire for power, fear and yes, even debt are all the slave owners of the 21th century.  For me, it was learning too late in life how finances really work and now face a financially crushing debt - given the circumstances I find myself in.  Whom could have ever imagined an 11 time employee of the year could be blindly laid off, without management thinking about it!  But it has happened and my 90 days to debt payoff became 38 years!

The free person is one who has decided on and chosen God as their master.

Slavery is serving a master you have not chosen, but the result of our sinful desires.

So, no matter where you live, no matter what form of government is inflicted upon you, no matter your social standing or amount of wealth: you have a choice to be FREE or a SLAVE.  If living to please others, being dominated by materialism or sinful desires = you are a SLAVE.  Conversely, if you SOLE desire is to please your Creator (hint: GOD!), you have just discovered freedom!

If you want to understand freedom, read a book called, "Of Whom the World was not Worthy", Marie Chapian, Bethany House Publishers.  I hate the title, but by the time you have finished reading this you will come to understand that "freedom" you understand, is not the FREEDOM God understands.

Please choose wisely.....