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1. Murder as entertainment. Would someone please explain why it’s acceptable in our society to indiscriminately splatter blood across the screen for young children to see, while romance and sex are deemed to be evil? It is so hypocritical. The Bible says that “life is in the blood,” and when we make human blood such an expendable unit, we attack the beauty of life.
2. Music without emotion. I like a good beat just like the next guy–but music has the capacity to touch the human heart, which is the doorway to the soul. Honestly, nothing does it quite as well. When we fail to use that ability of the medium to reach into the emotions of our fellow-travelers, we miss the greatest blessing available for being tuneful.
3. Dress-up religion. Here’s my thought: if you’re wearing a costume, it’s probably Halloween. Any time we feel the need to don garb or insert ritual instead of reality and truth into our worship of God, we are secretly admitting that it’s a childhood game of hide-and-seek, which really has no practical application.
4. Movies that don’t move me. A friend recently told me that he goes to movies to be entertained. That’s fine and dandy. I’m all for entertainment, but life is too short to allow ourselves to view a meaningless scene that does not enrich all the parts of our human vessel. So please, give me some heart that touches my soul while renewing my mind, while making my skin tingle with excitement. And life certainly is too short for us to be deterred from discovering our essence by portraying images on the screen that are anti-human or anti-Golden Rule.
5. Mirrors in the shower room. I don’t get it. If you think you have a great body, you certainly don’t require a mirror to tempt you to admire yourself, generating even greater arrogance. Or if your body is under construction or in transit to a better self, then viewing the present progress is nothing less than discouraging.
6. Opinions mingled with statistics. I welcome your opinion. I’m interested in what you have to say. You don’t have to agree with me. But please don’t bring along a bunch of facts and stats that you have swung in your direction to convince me that I am in the minority and that your opinion is held by the bulk of the populace. Honestly, my dear friend, I don’t mind being in the minority. It is where most miracles are spawned.
7. The made-up fight between men and women. Yes. It’s made up. It’s manufactured to accomplish two goals–to sell products which isolate one sex from the other, and to avoid spending the necessary time to understand one another instead of just bumping into each other for brief moments of pleasure. We will eventually have to grow out of our childish belief that the other sex actually does have “cooties.”
8. Brainless patriotism. It doesn’t matter how many times you chant, “Support the troops!” It doesn’t make you better than the person who works for peace so that the troops don’t have to go over to foreign lands and take a bullet for us. Here’s my gift to the soldiers on this Memorial Day weekend: thank you for being willing to fight. I appreciate it so much that I’m going to work very hard to make sure you don’t have to.
9. Destiny. We occasionally go through intervals in our society when we either become too lazy or too frightened to be responsible for our own lives. So for a brief season we focus on how God, the devil or even fairies control our futures. It’s ridiculous. Right now our literature, entertainment and even our churches are filled with the notion that God–who created free will–has changed His mind and really wants to manipulate us to do His bidding. Pretty soon we will grow weary of being helpless and will accept the great gift of being allowed to use our talents to make our own lives better.
10. Fussing about God. Since none of us really understand God, to fuss about Him is not only worthless and comical, but also may be the definition of arrogant. I will tell you bluntly–no one I know (including me) believes the WHOLE Bible. We all have favorite passages which we push to the forefront to promote our particular rendition of Mr. Almighty. So since that is the case, I have no intention of fussing with you about your interpretation of divine matters. I have decided to simplify my life down to, “NoOne is better than anyone else,” and enjoy the elementary mind-set of that concept while pursuing the complexities of its application.
Those are the ten things, on this beautiful Friday, that make me crazy. Each one of them can be tempered by those moderate souls who feel that I may be a little over-wrought in my representations. But there is a time to take a stand and a season where we refuse to accept mediocrity just because it’s wearing a fashionable hat. The question is not whether things make me crazy, but whether that particular brand of lunacy drives me into an asylum where I self-medicate and hide out from the world around me–or if it pushes me into the street to protest the injustice I see to the best of my ability.
I am not a radical, but I refuse to be a pushover. So until things get better and human beings are allowed to be human without having to walk around in lies, I will lift up the banner that God loves us as we are–but he also loves the fellow next to us, the lady down the street and all those infidels in other lands who might just be planning our demise.
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