We Still Have a Dream...

Dr. Mae C. Jemison

The first African American

woman in space (1992)

We Still Have a Dream...

Dr. Mae C. Jemison was born in 1956 in Alabama and grew up in Chicago, IL.  She is the first African American woman to go into space. She's a medical doctor, an educator, and, of course, an astronaut.

I thought about Dr. Jemison when I was pondering all the divisive, confusing, racially charged, and, ultimately, violent images we were seeing in the news lately.  According to Wikipedia, "Dr. Jemison says she was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.; to her King's dream was not an elusive fantasy but a call to action. 'Too often people paint him like Santa -- smiley and inoffensive,' says Jemison. 'But when I think of Martin Luther King, I think of attitude, audacity, and bravery.'^[8] Jemison thinks the civil rights movement was all about breaking down the barriers to human potential. "The best way to make dreams come true is to wake up."^[8]

I get Dr. Jemison's way of thinking and my reaction to these days of turmoil is captured in this rather long-ish essay below, not so much a blog post...
We still have a dream. We do. But we are heartsick. And we have a lot of work still to do to handle issues we must overcome in our country today.  

We still have that "call to action" Dr. King gave us and we need to get busy!  We have to shore up our communities, and FAST! The people who want to kill our dreams are trying to convince us there's no point in dreaming any more. But they are lying.

Practical Issues: We have so much poverty, fatherlessness, joblessness, heartache, fear, corruption, and educational deficit in our country that we need to get busy and do PRACTICAL things to overcome these specific issues. It will take work in our families, neighborhoods, and churches, but there are a lot of us, and we can do it!  

I believe in America and in Americans. What we want is to be able to get on in life, live in peace, support our families, make an impact on the world, have friends, our church of whatever type, and the freedom our country represents. It's just not in us to give up! There are more Mae Jemison's out there in every town! Young people hoping for their dreams to come true and parents that want them to make it!   We Still Have a Dream! 

Spiritual Issues:  This stuff in the news and the distrust that it brings does not come from the Lord. This is spiritual warfare we are engaged in -- evil hurts people, uses people, puts people under terrible pressure. We all have to fight fear, and racism, and division together,  with the tools that God has given His Church - the gospel, love for each other, mercy, prayer, the Scripture, practical benevolence to others, partnership across racial divides, and refusal to let ourselves be used by political people that use tools of division. We can win together, but if we are not together in trying to live up to "love your neighbor as yourself," all of us will lose. We cannot separate the message of Dr. King from his Christian faith which informed the message.  The Lord has Truth for us in the Bible, if we will read, understand, and apply it to our problems.

Grandmothers and grandfathers know how to do this.  We had to do it in the 50s, and 60s. If we could get all our various colors of grandmas and grandads in the same room around our towns, and pick some things to work on, we could fix one item at a time, just us and our friends!  We can leave this legacy for our country.  We have a lot of life left in us and we are wise.  For example:

  a. Our young people are in deep trouble in our cities and towns. They do not have the guidance or the help they need.  They are broke.  They can't get a job. They can't afford college because universities are just breaking their backs with the cost of education.  They have to go to a local place to school, so we better be helping them to go there!  Let's talk up the future to every business and ask them to provide local Junior College and specialty education (chefs, graphic artists, welders) scholarships and, if they keep their grades up, renew them - so we build local leadership for the future!  

  b. Getting money from the government, relying on people who are professional talkers, and people who helicopter into our communities, will not fix these things. Local hard work will fix these things.  So start by giving 2 hours a week to some practical effort - just do it. Food bank, job corps, baby-sitting for a single mom.  Then you will fall in love with the people there and will do more! 

  c. Our Christ-following people, our grandmothers, our grandfathers -- the elders of all races who are in our churches -- we can lead the fix for many of these things. Some have money and some have none.  Some participated together in building our communities from the ground up!  We are sick of this fighting and getting nowhere!  We have eyes in our heads and we can see the problems.  Get in your churches and plan something practical to help these young people get out of poverty!  Take care of their families if a guy goes in the service!  Get several churches to join to help pay for security around a that all-important grocery store and bank in your community!  You know, start with the basics.  One of you just start in your church and it will go from there.

  d. This is local and grass roots!  Let's get our men and women together and look at what's going on in an area about 1 mile around our churches and get to work on the poverty -- the hunger, the desperation -- by walking the neighborhoods and getting to know each other and helping.  Just KNOW who is in trouble and help them out even if they've never set foot in a church!  Some of them will find Jesus, too, and join you.  Then you can go to 2 miles!  If you need help, call in another church team from another church.  Get the women to do it!  They'll figure it out!

  e.  Let's invite the policemen to come to our schools.  Get the policeman to talk about how to become a policeman and why they want to protect people and change things for the better.  Our men can get them to come.  Get them into some groups and let them just talk, and talk about how a young person can change the world by being African American or Asian or Hispanic or Anglo COP. 

We church people can feed them all!  You think that's small?  It's big.  And we can pray over them.    We can take notes.  We can work on what they say.  Don't think it can work?  Well try it anyway and ask God Almighty to make it work!  It's better than a riot, right?  This is the "Talking and Eating Reconciliation Method."

  f. Pair up every fatherless junior high and high school young man with a man in the church who is married, loves his wife, has children, and a job.  Pair them up with a guy who will talk with them and pray with them and give them a sandwich and a ride to GED classes, or to work, or school, and to church. One guy can even work with 2-3 boys.  Work on the church grounds, paint a room.  Go to the ball game.  Go fishing.  Whatever, with a guy who cares!  Do the same with a girl's group - girls need community and grandmas who are looking out for them.

  g.  Let's pair up every single mom with a couple of grandmothers and the church.  We need to help her get it together and keep it together!  We can do this!  A few casseroles in her refrigerator would be a good start!  Just pretend she's in your Sunday School class!  Treat her like you wish you'd been treated!

  h.  Let's invite the firemen and policemen to our church to get to know them and their families.  Help them get to know your church people.  Let's pray over them.  Feed them.  Lay hands on them.  Call on God to protect them.  Take those firemen a big dinner sometime!

  i. Men, go out there and pray in the bars and the hangouts with those who will.  Let's invite those kids in the gangs to come eat at your church.  You don't think they will come?  Well, it might take some time...but we have time...we need music, you know, and lots of food.  And you guys in Anglo churches, make that music Latino sometimes, will you?

  j. Let's create REAL apprenticeship programs that start a bit above minimum and builds to a real job and future in our businesses.   Not a higher minimum wage, but a real path to making a superior wage in their future, not a small one.  A path that led Dr. Jemison to the life she dreamed about can be a path for many, many young people!

Let's put all our kids on a path to working, managing, and owning our businesses in the future.  You guys in the labor unions - get off it and do this, too!  If we don't, we won't HAVE any businesses in the future -- we'll just have people stuck in poverty. I'd like to call on every franchisor in the United States to create an apprenticeship program for their franchise, and especially for young people who would like to grow up to OWN a franchise!  Wouldn't that be fabulous! 

I do not accept that entire masses of American people actually desire to live at the bottom of the economic ladder for their entire life!  I just believe they don't know how to get on the rungs so they can get out!  They also think that if they get onto one of those rungs, someone above them will step on their hands so they will fall off.  We just do not have to let that happen to them.  We can protect them.  

America is still great!  If you've been anywhere else lately, you know that's true!  We are losing our way with reckless choices, moral decay, and the leadership of political fools.   But we can run our own towns and cities and schools and churches.  The real work of America is ALWAYS LOCAL!  We still have a dream! 

Yes, we need local government to flatten the crack houses, build some roads, open up the neighborhoods, build some hospitals and schools, and help us with crime.  We do NOT need to listen to the press and pundits talking about how rotten we are and how much we hate each other!  We are not rotten!  Very few are full of hate!  

We are just getting DESPERATE because we have problems, and we are a country of people who want to DO SOMETHING about these problems!  Don't be afraid.   Just get some folks you know and start.

We have leaders right in our neighborhoods!  We don't need some TV talking head, or political hack, regardless of their politics, to tell us what to do!  We know how to fix things in our communities.  Gather the people in your church -- survey the needs in a 1 mile radius around your church.  Put YOUR thinkers to work on those things with the people and  ministries who are leading the way in the suffering areas around you. 

Together we can do it!  Lately we have had a really good picture of how divisive and wretched our whole country can be if we don't get moving! 

Ask God Almighty to lead you.  Tell Him you're sorry you sat on your duff and let this country He gave us slide so far.  Trust Jesus.  

We come from stock that won World Wars, and fought in Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm and Shield, Afghanistan, Iraq -- all over the world -- for peace and freedom and justice.  We can surely do this at home!

We can.  We can.  We can!  We still have a dream!  

.

The Taxonomy of Life, Spirit, and Ministry

Part 1 of 4 –The Taxonomy of Life

When I was in high school, I worked for the summer at the Gulf Research Lab in Ocean Springs, MS. The outcome of that work was a paper entitled, "A Taxonomic Key to the Marine Plankton Diatoms of the Mississippi Sound." Why would anyone care about this little paper by a kid in high school? Well, taxonomy is the means of classification based on shared features for groups of creatures. These millions of tiny one-celled creatures were important to commercial fisherman.

You'll find the fish you want to eat hanging out eating the plankton lunch they prefer! BTW, the tiny phytoplankton in our oceans produce about half of the world's oxygen with the other half produced by trees, etc. on land. This important work is reserved for plankton.

I learned deep things while pulling that plankton net through the water and designing the taxonomic key to the identification of these beautiful little single-cell plants. Mainly, God drilled into me that He was indeed the Creator. There was no way that chance could produce what I was seeing with my own eyes. He designed it. He did it for a purpose. The variety, engineering, intricacy, and beauty of each little diatom was the result of His imagination and generosity. Each little diatom had a role to play in the world, a job to do that it's design was imminently suited to do.

Taxonomy can act as a metaphor for classification that works in other aspects of life. Before we are done with this 4-part blog, we'll build that taxonomy. My philosophy of effective ministry derived from the truths I learned about HOW God makes things and the Taxonomy of Life demonstrated in His world and His Word.

Taxonomy of Life Principle #1: God makes things according to their kind. (Genesis 1: 11-12, 21-25)

Diatoms, babies, and chipmunks do not start life as one thing and end up another. Nope. DNA, God's grand internal code for "kind," provides a blueprint to make an adult chipmunk out of a couple of little chipmunk cells, just as a baby is made from a couple of human cells. It's in the plan.

Because "kind" is in the plan, we can observe creatures (now even at the DNA level) and be pretty certain that the description of similarities and differences in creatures is a reliable way of defining a kind. Not only that, but, because kind is true, we can realize pretty quickly the purpose for that kind of life. The purpose of diatoms in creating oxygen is just as vital to the earth as it was when the first diatom was created. Had diatoms not been created, the world as we know it could not exist. The diatom kind has a critical purpose.

Taxonomy of Life Principle #2: All created things have a purpose.

Now, think about bees. If we don't have bees we won't have most of the food in the world, because without bees to pollinate them many food plants soon become extinct! We'd have to have an enormous army of people with little brushes running around performing bee work! So bees are meant to pollinate plants so plants can reproduce. It's in the nature of a bee to do it – because they were created for the purpose.

Darwinists have a different view. They think, but cannot prove, that purpose is something that somehow evolves as a creature develops the capacity to do in the course of adaptation to an environment. The crazy thing about believing that is that all the earliest creatures would have died while bumbling around un-adapted to the environment. How did they do that and leave no evidence behind? This is a seriously reductionist view to believe that human life in all its complexity is the result of purely random events. It seems so much more logical to recognize that hands were built from the start for purpose! Purpose becomes even more evident as intricate designs emerge – design is for purpose – and design requires a creative intelligence.

Darwinists want us to believe in a personified "Nature" to whom they ascribe characteristics of a mind -- but it is a random, aimless god of theirs who has to make a gazillion guesses because there is no plan.

Taxonomy shows us, however, that creatures of a kind are similar and if a creature of a kind did migrate up from water to land, it was absolutely created to migrate or it could not have been done.

Because purpose is built in, if we can discover what purpose suits a kind, and what kind suits a purpose, we can reach some meaningful conclusions about life on purpose! Biologists do it every day.

Taxonomy of Life Principle #3: Kind and purpose help define identity.

Once we know we are a human, If the purpose for our kind can be determined, then one might have a clue about one's identity.

If identity and purpose are known, we have a head start on success in life because we would be doing the thing that we were created to do. So we'll think more about the Taxonomy of Spirit in Part 2.

(Part 2 Coming Soon)

Part 4: The Big "I" World

We looked at the i-World and how it has become ubiquitous. We considered how the focus on information can cause us to miss the life and joy around us. Digital information access is a lot like a cultural phone booth, where individuals can "call" anywhere and get info, but where other actual people are kept out.

That little “i” in iPhone has turned into the Big “I” with which Christ-followers are so familiar -- after all, the failures of man in every age are there for all to see.

This current culture shift offers a great opportunity to tell our digitally hooked friends about the other great illusions that have separated us from the reality of our need for authentic human connection and spiritual depth that can only come from a relationship to God through faith in Jesus, the Messiah.

Consider the lady at the grocery store whose kid was getting ready to jump out of the cart while mom texted -- oblivious in the digital world to the real world of crashing kid. Ever nearly caused a pile-up because you were I-ing while driving? Big I.

Or the youngster trying to see his homework on a screen the size of a deck of cards – he was about 3 inches from the screen. When asked why, he said, "I have to do it. All the kids do it." Creeping up on Big I, this kiddo might do anything online that his friends do...juice bar with porn on the side (Portland, OR)?

Or the girls who go into deep depression at the relative number of friends they have on facebook compared to the most popular ones in their class. Big I. In our day it was the prom date ranking -- today, maximum friends one never actually sees in person.

Or the woman, in love with her iPhone, has her iPhone stolen in Paris, finding that her entire life has been stolen in the process. Sadly, the Big I, believing that her i-world is impervious to disaster. In our day it was the buddy who told all your secrets, or the friend who read your diary. We know the Big I.

The Unintended Consequence of the iWorld

Today, i-technology has changed the world and has made communication instantaneous and ubiuquitous. But it also has focused many individual users internally focused and tunneled, locked into a tiny reality, thinking in little bits.

There is no balance in that kind of thinking. There is no influence from experience. There is no synthesis of external plus internal information; no assimilation of multiple, simultaneous sources of information. Just a small, tight focus on oneself. I think we used to send people to counselors for that problem…

We who have lived through our version of the Big I and found it wanting can help prevent the logical outcome of this culture shift - Myopic Self-Worship -- the same old besetting sin in a new, pernicious form. Satan has only a few cards to play, but, man, can he find interesting, sneaky ways to play them.

What to Do? Engage!

Let’s make a pact to step back into the reality of the messy world we live in, not the manufactured digital world which, of necessity, has been packaged, and managed, and delivered to us by someone else and may be a lie.

Let’s think of OUR God, OUR world, OUR opportunities to serve, OUR neighborhoods, OUR families, OUR issues and problems to solve and let the “I” go for a little while in favor of real community.

The i-technology may be producing a generation of “I”-hogs – only interested in others if there’s something in it for “I.” Only finding things relevant if they relate directly to “I,” Only worth sacrifice if it benefits “I.”

Let's enter our culture as weary warriors of our own years of Big I struggle, and help revitalize face-to-face discourse and discussion of meaning and life.

Let’s get together and talk about ideas again – create community in your home or neighborhood – a group that gets together and talks and studies face-to-face about what the Bible is and says, heroes of the Bible and heroes of America, real American history not regurgitated pseudo-history, or how our government works, or what's going on that you can positively affect in your kids’ school, or your church, or even to pray for God's blessing on your families.

There is a spiritual reality in every person's life. That reality can be pushed down and disguised by the noise of everyday living. Give up some texting and online time. Turn off your phone and put it in your pocket. Take a good look at your girlfriend, wife, boyfriend, husband, children, or best buddy if he or she is still there!

In all this work you do, and in all this struggle, consider Jesus who can make all the difference in our understanding of the world.

If you're going to be online today, Why not start your day online with the Bible (http://bible.org/) -- it's out there in cyberspace waiting for you. Don't know anything about Jesus? Go to http://www.jesus.org and there you will find a varied, interesting, and Biblically accurate view and answers to many, many questions that people have about Christ, Christianity, and God in general. Use the access to find the Truth.

Read "More than a Carpenter," or Charles Swindoll's biography "Jesus". They are good overviews of Jesus. Spend time imparting Truth to your children from the Bible. Chances are they will not receive it from any other source. Parents are the primary teachers of spiritual and ethical values. It's not too late to start! Go to the Book of Proverbs and get some advice.

Teach your children to turn the digital world off and spend some time looking at what God has made. Walk with them. Go camping (I know, but just go. You will change and so will they.). You can start at a state park where they rent cabins... Oh, go on and get a bike.

Deal with the Big I

A tight focus on ourselves causes loss of perspective, loss of awareness, loss of historical connection, and disconnection from the context into which our bits of information fit. Those consequences are very, very real.

I-solation causes people to forget why we have rules of law, or families with moms and dads, or allies, or national interest in a republic vs any other form of government. They forget to learn any history. They expect results without effort.

There is a generation of God's offspring blindly becoming totally self-absorbed, spiritually bereft, ill-equipped people with few historical, moral, or geographic moorings. They will not know until it is over what they have lost.

Can Christians stand by and let this happen?

Get engaged. Share the gospel with every person you can. Use the AWANA gospel app to reach people in the iWorld. Take EvanTell's evangelism training at www.act111.org and hit the bricks!

The Lord works in every part of history and He is working here now -- every member of the Body of Christ can help re-engage someone who is drifting into "I"-solation.

Beware the idol of "I" whose priest is in your hand.

Part 3. The iWorld and the Unintended Consequences

Part 3. The iWorld and the Unintended Consequences

We worked in the i-world almost from the beginning. We worked with most major manufacturers and software developers who wanted to change the world in the 1985 – 2005 timeframe. And we figured out three things:


1. The world was going to change because Intel could make chips that computed faster and faster every year and no one could even guess how many generations of faster chips they could make. Lots. There would be lots of faster, faster, faster chips. Apple would get chips that did graphics faster and faster. It would be a race that both could win.


2. Over a short period of time the volume of voice traffic on networks would be replaced by the volume of data traffic on networks and it would happen faster than people thought.

3. Once people could hold the network in their hand, the world would REALLY change!


Steve Jobs, and Nokia, Motorola, and AT&T, Intel, IBM, Cisco, Netscape, AOL, Adobe, Yahoo,
Google and all those other guys gave us the network in our hands. And Jobs made it truly fascinating and beautiful to get music and art and access. We absolutely loved instant graphics printing. Graphics that really looked like you wanted them to look.

We were actually supposed to be able to have a paperless society. That is really, really funny, don’t you think? Don’t you have a shredder by your desk? Oh, well.

Thanks to all those guys, you can get the Bible in your hand in so many languages now that it
boggles the mind! But just getting the Bible in your hand does not make you a Christian, and that’s a fact.

Knowing something (and we now can know a lot about many things very quickly) does not replace doing something and many folks are misunderstanding that fact – ultimately one must synthesize information to truly learn. Just knowing and seeing is a fragment of reality.

Plenty of folks in other countries ripped off the intellectual property, stole the ideas, and reproduced them on the cheap. Jobs spawned a revolution in lots of places he never visited. So now the world has changed. Our airwaves are unclogging because our television is all data. We have broadband for that. We can get more information faster than ever before in history.

G I G O.

But the change, no matter how seductive, is not necessarily for the better! We have dependency
where we used to have freedom!

Think about this: Maybe one person in history ever got their identity stolen by using their library card and sitting in the library reading some reference material!

We have to guard the world in a way we have never done in history. Our personal identities are at
stake! Hackers of every description want our information. Hackers from other countries want to invade the United States at the byte level, and they actually have done it by hacking into some amazingly vulnerable precious stuff!

Just consider for a moment what happens if one’s government turns off the Internet, as they did in Iran recently. What happens when the net dies? Bad things happen.

You do know that the bank does not actually have very much actual money and that if the ATMs go down, or the credit card reader does not work, that you will not, repeat not, be able to get your money out of the bank or buy your gas at the pump.

You do know that not everything you read on the web is true, in fact, so much of it is not true that
people are making a good living sorting it out.

Do you know that there are people out there who have no actual friends at all --- just avatars?

They have exchanged the real, tangible world for the digital imitation. Too much of a good thing is really too much. Too much data in little bitty bites makes people think in little bitty bites.

While they can open a lot of files and go back and forth through them, their processing produces less comprehension. People are stuck in the land of instant read. Maybe being stuck is going to trigger a really torturous shift in personal relationships and comprehension, and an idolatrous "I" focus in the i-world.

More in Part 4: The “I” World

Part 2. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Knows Something that Changed the World

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein is currently professor emerita at the University of Michigan. She’s a brilliant thinker and has the awards and experience to prove it. Her initial work, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, is a sizeable (2 vol.), scholarly work that described the change that accompanied the “shift from script to print”. In it she evaluated the impact of the printing press on Western thought, and ultimately on the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Renaissance. An abridged version in paperback is called, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, latest ed. 2005, Cambridge University Press, 1983.

The Gutenberg Printing Press was a technology that truly changed the world. Eisenstein focused on the spread of printed information which changed the way “literate elites” in the West thought about and contributed to the body of knowledge of their time. She thinks of printing as an agent of change, certainly not the only one. She is not primarily interested in the movement from oral to literate tradition, but the changes in thinking that occurred as people moved from “one kind of literate culture to another.”

In terms of access, the Gutenberg Press was to the world of its time what digital text and image communications are to us.

If you want to know and think and ponder these realities, you have a fine companion in Elizabeth Eisenstein who truly gets it. She has recently published Divine Art, Infernal Machine, U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Imagine the differences in data collection, storage, access, and retrieval caused by the early proliferation of printing! One could not separate a printing press from its content. We can’t separate our devices from the Internet and i-content either. Without the content, the device is a paperweight (or a doorstop). Beware the tyrant with the keys to the content – the device becomes a propaganda machine.

In those days, the propaganda machine might not have had much competition. Think about worldview again. Let’s say that scribes are pretty slow, and expensive, so there aren’t many copies of anything. So even if you might have been literate, you might not have a copy of your own Bible, because it was simply not available.

Up until the point that people actually got a chance to learn to read, and then read the Bible for themselves, few people knew what the Bible really said. Thus their worldview was limited. But, even literate people had little access to the Bible before the Bible was printed and made available more widely. Some people who did have access to the Bible desired to control it.

People in power (Henry VIII, for example) had interpreted the Bible for other people, and, in may ways, to suit themselves. Reproducing information was costly, time-consuming, and, as a result, unavailable to most people. The Catholic Church did not object to printing itself, only to people who printed “heresy” based on how the Church interpreted heresy. Eisenstein cites a case in which a French king attempted to ban printing altogether, but failed. As is often the case with closely-held, personally valuable information, people were actually not told things that were in the Bible that might cause them to think the status quo could or should change.

Kings and tyrants, even today, find uneducated peasants much more tractable than educated ones. Literacy and access to information is a great liberator.

Each copy of one of those Gutenberg books was exactly the same. Amazing! People even thought it was magic! Consistency was the key! One could trust that what was on the page was the same in every copy made – they compared them to the originals. It was revolutionary – they had the Word of God, just alike, in their home and their church – not chained to the pulpit – right there on a table. The growth of public knowledge and individual thought began to produce change in many aspects of life.

Eisenstein’s most recent work has a chapter entitled, “Printing as a Protestant Weapon.” It was not just the sheer volume of published material that did the number on culture, it was the fact that anyone at all could put their thoughts out there – crazy or sublime, thoughtful or clueless –
ideas proliferated and culture changed. The “common man” as thinker was a radical, culture-warping phenomenon. Truth was out there for all to see.

I would submit that much the same thing happened when print became so commonplace that everyone could read what was happening around the world. Communism and socialism were revealed to be the deceptive, culture-eroding, primitive, death-dealing traps that they are. People read the truth in so many places that the truth could not be denied. They saw photos. They heard speakers. The individual man could see for himself that his family was in mortal danger!

Here in the United States we read, and listened on the radio. We read our newspapers and later watched on television. And we realized something, without many people telling us. The
words were true: what communism had, what Nazi-ism had, what socialism had, what Islamic
terrorists had was inferior to what WE had.

We’d better fight for what we believed or our lives would change immeasurably for the worse. So we fought WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf Wars I and II, and Afghanistan.

Old, wretched, even demented worldviews can only persist when deception replaces truth. Having the Word and words in one’s hand is a miracle every time. If we have truth, and we don’t share it, and we won’t read it, and we don’t use it, then we are clearly unequipped to deal
with falsehood.

There were leaps and bounds of technology, and it changed and grew. The printed word mattered, and its format was familiar, and suited to the capabilities of the time. We rode to
victory on our newspaper headlines!

Part 3: Steve Jobs and the i-World tomorrow.

Guttenburg, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Steve Jobs

How the World Changes

Part 1

The World Changes When Something

Changes How People Think

Join me to think about technology changes that have had a
profound impact on our culture. I worked in the IT and telecom industries for and with innovators from about 1980 to 2005, so watched much of it happen and I am thinking about context.

Access to information and the amount, speed and delivery range
of information escalated dramatically with these leaps in technology.


We don’t seem to be much smarter because of it. In fact, we can use those same technologies to observe humans all over the world doing thoughtless, misdirected, counter-productive, hateful, world-harming, people-crushing things. So, in Part 1, let’s think about getting smart.

How Does Someone Get Smart and Learn to Think?

Well, the limits for how smart we are likely to get are set early in our lives… Every person is more likely to get smart if:

A. From the time we are born our moms and dads love us, pay attention to us, help us when we are weak, pick us up, talk and sing to us, teach us that we have a positive purpose
in life, show us things and name those things, give us food, take care of us when we are sick, and see that weshare and appreciate others. Thus, our God-provided brains get all those synapses going and growing. About 70% or 80% of our lifetime brain is in place by the time
we are 3-4 years old, according to the early childhood experts. No sophisticated electronics or technology required. Mom and Dad do this.


Question: Can a society that does not value the family unit expect to have smarter or less smart generations to come?


B. We learn to read. Really read and comprehend – we can start with just about anything like labels on the cans in the grocery, and blocks, silly Seuss, and comic books (my personal favorite when I was a kid), and maybe Mad Magazine. We can progress to books with lots of pictures and then no pictures. And reading the Bible, of course, which I will get around to eventually.


Question: How much is it worth to know how to read?

We begin to understand, compare, and process what we are told and what we read. Even as a little kid, we begin to develop what people now call a “worldview,” which is the framework of thinking within which we process what we learn and experience.


“Worldview” is the construct of what we believe to be true. Even very tiny children appear to have this capability – they know their parents love them and they make their little kid decisions based on the safety and love and care they have come to expect as true. “Jesus loves me,
this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” This basic element of truth is core belief to one who holds the Christian worldview – even a very young someone.


Worldview can be positive, realistic, and wholesome. But worldview can also be died-in-the-wool off-planet like some people I knew in the 60’s, some of whom appear to be occupying parks this week!


Teachers and parents make the big difference here, because a child’s mind is malleable and has little defense against sincerely delivered falsehood and cultural programming. We get authentically smarter if we have a school where truth is told and where parents defend the individual “smarts” of their children. (See http://www.celebratekids.com/)


In the truest sense of the word, we are “smart” when our worldview is accurate, (built on immutable truth), and comprehensible (it makes sense to us and others), and helps us make decisions that meet the requirements of life in a wholesome way in the company of family and our larger circle of life.


Our worldview is fed by what happens to us, what we learn, and what we let into our minds whether on purpose or by accident. I am a Christ-follower and have an orthodox Christian worldview that is based in Christian understanding of what is true.

If you are a Christian we have real truth in common. No matter where you live at least one aspect of our worldview is the same – the eternal one.


We got here by thinking about information and how it affects life. It reminded me of how the whole world changed in two historically separate technology leaps and how those changes have both intended and unintended consequences.


See Part 2 of this discussion tomorrow.
Elizabeth Eisenstein Knows Something That Changed the World.

Seeing What God Sees

For a long time, well into my twenties, I thought I was who my parents said I was.

After that, I wrestled with who some other person said I was. Now I’m in my sixties and I know the Truth. But my road to Truth started a long time ago when I first heard The Big Lie.

The Big Lie is: You are only valuable if another person says you are.

The Big Lie is the foundation for:

• Racism – You don’t look like us or talk like us, so you’re not valuable.

• Class and age discrimination – You’re no longer productive. We don't need you.

• Euthanasia -- You’re consuming resources a healthy person needs. You’re dispensable.

• Discrimination against people with disabilities – You’re not productive enough.

• Abortion – You are a small human inconsistent with my life goals. You’re expendable.

Fight the Big Lie! The Truth is that every person has intrinsic value because GOD established the value of every human being. God made us in HIS image – we can think, and reason, and communicate, and love – He has a plan and purpose for us. Every one of His offspring are precious to Him. Read Genesis 1:26-31. We are “very good” workmanship.

A person’s true identity is realized when she trusts Christ alone for her salvation. She understands that Christ died as a substitute for her sins and rose from the dead to prove that death and sin had been conquered. She receives the gift of forgiveness, eternal life in relation with God, and the Holy Spirit’s power to live each day. People can live transparently. We don’t have to “measure up!” God’s grace overcomes the Big Lie!