Where Jesus Went and Why It is Important to Believers and Non-believers alike

Nazareth

Nathanal of Cana (Gospel of John) 

“Can Anything Good Come Out of Nazareth”

1^st century – population +/- 400

Unpaved roads and no public buildings in town – no public inscriptions either (which belies the fact that most of the inhabitants were probably illiterate).  Houses were built of stones with thatched reed roofs.  The thatch was held together as were the building stones of a combination of mud, clay and animal dung. 

Given the nature of the site as a modern entity in Christendom – the original archaeological remains, such as there are, are comprised of underground cisterns for water, storage bins, grinding stones, fermenting vats for wine , stone vessels and measuring cups – locally made.  No imported items have been found which imply that there were none imported – an ancient sign of some measure of wealth.  This was the quintessential “nowheresville”.  

Don't think rustic, think the crudest or poorest spot where people congregated in poverty:  Nazareth – Jesus’’ hometown.

Parts of the problem: Talking ourselves to death

We are talking ourselves to death and dying very slowly in the process.

There is a story here:  using the tools that created the problem . . . to try to fix the problem . .  humm

Buying a realpolitic approach to organizational building
Seminaries as institutions that are driving the destruction of the faith . . .

Knowledge as anathema to faith

No hope -  only the reality of knowledge, factual

Personalization of all things designed to idolize the self - modern, for sure.

A lack of spiritual instruction and inclusion in the common church experience.

A money solution to all problems - building & grounds, isolation, alienation, the poor, the dispossessed.

A preoccupation with sin as defined as a select group of individuals, professions, mindsets and beliefs.

No wonderment about the amount of suffering and its value to daily life.

Not understanding the role of salvation

No role for death and destruction, just to be something to be avoided.

Jesus had some thoughts about a dead body that doesn't know its dead, while the rest of the world kicks dirt on it. Each kick isn't enough to cover the corpse, but over time it will be buried.

Let the funeral begin - or has it already started?

Millennial slaves and societies' solution

Regarding new media "net slaves"

BUT AS BILL LESSARD FOUND OUT, NOBODY IN NEW media really wants to hear this story. Lessard did his time in new-media sweat labour. In 1995, he was hired as a content producer and bulletin-board manager at Pathfinder, Time-Warner's website. Like most producers, he found himself pulling twelve- to fifteen-hour days. "I wouldn't clean my apartment for a month," he recalls. "I'd have cartons of milk of various vintages, all fermenting. I was a mess." Like most digital shops, Pathfinder touted itself as a cultural hotspot, and the young staff governed themselves accordingly: hanging out, sleeping together and almost never leaving the office. "It was a dorm in there," Lessard says. He burned out and fled in 1996.

By then, all of Lessard's friends in new media were telling him horror stories about their jobs. So, he and a friend, Steven Baldwin, decided to compile a book on the subject. In an homage to Studs Terkels' famous book Working, it would relate tales of everyday digital work in the employees' own words: NetSlaves. They collected dozens of interviews, and given the boom in internet-related books, they figured they'd have no trouble attracting interest. No such luck. Publisher after publisher declined their proposal. "They'd say it wasn't upbeat enough and that nobody would want to read about this," Lessard says. "They wanted a book about how everyone was having these great opportunities." Eventually, even their agent lost hope and gave up. With nowhere else to go, they turned their project into--what else?--a website (www.disobey.com/netslaves).

Lessard's story is a testament to the power of the myth of "liberated" digital work. Yet it's surprising that today's young workers, so self-reflective, so otherwise fluent in irony, would buy into such a myth. This is not to suggest that new-media jobs are unmitigatingly horrible. All in all, they're considerably better paid and more challenging than the minimum-wage tedium that passes for most people's work in North America. But what's intriguing is that new-media employees are so desperate to believe that they are not, in fact, workers: that their work can be play, that they can control it and that their employers are bending over backward to please them. Instead of the other way around.

From Good Shit - content agregator

find the story http://krick.3feetunder.com/jobsucks.htm

Today's new religion unmasked - Humanism

Perhaps this deference to academic authority reveals an underlying lack of intellectual self-confidence in the famously breezy writer. More likely it reflects his unthinking adherence to the idea that science can enable us somehow to transcend the dilemmas of morality and history. For it is not simply that Gladwell appeals to psychology and sociology as sources of intellectual authority. Along with many of those who promote them today, he believes that these disciplines can provide practical guidance—not just policy proposals, but wisdom for living. Psychology and sociology can turn the sayings and parables of less enlightened times into an expanding body of knowledge. Quantitative reason can take over from the fumbling human imagination.

from:  The New Republic - Book Review, Gladwell's David and Goliath

"Learning how to think instead of what to think"

Changing Face of Society

" Michelle Obama's going on: 'Everybody must have college.' Why? Why? What is the reason why everyone has to go to college? Especially when college is so utterly meaningless right now, it has no core curriculum" and "people end up saddled with huge debts," says Ms. Paglia. What's driving the push toward universal college is "social snobbery on the part of a lot of upper-middle-class families who want the sticker in the window."

Money Changes Everything

But I think American liberals have also made the mistake of focusing too much on income and wealth as the measures of success. Every chart and graph we see about America’s increase in “inequality” is about either money, or the likelihood of getting money. Sure, disparities of wealth are distasteful . Sure, money is one thing that confers social status . But by focusing on it obsessively, I think liberals are helping to cement its paramount importance as the end-all and be-all of social outcomes.

This is bad because it cements an American attitude of crass materialism, but it’s also bad because it ignores achievable types of social equality while questing after the unattainable. Societies can be more or less equal in terms of wealth and income, but only to a degree; as Vilfredo Pareto observed , and as studies have later confirmed, every society on Earth has wealth and income distributions that follow some kind of power law, where a small fraction earn and command much more money than the vast majority. You can make the cure flatter, but never close to flat.

Whether we’re questing after a narrow money-based vision of equality or callously celebrating the “competitiveness” created by material inequality, we Americans seem to have mostly forgotten about equality of respect. This is bad not just because I personally dislike it, but because in a developed country like ours, respect is a big part of what makes people happy . In fact, I suspect that our turn away from egalitarianism is one factor behind our bifurcation into a class society .

I want this to change. I want to move back toward a society where the hard work of an unskilled laborer is considered worthwhile in social interactions, regardless of how many dollars it brings home. I want to move back toward a society where being a good parent or a friendly neighbor earns as much respect as making a hundred million dollars on Wall Street.

In other words, I want our “democracy” back. We need to redistribute respect.

A New Approach To Religion

Towards a new religion is not seeking to replace our Judeo Christian traditions or its Bible.  Instead it seeks to reacquaint and reinvigorate the levers everywhere with its unchanging precepts and ecstatic values.

There are many intersections between the spiritual and physical in the twenty first century but our current church while being preoccupied with the physical and not the spiritual seems to be listening to noise rather than signal as first proposed over two thousand years ago by the historical figure, Jesus Christ.

What this new religion will look like will not be different at all from what the old religion look like, perhaps with some rephrasing for relevancy but the core principles will remain the same as they did two thousand years ago since people are unchanged.

In the near future we will continue to espouse theology, philosophy, ideas, and hopefully, on good days enriched spirituality.  As mainline face compete with each other and critique other forces negatively we will seek unification of the spirit and understanding in a chaotic and uncomprehending world.