Jack Pelham

Gone the way of the hoe and the loom
Is the skill of searching for information.
The modern thinks he needs but to ask
And it will be delivered to him—
As are his food and his clothes.

If he has his eyes at least half-opened,
He will, in time, be repulsed by the muck
Of his current camp—even if the others are not—
And he will set out from there, convinced that
A fresh start cannot be put off for another minute.

How shall we define “cult”—and what if we were to define it thus?:

cult— n. any group in which the beliefs and practices of the group are guarded from the free, honest, and rational investigation and discussion of the members

If that were the definition, is there anyone among us who has never been a cult member?

And if this is our sad state, how twisted it is that so many are so hellbent on pointing out the cultishness of other groups and ignoring that of their own?

So many love to think they have won the battle by condemning the cultishness of other groups, even as they live in surrender to the cultishness of their own. And what more pernicious social trap is there than this?

I wonder if God does not pause in amazement
When he chances upon a human
Not looking for a shortcut.

Frankly, I think it surprised man—
The difference between God’s idea
Of a satisfactory level of human effort
And his own.

This is a post about how a great many Americans today read.

They start out with as much mental energy as they’re going to have, and their attention starts fading out from there.

Plus, they’re not as willing as their ancestors to read what is on your mind. Instead, they’re likely only interested in getting answers to the questions that pop into their minds.

Rather than to read a whole article, they prefer to get whatever they think the gist is, and then they’ll ask questions about the rest, if it occurs to them to do so—even if you already went to the trouble to anticipate all those questions and answer them in writing in advance. They don’t mind pushing the burden back onto the writer in this way. They lack a sense of responsibility about the reading.

By the time they’ve gotten this far—if they haven’t quit by now—they’ll only be paying attention at a fraction of the rate they paid attention to the first sentence. Further, once they see that a paragraph is more than two lines long, they tend to shut down all the faster. They also get triggered to shut down if your sentences are thorough and well-composed, or if the vocabulary is a stretch for them—though such writing was common not even a century ago in this once-literature-rich society.

They are not accustomed, as were more of their ancestors, to thoughts that take more than a few seconds to process. They are no longer willing to do the work.

And it is hard to see in this much of a future for us.

To them, it is insane that anyone would work this hard. (Congratulations for finding this, you clever soul!)

If you build it, they will come—
Including the one in ten thousand
Who’s already been searching
For something like this,
And about one in a thousand
Of the ones you go out of your way
To recruit yourself.

We must face the fact that sooner or later
A menace to society becomes so severe—
Such a danger to safety or justice
Or order or decency—
That we must intervene and remove him
From his place, dispatching him to prison,
Or in the most egregious cases, even to God.

Do the negligent have any advantage in religion
That they don’t have in mundane matters
Such as concern civics or agriculture?

The real Jesus expects his followers to stop sinning, whereas the fake Jesus only expects them to keep believing that he is Lord and that he died for their sins.

Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.

John 5:14. NIV

Unless you repent, you too will all perish.

Luke 13:5. NIV