Today marks the annual shift in the earth’s tilt, as the northern hemisphere slowly starts leaning towards the sun again, yielding an increase in the amount of daylight each day (until the summer solstice). And every year, it’s a day I rejoice.
Yesterday marked one month since I closed my Facebook account. Lo and behold, I live to tell the tale.
I won’t repeat all the details from my farewell post on Facebook about why I left. But it was a combination of
Just before deleting my account, I did use their capability of downloading an archive of all the content I had ever posted. Within a few minutes I got notified that it was ready to download, so I saved it locally among my documents for posterity.
Facebook really doesn’t want folks to leave. And when I say really, I mean REALLY. When I went to delete my account, I was asked three times whether this was something I really wanted to do. Then after the final confirmation, they displayed a message (followed up by an email with the same message) informing me that I had now started a 30-day clock, and that any time during the next 30 days all I had to do was log in with my regular user name and password, and my account would magically be restored.
What was interesting, and kind of troubling, was the wording in that message. It stated that after 30 days, Facebook would “begin the process of deleting your data”.
Wait – you just collected everything I ever posted within 5 minutes. What do you mean you’ll begin to delete my data? Just delete it. All of it. Immediately.
It makes me think that Facebook might actually hold onto the bulk of that data for much longer than they would have users believe. My guess is that Facebook would consider the possession of that much data, about that many people, far too valuable to just toss in the bit bucket. And from my perspective, that’s all the more reason to shut off the spigot I was feeding them.
I’ll confess that I do miss seeing some of the life updates from my friends. But overall, I’m glad I made the decision. It’s been good for me spiritually.
And from a data tracking perspective, my decision keeps being confirmed on a regular basis. In addition to the news earlier this fall that Facebook was seeking an agreement with the major banks to track users’ financial information and spending habits, there was the news a week or so ago that Facebook had filed a series of patents that would enable them to predict the future location of its users, based on the user’s current location, their past location habits, and the current and past location information of their friends. That’s just creepiness on steroids. And just this week there was more news of Facebook sharing user data with a wide variety of companies and industries, even allowing some of them to read, write, and delete users’ private messages.
For any Facebook user who’s feeling increasingly uncomfortable about such things – there is life on the other side. 😉 The trick is to make up for that lost virtual interaction by engaging in more face to face interaction, and that’s something I’ve started to work on, and plan to continue working on in the new year.
The Pew Research Center recently published the results of a study on where adults are getting their news (and, tangentially, to what extent they’re even seeking it).
In some ways, the results aren’t all that surprising. But in other ways, it’s kind of striking to see the differences among the age demographics. The implications for the various news delivery industries and platforms are clearly huge.
But in the Trump-era bizarro world we currently find ourselves in, there are even bigger issues – from my perspective – than which delivery platforms come out on top.
It’s no secret, nor a conspiracy theory, that the journalists at most of the major media outlets – as well as the faculty at nearly every university where those journalists attended school – overwhelmingly lean left, and favor progressive policies and progressive politicians. So the knives were out pretty much from the time of Trump’s nomination during the primaries. Some of their antagonism toward Trump is justified, but much of it is over-wrought.
And in response, defenders of Trump – and even just those who don’t necessarily like Trump all that much but are annoyed at the behavior of so many journalists on the left – stake out an anti-anti-Trump position, focusing so much on the irresponsible behavior of the left-leaning media outlets and journalists that in the process they under-report or play down the words and actions of Trump that deserve criticism.
In the midst of this divided and tribal media environment, critical thinking is badly needed – perhaps more than ever. And there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence – on both the left and the right – that critical thinking is a skill that’s been largely abandoned by our educational systems for quite some time. Especially in our current day, the educational focus seems to be on what to think, rather than how to think. (Just look at the increasing instances of college students who have to prevent debate, or who need safe spaces and videos of puppies playing in order to deal with the “trauma” of being presented with ideas that differ from theirs).
It also doesn’t help that a general decline of religious belief and practice has left an increasing percentage of the population without any sort of moral compass beyond “what’s good for me” or “what feels good” right now, or “I agree with whatever the popular culture says”.
Trust in media has been hovering around historic lows for a while now. Media outlets appear to be pretty entrenched and unlikely to change their behavior. Regardless of the medium we prefer, let’s all commit to dialing back the outrage, reading beyond the click-bait headlines, and asking critical questions of both sides.
I stumbled upon an interesting discussion with Ken Myers, creator and host of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. The Journal is a bi-monthly audio magazine of sorts. It originally started in 1993 as the ‘Mars Hill Tapes’, as it was originally distributed via the mail on cassette tape. I was among the early subscribers, and subscribed for many years (including a format move from cassette to CD), then let my subscription lapse for several years. I’ve since resubscribed (now in MP3 format), and eventually went back and picked up the issues I’d missed (though I’ll confess I’m still woefully behind in my listening).
The Journal was originally created as a thoughtful and intellectually rigorous resource to help Christians better understand our cultural moment, and encourage thinking about how to best address ‘culture’. Perhaps the idea behind the tapes can best be articulated by Ken Myers himself from the pilot issue:
Christian engagement with modern culture in recent years has tended to take almost exclusively political forms. Evangelical Christians may recognize that laws and policies are shaped by beliefs and convictions, but they’ve effectively ignored the fact that such beliefs and convictions are nurtured by cultural forces – by the rhythms and resonances of our prose and poetry, by our music and dance forms, by painting, architecture, sculpture, and films. Beliefs and convictions are closely related to imagination, and so politics in a society is an expression of its culture.
Evangelical Christians are heirs to a decades-long legacy which denied the significance of cultural involvement, and which only reversed itself when the culture’s decline had consequences that were too close to home – when Penthouse showed up at 7-11, or when Christians were informed that tax dollars were funding blasphemy. Conservative Christians had by and large ignored the worlds of the arts and humanities – the mainstream as well as the avant garde.
Unfortunately, those who talk most militantly about being engaged in a cultural war only seem to be able to think about political or economic strategies. There is more talk about de-funding the National Endowment for the Arts than there is about funding creative work that could be a healthy cultural force, more energy expended on boycotts of advertisers and producers of offensive media than in producing works that are rich in beauty and truth.
Many conservative Christians seem to believe that being heaven bound means that culture doesn’t matter or could be avoided. But more than 50 years ago, C. S. Lewis warned in his address ‘Learning In Wartime’ that it was impossible to live without culture. “If you attempted”, he argued, “to suspend your whole intellectual and aesthetic activity, you would only succeed in substituting a worse cultural life for a better one. You are not, in fact, going to read nothing. If you don’t read good books, you will read bad ones. If you don’t go on thinking rationally, you will think irrationally. If you reject aesthetic satisfactions, you will fall into sensual satisfactions”. Good philosophy must exist, Lewis later reasoned, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.
In the discussion linked at the beginning of this post, Myers talks about how popular culture can affect, and indeed has affected, the Christian faith – on both the left and the right. He contrasts the idea of a Christian ‘lifestyle’, which is a collection of artifacts and modes of expression that are driven by the culture and are thus transient, with a Christian ‘way of life’, which is something received, handed down, intergenerational, rooted.
Part of Myers’ background prior to starting the Journal included several years as an editor and producer at NPR, including the initial launching of NPR’s ‘Morning Edition’ in the late 70s. So the Journal very much has an “NPR feel” in terms of the production values. Most of the time, it consists of interviews with authors of books that are more philosophically and intellectually substantial than those generally found at the average Christian book store.
Subscribers have routinely said over the years that the Journal has helped form their general education and shaped their thinking more than any university or seminary courses. I can attest that having been a subscriber for several years before going back for my masters degree, the general background provided by the Journal gave me a distinct advantage in my classes. Even if one isn’t planning on going back to school, but just enjoys firing up their brain cells once in a while, the Journal is worth checking out.
If anyone wants to borrow an issue, give me a shout.
“Personality is that peculiar, incalculable thing that is meant when we speak of ourselves as distinct from everyone else. Our personality is always too big for us to grasp. An island in the sea may be but the top of a great mountain. Personality is like an island, we know nothing about the great depths underneath, consequently we cannot estimate ourselves. We begin by thinking that we can, but we come to realize that there is only one Being Who understands us, and that is our Creator.
Personality is the characteristic of the spiritual man as individuality is the characteristic of the natural man. Our Lord can never be defined in terms of individuality and independence, but only in terms of personality, “I and My Father are one.” Personality merges, and you only reach your real identity when you are merged with another person. When love, or the Spirit of God strikes a man, he is transformed, he no longer insists upon his separate individuality.
Our Lord never spoke in terms of individuality, of a man’s “elbows” or his isolated position, but in terms of personality – “that they may be one, even as We are one.” If you give up your right to yourself to God, the real true nature of your personality answers to God straight away. Jesus Christ emancipates the personality, and the individuality is transfigured; the transfiguring element is love, personal devotion to Jesus. Love is the outpouring of one personality in fellowship with another personality.” – Oswald Chambers, ‘My Utmost For His Highest’
An article at The Gospel Coalition addresses the question posed in the title of this post. And I have to say, simply through what I’ve observed in folks I’ve known personally over the years, as well as on-line acquaintances, I think there’s compelling evidence to suggest that the answer – in many cases – is “yes”.
The only other observation I would add is that a mid-point destination on this route towards atheism is usually universalism – the “many paths to God” argument that rejects Jesus’ statement “I am the way, the truth, and the life – no one comes to the Father except through me”. The precursor to “no God” is generally the conjuring of some sort of custom-designed divine being – a conjuring of a god that may maintain a few sentimental ties to orthodox Christian belief, yet at the same time conveniently falls in line with our own “progressive” sensibilities. And then, at some point, when we subconsciously realize that this god is something we’ve constructed ourselves – a God that effectively answers to us rather than us answering to Him – it’s easy to eventually view God as a figment of the imagination.
Once someone – or, increasingly, a denomination – concludes that the bible is no longer authoritative, that personal feelings are now our ultimate source of authority, and that the bible is akin to a buffet line, where we can take extra helpings of the items we like and skip the items we don’t, a decisive shift has been made to following a made-up gospel of personal preferences. It is, for all practical purposes, a self-deification – “The Gospel of Me”. And at that point, an actual, external God becomes unnecessary baggage.
