Monakhos

Time has a good photo essay named God and Dollars on the gospel of prosperity. It mostly focuses on a few Christian leaders from the past and present. While this does not happen exclusively in Christian circles, I guess it is the variety we are most familiar with here. I don’t know whether some of the people mentioned in the essay really belong with the rest of the crowd, but I guess from the outside it appears to be the same old speech. Time (not the magazine—the actual principle of the matter of seconds counting) will tell.

Pluto is no longer a planet. I know it is sad. You grew up learning that Pluto was a planet and now a bunch of astronomers have decided to rewrite the rules. And those poor Plutians are worse off than you! All this time they believed their planet was a good as ours, but now they don’t even have a planet and are just the inhabitants of some little rock a few miles away!

I just wanted to bring this up to point out that belief systems sometimes cause troubles. I have been reading this book Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell, and the author points out that too many times belief systems are like a brick wall. You pull a brick out, and all of a sudden, the whole wall collapses (well, this doesn’t always happen with just one brick, but sometimes, and even if it doesn’t collapse, you do have a big hole.) This is clearly a problem.

Let’s step back and look what we have been sitting on. Let’s not end up like the Plutians.