The D Word

I stepped on the scales peering at the number in frustration. I had gained five pounds between Christmas and New Years. How? I ate too much and exercised too little.

We all know that in order to maintain weight, we have to discipline ourselves. I can’t let my body have everything it wants to eat. And sometimes I have to make my body do things it doesn’t want to do. My body hates the treadmill. Yet, after 48 years of living I’ve learned that the way I can remain at about 145 pounds is to eat right and burn roughly 500 calories via a three mile run or some other equivalent exercise.

I was slipping out of shape toward the end of last year. So, when I dragged myself onto the treadmill shortly before the New Year my body was screaming at me, begging me to stop running after about six minutes. During the summer I ran at least three to five miles a day and threw in a couple of seven mile runs each week. Running outside is less boring and therefore less difficult for me. But here I was struggling with one mile on the treadmill.

The only way any of us can veto the wishes of our body is through discipline. We’re composed of parts–thinking, feeling, body, spirit, and soul. If the body is in pain we feel it and our feelings lead to certain thoughts all of which can diminish our spirit.

Spirit is will. It is the power inside all of us. It is the essence of who we are. Long after the body has rotted in the ground, our spirit will live. It is our executive center. It was created to be the CEO of the self, controlling the thinking part, the feelings, the body, and our various social interactions. It’s humbling for us to drag our body onto a treadmill with the will to do something only to find that our body has other ideas. And when we give in to our body and skulk off the treadmill too soon, our spirit is deflated, having given up its own glorious position to mere flesh.

Sometimes our spirit expects too much. In my case, I could have ran the three miles. I simply allowed my body to take charge. But what if I’d wanted to run 15 miles? Regardless of how much I might have wanted to churn out the miles, my body was not and is not, conditioned for more than three or four miles presently. The spirit might be willing but the flesh is weak, and sometimes the flesh simply isn’t prepared.

Eating the wrong stuff and sitting on the couch isn’t the only thing my parts–my members, want to do. My thinking likes to chew on delectable thoughts of my own glory. My eyes like to rest on expensive cars, beautiful women, expensive real estate. My tongue is always dancing around clamoring for attention with biting sarcasm. Sometimes it (my tongue) just likes to pop off angrily about things that don’t matter. It is even known to grovel in expressions of contempt and hatred, manipulation, exaggeration, and all the rest.

As an adopted son of God who has been set free from the dominion of sin, imagine how I feel when with the mind I agree with God and want to do or say or think the right thing, but find my spirit diminished, deflated, skulking away from life’s treadmill while my mere parts fight over who will reign as my executive center.

Being set free from sin only means that Jesus has broken the chains. He doesn’t drag us out of the cell. He gives us His Spirit to aid our spirit in reclaiming our relinquished humanity, but anyone who thinks this is an easy process probably has never stepped foot on a treadmill or said no to a slice of pizza. That is to say, there is no such thing as an undisciplined disciple. If we follow Jesus then we suffer with Him in order that we may be glorified with Him. And the context of those words (Romans 8) echo the Abba Father, a prayer Jesus moaned while suffering–not physically, but alone in the garden as the Enemy tried with all his might to convince Jesus to allow his flesh to take over the executive center of his self. Jesus’ thinking part, his feeling part, his body, the social context–it was all fighting against his spirit, his will, but he stayed on the treadmill.

How? He was prepared. He’d been disciplining himself his entire life. Forty days in the wilderness was just the beginning of a public life that required Him to constantly bolster his spirit as CEO over his flesh. And we are called to suffer with Him. Unfortunately we tend to read that as a response to Christian persecution. However that wasn’t Paul’s point in Romans 8. His point was that Jesus didn’t do it all. Jesus did his part. He died for us, became the second Adam, did for us what the law couldn’t do for us, clearing the path for us to follow him as disciples who are called to put to death the deeds of the body by the Spirit.

We can’t flop down on the couch of life and suppose the Spirit is going to whip our floppy selves into spiritual shape. That’s not the way it works contrary to what the majority seem to think (based on religious words and “church” action–or inaction). If I want to run 15 miles or 25 miles in the spring, then I have to start with 3 or 4 miles today. If I want to tame my tongue, my thoughts, my eyes and ears, my body in various social situations, then that takes little acts of discipline, allowing my spirit (led by His Spirit) to build strength through discipline.

If my body likes to take charge in certain social situations then maybe I need to fast so that I learn to say no to my body. Building upon that discipline my spirit will develop the necessary muscle. If my thoughts prove to be a chaotic force with an apparent life of their own, then maybe I need to memorize scripture, learning to be still and stay with one thought for a long time, saying no to all the other thoughts that try to barge in. Then perhaps when I need to control my thoughts, I will have developed the discipline to do so.

To reign in life, as Paul put it, is to allow the spirit–the will, to be the king. We are made in God’s image. We develop his likeness when we, like Jesus, suffer the pain of crucifying the flesh so that it becomes dead to us, no longer having dominion over our spirit.

If you want to follow Jesus, pull out the hammer of hard work and the nails that create extended pain. It will not be easy. You and I have been deformed by the world, individual and structural evil. The difference between being set free and living in freedom in Christ is discipleship, or discipline.

Beware of the passive, sweet sounding rhetoric being belched out of too many pulpits which leaves the impression that all you need to do is sign a membership card, give 10 percent of your income, and join a church ministry.

That may be boring but I don’t think boredom counts as suffering. Get on the treadmill and stay on a little longer each day. The only way to eventually do what seems impossible is to push yourself up to the limit of what is possible. And then go a little further each day. It will hurt and your parts will not like it, but your spirit will enjoy the Christ-promised conditions of love, joy, and peace in Him.

Ben O.

Holy Ground

I

t’s all holy—everything that God has created is holy. We see it in Torah; especially spelled out in seven of the Ten Commandments—Time is holy. Family is holy. Life is holy. Sex and sexuality is holy. Things/creation are/is holy. Words are holy. And your neighbor is holy.

But all of us have been raised on a steady diet of dualism that sees only the church building as something of a holy space. Do you think this is an over statement? How many of us will watch things on TV that we’d be embarrassed to see on Powerpoint in the church building? How many of us have our holy, sanctified, and carefully edited language which is used in the church building or in the company of church people, but another language that we let loose on the people in our workplace or in the privacy of our homes? There was a fellow in the church where I grew up who had two sets of jokes that he’d tell folks after worship—inside the church building jokes, and then those that he’d only tell if the listener would walk outside.

      The dualism of our world says that the world is ugly and bad and that only religion is lovely and good. Dirt and daisies, prayer and praises—one is temporal and essentially bad, the other eternal and good (or so we’re told). We protect the church from blasphemy, dress a certain way, speak a certain way, and behave a certain way (saying things like, “Don’t run. This is the church building!”); and it’s because in this building we affirm that we are on holy ground—holy because God is present. But if that logic holds up, and I think it does (though there’s obviously nothing unholy about running in or out of the building), then what follows from the fact observed by Solomon at the dedication of the temple where he said, “ “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built!” (1Ki 8:27). Paul says the same thing in Acts 17.

      God’s presence spills outside of our assemblies making it impossible to find a place suitable for telling jokes that are otherwise unsuitable for the assembly. The temple was holy because God’s presence was there; but His presence is everywhere, therefore, as the song teaches us, “. . . where He is, is holy!”

     So why is dualism so prevalent in our culture? There’s much that could be said about our history that brings us to where we are today, beginning with Plato through to the Enlightenment, and now to a religious worldview more informed by the Left Behind Series than the Biblical text. But for most of us it’s simply that we see a world that looks terribly unholy and conclude that it must be that God will one day vaporize it so that we can all fly away to a non-physical existence forevermore. And then we enlist songwriters to help us affirm that supposed reality even though it’s not even remotely hinted at in scripture. Apparently, like the Left Behind Series suggests, we expect to one day “Fly away, O, Glory.” It makes for popular fiction and fodder for some old favorites in our hymnals, but it can’t be found in scripture, and that presents a bit of a problem.

     Where are we? Are we on unholy ground our holy ground? Is creation good, very good, or bad, very bad?

     It’s hard for us to accept that life is holy when so many humans act so blasphemously. It’s hard to imagine that words are actually holy given the fact that language has been soiled and desecrated. How can we suppose that the earth is holy when it seems so violent, producing tsunamis and cancer, drought and fires? Who can affirm that sex is holy given the fact that it has been reduced to a commodity bought and sold on the market of immorality? Can sexuality be considered holy given the rise in the cultural acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle? Can family really be considered holy given it is the place where the most violence and abuse occurs? Can our neighbor be holy, the same neighbor who smells bad and looks different, or competes with me for my job?

      Think back to the Lord’s supper. When there was abuse, the appropriate response was to correct the problem, not give up the project. God’s creation has been blasphemed in a thousand ways, but God hasn’t given up on it—He’s redeeming it! Romans 8 teaches at least that much.

• To participate in the kingdom of God doesn’t mean the promotion of a devastating dualism with a God so small that He can’t clean up the graffiti sprayed everywhere by man’s sin.
• To participate in the kingdom of God is to step into vibrant reality, not a weak and flimsy religion.
• To participate in the kingdom of God is to realize that the answer to the question where are we is now and will always be “on holy ground.”
• To participate in the kingdom of God now, in anticipation of what He will do on the last day means that we go out in God’s grace and scrub away the graffiti with the cleansing blood of Jesus, affirming, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. ( Joh 3:16).
• To participate in the spread of God’s reign, His authority, His Empire, requires that we understand that He loved and loves the world, not just the churchy parts or the so-called spiritual parts or the parts with no graffiti.
• The soul of man is composed of two vital elements according to Genesis 2.7; it read, “ then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” Nephesh, or soul, is dirt and breath. Good dirt created by the word of God, and God’s breath blown from the depths of God. That being the case, and along with the fact that Jesus became one of us (he became dirt and breath and then ascended as a resurrected, physical human), how can we but reject the philosophy of men—the platonic, dualistic nonsense that strips life of most of its meaning?

 

      Where are we? How do you suppose the Darwinist atheist answers, or the humanist, the existentialist, and the nihilist? Let me conclude by illustrating what happens if we don’t know the answer to this important question.

     Friedrich Neitzsche was a German writer and philosopher who lived from 1844 to 1900. He’s adored by many intellectuals and thinkers around the world. He’s best known to us common folk (if we know of him at all) by virtue of his influence over what became the Nazi philosophy. Leaders within the Nazi party studied his work, especially his book The Will to Power and his notions of the unafraid “overman.” One of his more famous quotes is the short statement, “God is dead.” He hated religion, and what he described as a herd mentality. He believed that religion was the rotten child of an escapist, platonic, dualistic, and therefore, meaningless humanity. He saw humans attempting to ascend to something like the light in Plato’s Cave Analogy, and since sooner or later he supposed we learn there really is no light at the end of the tunnel, he concluded that humans invented religion to escape the truth—the truth that life has no meaning, and that the only purpose is accept that bleak reality, with the only measure of man being how well he copes with the dismal futility of it all.

And what sort of light was he getting from Christianity at large? Did he find people rooted in the rich narrative off God’s history, yearning with Paul in Romans 8, for God to act and set all creation free from bondage and decay? No, he found rather light-less people who sang about this world not being their home, just-a-passing through as it were, a people who’d forgotten where they were and that they were made in God’s image to be good stewards over creation, people who were complacent, if not active in the exploitation of creation for the sake of economy or progress or whatever.

What did he see in Christianity? He wrote, “The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 130. As confused as he was about reality, his observation was not way off the mark.

     He comes to us, in our houses or workplaces, in the woods or on top of a snow covered mountain, and by his striking critique reminds us, not that it’s all meaningless as he supposed, but holy and that we have a responsibility in the kingdom of God to find the world beautiful and good, and by God’s grace and in God’s grace, to help Him make the world beautiful and good.

      Nietzsche’s response to the blasphemy he recognized as ugliness was to reject the project and call it “nothing.” But Nietzsche’s the one who’s dead—God is very much alive, calling us to help restore His glorious creation. It is all holy.

Lights

Last evening, while home alone, I took on the challenge of decorating an outside tree with strands of lights. The tree stands about 15 feet high. I had no ladder and I’m barely 5 foot 8 inches tall. My strategy was simple. Throw the lights as high as possible and then adjust as needed by yanking and pulling the chord from the ground. The first strand was simplest. I threw it once and it hung like a pearl necklace around the Princess of Wales.

The rest of the work did not go so well. It’s hard to actually throw a strand of 100 Christmas lights with precision. And once thrown in the top of a tree, pulling the lights out is about as easy as freeing a fishing line that’s been thrown onto a bushy bank. If you yank hard enough you will find 100 tiny lights flying at your face in the dark.

Eventually it dawned on me that I should tie a weight to the end of the strand so that I could toss it higher and with accuracy. I used a full water bottle. A miracle happened when I threw the bottle the first time. I aimed dead center of the tree, and the tree shifted 10 feet to the left while the bottle was in flight. I didn’t even graze a single limb. The bottle soared like a Bret Farve pass, long and deep, until it crashed on the concrete driveway.

I spoke to the lights with words that should never be uttered. I cursed the bottle, the throw, and the tree. Whatever Christmas cheer is, that moment was its polar opposite! Assessing the damage, I plugged the lights into a socket and half the strand would not light up. 7 of the bulbs were broken. I took the time to replace the broken bulbs, however, the strand was still only half-lit. (Some might say that’s a metaphor of my life–a “half-lit strand.”)

But I soldiered on until I had manipulated most of the lights onto the tree. Kim arrived from a bit of shopping at which time I told her that the tree looked like something out of Charlie Brown’s Christmas. She insisted it was lovely. I disagreed too emphatically at which time she quite correctly informed me that I took all the joy out of Christmas. I thought about speaking to her as I had the bottle, the lights, and the tree, but came to my senses, remembering that unlike the bottle or the tree, she speaks back. I went back to my work.

Finally, I completed the task and was actually satisfied with the result. I stepped back to admire the creation. 600 lights (less half a strand) brightly shinning. Then I noticed the countless lights in the background, billions of stars hung throughout the cosmos, galaxies, strung on nothing, but each keeping it’s place with mathematical precision.

What sort of God is it that can speak the worlds into existence, needing neither a water bottle or electricity to get the job done? I was exhausted after 600 lights and my universe consisted of one tree. And I broke some stuff in the process.

Who is this God that dazzles us with stars just because He can?

Ben O

Work

A

t the Renovare.org website, Richard Foster writes about formation through experience, noting, “The most foundational of these character-formation experiences is found in our work. Work places us into the stream of divine action. We are “subcreators,” as J. R. R. Tolkien reminds us. In saying this, I am not referring to sharing our faith at work or praying throughout our work. Both of these are good, to be sure; but I am referring to the sacredness of the work itself. As you and I care for our daily tasks, we are glorifying God in the work itself.”

Much of our lives are spent in what we describe as work.  Often our approach to work is to think of it as a curse that we must endure until we arrive at the golden age of retirement.  But work is no curse.  Adam was working long before the fall.  God’s work in creating the universe wasn’t a reflection of a curse.  Work is the production of value—it’s creative.  And almost every sort of work has some redemptive quality, some redemptive value.  Our work becomes toil only when we lose our connection with God.  Work became toil for Adam when he was banished from the garden.  But being part of the new humanity (that is, the church) means that we are experiencing an end of the long exile–an experience that we’ll know fully when the Lord returns.  Therefore, our attitude toward work should be drastically different from others.  It becomes what Foster describes as a sacrament—a time for us to be with Jesus, honoring Him, bragging on Him, glorifying Him.  As subcreators, the work of our minds and hands is pregnant with possibilities—our creation will either honor God or further highlight the horror of the fall.  So, please, let’s stop categorizing our lives into spiritual and secular.  We need to erase those categories and just see life.  As new humans aligned with the new Adam we are filled with God’s spirit in every segment of our lives.  And given that we do spend so much of our time engaged in our work, it becomes a primary training ground, turf upon which we are tested, and a fundamental, ongoing experience in which the Spirit develops our virtues.  Enjoy your work as you grow in grace!

 

Salvation, Reality, Religion

 

I

believe the here and now gets its energy from what happens after death, especially what happens after the resurrection.  This is sometimes clumsily referred to as inaugurated eschatology.   Romans 8 is the central passage for this idea.  We are saved, not just from the guilt of sin, but from the power of sin in our lives (the whole story from Ro. 5-8).  The Spirit works in us in order to shape us into Christ-like people.  But for now we suffer with Him (Jesus).  When we look at that dense passage beginning in vs. 18, we see a creation that is sitting on edge, waiting for God to do what He’s promised He will do–i.e., redeem us and at the same time liberate creation.  As Isaiah told us, the lion and the lamb will lie down together, we’ll be fully spiritualized with a Jesus-like physicality, newly created to do what we were always made to do–exercise dominion over God’s creation (Gn. 1, Re. 22.5).  So, salvation is about life.  It’s about capturing a biblical (not a Platonic or post enlightenment) vision of where the whole project is headed.  Looking to the future, chewing on the images of Re. 21-22, or Ro. 8, or little (yet heavy) bits from Jesus’ teaching about the eschaton, we see a new heaven and new earth.  The two dimensions finally mesh rather than simply over lapping in places (the present day overlap is the kingdom showing up!).  The nations are healed.  Love rules, the Spirit is our life-source (no longer soulized but spiritualized in a physical body which dwells in a physical world).  There’s peace, oneness, goodness.  Salvation today means that I live in that future world in the present (see 2 Co. 4 and 5).  Because there’s continuity between this chapter and the next, we labor with Christ to redeem creation right now.  If we can show people today–through our communities (the things we call churches) what real humanity ought to look like, and share with them the rich narrative from creation to new creation, lots of people are going to want in on it.

How do we say it in a way that insures that folks know we’re talking about salvation today and after death?  It’s not so much what we say, as what we do.  We’ve got to learn to model the new creation.  How?  The answer will come to us in our own context if we pray (maybe even fast) that God pour His spirit into our open hearts at a pace we can stand so that we learn to live off His resources, His grace, His Spirit as a little bit of heaven overlaps with the earth, as Jesus prayed “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is heaven.”  We’ve flattened a rich and multi-dimensioned story out to little more than getting the right answers to a handful of religious questions.  In a nut shell we need to preach the gospel Jesus preached, and when we talk, we’ll probably have to stop using religious language.  Christianity isn’t a religion.  It’s reality (though much of what’s been brought into Christianity is doing the cause more harm than good; it’s more parody than reality, unfortunately).

 

Rejoice, You’re In Christ

T

he grave sin of some of our teachers is that they present a gospel that leaves people languishing under law.  I’ve been there, done that; therefore it hurts me all the more.  For most of my life, I’ve been in Christ.  However, most of my Christian experience was more like that of the wretched Israelite described in Romans 7.  Part of Paul’s point from Romans 5, through to the first few verses of Romans 8, is that Israel–though in possession of the law–was in Adam.  Israel had an incredible vocation to bare for the rest of the world.  She was given Torah, and according to Romans 5.20, the law (Torah) was given so that the trespass would increase.  Law brings about the knowledge of sin and can do nothing more by itself than condemn (see Ro. 3.19-20).  Part of the dark mystery of Torah is that it was eternally intended that the written code would lure sin in so that it would serve to focus sin’s power upon one people; Torah was intended to have the effect of heaping transgression on the back of God’s chosen people (and, of course, eventually their representative Messiah).  It was part of Israel’s glorious but mysterious vocation that she’d fail miserably so that in her failure and her exile, Christ would come to the rescue and grace would abound.

Are we going to allow the whole system to be reversed?  Are we going to promote a creed, a new Torah etched in stone by the hammer and chisel of religious sectarians who are duped into thinking they are doing God’s business by forcing others to bend beneath the heavy burden of their freshly fashioned tablets?  Do we not understand that if we are under law rather than grace then our only route is to endure the grief of inviting transgression in heaps?  God forbid!  If any of us is teaching a gospel that highlights law and diminishes grace, that extols commandment keeping while giving lip service to faith and grace, then the effect is to (in ignorance) push God’s children out from underneath the safety of His wings and back into the Adamic life of doubt and despair.  The balance of our talking, our teaching, our preaching must be weighted toward Christ and the salvation He offers by grace through faith.  If the scales tip the other direction, if we are spending our energy teaching (or listening to) an elaboration on the minutia of precision obedience while marginalizing the effect and the intent of the death and resurrection of Jesus, then grace will be voided.

Any tinkering with the gospel that exalts law and diminishes grace by constantly glorying in the one to the neglect of the other, any understanding that leads to contempt for other people because they aren’t as “right” as we are, any retelling of the story that promotes a written or unwritten creedal formula as the basis for justification, any religious chatter that pushes the cross into the shadow of some new fangled list of do’s and don’ts is a hazard to spiritual health and will create those who look like the antithesis of the law’s real intent.

The thing Torah was intended to do (it’s righteous requirement as per Ro. 8.3-4) was to develop a people who would love God with all their heart, souls and mind, and love neighbor as self.  But the law was made weak by the sin of Israel, especially her failure to understand the purpose of her vocation in being a light and blessing for the  world (a light not just for the Jews).  Paul says that his understanding of all that God had been up to, from Adam to Christ, allowed him to affirm the law as a good thing; not a thing that we are to be under now, but something once fulfilled could be seen as holy, just and good.  Again, the intent of the law was to form a people in the midst of the nations who, in faith, really loved God with the totality of their being, and who loved other people as they loved themselves.  But the law couldn’t reach its objective . . . until Jesus.  What Jesus did was to take up the mantle that Israel had dropped, showed the way of true humanity in loving God and His fellow man, died to condemn sin, and was raised for our justification.  And when we put our faith in Him, when we are baptized into His death and resurrection, He sends us His Spirit.   By the means of Jesus and His Spirit we are finally in a place (in Christ) and given the resources (the Spirit) whereby we fulfill the righteous requirement of the law, marked out by our absolute trust in God through Christ, and the production of the fruits of the Spirit which enable us to love rather than hate, be at peace rather than fight, to be patient rather than give up, to speak grace rather than anger, to serve rather than demand service, to rejoice rather than grumble, and all the rest.

Because it was my experience, and the experience of so many whom I know, that much of my life in Christ was actually spent with my head and heart still in Adam, I pray that the message of the real gospel will ring throughout our communities and the world.  If the world sees us as bitter, hateful, contemptuous, elitists, and all the rest, it will know that we are not disciples of Christ.  The energy for discipleship is found not in any written code, but in a message etched upon our hearts, a message embraced by faith, a message with a Man at the center, and more than a Man, a God who came to liberate us from the curse of Adam, liberation we can enjoy  if we’ll only listen to Him carefully, if we’ll hear Paul in context, and if we’ll run far and fast from those who are sucking grace from our lungs in their zeal to manage God’s kingdom.

 

Bedrock of Reality

 

G

od is community. He’s Three. A perfect circle of sufficiency (Dallas Willard). Each member of the Godhead considering the other more important than self, constantly esteeming the other ahead of self, etc. The Father always gushes over the Son, the Son always deflects to the Father, and Jesus said it was good that He go away so that the disciples could enjoy the presence of the Spirit. That is the bedrock of all reality. Loving, selfless community. Where some religions consider balance (dualism–ying/yang) to be ultimate reality, or monism (unity without diversity) to be the ultimate reality, we know that all reality gets its energy from Three, the Trinity, God–unity with diversity.

So what? We are made in that image, and when we are pulled into Christ by the power of the Spirit, we step into that circle of sufficiency. Paul’s teaching in Ph. 2.1f on this subject isn’t just good doctrine we might or might not follow–it’s a metaphysical statement, the likes of which no philosophy can begin to touch. And all sin is a violation of that selfless, universal circle of unbridled love.

Community, then, isn’t a program, nor can it be nurtured by some program.  Community is a way of being, not doing. We are communal “beings.” Much of what morality/doctrine deals with has to do with “doing” but it flows out of authentic being. And the summation of that “being” is love. God is love and we are His. So, we need love from the Spirit (love is a gift of the Spirit, btw). We need to be reminded who we are dealing with here. Humans made in God’s image, full of innate dignity, made just a little lower than God (not a little lower than angels, as our poor translations state). I fear we too often attempt the “doing” without affecting the “being.” And I think that sort of superficiality is what sends people running from institutional church. We program some “service.” We all go “do” it. But we don’t love any better because of it. I think we need a lot of prayer and fasting in community focused on reminding ourselves about the ultimate reality–the eternal Community and their offspring. We need to watch Them love each other and pray with all our might for much grace and the Spirit’s influence. Until then, I think that maybe all we’re really doing is putting an expensive paint job on a car that has no engine. When we start “being” the community, the things we do will reflect it. For now, the things we do reflect competition, religiosity, smack of manipulation, are self-centered, and glorify the program, not the Programmer.