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But what happens when we go out and look for inspiration? It seems to me that when we want inspiration we will find it anywhere. If you hear a vague statement, you will read into it what you need. This is basically how cold readings work, isn't it? The "psychic" throws out a bunch of random crap and people will latch onto whatever they can.
It gets worse when you expect something to be inspirational, in those cases, you can find inspiration in things that should be repulsive to you. Look at many of the stories in the old testament, Noah's Ark for example. A story about God murdering nearly every person on the planet has been turned into a children's story. People come in expecting it to be good and so they see it as good, even though the content of the actual story is pretty horrific.
I think many Christians do this a lot when they read the bible, they expect wisdom on every page and that is what they find. Much of the time there is nothing there, and yet they see brilliance. You can see this play out for yourself if you follow a bunch of Christians on twitter like I do. They will often tweet bible verses, which I had originally expected to be all about love, compassion, and so forth. What I see, however, is quite different, they seem to tweet any random verse at all. It almost seems like they opened their Bible to a random page, picked a random verse on that page, and tweeted it. It got me wondering if that is pretty close to what really happened, they asked God for inspiration, opened their Bible randomly (In their mind they are guided by God's hand I'm sure) and started reading. After doing this, they found the inspiration that they desperately needed, regardless of what verse they landed on. This verse now holds some meaning to them and they tweet it out. This is obviously some wild speculation on my part, but it is the best explanation I have come up with for the constant stream of random verses I see posted to twitter.
You nailed it on the head regarding the verses. I remember I used to do this thing when I was a Christian in faith and I really had to search for meaning sometimes. As you know if you open to revelations you may read about the beast and that takes a stretch to become relevant to your life, but you make it relevant.
ReplyDelete"you make it relevant"
DeleteI like that, well put
This comment spoke to me as well.. I didn't think about that, but I did the exact same thing when I was growing up. I would open up a random page, point to a verse and figure out what it "meant to me." It was like I thought the randomness was actually God trying to tell me something. A sort of prewritten Ouija board now that I say it out loud.
Deleteprewritten Ouija board, I love it. And yeah, when I used to do that I thought the fact that I could do that meant God was guiding me to what I needed to see. But really, I think you can always twist and twist until it means something for you. If you are going to twist enough, it doesn't matter where it started.
DeleteI remember finding TAE and Non-Prophets many, many years ago. I wanted a new podcast, I found them and spent the next month or two listening to their entire back catalog. There are a few podcasts out there that I have gone back and listened to all the back shows, but most I just start with the current and never go back. Hopefully, the one I produce is one that makes people want to hear what came before.
ReplyDeleteI think that when it comes to Christianity, people don't go looking for meaning, people have to try to impose meaning on Christian mythology, they have to come up with reasons why these old stories actually have some impact on modern life. Like we were talking about yesterday, often people have to decide what the lessons they can draw from a story are because the actual lessons are less than obvious.
When I first found TAE I also spent some time going through old episodes, although I didn't come close to listening to them all. Nowadays it's all I can do to keep up with the podcasts I subscribe to, it's hard to imagine listening to a back catalog at this point. I suppose if something REALLY jumped out at me I might try to do it.
DeleteSomething about your second paragraph makes me think of tv shows (star trek does this from time to time) where one character will say something random "hey, want some coffee", and another will suddenly find the solution from it "you're a genius! I need to put more power into the warp engine!"