Anyone who has read this blog knows I’m a HUGE fan of Johannine lit, and that thanks to the last class in undergrad I took which explained it for me. But in detail, John, being a good shepherd himself, attempts to teach each person to listen to God’s voice (truth) – not just in example, not in knowledge, but in experience – in a soul. “You already know, what you have already heard from the beginning..” He is always calling us to look to what we know, and dive in deeper instead of thinking you already know it, and trying to add on novelties.

Contrast this with Conservative Evangelicalism, which seems to presume Jesus & Paul going around shouting. So in the image they perceive, they fulfill and follow! However, such shouting to the masses is likely not the reality of the matter: Jesus was very discerning, even selective (Zaccheus!) & did not shout or assume all men were willing & able to listen..

John however, followed this selectiveness, speaking to those who can hear instead of forcing ears to be open, or trying to open men’s hearts and lives into conformance, only killing men in the end, creating callous hearts unable to feel or hear the shepherd’s voice, which ought to be known and heard much easier without all this violence..

Now, I understand how all this happened: mid/late modern individuals felt the truth needed defense or modernizing.. that it was an untenable position in the eyes of the masses and needed to be made ‘hearable’ to men’s ears. Sadly, with the updating of this ‘hearability’ or the truth, it weakens the hearability in one’s soul, and even those ‘ears’ were already being closed up by other anti-humane Modern traits and trends.

So what of it all? We are now in a place historically where men’s hearts are pushing against these systemic heart-closing trends, and the most of us who grew up with the half-truth are returning to its fullness once again. To avoid such troubles, what ought we expect in our lives? In our ‘small groups’, amongst our friends, towards our modern cubicle jobs?

Most of us in our 20′s are holding on to some form of identity statements. There’s a set of reactionary statements we make, pushing us from our stodgy, modern childhood & adolescence through our college brains into something called ‘life’ now. Most of us don’t have a good idea where we’re being pushed into, and most of us are ok with just being reactionary. It’s a tad healthy to ‘get away’ from all that was killing us and driving us crazy, but at the same time, it’s not very healthy to not have a solid, grounded, well-explained and considered position or two. Most of us are addicted to reactionism, since it’s just too easy, relative to being responsible & chained down or something.

So what are we to hold on to? What is “what we have heard since the beginning”? Our childhood? The politics and weird social ideologies surrounding “Jesus loves me”? How our parents are too squishy to have anything behind them? Or, our novel ideas which we would say are ‘the beginning’ to our ‘new’ lives as rational adults?

The answer to these q’s are obviously “yes and no”. There’s truth just about anywhere, and that’s the point. Modernism has taught us to learn something, learn it’s place, and them move on from it. That is “growth”. But John’s repetitive writing is obnoxiously incompatible with such a late western ideal. In all my studying of the philosophy of mind and Artificial Intelligence, there’s one thing that makes us human, and it’s not ‘choice’ like The Matrix held up. It’s our forgetfulness. Sure we can ‘learn and move on’, but life isn’t so hierarchical or ordered. We forget (oddly enough, in a logarithmic curve), and we need to be reminded, and relearn not just ‘the place’ but the places each idea influences.

For instance, we are taught to ‘love your neighbor’. (That is sufficiently ‘from the beginning’ as well!) Our first modern question is “and who is our neighbor?” We can learn through someone telling us that we are “to love everyone.” But most of us will not learn such a lesson until they fail to love everyone they meet, and learn the consequences of creating so many broken hearts in this world. This is the repetition we need, for the forgetfulness we bear, and the central point behind grace and mercy shown to another as well as us: we fail, and given enough time, we just might succeed once in awhile.

So back to our small-group. What and how are we to expect our friends to grow and learn? It’s awfully depressing to hear the same issues and concerns each week over and over again, but it’s awfully pressured to feel like we ought learn something weighty upon our hearts.

I’ve never been a fan of ‘a new topic each week’. It’s fickle, and who is doing anything more than repeating their trite identity-building resolutions/reactions anyways? Book-studies are better, and oddly enough, they are more pointed. That’s my point: perhaps ‘small groups’ ought not be focused on the people involved, the times that are compatible to meet, topics agreed upon, but each group have one central goal/theme/recurring idea. “We go to the ‘grace’ group”, or “This is the ‘wrath of God’ group”( ) that kinda sounds fun. The point is to focus our lives around a topic we believe we need to learn, and then to dive in, reminding each other each week ow that has played out in our lives for good or ill, how we forgot, how that could have been useful to survive the week, or perhaps in mildly more intellectual fashion: compare-contrast: each week is a new topic, yes, but how does some societal problem, theological point, sermon this week fail or succeed with or without mercy, or love? This way we learn the depths of God’s truth, love, mercy and wrath. Perhaps even reading a book on the topic, or reading another book off-topic to see how it is or is not shown in characters’ lives..

This all sounds so fruitful to live in the reality of  human forgetfulness instead of in the modern assumption of learn-and-move-on. Most of us will never move on from the Gospel. The love of God is not something to ‘step up from’.. Our lives are not just built on top of his grace, but each brick’s substance is his grace.

The latest American economic fad is to give hardware away at corporate-subsidized priced, ‘hiding’ the actual cost in a monthly service fee. I think we all know and see this with the iPhone 3G having a lower entry cost than the first iPhone, and as with many other cell phones, by signing up for a plan, you get a ‘discount’.

Further examples are the new ‘Netbooks’ being subsidezed by Verizon, and there’s always those online service vendors hocking SaaS.

My verdict: I kinda like it. It’s a new form of credit that makes us play responsibly with our toys for the length of the contract.

But the other half of the story gets real interesting real quick. We all know that when a company builds out a platform, they have but one option and goal: to make money off of it. But what happens when you build out a platform ..and everyone else does too? Upon ubiquity, the price drops. Plenty of supply, plenty of options, no more demand.

I know, I know, I’m being obvious thus far, but the interesting part comes when you consider all this in terms of decades-long entrenched companies and their platforms now being heavily undermined and competed against (Microsoft). What was once a staple, an assumption is now (finally) being questioned. How long before a company’s platform becomes obsolete, and they must not just re-brand, but pick-up decades of infrastructure? IBM did it. But Redmond is usually smarter than all-eggs-in-one-basket. Their desktop market is hardly everything. At least they’re innovative.

But I still wonder how long Windows will be profitable. On one hand they keep upping the stakes (requirements) beyond what people need(Just like Office.. and now we’ve got simple Google Docs!), so they tier-out, but honestly, that’s what Apple did between Jobs.

Fact is, Big Business trusts and buys Big Business.. but us little guys are willing to take bigger risks with less on the line. And when there’s enough of us, we win.

So why is it that NASA is having trouble building a new rocketship? Why is it that each generation thinks they’re on to something new & great? And why is it that the collegue of an old nuclear guy has come up with innovation?

Innovation isn’t my topic of choice in the post, but it comes up anyways: perhaps each generation is blinded to the original hope and greatness of the previous generations ideas. “Familiarity breeds contempt.” Not just contempt, but inability to truly innovate. It’s easy to improve, to stand on the shoulders of giants, but to understand the original hope and power of an idea.. now that’s hard to not just maintain across a culture over time, but also to remember and rediscover.

Rediscovery ends up happening when a truly innovative mind comes along and finds out his idea is either too late (someone else did it already in his own time) or when he finds someone else in past history tried, but was either “before his time” or had a poor implementation. Those are not the only options: my concern is when the original glorious hope bred too many ideas and implementations that a society could only handle a few of them, with the rest (wonderful as they were) end up as “failures”, not because of their own merit, but because of the conflation due to a simple collective understanding of the idea. I suppose I speak of fission.. there was much more than just warheads possible.. also semi-clean powerplants. But nuclear power is hardly limitable to electricity-production and bloodshed. And as grateful as I am that there’s now becoming improvements on  the cleanliness side, still I’d prefer to see the original ideas of all the Manhattan Project.