music: Younger Brother, a Flock of Seagulls

colors: yellow, almond

mood: scattered

thoughts: the other day i was working in the library and found a yellow post-it note with handwriting that said something to the tune of "utopianism: the false belief in trying to achieve heaven on earth in our time," which made me nervous. i mean somebody at my school actually writing that with their own hand. gah!

So i went home and was doing homework for my theo class, and looked up utopianism on the web, and found this commentary by a man named jonah goldberg, in which he uses the phrase "The attempt to bring such utopianism to the here and now is the sin of trying to immanentize the eschaton." If you look up the two ten-dollar words in that sentence, you may come to the same conclusion as me -- that he's of a school of thought, shared by many Christian conservatives, and implies that humanocentric christian universalism is sinful by nature, for trying to make the world better. Um, excuse me? Here are Christians who are at once so very hopeful that Christ will return, and then the rapture, etc, and at the same time call any effort to make the realization of that reality sinful. The eschaton essentially means the end of an age, and the beginning of a new one, and I can see how that could be quite frightening for some, especially those who feel they have a lot to lose and don't understand all that they have to gain.

[Appropriate Tool lyrics: "I can't imagine why you wouldn't welcome any change, my friend."]

Today in class, we discussed God, Sin and Evil, and the need to define them from a more beneficial perspective than the one associated with the Catholic guilt feedback loop. Some definitions:
God: a deity who suffers with us, and celebrates with us.
Sin: That which damages. Or missing the mark.
Evil: Continuing to miss the mark. Or acting without concern for consequences.

One nice thing a classmate said -- "our problem is that we avoid the power we do have and seek out the power that we don't have. also we focus on the immediate right now, and on the far distant future, but not on that essential and long stretch between."

Oh, here's a valuable link.

chant/prayer/mantra:
The charge for the day -- assiduous determination.

pax hominibus,
joel

"And so, Theodore Donald Karabotsos, in accordance with what we think your dying wishes might well have been, we commit your final mortal remains to the bosom of the Pacific Ocean"