Steve Jobs--Christ's Counterfeit

It is not my intent in this opinion piece to say anything derogatory or cast any aspersions upon Steve Jobs’ person. I know very little about the man’s personal life and make no judgment about him for good or for ill. But I do take issue with what he stands for as the media has edified him and where his products, and others like them, have taken so many unaware. Steve Jobs is, unarguably, the now-deceased human symbol of the changing of a millennium that we did not acknowledge on 01 January 2001—though the prime candidate, he had not yet been ordained the prophet of technology. Now he has been edified by the media.

In the decade following the turning of the millennial calendar, with its disappointments and disasters, the one bright point of hope for the secular world, seemingly, was a looking forward to each new miracle that Apple, under Steve Jobs’ innovation and leadership, could produce. The iPod and iPhone and iPad with their several updates and the competition’s hurried imitations became almost sacramental tokens of the gospel of secularism and the ‘me’ generation.

It is not, of course, the electronic instrument, itself, that is anathema, but where it has led so many.

In Andy Crouch’s piece on Steve Jobs (‘The Secular Prophet,’ Wall Street Journal, October 8-9, 2011), Crouch says, “[Jobs’] most singular quality was his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope.” He was the spokesman, by design or default, of that hope. That hope was that the promise of technology as the deliverer, or opiate, from the angst of a new generation’s existentialism now that they had put Christ as Deliverer, Redeemer, and Savior, and the hope of a better life beyond the troubles of this one, on the shelf of history. The ‘virtual’ or digital life that the possessor could live was now, as the ad-men would have you believe, as ‘good as it gets.’ (Until the next version comes out.)

The Holy Scriptures use the term ‘antichrist’: (e.g., “Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists…. Many false prophets are gone out into the world…and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God; and this is that spirit of antichrist…they are of the world…and the world [alas] heareth them.” (1 John 2:18; 4:1,3,5) The term ‘antichrist’ means ‘instead of, or in place of Christ’ and His function. The antichrist is a person or a concept or a philosophy that mirrors closely the Gospel of faith, hope, and charity and redemption but provides a distorted mirror with ‘self’ as one’s own savior and consequently operates in opposition to Christ.

I do not view Steve Jobs as a devil, but do propose that by this definition became an antichrist.

The W.S.J.’s reviewer Andy Crouch says, “Steve Jobs was the evangelist of this particular kind of progress…. He believed so sincerely in the ‘magical, revolutionary’ promise of Apple precisely because he believed in no higher power.” Jobs said this in a Stanford University commencement address: “Someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”

If you are over 50 don’t you hear this as an echo of the mantra: ‘Do your own thing’ that you heard in the 1960’s and ‘70’s? My counterpoint to that is that most peoples’ ‘inner voice,’ if primarily trained by the video games and movies/television and virtual (i.e., counterfeit) reality that makes up so much of electronic fare, unless it is an educated conscience, leads them down the path of least resistance to a truly hopeless and virtually meaningless life that has little room in it for serving anybody but themselves.

“There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification. Therefore if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh [or selleth, if I don’t buy his product] a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian [I would hope] unto me.” (1 Corinthians 14:10-11)

But the voice of the True Shepherd still beckons. Steve Jobs’ last words were, according to his sister, “Oh wow, Oh wow, Oh wow!” as the light burst upon him and he slipped out of this life into the next.

Now that’s something to think about.

Thanksgiving

I am an unabashed fan of Norman Rockwell, iconic American artist of the 1940’s-60’s. It doesn’t matter whether you are 19 or 99, I am sure you have seen his famous Saturday Evening Post cover of a family sitting down to enjoy their turkey dinner. Although I don’t know for sure, I feel strongly that the artist implied that a sincere prayer of gratitude was offered over that meal as an expression of this family’s gratitude for the blessings of family, freedom, bounty, opportunity and prosperity.

I am afraid, though, that in many of our homes Thanksgiving may not be celebrated any longer as a significant religious holiday. I think many of our observances have become celebrations of consumption rather than spiritual feast of of love, gratitude, and sharing.

It hasn’t always been so. The first community Thanksgiving was celebrated by our Pilgrim forefathers at Plymouth in the fall of 1621. Theirs was a celebration of gratitude to a Heavenly Father who had sent a bounteous harvest to that beleaguered little colony. Almost half of Plymouth’s original 101 settlers had died during the severe winter of 1620-21, just 11 months before. Most of the Plymouth Pilgrims had been merchants and artisans in England, and they were woefully unprepared to live off the land. Fortunately a bounteous harvest came in that fall and the native Americans shared with them what they had and a grateful and relieved Governor Bradford proclaimed a three-day period of fasting and then celebration.

That celebration was at least partially borrowed from the admonition found in the Biblical book of Leviticus that provides: “When ye have gathered in the fruit of the land, ye shall keep a feast unto the Lord. . . and ye shall rejoice before the Lord, your God (Lev. 23:39-40).

That first feast and many subsequent celebrations of Thanksgiving focused upon man’s relationship with his God. Our subsequent forefathers understood well their dependence on God.

George Washington, in his proclamation establishing the 1789 Thanksgiving celebration, said in part,

“Whereas, it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor. . . that we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks for his kind care and protection of the people of this country.”

King Benjamin, in The Book of Mormon clearly taught the sacred origin of Thanksgiving when he proclaimed unto his people:

“O how you ought to thank your heavenly King! I say unto you, my brethren, that if you could render all the thanks and praise which your whole soul has power to possess, to that God who has created you, and has kept and preserved you and has caused that ye should rejoice, and has granted that ye should live in peace one with another. . . . I say, if ye should serve him with all your whole souls yet ye would be unprofitable servants.” (Mosiah 2:19-21)

Regrettably, with prosperity came false and humanistic notions. People who once rendered thankful praise to their God soon came to praise their own industry and intellect and forgot their God. In like manner even Christmas and Easter have been grossly distorted.

I would suggest that our task today is to reconnect to the sacred principles of the past—to proclaim with joyful hearts and voices that the Gospel of God has been restored to the world, that this land, identified by God as the choicest and most favored land above all others is our land and that we respect it, will protect it, and not defile it, and that we serve our brothers and sisters more than we do and resolve to never take more than we give.

Remember always that it wasn’t our intellect or our acquired abilities that enabled us to be here today. May an attitude of thankfulness to God always be with us, and not just in the time it takes to listen to a blessing on our lovely Thanksgiving feast.

Notable--Quotable

I suppose that anyone who does much reading collects quotations or thoughts that are meaningful to him. I also know that reading a list of interesting or provocative or illuminative quotations is something like trying to get a drink out of a fire hose. I will, nevertheless, share a few of those I have collected in the hope that you may choose but one or two per day to ponder during the reflective pauses that the wise take time to build into their day.

• The things that matter most are not things. Possession is nine-tenths of our flaw.

• Consider this question: If your life were made into a movie, and that movie had an appropriate sound track, what kind of music would it be? What mood would it leave me in when I played it? Could I dance to it? The music of a sound track of a life will not be original, but it has passed into us and left its sound in the juke-box of the mind, becoming part of us. And we will likely pass it on.

• The most profound theological confirmations being made these days are in the photographs taken from the Hubble Space Telescope. And the most jaw-dropping picture I have ever seen is the Hubble Deep Field. It is a ten-day exposure, covering an area of the sky no larger than a grain of sand held at arm’s length. And what do we see? Galaxies beyond counting, eight to ten billion light years away. Astronomers have extrapolated the information about this tiny window in the sky to estimate that there are more than fifty billion galaxies out there. “And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose and… innumerable are they unto man; but all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine and I know them. And as one earth shall pass away, and the heavens thereof even so shall another come; and there is no end to my works….” (Moses 1:33, 35, 38. The Pearl of Great Price, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints).

• “Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answer. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer some distant day.” (Rainer Maria Rilke)

• “No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.” (Helen Keller)

• “We all live under the same sky but we don’t all have the same horizon.” (Conrad Adenauer)

“The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to him his own.” (Benjamin Disraeli)

C. S. Lewis Day

Last year at this time I wrote a respectful and appreciative entry on C. S. Lewis, the eminent Christian apologist. In it I noted that this brilliant and influential man died on 22 November 1963, the same day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Although President Kennedy will always be remembered in American history books, Mr. Lewis will be thought of with appreciation for decades to come by untold thousands of solid Christians because of the illuminative insights he published in books and essays of his authorship:

Mere Christianity
The Four Loves
Surprised by Joy
The Great Divorce
The Screwtape Letters
Miracles: A Preliminary Study
George MacDonald: An Anthology
The Abolition of Man
God in the Dock: Essays on Theology

These, and other books of his letters, essays, and his fictional works (Space Trilogy and others) have been extremely valuable for me in my adult sojourn in mortality, and have been a delight to review regularly.

As noted previously, C. S. Lewis is highly ranked as one of my most highly esteemed and influential heroes. If your list of heroes is short, or your view of man and his potential is jaded, a sampling of his work is highly recommended.

I end today with a very typical excerpt from Mere Christianity:

“Let us go back to the man who says that a thing cannot be wrong unless it hurts some other human being. He quite understands that he must not damage the other ships in the convoy, but he honestly thinks that what he does to his own ship is simply his own business. But does it not make a great difference whether his ship is his own property or not? Does it not make a great difference whether I am, so to speak, the landlord of my own mind and body or only a tenant, responsible to the real landlord? If somebody else made me, for his own purposes, then I shall have a lot of duties which I should not have if I simply belonged to myself….

“Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever…. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse—so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years: in fact, if Christianity is true, Hell is the precisely the correct technical term for what it would be.” (Mere Christianity, Book III, chapt. 1)

The Unending Battle of Fitness

Nearly every person I know has fought this battle. It is a battle that is not won, but it can be managed. Just as we don’t eat a meal ‘once and for all,’ or take a breath of air and be done with it, we don’t get fit ‘once and for all.’ So how do we manage it?

First, know what you really want to accomplish. Most people who say they want to get fit really mean they don’t want to be fat. This little article is not really about fitness, but about fatness. This article is not for people who want to compete in some athletic event but is for people who want to look better and feel better (and as a bonus, the person who looks better and feels better usually performs life tasks better!).

I have been involved with physical fitness and athletic performance in one way or another all of my adult life. Movement, of course, is the key; the greater the demands of the performance the more movement (in volume, intensity, and type) is required. But what we are talking about here is not competition with another person, it is just about looking better and feeling better about yourself. So here are a few non-conventional suggestions that may seem just common sense, or too easy, but might be just what you need.

Realize that every movement you make that goes beyond what just gets you by will be for your good. That is to say, for example, that if you want to get to the third floor of an office building you could take the elevator or you could walk the stairs. Guess what you should do? You could even stop on a step and do some toe raises for 30 seconds or so—or even 10 or 20 squats if no one else is around. And you could probably do it several times a day. Similarly, if you are going shopping you could drive around the block looking for a parking place close to the store you intend to patronize or you could intentionally try to park a couple of blocks away and walk (just don’t forget where you parked!). Likewise, every time you picked up a bottle of water or a bag of groceries, or your backpack, or carried in some firewood, etc., you could do a few arm curls. What could you do when a television commercial comes on? Can you see where this is going? In short, don’t take it easy. Every repetition counts.

What you don’t need is to get a membership at a gym or to buy some expensive exercise equipment or special clothing before you get started. Just start where you’re at and with what you’ve got. If you do have an inexpensive piece of equipment such as an exercise ball or a dumbbell then great; keep it out and use it when you can (and be innovative with its use) but just use your own body weight when you can’t. Nothing should hold you back. One of the most physically fit men I ever met was confined to a jail cell. He ran in place, did one-legged squats, did handstand pushups against the wall, isometrically curled his bedframe and he didn’t eat too much. He did all this to try to save his life. Ask me about him sometime.

That brings me to my last piece of commonsensical but unconventional advice. Don’t go on a diet. Don’t buy a bunch of miracle vitamins or energy bars or supplements or other hyped junk. Just eat less of what you normally eat (smaller portions). Also increase your intake of water or food that has a lot of water it (fruits for the most part). Lastly, get rid of all the food in your house that you know is not good for you (high-fat, high-sugar foods). You know the movie ‘Field of Dreams’ –if you build it they will come? Well, if you buy it, you will eat it. So don’t buy it.

But do buy this advice. It works. I hope to see less of you. Hmmm.

Sexual Predators

Without trying to emulate the bulldog-like histrionics of outspoken and tireless advocate for victims’ rights Nancy Grace (a Fox News television personality), I feel the time has come to weigh in on the societal illness of sexual deviancy that defiles modern culture. With the sexual abuse scandals that have, in recent years, been reported in the Catholic Church, with the women school teachers who have seduced their young male students, with the incest and predation upon young girls that my wife and I learned of in our mission to a South Pacific nation (and the consequent highest suicide rate in the world) and with the frequent and horrible crimes perpetrated by male perverts reported in the media every day it appears that we have a systemic problem that poses grave danger to the future of our way-of-life.

I was saddened last night to learn of the immediate dismissal of Penn State University football coach Joe Paterno, one of my heroes, as part of the outfall of the child sexual abuse scandal perpetrated by one of his former assistant coaches. Coach Paterno, though innocent of wrongdoing himself, (he did immediately, as a mandated reporter, report to his superiors hearing the allegation against one of his former assistant coaches, Jerry Sandusky) got caught in the crossfire.

I believe that probably the only area in which Coach Paterno was culpable was stated in his own words to the media: “This is a tragedy. It is one of the great sorrows of my life. With the benefit of hindsight I wish I had done more.” In one way or another, sexual deviancy by perverts affects us all and may be the catalyst that brings down the wrath of God and the downfall of this once-great nation.

A thoughtful recent editorial (09 November 2011) by the Christian Science Monitor says this:

“Sometimes such concealment is justified to protect a victim of sexual harassment, rape, or similar violation. States, for example, don’t release the names of people who make rape charges. And employees who complain about sexual harassment or sexual advances often want to avoid making waves or hurting their careers over such disputes.

“Institutions in many cases try to uphold individual rights, whether it is a presumption of innocence or a right to privacy. But such rights must also be balanced against the interests of other workers and society in general if an accused is truly a potential repeat offender.

“Simply paying money for a sex allegation to go away or easing the accused out of a position can result in someone else paying the consequences later.

“Courts are well placed to find that balance between rights and the collective interest. But such a judicious approach falters when a private institution doesn’t even make an attempt at it. Instead, it is easy to put reputation, stockholders, donors, or other concerns ahead of individual rights or prevention of crime.

“Colleges and universities like Penn State have a particular problem with cases of alleged harassment or rape. Young people are often sexually active or unaware of social and legal barriers for gender behavior. When should a school, for example, handle a sex-related accusation itself, rather than take it straight to law enforcement? Are schools even capable of discerning false accusations or whether someone is a real sexual predator?

“Both the Penn State and Herman Cain cases should stir every private institution to review its procedures for handling sex-related accusations. And managers need regular training to live up to the complex Supreme Court guidelines for determining sexual harassment.

“Institutional self-interest must be avoided if there is to be justice for either the accused or accuser in a sex case, as well as protection for others.”

In my mind the greatest crime against life, in our time, is that of abortion, but the crimes of sexual abuse and molestation of children by adults ranks up there with kidnapping and slavery as beyond the pale of tolerable human behavior. I hope my readers will, with me, be among the voices ‘crying in the wilderness’ for these things to stop.

Being Productive

You may have seen this before, but most good things need revisiting.

Persistence
Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. (Ray Kroc)

Here is something that seems at first like a counterpoint to the above, but it may be just another approach to ‘persistence.’

Procrastinate
If at first you don’t succeed, give up immediately.
Move on to some other task until that becomes unbearable.
Then on again circling back around to the first problem.
By now, your sub-conscious will have worked on it; sort of like sleep but only cheaper.(Author unknown, found in the Wall Street Journal Magazine, Nov. 2011)

An interview I heard with author Jonathan Fields, who wrote a book titled Uncertainty, explored the same topic. He said “The really big insights and ideas usually come when we work really hard and then we step away. It’s the moments that we’re not working, the deliberate pauses that we create where we step away from work where the really big ideas and solutions and creations come to us.”

I agree. I often think best when I am not thinking. That is why, for me, dreams provide the best grist for productive mental output. But the grist for my dreams comes from my recent reading. Dreams provide for me the revelation that penetrates my consciousness that the regular activities of life may block.

Another way of saying essentially the same thing was said years ago by Stephen Covey in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He addressed the habit of taking time to ‘sharpen the saw.’ The ‘saw’ of our mind, our body, our ability to interact effectively with other people, all, I believe, could be enhanced by some of the same tactics suggested above.