Tag Archives: Facebook

The Environment

My Environmental Conversion

Environmentalism is becoming my number one issue.

In the long term, other current issues are mostly irrelevant. Whatever legislation or policies we implement on issues like gay rights or gun control or religious freedom will only make a difference during our day. In one hundred years, or in five hundred years, when we and all those who knew us are dead and no one remembers us, new generations will come along and re-fight these issues and rewrite all we did.

Even the most influential triumphs (things like the Declaration of Independence or the Fall of Communism) are extremely fleeting in their effects. In another two centuries–or ten–no one knows what the world will be like. Maybe the center of the Earth will be Mecca. Or maybe it will be Tokyo. Or Salt Lake City. It’s extremely unlikely that the Fall of Communism will be much remembered–much less who the next US Supreme Court justice is.

Environmentalism is different.

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The Environment

A Single Day’s Work

The morning after the Brexit vote, as the status-quo-shattering results were becoming clear, Hamburger Morgenpost, the daily newspaper in Hamburg, Germany, rolled out a front page featuring a large portrait of Winston Churchill and a long headline in bold letters: Etwas aufzubauen mag die langsame und mühsame Arbeit von Jahren sein. Es zu zerstören kann der gedankenlose Akt eines einzigen Tages sein.

The headline is a translation of words Churchill delivered on September 29, 1959 in a speech to the Conservative Party Association in his constituency of Woodford: “To build may be the slow and laborious task of years; to destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.”

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Thoughts

On Male Monogamy

Note: This Facebook post is the rawest piece of writing I have ever published. Even today it’s hard to publish without some trepidation about being so transparent on the open Internet. But a core principle of this blog is to be honest about my intellectual and religious journey through life. I am committed to letting my past writing speak for itself, first and foremost as a reminder to me of where I’ve been. Looking back on this post now, a couple things have changed. First and foremost, I am no longer living as an unbeliever. I pray intentionally, and I have begun to read the Bible. I still see many reasons to doubt the historicity of parts of the Bible, but it has become increasingly clear to me that the Bible offers the only coherent framework for living that is accessible to me. Therefore, I accept the Bible as my guidebook for life and seek in faith to follow Christ in how I live. Secondly, the language of this piece is almost brutally jaded and unremorseful. Looking back and based on some of the feedback I received at the time, I wish it had been more gentle and treated pornography use s a sin of which to be ashamed. At the end of the post is a follow-up comment I posted a week later. (DL, June 10, 2023).

www.challies.com/articles/my-wifes-plea-to-christian-men

I want my Christian friends to read and let this article sink in.
In particular, absorb the line of thought reflected in the following quote. There are several threads in it I want to unpack.

Why do so many men, and even so many Christian men, have such weakness when it comes to sexual sin? . . . Why are so many of you failing . . .? Is it really that difficult? You would almost think that this one sin is beyond the power of the Holy Spirit. . . . The only conclusion I can come to is that you are so consumed with self-gratification that you are not willing to fight, and I mean really willing to fight, this sin. If it’s not that you can’t, it must be that you won’t.

I have some specific thoughts in response.

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Politics

Facebook Discussion on Cake Baker Rights

Notes: This series of Facebook comments took place on a post on the wall of a gay friend that I believe was related to Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law passed by Indiana to prevent government from substantially burdening the free exercise of religion. The law, which arose in part as a reaction to the Colorado Masterpiece Cake Shop case, passed into law the day of this thread. I engaged in response to another commenter who’s content was acerbic and anti-gay. This series of comments is a good example of the kinds of discussions with strangers I had on Facebook when I was most involved with the platform. The consistent failure to actually change any minds through all this engagement (as evidenced here) is one of the reasons I ultimately left the platform. I posted on the same topic in a comment on another thread a few days later. (DL, June 14, 2023).

[Commenter 1 Name Redacted], I hesitate to engage you simply because I’m not sure it’s going to get us anywhere profitable, but silence can be its own form of complicity, so . . .

1) The formulations “degenerate minority” and “degenerate sexual deviant” are not an indicator of an open minded clear thinker. Your expression is dismissive and muddy. It basically comes across as bombastic namecalling. Perhaps you could have written something like: “You shouldn’t get extra rights at my expense simply because of your race or your sexual preference.” In this way you could have made the same point without unnecessarily raising the temperature level of the conversation and offending many of the people you’re ostensibly trying to dialog with.

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Thoughts

Morality Presupposes Transcendence

Note: This series of Facebook comments began as a response to someone I’ve forgotten on a friend’s post that I’ve also forgotten. Through all my decade plus of spiritual doubt, I never lost confidence in—and still have never lost—the observation expressed in this post that without a transcendent reality beyond the material universe, there can be no rational basis for the concepts of Good an Evil. I only have my part of the exchange. Summary comments have been added for clarity. (DL, June 13, 2023).

What the quote [OP’s Name Redacted] posted addresses is a fundamental flaw with philosophical materialism. If there is no reality beyond the matter of this universe, then talking about good and evil is meaningless.

States of matter cannot be good or evil. They are simply configurations of atoms. A supernova doesn’t have moral quality, neither does an avalanche. Both are simply matter in motion.

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Politics

The Importance of an Open Marketplace

Note: When Mike Pence signed Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act on March 27, 2015, the news made the rounds in my Facebook circle, and I participated in a couple of threads on the topic. This short comment echoes some of the main points I had made a few days earlier in a longer discussion. (DL, June 14, 2023).

I had this discussion earlier on another thread, and I’ll repost some of what I said here:

I subscribe to the concept of the social contract. As members of a freely self-governing society, we undertake certain commitments to one another. In essence, we willingly agree to give up some of our autonomy in exchange for the benefits and protections of combined effort.

In regards to the public marketplace, I accept rules regarding fair and equitable trade for all in exchange for police protection, protection from unfair competitive practicies by more powerful competitors and banks, easy access to my customers and suppliers provided by the public transportation infrastructure, and (crucially) free access to the market myself regardless of my beliefs.

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Faith

On the Historicity of Genesis

Note: Like many of my peers (but unlike many of our parents or many of our children), I have made a lot of Facebook comments over the years. The writing is often unpolished, but they nevertheless offer excellent snapshots of what I was thinking at a particular time and how I articulated those thoughts for a particular audience in a particular context. This comment was made on the post of a friend who shared without comment a Gospel Coalition article entitled, “Biblical Reasons to Doubt the Creation Days Were 24-Hour Periods.” It is an in-progress moment in the decade-long unwinding of my evangelical faith. I have cleaned up a number of typos from the original comment. (DL, Sept. 13, 2021)

My thoughts based on my understanding of various things:

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Thoughts

The Biological Roots of the Self

Note: This post was originally a comment in a Facebook thread, the context of which has been totally lost to me. It was written 2-3 years into the my journey into spiritual doubt. While I don’t remember the Facebook thread that provoked the comment, I do remember the origin of the line of thought. Through casual conversations with my boss at work, I came to realize that almost everything I consider ‘me’ is rooted in genetics and circumstance. ‘American.’ ‘Male.’ ‘White.’ ‘Verbal.’ ‘Analytical.’ ‘Nerdy.’ ‘English-speaking.’ Once my brain and body are stripped away and Earth and all its cultures are left behind, what is left of me that is actually ‘me’? Even if we are resurrected after death as the Bible teaches, what would be left of us that was recognizable? This is another item that as I inhabit the life of faith I have to simply set aside as beyond knowing. (DL, June 13, 2023).

Is there any part of your consciousness that will survive the destruction of your brain?

Pointers to the answer:

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Technology

Why I’m Leaving Facebook

Note: I first made the decision to leave Facebook and migrate my content to this site in 2014. It would be seven years after that decision before I actually got the blog set up in September 2021 and started moving content over. I left Facebook permanently in May 2022. Looking back, I still entirely agree with the rationale below (although I came to like the Messenger app as the best part of Facebook and hardest thing to leave in the end). I have not missed Facebook or the interactions I had there. (DL, June 13, 2023).

After many months of consideration, I have decided to begin the process of disengaging from Facebook.

The primary reason is that I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with the way FB manipulates users: curating our news feeds, constantly inserting ads and links to third-party content, giving priority to paid posts, etc. I have ceased to feel like what I see on FB every day is an honest reflection of my friends’ activities and interests; it isn’t. It’s a revenue stream optimized by FB for me to get me clicking on things that aren’t first-and-foremost about my friends, but rather about making FB money.

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Poetry

What is a Star?

What is a star?

The gleam above me in the night?
It isn’t really in the sky.
It is in fact behind my eye,
triggered by a beam of light
that struck a nerve and touched my brain.
A wave of such and such a height
has stroked the synapses of sight—
a process I cannot explain.
But nonetheless the star I see
rotating on the neural plane
by memory can be called again.
(It’s shining still inside of me.)
If eye and brain are not a star,
and neither is a memory,
then neither can the gleaming be.

—David Lohnes
July, 2014

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