aerasio

random ranting

Ok, so I've just roughly settled my timetable and hopefully it will remain as it is now (although my Older Brother has given me some last minute considerations to think on) And it roughly is as follows:
Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays
-World Politics
-First-year Seminar on the Science Fiction and Popular Science of Isaac Asimov
(2 of my dream courses :D)
Tuesdays and Thursdays
-The World of Jesus (Sounds interesting doesn't it?)
-First-year Expository Writing, Writing and Reading Texts

It may not seem like much, but it is a full-time load of courses. Although these 4 courses only involve 12 hours a week in school, they involve triple that time in studying, reading assigned texts, thinking about said texts and then answering assignments. To top it all off, my laptop crashed this afternoon, vanishing into the oblivion that is technical failure. The possible root problems are that:
-Its Hard Drive is Bad (Bad)
-Its Memory Card is Bad (Not so bad)
-My Windows XP is faulty (Who's isn't?)
Thus, the virtual dog that is computer malfunction ate my homework. So I'll have to rewrite all the essays that are due this week, which I stupidly failed to backup or print. Oh well, sucks to be me.

So moving to a far less banal and irritating topic, I was reading the blogs of people other than:
-my immediate family
-Ps Eve, Seb and Youwei
-and my own
And Clarence had finally decided to stop making an idiot out of himself (though I guess his blog name kinda demands it) and write something halfway serious (not that I fancy myself a serious blogger, cos its obvious I'm not), and well it got me thinking.

Society has many pre-conceived notions of success and what is worth striving for. We like to call these its values I guess. Among these values, or perhaps foremost among them are Wealth, Power, Social Status and Fame. Arguably these are vague terms and in certain cases are interchangeable but that is beside the point. The point is where is God in that dynamic? What of happiness or family or the betterment of mankind? What of the millions of people dying around the world everyday for no other reason than they don't have enough food to eat? Isn't there a higher meaning or purpose in life other than the rat race for money and glory that society throws on us?
What is society's answer to this? Quacks. There are many 'Spiritual Masters', 'Gurus' and bathroom philosophers claiming to have found the answers to those eternal questions, such as "why do we live?", "why do we die?", "where do we go after that?", "Why do we spend so much of the intervening time waiting for traffic lights?" But claiming is different from having.
These obviously are important questions. Why then is the attention of society so focused on those earlier mentioned things that upon closer inspection are transient and lost as easily as gained? Why don't they turn to God? Its easy to blame that on a single reason or cause like the internet or Hollywood. But these reasons alone seem to lack weight. I recall from awhile back a group sharing in my youth group led by Sebastian and myself. Seb mentioned repeatedly the importance of defending oneself against and at the sametime reaching out to a Godless, apathetic and adulterous generation. Why is our Generation like that?
Someone wiser than me knows the answer to that and maybe one day I'll know. Maybe I'm just being overly conservative, but I can't look at the pop culture of today and not be troubled. I can't look at a Britney Spears Music Video and not be disturbed. I can't see my friends waste their lives on empty gains and not say something.

I'd like to ask you as a reader to stop just reading and start thinking. What are your answers to those eternal questions? What do you value? What keeps you going? What in the world are you living and fighting for?

That, I think, is something worth pondering.




Anyhow, replies in the comments system would be appreciated so I know when you're talking about a particular post and when you'd just like to talk.

Have a Good one

So said Aerasio at 22:42