Social media, September 2012.

THURSDAY, 4 SEPTEMBER.

Anybody who puts all their hopes in Mitt Romney or Barack Obama is a traitor to the kingdom of God. (I’ll leave the discussion of Star Wars worshipers for another day.)

SATURDAY, 6 SEPTEMBER.

Since Christians have decided they (unlike Christ) are not going to be the best friends gay people have ever had, it would appear the Democrats are stepping up. Debate their motives all you like—it’s a handy way to avoid talking about how Christians dropped the ball.

FRIDAY, 14 SEPTEMBER.

If there were anything to the lucky numbers in fortune cookies, they’d all be precisely the same numbers on the days before bigger Lotto jackpots.

When I heard the Christmas carol my reaction was, “Are you people kidding? It’s September!” Then I realized it’s just me—iPod’s on shuffle.

SUNDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER.

Most of the problem is people who don’t know any Muslims and don’t care to. It’s easier to believe the stereotypes than love our neighbors.

TUESDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER.

“Don’t judge someone just because they sin differently than you.” —Tyler Merritt

WEDNESDAY, 19 SEPTEMBER.

Live in fear, or live in faith. You’re either doing one or the other. That’s not an oversimplifiation. It’s exactly that simple.

FRIDAY, 28 SEPTEMBER.

We are the Samson generation. We do mighty, miraculous things, but our relationships with God have no depth, much sin, and little fruit.

Things one notices when people try too hard to sell acne cleanser.

I didn’t mean to turn into a media critic, but this is what you get when the advertisers run the same commercial 10 times during the same half-hour show.

Not sure why, but I’ve been noticing more acne medicine commercials lately. Maybe the computer has figured out that I have problem skin and is targeting me in particular with the advertising. Or maybe the world of Minority Report hasn’t arrived just yet. Not sure. Most likely this is just what happens when you watch all your TV over the Internet: Limited advertisers, so you wind up watching the same ads over and over again, ten times over the same show, until you start to deconstruct them. Either way… lotsa zit-lotion ads.

Briefly, what I find ridiculous about them.

Your 2012 Antichrist Election Watch.

Wondering if any of the Republican presidential candidates are the Antichrist? Well, maybe one of them. Maybe.

Ah, gematria. It’s just good clean fun.

Gematria, if you’re not familiar with it, is a system of numerical value that a letter or word has. Before Arabic numerals were invented, if you wanted to indicate numbers, you had to make do with your alphabet. Hence Roman numerals, with all its Is and Xs. Or in the case of Hebrew-speakers, they just gave each letter in the alphabet a value. Alef is one, bet is two, gimel is three, up till ten… then kaf is 20, lamed is 30, and so on till 100… then resh is 200, and so on till we’re out of letters.

So when Revelation refers to the number of one’s name, this is what it means. When it says to double-check the number of the beast by saying it’s the number of a man’s name, you’re supposed to take a person’s name, convert it to Hebrew, convert the Hebrew letters to number-values, add ’em up, and get 666. (Or, in a few ancient copies of Revelation, 616. But that’s a textual variant; likely a copyist’s error. Unless 616 is correct and 666 is the error. Unlikely, though.)

The charisma of Newt Gingrich.

The only reason people see Gingrich as a serious candidate is because he’s a personally likeable guy. But you don’t hand power to such people.

As I said previously, if I were still a conservative I’d vote for Rick Santorum: Social conservative (as I still largely am), fiscal conservative (as I no longer am), likes small government (whereas I think that dodges the real issue of effective government), and as a bonus is a fellow Christian. I would expect most conservative Christians to be like-minded.

Of course they’re not. Some are more libertarian than conservative, and are therefore Ron Paul supporters. Some are pragmatists, believe liberals might vote for Mitt Romney—revealing how very little they understand liberals—and therefore support him. Some are conservative but not that conservative, and will vote Romney; some are anti-Catholic and would like to vote Rick Perry, or Paul.

And then there’s the Newt Gingrich wing. There is a segment of Republican wingnuts who believe that Gingrich is, without exception or irony, the only person who could win the 2012 presidential election. They believe only Gingrich has the intellect to counter President Obama, that only Gingrich has sensible policies on immigration, healthcare, economics, foreign policy, the size of government, and the deficit. Plus he’s a good Christian. Or at least he says so.

I wrote this during a commercial interruption.

TV executives apparently don’t understand what a short attention span your average internet user has. We’re not sitting through two minutes of commercials.

Years ago I stopped watching TV and started renting movies from Blockbuster. When the economy tanked, I dropped Blockbuster (as did everyone else, which is why it went belly-up), and started watching the TV shows that were now suddenly available on the internet.

Of course, internet TV is growing to make the same mistakes that broadcast TV did. Stands to reason; they’re run by the very same people. The one I’m gonna rant about today is the commercials.

No top ten list for me.

Every year the print media, and now the Internet media, regurgitate old news by putting together top ten lists of the most important, or best, or otherwise most relevant articles of the previous year. Most of the blogs I read are coughing up a top ten.

Blogger, the web-based software I use to crank out my blogs, provides stats so you can see which of your posts are most popular this very instant, or over the last 24 hours, seven days, month, or all time. I does not provide you with information for the past year. To do that you have to hop into the editor, scroll through everything you've written over the past year, and note the tally of pageviews that each have had.

On resolutions, and my newest one.

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. That’s not to say I won’t resolve things around the New Year.

Years ago I stopped doing New Year’s resolutions. Not because I consider myself perfect, and those of you who like to kick people off pedestals will easily remind me I’m not. No; it was part of an overall package of self-reform I underwent years ago. I didn’t even come to it over New Year’s. I resolved to do several things: To stop gift-giving only for Christmas and birthdays; to stop tithing an exact 10 percent, down to the penny, to my church, but to give generously; and to make resolutions as needed, and not just at the beginning of the year or month.

Hey, if you need to quit huffing paint, do you wait for the New Year? No; it might be February, and you only have five brain cells left before your IQ drops to the point that you’ll soil yourself every time the phone rings. So you put down that spray-can now. And the same goes for any resolution: If it needs to be done, don’t put it off. Don’t procrastinate till the New Year.

And its corollary: If it doesn’t need to be done, don’t obligate yourself to do it simply because it is the New Year and everyone around you is asking what your resolutions are.

Speaking of which, people are asking me, naturally, what my resolutions are. I’m successfully resisting the temptation to say, “I’ve resolved to have you murdered and your body never found.” After all, the cops would suspect me first. But seriously: I just tell ’em I make resolutions as necessary, and not for New Year’s. If the Holy Spirit convicts me to change, I have no business putting him off till it’s convenient for me to do it. And I’m not going to arbitrarily change things simply because I have to change the calendar.

That said, I do have a new resolution, which I started last week. It’s ridiculously minor, but to some folks it’s actually ridiculously major, which is what triggered it.

I’ve resolved to capitalize less.

I told you it was ridiculously minor.