rings

If you've ever had a confrontation that made clear the people's enormous capacity to justify incredibly unjustifiable things and believe incredibly incredible things... if you've ever had the terrifying experience of realizing your very own power to delude yourself- to believe with a whole heart and a suppressed mind in the outrageous and illogical things...

you know, then, that you can never quite look at the world with quite the same amount of belief or trust again.  you can't quite greet humanity with the same sense of applause for our elevated ability to reason.  once you have had to recognize the giddy willingness with which humanity throws itself toward the fantastical, the comforting, the mystical, the self-assuring without regard at all for plausibility, the hollowness of all dogma seems to echo off even the most sound-seeming doctrines.

i feel that way about all things christian. among many other things

show me a truth and i will show you a price tag.

i've been thinking about that in regards to our culture's dependence and immersion in/abhorrence and distrust of media.  the internet has given us greater access to the world- more readily available technology has given us access to changing that world.

photoshop lays bare the strings that pull at miracles

i think that the acknowledged capability to manipulate and alter images has made everyone a bit more leery of taking visual proof as proof at all.

we crave it- we seek it- we still compare ourselves to the people on magazine covers- we still crave the satisfaction of the visual represented world- a world we can hold in our hands or call forth at a whim-

but deep down, we don't believe it.

hence a predominant sense of isolation.  little whispers of despair, if you listen.  a desperate, quiet confusion.  we know we are immersed in the unreal.  we know that we are informed by it, that we cannot untangle the strings enough to live apart from it.  but the unrealness of the unreal... the hollow... mars every clear ring of truth or beauty or stable promises in the world.

there is no euphony in the postmodern world without some reminder of the hollow it sprang from.