For the Christians in the room...

[alpharaposa]

Ephesians 6:10-18New International Version (NIV)

The Armor of God
10 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. 11 Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. 12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. 13 Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. 14 Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, 15 and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. 16 In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

18 And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people.

Comments

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

*hides here*

*pulls blanket over head*

[stryck.livejournal.com]

I did some praying this morning. It's a better reaction than the usual "read angry things, get angry in turn" cycle.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I think I am mourning, and what I'm mourning is the death of discourse. There has been no thoughtful discussion of the topic from anyone but asakiyume. Everyone else just wants to get pitchforks out and get righteous. And what they want to get righteous about is how wrong people like me are about everything.

Nevermind that quietly, I believe the same about a lot of the things they believe, and yet I still feel it is my duty to find the best road forward with those people. That I think consensus is important, and understanding. Those things are not valued anymore. What's valued is forcing people to do something whether they're ready or not, whether they've been convinced or not, whether their issues have been understood or not.

I am pretty sure this country is eating itself. I just wish there was a better place to go.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Twitter is definitely not a good medium for thoughtful discussion! Some one remark of yours can get caught up and retweeted wildly, but then if you have any follow-up thoughts, or reconsiderations, those never get seen.

But honestly, doing a fair amount of research on countries with recent pasts that include horrific actual violence, I think we're still doing okay. Our system is plagued by injustice but it still holds up the notion of justice, and people still believe it's possible to work within the system for positive change, and most of us, whatever our political persuasion, aren't advocating violence against those who differ from us. So, those are big positives, I think.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

It's not that I don't think we're doing all right now... it's that I don't see how we can continue like this without imploding. A society survives on the strength of its commitment to shared principles. Before you can survive (much less thrive), you need to agree on the basic, important things.

And the sense I get, increasingly, is that we don't agree on the basic, important things anymore.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if I said on your blog at some point, but I know I've said in other places--because it made a big impression on me--but this project called "slow democracy" works to get people talking about what they think is important to talk about. By coming together in a room to talk about this second-order thing (i.e., not the issues themselves, but what issues need to be discussed, and why), they discover commonalities of concern, and being aware of those commonalities makes the later discussion of the issues themselves more fruitful and thoughtful.

I think people *do* agree on many principles, but I think they disagree about cause and effect, and about loci of responsibility, and I think these lead to huge (and sometimes vicious) disagreements.

Related, and interesting, I was reading about the link between poverty and violence, and the person writing about it (a prof at Columbia who's worked for USAID in places like Uganda) was saying that although there are links, all sorts of other things are equally, or more, important, and one seems to be a sense of injustice. When people see what they perceive as an injustice, they can become very full of rage--you see this in this country on both sides of the ideological divide, when it comes to perceived abridgment of rights or impositions of hardships. So I think one thing that definitely unites us is our sense that injustice is wrong. And I guess yeah, there *is* a warning there, for all of us . . .

[stryck.livejournal.com]

I am afraid. We live in such peace that it can be jarring to realize that there isn't actually safety in this world. Civilization is fragile. In the end, the only stable thing is God. Everything else has to be fought for, over and over again.

It's exhausting.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I am exhausted with people who keep wanting to rewrite society's rules without addressing the underlying issues that prompted the formation of those rules in the first place. The amount of self-centered thinking these days is just astonishing. No, it's not self-centered. It's completely self-circumscribed. Nothing exists outside the limited bubble of a lot of people's needs and wants.

[stryck.livejournal.com]

Yes.

And you can't just reach over and pull them out, either. I wish there was a way to reason with people, or charm them, or something to get them to come out. But if I did have a method, that would mean I could control them, wouldn't it?

Reminds me of the Doctor Who special with the doomed cruise ship. "You don't get to choose who lives or dies. If you could, you'd be a monster, wouldn't you?"