Did you guys hear about the $1000 screen saver app for the iphone that was purchased by 8 people before Apple pulled it from their App Store? The product description reads, "The red icon on your iPhone or iPod touch always reminds you (and others when you show it to them) that you were able to afford this. It's a work of art with no hidden function at all." Hehehe! Read the article here.
And, if you are in the mood for something a little grim, check out Chuck Colson's ruminations on the prophetic words of Solzhenitsyn in a speech delivered 30 years ago at Harvard University. Here's an excerpt:
Solzhenitsyn delivered each line in his high-pitched voice in Russian. The translation blunted the impact somewhat—in fact, there were even sporadic bursts of applause. But soon enough, outraged professors realized that Solzhenitsyn was charging them with complicity in the West's surrender to liberal secularism, the abandonment of its Christian heritage, and with all the moral horrors that followed.
As it happened, this summer I was reading a tattered copy of Solzhenitsyn's speech at the same time I was studying Jeremiah in my devotions. I was struck by the chilling parallels between the dissident's words and Jeremiah's warning to the Israelites.
For example, describing the Western worldview as "rationalistic humanism," Solzhenitsyn decried the loss of "our concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility." Man has become "the master of this world … who bears no evil within himself," he announced. "So all the defects of life" are attributed to "wrong social systems."
Solzhenitsyn also argued that this moral impoverishment had led to a debased definition of freedom that makes no distinction between "freedoms for good" and "freedoms for evil." Our founders, he reminded us, would scarcely have countenanced "all this freedom with no purpose" but for the "satisfaction of one's whims"; they demanded that freedom be granted conditionally upon the individual's constant exercise of his religious responsibility.
1 comment:
Yeah, how ofter do we hear phrases like "failed policy", "tragic flaw", "unintended consequences", "mentally unbalanced" when really bad things are done. What about evil people doing evil things. And who is the source of the evil? People just being stupid doesn't really explain it. Social theorists can't deal with an influence toward evil outside their construct of psychoses. If they did , they'd have to tell people to go to church and pray.
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