Appreciation

Life seems so pointless at times. Just a cycle of stories repeated over and over again. Every story ends, every life fails. But the depression of pondering this cycle of hopelessness ends when I think of appreciation. Appreciation of music, nature, beauty, love.

The existence of appreciation counters my tendency to conclude that there is no hope for life beyond death. These moments of experience don't seem to be merely developed for the benefit of the survival of our species. Rather, they seem to be gifts from a being who would also give us a hope for eternity.

Scholarly Work

I look with general disdain towards the praise of scholarly work over other works. Academit merit and academic method to not ensure an author's work to be of quality and free of unfounded bias, ler alone to any exclusive degree. In fact, I believe that in the arena of non-scholarly work lies opportunity for superior peer review, sincere sharing of ideas, and a more humble attitude in these dissemination processes. What do you think?

The Cycles of the History of Worship

It is frequently argued that Evangelical worship is increasingly beginning to follow the model of a marketing corporation, and is losing its roots in traditional worship which used to have a model of theology.¹ Without saying whether this is a good or bad thing, I will argue that this is not a new trend. In fact I see this as a part of a cycle the Church has repeatedly gone through since the Apostolic Age.² This is by no means an academic paper based on a thorough research, but is just the spawn of an idea I wanted to get written down. If you have thoughts or reactions to this, by all means please share them with me.

The Church is composed of a community of individuals. I propose that the individual tends towards an experiential and emotional form of worship, and the community tends towards a traditional or principle based form of worship. I also propose that experience is a factor all authentic acts of conversion.³

My cycle is composed as follows:

1. Individuals convert to Christianity because of an experience they had. Their religion is thus based on their experience.


2. The community of individuals grows.


3. Once the community becomes sustainable, it no longer needs to be based on experience. In fact, it is impractical to do so, since the community is distanced by time from its individuals' experiences.


4. The community thus begins to emphasize on tradition and principle


5. The lack of emphasis on experience slows the inflow of converts, but this is not an issue since the community is significant in size and thus sustainable


6. The community begins to age, and dwindles in numbers


7. The community reaches a point of crisis where it can no longer survive


8. The community goes back to an emphasis of experience to draw individuals into the community, so that it can grow again

For example, the early church had an enormous influx of believers because they saw the acts of love by the Church, and the benefit it was having on their city, their neighbours, and themselves. This was enough reason to join the community of believers. The size of the community reached a critical mass where it had to begin institutionalizing many aspects of itself, thus shifting emphasis on deeds which have experiential consequences to deeds which dwell on principles of faith. In fact it became entangled with the state and thus became mainstream. The community dwindles and ages, mainly not through stagnation, but through falling to the temptations of mainstream culture. The crisis is sensed, and Christians begin to flee to the desert and other abandoned areas, to punish their bodies and seek true purity. This is the shift to an experiential emphasis. Many people see this as being attractive, and begin pursuing these Christian hermits and their ways. Communities of monks are formed, numbers grow, and the cycle begins again.

Notice how in this case there was not a conscious embrace of "experiential recruiting tactics", but the shift to an emphasis on experience was still there. Each example of a cycle will have its own complexity to the cycle, but the cycle is there in meta-form. Let's look at another example.

The story of the Salvation Army is that of reaching out to those who had rejected the Church because it was not relevant to them. They would provide to the needy, and put Christian lyrics to the tunes and genre which was popular at the time. Here lay the Crisis point and the shift of emphasis to experience. As the movement grew into a large community however, its emphasis shifted from experience back to principle. We can see that the Salvation Army still uses the same tunes and genre today which they used back in the 1800s.

As I said, I'm not trying to point out that the shifts are good or bad. I am just trying to demonstrate that there is a cycle, and it's been there from the beginning. I could go on with thinking up of examples, but I shouldn't digress too far from my studies. Having accomplished my task, I look forward to your thoughts and responses to my ideas.

Footnotes

1. If you are unaware of worship taking place on a marketing corporation model, or traditional worship which is based on a theological model, just ask me and I'll be happy to find demonstrations of them.


2. This "cycle" is can get complicated by other factors, which I will mention later


3. Inauthentic (e.g. forced) conversions are different, but nevertheless have had an influence on the history of the Church, which complicates my cycle

Isoformat in Python

As Tim mentions, trying to get the current datetime's isoformat is really ugly in Python. Unfortunately it's a little bit uglier than he described, due to daylight savings time... Here it is.

from datetime import datetime, tzinfo, timedelta
import time

class TZ(tzinfo):
    def utcoffset(self,dt): return timedelta(
        # begin extra craziness
        seconds = -time.altzone\
            if time.localtime().tm_isdst\
            else -time.timezone)
        # end extra craziness

    def dst(self,dt): return timedelta(0)

a = datetime.now(TZ())
a= a.replace(microsecond = 0)
print a.isoformat()

That prints

2009-11-01T22:24:30-08:00

Compare with php

date("c")

/* I actually don't know if this handles 
   daylight savings time or not
   but it's still way simpler */

grrr...