Why Are Christians So [Fill in the Blank]?

July 18, 2012 in Faith with 14 Comments

Here’s a fas­ci­nat­ing and eye-opening exper­i­ment that you can try in the safety of your own home. Go to Google. Now, begin typ­ing in the fol­low­ing phrase:

Why are Chris­tians so

Google auto­mat­i­cally com­pletes the remain­der of your sen­tence, giv­ing you the most commonly-searched for phrases that begin with the same words. Here’s what comes up:

Why are Chris­tians so crazy

Why are Chris­tians so closed minded

Why are Chris­tians so judgmental

Why are Chris­tians so ignorant

Now, try some­thing else. Keep search­ing for “why are Chris­tians so”, and this time put in the first let­ter of the alpha­bet — A. Now what comes up? To save you time and effort, I’ve com­piled all the Google auto­com­pletes for each let­ter of the alpha­bet. Now, cour­tesy of Google, Inc., here is what comes up when you type each sub­se­quent let­ter of the alpha­bet begin­ning with the phrase “why are Chris­tians so”…

A

Why are Chris­tians so ARROGANT

Why are Chris­tians so ANTI-GAY

Why are Chris­tians so AWESOME

B

Why are Chris­tians so BORING

Why are Chris­tians so BRAINWASHED

Why are Chris­tians so BLIND

Why are Chris­tians so BIGOTED

C

Why are Chris­tians so CRAZY

Why are Chris­tians so CLOSED MINDED

Why are Chris­tians so CONSDESCENDING

Why are Chris­tians so CREEPY

D

Why are Chris­tians so DIVIDED

Why are Chris­tians so DEFENSIVE

Why are Chris­tians so DELUSIONAL

Why are Chris­tians so DIVIDED ABOUT HOMOSEXUALITY

E

Why are Chris­tians so EASILY OFFENDED

Why are Chris­tians so EVIL

Why are Chris­tians so EXTREME

Why are Chris­tians so AGAINST EVOLUTION

F

Why are Chris­tians so FAKE

Why are Chris­tians so FAT

Why are Chris­tians so FULL OF HATE

Why are Chris­tians so FEARFUL

G

Why are Chris­tians so GULLIBLE

Why are Chris­tians so GOOGLE SEARCH VIDEO

Why are Chris­tians so GREEDY

Why are Chris­tians so ANTI-GAY

H

Why are Chris­tians so HOMOPHOBIC

Why are Chris­tians so HAPPY

Why are Chris­tians so HYPOCRITICAL

I

Why are Chris­tians so IGNORANT

Why are Chris­tians so IGNORANT YAHOO

Why are Chris­tians so INTOLERANT

Why are Chris­tians so INSECURE

J

Why are Chris­tians so JUDGMENTAL

Why are Chris­tians so JUDGEMENTAL YAHOO ANSWERS

Why are Chris­tians so JUDGEMENTAL YAHOO

Why are MOST Chris­tians so JUDGEMENTAL

K

Why are Chris­tians so KIND

L

Why are Chris­tians so LAME

Why are Chris­tians so LOVING

Why are Chris­tians so LONELY

Why are Chris­tians so LEGALISTIC

M

Why are Chris­tians so MEAN TO ATHEISTS

Why are Chris­tians so MISERABLE

Why are Chris­tians so MATERIALISTIC

Why are Chris­tians so MEAN

N

Why are Chris­tians so NARROW MINDED

Why are Chris­tians so NICE

Why are Chris­tians so NAIVE

Why are Chris­tians so NEGATIVE

O

Why are Chris­tians so OBSESSED WITH HOMOSEXUALITY

Why are Chris­tians so OBSESSED WITH ABORTION

Why are Chris­tians so OPPOSED TO GAY MARRIAGE

Why are Chris­tians so FULL OF HATE

P

Why are Chris­tians so PUSHY

Why are Chris­tians so POOR

Why are Chris­tians so PERSECUTED

Why are Chris­tians so PRO ISRAEL

Q

[NO AUTOCOMPLETE]

R

Why are Chris­tians so RUDE

Why are Chris­tians so RETARDED

Why are Chris­tians so RACISTS

Why are Chris­tians so SELF RIGHTEOUS

S

Why are Chris­tians so STUBBORN

Why are Chris­tians so STUCK UP

Why are Chris­tians so SELFISH

Why are Chris­tians so SELF-RIGHTEOUS

T

Why are Chris­tians so UNLIKE THEIR CHRIST

Why are Chris­tians so MEAN TO ATHEISTS

Why are Chris­tians so MEAN TO EACH OTHER

Why are Chris­tians so MEAN TO GAYS

U

Why are Chris­tians so UNCHRISTIAN

Why are Chris­tians so UPTIGHT

Why are Chris­tians so UNHAPPY

Why are Chris­tians so UNLIKE THEIR CHRIST

V

Why are Chris­tians so VIDEO

Why are Chris­tians so VIOLENT

W

Why are Chris­tians so WEIRD

Why are Chris­tians so WEAK

Why are Chris­tians so WORDLY

Why are Chris­tians so OBSESSED WITH HOMOSEXUALITY

X, Y, Z

[NO AUTO COMPLETE]

Obser­va­tions

I’d like to make three obser­va­tions about this list.

  1. Google auto­com­plete is not the barom­e­ter of cul­tural and Chris­t­ian trends. But still, this is inter­est­ing stuff. It pro­vides some insight as to what peo­ple are search­ing for online when it comes to the most out­stand­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of Christians.
  2. The above search queries are not part of a con­spir­acy by the evil empire of Google to darken people’s minds regard­ing the nature of true Chris­tians. Google’s auto­com­plete fea­ture is algorithm-driven, aggregating the tril­lions of Google searches (ide­ally to shave sec­onds off your search attempts). Satan is not Google, nor vice versa. What you read above is merely a col­lec­tion of search engine queries. It’s just math, not some sub­ver­sive tech­no­log­i­cal conspiracy.
  3. The major­ity of these ques­tions are tilted in a neg­a­tive direc­tion. I found only a few that are pos­i­tive. If Chris­tians were a busi­ness, we’d have a seri­ous PR prob­lem on our hands.

What does this tell us?

So, with the unim­pres­sive list of pejo­ra­tive ques­tions above, how should we respond?

1.  Option 1:  If we’re Chris­tians, we should expect this type of thing.

Let me string together some Bible verses:  “You will be hated by all for my name’s sake” (Matthew 10:22). “If the world hate you, you know that it hated me before it hated you…If they per­se­cuted me, they will also per­se­cute you” (John 15:18–20) “All that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suf­fer per­se­cu­tion” (2 Tim­o­thy 3:12).

That’s the reflex­ive answer. That’s the answer that makes us feel good. That’s the answer that exon­er­ates us from some of the guilt that per­haps we ought to feel.

But there’s another answer.

2. Option 2:  We as Chris­tians are to blame for the ugly pic­ture we’ve painted of ourselves.

I real­ize I’m paint­ing with broad brush­strokes, but is it pos­si­ble that we deserve some of the reproach? This gets uncom­fort­able. We pre­fer to think, “Yeah yeah! We’re being per­se­cuted!” when in real­ity 1) it’s not even per­se­cu­tion, and 2) we are par­tially to blame for it.

In a sense, this list is humor­ous. After all, how many unbe­com­ing adjec­tives can you heap up behind a sin­gle search phrase? At the same time, how­ever, this list is sad. It’s sad, because Chris­tians are rec­og­nized as an odi­ous, ugly, bick­er­ing, hyp­o­crit­i­cal bunch of peo­ple. We are liv­ing out the exact oppo­site of what Christ com­manded, which is that we be known by our love. When I read through all those search queries, I thought of two passages:

“By this all peo­ple will know that you are my dis­ci­ples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35)

And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first com­mand­ment. And a sec­ond is like it: You shall love your neigh­bor as your­self.
(Matthew 22:37–39)

We prob­a­bly won’t be able to change the auto­com­pletes in Google, but per­haps we can by God’s grace pur­sue Christ­like change in our own lives.

Patrick Henry, Slavery, and Inconsistency

July 17, 2012 in Books with 0 Comments

I recently fin­ished read­ing Lion of Lib­erty, the biog­ra­phy of Patrick Henry by Har­low Giles Unger. I found the fol­low­ing let­ter writ­ten by Patrick Henry (Appen­dix B in the book) to be interesting.

Con­tinue Reading…

Book Review of Marketing in the Age of Google

July 12, 2012 in Books with 0 Comments

Since a big part of my job involves SEO, mar­ket­ing, and online biz, I found this book, Mar­ket­ing in the Age of Google, to be helpful.

Con­tinue Reading…

A Four-Year Old Contemplates God’s Omnipresence

July 11, 2012 in Faith with 0 Comments

My four-year old daugh­ter got me think­ing about God’s omnipres­ence recently. She hasn’t exactly used the word “omnipres­ence” in a sen­tence or any­thing, but we have a lit­tle kid’s cat­e­chism book that we’re work­ing through. One ques­tion goes like this:

Ques­tion:  Where is God?

Answer:  God is every­where. Job 11:7

When she heard this, she objected, “No, no, Daddy! God is in heaven!” It was time to talk about omnipres­ence. I real­ized, while try­ing to explain it, that God’s omnipres­ence is hard to fully explain, let alone to try to under­stand. Even though we can’t fully grasp it, we can con­fi­dently believe it. Though it can be explained more, it is not less than  the three-word state­ment above:  God is every­where. I’ve writ­ten some med­i­ta­tions on God’s omnipres­ence over at Crossleadership.

Is God Really Among Us?  A Bold Dec­la­ra­tion of God’s Omnipresence

Book Review of All Business Is Local: Why Place Matters More Than Ever in a Global, Virtual World

July 10, 2012 in Books with 0 Comments

Thanks to a business-savvy friend of mine, I’ve enjoyed perus­ing some busi­ness books recently. All Busi­ness is Local is one such book that I read.

Con­tinue Reading…

Book Review of Jesus + Nothing = Everything

July 5, 2012 in Books with 1 Comment

“The blog almost ruined my wife’s life.” These were the words of Tul­lian Tchivid­jian when reflect­ing on a painful time as the newly-installed pas­tor of Coral Ridge Pres­by­ter­ian Church. A ton of peo­ple didn’t want him in the church, and they were try­ing to oust him, malign­ing his wife, and key­ing his car. They even started an anti-Tchividjians blog. It was a good ol’ fash­ion evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian free-for-all church fight (in the worst pos­si­ble sense). As God grew him, Tchivid­jian emerged from the fray with a greater real­iza­tion of the char­ac­ter and work of Jesus Christ.

Con­tinue Reading…

Checking My Email Is a Waste of Time

June 18, 2012 in Productivity with 0 Comments

I’m no pro­duc­tiv­ity guru. How­ever, a few months ago, I came to a dra­matic real­iza­tion:  check­ing my email can be a grand waste of time. I’m not sure why it took me so long to real­ize this. Thanks to a few help­ful com­ments in Four Hour Work­week, I was able to save scads of time sim­ply by check­ing my email less frequently.

Email itself not a waste of time. Rather, check­ing my email so fre­quently was becom­ing a time drain. “So what?” I would think to myself, “I’m just click­ing a tab on my browser, look­ing it over…No big deal.”

Actu­ally, it was a big deal. The lit­tle tab click thing was actu­ally cre­at­ing a mind shift as well. I was dis­tract­ing myself from my task, divert­ing my entire atten­tion to some­thing else, squan­der­ing away a few min­utes on need­less archiv­ing, then try­ing to revert my atten­tion back to the impor­tant task. With that hap­pen­ing so fre­quently through­out the day, pre­cious min­utes were being wasted.

So, I decided to deal with my email in chunks of time, at spe­cific points through­out the day. At 11a and 4p, I would go to my email and deal with it. Some­times, it takes me an hour to deal with it all. Some­times it takes me a few min­utes. All I know is that some­how, I am now able to do more, to focus more, and to get more stuff done.

Today, I read this sad state­ment by pro­duc­tiv­ity coach Jared Gorlanick:

Most peo­ple spend more time dur­ing the week on email than they do with their fam­i­lies. They also lose a quar­ter of those days to recov­er­ing from inter­rup­tions, pri­mar­ily due to email.

Of course, I don’t always stick to my reg­i­mented email times. I real­ize, how­ever, that email is a tool to help my work and com­mu­ni­ca­tion; it’s not the mas­ter of my day. Despite the addict­ing dopamine rush of new mes­sages, I have bet­ter things to do all day than keep click­ing that tab with the red envelope…that time monster.

Why Remembering What You Read Isn’t That Important

June 15, 2012 in Books with 3 Comments

I was chat­ting with a col­league of mine the other day. He asked me, “Do you think we retain more when we hear a book, than when we read it? If so, why do you think that is?” Both of us are audio­book affi­ciona­dos, so we do a lot of lis­ten­ing to books.

His ques­tion got me think­ing. Is retain­ing infor­ma­tion really the goal of reading?

I don’t think so. I think the most impor­tant net effect from read­ing a book is how it changes us, not the stuff we can recall.

That sounds pretty neb­u­lous, so let me pro­vide three examples:

  • When I read the Bible (which is vastly dif­fer­ent from any other book), my goal isn’t to remem­ber all the facts, but rather to see God, and to allow him to change me through what I read. Sure, I’d love to ace every game of “Bible Trivia,” but that’s not the point of read­ing the Bible. Remem­ber­ing facts is inci­den­tal to the deeper work of a changed life.
  • I read a book called Atlas Shrugged. Recently, I was try­ing to remem­ber the name of the pro­tag­o­nist, and it took me a while. (I finally came up with it:  Daphne Tag­gart.) I may not remem­ber all the facts from the book, but I know that the book plunged me into a deep think­ing expe­ri­ence about objec­tivism, pol­i­tics — stuff like that.
  • Some of the books I read have a lot of facts, fig­ures, dates, names, and details. I don’t remem­ber them. But I remem­ber how the book impacted me. For exam­ple, I read Blink by Pink (sounds strange, I know). I for­get a bunch of the con­tent, but I know that the book helped launch me into an exer­cis­ing rou­tine that changed my life. I read When the Rivers Run Dry, and can­not tell you how a dew pond is formed. But I sure can tell you how I was impacted by a stag­ger­ing real­iza­tion water’s importance.

So, remem­ber­ing what we read isn’t as impor­tant as being changed by what we read. There is a dif­fer­ence, but it’s subtle.

The sub­tlety leads me to offer a dis­claimer. Part of being changed by what we read is remem­ber­ing what we read. Being changed means recall­ing the con­tent of a book to some degree. That’s why mem­o­riz­ing Scrip­ture is impor­tant. That’s why I’d like to re-read some books I own. I want the actual con­tent — facts, state­ments, and infor­ma­tion — to stick. More impor­tantly, I want to go through the infor­ma­tion again to become fur­ther changed by its value, not just its facts.

Books change us, but that is not pri­mar­ily a change in the amount of men­tal stuff we retain. It has to do more with the way we change as a per­son. Here are my take­aways from this thought.

  • It’s impor­tant to be inten­tional about what I read.
  • It’s impor­tant to be care­ful how I read.
  • It’s not nec­es­sary to beat myself up if I for­get stuff about a book.
  • If I want to become a changed per­son, It’s impor­tant to read. Period.

Some­times, I get an idea and state it too strongly. I’d like to hear your thoughts on this.

Book Review of Fearless by Eric Blehm

May 22, 2012 in Books with 0 Comments

Adam Brown’s life ended in an iso­lated mil­i­tary clinic in the moun­tains of Afghanistan, his body rid­dled with AK-47 bul­let holes from Tal­iban mili­tia. How­ever, Adam Brown’s legacy lives on, described in his biog­ra­phy by author Eric Blehm. The book, Fear­less, released today (May 22) is a mov­ing account of the strug­gles, redemp­tion, and sac­ri­fice of Adam Brown.

Con­tinue Reading…

The Most Well-Read Cities in America and Why We Didn’t Make It

May 18, 2012 in Books with 3 Comments

Ama­zon came out with their top-twenty list of the most well-read cities in Amer­ica. Assum­ing that peo­ple read the books they buy off of Ama­zon, here are the twenty cities in the U.S. that read the most books.

  1. Alexan­dria, Virginia
  2. Cam­bridge, Massachusetts
  3. Berke­ley, California
  4. Ann Arbor, Michigan
  5. Boul­der, Colorado
  6. Miami, Florida
  7. Arling­ton, Virginia
  8. Gainesville, Florida
  9. Wash­ing­ton, D.C.
  10. Salt Lake City, Utah
  11. Pitts­burgh, Pennsylvania
  12. Knoxville, Ten­nessee
  13. Seat­tle, Washington
  14. Orlando, Florida
  15. Colum­bia, South Carolina
  16. Belle­vue, Washington
  17. Cincin­nati, Ohio
  18. St. Louis, Misourri
  19. Atlanta, Geor­gia
  20. Rich­mond, Virginia

If you live in one of those cities, congratulations on giv­ing Ama­zon your money, and help­ing to raise your city to the ranks of the literati.

My city is not on that list. I am dejected. With Keren’s vora­cious read­ing, I’m sure she could single-handedly pro­pel our city to the top of the list. Alas, here are three rea­sons why we pos­si­ble didn’t make it.

  • The city is known as “The Home of the Rebels.” Nuff said.
  • We read a lot of audio­books around our house, and they prob­a­bly didn’t count audiobooks.
  • Most peo­ple prob­a­bly pur­chase books from our town’s week­end Flea Mar­ket, which is biggest busi­ness around.
  • Dish TV has a strong local clientele.

Actu­ally, our city’s pop­u­la­tion is 3,181, so we didn’t qual­ify to be ranked. If we had been a big big­ger. I’m sure we wouldn’t have made it any­way. At least Colum­bia and Atlanta qual­i­fied, and they are both within a cou­ple of hours dis­tance from us.

 

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