Convenient Christianity

This is something that has been on my mind for quite some time now, but I don't want this confused another topic of Casual Christianity. That has been thoroughly covered by many brilliant theologians, my topic is a bit more specific. What I mean by convenient Christianity is that we will follow God and follow what the Bible says until something pleasurable comes up. When this occurs, we tend to put Jesus in a corner and kindly ask him not to watch as we partake in things that we know aren't morally good, but we do them anyway because it is fun. This catechizing eventually turns into being a Christian only when it is convenient.

Another reason why I make the distinction between casual and convenient is because casual Christians usually are in an apathetic mood, or just don't care at all, towards being a Christian while those who do the convenient way are trying to be better Christians and grow, but don't seem able to make the connection that certain activities hurt their testimony and credibility when it comes to spreading the word. When confronted, they have a barrage of reasons and excuses to legitimize why they do these activities.

Now the reason for doing these things are easy, they're fun and pleasurable. If sinful things weren't, they wouldn't be so hard to not do. It doesn't help when all around us we are encouraged to do what we want, when we want, and if it's possibly wrong/illegal, just don't get caught and all is good. Plus when we do see various people that appear to get away with doing whatever they want and still having a great life, we think that we can do it as well. We forget that everything catches up to you, whether it catches you now or years from now is up to God. There are many people who regret actions they committed when they were younger due to how it shaped their life later on.

So in summary, we need to stop being a Convenient Christian. Another way is kind of like saying stop being a 9-5 Christian. Although it may be hard to say no to certain things, going to clubs, drugs, ect., we need to always remember that God remembers our troubles and rewards us for standing up and sticking to what He wants us to do.

And remember, Don't Panic, and never forget your towel.

The Problem with Nostalgia

With Marvel vs Capcom 3 out, I think this is a great opportunity to address something that tends to get overlooked or sometimes ignored altogether, and that is the negative side effects of nostalgia. There's nothing wrong taking a trip down memory lane from time to time and reminiscence, but we, and I include myself in this, tend to put these memories on a pedestal. This is best seen whenever a new movie or game comes out continuing a series that goes back many years and watching people rip into it because "it isn't like 'the good ol' days' of...". This has a reputation of ruining any chance that this new game or movie had of being any good or any chance it had of trying to live up to the former titles. I bring up Marvel vs Capcom 3 to illustrate this for the simple reason that there have been countless people saying how it doesn't compare to number 2 and how much better number 2 is. Most people that do this tend to have selective memories and forget the flaws and frustrations that this game had and only remember the good times they had with it. So with all the bad memories gone and only good ones remaining, it would only seem logical that Marvel vs Capcom 2 would easily be greater than 3, but this isn't realistic.

I also see this with movies, both in saying why new movies are not as great as older ones and the other way around. Just start up a conversation with some fans of Star Wars and you can easily see what I mean with nostalgia. Now am I saying that there aren't points made when people show weak points or just flat out shortcomings in movies? I am not, but to completely throw a movie out because a person set the bar so high for it that it was bound to fail only because the previous movie has a special connection with that person due to it being a childhood movie or whatever is not right.

This may seem like something that shouldn't matter on a grand scale since my two examples consisted of video games and movies, but there are real life applications for understanding this. Politics is a very easy place to do this. Many times a president, senator, congressman, or any other political person will be under fire from everyone because they aren't doing the job quite like (fill in name of person) or you hear, "Well (name) would of done it this way." and it just hurts that person before they even got a real chance to do anything. Another example is just in regular conversation about anything. Many times a person who puts something up on a pedestal while down cutting another is due to the memory they have connected to it, which bring it back around to nostalgia. 

In the end though, this does boil down to mere opinions. So I don't post this to encourage arguments, since arguments of opinion never end well and it just has people nit picking words and seeing who can come up with the more creative/cursing insults. I post this merely because I want to post a different point of view to consider next time something comes out or next time a conversation comes up that is similar to what I posted earlier.

Remember, Don't Panic and never forget your towel.