Instant Hero

In twenty minutes Ross Lovegrove has become one of my new heroes. His approach to life and design reminds me of Patagonia founder Yves Chouinard who, in his book Let My People Go Surfing, describes his approach to designing rock climbing hardware for his company Black Diamond. Chouinard's primary focus in designing climbing hardware is to simplify, simplify, simplify. He believed that the strongest and most functional designs were also the simplest and most elegant. While other designers were adding features and gussets for strength, Chouinard was removing material that did not contribute a specific purpose. The result: the stongest, simplest, most elegant climbing hardware available. (Photo is of a typical piece of Black Diamond gear from their website. Notice the beautiful organic design).



Enter Lovegrove who, in his incredibly motivating presentation at TED, applies the same principles to his organic designs. Lovegrove's presentation is incredibly inspirational as it draws on the best source in the universe for efficient, beautiful optimized design: God's own handiwork.

I have no idea about Lovegrove's spiritual leanings, so what follows is not a commentary about him, but it is amazing to me how a typical naturalist - one who does not believe that the universe is designed by a personal God - can work feverishly for months, years, decades on developing a style or a paradigm or a method of interpreting the world, drawing on the abundance of design that occurs in nature, and still deny that it required a designer. Designers themselves create things that required intelligent input and effort yet they deny that the designed universe and everything in it that contain design and information required a designer, and instead has come about strictly through chance.

How could science, design and life in general advance if we all focused on God as the ultimate scientist/designer/author and emulated his methods and styles?

A Modern Tower of Babel?

The concepts that Ray Kurzweil discusses in his book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology are mind-bending to put it mildly. But one can't help but agree with his premises that life as we know it will be unrecognizable a mere ten years from now. His benchmark is a $1000 laptop computer. In 2010 it will have the capacity of a human brain. A few years later it will have the capacity of all human knowledge that has existed throughout history.

His description of existing nanobots that can cure diabetes in rats is fascinating. These are nano-engineered devices about the size of a red blood cell that can release insulin in a controlled fashion that have already been tested in animals. Star Trek is upon us!

This presentation is a good synopsis of his shtick, and I have to admit I am quite convinced. Our present rate of increase in knowledge is exponential and in a few short years we will see the stuff of science fiction becoming reality. What does this mean for life on planet earth?

Comments are welcome...

Be More Productive!

In this world of stress and increasing knowledge, the fact is most of us need to learn to take it easy. We hear on the news all this talk about how fast things are changing and how difficult it is to keep up with all our responsibilities...well, I for one have already rebelled against such things. I try very hard to keep my levels of peace as high as possible, and I like a lot of down time.

However...

There always comes a time when we wish we could be more productive, especially if it means I can have more quality downtime. So I've been diggin' the website 43 Folders. By his own definition, "43 Folders is Merlin Mann's site about personal productivity, life hacks, and simple ways to make your life a little better."

If you plumb the depths of this website I guarantee you'll find at least a few life hacks that will greatly improve your quality of life. A bold claim? Check it out...

Those @#!*&% Evangelicals!

Here's the problem with Christians today: their off-the-scale unhealthy emphasis on what we do over what we believe. This is precisely the reason evangelicals - especially fundamentals, with the emphasis on "mental" - have become so irrelevant in today's culture. What words of condemnation did Jesus have for the woman at the well or the gal caught in the act of adultery (an offense punishable by death back then)? Jesus did not have a single word of condemnation for either woman.

Then why are evangelicals so ready to point out what's wrong with the world? Their entire agenda has become what Christians are against when we instead ought to be preaching to the world what we are FOR. There is a huge difference. Everyone in the world can point out what evangelicals are against - homosexuality, abortion, divorce - but how many non-Christians can tell us what Christians are for? By emphasizing what Christianity is against we have bred an entire culture represented by Christopher Hitchens in his new book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Fortunately any thinking Christian can easily shoot Hitchens out of the water since his arguments are the same old weak garbage we incessantly hear from his type: look at all the evil wrought in the name of religion, you can't prove God exists, why is there evil in the world, blah blah blah...very tired arguments wrapped in tired intellectual language making it appeal to those spoken of in Romans: "although they claimed to be wise, they became fools." These same tired old arguments - peppered with a strong dose of contempt for anything that might hint at a personal and loving God - also litter the pages of Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion. I expected much more from such an accomplished intellectual as Dawkins but his book is (or certainly should be) a sore disappointment to fellow atheists. Lots of ranting, accusations often unsupported by references (making them toothless and meaningless), and lots of poor argumentation...the same old same old.

Even though these anti-God books are laughably inadequate in accomplishing their goals, yet us Christians bear a lot of the responsibility for their existence since these authors and millions like them look at all the stupid things we spend our effort on and rightfully reject a God that could support these crazy notions. When Christians make the greatest commandments their focal point - to simply love God and love people - then these God haters will have no more arguments left to stand on.

Is this not what's going to eventually happen? Will not every human being one day stand before God and realize the truth about who he is? So why are we not trying to accomplish this here and now? Let's show the world a God who loves with an infinite and perfect love. That will disarm them and help them take a quantum leap forward toward acknowledging who God really is and who he wants to be for them.

Times they are a changin'

Just realized I owned a blog! Whod've figured? Forgot all about this handy little communication tool, even though cousin Roy recently started his blog and has posted some very good stuff on it. Well, maybe it's time to start communicating again. Some good stuff has been happening...

For a while now - oh, roughly the last several decades - I've been mostly concerned about what's right and wrong. In my walk with God, I've been primarily trying to figure out what God is doing, how I fit into that plan, how all the events and activities in the world fit into that plan, and other such ramblings. Now I see I've been totally missing the point.

What God wants most is relationship, plain and simple. All that other stuff is by comparison crap (I have a better word - different spelling, same smell - but I probably shouldn't use it here even though it's the same word the Apostle Paul used for "dung" - as in "I count all my grand accomplishments as dung"...bet you didn't know Paul was a potty mouth eh?). All this other stuff only gets in the way of my loving God with all my heart, soul and mind.

What does the uprising in the middle east and its supposed implications for end time prophecy have to do with my loving God and loving my neighbor? Precisely zero. No matter what kind of hell or high water is going on around me my mission remains the same - to love, period.

So here I am on this new journey, one in which I feel totally out of place and unsure, but I know somehow that it's the right thing. For example, I saw Tim LaHaye (author of the Left behind series) on a cable news show the other night and just couldn't stomach listening to him. Don't get me wrong, he's got his place in this world and it's not my place to either condemn him or give accolades. It's just that such things really matter so little anymore that they have become totally meaningless. There are much bigger fish to fry than to stare dreamily at my future in heaven. Jesus wants us to be His kingdom HERE and NOW. So I for one am going to just get on with that goal, whatever it looks like.

Graham Cooke has been an incredible inspiration to me, easily the most influential teacher in my entire life. Please give a listen, download a couple MP3s, order a few CD sets and let me know what you think. He is running way out in the lead, and I for one am trying hard to join him. Here's a great place to start with Graham Cooke: on his website, go to store, choose MP3s, and download any of the Permission Granted talks. They're cheap, they pack a whallop, and I guarantee you'll learn something new and fresh about who God wants to be for you.