Sunday, November 7, 2010

I love conflict, You love conflict, We all love conflict!

I think it is interesting that when you turn on the news, all you hear about is conflict! It's what turns us on, gets us interested, and makes us take that second look. Our favorite kind of conflict though seems to be, the conflict in other peoples lives. huh...

Yesterday on the news, a little blurb came up about Demi Lovato, saying she "was headed to rehab..."...that was all it took, and immediately I started thinking "why?" and the TV had my full attention.

What is it that makes us so interested in other people's problems? What makes YOU so interested in other people's  problems?

For me, conflict in lives of people my age I find more interesting then conflict in adults lives. I want to see how the young person will react to the publicity, or how they will respond in general, then I tend to go on and think..."what would I have done?" I can keep myself occupied for hours in this manner....

So now I ask you...

What specific kinds of conflicts catch YOUR attention? and why?

Want a tax cut? Consider home schooling!

 
   Home schooling is becoming more and more popular though..." In the United States similar trends were noted with numbers jumping from 50,000 homeschooled students in 1985 to an estimated 850,000 in 1999, according to the US Department of Education."
(http://www.suite101.com/content/trends-and-growth-in-homeschooling-a48813)

...and here
"Home schooling is much cheaper than public school education. If government is looking for ways to reduce costs, active encouragement of home schooling as a serious option ought to be promoted and encouraged. If most children were home-schooled, then many schools could become public parks or libraries, and all the fossil fuels used to drive children to school, to heat, light, and air condition schools, and other activities that are anathema to environmentalists could be avoided. Public schools could always be the option for parents who, for whatever reason, cannot home-school their children or send their children to private schools, but the public policy of promoting private instruction of students could solve many problems that government currently and clumsily tries to solve through the expenditure of vast government resources and the hyper-regulation of education in many states." (http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/culture/education/4722-homeschooling-in-america-grows)


...may be an answer to help some budgeting problems our country is now experiencing!  Perhaps taxing the rich more is not the answer, or signing away stimulus bills.

The average funding per-student in Missouri is $7,000 in the public school system, while my mom spends $800-$1,000 a year on school curriculum for eight children, but never any more then $2,000 for eight children with sports, theater, dance, or debate included. That's $100-$250 per student a year! However, there are more expensive options for home schooling, CD's that can be bought with learning materials, or buying certain curriculum can get up to $4,000 a year, but not many homeschooling families spend that much. You can almost even home school for free from public libraries, and from libraries established by home school groups that are rooms of amassed curriculum. In the school district that I live in alone gets $38.3 million a year  at the rate of $7,625 a student. Where if these students were to be educated in my family,  $1,509,600 would be spent a year on them. That leaves a difference of  $36.8 million in my school district alone that could be use for something else.

We all either are paying taxes already, or will be soon. All this money is being dumped into school systems that are failing more and more as we speak...we see this as we look at the violence in our schools, the drugs, the poor grades...is this something you want to pay taxes for? or at least, this much money towards?





"What a Bunch of JERKS"

   If you consider yourself a "Christian", I am sure that at one time or another, you have experienced some sort of situation in which someone stereotyped you.
   One of my best friends now did just that to me two years ago when I first met him "oh, another one of those judgmental Bible believing Christians, well let me poke holes in all her theories, and prove to her how dumb it is to believe what she does." So over the next year and a half my Atheist friend would take every opportunity to challenge what I believed, and introduced me to friends of his who shared his opinions, and we would spend hours on debates. But I noticed through all of this, all of them thought of Christians as people who were very judgmental, arrogant, uneducated in their religion, prideful, hypocritical, selfish people. Having all this thrown on me came as a shock.
               "Why are Christian denominations the biggest targets?"  (http://religiousconflicts.blogspot.com/)
   I was not ignorant of the fact that these types of "Christians" existed, but this idea had never met me on a personal level. Now it had. This became a great source of frustration for me as I began to critique the lives of the Christian people around me; some I found were this way, others were not...then I turned the critiquing on myself. I also became more aware of instances on the news concerning "Christians"...
 
 "http://www.videonewslive.com/view/490022/prominent_pastor_accused_of_molestation"
   and
   "http://articles.cnn.com/2010-07-29/us/florida.burn.quran.day_1_american-muslims-religion-cair-spokesman-ibrahim-hooper?_s=PM:US"

...both instances in which most of us are now familiar. These sorts of things bring a lot of criticism on Christians, something that effects people nation wide, even me.

   But the other day while driving to school, on the radio I heard of a Church advertising it's self as "What a Bunch of JERKS!" Finally someone who has got it right! This is exactly how I had begun to feel over the past two years, and now someone was admitting it. Here is what the Church had to say...


What a bunch of JERKS!
The church has failed. That’s right; we’ve messed up, big time. The church was SUPPOSED to be a reflection of the God it claimed to serve. The church was SUPPOSED to be the hands and feet of Jesus Christ. But, for the most part, the church has failed.
Our failure has left a bad taste in people’s mouths. Our mistakes have led to a lack of credibility. Our messes have caused people to seek answers for this life elsewhere. And really, who could blame people for giving up on the church? Ghandi had a very good point when he said “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
What a bunch of jerks. Prideful, hypocritical, selfish, judgmental jerks.
At Christ Covenant Church, do you know what our response is? Guilty as charged. We are fed up with it just as much as you are. We’ve failed. We’ve failed you, we’ve failed each other, and the worst part is that we’ve failed to act like Jesus. And it’s time to own up to our failure because only then can we turn it around. So no more sugar coating it, no more pretending.
That’s what this is all about. We’ve decided that we want to turn it around. We may not be able to change the past, but we can sure change the future. And we want to. We want to be a reflection of the God that we serve. We want to be the hands and feet of Jesus.
...To which a media source replied "Humility. What a concept! "










Pier Pressure

When you think of peer pressure, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? For me, I see in my mind all my friends, the people I hang out with on the weekends, the ones I see every day at school. When you think of pier pressure, do you generally think of it as a positive or a negative thing? For me, I usually think of it as a negative thing. I do not think I have a lot of pier pressure in my life because of this, but when I thought about it more, I realized my life is full of it, full of positive pier pressure. 
My family creates the greatest amount of pier pressure in my life. Just one example would be my brother...

My older brother is crazy. He walked into his ACT test and got a thirty-four hands down the first time. All I can remember is thinking “whoa,” but when I talk to him about he says “I wish I had gone back and taken it again, I should have been able to get that perfect score.” My brother is one of a very few people I know who seems to be good at everything without even trying. But when I sit down and talk with him, I realize he is never happy with his performances, he sees how he can improve, and is always working towards perfection. But he challenges me to keep working hard, and to always find something to improve on. When I had received my ACT score back the first time, he called me up to see how I did. It was not a happy number. Instead of saying “Yeah, that sucks” he said “Well go take it again!”, and this continued as I retook, the test three more times before getting the score I needed. He has taught me to always have higher expectations for myself, and never fails to call me up every now and then to make sure I am still working hard. 

I listen to kids on campus talk about all the things they are up to, the party last weekend, the guy they met the other day and things got out of hang with...and I realized how blessed I am to have such a strong family base that would kick my butt if I did anything dumb. 

Perhaps the problem is not that there is too much negative pier pressure out there, but that we do not use the positive pier pressure to balance it out. It is not too often that I hear from friends what good relationships they have with the people in their family, especially with parents. The usual narration is: “yeah, my mom and I don't get along very well...”, “I really don't spend much time at home, it's boring.” I find this sad; the home is where one should be a place of support, learning, encouragement, and urging forward. Many times this is what keeps me going, something I know I can always fall back to.

So enough about all that negative pier pressure, where do you get your positive pier pressure? 

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

"Love does not cause pain"

I thought this was interesting...I put this as my facebook status and it got quite the discussion going, so I thought I would share.


‎"love does not cause pain"
57 minutes ago ·  ·  · 
    • Travis T-Wayne Ritchie But a lack of love does
      54 minutes ago · 
    • Liz Rene indeed.
      53 minutes ago · 
    • Jeff Holst Depends on how long u love someone ;)
      52 minutes ago · 
    • Jack Tutonka Thomas I disagree. Love causes lots of pain. If we eliminated Love out of people there would be a lot less suffering, emotion wise.
      51 minutes ago · 
    • Liz Rene Lol,you would have to explain that one to me Jeff, I think I missed the "hint hint"

      If you eliminate love Jack, what will be left? You aren't seeing the whole picture.
      48 minutes ago · 
    • Travis T-Wayne Ritchie If you eliminate love then you have hate, which causes pain.
      47 minutes ago ·  ·  1 person
    • Jack Tutonka Thomas You have knowledge. you wouldn't have hate or pain, because that's defined by it's opposite (love), which wouldn't exist. You would also have curiosity.
      47 minutes ago · 
    • Liz Rene I disagree, just because we define it that way, doesn't mean it would cease to exist, we might just call pain/hate something else. You have have just about any situation in which love does not exists, and when there is no love in situations, there is always pain or hate.
      44 minutes ago ·  ·  2 people
    • Jaron Sutcliffe Obviously you have never loved
      43 minutes ago · 
    • Liz Rene who me?
      43 minutes ago · 
    • Jeff Holst I was just kidding, Liz. The pain that might appear to come from love is usually associated with one or both people forgetting what love is about. There is no pain in love itself.
      42 minutes ago ·  ·  1 person
    • Liz Rene I agree! or the act is done when the person has stepped out of the spirit of love.
      40 minutes ago · 
    • Jack Tutonka Thomas Obviously all three of you lack understanding of emotions. Love is caused by a release of chemicals within one's brain. you eliminate the need for those chemicals, or the dispersion of those chemicals, and suddenly you don't have love, but you don't have the other extreme too (which is caused by the low level of that chemical). Sure, you'd have physical pain (darn nerve endings), but sadness wouldn't exist. Hate is caused by revulsion - another aspect of brain chemicals :P yay for knowledge.
      39 minutes ago · 
    • Jaron Sutcliffe I meant, the person who said that....not you
      39 minutes ago · 
    • Liz Rene I disagree Jaron, the man has been married 40 yrs :)
      37 minutes ago · 
    • Liz Rene maybe we should just eliminate hate then, give ourselves injections of hormones ;)
      31 minutes ago · 
    • Jack Tutonka Thomas but your body would run ragged from the emotional high all the time if you just injected hormones to increase the level. You'd die from the sheer exhaustion of having your body be set in that mode always. better to take out the dependency and method of hormones all together.
      29 minutes ago · 
    • Liz Rene lol, but since all of this will never happen, maybe you should consider a more realistic rout ;)
      27 minutes ago · 
    • Jack Tutonka Thomas I'm not saying I would do this, I was just providing an example for the discussion, which was over whether or not love causes pain. and it does.
      26 minutes ago · 
    • Liz Rene haha, but if everyone displayed love in every second of their life, would there be pain then? of course no one will do that, so it's impossible, but just for arguments sake.
      22 minutes ago · 
    • Jack Tutonka Thomas yes, there would be pain. I thought I just pointed out how that would destroy the body and thus kill the person?!
      22 minutes ago · 
    • Justin Taylor who says that love is an emotion?
      21 minutes ago · 
    • Jack Tutonka Thomas so says the chemical releases in your brain and body :P
      21 minutes ago · 
    • Justin Taylor is that love or just pleasure?
      20 minutes ago ·  ·  1 person
    • Liz Rene if love is not an emotion what is it?
      19 minutes ago · 
    • Liz Rene I love that one point though Justin
      19 minutes ago · 
    • Jeff Holst jack, you make some interesting points, that's for sure. it would be easier if love were as black & white as you've described.
      18 minutes ago ·  ·  1 person
    • Justin Taylor love is a commitment
      18 minutes ago ·  ·  1 person
    • Liz Rene you make it sound dead saying it that way Justin lol but I agree, part of love is the commitment.
      17 minutes ago · 
    • Jack Tutonka Thomas Of course I haven't taken into consideration the way other chemicals affect the way we love, and haven't addressed the difficulty one would have if they did try to remove those chemicals and hormones. Love is a commitment....of long term internal pleasure.
      17 minutes ago · 
    • Justin Taylor that depends on how you think of it
      16 minutes ago · 
    • Jack Tutonka Thomas but not always, now that I think about it. One can love something that hurts you, say, for instance, loving someone that is dying. huh.
      16 minutes ago · 
    • Jack Tutonka Thomas ‎(p.s. that causes pain)
      15 minutes ago · 
    • Liz Rene I agree, I think love is something deeper then "pleasure"
      15 minutes ago ·  ·  1 person
    • Justin Taylor i agree with you jack ut if you love someone enough you learn that eventually you have to let them go. and just because he/she is gone physically, doesnt mean that they are truly ever gone
      14 minutes ago ·  ·  1 person
    • Jack Tutonka Thomas but it does equal pain though, no? :P which, again, contradicts the quote.
      13 minutes ago · 
    • Justin Taylor and i also thought there was more to live than just "pleasure"
      13 minutes ago · 
    • Justin Taylor ‎*love
      12 minutes ago · 
    • Liz Rene there deff is more to love then that.

      Jack, I bet you would be hard pressed to find another black and white example that contradicts this lol

      I believe the problem is too many people confuse love w/ pleasure.
      12 minutes ago ·  ·  2 people
    • Justin Taylor the word no longer holds its weight in our society
      11 minutes ago ·  ·  1 person
    • Liz Rene here here!
      10 minutes ago · 
    • Justin Taylor it seems to be thrown around as much as curse words nowadays
      8 minutes ago · 
    • Liz Rene It is, it's very sad how people have devalued it.
      5 minutes ago · 
    • Justin Taylor its seems that none of them have ever actually experienced it, and im sure havent
      4 minutes ago · 
    • Liz Rene Ah but everyone will be hurt by those they love at some point...but it's showing love in return so that things can be mended, that's the tough thing which is not a natural thing for us to do, so most people fail to learn to overcome conflict by responding in love.
      a few seconds ago ·