all my friends are superheroes (except you)

[just a thought]

it's something thats been bothering me lately. i dont think Christianity is supposed to fit nicely into neatly packaged acronyms and analogies. personally, i think analogies omit certain things and introduce new arguments. i think messages lose meaning when speakers try to come up with too many analogies. and when things are intentionally put into acronyms, then important things get missed and random crap is put in because the letter fits. oh and another thing about acronyms, lets please try to be sensitive to those whose language has no alphabet.

i dont like it at all. sure its a great memory aid, but i think it takes away from the true meaning.
which takes me to another point. similar, but not quite. people tend to overanalyze things in bible studies. sometimes what is there is all there is. sometimes there is no deeper meaning to it. perhaps, just maybe, one idea might not be linked to another idea simply becuase one word is similar. it takes me back to everything i hated in english all throughout highschool. and that was find pointless meaning in ordinary writing. or finding meaning in art when the artist had intended no meaning outside of the obvious. dont get me wrong, i appreciate art, and i can appreciate artists, im just saying that sometimes there is no meaning. and sometimes there is meaning, but you're missing it and you're just putting words in the mouth of the artist. so too it is with the word of God. tangent: and the absolute worst is when we have "biblical, Christian debates" where people just pull things out of the Bible WAYYYY out of context and make something out of something completely different. but back to my original point, i think somtimes things are just the way they are, and there is no use in trying to sound intellectual and putting words into the Bible that weren't there originally. i think sometimes what Jesus said in his parables was all there was. We know what he meant when he said those parables because we know the context. His disciples would ask him a quesiton, and he would answer it with a parable. you know the question, and He gives you the answer in a story. dont take other messages from the story. dont look at other "technicalities" and try to make auxiliary lessons from them.

and another thing, about technicalities. when people pick significance in words. not im not talking about words like love or pharisee or God or boat etc. (those were random words that came to mind) those are non-negotiable words. im talking about prepositions and [insert fancy word pertaining to grammar here]s such as in or of etc. words that can be easily replaced. lets try to remember the original texts of the bible were NOT written in english. words get lost in translation. significant words retain their meaning, but the insignificant words (that end up being significant when people try to overanalyze them) get lost, or get put in place by translators because the word didnt exist in the original language. perhaps there is no significance in the word in in that particular verse. dont try to make anythning out of it. it was there becuase the two words sandwiching it had needed some sort of a link. just a possibility. remember, the null set is a set nonetheless.

going back to the point i made at the beginning of this post. i guess what bugs me is not the analogies themselves, but what people do about these analogies. not everyone understands them, and people inevitable end up taking them out of context, missing the original point. and i think the worst is when we waste time during bible studies picking apart at useless, meaningless technicalities in analogies.




in other news:
to add to the list of stupid things i do with people from my program: (on top of playing squash with 30 bouncy balls) tomorrow night (laaaaate at night) we're going to go to city hall to play dodgeball on skates.

peace out y'all