My Mustard Seed

There are protect marriage amendments up for vote in at least two states that I'm aware of, California and Arizona. Opponents of these efforts often criticize the LDS church for supporting these measures. Unfortunately, in today's political and moral climate, standing up for one's beliefs is often mistaken for intolerance by those who do not share that belief. This post is not about whether or not the protect marriage amendments should pass, but rather addresses why a church (like the Mormon church) has a right to be involved in the process. The protect marriage amendments are not fundamentally about discriminating against people who are gay. Their primary purpose is to seek to recognize the institution of marriage as between one man and one woman in law such that a judiciary cannot arbitrarily redefine what marriage is. The amendments as they currently stand do not seek to restrict any of the civil rights already granted to gay couples (things such as hospital visitation rights and others). So why then even need a marriage amendment? Why not let gay individuals marry just as a man and a women can?

"Some young people are amusing themselves to death—spiritual death." - Dallin H. Oaks, "Good, Better, Best", October 2007 General Conference

I was recently pondering what I had done in the past week and settled my thoughts on a significant amount of time and effort that I had spent on determining the entertainment I wanted to participate in or have available for me to view. I had picked out some great shows to watch or things to do! What caused me to reflect was the emphasis I had placed on it. Good, clean entertainment is important in today's world and it can be a wholesome thing. But part of me wondered if it might not just be young people who might be "amusing themselves to death."

Obviously life brings with it an ebb and flow of where our time and attention goes, but this question gave me pause and might be a useful tool to, on occasion, take a measurement of where we are at with this, "Do I spend more time planning and pursuing my entertainment than I do my spirituality?"

President Brigham Young said: “The worst fear that I have about [members of this Church] is that they will get rich in this country, forget God and his people, wax fat, and kick themselves out of the Church and go to hell.

Cross posted to http://blog.hintonweb.com

I'm member of many different social networks (Classroom 2.0 on Ning, LinkedIN, Twitter, Facebook, and other communities like Drupal.org and Moodle.org among others). Social networks, like other mediums of media, are successful that more people view or participate in them. In large part they are judged successful by how capable they are of connecting you with people or things that you are interested in. Likewise, they tend to fail when they are unable to help you make those connections. One of the powerful new "technologies" is that ability of these social networks to suggest people, events, or other resources based on what it knows about you. I think this is a tremendously useful tool in helping us connect with things or people very easily. So why am I leaving Facebook - especially when I would maintain that it does or has helped me connect with people and things that I have an interest in (family, friends, people who share my interests, etc)?

The ultimate reason is that Facebook, in connecting me with my friends, family members, and other events and subjects I was interested in, also presented me with things that are horribly offensive to me. So offensive that those things completely outweigh the other things it was doing well leading me to the decision that the only choice I had was to choose to not participate. So I'll be closing my Facebook account (which I hear is not that easy to do actually). In the final judgement, Facebook failed me, it connected me to things that I didn't want exposure to often enough that it wasn't worth continuing my participation. My only question (which I'm going to Twitter and email to friends shortly) is how they put up with the exposure to pornographic images as they use Facebook - do they encounter them frequently? I would be doing unrelated things and then BAM! an add with a slew of pornographic images would appear on a sidebar. Once a event that was advertised in the Phoenix, AZ network had a very objectionable picture. I couldn't get it off my page until I changed networks, completely leaving the Phoenix, AZ network, even then the Phoenix, AZ network info (including the picture) didn't immediately disappear.

I'm not a novice to the Internet or social networks here. I realize that occasionally, no matter how skilled or wise an Internet user you are, that you may run into an image or two, in those cases you ignore it and just move away from the pages. I tried those things with Facebook, I even used Firefox's ability to block images from certain URLs and still ran into things that were objectionable. I wanted to use it, I really did. I think Facebook has value - but it simply wasn't worth it for the content I kept running into.

Allowing users to contribute content is a powerful new tool provided by the Internet today. Social networks success will depend on their how well they let users (and the social networks) select content that users want to see and avoid people and content that they don't. I have some ideas on how Facebook could get me back, which I think would hold true for many others as well. That post will have to wait until after work however...

Until then, for now, goodbye Facebook......

Being the sports fan that I am, I'm fascinated by players who seem to have a special "4th Quarter" mentality. When the game comes down to the wire, these players continue to give their all, refuse to be rattled by the pressure, and "make the play" when others don't.