Results tagged “Christianity”

Lo! and Behold!  a blog post on Thomas Barnett's blog caught me off-guard, because it was something I had never expected to see there:

The end times core teaching of Protestant fundamentalism.

"Dispensational" refers to dividing the faith's sacred history into distinct periods, called dispensations.

"Premillennialism" is the view that Jesus will soon return, defeat the Antichrist and establish a thousand-year reign of peace.

Put together, you have a package quite similar to the Shia faith concept of the 12th or "hidden imam" whose return signals a similar and universal period of violence followed by salvation.

-- TPMB, "Dispensational premillennialism", 9-14-2007

That is opening a can of worms for the vocal 5GWer.

I am a bit surprised for another reason, given that I'd recently linked a Barnett post in which he says 5GW must be explored -- and had said, "So, Tom, explore."  The surprise is in the fact that his very brief consideration of pre-trib theology recalled to mind one of my own blog posts on the subject called "5GW and Christianity":  that may be the only 5GW post from my blog Phatic Communion that I consciously avoided cross-posting to D5GW when I set up this blog.  A little too inflamatory, perhaps; a little too metaphorical or horizontal; a subject I did not want to become mired in.

I recently read Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout.

This is really mostly a marketing/business book, but I am looking for ideas I can swipe from elsewhere fro 4gw/5gw.

I love the subtitle: The Battle for Your Mind. I am going to crib and re-use that soon.

The authors define positioning as what you do to the mind of the prospective customer of your product. Finding a position for product in the prospects mind is the key. This is difficult because all prospects are over communication- they got to much coming at them...and they is only so much room in their mind.

The authors also suggest that successful positioning will not involve the introduction of something new and different into the prospects mind, but will instead try to tie into something else already in the prospect mind.

That sort of sounds like the "embrace and extend" idea to me.

The authors write:

...the average person cannot tolerate being he or she is wrong. Mind-changing is the road to advertising disaster.

The authors suggest since people are over-communicated to, that they try to keep things simple to cope (optimizing the OODA...hmm). Therefore, if you are going to target a person's mind, keep the message super simple and focused. They write:

You have to sharpen your message to cut into the mind. You have to jettison the ambiguities, simplify the message, and then you simplify it some more if you want to make a long lasting impression.

Here is example I came up with for simplifying a message:

Instead of PNM, Gap-shrinking, DoEE, SysAdmin, A-Z...think 
"doing right by bringing liberty and justice to all". BTW, the "justice
for all" as a substitute message comes from a commentator on Barnett's
site. If I find the link I will add it.

Anyways, the book has some useful ideas for 4GW as information warfare/strategic communications/political theater/ message-sending. It has some application to the memetic engineering aspects of 5GW.

Lastly, I want to mention briefly a positioning exercise they mention that they performed for the Catholic Church (I think for some lay leaders)that I found interesting.

They started with:

What is the the role of the Catholic Church in the Modern World?

...and worked there way to:

[...]the role of the Church as that of keeping Christ alive in the minds of each new generation and relating his word to the problems of their time.

Wow. Simple. Direct. Focused.

Recently on tdaxp, Dan highlighted a comment that his friend Aaron had left on a 5GW-related post at tdaxp:

I don't find patriotism some quality to aspire to. It's racism minus the pigmentary convenience.

[Aaron, from "Comment Upgrade: Patriotism and the Iraq War"]

As might be expected, the comment has created a controversy. Some patriots are wondering how their patriotism makes them racist.  Others wonder if the loose use of the concept of racism makes it meaningless.  The comment was made in the context of the Iraq war and politics -- so there we have another occasion for controversy, and a burgeoning debate over whether Democrats or Republicans are authentically patriotic, or liberals or conservatives.

Dan left a short comment wondering what was meant by the statement:

I'm interested in how patriotism is just racism without the skin color. Is it because both are forms of in-group favoritism?

[Dan tdaxp]

This comment, as well as the looser connection with the subject of 5GW in the original thread which ultimately threaded through various things to the issue of patriotism, led me to leave a comment relating the subject back to 5GW and away from the aforementioned controversies:

Is it journalism? Is it docu-drama? Is it archeo-porn? Is it a window into a 5GW operation? This last Sunday evening, without the distraction of NFL football and not being a fan of Desperate Housewives, my television landed on the Discovery channel and The Lost Tomb of Jesus. The program was promoted as a James Cameron (Executive Producer) documentary and was followed by an hour-long discussion hosted by Ted Koppel including the film’s Director and Writer Simcha Jacobovici and several archeological and theological experts.

In a nutshell, the program is about a tomb that was discovered in Jerusalem in 1980 during a construction project. Inside the tomb were several ossuaries, or boxes where the bones of a person are kept. The mystery begins when several of the boxes are discovered to be inscribed with what are possibly the names of the persons whose bones are inside them. These names, when taken together and with a bit (some would certainly argue more than a bit) of massaging, suggest that this tomb belonged to the family of the biblical Jesus and contained not only his remains but those of his mother Mary, two of his brothers (who were disciples), possibly Mary Magdalene and perhaps the remains of his son. The claims are backed up by the suggestion of science and the statistical probability of this combination of names being found in any other tomb in Jerusalem.

It seems that I look at the world now with 5GW glasses. I can’t read a spy novel or listen to a newscast without a little thought in the back of my head prodding me to consider how something would work as a part of, or engineered by, a 5GW campaign. For this particular program that little, persistent thought was armed with an air-horn, and waving a banner while leading the official 5GW marching band. It wasn’t the subject matter; though finding remains of a person who could have been the biblical Jesus in sufficient quantity to conduct DNA testing certainly is provocative, but rather the positioning of the evidence that caused a blip to appear on my 5GW radar.

A common theme, or call it a common question, frequently resurfaces in our little neck of the Blogospheric Woods, amazingly emergent wherever the discussion turns toward an examination of the future of humanity:  Shall there be tribes; if so, will they be networked or largely insular; or does globalization ultimately eliminate any sort of identifiable tribalism?  Discussions inspiring these question often range from topic to topic which themselves remain insular (they are not always considered together), and the definitions we use are often obscured or fuzzy.  We do not always agree on terms.  Unfortunately, our disagreement means that our attempts to come to some mutual understanding of the relevant issues are often also fuzzy, if not entirely hostile in an incoherent way.

One such fuzzy term requires further analysis: "primary loyalties."

After no activity for a year in a half in the comments section of my first post on 5GW, guest Herb Harris adds his thoughts:

I just read this post and began to think of how the world is fighting a 5GW with regards to Satan and sin in the world. Do we even realize that our minds are being changed without our conscience mind becoming aware of the warfare with only our subconscience being fully engaged? Look at how our family has become basically destroyed through the need to gain material things. Several generations before seemed to function well but were not influenced with the saturation of information. It is not until you take a look back that you see the effects of the unconscience attacks that have taken place.

This seems to tie into the Catholic idea that with every sin, every future sin becomes easier and with every virtuous act, virtue becomes easier. 5GW can be used as a method to reprogram minds through neurocortextual rewiring of the brain, bypassing conscious cognition in physically changing the nature of the observer.

Your opinion?