dual personalities

You’ve probably seen this by now, the question that stumped all three contestants on Jeopardy recently:

People were outraged at their ignorance, but I was not that surprised. People these days know nothing. Even Jeopardy contestants who probably have an inflated idea of their own intelligence. Anne wrote about it. She says that those contestants didn’t know it because no one taught it to them. She’s right, but I would contend that it used to be that everyone knew the words to the Lord’s Prayer. Not just people who went to Sunday School and had parents who said it with them at bedtime. I have attended many a funeral and the Jewish person sitting next to me knew the words to the Lord’s Prayer, maybe because they attended a college where they had to go to daily chapel and a little something rubbed off. Back in the day there was even a joke about “Our Father who art in heaven, Harold be thy name…”

Now nobody knows anything. When I was growing up people had a general knowledge of history and a curiosity about how things worked. You know, they knew that Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor and that Benedict Arnold was a traitor. They knew that Jesus was born in the year 1 (Anno Domine) and that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. You can’t assume that people know those things anymore.

Well, insert a big shrug emoji here. There’s not much I can do about this except make sure that my grandchildren are burdened with all kinds of “trivial” knowledge. Onward and upward.

I love reading stories about people like this.

What is Pride? “Pride is arrogance. Pride thinks it knows better and is better. Pride sets itself in first place. It bows to no one but itself. But, as C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, ‘Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.'”

I love my books (and DVDs)–you’ll have to pry them from my cold, dead hands.

“Only if your god can outrage and challenge you will you know that you worship the real God and not a figment of your imagination…If your god never disagrees with you, you might just be worshipping an idealized version of yourself.”

–Tim Keller

And I kind of love this hat one of the Catholic protesters wore before that Giants game…