A Separate Peace

I was organizing my music collection today (my life is one nonstop thrill ride) and I discovered that I have a little over 8 gigs of music. Almost enough to fill my entire iPod. So now the question becomes: how long can I go before I upgrade to a larger one? I found myself browsing 20 GB models on eBay today. What’s really pathetic is that I got this one for my birthday only a few months ago.
General William Boykin is a devout evangelical Christian who is also a senior Defense Department official. Describing a battle he fought against a Somali warlord, he said, �I knew that my God was bigger than his God. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.� He also claims that Bush was elected because God wanted it that way, using as supporting evidence that a majority of Americans didn’t vote for him. He has made some feeble attempts to explain himself, but not before the press aired all of his boneheaded remarks from over the years. I actually have some sympathy for evangelicals like Boykin. They are desperately trying to keep themselves true to their own rigid moral compass, from being washed away by the tides of modernity and pluralism. And when your beliefs are so hopelessly medieval as to be almost irrelevant, you probably feel the need to shout all the louder just to be heard above the din. I think that’s what’s going on here. In some ways, evangelicals remind me of the Amish and Mennonites. The key difference is that those groups realized that mainstream society would never change to accommodate their beliefs, so instead they chose to live apart in their own insular communities. I wonder if we will one day see a similar phenomenon among evangelicals.