Please could you stop the noise, I'm trying to get some rest

I'm tired. On Sunday night Wayne and Denise came over and I was introduced to my archnemesis Red Bull and vodka. That crappy drink made me stay up until 6:30 the next morning. I can tell you this: it should be outlawed because of the effect it can have on people. It made me sleepy and wired at the same time. I'm composing a letter to Antwone Red Bull right now to register my complaint.

I've been thinking about individualism and its impact on faith. It rules everything we do but we summarily fail to recognize its damning effects on our faith communities and individual understandings of God. As Americans we are so ingrained with the idea that our sole reason for existence is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that we forget that these things are only cultural relevant. Everyone has an opinion and we are told that we must listen to it all. We learn that we have "rights" to certain things, namely freedom. I think it is this spirit which has divided the Church into countless factions. Because I don't have to listen to a pastor I don't like when there is another one who might be saying something I like better. Because if there are people I don't like in church, there's another church with people I like better. Because if I don't understand what is being said about God I can go buy a book that tells me what to think about Him instead.

It's eye-opening for me to recognize that the pursuit of me (my rights, my freedoms, my will to live, etc) has been the most important thing to me for my whole life. And what's even more odd is that the culture which gave me this belief structure is not Christian, but instead American (and a result of the Enlightenment).

(And as an aside, isn't it funny that those who lived after it called it "THE" Enlightenment, as though the movement was what we needed to finally come out of the dark. It seems to me after the next Enlightement we'll call this age the dark ages. We're so pompous in our understanding of ourselves...)

I know I'm not the only one who has thought this and there are a number of books and thinkers which I'm pretty sure I'm stealing my thoughts from, but it is still a significant paradigm to see myself in. Is there hope? I hope so. There had better be. I bet it has something to do with God...