Thoughts of a Canary

Happy Ash Wednesday to everyone! The advent of the Hipster Uprising has brought many unpopular things to the forefront of the trendy parade for the sake of simple irony. It's really quite amusing and for those in less urban areas completely unintelligible. Unfortunately this ironic effect is spilling over into the ancient and aesthetic Christian observance of Lent.  The purpose of Lent to the Chrisitan faithful is simply to unite with the sufferings of Jesus through sacrifice, and gain virtue through habitual practice of this sacrifice. I'll come right out and say we ourselves have lost the forest by focusing on the trees in this ecclesiastical season.  As a disclaimer this post is not directed at any individual or group of individuals, except for the group of Christians as a whole. It's a trend I've seen in myself and others, and it's gotten to a point where it's absurdity needs to be proclaimed.  We have all become a people of excuses.  In the time period wher...

There are very few things that I have found to be universally loved by humankind. While we have disagreements about things we fundamentally disagree on, we also have enjoy having fundamental disagreements about things we agree on simply for the sake of argument. We even gave this a fun name: Trolling. Anyone that has taken philosophy (read that in a snobbish voice) knows that there are some fundamentals that we have clung to for dear life through historical de-culturalizations, renaissances, and dark ages. As individuals we have disagreed on so much that in the past twenty years especially we have had to bring to the forefront some mutual human feeling so that we don't lose our kinship with one another. In the 1930s and 40s it was Nationalism, in the 60s it was free "love", etc. In spite of (and more to the point because of) this ramification of human identification, and in deference to the careful "tolerant" and "morally neutral" culture we've...