The madness of things...

I have to admit I couldn't resist when I read the story about Sheryl Crow and her public advocacy of using only one or two sheets of toilet paper to help save the earth. It was too tempting a target, an idea so absurd that most people when they heard it just said "Huh?"

And after the laughter dies down the really scary stuff starts. She means it. And there are more like her, maybe many more. They really have no idea of the radical disconnect from reality required for a millionaire rock star to lecture all of us "unenlightened" about the dangers of toilet paper. They have no framework to see the irony of promoting environmental awareness and then flying home on a private Boeing 707 .

But the truth is if you cut yourself loose from a solid anchor you drift wherever wind and tide may take you and one way or another you become mad as a hatter as sense and nonsense merge. The world you inhabit is the asylum you have created where you, as the most insane of all, have free run of the place. So up can mean down and this that and a person can think using one piece of toilet paper on the trip home in a private jet will save the environment.

And we have cut ourselves loose in a big way. We have given God the metaphorical middle finger and set about creating ourselves, reality, and everything we touch in our own image. Its the oldest sin in the book and while we're thinking we're novel and radical and chic and adventurous the downside of it all is the consequence, death of soul and body, is still the price we pay. Along the way to that inevitable end the road is paved with confusion, intellectual drift, the gnawing pain of unsatisfied spiritual hunger, and a million blind alleys.

Modern culture, unaware of its own irony, often suggests Christian faith is the product of delusion, of fanciful myths to soothe those unable to live in reality. But as our society grows increasingly dysfunctional a question should be asked. Which is the more strange and delusional; a world where people are obsessed about toilet paper, carve themselves into mannequins in the fear of a wrinkle, drug themselves into oblivion, work themselves to death, and pursue with fascist passion the very things that are murdering them or the carpenter from Nazareth who asks those who follow him to "love thier neighbor as themselves"? Who is more together, more grounded, more in touch with the truth of life? Who do you want to call the shots?

I thought so.