News is BAD for You – and Giving up Reading it will Make you Happier

Out of the ­10,000 news stories you may have read in the last 12 months, did even one allow you to make a better decision about a serious matter in your life, asks Rolf Dobelli. Photograph: Guardian/Graphic

 

In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking. That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.

News misleads. Take the following event (borrowed from Nassim Taleb). A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What's relevant? The structural stability of the bridge. That's the underlying risk that has been lurking, and could lurk in other bridges. But the car is flashy, it's dramatic, it's a person (non-abstract), and it's news that's cheap to produce. News leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads. So terrorism is over-rated. Chronic stress is under-rated. The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is under-rated. Astronauts are over-rated. Nurses are under-rated.   Continue at Rolf Dobelli

Fiery Preacher Leaving Pulpit, but this Won't be his Last Word

John Piper will not be in the pulpit, promising God's judgment against sinners, for much longer.

After more than 30 years as senior pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, the fiery preacher of hardline biblical values is retooling his priorities.

But he won't go quietly into retirement. At 66, he still has the passion to write books, preach and tour the country with his Desiring God ministry, just not so much for the day-to-day duties of running a megachurch with close to 5,000 weekly attendees.

"I have ... a limited amount of energy, and I want it to go toward reading, writing, preaching but not organizational efforts at meetings," Piper said in a recent interview.

A prominent theologian and author of dozens of books, Piper is considered one of the most influential voices in conservative evangelicalism. His voice has energized some and appalled others.

When the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed in 2007, killing 13 people, Piper called it a sign of God's wrath over sin. When a tornado damaged the steeple of Central Lutheran Church in 2009, he said it was "a gentle but firm warning" to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America convention, which was voting nearby to allow openly gay clergy to be pastors.

Yet Piper disappointed some of his allies this year when he refused to endorse the proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in Minnesota. He preached against gay marriage but did not join other religious leaders in explicitly urging members of his church to vote for the amendment, which was defeated in November.

"I'm not a crusader when it comes to parties or legislation or politicians," Piper said in defense of his actions.

"Usually evangelicals work like this. You have the very conservative, Republican types. And you have the more socially oriented, Democratic types. And they both worship the same God, read the same Bible and vote for different people. And what I want to do is on every issue ... say, 'We're not Republicans. And we're not Democrats. We're Bible people. We're Christ's people."    Continue at Star Tribune

Generation of Barbarians?

Robert Bork once famously said that the next invading barbarian army would be populated by our own children. Such a notion really doesn't seem so outlandish in the light of the increased riots perpetuated by the young, bored, immature generation of monsters that occupy large swaths of society (and evidently, especially English society) all over the world.

I don't mean to be alarmist, but it sort of appears that the barbarian invasion of England has begun, and my guess is that this generation of bored, violent, impulsive youngsters is not going away any time soon. I want to highly recommend this article from the UK Daily Mail by Max Hastings. You may not agree with everything in the article, but there is no question that Hastings has his finger on something here. The truth is, if I hadn't read this article this evening, I probably would have typed out something similar at a furious pace.

While you're at it, it wouldn't hurt to read this pessimistic little article from the Christian Research Journal from a few years ago.

I just want to make one observation as well, from a Natural Law perspective. Reading this article from Max Hastings causes me to reflect that all men - secular or religious - know that what is happening the world over is wrong. They can see that children have been raised to think of themselves as impulsive animals and responsible to no one, and now the price is being paid by society.

[An additional article that I would recommend is by Mike Ovey. Another one by Scott Stinson is quite unsettling, as well.] 

 

HT: Bring the Books