Just skimming around, searching for a new book and I discovered this interview with Elizabeth Scalia, who wrote Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols in Your Life. She made a fascinating point about how Facebook and Twitter can lead to labeling and un-loving. The following is from an interview with Tony Rossi and Ms. Scalia:
Elizabeth noted, “Kierkegaard said, ‘The minute you label me, you negate me.’…And I came to a decision through prayer, saying, ‘God, I want to love again.’ I don’t want to have all of this kneejerk disgust towards others who I don’t even know. Terry Pratchett wrote a book called ‘Carpe Jugulum.’ In it, one of the characters…says, ‘Sin is when you treat another person like a thing.’ It’s true, and we do that continually on social media…Everybody is breaking up into smaller and smaller cliques and making their mindset very exclusive, to the point where if you disagree with one point of it, you’re out. It’s got this strange effect of making this vast communication tool into something really small…We miss sight of the person in front of us. When we do that, we miss sight of Christ because – and this is St. Benedict – we are meant to find the Christ in each other. If we’re immediately discarding their personhood, there’s no way we can find Him.”
Part of the reason for that is our distorted modern definition of love. “Love is the constant turning and saying yes to something that is outside of yourself,” Elizabeth said. “That is really difficult, particularly for us today because we are turned inward and we’re celebrating ourselves, we’re fascinated by ourselves. When you’re doing that, you have a distorted sense of love because it’s all polluted by that inward self worship. And that takes us right back to Eden. That was the serpent’s thing: eat and you can be as gods. And we’re still there. All these millennia later, we’re still there.”
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/christophers/2013/04/what-are-you-putting-between-yourself-and-god-unmasking-the-idols-in-your-life/
