Lifeboat Theory (learning to be a snob)

This post was written by Ben Michaels

So my day goes like this: I wake up. I get coffee. My ADD brain kicks into gear. Thoughts tumble over each other like a landslide all day. I go to bed. I wait for the landslide to settle down and my thoughts to order themselves before I go to sleep around 2 AM. Repeat. Generally the last rocks/thoughts to settle down in my brain or the big, heavy philisophical thoughts. And the thoughts about girls, but that's normal and I've learned to ignore them.

So you mix these philisophical thoughts with the thoughts I was having from reading my Psychology text book (homeschool moment) and you get someone who is thinking about how humanity works and what makes people tick. I learned that some people think humanity is just trying to survive. I learned other people think people are always look for patterns, or wholes, in the universe. I learned what Freud thinks. Nuf' said. Sicko. We won't go there.

But I was thinking about Freud and people and Eden and Jesus and humanity and rocks and girls and ethics and labels and politics (and Donald Miller, who weighed heavily on my mind and inspired many of these ideas) when my brain exploded. Or something like that. You could call it a blinding flash of insight but that would make sound like I'm special or something. Which I am, but not like that. I like to leave that open for interpretation.

I remember in my 4th grade sunday school the teacher asking the class a lifeboat ethics question. The teach asked, "You, the President, a female pop star, a married lawyer, and a garbage man are in shark infested waters in a sinking lifeboat. Who do you throw overboard in order to save everyone else?" I can't remember exactly, but I think we threw over the pop star. Adios, Miley.

Looking back, with my landslide-like mind, I think that questions kinda profound. Not neccessarily in our answers to it, but more in the scenario of it all. It's a metaphore.

With that, I came up with a new theory for how humanity works. Freud was wrong.

See, a long time ago in a garden called Eden, we poked a hole in our lifeboat. Now we spend our lives running around deciding who we should throw overboard. That's key. Think about that before moving to the next thought.

Now with culture and technology and over-population we've developed more civilized ways of throwing masses of people overboard. Nowadays, instead of just whacking each other over the head, we spend our lives slapping people with labels. You call them demographics, parties, or demominations, I call them labels. Then, we decide which labels deserve to be thrown overboard and whcih labels don't. It's called politics. Republicans are yelling for Democrats to be thrown overboard and Democrats are yelling for Republicans to be thrown over board. Conservatives and yelling for Liberals to be thrown overboard and vice-versa. Pro lifers are yelling for Pro-Choicers to be thrown overboard and vice-versa. There's no love. If you want to hear what a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal sounds like, turn on Glenn Beck.

It gets worse. Thanks to Satan, even religion has become nothing more than a label. Christians are yelling for Muslims to be thrown overboard and vice-versa. Protestants are yelling at Catholics to get thrown overboard and vice-versa. Baptists are yelling for Methodists to get thrown overboard and vice-versa. It makes someone want to be an atheist. Where's the love? Even something as simple as Morality has been twisted around to be a label. It feels like if you're Moral you stay. If you're immoral, you get thrown overboard.

It goes on and on. I see it everywhere and it's affects. It explains all the war metaphore in churches nowadays. We're in a "culture war." A "battle against the world." I hate that. In war you kill your enemy to win. That's not how it's supposed to work. Nobody should have been killed in the first place, much less in order to further the "cause of christ."

I want no part in that. I hate the "Join a team and fight" mentality. I refuse to be a liberal or a democrat or an evangelical or a conservative or a republican. I hate the Culture War. I hate the lifeboat.

See, no matter how many people we throw overboard, the lifeboat won't stop sinking. Think about that.

So, as people who know Jesus, we shouldn't save the world by throwing all the people who don't know Jesus out of the lifeboat. We should save the world by teaching all the people who don't know Jesus how to swim.

--Ben