JAY - EE - ES - YOU - ES and Phonetic Religion

My wife and I had dinner with our wonderful new neighbors, Jonathan and Cheri, he's a public school teacher and she's an accountant and they are an incredibly funny couple. We had some good food and we laughed about ourselves and the world.

We had some incredibly stimulating conversation, though, and Jonathan made a phenomenal point about teaching techniques. We were discussing the way some educational systems teach reading. He said that some groups focus specifically on phonetics, dividing everything into individual sounds instead of words. His point was that as long as we teach the individual sounds and not whole words we can keep them from the one thing that will make them harder to manage: ideas. You see words lead to ideas and questions and possibly even to resistance. That's not good for entities that are more about control than they are about education.

If we're limited in our capacity to educate than the best thing to do is segment the concepts enough that they won't connect into ideas. Oh, man, I almost jumped out of my seat. He didn't know that I've been labeled as the "poster child for the fight against legalism" by my good friend Mike Ekbundit. That's what legalism is all about, though, scrutinizing the minute issues and focusing on religious concepts and observances that keep us from connecting all of the dots into coherent thoughts that will lead to ideas that may lead people out from under the control of religion. That's what Christ came to do, to educate us about truth and lead us out of the bondage of ignorance.

This is my first real forray into blogdom. I had the opportunity to write for a site called NinetyandNine for the month of November and was really impressed with how the blog site worked as opposed to doing everything manually in a web editor. Anyway, I did some major adjustment to a couple of my website projects. Check out UnitedStatesYouth.com and Mundhaus.com. I switched them over to blogspots so that they could be more interactive and effecient. Let me know what you think.

I am really excited about the possibility for Collaboration on the Collaboratory Site, UnitedStatesYouth.com. If we can tap into the right creative minds we may be able to reach a tipping point and cause an epidemic of youth ministry that is definately outside of the box.

Be Bold.

-Armando

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