I See Your Naughty Bits
December 9th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
As I came home from work today I passed though an area known for it’s many bars and nightclubs in a town adjacent to where I work. As I passed one of the nightclubs, I saw this parked outside one of the clubs.
In case you don’t know what this is, it’s the Girls Gone Wild bus. (Don’t worry, the link goes to the Wikipedia article about this and not the Girls Gone Wild website. It’s definitely NSFW.)
I decided to stop in the parking lot and snap a picture of the bus. To be honest, I was a little shocked to see the bus there in Harker Heights. Not that the clubs in Heights couldn’t sponsor such debauchery, this particular club regularly advertises their wet T-shirt contests. I just didn’t expect to see it in our obscure burg.
Girls Gone Wild is a video franchise where the producers encourage young, usually drunk women to expose themselves or even engage in sex acts on video. In exchange for their performance the girls usually get a T-shirt or some other trinket. The Girls Gone Wild folks then sell the pornographic videos and probably make way more than the price of the T-shirt.
The reason this piqued my interest is I wondered why some women would think this is a good idea? Call me a prude if you will, but I wonder if this has to do with our culture being so attention driven that people will resort to darn near anything to get what Andy Warhol described as their “15 minutes of fame”. To make my one and only Tiger Woods comment, I also wonder if the “15 minutes of fame” had anything to do with Tiger’s plethora of alleged mistresses deciding to cuckold Tiger’s wife.
I wonder how many of these women will be proud to tell their grandchildren they made a porno for a T-shirt? Maybe, they can use some of the video of them showing their naughty bits for the video montage that’s become so popular at weddings when they get married. I am sure their parents and future hubby would be proud.
From Compassion to Depravity
May 19th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Previously I marveled at the compassion of Joseph found in Matthew 1. Today I turn to the account of Herod The Great found in Matthew 2. None of Joseph’s compassion was found there. In fact I found someone so depraved that he would slaughter toddlers to attempt to thwart a prophecy of one who would come and rule Herod’s people one day.
Matthew’s account puts it this way:
Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men. Matthew 2:16 ESV
What kind of man would do this?
A man who feared becoming irrelevant. A man who feared losing his position. A man who feared losing his possessions. A man who was selfish. A man not unlike you or I.
Writing about another Holocaust in more recent memory, Jewish historian Saul Friedlander writes:
“Not one social group, not one religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews.”
Friedlander and other historians argue that it wasn’t monsters or sociopaths who perpetrated the Nazi Holocaust but ordinary Germans. People a lot like you and me.
The common thread between us and them is our sin nature. We are as equally capable of depravity as Herod or a Nazi concentration camp guard. All it takes is for us to minimize how our sin is an affront to a holy and just God. To justify those things that God hates. To say to ourselves “surely my sin isn’t that bad, is it?”
