A Heterodox

Although Christianity has always had a significant diversity of belief, mainstream Christianity considers certain core doctrines essential. Those accepting them often consider followers of Jesus who disagree with these doctrines to be Heterodox /1, heretical, or “outside” Christianity altogether. That does not have to be the case. It’s just a position taken by many Christians that might have an unreasoned position.

On the other hand, the term heterodox is occasionally used by some Christians to refer to themselves when they are in disagreement with orthodox understandings, but voice this disagreement while still maintaining the overall value of the tradition. The heterodox Christian therefore remains in the tradition, and attempts to stimulate constructive dialog around issues with which they disagree.

Or, from my standpoint, one can value the tradition, yet not hold to some of the core beliefs – the Christ element – for example, while believing there is one God.

This is not, however, unique to Christianity:

“Most of the Kurds were Sunni Muslims, but perhaps a quarter or a third adhered to heterodox varieties of Islam that preserved traces of earlier religions. They fight with members of other faiths, who seem to challenge their claim to a monopoly of absolute truth; they also persecute their co-religionists for interpreting a tradition differently or for holding heterodox beliefs.”/2

[...]  Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History

I address similar thoughts, albeit from a different perspective, in my (future) post: Image

Peace to my Brothers and Sisters.

brian patrick cork

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1/ Heterodox comes from Greek heterodoxos, “of another opinion,” from hetero-, “other” + doxa, “opinion,” from dokein, “to believe.”

heterodox \HET-uh-ruh-doks\, adjective:
1. Contrary to or differing from some acknowledged standard, especially in church doctrine or dogma; unorthodox.
2. Holding unorthodox opinions or doctrines.

NOTES: The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume IX, Monotheism; William F. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity; H. Richard Niebuhr, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture; About.com, Monotheistic Religion resources; Jonathan Kirsch, God Against the Gods; Linda Woodhead, An Introduction to Christianity; The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia Monotheism; The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, monotheism; New Dictionary of Theology, Paul pp. 496-99; David Vincent Meconi, “Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity” in Journal of Early Christian Studies pp. 111–12

2/ Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History

The MySpace Experiment

So, this is an experiment.

I read an online article about the Delta Zeta National Sorority kicking a group of sisters out the door for (apparently) not being attractive enough.

The article went on to discuss how MySpace has become an environment where attractiveness has become a commodity, and people are more interested in “friends” that meet a certain physical profile. In fact, the emerging suspicion is that people on MySpace are “renting” profiles in an attempt to appear more attractive to strangers than they actually view themselves. This is accomplished by using pictures of other people (possibly models) and making false claims around their accomplishments, financial status – and, obviously marital status. If this is accurate, then this might indicate that MySpace has lost it’s social integrity.

I fired up a MySpace profile to see what type of reaction a 46 year old white guy living in Alpharetta “Horse Country” who is happily married with kids can generate. As you can see from my photo, I don’t qualify as a model. I am, by most definitions, successful as a family and business man.

Stay tuned for updates around this exercise.

Peace to my Brothers and Sisters.

brian patrick cork

Verizon and my Butt

Verizon users are similar to those willing to suffer Windows in terms of obsolete technology that represents more trouble than it’s worth.

And, like Microsoft and it’s Windows users, Verizon and the ASM crowd have a chip on thier collective shoulders /1 over Apple and it’s partnership with Cingular around the iPhone.

When Microsoft launched Vista, all we could do was laugh out loud – our point made all the more poignant with the quick to classics Apple spoofing Microsoft commercials /2 on television. And, Verizon will strike back at Cingular with a new player, where you can press as few as a dozen buttons to get to your favorite song, and you can listen to almost half of it before it drops out.

Whereas Apple and Cingular are inspiring and reliable, Windows (Microsoft) and Verizon are like a “Fart in a Phone Booth”.

brian patrick cork
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1/ See Bill Gates get his Butt kicked over Vista by Jim Hodgman in Newsweek 02/03/2007.
2/ For Apple Commercials Spoofing Microsoft CLICK HERE.

Failure – Part IV

Failure reminds us that quitting is not always a bad thing. Part of the value of learning to face failure is that doing so permits you to know when to give up. Robert Kurson graduated from Harvard Law School — usually a sign that one is going to be a lawyer. But he quickly realized his law career was a mistake — what he really wanted to do was to write about the Three Stooges. So he quit law and penned The Official Three Stooges Encyclopedia. Which itself might not seem the long kiss of success, except that his second book, Shadow Divers, a tale of deep-sea divers discovering the wreck of a sunken German U-boat, was a huge best seller in 2004 and made him rich.

To create is to fail, if only by deleting pages, discarding drafts and abandoning dead ends that seemed a good idea during the months they took to write. To look at authors is to realize how much failure is a matter of time, and perspective. John Kennedy Toole wrote one of the best and most popular comic novels of the past decades, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning A Confederacy of Dunces, though he never knew it; he killed himself in despair at age 31, and his mother got his book published posthumously.

We think of F. Scott Fitzgerald as an icon of 20th-century literature. Yet his perspective at the end of his life must have been different: He died at 44, an alcoholic, almost broke and all his books out of print.

Of course, not every failure has a silver lining. Sometimes failure is just failure — the project fizzles, you lose your job, the feds swoop in and you go to prison. But even then, facing unmitigated defeat, how you react — whether you stand up or give up — determines everything. Failure can be an invitation to re-invent yourself. Undone by a corruption scandal, Illinois Gov. George Ryan turned his attention to opposing capital punishment, and suddenly some were saying he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Martha Stewart used her five months in federal prison to do yoga and lose weight, and she emerged to resume her role as America’s domestic goddess.

The idea that a single “F” will keep you out of college and ruin your life is something they use to scare students into doing their homework. The reality is that we all have a string of “F”s on our records, whether we acknowledge them or not, and those failures, just like our successes, add up to form our lives and who we are.

You fail, but you survive. Usually. Sadder, maybe. Smarter, maybe. More adult and more human, certainly. We can cringe in embarrassment at our failures, or wear them proudly as noble scars, as the evidence of struggle that they certainly are. Dante begins his Inferno, famously, in setback and confusion. “Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost….” It takes a scary slog through all nine circles of hell, but — not to give away the ending — Dante comes out all right and sees the stars once again./1

Most people do.

…that’s it.

brian patrick Cork
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/1 See “Failure – Part I” dated February 19, 2007

Failure – Part III

It is important to realize how often failure occurs and how frequently it must be overcome, particularly in business, where stunning set-backs lie hidden behind the most popular products. World War I ended too soon for Wisconsin paper maker Kimberly-Clark –it was stuck with vast supplies of cellucotton, used in making gas mask filters and surgical dressings for American doughboys. Trying to find a use for the surplus, the company invented two products — Kleenex and Kotex. Neither did well at first. Rich ladies did not want to use Kleenex to remove makeup, the purpose for which it was originally marketed. As for Kotex, stores wouldn’t stock it, and customers were too embarrassed to ask for it.

But Kimberly-Clark stuck with both, and eventually, the products found a market. Persistence is often touted as the universal solution to overcome failure, as dictated by all those locker room edicts. Sometimes it works — yogurt was a niche foodstuff for infants and invalids until the dairy industry, finally, after years of trying, found a way to sell it.

Sometimes, though, perseverance only worsens failure–call it the Vietnam Syndrome. DuPont spent a quarter billion dollars in 1960s cash before it admitted that Corfam, its synthetic leather substance, was not the right material to use in shoes. R.J. Reynolds lost even more on its “smokeless” Premiere cigarette, relentlessly pouring resources into the doomed product, despite obvious drawbacks: The cigarettes were expensive to make, impossible to light with a match, difficult to keep lit and tasted like “burning plastic.”

More later…

brian patrick cork

Failure – Part II

We all fall down in our lives at one point or another. Some stay down; others get back up. Failure is such a common human experience that it is difficult to find a general observation about it that doesn’t sound trite, like something off a high-school locker room wall. “Winners never quit, and quitters never win.” “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” And on and on.

Despite all the truisms about failure, and despite it being universal, we still tend to ignore failure. We leave the disappointments off our resumes, and we overlook them in the lives of others.

How many people, watching Steve Jobs announce the iPhone, the latest hot product from computer giant Apple, paused to remember that he was once a notorious has-been? That in 1985 Jobs was forced out of the company he co-founded before blowing $100 million on NeXT, a start-up computer company that arrived stillborn (never-mind that the Operating System developed at NeXT was the platform for Apple’s current OSX)?

Not many… Because success eclipses failure. We think of George Lucas as the creator of Star Wars, not the guy who produced Howard the Duck. When we see Dustin Hoffman chatting with David Letterman, he is the star of The Graduate and Tootsie, not the star of Ishtar, one of the biggest bombs ever made.

Why? Because failure is painful. It’s impolite to dwell on it. You don’t shake Ross Perot’s hand and say, “Nice to meet you, sir. That presidential campaign of yours sure was a botch job.”

More later…

brian patrick cork

Failure – Part I

Dante Alighieri had a very bad fiscal 1302. His mission to Pope Boniface VIII ended in a betrayal, political rivals burned down his home in Florence and he was forced to flee into exile and condemned to die if he returned, accused of the rather ordinary and un-poetic crime of skimming money off municipal road repairs in his capacity as superintendent of widening and straightening roads, one of the many mundane duties the poet performed for his beloved native city.

But Dante made the best of it. While scrounging his living, he began writing Inferno, the first part of his Divine Comedy, inventing a fiery Hell and meticulously placing his enemies — including Boniface — one by one into it. The public embraced his creation. Dante was celebrated, both in his lifetime and without pause for the next 700 years, lauded as one of most important writers of the modern world, a titan alongside Shakespeare and Cervantes.

All in all, a fair recovery.

brian patrick cork