Mmm, don’t you just wish you had some right now?

When I was in Columbus recently for a They Might Be Giants concert, Sarah and I stopped at a restaurant called Pera Fresh Istanbul Food near The Ohio State University’s campus. I like trying food from different cultures, and so I thought this would be pretty good. It was.

But it was slightly strange to me because it was more of a fast food restaurant where you pick your bread, a meat and then your choice of veggies. It was similar to Subway or Chipotle, but for Mediterranean food. The menu isn’t a choice of popular cultural favorites, which I was hoping for, it was just letting you make your own food creation instead.

I told Sarah that it’s a sign that our culture is getting lazy in that, restaurants don’t offer something that they created anymore, they letting the customer do all the mental work. Especially for food that isn’t common in the U.S., I don’t mind someone holding my hand to show me what’s good. I assume chefs in other countries have a better idea of which foods are more tasty together, which in my mind would be better than me just picking a bunch of stuff not knowing if it tastes good together.

So much of our culture places emphasis on customization. ITunes allows people who like music or TV shows to purchase single songs instead of whole albums or single episodes instead of an entire TV series.

For people who play videogames, something that’s popular now are sandbox games, like Skyrim and Grand Theft Auto, where there is a story to follow, but when you’re not working on the story, you can go explore and do whatever you want, including creating 2,500 cheese wheels (see below), creating your own stories that are often more interesting and engrossing than what the writers came up with. You create better anecdotes to tell your friends and an experience that you streamline for your own personal entertainment.

Likewise as I thought with the restaurant, I said this is more of an example of laziness with developers and writers, as they aren’t very good at coming up with their own story. I could make the food Chipotle or Istanbul serve myself, because all you have to do is take a tortilla and fill it with whatever you want, and it would be the same or possibly even better. I can’t make my own videogame or music album (well, I could write music, but it would not be good), but I could use my imagination and come up with something better and save myself the money.

This was Sarah’s response to my observation.

Sarah responded that it’s not just laziness on the part of creators. People don’t take the time to make their own food, and it’s much more convenient to make others do it even if you have to pay for it. And people want to come up with their own stories and ideas. It promotes creativity to the player of a game or the person who creates a music playlist. It allows the consumer to both create their story and play through it.

That made sense to me. It is good that we are given the means to create our own art. But at the same time, I am lazy. I like to be creative, but using creativity drains me instead of sustaining me. I watch a movie or TV because I want someone to tell me a story. I want games to engage my mind, but not to the degree that they exhaust me. I can only play sandbox games for so long because when I get tired of creating on my own, I don’t continue. The hook to me in stories is to find out what happens next. If I have to decide what happens next, then eventually, I will run out of mental energy. At that point, I’ll move on to something else.

I may be one of the few, but I still like to listen to music in albums because it represents a more focused train of thought. I don’t like greatest hits albums because, though the songs are all “hits,” for lack of a better word, they usually come from different points in time and just sound odd next to each other. I’m not sure I’d want to listen to an entire PSY album just because I like Gangnam Style, but that’s an exception.

Eventually, I’ll decide to stop spending $6 for a Chipotle burrito and decide I can do it on my own, cheaper, healthier and fresher.

But then again, I work 40 hours a week, and I want to spend little time outside of my job doing actual work, so I’ll probably keep buying burritos there.

I write this because I’ve seen the shift in culture over the years from a time when everything went by the rules, offered little input from consumers and basically told them what their few options were to total customizability.

Kickstarter is a prime example of the shift our culture is experiencing. Now, the customer gets to choose what actually gets produced. Bands have started funding their albums through KS, movies and games get funded through KS. But if your album doesn’t get enough funding, it doesn’t get made. I like that we now have more freedom to choose these things, but it’s another sign that the world is shifting sometimes drastically to cater to consumers.

What do you think? Do you prefer to be given the free reign of total customization in the things you consume? Or would you rather have someone create packages of options for you to choose from? I would guess that most people prefer the option to customize things that they have deep concern or interest in, but would rather have help with things they find boring.

But I’m hoping to learn something from people’s responses.

A phrase I’ve heard thrown about quite often in Christian circles is “your brothers and sisters in Christ.” Recently, someone accused me of “thrusting” my last post in the faces of my brothers and sisters in Christ, which was used to make me look bad.

That aside, I wanted to take a look at what that phrase implies for Christians and how they treat others.

First of all, other than Jesus referring to his disciples as his brothers and sisters, the phrase does not appear in the Bible.

I could understand how the phrase could be used in a time in which Christians were persecuted as a sign of solidarity and a display of community among fellow believers.

In the U.S., however, Christians hardly live under persecution. There are certain Christians who believe that they are persecuted because the public and the government don’t buckle to their every demand. But despite the fact that the nation was meant to be a place of religious freedom, let’s just admit that Christians basically rule the land. According to the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life, 78 percent of Americans identify as Christian and 26 percent identify as Evangelical. In comparison, 18 percent attend mainline churches and 23 percent identify as Catholic. I’m not saying there aren’t Christians who are persecuted in the world, because there certainly are, as there are accounts of hostile, sometimes violent reactions to Christianity in some countries.

Getting back around to the point, I don’t think the phrase “brothers and sisters in Christ” is the stamp of solidarity it once was. Like the Jesus fish, which used to be a symbol used to help Christians identify each other in a time when an open and obvious display of faith was  more or less asking to be fed to the lions, yet now is seen ubiquitously on the rear ends of the cars of bad drivers, the phrase no longer carries the same meaning.

The way it is used in common language among Christians, I feel it does more to reassure and solidify Christians as the elite group in society, the dominant ruling class that holds fellow Christians in higher esteem than the rest of the world, preferring to keep the others at arms length. I don’t know that this is always the meaning Christians intend for the phrase to hold, but I think it definitely carries that weight regardless.

As I alluded to earlier, Christians often seem to view themselves the victims of the oppressive secular world, and I think the phrase helps to reinforce that idea as well. It provides motivation to continue its dominant grip on American society while simultaneously reinforcing their self-given identity as the underdogs. The rich, white underdogs who are being oppressed by minorities, other religions, LGBT people and the poor.

I don’t say all this just to tear down religion and say it’s inherently evil, because I don’t believe that’s true. I just have a different vision of the way things should be.

I view the thrust (for lack of a better word) of Jesus’ message is one of inclusivity, as opposed to a common ideal of exclusivity. In the Social Network, Justin Timberlake’s character, whose name I can’t be bothered to remember, said the reason Facebook would succeed is because of exclusivity. If you create at least the illusion of exclusivity for a product, then everyone will want to be a part of it. Everyone wants to be part of the in-crowd because with it comes the perception that if you’re part of a group that you are a member of the elite class. That’s what Facebook does. It’s still the cool thing to do, even though everyone else does it. Look at how GooglePlus used the same principle when it started to get the publicity buzz it had.

The thing most people probably don’t remember about Facebook, unless they watched the Social Network, is that it was exclusive to certain American universities. People clamored for it to come to their university. At the time that I reluctantly joined, it was required for users to have a college email address, as it wasn’t open to the general public.

But now, everyone is on Facebook.

Similarly one of Jesus’ main points was opening up a religion, which up until that point was exclusive to the point of one’s genealogy and culture, to all people, even Gentiles. Christianity was and is not meant to be an exclusive group dependent on race, culture or class status. And working toward the welfare of others should go beyond those who share our beliefs.

To take it a step further, Jesus opened his arms most widely to people who were the most rejected by society, in the prostitutes and tax collectors. It wasn’t based on what they had to give or what they did. Jesus made it known that they were welcome in the kingdom of God.

In the many instances that Jesus addressed the call to take care of the poor and marginalized of society, it wasn’t conditional. This is what we are called to do regardless of whether they are “taking advantage of the system.” If you want something from the Old Testament, try Proverbs 14:31, “Whoever oppresses a poor man insults his Maker, but he who is generous to the needy honors him.”

So, I don’t take to the phrase “brothers and sisters in Christ,” because it promotes an exclusive gospel. I think that if Jesus saw the world today, that he would tell us all people are our brothers and sisters in Christ, regardless of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and even religion or atheism. I believe in an inclusive gospel, one that seeks to meet the needs of all instead of a select few.

And as a side note, I’m not trying to say that Christianity is the only means to achieve an inclusive world. I wouldn’t ask anyone to convert to Christianity, though I would promote a philosophy of peace and love, because I think those things are the most important. But I certainly think those ideals are attainable through other avenues besides Christianity.

To pull from another popular phrase in Christianity, it’s obvious to me what Jesus would do. Just look at what he did and said. That’s what Christians should do.