Welcome to Patient Zero...

Well everyone, welcome.

I have wanted to start a blog for a while, but hadn't had the time or the right way to go about doing so. Blogs are about more than just writing down what I did today, or how I feel. They are about ideas. Which got me thinking. I want to write about my ideas on many things, and not just be locked into one topic. Sure I could focus on my studies around men's issues, spirituality, psychology, theology, and the like; but that would limit me. What if I wanted to talk about something else?

In my thought process, seemingly random things came up. Connections between theories and worldviews. Connections between movies and books. Connections between science and religion. Connections between ideas themselves and the human brain. You see, we humans are shaped by the world around us and the world within us, by our total experience. When we are young, we learn who are parents are, learn how to breathe, learn even how to think. The learning process isn’t just a matter of learning things for future use; it’s about hardwiring the brain. That’s right, your interactions with others from before you came out of your mother’s womb to the moment you read this sentence, are physically changing the way your brain is constructed and operates. This makes what we expose ourselves to important, because that exposure, for good or for bad, changes who we are. This goes beyond even just interactions with people, but to books and movies and anything else like this. It even goes to our experience of spiritual practices, even drug induced hallucinations.

While thinking about these things, I remembered the book Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson. While the book is fiction it does bring up an interesting concept that, for better or worse, inspired the name and concept behind what I will do here. The book focuses on a computer virus that is affecting human beings as they surf the net. The book equates the way that this virus works to the same way that a biological virus works. Stephenson then relates some very interesting research that looks at ideas as viruses. Given what I have said above about how the brain is hardwired, ideas as viruses makes a lot of sense to me. Bacteria might be better, or infection. Regardless, ideas as viruses got me thinking. Thinking about the past five years of my life, about two masters programs and a coming PhD program. About all the ideas that have been thrown at me in various ways, from macro-social work principles to contextual theology to racial identity to liturgical formation to food production to Twitter and Facebook to advertising. How many times would life have been easier if I just didn’t have to worry about thinking X,Y, or Z. Ignorance isn’t bliss, its health in some cases.

And in other cases, it’s just another infection, taken hold of its host, ready to be spread. Some ideas are useful for fighting others. Think of the Christian Apologetics that have been written, or the recent atheist apologetics. Regardless of how one thinks, these works are there to help guard against the “bad thoughts” or infect you with “good” ones. Some ideas take time to incubate. You hear a theory, or a movie line, and it’s not until days, weeks, or months later that the idea comes round again. This time, it is fully internalized, deeply ingrained, and very useful for dealing with a situation. Some ideas are trivial, like a preference for food style or condiments. Others are deeply ingrained, like racism or internalized oppression. Some ideas are held by a few, and others by many. Some are state sanctioned and are systematically injected into all of us through the needle of indoctrination (like school), while others are systematically avoided by groups who oppose them (think religious fundamentalism’s rejection of evolution).

So, what does that mean for us, or for me? I hope that it means that in this space I will share with you my thoughts and ideas. Some of them will be my reactions to things I have read and seen, in the hopes that we can, together work to fight off the infection. Sometimes it will be with the intention of infecting you for purposes of inoculation, to build up resistances to things that you might not want (even if those are my ideas that you don’t want). Finally, well, all infections have a source. All epidemics start from a single host. I am Patient Zero. I hope to infect you with my thoughts. In fact, it is already happened. The fact that you have read this means that your mind has been altered. Welcome to the infection, and feel free to respond with your own virus. As we pass them back and forth, who knows what kind of epidemic we may create?