I have hijacked this topic from my blog buddy Rain’s site. I just copied my comment to her blog. She quotes from Craig M. Gay’s book “The Way of the (Modern) World”. It is very thought provoking and I recommended you pay her blog a visit to read it. http://ivyrain.wordpress.com/2009/10/18/food-for-thought/
We do want it all, and we want it now.
Patience is no longer considered a virtue, and its something I have worked hard at developing all my life.
Technology is just a tool. We decide if we use it to make our lives better, or worse. All the nice, shiny, toys that technology produces can become very addictive. As with all addictions we either control it, or it will control us.
Technology does have a profound effect on how we live. The spear, and bow and arrow, turned us from prey into predators. The discovery of agriculture changed us from nomadic, hunter gathers, into city dwellers. Information is power, and the printing press meant the ruling elite could no longer control who had access to it. Serfs and slaves became citizens in a democracy. All of these changes revolutionized how we live, and how we view the world.
Modern technology, the cars, computers, the cell phones, give us greater control over the life choices we make. Our parents can no longer dictate who we marry, our jobs, or where we will live.
However all revolutions come with a price. While we now have more freedom to make the decisions about our lives, technology has created this fast paced world, where we must make many more decisions, and make them quickly. It becomes to easy to become a slave to technology, instead of being freed by it.
If you believe the world is becoming a worse place to live, than you will look to the past for a better answer. You will see the garden of Eden as the perfect world. A world we should try to emulate today, as much as possible. God created Eden, and we need God’s guidance to make the world we now live in a better place.
If you believe the world is becoming a better place to live, than you will develop faith in what has brought about these changes. You will believe that evolution will continue to make the world better.
I believe we humans are physically evolving to adopt to changes in our environment. We will evolve a better brain, that we will use to create a better world. We will make better use of the technology we develop to make the world a better place to live in.
Of course it would help if I could evolve a better brain now, but I am afraid I am stuck with the one I have. One that has not yet evolved the patience I need to deal with all the choices technology is throwing at me.
How patient are you?
How has your faith helped you become more patient, assuming it has. 
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October 21, 2009 at 1:34 am
lovewillbringustogether
One of the problems i see now is that the pace of technologic change has outstripped human evolution’s ability to keep up.
As individuals and as a society we are falling further and further behind the rate at which technology is changing our society and lives.
i don’t see a happy ending coming from this, neither do i see any serious united efforts being made to reverse the rates of change so as to give us the time we need to adapt or ‘evolve’ successfully – in the most beneficial manner to our society of all the advances technology is capable of presenting to us.
We no longer have the luxury of ‘patience’ – although this makes having patience no less of a virtue in my opinion – but are being forced more and more to try and play the ‘catch-up’ game in order to fit in with everyone else in our community, or society, or country or other country’s.
Those who snooze, lose is an ever increasing catch-cry in today’s world.
The big problem is if we are not given sufficient time to snooze we will die.
So our choice now is lose or die – hardly a favourable long term view?
Am i patient? more patient now i spend some of my days trying to understand and come closer to Christ/God than in my youth – which is a little strange if you consider i now have far less time available to me now than i did back then.
i believe my faith ( such as it is currently) has helped me to acquire a wider perspective than just my own as i used to possess and i no longer see my place as being ‘me against the world’, but rather that i am to learn from the experiences the world presents me with and have some trust that their is a presence that actually has a far better and more important goal for the world, and us as a race, than i ever had.
in the scheme of things i may have a place – but it is not at the centre having everything revolve around me, and i do not need to fix the world ‘right now’, if at all.
in fact i may not even have to fix ‘my’ part of the world.
i can afford to be more patient now.
it’s taken me the best part of 50 years to figure that out.
i still have some way to go though.
<B
October 21, 2009 at 11:31 pm
edfromct
The pace of technology has been increasing. I have more faith than you that we can catch up. Mankind has the unfortunate habit of waiting until there is a crisis before we react, as with floods, famine, and the threat of nuclear war. The questions is how many will suffer because of our lack of vision.
I agree we sometimes utilize technology before we understand it, Chernobyl proves that.
Religious faith can widen your perspective because the source of it is beyond the world we live in. Faith can also replace impatience with acceptances.
Finding our place usually takes time. We will hopefully our place before it becomes 6 feet under.
October 21, 2009 at 7:33 am
Indian Lake Papa
Patience ?? Still working on that one!! LOL!! Not one of my strong points for sure!
October 21, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Debs
I’m patient as long as things go my way, the first time, and I don’t have to wait… I’ve come a long way from when I was impatient.
I think perseverance and patience go hand in hand. The longer you are in this walk of life, the more you understand the need for patience. And, the more you learn patience, the stronger you become to persevere. I think one of my favorite scriptures about this is in Hebrews 10:36 “You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised.” So important to keep going, patiently and purposefully. Another is in James 5:7-8 “Be patient, then, brothers, until the Lord’s coming. See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop and how patient he is for the autumn and spring rains. You too, be patient and stand firm, because the Lord’s coming is near.”
October 21, 2009 at 11:56 pm
edfromct
I like the advice in James 5:7-8. He also could have used the technology of irrigation and water sprinklers.
Perseverance does go hand and hand with patience. Faith that you will ultimately received your reward should help keep you on the right path, no matter how long it is, or how much time it takes.
It is best that we focus on one step at a time, or we may fall in a hole.
October 21, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Indian Lake Papa
Ed! Come on! Make some comments – I am getting impatient!!!
October 21, 2009 at 11:18 pm
edfromct
While you may be struggling with impatience, I am having a equal problem with finding the right words.
I could use a new brain, the old one is slowing down. We have the technology to replace our knees, and joints. I need some brain replacement surgery.
You may also be impatient for a new bible study, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.
There have been so many great blog post on everyone else site which I have been trying to catch up with.
October 21, 2009 at 11:43 pm
lovewillbringustogether
Ed – as i am certain you will have noticed by now – there are far too many great blogs out there (including yours) for any single human being to possibly ‘keep up’ with them all – and that’s even after twitter has almost killed blogging off completely.
The problem is not simply man somehow ‘catching up’ (which he simply can’t in this technologic explosion) but is that in him trying to catch up we are making demands upon our nervous system that our system was never ‘designed’ to cope with, stressing our bodies and minds out beyond their ability to deal with thus adding further to our inability to ‘keep up’, compounding the whole problem
Unless this issue is tackled seriously there is going to be a very major fall from grace for modern man and his environment/society.
<B
October 22, 2009 at 12:44 am
edfromct
I actually am looking forward to the technological explosion. There are many groundbreaking discoveries in medicine, physics, and nano technology, that will significantly improve how we live.
I don’t know enough about our nervous system to comment about that, but I think our brains have a much greater capacity than what we now utilize, (insert your favorite joke about entertainers and politicians). I think we have only just begun to explore the potential of our brain.
I look at the stress filled lives of the millions of people living in New York city. The vast majority are doing just fine. Even with 9/11, by 9/12 New York was back on its feet.
During the Ice ages early man was always just one day away from starvation. That’s stress. Our species could easily gone extinct back then.
I agree we have not taken the time to adequately understand of much the world is likely to change. There will be pain and suffering. However I have faith we will survive, learn from our mistakes, and continue to build a better world for future generations.
The biggest problems are likley to be with that part of the world that fights change, rather than trying to learn how to live with it.
I suspect that if we could go into the future, you would say “My God, what has happen to this world.” I would say “Wow. Look at what has happened to the world.”
We might both say the same thing about todays world. 
October 23, 2009 at 1:16 am
lovewillbringustogether
You don’t have to look forward to the explosion Ed – it’s been happening since at least the 1950’s. The results, good and bad, are all about you and the explosion – like a nuclear reaction – is continually growing and picking up speed, uncontrollably.
Neuroscience is a little bit of a tricky thing to fully understand
but here’s two reasonably simple concepts that i consider point to a serious issue mankind needs to respond to by curtailing the explosion somehow (slowing it, not necessarily stopping or reversing it).
1. our nerves, including the neurons which comprise our brain, have a fixed limit of reaction time and rate at which they can adapt to changes in our daily environment. Evolution does not work on these nerves at a steady constant daily rate, but usually makes ’sudden’ advancements – but these are often made over periods of several human generations (minimum 100 years) rather than within a few years or a single person’s lifetime. The rate of change in our environment is currently much faster than this and we are rapidly falling behind the technological rate of change. (consider how many completely new generations of ways to store and listen to music you have experienced within your own lifetime as a single example; do you still have any 78’s or a gramaphone?)
2. It is true that most of us never use the full potential of our brain’s capacity; our brains are designed to have inbuilt excess capacity so as to be able to still operate if our environment undergoes significant change within our lifetime requiring us to suddenly learn new ways of survival.
Some guesstimates place the average brain use at around 10-15% of it’s potential in terms of total neural storage capacity and we can generally operate pretty well at these levels.
increasing this capacity because we are forced to in order to compete equally with a small portion of human population (those who are able to adapt most successfully to the tech explosion) may not be such a good idea because it can drastically reduce our ‘reserve capacity’ which we will still need to adapt most effectively to world-wide evolutionary or unexpected change.
Consider the example here in Australia, which i am certain you would be able to find a comparable case in some government department in the US.
Because of economic necessity (rapidly growing costs owing to a longer living population beyond retirement age where tax income is not increasing at the same rate) our hospitals have had to pare back the ’spare’ capacity it held in terms of work done per doctor/nurse and the number of beds, complete with staff, to maintain the patients in them.
As a result they operate far more ‘efficiently’ for some of the year, but the waiting list times for general elective surgery for things like hip replacements, back injuries, cataracts and non-life theatening operations have been growing (until this was seen to be too bad for public relations and they learned new ways to create these lists so the figures don’t look as bad – it’s easier for a government to adjust the stats than increase the number of operations). whenever a higher than ‘expected’ number of patients are required to be admitted to our hospitals now (such as in winter when we have a viral epidemic increase) emergency patients are no longer able to be admitted to a hospital but can be put on ‘bypass’ meaning patients in an ambulance must either drive to another distant hospital that has the required staff and ability to treat thm or sit in cues in the driveway until the emergency ward which has to be used as an ‘overflow when not enough beds and staff are available to put the patients in the main hospital wards are cleared. This can take as long as 12 hours in our central city hospital.
12 hours waiting in an ambulance – for an emergency patient (road accident or heart-attack victim)??
And all this because government cuts down to the minimum anticipated/planned number of beds for most situations they have determined to be likely, reducing any spare capacity.
The problem with having less than optimal spare capacity is that on the rare occasions where there is a spike in external activity requiring us to access the reserve to be able to live in our environment we are very likely to not survive it whereas otherwise we likely might.
Just like i am finding with my hospital system, it can be a serious mistake to maximise our ‘efficiency’ by reducing excess (some see as ‘waste’) capacity.
When the unanticipated happens we may desperately need what is no longer there.
Ok that was a bit long but it’s not a simple idea to explain fully
<B
October 25, 2009 at 12:50 am
edfromct
1) What is the “stress” capacity of the human brain?
I spent a couple of hours researching this question on the net, and come to the conclusion that nobody really knows. Guys with PHD next to their name spend hours, probably days, debating this question.
I don’t have a PHD next to my name but I suspect my guess is a good as their guess.
I think of stroke victims who lose the ability to use one-half of their brain. In many cases the other half steps in and takes over the lost functionality(?).
We also now have computers that can perform calculations far fast then the human brain, and store vast amounts of information, we no longer need to store in our brains. We design the computers, let them do the grunt work, and save our brain power to analyzing the data. The school kids today do many times more homework than I did, one reason being they have computers.
Of course our growing reliance on computers scares the bejesus out of some people, with thoughts of “World Robot Domination”.
To me the computer is just another tool we can use to help us live better.
I agree we need to be aware of the potential problem of our fast paced life outpacing the capacity of our brain to deal with it. We need to find ways to monitor this stress(?) level. I also think with advanced technology, like the latest MRI machines, we are learning far more about how our brain works. Technology will not solve the problem, if it every becomes a serious one. It is up to mankind to think of creative solutions. I think we can. I don’t believe we need to slow down the pace of technology, we need be more creative in how we use.
2) We do have the same problem in the emergency rooms in American Hospitals as you do in Australia.
http://www.mediregs.com/blog/2009/06/crowding-hospital-emergency-departments-continues-occur.htm
We do need more beds in hospitals, and more doctors, and nurses, to treat patients. I believe we have the resources to deal with this problem now. We don’t allocate our resources as well as we should. However overall we are receiving far better health care than at any time in the past, proven by the fact we live longer. It could be better, but it is a vast improvement over the past.
I see no sign that our medical care is worse than it was when I was growing up years ago. Our medical care is getting better, in the long run, not worse. We are diagnosing physical, and mental health, problems better, and treating them better.
Rant – how much hospital resources is cosmetic surgery taking up? What if all those surgeons giving us big boobs, and sucking the fat out of us, work in emergency clinics?
October 26, 2009 at 4:10 am
lovewillbringustogether
Good Thoughts
i’m not sure we are on the same page though with ’stress capacity’ of our brains.
i do believe we are rapidly increasing the levels of stress we place on our bodies (in significant part due to demands new technology places on all of us) and as the sole or prime organ involved in all the many aspects of physical stress our brains are subject to it more than most other parts.
i was sort of referring to this under point 1 of my comment but was focussing more on the fixed reaction times our nerves can never exceed as a result of their actual physical chemical composition more than the amount of stress a human being can learn to cope with.
What i was saying is that there is in each one of us a limit built in which our nerves and nervous system is limited to and cannot go beyond in our lifetimes. – The ‘reaction time’ that can be determined by testing certain nervous responses in our bodies and dividing by the number and length of nerves involved in the reaction.
to this i was comparing the rate of technologic change in our everyday life – it is increasing logarithmically without limit so what i am saying is that there will ( or maybe already has come a point at which our society will change faster than our body is able to deal with.
This will cause a person ot have what some may define as a ‘mental breakdown’ – when a person is no longer able to make the necessary number of adjustments or keep up the rate of such adjustments so as to keep up with where they think the ‘ought’ to be in their society.
i submit that there is ample evidence of this occurring, and has been for a number of years, and that drug-taking is both a method of trying to ‘keep up’ (or avoid) the rate of change while at the same time compounding the problem and putting even more stress upon an already stressed system.
in point 2 i was hoping to show that we humans need to have a great deal of reserve capacity in our brains (much like computers that work far better when their hard drives are no where near at full capacity – indeed if they reach 95% capacity there is a noticeable decrease in ‘normal’ performance, while more complex functions can cause such a computer to virtually come to a grinding halt.) and that if we start using this natural ‘reserve’ brain capacity (currently something like 85%) there are going to be an increasing number of us who ‘freeze’ when certain conditions exist in our lives and we will become a virtual vegetable or not be able to perform our normal functions in a manner that our society expects, needs or demands of us depending upon who we are and what we do for a living.
What a single human brain has as a ‘normal’ stress capacity would no doubt keep the PhD’s busy for years, but any one of us needs to understand how the stresses and rapidly increasing rate of change affects us so as to ensure we don’t some day wake up in a funny farm with padded walls and guys in white coats looking out for us – or worse, in a jail cell because we ‘cracked’ and did something unforgivable.
If you want an interesting research topic for google try looking up expenditure on Mental Health versus the numbers of people who currently need it – compared to say the 1960’s and the anticipated need in 2050.
And then be thankful you may not live to see 2050.
We see ourselves living a relatively ‘normal’ life even with all the new technology and think there is not much of a problem/
This is because no-one WANTS to see it (it frightens us to think what is or could be happening under our very noses) and so few will talk about it. If you start to look carefully at the issues you might see a different picture of our modern life.
Are you familiar with the story of the frog in a pot of water?
As for your rant – i cannot say how much people’s vanity saddens and disappoints me – i would so much rather people would have psychological ’surgery’ to deal with their vanity issues than cosmetic or physical surgery ( with the exception of when accident causes disfigurement)
Wearing make-up or putting on creams so as to protect and preserve looks is one thing, to be cut and poisoned (BOtulism TOXin – botox) is quite another. What is the point of looking good on the outside if on the inside you are a very ugly, self-obsessed person? Yes – make the surgeons do the much needed surgery – but again it is not just a matter of enough surgeons but ‘fully funded’ beds in hospitals which includes ALL the staff each bed needs in order for the patient in it to be treated properly and humanely.
<B