365 tomorrows » Will To Live

365 tomorrows » Will To Live

Wow, this story gave me some serious goosebumps. If you spend any time at all reading anything on the internet, you should definitely visit 365tomorrows.com often. Its a new scifi/fantasy short story every day. Amazing. Some of them are so-so. Some of them, like this one, actually move me.

This story could spur some truly interesting discussion... could a test determine our will to live? Should it?

I like the idea. A lot.

Free lunch.

Services that should be free

1. Connection to the internet. The next big step for mankind is to have the whole of the human race connected to each other, voluntarily of course. Every person in every village in every nation, poor or rich, smart or not, popular or isolated should have the ABILITY to reach the wealth of information, contacts, outlets of expression, and awareness that the internet offers us. For so long, it has not been a feasible business enterprise to supply that access to those who can’t really pay for it. People have tried the whole free internet thing and it has failed. Google took another free service, searching the web, and made it extremely profitable using AdSense. They could do the same with GoogleNet…


2. Church. If you think church is free, think again. Church, the way most of you know it, costs a lot of dough to pull off. The spectacle that many churches have become is a big business, with large profit margins and comprehensive business strategies. The smaller churches do the same thing on a much smaller scale, and wish they could do all the neat stuff that the bigger churches can. The older traditional churches are basically like the older traditional businesses… stuck doing the same thing they have been doing and mainting business status quo. If you think church really is free, try getting your congregation to stop tithing. See what happens. Or even better, use all the tithe money to do what Jesus wanted the church to be about – feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and oppressed. You are the customer to the church these days, not the sheep. So how do we do free church? Well, I’ve never seen one, but the house church idea seems like free church. Maybe we just pay for teachers, since that seems to be the thing we want our pastors to be best at. Pay for big worship events, since we pay for concerts and stuff. But gather freely. Counsel each other freely. Study the Word of God freely, using your free internet as your resource. And most importantly – freely give.


3. Education. Education is really not free. Teachers must be paid. But maybe we can find a better way to pay, and a better way to teach. The school system has been basically the same since we invented it. Sit in a classroom, be taught by the expert. Seriously, how many teachers really are experts in their field? We don’t pay them to be, so why should they be? Is that what we need anyway? I don’t have any suggestions for this one, only that things need to change. There has to be a way to equip the next generation of youth to actually contribute to society in progressive and meaningful ways, and still actually make money in the end. Any ideas?