• I’m not your average blogger

According to a recent Barna study, I’m not your average blogger.

“Blogs are most common among single adults, Northeast residents, homosexuals, those not registered to vote, and atheists and agnostics.”

Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. And nope.

While about one-quarter (23 percent) of Internet users have a page on Facebook or MySpace, only one-tenth of Americans have a personal blog or Web site.

The Barna Report adds, “Blogging has not reached the ‘tipping point’ towards becoming a mainstream activity (an emerging technology is often thought to ‘tip’ toward majority use when the penetration reaches 20 percent or more of the population). Still, there are an estimated 16 million American adults who use their blog as a pulpit to broadcast their voice to the world.

Before blogging reaches that tipping point, I’d like to see some kind of legal definition of bloggers. Are they “journalists” and thus afforded the legal privileges of the media? Are they required to follow the same copyright laws and standards for verification of facts? How about laws concerning libel and slander?

What are your thoughts?

• Lone Ranger to blame for Iraq War?

Unless you’ve been in a coma the past few days, you know that George Bush’s former press secretary, Scott McClellan, has come out with a blistering book about the President. McClellan writes that the president, “convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment” and engages in “self-deception” to justify his political ends. Thus, the decision to invade Iraq was a “serious strategic blunder.”

Wanna know who I believe is to blame for the “strategic blunder”? The Lone Ranger! Yep, President Bush and his advisors, like me, spent their formative years watching “the daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains.” More

• What will half a trillion buy?

Sunday’s safe landing of the latest Mars explorer, Phoenix, has renewed talk of sending a manned mission to the red planet.

The Phoenix price tag is estimated at $520 million, but a manned mission could cost between $500 billion and $1 trillion. So, what else could half a trillion buy? Here are some thoughts.

• Sex and the Pity

The popular HBO series Sex and the City is coming to the big screen. The series followed relationship columnist and anthropologist, Carrie Bradshaw, as she and her three gal pals indulged in designer shoes and casual sex. As a researcher, Bradshaw somehow missed some important research findings on the subject—and that’s a pity!

For ten years, Dr. Nancy Moore Clatworthy, a sociologist from Ohio State, has been researching couples who have lived together. Clatworthy’s survey asked questions about “finances, household matters, recreation, demonstration of affection, and friends.” In every area, the couples who had lived together before marriage disagreed more often than couples who had not.

Clatworthy also observes, “The finding that surprised me most concerned sex. Couples who have lived together before marriage disagreed about [sex] most often.”

Dr. E. Mansell Pattison, chairman of the Department of Psychology at the Medical College of Georgia, believes the lack of commitment is the reason sexual relationships are the most common break up factor. In marriage, couple have time to work through sexual problems (and sex is never problem free!). But, in a live-in situation, the partners can simply go looking for other willing partners.

Sex and commitment can’t be separated. The research shows that total intimacy without total commitment leads to concerns of breaking up, often “extreme unhappiness,” and more disagreement—especially about sex. As a result, Dr. Paul Pearsall claims “Super sex requires super love, a love that is possible only in a relationship that lasts. . . .”

According to Leo (“Gimme me a hug!”) Buscaglia, living together is “pseudo-intimacy, a caricature of an intimate relationship.” And, again, researchers agree. While there may be good intercourse, there is little intimacy. It’s impossible because both partners know very well that they’re on trial.

(Click here for more of the studies.)

More recent studies on “hooking up,” or sex without any commitments, reveal the same findings:

Adolescent gynecologist, Melisa Holmes, writes in Girlology: Hangups, Hook-Ups and Holding Out, “They don’t learn to build that emotional intimacy before they get physically intimate. In the long term, that develops bad relationship habits. They may grow up not knowing how to connect with a partner on an intimate level.” The new research seems to verify earlier studies on sex that commitment is an essential element in truly satisfying intercourse.

(Click here for more of the studies.)

So, please Ms. Bradshaw, read the research before you write your next column.

• Where is God in natural disasters?

May has been a horrific month of cyclones (100,000 possibly dead in Myanmar), earthquakes (55,000 reported dead in China) and thousands left homeless by the most-active tornado season ever in the Midwest. So, where is God in all these natural disasters?

Rabbi Daniel Lapin wrote, following December 2004′s tsunami, that when God commanded Adam and Eve to “subdue the earth” He was giving humans two commands:

Our first distinctive cultural imperative is to render ourselves less vulnerable to nature. We believed we were following Divine will when we developed medicine and medical technology to dominate disease. We found insecticides to protect our food supply, and we built dams to control rivers. We knew we were pleasing God by making ourselves safer and more secure, and this knowledge lent added urgency and meaning to our efforts. Not by coincidence did the overwhelming majority of these scientific and technical developments take place in the West.

Civilization`s second distinctive cultural imperative is the importance of preserving human life. This too derives directly from our biblical roots and distinguishes us from the peculiar fatalism toward death found in so many other cultures.

God runs this world with as little supernatural interference as possible. Earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and, yes, tsunamis happen. It is called nature, which is not always benign. Fortunately, God also gave us intelligence and commanded us to make ourselves less vulnerable to nature. He also implanted in us a culture in which each and every life is really important. Many of those fatalities are attributable to misguided cultures.

In Myanmar, the government actually prevented aid from reaching hurt and homeless; in China lax building codes assured destruction. In the Midwest, however, early warnings and storm shelters have prevented thousands of deaths.

While in Mozambique in February 2001, I was amazed that residents were rebuilding on the exact flood plane that had destroyed thousands of homes just one year earlier. Our missionary host explained that many Africans view life as cyclical (“The Circle of Life”) and have no concept of changing the future through relocating or minimizing flood risks.

When God commanded that we “subdue” the earth, that may have included levies, strict building codes, Doppler radar and storm shelters. So, have a safe Memorial Day weekend—and put fresh batteries in your weather radio.

• Indiana Jones and the Suspension of Disbelief

MediaCollege.com describes “suspension of disbelief.”

In the world of fiction you are often required to believe a premise which you would never accept in the real world. Especially in genres such as fantasy and science fiction, things happen in the story which you would not believe if they were presented in a newspaper as fact. Even in more real-world genres such as action movies, the action routinely goes beyond the boundaries of what you think could really happen.

In order to enjoy such stories, the audience engages in a phenomenon known as “suspension of disbelief”. This is a semi-conscious decision in which you put aside your disbelief and accept the premise as being real for the duration of the story.

Suspension of disbelief only works to a point. It is important that the story maintains its own form of believability and doesn’t push the limits too far.

So, after Indiana escaped a nuclear bomb while hiding in a refrigerator, thousands of rounds of automatic gunfire and three—yes, three—Niagara-sized waterfall plunges, my suspension of disbelief was pretty well depleted by the time he escaped a UFO abduction.

Maybe it’s just that I’m twenty year older (and more critical) since Indy’s Last Crusade, but film four seemed to “push the limits too far” for me.

What did you think?

• Travel world on tank of gas

Yikes, with a tank of gas topping $3.99, the traditional family road trip may become a thing of the past. But fear not. Let me suggest the Rand McNally travel agency. Here’s what our team of investigative humor columnists discovered by searching through the index of its famous Road Atlas.

Click for “one-tank” worldwide destinations. Bon voyage!

• Proud Papaw’s pics

Before I have my grandparent license revoked, here are the 2008 pics of Micah, Hannah, Nathan and Kaylah. Lois and I have the privilege of babysitting the girls every Thursday afternoon and seeing the boys about every six weeks. What fun!

Tomorrow I’ll get back to the more mundane topics of sex, money and power.

• Perfect timing

In January, I realized I didn’t have a single speaking engagement in June and July—which are usually two of my busiest months. And that was just a bit disconcerting!

The only other time I’ve had a summer without speaking engagements, the youth pastor at my wife’s church resigned—by email—to the entire church email list—at 11:30 pm Saturday night—and was gone! I became interim youth pastor at 51 years old that summer.

Again, God has cleared my schedule for this summer. This time, so I can undergo radiation treatment for prostate cancer. And that realization has given me added confidence that a) nothing surprises God and b) that He has the situation under control.

God’s schedule doesn’t always conform to mine, and I don’t always like how He answers (or doesn’t answer) my prayers, but I do trust He has things planned better than me. So some thoughts . . .

God is never late—but He sure is slow

God is in control

Some thoughts on life’s tough questions

When life is not “happily ever after”

• Reading, ‘riting and Rockies

What a joy to speak and share writing resources with the writers at the Colorado Christian Writers conference.

The students in my Communicate to Change Lives continuing seminar, as well as my one-hour Heavy Topics with a Light Touch, were very receptive and responsive. “Thank you, thank you! You’ve been a great audience!”

I also found some wonderful new writers for Vista, the paper I edit.

I’ll be closing the conference with my keynote talk, I Have a Dream this afternoon. Right now, I’m trying to soak up as much as the sunshine and the snow-capped mountains as I can, before heading back to the soybean fields of Indiana. There’s no place like home, but the Rockies and writers are a close second!