In my Scripture & the Church class this past semester, we had an entire session devoted to thinking about ethics. Really, all we did was answer questions that made us think about our ethics. Some ethics-related questions are pretty easy to answer. For example: If you had to squash either an ant or your neighbor’s noisy, pimped-out car, which would you choose? Obviously, it would be the ant. Cars are harder to squish.

Though some questions are a little more difficult to answer. If you had to rob a bank in order to buy some sort of obnoxious car squashing device, would it not be worth it? It’s kind of harder to answer, isn’t it. Because on the one hand, you want to save your other neighbors from having judging thoughts toward that dirtbag neighbor with the loud car, but the bank might not even have enough money for you to buy your own car squashing device. And where would you put it? You wouldn’t have much room for your house parties anymore, would you.

I want to move quickly away from the darker questions and on to my main point which is social networking has given us a whole new set of rules and ethics to follow. While before we were asking ourselves difficult questions, Facebook makes us think about things like the following:

• If you had to choose between looking like a hero to a few gullible friends and looking kinda silly to everyone else, would you still ignore that photo of the poor child who would be able to get medical attention if only it got enough shares?
• Does your desire to love God without copying and pasting a poorly-written status outweigh your desire to go to heaven?
• If your mom didn’t have a Facebook, would you still declare hatred for your own mother to all of nobody at all by ignoring that image that proclaims motherly love?
• If hospitals accidentally only hired doctors who couldn’t operate unless their patients’ stories got a certain number of ‘Likes’, would you ask them to rewrite their resumes or would you just get them arrested?

Think about it, guys. Where do your priorities lie? Never get off of Facebook. The children need you. Share this if you want to live forever!

Every once in a while, a new teenage pop artist comes out and redefines a generation in a way that many of us don’t understand. An example of this would be Justin Bieber. Because someone gave this well-groomed kid a record deal, every preteen either is Justin Bieber or is dating Justin Bieber. However, it’s so easy to make fun of the Justin Bieber subculture that it’s not even worth it (especially if your parents have told you your hair resembles that of the Biebs).

Yesterday, while doing nothing (a vital part of my daily routine), I stumbled upon “Friday” by Rebecca Black. Since it’s release last month, the music video for the song has gone viral. You might be able to tell why.

Yeah. This song became popular because of how awful it is. If I had said otherwise, the sarcasm wouldn’t have been subtle enough to be even slightly funny. The song is obviously terrible, and Rebecca Black isn’t really the best singer, but I believe that she’s the victim of some greedy exploitation here.

When I first heard “Friday,” I assumed Rebecca wrote it herself. Since she’s only thirteen years old, it makes sense that she’d write these song lyrics while slipping in and out of consciousness during language arts. She obviously would’ve slept through the lesson on linking verbs. ”W-we is so excited? We be so excited? … Screw it. We so excited.”

But here’s the thing, Rebecca Black didn’t write the song. The song was written by Clarence Jey, an Emmy Award winning songwriter, and Patrice Wilson, for whom there’s no Wikipedia page. To save myself the research, I’ve decided she’s just one of Rebecca’s friends. So because two people wrote a bad piece, Rebecca is the victim of “being cyberbullied.” Or it only seems like they accidentally wrote this bad song.

Emmy Award winning songwriters aren’t stupid. I’m pretty sure they would know that a review of the days of the week isn’t remotely acceptable as song lyrics (unless you’re either in kindergarten or Spanish class). Even if Rebecca’s BFF Patrice Wilson helped write it, no one in their right mind would let a rap about changing lanes slide through the system. Unless, of course, they thought it would be funny. Really funny. So funny that the music video for such a song would receive over 16 million views in a little over a month.

Here’s the even more hilarious part: Rebecca’s mom paid $2,000 to have her daughter sing about eating cereal on the Internet. So a thirteen-year-old girl who was expecting to fulfill her dream of becoming a famous pop star became the laughing stock of the Internet because some record company wanted to make bank off of song downloads, T-shirts, and her mom. In the process, they ruined her future in the music industry. And now Black’s planning on doing an acoustic version of the song. I wonder who told her that was a good idea.

Rebecca Black got hung. William Hung. Have a nice day.

In an effort to prove to myself that I’m not becoming a part of it, I decided to sit down and research the hipster culture. My first, and main, reference was Cracked.com’s wildly opinionated topic article concerning the trend. By reading this article, I stumbled across Pitchfork.com, a media reviews website that seems to review either the most obscure indie bands or most mainstream pop artists. They give off the illusion of being unbiased by giving good and bad reviews to both, but we know better. Giving popular music good reviews is just another opportunity for them to be ironic.

Their review of Radiohead’s Kid A (supposedly) is so cryptic that it almost seems occultish. The review gave the album a 10/10, but with lines like, “The experience and emotions tied to listening to Kid A are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax,” I’m still unsure as to whether or not it’s a positive review (or a review at all, for that matter). But I guess it doesn’t matter because this site seems to worship Radiohead, so likewise, you should too. However, their negative review of Muse’s album Showbiz is rudely interrupted by a surprising negative review of Radiohead’s newest stuff. But that was back in 1999, just before Kid A was released, so in reality, I still don’t have a freakin’ clue what these guys think of Radiohead.

Looking deeper, I realized that you’re gonna need a couple things to fully understand a Pitchfork review. The first is a dictionary. It may be because of my limited vocabulary, but one can only take in so many four-syllable adjectives in a row before wishing they had never started reading in the first place. I think their hope is to make their style of writing as obscure as the music they review. It’s a whole new level of condescension that not even Dr. House would be willing to explore. It seems highly likely that they would rate music a 6.8.

Speaking of which, the second thing you need to understand a Pitchfork review is an understanding of decimals. It’s elementary school material, but Pitchfork complicates it by ostensibly pulling these numbers out of nowhere. (I found out the definition of ostensibly after looking it up while reading a Pitchfork review.) I’m not too sure what makes a 2.6 album different from a 2.5 album, but if an album is given a rating that low, a decimal difference doesn’t really matter, does it? Apparently it does, but I just don’t get it. I figure most hipsters probably wouldn’t listen to anything worse than 5.6, but they may be willing to witness the stillborn birth of a 5.5 depending on how much it sounds like Sufjan Stevens (without trying to sound like Sufjan Stevens).

The third thing you need is the ability to find your way around Wikipedia. Statistically speaking, a Pitchfork review is 35% review of the album, 13% review of a “better” album, 2% arbitrary numbers, and a whopping 50% obscure pop-culture references (Estimated Bull Crap, 2010). Hopefully, enough people catch the reference that it would appear on Wikipedia. If you’re looking up a reference to understand a joke they made in a review, don’t bother. They probably didn’t make a joke.

And the final thing you need (besides a multilingual dictionary) is an attention span longer than the one required for you to read all those Wikipedia articles. If you’re like me, you lose interest in a long, vocabulary-ridden, sentence halfway through so that by the time you reach the end of it, you just dismiss it as a fragment. But trust me, it’s not. Pitchfork writers are obviously grammar freaks, so if they want to write a paragraph-long sentence, they can. And they do. Just be prepared to read a few of their sentences more than once.

In all honesty, I wish I could write like the guys at Pitchfork. But I don’t think I could live my life being so condescending and cynical. I fear this post is a start in that direction, though. I think I may have had an epiphany not unlike Lindsay Lohan’s in Mean Girls. Making fun of the mean girls just makes me a mean girl. Oh no.

I think we can all agree that Facebook is the perfect medium through which we can define ourselves. If you want to really know someone, the way to do that is by looking at someone’s Facebook profile. At the risk of ruining the satire of this blog post, I want to establish it’s satire very early on by making an extremely outlandish statement like, if someone can’t be entirely figured out by their Facebook profile, they’re probably not worth knowing at all. In fact, they’re obviously hiding something, like the fact that they ax people’s heads off in movie theaters.

The truth about Christianity is that there are a lot of people out there who call themselves Christians who aren’t really Christians, and as true Christians it’s our sole purpose in life to join in the holy witch hunt that is outing these kinds of people. And I believe Facebook is the best way to do it. Here are just a few things to look at when looking for hypocrites.

Religious Views
Let’s face it. If your Religious Views on Facebook just says “Christian,” you’re probably faking it. I mean, when I accept friend requests on Facebook, the first thing I look at is their Religious Views. If that person doesn’t know their Bible well enough or doesn’t know enough worship songs to put a verse or some encouraging, faith-defining, lyrics there, I just can’t see our online friendship going beyond an occasional “Like” on their status (or a good creeping session). Obviously, I won’t want to associate with them in real life; I just don’t talk to fakers. I mean, shouldn’t they know that Christianity isn’t a religion, anyway? Putting “Christian” under Religious Views would be such a horrible hypocrisy.

Arts and Entertainment
If your favorite music doesn’t include any worship bands, if The Passion of the Christ isn’t one of your Liked movies, or if the Bible is just thrown somewhere in your favorite books to make you look somewhat fashionable instead of being the very first one listed, you’re Arts and Entertainment section needs a serious overhaul if you don’t want to be burned at the stake. You know you’re just trying to look cool by putting bands like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin in your favorite music. Sure, you might legitimately like those bands, but if you’re too ashamed to Like bands like Hillsong United or Casting Crowns, then you’re too ashamed for Jesus. Just sayin’.

Favorite Quotes
I didn’t see a single quote by C.S. Lewis in your favorite quotes. Do you even love Jesus? I can’t be too sure if you actually read the Narnia series when you don’t even bother to quote any of them. I saw your status updates too. Not too many Bible verses, I see. Sure, you might have John 3:16, but everyone knows that verse. Let’s see if you can quote it without mixing translations. Hint: the translation that says “one and only Son” also says “eternal life.”

Okay, I know no one’s really as hostile as this blog post is, but looking back at the Religious Views part, I think it’s really strange that a lot of Christians don’t put “Christian” as their religious view. I’ll be honest, even I didn’t put it. Instead, I have a Bible verse. But why? Am I really afraid of being judged as not being a sincere Christian if I simply put “Christian”? I mean, it’s true that there are people out there who call themselves Christians but don’t strive to live like Christ, but if each of us have, on some level, a personal struggle with sin, why do we feel the need to separate ourselves from people like that. Aren’t we all rebels, anyway?

I’m not saying we should just give up on striving to be like Christ. I’m rather saying that sometimes I hear others and myself be quick to judge others as fakers. If we put ourselves on Christ’s level, the level of perfect righteousness, then wouldn’t we just be faking it? We’re all sinners. Outward actions don’t always express inward struggles. If someone’s not acting Christ-like, that doesn’t always mean they don’t feel guilty about it or that their not trying to correct it. We should encourage each other in love.