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What is...um...oh, whatever...
The blah blah blah factor is an idea from advertising. At some point in the ad campaign, the message will have been received by its audience, and further repetition of it will neutralize it by making it ho-hum. The consumer says, 'Okay, so your product cleans teeth; tell me something more'. Smart advertisers alter the message, the product, or the campaign before it reaches that point. The yada yada effect is from Jewish sources. In it, when someone hears too much of something, there becomes no reason to bother listening. It's seen as all talk, nothing worthwhile, and goes in one ear and out the other. In some US youth circles, they say 'whatever' and is expressed by putting the pointers out and thumbs together to form a 'W'. That usually is a sign that they'd really like to stop you from further talking, especially when the talk seems to have an ulterior motive ('what's he trying to get from this?'). These phenomena are happening to all institutions, to all the world's religions, and especially to Christianity. Most Christians have been saying the same things the same basic way over and over and over again for stretches of hundreds of years (on some matters, thousands of years).
Some Christians are tempted to alter the message of the faith, taking out all the 'negative' talk about sin and possible damnation (the stuff that Luther called "Law"), and taking the emphasis off of Christ and the Scripture that tells us about him and what he wants from us. The positive stuff then gets made fuzzy so that people can adapt it to their own frame of mind. But Christians are not advertising a product; we are sharing the truth about the Almighty and about the human species. Those truths can't be changed by us. We can, however, explain those truths in a different way, as Paul and John and Patrick and Francis and many others have in their times. They expressed those truths in ways that tied into the real lives of the people around them, so it was definitely worthwhile. They told it at their own expense and risk, so the motive was not ulterior. They did it with great imagination and daring style, so there was little room for ho-hum. And they relied greatly on the Holy Spirit to lead them, so it went in the ears and got stuck inside. In today's world, Christians (like everyone else) will need to be very aware of 'blah blah blah' and 'yada yada' and 'whatever', because it kicks in a lot quicker than it used to. The best way to find out if it's kicking in is to watch the teenagers; they are usually the first to show it.
A special treat for you cynics who think all religious talk is blah blah blah -- see the Google searches on :
- spiritual blah blah blah;
- religious blah blah blah;
- Christian blah blah blah;
- mystical blah blah blah;
- metaphysical blah blah blah blah;
- church blah blah blah.
For the clinically cynical, please look at the first page (sometimes second) and see where this Spirithome.com site comes in. (Search results vary over time.)
Also, Neta Jackson's Yada Yada Prayer Group books, and Barbara Rosenblat's audio-book CD version of it.
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