Jeremiah Goes To San Francisco?

http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=47734

The Pope has sent a new, hardcore Archbishop to San Francisco.  One who is sure to imitate the prophet Jeremiah.  Surely the remnant of San Francisco needs the encouragement he will provide.

I joked with my wife that it would perhaps make a great screenplay were the Pope to send Jonah, instead of Jeremiah.
Jeremiah, you see, calls people to repent, and desperately wants them to, but know that they assuredly will not.
Jonah, on the other hand, calls people to repent, under duress from God, and hopes that they won't.  But they did anyway, a profound lesson for any would-be evangelist.  You can plant the seed, but only God gives the increase.  Sometimes He gives it without any consideration whatsoever to our desires.

On The Army Of Darkness

On our previous post, Anonymous commented:

Let us not forget that Screwtape's goal not the corruption of "society", it is securing individual souls. Insofar as whatever political or social conditions on earth aid this end they are good, but they are in every place secondary. It is the salvation of individuals on which the battle is fought, not "societies".
God cares not for the state of the world, it will be whatever state he wishes in the end. He cares how men act. Job was not asked to make heaven on earth. He was not asked anything but to show faith in the face of a miserable earth.


What I suspect that the commenter is forgetting is that just as the Body of Christ and the Communion of the Saints is an army, so too is what I'll call the 'Army of Darkness'...you are free to use Powers and Principalities if you prefer a more KJV feel.

Just as armies have elements that specialize in retail level destruction, so too does the Army of Darkness.  Screwtape, for instance, advises one of his minions who is precisely just such a retail-level agent of corruption.  But armies also have artillery sections, specializing in wholesale destruction, and they also have logistical and intelligence sections, which, IMO are the most dangerous of them all.  Screwtape is basically a fairly ranking officer in Infernal Logistics.

The culture is basically the logistical arena of the battle for individual souls.  This is why it is so important to at least contest it vigorously.  Just as you'd not like to be an army fighting while constantly beaten down by artillery fire enabled by your enemy's logistical supremacy, so too is it much harder for Christians to keep the faith under such adverse conditions.  Sure, there are some that do regardless, but let's be real.  The mass pornification of our culture has made it a LOT harder to walk the Christian walk.  Satan most assuredly cares about the culture and the society, because that is the strategic and logistical environment wherein he will secure the individual souls that he is ultimately after.  Because he is our Adversary, we should care as well.

Because encouragement is a main focus here at the Chariot, I'll close with this.  Satan's strength in the US is immense on the tactical and strategic level, but he is very vulnerable in logistics.  Cutting his line of supply is doable, indeed many of his organs of corruption are both not profitable and vulnerable to disruption, technological and otherwise.  Many of them lack even the support of his fire and maneuver elements, who could probably be manipulated into opening fire on their own logistical troops in the glorious manner of 'Mordor Friendliness'.

Christianity And Political Degrees Of Freedom

Unlike Islam, Christianity has an awful lot of degrees of freedom insofar as political, economic, and social organization is concerned. 

It is exceedingly unlikely, for instance, that God cares a whole lot which incredibly rich (by New Testament Standards) group occupies the front or the back of the American status bus.
It is also exceedingly unlikely that God cares too much whether a candidate that will spend ruinously prevails over one who will spend insanely relative to our actual means.
It is further pretty unlikely that God cares too much whether marginal income taxes are a few points higher or lower.
He probably doesn't even have a strong opinion on whether one should have to present an ID in order to cast a ballot---or, for that matter, what qualifications suffrage is based upon.
Societies historically with a Christian majority or plurality have made a significant constellation of different decisions on these issues.  About all they would agree upon is that when Jesus returns, he'll be an Absolute Monarch.

St. Vincent's rule of thumb---basically looking for the commonalities throughout Christian Tradition, should be our guide insofar as taking positions on issues that are politicized.  If the direction of Scripture and Tradition is clear, go for it.  Otherwise, it is unwise and probably immoral to wrap it in the banner of Christ.

Recommendations To the 21st Century Church From One Who Loves It

Today I intend to provide criticism and recommendations to the Church of this century from the standpoint of one who loves it.

1.  Teach your pastors to in general use the Scriptural Exposition method of preparing and delivering sermons.  Just like avoiding being alone behind closed doors with attractive young women that you're not married to, this greatly reduces the occasion of temptation when preaching.  The sort of temptation is to grind one's own particular ax or to make accommodation to the culture, rather than to God.  You see, if you preach entire books of the Bible, not avoiding any uncomfortable passages or books, you will be forced out of your cultural comfort zone into the deep wherein you and your congregation can actually encounter the actual God of Christianity, rather than the god of Churchianity.  In particular, make sure to give the Old Testament its due, because frankly, the New Testament makes zero sense without the 'spiritual grammar' of the Old.

2.  Don't take official positions on things wherein the Tradition and practice of Christians throughout the ages are contrary to yours.  Not only are you EXTREMELY likely to be wrong when the Communion of the Saints from AD500, 1000, 1500, 1750, 1850, and even 1950 disagree with you, but you are contributing to a hatred of the Church among a lot of people who might have become believers back then and you are seriously squandering your offense budget.  Remember this:  Simply saving nobody comes to the Father but through Jesus is plenty offensive.  When you absolutely need to take political positions on moral issues that have become political, make sure the Christians of the eras previously cited would mostly agree with you.  Also, in pretty much every case, your endorsements ought to be negative--as in, don't vote for X.

3.  If you can't take the Scriptural position on a cultural war issue, at least be silent.  Taking the world's position on said issue simply aggravates the problems in 2).  If you do 1), you'll have a much easier time taking the Scriptural position.

4.  Stop pushing size of congregation as the primary metric of success for pastors.  This just intensifies the temptation to accommodation that pastors constantly face.  Also, in groups of 150 or less, people can actually be regarded as human beings, as opposed to mere social constructs.

5.  Purge your seminaries of heretics.  If you need guys with floppy hats and red robes to do it, using surprise and other tools, so be it.  Just get it done.

6.  Stop being afraid of talking about Hell.  Jesus talked about Hell plenty, way more than Paul, for instance.  He also didn't talk about it like it was a place that only a very select few got into---broad highway and 'many find it' were more His speed on said issue.  Does someone who fails to tell you about a deep dark pit with spikes at the bottom that is in front of you in your path of travel for fear of offending you love you?  Hell No!

Closing the Cafeteria in the Arlington Diocese?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/sunday-school-teachers-balk-at-oath-agreeing-to-all-church-teachings/2012/07/11/gJQAcAvGeW_story.html

Obviously the article above is hostile to this movement, but I find it quite encouraging.  This demonstrates that at least part of American Catholicism has gotten serious in the eternal war against heresy.
If your prospective Sunday School teachers don't agree with your teachings, OF COURSE you shouldn't allow them to teach, regardless of what Spirit they claim to be moved by.

For those who would like a little extra encouragement, let me relate something said recently by a Quaker woman who attends our church.
She said that she felt led towards promoting the education of boys AS boys, not like they were suboptimal versions of girls.  My guess is whatever Spirit led her wasn't the same one the cafeteria Catholics were being led by.
In our church we've generally done quite well by our young men and boys.  This is primarily the result of one thing:  We don't hate them or wish that they were girls.  Because of this, they keep showing up and bring their friends.

As Wise As A Serpent?

http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/what-the-sspx-reconciliation-means-and-doesnt.html

By the look of things, most of SSPX may well reconcile with the Catholic church as a whole fairly soon.  This raises an intriguing possibility---Benedict may well actually be as wise as a serpent, if his game is to harness the energy of the SSPX traditionalists in his bid to purify the Church.  His opening salvos against the heretical nuns of America tend to support that estimation.  My own denomination has pretty serious problems with heresy as well, perhaps the former head of the office formerly known as the Office of the Holy Inquisition can instruct us.
For those who have their irony detector gain levels set high, I'm not being ironic here at all.  I'm quite in accord with 2 Peter 2:1-22 on the subject of heresy.



Dante was probably right in his Paradiso when he said that Divine Justice always appeared to be far too slow, or far too fast depending on your perspective.

The Catholic Church Must Stand and Fight the HHS Mandate

http://www.sanctepater.com/2012/05/bishops-are-being-played-like-cheap.html
by way of
http://orthosphere.org/2012/06/01/a-better-way-to-fight-the-hhs-mandate/

I have to agree with Ann Barnhardt, the time for retreat, if it ever was such a time, is over.  It is time to make the Administration demonstrate its tyranny in broad daylight.  I'd add the recommendation of wholesale jury nullification to the call for wholesale civil disobedience as well.
I also agree that the timing of 'For Greater Glory', which opens today in the US, could not be better.
One might even suspect that it was Providential.
It is not the time to be nice and non-confrontational.  It's also not the time to be nice to the myriad heretics that infest the church.  Here you have a golden opportunity to drag them into a battlefield under God's own sunlight, with no cover available.

Can the Catholic Church Find Its Voice?

http://collapsetheblog.typepad.com/blog/2012/02/the-ongoing-apostasy-58-of-catholics-support-contraceptive-mandate.html

Apparently a clear majority of American Catholics support mandating that the health insurance provided by employers cover contraception.  This is a step of apostasy beyond simply ignoring the clear direction of Catholic doctrine and tradition.

Clearly, Benedict, you've got an apostasy problem.  Now, as a Quaker (albeit in name only), I've got little room to talk, as my denomination is at least as hollowed by apostates and frankly, probably moreso.  So let our Catholic readers not imagine that I'm taunting them.  Far from it, encouragement is what we do best here at the Chariot.  What we aim to do this evening is encourage.

As I see it, the problem is that you've lost your voice.  Oh, I see your many encyclicals---I've read many of them.  I'm a Protestant but I'm more inclined to give you the time of day than most Catholics, at least in my country.  The problem with the many encyclicals is that they generally tend to speak to Reason, and not to the gut.  Not by accident, I think, does God say He wants obedience, not sacrifices.  But most of us have forgotten what your voice sounds like.  Perhaps you have as well?  Let me refresh your memory

(From A Canticle for Leibowitz, hat tip to http://payingattentiontothesky.com/2009/09/18/book-recommendation-a-canticle-for-leibowitz-by-walter-m-miller-jr/ for the quotation, but read the book if you've not already, it is a masterpiece and the only thing, IMO Walter Miller wrote of lasting value)

“ – but even the ancient pagans noticed that Nature imposes nothing on you that nature doesn’t prepare you to bear. If that is true of a cat, then is it not more perfectly true of a creature with rational intellect and will – whatever you may believe of Heaven?”


“Shut up. Damn you, shut up!” she hissed.
If I’m being a little brutal,” said the priest, “then it is to you, not the baby. The baby, as you say, can’t understand. And you, as you say, are not complaining. Therefore—”
“Therefore you are asking me to let her die slowly and –”

“No! I’m not asking you. As a priest of Christ I am commanding you by the authority of Almighty God not to lay hands on your child, not to offer her life in sacrifice to a false god of expedient mercy. I do not advise you. I adjure and command you in the name of Christ the King. Is that clear?”

Dom Zerchi had never spoken with such a voice before, and the ease with which the words came to his lips surprised even the priest. As he continued to look at her, her eyes fell. For an instant he had feared that the girl would laugh in his face. When Holy Church occasionally hinted that she still considered her authority to be supreme over all nations and superior to the authority of states, men in these times tended to snicker. And yet the authority of the command could still be sensed by a bitter girl with a dying child. It had been brutal to reason with her, and he regretted it. A simple direct command might accomplish what persuasion could not. She needed the voice of authority now, more than she needed persuasion. He could see it by the way she had wilted, although he had spoken the command as gently as his voice could manage.

That, Friend, is what your voice sounds like.  Not the plaintive meow of a housecat but the roar of the Lion of Judah.    Not the simpering of the scholars of the Second Sigma, but the Command Voice of the Vicar of Christ.

The Task of the Church: To be an Honest Broker between Disputes, Not to Shout 'Me Too' with the Culture

Presently the Church as a whole stands accused of being a one-eyed watchdog on a lot of issues.  By this I mean it sees two sides of a dispute, both of whom can be accused of being in violation of some command or covenant, and it chooses to hold merely one party responsible, and that party invariably being the one that the Culture also generally chooses to sanction.  Thus you see the majority of the Church, and nearly the entire 'elite church' taking the anti-male and anti-white sides whenever possible in disputes.  I do not believe that shouting 'Me Too' is a productive form of Christian witness.

For instance, lots of males and an overwhelming preponderance of women have seriously defaulted on the command and covenant that used to exist and which the Church still nominally upholds.  We call this marriage 1.0---woman respects, man loves, woman obeys, man sacrifices.  You see the breakdown of the extended social version of that covenant (Women and children first) in recent events.  The extended social version was based on a level of social solidarity basically making the pact---we'll sacrifice for YOUR woman and children if you'll do the same for ours.  Now, of course, neither the social solidarity nor the original man-woman covenant has the strength to be a moral hegemon.  Why should we be surprised when we no longer see the sacrificing behavior?

The problem arises when the Church selectively decides to shame and scold only one side of this social default.  This sort of thing is but one reason of the many why most churches have a serious deficit of males (I've recommended to readers looking for a good church in the past that they look for one where men are not significantly outnumbered by women, since men will go where they are wanted and stay where they are well treated).  This would be one thing if the culture were, say, a culture that seriously shamed women who defaulted so and gave the men a totally free pass (e.g., said 'boys will be boys').  There it would be an example of redressing a imbalance.  But when the Culture is pushing hard in only one direction, the Church must exercise extreme caution if it decides to push in the same manner.  Yes, you get called names when you push in the opposite direction, but Jesus never promised you that the culture would like you.  Rather the opposite, if my memory serves.  But the calling of the church when two groups have mutual grievances is to make peace where possible, and to provide a sterling example always.

Giving the Devils Their Due: Romney and Gingrich

Let me be blunt, I don't like either of these two candidates.  If Gingrich or Romney is the answer, it is a pretty damned stupid question.  Unfortunately, one of these two is probably the answer to the question:  Who will run against Obama with more than a single digit percentage chance of victory?

My gut would love to beat them with sticks, but Christian charity obliges otherwise, and to at least make an attempt at being fair to them.  So here is my praise, faint as it might be:

Romney:
Is a husband of one wife and seems to have raised functional children.  Maintained his financial privacy as long as was feasible, but is now shown by his tax returns to be very generous (around 15% average, which is still way above average even if one neglects his expected Mormon tithe).  That he never trumpeted his generosity speaks well of him.  Romney also apparently possesses considerably more than the average level of self-control (I'd say 2 sigmas, maybe more).  Newt might even have ordinary (+0 sigma) levels of that same quality.  Let me explain:

Romney, and especially Gingrich are both very high status males.  Most of us have to work to some degree to make attraction to the opposite sex happen.  Some of us have experience with unsolicited indications of interest from them---as I did, for instance, when my status was enhanced by being a ranking representative in the student governing body at a large university.  But I'm willing to bet very few of us have any experience at all resisting a deliberate onslaught of temptation in the manner that a Romney or a Gingrich receives as a matter of course.  It is for this reason that I occasionally find a slot for Tim Tebow in my prayer list, and hold him in great esteem for his manifestly superior self-control, which we Christians deem one of the 'fruits of the Spirit'.

Indeed, Christianity has always recognized this, even back on the Sermon on the Mount prior to the Resurrection.  Simply because you may not be attractive or have no 'game' in no way immunizes you to the spiritual sin of adultery.  God looks to the condition of your heart and not your capability to find willing partners for sinful purposes.  Many are perplexed by why God loved King David so much, despite his appalling behavior in the Bathsheba/Uriah affair.  My intuition is that most of us, faced with the same intensity of temptation and in possession of the power to paper over the difficulties that King David had, would fall just the same as he did.  For this reason I'm inclined to be less harsh in my appraisal of the character of politicians who commit adultery than I would otherwise be inclined to be.  I'm also, in the spirit of 'avoiding the occasion of sin', seriously disinclined to run for any significant office.

And Newt, I did promise to say at least a few things positive about him.  Newt, in conjunction with his brother in spirit, Bill Clinton, did accomplish significant welfare reform back in the 90s.  They also accomplished something a lot less ruinous in terms of living beyond our means than did Bush II and God forbid, Obama.  Finally, in Newt's favor, he is one of the only prominent governmental figures who vaguely gets the notion of civil defense (check his forward to One Second After).  The condition of our civil defense apparatus and the brittleness of our infrastructure (especially the power grid and the Just in Time system) is appalling, and could easily turn survivable setbacks into outright catastrophes.  Newt, given the proper position, might actually move towards doing something about this problem, if he can keep his  attention focused long enough.

The Evolution of Atonement

Back in Old Testament times, a follower of God who had sinned had a fairly organized rubric for what he needed to do in order to get 'back right with God'.  Basically he had to sacrifice an assortment of animals through approved clergy and make restitution to whoever besides God that he had injured through his actions.  Since there hasn't been a properly consecrated temple for a very very long time (AD 70ish), if you're still observing that covenant there exists a massive sin backlog.

If you're a Christian, you believe that God replaced that covenant with a new and improved version, where Jesus served as the sufficient and perfect sacrifice for all sins that were, are, or are yet to come.  God still commanded, though, that Christians were to make restitution to those besides Him that they had injured, and to confess their sins to one another and thereby take the social status hits associated with such confession.  A very very dim view of gossip was taken though, so in a functional Christian community this wouldn't have been quite as scary as it might sound to modern ears.  The Catholic church later formalized this into the sacrament of confession, appealing to Jesus' grant of power to forgive or retain sins to Peter, upon whom he would build His Church.  There, instead of confessing your sins in what might amount to a neighborhood prayer meeting, you instead confess to a priest who has lots of experience maintaining confidentiality and who has probably heard far worse than the tawdry sins you're confessing.  I find this far less intimidating, as do most people, which is probably why the practice caught on so strongly.

Sometime later on, some brilliant theologian got the idea that the Saints had built up SO much 'good works capital' that lots of it could be sold in the form of indulgences (the Catholic church still grants indulgences, they just don't sell them anymore).  Here, people with unresolved guilt could purchase indulgences, which would be used to fund the magnificent architectural and cultural contributions of the Church at the height of its temporal power.  Of course this didn't last, it lead fairly predictably to the Reformation, and few Protestants today have anything remotely like either the free for all confession of the Early Church or the organized confession sacrament of the Catholics.

Interestingly enough, few Catholics these days go to confession either---the matter is considered scandalous.  So there's all kinds of unresolved guilt that people have in modern America.  And how do they resolve it?
Well, there's a new step in the evolution of indulgences.  Instead of doing penance for one's sins, or paying for an indulgence for the same, we now, in our upper middle class SWPL segments, outsource the penance and payment for the indulgences instead to other groups that we don't like or who compete with us for status.
So, instead of giving to the poor, we lobby for income redistribution away from other groups.  Instead of living simply so others could simply live, we lobby to force other people to live more simply.  To expiate the perceived sins of racism, we lobby for Section 8 housing in OTHER people's neighborhoods, and for the discrimination in terms of allocation of society's goodies against OTHER people's children.

Frankly I think I prefer the medieval version---oh, how did it go?  When the coin in the bottom of the coffer rings, the soul, from Purgatory springs?  At least the sinners in question usually paid with their own money.

What Can Society Do for the Neurotypical?

Commenter In asks whether it is possible for neurotypicals to transcend their state to become not neurotypical.  At first blush, this seems a strange question, as most people would prefer to be neurotypical---or at least to have available a very good emulation capacity.

But it is true that the garden variety neurotypical mind is vulnerable to a lot of exploits.  Game and salesmanship exemplify a lot of these, and value investing as a strategy relies on the fact that the neurotypical mind feels a loss of X approximately as negatively as it feels positively about a gain of 2X.  That 2:1 risk aversion isn't common to all primates btw, some species have nearly no statistical risk aversion.  Human beings have been coming up with these hacks for thousands of years, in some cases writing them down like Ben Franklin, Carnegie, or a myriad of other practical manuals for selling goods, services, and status.

But what can we, or society, do about this?

The Bible, in the Old Testament, is the long story of God attempting to get the Jews to love him---God is a lover who wants to be loved, reading the bible, particularly the accounts of the prophets like Hosea, and the cycle of degradation and partial redemption played out in Judges, Kings, and Chronicles should give you some empathy for His position.  God is essentially trying to teach the Jews to be grateful---to have gratitude for the many gifts he has given them.  But gratitude isn't in our neurotypical nature.  We don't like people better that do use favors, or who we owe a great deal to, we like the people WE have done favors for.  The stereotypical complaint of the neurotypical about the non-neurotypical is that they are selfish (and don't get it).  The stereotypical complaint of the non-neurotypical about the neurotypical is that they are ungrateful (and don't get it).  In my more lucid moments I realize both are correct.

Interestingly, when God brings the pain---shows the Jews His 'hand', in the Old Testament, they tend to fall back into line, repent, and beg Him to deliver them. He loves them, and it terribly pains Him to do so, but he does what is necessary.
In the New Testament, God seriously doubles down on His strategy to teach human beings gratitude, basically allowing a member of the Trinity to be dismembered on and after the Cross.  Pretty extreme stuff, when you think about it, but how many folks, even fairly devout Christians, act as if they are truly grateful?
Not many, which IMO is a big part of the reason why Tim Tebow makes many of us so uncomfortable.

So on the gratitude count of the indictment, even the Master of the Universe is having grave difficulties.  He says His is a work in progress though, and that he'll finish what he started.  I believe Him, but I recognize from the fact that He is having so much trouble that anything I, or a society, could do will have even less fruit.

On a lot of the other aspects of being neurotypical, most Western societies prior to around 1960 were considerably more functional.  Conservative sexual morality and the fairly harsh consequences for bearing children out of wedlock kept many of the worst problems associated with hypergamy largely in check.  Society collectively practiced what you'd call 'Game' on most of its immigrants---fairly mild hazing promoted far more actual assimilation and loyalty than the present coddling approach.  One of my great-grandfathers, for instance, immigrated from Sicily and lied about both his age and place of birth to get INTO WWI, and such behavior was more the norm than the exception.  Men were encouraged to be reasonably dominant, or at least not unreasonably timid or deferential in their romantic relationships, which counter to the the modern intuition, made women happier in general.  Divorces were very hard to obtain and required cause, which made them considerably more rare.  Obviously there were costs associated with all of this, any good reactionary recognizes that every system or decision will suck for somebody, but the overall effect was far more functional.  Back in the early 60s, less than 1 in 4 blacks were born out of wedlock, less than the rate for white people today.  Today, being born IN wedlock is unusual for black people, and the rate for white people is similar to that experienced by blacks in the 60s.

More things difficult to explain from a Darwinian or a folk animal husbandry frame

Most people who think seriously about HBD tend to view it from either a Darwinian frame of reference or from the frame of what I'll call folk animal husbandry.  Folk animal husbandry tends to talk about things like 'the apple not falling far from the tree'---an expression, which, if you think about it, implies pretty strongly a strong central tendency based on genetics with some variation due to randomness and environment, especially when the modifier, the wind wasn't blowing too hard when that apple fell from the tree, is applied.  In addition the expressions about 'good stock' (sometimes 'good pioneer stock', with the stipulation that 'the cowards never came, the weak died along the way' applied) abound in the language.

For most practical HBD purposes, these frames are equivalent.  Honestly, creationists are more likely to agree to the practical application of HBD than are evolutionists, probably due to memetic entanglements.
Most creationists, for instance, will not dispute the claim that the races are partially inbred families writ large.  The ones who know their Old Testament will even point out the particular pedigrees involved going back to Noah.  Most also won't dispute the claim that different families have different tendencies towards large or small endowments in various attributes.  The ones who are lower case o orthodox won't even balk when one points out that said endowments are not fair in any human sense of the word---there's no point-based character generation going on here, God is not a Champions or Hero system gamemaster.  Those with a good practical command of Scripture will quote 'Hath not the potter power over the clay, to make one vessel unto honor and another unto dishonor?'  It's also not unlikely that the Parable of the Talents will be shared with you.  The creationist feels no need to pretend equality in any human sense, because he is confident that human beings are of equal (or at least inestimable) value to God. 

But whichever frame one chooses, one has two huge problems to deal with---two huge brute facts that challenge our frame.

The first is alluded to by a commentator on the 'Final Judgment of Darwin' on homosexuality.  The evidence that the trait is partially influenced by genetics is reasonably strong, but the depression in TFR that it causes is extremely strong.  Using either frame of reference, one would predict that it would be rapidly extinguished from the population, even leaving aside the impact of various 'social diseases', pogroms, or the like.

The second one is the massive differences that exist between women in terms of fertility and ability to safely carry a child to term.  Presumably, if Darwin or animal husbandry optimize ANYTHING, they optimize the ability to produce offspring.  That's about as fundamental as it gets.  Yet we have women like, say, my wife, mother, or great great grandmother who have had no significant difficulties whatsoever bringing a fair number of descendants into the world.  On the other side, we have women like two of my sisters in law who have had a great deal of such difficulty, one of whom would not survive a pre-modern childbirth.  Similar differences exist in terms of ability to conceive in the first place.  Given that even the youngest of Young Earth Creationists believe that humanity is around 300 generations old, that's plenty of time for natural/artificial selection and/or animal husbandry to optimize this pretty key capability and to largely fix whatever genetic variants promote such throughout the population.  Compare, for instance, lactose tolerance, which took very little time to become near universal in populations where cattle were common.

Both of these problems point to the conclusion that we don't understand this portion of reality anywhere near as well as perhaps we think we do.  This isn't to say that we know nothing, or that what we know is not useful (look to the radically increased yields we've been able to squeeze out of plants, for instance, even before modern 'genetic engineering' or, for instance, the incredible amount of intellectual talent the first wave of psychometrics was able to mine out of unexpected sources).  But it does tend to indicate that we should try to avoid straying too far from the actual data. 

A quick and easy way to identify a (lower case o) orthodox church

I'm often asked by reactionaries the question:  how do I find a church that is actually orthodox and isn't a bastion of mere churchianity?  How do I find a church that actually respects and reveres that masculine and not just the feminine?  A lot of folks among the MRA/MGTOW crowd have become profoundly alienated from their foundational faith for pretty much this reason.  Fortunately, there exists a remnant of churches that do not hate men for being men, and they're sprinkled throughout a wide variety of denominations.  Identifying said churches is pretty easy.  Here's how you do it.

Count the approximate number of men in the congregation.  Count the number of women who aren't obvious elderly widows.  If the two numbers are very close together, you almost certainly have a lower-case o orthodox church that will give a damn about your personal and spiritual well-being before you.  The dead giveaways are the lack of large numbers of obviously married women without their husbands and the presence of comparable numbers of single men to single women.  There's really nothing mystic here---men go where they're wanted and stay where they're appreciated.  Churches that don't hate men are also extremely unlikely to hate the authority of Scripture and usually don't shy away from preaching the whole Bible, not just those portions that modern society likes to hear about.

Making being neurotypical work FOR you, Christian edition

Pretty much by definition, the overwhelming majority of the population is neurotypical. I suspect that many of my readers are as well. Because I'm religiously obligated to love you, I'm here today to offer you some encouragement if you're working out your salvation with fear and trembling.

You've got one huge advantage over me---you're neurotypical, which means you're at the center of mass of all the theological advice that's been heaped up over the centuries by the communion of the saints. You're the bullseye of the target, as it were. Let's turn to a genuinely difficult problem, the central one, in fact, for a Christian:

How do I love God?

For some of you, loving God is as natural as breathing. Lord I envy thee. Others of you have such profound self-deception that you can convince yourself that you love God even when your actions indicate to an outside observer that you must not. Many of the rest of us have to struggle in the darkness in the fear and trembling that Paul spoke of in his letters. Its this group that I'm speaking to.

Fortunately for you, I've got something to offer you today. It comes to us by way of our good friend C. S. Lewis. Lewis understood the neurotypical very well:

"Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone you will presently come to love him."

See, you, as a neurotypical are wired to like people better that you've done favors or nice things for, not those who've done such things for you. It's perverse but it is true. In an awful lot of instances, this REALLY sucks for you, because most of the science & art of manipulation that has been developed over the centuries since Adam has been aimed squarely at YOU. You run what amounts to the Windows OS that 99% of virus authors write for, the non-neurotypical is like the OS/2 or Linux OS. This unfortunately doesn't work worth a damn for me, because I'm not wired that way, I'm wired to like people better the more they do for me. So, I'm selfish and you're ungrateful, or more likely, both of us are selfish and ungrateful, we just have different degrees of predilection towards each vice. Pray for me as I also pray for you.

Praying for others is, for the neurotypical, a way of 'hacking' yourself to love them more, and in so doing, to love God more under the whole 'least of these my brethren' rubric laid out by Jesus. It's a spiritual aid in your walk that's available and efficacious for you and I encourage you to use it. Actually helping your fellows is another such aid, and in that I'll borrow from Lewis again (from the Screwtape Letters if I recall correctly) and advise you to keep your charity as close to home as is feasible. Help the people in need in your own church or social circle---your love for them will be concrete as opposed to abstract. Abstract love is generally no love at all, as when one practices 'Telescopic Charity'. They are very much your neighbor in the sense that you are told to love by Jesus in the Gospels. This love is also how the lost are supposed to be able to recognize Christians.

Now I'll give you the biggest one of them all, harvested straight from Matthew 6:21. That guy Jesus really understood the neurotypical heart...I mean, you'd think that he had a hand in designing them or something :-)

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also

Translation, give your treasure to advance God's kingdom. For most of us, in a modern nation, that means tithing. For a neurotypical, I'd suggest giving enough so that it hurts a little---i.e., it cuts somewhat into the money that you'd otherwise spend on the various luxuries that you desire. I say 'a little' because God is VERY clear in Paul's letters that you're supposed to take care of your family, and that if you do not when you're able to do so, you've denied the faith and are worse than an unbeliever. But this is really the nuclear option in conditioning yourself to love God if you're neurotypical. It mashes the 'I've made sacrifices/done favors for you so I MUST love you button' and triggers your sunk-cost misprocessing cognitive bias to boot. God must really love the neurotypical. If this helps you, you're welcome to it, and if you like, you're even welcome to pass these insights off as you own.

Metaphors for the Divine

People have been trying to understand the Divine pretty much for as long as there have been people. Christians, in particular, have the impossible task of wrapping their minds around our conception of who God is. While it is not possible for us to fully comprehend God, we are required to try, and it is hardly correct to say we know nothing about Him or His character. Naturally, being human beings, and therefore demonstrably fallen regardless of the ethical schema one is using, our first attempt to grok God comes out as projection. That is, we make God basically a bigger and more powerful version of ourselves. Sometimes we take this a step further and make ourselves God :-) When you think about it, this is our first cut of a mental model of another mind, be it a mind or The Mind. In a lot of cases, projection works really well, as in when we ourselves are fairly neurotypical and we're interacting with someone who is similar and also neurotypical. We assume they'd want what we'd want in their position. A programmer might view this as instantiating a copy of their own mind inside the other person's body and circumstances and using that instance to predict how the other person feels and how they will react. Unfortunately for them, most programmers are NOT neurotypical. Worse, many of them do not realize how deeply non-neurotypical they actually are. Needless to say, on the other side of the relation, God is most assuredly not neurotypical. We know this from His writings and our own interactions with Him.



So what do we do? Well, like in our own human relationships, we try to build some sort of a mental model of the other person. We do this based on our own experience and folk psychology and what others have told us. If your model inputs are pretty good, your success will in general be pretty good. In short, we construct a metaphor for the other person. Hopefully we realize that the metaphor isn't the other person, but rather a useful construct for understanding that person.



Christians have been at this metaphor construction business with respect to God for an awfully long time. The Gospels, for instance, are full of them. The first one is God as Father.

This metaphor is one of the best ones, IMO, and perfectly adequate for almost all purely ordinary theological purposes (i.e., what does God expect of me, how should I try to relate to Him, and how does He feel about me?). It doesn't help much when one attempts to understand why God made a world that He knew would fall, or what is His purpose in allowing evil or pain, but for most people, most of the time, it does the job. Why does a father love his son? Having recent experience with a very small son of my own, I can simply answer, because he is mine. A programmer would say that the son inherits some fraction of the father's love for himself, as well as some fraction of his love for the mother. The impulse is biological, and strong, I do not have a choice as to whether to love him or not, I simply do because that is the sort of creature I am. The little boy has a strong nonrational claim on my loyalties and my affection, even when he is being difficult. I first encountered this with my older brother's children, and I was honestly somewhat taken aback by it despite it being significantly attenuated from the feelings I experience with my own son.



The Father metaphor fits the narrative of the Old Testament very well, with Israel continually following the misbehavior->oppression->suffering->repentance->deliverance-Misbehavior cycle. As time goes on, they started frequently skipping the repentance stage. How does God feel about that? His actions are very consistent with those of a good father, trying to bring about the best for his children. He suffers when He must chastise and discipline. Frequently in the latter part of the book of judges, He delivers them, not because they repented, but because He simply could not bear to see their suffering any more. One could say this is a very human feeling, or conversely, that when we feel this it is a very divine one. We are after all, in His image, although we are fallen. What does a father want from his son? In general they want to love their son, and to be loved and obeyed in return. They desire that their son realize his potential and live a good and moral life. Many fathers want other things, but I think most want at least those. But God is far more than merely a father. When one considers the problems of evil and pain, we find ourselves reaching for another metaphor. I'll talk about some more of these metaphors in my next post.

Sola Scriptura or Solo Scriptura?

I self-identify myself as a Protestant, and, in theory I agree with Sola Scriptura---the belief that Scripture is sufficient guide to what Christians should believe on things which are actually salient to Christianity. When the Holy Spirit moves to enable the full comprehension of what Scripture means, this works quite well. Unfortunately, this far too often seems not to be the case, and I find myself in sympathy with the more Catholic position that church tradition should be given a far greater weight.

I suppose one simply has to reflect that on many issues with theological significance, most of the church is presently at serious variance with the unseen church---that is the communion of saints reaching back to around 30 AD. Further, most Christians place far higher weight on current opinion then on the opinion prevalent in say, 100 AD, 500 AD, or 1500 AD. Further, one has to admit that Protestantism itself has schismed over and over again, to the point of being a frequent source of humor. It would seem that the Spirit animating many interpretations of Scripture is not in fact the Holy Spirit but a decidedly more malevolent one, or sometimes, perhaps no Spirit at all but simply a desire to find an interpretation that does not require the reader to be out of step with his peers and his age.

What can we do about this? Should we beg readmission to the Catholic Church, with it's more centralized approach to scriptural interpretation? Should we just pray harder? I can't answer either of those questions for myself, much less for any reader who happens to have dropped by for whatever reason. All I can suggest is this:

We must accept that our predecessors in the Church were at least as Christian as we are, in the aggregate. We must furthermore accept that they succeeded in spreading at least the knowledge of the Gospel to at least as great of a degree as we have. Furthermore, they have generally had a degree of understanding of the Bible at least as great as the average possessed by Christians today (a brief examination of the surveys of knowledge of Christians of the doctrines and beliefs of their faith will reveal this is a fairly low bar to meet). In many cases, they are far closer to the social circumstances in which the Bible was written and are closer to the source material than we were. For instance, how many of us have ANY concept of what living in a low-surplus society is like? Or what the accomodations needed to make such societies work actually are? I suspect that only a few modern Christians, likely those who have lived in very poor places of the world during long term missions have any grasp of this at all---and even then, they generally always had the option to move back---such privation was not a permanent state of affairs.
Given these premises, I would suggest this to anyone inclined to make pronouncement about how the Bible says that Christians should behave today.
Honestly answer the question, how would orthodox Christians from AD 500, 1000, 1500, 1750, and 1900 answer your question? If they all, or most all, agree with your position, you are probably right. Certainly each era has its errors, but as C.S. Lewis famously pointed out, they usually aren't the SAME errors. If most or all of them would disagree with you, the burden of proving that YOU aren't the heretic is pretty large. Smart as you might be, you probably aren't smarter than the collected wisdom and practice of your religion, and if you accept the premises of your religion at all, you must recognize that you are 'running on corrupted hardware' as the folks over at overcomingbias are fond of pointing out (in our neck of the woods, we call it original sin or total depravity, or simply failing to be a Pelagian heretic :-).
So let's take a hard case---slavery. Both Old and New Testaments talk quite a bit about it, probably because it was a fairly common part of the experience of a large fraction of the population. It isn't presented as an ineffibly evil institution in either Testament. Paul, in his letters to a slave and his master, doesn't even say the master should free the slave to the master. Yet in the 1700s, the church started moving strongly in the direction of condemning slavery and we take it totally for granted now that slavery is contrary to Christianity.
Why is this? Were the Christians who accepted slavery, serfdom and similar instruments of bondage wrong for nearly 1700 years?

I would argue that the key to understanding this lies in understanding the low surplus human society's condition. We are obscenely richer than anyone born before the 1700s. In a low surplus society, you simply can't afford to do a lot of things we take for granted now. In fact, you might not even be able to feed everyone. So what, in such a society, do you do with your screwups, idiots, and people who just can't fend for themselves? Your minor criminals that you can't afford to incarcerate and feed, your prisoners of war? The most merciful answer to that question is often bond-servitude, be it slavery, serfdom, indentured servitude, or the like. Christianity was not designed to only work in high surplus societies like our own, but in any society that God or Man might decide to inflict on us. Therefore it emphasizes that such servitude carries reciprocal obligations on the part of both master and slave (refer to Paul's various letters and the laws regulating slavery in the Old Testament). So why did it become considered an evil thing in the 1700s? Well, for that I suggest heading down to your local gym. Find yourself a fancy exercise bike or treadmill---one with a calorie consumption meter that will display in watts. You'll find that producing 150 watts is quite taxing, and the 6-7 hours that would be required to squeeze 1 Kilowatt-hour out of you very fatiguing indeed. Congratulations---you've just produced about 12 cents worth of power. This should drive home just how rich in terms of the power at our command we've become since the Industrial Revolution and the widespread availability of fossil fuels. Christians in the 1700s recognized that the amount of wealth available to society HAD FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGED as a result. Furthermore, Christians recognized that they had always been obliged to be as charitable as they could afford to be, and no more, and that said obligation had just enlarged along with their purses. Therefore they argued that society should no longer permit slavery.

Of course they didn't express it in many cases in exactly those terms, but it is telling that the timing is so close. Slavery generally ended in heavily Christian countries about as soon as society could afford to end it. Regretably, most abolitionists in the US didn't phrase their arguments in these terms. Had they done so, slavery might have ended in the US via a buyout similar to that in Brazil instead of via the bloodiest war in American history.

On fostering 'diversity' in churches

There has been a fair bit of talk on the notion of megachurches fostering 'racial transcendence' (most recently on http:\\www.onestdv.blogspot.com). Here's my take on the diversity issue as it relates to churches.

Different styles of churches for different sorts of people are very important, in my opinion.People need a church where they can feel as if they are a valued part of the community---a little platoon or company of the body of Christ.People differ a LOT on the expressive style of their worship. Everything from silent and contemplative to exhuberant and 'Spirit-Filled'...people with one style DO NOT feel comfortable when they're in an area dominated by an opposing style. Guess what else, different races have different distributions of preferred worship styles---they differ on everything else in terms of the distribution, why should this surprise anyone? Left to their own devices, the extraverts in a population similar to the US will tend to run roughshod over the introverts as well. Churches have their own personalities, and necessarily so. A number of denominations and churches have made themselves into places where introverts are quite at home, by suppressing the ability of the extraverts to dominate the social scene of the church and by attracting a disproportionate share of introverts relative to the population as a whole. My wife, for instance, absolutely can't stand the Pentecostal style of worship, whereas I'm indifferent to mildly friendly to it. Neither of us are at all tolerant of the notion that all cultures are of equal value, excepting White American and European culture, which is evil. Churches are frankly one of the last bastions of free association in the Western World. I get very angry when people try to browbeat churches into 'integrating'. My take is that good churches are open to whoever has a desire to go, and if they want to become part of the community, they'll stay. To go out of one's way to bring 'diversity' to a particular church absent a clear calling from God is, IMO, wrong.