When Israel and Judah turned away from God and began worshiping idols, God sent the prophet Jeremiah to warn them of the impending destruction of Jerusalem and captivity in Babylon. Jeremiah chapter 2 lays out God’s complaint against his chosen people. Here are verses 26-28:

“As a thief is disgraced when he is caught,
so the house of Israel is disgraced—
they, their kings and their officials,
their priests and their prophets.

They say to wood, ‘You are my father,’
and to stone, ‘You gave me birth.’
They have turned their backs to me
and not their faces;
yet when they are in trouble, they say,
‘Come and save us!’

Where then are the gods you made for yourselves?
Let them come if they can save you
when you are in trouble!
For you have as many gods
as you have towns, O Judah.

As crazy as it is, we live in a world where people say to the dust, “You gave me birth!” But would anyone be crazy enough to cry out to dust or stone for rescue? Rocks cannot see or hear or walk! Revelation 6:15-17 says:

Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and every slave and every free man hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They called to the mountains and the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?”

Some atheists find comfort in the belief that there is no afterlife. All atheists find comfort in the belief that there is no wrathful face of God awaiting them. Instead of facing a wrathful God, they would prefer to have the rocks fall on them and hide them from His wrath. Revelation 9:6 says:

During those days men will seek death, but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them.

It’s forgivable for Dawkins to believe that the dust gave him birth, but he would surely change his mind when faced with such strong punishment, right? I wouldn’t be so sure. Revelation 9:20:

The rest of mankind that were not killed by these plagues still did not repent of the work of their hands; they did not stop worshiping demons, and idols of gold, silver, bronze, stone and wood—idols that cannot see or hear or walk.

Do you really want to say to the dust, “You gave me birth”?

Jeremiah is beautiful poetry. I have said before that Psalm 13 is my favorite Psalm. Jeremiah references this Psalm, in Jeremiah 3:1-5, right after condemning Israel and Judah:

“If a man divorces his wife
and she leaves him and marries another man,
should he return to her again?
Would not the land be completely defiled?
But you have lived as a prostitute with many lovers—
would you now return to me?”
declares the LORD.

“Look up to the barren heights and see.
Is there any place where you have not been ravished?
By the roadside you sat waiting for lovers,
sat like a nomad in the desert.
You have defiled the land
with your prostitution and wickedness.

Therefore the showers have been withheld,
and no spring rains have fallen.
Yet you have the brazen look of a prostitute;
you refuse to blush with shame.

Have you not just called to me:
‘My Father, my friend from my youth,

will you always be angry?
Will your wrath continue forever?’
This is how you talk,
but you do all the evil you can.”

Such attempts are more likely to produce hypocrisy and Phariseeism than virtue. But more importantly, in a free and secular society, we don’t have the luxury of beheading or torturing people into virtue. We can do our best to reduce and avoid temptation, but there is more to the story than temptation.

When presented with identical temptations, some people succumb, and some don’t. And people are very capable of doing things that they know to be wrong. This presents an interesting opportunity for the person interested in the promotion of virtue. How, exactly, do people convince themselves to do things that they know are wrong? And how can we inoculate people against these self-destructive techniques? Instead of attacking temptation or beheading sinners, can we perhaps attack the mechanism by which sinners justify their sins to themselves?

Immanuel Kant grappled with this question, and concluded that people convince themselves to sin by choosing from a small number of fantasies. As people repeatedly choose sin, their choices become increasingly judgment-resistant. Kant scholar Robert Gressis has written a masterful paper on the subject which is well worth a read.

Once we realize that people employ a number of self-deceiving fantasies, we might dig into the specific mechanics of the process. Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis do a great job of presenting fictional accounts of this process. But for this post, it will be instructive to look at a real-world example involving NLP, hypnosis, and the anxiety of an Emergent.

Anxiety

Recently, notable “Emergent”, Mike Morrell, wrote a tale of his debilitating struggle with anxiety. He suggested that it might be related to theology, then asked for people to give him advice.

His story begins with a fear of riding in cars:

Rather simultaneously with this, I was becoming an increasingly troublesome passenger. First I had difficulty, occasionally, riding in the front seat with drivers; I’d writhe and squirm as though I was strapped to a rocket headed toward the moon – on the outside. It wasn’t that I was afraid of an accident per se – I’ve never been in a serious car accident. It wasn’t fear of sudden impact or death; the motion itself is its own source of dread. For awhile the backseat was my safe haven; no more, not necessarily. When this sense of sheer panic would come or go was unpredictable; I could go cross-country with no problem, or go around the corner with a friend and be crawling out of my skin. I began to avoid riding in the car with others besides my wife (who, ordinarily, does not provoke this response). I get out less nowadays.

As the phobia progressed, the number of trigger conditions increased:

This has been effecting me more and more, of late; I love to travel, and I love spending time with people. But lately, I’ve restricted both, significantly, as a panic attack can occur anywhere – at a restaurant, at church; surely on a cross-country or transatlantic flight.

Mike mentioned that hypnosis made things worse, and someone else suggested NLP. I replied, in part:

NLP can work well in curing phobias; especially the type you describe. Your post about your phobia is a textbook case of meta model violations, which is unsurprising, since your theology seems fraught with the same sorts of meta model violations

In situations like this, a person’s “cry for help” is sometimes merely a “cry for validation”. Many of “Mike’s comforters” concluded the latter, and slathered him with sycophantic praise for his “honesty”, “transparency”, and so on. If he would only “believe in himself”, everything would be better.

If Mr. Morrell were simply exploiting his weakness to pander for extrinsic validation, he succeeded. But if the disease is real (as seems to be the case), and if it is largely caused by an extrinsic locus of control (as his post strongly suggests), it is terribly unethical to reinforce his external locus by rewarding him with praise.

Furthermore, his Emergent theology shows all of the same errors. Fortunately, my comment sparked a private e-mail thread about the relation between hypnosis and theology, and I’m optimistic that Mr. Morrell was not merely pandering for extrinsic validation. I never share details of private e-mail threads, but I would like to talk about NLP, Hypnosis, and the relevance to postmodernist “Emergence”.

The Meta Model

Alfred Korzybski famoulsy remarked, “The map is not the territory“. In the Abrahamic religions, idolatry is the gravest sin. When you make a model or “map” of something, you must not confuse your map/model with the thing. Confusing the map with the territory is the surest route to madness. Fritz Perls and Virgina Satir achieved considerable fame as therapists by helping patients to distinguish between map and territory.

Richard Bandler and linguist John Grinder spent years observing Perls and Satir, and attempted to distill their therapeutic insights into “The Meta-Model“.

Here are the key points for therapists:

• As a therapist, you can place a person’s mental model on a gradient from “resourceful” (which means the person has many options for coping) to “impoverished” (which means the person is trapped in self-destructive behaviors and has few options for coping).
• People entrap themselves in impoverished mental models through imprecise use of language. When a patient who is presenting symptoms begins to describe his situation, you’ll invariably see many “meta-model” violations used to justify the maladaptive behavior. These are similar to the Kantian fantasies, but more granular.
• You can treat patients by exposing these meta-model violations and forcing the patient to be more precise. As the patient erradicates his meta-model violations, his mental model is enriched and he attains more options for coping

In short, Meta-Model violations are cases where a person uses language ambiguously to justify some self-destructive or maladaptive behavior. I won’t argue that the Meta-Model is Christian, but it ought to be very persuasive for atheists and Emergents. And it’s very easy to empirically observe, by listening to people talk about their problems.

Mr. Morrell’s post is a textbook case of Meta-Model violations. You can easily find examples of nominalization, cause-effect, deletion, presupposition, and unspecified comparative. His preferred modality is kinesthetic. I’m not a therapist, but it is easy to observe the symptoms, plainly present in the language.

Of course, meta-model violations are common, and not necessarily harmful. But when you see people creating demons for themselves, it’s often accomplished with especially flagrant abuse of the language.

Bandler and Grinder’s first major successes were in curing phobias, since phobias are often clear-cut cases of meta-model violation. A therapist doesn’t cure the patient by nit-picking about language, of course. The therapist generally interviews the patient to discover the exact process/strategy that the patient is using to trigger the phobia, and then uses subconscious techniques to replace the trigger patterns.

Hypnosis

In addition to their work with Perls and Satir, Bandler and Grinder attempted to model Milton Erickson, the godfather of modern hypnosis. Using hypnosis, Erickson accomplished many apparently miraculous cures. He was the first hypnotist to “hypnotize” people while they were wide awake; something that many modern hypnotists now do. Bandler and Grinder were eager to understand what he was doing.

Hypnosis is almost the mirror-image of Perls and Satir therapy. To hypnotize someone, you must deliberately violate the meta-model, create intentional ambiguities, and give their subconscious the opportunity to fill in the details. Erickson wrote several papers describing this process, which is essentially symmetrical to Satir’s model. Bandler and Grinder contrasted the Gestalt-like “Meta-Model” with hypnotism’s “Milton-Model“.

The Meta- and Milton-models are not magic, nor are they science. They are simply detailed models of gestalt therapy and hypnosis that are useful for understanding both. Needless to say, the techniques can be used for good or for evil. Milton and Satir both lived modest lives of service, carefully bending and unbending words to cure people of sickness. Bandler, on the other hand, began promoting the use of these techniques for selfish personal gain, and veered dangerously close to madness himself:

Despite his success, Bandler never trusted the truth to provide the sense of importance he so deeply desired. Parallel to his real life grew a legend, one he cultivated assiduously; his life story became a blur of fact and fiction, obscured by cocaine and gin, distorted by an ideology that provided intellectual justification for reimagining the past. “If you got a bad [personal history] the first time around,” he and Grinder wrote, “go back and make yourself a better one. Everybody really ought to have several histories.”

Deconstructionism

Bandler’s line above about “several histories” should bring to mind the father of deconstructionism, Jaques Derrida. Derrida argued that “deconstructive” readings of literature and history challenge the idea that texts have unchanging, unified meanings. When deconstructionists “re-invent” histories, it’s never for therapeutic purposes. Derrida was fond of pointing out that deconstruction is not a “system”, “theory”, or anything comprehensive like that. It’s basically a grab-bag of word-twisting techniques that can be used to dismantle clear speech.

Deconstructionism and NLP arose from the same analytical approach to language, during the same timeframe, and share some similarities. Many portions of the meta-model overlap with the things that deconstructionist focus on when bullying people about language. Referents, signifiers, nominalization, and so on.

While the therapist treats a sick patient indirectly and enriches the patient’s mental model, the deconstructionist goes directly to the language and attempts to dismantle the opponent. Postmoderns will vaguely specify their own terms, while demanding that their opponents apply infinite distinctions in terms, until all meaning is obliterated.

It’s not my purpose here to argue with postmoderns about their motivations or techniques; their actions speak for themselves. I will just observe that even famously incomprehensible linguist Noam Chomsky has called Derrida an “obscurantist” and “charlatan”.

Pick-Up Artists

Then things really went downhill.

About 15 years ago, Ross Jeffries decided to apply NLP “waking hypnosis” techniques towards the goal of seducing women. He achieved some success with his techniques and started a business “coaching” horny frat boys to do the same. Others picked up the mantle, and the “Pick Up Artist” industry was born.

The techniques that Satir and Erickson used to heal the sick are now being packaged up and marketed to young men as a way to get laid.

The Curse of Babel

Aside from the moral reprehensibility of deconstruction and pick-up artistry, the widespread popularity of these techniques among postmoderns exposes them to danger. Professional therapists, and maybe even professional philosophers, understand the techniques deeply and are capable of maintaining self-control. But lay people who get in the habit of twisting words can find the word-twisting taking on a life of it’s own. The problems are compounded by the fact that word-twisting is now sold and evangelized as a mechanism of personal gain. Perverted incentives paired with poor mastery of the tools is a recipe for trouble.

We’ve already seen how phobics use ambiguous language to enslave themselves to demons, and we’ve seen how close an expert like Richard Bandler came to self-destruction. Anyone who is even thinking about using these techniques should be fearful and very cautious. Personally, I believe that such techniques should only be used by trained therapists, and preferably by therapists who have an unshakable foundation of Biblical truth.

Many people, admittedly, use these techniques instinctively. Seductresses and shysters have been doing this for thousands of years. These techniques were modeled after the techniques of real people, after all. Mike Morrell seems to have an instinctive talent for using the Milton-model to persuade people of things. But having a latent talent for language-bending is not proof of your competence to do so, especially in areas where self-interest is at stake. If anything, people who instinctively use these techniques should be doubly cautious, since they are more likely to get themselves into trouble.

Theology

This is why I find the embrace of postmodernism within the “Emergent” church to be disastrous. A firm anchor to ultimate truth is essential for anyone who wants to bend language with any hope of ever coming home. Christianity is ultimate truth — it’s the thread out of the labyrinth. But instead of anchoring themselves to an unshakable Christianity, the postmoderns deconstruct their anchor and reinvent Christ to suit their personal interests.

No longer is Christ the “rock of ages”. The emergents deliberately distort the meta-model to create a countless number of imaginary Christs, like Wentworth’s succubus Adela. They’ve anchored to their own imaginations, and when the storms come, they go to their constructed succubi for comfort. It’s the ultimate form of madness.

How does a postmodern escape from this madness? I don’t know, but perhaps one route out could be the following:

1. First, become consciously aware of all meta model violations. Resolve to never employ these techniques automatically again. Deconstruct your own process of mental modeling to find all of the places you do it.
2. As you deconstruct your own process of mental modeling, you’ll realize that a huge portion of your reality is fabricated. It will be increasingly difficult to hypnotize yourself into believing anything, because you’ll be too familiar with your own tricks. At this point, you are ready to accept the fact that ultimate truth is not something you get to invent, and you’ll realize that this is a good thing.
3. Start dialing back your (now-conscious) meta model violations, especially in the area of anything related to ultimate truth.
4. Now, start looking for ultimate truth.

Lanier has a ton of credibility, having been mentored by Marvin Minsky and having known Dennett for decades, as well as being responsible for some of the most interesting AI work of the last century. I would hate to ever get in an argument with Lanier, but Yudkowsky holds his own quite well. I’ve watched several interviews conducted by Yudkowsky, and this has to be one of the most difficult by far. He does a great job, but in this debate, which I’ve watched twice, I’m persuaded by Lanier.

Respect for the word – to employ it with scrupulous care and an incorruptible heartfelt love of truth – is essential if there is to be any growth in a society or in the human race.To misuse the word is to show contempt for man. It undermines the bridges and poisons the wells.

It’s been a favorite of mine for 20 years, and I’ve studied the topic for much of my life. In this post, I’ll share some quotes from two fictional portrayals of well-poisoning; one by C.S. Lewis, and the other by Charles Williams.

That Hideous Strength

The C.S. Lewis novel, “That Hideous Strength“, paints a picture of what happens when people disrespect the language and twist words to their own ends. The title is taken from a David Lyndsay poem, and refers to the tower of Babel.

In the story, young university professor Mark Studdock is invited into a secretive inner circle known as “the progressive element”, who help him advance his career. Eventually they draft him to write propaganda pieces in the newspaper for a powerful but evil foundation bent on taking control of society. His talent for twisting words serves him well at first, and the conspiracy seems unstoppable, but it all starts to unravel at the end:

It was well that both men had some knowledge of poetry. The doubling, splitting, and recombining of thoughts which now went on in them would have been unendurable for one whom that art had not already instructed, in the counterpoint of the mind, the mastery of doubled and trebled vision.

The turning point for Mark Studdock is at a dinner for the foundation, when the director, Jules, gets up to give a speech, and the curse of Babel is placed on everyone in the room. Tell me this doesn’t sound like an emergent conversation, complete with the people rebutting nonsense with more nonsense:

“The madrigore of verjuice must be talthibianised.”

He thought, indeed, that Jules was sailing very near the wind, that a very small false step would deprive both the speaker and the audience of the power even to pretend that he was saying anything in particular.

“Come! That’s going too far. Even they must see that you can’t talk about accepting the challenge of the past by throwing down the gauntlet of the future.”

He noticed that everyone except himself had begun to attend.

“Tidies and fugleman—I sheel foor that we all—er—most steeply rebut the defensible, though, I trust, lavatory. Aspasia which gleams to have selected our redeemed inspector this deceiving. It would—ah—be shark, very shark, from anyone’s debenture …”

Then all hell breaks loose. Someone murders the director, and someone lets the foundation’s wild animals go free to slaughter guests:

the smell of the shooting mixed with the sticky compound smell of blood and port and Madeira.
He had only caught a gleam of black and tawny. Those who had seen it clearly could not tell the others: they could only point and scream meaningless syllables. But Mark had recognized it. It was a tiger.

Then, a voice proclaims judgment:

“Qui Verbum Dei contempserunt, ei, eis auferetur etiam verbum hominis.”

They that have despised the word of God, from them shall the word of man also be taken away.

He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through Pragmatism, and thence through Logical Positivism, and out at last into the complete void. The indicative mood now corresponded to no thought that his mind could entertain.

The novel is tremendous, and a few quotes can’t do it justice. If you want a literary illustration of the dangers of twisting words, this is one of the best.

Descent Into Hell

Remonstrans once asked, “The children of postmodernism could not be respected citizens in either Jerusalem or Athens. What would their culture look like if they had their own city?”

Charles Williams symbolized this descent into meaninglessness as the city Gomorrah in his novel “Descent Into Hell“.

In this novel, Lawrence Wentworth is a frustrated old historian, someone who should know a thing or two about being honest with words. Wentworth is infatuated with a young lady named Adela, who is not interested in him. He finds reality increasingly unsatisfying, and much as the Emergents do with Christ, Wentworth decides to create an imaginary Adela who will do what he wants. His delight in tyrannizing over this fantasy is described thus:

“Image without incarnation, it was the delight of his incarnation, for it was without any of the things that troubled him about the incarnation of the beloved. He could exercise upon it all arts but one; he could not ever discover by it or practice towards it the freedom of love. A man cannot love himself, he can only idolize it, and over the idol delightfuly tyrannize — without purpose. The great gift which this simple idolatry of self gives is lack of further purpose; it is, the saints tell us, a somewhat similar thing that exists in those wholly possesed by their End; it is, human experience shows, the most exquisite delight in the interchanges of romantic love. But in all loves but one there are counterpointing times of purposes; in this only there are none.”

Better yet is this description of the Postmodern mind:

“He was approached, appeased, flattered, entreated. There flowed into him from the creature by his side the sensation of his absolute power to satisfy her. It was what he had vehemently and in secret desired — to have his own way under the pretext of giving her hers.”

And:

“It had been an ape of love’s vitality, and a parody also of its mortality. It posessed a semblance of initiative, and had appeased, as all lovers’ duty, the fantasies of his heart; it had fawned on him and provoked him.”

As his relationship with his fantasy Adela blossoms, he increasingly loses touch with reality. Wentworth becomes terrified of the real Adela, because she would smash his illusion.

Likewise, Adela begins her own lonely journey to Gommorah:

“She would neither revolt nor obey nor compromise. She would deceive. Her admission to the citizenship of Gommorah depended on that moment at which, of those four only possible alternatives for the human soul, she refused to know which she had chosen. ‘Tell me it’s for yourself, only yourself…’ No, no, it’s not for myself. It’s for the good of others, her good, his good, everybody’s good. Is it my fault if they don’t see it? Manage them, manage them, manage her, manage him, manage them.”

In a final scene, we see Wentworth confusedly wandering around a train station, having lost all capacity for language. Unable to hear or speak, only muttering incoherently.

Again, I’ve pulled only one theme from the book, to make a singular point. The book is one of the best I’ve ever read, and well worth your time. If you want a vivid literary portrayal of the postmodern mind, give “Descent” a try.

What does the Bible say about the matter? The Bible is inconclusive on the matter, which is strong evidence of scriptural inerrancy, in my opinion. We can look at the stories of Pharaoh and of Saul to see why.

Pharaoh

In Exodus 4:21, before Pharaoh has had any chance to respond to God’s warnings, God says to Moses:

“The LORD said to Moses, “When you return to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all the wonders I have given you the power to do. But I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go.”

Later, after Pharaoh saw some miracles, the Bible reports, in Exodus 8:15:

“But when Pharaoh saw that there was relief, he hardened his heart and would not listen to Moses and Aaron, just as the LORD had said.”

and Exodus 8:32:

“But this time also Pharaoh hardened his heart and would not let the people go.”

Clearly, Pharaoh seems culpable in these instances. However, after repeated warnings, when any reasonable human would have relented, Exodus 10:20 reports that God takes over:

“But the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let the Israelites go.”

What happened here? Who is culpable? Is this a contradiction in the Bible?

Did God preordain all of the heart-hardening? Or did He simply utilize His foreknowledge to make an example of Pharaoh in Exodus 10 after Pharaoh had already irreversibly implicated himself somewhere after Exodus 8? Maybe Pharaoh had already condemned himself by some previous sins, long before Moses’s challenge, and the entire thing was a charade meant to bring glory to God?

I think it’s a mistake to try to parse this story out and conclusively decide which explanation applies. Just fear God and pray that you don’t end up like Pharaoh.

Saul

The story of Saul is very similar. Very early in the story, Samuel anoints David, passing the blessing of God from Saul to David. Saul’s condemnation is already predestined, before David is even anointed (1 Samuel 16:1-2):

The LORD said to Samuel, “How long will you mourn for Saul, since I have rejected him as king over Israel? Fill your horn with oil and be on your way; I am sending you to Jesse of Bethlehem. I have chosen one of his sons to be king.”
But Samuel said, “How can I go? Saul will hear about it and kill me.”

The anointing of David is performed surreptitiously, and to the bitter end David refuses to slay Saul, who he still regards as “The Lord’s anointed”. When Saul dies, he apparently does so by his own hand (1 Samuel 31:1-6):

Now the Philistines fought against Israel; the Israelites fled before them, and many fell slain on Mount Gilboa. The Philistines pressed hard after Saul and his sons, and they killed his sons Jonathan, Abinadab and Malki-Shua. The fighting grew fierce around Saul, and when the archers overtook him, they wounded him critically.
Saul said to his armor-bearer, “Draw your sword and run me through, or these uncircumcised fellows will come and run me through and abuse me.”
But his armor-bearer was terrified and would not do it; so Saul took his own sword and fell on it. When the armor-bearer saw that Saul was dead, he too fell on his sword and died with him. So Saul and his three sons and his armor-bearer and all his men died together that same day.

However, the narrative says that he was already critically wounded. His death was already a foregone conclusion, and he apparently hastened it on only out of a desire to avoid “abuse” by the “uncircumcised fellows”. Who killed Saul? God, the Philistines, or Saul himself?

The situation gets even more complicated in 2 Samuel 1:5-10:

Then David said to the young man who brought him the report, “How do you know that Saul and his son Jonathan are dead?”

“I happened to be on Mount Gilboa,” the young man said, “and there was Saul, leaning on his spear, with the chariots and riders almost upon him. When he turned around and saw me, he called out to me, and I said, ‘What can I do?’

“He asked me, ‘Who are you?’
” ‘An Amalekite,’ I answered.

“Then he said to me, ‘Stand over me and kill me! I am in the throes of death, but I’m still alive.’

“So I stood over him and killed him, because I knew that after he had fallen he could not survive. And I took the crown that was on his head and the band on his arm and have brought them here to my lord.”

Whoa! So an Amalekite is now claiming credit for Saul’s death. Again, in this narrative, Saul was already in the “throes of death”, so his death was apparently already a foregone conclusion. And the Amalekite claims the slaying as a “mercy killing”. So who is culpable now?

Clearly, David regarded the Amalekite as being culpable (2 Samuel 1:14-16):

David asked him, “Why were you not afraid to lift your hand to destroy the LORD’s anointed?”

Then David called one of his men and said, “Go, strike him down!” So he struck him down, and he died. For David had said to him, “Your blood be on your own head. Your own mouth testified against you when you said, ‘I killed the LORD’s anointed.’ ”

Did the Amalekite kill Saul after Saul had already initiated suicide? Or was the Amalekite simply lying to curry favor with David (despite this clearly being represented as a mercy-killing)? How do we resolve all of these apparent contradictions?

1 Samuel and 2 Samuel are part of the same original book, so this is not an example of clerical error. These apparent contradictions are essential parts of the story. God pre-ordained Saul’s defeat, while Saul, the Philistines, and the Amalekite are all held culpable in one way or another.

Again, I think it’s a mistake to over-analyze these apparent contradictions. Fear God, and pray that you don’t end up like Saul or the Amalekite.

Conclusion

The Bible is clear that determinism is, at least sometimes, a possibility, but that personal culpability is a reality. This appears to be a contradiction, but regardless of our position on determinism or libertarian free will, it is exactly what we intuitively know to be true.

If the Bible took a strong conclusive stance in either direction (either that determinism is never true, or that culpability is false), the Bible would not be credibly inerrant. Such bickering is the domain of fallen man.

How long, O LORD ? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and every day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?

Look on me and answer, O LORD my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death;

my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.

But I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart rejoices in your salvation.

I will sing to the LORD,
for he has been good to me.

This Psalm unifies many of the most important Bible passages. I won’t enumerate the relevant passages, but Psalm 13 often comes to mind when I see people speculating about God’s justice or love. People want to know if God really loves everyone? How can you tell who is saved and who is not? “If He doesn’t save my apostate boyfriend, he’s a monster!” People wonder how God could take out the wrath that was due to us against an innocent Jesus. People ask themselves whether something is good because God loves it, or God loves it because it is good.

The punishment for such speculation is that people start applying the same absurdly reductionist paranoia to their human relationships. Your mother doesn’t really love you; she’s just obeying her selfish biological imperative. Did your girlfriend love you because you loved her first? Who selected whom? What attributes caused her to love you? What attributes should you praise in her so that she believes that you love her?

It’s insanity. It’s an insanity like psychosis, where the sufferer is incapable of even realizing that there’s a world different from his diseased fantasy world.

The decision to raise children atheist is typically couched as noble desire to give the children “freedom of choice”. Even people who are nominally spiritual, pay a great deal of lip service to “allowing the child to choose” (meaning, “shielding him from Christianity”), as this current discussion amongst homeschoolers attests. I think that all of this discussion about “freedom of choice” is terribly misleading.

If we really believe something, we tell our kids, and we explain why we believe it. Nobody says, “I choose to follow a path that believes in gravity, but I don’t tell my kids to avoid cliffs, since I want them to make up their own minds when they’re old enough.” We indoctrinate our kids with all sorts of beliefs about personal responsibility, financial responsibility, commitment to education, and so on. You teach your son that Mommy and Daddy love him. Some of these lessons are objectively defensible, some are more subjective, but educating a child means indoctrinating him.

If you’re holding off from teaching your kids something, it might just mean that you don’t really believe it. That’s what I think is going on with many of the responses on the homeschooling thread. People today often use “faith” as a part of their projected identity. Their “belief” is something they wear like clothes to signal something about themselves. If you choose faith like you choose clothes, you’ll want your children to do the same.

On the other hand, if you really believe something important, you’ll indoctrinate your kids. It’s your job. Part of your indoctrination may be to tell him that Christians are brainwashed, if you really believe that. In the case of many atheists, I think they really do believe it, and they simply don’t want their kids to become Christians. So this claim that “I don’t want to indoctrinate my kids” is a cop-out.

And either way, I think it’s also a cop-out to say that it’s about “letting the child decide”. No amount of indoctrination can stop a child from making his own choice when he is “old enough”. Young adults frequently throw aside all of their best training. Atheists become Christians, Christians become atheists, and young adults enter risky careers, pick up bad habits, and adopt poor financial strategies. Children sometimes decide that Mommy and Daddy never really loved them. You don’t mitigate this risk by pretending to have no beliefs. You mitigate the risk by being clear about what you believe, and why.

The ugliness of Jesus is the central theme of Martin Luther’s “Heidelberg Disputation”, which he penned in 1518. When I first read Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation a few years ago, I immediately judged it to be a pile of Zen koan-like sophistry. It’s very brief, formulated as 14 short paired “theses”, with each thesis followed by an “antithesis” (for a total of 28). Much as with Zen koans, though, subsequent life found me repeatedly saying, “Aha! That’s what he meant!”. The Heidelberg Disputation, above all else, is about the sheer repugnance of Christ.

It turns out that Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation is perhaps the most important document in the Reformation. This short document is far more important theologically than his “Ninety-Five Theses”. I learned later that Luther provided extensive commentary for each of the theses in Heidelberg Disputation. Gerhard O. Forde’s “On Being a Theologian of the Cross” walks through the HD and Luther’s associated commentary. The HD starts thusly:

1. The law of God, the most salutatory doctrine in life, cannot advance humans on their way to righteousness, but rather hinders them.
2. Much less can human works, which are done over and over again with the aid of natural precepts, so to speak, lead to that end.

This is standard Pauline Christianity, from Romans. But Luther throws down the gauntlet in theses 3-4:

3. Although the works of man always seem attractive and good, they are nevertheless likely to be mortal sins.
4. Although the works of God are always unattractive and appear evil, they are nevertheless really eternal merits.

In his commentary, Luther expands, saying that the works of God always appear “deformed”. He cites Matthew 23 and Isaiah 53 in support. Matthew 23:27:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth.

And Isaiah 53:2:

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him

Forde summarizes:

Our complaint — as is generally true of arguments with Luther! — does not really refute the argument but rather just illustrates it. We actually do “hide our faces” and look for something more, “positive, self-affirming, and attractive”. And so we don’t see. We can’t look. We call evil good and good evil. As addicts, as theologians of glory, we have no choice.

The rest of the Heidelberg Disputation systematically dismantles our human tendency to glorify “beauty”, and explains why Christ’s hideousness is just what we need. Luther touches deeply on “the problem of suffering” while annihilating our “aesthetics”, and culminates with this:

28. The love of God does not first discover, but creates what is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through attraction to what pleases it.

Scriptures command us to see Christ in the “last, the lost, and the least”. The dispossessed, the poor, the sick. The ugly and repulsive. Jesus never self-identifies with the strong, the healthy, the wise, or the powerful. The only time He self-identifies with people, it is with the weakest. See Matthew 25:40-45:

“The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’ “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

“He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

Clearly, Christ wants us to see Him in the most unattractive and dispossessed. Forde links this to Luther’s 28th and final thesis in a powerful conclusion:

This love of God that creates its object is contrasted absolutely with the love of humans. Human love is awakened by attraction to what pleases it. It must search to find its object and, one might add, will likely toss it aside when it tires of it.

Can you say “Rahab”? Forde continues:

The first part of [thesis 28] is clear because the love of God that lives in man loves sinners, evil persons, fools, and weaklings in order to make them righteous, good, wise, and strong. Rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows forth and bestows good. Therefore, sinners are attractive because they are loved; they are not loved because they are attractive. For this reason the love of man avoids sinners and evil persons. Thus Christ says, “For I came not to call the righteous but sinners.” [Matthew 9:13]”

Even the Qur’an gets this right. As Forde explains:

The problem is that for a theology of glory the bad, poor, needy, and lowly cannot really exist. What really exists is the true, the good, and the beautiful, the great abstractions, the “invisible” things of God. Because the theologian of glory is always looking through what is actually given, the bad, poor, needy, and lowly are invisible.

Shall we compensate by saying that the poor, lowly, and ugly should have “equal opportunity” with the beautiful and privileged? If you answer “yes”, you’ve understood nothing about the Heidelberg Disputation. The least alone are Christ!

Shall we compensate by arguing that Christ’s teachings which we find “ugly” and “repugnant” should be counterbalanced with those teachings which we find aesthetically pleasing? Again, if you answer “yes”, you have failed to understand the Heidelberg Disputation.

A sharp-witted hetero-Egyptian brought into Egypt through a second distortion could indeed have the ability to understand the homo-Egyptians better than they understood themselves. This hermeneutical superiority would be a gift bestowed by his specific marginality — and would in fact transpire to be the key to Joseph’s success in Egypt.

‘Egyptian’ is the term for all constructs that can be subject to deconstruction — except for the pyramid, that most Egyptian of edifices. It stands in its place, unshakable for all time, because its form is nothing other than the undeconstructible remainder of a construction that, following the plan of its architect, is built to look as it would after its own collapse.

Hehe, honesty is great:

Whoever chooses exposes himself to the risk of identification, which is precisely what Derrida was always most concerned to avoid.

Speaking of the Exodus:

All of a sudden, the divine changes hands: is passed from the architects to the archivists. From a monument, it becomes a document.

So close to Barfield, yet so far away:

Every sign, according to Hegel, is ‘the pyramid into which a foreign soul has been conveyed … and is preserved’

This is the dream of reductionism:

If he is to bring his theory of the spirit to its goal, he cannot waste any time with the weight of the pyramids or the enigmatic nature of the hieroglyphs; both must be overcome, until the spirit can clothe itself in a shell of language whose lightness and translucence allow it to forget that it needs any external addition.

I speak Chinese, and he’s wrong about this next quote (the ugly old Saphir-Whorf fallacy). But it’s pretty anyhow:

In this sense, the Egyptians remain eternal prisoners of externality to Hegel, like the Chinese, whose language and writing form one giant system of barriers and disturbances that render impossible the fulfilled moment in which the spirit, distancelessly attendant on itself, hears itself speak.

This final one brings to mind Scruton’s “Beauty”:

The pyramid’s chamber is thus likewise an object that can be sent on a journey — it especially likes to land in those areas of the modern world in which people are obsessed with the notion that artistic and cultural objects should be conserved at any cost. …where selected objects are mortified, defunctionalized, removed from all profane uses, and offered up for reverent viewing.

When afflicted by “love”, people are often jealous and possessive. When I was about 10 years old, a pair of local lovers formed a mutual suicide pact and committed suicide together. This sort of “commitment” is glorified by our culture. Tell your wife that you have found a way to freeze yourself and your wealth, and that you’ll come back to earth long after she is dead, and see how she responds. Are you really surprised that she doesn’t support your quest to be a celebrity caveman to some young ladies who won’t be born for centuries? You might as well tell her that she’s a temporary lover who will occupy an infinitesimal fraction of your love life, since your love life will extend immortally.

It should surprise nobody that Christ already dealt with the issue of possessive love among the resurrected, 2,000 years ago. Matthew 22:23-33 says:

That same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. “Teacher,” they said, “Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and have children for him. Now there were seven brothers among us. The first one married and died, and since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. The same thing happened to the second and third brother, right on down to the seventh. Finally, the woman died. Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?”

Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”

When the crowds heard this, they were astonished at his teaching.

It sounds like Mrs. Hanson has nothing to worry about, and should instead be demanding that her husband pay for her own cryogenic preservation. There is always the issue that the resurrection may not be cryogenic, but subscribing to a cryogenic service is certainly a good way to signal to the future your desire to be reborn.