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.

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.

This “principle” makes no sense to me. DNA is sort of like a compression algorithm, from which an entire organism is constructed. Compression algorithms are efficient to the extent that they factor out redundancy, so a sufficiently advanced compression algorithm creates output that is virtually indistinguishable from random data.

Imagine that you’ve written an epic story for you grandchildren, and you ZIP up the file to save space. Your grandkids grow up, and are perfectly able to unzip the file and read the story. One day, one of the grandkids gets the idea to analyze the raw bytes of the ZIP file, and concludes that “the bytes are essentially random — the story has no author”. Huh?

When DNA is uncompressed, it has given us the Psalms of David, the works of Shakespeare, and countless other treasures. It’s even given us what we need to decode our own DNA. If Slartibartfast were truly a brilliant designer, he would’ve created planets which would support creatures who would eventually write comedies about a designer who says “Slartibartfast was here”. And he would create creatures who could understand how funny and absurd the idea is. That would be a signature!

I’m not ready to reject dualism wholesale yet, and I’m not sure I even know what that would look like. However, I don’t think it makes sense to say that God’s interaction with the world is “supernatural”, in the sense that people today use the word.

People today use the word “supernatural” to mean “impossible through natural means”. This makes no sense to me, since the moment you observe something, it has obviously been proven to be possible. If we say that something is “supernatural” simply because we don’t have an explanation for how it could’ve arisen through natural means, we’re engaging in “God of the gaps”, and I don’t think that God would want that.

Worse, when we insist that God’s hand is, by definition, only that which can’t be explained by physical means, we’re essentially banishing God from the physical universe. I can understand why atheist materialists would want to promote this view, but it’s astonishing to me that any Christian would support this view. Christian orthodoxy for 2,000 years has insisted on God incarnate, bodily resurrection, opposition to Gnostic dualism, and belief in any number of other materialist-compatible positions.

The word “miracle” is perhaps slightly better. We could use the word “miracle” to describe something completely unexpected, rare, or inexplicably coincidental — yet physically possible. Used this way, the moment a “miracle” happens, it is incontrovertible proof of physical possibility. If a miracle were miraculous primarily due to physical impossibility, the idea of miracle, and thus the “hand of God” would be self-refuting. But has this ever been the standard view of miracles? It seems to me that the linkage between “miracle” and “physical impossibility” is a very modern view (and incoherent, as we see). In scriptural usage, miracles seem to be things which are physically possible (and in the case of Moses’s staff and the court magicians, even repeatable by others), but very unpredictable and coincidental. When coincidental, the coincidence generally centers around a moral context where someone has been granted some insight about what is going to happen.

For the committed materialist, ability to predict the future requires no supernatural pixie dust, since everything is predetermined anyway. And even for someone who believes in libertarian free will (by definition, not a materialist), the ability to look ahead over a certain window of time is not problematic. Therefore, we do not need dualism or the colloquial “supernatural” to explain miracles in any Biblical sense of the word. Of course, we don’t have a materialist explanation for future prediction any more than we have a materialist explanation of intentionality, but neither fact ought to give the committed materialist much grief. Materialists will agree, no doubt, that we don’t yet have a solution, but “we can taste it”.

Postulating some exorbitant privilege for God, where His hand escapes or negates the laws of physics, seems to me to be an act of little faith. Is God that impotent, that He cannot reconcile physics to Himself? Therefore, I don’t see why we would insist that God’s hand is immaterial or anti-material. It may be true that His fingers are not clad in animal skin like ours, but He has a “hand” that is physical, and which manipulates the physical. I still think that the attempts to measure God’s finger length or calculate the size of God’s arm are stupidly literalist, and even idolatrous. But the staunch insistence on the physicality of God’s hand can be seen as a rejection of an unnecessary and counterproductive dualism. And to the Muslim theologians, I am thankful for that.

Few atheists seem to realize that this implies the immortality of the soul. Computer programs can be run on a new computer, even if the old computer passes away. For a small handful, this is an exciting fact, promising a future where we can upload our souls to the singularity. But for most atheists, this is a disturbing implication. These atheists want to believe that we can obliterate our souls forever by destroying our bodies. As if we can make a troubling computer program disappear forever, simply by frying the CPU of the machine that’s running it.

The most popular theist alternative to materialism is dualism, which asserts that the universe is composed of both the material, which follows the laws of physics, and the immaterial (e.g. “spiritual”), which doesn’t follow the laws of physics. You can see how the dualist could invent a soul that is not immortal. The “spiritual” plane could theoretically devise anything, including a soul that disappears without chance of reconstitution.

It’s hard to imagine a materialist mind that could not be reconstituted. If you reconstruct the exact physical configuration, you’ve reconstituted the mind. If you buy the theory that the mind is like a computer, you don’t even need to reconstruct the exact physical configuration — you need only create a functionally equivalent substrate and upload the mind. It’s the difference between replicating a running computer atom-for-atom and copying a program from one computer to the other.

Theists often criticize atheists by pointing out that materialism has no explanation for intentionality. That is, materialism has not yet explained how the physical layer can be composed into intentionality. Committed materialists insist that this leap will eventually be made. Even if we don’t have an explanation for intentionality today, we will, they say. But the day that we do, we will have proven immortality of the soul in a manner than is stronger than any dualist could make.

Once the atheists prove that our minds can be wholly composed of atoms, they will face the insurmountable task of proving that our minds can never be re-composed of atoms. Proving that the soul can be composed of atoms will make it infinitely more difficult to prove that the soul can be eternally extinguished, and it’s the latter that most atheists want desperately to prove.

Atheists sometimes feel compelled to answer these questions. The most common answer goes something like this: “Ancient people were superstitious and ignorant about nature. When they saw things that they didn’t understand, they invented explanations, projecting their own psychology onto nature, in a process known as “anthropomorphism”. Lightning strikes a tree near you? God must be angry!”

This explanation of theism is far from satisfying, though. What evidence do we have to support such a narrative? The most ancient scriptures of theistic religions describe very different motivations and mechanisms for their beliefs. Nowhere in the Torah, for example, do we find a patriarch asking himself “what is the cause of lightning?”, and then hearing the voice of God answering in explanation. In the Torah and the Vedas, we find the ancients obsessing over issues of justice, agency, love, and responsibility — nowhere do we see them appealing to God to explain some natural or cosmological process. If theism is a fiction created to explain the cosmos, the ancient theists were cunning in their concealment of this fact.

Likewise, the theory doesn’t match with our empirical experience of modern theists. How many Christians do we know who started by asking, “why does lightning happen?”, and ended up at Christianity? The very idea is ludicrous! It would take a truly special sort of idiocy to believe that modern Christians adopt their faith as a way to explain lightning, so why would we assume any differently about the ancients?

And this leads us to the real problem with this common atheist response. We’re expected to swallow this narrative about how theism was “invented”, with no real evidence past or present. Since there is no evidence to back up the story, atheists project their own psychology to support their chosen narrative. They explain, “people today always ask ‘why?’ and invent answers, so the ancients must have done the same”. Besides the fact that the atheist is inventing a narrative to explain theism, the idea that the ancients cared so much about explaining natural phenomena is pure projection. It is modern materialistic reductionists who are obsessed with detailed explanations of minute natural phenomena. Nowhere do we see such an obsession among ancient theists.

When faced with a series of unexplained facts, humans love to invent narratives to explain those facts. Nicholas Nassim Taleb calls this the “Narrative Fallacy“. Atheists would have you believe that theism is simply a gigantic example of narrative fallacy, backed up by anthropomorphism, and concealed with lies. But this explanation itself reeks of narrative fallacy and relies on projection of motivations that apply primarily to atheists. When faced with narrative fallacy, you don’t combat it with your own narrative fallacy. And you don’t back that narrative up with psychological projection — especially when you are accusing your opponents of doing the same. You combat narrative fallacy with evidence and empirical tests.

Why do atheists rely so frequently on narrative fallacy and psychological projection when explaining theism?

The book plays to people’s vanities.  When humanity as a whole has arrived at no consensus about the validity of Torah, Vedas, or Marxism, it’s more than a little presumptuous to think that one can arrive at an objective appraisal of these systems by reading a little book.  But this is exactly what the readers of this book claim to have achieved.

I flipped through the book and read a number of random passages, and the author certainly strives to appear unbiased.  But the book is filled with speculation, half-truths, and even outright lies.  One particularly startling passage was when the author solemnly reported that “Christianity arose from the Greek system of philosophy known as Gnosticism”.

I thought that people stopped making this absurd claim.  Having read several books on the topic, it is clear that there is absolutely no support for this lie (rather, Gnosticism was a perversion of Christianity).  And most people have stopped parroting it.  Such casual repetition of untruth damages Watson’s credibility; although he makes the same sort of errors in talking about the Vedas and Quran.

~

Even if we dispense with the claims about “Gnosticism”, there is a more subtle form of this error alive today.  I recently came across this quote on a Christian web site, which many people would take for common sense:

“Christianity began as a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. When it went to Athens, it became a philosophy. When it went to Rome, it became an organization. When it went to Europe, it became a culture. When it came to America, it became a business.”

But this isn’t common sense; it’s simpleton’s thinking.  It presupposes that all cultural advancement is an evolution or “progression” forward; from backwards, ignorant thinking to more enlightened thinking.  Anyone with a modest IQ can look at the history or Greek philosophy, and see that it was Greek philosophy that was influenced dramatically by Judaism in the form of Christianity, rather than the opposite.  And why not?

The truth is, all of these things were deeply diseased when Christ arrived.  The nature of our personal relationships, our philosophies, our political organizations, and our business practices were hopelessly corrupted. 

The quote implies that Christianity drew sustenance from, was built upon, and adapted to, these human institutions.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  These human institutions were built imperfectly upon the foundation set by Christ before time began, and by the time Christ arrived, they were hopelessly corrupt and diseased.  Christ reformed and healed them, and breathed new life into them in the form of Christianity.  And this isn’t just theology: it’s plain facts for anyone who cares to actually look at the history.

Just as you’ve undoubtedly seen ad hominem attacks, you’ve seen people accuse others of making ad hominem arguments.  Accusing someone of making an ad hominem argument is a foolproof way to shut them down and force them back into whatever logical trap you’ve constructed for them.  C.S. Lewis was often irritated by people who made circumstantial ad hominems, and he even gave this argument a special name, “Bulverism”.  Anyone who engaged in “Bulverism” was considered immediately illogical and wrong.

As much as I respect C.S. Lewis’s philosophical instincts, I think he misses the point on this one.  People who throw about accusations of “ad hominem” and “Bulverism” reveal what their true motives are.  They see logic and reason as weapons which can be deployed to bend the will of another.

To be sure, there is nothing wrong with reason.  God is never illogical or irrational, and a firm commitment to intellectual honesty is an absolute necessity for Christians.  But when you start beating people up with “ad hominem”, you are obviously not thinking about your own character and humility; you are thinking about binding another person’s mind.

And Christianity at it’s core is an ad hominem proposition.  We believe that man is fallen and that the desires of his heart are sinful.  Christianity is entirely about the battle of man’s will against God.  Accusing people of “Bulverism” presupposes that those same people will arrive at God via logic, if only they close their eyes and pretend that neither of us has ulterior motives.  This fantasy is not only preposterous, it is non-Christian.

Circumstantial ad hominem is a logical fallacy in pure syllogistic reasoning.  But Christianity (and life and truth in general) is not an abstract syllogistic exercise.  Christianity is not illogical, but you never arrive at Christianity through pure logic that is ignorant of human motives.  Christianity addresses human nature and the desires of our own heart.  I don’t know why Christians would be afraid of admitting this.

When someone says, “You are a Christian!  Of course you would say that!”, you can take it as a compliment, and say “Yes!  And it’s not even illogical!”.

“What constituency is there for pessimism? People believe optimism is necessary, an American right. The presumption of optimism is the problem. That’s what creates the debt we have now.”

This is exactly the point I was making in my post about “Eschatology and Epistemology: Christians and the Housing Bubble”.

This also explains one major beef I have with the defenders of Arminianism.  I’ve seen numerous people argue that “God is Love, so he’ll give every unbeliever numerous chances to be saved, even it that doesn’t involve acknowledging the supremacy of Christ.”  They take God’s love and throw out the fear of God.  They even argue, “What constituency is there for fear of God?  People won’t believe in God or feel good about God if he is fearsome.  Belief in our own innate goodness is an American right.”

This presumption of our own innate goodness, of our own entitlement to stand in judgment of God and accept him only if he is harmless and cuddly enough, is what creates the spiritual deficit we have now.

1 Thessalonians 5:1-11 is instructive:

Now, brothers, about times and dates we do not need to write to you, for you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, "Peace and safety," destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.

But you, brothers, are not in darkness so that this day should surprise you like a thief. You are all sons of the light and sons of the day. We do not belong to the night or to the darkness. So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep, but let us be alert and self-controlled. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, get drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be self-controlled, putting on faith and love as a breastplate, and the hope of salvation as a helmet. For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. He died for us so that, whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him. Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing.