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.

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.

As a Calvinist, I’m not going to take a glorified view of man’s free will. But I find it interesting that atheists proudly hew to such determinism. Determinism is the only honest position for a materialist to take, but it’s ironic that the atheists are so proud of this position. The topic generally comes up in discussions of justice (“How can God be just if he predestined me to evil?”) or in discussions of the stupidity of Christians (“Those stupid Christians talk about free will, but we atheists don’t believe in such illusions!”).

Evolutionary biology suggests that altruism is a sort of “costly signal” which signals one’s suitability as a mate. Standing up for something we believe to be true, at great cost to ourselves (and especially in the face of universal opposition) is sexier to women than a peacock’s feathers are to a peahen. Such intellectual honesty is the sexiest thing in the known universe. A man’s willingness to extinguish his own ego in service to the truth of determinism is, therefore, the most costly signal man could give to a woman. It is the ultimate altruistic “costly signal”, right?

The problem is, costly signals are, by definition, signals that cannot be faked. If you can fake it, it’s not a properly costly signal. And the atheist’s commitment to determinism is nothing if not fraudulent.

Atheist materialists like to explain that there is no such thing as free will. They want you to know that they are totally cool with that fact. They want you to find them to be sexy and courageous (or at least, they want you to admit yourself superstitious and delusional for believing in free will). But it’s all a bunch of posturing. For all practical purposes, these proud atheists operate under the same delusion, and adopt the same lie, that they claim to reject.

What, exactly, is different about the atheist who professes determinism on the Internet, and the Pelagian who professes free will? In practice, how is the life of the professed determinist different? Do these atheist determinists “cut to the chase” and commit suicide, since “all ends in death”? Do they reject “atman” in daily practice, and fully realize “anatman”? Hardly! Every act of the atheist determinist belies his professed belief, proving that his profession is a sterile, impotent, and purely intellectual assent; far removed from any practical manifestation. Indeed, the only practically measurable difference between the atheist and the Pelagian is the belief about free will that each professes on Internet message boards! And this professed belief has no impact on actual behavior.

In species where female sexual selection is operative (e.g. peafowl and humans), any public forum which includes females is a platform for lekking. In such forums, women need to be extraordinarily skeptical of any feather displays, and need to ensure that feather displays are authentically costly (i.e. not fraudulent). The best females do not tolerate male beliefs which are fictional, imaginary, and which impose no cost. In practice, any professed belief in determinism is virtually indistinguishable from a belief in free will, and is therefore useless for signalling.

I believe that God loves everyone, but it is clear from the Bible that He also hates some people. The whole issue seems irrelevant to the Calvinism vs. Arminianism debate. I just don’t see any point at all in speaking on behalf of God about who He hates. Let’s just make sure that He doesn’t hate us.

There is a funny video mocking the Calvinist position, which shows a hapless Calvinist approaching someone and saying, “God might love you; believe in Him and be saved!”. The apostles didn’t lead with “God loves you”, and I find no precedent for such an approach in early Christianity. So I wonder why we would want to anchor our own evangelism in “God loves you”?

Of course, major chess tournaments are advertised as battles between titans, but the relationship between chess and violence goes far deeper than metaphor.  Chess is violence.  Chess is about unilaterally imposing your will on another human being, while he tries desperately to avoid having your will impose.  And if you fail, his will will crush yours.  Some might argue that all two-opponent games could be tarred with this same brush of “violence”.  But no other voluntary game presents such a distilled essence of violence, except perhaps for the middle game and tesuji of the game of Go.

Violence is about will power.  With physical violence, the body is simply an instrument of the will.  In fact, wrestling could be seen as half cooperative dance, and half violence.  Boxing is much closer to pure violence.  And chess is pure violence – all that is preserved is the ruthless wills locked in combat.

To understand why chess is unique, you need to consider what other sorts of non-violent mental activities can be involved in games.  Cooperation, clarity of communication, pun and fancy, metaphor, narrative, empathy, persuasion, seduction, estimation of probabilities, and so on.  None of these mental skills are very important to chess, and are not developed with chess practice.  To become great at chess, you need brute force mental capability and extreme will power and concentration.  Your killer instinct and desire to crush the opponent needs to be strong and sustained over much longer periods than in the typical physical confrontation.  There is a reason that chess is physically exhausting, and that chess masters often go mad.

What else compares?  Maybe only love.  As Shakespeare said, “all’s fair in love and war”.  St. Paul gave the most beautiful definition of love in his letter to the Corinthians, saying that “love is not self-seeking”.  We all know that most human love affairs are completely the opposite of St. Paul’s description, and end up looking a lot like chess boxing: periods of intense mental calculation and scheming punctuated by bouts of overwhelming physicality.

~

Note that this is not a criticism of chess.  I personally enjoy the intensity of chess.  And when I play Go, I often play on a smaller board, to increase the element of battle and will power and to reduce the component of broad strategy that is critical on a larger board.  I am simply arguing that chess is a fun game because it strengthens and exercises the selfish will; a point which I intend to revisit in a future post about C.S. Lewis’s “Bulverism” and the “ad hominem” fallacy.

The anti-Calvinists have a lot of fun with this, imagining the contortions that a true Calvinist would have to go through in order to share the Gospel honestly:

• “Jesus died for my sins, and he might have died for yours, too!”
• “Jesus died for my sins, but you have no hope unless you are one of the elect like me!”
• “Jesus died for the sins of a small group of people, which sadly might not include you”.

After I first started dating, I dated a number of girls over a number of years without ever falling in love.  I sensed that it would be very wrong to lie to someone about loving them, so when girls tried to raise the subject, I learned to be very sneaky.  I learned to change the subject, or even to preempt the question with statements like “I love how you make me feel”, or “I love hanging out with you”. 

Since then, I’ve fallen in love and married, but this experience taught me a thing or two about sneakiness, and I can understand why anti-Calvinists find the sneakiness to be funny.  But I think that the anti-Calvinists are completely wrong on this point.

The typical Arminian will evangelize the gospel by saying, “Jesus died for your sins”.  But they know as well as the Calvinist that some of the people they approach will NOT be saved.  The Arminian and Calvinist would agree 100% with the honesty of an evangelical introduction, “Jesus died for the sins of the world, but I have no idea whether or not you will be saved”. 

Both Calvinist and Arminian would agree that such a statement is true.  The only difference is that the Arminian chooses to obfuscate the truth (and even mocks the Calvinist for hesitating to obfuscate).  The Arminian argues that it’s best to present a half-truth at first, and only share the full truth after the convert has been "snookered”, so to speak.

This would be identical to my telling my youthful dating partners, “Sure, I love you honey!”, and then, later, having to qualify that earlier affirmation with, “Well, when I said ‘love’, it didn’t necessarily mean ‘love’”.  Or worse, “Well, when I said ‘love’, that was before you proved yourself to be unlovable”.

So I conclude that if the Calvinists are sneaky, the Arminians are worse than sneaky on this particular point.  The Arminians want to be able to say exactly what you want to hear, in order to get what they want out of you, and therefore they are willing to obfuscate and twist the truth – the truth that not everyone will be saved.  The truth that some will perish.

I will stop short of claiming that the Arminians are apostate.  But both camps clearly place a different sense of gravity on truthfulness with the unconverted.  Arminians seem to think that the end justifies the means, while Calvinists seem to think that you must be respectful and avoid manipulation when talking to the unconverted. 

The Arminians want so badly to be able to say “I love you”, and so desperate to avoid saying “I love how you make me feel”; that they change the definition of love.  Which is sneakier?