Text Treatise: How Do We Deserve to Be Treated by Other People?

This was a response to a friend's text. I had expressed frustration with the behavior of coworkers and she'd replied with the ever-relevant "anything better than hell is better than you deserve."

Well, there are two levels of "desserts." The one you mentioned is before me always and is a relished bulwark against pride and resentment. Then there is "what we deserve" in the sense of how other humans should treat us if they were acting in obedience to the Law of God and with the Love of Christ. So there is a sense in which it is wrong how you and I and any Christian is treated -- but it's not wrong because we deserve better on our merits, but because God says that there is a better standard by which they should be treating others. So not a dessert in an ultimate sense, but a dessert in the sense of idealized personal relationships.

Basically the ultimate sense is important to avoid sinning by thinking that we deserve any thing, which is pride: thinking we deserve more than we do, which in an ultimate sense is nothing good, and everything bad. The second sense is helpful in addressing grief and other emotions in response to ill treatment: that feeling such a way is valid and appropriate. You have been wronged, and you are not inherently wrong to feel anguished or even angry about it. "But in all your anger do not sin." It's helpful as a perspective on why it's wrong: it's not wrong, what they did to you, because you're hurt. That makes you the standard, and now we're back to pride. It's wrong because it's a sin against God. David after indirectly murdering Uriah: "against you, and you only, oh Lord, have I sinned." If you should be angry at mistreatment, it should be because they're dishonoring God, not because they insulted you. I try to harness my feelings of insult and turn it into zeal instead. To validate the emotions in an appropriate way, with truth.

~ Rak Chazak

Christian Encouragement: How I Compliment Pretty Girls Who Have Good Theology

The following contains 1,700 words of fairly easily-readable monologue that I sent as an expanded version of a compliment to a girl on her theological soundness and zeal. I'll place a page break early on, to avoid cluttering the front page, and encourage you to click on "read more" to look at the whole thing for your consideration, edification, what-have-you.

Hiyah,

I came across your facebook profile on a [..............] post where you had commented. So the fact that you seemed to affirm pre-trib eschatology was what first stood out, not to mention the fact that you're following a page representing Reformed doctrine, which is encouraging. The next thing that I saw was that you're cute, which is only natural considering that I'm a typical male in that I'm visually oriented, and that my personality preference (which I find the Myers-Briggs profile to be a fairly effective measure of) is to thoroughly evaluate everything I perceive. It's a little unclear from facebook and your blog, but erring on the safe side, I'll treat you as if you're married and avoid anything that might be flirtatious. However, I have many compliments to give you.

It's rare for most young people to be very theologically astute -- I speak as one myself, who feels sometimes as if the peer landscape is very sparsely populated with Christian brethren -- and considering that roughly half of any age group is female, and only a subset thereof is of notable physical attractiveness, it's only logical to conclude that it's a very rare thing for a beautiful young woman to be so zealous for good doctrine as it is apparent to me that you are.

And mark, that is primarily what makes you beautiful:

3Your adornment must not be merely external-- braiding the hair, and wearing gold jewelry, or putting on dresses; 4but let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the imperishable quality of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is precious in the sight of God. 1 Peter 3:3-4

Irrationality in Regeneration: A Source of Relief

Lemme explain some terms before I start:

• Something irrational is something that can’t be explained, for which there can’t be discovered a reducible reason WHY something is the case/is happening, by using logic. (Something is reducible if it can be broken down into parts—a bike can be reduced to a collection of gears, bolts, chains, wires, metal frames etc;  abstract reasoning is broken down the same way, just with premises, reasoning mechanisms, etc)

• Regeneration is the phenomenon that occurs when God initially “changes a person’s heart,” as only He can do, that alters their instinctive desires and motivations. I’m not more than a lay theologian of 3-4 years going, but in my understanding it would be inappropriate to refer to regeneration as a continual process after a person’s saved—that would be sanctification. But regeneration’s effects are felt continually, and become more pronounced the longer a person is sanctified. But there’s an initial period that the affected person can point to as the moment when things changed. That’s when God ‘regenerated’ their soul, awakening them to receive the gift of salvation by faith in Christ.

To the point: when I began my investigation into Biblical Christianity (having had a nominal belief, at least, for as much of my life as I can remember up to that point) in early 2010, I came upon a philosophical challenge: is my motivation pure? Specifically, the motivation to do good. Consider the materialistic-reductionist view: everything you do to help others, which appears to be altruistic, is ultimately done for a selfish reason on some level. And if you can’t figure out what that reason is, it’s still reducible to a conditioning of your brain from previous behavior. You help others because you want to feel good from helping them—and therefore, your actions are not unconditional, they are self-serving. Your act of helping someone else is merely the way through which you satisfy your own selfish desires to feel good about yourself by riding the boost you get when you do something nice for someone else. You never help someone just to help them. You’re merely using them to get to your real goal.

 

‘Probably something the atheist economist-philosopher Ayn Rand would be all on-board with, since she held that people were utterly selfish, no exception—although she considered that a good thing. Selfishness (or as likeminded libertarians would put it, self-interest) is held up as the highest good in various areas of modern thought. Can you think of anything more anti-Gospel at the core? Selfishness is good, and nobody is truly altruistic; doing good for others is fundamentally selfish in itself?

 

Journal Treatise: Oort Cloud

Treatise: Oort Cloud

                        In my three years so far as a passionate apologist, I’ve had a number of varied interactions which I imagine fairly well represent the gamut, though obviously not constituting the whole spread of relationships that Christians can have with unbelievers. I’ve dealt with false converts of Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Orthodox Jewish and Lutheran persuasion, among others unstated. Homosexual ministers, Sadducees (which I take to be Jews who don’t believe in God or an afterlife—the Pharisees were the conservatives from which the modern Orthodox Jewish religion stems), muslims, mormons and jehovah’s witnesses (I refuse to capitalize these as if to indicate that they are credible or honorable, as with the Bible and Christianity). Of atheists, there are also many different kinds of individuals. One of them, whom I shall refer to as Oort Cloud, for a number of metaphorical reasons, was someone I met very early in my study of Biblical Creation and who, despite his mannerisms and facial expressions, came across to me as quite jovial and easy to get along with. Don’t judge someone as being angry just because they look like it. Some of the least pleasant people to talk to – or, some people you might not even be able to talk to – are people who put up a feigned air of politeness. People who are deceitful about their emotions and attitudes anger me much more easily than those who are straightforward.

                        Oort Cloud’s first encounter with me, that I remember, consisted of him showing the “Ray Comfort: The Banana, the Atheists’ Nightmare” video on youtube and asking what I thought of it. I answered that of course the banana wasn’t made in its current form at the very beginning. What I would have said if it had been today, however, would be that despite this, Ray’s statements are no less true about how the banana is an example of God’s care for human beings in how He designed the world. This is because even though the banana as we know it today likely did not exist 4,000 years ago, the genetic information which codes for the variety we see in grocery stores was nevertheless present in the original ancestral variety. The banana is an excellent example of directed selection, where certain qualities in an organism are “hand-picked” and used to develop the next generation, and of man’s stewardship for the earth, wherein he exercises his creativity to utilize the natural world for the benefit of mankind and nature alike. But as it were, my response surprised Oort Cloud, who apparently expected something more ignorant, and it, and a few other subsequent interactions of a similar sort, impelled him to search for “stumper” questions to try to debate me with, and see if he could shake my resolve and get me to relent of my confidence in the Bible.

                        Oort Cloud would see me on occasion and would over time begin to act as if, and tell me that he was angry with me for always having answers. This is not to say that they necessarily convinced him at any point, or that they even seemed to be an impressive argument, but I think his perception was that my answers did not fall to the level of being transparently illogical, and my views were internally coherent. He would often wear a contemplative frown when listening to my responses to his questions. His animated reactions to things that shocked him were amusing and will probably remain in my memory for some time. But as far as I can recall, he never made any effort to slander or attack me as a person, or to spread damaging lies about me to others, as a different group of people attempted to do roughly a year after I first met him.

                        I probably would have forgotten about the Oort Cloud if it wasn’t for a moment in late spring 2012. I hadn’t seen him for a while, but I encountered him suddenly in my campus dining hall. He was either graduating or transferring, and so he had come up to me to say goodbye. It was a curious occasion. Dejectedly is not quite the right word, but it was with a flustered insistency that I understand his reluctance to acknowledge what he was telling me,  that he told me, in effect, that he’d miss me, essentially. Not that he said those words. No, he said something akin to that he was bothered by my strong faith AND mastery of scientific facts and logic, that he thought in his heart that such a thing should not be—that a person of faith could believe without misunderstanding or rejecting science. He said in essence that he was impressed that I was a ‘worthy opponent,’ and expressed a wish to not be reminded of his confusion by meeting me or a person like me again. He would go on to grumble about these things for some time. I am glad to have served as a challenge to his presuppositions, and I hope that down the road, Oort Cloud will encounter something or someone that sparks the seed implanted within him to germinate, and that he does not stifle his discovery of the truth. The fact that he alone of the atheists I’ve spoken to came to me and gave me a verbal handshake is a good and hopeful sign, in my eyes. But you can never be sure. So if you read this and feel motivated to pray, I encourage you to pray for Oort Cloud and others like him to not seek relief from the challenge that they’ve encountered, be it in an intellectually savvy Christian or something profound in Scripture that just won’t let them be, but that they would struggle through it until they come to the foot of the Cross in humility and defeat. They may come unwillingly, as Oort came to me, but God’s Holy Spirit has the power to change a human heart. In time, we won’t want anything but to come to Him, whether we once struggled with it or not.