People’s minds are messy. In many things involving both our understanding And the way we explain that understanding We are fuzzy and imprecise and technically incorrect In some regards, even if not in every regard.
If I were using my skills to stir up the passions of
hatred
bigotry
pride
lust
greed
war
camp
competition, and
entitlement,
I would be in high demand and would probably live in a very nice house by now.
But I’ve been trying instead for many years to stir up the passions of
justice
righteousness
love
honesty
rationality, and
responsibility—
Learning them myself as I go (some faster than others, I freely admit). And for the record, I do not live in a very nice house.
In fact, I find so few takers as to give serious pause on the question of whether it is worth the time and effort even as an avocation—not because I cannot see the good in it, but because of the ever-present lonely disappointment of it all. I have striven again and again to set a rich table of God’s good things, and can find hardly anyone to sit down and partake.
And on that note, I have wondered from time to time whether I should even consider it my responsibility to try to do this. And in support of that question, I offer up the line (that some of you will know): “They’ve got Moses and the prophets; let them listen to them.” (Except in my case, I’d put it this way: “Well, don’t they already have all this information in the scriptures? So if they’re not going there to get it, what makes you think they’d ever want to get it from you?”)
Jesus was so right about that wide gate and narrow gate business,and it has not changed since he said it! To this day, the narrow gate is so seldom tried that not even in the churches can one find reliable support for the godly passions that God and Jesus have always espoused. And of the few who see this problem, almost none are willing to do anything new to solve it—and especially if that were to mean they had to leave their existing churches. By tolerating it in their camps as they do, they perpetuate it—becoming the bulk of the problem themselves, even as they continue to complain that it needs solving! This is the trap, and I have certainly wasted too many of the years of my own life trapped in it.
Because so few are really seeking anything better, I have no option of making a vocation of stirring up these passions, for I must eat, and there’s no living to be earned from it. Perhaps with a benefactor to fund the promotion of my material to a wide enough market, I could find enough support to make a living from it. But barring that, I must trade away far too much of my time for the empty necessity of money in a culture that understands little more. And this means that I can spend even less time learning about and documenting these things.
And getting no more support of any kind than I do from others, I often have no motivation to keep going, other than the one that got my started in the first place: to keep learning it myself. This has often proved to be the thread onto which I keep clinging—though I do regularly find motive in the hope that I could facilitate the efforts of others who are learning it for themselves. (For they certainly aren’t learning it at church.)
So I keep working on this understanding, improving it as I go, and trying to promote it in a market that is so filled with cheap fakes that easily satisfy inauthentic people, that it is hard for the authentic ones ever to find the real deal amid all the chaff. And no, I’m not certain I’ve got it all right myself. In fact, my big epiphany from 2012 was this, and I still believe it:
“I am most likely wrong about many things.” (Pelham’s Law of Cognitive Error)
But I find precious few people who continue to work the puzzle, rethinking it as necessary until they can get all the kinks worked out. And one might expect that I’ve have a huge network of like-minded friends along that journey by now, but it is actually very small. There are just too many appealing exits to allure one off the highway of learning.
Here’s a diagram of the principle I see at work as people go through life, on what is supposed to be a journey of finding the truth. (It should expand if you click on it.)
It seems there’s a preacher at every exit, offering some unvetted philosophy that promises to encompass the whole of what needs learning. And too many people are suckers for this sort of pandering. Being “cognitive misers” (as Cognitive Science has labeled it), they lack the mental energy to stay diligent in learning. And being “moral misers”, they lack the energy to care about their cognitive miserliness.
But I have kept going (so far!), and frequently wish I could win a lottery so as to be able to hire a research staff to help me keep learning (and publishing) faster and faster. This is my passion. But it has little place in this world. “And this is very sad indeed,” he sighed, as he continues to look for a new career to pay the bills.
We could do so much better, and still stay well shy of the perfection to which so many are so averse.
Far too few Christians are in the habit of checking themselves on their beliefs about what God is saying—whether it comes to interpreting the scriptures, or to whatever might be going on in their hearts. As a result, they tend to miss it whenever they make errors in interpreting these things, and come to regret it later.
It’s one of the top false teachings in the churches that “God loves everybody”. It’s taken as a given—as an unassailable fact, and non-negotiable. But while it’s true that God is an amazing lover of people, and loves people far more than any of us could ever deserve, we owe it to ourselves and to God to understand everything that the Bible says about this important topic.
The surprising-to-many fact of the matter is that God does not love everybody. Yes, yes, “God so loved the world that he gave his only son…” (John 3:16), but do you know the rest of what the Bible has to say on the topic? Let me throw out just one example for your immediate consideration:
The Lord examines the righteous, but the wicked, those who love violence, he hates with a passion.
He had been so certain that day that the thoughts and feelings that had come into his heart were a direct communication from God, having been put there by none other than Jesus Christ himself. Later, however, he would come to understand that those thoughts and feelings had been nothing more than the natural workings of his own mind, and that he had been merely assuming that God was behind it.
Even so, he went for decades without ever adopting a reliable strategy for telling the two apart. And he would make the same mistake thousands of times. For the many failures he encountered, one would think he might have tired of the whole thing and turned to scripture instead for learning the will of God. But it was just too alluring—this idea he had got from church that God was going to be communicating with him directly, as if by a private conversation in his own heart. He much preferred that to the prospects of reading and study and contemplation. And so he continued on as he had been taught.
And he would not come to see it for many years, but the result of all this was that he had set up by mistake an interior altar to his own will and reasoning, and that the actual opinions and wishes of God had had very little to do with his daily decision making. Once he finally stared learning how to listen to the scriptures, he realized then that God was “telling” him many more things through the Bible than he had ever perceived before, when he was looking mostly inside his own heart for communication from God. And not only was there more of it, but what he was hearing now was much different in nature than before, for now, it disagreed with his own thoughts and feelings much more often, and required him to adjust his personal view accordingly.
This was much harder work, but was much more authentic and effective, and he was alive again, growing in ways he had not grown before.
I have sat back in amazement And watched the religious man Post a hard and cautionary meme That condemns the very practice He regularly commits himself— As if it could not possibly Be relevant to his own behavior.
And I wonder at how he Must have got hold Of a different Jesus than the one I have read about— Who would have scalded him With a rebuke about his blindness, Even as the man was busy Posting memes about blinded people.
He is proud, it seems, That he knows the warning And passes it along to others, Playing a role in this world That he, no doubt, counts as important, For he is the teacher of good things, With hardly an apt thought about Being the doer of good things himself.
