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Psychology is Bunk.

Did you know that there are studies that show that talking to a friend is just as effective a treatment as talking to a trained psychologist?

Did you know that a review of several studies shows that only 8% of patient improvement during counseling can be attributed to any component of the therapy itself?

Did you know, in the field of psychology, there is a professional term called the “deterioration effect,” whereby therapy causes people to have a worsened condition ‘comparable to people who do not receive such treatment?’

Did you know that there is psychology literature that demonstrates that 3-10% of people become worse after psychotherapy?

There are also surveys that show, that in pre-delinquent boys, more frequent visits by case workers resulted in higher levels of criminal offences.

Did you know that publication fraud is rampant in medical, psychological and pharma research, much more so than in comparable fields?

What is even worse, is that in the academic field in general, reproducibility studies have clearly demonstrated that 65% to as high as 90% of studies cannot be replicated if different researchers attempt to do so.  (2011, Glenn Begley.)

Not only is psychology a pseudoscience, but its bedfellow, psychiatry, is worse than that: it is an insidious, destructive field of practice that regularly commissions men and women to a pharmacological prison.

As someone who has suffered from anxiety in my early 20s, I also went to see psychologists and shrinks. I did exactly as I was supposed to. I was given drugs that did more harm than good. Sleeping 12 to 14 hours a day. Being passed from one doctor to another. Becoming dependent on the drugs, and addicted, which led to a 20 year battle with various addictions. And there are many like me.

There are numbers of people commit suicide and harm others after taking antidepressants. Almost every mass shooter was being treated by a shrink and on anti-depressants. You can hardly name one who wasn’t.

The fact is that psychologists are working off the wrong template of man. They don’t understand man.

Their version of man is a schematic that can only be found on paper, in textbooks, and taught in classrooms, but cannot be found in the real world. Their false idea of man is not a living, breathing soul, but rather a naïve and exuberant modelling of man as they wish him to be.

In this same respect, I’ve often thought of the bible and its many books and assembled literatures as a kind of diagnostic on the soul of man. It opens up man’s psyche, exposes it to us in all of its inglorious violence, and then proffers the solution, which is a hard commitment to what is right and true.

This is the only thing that can make a man whole. Man needs this higher purpose. Without it, he is merely just a machine made of flesh. A living soul cannot live as a machine, as a fleshbot, without developing pathology and side effects. Without incurring anxiety and depression and self-loathing.

Before a man can be healthy, he must first come to terms with his sickness, which is embedded within him, literally a circulatory part of himself. There must be a self-diagnosis. Only then can he begin to treat himself.

Christ said as much.

One must recognize that oneself is bad, is sinful, is wrong in many ways. This is the first step of acceptance. Then one repents and turns in a new direction, toward a new light.

The bible is violent, sometimes ugly, sometimes scatological, because man is exactly that: full of sin, moral errancy, ugliness and pain.

The human condition is sinfulness, through and through. The treatment for the condition is an accurate diagnosis, followed by a program of service and charity. It is not to make up for one’s faults, because our evils are often unforgivable offences. It is to redirect our passions toward goodness, toward the light. We accept, and then maneuver the flow of our passions toward the light.

We do not and cannot dam up our passions, or put a lid on our sins. No dam wall can hold strong under that immense amount of pressure.

Christianity does not offer repression. This is important.

Christianity offers solutions to problems that modern society, with its soul-destroying cultural practices, have introduced. It does this by bringing us back, closer to our natural, original, ancient habitats. We practice prayer again. We practice religion again under the stars. We become family-focused. We become community-focused. Danger may even be reintroduced to our lives, in the form of persecutions. We become human again, and by doing so, heal ourselves of the poisonous cultural toxins introduced by the modern secularists. We live as God intended us to live, and many of the personal problems associated with modern society subside in impact.

We can talk to God, but yet so many of choose to talk to a shrink or even ourselves. It seems absurd to ignore the creator in such a way, but we do it to our own demise.

Therefore, the greatest psychological treatment on man is found in the bible.

The alternative is barely better than a placebo. Almost everyone who has a positive testimony from taking these drugs would have had the same testimony if you had given them sugar pills.

People indeed have a right to be wary of the whole profession. When I was in college, from what I saw, the brightest minds were taking math and science, while those who couldn’t hack the material settled for psychology or human resources.

Even worse are the multitudes of studies that the godless quote as if they were chapter and verse. Most of these are prepared by university students, and when reproducibility tests have been attempted on these studies, astonishing figures play out– whereby 60+% of these studies could not be reproduced, as mentioned earlier.

Think about that the next time an overeducated atheist arrogantly posts a psychology study on a web forum, as if he had proven something.

What they don’t tell you is that there is a Christian drug and alcohol treatment center in Texas that is pulling off 70% cure rates, compared to secular cure rates, which are under 10%.

People have every right to be wary of the secular priesthood.

I’m sure there is a time and place for modern psychological treatment, but for the vast majority of men, it should be a last resort. Religion, faith, prayer, communion with the saints– these should be first guard treatments.

Citations:

Daniele Fanelli (2009)

6-https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1080/00048670903107559

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1080/00048670903107559

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Hell Isn’t a Problem.

I don’t know whether I believe in hell or not, honestly. But I do believe that God is just. God is fair. God is love. I trust his judgments will be fair and just and right.

If you asked me to defend the idea of hell, I’d say that I think God doesn’t want anyone to go to hell. I think humans do, though. Humanity demands justice of God night and day. I think if God did not create a place like hell, we would demand that he does.

All you have to do is look around at all of our crowded jails and prisons. Or look at the number of people on death row. Or look into the hearts of those who have had their loved ones taken away by a murderer, a rapist, a child molester, despot or drunk driver or so on. I don’t know why people have trouble with the idea– it is a human idea if there ever was one.

You can find the idea, and the longing for such a terrible place– in the heart of man.

Who has never read the news of a terrible murder and not demanded justice ‘of whatever gods may be?’ Imagine a hypothetical godless person. Also a nihilist. Someone who believes that morality is for the birds, so to say. So this man cheats and lies and steals and murders and plunders, doing whatever he thinks he can get away with it– when he thinks nobody is looking.

God isn’t looking. God doesn’t exist. Nobody sees me, anyway.

If he were allowed total annihilation at death, would not his whole philosophy of life have been justified?

Was he not “right” to live this way?

Would that be justice?

I also think you can also make a case that hell is a natural byproduct of the human yearning for eternal life. We all long to live forever, to never die.

Hell could be the other side of that coin. If we look into our souls, we may find the answers. We may be judged one day and obscenely question God about hell, and He may laugh and rip open the human soul and show us that heaven and hell were demands made nightly ON HIM; that it was humanity who demanded of him eternal modes of bliss and punishment. And that hell was originally created for the devil and his angels.

Maybe he would allow us to hear the desperate pleas for justice, for retribution, for comeuppance that he is inundated with nightly by his earthly children.

Finally, hell is simply a human demand on God. The proof of it? Even if you believe that God does not exist, you still have to recognize that billions of people believe in hell. Hell is an all-too-human belief, and a deep and powerful yearning for eternal and divine justice common to all in every society, in every era and epoch.

Someone who doesn’t possess that longing for divine justice is the anomaly, and the freak. Not the hundreds of millions that do.

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Carl Sagan, on Abortion.

It was actually while reading Carl Sagan about 14 years ago that I came to rethink abortion.

He was basically talking about the miracle of life, and how being born at all means conquering such outstanding, almost unimaginable odds, whether that means wriggling your way toward an egg, racing past millions of other sperm, being in the womb, being comforted by the sound of your mother’s heartbeat; and how we are just stardust, so small and tiny, like granules of sand upon the cosmic beach, and things like that.

Later that night I was drinking with my girlfriend at Milton Lake and wondering at the stripe of moonlight trembling across its glassy face, when I really had a revelation of what he was talking about: That it really was a kind of miracle that I was ever born, and that it was obscene, in a way.

I was actually aware of the past and the future, when I would not be around, and when I wasn’t around, and immediately I thought of the millions who got so close to that miracle-moment of being birthed into this world, beaten almost all of the inestimable odds, defied all of the astronomical maths–so damn close that they had begun to gestate, developed a body, ears, eyes, primitive respiration, and were that close to freedom; within mere months of giggling and playing and learning and being awed by this life, of the wonder of life, but never made it, and would never know anything of the beauty that I was now experiencing at this lake, holding tight my gal, wondering at huge, cosmic questions and metaphysical grandeurs.

And it just seemed unjust to me.

I guess you had to be there, and felt what I felt at that moment. I could never really put it into words.

And so I want to thank Carl Sagan for that moment, for that eye-opening realization of the miraculous, odds-defying journey we all have to take in order to plant our flag in time. Perhaps he believed that we were merely star-stuff, as he often said. But I suspect he too, would rather have appreciated being star-stuff in the form of a living, breathing human, instead of having his blessing crushed, his miracles negated, and lopped away limb by limb in the false darkness of the maternal womb.

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Faith comes Through Revelation

I’ve been thinking about what faith really is for over 20 years now. The other night, just being in bed, I received a revelation that furthered my understanding on this topic.

We have been told that faith is so many things. We have been told that it is a spiritual force. We have been told that it is a spiritual law, and that it works much like any physical, natural law. But I’ve never felt that those ideas were quite right. I fear they treat God as a kind of push-button God, who reflexively responds to faith on demand. Somehow, I don’t think that God is like a computer program, where if you punch in the right code, He does what you want Him to do. It reduces God to the status of a tool, and that just can’t be right.

Immediately, a few verses came to mind.

In Ephesians 2:8, the bible states that we are saved by faith, and that it is the “gift of God.” And in Romans 12:3, Paul indicates that a “measure” of faith is assigned to all believers. And in 1 Corinthians 12:9, faith is said to be a spiritual gifting.

Finally, we find that “faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”

So, why? Why does faith come from hearing the bible?

I realized that faith comes by revelation, through an epiphany, that comes by meditating on the gospel or God’s ways.

Of course. Because the christian walk itself starts with a realization, that we need God and His ways in our lives, or that we are sinful, or that Christ is the messiah.

So, I realized that faith is not some ethereal force or some mechanical spiritual law or principle, but just a gifting of revealed knowledge. It comes through revelation.

And revelation is just a windfall of understanding. It is that “aha” moment of sudden and impactful realization. And it is always personal, always a moment of awakening.

That is why it is critical to hear the Word, to speak the Word, to be around the Word, to think on and meditate on the Word. The Word is your source of personal revelation, which really are just gifts of faith.

When God speaks to you, or reveals something to you, in His own voice and through His own Words, you come to recognize God. You come to develop faith in His voice and in His word by constantly encountering Him over and over. This is how relationships are built. This is how trust and confidence are gained. This is how faith works.

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The False Religion of Victimhood

Definition.
Victimhood: the condition of having been hurt, damaged, or made to suffer, especially when you want people to feel sorry for you because of this or use it as an excuse for something.

The truth is, victimology is a lazy play on morality. People think they can use it as a cheat-code to attain righteousness.

If the mantle of victimhood is granted to you gratis, you don’t feel like you have to be persecuted for telling the truth, or doing what is right. Persecution is often imagined, or cooked up. You imagine that you are just born into it. And so, no moral effort has to be made, because a coat of righteousness is already yours, and it was free to claim.

What is really appealing about this racial victimology that we see in play today is that you don’t have to DO ANYTHING in order to suffer persecution. Rather, you are crowned and initiated into a false sense of moral goodness by just being yourself, by just having the wrong skin color or the wrong last name.

Your goodness, and your special place in the moral hierarchy comes directly from something apart from your own moral choices and behaviors. It is almost as if goodness becomes a grace, something that does not have to be earned by actively BEING GOOD.

This is the danger of victimhood. You take the apple in hand, and it is shiny and it looks good for eating. But if you eat it, it becomes part of who you are, and you lose your moral status, exiled from the grace that you assumed was yours all along.

The victim has special rights.

You do not have to be charitable. You do not have to feed the poor.

You do not have to take care of the widowed. No. You are special and unique, and inherit your goodness based on forces you cannot control.

This is a false moral system, much like a religious meme, that is spreading widely in our culture. Victimhood is the lazy person’s path to righteousness. One does not need to be just, because everybody around you is unjust, and your victimhood is a kind of shield that protects and defends you from moral responsibility.

This is really about persecution, and you should know it.

Persecution that is earned by a commitment to goodness, rightness and truth is legitimate persecution. It is true persecution, because one knows in advance that in a world of liars, a truth-teller will never escape suffering. But in a world of liars, the lies we tell ourselves are just as important as the truths we should be committed to.

And we should distinguish one from the other. Too many groups and nationalities and cultures today are erecting worlds of persecution around themselves, in order to shield themselves from moral responsibility. And THAT is a big problem.

That is a moral failing.