Categories
creative essays revelation Uncategorized

The Truth is not Nice.

There is no mere relationship between truth and goodness. In fact, they are one and the same thing.

They are more than just siblings, but rather like spirit and soul, body and soul.

Whatever is true is right. Truth is a lamplight that uncovers the future, exposes all of it as more of the same, as something not to be feared. It is just more of the same, shrouded in darkness, but still more of the same.

There are no lies in goodness. Just as there is no darkness in the light.

Truth and morality have become divorced today. “Niceness” is more highly valued than truth, or goodness. Goodness and niceness are not the same thing.

Niceness is a hypocritical, nominal, superficial nod in the direction of morality, but lacking the courage of conviction about moral things.

Niceness is just the living out of lies. You dress up lies in expensive clothing, and you have the world’s version of moral goodness.

Look, the fact is, that the telling of truth is not nice. It will not gain you favor with the world, and you will not be popular.

But telling the truth can never be wrong, in a moral sense. Truthfulness is rightness. Truthfulness is goodness. Niceness is not goodness. This is where the world becomes confused.

Niceness is just a form of outward hypocrisy. It is the display of goodness, but lacking the faith in truth that goodness demands and necessitates.

If you have ever wondered why a lie just feels wrong, even in the service of niceness, it is because a lie has no authority in and of itself. It can only manipulate, but never expose. It can only dress up or cover an injury site, but never heal the wound. A lie, then, is much more than a falsehood. It is the opposite of truth, which is the active opposition to light, and to goodness.

Jesus never said that the truth will set you free. He said that you will know the truth, first. This is critical. Because all of the science and facts in the world isn’t worth anything compared to understanding, to a personal, face-to-face encounter with knowledge.

It isn’t the truth that sets you free, but a revelation of the truth. It is when an old, time-tested adage that you memorized as a schoolboy suddenly becomes activated with new energies, finally is understood as a great store of value that you never appreciated.

Christ said: “and you shall KNOW the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” This is where the godless get off of the train. They know what truth is, but they just don’t like it. They know where truth lives, has his address, but they don’t want to visit. They are satisfied enough with knowing that is around, out there, somewhere. They don’t allow it to have an impact in their moral lives. That would bring enlightenment, which leads to change.

It just isn’t obvious to most that whatever is true is right, and whatever is false is wrong. Goodness is just the electrification of moral facts. Not just any ole data suffices. I’m not talking about mathematics or history or any other factual disciplines.

This seems obvious, and it should be, but it really isn’t. Nothing is truly obvious to a man until he receives a revelation of it, until he is enlightened about it, or approaches it in a deep and personal way.

Finally, truth is valuable, but it is also not without risk to commit to it. Truth, being of great value, always carries a personal cost. There is always a price to be paid for the telling of truth.

The lesson of Christ is that “no servant is above his master.” The speaking of truth will lead to persecution. If you commit to a lifestyle of truth, men will seek after your life. If men are not seeking after your life, you are still yet above your master, still yet not living up to his call toward total truth.

Truth is valuable, but anything valuable is also inherently costly. It goes without saying. There is no such thing as a free lunch, or a free anything. Goodness is not cheap. Truth is very expensive, as it should be.

I think we need to commit to truth again, as a people, as a nation, as a race. We need to turn away and reject the false idea that truth can be convenient and fluffy, adoring and nice. It is not nice. But it is good.

Niceness is not goodness, except in the world’s view of things. If Christ was nice, he would not have been crucified. He was crucified because he committed to truth, and goodness.

Let the world be nice. Let them become apologists for convenience. Let them enable sinners in their path of self-destruction out of a sense of niceness. They will destroy themselves in the process. Because niceness is not a natural law of nature or Nature’s God. Nature is always true to itself, but never nice.

If we are going to survive in this world, we need to be the same.

Crafty as a fox, but as harmless as a dove.

Not nice. But truthful. Which is always right.

Categories
Uncategorized

Sometimes, it Just Be Like That.

About 7 years ago, I was in a rough patch with my walk with God. Everything had fallen apart in my life. I was down, and I was out. I remember being so mad, so angry at God. I have always been a giver, and now, I had damn near nothing to show for it.

It was a Thursday night, and I was driving by my old church. I decided to attend the service at the last second, literally almost crashing as I pulled across 3 lanes of traffic to get off on the exit.

I had a plan. I was going to sit all the way in the back and stew. I wasn’t going to praise or worship or give or nothing. I was going to protest silently.

If God wanted me, he was going to have to take me, then and there.

You can just guess the rest.

Every song the worship team played was “my favorite song,” almost as if I had personally put the list together.

The Pastor’s sermon? It was as if it was written personally, for me, from the Pastor’s desk.

By the end of that night, I was on my feet: worshiping, praising, 4 rows back from the podium.

That’s how God works sometimes.

Categories
creative essays science Uncategorized

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

Categories
creative essays revelation

Religion Over Science. Triumphant.

There is a fatal flaw in science. It is the fact that the best that a scientific approach can accomplish is to rule out hypotheses, one after another. The flaw is that you can think up another 100 or 1,000 possible explanations for any given phenomenon. There is no way to test them all.

You can never truly be certain that your theory is absolutely the best fit for the evidence, even after extensive testing, as long as a multitude of hypotheses remain untested and in theory.

On the other hand, I believe that revelation knowledge, as received by the ancient prophets and holy men, is truly the highest and most reliable form of knowledge.

Science can never deliver the certainty that a metaphysical revelation can, and what you see as science’s greatest asset, is also its greatest weakness– that any idea can be invalidated by new information. For example, it is common today to find people using science to expose science. They are working within the margins of that uncertainty, planting their ideas there, fortifying their positions with research, and standing their ground. Two men argue a point, and both have surveys and studies to back up their arguments. They bonk each over the head with opposing studies and cite from journals and research projects. They invalidate the studies that their opponent cites from by critically examining it for errors and missed hypotheticals. They both often succeed at this purpose, and no winner is declared.

And so what is the answer?

Wisdom through personal revelation. Which should be sought after through meditation on ancient scripture.

Even great scientific achievements start with a remarkable idea. An idea that seems to explain everything at once. All of the pieces fall into place, and it seems to answer all of the objections and challenges.

This is revelation.

Revelation is a windfall of understanding. It is the sudden reception of a grand, unifying idea that has great explanatory power and reach. It is like the arrival, whole cloth, of a complete body of knowledge. It feels as if the truth has been deposited into you from on high.

It seems to come out of the ether, but it really doesn’t. It often comes out the other end of a long train of thinking deeply about certain problems and unanswered questions. It comes from a commitment to truth, to what is right, no matter where that might lead.

Because once you marry yourself to truth, you open yourself up to personal revelation. This happens because you are seeing all of the contributing environmental factors with perfect clarity, and not through the warped lens of the ego, or through the glazed screen of emotions. You have left yourself exposed to the harsh and brutal elements, and only in this dangerous world can you find dangerous truths. Truths that Christ discovered, that made men who lived in their world of uncertainty and lies to seek to kill him, to censor him, to shut him up for good.

This kind of revelation comes when you only seek what is right. When you focus on morality, you are really focusing on truth. Whatever is true is right. True-ness is rightness. And so you are left wide open, as it were, to undiluted injections of truth, because you aren’t predisposed toward anything but the pursuit of truth. There are no blockades, political– emotional or moral, even.

Revelations are experiences, in fact. They come out of an accumulation of thousands of previous meditation points. They are, in fact, the end-result of a kind of large-scale experiential survey of various intellectual experiences. They are published, more so than received. Through the spirit and into the mind.

But you have to believe, at bottom, that the pursuit of philosophy is a more noble and enriching pursuit than that of science. You have to believe that it is better to be wise than smart. You have to believe that applied knowledge is better than knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

In the end, you cannot just remove the human influence from the scientific ideal and deify it, as many do today. Science is and always will be poisoned by the human influence until we can hand it over to AI.

To ignore wisdom is stupid. Thinkers, metaphysicians, priests, scholars and prophets have laid a groundwork of two thousand plus years of revelation, epiphany and spiritual and philosophical insight. The moral guidelines they have patiently and carefully constructed and worked out have served humanity well for millennia. In fact, you can make a strong case that we would not have survived as a species without them.

And finally, religion is more important than science to society itself. Because in order for a society to survive and succeed, they must find common ground in similar and shared morals. Science is great for engineering, for aerodynamics, for moving about large stones or building large structures or developing medicines. But there is a dark, blind spot, and this spot can be found at the intersection between faith and fear. Because there are some bridges that scientific thought cannot cross.

The fact is that religion becomes most valuable at the exact moment when the cost for doing right starts to become unreasonable. And without men willing to go the extra mile for what is right and good, society would devolve and collapse without religion’s essential superstructure.

The thing with science, also, is that if you are willing to hold an idea until new evidence comes along, then it is pretty obvious that the nature of your thought process isn’t to ‘find truth.’ Because truth is truth. It is not open to dismissal or being changed through a presentation of new evidence.

Also, I’ve noticed, that every time someone gives an example of ‘science proving truth,’ it amounts to something equivalent to common sense, not something that necessarily deserves scientific scrutiny.

A revelation, on the other hand, takes a mystery, solves it, and makes it as if it was always there, right in your face, just common sense, but for whatever reason, you couldn’t see it. But aha! Why couldn’t I see this before? It explains EVERYTHING.

I think many today have married metaphysical ideas with scientific ones. And so you see the inaccurate language, where science ‘leads to truth.’ But I believe that this marriage cannot work. Philosophy and science are not friendly bedfellows, but are sworn enemies.

I have said it before, but the only hope for mankind is a great falling away from science, and a re-commitment to the natural art of thinking and doing philosophy, which is accessible to every man. Science is, and has been an occupation for elitists. The scientific establishment has long been hostile to the common man and the wisdom he has accumulated from philosophy, metaphysics, and personal revelation.

Without the hostile takeover of the man of ruler and beaker, we might have continued on our natural progression of accumulating wisdom. Maybe by now, a singularity would have been reached, or a tipping point in the spiritual struggle between good and evil. But instead, we are on the verge of annihilation, under the threat of extinction at every passing moment.

Lockdowns. Political extremism. Mystery viruses. The threat of nuclear annihilation.

Maybe it is time we stop pretending that philosophy is science in other words. It is not. Only one can give us wisdom, which is what the world really needs more than anything right now.

And anyway, science today is vulnerable. It is vulnerable because we are now presented with the opinions of scientists and sold these opinions as science itself, by the media and political mouthpieces. Their opinions may or may not be informed, but they are still opinions, and they are not scientific results.

And of course, I am not completely dismissing science. Science is a useful tool for getting stuff done, and in more efficient ways than we previously could. It is a great utility. But if we are to survive the self-destructive rage of our own nature, we need something more valuable, and that is moral revelation.

Maybe, we should take our minds off the training wheels.

Personal revelation, or epiphany, is what we should be seeking. It is a windfall of knowledge that connects all of the dots.

It is when an idea takes a saltational leap and suddenly becomes apparent, and as clear as something considered to be common sense.

To me, this all seems like common sense.

Categories
creative essays Uncategorized

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.