Gullible Taboos

Posted on March 28, 2012 by ehurst

Most taboos hide some valuable truth. Sometimes the truth hidden seems to have little connection with the taboo itself, but some of the best lies keep you too busy to notice obvious truth.

If I cared much about convention, this blog would not exist, so today I’m going to offer an example of reevaluating taboos by scratching away the big lie to see what’s underneath. The basic topic here is pedophilia. My broader review is here (site is closed now).

Today I’m picking at one particular aspect by pointing out what everyone wants to ignore regarding a certain scandalous novel, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Most of the time, stuffy progressive literati peg some novel as important only because it’s good writing craft (as they see it) which attacks genuine morality. They delight in destroying all social convention, good and bad alike. This novel has been analyzed to death, and I think most of it misses the point. So we have the irony of the goofy literati being right for picking the novel as important, and wrong for not understanding why it matters — the main character is one of them. About the only correct comment I’ve seen so far is that it’s a dark tragicomedy.

First of all, no part of this novel is pornographic, not even by my prudish standards. The subject matter is taboo, but the story is pitifully romantic, not graphic. It’s a badly damaged man taking advantage of what was then a modern teenybopper, with her own perverted sexual curiosities. He’s like the dreamy movie stars she idolizes. She’s typical, but not normal. He destroys her youth in one sense, but the perverse American culture would have been just about as destructive had she never met him. So he sells his soul, as it were, to maintain some weird addiction. She gains all the power over an adult male she never dreamed was possible, until he devises something he thinks will work. The cost of asserting some effective dominance guarantees she’ll never love him. It doesn’t work. It can’t.

That’s the whole point. What he fantasized about remains a fantasy, and it can never be reality. That’s the fundamental error of pedophilia. It seeks something which cannot ever be. Granted, most adults have serious neuroses about sex as it is, but little girls are simply not capable of offering a fulfilling sexual experience. It might fill the thrill on one level, but the likelihood any kid in our Western world could possess adult reactions to sex is so small, it’s functionally zero. These things take time, attention and a certain level of hormonal development. It’s more than just puberty, but several years in that post-pubescent body, and it would really help if there was some good solid social training to go with it. Let’s get one thing straight: In a wise social structure, a young bride can grow into her role as wife even if the wedding is in her youth. Ancient societies did just fine that way, for far longer than the whole of democratic Western society has existed so far.

The biggest fallacy of all is our cultural mythology about calendar age. It’s bad enough we assume girls and boys have to be age mates for things to work. That’s manifestly false. Girls develop, on average, no less than four years ahead of boys. Given the actual truth of human development without all the cultural crap, a fellow older by a decade is just about right. The other half of this is thinking girls can’t marry so young. It’s related to the paranoia which led to creating the false notion of adolescence in the first place. Most of that silly concept arose from unions trying to keep young people out of the labor market.

Unions exist to create an artificial labor shortage. Thus what was once advanced prep school as a privilege for upper class kids on their way to college became mandatory for all social classes, a total waste of time and expense for people who don’t need a degree. Think about how little they learn in high school, and how even most of that is forgotten in a short time, and irrelevant for college. And don’t get me started on how most college education is a joke itself. But Modern American society was utterly perverse on the question of when young people are ready for varying measures of adult living, largely because of a shallow understanding of what makes for lasting material progress, and Post-Modern America is no smarter.

Does no one understand pedophilia and child molestation has literally exploded precisely because of how our government handles it? This is the same damnable perversion which funds the Drug War, precisely so it remains profitable. That a few of the elite ruling class make huge profits from drug trade, regardless of other consequences, is precisely the same sort of two-faced corruption which makes the child pornography market so profitable. The issue of how it does or doesn’t harm the children involved never had anything to do with it. The only studies given any credit were from the likes of Kinsey, who we all know was the biggest criminal pervert. It’s the same propaganda schizophrenia of splitting the public attention between two false extremes to hide the truth in the middle.

So on the obvious level, the taboo over books like Lolita prevents folks understanding nothing in the book promotes pedophilia, but instead demonstrates what a loony idea it is. Less obvious is how keeping this taboo in place avoids digging into some really serious social perversion about human development as a whole. As fantasies go, pedophilia is pretty tame compared to the fundamental cultural mythology of the Post-Victorian Feminist West.

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Delusions and Wiring

Posted on March 27, 2012 by ehurst

Some elements of human nature are hard-wired.
Every generation comes up with the most stunning arrogance about how it has somehow discovered something new, by which human nature itself can be rewritten at will. Then, all it takes is some brilliant theoretician to decide what to write. And each succeeding generation is amused by the ignorance of those who went before. Because I managed to stay alive long enough, I also get a chance to laugh at some of those who followed. It seems to me a certain amount of wisdom leaking down through from ancient times still stands. While everyone is running to and fro trying to dig up an excuse for their new approach, it seems to me they keep confirming with clinical precision what the ancients knew instinctively.
For example, male and females are wired differently. Oh, shock! That doesn’t fit into current fashion and cultural orthodoxy, but actual factual data points it out with alarming frequency. Put your boys in skirts and they still prefer toy trucks and guns. Up to almost age five of six, the differences are more of type. Beyond that and girls do some things very much better than boys, and vice versa. Boys are more active and physical, and are academically four years behind girls. That’s because “academics” is entirely shaped around female development, and is openly hostile to male development.
You should not imagine the people who actually get to design and run the education system are being sincere. They are smirking with evil grins at the way boys are typically “diagnosed” as maladjusted when the entire system hates everything they must to do in order to be normal. Their own sons are treated better in private academies, but they intend to castrate yours, one way or another. All it takes is some reading into their documented plans and you’ll see this is pure intentional hatred and evil.
Okay, let me be blunt. They are flaming sexual perverts, and they delight in perverting it for everyone else. They make boys more feminine because it offers them a larger pool of sex toys. At the same time, the standards of what’s “feminine” is more boyish, where girls are supposed to have narrow hips, and our culture subtly sexualizes undeveloped girls as the other ideal. It’s the damned notion of unisexual slavery, making the sexes undifferentiated and begging to be abused. So the same Joe Sixpack who claims he likes a rounded and busty gal will also lust after the little girls who wear inappropriate clothing and make-up, whether he admits to himself or not. I could point out other trends, but this one is one of our greatest sources of misery.
The elite aren’t always malevolent. At the beginning of a civilizational shift, something which in itself lasts multiple generations, most of the elite are pretty good people. They caught a vision of what could be, however flawed that vision, and earnestly sought to make things better for humanity. Yet, before that first generation even got old enough to retire, the psychopaths showed up and infiltrated the system. You see, the existence of psychopaths is hard-wired into human nature. You can’t simply breed them out of existence, because it’s something fairly random and based on multiple factors. There is no genetic test possible, only a very firm shift in how the brain operates once they develop beyond a certain level. There are also degrees of psychopathy, so it simply isn’t that easy to detect. Precious few ever manage to recover any normality with therapy, so the only way to stop them is to kill them young. You’d have to be a psychopath to be effective at weeding them out early; good people won’t do it.
Psychopaths are opportunists by nature, so they work their way into power in every civilization and social structure. Whatever you build must be able to work with them involved. The solution is not simply education alone, because that’s been tried. Our own US education system is proof of that. It was hijacked in a process which began a decade or so before the outbreak of the Civil War. While the first whisker of the beast snuffing around could be felt before America was colonized by Europeans, we see most of the plans failing until the middle of the 19th Century. The Civil War was an early symptom of their success, and in the aftermath, their plans really took hold and have steered things on the same path ever since. What we have today in terms of public education, including the tendency to oppress all private education which isn’t property of the elites, is so deeply owned by the psychopaths, most of the participants can’t imagine any other system. The point here is, the psychopaths took over the one thing most people reflexively expect to be the best means of attacking the psychopaths. You can’t educate them into a corner, because they will simply hijack the education system.
So restraining that sort of evil government rule has to come from something they can’t easily touch. That means something rooted in the civilization and social structure itself. Whatever bright idea you come up with has to limit the psychopaths. Need I point out our so-called democratic system, with its Enlightenment assumptions, was the least resistant to such hijacking? No other system in history fell so quickly to oppression. And it looks to remain in their clutches because they are using the system to prevent anyone coming up with something truly new. It goes to the core of our current civilization. Consider the fundamental assumptions behind the Westphalia Treaty. This is the psychopath’s dream: the State as a disembodied corporation. It’s a civilizational shift in itself. You now have a devil of a time getting people to remember government is people, because no people are held accountable except in the most rare occasions, and then it’s usually a mere show trial. No, we have to have something too deeply rooted for them to rip it out easily.
When psychopaths can direct attention from themselves, they win. Period. Whatever it is we do has to keep them in high profile so we know who they are, and what they are. Bell the cat. We cannot keep them out of power, so we need to make sure their power is limited by the nature of things. You have to have in place something fundamental, something sacred they dare not touch. Granted, there are ways to get around that, but it’s the longest and hardest path we can force upon them. What we have now, and what seems to be forming as we drift into the next civilizational shift, seems to offer them no resistance at all.
It’s not that I expect people to suddenly wise up, make me their guru, and follow all my marvelous suggestions. By no means would I imagine things getting any better anytime soon. I just hope I can offer something which helps explain my cynicism, and where it leads me. Finally, I hope it will lead you, dear reader, to consider realistically ways you can minimize the certain coming sorrows by implementing some wiser measures based on actual human nature, not a bunch of cultural mythology. What I offer in my high volume of long posts is not intended to make you think like me, but to make you think.
If you can accept the notion some things are hard-wired in human nature, you’re less likely to beat your head against a brick wall, trying to change the immutable, and work on things which are more malleable.

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Open Line Tuesday

Posted on March 27, 2012 by ehurst

I’ve got something cooking in the back of my mind for later, but I noticed we haven’t done an open question day in awhile. So here it is; post your questions in the comments or by email, using the subject line above.

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I've Been Framed

Posted on March 26, 2012 by ehurst

As noted previously, dominance in Game is not about having total control over anyone else, but refusing to surrender control over yourself.
In other words, you demand the freedom to be yourself. This assumes you’ve committed yourself to looking in the mirror of your soul on a regular basis. Particularly important is when you suffer a setback of any sort, it requires you take a moment to let the passions die down and analyze things carefully. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is only about males, either. Women who surrender control too easily, or for the wrong reasons, end up being abused. The issue is remaining free to operate in your own best interest.
Marriage is a negotiated mutual surrender. All other relationships have an entirely different goal. You still have to negotiate, but the threshold is not at all the same. There is a literal-figurative duality in the image of having only your spouse come into the bedroom, while everyone else has to negotiate just to get up on your porch. Thus, the underlying principles of operation are always the same, because sexual identity can’t be removed from human relations, nor even some animal relations, without destroying the humanity of people involved. (Need I state bluntly that’s a sin?)
Game theorists refer to the concept of frame. You view your world through a portal, a frame of reference. You can’t do this artificially for long; it will eat you alive. You don’t wear the frame, you develop it and make it your reality. As a mystic, I insist there is no objective reality in the ultimate sense. There is a certain amount of common conception by which we can all agree to operate, but no one is really bound by that. One of the most poorly understood Hebrew symbols is the image of sun, moon and stars being shaken and altered. It’s a complete failure to take that literally; the point is to warn you reality as you know it remains questionable, particularly in certain contexts.
This world is a big lie in the first place, so don’t put too much trust in what you think you know simply because of what your senses have detected. You’ll be surprised at how often what seems obvious on one level is wrong on some other level. There is a sense in which your reality is your convictions, the things from which you can’t walk away. Deluded or not, you operate from your frame of reference and let others have their own. The mind trap of believing in a concrete objective reality in this makes you an annoying member of the truth police; while you may do well with lesser things, humans will hate you and justly so. The part of you dealing with humans is recognizing they aren’t required to accept your reality, nor you theirs.
This is particularly important in dealing with the world at large. The common ground which most of us can agree upon is the observations and tested analysis of Game theorists about human behavior in response to people who know their own frame. There is a core of certainty which gives you character. Test it for yourself. Test it often with the aim of refining it, because you’ll never arrive at the definitive end point until you die. What permits humans working together is sufficient intelligence to recognize when and where frames overlap enough to interact. It requires a sense of character to handle those places which are disconnected. The strategies vary with your purpose and the context, but the underlying principle is refusing to negotiate things you simply cannot.
Most of the time, the best strategy is to ignore the discontinuity. Sometimes your persistence alone is sufficient. Calculate the price in advance and be ready to pay it, because at times it will seem the whole world will test your reality. Recognize that boundary layer of things which become negotiable under certain contexts, and learn there are most likely a whole lot of things which simply aren’t necessary in the first place, but your failure to consider makes them seem essential to you. In other words, don’t be an asshole because you are too lazy to think about it. Being free includes not being trapped by your own weaknesses.
Some practical applications:

  • If you tend to make verbal mistakes, learn to laugh at them or keep your mouth shut.
  • Play to your strengths, stick with what you know best, and never make extravagant claims you can’t back or can’t laugh about.
  • If you are strong in taking your lumps, and you don’t take yourself too seriously, you can afford to experiment a great deal more and take risks.
  • Learn the language of eye contact; it’s as important as speaking.
  • Break the habit of nervous laughter.
  • Humor, whimsy, comical sarcasm — these are very powerful tools to reducing tension and diverting challenges.
  • Never apologize if you really find something funny. Seek other company instead.
  • Learn to recognize a challenge to your freedom/dominance. It could be something as simple as, “Does this [whatever] make me look fat?”
  • The woman who doesn’t subtext is a rare treasure. The man who does subtext cannot be your friend. If you can, learn to recognize subtext when you encounter it.
  • You can be wide open and transparent if your center is strong enough.

Enjoy your frame.

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Game and Lasting Satisfaction

Posted on March 25, 2012 by ehurst

Most people really don’t know what to look for, because they don’t know what’s possible.
There’s no accounting for some people’s taste. As my wife and I walked into the supermarket today, a very attractive young mom (kids in tow) coming out locked eyes with me and held the contact a long time, smiling brightly as she drew even with me. Nothing more happened. There’s a chance it meant nothing at all, but statistically this was hypergamy in action. Who’s to say she was all that conscious of it? It won’t ever matter because I’m not in the market.
I suppose it’s possible my sense of peace and comfort with life in general, my overwhelming self-confidence in my mission, might cause some women to mistake me for an Alpha. When you start early in life aiming at self-honesty, it tends to build up that sense of knowing who you really are. Without that ability to look deep in the mirror of my own soul, I would never have had such a powerfully satisfying marriage. I would never have had so many people asking my advice and counsel about their marriages. We are talking in the hundreds of people asking me about such things. When you are comfortable with your own life, people tend to think you might have some idea how you got there, and could help them figure out theirs.
If any part of what you tell them pans out, they’ll come back again. A good portion of those who asked once asked more later. This only reinforces the sense of self-confidence. But what others have had to say in the manosphere about Game has helped fill in a lot of blanks, or offered better ways to think consciously, and say what I knew instinctively. I have marriage satisfaction, the kind of good thing most Christians claim to seek from God as a major element of their earthly existence. I’m in a much better position these days to explain why and how.
Were I in the market, I still would be hesitant about that very pretty young mother. Such aggressive behavior is flattering, but the context is a red flag. She knew nothing about me, but was willing to flirt, as it were — while I had one hand on my wife. That sort of risk-taking behavior is a strong indicator she was a predator of sorts, a rather head-strong woman. That’s the kind that rips a man’s heart out and throws it back in his face. Yeah, I’m just guessing, but it’s an experienced guess from all the couples I’ve talked to over the years. I knew before I got serious about marriage that appearances were deceiving.
A critical element in human failure is self-deception arising from human frailty. Because so few people know themselves, and so few learn from past experiences in the realm of romance, lots of marriages are built on a very shaky foundation. They figured they felt in love today, and maybe for two whole weeks, so let’s get married. Cathexis is a fearful master, and an utterly unreliable servant. But genuine attachment and passion are separate entities, and naturally arise from propinquity. It’s how humans react. We become deeply attached to anyone we don’t feel we have to kill, and we extend that in varying degrees to non-humans.
If you realize that going into marriage, you can take the time to choose someone who actually matches your real needs and desires. That is, assuming you have made some effort to know them. Not what turns you on, but what keeps you coming back for more. A pretty face and shapely figure just isn’t that much to go on, and in our modern life of massive and pervasive pollution throughout the food chain and everywhere around us, those things fade quickly. What really matters is tied to something much deeper in our souls.
In general, a man who knows why he’s alive on this earth is a good man. Just getting that far is quite an accomplishment, when you consider all the cultural factors seeking to prevent him even thinking that much. The man who figures out this much is pretty persistent where it matters most. Not that he can’t drift from one thing to the next, but that there is a recognizable thread of purpose. When he knows himself, he knows what he really needs, and is more likely to be satisfied when he gets it. The rest is just mechanics and entertainment.
I’ve not encountered too many men who are that way, but most can get there when given a chance to see the importance of it. Precious few women are even close to what makes a good woman. That so many do seem to hit something acceptable by accident and instinct is the only reason there are what few good marriages we do see. Expose a man to Game Theory and he gets it without much struggle. Women typically choke on it. That’s because they wrote the mythology which traps both sexes in the current wasteland of confusion.
Women respond to a strong and confident man. That’s hard wired, and is the number one factor. The rest is just a matter of taste and timing. Her internal wiring reads that man as a good provider and protector; good breeding material. She has to catch his attention. If any part of her perceives a shortage of such manhood, she’ll instinctively strive to keep the one she catches. The only trade is trading up — hypergamy. If she’s conscious of these things, she can avoid a ton of heartache by making a wise start. If she wants to improve what she’s got, she’ll have to learn how to cultivate her own man’s manhood.
Any man can be improved by the proper treatment of a good woman. She can literally make him more of a man by understanding manliness and her own response to it. Her artful promotion of him in public is half of that. The other half is understanding he is not the enemy when she senses there is something she needs he’s not giving. It’s utterly wrong for her to assume she knows what’s best for him, in the sense she can tell him what to do without first winning his confidence in the issue at hand. If she’s not willing to sacrifice in some rather obvious ways, she can’t win that confidence. Nagging is a demonstration of distrust in his good nature, as if he were some enemy to fight.
Any man can make his woman better by first ignoring what she says. That is, most women use subtext, and refuse to recognize men don’t. If he can read that stuff, good for him. Otherwise, he should focus on what she does. Pay attention to what she actually responds to by careful testing, so you can then understand how to give her what she really needs to feel like a good woman. She will act what she feels. It’s typically counter-intuitive for men, who tend to be direct about things. Never let her feel dominant; never supplicate. If she won’t cooperate, do what you like and show her she’s not in charge, but always turn off your passion in doing so — purely reasonable and total aplomb is your greatest strength. Meanwhile, accept her weaknesses as they are, and seek for ways to make her stronger where it counts.
The ultimate sexual satisfaction is not what most people assume. Getting your rocks off is just a temporary measure. What you really need is someone who keeps the fire burning, keeps you wanting more of the same. That’s an art too few couples understand, or are willing to put in the effort. For the man, the ultimate sexual fantasy is really one thing: She’s into it, into him. Nothing is better than a woman who wants you enough to initiate sex herself. For her, there is only one true path to sexual fulfillment, and that’s absolute surrender. Sounds easy unless you are a woman. Her intelligent move is finding a man she can trust that much, someone who dominates in the way it calls forth her surrender. Such a man knows what he wants and pays the price to get it.
Without knowing anything except what your eyes could see, had you been with me today and compared that pretty young mom with my wife, you’d wonder why I stayed with her. She’s not physically attractive to most guys. And it means exactly nothing to me, because I know what’s inside that plain wrapper — a treasure few men even know can exist in any woman at all. I’d have to let her tell you what she finds inside my wrapper, but she’s not a writer. You can be sure it’s not a matter of money, because she stays with me knowing I prefer some degree of poverty. If she wanted to leave, she could take just about everything without hiring a lawyer, and she knows it. Whatever it is she sees in me, I seriously doubt any other woman would know just by looking.
It’s absolutely necessary you understand how your eyes and hormones will deceive you, and take the moment to listen to some other part of you if you want a good marriage.

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Philosophy of Christian Faith

Posted on March 24, 2012 by ehurst

Bad things happen to good people, and vice versa.
This is not theology, but Christian logic. There are certain things we consider given. For us, there is a God in Heaven, and Heaven is an entirely different realm of existence than this one. What may seem reasonable here has little or nothing to do with that Other Realm. We can’t even understand it, but some bits of revelation have been granted. That is, we assert God has revealed as much as we need to know to find His favor. We further assert this revelation is recorded in the Bible. There isn’t room here for discussing how we arrive at what is and isn’t canon Scripture, but I’m going to run with the minimum standard Protestant canon. Christians take the Book seriously.
Too bad most of them ignore critical points, but that’s another discussion.
The fundamental assumption about this level of existence is it’s fallen, permanently broken and God has no plans to fix it. That it’s broken offers the first explanation for why people suffer. From a human point of view, it’s entirely random. The second explanation has to do with ignoring His revelation about how this broken world works. Thus, most people suffer an extra dose of suffering for that, and some who obey suffer less. Nothing in this is meant to be precise and neatly packaged.
But it stands to reason even Christians can’t really count on much regarding this life. The whole purpose is to participate in His revelation, and He holds all the cards. Revelation is whatever He says it is, and our part is mostly doing what He said we should do regardless of what happens to us. Our actions are not conditioned on success by any human measure, but adhering to a standard from the Other Realm.
Thus, it is entirely at His whim whether any good thing is granted, denied or taken from anyone, particularly Christians. We aren’t supposed to care all that much. Random bad luck, human cussedness and any number of other factors can make life tough for everyone. Nothing ever promised Christians an escape, except by deciding we don’t care about this life because we care about the Heavenly life which we were promised. Sometimes that includes a little relief from the ills of this plane, but only if He considers it revealing. Miracles are the same. So is death. We are told to regard human death as our best friend, because we are supposed to keep looking forward to our exit from this life.
We have to stay until He provides that exit. For us, it’s the ultimate good news, because life here below is just a big fat lie, a prison, a place of suffering. Again, we are here only so long as we serve the purpose of boosting revelation, particularly about what’s on the other side of death. We say those who embrace Him go to be with Him as friends and family. Everyone else goes before Him as enemies, and something about how things happen on that other side makes a huge difference whether you pass over as friend or foe.
Meanwhile, so long as we are stuck here, our friendship with Him should be obvious in how we react to the same crap everyone else faces. Now, if only I could get the rest of those claiming to be His friends to keep this in mind and stop chasing the same stuff everyone else wants.

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A More Considered Review of LifeChurch.tv (Updated)

Posted on March 23, 2012 by ehurst

I’ve been asked to take the time to think through and summarize my findings on Life Church. My thesis is, while the theology is harmless at Life Church, the way Life Church is organized and operated is tightly controlled from the top down. Nothing and no one is permitted to depart from Craig’s personal organizational script. The only membership participation allowed is carefully and tightly controlled. The instant anyone feels called and led by the Spirit to do things just a little differently, they are marginalized, at best. If the Spirit of God moves in your heart to do something not listed, you will have to leave Life Church to do it. Shallowness is not the problem, it’s that shallowness is enforced. Further discussion here. Comments are closed. Look around here on the blog; there are other ways to contact me.
Craig Groeschel is an entrepreneur. His primary business is entertainment. He’s also an accomplished actor. LifeChurch.tv is an ongoing drama with lots of noise, action, and some religion thrown in for good measure. Most people think it’s a church, but it’s simply a multimedia entertainment empire.
According to some who were involved at the start of this business, Craig admitted he chose the Evangelical Covenant Church solely because they had the lowest requirements for ordination. It’s not as if what he offers is bad religion. In terms of doctrine and Scripture, his material is fairly orthodox. He actually talks about sin and the need for redemption in the Blood of Jesus. But those things are simply not the real point of his work.
This is all so Craig can fulfill his personal dreams, and do what he likes, and get paid a lot for it. A driven man, he works hard, but like any modern CEO, actually serving the customer is the last thing on his mind. That is, real spiritual needs never enter into the picture. He comes close in some ways, and close enough for a lot of folks to be satisfied enough to keep coming back. In an industry where full satisfaction is actually quite rare in the first place, he’s found that sweet spot of client tolerance and people come by the thousands. They come because it’s still better than many of the alternatives.
Like any network, Craig’s product rolls downhill from him. What he does not want to provide directly, he contracts with others who specialize in certain forms of religious entertainment. I’m pretty sure there some kind of reciprocity in there. However, each is carefully selected for entertainment value first. A critical element in the audience draw is the appearance of faith challenge. For the majority, there is a bit of challenge, just enough to sound like that mortification and sacrifice we all instinctively know is a trait of genuine faith in Christ. It’s just a taste, just a little bit more demanding than “three dollars worth of the gospel.”
This is nothing more than the standard threshold programming we see in any part of the entertainment industry. What puts butts in the seats and dollars in the bucket? What keeps them coming back? Don’t go too far, because there has to be room to top it later. Of course, anything can be repackaged for reuse later, once it has been somewhat forgotten. It always sounds edgy and current, but it’s really carefully controlled to prevent it getting out of Craig’s firm control.
This is where it comes off sinister. I have personally observed people planted into each group by the staff at events, plants whose only mission is to keep an eye on what happens, to prevent small groups from departing the script. If they can steer things back onto the script, they will. If the person leading things is too strong, they’ll report that to the staff and the strong leader will be gently contacted. Depending on how strong they are, the staff may simply explain what’s expected in the most positive terms, perhaps sidelined from leading, moved to another group arrangement, etc. If all else fails, the strong leader will be told to withdraw and not remain involved. Because real Christian leaders know when they are being firmly excluded, I doubt anyone is actually escorted out the door. I’m sure they would do that, though, because they keep highly paid off-duty law enforcement officers on hand.
But the fundamental rule of all activities is to prevent anyone probing real spiritual need deeper than whatever is officially declared “deep enough.” Only carefully selected teachers are permitted to lead a Bible study. Anything officially supported by the corporation must be fully controlled. Every time someone makes noise about any kind of special need, the central network hands down a curriculum. It’s use is required, but the requirement sounds like a gentle sales pitch. For example, to prevent anyone starting to hunger and thirst for genuine holiness, Craig’s “Chazown” is heavily promoted. Granted, it does cover the basics rather well, and can keep most people busy for several sessions. You will never, ever see the corporation support a genuine exploration into any faith issue not already covered by the available materials.
Craig is constantly pumping out more books himself, all of which follows the same formula of demanding just enough, without going beyond that invisible line any good theologian could discern. The dirty secret of Christian publishing is most of the big names are operating in exactly the same mold as Craig. It’s a critical part of the entertainment industry, but targeted at a very large specialized market.
It would be impossible to determine easily whether the planted spies and even staff members are true believers or operating from the level of cynicism I describe here. The business of compromise by avoiding looking too deep into the mirror, a good moral desire to really believe in something which seems to work, is more than even a good psychiatrist should want to investigate. There is a concerted effort to substitute enthusiasm and familiar assumptions about holiness for the genuine power of the Holy Spirit. Even the common popular expressions of Neo-Pentecostal religion is somewhat suppressed, though the sermons always include just a pinch of “name-it-and-claim-it” spiritualized materialism.
In the end, I am inclined to think Craig Groeschel is at least partly cynical in all this, though hardly sinister. However, it’s not unfair to call him a deceiver, a manipulator, and some even go so far as to say a liar. He tells a utilitarian grade of truth to the audience, and says something different inside his office. So much has been confirmed by former insiders, which makes him just like a lot of other famous pastors I’ve known. I’m sure he realizes he is filling a void and doing just enough good he need not fear complete failure. I can’t pretend to guess what his conscience says, but I suspect it’s pretty badly damaged in the first place, as it is with most Westerners. It does no good to blame Craig for what he is doing. It’s enough to simply label the whole thing a decent gateway, but not a source of genuine spiritual nourishment.
Instead of genuine spiritual growth, there is a very admirable amount of worldly good. That is, the real focus of service is all the things which make for marvelous PR, and they really mean it. They work with local municipal code enforcement to identify people needing help fixing up their homes and yards, sustain quite a few recovery type programs, and even work with the state to engage the foster children program, along with a lot of other innovative charity work. Perhaps their crown jewel is heavy investment in third world development programs which tend to actually work.
But for LifeChurch.tv to work at all, it cannot meet genuine spiritual need beyond the most basic stuff almost every human needs. You’ll get the $20 gospel instead of the $3 version, but you still won’t get anything calling for a full commitment of yourself to genuine holiness.
It’s unanimous; everyone who has left says truly following Christ means you’ll eventually have to follow Him out of Life Church.

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The Mission

Posted on March 22, 2012 by ehurst

What do you love doing most?
Somewhere within the landscape of your passion and drive to do any particular thing can be found the secret of your mission. Almost everyone, with even the poorest public education of today, can do this sort of self-analysis with just a little help from folks who know you. You need not see it in terms of eternal objective reality, but just know what really is necessary for you today.
Don’t buy into all the guilt inducing valuations. If you can’t walk away from finding peace in dark humor, then explore the landscape of laughing at death. Even outright perversion signals something of importance, if you are willing to face it with sincerity. Discover what really is inside of you, because that’s the only way you’ll ever make anything better. But whatever you do, there must be something which permits you to help others. Without that, you aren’t human.
Whatever this thing is must be bigger than you, something which looms large and shadows you everywhere you go. It must be so big you have no trouble dying for it, suffering for it.
Every time I lambaste some church or other religious organization, it’s because they have failed the mission. The leadership determine the mission, one way or another. The mission must of necessity arise from the combined calling and mission of the people involved. You do not simply write something which sounds good and logical, something you can sell, and them squeeze people into that mold. People are the mission in that sense, and every human organization must match itself to the people involved. Only mundane and wholly unimportant occupations can be filled by conditioning people to respond to external structure. If the structure is not the net result of humans interacting from their true mission, it’s not worth doing ten seconds.
My wife and I are restarting our house church mission work. It really should not be necessary to write what follows, because it’s really not about us, but I write to shame the churches who surely have failed to qualify for the label “church.” Here’s our bylaws:
This is our home. All the controls and order we need arise from this fact. We are the host and hostess, and you are the guests. You enter by invitation, and while we don’t wave this around with great fanfare, it’s a privilege, not a right. We assume you come because you want to be here, and we are all too glad to see you come.
There is no offering receptacle, no hat passed, nothing of that sort. If you sense a need to give, it will be a personal gift neither of us declares to any human government. It’s a wholly private matter, and you’ll have to believe God will make sure I do the right thing. Most likely, I’ll tell you how it was used, but if my life isn’t already wide open and transparent, you shouldn’t give. Meanwhile, we can only do what the resources will support. We’ll give the last mote of dust we hold and then wait on God to supply anything else we need, however it is He does that.
The only time you’ll be asked to help is in something needing only the extra hands of any human, or something you are particularly able to do. I may even go so far as to prod you if I honestly believe it’s in your best interest, but you’ll never be forced to fit into some pre-determined, artificial mold. If you don’t want to, don’t.
We do have a general plan and outline of worship, but things happen and we go with what arises in the moment. Yes, there are things we simply can’t permit, but it’s unlikely we’ll see the need to get pushy about anything unless it’s a consistent problem which conflicts with our mission. You really should come prepared in your mind to ask questions if I miss something you want to know. I’m not a dictator, but a father figure offering his best, and I need to hear from you when it’s not what you need. That doesn’t mean I’ll deliver everything you ask, but I can’t even decide if you don’t ask.
The emphasis is our combined growth and progress in holiness. Whether you are here every time or only once, nothing in our work requires you register your real identity. Just let us know what to call you while you are here. Only God has to know anything else about you. Naturally, your conduct will leave an impression, but you are free to adjust that by what you say and do subsequently. It’s not that we judge you by ourselves, but measure you against our mission only. That’s what God requires of us, and you’ll do the same in return.
We are not the truth police, and neither are you. If we can work together, we should. If not, it won’t necessarily make you our enemy. There’s a lot of room for positive regard even when we can’t work together. There may even be room for some support from whatever our mission provides. Thus, you don’t have to swallow all my teachings, only be civil with us. Humor me, because I don’t take myself that seriously.
We are altogether willing to worship alone and not see it as a failure if it stays that way most of the time. This is not about building a kingdom and making headlines. Our sense of success is not measured in typical human terms, but in obedience to our own calling. The results are not in our hands, and will all be swept away when the Lord comes back. We have nothing to lose but our own obedience.
Some part of us deep inside knows ideally this should all result in growing a spiritual family, rather like an extended family household. Current reality does restrict that, but it’s what we believe is the best we could ever expect. If you wish to join the family, it’s wide open, but entirely voluntary moment by moment with each individual. I am the elder because God said so, but I would never pretend to own you. So far as I’m concerned, He owns us all.
Welcome to the family; this is what I love most.

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Fighting Cultural Mythology: Manhood

Posted on March 22, 2012 by ehurst

Let’s pick apart some folly.
The ideal symbol of manhood is the shepherd, not the hunter or any other image. It has nothing to do with how he feels about the sheep. He sacrifices a significant chunk of himself to protect them and get them to pasture and water. They are a huge pain in the butt to herd, full of risk, but the payoff is pretty big. In the process he learns to care regardless of emotional attachment or lack of it. Real men look to the long term, and work patiently. They fight threats but don’t take them personally. When there’s a major loss, they simply start over, keeping an eye on that long term result. It’s not the money, nor really the expertise, but the moral competence of doing the right thing, the best they possibly could.
God uses the family court system and child welfare agencies the same way He used Babylon II. Despicable in every way, Babylon was the rod of iron to punish those who refuse to listen to His demands. Because we have ignored His fundamental judgments about things, He has allowed us to be thrashed and punished by the government family welfare system.
While I have certainly known some real jerks in my time, and a few who honestly deserve death, the family courts are utterly unjust even to criminal dads. This is not the way to do things. I highly encourage any man capable of evading family court “justice” to do so, because it’s an abomination to God in its very structure. Anyone who cries against any man the popular label “deadbeat dad” is calling the curse of God upon themselves.
God never called for alimony. If a woman was determined to leave her husband, she knew her economic prospects were toast. There had to be really powerful reason. If he’s an abusive jerk (as husband specifically), he risks vengeful abuse from her family — an eye for an eye. In some rare cases, some peculiar crime he commits may justify a forfeiture of some kind to her family, always based on his genuine economic prospects. It was a single judgment due, not a continuing payment. No one was permitted to make a man a slave on those grounds.
In biblical culture, should there be any reason a man is a crappy dad (as father specifically), only his own family has standing to correct him. Failure is an abomination to God, and because we have developed a culture preventing this, God has afflicted us with the family courts. But should things necessitate separating a man from his wife, only in the most egregious cases of dissolute lifestyle should the mother lose custody. Those words seem to resemble what the family courts say, but they seldom judge by any rational standard what constitutes dissolute motherhood. That’s in part because the entire Western Civilization doesn’t understand it. Still, the whole point is not justice for either parent, but a genuine threat to the children. There is no jurist in Western Civilization who understands this from God’s perspective.
The mother’s family takes up the burden of providing fatherly care, their duty before God. The dad knows he must release them into their care, and embrace the burning sorrow of loss. He must know this of a certainty before he takes the path of divorce, before marrying in the first place. Boys belong to mom until at least age nine, and girls always do. The mother’s family takes full responsibility, like it or not, for deciding in those rare instances when the mother is a threat to the kids. It has nothing to do with economics, because being raised dirt poor is not a crime against children.
Given the idiocy of Post-Modern Western decline, I heartily recommend no man marry legally, particularly in the US. There may be compelling reasons to do so, but start from the assumption it’s not a good idea. The single greatest problem is legal marriage makes all children and all economic assets property of the state. If a woman does not understand how this is a threat to her, she is not worthy of being anyone’s wife. Any woman who thinks the state is a good ally against any possible future disputes, she is a slut already, an adulteress who plans well ahead to be unfaithful to the covenant. It really has nothing to do with sexual infidelity; a faithful body without a committed heart is just a slave.
Nobody says sluts cannot live, but no man with any sense takes them seriously. The man who is needy in romance in not a man. You aren’t a man until you can live without her, regardless how unpleasant it may be. Children are a liability, but a culture which claims to put them above all other considerations is a culture which deserves to die, painfully and slowly. It’s nothing more than an excuse to make the state god.
Who makes the state god serves Satan in disguise; tribal patriarchy is God’s only plan for fallen mankind.

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Attention Deficit and Adaptation

Posted on March 21, 2012 by ehurst

Over the past decade we see an increasing number of people who suggest Attention Deficit (both ADD and ADHD) may be the early stages of an evolutionary adaptation.
For those who must know, I don’t deny evolution as a fact of biology in the now, but dispute even the mere possibility of using it to explain how we got here. While we experience evolution as a daily fact of life, there is no logical justification for extrapolating it beyond actual evidence. The business of juggling archaeological finds takes entirely too much unknown for granted.
The current tiny incremental changes which we measure as adaptations which seem to affect the whole population of a given species in any particular context are easily found all over the place. If we posit the context is a very high volume data world for humans, there are elements of ADD and ADHD which indicate an adaptive advantage. While you can find research into this going all the way back to the earliest formulations of Attention Deficit as a concrete diagnosis, the terminology has shifted a great deal. It’s easy to find articles addressing some of this research from an adaptive viewpoint:
Born to Explore, 1997
ZDNet/Huffington Post, 2007
The Human Imprint, 2008
Psychology Today, 2010 (rather long)
The Telegraph (UK), 2012
and most recently, a much more speculative, less careful discussion at the Activist Post the past few days.
All of this hits dangerously close to home because I have been diagnosed with the milder ADD (specifically, Adult ADD) as was my son. I find the actual hyperactive version (ADHD) is probably an overshot, missing the putative advantages by going too far. The milder form I have, particularly as an adult, is probably closer to what the articles together suggest.
I’ve noted before, the smallest natural unit of cognition for me is the paragraph. I don’t do well memorizing text as words the way most people do. On the other hand, just about any paragraph of which I can make any sense will likely find a peg in my memory in terms of content. So, for example, I can recall easily the import of the linked articles, though it required some bit of research to recover where and when I found them. I extract and internalize the content but struggle to keep track of the linkages.
More precisely, Adult ADD is a recall disability, not a learning disability. It’s easy for precise bits of data to get lost. I know I know it, but can’t find the path to it’s storage in my brain. However, if the item in question is a larger block of data, it’s always easy to recall. Further, I can make creative linkages across multiple disciplines without much effort. I see parallels more quickly than most people, though quite often those parallels are flawed by incomplete data. I may not know a lot about something, but I recognize trends easily, even if they are inaccurate. It’s how I process and store things.
The central claim is something in this change from the previous norm of human learning and cognition grants an advantage in this modern age of huge volumes of data. Instead of being overwhelmed by too much information, it’s all absorbed as structure, and more of the content is kept that way. Once the structure is in place, it’s easier to keep more of the content, and the structure is detected — or inferred — intuitively. It’s the trademark of intuition itself.
Concrete example: Regular readers know I am fanatical about the Bible, in terms of the effort I expend working with it. In one sense, I’m completely crippled from retention because it takes a monumental effort to rote memorize even small portions of text. In another sense, I’ve already memorized the whole thing. Once I gained ground in the effort to think like a Hebrew, the underlying structure become almost painfully obvious, poking at my mind, as it were. I can recall what the Bible seems to say about almost anything, even if I struggle to offer locations within the text. Naturally, I memorize the content according to my own best understanding, but I have a high degree of confidence in my ability to parse the logic and meaning.
The liability is I can’t easily limit inputs. There’s a paradox: either everything in my context gets in, or almost nothing gets in because I’m too deeply absorbed by something specific. Regarding my previous post about the hypnotic effect of video, I can get utterly lost in the presentation, or find myself deeply annoyed by the distraction. Because I am very conscious of the effects, I react internally with anger to the presence of a TV screen running wherever I am. It makes me very uncomfortable, and I strive to find ways to block them. You can imagine I hate waiting rooms, where it seems they are ubiquitous. Another example of liability is when I drive more than six or eight hours, particularly routes I don’t see often, I have to stop and sleep so my brain can process all the massive visual stimulation I’ve absorbed. Otherwise it leaks back out and I start hallucinating, and enter that half-sleep state which gets people killed in auto crashes. On an average day of reading and Net surfing, I always take a nap mid-day.
So long as our high-tech environment holds, this is fine. Oddly, those years when I played at military maneuvers, I did rather well for noticing odd details even when physically tired, so long as there was no great lull in activity. I’m pretty much useless at waiting alert when I’m tired.
But I want you to notice how the political and institutional trends of public education is fighting all this tooth and nail. Easily 90% of staff attention is given to behavior management, and only some 10% is actual learning. That 90% is contrary to the rising tide of children doing their best to be ready for the massive flood of information, adaptations harshly contrary to what educators demand kids do physically in class. It’s education which needs to adapt, now. Kids simply do not have to sit still and be quiet to learn, because while they squirm and make noise, they are still absorbing from learning activities tailored to allow such activity. I’ve seen this first hand as a teacher.
At any rate, even if we could teach teachers to change their student behavioral expectations, getting closer to reality, I find the adaptive value of Attention Deficit is hit-and-miss.

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