Conservatives, generally more informed than their liberal counterparts, have long known of the evils of  Jeffery Epstein.  Back when Trump was a Clinton donor and Clinton could still get it off the ground in Epstein private jet without medication.  It became obvious that people with unlimited resources, political connections and evil desires had both motive and opportunity to abuse young women.  It is interesting to see the way attempts to bash Trump have led to the metoo movement.  An attempted undermining which ended up going full circle a roundhouse kick to the face of every powerful Democrat.  But while the media is still looking for Russians under the bed they miss the perversion taking place on the bed.  Democrats have wanted to take some moral high ground of the type they often accused Republicans of being hypocrites for failing to hold.  But they don’t have any moral high ground,  they are immoral in one and all areas of life.  It shouldn’t be surprising when a group of people who profit by lying about helping the poor are found in bed with their underage daughters.  But the current iteration made me think of a few issues being brought up.

A Rabbi tying the Phylacteries to the arm of a boy. Obermüller, Franz (1869-1917)

What is an adult?  Today we seem to like prolonging adolescence longer and longer.  In the cased of women we seem to prolong the period of innocence all the way until death.  And so we must always believe the woman, because she is always right, according to the metoo movement, presumably because she is always innocent.  But even the idea of adolescence as a period from puberty to adulthood, is strange.  Historically the preparation for adulthood was before puberty, and puberty was the entrance into adulthood.  Bar mitzvah was the celebration of a boy’s entrance into adulthood, happening at age 13 which coincided with puberty for most males. But before it was an arbitrary age it used to carry with it training, and engagement.  It began the Jewish man’s participation in public worship and the world.   And don’t think the females were free of a similar public ceremony.  On the day a girl first has her flow of blood, she begins going to the temple, every month, for purification(Leviticus 15).  Which seems pretty public to me. Obviously there are gradations of adulthood and the next stage of life biblically was the gray hairs of the wise.  But what else does the Bible say about when someone is an adult, especially as it pertains to sexual matters?

In Ezekiel 16 the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob tells the story of how he chose his people Israel.  Since this is God describing his actions, thought it is a metaphor, I think we can take this story as instructive.  He describes his love for his people Israel as an adoption/love story.  He rescued her as an abandoned baby, and raised her up to maturity.

And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live.  I have caused thee to multiply as the bud of the field, and thou hast increased and waxen great, and thou art come to excellent ornaments: thy breasts are fashioned, and thine hair is grown, whereas thou wast naked and bare.

But then he passed by again and something was different.

Now when I passed by thee, and looked upon thee, behold, thy time was the time of love; and I spread my skirt over thee, and covered thy nakedness: yea, I sware unto thee, and entered into a covenant with thee, saith the Lord GOD, and thou becamest mine.

He goes on to detail the way he adorned her as a queen and provided for her every need.  A good model for every husband though hopefully without the later adultery on the part of his bride.  But that  phrase “the time of love” seems pretty relevant to the discussion.  He takes it as a given that everyone knows when this is.  There is a major shift here from the role of  a father to a lover, which I think is present in every husband wife relationship.  Women are handed from their father to their lover in marriage because there is a relation and connection there.  But if we are looking for help on figuring out when this is, it’s right here.  “Her breasts are fashioned her hair is grown”  she suddenly has something which must be covered.

If we try to remember way back to 1950, before the pill when marriage was still connected to procreation.  We can see that marriage is only possible when procreation is possible.  After puberty, which seems as biologically obvious as what a male and a female are.  Even virginity is biologically established in Scripture.  But in our day of mass immorality, we like to muddy the waters.  As evils increase we increase rules to try preventing evil.  But do our laws, based on our cultural sensibilities, whims even, lead to a more God honoring culture?  I don’t think so.  We can see the recent slippery slope of keeping children immature longer and longer.  They never grow up.  Children didn’t used to be a state to be admired even for children, much less for 35 year olds(Eph 4;14, I Cor. 3:2).  Children are adults in training, maturity is the point.

It used to be that most people only got an 8th grade education.  Which coincided roughly with puberty, then you were off to the real world.  Today high school graduates are less capable than many 8th graders of a century ago.  Is this a good trend?  Do we justify this by our extended life expectancy?  Fifty is the new forty so it’s ok for forty year olds to act like children?  And so it seems to me that questioning our social construct can only be productive.  Why do we arbitrarily make 18 the cut off point?  Many early Americans had lived a whole life by the time they were 18.  And the same goes for much of the rest of the world.  Is our system really better than the two books, the book of nature and the Book of Scripture.

More and more young people from puberty to 18 are losing their virginity.  We throw them in hyper sexualize environments known as public high schools and almost dare them to make it through.  Most don’t.  Which means that even those who waited for the culture-appointed-day of adulthood, are coming to the marriage with unnecessary baggage.  By any measure this makes less stable marriages, and families and undermines everything human which we value.  It is not given to human flourishing.  So why do we hold on to it so religiously?  We could follow Paul’s advice and use marriage as a remedy to burning.  Or we could reduce the sexualization of our high schools.  I doubt the latter is possible since we can’t even seem to get the three R’s in there,  and Christians can’t seem to get their kids out of there.  But why are we so afraid of 13-year-old adults?  Why is maturity so scary? Why don’t we try something different?

By culture’s rules, having sex with an immature woman is wrong.  And having sex with someone who likes it is right.  Which means that right and wrong are up to the whims of however a woman feels now or whenever she decides to change her mind decades later.  And so Epstein is now wrong.  According to God’s rules Epstein is wrong not because the girls were 16, but because it’s sex outside of marriage.  And many of the women are wrong for seeking power, or affection outside of marriage.

The other aspect of this situation that I think worth thinking about is prosecuting Epstein after his death.  On the one hand it’s pretty lame that that justice system couldn’t keep him alive.  “You had one job.”  But on the other hand the taxpayers are spared millions of dollars.  Trying to prosecute him afterwards or go after his estates seems a little like race reparations.  Which is in vogue, but is also crazy.  We want to blame the British Empire fore it’s nasty empireness hundreds of years ago.  We want to prosecute the Spanish for conquering the Incas.  But it always seems to stop at whitey.  We don’t really give a damn about the people the Incas conquered.  If you really loved all of humanity, you would want it all straightened out.  But the fact is that reaching back in time is beyond your grasp.  It is beyond our collective grasp too.  That is just the way it is.  Human justice can only go so far.  It is only mandated by God to go so far.  After that we must look to the final judgement.

Dante and Virgil in the Ninth Circle of Hell. Gustave Dore 1832-1883. Oil on Canvas.

Real love is to hate those who cause harm.  We should hate what Epstein and Weinstein and all the Democrats have done to people.   We should want them to be charged and weighed fairly by a court.  And then the victims should be made whole and eye for an eye, and the perpetrator punished.  But it might also be that some of them are looking to exploit the situation for fame and cash.  We should hate this too.

But I think rather than lament that Epstein got away with it, we should take joy in knowing that vengeance belongs to God.  While God clearly says that he appoints instruments of vengeance on this earth, Romans 13 et al., there will be an ultimate day of reckoning.  And I think rather than being more lenient, God’s wrath will be worse.  I get the idea that waiting for God to sort it out is because his wrath is far worse than anything we can do on earth.  In Matthew 6 Jesus says a number of time “they have their reward”.  Their deeds done in public resulted in cultural affirmation.  And the matter is settled.  But to those who wait for ultimate reward, for good deeds done in secret, their reward will be unfathomable(Mat. 6:4, Mat. 19:7).  And also you have that verse about not gloating over a evil person when they come to ruin(Prov. 24:17:18).  God will have compassion on them.  And so what we do here has eternal consequences and when people “get away with things” here it will only be that much worse for them in eternity.  So rest contented that Epstein will have his place in the torment hierarchy, a little lower than the Clintons.

Obviously I’m not a female and I don’t play one on TV nor in real life, but I hear women throwing around the terms alpha and beta males all the time.  Obviously they have never walked a mile in a man’s shoes, and no one seems to object to their, ranting, even when it becomes bitching.  I though it only fair that I return the favor.   Also I consulted the Muses and they seemed fine with it.

Sonia. Thomas Martine Ronaldson. c. 1942.

What is a beta female?  I suppose since it isn’t really a common term I get to use it however I want.  But like all words in a hostile context it should be defined.  I think if you are reading this, by which I mean, if you can read, you are a beta female.  No doubt I have already crossed so many lines that very few females are still reading, but the point isn’t to be offensive nor to join the crowd apologizing for reality.  I value truth and facts despite what sub Theta Joe Biden has to say and there are some very real problems created by not thinking this through.  I get the impression that while women like going to the bathroom in groups, they don’t like being categorized in groups.  Each one of those women in the group on their way to the bathroom taking selfies tags the others women as “her girls”.  Each women thinks it’s ‘her’ story and not ‘their’ story.  I can only think of daring such a thing as the groom with groomsmen and probably not even then.  Generalizations seems to diminish the relational aspect of women which is their penchant.  If you lump one woman in with other women it’s like saying you don’t know her. But I’m ok with it.

All the science on IQ distribution I have seen shows the same thing. Women cluster towards the center of the graph like it was a bathroom at a sports arena.  Most of them fall around average intelligence while men are more distributed along the curve.  There are a few studies that show the male curve is ahead of the female curve.  And given the outright hostility to such an idea at every level of our culture I am inclined to believe this.  If these studies err, they certainly err in favor of making women look good.  While it is fair to say that most men and most women are average, there are more average women.  And at the upper end there are more than ten times the number of men populating that portion of the graph than women.  So if the beta male is the average male those above the average are the Alpha males.  The same should go for women, but there are hardly any Alpha women.  It’s science.  And it looks like the low end of the curve, the Gamma females, we could say, are pretty rare too, and like I said, probably can’t read.  IQ obviously isn’t everything.  It is possible for people to be intelligent and not assertive or successful.  But I think in general intelligence and capability are restless.  Especially in a culture so dominated by the myth of meritocracy, and climbing various greasy poles.

This has some implications.  C.R. Wiley was mentioning that even in evangelical circles the publishing industry was dominated by these Alpha females, who were generally feminists.  It only makes sense, NY publishing  circles are competitive.  Women favor seeking wisdom from other women.  And maybe a very small percentage of women at the top, really can do it all.  To them feminism might make a lot of sense, because they are so capable that chasing a career might not be detrimental to their raising a family.  But their capability and experience is so different from the average woman, from most women, that following their advice may just be disastrous.  And since most books by women or for women are heavily based on examples, a disconnect here is a big disconnect.  Wanting to share in an example, in someone else’s story, when you simply can’t, will leave you very frustrated and probably bitter and alone.  Beta Females would be most fulfilled having a family and a bunch of kids and not focusing on a career, endless school, or all of the above together.  That’s just the way God made most women.  Having kids keeps women out of trouble the same way that hard manual labor keeps men out of trouble.  It makes less time for gossip, legal meddling in myriad laws(think nanny state), and cultural meddling of failed social reforms (think prohibition)(I Timothy 5).  But attempts at marriage to your career or your degree program aren’t all that attractive to the decent men.  And since having it all isn’t possible, that means that the ball which gets dropped is the relationship/marriage/family ball.  When your life doesn’t look like the Alpha female life, you are forced to blame someone.  And it’s hard to blame that woman on the self-help book with the perfect hair and makeup.  And you can’t blame yourself, you followed all the steps. So you blame your husband and leave.

If this is a social experiment I think the Millennial generation should demonstrate that it is a failed one. Or we could look at the vast majority of divorces filed by women.  When are we going to admit this?  It looks increasingly like being a good mother and wife was more about nurture than nature.  Good mothers don’t just happen they were made by training.  Good wives don’t just happen they were made by training, and probably a lot of prayer.  And so we have rebelled against the advice of Paul: “that they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children”(Titus 2). You had one job! Ok maybe two.  But raising incompetent kids an leaving your husbands in droves hardly seems like a success.

I think alpha to beta relations are more scalable on the male side than the female side.  As I mentioned, trying to share experiences across that divide can be dangerous.  A beta female trying to balance all the tasks she sees an alpha female balancing, a media empire,  three children, a church speaking circuit etc, will end up in a nervous breakdown.  But men are more theoretical.  Beta men watching alpha men will take the principles of the leader and apply them to their own smaller kingdom.  You may not be a king but you have a domain you rule over, however small.  And that may be the most glorious thing in the world.  As Chesterton said there is nothing more wonderful than a common man, with is common wife in his common home raising their common children.  The Alpha female is very rare and not all that attractive.  Beta females are better of emulating the older beta-female-of-God next door than the Alpha female on the back of that dust jacket or on the mega church speaking tour.  The path to true greatness is a queen of her house, giving of herself every day for her children and her husband.  Which seems to be more difficult and more rare than just getting a job or endless graduate studies in graduate studies.  And it is therefore the more glorious.  Don’t you want glory? Don’t you want to pass away surrounded by endless well adjusted grandchildren?  Grandchildren not raised by you but by their married parents?  Or do you prefer to die in a pile of paperwork and statistics detailing further decline?  Even if your paperwork sold a million copies.

Further Reading:  https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2015/10/02/sorry-girls-but-the-smartest-people-in-the-world-are-all-men/

There once was an American man-man traveling to Whole Foods for some avocados, when the battery in his earth-saving bicycle exploded.  His iPhone was damaged and he was laying in the ditch with a minor booboo, and a bruised ego, wanting to die.  It so happened that Bernie Sanders was walking by and seeing the man-boy lying there he crossed to the other side.  Elizabeth Warren also passed by, she stopped and took a few selfies so she could blame it on the Republicans, and then kept walking.  Then a Christian passed by and when he saw the man-boy he felt deep pity.  He kneeled down an put a band-aid on the booboo.  Then he put the man-boy and his melted scooter in his truck and took them to church.  He fixed the man-boy’s scooter and left him at the Church so he could become a real man.  The next day the American woke up and decided to press charges against the Christian, accusing him of sabotaging his ride and physically assaulting him by daring to touch him.  He further sued the Church for daring to believe that he shouldn’t have sex with his scooter.  After about 5 years they all settled out of court, it cost the Christian about $10,000 and the Church the same.  The American was last seen telling the story of his victimhood on CNN.

Now, why do you think that Millennials have no neighbors?

The Parable of the Good Samaritan, 1575. Francesco Bassano.

Tap—tap,tap. The struggle was real.  The mayfly continued to try penetrating the double paned glass. He simply must get through it.  Despite having access to the entire outside world, his only desire was to get in, through this seemingly invisible barrier, into this small confined space.  What a tale, that seems to be how sin works.  We are given the freedom of the entire garden, save for one tree, and that is the one we simply must have.  And not that even that tree was not on the menu at some point.  But we wanted it now.  We wanted more.

The Connoisseur. Norman Rockwell. 1961. Oil on Canvas.
Sometimes there is nothing to appreciate, like the work of modernist artists failing to appreciate.

There is a certain aspect to human glory which can be positive.  I think it’s a lot like anger, which rarely works out by proper motives to God glorifying ends.  But it is theoretically possible.  Man is meant to take his place from a little lower than the angels, to ruling over them.  Of course the ultimate fulfillment of this is by the work of Christ.  But like all that we do as Christians, our work should echo his work, as his body today on this earth.

I often see the new not-so-liberal Liberals mocking people for patriotism or taking pride in their nationality or gender.  “You didn’t do anything to become an American, you were just born here.”  But there is always something you can do with all things you have been handed, give thanks, appreciate. In a very real sense this is all any of us can really do, for even the voice you praise with was given to you.  21st century Americans have been given more than any people group in all of  human history.  But all the other men along that path stretching back over time, still have a multitude of things to appreciate; the very breath of life we all take in for every moment however fleeting; the endless beauty and meaning in nature as the choirs of the Psalms proclaim.  And our response ought to be the ‘new songs’ in imitation appreciating what is done for us each day.  Of course anything can be taken too far.  When your sports team loses and you start destroying property or killing people in the streets, that is a major problem.  But the comparison with sports is somehow more understandable.  Team pride is a fine thing.  You don’t wallow in the losses or the weakness of your team as if they prove no team is ever good.  You remember the victories and the accomplishments of the heroes of the past.

This is a rare time, without any heroes.  The myths of the past grew up around men in their finest hours.  Humanity wanted to appreciate and memorialize when great men did great things, despite their faults.  Everyone knows about the faults of humanity, it doesn’t take any skill to tear men down and wallow in the faults.  A people with no great men and no great myths is not great, and so our people is uniquely not great.  Appreciating the past is the only real way to move forward, to grasp rightly at any future glory.  The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, was often pointing this out for his people.  It’s right there in the title.  What did God do for Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  Before that men could look back to the salvation through the waters of baptism for Noah.  Before that men could look to the blessings of creation that had been given to them by God.  You are but dust filled with the Spirit of Life, you are fallen man spared in the Garden, you are given to your lust yet brought through the flood, you are a stiff necked people brought out of Egypt and made a great nation. Tell the stories to your children, as you walk, as you sit as you lay down.  Because without that appreciation, mayhem.

This is our problem today.  I think a good definition of a millennial is someone who doesn’t appreciate anything.  Everything has come so easy for them, they don’t realize the struggle and sacrifice that went into making the world they have been handed by their forefathers.  So rather than be inspired to go on and achieve more things, make America great as they say, they sit around and criticize everything.  I mocked the Occupy Wall Street movement for it’s failure to maintain basic sanitation in a city park, while arrogantly proclaiming the solutions to the world’s problems.  And now that movement has been expanded to whole cities in California.  Having not appreciated the hard work required to carve out civilization and maintain it for centuries, they just throw it away to the sub civilizations looking for a piece of the spoil.  Looters don’t appreciate property, owners appreciate property, and inheritors have a choice they can join the looters or they can appreciate what they have and move forward to help everyone achieve similar prosperity.

There is another form of appreciation.  Appreciation of how bad you are.  Today we lament criticism because we don’t want to be criticized but then we hop on any band wagon destroying the rich and famous or the random.  And anyone born before we were, is somehow an open target to be criticized for anything. It shouldn’t be hard to imagine how other men have failed if we would truly face our own failings first.  Keeping in mind a healthy appreciation for the largeness of the world and the blessings of this world should make us humble and repentant.  You may have an advanced degree, but look at the much larger category of things you don’t know, things you can’t do.  “All we are is dust in the wind dude. “  All we are is a little fly trying to get into the glass cage of sin.

For any ex girlfriends who are still reading, for some reason.  And for those possible girlfriends to whom this applies so much that I doubt if you will ever be a girlfriend again:

The Bitter Draught. Adriaen Brouwer. 1605-1638. Oil on Wood.
And I think this painting finally made bitterness real. Bitterness is a response to something really bitter. But does it make you bitter or do you leave the bitterness in the cup. The sin of others is real, causing this reaction. But do you let the reaction make you? Is this expression frozen on your face years after you have had that draught?

G. K. Chesterton is most famous for the adventures of his Father Brown character.  A lowly priest whose paradoxical poetry is actually more adept at solving mysteries of the Sherlock Holmes variety than said Holmes.  As he says, when things go wrong you don’t need a practical man you need an impractical man.  For Chesterton the modern man was too practical to be of any earthly good.  Chesterton had a great imagination, which is a very useful way of figuring out what might have gone wrong.  You might call it intuition or logical extrapolation but truth about the world can be attained by this method. Modern man doesn’t really care for this sort of thing.  We go in more for the empirical.  Which is why you hear “don’t judge me until you walk in my shoes.” so often.  Because for the modern, truth is only attained by experience, or sense perception.  Chesterton played on this theme often.  Men are always asking Father Brown how he knows about the depravity of man, since it is assumed that he does not have any first hand experience.  “He could have read about it.” As C. S. Lewis said explaining how the creator of Sherlock Holmes may not have actually been addicted to opium.  That it is possible for Conan Doyle to accurately portray an opioid addict without being one.  And this is the case with Father Brown.  Though he didn’t read about the depravity of humanity he heard it every day in confession.  This seems like the proper way for a Shepherd of God’s flock to come by truth, reality.  Again our evangelical culture seems to prefer even that our shepherds have gone astray and had a dramatic conversion experience, themselves.  Building generations of solid Christianity seems to be best done, not by learning things the hard way, but by wisdom imparted from others.

I recently read a small book by Jim Wilson on the subject of Bitterness.  He goes through a number of examples of people he has counseled and how they overcame bitterness.  Of course he had some first hand experience as we all do.  But I’m guessing the subject would not have been so filled out, or possibly addressed at all were it not for all of his counseling experience.  And it was like finally having the cypher which unlocked a lot of my past experiences.  It seems to me that a lot of the things  people do doesn’t make any sense.  As the Architect of the Matrix says “The problem is choice”.  And as another pastor has said, if it made sense, it wouldn’t be sin.  And so hearing Jim explain what bitterness actually was, made some of the actions of others in my past make sense.  “Oh so that’s why there were doing that.” Now this isn’t about blaming others, or missing my own sin, but that’s what a detective does, he tries to explain the nonsense of others. And that’s what each and every one of us must do every day, with ourselves and others.  And a lot of times it’s easier to see our brother’s faults, which is the point of fellowship, iron sharpening iron.  We need to be wise in sorting these things out and we need to help others sort them out.   As this is happening to you, it just seems crazy.  Why is she so mad at her father for something 20 years ago?  Why is she so upset at men in general because of something her boyfriend did 10 years ago?  Why is there never a clean slate with me?  Why does she never want to resolve anything?  Why does she find fraternity with others based on sharing the sins others have committed against you?  Oh I see bitterness.  It seems to me that this sin is more prevalent in the fairer sex.  It also seems that as the fairer sex takes over our culture, this is one of the sins of our age.  Victimhood is everywhere, everyone wants in on the act.  When you are sitting in the counseling situation and one person has a list of grievances going back to the beginning of time and the other person is sitting their with their mouth open, chances are that the first is female and the latter is male.  But why do we side with the woman?  Why do these lists of sins guarantee that she is right and he is wrong? Why are women’s sins so cool?

Bitterness is a failure to forgive.  It may have been triggered by actual sin on the part of the other person.  But then your responsibility begins.  Do you forgive them, or hold it against them?  It never occurred to me that Jesus’ teaching about restoring a lost brother from Matthew 18 could be so turned on it’s head.  Rather than a confession or church discipline being about restoring a brother, bitterness turns it into confirmation.  A confession becomes proof that they really did wrong you and now bitterness says you should hold it against them forever. Every time you say you are sorry(This ads an extra peril to the apology given to make peace, or get physical affection, when you don’t think you really sinned. Don’t do this.), it’s just a confirmation that she can add this to the bitterness list, rather than considering her own sin.  This is not love.  Love is quick to forgive, it is yearning for repentance in another so that they might be free of their sin, and fellowship might be restored.  Bitterness is keeping tabs, because a focus on the sin of others seems to make our sin less of a big deal.  Another aspect of this was made clear to me by another girlfriend.  She was always accusing me of weird things that didn’t make any sense.  And it became clear that she thought accusing me of what she was doing somehow erases any fault on her part.  I just never would have thought about doing such a thing.  It’s another side of the bitterness sin.  It’s all about the sidelong glance, the comparison.  You want your column to look better than their column.  But this means there is always a loser.  This means there is never a comparison with the actual standard, a Holy God.  In which case, who can stand?  How can you have any fellowship or unity when someone is always losing?  We should find common ground in all being losers, in all being sinners before a Holy God.

Tracing the messy entanglements of sin complicates what God has expressed simply, “Love God and Love your neighbor as yourself”.   I wish the ridiculously simplistic version of clenching your fists and ‘loving’ from a frozen Disney princess were true.  But it’s not.  Things are more complicated than that.  I was recently struck by this phrase from the prophet Isaiah:  “I am a man of unclean lips amongst a people of unclean lips.”  There are two categories, yourself and the company you keep.  The company we keep today, loves institutionalized unforgiveness, bitterness.  It loves the sins women have a propensity towards.  Whole fields of psychology have grown up based on digging up the faults of others and focusing on them.  We must be aware of these trends and fight them actively.  This is not an easy thing to do, as clearly seen in the story of Lot and his Pillar of Salt.  We are connected with the people around us, often in ways we should not be. We are to be spreading the light to them, not trying to fit in with their unclean lips.  This is the Gospel light that must shine on our own hearts and which we must take to the world.  Isaiah saw his evil and the evil of those around him because “his eyes had seen the King, the LORD of hosts.”  The sidelong glance was not the right comparison, the right comparison was between Heaven and Earth, God and men.  To see things in perspective is to cleanse your own heart and then run to the world to offer them the only true relief.   The world doesn’t need more bitter stories passed by judgmental whispers in your office.  The world doesn’t need more lists of sins carried on nearby shadows everywhere you go.  The world needs the repentance of the Gospel, even repenting for holding on to the sins of others.  The world needs the forgiveness  of your brother because He first forgave you much more.

Further Reading:
How to Be Free From Bitterness, Jim Wilson

Father Brown, G. K. Chesterton

The quality of public discourse in this country is growing more pathetic by the day, especially among Christians.  We nitpick everyone we dislike and disavow people based on one little thing,  despite a life-long faith of incredible accomplishments, like many of these Civil War Generals(oh good now you snowflakes can stop reading), who were each a better representation of Christ than any Christian leaders today.  And since we see all the falls from glory based on the smallest of failings, we just lay low and keep lowering the standard.  Maybe if we make ‘not judging’ our religion no one will notice us.   Then we can all be happy in our sin. No one will put us on the outs with the big clique.

Knight, Death and the Devil, 1513 , Albrecht Dürer. “The ‘Christian knight’, a tireless warrior who cannot be deterred from his path by Death with an hourglass on an old nag, nor the Devil.”

We have allowed the World to relegate our ‘faith’ to a small corner of our secret, private individual lives during a few hours on Sunday.  If it ever makes it’s way to the public square, then it becomes ‘religious zealotry’, and then we are basically Muhammedan terrorists.  And the World doesn’t even have to enforce this with peer pressure.  Fake Christians do it for them.  And having become friends with the world they are not able to comprehend Christ’s words ““If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.”  People acting out their Christianity in the public square will be hated and persecute, especially in a culture as evil as ours.  And when they are hated, do you think Google searches of them are going to reveal truth?  You trust Google and it’s women abusing, fetal-murdering, truth abusing, friend-of-China-for-monetary-gain culture?  You think you are going to get something besides whatver minor flaw they choose to ‘discredit’ the person.  They do the same thing on the whole with scripture.  They take some evil our culture loves like homosexualists, and then find a verse that sounds bad, and voila the whole Bible is junk.  Then many Christians talk about “the God of the Old Testament”, maybe that will get us off the hook.  “I’m a New Testament hip, modern, postmodern, woke Christian, so no gay bashing here.”  “See I can be friends with the world.”  “Please like me.”

You really think Christianity is about getting along with this evil culture spreading infanticide and sexual perversion?  Spreading all these -isms like environmentalism?  Then when someone dares to debate, argument becomes the enemy.  As if this Christian faith isn’t a War as Paul often said.  Jesus said he came to bring the sword.  And he needs to bring it to the church again, separating those in love with their sin, from the Orthodox.  It’s all right there in Matthew 18.  We should care about those who are in sin.  We should sort it out and pursue them. Maybe we were wrong or maybe they really were in sin.   What we bind on earth is bound in heaven.  What we do here has eternal consequences. We are supposed to decide who is in the Church, who can come to the table and who can not. Hold a trial like Peter in Acts 5.  You don’t just walk away with limp-wristed talk about how you are praying for me and “I hope you find enlightenment”. And all the other passive-aggressive things which are just cowardly.  And ammount to nothing more than judging in every bad sense of the word.  Do something, fight it out like a man, like Paul or Jesus.

It’s going to be a long road.  But start educating yourself.  Read the classics they don’t want you to read because of such excuses as “they are just dead white males” “because, slavery” and all the other nonsense which is really just hatred of Jesus the Christ.

Read Witness by Whittaker Chambers.  Understand the war Marx waged on Christianity.  Go to Summit Ministries and take the worldview test and see how much has crept in that you don’t even realize.  Question the motives of everyone of your public(government) school teachers.  Where they attempting to glorify Christ in History, Literature, Math etc as they taught?  These things do matter.  Jesus is Lord over all, not just our private feeling.  He isn’t just a ticket to heaven.  He is a way of Life.  Read Vaclav Klaus or any number of other people talking about the Global Warming farce like Mark Steyn.  Get a book on logic, read Richard Weaver’s books on Rhetoric.  Then have real debates.  Do some real thinking.  Take every thought captive.  Be a real Christian.

Once upon a time there was a poet, I know not when, I know not where, I remember not who.  He was before an audience reading one of his poems. When he had finished someone asked him what it meant.—and he read it again.  I just love that story I feel the same way about so many things.  The poem was the best way he could express what the poem meant.  The meaning was the poem.  Reading it again was the shortest, most accurate, most beautiful way of expressing what it meant.  Anything else would not due.  It would be to leave something behind.  To dissect it would be to vivisect your beloved family pet in an attempt to understand why he was beloved.  You would destroy him.  Part of the understanding is a thing inexplicable. 

A physiological demonstration with vivisection of a dog. Oil painting by Emile-Edouard Mouchy, 1832.

A woman told me she wanted to copy the colors of my house and I was instantly off contemplating the millions of factors that went into making it beautiful.  A list of colors just seemed vulgar, for that is not where the enchantment resided.  I couldn’t give her what she wanted.  At some level she would be disappointed.  So I suppose I chose to disappoint here now rather than later.  I gave her the first step in the journey, but who knows where she will end up.

I think this may be how Jesus responded to people.  He says that parables concealed meaning.  They can’t be broken down.  You have to have the right heart to inculcate the truth they are brimming with.  If you don’t have that, there is no help for you, there are no smaller bites, no introductory course.  The magic isn’t there. When we turn them into platitudes that apply to every situation, to our situation, they die.  This is especially true of our reading, it is modern mechanistic.  We want formulas and diagrams that work.  Which is why C. S. Lewis compared machines to magic.  Both get things done, they exude power over the world.  But the Logos, truth in word, should work the other way round.  We don’t manipulate it, we should allow it to remake us.  And this is a complex thing, we are body, soul and mind and sinful nature.  We don’t like changing much, we like our sin.  We could learn things by just being told, by using our minds.  But often it requires a sort of living parable or metaphor for us to learn.  God puts us in situations which go to all aspects of our being, and force us to learn or make a choice to learn.  Often we fail the test and go off to worse evil and he leaves us to ourselves.  But he made the world to do this, situations can teach us, minister to our soul, feed our bodies.  Good art can help us do this better, by taking us into another world we can reflect on our own world and become better men.  Nathan does this fofr David when he exercises David’s kingly wisdom, without revealing the bias David has for himself.  Jesus also did this as he put people in situations that forced them to rethink their world the rich young ruler, the woman he called a dog.  These were not theological debates, these were tests of all that they had built themselves to be, their whole person.  And they also make great stories to tell other. To put us in those situations too.

It’s an odd place we find ourselves in philosophically today, because this modern view of the world is going away, but only partly.  We want to each possess a unique, self in many senses of the word.   We want to remake our bodies with tattoos and piercings and crazy clothes and gender reassignment surgery and the bastardization of language.  But in many ways our thinking is more homogenous than ever.  We want to put people in two categories us and them, good and bad.  We love our systems.  We don’t follow professors or wise thinkers, we go and get degrees in programs.  We get jobs in companies, with titles.  They plug any old person into the system.  The particulars of the person matter little.  In fact when they do come out it is often a problem, “it’s not professional”.  What a hideous word, dehumanizing.  It is a modern word, and it’s strange that we keep it around in this sea of hyper individuality.  And we even apply it to churches, pastors are professionals?  How sick.  Absolutely sick. Churches are now seen as business and not living organisms.  We want to make every field of study and every profession into a science instead of an art.

And yet even the sciences are not that modern in the way they really work themselves out.  The average person has never read a scientific study, they just read the story told by the person in the lab or the journalist discussing the person and his lab.  There is an art to solving complex mathematical problems, or using math to solve engineering problems.  There is an art to programming, to say nothing of all the jokes,  because nothing is perfect, especially when dealing with humans.  People ask me how I fixed their computer or how I built a software solution.  And again I am back to staring off into space.  It doesn’t work that way.  We need to get back to the art in things.  As Chesterton said, when things go wrong you don’t need a practical man, you need an impractical man.  The practical man can not imagine things going wrong, only the way things ought to go.  It takes the impractical man, the poet to venture outside the system and dare to see the unseen, the ghost in the machine.  To reenchant what has been taken from us by the modern machine.  It just can’t seem to participate.  And so I will continue to offend people with vague answers.  I will continue to drive people nuts asking too many questions to get to all aspects of a thing to really understand and appreciate it.  That is to love and not vivisect.

If only feminism was as cute and lovable as Rachel McAdams.  But in the movies it can be.  In the movies we can make whatever reality we want become real.  And so it has.  This movie, Morning Glory, is ten years old, but the ethos has become mainstream.  A recent study somewhere, put into numbers the reality that thinking people can see all around us.  Women are more obsessed with their careers than ever.  And men seem to think it’s cute.  While everyone mocks Millennials, including many millennials, no one seems to wonder how this happened.  Why can’t our society raise kids successfully anymore?  Whose fault is this?  Who has dropped the ball?

This is a pretty typical rom-com.  Girl gets dumped, then finally finds a new guy and they fall in love.  They go through some rocky times and live happily ever after.  Only she isn’t dating a guy, she is dating a career.  And she doesn’t get dumped she gets fired.  And she doesn’t fall in love she finds a new job.  It’s really quite insane.  Her boyfriend is really just a sex toy, fading into the background of her career success.  She even has a triumph over the patriarchy as she finally brings Harrison Ford to his knees.  More unfortunate still, this triumph is a triumph of kitschy, pop garbage culture over the erudite.  Of course Hollywood ever in bed with elite journalism, has to maintain this contradiction, playing both sides.  The respectable news anchor, saving the world, speaking truth to power and the new girl on the block, flexing her feminist muscles smacking him down, with a sugar high of vapid nothings.

This whole mess would be somewhat true to life if it were a man, playing the lead role.  But as it stands a pretty young actress is just used to sell the ugly lies of feminism.  And Hollywood has made that sale.  Barren lonely women married to their careers are everywhere.  Each generation of children is a bigger disaster than the last.  Suicide is up.  People don’t get married anymore.  This doesn’t work, we need to try something else.

Why review an old movie?  Beside the fact that I am scraping the bottom of the free barrel, we are the result of our past.  What we sow we reap.  It is also an “I told you so”.  But unfortunately people rarely get that message no matter how blatant.  We are an arrogant people, slow to admit fault.  But rather than move on to the next evil we should learn from our mistakes and try not to repeat them.  That’s what makes us human, we can communicate to one another and warn one another.   Time and again Christian thinkers warn of current and upcoming dangers.  As a category they have been right about a lot of things including most of the modern isms.  Biblical wisdom has the answer to the problems of our age, because it has the answer to the problems of every age.  But first we must humble ourselves and admit where we went wrong.  Only then can Biblical wisdom penetrate our thick heads.    It’s not just about getting saved, it’s about saving everything.  Think about the messages in the movies and music that go into your head, take every thought captive.  Seek to apply the Bible to everything.  God’s word is a blessing.  He doesn’t want us to have these problems as a Family, Church, Nation.  He wants to bless us and make us fruitful. That’s why he hates feminism, it kills the fruit.

The first to go were the fruits and nuts,

They came out of the closet to play.

Then the amber waves of grain decided they were gay,

Rejecting offspring to follow dreams.

Next the cattle on a thousand hills,

Erased their progeny before they were born.

The waters teaming with life,

Burned instead for one another.

The fowl filling the air grew foul,

Transitioned to lust against nature.

And then the man lamented ,

Why nature had turned against him.

The God in whose face he spit,

Spit back with fire and brimstone.

Why did God put the Infinity Stones in the universe?   I don’t mean the Marvel universe but our own.  As the Marvel world winds down, Stan is dead, many loose ends are wrapped up and the last movies is called ‘Endgame’, it won’t be the same going forward, the magic is gone.  But some of the magic that made this world work were the  Infinity Stones.  Gems which contained complete power over certain aspects of the world; space, mind, reality, power, time, soul.  In Infinity War the bad guy gets them all and is basically all powerful, in a Malthusian move he wipes out half of the life in the universe, in a failed attempt to solve the economic problem of scarcity.  Now this sub-created world isn’t as morally accurate or as good, in the real sense of the word, as say Tolkien’s world.  But in order to hold sway with so many it must contain certain connections to the truth.  So why these ridiculously powerful objects?  Obviously it makes these stories better, which is not unlike our world.

In our world, also known as reality, the Infinity Stones are more like ideas, really bad ideas.  From the start they were questions no one had asked before with devastating consequences.  “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”.  Then we are off to the races, the bad idea creeps in and is embodied in the fruit, the apple, or pandora’s box, various forms in various literatures. But wouldn’t the world have been better if no one had asked the question?  Apparently not.  Why do bad things happen?  We often wonder while they happen to us.  Yet we all flock to the theater to watch them happen.  How many people went to see Titanic?  One of the worse sea disasters of all time.  Asking bad questions makes good stories.  When everyone does what they are supposed to and there is no possibility of failure, there is no story.  Which is why Captain Marvel is so lame.  After the garden God placed angels with fiery swords to keep humans from solidifying their sin by making it eternal, by partaking in another object, the tree of life.  Bad questions are generally just testing the opposite of what God said.  And they piled up into a huge flood of sin that wiped out most of the world, save Noah.  Then they piled up again in the great tower of Babel, as men tried congregating instead of spreading and filling the earth. God resets the world again.  It continues generating bad ideas; “maybe we should sacrifice our children?” “virgins?”.  But from now on God only pulls out a small remnant.  And there seems to be cycles.  Why does God allow these ideas of such immense destruction?

Each bad idea, each Infinity Stone asks a bad question and posits a fake Messiah as the solution.  In 1798 Thomas Malthus, wrote an essay laying out the philosophy of Thanos.  War and famine were necessary to balance out the people vs. resources equation.  Since these were going away in the modern world other steps would be necessary to balance the equation.  This thinking lead to modern catastrophes such as eugenics, championed by Hitler and the lesser known founder of Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger.  They were trying to balance the equation.

In 1848 Karl Marx ask his stupid question.  Was the problem with the world really all about economic disparity?  If only we could crash capitalism, Christianity and the Family we would reset the system and all live happily ever after.  The dark red armies marching the earth in pursuit of this insane question, have killed hundreds of millions of people.   Communist famines, wars and death camps made the 20th century the bloodies in human history.

In 1852 while the Communist Manifesto was still hot off the presses, Harriet Beecher Stowe asked a similar questions.  Maybe the problems of the world were due to slavery?  Her misrepresentations and overstatements of southern slavery in a work of complete fiction, kicked off much of the strife we now see to this day in the US.  The radical abolitionists went on to undermine the Biblical and legal foundations of our nation, and the reverberations spread around the world.  The resulting war killed close to a million men and actually made race relations worse.  Rather than patiently working out the issue with talking in government, we took to arms.  North vs. South, the Klan, Black Panthers, marches, demonstrations.  Shows of force instead of political discussions. And now we have all the piggy back movements, everyone wants to be repressed minorities, LGBTQWERTY.

Shortly after Darwin asked his question.  Did God really say he created each according to his kind?  Perhaps kinds just turned into other kinds.  Perhaps their was no God, just metamorphosis.  His question led to the further devaluing of life.  Humans were not special, we just happened.  Forces and Nature had conspired randomly to drive this extreme pragmatism.  Our task was really to further this happening, this survival of the fittest.  Hitler took up this mantle too and millions more died.

Well that didn’t work out so well.  Maybe the problem was really your parents and repressed sexual desire.  Sigmund Freud asked all sorts of insane questions placing blame everywhere but upon you.  There was no original sin, the heart was not desperately wicked.  Men are good made bad by their parents.  So don’t repent, blame someone else.  He may not be responsible for millions dying, but he is responsible for enslaving the modern world in bitterness, anger, envy, jealousy, and a myriad of sexual perversions.  He undermined truth as it applies to self discipline, all the virtues and criminal law.  He kicked off all sorts of destructive projects from asylums to drugs to electroshock techniques.  Science had given us machines.  So let’s apply that science to men and fix everything.

The last of the six stones was The Feminine Mystique.  This bad question asked by Betty Friedan was “Is sex just a social construct?”  The problem with the world doesn’t have anything to do with sin, it’s all about women being forced into subservient positions.  The problem was Paul telling women to love their wives and their husbands.  And the solution was walking out on your kids and your husband and the white picket fence and having free sex in the mud at Woodstock.  And if sex is a social construct so is marriage, so I can marry whomever I want.  I can even choose my own sex, or invent new genders.  And the disease and social chaos continue to this moment.  Many of us are so wrapped up in it we don’t even notice.  Because this evil is now the enslaving social construct Friedan purported to shatter.

But why does God allow all this to happen. Why not keep the lid on pandora’s box?  It’s almost like that isn’t good enough.  It’s like that conversation with Peter by the lake.  Do you love me?  Do you love me in a world where you have to love me?  Will you choose to do what I say in a world where there are only two options?  How about 5 options?  How about 50 options?  Will you repent despite all the excuses given by the above people?  It’s easy to follow Biblical tradition when everyone is doing it.  But will you marry and treat your marriage roles as I have created them, male and female, in a world where everyone is making up new rebellions to my order?  Will you keep your long hair and submit to your husband when no one else is?  Will you work hard and lay down your life to protect your wife from all the snakes in the garden offering lies?  Will you raise your kids to walk in my way?  It’s easy when the free public schools are doing most of it for you.  But will you choose it when it’s not popular?  When it’s expensive?  The Church of late has almost obsessed with the notion of chosen good.  We over emphasize our choice so much because, deep down we “hate the idea that we are not in control of our lives”.  And so we have stopped coming alongside our brother, we have stopped correcting those in error.  We have stopped holding the world to account for it’s evil.  We don’t rule the fool with the rod.  We think the presence of the rod is an indicator of a problem not a form of the solution.  Yet we do the same thing in many areas, we forbid alcohol, we make arbitrary limits on all sorts of areas of life where God does not.  And in addition we succumb to the power of these bad questions, these Infinity Stones.  Part of this is correct.  God made a world with the potential for incredible destructions, from small ideas, mind objects, idols.  He gave us enough rope to hang ourselves, and everyone else.  The world is dangerous and risky.  In some ways pressing on despite the tide of growing evil is a greater love.  It requires much wisdom, which is sorely lacking.  Often we enable sin, cause these little ones to stumble unnecessarily.  We don’t train them to fight, to obey in the face of these new growing forces.  We need to ease children into these risks not protect them in a bubble.  Yet often when they are older and they do stray we need to pull out the rod and correct, bring back that lost sheep.  Narrow the field of options a little.  If not, woe to us for causing the sin.

So I wonder about all these things, as I think about how our universe winds down. What is God’s endgame?  It seems very clear that the Gospel has been remaking the world for the past 2000 years. No more remnant, every knee shall bow.  Much has changed, paganism with its cannibalism and child sacrifice are gone, but in a sense they are not.  The gospel has divided men of every tongue tribe and nation.  The truth has been put to them in the sea of lies and they have made their commitment by the Spirit.  The false world marches down the road to inevitability, getting ever more ticked off that it lost at the cross.  All it can do is ask more dumb questions.  Use the Stones for evil because it must.  Their raging will grow louder but they won’t win.  American Christians have fallen into the inevitable pit themselves, by saying “in the end times things will get worse”.  But that was meant for 1st century Jews trying to decide whether to rebel against Rome or follow Jesus.  Those who followed Jesus lived.  And today following Jesus to life is similar, do what he says, remake the world.  They may have the infinity stones. But we have a leader who came back from the dead.  He his now seated and ruling in heaven.  People who ignore that are inevitable, but they are also a joke.  We are laughing at them.  We have the ultimate weapon, we can lay down our lives.

Further Reading: Pereladra, C. S. Lewis