Month: November 2024

Step Out Of Your Echo chamber

How many perspectives are you getting? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

“What are you reading?”

“A book by Herbert Marcuse.”

“What’s he doing now?”

“Not much since he’s been dead for several years, but I consider him one of the most wicked men of all.”

“Then why are you reading it?”

So someone asked me at my job recently. It’s a good question. I told them that it’s important to know what your enemy is doing. I told them this is one of the starting places for DEI and other such ideas. I have read many books I disagree with. Now, I also make it a point to always be going through at least one book that I disagree with.

I interact frequently with JWs on Facebook and they never seem to really interact with opposing arguments. I challenge them to read books they disagree with. No interest. I ask atheists if they will read something they disagree with. No interest. It’s become so common that I make it a point of saying these people are scared of contrary thought. It’s usually demonstrated when I just ask “What was the last book you read that you disagreed with?”

Why should you do this?

For one thing, it shows you’re taking a position seriously. If I go to a Muslim, it’s good for them to know I have read their material. I have read the Qur’an and the Hadiths of Al Bukhari. I have read all the Mormon Scriptures and a number of their other supplementary works. I still remember one time I asked a Muslim if he had ever read the New Testament and he said “No. Have you ever read the Qur’an?”

Conversation ended quickly when I said “Yes.”

Second, you can actually learn some things. I have learned things, and not just what I disagree with, from reading Bart Ehrman. Sometimes, an outside perspective can cause you to see things in a new light. You can miss what your blind spots don’t let you see, and we all have blind spots.

Third, hypothetically, they could be right. You could read about a position and wind up changing your mind on it. I remember someone read my co-authored book Defining Inerrancy and left a review saying they went in sure they would disagree with what we advocated, and they left agreeing with it. If your end goal is truth, what do you have to lose?

Fourth, you show respect for your intellectual opponent that way. If you come to me and I know that you know my position and not only that, understand it and can articulate it, then I am more likely to listen to you. If you go to me and you totally misrepresent my position, then I have no reason to listen to you on anything.

Now some of you might be firm Christians and aren’t interested in dialoguing with atheists and cultists and others. I think you should, but aside from that, you can still read something you disagree with. Pick a position you strongly hold in Christianity and read something that disagrees with it.

Strong Calvinist? Read an Arminian.

Strong Preterist? Read someone arguing for dispensationalism?

Cessationist? Read someone advocating for miracles today.

Old-Earth creationist? Read a young-Earth creationist.

Believe you can lose salvation? Read someone who holds to eternal security.

This also applies to political views. Strong liberal? Read a conservative. Strong conservative? Read a liberal. Hate Trump? Read a book by someone defending him. Can’t stand Democrats? Read a book by someone defending them.

Also, when you choose another book, try to read someone who looks like they know what they’re talking about. Pastor Bob’s reasons to believe God exists is quite likely not the best resource to go to if you’re an atheist. “Why God is Stupid” is probably not the best atheistic book title. (And no, as far as I know, those are not real books.) Try to take on something that will challenge you.

If you’re curious, since a student here asked me about Black Hebrew Israelites, I’m going through a book about them now by someone who advocates the position. This is the one I chose. It didn’t cost a lot on Kindle and it’s a little over 1,000 pages which told me the guy had to be really dedicated with it. Do I think it’s nonsense? Yes. Do I think he uses poor argumentation? Yes. Am I better informed still for going through it? Yes. If I meet someone who holds this position, I can say that I have read such  work and I could be seen in a more respectable manner also.

Step out of your echo chamber. You could learn something.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Is Masculinity Bad?

Is it bad to be a man?

Recently, I was still going through The Bully Society and I was reading about the bully economy. While the book has a lot to say about the problem of bullying, it fails a lot in the area of solutions, and in this case tying the problem in with capitalism. Am I to think that if we went to socialism, all the kids in the world would join hands and sing Kum-Bu-Yah together?

Anyway, the author notes that some of the attributes given to masculinity are also similar to capitalism. Those are aggressive, competitive, and powerful. That is the way the market is seen sometimes. I could defend capitalism here, but I have done that in other posts.

For now, I notice that it seems that being aggressive, powerful, and competitive are bad things inherently. There is no doubt these can be used for evil purposes, but that does not mean that they are evil. I can use my car in my apartment parking lot to drive to work and church. I can also use it to drive over little old ladies crossing the street. The car is not the issue. The person is the issue.

You can think it wrong for a man to be powerful, but if a man is going to make a positive change, he needs some power. You can think it is wrong for him to be aggressive, but if he is going to go forward in pursuit of a goal and stand up to evil, he needs to be powerful. You can think it is wrong for him to be competitive, but if he is going to want to excel, he needs to want to be better than those who don’t.

I can say on my end that while I do not see myself as aggressive or powerful, competitive does ring true, but that is what has caused me to study academically far more. It is wanting to be the best at what I do that has got me here. Had I not had this kind of spirit in me, I would have heard the doom and gloom about a diagnosis of autism and said “Oh well. Guess I’ll never amount to anything.”

What would be better is to ask the question of what a man is instead of saying that those ideas of masculinity are bad, or at least implying that they are. This is part of the problem. We do not know what men are, but usually it is assumed that whatever they are, they are bad.

If society does not know what men and women are, it should not be a shock that we have issues like failing to understand marriage and relationships or that we have debates over transgenderism. I acknowledge that in some ways, the question of what a man or a woman is is a simple question. In another way, it is a complex question. It gets to a question of essences, which I consider a problem for a purely materialistic position.

So if a man does not have any indicator that he is a man, then what will he do? He will try to seek it elsewhere. He could do so by being powerful in a gang. He could do so by being competitive in sports or even video games. He could do so by being aggressive in business or with women. Some of these are fine, but some aren’t. It is fine to be competitive on the athletic field, provided you are not wronging the others out there. It is not fine to be powerful in a gang and seek to do wrong to other men and women. It is fine to be confident with women. It is not fine to be so aggressive that you force your way onto them.

If a man doesn’t know if he is a man, he could still try harmful ways. He could think he has to sleep with as many women as possible, highly persuasive since sex often leaves a man feeling like a man. He could be willing to cheat to get ahead in sports, say by taking steroids. He could seek power by trying to beat up other men or even kill them. He could try to get material possessions as a status symbol to everyone else.

By the way, women will also try counterparts, but seeing as I am a man, I am talking about them.

What he likely will not try is to try to build up character and be a man of virtue. We have lost sight of virtue as what builds up a person and ultimately a society. A society cannot last if goodness is not one of the goals of society. If all a society cares about is going for all that you can get and the vapid pursuit of pleasure, it will fail.

Unfortunately, not much is said about that. Everything else is blamed. It’s the video games. It’s the guns. It’s the schools. It’s capitalism.

No. The problem is us.

We need to change.

We need a return to virtue and men being virtuous men and women being virtuous women. Unfortunately, with moral relativism, we don’t really know what virtue is either. The more we blame everything else, the less we will care about virtue.

Masculinity is not bad, but anything we do without virtue will taint everything else. We must return to that and I contend only Christianity can truly give us the virtue we need.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

Should Elon Be Wealthy?

Is it wrong to have wealth? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I got into a Facebook debate recently with someone talking about Elon Musk and all the wealth he has. Obviously, Elon needs to do more with the money that he has. He has so much money while so many people are suffering from hunger.

This kind of argumentation has a lot of emotional appeal. In our society, many of us have come to hate some people for having money. Of course, a lot of celebrities and athletes are exempt from this because, well, we get entertained by them. We also know that we can’t be them, but a CEO? That’s different.

Let’s look at the last part first. There are a lot of people dying from hunger. Yes. The problem is that this is not just a money problem. This is a problem because of wicked governments in the world. Believe it or not, some dictators out there don’t care if their people starve or not. It’s not as if people wanting to feed the hungry are allowed to go door-to-door in these countries giving out food to the poor. No. In many cases, the government will seize and goods that come in and use that as leverage to control the populace.

“Well, Elon has more money than he needs!”

Yet as I was told this, I asked back immediately if the person was using a library computer. Do they have a car? Do they have a smart phone? Do they have a place to live with a bed and with heat and air? Can they take a warm shower? Do they have food in their refrigerators and cabinets? If they answered yes, then they are actually themselves among the richest people in the world.

It’s awfully strange then that such people do not have to give away what they have. They do not have more money than they need. It is those people who are above them that are the problem. To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, it is amazing that Elon Musk is greedy for wanting to keep the money he has earned, but someone else is not greedy for wanting what they think is their share of the money Elon has earned.

Not only this, but it’s not as if Elon Musk keeps his money in Scrooge’s vault and goes swimming in it regularly. Usually, what we measure is the net worth of a CEO. He has money invested in his earnings and his business. Saying he is worth X billion does not mean he has X billion in his bank account.

We also have to ask how many people does Musk employ? There are plenty of people who have jobs today because of Musk. CEOs own the company, but who does a lot of the work also in the company? Middle-class employees.

Does Musk give to charities also? Yes. When the hurricane hit areas in the east of America, he was there to provide internet services and other goods for those in need. Someone could say Musk could give more, but when we stand before God, we won’t be asked about what Musk did with what he had. We will be asked what we did with what we had.

Let’s suppose that instead of investing in his company which would create jobs, Musk goes out and buys a yacht or a mansion. Doesn’t that hurt us? No. Hint. CEOs do not build yachts and mansions. Who builds them? Again, middle-class people. It is the rank and file that build them and thus, they have jobs. You can say they are temporary, but all construction jobs are temporary.

Let us suppose that Musk puts his money in a bank. You could say it is just sitting there, but you know who it provides opportunities for? You and I. We can take out loans from a bank because of money that has been put there by others. That money could be used to fund education or our own small businesses we want to start.

Does the Bible often seem to condemn the rich and the wealthy? Yes, but it is not because they are rich and wealthy. Plenty of heroes of the faith are also rich and wealthy. Abraham and the patriarchs were incredibly rich. David and Solomon were rich. Anyone who provided for a New Testament church and the copying of New Testament manuscripts was rich. Having wealth is not the problem. Wealth having you is the problem.

Also, in America, if you are poor, it is not because another person is rich.  If Elon’s money was equally divided among all Americans, we would all get about $777 one time. For me, that could pay my rent for one month and maybe one or two other bills and then that’s it. This is something people miss when they want to talk about going to college and getting free health care and just letting the rich pay for it. As Margaret Thatcher said, the problem with socialism is sooner or later you run out of other peoples’ money. Not only do the rich lose the money, but they have less they can do to hire other people.

Keep in mind as I say this that I am not rich myself. I have my own Patreon and I make minimum wage at my job. When it comes to voting, my policy is simple. Never vote for a new tax. Always vote for a tax cut. Does that include tax cuts for the rich? Absolutely. I trust that they can do more good with the money than the government can, a government that is $35 trillion in debt doesn’t have a lot to say about how other people should use their money. Government needs to reduce its spending, not take more from us.

Could Musk do more? I am sure he could, but that is an irrelevant question to ask. The question I should be asking is “Can I do more?” The question you should be asking is the same. When I meet someone who wants someone rich to give away all they own, but they won’t part with their smartphone, computer, automobile, etc. I just can’t take them seriously.

Do what you can with what you have. How someone else is spending their income will be between them and God.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

The Ouroboros of Feminism

Has feminism really helped women? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I have been reading The Bully Society and the book talks about how women are often treated, including by other women! Women live in a quite contradictory world. If you wish to remain a virgin until you’re wedding night, then you’re a prude. If you do sleep around with men, you’re a slut.

I have said that the self-esteem movement was a failure. Feminism was also a failure and has become an ouroboros. If you do not know, that’s the depiction you will see sometimes of a snake that eats its tail.

The first mistake is that it has been thought that men and women are different and therefore, one is superior to the other. This doesn’t follow. There are plenty of things that are different to one another, but it does not follow that one is superior. Cats and dogs are different and people have their preferences, but it does not follow that one is superior. The same could be said with various foods, colors, books, movies, etc. Sometimes there is a superior, but not just because two things are different.

There was also the question of men sometimes getting different treatment, such as in the workplace, but this was not because men are superior. It was because men and women are different in that women can miss long periods of work at a time when they have children. Men are not the same way. It was tempting to write “Do not have the same problem” but that assumes that it is a problem.

I happen to side with what the Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft said. Men are superior at one thing, being men. Women are superior at one thing, being women.

Keep that in mind as we go along.

Unfortunately, women started seeing their being a woman as the problem. While the pill certainly helped some, it was abortion that really got the ball rolling. With that, women were able to eliminate pregnancy. Thus, they could have careers like men.

Just pause to think about that. Innocent human lives dying for the sake of a career. We read in the Bible about the Canaanites performing child sacrifice, but we’re worse. At least they saw that as a real sacrifice and did it for the good of the harvest.

Baby: Why must I die?

Canaanite: We realize what a value you are to us so we are sacrificing you as a gift to the gods so that they will bless us with a bountiful harvest so we can all survive.

Baby: Why must I die?

Women: Because your mother didn’t want to have you and just wanted to have sex without consequences and if she has you, she can’t get that promotion she wants at work and go on to have a successful career. You are an inconvenience on her path to independence.

They are both wrong, but the Canaanites make a better case.

In The Bully Society, it is claimed that many of the early feminists wanted men to start treating sex the way women did. Generally, women seem more interested in building relationships. Men generally tend to be more interested in, well, sex. Not so, instead, women started to act more like men and why wouldn’t they? They had already killed their femininity with abortion.

Fast forward past that and the LGBTQ people start making cases. “Hey! If couples get married all the time without children and we allow abortion, then really children don’t matter. Right? If marriage is not really about children, but about the happiness of the people involved, then why can’t we get married?”

And if it is true that marriage is not about building up a stable family unit for a future generation, then they have a point. Why can’t they? It is as if the whole of society had ceased to really think about marriage and what it was and decided that whatever this is, we can just apply it to another group.

With that, the sexes in a marriage became interchangeable. You don’t have to have a man and a woman. You can have two men or two women. Now we have people marrying buildings and animals and other inanimate objects and even themselves. Before long, the Mormons will surely be pushing for polygamy, and why not? After all, if male and female are artificial ideas thrust on marriage, why stop at just two people?

It was only a few years after that we went the next logical step. Note in saying logical I am not agreeing with it, but I am saying that if you accept the premises already mentioned, the conclusion does naturally follow. If men and women are interchangeable in marriage, why not everywhere else? This gets us to the transgender movement.

Remember how I referred to Kreeft earlier saying men are superior at being men and women at being women?

This is no longer the case.

Men claiming to be women are winning sports competitions. They are winning beauty pageants. They are even winning poker tournaments. Not only that, but many women are defending this. Who are the superior women now?

Looks like men are.

Oh. What else do the men get out of this?

They still get to keep their jobs. They also get to have all the sex they want with the women who will kill the children so that men don’t have to have responsibility for them. They also don’t even have to marry the women any more to get to have sex.

Women meanwhile have lost their femininity and are being beat by men in what was supposed to be the areas for women.

This is the end result of feminism.

True femininity encourages women to celebrate being women. It tells them having children is not a hindrance but is a gift. It tells them to celebrate the differences they have from men. It tells them to have men earn sex with them by making lifelong commitments to them prior. It also tells them to stay faithful to the men that they do marry and build families together.

In this deal, women get to have a future with their DNA passed down to their children, they get to be provided for by their husbands, they get to be loved and adored, and oh yes, they get to have the sex without worrying about the consequences because having a baby isn’t a problem to them. They can also tell men to get out of women’s sports and other women’s areas. They can work if they want to, but it’s not a requirement.

Maybe it’s just me, but it looks like women are better off with a more traditional approach.

If you are a woman, celebrate it. Don’t be a feminist.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

Why I Am Enjoying Persona 5 Royal Edition

What makes this game so appealing? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

A short while back, a friend of mine gave me a $30 gift card to the Nintendo Eshop. (Anyone wanting to repeat his gift is welcome to!) One of the games I bought was Persona 5 Royal that was on sale. I have come to know it as a popular RPG series so I wanted to give it a shot.

I’m quite glad I did.

So firstly, with RPG styles, it’s one of my favorites. Turn-based. I get to think out my strategy and see how everything works together. That being said, it has to be more than just a turn-based game to get my notice and to get to this blog.

So some minor spoilers, but it’s just for the first level. You start out in a point in the story that I have yet to get to, and then the game is a flashback of when you arrived at an academy in Japan with a reputation, apparently undeserved, of a delinquent. As you are at your school though, you find yourself in a different world of sorts.

It is like a castle and the king is of all people, the volleyball coach at the school. You meet a character in the castle who becomes an ally and soon meet others who wind up in the castle with you. What you learn is that these are worlds that are based on the cognitive perceptions of people with really distorted views of the world and especially themselves.

Turns out, this volleyball coach is actually abusive to the students and likes to take advantage of the female students. Yes. This is really deep stuff going on. The first mission then is to go into his palace, which is the name of the cognitive dwellings these people have, and steal his treasure, which should lead to him confessing his sins in the real world.

The psychological side of it all is quite fascinating and I understand it borrows a lot from Jung. I haven’t read Jung, but I did just find his complete works on Kindle for less than a dollar so I’m going to take care of that. The game involves characters facing up to reality as it is and embracing their “personas”. Your main character is the only one who can embrace multiple personas and switch between them and even fuse and sacrifice them later on for different effects, including all-new personas.

The battle is not the only part that matters. As I am going through the game, I have to build up other attributes, namely guts, kindness, charm, proficiency, and knowledge. Not only that, I have to build up relationships with various people in the world and the more I do that, the more my skills in the “metaverse”, as the cognitive world is called, and other such places improves.

As someone on the spectrum, I am finding this fascinating as a prompt will pop up asking what I want to say at a certain time and I am given various options. It’s a really easy way to learn to converse seeing as I have all the time in the world to think. I have to try to think how each person I talk to will respond to what I say. The goal is to build up the relationships after all.

I have yet to finish so if you have, please do not give me spoilers on it. I am quite enjoying it now and that is leaving me thinking about my own relationships in the real world. I can see the people I know in my own life and think about improving my bonds with them. Odds are whenever I finish reading the work of Jung, I will come back and visit this some more as well.

So if you like RPGs and you want something with a psychological and philosophical style to it, give the Persona series a try. You also don’t have to play previous games to understand later ones. This one is the first I have played and I am understanding it just fine.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Book Plunge: God Doesn’t Whisper

Is God whispering to His people? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Buy this book!

Seriously! What are you waiting for? Buy this book!

As I kept going through this book, I was thinking “I wish I could put this in the hands of every evangelical Christian out there!” The problem pastor Osman is speaking about is one that is present throughout the church. It is the idea that God has a will for your life and He is trying to tell you what it is and you need to be listening for it.

Osman goes after this entirely and he has done his homework looking up the claims of people who teach this and reading their books. I have read books like this here as well and every single one of them is just awful in this area. Pastor Osman is much more thorough than I am in this.

Bonus too! This guy is a pastor! I treasure that because so many pastors seem to fall into the groupthink on this. So many people are making disastrous decisions with their lives and not following proper wisdom for following an unbiblical pattern of decision making.

It puzzles me even more when my fellow Protestants do this. Aren’t we the people who claim that we are people of the book? The Bible is our final authority? We only go with what the Bible teaches? Despite that, we have bought into an idea that is not even taught in the Bible and is our own form of extra-biblical revelation that is to each of us and has us playing a guessing game with the will of God.

It reminds me of what my ex-wife used to struggle with as she would have a dream and the next day be thinking about it all day. She would ask me “What do you think it means?” I always said the same thing to her. “Honey. If you spent as much time trying to understand what Scripture means, which you know comes from God, as you do trying to understand your dreams, which you don’t know come from God, how much better off you would be.”

What does Osman deal with? Still small voice? Yep. Feeling a peace about it? Yep. Being led by the Spirit? Yep. Open doors? Yep. My sheep hear my voice? Definitely. Every biblical distortion out there, he interacts with.

At the same time, there seems to be nothing personal against the people who hold to this methodology often. There is no doubting that many people who hold to this are sincere Christians and think they are doing good. However, sincerity is not enough.

The only section I really disagreed with him on was Muslim dreams. I am entirely open to Muslims having dreams that lead them to Jesus and the difference I think is that these are dreams that are JUST for that purpose. They are not meant to help the Muslim in day-to-day decision-making. Osman and I can debate that hypothetically, but we do agree on the general premise of day-to-day living.

Also, Osman is a cessationist, but that is not necessary for his position. I am not one. I think Craig Keener has presented tremendous evidence that miracles are taking place today. I am open to the possibility that God can speak today if need be, but it needs to be tested and checked and it won’t be something done subjectively. If God speaks, it will be clear. We won’t have to wonder if it’s Him speaking.

Please. Buy this book! Read it and learn it!

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

The Failure of Self-Esteem

Does it work to build up a child’s self-esteem? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I am going through The Bully Society now, among many other books. Something I am noticing in this book is the rampant problem of bullying in our schools. That’s not a shock. What causes it though is often making sure kids have the right fashions or that men are men and not coming across as feminine or “gay”. It’s odd that in schools, those who are educated are the ones who are the oddballs and the schools lavish everything on the athletes.

As I keep going through this, I have a dominant thought.

The self-esteem movement is a colossal failure.

We have spent so much time telling kids to feel good about themselves and be proud of who they are. Meanwhile, you have numerous kids around them telling them that they are shameful and embarrassing and they should not be proud of who they are. Who do children at that age want to please more generally? Their teachers and other adults, or their younger peers?

Knowing that, which voices are going to speak the most to them?

The problem with the self-esteem movement is that it is grounded in nothing. Think about how it is when you get a mass text or a mass email from a business that tells you how much they are thinking about you. You know they’re not. You’re just a name on a list. They don’t know who you are.

It is the same with the self-esteem movement. “Oh! You’re telling me all these wonderful things about me! Thank you so much! It means so much that you see me that way and….wait….you just said the exact same thing to them….and to that other person…and to the next one.”

At that point, you realize it has nothing to do with you.

Kids then want to go to the people who do know them and those are their peers. They will do anything because they want to be accepted and not rejected. They want to fit in. In principle, there’s nothing wrong with that. We all want to be accepted. We all hate rejection.

The problem can be sometimes these kids do things that they shouldn’t do because they want that acceptance. Status has been defined before as buying things you don’t want with money you don’t have to impress people you don’t like. It is really short-term thinking. It’s not about children building up good character, but about children being liked.

This also leads to them getting involved sexually. The problem is, they approach usually from very different standpoints. A man needs to be sexually active in society because that is what a man does. The man is not thinking about long-term commitment. He’s thinking about notches on his headboard and getting the woman naked. This is also why so many guys dump girls after they sleep with them.

Girls generally want love and often think “if I give the man what he wants, he will give me that love.” The sad thing is, it doesn’t work. The idea of feminist empowerment so that women can enjoy sex the way men does is a failure because women are not men. Women end up being used and the guy still gets what he wants most of the time.

So what are children chasing after for acceptance? Material things and sex. Why shouldn’t they? What else are they being given to ground their worth in?

The church definitely needs to improve. Often, our message is the same as the world’s, but with a Christian veneer painted on it. The goal is often to get young people to feel good about themselves instead of being good themselves. It is to determine how they stand with God based on their feelings instead of a sound understanding of Scripture.

That also means a whole teaching of theology and doctrine and the reasons behind it. Hard work? Yes. Would you prefer to keep doing what we’re doing instead? How is that working out?

Our young people are worth it. They need a solid foundation for who they are in Christ. Only then will they not chase after everything else for identity.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

 

Make It Engaging First

Does our material really connect? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I recently started reading Kevin J. Vanhoozer’s Mere Christian Hermeneutics. This is actually the first time I have ever read a book by him and I did not know what to expect. As I started going through, I found myself quite enjoying what I was reading.

There seems to be a hidden assumption among academics that their writings must be as dry and boring as possible. Yes. There is a tendency to think “Just the Facts” in Joe Friday style, but the prophets used vibrant language at times and the life of Jesus was put into the form of a story.

Consider these quotes from Vanhoozer:

“There are more things in discourse and text than are dreamed of in critical theory.” (p. 4)

An avid reader will recognize an allusion to Shakespeare immediately. Vanhoozer makes the point about how lacking critical theory is to the reading of Scripture, but does so in a way that sticks with the reader. The reader sees that and with a bit of bemusement goes on, but remembering the point.

Also on that same page:

“Consequently, we need not only to “test the spirits” (1 John 4:1) but also to test the hermeneutics. We need to conduct an experiment in criticism.”

Readers will here note a reference to Scripture, but others will note a reference to a work by C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, in a book that is also itself a reference to Lewis in title, a take-off on Mere Christianity.

Things like this show up regularly in the work. The point is the reader feels engaged with then. If the reader is engaged in the material, they are more likely to remember the material and apply it.

About a year or so ago, I had Switch Online at the time on my Nintendo Switch and sat down and went through the first and second quests of the original The Legend of Zelda and then went through A Link to the Past. I could still do everything and find everything. Had I ever taken a test on these games? No. Was it even a necessity to find everything? No. You can finish the games without doing so. Had I been regularly reading material on those games to make sure I remembered where everything was? No.

I just engaged with the material and I learned it.

Quick. Try to think of two words that can be used to describe a long and boring talk. Two that I can easily think of and the ones you might have are sermon and lecture. If you go to a church on Sunday, what is the message often called? A sermon. If you go to your college or seminary classroom what do you get? A lecture. Quiz time. How much do you learn from those? If you’re like me, not much. Most of us the next day can’t remember what the pastor preached on yesterday. Some people can’t even remember a few hours later.

I watch a lot of gaming news and I am particularly interested in how my culture is responding to DEI. One such channel is the Kilted Cajun. I am going to use a slogan of his in talking about making good games and that is “Make it fun first.” I am modifying that a bit to say “Make it engaging first.”

We often have made this mistake in Christian media. How many of you have ever got together with non-Christian friends to go see something like a superhero movie? Sure. Most everyone wants to see those. How many of you have ever got together with some non-Christian friends to go see a Christian movie? Right. When was the last time you had people excited about a new Christian movie coming out?

The only one I can think of is something from The Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis was a master of this. Lewis was engaging. In Christianity, Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox all like to read Lewis. Atheists enjoy reading Lewis. I recall the account of one atheist who was stunned years later when she realized that Aslan was meant to picture Jesus. How many times had she been reading those books and unbeknownst to her, she was learning Christianity at the same time?

In the gaming field, this is the big mistake that the DEI crowd is making. They are forcing DEI into everything so that it’s artificial. To refer to another YouTuber, they are all about doing whatever they can to get in “The Message.”

Consider the case of Concord. This was a game that Sony spent at least $100 million on. Some places say as much as $400 million. It was at least eight years in the making. It was hoped to produce a major franchise.

Most FPS franchises nowadays are free to play and buy with the money coming from in-game purchases. That was the first strike against Concord. The major problem seems to be that the game was incredibly woke pushing things like pronouns.

DEI is so bad that there has even been a website set up to warn people about games that have DEI in them. I used to play Pokemon Go regularly, until they had a developer come in who remade the avatars and pretty much erased male and female from them. All the bodies had to look exactly the same.

There was recently a remake released of Dragon Quest III. I loved the original game, but I am not getting the remake. Why? Woke is in it. Instead of male and female for your character, you have type A and type B. Nothing uplifts women like referring to their bodies as Type B.

Why is this ruining games? Same reason. The material is not engaging. The message comes first and then they try to strap a narrative or a game on top of that. No one wants it. It would be interesting for a company like Square Enix to release another version of the Dragon Quest III Remake and have it be one without the woke stuff in it and see if it sells better. Prediction. It would.

In all of this, I am not at all suggesting that we lower the importance of facts and data. I am saying we need to consider how the material is coming across. We can have the best material in the world, but if no one wants to engage with the material, no one will get it. No one will learn it.

A teacher can have the best information, but if his students aren’t engaged when he teaches, then they won’t remember it long-term. They can study and learn it for a test, but they will forget it after. A preacher can work hard on a sermon, but if the audience does not feel engaged, they will not recall it or practice it. How this is done is up to the speaker and producer of whatever material is there, but it needs to be done.

We have a long history of bad media being made because we focused on message instead of the packaging. Now the woke are making the same material and we can see what we were doing for years. Let’s learn from our mistakes and their mistakes.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Why Do Christians Doubt Science?

Why are so many Christians skeptical of science? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

When I say Christians, let me be clear at the start that I am speaking largely of lay Christians. There are several devout Christians in the sciences. Also, I do not think a lot of Christians doubt everything in science. Most Christians still cook food using tools of science and drive cars and travel by airplane.

Yet somehow, it seems there is an increase in the skepticism of claims of science.

In all honesty, I’m one of them also.

Why?

There are two great tragedies I think have happened in scientific history. The first is that there was a false warfare started between science and religion. This meant people had to choose one or the other normally. Atheists would ignore anything religious and quickly dismiss it and miss out on eternal life from a Christian perspective. On a more pragmatic level, there are Christians with great minds who could have gone into scientific fields, but were told they had to choose science or Christianity.

On the other hand, Christians bunkered down a lot more in their own circles and didn’t invest enough in the scientific enterprise. They perpetuated a myth that had been started. Christians could have been doing wonders in science, and yet the warfare continued. Christians got injected with a heavy dose of scientific skepticism.

The second great tragedy I consider far worse for the scientific enterprise.

That was when science married politics.

At least, on the outside looking in, that’s what it looks like.

Let’s go back to 2020 and the Covid controversy going on. Narratives were controlled then. If you said the virus came from a lab in China, you were a racist and a conspiracy theorist. Now, that is accepted truth. Many of us were skeptical of masks and school shutdowns. Looking back, it seems that we were right.

Any mention of hydroxychloroquine was off-limits, especially since it was espoused by the bad orange man. The same happened with Ivermectin. I remember active debates with people who were arguing that people were being encouraged to take horse medication.

Then the vaccines came out. I thought that would be the end of it. I was wrong. Suddenly, you didn’t just need the shot, you needed several boosters of the shot. We were also told if we didn’t get a shot, we were a danger to those who had got the vaccine somehow. It made no sense to us.

Not only that, anything contrary was quickly shut down. Yes. We saw the emails between Fauci and Collins and others. We saw that the science was being controlled and if you dared raise questions, you were anti-science.

And yet, many of us thought raising questions was what science was about.

Many of us also knew people who suffered long-term side-effects from the vaccine. Those stories were ignored as well. The information was being controlled and people would be punished somehow on social media. I remember making a joke post about what the best place was to farm for vaccines on Final Fantasy IX only for Facebook to automatically put up something on my post about contacting the CDC.

Now let’s talk about global warming also.

Many of us have seen threats of doom and gloom and the funny thing is, every prediction in the past that the due date has arrived, it has proven false. I remember being taught in Elementary school back in the 80’s that an ice age was coming. Leonard Nimoy talked about it back in 1979.

Now imagine if we had done something radical back then and taken steps to warm the planet. Where do you think we would be today with the hysteria? The problem many of us see is that the solution is always the same and well, it always seems to come down to more government control and more power for politicians.

Funny how that works out.

We also see all these celebrities talking about the crisis and we all need to cut back while they fly off on their private jets. We see politicians talk about the oceans are about to rise and then they buy oceanfront property. It always seems like the environmental stuff is what everyone else is supposed to do.

By the way, none of this is allowed to be questioned either.

You can also add in transgenderism where we’re told to deny basic biology. It is interesting that it seems to be abortion where people don’t want to look at the science the most and really turn philosophical. It may be a baby, but is it a person? Again, all of this seems tied to one end of the political spectrum.

For me, I can say that since Covid, I have grown a lot more suspicious. We have also seen in our political news how quickly stories get covered up and buried. Many of us do get suspicious.

This is ultimately why many Christians, and also many non-Christians are skeptical today. It’s not because we’re hiding thinking our worldview is in danger. It is because that science often seems to be science tied to an agenda. We live in an age where people are questioning narratives and if science seems married to a narrative, they will question whatever aspect is tied to it.

Until the average layman can tell that the two are not married, they will question whatever aspects of science seem tied to that union. Will this have worse consequences down the line? I am sure it will. Sadly, for many of us, it looks like the enemy came from within.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

Is Atheism a Lack of Belief?

What does it mean to be an atheist? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Recently, I had someone give me the old saying that atheism is just a lack of belief in God. I had heard it several times. Fortunately, I decided I would bring up an article I had written on that which I found….

Wait! What’s this?! I didn’t have one!

Time to take care of that oversight!

Many a times, an atheist will say they are just someone who lacks God belief. I find this to be a cowardly move as it is a way to avoid dealing with the arguments more often and put the onus on the believer entirely. After all, how can you refute it if someone says they believe or don’t believe something. Even if I met the most staunch and intellectual atheist in the world, how could he argue against the fact that I do believe in God? He could say “I 100% agree that you believe, but I just don’t think your belief is well-founded.”

So a question that arises then is “Who has the burden of proof?” The answer is simple. Whoever makes the claim has the burden. Suppose the atheist says to me “There is no God.” I ask “What’s your evidence God does not exist?” He then says to me “Well if He does, demonstrate that He does.”

Now let us suppose that I am incapable of doing that. What does that prove? It does not prove atheism. It just proves that I did not have sufficient reasons for belief. He still has asserted a belief and he still has to demonstrate it. We could easily leave with agnosticism. We do not know if He does or does not exist.

Now if I enter the debate and originally say that God does exist, I do indeed have the burden of proving my claim. If I am unable to do that, that still does not show atheism is false. It just shows my reasons were insufficient. At best, we are left with agnosticism.

So now let’s look at what atheism is. Is it the lack of belief? One of the first places I turn to is the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the topic. You can find that here.

A relevant section is this part:

It has come to be widely accepted that to be an atheist is to affirm the non-existence of God.  Anthony Flew (1984) called this positive atheism, whereas to lack a belief that God or gods exist is to be a negative atheist. Parallels for this use of the term would be terms such as “amoral,” “atypical,” or “asymmetrical.”  So negative atheism would includes someone who has never reflected on the question of whether or not God exists and has no opinion about the matter and someone who had thought about the matter a great deal and has concluded either that she has insufficient evidence to decide the question, or that the question cannot be resolved in principle.  Agnosticism is traditionally characterized as neither believing that God exists nor believing that God does not exist.

Unfortunately, I do not really think this part is well-written. (Would includes?) On this, I do not see any real difference between what it calls negative atheism and agnosticism. Are there any other authorities we can go to? As it turns out, yes.

“Atheism is the position that affirms the non-existence of God. It proposes positive disbelief rather than mere suspension of belief.”

William Rowe The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy p.62

“Atheism, as presented in this book, is a definite doctrine, and defending it requires one to engage with religious ideas. An atheist is one who denies the existence of a personal, transcendent creator of the universe, rather than one who simply lives life without reference to such a being.”

Robin Le Poidevin Arguing for Atheism: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion p.xvii

And

But is there anything beyond what scholars of atheism say?

An atheist should hypothetically imagine a world where God exists. In this world, the claim of theism, God exists, is true. I understand atheists do not believe that, but Aristotle is said to have said that the mark of an educated man is to be able to entertain an idea without believing in it.

Now in this same world, imagine if you are an atheist, that you are still an atheist. That is pretty easy to do. In this case, atheism is true, in the sense that you lack God belief. However, that would also mean that its opposite, theism, is also true, since the a in front of the word theism is a negation. This would mean that two contradictory statements were true, which is impossible.

Okay. So maybe you want to change theism to mean just that someone has God belief. The problem with that then is, “What are we even debating?” The terms become simply statements about personal psychology and nothing more. You can go see a therapist and talk about what you feel about something, but a therapist will likely not try to argue that you do not feel it.

Now if an atheist wants to come and debate their feelings with me, well, okay. I don’t see the point. I’d rather talk about external reality. If you’re saying atheism is just a lack of belief, you’re really saying you are not informed enough to take a stand on the issue and if that is the case, why should I even bother debating you and why should you even try to argue me out of my position?

Be real instead. Atheism is saying that God does not exist. I think it’s a wrong position, but at least we can debate it.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)