Odds, Ends & Stray Musings: Images Of God

 

"Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.”
Thomas Merton

Alongside that is Calvinist pastor and psychoanalyst Oscar Pfister’s observation:

“Tell me what you find in your Bible, and I will tell you what sort of person you are.”

While I don't think those observations are literally true every step of the way, they contain a lot of truth. Often we ask what God is like, but we shouldn’t neglect to ask what we are like when we look at Him. Is our conception of God sometimes less the God who is, and more the God we think we need, or the God we want Him to be? We must allow God to shape our image of Him, and be careful that it’s not our wishful image of Him shaping us.

Just a few thoughts for us all to be mindful of.

Most Schools & Universities Are Now Indoctrination Camps For Impressionable Young Minds That Deserve Better

Depressingly, according to Rob Henderson, the number of incoming college students who describe their political beliefs as “far left” has tripled since the early 1980s, and doubled since 2013. Alas, it's all a very deliberate ploy from the state, of course.

Think of it this way. Arguments frequently erupt about whether 16 year olds should be allowed to vote. Most left-leaning people habitually say yes, most others say no. The majority of young people vote for left wing parties, so the bias of the two contrasting positions is obvious. Left-leaning politicians want young people to have the vote so they can secure more votes.

I once explained why women tend to be more left wing, but alas, the reason I think young people also tend to be more left wing is much more disturbing and disheartening. The cynical answer, which I also think is the truest, is twofold: it's that young people have fewer responsibilities and not much capital, so they don't feel many of the costs of left wing policies (although even that impression is less true than young people think). And it's also the case that very young people are ripe for indoctrination, and the education system plays on this (as anyone who has been to a protest rally would have witnessed).

I believe it is very much the fault of the schools and universities at a proximal level, but it's also more distally a product of the establishment that has a significant deleterious effect on young people's education. I think whenever you observe significant shifts in the zeitgeist, whereby something is very noticeable (which in itself is unusual, as things usually manifest in a creeping fashion), you have to look for a top down influence, because bottom up influences don't usually show up on the radar this way (occasionally they do, but not often).

The surge in young voters in the past few years is symptomatic of a mass indoctrination program by the left, to take their thoughts captive when they're young, and keep them for as long as possible until they (or at least some of them) grow up and learn how to think more proficiently. Didn't you find it strange that the parties who support votes for children are Labour, Liberal Democrats, Green Party, the SNP, and Plaid Cymru? It's all very deliberate, you know.

That's why the left wants to lower the voting age to 16, to catch even more pliable young minds and enmesh them in their net. This is because for the past couple of decades (at least) the establishment is potentially vulnerable to opposing ideas and movements that occur in a more globalised nexus of interconnectedness. That is, influential ideas, in favour of the establishment and against it, are going to manifest with an exponential curve, not a linear one. Consequently, the establishment has driven its agenda to start on schoolchildren when they are young, and mould them in the establishment fashion through the rest of their education, and later in university too.

And because the state operates in loco parentis, it tends to become coterminous with actual parental influence/family too - so the child has even greater difficulty escaping the often subtle, sometimes explicit manipulations. There are many elements to the agenda - a lot of it is a Stockholm syndrome-type conditioning to make the impressionable young things believe they should love the authorities and delegate personal freedoms to their leading players. Then there are veiled threats bound up in identity politics, and group identification, and a whole host of other things that are complex and probably require a whole book of thoughts for me to jot down.

The upshot is, the top down cause is a systematic drive by the establishment to manipulate the young into exactly the kind of pliable, conformist citizens the establishment wants them to be. And that is the principal reason why left wing politicians are always championing the lowering of the voting age to 16, and why the number of young people who describe their political beliefs as “far left” is increasing to the levels it has been.  

See The Individual By Seeing The Group

 

You can tell a lot about the credibility of many views in public discourse by analysing the groups of people who subscribe to them. You can't always tell everything - and obviously you should also draw from further analysis of the propositions - but a good subsidiary way to consider which group is right is to consider the type of people in each group, and work outwards from there. You also get indication, as I've stated before, of what else they are predicted to believe, and then you can start to join the dots and understand that the structure and bad logic of one belief is connected to structure and bad logic of another, and so forth.

Let's take the example of a matter I raised recently in this Blog post, and expand on the psychology even further:

Opinion A: Israel is committing genocide in the Middle East.

Opinion B: Israel is not committing genocide in the Middle East.

Swathes of people are firmly convinced of Opinion A, and swathes of people, myself included, are firmly convinced of Opinion B. Those who hold Opinion A are unlikely to be convinced otherwise, and ditto those who hold Opinion B.

So how do we tackle such a subject, when it causes so much irreconcilable division, so much animosity (even between people with whom we otherwise get on well and like), and evokes so many painful emotions, given the near-inevitable continued bifurcation between Opinion A and B folk?

Even if you knew nothing about the particular propositions at hand, you can get some idea of the likely credibility of the claims by observing the individuals at the group level. I will give you my impression of both groups, from my experience of hearing comprehensively from both sides, and from knowing quite a few people, including extended family, who are based in the Middle East, and have openly shared their perspective. While there are always exceptions, the individuals in Group B (Israel is not committing genocide in the Middle East) tend to be much more balanced, objective and thoughtful in their analysis, while allowing for fair criticism of Israel's handling of some situations. They are also a much broader and more diverse group of people, whose views on other matters would be much harder to predict.

The upshot is, when I look at individual beliefs people have, I try to discern the character and tendencies of the groups behind particular opinions, because it offers a subtle but powerful lens through which to evaluate the driving forces behind those beliefs. Obviously, careful examination of evidence and argument should always take primacy, but knowing the patterns in individuals’ broader beliefs can illuminate potential biases, inconsistencies, and blind spots, and confer high degrees of predictability on what else they are likely to believe.

One final point regarding the claim that Israel is committing genocide: Israel possesses overwhelming military superiority and, if its objective were simply the physical destruction of the Palestinian people, it has the capability to inflict vastly greater casualties than it has. That alone should at least give reasonable observers pause before assuming genocidal intent.

Schoolboy Climate Errors

 

One of the reasons I’ve written a whole book dedicated to the physics and economics of climate change is because the mainstream scientific and political interpretations are so misjudged, I can’t actually believe they see the light of day, much less become the mainstream narrative swallowed up wholesale by large swathes of the population. And here I really don’t just mean “Alas, they’ve got a few things wrong”, I mean “Heck, this is one of the most absurd failures of analytical reasoning ever wrought on a developed society, and one of the costliest ideological mistakes in recent history!” (see my blog post here for more on this)

The basic errors being made in the climate change alarmism are so elementary that I'm in a constant state of surprise that they are taken seriously enough to make it into mainstream discussion. Note, I don’t mean on the matter of whether there will be problems to solve - I mean the schoolboy-like heuristics being applied to how the whole situation is evaluated. Take the most blatant of all errors: literally the vast majority of the projections of future climate issues I’ve seen are implicitly assuming no technological, scientific, economic, or general standards-of-living progress during the period being measured. It is so absurd, it’s hard to describe it as anything other than recklessly negligent.

Once we see the naïve analytical failure in the assumption that human systems will simply remain static in the face of changing conditions, it becomes plainer to see the folly in the tendency to treat worst-case scenarios as if they were the most likely outcomes. This is a classic misunderstanding of risk modelling, which I blogged about here: extreme projections exist to bracket the outer limits of possibility, not to define the central forecast - which is a bad enough error if you are factoring in dynamic human change within the timeframe, but positively ridiculous if you are treating the timeframe as static. Presenting tail-risk outcomes as standard expectations in a mistakenly static model creates such a distorted sense of perspective that it has vanishingly little to do with the actual distribution of probabilities. It’s the kind of mistake you’d expect from a child who hasn’t yet learned that he won’t always have the problem of relying on stabilisers to ride his bike, or the issue of not being able to reach items on adult-size shelves.   

These are the principal reasons behind the negligent attempts to smuggle moral or ideological conclusions under the pretext of scientific claims. And here I’m only talking about some of the least bad attempts to frame this - I haven’t even sunk to the level of the average political folly coming from the mouths of mainstream politicians like the Green Party and Ed Miliband.

When it comes to the climate, there is no such thing as ‘the’ scientific community (see my blogs here and here) – the institution has become so fraught with crony capitalism, political meddling and institutional malfeasance that many of its exponents (though not all) no longer distinguish clearly between empirical findings, value judgments, and policy preferences - they simply blend them into a single, confused, ideological narrative, as though the data itself mandates the particular political agenda they are being paid or coerced into supporting.

This conflation of facts and prescriptions is such a basic category error that it’s one that even any first-year student of critical reasoning should spot a mile off. The fact that it has become the rule and not the exception is a shocking indictment of our times - especially as the same thing has happened with fiscal and monetary policy, labour markets, housing policy, price theory, basic biology of the sexes, and education policy.

Christians Need To Rise Up

I think it’s high time that Christians spoke more confidently about politics from a Christian perspective, because currently too many Christians are being co-opted by the cultural manipulations and tribal impulses of political parties on both the left and right, who are anti-Christian in their ethos, and corrosive in their influences. 

Some of them are even able to seduce by offering the sort of policies and calls to action that simulate the kind of things one might expect Christians to say, which is why it’s good to remember that darkness often masquerades as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). One of the most salutary lessons you can learn about what comes from most of our political parties is that anti-Christian beliefs often try to imitate goodness by counterfeiting it.

Therefore, Christians really shouldn’t keep maintaining a circumspect faith as they nervously dance around a political landscape that seeks to dominate the narrative on subjects over which Christ has given us authority. Too many believers approach political discourse with hesitation, as though their deepest commitments are liabilities rather than sources of truth, justice, clarity and courage. Christian belief is not something that must be cautiously justified before it can be proclaimed. The convictions Christians hold (or should hold) about truth, justice, human dignity, goodness, compassion, etc, should be confidently leading the way in politics, not taking a back seat to party-political ideology and virtue-signalling that’s anti-Christian at source, and hollow in substance.

I don’t, of course, mean that Christian political conviction should always be voiced like a minister delivering a sermon. But there’s no bigger political truth than this: At its best, Christian belief provides the most coherent moral framework for the social considerations of the dignity of every person, the reality of sin, the call to justice, the priority of the vulnerable, the hope of redemption, and the limits of earthly power.

It is time for Christians to recover their voice in a nation that so badly needs to hear it.

Odds, Ends and Stray Musings: God's Nearness

 

Some people say they have an absence of evidence for God’s existence or that He has remained hidden from them. The problem is, if God knows us and cares about us even more than we know and care about ourselves (as per Acts 17:27-28 - 'In Him we live and move and have our being), then He cannot really be absent or hidden. It must be the case that something in the individual human state - whether distraction, woundedness, pride, fear, myopia, or simply not being ready yet – prevents the individual from recognising Him, as He is already as near as we need Him to be (especially given verses like 2 Corinthians 4:4; Ephesians 4:18 and John 1:10–11).