On Women Being Attracted To Bad Boys

It is frequently believed that bad boys are attractive to a significant proportion of women, especially younger women. Andrew Tate's current popularity (and men like him) seems to give exhibition to this idea. But I don't think the theory is quite right. Women aren't generally attracted to bad boys - bad boys tend to make poor, unreliable and ultimately unsatisfying partners. It's more the case that women are attracted to certain traits, like confidence, extraversion and machismo, that are found in excess in many bad boys, but are misleading signposts in the quest to find a high quality beloved.

I will tell you what I think it's like with an analogy. When I was a child, we had some family friends who had a house in fairly bad repair, but with a fantastic swimming pool and an awesome games room in their outside garage. As children, we loved to go there for the pool and the games, but being so young, we were largely oblivious to the state of the rest of the house. Over time, the house declined into an even worse state, and eventually, by the time we were teenagers, even the swimming pool was neglected to a point where it became a grotty eyesore.

Similarly, bad boys have characteristics, like the swimming pool and games room, that in the short term superficially attract women who are more likely to be swayed and charmed by things like confidence, extraversion and machismo - but because the rest of the house is in such bad disrepair, the long-term prospects are full of hazards and disappointments. 

The swimming pool and games room made the house visits more appealing, but the quality of the house, and how it is attended to, like the bad boy, can only be measured properly when everything is taken into account - where it is then found to be lacking.

Church Set-Up & Varying Human Beliefs

 

When on the church set up team, one of our jobs is to put down the mats for the kids to play on. As you can see from the picture I took above, there are four colours, and for aesthetic effect we endeavour to place the mats so that no two adjacent mats are the same colour. There is actually a mathematical precedent for this - it's called the four colour theorem, and it states that no more than four colours are required to colour the regions of any map so that no two adjacent regions have the same colour.

The four colour theorem has been proven, although the heuristic for the proof is fairly long-winded. This is in contrast to something like the Twin Primes Conjecture (there are infinitely many primes p for which p+2 is also prime), where it has not yet been proven, but yet the heuristic makes the explanation fairly tractable. Then there's Gödel incompleteness theorem (G(F)), which shows that any finite system of axioms is insufficient for proving every result in mathematics, and that any formally mechanised system in which a categorical set of axioms exists cannot be fully captured without leaving a state of incompleteness.

These varying mathematical propositions gave me pause to think about commentary I frequently make on human behaviour, on smart and dumb thinking, and on how certain beliefs are embraced wantonly, even when they are obvious nonsense. This ties in with the other reliable rule of thumb too, that the amount of effort needed to refute incorrect thinking is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to come up with it. There is a complex relationship between the beliefs themselves, the reasons people believe them, and the motivations they have for not questioning them very rigorously (or often not at all).

I think there are three important things to bring to attention about the formation of beliefs. The first is that most of your beliefs are likely to be partially wrong or faulty - the chance that you've thought everything through with precise rigour and without cognitive error is infinitesimally low. The second is that the number of possible wrong interpretations of reality we can produce is immeasurably large, whereas the number of possible right interpretations of reality we can produce is vanishingly small in comparison. And the third is that you have very strong emotional, psychological, cultural and tribal incentives for your beliefs - and the chances that you've managed to address them comprehensively and honestly, without any biases distorting the picture for you, is practically zero.

Consequently, the formation of rational and correct beliefs and viewpoints involve a big ask; they involve precise, careful and attentive reasoning and truthseeking; they involve understanding how complex the search space is; they involve the ability to sift through a lot of data and select the right beliefs from an astronomically larger number of incorrect beliefs; and they involve the willingness to discern and confront our own intellectual biases and emotional prejudices and filter them out as best we can to leave us in support of the bare truth and plain facts. That is a gigantic ask.

And, assuming a willingness to seek the truth honestly, we find that, like the mathematical examples above; in some cases it is hard to sense precisely why something is wrong, but not that hard to determine the steps needed to arrive at the corrective; and in some cases it's easier to sense why something is wrong but harder to determine the steps needed to arrive at the corrective. This is because human error is riddled with complex fault narratives, ranging from intellectual ineptitude, scarcity of knowledge, emotional biases, tribal pressures, paths of least resistance, indolence, weak support networks, and other competing trade offs that compromise the success of the task.

This means the mind is fighting to reconcile a number of foggy inner conflicts; sensing a belief is wrong but lacking the incentive to find out why; finding it convenient to hold a dubious viewpoint because it lessens burdens elsewhere; making assumptions based on outsourcing your thinking to people whose views subliminally serve your own interests well; compromising the truth in an attempt to attain status within an assortative mating pool within sexual selection; assenting to a black and white mode of thinking because it helps you manage negative emotions - the list goes on.

Given all the above, here is some guidance you may find useful. If you hold a view and you suspect deep down that it may be wrong, ask yourself a candid question. Do I really care about being right on this matter? In other words, am I prepared to pay the costs of trying to understand why I'm wrong, what the correct alternative is, and the costs of changing my mind (there may be social, familial, cultural and professional costs of a public change of mind). The vast majority of people who are wrong on a particular issue don't really care about being right. If they were prepared to pay the costs to be right, they usually would have done so by now.

If the answer to the question "Do I really care about being right on this matter?"  is yes - and you'd better pray it is yes - try analysing why you believe this wrong view; think about how you arrived at this belief; think about the incentives of those who also claim to believe this wrong view; think about what experts and others who disagree with you believe about this matter; think about how much you understand the counter arguments to your belief; think about whether this belief makes you feel good about yourself or uncomfortable; think about what would convince you your view is wrong; think about what your best arguments for the opposing side would be if you had to argue for their case in a court-type of scenario.

If you care about being right on a particular matter, and you subject yourself to the above questions and are prepared to go where the indications lead you, there's a decent chance that you will arrive at the right viewpoint. Two words of warning, though. First, if you sense you're not willing to subject all your views to this level of scrutiny, you are probably not taking things seriously enough. Second, if you hold a wrong view and you have no inkling that it's wrong, you need to locate the means by which you might possibly recognise the view as wrong. This can be difficult because the fog that clouds vision can often feel like the vision if you don't sense the clear horizon in the distance. Being wrong but not knowing it, doesn't feel much different to being right; being closed-minded doesn't always feel like close-mindedness; and cognitive errors don't always feel like defects, especially when they are enslaved by passion for a cause.

Anarcho-Capitalism & Benevolent Libertarianism

On a recent video episode of mine, I talked with the brilliant anarcho-capitalist economist Dr. David Friedman about his views on economics and the state. David Friedman believes that everything that the state provides can be provided by the market, but he acknowledges that such a transition would take some time to materialise, as we gradually wean ourselves off state services and onto market-based provision. I’m fairy sure he and I agree on virtually everything to do with the benefits of capitalism and the inefficiencies associated with state provision, but I’m not as confident as Dr. Friedman that his ultimate no-state model is realistic – I think it is more complex than most anarcho-capitalists think.

In my eponymously titled book Benevolent Libertarianism, I tried to come up with an original term that perhaps most accurately summarises my economic and political ethos – and it’s one that gets to the heart of the complexity better, in my view, than the anarcho-capitalist model. Below is a rough post-it-note summary of my views on this matter.

Good economic principles are based on the successes of the free market - trade, innovation, supply, demand, prices, labour, productivity and consumerism - but also in using that framework to take it to an even higher level of personal responsibility and benevolence towards others. That, I think, is the biggest challenge in the modern globalised market, where the world is interconnected and economically unbound by national, cultural or ethnic boundaries; it is to conflate the qualities of the free market with the virtues of loving one's neighbour as oneself, on top of charity, prodigious generosity, and helping the poor become self-sufficient and with a greater standard of living. My economics book attempts to factor in all the social elements, and people's other incentives too.

Humans face a tension between choices which serve ourselves and family, and choices which serve the social group, and sometimes the zero-sum decisions create competing forces between self and community. Humans are motivated by social relationship factors even more than they are material wealth – once material wealth goes above a certain threshold of utilitarian functions (food, drink, safety, shelter, warmth, health etc), then material acquisition becomes bound up with the complex social world of status and impression on others. Even status has a significant social value for many. That is one of the blind spots of the raw capitalists – they miss the chaotic perturbations of feedback capitalism, especially the division and tension in the social aspirations around identity and belonging.

Humans emerged from the complex biological world of adaptive systems, which rely on both central and decentralised methods of adaptation. This requires complex informational signals that cannot always be effectively distributed bottom-up, because the Smithian ‘invisible hand’ method of local incentives and trial & error processing is too computationally protracted to deal with large-scale problems that require some coordinated top-down intelligence. If Benevolent Libertarianism is to have any influence, it must concede that the decentralised market patterns are sometimes inadequate to the task of factoring in all the complex social motivations that feed into status, group identity and community cohesion.

Although I’m not at all party political, it’s obvious from observing party politicians that the great chasm between the left and right is that the right believe society does best by innovation and self-determination, and the left believe in the ideals of community and wealth distribution. It’s clear to me that one’s group affiliation is the key driver in who one prefers, and the policies and economics come second. In reality, a successful society is a complex blend of community ideals and market competition, but both sides are naturally suspicious of the other, and are unlikely to ever change, because capitalists don’t touch base enough with people's social motivations, and the socialists live in an idealised delusion about how the world actually works.

A centralised democratic government, if it has one useful function, would be one that bridges the gap between the two polarities – offering the best of innovation and self-determination, and what the left believes in the ideals of community and wealth distribution – but it usually fails, because almost all voters are in one camp or the other, with few being able to balance the two.

The challenge, therefore, is to find a way to incorporate the qualities of a kind of socialist-individualist-libertarian triumvirate at the personal level with the qualities of the free market and its concomitant mechanism for price theory to efficiently balance supply and demand. Otherwise, we won't make any significant inroads into the deep-seated prejudices, indelibly stamped cognitive limitations and exiguity of epistemic resources available to the individual mind.

Humans are not adroit processing machines like computers, they are adaptive systems that are fed from the minds of other humans, and this communication is replete with incentives and blind spots around status, self-preservation, security, social connection, tribal biases, and individual persona and identity. This means that humans can subject their data to an honest enquiry to the best of their ability and still end up reasoning poorly and getting their facts wrong.

Groupthink and community in-group biases can be advantageous for the individual agent because it short cuts some of the cognitive processing functions and spreads them more thinly across the group. Just as this can be advantageous in learning how to cook, hunt, codify ethics and tell stories, it can also mean that some of the views we have are not subjected to enough individual scrutiny and remain unchallenged, as we become a little more dehumanised by being embroiled in the mistakes and cultural taints of the wider community. We are creatures who incur both costs and benefits of distributing computational power too readily among other minds and both costs and benefits of distributing computational power not readily enough.

Markets contain non-linear feedback systems, which are likely to yield chaotic market instability that brings about stress and insecurity for humanity. The first part of this problem is that humans are only cognisant enough to operate within a set of values that place the individual self, the family, and other strong ties at a primacy, which makes it harder to factor in the global effects of their decision-making.

My big personal problem with the state, as it has evolved in the past few hundred years, is that I find it profoundly difficult being governed by people who are so incompetent at the things they manage, and by people who are so self-serving, partisan and narrow minded that they do not deserve the power they have, and operate within a system that makes it nearly impossible for it to be radically undermined or peacefully overthrown. This is a big philosophical and moral problem. But the other side of the philosophical and moral problem is that most people in most nations do not want to live in a world without the state. The state would not exist with such prominence if the majority of individuals had not empowered its proliferation in size and scope – but if the state’s existence is a central part of our socio-personal psychological make up, then the increased freedoms enjoyed from its eradication would likely encroach on the freedoms of those who value it and deem it necessary. Of course, we could contend that if only people just became a lot smarter and understood how fraught the state model is, they would join the libertarians in desiring its diminution, but the “If only things were x, then y” propositions are usually not very robust arguments.

The thing that I think anarcho-capitalists neglect to understand most is that, being complex adaptive systems, humans are continually caught between the lines of an ex ante (before the event) assessment of the world and a post facto (after the event) projection of how things will play out - and bottom up systems do not always contain the foresight and central intelligence to simultaneously plan for varying eventualities and at the same time adapt fast enough as the situations evolve. For example, things like welfare provision, disease research and virus prevention seem to require a delicate balance between centralised and decentralised information structures, and it is hard to imagine how pure market initiatives could administer the foresight and central intelligence to allocate resources efficiently and with adequate execution time to keep the institutions up to speed with changing environments.

Centralised intelligence also keeps in check the chaotic perturbations that emerge from feedback loops and non-linear instabilities, and create hazards and distortions. It’s true that politicians are hopelessly incompetent at managing these situations, but it’s also the case that leaving all this to market mechanisms would be an inadequate solution for the top-down complexity of the task. Markets with too much freedom underwhelm the necessary big picture thinking, and governments with too much power overwhelm big picture thinking – and therefore, the optimum balance is likely to occur with a much freer market than we have now, with a much smaller state than we have now.

I’m not even sure it’s realistically possible to get rid of the state. Given the inevitable power law distribution of wealth, and the natural hierarchies that emerge from differentiated power and competence and status mongering, I suspect that even a concerted attempt to produce the hypothetically ideal anarcho-capitalist society would soon find itself succumbing to the formation of a structure where acquisition of authority and rule was at the heart of the society, because it will probably always be the case that there are a majority of humans who wish to delegate responsibility to those who promise to govern them according to their wishes and principles. In most cases, central planning will never have the knowledge, incentives or resources to act on our behalf better than we can ourselves from a bottom-up standpoint; but on the other hand, in some cases, bottom up decision making also lacks the knowledge, incentives or resources to centrally plan and distribute resources with the foresight and big picture thinking required to support the free market. The upshot of all this is that a healthy combination of market and state is highly likely to be an inevitable coaction on the journey of human progress.

 

Theological Reflections From A Greek Pilgrimage

 

My wife Zosia and I have just spent nearly two weeks travelling over 1200 miles around Greece. We set out to have an exhilarating, spiritual, theological and philosophical adventure - following in St. Paul's theological footsteps in some places (Corinth, Thessaloniki, Philippi, Veria, Kavala), following in Greece's rich historical and cultural footsteps in other places (Meteora, Drama, Pella, Mount Olympus, Preveza), and fulfilling both criteria in our visit to Athens.

We invited God in at every step to feed into our journey, fill us with more of Himself, and enhance our wisdom with every passing mile. He most certainly obliged - in fact, it's highly unlikely that one can embark on such a spiritual adventure with hunger, good intentions and an open heart, and not come away fed, blessed and fulfilled. That which we give to God in dedication, He gives back to us to an immeasurably greater degree.

Below is a reflection of some of the things I captured along the way, in this quest for nourishment on our pilgrimage. A small confession - as a writer, I did, of course, take my note book and pen, enchanted by the prospect of jotting things down profound wisdom like an ancient scribe - but the reality is, what was captured below was done so on the voice recorder and camera on my mobile phone. The ancient and the contemporary crossed paths, blended through the long passing of time.

Adventures of the kind we had, teach us about the new things contained in the adventure, but they also teach us new things about the life we've temporarily left behind - rather like how eating another nation's cuisine heightens our appreciation for our own national cuisine at the same time, or how reading literature teaches us important things about reading philosophy too (and vice-versa). Rudyard Kipling once said “What do they know of England, who only England know?”, and what he meant was, not only do you not know much of other countries if you only know England - you don't know so much of England either without knowing other countries with which to make comparisons. Travelling helps us understand the destinations better, but it also helps us understand our homeland better - and that can be extended into our psychological, philosophical and spiritual endowments too.

In some ways, the Greeks are so much more laid back about rules - it's a more liberating place than Britain, and hasn't yet been infected by the many cultural viruses that have plagued the UK. But it's less liberating in some senses too; for example, it has a very religious attitude to church buildings - you can't walk in to a church without the right coverings, especially if you're female. Greek orthodoxy and some of the Catholic tradition is mired in religiosity, and it heightened my appreciation for freer expressions of the faith found in countries like ours, where dogma has not ossified the faith in as many places.

In a monastery in Meteora, I read a sign that proudly stated that every year on Holy Saturday, for two millennia, the Holy Light is miraculously lit by lightning inside the Holy Sepulchre, and only of course in the presence of the Greek orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, to symbolise the resurrection of Christ. I do not believe a word of it. I think God neither endorses this nor deigns Himself to perform miracles during conditions under which such poorly motivated mechanical proclamations are at play. It reeks of false attestations made because the spiritual well of grace theology has dried up. Britain may not be half as religious as Greece, but for now the Christianity it does have seems for the most part to be suffused with grace as the pivot around which the power of the gospel revolves.

Walking around some places in Greece, taking pictures with modern mobile technology that the ancients couldn't possibly have conceived, gave me a sense that there are ways in which not much had changed in cultural pockets of Greece for hundreds of years. We are tendentious creatures; we often prefer to stick to the comfort zones. But it ought to be mentioned – even the great dramatists like Herodotus and Sophocles and Euripides and Aeschylus all at first seem ponderous to the boy who has only read Roald Dahl and Hans Christian Anderson, and even, perhaps, Oscar Wilde. And the comparison works at an extra level of significance too, because the Greek tragedies, set in a backdrop of cultural, political and military power, and colonialism, and cultural identity bring forth their slowness in being only a substitute for something better (as shown by the cultural worshipping of Dionysus – who had the exotic womanliness akin to the motherliness of bonding sacrificial love). In dramatisations of the tragedies on stage, the actors wore masks, and the masks transformed the actors in a similar way to how the masks of works transform our true identities as creatures liberated under grace. 

There is a reason why Christ talked of bringing not peace but a sword, and why He said conflicts were inevitable, and why He reiterated that He has come to divide families. I do not think it is simply because He knew that many would reject His gospel of grace, or that we would be forever falling out over how best to go about our business. I think it is because He knew that although life is lived forwards, it is only reviewed backwards with retrospect - and it is with such retrospection we are able to see that God never wanted homogeneity. Our very uniqueness in mental composition and in cultural influence is precisely what makes the reaching of our full potential so full of wonder, as we journey through the stages of growth. 

Herodotus and Sophocles and Euripides and Aeschylus only seem ponderous to the populist, not because easy fixes on Oscar Wilde are a bad thing (in many ways one could make a decent case that Oscar Wilde is better than all four), but because at our worst we can be so busy with our own masks on that we remain inattentive to where those tragedies lead us to when we are incarcerated in a cultural stasis, worshipping gods and images that were no more exalted than their best thinkers, and in many cases, worse.

I captured this photo as we were driving through Macedonia, because it brought to mind a line from C.S Lewis from his Surprised By Joy: "To prefer my own happiness to my neighbour's was like thinking that the nearest telegraph post was really the largest."

For sheer natural gravitas, I think Mount Olympus was the most stunning place we visited - so named because, being the tallest mountain, it's the place where the Greeks thought the 12 Olympian gods lived. Made up gods don't live anywhere, of course, whereas the one true God lives everywhere (Psalm 139: 7-12) - and that is the power and spirit we took to the mountain. As we made our way up to the highest points accessible by car, I reflected on my past writing about how our ideas about multiple gods evolved into ideas about one God. The multiple gods the Greeks (and Romans, Scandinavians, etc) created over time represented the best and worst of our ideas about higher order values, and we began to refine them as we subjected them to a natural selection kind of filter, which inevitably led to the dying out of these invented gods.

As well as the rise of Christianity, the principal thing, I think, is that the gods of the Greeks were so obviously gods made in man’s image. Greek gods were in every way simulations of what the imagination can sense about the self if we are left to our own devices. Like us, they were on the most human of levels – their gods were often uncharitable, insensitive, base, incorrigibly proud, far too animalistic to be considered Divine, and nowhere near beautiful or numinous or ineffable enough to be worthy of our awe and worship. This gives them poor evolvability, because when subjected to selection pressure, humans will usually outgrow their deference to made up creatures and recognise these qualities in other humans instead. Many thousands of other gods and religions (although sadly, not all) went the same way for the same kind of reasons – the concepts associated with the ideas lost out to competing ideas, be they religious or non-religious.

The most rewarding part of Olympus was the secret waterfall we discovered. It was also the hardest place to reach, requiring a concerted effort on foot to get there. This, of course, is true of nearly all of the most rewarding pursuits in life - the things that are most worth discovering are the things that take the most effort to acquire.

 

As we visited the ancient ruins of Corinth and Philippi, and sensed St. Paul's influence there, I also felt myself moved with the regard for the struggles the early Christians endured for our sake in influencing the dissemination of the word. It is good to reflect on such matters, and clothe ourselves in humility and gratitude as we do so. We can also celebrate the fact that although the church throughout its early years endured severe persecution at the hands of both the Jews and the Romans, it flourished and grew rapidly. When we look at the Christians persecuted after the resurrection; under such conditions there were few earthly benefits for them for their unfeigned allegiance to Christ, only the cause of grace that they believed in. They were locked up, beaten and tortured, but still did not renounce their faith in Jesus as God, because they were stalwarts – real warriors for Christ and people who deserve our respect, our admiration, and our remembrance. They believed in the profound message of grace that would put right the wrongs of Roman oppression (a notion which quite a few Romans actually embraced).

Greece is steeped in Roman influence, of course, especially in terms of the influence Rome had on Christendom. If you are familiar with Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, you can see parallels between the historical decline and the socio-cultural declension of the grace theology that should bootstrap the faith. Gibbon’s thesis is that the Roman Empire succumbed to external and internal sanguinary conflicts (including the degeneracy of the Roman army and the Praetorian guards) and its own gradual diminution because of loss of civic virtue among its citizens. The fall of the Empire, just like the fall of humankind, is not God’s primary dispensation – fallenness seems to be part of nature’s quintessence, as the true riches of God’s plans are played out in the poorness of a broken world. It seems to take a world of fallenness to see a world full of grace, which is what St. Paul writes about so comprehensively in his epistle to the Romans.

The other work that strikes a symbolic chord here is also Roman; it is Dante’s brilliant exposition of his own journey in Divine Comedy, journeying through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven towards our Triune God. Just as in the Psalms of lament (such as Psalm 12 where the Psalmist is bemoaning ungodliness, or Psalm 74 where the Psalmist is bemoaning a malcontent towards God Himself), God remains our the last refuge, because every part of our love and our virtue steers us towards Him – His feet and arms carry where ours are in despair, and dejection cannot even lift us off of our knees. And if He will lead us back into a standing position, fortified and consolidated in our readiness to progress, then He will put us right back on course with beatific visions, just as Christ did. The real secret wisdom in Dante choosing Beatrice (Beatific) to guide him through Heaven seems to me to be this; in being his ideal woman she must have most closely resembled the bride that he wanted to be. As a bride of Christ, she was the embodiment of the bride that he wanted to capture in himself (Revelation 18:23).

If Dante’s inferno was about our seeing sin for what it really is, then heaven must be our seeing what supreme grace really is. The in between “Mountain of Purgatory” is a brilliant allegorical depiction of the psychology of getting to know the first hints of grace theology by confronting the darkest that is in us. If the freely given cross of Christ is the answer to nature’s need of love and grace, and its encouragement to play a part in our own administering of the best love and grace we can, then our being brides of Christ is the security that underwrites that mission. In the words of Dante, the desires and the will are…

Being turned like a wheel, all at one speed,
By the Love which moves the sun and the other stars.

At the end of Divine Comedy, when Dante meets St. Peter and St. John, we get to understand something so inherently absent in Greek orthodoxy; we cannot easily express our deepest intuitions about grace because we are only sampling its true fullness. Legalism and stuffy religiosity is myopic to the fact that grace is the most liberating thing of all (John 8:31-32 - "the truth will set you free") - and consequently, the real power of grace can only be fully understood in relation to a perfect God who revealed grace in the mystery of Christ's simultaneous divinity and humanity – only by trying to grasp that with the help of the Holy Spirit can we become aligned with God's supreme grace.

This is a significant part of the influence driving my desire for following in Paul's footsteps in Greece and Rome (I aspire to go to Ephesus too in the future). Where Dante seems to find the greater refuge in meeting St. Peter and St. John, my own gravitation was always more forcefully pulled towards St. Paul – for I think he is the greatest Christian explicator who has ever lived. His epistles take the Divine level of Jesus (through St. Paul’s own encounter with the Holy Spirit), and the human level of Jesus (through St. Paul’s own humility, weakness and suffering) to convey the most advanced and enlightened grace theology ever written. 

Contained within St. Paul’s epistles, we find not just the greatest explicator of grace that we have ever seen, we find a mind hugely tormented and assailed by the world outside of him – a mind of devotion that was able to disconnect him from the faults and weaknesses of others in order that he could counsel them best and serve their needs by using his own strength in Christ as a bridge to grace. One of the best examples of this is his approach in Areopagus - a place that we had the pleasure of visiting - where Greek philosophy had a huge hold on the people there – a place of strong intellectual vigour and a legacy of philosophical wisdom. St. Paul begins by bringing together the virtues of mankind by praising them for being worshipfully inclined, but he then proffers the suggestion that what draws a man towards worship must be greater than anything humans can construct:

"Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands."

Although human virtue is the first step of a good conceptual footing – its goodness is relative to the God behind this grace theology – and the mind of St. Paul probably understood that better than anyone. His greatest thinking led him to see that no earthly richness could compare to knowing Christ, as he rightly considered everything else a loss when compared with knowing Christ. He powerfully declared that that neither earth nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord – and this is the ultimate grace theology – the best the world has ever known. 

Given the foregoing, standing on Areopagus hill was one of my personal highlights on the trip.

I imagined Paul preaching there to the masses steeped in Greek philosophy - and having read the works of Aristotle and Plato in the past - I can well imagine their reaction was not exactly very positive. Nevertheless, St. Paul was at pains to point out that grace extends to everyone – there are no philosophical hoops to jump through because recognition of grace is recognition of Christ’s expression, both human and Divine - and that is what Divine inclusion is. Perhaps at a subliminal level the Pagan (and the atheist in general) has to 'hope' in the absence of faith, and the Christian 'trusts' in the absence of unbelieving 'hope'. Maybe that's why Zeus left "hope" at the bottom of Pandora's Box - seeing it as shaving off trust and leaving hope that one's future is in one's control and not the gods. St. Paul was delighted to put his life in Christ’s control, and that is where we know true blessedness will be achieved. 

It also serves a good reminder that theology is a formal subject to us moderns, but it wasn't so much to Paul - it was a mission, a state of necessary being, in order for the gospel to be propagated - just like, to the physicist, componential study of light reveals transportations of energy through electromagnetic radiation; but to the 1st century man lost in the forest at night, the flame on his candle is seen only as the source of the way out. 

Areopagus hill has another important place in my heart, as it was also the influence of Areopagitica, the great work by John Milton - and possibly the best book ever on free speech and freedom of expression. Milton lays down the edict about the necessity of having a free press, the liberty to not be silenced or censored, and the wisdom that people who try to impede the freedom of expression in others harm themselves too, because they rob themselves of the ability to hear and think.

By the time we had visited Athens, I acquired another strong sense of how God was speaking to us on this pilgrimage. We felt so close to Him throughout the adventure, and we sensed a profound level of favour in everything we did - in all the little details of our journey, from public transport arriving just when we needed it to be, to favourable weather, to room upgrades, to all the right people being there just when we needed them. I believe God wanted to remind us how much favour there is in drawing near to Him. Favour of this kind doesn't mean everything will always go exactly as we think we want it to go, but it does mean that everything will always go exactly as we need it to go in order for God to ultimately bless us and teach us what we need to learn.

I'm sure that this pilgrimage has opened doors for God to speak to us in new ways, and a short piece like this is quite inadequate to the task of capturing the full essence of what God has said to us, and plans to do further within us. For quite often, we find that the most powerful ways that God connects with us are beyond the scope of our own articulation. And we all know too that the surest way to undermine something satisfying is to try to break it down into constituent analyses. Introspection aimed at joy and pleasure only leaves us with the by-product, not the thing in itself - like the ripples in the river after the current hits the rock.

We planned and researched this trip ourselves, and as such, we spanned the entire country with a sense of freedom and liberation, entirely open to what God wanted to do in us and through us on this pilgrimage. I sense that on top of what I've conveyed above, further seeds have been planted that will bear more fruit in the future. For anyone inclined to embark on a similar journey of this kind, I cannot recommend it enough. Apart from maybe a trip to the Holy Land of Israel, a spiritual pilgrimage in Greece in the footsteps of St. Paul is perhaps the most rewarding excursion a Christian can make.