The Ten Rules of Cult Club

Whenever I’ve spent some time engaging cults (with Answers In Genesis being the most recent), I’ve inevitably found the same patterns of observation – almost always without fail. Here is my rough ‘Am I in a cult?’ top ten checklist: 

1)    The first rule of cult club is that you don’t know you’re in a cult.

2)    The second rule of cult club is that you’re made to feel guilty for even considering that there’s anywhere else you should be.

3)    The third rule of cult club is that any alternative viewpoint or meaningful connection you may explore from within the cult will be frowned upon as a sense of betrayal.

4)    The fourth rule of cult club is that it is everyone outside the group that is wrong, dishonest and corrupt, not you and your cult.

5)    The fifth rule of cult club is that if you stick with them, they ensure favour and protection against all those wrong, dishonest and corrupt outsiders.

6)    The sixth rule of cult club is that questioning the authority of the leadership is equated with wrong thinking and being seduced by falsehoods and untruths.

7)    The seventh rule of cult club is that leaving the cult means condemnation and ostracism from the community (or in extreme cases, threats and intimidation).

8)    The eighth rule of cult club is that they will eventually make you so comfortable in the cult that you’ll learn to enjoy dismissing and laughing at external attempts to appeal to evidence, reason and rational argument.

9)    The ninth rule of cult club is that aspiring status-mongerers within the cult will break away and form their own subset cult, invoking public shaming and repudiation.

10) The tenth rule of cult club is that if you doubt any of the previous 9 rules, you’re not really fully committed to the cult’s membership and cause.

Showdown With A Swindler

You know how I like every day to be an adventure – well, here’s a strange case. I received a friend request from a Sandra Knight Sr, which I immediately identified as a con artist who has cloned my mother’s Facebook account. So, I decided that the most adventurous thing to do would be to try to strike up a conversation with the would-be scammer that he’d hopefully never forget, and then document it in pictures on my blog.

(The image is enlarged off the page template so the text is readable) 

The Three Types Of Atheists To Avoid Debating

Atheists can make good contributions to religious debates, but there are 3 types who are generally not worth engaging with, as attempted dialogue will usually be futile. 

1)     The spiteful detractors of faith who lurk parasitically in the comments section of other people’s writings in order to stir up trouble. 

2)     The commentators who just cannot stop banging on about how strongly they disbelieve in God and dislike religion. 

3)     Those who lack any willingness to concede anything good about that which they criticise. 

Group no 1 are the worst of all; they are people on whom you should waste absolutely none of your time discussing your faith. Leave them be, in the hope that, in ignoring them, they will learn to seek the rewards of proper engagement. Group 2 are usually people with an ex-church background, and an axe to grind, and are looking to seek attention and draw it on themselves, not to seriously engage in the matter. Group 3* can seem willing to engage at a superficial level, but if they are unwilling to acknowledge anything positive or persuasive about Christianity or the counter position, it should arouse suspicion.

* On the third group, I remember C.S Lewis once said "In order to pronounce a book bad, it is not enough to discover that it elicits no good response from ourselves, for that might be our fault." James Joyce has lots of streams of consciousness in Ulysses that say something similar about our response to human beings themselves, and how we might be indicted if we can’t extract the interesting from the apparent mundane. And as we’ve seen so often, the most tremendous minds aren't just operating at a great height themselves, they help others reach a great height too by meeting people where they are at and aiding them in climbing higher. A quality similarly expressed about Falstaff’s wit (a subset of intelligence) in Henry IV:

"Men of all sorts take a pride to gird at me. The brain of this foolish-compounded clay, man, is not able to invent anything that tends to laughter more than I invent, or is invented on me. I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men."

It’s The Dark Spirit That Desecrates The Sacred

 

To elaborate on a point I made earlier on social media about how the shame of people who are willing to desecrate the sacred. The reason we view things as sacred is that they are human expressions of reality’s majestic phenomena that are too profound to fully capture – like the sense of the numinous and the ineffable wonder that drifts in and amongst physical reality. Sacred art is our attempt to capture hints of Divine things. It is also an outward expression of an inner will to transcend the everyday routines and convey a sense of awe and appreciation for grander, metaphysical conceptions that offer the deepest sense of gratitude for how astounding reality can be. 

Sacred art, literature, poetry and architecture are like portals into transcendent realms that present ideals to which we should all aspire. That’s why goodness, beauty, and awe are some of the few things in life that can unite us across political and ideological divides. When you have a sense of wonder for a profound act of goodness, or for a thing of genuine beauty in the natural world, it unites in a shared experience and speaks at a level far beyond your political leanings or ideological standpoints.

Consequently, when you see the horrid Just Stop Oil cult members spoiling sacred artefacts and historical works of art, these aren’t just anti-oil or anti-capitalism protests, they are invocations of the most base and incorrigible spirits of darkness known to humankind. To desecrate the sacred is to exclaim to the world that your heart is corrupt and your mind is poisoned; it is to place yourself in opposition to humanity’s most profound attempts to reflect the Divine. And when an individual sinks that low, that means hostility to love, goodness, grace, forgiveness, and even Divinity itself.

These egomaniacal acts of narcissism come straight from the pit of hell; acts of vandalism not just against physical objects, but against the highest ideals of all that is worthy, precious and beautiful. And slowly, day by day, all these selfish, entitled, thoughtless proponents of this idiotic cult are turning into little devils.

Richard Dawkins: A Strange Secular Icon

 

I’ve always found it strange that Richard Dawkins became the leading poster boy for atheism in popular culture. While there’s no question that his works on biology are tremendous contributions to science, and terrifically written – especially The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable and Unweaving the Rainbow – there is little to recommend about Dawkins on the subject of God, Biblical exegesis, philosophy or religious faith. His book The God Delusion is a very weak attempt to undermine religious faith, his arguments against Christianity are woeful, his attempts at philosophical engagement are sub-standard, he’s fairly rigid in his thinking and in his ability to explore ideas openly, and he’s not especially witty or charismatic. 

And my surprise doesn’t end there. Given his supposed love of reason, he employs surprisingly inadequate reasoning in his atheistic arguments. And given his dislike of religious fundamentalism, which is the main target of his diatribe, it has probably slipped his notice that he resembles those fundamentalist traits in his own atheistic stridency. Is it really the case that his excellent works in biology have justified his place as the most popular spokesperson in atheism? I highly doubt it. Given the kind of people who were so easily talked out of their professed faith by Dawkins’ The God Delusion, I suspect that, as Tolstoy observed in his Confession, it was often merely "the push of a finger on a wall that was ready to fall by its own weight."

But perhaps the defining inadequacy is this. Like most atheists, Richard Dawkins states that he thinks God does not exist – but his strawman caricatures are so clumsy that most Christians do not believe in the god that Dawkins denies. This points to one of my long-standing rules of thumb; the God one accepts or denies is only likely to be as intellectually tenable as the intellectual tenability of the person holding those ideas. 

And this leads to a point that I think reveals an incisive truth, but one that isn't necessarily obvious at first glance. To see what I mean, imagine that for Richard Dawkins’ next book, he decides to write a project called “The Flying Spaghetti Monster Delusion” – in which he explains in about 200 pages why there is no such thing as The Flying Spaghetti Monster. I am pretty certain there would be no demand for it. because nobody believes in The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Therefore, not only would the refutations be pointless, it would be a book replete with misrepresentations of what people actually believe. 

Yet the absurd truth is, Richard Dawkins has done more or less the same thing with his book The God Delusion. He has written a book replete with misrepresentations of a belief system, only this time it is not The Flying Spaghetti Monster, but Christianity, I know this because I know Christianity, and no Christian really believes in the things Dawkins spends 200 odd pages trying to refute.  At best, he may have counter-argued against a few ideas held by the most extremist religious fundamentalists, who are both unlearned and unworldly - but in doing so, he has written a diatribe against a set of ideas that most people don’t believe in and never have. That is the essence of this strange secular icon.

The Base Rate Errors of Young Earth Creationism

 

The basic logic from any propositional statement is that the conclusion must follow from the premises, and that an argument must be both valid and sound. An argument is valid if its logical structure ensures that the conclusion follows from the premises, but an argument is only sound if it is valid, and all its premises are true. Consequently, an argument can be valid but not sound, but if sound, it is valid too. For example:

P1: All gorillas are yellow

P2: Bruce is a gorilla

C:  Therefore Bruce is yellow

This argument is valid, but not sound. It has a valid structure (the conclusion logically follows from the premises), but the premise that all gorillas are yellow is, of course, false.

A sound argument would be:

P1: All gorillas are mammals

P2: Bruce is a gorilla

C:  Therefore, Bruce is a mammal

When making arguments that purport to be valid and sound, you have to make sure all your base rates are properly examined, and you also have to ensure you have the right number of premises to reach the right conclusion. The optimum number of premises would be a number sufficient to provide enough information to support the conclusion, but contain no extraneous premises that are redundant to the process. There are lots of premises we could add that give additional information about Bruce, which are unnecessary in determining whether Bruce is a mammal (“Bruce lives in a zoo”, “Bruce likes to eat fruit”, etc) ; but equally, the removal of one premise (“Bruce is a gorilla”) undermines the argument, as there are now too few premises to reach the conclusion.

Turning now to young earth creationism - pretty much all of their erroneous conclusions are defective because of initial base rate errors. Remember, if you have a base rate error, your subsequent probabilities and propositions will be faulty, while still seeming internally consistent to you. From much experience in dialogue with them, here are the primary base rate errors that I’ve noticed young earth creationists make, and the problems they cause.

Base rate error 1: Biblical literalism without context, nuance, or proper interpretation.
This is the primary base rate error that influences the majority of their other errors. Once you fail initially to discern the proper depth of meaning in texts like early Genesis, and later Biblical references to them, then you’ve just laid the foundation for a litany of basic errors in reasoning, and numerous faulty conclusions.

Base rate error 2: God’s word is perfect and without error, therefore if I think it says something, it can’t be questioned.
This base rate error underwrites so many of their associative errors, and works in conjunction with number 1. Because YECs read these key verses without context, nuance, or proper interpretation, they just see ‘God’s word’ without any critical analysis, and therefore if God’s word can’t be wrong, they must be right, and evolution must be false.

Base rate error 3: Failure to understand that the Bible is not a book that informs on scientific facts.
If your base rate error leads you to believe that scripture is making scientific claims, then these misinterpretations will lead to all kinds of faulty conclusions in contradiction to known scientific facts. Every pseudo-scientific claim YECs make is based on this base rate fallacy, and bootstrapped by base rate errors 1 and 2.

Base rate error 4: The evolution = no God fallacy.
Once base rate errors 1-3 have got under their skin, then this one naturally gets embedded too. YECs think evolution over millions of years means just random naturalism and no need for God (to them, it sounds too much like atheism), so any established scientific facts that support evolution are ignored or dismissed because they threaten the concept of ‘creation’ (and from which, the whole bogus institution of ‘creation science’ takes root and spreads its weeds).

Base rate error 5: If it doesn’t support a young earth, it must be false.
By now, the YECs are so conditioned by numbers 1-4 that the final base rate error to embed itself with all the others is that any Biblical interpretation, scientific propositions or rational argument that doesn’t support young earth creationism must be false. At this point, their brains will be so disordered that they will only be able to conclude that a) You’re not really a Christian; b) You’re a Christian who doesn’t take God’s word seriously enough; c) You’re a Christian who has fallen for an atheist deception; or d) You’re a Christian who is contributing to the secular decay of Christianity.

These bate rate errors form the bedrock of almost all the Biblical, interpretive, scientific and historical mistakes that comprise young earth creationism. All their monomaniacal scriptural fundamentalism, their pseudo-science, their ill-informed books, articles and videos – they are driven by the above base rate errors that start them off on the wrong track.

I hope that’s a useful account that will help you engage with young earth creationists (if you are not one), and help you to fix the faulty thinking (if you are one).

Why Socialism Is Irresponsible

It's a shame that all the main parties competing for your vote are socialist, because to understand human beings is to understand that socialism doesn’t work; and the reason it doesn’t work is because it gets its fundamentals wrong. Just so we’re clear, socialism is the view that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or heavily regulated by the state. Of course, it has morphed into something that purports to be friendlier towards the individual, taking the Marxist principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” and using it as a conceptual lever to usher in state ownership and radical redistributive measures. But spraying perfume on raw sewage still doesn’t make it smell much better.

I’ve written for years about the fundamental problems with socialism (see side bar) – namely the way that capitalism is superior in the vast majority of ways, the perennial problem with top-down as being mostly inferior to bottom up, the fact that the people socialists purport to want to help are the ones hurt hardest by their policies, and the fact that the price system is better than the state at allocating resources.

But perhaps the even bigger issue is that socialism has a big contradiction at the heart of it, which goes largely unnoticed by the socialists. It encourages those behaving in a way that socialism claims to be against, and it penalises those behaving in a way that socialism claims to advocate.

To see why, let’s break down socialism’s most fundamental principle, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. Unfortunately, the big flaw is that the system rewards those who are behaving badly according to the values of the socialists themselves, and punishes those who are behaving rightly according to those same values. The “From each according to his ability” part means society functions best when people contribute to society in accordance with their ability to do so. This is a good thing; no quibbles there. The “to each according to his needs” part means people should receive help from society in accordance with how much they need it”. Most of us would agree that this is a good template for society – and one in which we do our best to help the first group thrive as much as possible, and the second group become part of the first group wherever possible.

The core problem at the heart of society, though, is that people are active agents with their own incentives, and people’s ‘according to their need’ is not simply a product of their environment as the socialist narrative holds - it is a lot to do with the decisions they make and the way they behave. By failing to acknowledge that people should be given credit for their positive contributions to society, and that people should also take responsibility and be accountable for their failure to contribute, the socialist model gets both things backwards. The socialist narrative treats those who contribute most as the enemy, and those who contribute least as the victim.

Don’t get me wrong – there are many vulnerable people who through no real fault of their own can’t contribute as much as others to society – and they should, of course, be the ones for whom the quality “to each according to his needs” should be most sympathetically administered. But, alas, there are many people who, through perverse incentives, bad decisions and wrong behaviour have made themselves part of the “to each according to his needs” group when they should be part of the “From each according to his ability” group. Socialism blindly treats this group as victims of a societal injustice, instead of as people who create greater dependency for themselves by their own behaviour.

Moreover, in the system that the socialist ideology ought to support – that those who can contribute more to society should be rewarded – the socialists then bemoan the natural outcome of this, which is that inequality increases, so they then claim an injustice based on the very principles their Marxist systems claims to advocate - that those who can contribute do so according ‘to their ability’. Socialism rewards those who are willing to be a burden to the economy, by treating them as the oppressed and taking money off others to give to them; and it penalises those who are willing to work hardest to make the most contributions to society by stigmatising them as oppressors who owe a debt to society in the form of supporting those who are willing to be a burden to society. It is a belief system with a big contradiction at the heart.

Why The Truth Is Always The Greatest Story

 

First published on my Network Norfolk page:

Many people ask, if God wanted us all to know the truth of His love for us, why did He demonstrate it in such a brief, one-off earthly visitation 2000 years ago with Christ’s incarnation? “Couldn’t He have stayed longer, or returned more often, or made it more obvious for each new generation?”, they ask. But I think this line of enquiry misses something profound about a) why the truth is always the greatest story, and b) why the greatest stories have the biggest impact because of how they are told.

Consider a literary analogue. There are some highly useful rules of thumb to apply to your writing techniques in telling stories. One is to only include sentences that either advance the plot of the story or the development of the character. A second is to enter a scene as late as possible and leave as early as possible. A third is, show, don't tell - sometimes referred to as working out what you want to say and then doing your best not to say it. These methods will help a writer with parsimony and style - trimming the fat until the body of the story contains only the essential and most compelling parts.

Another key thing a good story needs is drama and suspense, and this is best manifested in the reader having empathy for the characters. For your story to advance, your characters need to be relatable, and have goals and challenges. They must have a want that they are working to satisfy: whether that's love for another person, a battle against the enemy, a journey, a hunt for treasure, or overcoming a monster – devices that create conditions under which the protagonist is in pursuit of something, and the reader really cares about the outcome.

Characters that do not have needs are of no interest to the reader - there is nothing for them to engage with. Imagine a novel about a perfect character who was wholly satisfied in his perfection - a kind of distant, unattainable, omniscient, omnipotent Divine figure but who felt no pain, never empathised or suffered, felt no danger, and had no involvement in creation because all his needs were satisfied merely by the essence of his being. A reader would find that character quite boring, because there is very little for imperfect humans to relate to or engage with.

Given the foregoing considerations, I think this is a good inroad to understanding why Christianity uniquely differs from the other religious belief systems, in that it is the only one in which God takes an active interest in His creation, in which He shows us the full range of His character, and the one in which Christ’s incarnation, suffering, death and resurrection demonstrates why the truth is always the greatest story, and why the greatest stories have the biggest impact because of how they are told.

In the deepest sense, Christ’s brief time on earth told the greatest story because it reflected how all the best stories are told; it involved the most powerful way for God to relate to His creation; it displayed the most personal way for Him to show His love for the world, in the most exhilarating plot and development of character; it contained the perfect of balance of the ‘show, don't tell’ maxim; and it employed the “enter a scene as late as possible and leave as early as possible” device to enable us to become fully immersed in the drama, and carry on His story and His truth in our own lives in relationship with Him.

There is no greater story in all of history; firstly, because it is told perfectly; and secondly, because it is perfectly true

Baby Reindeer: The Drama That Keeps Unfolding

The Baby Reindeer saga is a Netflix drama that has evolved into an equally interesting, headline-grabbing meta-drama, where every party seems to have made mistakes. What seems apparent at this stage is this. Fiona Harvey appears to be an unpleasant, unstable woman, who has caused plenty of suffering and anxiety to, at minimum, Laura Wray and Richard Gadd. Richard Gadd seems to have lacked a proper handle on the truth claims of his drama, and we know at least one or two of the principal claims in the drama were false (for example, it appears that Fiona Harvey never served a custodial sentence, as portrayed in the drama). And Netflix appears to have seriously messed up in allowing a ‘This is a true story’ drama to be aired that wasn’t wholly a true story.

Both Richard Gadd and Netflix may have been irresponsible in enabling the real Fiona Harvey to have been identified so easily (by using real Tweets in the show, Internet sleuths had no trouble tracking her down). And Laura Wray appears to be very credible, and seems to be telling the truth about her dreadful experience, after having the severe misfortune of encountering Fiona Harvey several years ago. Fiona Harvey and her legal team have apparently now filed a lawsuit against Netflix to the tune of $170 million in damages. 

Now, there are still some unknowns yet to materialise, but given how culpable Fiona Harvey is in her historical behaviour, I don’t like to think of her making a fortune off her own historically bad conduct. The extent to which she is now a victim of the Baby Reindeer show’s popularity is hard to separate from the notion that there wouldn’t have been a Baby Reindeer drama if she hadn’t allegedly conducted herself so badly towards Richard Gadd and Laura Wray in the first place. Equally, given the false claims in the drama, combined with the mistake in calling it a true story, both Richard Gadd and Netflix have errors to account for as well.

I watched Baby Reindeer on its first week of release. I think it’s a brilliant drama, and the sensitive subject matter was handled with aplomb. But it seems like this whole meta-drama saga could have been avoided if only they’d begun with the disclaimer: “This is based on a true story, but some scenes have been changed for dramatic effect.” 

Although, all that said, it might transpire that the famous aphorism from Oscar Wilde, “There's only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”, may turn out to be the case for all the main parties involved in this saga.

Probing The Answers In Genesis Cult

 You may have noticed recently I’ve been criticising young earth creationism more than usual. This is working towards creating a single Blog page - a kind of comprehensive YEC critical page - which contains all the hyperlinks to all the different rebuttals, both articles and videos. Then I can just share that one source when it's pertinent, and it should be like a portal that leads to all the material.

Given how extraordinarily wrong young earth creationism is, one of my lifelong puzzles about YECs is whether they really believe this stuff or not - and to what extent is it pride, ignorance, deception or self-deception at the heart of their misapprehensions (probably a mix of all four).

I've engaged on the Answers in Genesis Facebook page a bit in the last few weeks, and we've got in to a bit of a rinse and repeat cycle. So, I asked this genuine question: How many times are we going to go around like this, where you present an article that's wrong, I tell you what's wrong with it, you ignore it, and then just carry on posting more articles that make exactly the same or similar kinds of mistakes? How long can you keep presenting dishonest falsehoods before you start to develop a conscience and question yourselves and the material you're producing?

As expected, the question has been totally ignored by AIG, as have most of other critiques of their pseudo-science. As I said, I suspect there's a heady mix of pride, ignorance, deception or self-deception at the heart of it - but it's the deception and self-deception parts that interest me most, because we are all ignorant of many things, and all susceptible to pride - but we do not all deliberately deceive and suffer the consequences of self-deception in the teeth of deliberate external deceit.

Normally, when you believe something genuinely and honestly, you know why you believe that thing, and you justify the belief by drawing out the empirical, rational and logical consequences of that belief. But when you're mired in self-deception by being outwardly deceptive, you obviously don't do that. If you tell a lie, you don't try to explain why it's true, because you know it isn't - you either stay quiet and hope no one questions it, or you distort the picture to make the lie more believable.

So, from experience of AIG, I think the shadow sits somewhere between deception and self-deception. Because if you observe what they say, and how they operate, they never draw out the empirical, rational and logical consequences of their own beliefs. They perpetuate the deception by staying quiet on the things they are omitting, and they spend most of their time criticising evolution to distort the picture in an attempt to make the lie of young earth creationism more believable.

How Cults Are Formed

Are the qualities required to become a good cult leader rare? Chief execs are relatively rare, compared to the workplace size. Very high wages are a reflection of a job that requires skills that are scarcer than most other skills. If the skills required to be chief exec were common, then competition would be greater, and it would bid down the wages for being chief exec. 

An increased demand for chief execs may benefit less good chief execs by increasing the pool size, or it may bid up wages if the supply stayed the same. An increased demand for guitar bands won’t necessarily benefit individual guitar bands, because it will probably bring many new aspiring guitar bans into the music scene. But an increased demand for Radiohead will benefit Radiohead because there’s only one of them. 

In other words, it often pays to be unique and different, especially if those qualities stimulate high demand. If your music school has twelve pianists, ten guitar players, and only one drummer – the lone drummer has a greater chance of being in the band.

Leaders of cults (political, religious, environmentalist, social justice, etc) follow a similar pattern, even if what they are selling is almost always garbage. Cult groups are started by a few individuals scattered about in the annals of time. Irrespective of how ubiquitous they become, all cults can be traced back to an inceptive founder who had the charisma and socio-personal skills to acquire the initial following. 

These leaders must have rare characteristics, because if their contributions were not unique, there probably would be many more cults than there are. But yet, on the other hand, the intellect, rational persuasion and likeability of cult leaders is usually of dubious integrity. Which leads me to believe that cults are formed when groups of pliable individuals are (often independently) looking for a leader with rare qualities, and someone steps up and takes advantage of the demand.

 

Sunday Faith Series: Two Observations About Suffering

 

Some sceptics say the world is too cruel and unjust and too full of suffering for there to be an all-loving God as Creator. I have two brief observations to make, which are somewhat whimsical, but only somewhat, as I think there are several grains of truth attached to them: 

1)     Those who have the above objection but still choose to have children (which is probably a great majority of them) clearly believe that the world is not too cruel and unjust and too full of suffering to bring children into. If they thought that, on balance, the world was good enough, purposeful enough and interesting enough to bring new life into the world, knowing this new life would be subjected to everything the world throws at them, they perhaps shouldn’t be so sure that God didn’t feel the same about creation as a whole. 

2)     Suppose you were offered the chance to push a button, after which you get 5 seconds of awful pain, misery and suffering, and then the rest of your life consists of a continuous state of blissful, heavenly joy and contentment. I think most people would push the button. Now, consider a life span of 80 years on earth, comprising the entirety of human experiences, both positive and negative, as a ratio to the timescale of eternal heavenly bliss with God for those who choose it. Even though 5 seconds is but a mere blip in an 80 year timescale, as a ratio, 5 seconds compared with 80 years is an astronomically higher ratio than 80 years of earth compared with eternal bliss in Heaven.

Those grains of truth are, I contend, both indicative and evocative. And, sure, I can already anticipate what some objections might be, as they ought to be considered. I’d say the primary challenge to number 1 would be; yes, but there are many other factors (both conscious and subconscious) that drive the desire to have children (biological, psychological emotional, selfish, socio-cultural), and couples may rationally choose to do so in spite of believing the world is not the creation of an all-loving God. To which, I say, true – but a) It still doesn’t stack up well alongside your contention that God shouldn’t have created such a world; and b) Some of the psychological, emotional, selfish and socio-cultural factors driving your desire to have children in spite of your view about God’s creation are likely to be some of the same factors driving your belief that it feels convenient in the short-term if those desires influence your argument against God being the Creator.

And if we move to number 2, it may cross your mind that the primary objection to 2 actually seems like an ironic supporting statement of number 1. That is, the biggest challenge to number 2 seems to be that, even if you accept the proposition that the world is too cruel and unjust and too full of suffering, there is, at least, a great deal of goodness, purpose and interest that works alongside it. This shows me that they think life is sufficiently worth living that they would willingly allow their own children into the world to experience it. Once they do that, it becomes hard to accept that they really do believe that there is too much badness and suffering in the world for them to believe in God. If the world is sufficiently worth living in (in their view) that they'd happily bring new life into it, then it's not such a big step to accept that God feels the same about the world and all the lives in it. After all, life on earth is both hard and easy, it's both joyous and dreadful, it's both simple and complex, and it's both pleasing and frustrating - but it never fails to be interesting, exhilarating and enriching for those who want to throw themselves into the adventure. 

The Christian, of course, would add that those challenges and struggles are a necessary part of the journey of growth, progress and fulfilment, and therefore hold deep inherent value in the creation story – which is the same line of thinking that seems to make it worthwhile bringing new life into the world, in spite of those challenges and struggles.

All High Things Lead To God

 

The deeper we delve into reality on any positive epistemological or ontological path, the closer we get to the answer being God. We take things to their furthest conclusion, and the enquiry reaches a terminus where God is the most natural stopping place (this is the nature of what’s called Aseity). Here are four examples of what I mean, with obvious overlap between them –Truth, Morality Mathematics and Facts: 

1)     Truth: Any propositional statement that is true, leads to a further, more primary propositional statement that is true, and so on, until eventually we arrive at the most primary truth that explains all truths – which is God. 

2)     Morality: Any moral proposition leads to a further moral proposition about the truth of that moral proposition, and so on, until we eventually arrive at the concept of the highest of all morality – a goodness that is so high it comes to its natural origin in God, who is the ultimate good, and from whose goodness all other moral propositions find their metric. 

3)     Mathematics: Any mathematical statement can be superseded by a further higher mathematical statement, with seemingly no halting point, even at the uppermost end of the complexity spectrum. This leads us into a realm of cognitive complexity that can only reside in a Mind of sufficient higher order complexity – which is God. 

4)     Facts: Any factual statement about reality is causally linked to a more primary factual statement that explains the preceding fact, and so on, until we reach the fact that explains the existence of all other facts – which is God.

In summary, everything that is true, good, mathematical, rational, logical and factual, when pursued to its highest end, leads us to God as the ultimate explanation.

Why Comedy Is Probably The Hardest Genre To Write Well

 

There are certain genres that are harder to write than others, because a creative examination of life is not the same for all parts of our earthly living. Comedy, for instance, is particularly hard to write well, and easy to write poorly. As much skill as it takes to write good dramas, tragedies, thrillers and romances (and it takes a lot), the one advantage the writer has in choosing those genres over comedy is that those genres more easily express their quality with the intrinsic nature of the story.

For example, if you're writing a tragedy about the death of a child, one thing in your favour is that the occurrence of death naturally devastates those engaged in the narrative, so at least some of your work is done for you, because child death is a tragic thing, and most of us can elicit deep sympathy as we share in each other's suffering. Similarly, a woman being stalked by a serial killer is a chilling thing, so, as with tragedy, some of the work is already done for you if you're writing a thriller intending to unsettle the reader. 

But when it comes to the writing of comedy, we have a slightly different situation to the aforementioned - because when setting out to write a comedy, almost every scene won't naturally be funny or witty. We all know how discomforting it is to be in a room or a theatre or a comedy club in the presence of someone trying desperately hard but failing to be funny. The writer has a harder job constructing the right setting, plot and (in particular) the right dialogue to make things funny, as well as choose the right literary characters to deliver those lines.

That is why, in my submission, comedy is the hardest genre to write well.