Conspiracy Theories: Navigating the Swamp

What a strange year 2020 has been.

Whether urgent pleas not to be self-centered and to abide by shelter in place orders, equally urgent concerns about the seeming ability of one virus to wipe away the rights of American citizens like a hand sanitizer-soaked sponge across a whiteboard, or gallows humor that seems to be getting a pass as people understand it's that kind of season, my FB newsfeed has been covered up in content about the coronavirus epidemic since late February.

For several days last week much of the focus was on "Plandemic," a video project I had not heard of until a few people on my newsfeed emerged to promote the trailer, and about 2 to 3 times as many people immediately began sharing pre-refutations and urging others not to share it or talk about it. Of course, because of how human psychology works, that made me very interested in it.

I have not watched that trailer, though I plan to do so later. I have already seen one video explaining the Buddhist/New age spiritual beliefs of one of the producers and that Christians may want to be very cautious and do more research before supporting the project. Yet to underline the point of this whole post, when I went back to watch it again, I found that video is no longer available for public viewing on Youtube. Does that make it more or less trustworthy? We cannot know.

1. The Problem: Why I'm Writing This

As a rule I do not spend much time reading about specific conspiracy theories. But I am familiar with how the broader "conspiratorial" mindset works. I was aware of the term "the narrative" long before it entered the popular consciousness, and the Daily Show hadn't yet run those clips showing journalists across many various channels repeating exactly the same lines with which they had clearly all been supplied. If you haven't seen what I'm talking about, a couple years ago there was a dramatic example of the same thing, where journalists on dozens of local stations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting Group were all required to read the same statement on how biased, non-mainstream news online was "dangerous to our democracy". (Apparently the ominous irony was entirely lost on whoever wrote the statement all those news stations were required to read)

So conspiracy theories have become increasingly popular, because more and more people are becoming aware that something is up, on a large scale. Something that, prior to the internet, it would have been very difficult to figure out. When journalists all speak in lockstep, the sheer effort it would take to compare different channels and somehow get that information out to people 30 years ago would make you easily dismissed as a crazy obsessive person. Now, we can all watch these videos on YouTube (before they get deleted) and wonder what's going on.

There is no way to prove conspiracies on the global, generational-spanning scale that are being alleged by innumerable conspiracies theories and schools of thought. We don't have access to that information, and can only choose to believe either what the authorities tell us, which tends to be, uh, "comfortingly consistent," or else what those people who say the authorities are lying tell us, which is of almost endless variety, some that is reluctantly plausible and much that is anxiously fanciful.

But what is quite clear at this point is that the information we are presented with via mainstream media channels has been carefully curated. That realization encourages people to turn to non-mainstream sources, like people in Nazi-occupied Europe subjected to Third Reich propaganda but secretly tuning into VOA or other underground radio broadcasts to get the real news. In fact our situation today is very much like that, because that wasn't exactly the real news either. There was no "real news" about the war to listen to, you either accepted that Allied reports or underground radio (or the German communists, with their "People's Radio," etc.) were telling you the truth, or not.

One difference for us today is that the internet allows "mixed-truth" information to be disseminated at such a rapid pace that there's no way to keep on top of it all. There are not a few radio channels, there are a myriad of channels, some saying the same things and some disagreeing with each other. (Not to mention there is now AI software that can cobble together basic articles and even news reports with visuals and audio voiceovers, making it even easier to dump literally fake news into the turbid waters of online information.)

Social media has altered the equation too, by making these stories show up on your "own" news feed, shared by people you know. There was a popular late night radio show called Coast to Coast AM (I only caught it once or twice, I recall one caller was very interested in lizard people), hosted by Art Bell, and the fringe ideas shared there had their mysterious appeal based partly on their fringe-ness. Now the same process by which morally fringe behavior has become normalized in the eyes of society is being repeated in the world of news, where previously recognized authorities and standards have been dethroned, and now the concepts of "true/factually accurate" and "untrue" are being eroded even more quickly than "right" and "wrong" behavioral standards were in previous decades.

Bell's current spiritual successors sharing what used to be considered fringe theories on their various podcasts and shows are only part of the wave of unverified news and alarmist articles now coming from mainstream sources too. Much of it is designed intentionally to appeal to our sense that we're being lied to, that something big is going on and "the powers that be" are trying to keep us from figuring it out. They often portray themselves like those old underground radio broadcasts, brave men and women trying to get the truth to you despite opposition from the Deep State or Shadow Government or whoever.

To be interested in that sort of content is a very human trait. Just like it's a very human problem to be addicted to looking at your phone too much, because they are specifically designed to take advantage of human psychology to addict you, so the draw toward the world of conspiracy theory is too, for reasons we'll delve into later. That idea of "underground, government-discouraged sources" is also psychologically appealing to Americans in general and Christians in particular. It has nothing to do with the content being true or false, and everything to do with many people being pre-disposed to look favorably on information coming from that angle, and wanting to pass it along to others.

Art Bell, harbinger of the era when fringe news went mainstream

2. The Problem: The Antifragility of Conspiracy Theories

Another reason I'm writing this is that as soon as the Plandemic video trailer began popping up, various Christian outlets began popping up quickly denouncing it. This interested me, because a term those people in the world of non-aligned thought use is "gatekeeping." That is to say, there are people who self-identify or are popularly identified as being "on your side/part of your movement" but who actually exist to supply the appropriate rhetoric to make sure people don't stray too far from the narrative they're supposed to be following.

To be clear, I don't think that's what these editorials by big Christian websites are doing. I think articles like this one contain the genuine thoughts of the writer, who is probably tired of people in his congregation sharing totally unverifiable stories. But that article and others I've seen (Ed Stetzer has written multiple times for Christianity Today calling for Christians to repent and stop spreading conspiracy theories), and the angles from which they approach the problem, seemed a little misguided on a fundamental level. This from Stetzer's article:

"Yet in perpetuating the Seth Rich conspiracy, some Christians again are looking silly. The conspiracies were debunked by independent investigations such as websites like PolitiFact and FactCheck.org. And if that isn’t convincing enough, Fox News itself retracted their original story, stating, 'The article was not subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require” and “was found not to meet those standards.'"

Oooh, fact checking websites, and even Fox News itself! Aren't you embarrassed, Christians who believe we can't trust the mainstream media, to hear that the mainstream media has cleared itself of any suspicion? Such failures in perception are one reason I'm writing this article, because they aren't going to help their target audience.

Antifragility, which I have written about in the past, is that quality of things that benefit from disorder, shocks, and apparent damage instead of being hurt by them. The most common metaphor is that of a Hydra from Greek mythology. Cutting off one head only leads to more growing.

A conspiracy theory has a kind of antifragility. This can be seen in that having accepted it, not only are people mentally inclined to defend against every attack on the theory's validity, but the very effort expended in trying to debunk it looks like more proof that it's true. Any idea that says "They'll try to stop me from telling you this, but--" has the potential to gain this kind of antifragility, if a widespread sense of recognition for it emerges. Fringe theories become very powerful if they can ever escape the fringe, and denouncing them as fringe/hearsay/debunked, as Stetzer and others have done, only increases the rate of their spread. As Nassim Taleb (developer of the concept of antifragility) has remarked, for a book to be publicly banned can only help its sales.

I'm sure that some people do share conspiracy theories out of "hatred for Hillary Clinton" as Stetzer claimed in that article, and that is not Christian behavior. We are commanded to love our enemies, and spreading unverified, negative stories about someone in order to discredit them is the sin of slander. But some others shared them because that "banned" motivation: they were trying to get the secret information out despite the blanket of government misinformation.

3. The Problem: False vs. True Prophets

As a rule I do not promote or share specific conspiracy theory-type stories about Hillary or vaccines or 5G or COVID-19, even when they seem probably true. This is because to paraphrase the common dictum about wrestling with pigs, when you enter the muddy arena of semi-truths and rumors and false cover stories and conspiracies to wrestle with swamp creatures, you just get muddy too, and besides, the swamp creatures like it.

That being said, there is a difference between conspiracy theories and "explanations we don't approve of." The emergence of COVID-19 has a lot of weird things associated with it. We shouldn't believe every story connecting the dots by dragging in the Rothschilds and the kitchen sink too, but I also believe there is so much geopolitical dynamite attached to a pandemic that spread out of China that we'll probably never be told the real story by any mainstream news source. We will be told whatever stories make people feel towards China, or Trump, or the CDC, or other parties, in the way that whoever is paying the salaries of those media institutions wants people to feel. That's not a conspiracy theory, that's an observation of how politics and media work in 2020.

I am working as a full-time missionary, and if I am informed that the fallen world is menaced in some new way by fallen leaders working in league together, the best thing I can do is spread the gospel and strengthen churches, not wade into the darkness of the swamp. Behind every corrupt, lying, neo-babelonian politician are 100 others. I would rather lead 10 people to Christ and train them to lead 10 each in turn, and so on. The Church is the ultimate antifragile institution on earth, and it has endured and grown through many centuries of stability and chaos.

In Old Testament Israel, true prophets did not exist alone. There were lots of false prophets spreading disinformation. Some could do so convincingly, with visual aids:

"Now the king of Israel and Jehoshaphat the king of Judah were sitting on their thrones, arrayed in their robes, at the threshing floor at the entrance of the gate of Samaria, and all the prophets were prophesying before them. And Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah made for himself horns of iron and said, “Thus says the Lord, ‘With these you shall push the Syrians until they are destroyed.’” And all the prophets prophesied so and said, “Go up to Ramoth-gilead and triumph; the Lord will give it into the hand of the king.” 1 Kings 22:10-12

In 2020, you and I and anyone with a TV or internet connection are like kings on thrones. Below us are many voices "prophesying" (professing to reveal the truth to us), clamoring for our attention, and we must decide who speaks truly or falsely. The fact that lots of them are saying the same thing does not mean it is true, and in fact none of them may be right, and we may need to call for, as happens in this story, someone else who tells us what we don't want to hear.

That should be a truth-tell we never lose sight of: the Truth will always have some things we don't want to hear. If it sounds like exactly what we expected, if it confirms what we want to believe, it's probably mixed with falsehood. If a conspiracy theory seems "too pat" and seeks to bolster my prejudices against someone, it's probably just addictive, artificially-sweetened fodder created for my mental consumption. Beware of those who offer those snacks for free, it leads to mental obesity.

As for those false prophets, scripture tells us that the proof of a true prophet is that their word comes to pass. So when I hear someone putting out a conspiratorial-type theory that sounds like it may have some real information behind it, or is in line with things I already know to be true, I may give it my ear, but if later it proves to be untrue (which is different than "the story goes away"), then I know that they are at worst a false prophet, deserving of censure, and at best a peddler of unhealthy snacks, best avoided.

4. Christians and Conspiracies: Planned vs Randomness

There are two major competing theories in the West to explain the world we see around us. One is that it all emerged gradually, through changes that took unimaginable lengths of time to slowly happen. Modern science assumes this; the theory of evolution is an obvious example, and even the Big Bang has become problematic for some who want to upgrade the scientific method into an all-encompassing worldview because our universe exploding from an infinitesimal primordial nugget into its current state is too like a creation event that needed an outside force to kick it off.

The other major perspective is that things as we see them now came into being much more rapidly, and could do so by means of important and specific events. In Genesis we see the forming and populating of the earth with life by God as a work He began and completed. There is also Noah's flood and the vast effect on the world that it had, and the languages being divided at Babel. These events dramatically speed up the timeline of reality and human history as we know it to lengths of time comprehensible to our minds (We have no real way to conceptualize one million years or even one hundred thousand, let alone a trillion years)

There is no use trying to reconcile these two perspectives. Either things came about through randomness, which required a basically infinite supply of time to allow them to happen, or they came about through a plan, which required a basically infinite supply of power to accomplish. Whether the design took a long time (Old Earth Creationism) or the randomness also involved near-infinite amounts of applied power (Alien-creator-race theories) is not as important, but we can see both groups trying to massage the arbitrary infinite-ness of one factor (Incomprehensible depths of time, or God-like/Divine power) by balancing it with the other.

As we think about conspiracy theories, it's important to recognize that Christians are typically going to be coming from a worldview that understands there to be a Divine plan behind reality, not that things gradually arose naturally and for no particular reason. Yet in the West they are typically also immersed in a society and culture that holds the latter view.

Modern news is often presented from that Random/Uncaused angle that "things just happen in the world and we tell you about them." Stories about lone gunmen, often the subject of conspiracy theories, are a good example of this. We are assured that it was just one random person who did a terrible thing but it's over now. But with the mainstream media deservedly losing credibility, people begin to search for other explanations behind the story. Perhaps this wasn't a random incident.

And now people are more open than ever to the idea that perhaps major events didn't even take place, that the whole event and news story was faked for some ulterior motive. Maybe there is some big plan, with lots of power behind it, and this is one small piece of it. It would be wrong to say this is unbiblical thinking, as studying a scriptural account of reality in some sense trains our minds to think in this way. (How does this particular story or event fit into the big picture, long-term plan?)

However, the Bible also gives us a balancing principle: Things act according to their nature and the laws that govern them. A good tree bears good fruit, and an evil tree bears evil fruit. Sinful people do sinful things, and so it doesn't require a conspiracy to explain why a few people might do especially wicked things, or want to cooperate to do evil. Whenever we are informed of a "secret master plan" as the explanation for various events, we should remind ourselves that this need not always be the case, and that God's sovereignty means that even if evil people have come up with a secret plan, it will not succeed unless He permits it, to accomplish His greater purposes.


5. Christians and Conspiracies: Selective Listening

Anyone who grew up going to church in the U.S. is probably quite familiar with the debate I mentioned above, between the narrative of evolution's gradual, emergent changes and a universe made quickly into something much like its current form through a specific creation event and subsequent divine interventions.

Yet I cannot recall meeting a single Christian who denied the legitimacy of Science or History outright. What happens instead is that when "experts" make truth claims which are irreconcilable with the Bible's truth claims, we simply ignore those experts. Sometimes we do listen to other things they say, but ignore those particular statements, like parents skipping past "that one scene" in a movie the family can otherwise enjoy together. (a practice which seems endangered now in the days of streaming and uninhibited consumption of media)

The Church is, then, quite comfortable with taking a selective approach to science and history. Did we all stop believing because well-credentialed archaeologists at one point claimed Pontius Pilate never existed, or because many historians still believe the Old Testament was an invented back story to unite various Canaanite groups who found themselves exiled together in Babylon?

While the idea of rejecting "expert" academic claims when they go against what the Bible says but listening to other things they say gives some people fits, in truth for the average believer (i.e. someone not having the academic background to really debate the issue effectively) this is a very robust and pragmatic way of solving the problem. We have different categories of authority, and the Bible is in that "non-negotiable" category, while academic experts are not. (And do not deserve to be, since their authority is mostly borrowed and they rarely have any "skin in the game" -- they won't suffer any consequences except at worst a loss of reputation in their field if their theories turn out to be wrong)

So then, for Christians we're already used to navigating a lower hierarchy of truth claims based on a higher one. When the Bible says there's a reef there, we don't sail that way even when "the latest, peer-reviewed paper on the effect of tidal forces on reef development" says it ought to be clear water. (And those progressive-minded souls in the Church who do make the attempt must be fished out of the water, though often they go down with their ship.)

This means that for some Christians, it's very easy to shift into that mode of thinking where a conspiracy theory (based not on verifiable claims, but believed for other reasons) becomes our guiding truth claim, and we start rejecting official sources when they contradict it. This is a problem because now the conspiracy theory has become the filter by which we judge reality. If we are not careful, just as can easily happen with political convictions, it will become part of that filter by which we read scripture as well. We should be very wary of letting unverifiable claims through a backdoor to become part of our worldview.

Of course, there is another thing Christians do, which provides ammunition for the other side of the debate, the people who have no patience for those attracted by conspiracy theories. Because Christians are used to believing things based on authority, and indeed are taught (more in some circles than others) respect for authority, some transfer this to what they have been taught are, or come to regard as, respectable and reliable sources of information. Any conspiracy theory that comes along, if "debunked" by these respectable sources, will then be considered unworthy of future speculation. And anyone forwarding these conspiracy theories will look incredibly foolish in the eyes of those who still look at establishment media as possessing authority to say what is accurate and what has been proven false.

6. Christians and Conspiracies: Religion vs. Conspiracy

It has been said that the exclusive claims of the world's major faiths force us to conclude that either they are all wrong, or one is right and the others are wrong. Either the LORD, the Creator of the universe, also made humans according to His own likeness, or the Chinese goddess Nuwa made them from dragging a rope through mud, or they were made from driftwood by Odin and his brothers, or they are the result of chemicals that randomly bounced into each other long enough to kick off one reaction that led all the way to human consciousness, but those explanations cannot all be correct.

In the same way, it cannot be true that the way to heaven is to slaughter one's enemies with sufficient valor, to earn enough merit through multiple lifetimes and understand that reality is an illusion, or to trust in the grace of God as seen in the work of Jesus Christ, all at the same time. And those various conceptions of heaven/the afterlife are all mutually exclusive too.

So either we A) reject all religions, or B) we must figure out which one is true. Or, C) we could decide we don't care or couldn't ever figure out what is True, and pick the religion we think is most attractive or useful, or pick some parts of several of them and follow them without regard for potential internal contradictions (which is the approach one typically encounters in Taiwan).

Conspiracy theories are stories that claim, usually with at least some cursory attempt at providing evidence, that many events we see are not natural/normal, but are brought about by the actions of a secretive group with specific motives. But to an atheist or non-religious person, who goes with option A) above, Christianity is exactly this--an attempt to explain observable events and phenomenon (which can "already be explained by Science") by providing a unproveable backstory of unseen forces (God, etc).

This seems like the simplest approach, but our materialist friend has a big problem: he's got to ignore too much of reality to make his theory work. One single, real, true miracle, the kind countless people claim to have experienced throughout human history, renders his choice moot. In these kinds of situations, there are usually 2 strategies he will fall back on.

1) Deny the event: Claim that anyone who thinks they have witnessed something miraculous, supernatural, or violating the laws of physics as we know them were mistaken, confused, deceived, or lying. The burden of historical proof testifies overwhelmingly against this, but your average materialist science groupie has no concept of historical proof, and may in fact consider history to be merely one long struggle to achieve particle accelerators and rockets which can land themselves.

2) Use the Science-of-the-Gaps argument: Because most people throughout history, including many Christians, explained things they could not understand by saying they were or were caused by gods or spirits or other unseen powers, yet now we understand them to be natural phenomenon which we can describe and measure by the scientific method, so all those things and also that which we cannot explain scientifically in 2020 will in the same way be explained by future advancements in science.

Both of these seek to keep reality free of any behind-the-scenes Actor/s whose existence would make his simple dismissal of all religious belief untenable.

Those who dismiss all conspiracy theories automatically are more or less doing the same thing. They are seeking to keep reality and their concept of history and what they read in the news simple and clear: Things happen, and the news exists to inform us of these happenings, and don't try to sell me on some secret society or scheme behind them. If they existed, The Papers Walter Cronkite CNN Fox News would have told us so. Yet these people have a similar problem to our atheist friend above: There must be a true explanation, and if those establishment sources turn out in the end not to be reputable sources, perhaps one of the conspiracy theories floating around is actually the correct story of what happened. So the option of simply dismissing them all is another kind of lazy thinking, or one trying to reduce the world to a more simplistic (and less scary) model than it really is.

7. "Why are Christians being drawn to Conspiracy Theories?"

"If you're a Christian, you think that the entire fabric of the cosmos was ruptured, by this strange singularity, where Someone who is a god and a man sets everything on its head. And to say it's supernatural is to downplay it; this is a massive singularity at the very heart of things. And if you don't believe that, it seems to me that you aren't really a confessional Christian--you may be a cultural Christian, but you're not a confessional Christian. So if you believe that, then it should be possible to dwell on all the other weird stuff that traditionally comes as part of the Christian package." - Tom Holland (Not Spider-Man)

Christians, by contrast, have already chosen B) from part 4 above and believe that one religion is true and only that one, and others cannot be chosen along with it. The others may have much that is good in them, but they must necessarily fall short of complete truth, since none profess Christ as Lord and seek atonement through His finished work on the cross. That is a good, straightforward assertion which we make through faith, and which we believe will one day be sight.

We cannot prove that faith, but we have evidence in lots of areas of life (historical references to biblical events and people, changed lives after a decision of faith, answers to prayer which can't be put down to coincidence, etc) that it is true. This kind of evidence is important because Christians reject option C) up above, believing there is Truth which can be known and believed. We believe the Bible tells a long, true story which can be learned and lived by, which is also the underlying narrative of all human history and reality. A reality which is full of miraculous, wonderful, and terrifying things, and exists partly as an unseen world of which we have scant knowledge.

This understanding of the world, coupled with today's growing recognition of how inaccurate or intentionally misleading is so much of the information we're constantly immersed in, leads people to turn away from now-distrusted official sources and seek the real story behind reality somewhere else, just as believers turn away from academic sources who say Noah's flood never happened but might get misled by a well-spun yarn about finding the real ark somewhere in the mountains of Turkey.

We are misled because we believe that the ark is real, and therefore stories that affirm (or maybe, cater to; or perhaps, take advantage of) that conviction can get past our primary filter which would reject mainstream academic sources claiming it wasn't true. Or worse, we are lazy, and simply see "ark" and "discovered" and share the story without feeling it's important to know whether it's factual or not.

Either way, too many Christians have not developed a secondary filter, one that can intuit if something is plausible within a context of belief on the one hand and selective rejection of mainstream sources on the other. This is true for newly-"woke" Christians who have only recently become aware of the extent to which they've been lied to about the world we live in. Put another way, they hadn't realized that the god of this age who has blinded the minds of unbelievers (2 Corinthians 4:4) to prevent them from seeing the truth of the gospel did so in certain ways that Christians can easily fall prey to as well if they lose a biblical worldview and do not practice discernment.

Yet this is not a new phenomenon for Christians. Think of the popular eschatology phases where everyone had books and maps and charts and theories about the end times. How many were sure the world was going to already be over by now? How many conspiracy theories circulated about how the antichrist was some politician or world leader of their day? In a sense, we have seen this whole thing before, we just didn't have social media then. How many of those Christian thought leaders who convinced people the rapture was coming at a certain date or that accused various political leaders of being the antichrist were called to account?

Of course, it's more palatable to believe one has been intentionally deceived than to believe one has sinfully failed to exercise discernment, and so the impulse is strong to believe conspiracy-theory-type stories or explanations which make some sense of confused reality and simultaneously assert that things would make much more sense if they weren't being intentionally deceived by a massive conspiracy. Again, this does not mean any particular conspiracy theory is not true, or that none of them are, but it gives us a reason to be cautious about accepting them or sharing them as true.

8. How to be discerning in a climate of conspiracy and information overload?

As we start to wrap up this long post, I want to mention a few ideas we can internalize in order to build a stronger filter which will help us navigate the excess of information and truth claims we're bombarded with. Some of the points are obvious, some perhaps less so, but I hope they are helpful, or at least thought-provoking, as you wade through the claims about the coronavirus and everything else:

1. The person who agrees you are being lied to, might also be lying to you

There is a whole highway system across the internet by which conspiracy theories get shared and passed along and commented on, and they are by nature antifragile; the more mainstream media companies take action to suppress them, the more it looks like evidence that they are true. 

Some followers of conspiracy theories are like preteens who, having realized their dad (or mom) isn't the superhero they'd imagined them to be in earlier childhood, begin to idolize a teacher or older classmate who demonstrates some of the qualities they were disappointed to find lacking in their default hero figure, not realizing they are committing the next step of the same mistake. Thus having realized, to the great disappointment of their healthy lack of cynicism, that they cannot trust the mainstream media whose job it was (and not merely a job, but a sort of implied social contract) to inform them of what was happening in the world, these people now automatically turn a credulous ear to anyone who invokes the new password: "the mainstream media cannot be trusted." 

2. Is your intuition being hijacked?

A person skilled in rhetoric always sounds persuasive, and although it's an art, it's something of a science as well at this point. Humans have buttons, and they can be pushed, and vast amounts of money circulate around that fact. For explanations that are "outside the mainstream," the way the information is presented will attract different kinds of people. For some, authenticity will look like a lone dissenter, a "voice crying in the wilderness" with a bare-basics website, and anything that seems to have some money behind it becomes untrustworthy. For others that would be too fringe to take seriously, and a more polished approach with good rhetoric and some credentialed names will win them over.

P. T. Barnum's famous aphorism, "there's a sucker born every minute," still holds true in 2020. But these days one doesn't need to be a sucker to be deceived, either by mainstream or alternative sources. "Going with your gut" when deciding whether to trust a source or not is dangerous, because decades of studies have figured out what can make people's intuition push them one way or another. Unfortunately your gut intuition has been commoditized, without your permission, and those whose profession is mass marketing, whether its products or ideas they are trying to sell you, know how that works. So a darkly plausible sounding accusation about a politician you don't like, or an empathetically morally outraged article about life-improving information suppressed by profit-hungry forces, or any other article that feeds some sense of satisfying grievance, should be taken with many grains of salt.

3. Hanlon's Razor

"Do not attribute to maliciousness what can be adequately explained by incompetence." Think of the situations, events, well-intended plans, work projects you've seen go wrong before; think of people in very high positions of power or influence who say or do really dumb things. People simply aren't good at executing carefully controlled secret plans, and that goes for rich and smart people too.

That doesn't mean it never happens (the existence of secret societies and political conspiracies is part of the historical record), but it probably shouldn't be your go-to explanation without serious evidence from trusted sources. And what are trusted sources these days?


4. Are there biblical or historical principles that already cover it?

The Bible describes a world where people are flawed and sinful, where people in positions of authority abuse their power to do terrible things, and yet Paul says our battle is not against flesh and blood but with evil spiritual powers of this dark world and in heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12)

I believe what the Bible says about God's kingdom, which is not of this world, inaugurated by Christ and advancing against the kingdom of this world, which is the hierarchy of secular authority which goes all the way up to the Prince of this World and his fallen spiritual allies. That some world leaders would be deeply under their influence and foolishly imagine themselves their allies instead, and practice perverse rituals to reinforce that belief, doesn't surprise me at all. It has always been so.

So when I see rumors and dark intimations online describing the secret cultish behavior of some world leaders, etc., they don't sound all that conspiratorial to me. We have historical evidence that Aztec leaders were conducting public rituals that involved cutting the living hearts out of their enemies, and Roman emperors were setting live Christians on fire as human candles in Rome. More recently, for decades before and during the turn of the 20th century, seances were popular activities. Many people, including famous people you've heard of, tried to talk to the dead through mediums, sometimes for amusement but sometimes in earnest. In Taiwan up until recent years it was a regular practice for children to be taken to temples and "opened up" to spiritual influence so they can serve as mediums, an ability they apparently retain for life. Though I keep a distance from such things here, my understanding is that the practices continues today, to a lesser extent.

All that is to say, sometimes breathless stories insisting that we should be alarmed that certain famous people are secretly engaged in dark and illicit activities have the opposite effect; the testimony of history, the bible's take on the world, and human nature more or less guarantee some of them are up to much worse things than the average conspiracy theory alleges. That certainly doesn't mean we need to believe every specific story we hear.

5. Know what you can't know, and whether that matters

At this point I view everything I read online on a sliding scale of unverifiability. I don't know if any of it is true, and I can't verify or debunk a CNN article about a bombing in Kenya which proves Al-Qaeda is active there, any more than I can verify the secret discovery of an ancient supercomputer under the Sphinx, or that some government officials instructed their family members to get out of NYC on Sept 10th, or that the Coronavirus is a man-made ploy to get us to accept the vaccine which will be administered via bioinfernal Mark of the Beast technology. I can't know if those things happened to begin with, nor whether the explanation provided to me about those things is correct. There is no strong reason for me to trust an unverifiable conspiracy theory video on YouTube more or less than I trust unreliable poll numbers on MSNBC. (Though in a pinch, if it's MSNBC, I'd go with the YouTube video. Just kidding. Probably.)

If you are sheltering at home because of the coronavirus, and especially if you've suffered or lost friends and/or family members because of it, it's only reasonable to try and figure out what's going on. If the government seems to be lying, with their track record of dishonesty, it's also reasonable to entertain other theories, though not wise to share them with others. What if you are sharing, and thus promoting, false prophecy? But we have to recognize that we won't be able to personally verify if the people telling you it's a planned virus being exploited to create a one world government are correct, any more than people in Beijing will be able to verify if it's a weaponized virus created by the CIA to attack China, as they're being told over there. If it turns out that people really were lying, anger is also reasonable. But will it ever "turn out"?

Will the truth ever be found and explained? We don't know, and that's frustrating enough to turn a lot of people to conspiracy theories to provide an illusion of knowing and thus a little less lack of control.


6. Do you want it to be true?

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils." - C.S.Lewis

Lastly, I offer this Lewis quote not to suggest that some people in positions of power are not involved in filthy atrocities, but that our desire to keep filling our minds with conspiracy stories about them and clinging to those explanations which attribute maximum evil intent to people can be unhealthy.

If you find yourself rejecting evidence for a more mundane explanation ("sometimes accidents just happen") because you don't want there to be a more mundane explanation, because that would be less entertaining, or less cathartic, or because that particular story would prove what you suspected all along about Trump, or Obama, or the Republicans, or the Democrats, or Big Pharma, or Monsanto, then be very, very careful. Because that is a point where the truth of the story is no longer the thing that matters most to you, and you wish evil to be true of others.

That is the negative version of believing something because you wish it to be true. The positive version could be represented by my own sympathy toward stories that claim sightings of creatures thought to be long extinct, because I want them to still be alive, and I want to believe the world is still big enough in 2020 for mysterious life to still be hiding somewhere. So I have to be extra careful to guard my mind against embracing those kinds of stories, which typically are based on very flimsy evidence. A historically famous example of this was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlock Holmes fame, who defended various, obviously fake reports of fairies, ghosts, etc., because of his strong desire to prove the existence of the supernatural.

Christians can commit the same error... every time people share a fake story about someone who went to heaven or hell without trying to verify it (witness the ruin caused by this example), they are promoting a lie and weakening the Church's testimony that heaven and hell are real. That it supports what you believe to be true does not mean it should get an automatic pass.

9. Conclusion: Wisdom... and Patience

Simply put, if you believe respectable institutions and elected officials don't cooperate to deceive us, you are a fool. But if you believe and share every conspiratorial, alarmist, or political attack story you see, you are a different kind of fool. We are drowning in information, and sharing half-truths or fake news means you are part of the problem. Yet, if we are not being told the truth by official sources, we will seek for it in other places, and these stories are not going away, and censorship only strengthens their appeal, as we saw above.

I have no delusions that articles like concerned Christians I mentioned earlier, or this one, or others like it, will have any great effect on human nature. But you, reading this, you can change. You can choose to be wise and exercise restraint when you want to share the latest tantalizing rumor or urgent, probably-true update, and to be patient and wait until more facts come out before sharing a conspiracy theory trying to explain an event based on "what we already know about how those people act" vs. whatever evidence is available. If you believe the evidence will be faked or changed as necessary to keep people from figuring out those people are behind it, that is indeed a kind of consistent logic, but it's also an inescapable trap, so just be aware you are in it.

At very least, educate yourself broadly on the topics you are sharing stories about. (And I don't mean in the YouTube rabbit hole way) Don't have a careless attitude towards spreading half-truths and unverified accusations, but be very focused on sacrificial love and doing good in this world, not "raising awareness" or "putting everyone on alert" from the safety of your digital device. Needlessly raising the anxiety level of a world suffocating in anxiety is not a light sin.

So as you encounter stories and rumors about the coronavirus, about political leaders, about alternate versions of history or government cover-ups or aliens or vaccines or false flags or anything else, I hope you will keep some of what I've said here in mind. It would be hypocritical of me to suggest you should just stop listening to alternative theories and believe the official stories about everything--I often do not believe them either. But the fact that scripture calls Satan the father of lies should make us extra careful not to accidentally do his work for him.

"Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil." - Ephesians 5:15-16

Be well, guard your mind and heart, and let His word be a lamp to your feet
and a light to your path among these swamps of misinformation and deceit.

A New Year: The Blessed Unknown

Borrowing this pic, since I didn't go to the Taipei 101
fireworks show this year, though we did watch from far away

Resolutions vs. The Future

Happy New Year everyone. It's January 1st, that time when many people make resolutions which will seem increasingly less worth the sacrifice it takes to maintain them as the cold weeks slide past. That's the problem with resolutions; they are goals which can't factor in what might happen in the coming months. Sure, maybe you give up out of simple laziness, but let's say you have better reasons than that. Often it's the same reasons we are all familiar with--by mid-February winter has worn most of us down and we don't have the mental fortitude to keep doing productive but willpower-draining things which aren't an established habit quite yet. (In Taiwan there's a different yearly rhythm; no Christmas holiday and a mad rush to finish everything in January before the long Chinese New Year break in late January or February.)

But let's imagine that your failure to maintain your resolution is entirely due to unforeseen events: you are determined to go to the gym, but then you land a huge work project which requires most of your energy and all of your time. Or you were going to lose weight, but you started learning to bake and have discovered your superpower is making delicious cookies. Neither a valuable work contract or the ability to produce perfectly-crunchy-or-chewy chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven whenever you want are bad things, and maybe if you'd known about their emergence ahead of time you could have planned your resolutions accordingly, or at least been better prepared for the struggle of maintaining your resolutions in spite of them.

This ignorance (not stupidity--ignorance is not knowing something, stupidity is when knowing it wouldn't help you) of what the new year might bring can in some ways be considered a form of mercy. My examples above are positive, but all too often what lies ahead as we face every new year is unforeseen hardship and pain. Perhaps the global geopolitical situation will become more unstable, straining the economy and threatening war. Perhaps sickness or disease will afflict you, your friends, or family members. Perhaps you'll simply find yourself unable to meet your goals through factors seemingly beyond your control, and slowly slip into ennervating ennui.

All these things and many more are possible, and we know that they will all happen at some point in the future, as a matter of statistics. This is the world we live in; we never know when misfortune may strike, and that inability to know can be faced in various ways. (Libraries of books and articles have been written about how to face the unknown without debilitating stress, many of which can be encapsulated in Paul's reminder to "be anxious for nothing".)

Making Impossible Decisions

With the future tantalizingly guessable but also unknown, many decisions must be made without knowing the outcome. As an INTP on the Myers-Briggs personality indicator, I know that I have a tendency to delay making a decision until I have all the relevant information to help me decide, the problem being that a) sometimes you simply can't know all the relevant information, and b) sometimes if you wait long enough to try to know everything, you've missed the decision-making window.
Life is unfair; sometimes the only effective decision is one made before you know how rightly to decide. It's still a little surprising even now when I do that and turn out to have chosen well; it seems like any decision made before you could know enough to make it would be wrong, yet that's often not the case.

People have different ways to make that kind of "stab into the unknown" decision; some like to "go with their gut feeling" (this depends on having a healthy/reliable gut in the literal, physical sense--anxiety and depression can make your gut feeling a bad and unreliable guide, something I have discovered only after many years trapped in the doubt-labyrinth). This is a form of taking personal responsibility for the decision, and for people with strong intuition and the "knack" for making good rapid decisions, the results can seem almost like magic.

By contrast, some prefer to offload the decision-making stress by flipping a coin or using some other "this is random yet maybe fate/divine providence is out there guiding it" method. This is more natural for people with a more external locus of control--they feel they're not really in control of most things to begin with, so every decision is somewhat arbitrary. I am the opposite, with a very internal locus of control--I believe there are very few things in life that you don't have some measure of control over, it's only a question of whether you are willing to really consider all of your options, including those most people aren't willing to consider, and deal with whatever consequences may result. (The upside to this is the capacity to see options and make choices and achieve results which are not even on the radar of many people; the downside is knowing that basically all the bad things that happen to you are your own fault, and not being able to externalize the blame for your problems without knowing you are being hypocritical in doing so. Some degree of self-loathing is the risk of making better use of your gift of free will.)

Other people (very commonly, here in Taiwan) try to get around the unknown future problem at its source, by resorting to a wide variety of fortune-telling methods. There are entire classes of fortune telling here largely unknown in the West, using birds and dangling pendants and the dates of one's birth and characters in one's name, and tossing little red crescent-shaped wooden blocks (jiaobei) at temples to see how they land.

All fortune-telling is forbidden by scripture, of course, as it's random self-deception and ex-post-facto rationalization at best (and real contact with dark spiritual realities at worst), and in every case an attempt to face an unknown future with less or no need for faith or God's presence and guidance (or for learning discernment and wisdom). God wants us not to know the future, because that's how we learn to trust. We want to know the future, because trusting is hard and can hurt. It's more or less the sin of Eden; we want to know what God knows so we can make decisions as we deem best, vs. trust and obedience to someone other than Self.

Hindsight Is Not Invalidation

Another reason knowing the future would be harmful, is because that knowledge is a "collapsed" version of reality compared to experience. You do not live a year instantaneously. The troubles and hardships are spaced out with joys and relief. Looking back with hindsight is different from knowing all the ramifications of a decision ahead of time, because knowing them ahead of time would compress them all together, a giant bundle of future pain, whereas experiencing them in reality takes place over time, where there is solace and recovery and lessons learned. Living in time means you only need to confront and deal with each problem as it comes, whereas the ability to see all the future problems together means mentally confronting all of them at the same time, which would make any decision impossibly daunting.

When I was making the decision to move to Taiwan to do long-term missions work, I had no idea how my life here was going to be. It turned out that I had mostly rational expectations (for those few expectations I dared to have, knowing how dangerous they can be) but I was also wrong about nearly everything: most of what I was looking forward to fell through, didn't work out like it was supposed to, or was taken away rather painfully. Why were my expectations so far off-base? Partly through things I could have known but didn't know to ask about (the "you don't know what you don't know" problem), and partly through things I could never have known or predicted ahead of time (I have a strange talent for getting myself into frustrating situations that no one I know has ever encountered before).

I think if I could have foreseen all the various difficulties and challenges I would encounter as a missionary ahead of time, I would almost certainly never have left the U.S. Yet that would have been the wrong decision, and coming was the right decision, which I could make because I was spared from knowing what would have made deciding correctly impossible for me.

When seeking God's will to come here, I did not foresee all the difficulties and obstacles I would face, but I did receive very clear confirmation to go. It was not wrong for God to decline to inform me of what would happen if I followed His leading, because it would have stopped me from obeying.

In terms of making the decision itself, I was blessed to have the strong confirmation that not every missionary receives. Yet that is not a necessary condition for making the decision, since with the Great Commission given to all followers of Christ, deciding to serve the Kingdom of God in a full-time capacity is never odds with the revealed will of God (who will open and close doors according to His hidden will for the particulars, whether we like and understand it or not).

Though we sometimes act as if the default is to do nothing, and that in special circumstances, some "super Christians" or the "specially called" can work at the Great Commission and spreading the Kingdom, the Bible teaches the opposite; the default is what God already told us all to do. I spent a lot of time worrying that being a missionary to Taiwan might not be God's will, until finally I made the decision to do it, and simply asked Him to close the door if it was not His will, and close it hard enough that I would absolutely not be able to get through it. Then it was simply a matter of crawling over every obstacle until I got here. (At which point the obstacles got taller and thornier. The reward for endurance is more weight on the next set, when strength and not comfort is the goal)

If It's Not Wrong, Pray, And Do It

No amount of hardship encountered after the fact can make a decision wrong purely on the basis that there is hardship (unless it was a comfort-based decision). That is a blessing for we time-bound creatures; we can "swear to our own hurt and not change"--make irrevocable decisions which cause us pain yet still honor them; Psalm 15 calls this a mark of someone who may dwell in God's presence. Because the future is unknown to us, we can make correct decisions which we might not be able to bring ourselves to make if we knew how hard the consequences would be, yet still not give up.

The idea that "God won't give you more than you can handle" is false and a lie; God will absolutely give you more than you can handle, so that you have no other recourse but to take refuge in Him, or reject Him. Those are the only two eternal choices any human has.

But it's one thing to make a godly decision, then need to rely on God to survive the consequences, and another to know how hard it's going to be and still make the decision. Ignorance is a protection for the weak in a sinful world; those who know a lot have to be much stronger to handle that knowledge and still move forward, and that strength often only comes through suffering.

Yet the Bible exists so that we should not be ignorant of those things God considers it necessary for us to know and act on, and it teaches us not to stay willingly ignorant, but to seek wisdom and get understanding. And while scripture is deep and sometimes complex, on the whole the Bible is not that complicated when it comes to what we should and shouldn't do. We no longer live under Old Testament law, but one sin of legalism in any era or church is that it destroys the freedom that God offers us: The idea of "Thou shalt not..." is actually incredibly liberating, because "Thou shalt..." would confine us to only what was mentioned. But we have freedom in Christ to do whatever is not sin, for His glory.

So that is my advice to you as we all face the daunting prospect of the year-which-comes-after-2017: make right decisions, and trust God to walk you through whatever difficulties may arise. And if you are a believer* who wants to do something that scripture does not condemn anywhere (specifically or in principle), if you have asked God to reveal His will to you, and He has not said No, then ask Him to close the door if it is not His will yet you can't know that, and move ahead with confidence that He will direct your paths. As I was told when in the middle of a tough decision once: "You can't steer a parked car."

(*--And if you are not a believer, 2018 is the perfect year to stop holding out against what everyone from astrophysicists to a child in Sunday school knows is true, and begin your path of faith to God. The Gospel of John is a great place to start--the trail of atheists who set out to disprove the Bible and later believed it is rather impressive.) 

The Church stagnates because we make non-action the default, afraid we might accidentally do the wrong good thing. We should be more concerned with not doing the good God has set in front of us. The world needs it in 2018 more than ever.

Avoiding "Friendly Fire"

Today I want to post about something very important that I've been learning in the last year (through the election and with the confederate statues issue, etc)...


"I can't go to bed yet, someone is wrong on the internet"

It's common to decry the anger and lack of civility in arguments online, for politics or theology or anything else. This is partly because the semi-anonymity of online comments tends to bring out the worst in people; also when you aren't face to face with someone, there is a tendency to respond to "wrong ideas" and forget that you are really responding to a person. (I think one could make the argument that someone who has decided to become an avatar or promoting conduit for those ideas deserves to be treated as such, but otherwise not.) Also, people are sinful and many simply have zero interest in treating other people well and enjoy trolling, insulting, and/or disputing, and the internet is a convenient tool doing so.

But one more specific danger of arguing on social media, for those who do it for reasons more or less involving what is true and what is not, and not because they simply enjoy it, is that you don't know the context of error that people live in and are responding against. So they may be coming at the issue from a different angle from you, and may indeed be wrong on some particular aspects which you may be pointing out accurately. But if you were to enter into their context, and see the errors they are confronted with and responding against, you would find you were fighting on the same side as them.

As the graduate of a well-known seminary, I and many of my former classmates have trouble not responding to error when we see it, especially theological error. (Yes, sometimes things are not a matter of perspective, but violate basic truths. If you believe the Bible is true, then you believe it's worth arguing about; for humans, one necessitates the other) We certainly have many issues where we disagree; part of going to seminary is being exposed to the scriptural fountain of theological truth whose water is poured (along with many sweeteners and artificial flavors and dyes) into the giant soda fountain of theological opinion, and we all have our favorite flavors of soda even when we did not come to seminary already possessing deep worldview differences that influence how we approach even that pure fountain.

But on the occasions when I have taken issue online with a fellow seminarian or anyone else either expressing a truth unclearly or expressing what was not true, I have often found that their intent was to combat an error they had seen in some other place. Perhaps they had been reading Genesis 1 and 2 and thinking about God's command to humans to be stewards of the earth, and then, stung by a video they saw of environmental devastation somewhere, posted an article which strayed over into dangerous "climate care is the gospel" territory. It is not wrong to stand against that error, indeed it is necessary to do so, but one needs to understand their motivation for posting to address the errors in a constructive way.

Understand 1, before deciding whether engaging 1 or 2 is better worth spending the time for 3

Attacking the wrong they saw, not the one you see

A vivid ongoing example would be the endless array of opinions possessed by American Christians regarding President Trump: If you live in a context (online and/or offline) where most people react to Trump with visceral hatred as a mascot of everything they despise, moving in the direction of truth requires setting aside those emotions and considering the actual ramifications of his actions as president, at least some of which have been positive and helpful, as was also true for Obama. So this is something it was fair to challenge people to do when Obama was the president they loved to hate, and it's fair now that we have a traditionalist authoritarian narcissist in the White House instead of a progressive ideological narcissist.

On the other hand, if you live in a context where there are a lot of people who consider Trump as God's gift to the Church, and to America, which are considered more or less the same thing, then moving in the direction of truth does require challenging some very erroneous assumptions there. (My own stance is that we must be more pragmatic and recognize that, like Treebeard in LotR, the Church should not be on any politician's "side," because none of them are on our "side," and certainly the political machine and swamp of corruption are hostile and corrosive to even those comparatively good men who find their way into positions of power. It is good to be concerned for the state of one's nation and culture; we do not give up our passports or our hard-won freedoms or stop paying taxes or stop driving across local bridges when we enter God's kingdom, for His kingdom is not of this world. But we also don't need the influence of Washington to get things done, and we greatly weaken ourselves to lean on that splintered staff; for we are the adopted sons and daughters of God Almighty)

With our current social media environment (exacerbated by the desire of companies like Facebook to become a walled garden that you never need to leave, by bringing news and everything else into the FB bubble) these arguments all fall into the same space. So I can see posts praising good actions by the president met with offensive hostility by Trump haters, and posts attacking the conflation of what is Caesar's and what is God's met with defensive hostility by Trump supporters, all on my FB wall on the same day.

I have written elsewhere of how the two camps and other zero-sum ideological groups could attempt to live together in relative peace by regarding each other as different nations in the same country. But what I'm talking about today is another way, especially for those being pulled to one side or the other but not yet "in the camp." Sometimes protesting the particular errors around them can drive people too far in a particular direction; many historical evils would be less inexplicable (though not less wrong) if we could feel what it was like to be in a particular context, the unfairness, the personal pain, etc. I see a dangerous tendency to use that kind of language now. In the past, violence usually follows, and that's been true for a couple of years now in America.

So while it's as important as ever to engage and combat falsehood, and keep ideological thinking from undermining the truth that changes not, it's also important to recognize that lots of people's worldviews are being pushed to extremes in our crazy fragmenting society, and attacking their ideas without understanding where they come from is not defeating that extreme thinking but is strengthening it and pushing those attacked to double down on those ideas. This is true of theology as well as politics, since we don't necessarily treat those convictions differently.

So, is it necessary to stop arguing about important issues in "the commons" for which social media has become a very poor replacement? It's useless to even try to say that people shouldn't argue online, but actually I don't think it's necessary to say that. We should argue sometimes, it's an important part of discovering and defending truth. But if truth is indeed our motivation, we should try as much as possible to argue constructively.

Avoiding Friendly Fire

So how do we engage error online when we consider it an appropriate situation to do so, yet focus on attacking the untruth while still loving the person? And more specifically for this post, how do we figure out if there is really a point of disagreement worth engaging, or whether the person is responding to their own context and not yours (or since you are part of their context if you can see what they are posting, we could say, responding to a different part of their context) I think we can do so by making use of two questions:


Important Question #1: What do you think the greatest danger/problem here is?

By asking this question, you do two things. You let the other person feel listened to (because you are in fact offering to listen), which tends to diffuse a lot of potential badfeel if constructive disagreement is going to follow. You also identify what really motivates them in the argument. If you were arguing with a robot, you wouldn't need that, but since even INTPs are people too, it's always more helpful to respond to that motivation too and not merely its symptoms.

In asking, you may find that you don't disagree in any fundamental way, you just don't consider the thing they've honed in on to be the primary issue at stake. In that case you can either end the discussion on friendly terms, agreeing that they are right to be concerned about that thing, or you can shift the argument to whether that thing is really the primary issue. In that case you may need to ask some more questions to find out why they are so worried about that particular issue.

One example of this would be the churches that consider drinking any alcohol to be sinful. That is scripturally indefensible, and the attempt to do so leads to convoluted absurdities of interpretation. However, one often finds that when normally sound, bible-loving pastors also preach this extra-scriptural rule, there are usually strong personal reasons for doing so. (A loved one was lost to a drunk driver, or ruined their own life through alcoholism, etc.)
It is right to stand against misuse of scripture even (especially?) when it has good motives, for that is how heresies tend to begin, with the best of motives. But at the same time, when attacking someone's error, it's important to know what the real motivation behind it is. All the arguing about alcohol in scripture may have been useless, where the person in question may have really needed someone to walk through the grief of their loss with them, so that they did not need to deal with it by bringing the authority of scripture to attack the source of their pain.

Important Question #2: If you were in charge, how would you solve this?

This is an invitation to constructive and not destructive thinking. Sometimes people have never thought this far, and it stops them short. Sometimes they have thought about it a great deal, and will be relieved that someone wants to hear them out.

It seems (at least to me) that a reply to this question of "I'm not saying I have all the answers, just that this isn't right" is basically a cop out. They just want to express disapproval, there is no substance to their opinion to argue over. On the other hand, as Sun Tzu teaches us in the Art of War, it's often wise to leave your opponent one line of retreat. Often lines such as the one above are a way of retreating from the artillery of reason offered in good faith with dignity and order intact.

This question is also one in which you're more likely to come away with something useful for yourself. It's highly unlikely that you are going to convince anyone of anything online via an argument, even a polite and constructive one, but this means that at least one side gets to be heard, and invites the other side to respond in kind. If you have an audience, asking them how they'd solve it also invites the audience to think in a critical way about your opponents proposed solution. If it's implausible or problematic in other ways, that's usually going to much more obvious to bystanders than when you're arguing about the problem itself.

Potatoes argue from identity. Don't be like a potato. Also the cake is a lie.

So...

In an age of ideological conflict and identity fragmentation, Jesus said it best: "whoever is not against us is for us." When we attack the arguments of people who are addressing problems from their own contexts, we need to at least understand their motives. We might be accidentally engaging in friendly fire, distracting or defeating their efforts to engage people in a different context from ours.

I have done this. As an INTP, for an argument I don't shoot a tiny missile at the other person as in my diagram above. I cease to restrain the hungry attack raptors and they devour anything in the argument that's not rock solid. I am not saying I win every argument, there is much I don't know and many other skilled debaters around, and if it comes down to good-sounding rhetoric or emotionally resonant language I'm okay at best. But I am good at seeing what is inconsistent or weak in an argument and articulately dismantling it. And, due to that, there have been times when everything I said was correct and every issue I raised was legitimate, but it was a misdirection from another real problem that needed dealing with, which I wasn't aware of. That didn't delegitimize my own statements, but it made them less helpful in the overall struggle against falsehood.
So today's post is written as much to myself as to anyone else reading it.

I do think arguing online can be selectively useful, and I also do it much less than I used to, partly from being busier with worthwhile things. I usually approach it from the stance that I want to learn more about what other people think and also demonstrate when a position is logically indefensible. Those have been tricky goals over the past year on many topics, especially when emotions and identity are so commonly involved. So my advice to everyone (most of all myself) is to only go into an argument 1) as much as possible not because you are "triggered" by something that seems indefensibly wrong and know exactly how to reduce it to a pile of shattered inconsistencies (or raptor poop), 2) having pictured what realistically winning the argument or having a profitable discussion as a result would look like and making that your goal, and 3) use the questions above and similar ones as needed to keep ideas and people separate, and show that you are willing to listen and learn, and yet that listening and learning doesn't mean conceding the point.

That's all for this post. Have a Resplendent Reformation Day and Happy Halloween!

Babylonian Cuneiform, Virtue Signalling, and Fungal Fake-Wheat

The other night I was preparing for a sermon, and got off on a whole rabbit trail which began with cuneiform and went all sorts of places. (The most fascinating intellectual inquiries always seem to pop up when one is trying to concentrate on preparing a sermon) What began as the discovering of some fascinating scholarship mixed with disappointingly juvenile conclusions about scripture, now continues as a question of how to get rid of the dirty bathwater but keep the baby, intellectually speaking.

1. Not Settling for the Bronze, Owning It

I had heard vague noises about a professor achieving momentary internet attention by deciphering an Akkadian cuneiform tablet only to discover it recounted a Babylonian flood account in which the ark was a massive upright cylinder, but discovered the man himself was actually quite fascinating. It turns out his name is Dr. Irving Finkel, he has a PhD in Assyriology, and a glorious beard to match.

I happened upon Dr. Finkel not via the "real noah's ark" controversy, but after a post one of my seminary professors shared on FB, of a Dr. Jeremiah Peterson doing cuneiform in the original fashion, on a circular, wet clay tablet with a square stylus. It's a beautiful thing. I can't link to his video but here is a screenshot. Apparently he makes these for sale as well, though a quick search didn't reveal any links to an online shop.

This piqued my interest (which is admittedly highly piquable), and headed me off in search of more information, the rabbit trail I mentioned at the beginning. Dr. Finkel turned up early in the process, due to his enviable position as Assistant Keeper for the part of the British Museum which houses 130,000 cuneiform tablets, which he gets to read and keep track of. I don't know who the primary Keeper of the Tablets is, perhaps the position is honorarily kept open for Ashurbanipal himself)

Dr. Finkel should be experienced by everyone, so here he is. Skip to 1 minute in to get past the perfunctory student intro before Dr. Finkel starts speaking.

(Bill Nye and Neil Degrasse Tyson, get on this guy's level)


I especially appreciated his asides on education (Babylonian cuneiform lessons involved a schoolmaster with a cudgel who would smack students on the head if they'd not been diligent, a practice Dr. Finkel believes should be brought back in modern schools "to make people learn something") and on cuneiform tablets as a superior method of information storage (in the far future everything from the digital age and indeed the age of print could conceivably be lost, being printed on perishable paper or stored electromagnetically, but in that distant future all the cuneiform tablets will be more or less exactly as they are today)

2. Avoiding both Scylla and Charybdis

Dr. Finkle is a gentleman and a scholar by all appearances, but in his lectures and writings he does lapse into unbeardsmanlike conduct. Celebrating his own discovery of a new Babylonian flood account (apparently the only one to mention the animals going in "two by two" as in the Biblical account) he ran straight into the same error so many secular scholars of antiquity fall into, that of discovering something with connections to the Biblical account and then immediately assuming he's figured out where the Bible writers got their ideas from and proclaiming it as the new definitive "real story behind the Bible." It happens pretty much every time. Anything people manage to discover from antiquity that agrees with the Bible on particular points is automatically regarded as the original, and the authors of scripture must have been copying it.

This kind of modernist intellectual arrogance is common among the more charismatic scientists and professors (I did not choose the examples of Bill Nye and NdgT at random, though much of their own sciencing is in fact Science cosplay), who being good modernists in a post-modern era have a religion of artifacts and lab coats and the distinguished trappings of old-school academia.

This "science is frickin' awesome" movement has been a loud and enthusiastic voice online against a scriptural worldview for years now, although I believe the Trump election is sort of a convenient social landmark which demonstrates the conclusion of that era and the beginning of a different phase, in which many people have finally realized people they used to view as ideologically neutral are actually all pitching narratives at us, and circle their respective wagons. (not necessarily a better situation, but a different and perhaps less naive one)

In general, educated people know better than either to listen to every single thing scientists say, or to refuse to believe any of it, but there's not much at stake either way. For Christians this process is complicated by the fact that we value science as a method of understanding creation, yet recognize that many doing the science come at the process with atheistic premises which clash with a scriptural worldview and both consciously and unconsciously promote these via their efforts. (The scientific method is a great tool for exploring and understanding our physical universe, and even has built in self-correcting mechanisms, but it's naive to pretend that any process which involves humans is not influenced by their premises coming in.)

So for believers there are two mistakes we can make at this point. The first is to throw out whole fields as "tainted" (something people might call fundamentalism, though everyone is doing it these days) or, convinced that sufficiently well-trained experts can successfully set aside their worldview premises and produce raw truth, try to "balance" our faith with these findings (the source of much liberalism in the church).

1. Virtue Signalling: "You have been Weighed on my Scale of what's Okay and what's Not Okay and found Wanting"

The first mistake arises very naturally from a prior mistake, which is to identify one's duty as a believer as finding reliable sources of information (websites, authors, pastors, etc) and passively absorbing them. Then, when a pastor says something wrong, or an author "goes liberal," or "gets too right-wing," people start viewing them with increased wariness, and will perhaps eventually throw them out, and look for someone who will hold fast to an ever-narrowing and more specific range of convictions espoused in certain ways.

Those who go about things in this way, and they are very numerous, often make statements or symbolic actions which have the primary purpose of communicating to other people where they stand on a particular issue. This is called "virtue signalling," in case you've heard the word thrown about recently. They may loudly condemn, or try to convince everyone to stop listening to, a pastor who takes a position with which they don't agree. But they won't write a book with sound theology, or usually even explain what specific things are invalid about the pastor's views and how they determine that. They just want to make sure they've expressed that they're a good person for publicly praising and condemning the appropriate things.

Of course, there are always lies being promoted, and plenty of pastors and books and sources of ideas which shouldn't be trusted. But in the world of ideas, there are a lot to go around. We don't want to narrow our minds to keep all unsafe ideas out, we want to be more discerning, knowing how to navigate the world of ideas safely and effectively, steered by a deep understanding of scripture. This takes time and effort, confidence and humility. But if our goal is to make ourselves more able to see and understand the underlying claims or premises of whatever information is being shared with us, whether through a book, or a TV show, or a sermon, or a scientific article online, rather than to decided if this is "good" or "bad" and then announce to everyone our acceptance or condemnation of it, we're probably on the right track to Jesus' command to be not only innocent as doves, but also wise as serpents.

2. Progressing from Scripture while trying to Bring it along too.

The second mistake may arise from a desire to avoid the first. Recognizing that the world of ideas is primarily not a bunch of atheistic professors trying to sarcast the faith out of their naive students, but often nice or at least very intelligent people on a quest for knowledge who have never accepted the premise of theism, many Christians want to somehow find a way to reconcile the fact that beloved teachers and/or impressive scholars teach that which cannot be reconciled with scripture, with their own conviction of the truth of scripture.

When these two convictions clash, however, it is very often scripture which is expected to conform. The basic (and nonscriptural) idea of progress or progressivism (using it loosely here), that humankind is moving forward from error to enlightenment, makes it tough to hold to any unchangeable standard, because for progressively-minded people such a standard, no matter how brilliant and true in its day, would necessarily be becoming slowly but inevitably outdated and untenable. Evolution is in many ways not merely a theory of the development of the biological life we see around us, but a whole worldview of itself; the idea that things can and will improve as they change over time, and that we all partake in this process not only biologically but societally, morally, etc.

Progressives with a more favorable view of Christianity's influence on the world may say things like "Christianity got so many things right, but we can do better," while others may view it more negatively, but either way the question is not of truth, but of progress. For them the question would be: Is Christianity getting us where we want to go? If not, we can move on from it.

Interestingly, the majority of American Christians seem to have ingested this worldview of progressivism to varying degrees growing up, usually more and more the younger they are, and it has led to a fascinating array of paradoxes in their own beliefs. I see many people trying to say morality is derived from God, while simultaneously updating their own moral sensibility according to secular trends (of the month), without noticing any contradictions. (An extreme example was one person telling me that if Jesus were to do the things He did in the gospels today, some of it would be sin, though it wasn't at the time because people didn't know any better.) This is of course untenable, both in terms of consistency of faith or even rational thought, but reason speaks calmly while trends shout enthusiastically.

3. One Solution: Look to the Wheat and the Tares

If we seek to avoid both of the preceding mistakes--living in a sort of perpetual Inquisition and virtue signalling our allegiance to the increasingly few sources of information which "can be trusted", or else trying to cram secular academia and moral philosophy into the throne alongside scripture and serve both masters--we must do what Odysseus could not, and find a way to avoid both Scylla and Charybdis. Like him, for most of us pragmatically speaking it may be a matter of veering closer to one or the other, with the goal of making it through as unharmed as possible.

Yet I think the concept of "the wheat and the tares" can be applied here to good effect.

Jesus tells a fascinating parable in Matthew 13:24-30: A man sows his field with good seed, but "an enemy" comes and sows "tares" in the field. Interestingly, this isn't noticed until the heads of grain start appearing. ("when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also") This lends credence to the theory that the word translated as "tares" in the KJV (Simply "weeds" in the NIV and ESV) is a reference to a kind of plant called Darnel, which very closely resembles wheat until the grains ripen. (At least according to wikipedia, in the Roman Empire sowing Darnel in someone's field was illegal. So Jesus may have been referencing for His parable a destructive practice common enough to be banned, a scenario with which his listeners would have been familiar)  Darnel is susceptible to fungal infection, and the particular kind of fungus which infects darnel is toxic and causes drunken-like nausea, which can be fatal. Sowing darnel in someone's wheat field was literally small-scale biological warfare, and hard to remedy, though in this case the owner of the field has a wise solution.

(Note: Jesus Himself explains what He meant by the parable in the same chapter. I'm not suggesting this is an alternative meaning, this is just an application which I find helpful in my quest for wise discernment vs. either judgmental over-rejection or naive over-acceptance)

Wheat, top, vs Darnel, bottom. Once threshed, the grains are hard to tell apart.
Credit: http://the-biologist-is-in.blogspot.tw/2016/07/more-crop-mimics.html

Applying this parable to the world of ideas, the parallels immediately jump out. Truth is there for us to grasp, by observing the reality of God's creation and by accepting the special revelation of scripture. However, the Enemy has sown lies throughout the fields of human knowledge (and corresponding heretical ideas throughout the Church), lies which seem like truth--until they bear their false fruit, which leads to toxin-induced drunkenness and death.

What can we do to root out these dangerous untruths? The parable has the servants suggest that the false wheat can literally be uprooted--pulled out from among the true wheat. This is the first mistake mentioned above--over-zealousness in trying to keep ourselves from being in contact with any "tainted" sources of information. The master explains the problem with this in his reply--in doing so, you will throw out much real truth in the process. This is not the right stage for sorting them out, it's too early. But one does not simply accept this false wheat along with the true wheat, which would be the second mistake. Instead, having been taken in, now the wheat is sorted. True wheat is taken into the barn, fake wheat is burned to ashes.

This happens before the wheat is threshed. Thousands of tiny darnel and wheat grains look similar, and once mixed together can't be easily sorted out. But the clusters of grain look different on the different plants, as the picture above shows. Once you internalize ideas (I.e. "Once you take them into your barn," but as Spurgeon would say, there's no need to push a good metaphor/illustration to exhaustion), it can be quite difficult to figure out which ideas you got from what source. The process of distinguishing truth from falsehood does need to happen in the context of where you received the information. The facts, context, and situation all matter; there is no "hypothetical wheat." (And the task of discernment is greatly helped by recognizing how to reject false hypotheticals and "setting aside X" arguments where X is relevant.) If you do find that a certain field pretty much always produces false wheat, it makes sense not to spend most of your time searching for true wheat there.

(Though indeed it's not an entirely one-sided process; our Friend seems to delight in sowing real wheat seed in the night among what the Enemy considers a safe field of tares.)

In summary, the wheat and false-wheat are to be harvested together: we take the good and bad ideas together as they come. It can be tough to distinguish them at first, but we can tell them apart since their fruit is not the same. This is the role of discernment. Not to pull up and throw away anything that looks like a weed before any fruit is ripe, nor to internalize all ideas and try to sort them out later, but to know the difference between true and false wheat by the fruit they bear, and take what is true and discard what is false.

Psalm 119:66 - "Teach me good discernment and knowledge, for I believe in Your commandments."