You cannot trust the church leaders to be righteous.
You cannot expect some of them to fall. To turn away. To follow myths.
And you can expect the enemy to enter, and try to seduce us into a false use of denial of that which is good, and call it spirituality. Or progress, because men get hurt. Or something.
For I predict one thing: these entryists, these heretics, will look and sound so righteous. They will look perfect. They will radiate power.
And they will not confess their broken state. Instead they will say that none can speak of it.
He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”
(Matthew 13:24-30 ESV)
Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.
(1 Timothy 4:1-5 ESV)
We have to choose wisely. The diet of the West is unhealthy: choose better. But don’t worship it: it is not a sin to enter the Golden Arches — and I have had food poisoning from the chicken at conference dinners, but never from McDonald’s or Wendy’s or the King or Carl’s Jr.
(Or from street food in hawkers markets: the local people know how to cook things so they don’t get sick).
But going full paleo or full vegan and thinking that this will make us better is an error.
We know that we should be wed or celibate. And that this is a struggle for many, me included. But we also teach women that they should only be sexually available when they desire the man who the churchians tell them to despise, and that a sexless marriage is highly worthy. Denying that one marries to deal with sexual desire, and to produce godly children. Denying the very nature of our sexually divergent species. Because of patriarchy or something.
And then we are shocked when the wife dumps her husband whom she has been taught, by these female teachers who sound oh so spiritual, is unspiritual because he desires her. We are shocked when he finds another. We don’t think that the teaching of the last thousand years had some use.
Who do you think will make more accurate predictions about humans: a 25-year-old sociology/psychology graduate student who has read a ton of studies, or a thousand-year-old vampire? If you agree with me that the vampire would eat the graduate student alive, then we can conclude that sufficient experience with people can overpower social science.
(Hat tip to social matter for finding this: the blogger has a conceit that he has found a thousand year vampire who has been awake the whole time, reading between soirees to find his prey)
Why is experience so valuable? One possibility is that the more experience you have, the time you have to fix mistakes in your knowledge, like when the vampire abandoned his belief in geocentrism and started believing in heliocentrism because the evidence was persuasive.
Another reason that experience is valuable is that it offers you a sensible set of starting beliefs, background assumptions, or hunches.
A big problem in philosophy is figuring out what beliefs to start out with in the first place. In Bayesian inference, you start with some initial beliefs (called “Bayesian priors” or just “priors”), and then you “update” them as you receive new evidence.
…
When the Count turns 1000, a study comes out that contradicts his understanding of human nature. This study has a sample of a couple hundred college students, a p-value of 0.05, it was conducted by a professor who proudly claims a political cause, and the results just happen to line up with that cause. Would the vampire throw out his 999 years of experience and believe this study?No, he would stick with his prior beliefs and laugh at the puny humans. College students are only good for dessert, not for generating knowledge.
Typical social science studies, which nowadays pass for serious evidence, are immensely weak in comparison to knowledge accumulated over human history.
Now, there are some implications.
- We have five thousand years of experience. Of worship, of shame, of repentance, or reconciliation to God. We have the wisdom of the ancient proverbs. We have a historical account of errors. It is called scripture, and it is profitable for teaching, correction, and training in righteousness
- The social sciences are corrupt. They seek too much funding from the state, who want results that meet their managed goals. Trust them not, particularly when the lab rats are first year psychology students.
- In a survey, correlations are descriptions. They are not causal. At best, they suggest hypotheses.
- The natural experiment of allowing sexual and gender fluidity, with free love and easy divorce, has decreased the population, destroyed family fortunes, ruined the soul of many adults and damaged many children. It has failed. If you follow evidence, you would abandon this as surely as the vampire abandoned a geocentric view of the universe.
This elite are not our friends. They want us following strong delusions and teachings that are evil.
Do not be them. Do not be like them