My dear Retgud,

You tell me with some alarm that your patient is dwelling on his sins, contemplating his downfalls.  You fool!  It isn't your job to pick one particular set of sins in which to encourage the patient,  Your job is to to encourafe whatever sins he is currently disposed toward.  Your man is standing on a pillar.  You wont get anything done if he is pushing one way and you are pushing the other.  Give him a hearty shove in the direction he is already leaning, and he is sure to fall off.

Remember the unholy trinity: the devil, the flesh, and the world.  His nature is to do wrong.  It is your ally.  While it is not strictly neccesary for us to unite with the flesh and the world in our task, why prod him with temptations he is inclined to resist when we can join forces with the rest of fallen creation to destroy him.

I do not mean, of course, trying to get him to do something spectacularly evil, as much fun as it is.  I simply mean playing your strongest cards from the start.

So what does this have to do with your patient's so called humility?  For every true and good condition there are two sides a man can fall on.  He is unlikely to fall into conciet just now (that will come again eventually.  These creatures are pathetically cyclical).  Therefore, let him abuse himself.

Let him never once suspect the truth that you so plainly see.  The brilliant spark of divinity buried in even the worst of these creatures, the seed that may one day sprout when the Tyrant gives them rule over us -- but let it not come to that!  Are they evil?  Yes.  Contemptible to all that is good?  Certainly.  But the Tyrant made them good, and sees in them good and has worked to retrieve that good.  It is there, that trembling flame guarded by His hand from even our mightiest of winds.

If we cannot make a man proud, let us redefine humble.  The Tyrant told them to Love their Enemies, and to Love their neighbors as themselves.  If we can convince them to hate themselves, it will not be difficult to have them hate their neighbor as themselves.  If we teach them that there is not one single spark of good in bent humanity, if we teach them contempt of their race, and best of all, if we do this in the name of faith and truth, well, we will have a start (and, in fact, an exit ramp to Pride, once they start to realize how they understand human nature better than anyone else).

In fact, if you look for humility in the Tyrant's Book, you never find self-loathing.  You find perspective.  Knowledge of one's place in cosmic heirarchy, and willingness to serve.  Before Him, they are to acknowledge they are mere worms, for what can anyone be in the presense of that aweful light?  But when He came down and modeled humility for them, did He ever once loathe Himself?  No.  Did He consider his talents inferior?  Not once.  For Him, humility meant serving, in His loathsome tradition of forcing the great to bow to the small.  For Him, humility meant setting others first, not setting Himself last.  It was never about the self, but about other selves.

And look at His appeals for humility!  "The last shall be first," He says.  "If you want to be great in God's kingdom, learn to be the servant of all."  "When you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when the host arrives he will say, 'Friend, move up to a better place.'"

He appeals to their ambition!  Ambition!  To teach them humility, he openly offers high positions, even up to ruling kingdoms!

We have done well to define ambition as a vice among His sheep, just as we have done well to define any aquisitiveness as greed.  Every virtue we claim, we take away some of the joy he created for the little leeches.  He offers actual rewards for their offerings and charity.  By teaching them that the desire for gain is always greed and always evil, we rip the motivation He designed away from them.

So it is with ambition.  Let us teach the worms that they are giving up everything for nothing, and see how happy they are to serve the tyrant.  Let them believe in a devil's reward for an angel's deeds.

But best of all, let us teach them to denegrate, despise, and defile the image of the Tyrant they bear in every possible way.

Your affectionate brother,

Vanprek

The first rule of the quest is you don't talk about the quest.

Apologize, please.

I have discovered meaning and purpose.

I like to tell people this just because it makes them blink and re-evaluate my sanity.  However, it is true.

Story at eleven.

I've been looking for ways to grow a spine.

Fact is, a lot of people say and think stupid things, and I am too afraid of offending them to point this out.  Here in the BSU library, the liberal inner sanctum of a liberal university of liberal Minnesota, a guy like me with no spine is a laudible thing.  I am sensitive.  I respect people without shoving my beliefs down their throats.

In reality, where life and death and better and worse hang in the balance, truth needs to be told whether it hurts someone's feelings or not.  Not nastily, perhaps, but not cringingly either.  And I can do this... in print.  Behind a screen.

But in real life, in the world, I am too attached to my reputation, my high standing with everyone I meet, to call it as I see it.  I am brave enough to swoop around in a cloak in public, but not enough to whisper "(By the way, you are wrong)."

And it eats me.  This is one of the things that drives me nuts about going to school.  I can give the professor what he or she wants for a while.  A month.  A semester.  But eventually, I want out.  I want to tear out my hair, give them a list that has been growing inside the while of all the wrong things they said and I didn't respond to, and walk away.

But I'm afraid.  I'm afraid of what they will say about me, how they will ridicule me.  So I keep my ruddy trap shut.

Last year I flunked Intermediate Writing, even though I had demonstrated the ability to get an A+ out of the prof whenever I wanted because I got tired of being nice and concilatory to one student who insisted on deriding and attacking creationism in particular and Christianity in general at every possibility.  It wasn't just that he was wrong.  He was stupid.  His arguments consisted wholly of assuming he was right and scorning us religious fanatics and our historical anti-scientific stance.  So I blew up in the end, wrote a paper in which I took his arguments to peices, provided a few of my own, and drew attention to every obnoxious, groundless criticism.  It wasn't a nice thing to do.

Then I walked away rather than deal with the fallout.

In my other, education classes, the problem was more with my homework issues, and with me walking away before I blew up.  If I had the good sense to switch to a BFA in writing, all of this may have been avoided.

Maybe.

Everything I want to do has philosophical tendancies.  That means if I want to do it, I need to grow a spine and go.

In the meantime, maybe a nice degree in computer programming will support my writing habit, huh?  I don't know.  I guess what I need to do is write my bloody book and get it published.  That's what I really want to do, and the only way I am going to get that career is to jump in.  Degrees don't get contracts from Baen and Tor.  Good stories do.

Quotes from exhile

Bruce's coworker at CK:

"I'm glad I met Bruce.  It's so nice to meet a Christian who actually knows something.  Before I met him, I thought all Christians just believed in Jesus because their pastor told them so.  Every Christian I met would just be like: 'My church says so.  You just gotta have faith.'  I never knew there was even a case for Christianity before."

To this speech, two other CK employees nodded and heartily amened.  None of them are Christians.  Perhaps maybe one of them may become a Christian later.

Point is, anyone who says we ought to skip rationality, apologetics, and hardcore theology because we will offend people, or worse (I hate this one), because it's 'not loving', doesn't know what's going on.  This world is starving for people who know what they are talking up and who can back up their knowledge with facts and logic rather than some nebulous concept of 'faith' that has nothing to do with the first century pistiV.