Learning Indonesian, Part 3

I've been learning Indonesian for about two years now. I'm better at it than ever before. But I'm also questioning whether I should continue.

What use is it to learn a language for yourself, now that AI is as good as it is at translating? I think it's still useful if you want to be able to talk to people without pausing to check your phone for the translation. Also it's useful if you want to feel the full emotional impact of writing or speech. What are the connotations of words? What makes something a good joke or a bad joke? Or good poetry or bad poetry? Even prose has humor and poetry in it. Writing styles use sound, which make more sense if you know the language well. So it is still useful if you want to get close to a people group.

Do I want to do something like that? Before, it seemed clear. It could be useful to relate my writing to the Pancasila religions (Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism) and also to Indonesian culture in general. This would best be done if I knew people there and read enough Indonesian literature to belong (or to have the substitute for belonging that writers have when they know a culture well-enough to write about it). But now that I think about it, I'm probably never going to be the most qualified person to do the task of relating to the Pancasila religions. It makes more sense for someone who is a "native speaker" in those religions and/or in Indonesia to do that. But maybe I would be the only person who would be willing and available.

Is it likely that I would be? Looking at my priorities, I think that if that day comes, it will be far in the future. First, I would try to focus on philosophy. Next, on relating my philosophy to the Western world (primarily to America, where I live). After that, hopefully someone more qualified than me would know about my writing, to get into the non-Western world. If not, then it might make sense for me to learn Indonesian. But I may never need to for my writing project.

What about for other reasons? I don't see myself doing development-related writing. Maybe move there to save money? I guess it's possible that that would make sense, but it's uncertain that it would. I can already pursue relatively superficial online friendships with people in Indonesia using machine translation. (The deeper ones run into problems with indirect communication, and the usual problems with the fragility of online relationships.) Learning a language is a pastime and mental workout. But I can find others.

If I need Indonesian, I can pick it up again. My two years of learning it should give me some foundation. I took Spanish classes in high school and college, and have put basically no effort into maintaining my Spanish since, but I find that what I did know I can bring back when I need to, given a bit of time to get back into it.

So my thought for now is to forget about learning Indonesian for now, unless and until I really need it.

"Justice", Memory, and Forgiveness

A lot of what I can say about justice and forgiveness is probably well-known. But I think I should still talk about it in the context of MSL.

What is "justice"? It seems like it usually means "paying someone back for something bad they've done" or "making someone do something now to undo their own bad past actions". Basically, that the wrong things people have done in the past matter still and must be dealt with in some way. For the sake of this post, that is what "justice" means.

Is the past real? What would it mean for the past to be real? It would have to exist in the present. How would that work? I've tended to think that the past exists in the present in the form of memories that God continually remembers. We are writing a book, and the past pages exist in the present and are being read by God all the time.

We can access the past as well, through memories or proxies for memories like books.

Why do we hold onto traumatic memories?

1. One reason is to try to teach ourselves to stop trusting people who are untrustworthy. When people traumatize us, we can't believe that they could be so bad, so we hold on to two conflicting images, of them as devil and as angel. People really can be mixes of devil and angel, but they are coherent, finite mixes, not superpositions of all-devil violently alternating with all-angel. The traumatic memories are the voice saying "do not see them as all-angel", and uses lurid imagery to make its point.

2. Another reason is because the other person enslaves us to them by traumatizing us, and the memory is their lingering power over us over the years. People set themselves up as gods over us with an imperious word, or an intimidating tone of voice, or maybe an act of violence or deception. They sometimes do these things deliberately and knowingly, to achieve some kind of purpose. Other times, they act instinctively in the moment, and perhaps forget the idolatry they've set up in someone else's mind, and are surprised to see its fruits. The memory is what was set up, and the memory (empowered by demonic influence) is what enacts their past selves' will, years upon years into the future.

3. A third reason is because we hate people, are looking for an excuse to hate somebody, and the fact that they really did wrong us gives us a good excuse.

4. Another reason to hold onto traumatic memories, to add to the ones above, is the affirmation of memory. Abusive people sometimes want to erase the past, and in the process will try to discredit people's faculties of memory, and the content of those faculties. If you can't trust your memory, you can't trust yourself very much. So you have to either put up a wall to keep out people who attack your memory (part of the process of figuring out if people are trustworthy), or you have to strengthen your own memory and self-trust so that you can push out people trying to lie to you.

(There could be other reasons I haven't thought of.)

The third reason given above is I think the point of the command to forgive (forgive that you may be forgiven). That's where you really do sin by not forgiving. The other three reasons are cases where it feels like you need to forgive (at least, the thoughts you have toward the person who injured or wronged you can be negative), but in your heart you are not unforgiving, the issue more is that you need to learn to not trust people who aren't trustworthy, or you need to get free of (be freed from?) mental slavery.

Is "justice" a useful idea? The desire for justice keeps the past alive. You think about the past traumatic actions and demand that there be justice. Something happened that should not have happened, and so there is a dissonance between what should be and what is. You will hear a voice saying "get over it" as though there is no dissonance between what should be and what is. This spits on the face of morality itself, and to accept that spit is to claim that morality has lost its legitimacy. It's to claim that humans are god, not morality. If we accept debasings of morality, our societies will degrade. So the voice of "get over it" is a temptation to despair, laziness, cynicism, and degradation. If morality is weakened, people will suffer and die young who didn't have to.

5. Maybe this is a fifth reason to hold onto traumatic memories, to defend the honor of right and wrong. I guess this is "justice", the accounting of past deeds for the sake of right and wrong, urging change.

If "justice" keeps the past alive, then it gives power to the people who set themselves up as gods. We may still need to keep the past alive to teach ourselves that people aren't trustworthy. But by keeping the past alive, we give power to the people of the past to keep enslaving us. The unfortunate side effect of us choosing "justice" is that it allows evil people to do more harm to us than they otherwise would have been able to.

Is there a way out of this situation? Can we affirm morality while not allowing past (or dead) people to rule over our minds and torment us with what they've done?

I think one path is like this: first, figure out whom you can trust and how much, establishing who can be in your life and how much. This enables you to resolve your concept of the person who wronged you. Second, let go of "justice" for a minute (if you can), until the past person no longer has power over you. Third, notice that you are in danger of letting go of the value of morality. Now try to find a way to affirm morality.

I've assumed in my writing that in order for God to be legitimate, he must be truthful, and thus remember everything. (There are exceptions, but certainly he must remember everything that was us making ourselves who we are, which includes all our decisions.) So every bad thing you or another person have done is kept stored in the book of the past. It will never be erased.

That book does not have to be unbearable for God to read. (Perhaps because the death of his Son balances out its injustice.) It can't be, or else he could never rest. But there is a sorrow that is bearable. When God remembers our pasts, he does so with a mixture of feelings, including sorrow, and he will do this for all eternity. If we are like God (as we someday must be), then when we look over the parts of the book of the past that have us in them, we will feel a similar mixture, or the same mixture, of feelings about what we have done. With this, we respect everything that we have done in our lives, see the good and bad, and fit it into our reason. We read everything in it without feeling the qualia of unbearability.

I think this goes some way (maybe some would be satisfied that it goes the whole way) toward alleviating concerns that we forget that morality really matters by forgiving / letting go of "justice". After all, wrong never stops being wrong, and right never stops being right. Memory and the truth are affirmed. (But some could object that some of the wrongness has gone away if the contemplation of it is not unbearable.)

Another thought to consider is: what does it take to repent? Some people (maybe all people?) will have to look at the bad things they've done in the past, each in its turn, and reject them. To relive your past accesses certain tendencies that are still in you, and once accessed, you can choose to reject the values you had in the past, and adopt ones which are better. I can see this being a part of the Millennium.

So there is some reason to think there would be a "day of reckoning" in MSL. But does this maximally affirm the value of right and wrong / morality?

God must rest someday, and God is morality. God must cause to cease to exist that which is unbearable to him. Therefore, morality must not find past injustices unbearable -- can only object to them in some way that they are not unbearable. (This is intended to be the same as what I had in mind above where God reviews our past for all eternity and feels sorrow among the other feelings he has about our past deeds.) The past is loaded in a bitter way, with an edge to it, but morality itself requires that that edge be taken away someday. Therefore, the "day of reckoning" mentioned in the previous paragraph does maximally affirm the value of right and wrong / morality.

When we think that morality (right and wrong, the moral standard), is impersonal, we can imagine it being infinite, mathematical, mechanistic, tireless, and without responsibility. But when we think that it is personal, we see how it itself pays a cost for maximal "justice", and thus maximal "justice" goes against morality.

What Does Caring Look Like for Me?

I knew specific "broken-brained" people and who or what they were. When my brain is "broken", I can be them, and it feels good and natural.

Maybe caring looks like that for them. But what does caring look like for me? Not that, not really.

Going too hard on myself, or going too easy on myself, doing something that someone else is already doing, or can do better. But I am most useful to God when I ask "what does caring look like for me?" and come up with my best answer, which is plausibly correct.

It's important to care. Caring is how you value, and valuing is love. Value is how things are valuable, and thus it is important to care. Caring is who you are, and the way it affects what you are and how you act and trust.

What you are is clothing for who you are. The flesh of your mind and what it does are clothes that you wear. It's better to be the right small person than the wrong large person, and the right large person than the wrong small person.

Suicide

How does MSLN deal with suicide?

I don't like writing about this subject, because I feel like I'm checking off the boxes of "things that an ethicist is supposed to deal with" or "things that an ethicist is supposed to make a ruling on as though they know anything". In a way, I would rather state the truth and not my rulings, and let my readers come up with their own rulings for themselves, based on their own understanding of the truth.

However, I have some experience with this topic, and perhaps can write to people who are contemplating suicide, or who might again contemplate suicide.

I don't believe that this life matters as much as atheists or some Christians do. This follows from MSLN. I think that our culture (and biology) scam us into thinking it is "the" thing. People make this life into a god, and they worship it by trying to control people so that they also worship that god. Death (at least, the first death) is more like "falling asleep". (The second death, the result of hardening, really is the end, and is something serious.)

Life is a time to be useful, whether through what we do or who or what we are.

I've never made plans to kill myself, but I've had my mind captured so that that action seemed like the default thing to do.

When I've been closer to suicide, I've done different things. I didn't really want to die, because I had things to do still. I also knew that as someone who was against the "life-god", I paradoxically had a greater duty to not kill myself, because people under its rule would automatically discount what I had to say against it, if they found out I had killed myself. I tried a number of different things to avoid killing myself, such as going to therapists (but the therapists were aggressive or manipulative, and not on my side, so I quit going), taking psychiatric medication for my bipolar disorder (a pre-existing, relatively contained condition made worse by the thing that was making me suicidal), exercising, talking to friends, and maybe other things that secular people pursue, to stave off "falling asleep".

I also prayed, and I wish that that always worked, so that I didn't have to do the secular things. That would say that God, and relating to God, were what saved a person, instead of a bundle of coping mechanisms which could contain God, or not, whatever works for you. The "life-god" cruelly smothers the part of people that wants to love God more than life.

Praying did help sometimes, and gave me the gift of having heard from God, on some occasions.

I think that being suicidal (and experiencing other unbearability to a lesser intensity, over a longer period of time) has given me a sense of confidence, through a confrontation with life and death. I am not sure if I learned all the lessons that I can from that time, but one that I might learn is to understand the full nature of love, which loves when times are good and when they are bad. Love is not full-grown except if it has exercised its ability to deal with the desert, when it goes unrewarded for years. It is also not full-grown if it does not pay a cost. Full-grown love has paid a cost that goes beyond what it is willing to pay. So I hope that by resisting death, I was learning to love something.

My temptation is to say that I was learning to love life, but then the life-god wins and I am pinned down on one side, no longer free to go to God. Is it possible to really love God, when life pursues you? I didn't feel like I was learning to love life by resisting death, and maybe I wasn't, and was only learning to love. And if I can be whole-souled, I love God and those whom God loves, and not the clothes we happen to wear.

The love that comes in the desert and is asked too much of does not feel like love. But it is love. Sometimes, what feels like love, is love, a different kind. But sometimes it only feels like love, and is something fake.

Life Scams; Nice Maturity

From my notes:

Life scams: How the motions of life, of your life story, can scam you.

I'm not sure how many there are. But here is one:

You feel great in youth but have problems: the opposite sex / romance, not being respected, being trolled by friends/foes/emotions, lack of confidence, lack of outward success.

Then as you struggle to resolve all those things, you gradually or in obvious phases or moments come to not feel great. Maybe you enter a time where life is terrible. But, somehow or other many of your characteristically youthful problems resolve, with increased experience or being "broken open" by life stresses. Now, the temptation is to settle on this nice life, follow your instincts and pleasures, and become shallow, forget God to a large extent and not be altruistic. Your natural ability to be serious, to will, to long for somewhere other than "here", is broken down by stress, and that broken-downness allows you to enjoy social validation, a kind of "peace", health, well-being, and pleasure. You can be an ordinary human, and no one will object.

Somehow, you have to see the temptation and spiritual attack in this, see what it would be easy to see as good as dangerous and mixed. You may have to remember to have courage to restore yourself to seriousness, quietness, and another kind of "peace".

The scam works by beating you into a place where you "just want to be happy" and then offering you a way to be happy by giving you what you had longed for for years.

(It gives you some of what you had longed for for years.)

Listening to Satan Can Have Good Results

28 July 2023: minor edit and added update to the end.

I used to have a friend, whom I will call "A" (she was a philosophy major). At some point, she fell in love with a friend of hers, whom I will call "B", who had been pursuing her romantically. They became a happy couple.

I learned at some point from her that there was a young man who went to the same church as her and B, whom I will name "X". X was not a good person according to A. I don't remember all the details, but he could well have been immature, or had a bad personality, or was in some deep sense ill-intentioned, or something else. In any case, A did not trust him. And it became apparent that he had a crush on her.

At some point, X said that God had told him that he was going to marry A. (A and B eventually got married -- I don't remember if they would have been engaged at this point or not.) The pastor of A, B, and X heard about this and had a talk with them. He told X that God does not tell people that they are going to marry people if the person being sought or desired is in a relationship already (boyfriend and girlfriend? engaged? I can't remember / would depend on whether A and B were engaged at that point or not).

This story has stuck with me for years -- it came from a past era of my life, and it's been quite a while since I was friends with A, as well -- and I still think about what might have been going on.

Did X hear a voice from God? Or from some other spiritual source? Was the pastor's judgment Biblically-based? Or was he saying something pragmatic? Or was he led by the Spirit to say what he said? Or by a spiritual force of pragmatism?

I don't know, and I suspect that the people in the situation also didn't really know.

So what should X have done? Let's assume that he was sincere and wanted to please God. If God tells you you're going to marry someone who is in a relationship, but it could be Satan telling you that, you could say "I just shouldn't listen to that voice, try to forget I heard it". But what if God is trying to tell you something important? It's risky to not listen to God when he's trying to get you to do something, as much as it is to listen to Satan when he's trying to get you do something. So X might not ought to have just forgotten he heard the voice.

So now what? As a sincere, theistic young man, X might say "well, how can I be most pleasing to God in pursuing this message that I think might be from him, given the possibility that it is from Satan?" He might think of all the ways that Satan could use this message. Perhaps Satan would want X to harrass A and discourage her. Maybe Satan would be setting up a two-step scam, where because of him harrassing her, she had to (or would be tempted to) put up defenses, act out of fear, judge X, etc. Or maybe if he looked further ahead he could see the potential of Satan using his action to affect other people in the church community or the community as a whole. A two-step scam could be meant to get the pastor to form pragmatic judgments ("let's just not have creeps hitting on young women in my congregation") rather than really being open to the range of things God could be asking, weird though they may be -- to put practicality before obedience to God. And this emphasis on the pastor being the "professional manager of human situations" could affect his overall approach to leadership, making him less deeply theistic and thus less able to anti-tempt.

A smart, safe thing X could have done would have been to not mention that he expected to marry A, to stop showing outward romantic interest in her, and simply try to love her and love God, not with any sense of grasping but with the hope that is a "non-technique" (as Godfrey puts it in A Philosophy of Human Hope), hoping that someday she would understand that B wasn't the one for her after all, if that was in fact the case. Or even to persevere in loving her without grasping onto that potential outcome (of her realizing that he was more suitable for her). He could try to change to become more suitable for her.

If X learned the ever-educational way of the desert, and perseverance, hope, and trust in God, and sought to become a generally trustworthy person (and thus more trustworthy to God), through the message of "you will marry A", and didn't harrass or otherwise bother A, then no matter where the message came from, the outcome would be fairly unambiguously good from God's perspective (assuming that there are no other significant factors than the ones listed). It might not have been the best possible outcome (maybe X could, or couldn't, have known that God didn't really give that message, and either way it would have been better for him to not listen to it), but unless deciding to forget the message would have furthered some bigger plan of God's (that is, if we just evaluate this situation in itself), it would no longer be a win for Satan, but rather more so a win for God.

So, if that message came from Satan masquerading as God, if X had been serious about pursuing God, and had known how, he would have actually turned Satan's weird advice into something good.

--

28 July 2023:

Having reflected more on evil, my perspective has changed. I think the tone of the above does not take spiritual danger sufficiently seriously. I understand the pastor's behavior more now.

Otherwise, I think the post still makes sense to me. If you're going to listen to voices that could possibly be from Satan (voices in your head, from culture at large, from people you know, etc.) then you should implement what they say in as God-honoring a way you can.

Dependency, Independence

I wrote the following almost two years ago to the day (6 July 2019):

In The Wind is Howling, the author, memoirist, Ayako Miura, is for many years in the hospital with tuberculosis. There she meets a fellow patient named Tadashi Maekawa, who nurses, teaches, pushes her out of nihilism, in the direction of Christianity. Tadashi expects he won't live long, but invests his energies in helping Ayako. They start as friends but eventually fall in love. For her health's sake, Ayako has to travel to a different hospital.

P. 93 (1976 IVP ed.) / ch. 26:

At this point Tadashi Maekawa looked at me and smiled.

'Aya-chan,' he said, 'the time has come for you to live without relying on me or anybody else, because as long as you are living in dependence on others you cannot really live. You've got to make up your mind to depend on God.'

But while he said this he also admitted it was wretched to know no one, and he sent a postcard to a Mr Nishimura, an elder of a Sapporo church. I knew nothing about him.

Miss Ayako Hotta [maiden name of author], a seeker from Asahikawa church, is going into hospital in your city. Please do what you can for her.

So, to really live, rely only on God. Often, you will need other people, but don't rely on them, don't be dependent on them.

Side Effects of Solving Problems

When you solve a problem, you're often trying something new. You're adopting a new mindset, or developing a new institution or habit, developing a new relationship. In order to live you seem to have to use new tactics, "whatever works". But solutions have side effects. (This sounds like something We Are Not Saved would talk about on a societal level.)

So what you can end up doing is solving a loud, obvious problem by trading away something of quieter but greater importance. You might laugh off your problem, and get relief from "taking it too seriously", but as a consequence lose some of your ability to take anything seriously, and thus close yourself off to the voice of God to some degree. Or you might push for justice, and get what you deserve -- and not learn to receive greater gifts from God.

I am a bit hesitant to be a historian, but I think I see in the cultural history of the 19th or 20th centuries a kind of build-up of tension, up to a time of breakdown from perhaps 1920 through 1970 or 1980. I know of existentialism in postwar Europe and the big cultural crises of the 1960s. There was a time when people would be deeply disturbed by intellectual teachings, especially existentialism. Well, existentialism can be read just as easily now as then, and it hardly has any effect. We are not concerned with the burning question of "Is there a meaning to life? How can we go on given the 'death of God'?" Now the questions just don't have much resonance with us. We're just fine... but maybe the sense of "there is a right and wrong" and the (what I would call) cultural passion that led people to take things really seriously in an idealistic way (what I would associate with "having a sense of real meaning in life") is exactly the thing we need now, and our alleviation of our anxieties and mental anguish over existentialism traded away something that we would regret, if we hadn't blinded ourselves spiritually, and which we have good reason to regret.

The Enemy, of both societies and individual people, profits by throwing stresses at us and leading us to choose solutions which trade away something of real value. The scam of evil is multi-part sometimes, taking attention away from what is really at play. Satan wants to make you miserable, and that's obvious, but also wants to shut you down, make you hopeless, cynical, turn you away from loving and trusting God.

--

However, as dark as all that sounds, the good news is that sometimes you can solve a problem and then correct for the solution's side effects. You can deal with the obvious problem and not get taken in by the quiet lie that tends to go with that solution.

The Process of Maturity, Salted With Fire

Mark 9:

47 If your eye causes you to stumble, throw it out. It is better for you to enter into God's Kingdom with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into the Gehenna of fire, 48 'where their worm doesn't die, and the fire is not quenched.' 49 For everyone will be salted with fire, and every sacrifice will be seasoned with salt. 50 Salt is good, but if the salt has lost its saltiness, with what will you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another."

Sometimes it can seem like the world is mostly divided between flippant, irresponsible jerks who seek conflict, and overly-responsible, sad, hopeless people who do not. One can see why society would prefer the latter over the former, and it's natural for people to drift into the latter category over time. We get beaten down by life, broken, and come out, not with new wisdom, but with the inability to cause trouble. But this can be taken for wisdom.

Liberalism is about taking what's messed up about people and using it to disable them so that they can live in harmony. It assumes that you can't have the really good thing, not reliably, so you have to get people using a messed-up substitute that's more effective in the here-and-now. A liberal thing to do would be to break people's youthful pride (and their self-respect, their hope, their true personhood) through some kind of process of exposing them to things that overwhelm them and break them down. I don't think anyone consciously designed the process of maturity in our culture, but it almost seems like the kind of thing designed by a liberal theorist to keep people effectively docile (no matter how sad they might get over the status quo). Let people go off into the wilderness without education and support, and let them lose their taste for seeing things for themselves. Then they can be nominally free, free to speak, write, assemble, etc., while "magically" not using that freedom to attack the state or set up a rival to the secular order.

Yet, Jesus sees value in "fiery salt" keeping us living at peace with each other, and Jesus does not seem like the kind of person who would want us to end up mutilated or debased for the sake of peace. Salt is a good thing in Jesus' point of view. So can we distinguish between Jesus' salt and our culture's alternative to salt?

One possible difference is courage. Neither flippant, irresponsible jerks nor overly-responsible, sad, hopeless people have courage in a defining way. In general, we know things through their fruits. So what is the fruit, in you and your life, of the "brokenness-wisdom" (or the thing that could be mistaken as brokenness-wisdom)?

It's possible that what makes something salt is how things turns out. If you are broken but then go on to be fertile, then the fire became salt. (For the sake of the metaphor, salt is something that preserves and flavors.)

The secular order is not all bad, and Jesus didn't come to set up a kingdom on earth to replace it. The fear of religiosity that political people had in setting up liberalism does not have to be borne out. Religion does not have to be the cause or excuse of war, even ardent religion that puts God ahead of political, cultural, human-based things-to-be-trusted or objects of allegiance. So there doesn't have to be an overt conflict between Christianity and a this-worldly social and political order, and to an extent, there can't be for Christianity to really be true to the prince of peace. Perhaps Christianity can only be allowed to be supreme in the unofficial, non-established culture when it learns to not use any kind of coercion to establish itself, leaving coercion in the hands of the secular government.

But having said all that, the secular culture that liberalism helped set up does mire some people in hopelessness and discouragement, and turns people away from loving God. There is work to be done to combat the damage done to us either by liberalism, or some less-intentional, evolved culture of maturing. Culture is not just what we say, but also how we live and what happens to us. We each have a part to play in how maturing works in our society, and if maturing worked better, we would be better able to seek God, and better able to make society better.

How can we help people mature? It's good to respect younger people. Also, it is good to not tempt young people, but rather to anti-tempt them.

Values of Altruists

Values of altruists, based on this thread.

Altruism: concern for other sentient beings. A larger moral circle is better than a smaller one. Components:

other-orientation / relative lack of self-focus

(curiosity is an intellectual version of this)

hope (a fusing of something like optimism with openness to evidence, a kind of trust)

personal connection with reality (maybe a sense of moral obligation, a connection with other being's subjective states, or a taste for a better world)

inclination to work

Support values/practices to the value of altruism:

"moral uncertainty (normative uncertainty in general)" -- helps keep an ethical/social movment from becoming fanatical

(another approach being "you trust God, and thus you know things, and thus you don't act as though God doesn't exist to underpin your well-being and be the authority in your place")

rationality -- disciplined thinking helps find problem areas and address them effectively

outcomes matter

don't only do emotionally appealing things

effective communication -- work with the culture while trying to change it, listen, be disciplined / rational in speech and listening, argue well

against politicization

for working / building rather than fighting / exposing

("exposing": "saying the unhealthy truth for truth's sake", or something like that)

for knowing and self-improvement

Support values that are riskier to promote culture-wide:

some kind of ambition is good

humility is good but trying to maximize humility is bad (being so humble you don't have any confidence in your knowledge prevents action)

courage is good but not foolhardiness

will is good, if it stays in touch with reality

being "real" is good (following through on promises, really having intentions)

personal sufficiency is good (you have enough or are enough to dare reach into someone else's reality)

These are riskier. I think one thing to remember is that ideas are things in people's minds, that culture is really embodied in people, not in words. A lot of culture is in interpersonal contact, which forms the context for ideas. So ideally, if you promote values, you shouldn't just say things, but should instruct people (or be in relationships with people) such that they really understand what you're saying. Genes become phenotype through epigenetics, and concepts become emotions, attitudes, and behaviors through the "epiconceptual". The epiconceptual could be the cultural background that informs how people hear a message (like "yes, this is the moral truth, but we don't actually expect people to live up to the moral truth"), or it could be the subcultural background from a relationship or community that makes it make sense. The practices and expectations of culture / subculture. So values are a thing which are not promoted just by communicators, but also by community-builders, and good communities help make risky but productive words safe to spread.

Father and Daughter

She grew up in her father's house. Her father had a corporation and she went to parties. She was beautiful and desirable.

One day, she asked her father for her inheritance. He said, "OK, but you only get half of what you ordinarily would have." She thought, fair's fair.

She went out into the world and associated with all kinds of people. She gave parties and sent her family photos.

But at some point, she fell in with a band of Christians. Soon, she was baptized, and gave all her money away, following Jesus.

But that life didn't suit her. She started to think it was only a phase. "Maybe I could get a job in my father's corporation," she thought. So she put on a long-sleeved T-shirt to cover her cross tattoo and took the bus, another, another bus back to her father's door.

He answered the door and said, "I'm not your father. God's your father." And he shut the door in her face.

Father and Son

He grew up with no father, only the address of where his father lived, and he was always trying to find a father. He knew that it would be unreasonable to expect his father to care for him, since he had abandoned him at birth and moved very far away. But he always hoped to find a father, and then forgot that hope and found himself offering himself up as a son to father-figure after father-figure, abusive men and men with no use for him.

Finally, with his mind and body broken, he thought, "Maybe I should go see my birth father." So he got to the door and his birth father let him in and they talked. And he wanted to stay the night, but his father said, "I'm not your father, son. You have to go. God is your father."

Knowing Others Better

It's dangerous to think that you know someone better than they know themselves.

First, it's dangerous if you're wrong. You may see certain aspects of a person clearly, but it's unlikely that you have all the data. So you can possess a distorted view of someone which is very compelling to you. Then, you reflect that view back to them, directly or indirectly.

But also, it's dangerous if you're right. You have a lot of power if you understand someone better than they understand themselves. You'll know better how to defeat them in arguments. You'll approach them with a settled confidence about who they are which they can't contradict -- after all, you're the one with a better command of the facts of who they are. You set yourself up as the trustworthy, wise one, and the wise are those whose decision-making has legitimacy, and thus social power.

When in possession of this power, you can put the other person in a dependent state, setting their horizons within the bounds of your vision. This can prevent them from being the person that God wants them to be.

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Which is better, to know someone accurately, or to share the same reality as them? People who share the same reality can be friends. So you make the choice (or life makes it for you): to see things your way (to see the facts) or to share a journey with someone else.

If you know someone better than they do, you don't need to listen to them anymore. Speech is how we create reality, how we express ourselves.

The Hierarchy of Betrayal

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is familiar. It can be depicted using a pyramid. On the bottom of the pyramid are needs like food, sleep, sex, and temperature regulation. Next up there are social needs and emotional needs. When we have satisfied the lower needs, we can then worry about and try to satisfy the needs the next level up.

Perhaps the need to be loved can sometimes be at the very bottom of the pyramid, and sex can be a level up -- "no one died from not having sex", some say, while babies that are emotionally neglected fail to thrive. I think Maslow may have meant not that we really need sex but that if we don't satisfy that need, it's all we think about until we do, thus it is a subjective need, if not really an objective need. Maslow put "self-actualization" as the top need of the pyramid, to be sought when all others have been satisfied, but perhaps there is even something higher.

The "Hierarchy of Betrayal" works like this: when someone is trustworthy with the more basic things, they can then betray you on deeper, higher-on-the-pyramid ways. The glowering person in the street might stab you, but won't break your heart, and only a real sweetheart can gradually lead you away from your deepest values.

Loyalty to a Woman

From Blanquerna by Ramon Llull:

Once upon a time a man loved a woman and said to her that he loved her more than any woman beside, and the woman enquired of him wherefore he loved her more than any other woman, and he replied that it was because she was fairer than any.

The woman made sign with her hand in a certain direction, saying that in that direction there was a woman that was fairer; and when the man turned and looked in that direction the woman said that if there were another woman that was fairer, he would love her more, and this signified that his love to her was not perfect.

Inherent Danger of Trustworthiness

Father Clérissac was the trusted spiritual director of Jacques and Raïssa Maritain. At some point, he got into Action Française, a right-wing political movement, and attracted the Maritains toward it. They eventually moved away from Action Française, repudiated it.

Because Fr. Clérissac was trustworthy overall, he was able to introduce currents into his friends' lives that they came to regret later on. So there is a warning in this for anyone who seeks to become more trustworthy, that they might be creating the conditions to mislead other people.

Also there is a warning in this for anyone who considers themselves trustworthy and wishes to avoid being ambitious in becoming trustworthy. Whether you want to be trustworthy or not, you are, to some people and in some ways. So the untrustworthy aspects of yourself that you don't do anything about may betray those people.

"Jesus Wept"

The following is a memorial lesson I gave at the 2019 All-California Sacred Harp Convention. Memorial lessons are given to remember people who have recently died. You can hear an audio version here.

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In the days of the early church, as recorded in 1 Thessalonians, we see that death was referred to as "falling asleep". Paul says (1 Thessalonians 4:13)

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.

For those like Paul, death was a light thing, a closing of the eyes. They had hope in God, who would, or will, resurrect them to new bodies and new life at the end of this age, as he planned.

According to this plan, in John 11, Jesus saw his beloved friends grieve over their brother Lazarus, and offered them the hope of a new body on the last day. (John 11:17-27)

But a few verses later, in John 11:35, we see that Jesus wept. This is a short verse, easy to memorize, and it’s one of the ones that ought to be memorized first, both in itself and with its context. "Jesus wept", in itself, is God with a broken heart. In context, it's God weeping with those who grieve, not because they've permanently lost Lazarus, but because we have a world in which people can't see beyond the grave, though they might want to. Many Christians grieve for people whom they believe have only fallen asleep, feeling in their bodies that they will never see them again, although their spirits know better. Grief itself can be a raging thing, even destroying the lives of the people left behind. All of this is cause for God to weep.

A few verses later, though, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. His sisters can have him back in their lives after all, so soon. Jesus knew he would do this all along. But Jesus wept. He lived in our time, though he didn't have to, and this is a reason why he deserves to be followed with all of our hearts.

So we live in our time of grief, and in eternity, when we think of those who have gone on.