Judas as Victim and Perpetrator

Judas as perpetrator: he stole from the moneybags. Judas as victim: Satan entered into him. Even if (as perpetrator) he invited Satan into him, Satan using you takes you further than you would have gone on your own. You are Satan's victim if Satan uses you.

God as Younger than Us

A lot of what makes a person older or more mature is their broken-downness and lack of energy. So God, though he is many millennia older than we are, may in a sense have a younger outlook than many of us, because he still has his energy, and he is more functional than we are.

We think that the truth is that which is believable by mature people, but it may really be the case that immature people, in many ways, are closer to the truth, see things with eyes as young as God's.

Young view of reality: looking at reality literally instead of through the lens of practicality. A thing is what it is in itself, not seen in the way that is most advantageous to us to see it for our own personal well-being over the long term. We are not practical beings who use sight, but we are seeing beings, when we are young. Also, each moment or person or idea (etc.) fresh, instead of discounted by their diminished place, among other moments or people taken generally, general rules, "the way things work".

Really Praying by Believing

One traditional way to pray tries to get you to adore God, confess your sins, give thanks to God, and ask God to help with needs. (There could be other ways to pray.)

When you pray, really believe. Don't just say words of adoration for God, actually adore him (find him valuable and worthy in your thoughts and feelings). Don't just say words of confession, really see them as sins. Don't just say "thank you for what you've done for so-and-so", really be grateful for what was done. Don't just say words asking God to help with needs. Really believe that you need them, and that God will help with them.

Relating to God but not Forever

There are times when God speaks to you, lives in you, which make it seem like there is nothing but his favor for you, and you are guaranteed to be with him forever. This is like how it feels when you're friends with someone, or in love. But friendships and love relationships break, despite that.

So it is with God. Like with human relationships, the closeness that you share is a good sign for what's to come. But the saving relationship between you and God can come to an end, if you choose decisively enough to value something else over putting him first.

Exile

Holding a value that is unpopular is difficult. You may find yourself surrounded by people who don't value what you value, and you may find it difficult or impossible to live out your values. So, in this case, at least retain the sense that you are in exile. Someday perhaps you will see yourself in a social environment where your values are common enough that you can live them out. Even if there is nothing practical you can do to further your values, you can remain true to them by keeping your innermost self apart from the world around you, keeping a fire burning for the day when it is safe to show it. If the people who see a vision can at least hold onto it in this minimal way, then if they happen to find each other, they may recognize each other and produce that social environment for them in which they can live out their values to at least a somewhat visible extent. But if they don't hold to their values in exile, this can't happen. You can adopt a value in exile that you couldn't adopt publicly, and thus be true to what is really good.

The mindset of exile is a way to resist value drift. Arguably, value drift is really "lifestyle drift". If your life forces you to not live out your values, then you can still hold your values, if you hold them in exile.

Exile requires patience. Patience is when you can wait for the future, and you can exist in the moment without having what you really want.

Really Believing, Really Healing

To believe that something is true is not just to believe that one should believe that it is true, to prove it true. Belief is not just recognition of the justification of a belief, even if somehow justification is to show that something is true. To believe is to trust what you believe you ought to believe. So attempts to justify beliefs can keep things in the frame of justification, rather than ever proceeding from that into the frame of belief, of trust, and thus defeat the purpose that one would think they serve (to guide people to believe what is true).

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Another angle: If you're seeking healing by repeatedly doing something, that's different from just being healed. The mindset of trying to heal yourself may be preventing you from being healed. Healing is not when you apply effort to yourself to bring about an effect of healing, it is when you are actually healed.

God's Self-Obedience

The vision of God which I have presented in this blog tends to be a God constrained by this or that rational factor. To think of God as being constrained by anything may sound like a lowering of God to some people. I don't think that God's greatness derives from anything other than his legitimacy. In other words, it's not his power, freedom, sovereignty or anything else that is really great. We as humans are impressed by such things, but if we truly understand love, we are no longer impressed by them, seeing them only as servants of love.

So in some cases, I am (or at least could be) in conflict with more traditional approaches to God. However, in the case of constraint, I think I can provide a bridge between my view and what I take to be theirs.

God is obedient to himself. All of his constraints follow from his self-obedience. Because he is who he is, he must obey that. So his nature constrains him. But his nature just is himself, and so God is sovereign after all, yet, still limited in some ways.

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.

Attractive vs. Coercive Law

One way to look at a law is to see it as something which obligates and coerces, as though we might die if we don't obey it, or cause some kind of irrevocable harm right now. There is a forceful urgency to coercive law. The law is an impersonal force. We are slaves to the law, and so is everyone else, and this is how we can live together in harmony, if the law is good.

Another way to look at a law is to see it as almost a living being that draws a person toward compliance with it. The law can be turned away from, from time to time, so that a person is drawn toward some other attractive principle. But as the person turns from one thing to another, they will eventually look at the law again, and because the law is attractive, they will be drawn toward it.

An attractive law can be just as necessary as a coercive law. That is, it can feel just as necessary, and that the law be observed may be just as necessary. But the difference is that in an attractive law, or a law that is approached in an attractive way, it feels like you are drawn toward the necessity, instead of, as with coercive law, or law approached in a coercive way, being forced to observe the necessity right now. A coercive law is one as though you're already behind on observing, while an attractive law is one as though it pulls you toward a future of full observance.

A coercive law goes against what you want, and you are forced to observe it, but an attractive law, or the thing which enables you to approach a law in an attractive way, changes you so that the observance of the law is something you genuinely value, love.

The MSLN view of laws is that there really are absolute laws which must be observed "or else", but that there is a long process, or journey, where we are drawn toward observing them. The "or else" is a note of coercion, but we must leave coercion behind if we are truly to avoid the "or else". The "or else" is a gateway into feeling the necessity behind what we observe out of love. But a law that we observe out of coercion is not one that we love, and in order to be in tune with legitimacy, we must value what it values, love its laws as much as it does. So, in MSLN, law is something that we are drawn toward, over time, attractive law.

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.

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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.

Pray to Care

In life, sometimes we are tempted to not care. Happiness or discouragement alike can rob us of some of our personhood, as on some level we settle into the blindness of nihilism. It's likely that evil spirits would use these things, even happiness, to blunt our ability to help other people and our ability to create a culture in which people are passionate theists and altruists.

When I feel these tempting spirits come over me, I pray. I think seeking to connect with God relationally, overall, helps as well. Jesus recommends believing that you have received something you have prayed for, and it will be yours. I find these prayers, prayers to care or return to caring, to always help. Maybe it helps that I pray under other circumstances, about things that matter to me, to build up my trust in prayer.

If prayers like these were tried by more people, perhaps there would be less value drift.

Value Drift

The effective altruists have a concept called "value drift". The idea is that passionate people over time lose their passion and stop being altruists. It is valuable to add a person to an altruistic movement, but also perhaps equally valuable to keep a person from leaving one.

Drift is something that you don't always understand at the time. Some people might decisively quit altruistic pursuits, but the danger is more that you will go lukewarm and then cold over time, sinking into the default without catching yourself.

News: 1 July 2021

I have been fairly productive over the last year (and going further back), and feel it time to take somewhat of a break -- not that anything is finished, or likely to be. So this seems like a good time to mark a new division in the blog, to a time of lighter writing. I'm not sure how long this time will last. I can promise that somewhere in me is a valuing of many or most of the topics already discussed, and this is likely to remain in me, whether my mind is in the right frame to address them or not.

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However, if anyone happens to have questions or criticisms of posts from the last year, I might go back to them to try respond.

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