#your morality as a person was intrinsic to your good deeds and your bad deeds

[asocial-skye]

no but Hindutva is so fucking stupid, because it’s a bunch of old men going around imposing a religion whose main thing is that it’s not a religion; it’s a way of life. a way of life where the gods don’t give a shit if you aren’t a believer and non-believers aren’t going to burn for their sins. a religion that preaches tolerance, the importance of doing good deeds even through you are trapped in a cycle of life, death and suffering. seriously, to break from the cycle, you just have to lead a good life doing good deeds and to help others. nowhere in hindu scriptures does it say that you will not attain moksha if you aren't a hindu; just do the good deeds, and you will become one with God. hinduism is like ‘let live and do good’ it says nowhere that you are a bad person if you aren’t a Hindu in doctrine; that’s what abrahamic religions do. I’m not even sure BJP understand what Hinduism is. fucking idiots.

[navree]

Jonah Magnus

ugh number one guy, enough of sam trying to find out about martin blackwood and helen richardson and more research of the magnus institute involving research of jonah fucking magnus, also he just needs to return to me at once, i miss him dearly

How I feel about this character: I really like him. A fair amount of that comes from the fact that I've always had a natural affinity for villains and also that Ben Meredith's performance was just really good and I appreciated that. But I just enjoy him, I've always enjoyed villainous characters who are unapologetic in their villainy and aren't in a constant moral quandary about their bad deeds, and Jonah really just has no problem with any of the objectionable acts he does. I like his villainous traits, that he's duplicitous and manipulative and a bit sadistic (he didn't need to go that hard against Martin or Melanie, he did that because he wanted to), I like that he has his own agenda that he works at no matter what and no matter who it hurts, and I like that there are layers to him. 102 is one of my all time favorite episodes because we get to see things like Jonah having some kind of consideration (mild though it is) for other people, his curiosity, his enjoyment at things when he feels it unbridled, his sense of humor, and beyond that, Jonah is clearly not just a determined and driven individual, but there is some interiority in themes of choice, creation, and transformation intrinsic to the very nature of how Jonah extended his life the way he did. I dig him, he's real neat, he's legit my second favorite character in the show. Plus, when he snaps, he snaps, that's always so much fun (one hit would have killed Leitner and Martin and Melanie would have both been cowed with far less, but when Jonah gets mad he gets vicious and violent and that's why he pulverizes Leitner's head and goes way farther with torturing people who've irritated him and it's really fun that he has that side that just kinda loses it when pushed, I love it).

All the people I ship romantically with this character: I do actually ship Jonelias, it's an interesting dynamic and i wish it had been explored more post season 3. I also enjoy all of Jonah's romances that he definitely had with, like, every member of his original squad back when he still was Jonah Magnus. But number one OTP is always gonna be Lonelyeyes, andnot even in a meme way. Like I genuinely enjoy them as a couple, I have a LOT of thoughts on how that went on and what they meant to each other in the grand schemes, and I wholeheartedly believe there was emotional investment from Jonah's part (there kinda has to be, because Peter by nature isn't gonna be actively pursuing anything except potential victims, certainly not romantic partners). I have a post about this somewhere, but Peter is also the only person who has died in Jonah Magnus's ten million lifetimes that can be laid squarely at his feet. Anyone else who dies was likely gonna die around the same time in similar circumstances even without his involvement, but Peter, assuming he and og!Elias were the same age (which I do) is the only one who dies because of Jonah's actions and nothing else, if only because he's in his, like, mid-forties, and I can't pass up the thematic richness of someone who was so afraid of death he found a way to legit not have to deal with having a lover who dies well before his time as a sole result of your involvement in his life. I'm heavily invested in them as a couple, I could talk about it for days, not just because Jonahlias is my second favorite character and Peter Lukas is legit my fave.

My non-romantic OTP for this character: I know it's not canon but given my issues with season 5 I can elect to ignore it, I like imagining him and Rosie as buds and her as someone who doesn't take his shit and them just vibing (was always big into Web!Rosie or even just Eye!Rosie as long as she was specifically into just observing). To me, they just spent season 2 staring at the Archives and being judgy while sharing a coffee.

My unpopular opinion about this character: Again, I like villains, I don't mind Jonah as an out and out villain, but I think I preferred what we were getting out of him in season 3 than the turn to big bad. Like, season 3 Jonah seems to operate honestly similarly to Gertrude on a wider scale. He wants to stop Rituals, by whatever means necessary. And he wants to keep control over the Institute, his center of power, and is willing to do whatever necessary to keep it as well, and has no problems being cruel or awful in the process. And he has different motives for ending Rituals than Gertrude does, clearly, because he's not a very good person, but I just prefer that kind of grey/neutral affinity, regardless of him personally being bad or evil, and that role that he was playing. It was more fun for me, and I think it had more creative potential for Jonah as a character while still keeping him in a sort of villainous personality, which as I've said, I love. Also I think that all non-Elias enjoyers need the word "capitalism" taken away from them and they can only have it back when they prove they understand wtf they're talking about because a lot of the critiques are not only weird but straight up inaccurate to the character and don't make sense. Not gonna elaborate much on it too because I have a post about it already on my blog in some detail, but another major unpopular opinion of mine is that Jonah, specifically Jonah, was not seen as a bad boss or hated by wider employees at all, canonically, it's only Tim that starts turning on him in season 2 because of his issues and everyone else only hops on board after he legit reveals that he killed someone in cold blood and framed their coworker for it, they liked him as a boss and thought he was good this is literally canon even if it's an unpopular opinion.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: That he shows tf up in TMAGP. Like, where is he? I'm pretty sure he's involved in the computers, because "jmj errors" are not actually a thing and very specifically for this show, and it makes sense that the three people in the Panopticon in 200 were the ones transported to the computers, but that's TMA!Jonah. There was a Jonah from this show's universe too, one that created the Magnus Institute and very obviously had plans, even if they diverged from what we know. And I don't think the fire at the Institute, stopped him, so where is he? Can he show up? God I hope he does, and if he doesn't I still have a draft of something that I might write down eventually.

[blessed1neha]

Jupiter in First House

Jupiter in First House

Jupiter in first house makes you matured & blesses you with healing powers. It makes you sincere towards your work, compassionate and bestows respect and fame upon you. If Jupiter forms Hamsa Yoga, it will bless you with prosperity, success, recognition, luck, wealth, strength, etc.

Usual effects of Jupiter in 1st House

This placement of Jupiter makes you kind-hearted, devoted and inclined towards spiritualism. It also brings your fortune to the fore. It impacts your personality in a positive manner and develops in you a profound attraction towards being righteous, kind and devoted towards your motive in life.

Jupiter has the intrinsic quality to expand the aspects related to the house where it resides. Hence, when in the first house, it blesses you with excellent fortune and your luck will always support you when you need it the most. It also makes you courageous and brings ample opportunities for you whereby you can forge ahead with your actions without worrying much about the outcome. Results will be in your favour, which builds your self-confidence.

Jupiter in 1st house activates your emotions and gives you a subtle attitude; gets you inclined and attached to your work or your relations with great levels of energy and compassion. Your compassionate attitude fetches you respect and popularity in society; people praise you for you good deeds and selfless behaviour.

Jupiter here blesses you with an upright and honest personality, doing things in the right manner and staying away from ill deeds and actions is your way of life. You value trust, faith, and morality the most in your life and this is displayed in your activities as well. Adhering to principals in life gives you inner strength to do good for self and others.

You will be very confident and energetic to pursue your goals with ease and achieve positive outcomes. Jupiter in the 1st house also gives you a charming and attractive appearance, which will draw people towards you. Your charming personality makes you stand out in a crowd and people admire you for the same.

Positive Jupiter

A positive Jupiter in 1st house gives you profound mental strength, self-confidence, upright attitude, spiritual inclinations, and a charming personality. You will be kind-hearted and compassionate towards others. The Zodiac sign, exact degree, conjunction and influences of other planets on your Jupiter determine a positive polarity of Jupiter.

Negative Jupiter

A negative Jupiter may make you indulge in activities that may unintentionally hurt others. It may also make you exaggerate your actions or help others unnecessarily, that may draw you a bad name. Overall, the Zodiac sign, exact degree, conjunction and influences of other planets on your Jupiter determine a negative polarity of Jupiter.

Some notable sign placements for Jupiter in 1st House

Cancer-Jupiter: Jupiter in Cancer is in exaltation; this is a powerful position that blesses you with the ability to monitor your actions and relationships. It amplifies your empathetic nature and blesses you with wisdom, knowledge and success in life.

Sagittarius-Jupiter: Jupiter in own sign, Sagittarius, blesses you with knowledge, understanding and principles. It makes you have your own ideologies, self-confident and curious about everything in life. This position makes you fortunate and blesses you with sudden positive opportunities in life.

Capricorn-Jupiter: Jupiter in Capricorn makes you focussed, disciplined and gives you a practical approach. Luck will be on your side if you follow the right path. There may be delays and obstacles; but you will have the ability to overcome them.

Pisces-Jupiter: This, again, is a powerful position but makes your agenda and aggression covert, rather than overt. It brings you progress; but your inflexible nature does cause issues in image building.

Retrograde Jupiter in 1st House

Retrogression of Jupiter in the first house will make you intelligent, inclined towards gaining knowledge, enhances your spirituality, and makes you kind-hearted.

Combust Jupiter in 1st House

Combustion of Jupiter may bring lack of fortune, good results may be held back and there may be restrictions in acquiring knowledge.

Common Yoga positions possible with Jupiter in 1st House

Hamsa Yoga: Jupiter in the 1st house has the ability to cause a Maha Purusha (Great Human Being) Yoga, elevating you to great heights. This yoga makes you very charitable, spiritual and empathetic towards others.

Gaj Kesari Yoga: If Moon conjoins Jupiter in the 1st house, without any malefic influence on Jupiter and Moon, Gaj Kesari Yoga is formed. This is a very powerful yoga and makes you intelligent, wise, prosperous and wealthy; and blesses you with all comforts in life.

[bak3r]

Narrative Concepts + Refinement

Coming up with a narrative was a completely messy and haphazard process - a way of working that ultimately payed off I think? This mainly consisted of rigorous research in which I would note down all of what I found interesting to guide the narrative of my game / film. Below is a collection of lists, quotes and interesting ideas:

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Pre-existing tropes to pull from (from tvtropes.org) -

Afterlife:

Celestial Bureaucracy - A bureaucracy whose job is to determine where people are supposed to go after they die & divine misfile - however sometimes the celestial bureaucracy screws up...

The Ferry Man - A character whose job it is to help people pass nigh-impossible obstacles to reach a destination, which can be an afterlife

Limbo - An afterlife where people go who aren't good enough for heaven but are too good for hell

Unfinished Business - A dead person can't enter the afterlife until they take care of some important task that their death prevented them from doing

Morality:

The Atoner - A character seeking to make up for all of their bad deeds.

Befriending the Enemy - Perhaps the villain wouldn't be so evil if they had a friend.

Buy Them Off - Avoiding owning up to your misdeeds through bribery.

A Chat with Satan - You are confronted by a force looking to tempt you into darkness.

Embodiment of Vice - You're a representation of an immoral act & Virtue - You're a representation of a moral act.

Father, I Don't Want to Fight - Refusing to embrace a warrior culture because it's not in you.

Karmic Misfire - You not only get away scot-free with whatever bad thing you did, but an innocent person gets punished in your place.

Machiavelli Was Wrong - Using love and compassion instead of fear to gain respect.

Outcast Refuge - A (relatively) safe place for outcast / oppressed groups.

Obsession:

Just One More Level!: A character becomes so engrossed in a video game that they won't stop playing it.

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Solution 214-238: The Book of Japans by Momus - A thread loosely connecting Momus' various meditations, speculations and preoccupations with Japan and how one constructs knowledge about a place (especially the creation of notions of the 'exotic' by foreigners). The central conceit is to explore the idea of Japan entirely filtered through the biased perceptions of outsiders, serving as a critique of any claims to a hegemonic monopoly on meaning and history.

"In a world dominated by “aggressive normality”, perhaps evoking strange kindness is the most subversive, interesting and challenging thing an artist could do" - Momus

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The Dream of MSX Cinema: An Interview with Ikko Ohno, Creator of The Flying Luna Clipper -

"The cross-pollination of games and cinema, gaming technology, and digital art, the intersection of the creative computing domains of: creative programming, video game development, electronic music, new media art and computer animation."

"The limited resolutions and colours of the MSX helped me draw pixel art paradoxically without spending an enormous amount of time and effort. I believe that pixel art has an intrinsic value as a style of expression for its symbolic nature. There is a margin that is omitted and the viewer has to imagine. It allows viewers to imagine things for themselves in the space they see. In this, parallel Japanese forms of expression like, for example, haiku, or aesthetic sensibilities like wabi-sabi, which are somewhat related to that capacity for imagination in the margins. Pixel art allows us to express a view on the world through omission and imagination."

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“As children, we all had all kinds of ideas like washing hair in the washing machine, and we were all trained out of these ideas by more-or-less well-meaning adults. Part of learning how to operate in the world is learning that you do not wash hair in the washing machine, precisely for the reason this mother suggested: you can’t separate the hair from the head to put it into the machine and then hope to reattach it. In this way, hair is unlike clothing, which you can certainly take off, launder, and put back on.

Everyone needs to learn this kind of thing, and yet something is lost in this learning. While children constantly come up with fresh combinations of ideas that follow exotic, fecund logics, we grown-ups have a much harder time having thoughts that we have not already been taught to have. It is often not until we spend time with children and enter their less inhibited thought-worlds that we realise what we deny ourselves in the name of maturity.”

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The rest is just an assortment of ideas / ways to describe my project and thinking that came to me through research. Looking back through these ramblings, It's really interesting to see my idea come into play!

[olderthannetfic]

Okay this is just me talking into the void (your inbox) but if anyone has ever dealt with this, I would love to know how.

How do you handle a friend who has good intentions, but whose actions bleed right back into racism, sexism and (at least from my standpoint) offensive LGBT stereotypes?

For context, I'm queer, mixed race but very white-passing. This friend is technically the same, except not AS white passing in terms of skin color and appearence. I grew up with the non-white culture I am mixed with. I have somewhat of a grip on the language and the culture is reflected in my lifestyle. This friend is not like that. He was adopted and he grew up in an extremely fundamentalist religion.

Although he is very against the church now, the tendency towards black and white thinking is still there. He's worldbuilding a fantasy story and I'm proofreading. It's painful to read.

There are characters who are coded as my (our?) own race, but there are a lot of misunderstandings with the language and the realities of colonial history. There is also a tendency to equate "anything foreign" (non-white) with "sexy" and it feels uncomfortable to me.

There is a genuine desire to empower women and queer people in these stories, but in execution, what this effort really amounts to is incorporating all represention as overpowered Mary Sue types who can do no wrong. And justice comes in the form of a conservative white dude getting dunked on every once in a while.

In fact, in terms of character building altogether, there really isn't any moral nuance. Everyone is either intrinsically evil or intrinsically good. And if a Good Person does a bad thing, there's a long and carefully reasoned out justification for it. If a Bad Person does a bad thing, it is simply because they are Bad People. There's no nuance, no humanizing reason for those bad deeds.

This person is so careful and passionate about being a good person, that if I outright tell him that his writing feels racist or homophobic to me, it's going to break his heart.

I just don't know how to begin to explain that some of these things feel offensive, that it's okay to give "victimized" minorities some moral nuance, and how he's not really addressing the issues that he's trying to address.

Our worldviews are too fundamentally different. From his perspective, morality is black and white, and any Good Person who is worth being friends with would intuitively follow this same logic. (We grew up together, though. We're attached. This isn't one of those internet friend situations where people cut each other off the moment someone has the wrong opinion.)

It is a very awkward situation. I have no idea how to sincerely connect with him on this issue. For lack of a better term, there's so much obsession and anxiety around being "politially correct" that there's no room for nuance.

--

OH NO.

God, that's my first thought. I am so sorry, anon. I don't think any of this is going to go well, though maybe a reader will have more relevant experience than mine.

--

In case you don't get other answers, and for what it's worth, here are my own thoughts:

Fantasy worldbuilding is always a minefield. Hell, critiquing friends' work is a minefield.

I don't think there's any winning this one. You're obviously not dropping the friend, so you're going to either have to make him uncomfortable on purpose sooner or do it by accident later. His writing sucks, but this isn't really about his writing. Your world view will come out eventually no matter what you do, and he's going to struggle to reconcile his shitty views of Good People with you, a friend he likes who does not do things the same way.

I am a bland-ass WASP in the US, so my experiences are more "Uh, friend, is there anything too horrible in this manuscript?" and less from your current side, but I guess how I would approach this would be as a problem of weak writing. And it is a weak writing problem. The work feels homophobic and racist because it's cliched and flat.

You could try to make the political realization more palatable by hiding it in less confrontational writing advice and using the language of the latter.

Tell him that you find the characters a little flat and wish they had more of an arc. Tell him that you wish they had more internal problems to overcome instead of only external ones.

Tell him that you feel like the damage left behind by colonialism often fucks people up so that they do bad things out of trauma and you feel like making the stories reflect this would deepen his writing.

You could say that the world building makes this culture feel very Christian with a black and white view of morality and explain how you perceive the real world culture it's riffing off of and what that morality would look like in this fictional setting.

Hell, tell him that being an example to the community 24/7 is exhausting, and it's hard for you to relate to these overly perfect characters because they feel like what you're supposed to be and not who you really are.

Are there any writers doing similar things whom you do like? You could refer to some of them. Maybe he'll take a rec and absorb some of the points without you making a more explicit big deal about it. (I mean... I'm not optimistic, but the more gradual and self-driven these revelations are, the more likely your friend will come around to your way of thinking without it being some soul-destroying trauma.)

One thing to keep in mind is that he is currently hurting you. I know you don't want to hurt his feelings, and maybe his devastation over finding out your honest opinion would be a lot worse than your discomfort reading his stories, but he's not totally blameless here. You're his friend, and he's making things awkward for you. He wouldn't want that if he knew.

Just letting him wander the world causing harm while trying to do good is not kind to him in the long run either.

I wonder also how much of this is a fear of rejection, whether that's for an insufficient connection with his heritage or insufficient ~correct~ political action. He might ultimately be a lot happier if he could accept that you find his first draft kinda shitty and still love him anyway.

[lionfanged]

@eternasci sent :  Does your muse think they are intrinsically a good person? Objectively, are they?

nope! atticus and the moral compass of good, bad, and neutral have a highly complicated relationship, with his definitions differing from most people.

childhood trauma has warped his perception of human ‘goodness’--something that is sparing, more often than not self-serving, and shallow at best. i.e., while the kindness shown to him in giving him cairo’s egg was something he appreciates in the long run, as an adult, he thought often on those passing breeders who did not feel like truly going out of their way to help this homeless child, and soothed their own guilty consciences instead by leaving a gift instead.

his logic is warped based off of, again, these traumatic experiences coloring his worldview. when asked to think about the goodness of people, and himself, when he hasn’t made any sort of significant progressing in emotionally healing from his past, he would say that ‘goodness’ is an arbitrary thing. it is good that he donates to local charities, but does that make him good? what about the galas hosted and organized to donate funds as well? the inventions of new machines to advance the nature of pokemon centers?

each and every one of these events can be labeled ‘good’, but when the curtain is pulled back, atticus would point to the direct reasonings for them--the tax write-off’s, the publicity stunts, the money funneling into his bank account with every transaction. ‘good’ is not a gift to give. there is give, and there is take, with an expectation at the end of such charitable deeds to receive something in turn.

outside of his opinion, is atticus a good person?

that will ultimately be decided by whether he continues on the path he is down, or finds another to follow.

[missfay49]

Who is Orange?

Disclaimer: Please enjoy?  Accept?  Beware?  This… Thing that started out as character analysis and turned into a deranged fanfic, because I experienced a literal revelation mid-way through free writing.  I did not clean this up much because I’m still reeling from the theory implications myself.  I cursed a lot.

~

What does Orange Side represent?

What do we know?

Orange is a “Dark Side”, defined as being one of the Sides hidden from C!Thomas.

The other Hidden Sides were Janus, Remus, and Virgil.

All the Hidden Sides were hidden due to a key aspect of their character that C!Thomas had to first acknowledge and then accept.  Virgil required C!Thomas to acknowledge that he had heightened anxiety and accept that anxiety isn’t inherently wrong, just a different form of information that can be processed.  Remus required C!Thomas to acknowledge that he had intrusive thoughts and accept that those thoughts don’t make him evil; they’re just thoughts.  Janus required C!Thomas to acknowledge that he was capable of lying and accept that acting “selfishly” sometimes isn’t just okay, but actually critically important to managing stress.

 What are the common themes here?  

Confronting the reality about ourselves instead of pretending some traits don’t exist.

Understanding ourselves to be more complex than ‘good’ and ‘evil’.

Addressing mental health.  

Orange Side is still hidden, but we can expect him to be something C!Thomas doesn’t want to (or isn’t ready to) acknowledge.  Something that would be difficult to accept about oneself.  All Hidden Sides fall under the jurisdiction of Janus, so let’s take another look at him.

In “Can Lying Be Good?” we get a lot of information about what Janus’ purpose is:

Roman: It you really don’t want to know something, he… can keep our mouths shut.

Logan: You don’t want to believe it.  That’s where his power comes from.  Things that you want to believe.  Things that you wish were true.  And things that you wish weren’t.

Deceit: What you don’t know can’t hurt you.

This all means that Orange Side is something that would cause C!Thomas distress to learn and something he subconsciously wishes weren’t true.  This is not new information to most of you: the spin-off interpretations of Apathy and Pride are widely popular fandom theories, traits that are typically viewed as negative in large doses.

But the Hidden Sides being seen as something negative isn’t their only defining characteristic.  They typically involve an aspect a mental health, involve societal expectations, and... what is it...

Janus is the umbrella over all the other Hidden Sides, sheltering and obscuring them from view. He is the gatekeeper in a very literal sense.  What is he gatekeeping?  

What is it?  What is it what is it, why?  What does he do?  What seems bad but isn’t?  What can he do?  What issue is actually useful?  What’s useful what’s useful WHATS USEFUL WHATS USEFUL?!  WHY DOES IT HAVE TO USEFUL?

shitshitSHITSHISTHISTSTs

I KEPT ASKING MYSELF, WHAT’S USEFUL?  WHAT TRAIT COULD IT BE THAT APPEARS BAD, BUT ISN’T BAD, IS ACTUALLY USEFUL.  ANIEXTY WAS OKAY BECAUSE HE WAS JUST LOOKING OUT FOR US.  LYING WAS OKAY BECAUSE HE JUST WANTED TO PUT C!THOMAS FIRST.  INTRUSIVE CREATIVITY WAS OKAY BECAUSE DARK IDEAS OPEN UP NEW PATHS.

But the whole GODDAMN POINT is ACCEPTANCE!  

You don’t HAVE to be useful to be accepted.  You – yuo just BE.  YOU BE!

PEOPLE don’t have to prove their Usefulness to you before you can treat them with respect.  Our WORTH does not depend on what we PRODUCE. YE GODS, THE COGNITIVE DISSONANCE I JUST BROKE-

~~~

C!Thomas comes back from his self-care stay-cation.  He’s ready to start production, he is rested and refreshed.  BUT JUST LIKE EVERY PREVIOUS DILEMMA, it isn’t Good enough, Original enough, Fast enough.  He’s done everything right, why is it still wrong?  He’s accepted his anxiety, he’s accepted that things aren’t just black and white, he’s Accepted That It’s OKAY to have Dark Thoughts, he Has ACCEPTED SELF_CARE.  Why Isn’t IT ENOUGH?!

“Fuck it.”  

C!Thomas spins in his chair, looking at a man that looks just like him, but not quite.

“What?”

“Fuck it.  Fuck them.”

“You sound like Remus,” Thomas jokes.  He’s lying, of course.  He’s nervous. The Side looks like a normal guy, but something about him is unsettling.  The unidentified Side just presses his lips together, unimpressed.

“Um, ef w-who, exactly?” Thomas asks, but part of him already knows.

“All of them.  Every person who isn’t you.  Every person who expects something from you.”

“Now, you sound like Janus.” Thomas looks back at the computer screen, but the Side’s retort has him spinning around again.  

“Janus is a short-sighted pseudo-rebellious minion of a capitalistic society, just like the rest of them.”

“Uh, excuse me?!”

“Isn’t it obvious? They’re all obsessed with Success. Whether they want to play by the rules, or manipulate them, or break them, whether it’s making money or pumping out good deeds, they’re still just trying to make you be successful within the framework of a system that prioritizes production over a human life.”

Thomas just stares for a moment before he can find his voice.

“Who are you?”

“Dude, seriously?”  He waves his hands, palms up and presenting himself.  “I’m Achilleus.  I’m your motivation.”

~~~

Take a deep breath and follow me down the research black hole, where every topic I looked up was more and more terrifyingly appropriate: 

Freedom

noun

the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint.

Self-Determination

noun

the process by which a person controls their own life.

Autonomy

noun

(in Kantian moral philosophy) the capacity of an agent to act in accordance with objective morality rather than under the influence of desires.

Autonomic Nervous System (because i believe each Hidden Side is closer to the subconscious)

noun

the part of the nervous system responsible for control of the bodily functions not consciously directed, such as breathing, the heartbeat, and digestive processes.

Inherent Value

“inherent value in the case of animal ethics can be described as the value an animal possesses in its own right, as an end-in-itself” – Animal Rights – Inherent Value, by Saahil Papar

Intrinsic Value

“Intrinsic value has traditionally been thought to lie at the heart of ethics. Philosophers use a number of terms to refer to such value. The intrinsic value of something is said to be the value that that thing has “in itself,” or “for its own sake,” or “as such,” or “in its own right.”” – Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value, by Michael J. Zimmerman and Ben Bradley

“Finally, his sense of respect for the intrinsic value of entities, including the non-sentient, is the Kantian notion of the inherent value of all Being.  This is based on the notion that a universe without moral evaluators (e.g. humans) would still be morally valuable, and there is no reason not to regard Being as inherently morally good.” – Technology and the Trajectory of Myth, by David Grant, Lyria Bennett Moses

Motivation

“Another way to conceptualize motivation is through Self-Determination Theory … which is concerned with intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.  Intrinsic motivation happens when someone does something for its inherent satisfaction.” – Second Language Acquisition Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching, by Steven Brown, Jenifer Larson-Hall

Capitalism

“The flowery language of the United States Declaration of Independence would have you believe that human life has an inherent value, one that includes inalienable rights such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But in America, a major indicator of value is actually placed on being a productive member of society, which typically means working a job that creates monetary revenue (especially if the end result is accumulated wealth and suffering was inherently involved in the process).” – The Diminished Value of Human Life in a Capitalistic Society, by Seren Sensei

Religion

“At the heart of the debate between Calvinism and Arminianism lay the insurmountable chasm between God’s sovereign election versus human self-determination.” – Sovereignty vs. Self-determination: Two Versions of Ephesians 1:3-14, by Reformed Theology

Mythology

“In Classical Greece, Achilles was widely admired as a paragon of male excellence and virtue. Later, during the height of the Roman Empire, his name became synonymous with uncontrollable rage and barbarism… He chooses kleos (glory) over life itself, and he owes his heroic identity to this kleos. He achieves the major goal of the hero: to have his identity put permanently on record through kleos…

“But is this really an accurate characterization of Achilles' pivotal decision? Is he really driven to sacrifice his life by an obsessive quest for honor and glory? One scene in the Iliad suggests the answer to both questions is no.

“When Achilles leaves the battlefield after his dispute with Agamemnon, the Trojans gain the upper hand on the Greeks. Desperate to convince their best warrior to return, Agamemnon sends an envoy of Achilles' closest friends to his tent to persuade him to reconsider his decision. During this scene, Achilles calmly informs his friends that he is no longer interested in giving up his life for the sake of heroic ideals. His exact words are below:

“The same honor waits for the coward and the brave. They both go down to Death, the fighter who shirks, the one who works to exhaustion (IX 386-388)…

“Not only does Achilles reject the envoy's offers of material reward, but he rejects the entire premise that glory is worth a man's life.” – making sense of a hero’s motivation, by Patrick Garvey

Achilles (/əˈkɪliːz/ ə-KIL-eez) or Achilleus (Ancient Greek: Ἀχιλλεύς, [a.kʰilˈleu̯s])

Achilles realizes his own inherent self-worth, thereby freeing himself from the expectations of others; societal or otherwise.  Only once we are free can we find the balance between our own needs and the needs of others in a way that breeds neither anger nor resentment in either.

~~~

But that’s... that’s just... a theory.   Huh.

[mbtimyths]

What Your Child Needs to Hear Based on Their Myers-Briggs Personality Type

By Susan Storm

ISTJ – “I’ll Always Be There For You.”

ISTJs are all about loyalty, and ISTJ children especially need to know that their parents are with them through thick and thin. They need to know their parents will show up on game day, or when they’re on the debate team, or when they’re sick or scared. They need to know they can count on their parents and believe in them. Consistency, honesty, and trust are three of the most vital ingredients for a healthy ISTJ child and parent relationship.

ISFJ – “I Notice Everything You Do. Thank You.”

ISFJs are compassionate and generous children, but they don’t usually like to draw attention to themselves. They tend to take on responsibilities at an early age and many of their good deeds are taken for granted. Even as children, ISFJs notice details about the people they love. They notice the little things; their smiles, their small anxieties, their likes, and dislikes. They need to feel appreciation and a sense of belonging. Attentiveness, consistency, and kindness are three of the most vital ingredients for a healthy ISFJ child and parent relationship.

ESTJ – “I Believe in You”

ESTJ children strive to be competent and capable. They are usually hard workers who want to feel like their parents respect them and have faith in their abilities. Parents who hover over them, or “helicopter parent” make them feel insecure and frustrated. They need to know that their efforts to grow, mature, and be capable are actually noticed and that when the time comes, their parents will trust their abilities to take care of themselves. Respect, consistency, and loyalty are three of the most vital ingredients for a healthy ESTJ child and parent relationship.

ESFJ – “I Appreciate Who You Are. Not Just What You Do.”

ESFJ children desire belonging, closeness, and affirmation from their parents. They tend to work hard to try to be the best they can be, and this perfectionism and focus on meeting expectations can leave them tired or overwhelmed. ESFJ children need to know that who they are on the inside is valued; their intrinsic beliefs, morals, personality. They need to know they’re loved not just for the kind things they do, but for the things that make them them! Affirmation, affection, and trust are all vital components in a healthy ESFJ child/parent relationship.

ISFP – “No One Is Like You. And I Love That.”

ISFPs are sensitive, individualistic, and practical children. They often struggle with feeling misunderstood, but they also enjoy feeling unique and different from the crowd. They want to be appreciated for what makes them unlike the rest. They have a certain non-conformist quality that combines with tenderness and passion to make them truly unforgettable children. Sincerity, affection, and gentleness are three vital ingredients to a healthy ISFP child/parent relationship.

ISTP – “I Know You Like Your Alone Time, but I’m Here For You When You Need Me.”

ISTP children aren’t usually very verbally demonstrative or expressive of their feelings. They often feel pressured to give affirmations of their feelings to parents, and this can make them feel awkward or uncomfortable. They enjoy their alone time and they want parents who will respect their need for privacy without taking their privacy and independence as an insult. They also want to know that when they are ready, their parents will be around. ISTPs want parents who will take time out of their schedule to just “hang out” with them, drive around, play a game, or build something together. Actions speak louder than words for these types! Respect, trust, and freedom are all important ingredients for a happy ISTP child/parent relationship.

ESFP – “You Light Up My Day”

ESFP children want to provide joy to the people they love. They want to know their humor, their smiles, their liveliness and enthusiasm is rubbing off and making a difference. Almost nothing makes them happier than seeing someone they love smile, laugh, or brighten up at their presence. Affection, sincerity, and a sense of adventure are three things that ESFPs crave in their child/parent relationships.

ESTP – “Show Me What You Can Do!”

ESTP children want to prove to their families that they are competent, capable, and independent. They want the freedom to stretch their wings and take on new and interesting challenges. These are the kids who yell “look at me!” while they climb the tallest tree in the yard. They are risk-takers, the thrill-seekers, the adventurers. They generally love to get their parents attention with new physical challenges they’ve overcome. These kids want your attention, your trust, and a little admiration never hurt either. Steadfast love, affirmation, and respect are all extremely important to young ESTPs.

INFP – “Your Sensitivity Makes You Strong”

INFP children are often given a tough time for being overly-sensitive. They are deeply affected by the good and bad in the world and are very aware of the moral value of things. They are gentle, imaginative, and highly in-tune with not only their own feelings, but the feelings of others as well. It can be easy for them to think that their sensitivity is a curse or a weakness if they aren’t given proper guidance or affirmation. Parents need to assure them that their gentleness and compassion are strengths that can be used to change the world. Gentleness, affirmation, and open-mindedness are all key ingredients for a happy INFP child/parent relationship.

INTP – “You Have An Amazing Mind. What Do You Think of (Interesting Theory or Fact)?”

Showing a young INTP you care can be challenging for parents who are more fond of physical affection and verbal demonstrations. INTPs tend to feel put on the spot by excessive affection or compliments. One of the best ways to show you care is to feed their Introverted Thinking (Ti) or Extraverted Intuitive (Ne) preferences. Show them you admire their intellect, their thoughts, and their ideas. Listen attentively when they speak, but don’t pressure them to speak if they’re enjoying time alone. Ask their opinions on interesting theories and intellectual matters (yes, I know we’re talking about kids, but INTPs are highly intellectual kids at that!). Work on an experiment together, solve a brain-teaser together, show them you appreciate their thoughts. Respect, attentive listening, and written affirmations mean a lot to young INTPs.

ENFP – “I Love Your Dreams, and I Believe in Your Ability to Achieve Them.”

ENFPs spend their childhoods lost in a whirl of thoughts, ideas, and imaginative possibilities. They see potential and beauty everywhere and they long for a parent who believes in their capabilities to make those dreams come to fruition. Young ENFPs may struggle with finishing projects or focusing on the nitty-gritty details, but with proper encouragement, many ENFPs grow up to be astounding visionaries and creatives. Just look at J.J. Abrams, Hans Zimmer, and Oscar Wilde – all rumored to be ENFPs. Affirmation, encouragement, and sincerity are all vital ingredients for a healthy ENFP child/parent relationship.

ENTP – “I Love How You Think Outside of the Box”

Young ENTPs tend to be scolded regularly for arguing things from many different angles. This tendency to see everything from 100 sides comes naturally to them, and it’s a skill that is regularly admonished and stifled by parents who get fed up with the questioning. It’s important for young ENTPs to know that their innovative, out-of-the-box thinking is appreciated and admired, and it’s not just something that will get them in trouble! Open-mindedness, respect, and a sense of humor are all vital in an ENTP child/parent relationship.

INFJ – “Can You Share Your Thoughts and Dreams With Me?”

INFJs live in a vast internal world of meaning, insights, and abstract connections and possibilities. They are usually wary of sharing their ideas because oftentimes they are met with confusion or patronizing reactions. They need to feel that their parents want to hear their ideas and that they want to understand them. They want to have the chance to express all the many connections and mysteries that play through their minds. They may have big existential questions or fears that parents need to know about. They may have an insight into something that other people have missed. They just need someone to listen. Attentiveness, affirmation, and open-mindedness are all paramount in the life of a healthy INFJ child.

INTJ – “I Have an Interesting Idea, But I’d Like To Know What You Think”

INTJ children want to feel that they are listened to, respected, and that their ideas aren’t going to be tossed under the rug or laughed at. They have an infinite depth of insights and abstract connections that channel through their minds incessantly, but they aren’t often given the opportunity to share them. When a parent asks their opinion, advice, or insight on something, it shows that the parent not only respects them but WANTS to open up that channel of insight and glean something from it. This is something that will mean a lot to young INTJs. Authenticity, respect, and open-mindedness are essential in a healthy INTJ child/parent relationship.

ENFJ – “I Love Listening to Your Heart”

ENFJ children exude passion and friendliness. They are a bold combination of imagination, depth and sunny optimism. They tend to give so much to others and share so much of their time that they may start to feel that all their worth is in what they do. They need assurance from parents that their worth isn’t dependent on pleasing others, but lies in their heart. They need parents who want to listen to their feelings, understand them, and who will not laugh at their imaginative ideas even when they’re off the wall or outside the norm. Affirmation, gentleness, and attentiveness are all extremely important to young ENFJs.

ENTJ – “I Know I Can Trust You With This”

Young ENTJs are often running at full speed to be independent and grown-up. They want to feel free to pursue their wildest dreams and visions, but they often feel tied down because their parents want them to slow down and act like “normal” children (what is a normal child anyway?). They want people behind them who believe in them and are supporting them in their efforts, whether it’s selling lemonade in front of the house or studying for the SAT. Anytime parents can show their young ENTJs that they respect them, trust them, and believe in them they are building a greater bond than they ever could through emotive verbal demonstrations.

For detailed explanations of the needs of each MBTI type as children, check out this article. (click here)

[argentdandelion]

Child Psychology and Chara

(Sprites from the sprite resource of CrasherGale, who has since left Tumblr)

(Made with consulting from Keetah Spacecat.) (WARNING: This article covers Chara's possible motives for knowingly eating a lethal dose of poisonous flowers. It thus covers some dark material.)

Some fan works depict “Chara” (the default name of the Fallen Child that will be used in this article) as violent and demonic even before the completion of the Genocide Route. It’s possible this interpretation comes from a lack of familiarity with child psychology, or disagreeing on Chara’s age and thus age-appropriate moral awareness. Furthermore, there’s little evidence Chara acted demonic before the Genocide Route. Sometimes, kids are little sociopaths—and that’s not a sign they’re pure evil.

Basic (Canon) Information

Canon Details:

Hated humanity.

Felt very strongly about that, but never talked about why.

With Asriel, poisoned Asgore by putting buttercups in a pie rather than cups of butter

Laughed upon hearing Asgore was really sick

Apparently does creepy faces sometimes

When Asriel had absorbed their SOUL, wanted Asriel to use his “full power” on the humans

Has a sophisticated vocabulary (“vanquished”, “absolute”, “consequences”, etc.) and formal way of speaking for a child

Climbed Mt. Ebott, a mountain it's said travellers never return from

Chara's reason for doing so "wasn't for a very happy reason".

Extrapolation:

Made the Mr. Dad Guy sweater

This is based on how Asriel just calls Asgore “Dad”, and how Chara may be reluctant to refer to Asgore as just “dad” due to being adopted when they could remember their original parents.

Chara’s age is 8-12.

This is based on Chara’s planning abilities and sophisticated vocabulary.

Chara hated humanity and was “very clear about that”: this is one of their few canon traits. However, dying a gruesome death by buttercup poisoning does seem quite a lot to do out of just hate. Most people wouldn’t go so far as to die to destroy something they hated.

While wanting to destroy humanity was surely motivated least partly by hate, the particular intentions of the plan and how well they would execute it would likely depend on age. Assuming an age range of 8-12, Chara would likely be in the Stages 2, 3, or 4 of Kohlberg’s developmental stages, with Stage 3 being the most likely.

The apparent purpose of the buttercup plan was to “free everyone”. That is what Asriel emphasizes in the VHS tapes, and also what the Angel of the Prophecy is said to do.

In Underline, Growth Spurt, Dogs of Future Past: Chara Origins, Chara’s motives were initially explained or mentioned to Asriel in ways more sympathetic than punishment, vengeance or simple hate. It’s unclear whether Chara had the mental ability to anticipate Asriel reacting badly if they said their motives were one of those three, or whether Chara just reloaded whenever they got a bad outcome.

Kohlberg’s Stage 2

Ages 5-7 or 9, or Ages 4-101

“People at Stage 2 are self-protective, dominant, exploitative, and opportunistic. The need to love and to be loved is gratified on the basis of reciprocal altruism.”- The Moral Development of the Child: An Integrated Model

Though those in Stage 2 may sometimes seem as if they lack morals, they do have some sense of right action. The stage is defined by fair exchanges and pragmatic reciprocating, with moral reasoning guided by a sense of “fair play”. Stage 2 reasoning shows a limited concern for others, but only to the point where it might further the individual’s own interests: it’s a “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” mentality. Thus, it’s not based on loyalty or intrinsic respect.

Chara’s needs or interests might include punishing/inflicting vengeance on humans for one or more of these reasons: treating Chara specifically badly, sealing monsters underground long ago, or their wicked deeds in general. According to this source, vengeance is in fact considered a moral obligation at this stage.2

Though collectively punishing all of humanity/a minimum of six people doesn’t make sense (assuming that minimum of six people didn’t abuse Chara), it might make sense if Chara is ages 8-10. Kohlberg based his work on Jean Piaget’s own work on moral development in children, though Piaget’s had fewer stages. Those in the first of Piaget’s stages (approximately from age 5 to age 11-12) believe in collective punishment, so, if one person in a group does something bad, it would make sense to punish everyone in that group.

Due to the principle of reciprocity, Chara may also have thought they should “return the favor” to monsterkind by sacrificing themselves for monsters’ freedom. However, because this stage is characterized by pragmatic reciprocity, such an altruistic perspective does seem unlikely at this age (and death by buttercups was an awful way to die).

--

GlitchTale

In the GlitchTale episode Continue, Chara tells Asriel that Frisk isn't the goody two-shoes they thought they were. Chara didn’t force Frisk to do the Genocide Route; Frisk did so themselves. When Frisk reset, all the hate (which is both a substance and a feeling here, like Determination) built up in that route went to Chara.3 Chara says it makes them sick that Frisk thinks they’re above consequences, wants to make “the little murderer” pay for their actions, and also believes that Frisk shall use all of Asriel’s friends as toys forever. This relates to the idea vengeance is considered a moral obligation in Stage 2.

--

Underline

In one timeline, Chara crossed the barrier with Asriel by holding hands, and some humans attacked Asriel because he was a monster. Later, during a horrific reliving of this event, Chara stabbed (who they thought was) a human. Chara believed humans thought themselves above consequences, and wanted to make them regret what they did. (Later, Chara’s motives were different. As a soul absorbed by Asriel, Chara wanted to destroy humans because they considered humans “the real monsters” who would destroy their family.)

Kohlberg’s Stage 3

Age Estimate: 7-13.

People in Stage 3 are aware of shared feelings and expectations, which are more important than individual interests. Those in Stage 3 believe people should live up to the expectations of the family and community and behave in “good” ways. To do right is to conform to social expectations, such as showing concern for others and following rules set by others to win their approval. Belief in the “golden rule” is one aspect of Stage 3. The reasons for doing the right thing is to maintain rules and authority and to be seen as a nice and good person by others.

If Chara believed they were expected to be “the future of humans and monsters” and/or “the angel of the prophecy”, that would count as an expectation of the family and community. Thus, Chara would believe they had to break the barrier by any means necessary because that’s what the angel of prophecy and/or the future of “humans and monsters” should do.

By this perspective, the buttercup plan would have seemed like a good, moral plan to get Asriel past the barrier to obtain more SOULs. Chara’s hatred for humanity might have made this plan easier to do, especially if Chara planned from the start to get more human SOULs by killing.

However, part of this stage is belief in the “Golden Rule”, and “do unto others as others would do unto you” doesn’t really apply, since Chara (as a SOUL absorbed by Asriel) wanted to kill humans but wouldn’t want humans to kill them in turn.

--

Dogs of Future Past (WARNING: This section is slightly darker than usual.)

In Dogs of Future Past: Chara Origins, Chara was raised in a cult. Chara tried to be “good” and obey the cult’s teachings and the claimed desires of The Player, a godlike being the cult worshipped. The cult said The Player would wipe away all those whose hearts were filthy with wickedness (that is, kill them) and would do so “soon”. Sometimes, Chara seemed to think The Player’s desires were valid, to the point they questioned why The Player hadn’t destroyed wicked people already. Yet, after the callousness and cruelty of the cult members, Chara concluded everyone in the cult was a bad as everyone outside it.

Later, Asgore calls Chara (and Asriel) “the future of humans and monsters” in front of a crowd of monsters, which causes them all to cheer. Chara interpreted this as a crushing responsibility to do the best thing for monsterkind. Later Chara concluded they were what the Player was playing as/conflating their identity with the Player's, and so executed the buttercup plan. Their original parents repeatedly told them how "selfishness corrodes the heart". Chara may thus have thus believed a sense of self-preservation was selfish, and fulfilling monsters' apparent expectations was worth more than their individual life.

Kohlberg’s Stage 4

Age Estimate: 10-15, on average.

““Right” is helping maintain social order by doing one’s duty, obeying laws simply because they are laws, and showing respect for authorities simply because they are authorities.” -Psychology Second Edition, by Hockenbury & Hockenbury

Stage 4 reflects a belief that rules maintain the social order and that the social system will break down if people do not follow rules. At this stage, doing good involves following through on what one has agreed to do, for the good of the larger social system.

If Chara believed it was their duty to free monsters, Chara may have believed any tactic that would enable them to fulfill that duty was justified. On the matter of "following through on what you have agreed to do", perhaps Chara thought Asriel ought to follow through with the buttercup plan they had agreed to do together, to the point of (potentially) manipulating him to ensure he complied.4

--

The Chara of Dogs of Future Past: Chara Origins is, of all the applicable Chara interpretations the author has studied, the closest to this interpretation. However, Stage 3 is better-supported in the work.

Caveat

Kohlberg's work has been criticized in various ways. In the scope of this article, there's only one major flaw: Kohlberg’s early studies were done purely on male subjects. It’s therefore possible his work doesn’t reflect the development of moral reasoning in girls. The book Psychology Second Edition (by Hockenbury & Hockenbury) points out that, in general, men and women may approach moral matters from slightly different perspectives. Many works do not describe or specify Chara as a boy or girl, or openly define Chara as neither, so which perspective to take is unclear.

Conclusion

If Frisk talks with Asriel in the playable epilogue of the Pacifist Route, Asriel will eventually come to terms with his decision to resist Chara’s control and not kill the humans attacking him. Asriel realized that if had killed them, it would have started a war with humanity.

Some suggest war with humanity was the whole point of the buttercup plan, and particularly point out the detail that Chara requested to see the golden flowers of their village before dying. It is, however, likely Chara couldn’t foresee all the consequences to monsters from their plan, including the immense emotional suffering for their family members. Thus, as far they knew, the plan was a good and moral one.

Related Reading

Flowey and PTSD (Part 1 and Part 2)

Age Estimate Source 1, Age Estimate Source 2 ↩︎

As Voltrathesparking pointed out, this does bring up some questionable motives: if Chara's goal was vengeance, how could they be sure vengeance would be executed if they died? Wouldn't they want to see the look on humans' faces as they/Asriel destroyed them? Some works presume the two Waterfall history plaques unreadable in the game (the one in the artifact room and the one defaced by Nice Cream flavors) provided the information that a monster that absorbed a human SOUL had control of its body split between the two SOULs. However, this remains speculation. ↩︎

It’s possible the hate substance itself made Chara feel hate spontaneously, and it was up to Chara to put reasons to it. (See this GlitchTale analysis) Nonetheless, this would reflect Chara’s, well, character. ↩︎

For more information, see this Nochocolate post, as well as this counter-post. ↩︎

[idjurovic]

On Rewards in 2019, in Games and in Life

This is a tad off-topic for this blog, but a thought that’s followed me into the new year is the idea of rewards and how we expect feedback for everything we do, even outside of games (and perhaps because of games). With the new year rolling in, I’ve been thinking about my goals for 2019. I’ve always been a very results oriented person, for better or for worse. It’s certainly what’s gotten me some of the achievements I’m most proud of; there’s been a lot of opportunities given to me that never would have been possible had I not worked every angle in pursuit of some goal, whether it was fleeting or truly what I wanted. But that kind of thinking has also caused me a great deal of pain and anxiety. It’s a little sad to say, but I’ve never been the type to “stop and smell the roses,” and the saying “it’s the journey not the destination” has always eluded me. However, as I thought of resolutions these past couple of weeks, I found myself feeling so exhausted from the rewards thinking. It’s strange, because this is the only way I’ve ever lived my life, and also because games may have some role in molding the minds of highly engaged players like myself to expect payoff - or response at the very least - for the deeds we do. It got me wondering: is there another way to reward players? Is there a way to reflect experiencing something for pleasure and not for strictly tangible gains that is still satisfying? And underneath it all, past the surface-level fascination I have for rewards systems in games, what can I learn from them to better myself as a human?

There’s a lot of ways to reward players of your games. Feedback like I mentioned above is a great one; visual and aural feedback, balancing intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, variable vs. fixed rewards - and unexpected rewards even! - all for the player to see and understand. Showing task relevance and the value of behaving a certain way in the game is another big one; sometimes even learning itself is a great tool for rewarding the player - giving the player a brand new, interesting area to explore when they go off the beaten path for example, or allowing multiple solutions to a problem so the player feels like they found unique and unexpected ways to interact with the game... the list goes on. Maybe learning as a means for rewards is one of the better ways to fight the dangerous feeling I described above, where we start to only do things for the end results. Heck, simply showing a bunch of juicy particles when the right buttons are inputted feels like such a good reward in a lot of games! We game designers have a great responsibility to our players in how we reward them - if we don’t design these systems in a way that’s satisfying, our players will leave to find something more worth investing their time in. In life, as people without titles like “designer,” it’s not always so clear when you’re doing something to advance yourself. It’s not wrong for games to be different in this way - we do use games to escape the confusion of our daily lives and to amplify our desire to prescribe meaning to events that may otherwise seem unfortunately meaningless, after all. We want to believe there’s an order somewhere. At least, I do. Games really play up this part of my brain that is relying so heavily on the notion that the things I do matter somehow, and that all things that happen in the world are noticed and accounted for. It scares me to think of a life where even a small fraction of the things we do are possibly inconsequential. How can all our planning, all our tears and efforts and endurance, ever fall to the wayside when they matter so much to us? Can that ever really mean nothing? In most games, anything worth doing always matters.

Then something struck me. On New Years Eve I finished Season 2 of a show called The Good Place. The show is genius, if you haven’t seen it already - a great blend of comedy and thought-provoking concepts about morality and the afterlife. An idea relevant to rewards systems that kept appearing in the show was the concept of “moral desserts.” The show describes this as the idea of doing something good for the sake of the anticipated reward, as opposed to doing something good because it’s good. In other words, it’s the idea of doing something almost exclusively for the dessert you’re expecting and feel you’re owed at the end of the meal. This is a huge dilemma in reward systems design; many times you want a reward to feel like icing on the cake, not like the sole reason the player will do that cool quest you spent so much time creating and tuning. There’s the idea that content, if it’s cool enough, will be reward in itself to play, and satisfaction will arise from play itself. Is this a naive thought for designers like us to believe, if so much of what we do in our day-to-day lives is with a specific reward in mind (like recognition, or social or financial gain)? It seems at odds with how we operate, but perhaps it’s another form of idealism we’ve woven into games: deep down, we want to do things for the sake of doing them, NOT for the fleeting reward itself. But boy does the carrot taste sweet once you finally reach it.

The term “moral desserts” is so aptly named and so relatable that I can’t help but find myself recalling these last few months where all I’ve been doing is moping over the dessert I feel I earned but didn’t receive. For me, 2018 was so life-changing and full of newly found joy... but it also felt cruel in a lot of ways, like it was overflowing with moments from start to finish where I did my best, put my heart and soul into a thing, and was left with an empty plate when all I wanted was to dig into some metaphorical cheesecake and call it an experience. (Who doesn’t love cheesecake?) I found myself obsessing over it all - through researching and playing with rewards systems in games, actually! I found myself studying all the different kinds of ways games would make me feel good - or bad - for the actions I took, and reveled in how immediately the world took notice of me. I dissected all the dissatisfying moments of my year that haunted me, and put them up against a chart in my mind of ways it could have felt rewarding and wasn’t, or why exactly my enormous efforts in situations that were so important to me felt so meaningless in the end when I had all the words in the world to explain why it felt good to do simple fetch quests in an RPG. I thought about how a reward can seem like a punishment if it’s not the one the player expects and wants, or how failing to give a reward when the player feels they did something to earn one is demoralizing and threatens their capacity for long-term engagement. I blamed everything around me for threatening my “long-term engagement” with my dreams for game design. I’m not exaggerating when I say I wrung myself out with this line of thinking. Indeed, I’ve been a child crying for dessert.

But as I watched The Good Place and waited for midnight to strike on New Years Eve, I really pondered moral dessert. Had I done any of the things I did in 2018 for the dessert? I felt I didn’t get any, and had nothing to show for all my efforts - I even thought for so many months that I had even less than what I started the year with, and that I may have even regressed. But could that really be true, if time passed and I matured? It’s not tangible, but does that mean it doesn’t exist? What if my mind and expectations was in the wrong place all along, and that’s why it didn’t turn out the way I wanted; in other words, what if I was expecting the kind of reward I might get from a strategy game when all along I was playing a hack-and-slash? Of course I’d be disappointed as a player; I was setting myself up for disaster. In that line of thinking about the “why’s” instead of the “what’s” of the year, it occurred to me that as much as I mourned the endings... the “why” in the things I did was never for the result. Maybe I wanted the dessert in the end, but really I did what I did because I wanted to pursue it at the time. Maybe my growth isn’t tangible, but saying it doesn’t exist would be totally negating those 365 days that I really believed I wasn’t wasting as I lived them. I wanted to know it was noticed, but if I were to go back now, I think I would do the same knowing I wouldn’t get the results I wanted. It really isn’t about the dessert in the end, and growth is not material but it exists and is something to be proud of. Maybe the game of 2018 was trying to show me that.

Some say there are two different kinds of players to identify when you’re conducting a playtest: the kind that blames themselves when an interaction is confusing or unexpected, and the other kind that blames the game itself. Maybe this time it wasn’t a problem with the rewards system itself, if I’m to be so bold to say that there even is one in life, but rather a problem with me, the player, for blaming the game when I could be more balanced and look to myself for how I can improve despite how the game is structured. We don’t really have a choice in life but to adapt, do we? So, reader, I’m going into 2019 now with a new mindset thanks to games, the pain of living, and Kristen Bell. I’m cutting down on moral desserts.

[delwray-blog]

WHY AMERICA IS SUCCUMBING TO THE JEWS?

Because of its Rejection of The Doctrine Of Human Depravity. Human depravity is the lost Christian doctrine. “If the case be such indeed, that all mankind is by nature in a state of total ruin, then doubtless, the great salvation by Christ stands in direct relation to this ruin, as the remedy to the disease.” Jonathan Edwards The lost Christian doctrine of total depravity has been found by many who believe the Bible. Satan has done his best to try and rid it from the writings and language of most modern day preachers while any true Bible believing Christian needs only to go back two hundred years and read the writings of all the great Baptist preachers of their day to know that the Baptist people back then believed the greatest doctrine in all of Holy Scripture preached by Jesus Christ, Himself. That is that human nature is utterly depraved. This treaty is written to disprove the lie propagated by such modern-day preachers as the late Adrian Roger’s, who claimed to have destroyed the Bible doctrine of total depravity. One only needs to read his defense of the goodness of human nature to see how the devil has deceived his thinking. Here is absolute proof, biblically, that human nature is depraved. No matter how spiritually ignorant Adrian Rogers was and how deceivingly he tried to destroy what the Bible plainly teaches on the great truth of complete depravity. Disclaimer: As to Doctrine I am a Baptist from the top of my head to the soles of my feet. Baptist doctrine is Bible doctrine and if it is not Bible doctrine it is not Baptist doctrine. Many men of the past such as John Calvin and John Wesley were not Baptist’s but still in their writings were sound biblically on such subjects as the inability of men to save themselves or the doing of any good to please God. Some quotes of these men are used here to prove and validate Holy Scripture. No Baptist in any age has ever disproven or denied that the Doctrine of Total Depravity is not sound biblical teaching. Thus, this writing is in defense of the total ruination of man through the fall of Adam in the Garden of Eden. Author Dennis Prager stated, “No issue has a greater influence on determining your social and political views than whether you view human nature as basically good or not.” I think Prager is correct. But even more important and foundational than your social and political views, your view of human nature has important ramifications with regard to your theology. Perhaps second only to what you believe about God, no issue has greater influence on determining your theological views than whether you view human nature as basically good or not. It is no coincidence that theological liberals who deny doctrines such as original sin and human depravity also, more often than not, end up rejecting other Scriptural teachings such as justification by grace through faith, the necessity and exclusivity of Jesus Christ for salvation, penal substitutionary atonement, the biblical doctrine of hell, or just simply scratch their head and wonder inquisitively when reading Scriptural passages concerning God’s judgment on sin, the flood, destruction of the Canaanites, etc. They ask themselves, “Why is God so mad all the time? I don’t understand!” Much of modern secular sensibility seems attracted to the idea that human beings at their core are basically good. In his book What Americans Believe, George Barna of Barna Research Group found that 87% of non-Christians agreed with the statement “People are basically good.” But this belief in the inherent goodness of humankind isn’t peculiar to non-Christians. It has found its way into the Church as well. In that same study, Barna also found that 77% of self-described born-again Christians agreed with the statement. Perhaps most shocking, of those self-described born-again Christians who identify themselves as mainline Protestant, 90% agreed with the statement “People are basically good.” This was the thinking of teacher and theologian Langdon Gilkey before he became a prisoner at a Japanese internment camp during World War II. But after spending two-and-a-half years with 2,000 other men, women, and children, and directly witnessing the inherent selfishness, greed, and general rudeness of his fellow internees, he came to the exact opposite conclusion: “The camp was an excellent place in which to observe the inner secrets of our own human selves, especially when there were no extras to fall back on and when the thin polish of easy morality and of just dealing was worn off. For one of the peculiar conceits of modern optimism, a conceit which I had fully shared is the belief that in time of crisis the goodness of men comes forward. Nothing indicates so clearly the fixed belief in the innate goodness of humans as does this confidence that when the chips are down, and we are revealed for what we, really are,‟ we will all be good to each other. Nothing could be so totally wrong and in error. A Lesson from Calvin: “Knowledge of God and Knowledge of Self” One of the original and most influential Protestants, John Calvin viewed the matter of human depravity quite differently than self-described Christians today. The 16th Century Protestant Reformer is best known for his masterpiece “Institutes of the Christian Religion.‟ What is interesting to note is the topic which Calvin chooses to begin his entire magnum opus with knowledge of God and knowledge of self. He states, “Nearly all wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” Calvin argues that unless a person possesses a proper knowledge of self he will never have a proper knowledge of God. He states, “Thus, from the feeling of our own ignorance, vanity, poverty, infirmity, and what is more, depravity and corruption, we recognize that the true light of wisdom, sound virtue, full abundance of every good, and purity of righteousness rest in the Lord alone.” Calvin goes on to say that until we become displeased with ourselves we cannot aspire, nor would we ever be aroused, to seek God. Likewise, unless an individual possesses a proper knowledge of God he can never have a proper knowledge of self. Calvin states, “As long as we do not look beyond the earth, being quite content with our own righteousness, wisdom, and virtue, we flatter ourselves most sweetly, and fancy ourselves all but demigods.” As long as we fail to see God for who He truly is, in all His majesty, we will never recognize or scrutinize our own lowly state but rather will continue to view ourselves in our natural fallen condition as “basically good.” If Calvin was right and I think he was, this means that anyone believing in the intrinsic moral goodness of fallen man in his naturally born, unregenerate state has two problems: he possesses a false sense of self as well as a deficient understanding of the holiness of God. Calvinism vs. Arminianism: Why Can’t We All Just Get Along? Isn’t human depravity just a Calvinistic doctrine then? No, it’s a biblical doctrine first and foremost, and though Calvinists and Armenians have traditionally been at opposite ends of the theological spectrum on a number of issues, historically they have agreed on at least one point: total depravity. Total depravity, of course, does not mean that human beings are as bad as they possibly could be. All people are not always bad all of the time. Rather total depravity means that no part of our being remains untouched and unaffected by the corruption of sin. Sin has enslaved the total person: It is not just that some parts of us are sinful and others are pure. Rather, every part of our being is affected by sin, our intellects, our emotions and desires, our hearts, the center of our desires and decision-making processes, our goals and motives, and even our physical bodies. Paul says, “I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh” Rom. 7:18, and, “to the corrupt and unbelieving nothing is pure; their very minds and consciences are corrupted” Titus 1:15. Moreover, Jeremiah tells us that “the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, corrupt; who can understand it?” Jer. 17:9. In these passages, Scripture is not denying that unbelievers can do well in human society in some senses. But it is denying that they can do any spiritual good or be good in terms of a relationship with God. Apart from the work of Christ in our lives, we are like all other unbelievers who are “darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart” Eph. 4:18. Our totally depraved human nature as fallen human beings leads to a total inability on our part to do any spiritual good or to please God: Not only do we as sinners lack any spiritual good in ourselves, but we also lack the ability to do anything that will in itself please God and the ability to come to God in our own strength. Paul says that “those who are in the flesh cannot please God” Rom. 8:8. Moreover, in terms of bearing fruit for God’s kingdom and doing what pleases him, Jesus says, “Apart from me you can do nothing” John 15:5. In fact, unbelievers are not pleasing to God, if for no other reason, simply because their actions do not proceed from faith in God or from love to him, and “without faith, it is impossible to please him” Heb. 11:6. When Paul’s readers were unbelievers, he tells them, “You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once walked” Eph. 2:1-2. Unbelievers are in a state of bondage or enslavement to sin, because “everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin” John 8:34. Though from a human standpoint people might be able to do much good, Isaiah affirms that “all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment” Isa. 64:6; Rom. 3:9-20. Unbelievers are not even able to understand the things of God correctly, for the “natural man does not receive the gifts, things‟ of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” 1 Cor. 2:14. Nor can we come to God in our own power, for Jesus says, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” John 6:44. This then is the sad state of fallen humanity into which we are born: dead in trespasses and sins Eph. 2:1-2, by nature children of wrath Eph. 2:3 and enemies of God Rom. 5:10, darkened in understanding, excluded from the life of God, ignorant, and hard of heart Eph. 4:18, in bondage to sin John 8:34, unable to please God Rom. 8:8, unable to accept and understand the things of God 1 Cor. 2:14, and unable to come to God in our own power John 6:44. This is the teaching of Scripture. Historically, this has also been the teaching of Baptist and both Calvinists and Armenians. That Calvinists affirm total depravity is a given. But what is not so well known is that Jacob Arminius, after whom Arminianism is named, agreed with the doctrine of total depravity and affirmed the bondage of the will: James Arminius was emphatic in his rejection of Pelagianism, particularly with respect to the fall of Adam. The fall leaves man in a ruined state, under the dominion of sin. Arminius declares: “In this state, the Free Will of man towards the True Good is not only wounded, maimed, infirm, bent, and weakened; but it is also imprisoned, destroyed and lost. And its powers are not only debilitated and useless unless they are assisted by grace, but it has no powers whatever except such as is excited by Divine grace.” Commenting on this quote from Arminius, R.C. Sproul states, “The above citation from one of Arminius’s works demonstrates how seriously he regards the depths of the fall. He is not satisfied to declare that man’s will was merely wounded or weakened. He insists that it was “imprisoned, destroyed, and lost.” The language of Augustine, Martin Luther, or John Calvin is scarcely stronger than that of Arminius. After further citations of Arminius regarding his view of the effects of the fall and human depravity, Sproul summarizes the views of Arminius this way: “Arminius not only affirms the bondage of the will but insists that natural man, being dead in sin, exists in a state of moral inability or impotence. What more could an Augustinian or Calvinist hope for from a theologian? Arminius then declares that the only remedy for man’s fallen condition is the gracious operation of God’s Spirit. The will of man is not free to do any good unless it is made free or liberated by the Son of God through the Spirit of God. When it comes to “Calvinism” then, it could be said that Jacob Arminius was really a one-point Calvinist! But Arminius was not the only “Armenian” to hold to total depravity and the bondage of the will. John Wesley, the eighteenth-century revivalist after whom the Wesleyan-Armenian theological tradition is named, also affirmed the total corruption of fallen humankind, our bondage to sin, as well as our inability to choose the good and choose God: I believe that Adam, before his fall, had such freedom of the will, that he might choose either good or evil; but that, since the fall, no child of man has a natural power to choose anything that is truly good. Yet I know and who does not? That man has still freedom of will in things of indifferent nature. Such is the freedom of the will; free only to evil; free to “drink iniquity like water;” to wander farther and farther from the living God, and do more “despite to the Spirit of grace!” Wesley scholars have acknowledged these points: Harald Lindström: “Wesley maintains that natural man is totally corrupt.” He is “sinful through and through, has no knowledge of God and no power to turn to him of his own free will.” Robert V. Rakestraw: In Wesley’s theology “men and women are born in sin and unable in themselves to make the least move toward God.” Colin W. Williams: “Because of original sin, the natural man is, dead to God‟ and unable to move toward God or respond to him.” Leo G. Cox: “By nature man receives nothing that is good. He is free but free only to do evil and to follow on in the way of sin.” Thomas Schreiner sums up Wesley’s view of the human condition this way: The Wesleyan analysis of the human condition does not differ fundamentally from the Calvinistic or Baptist one. Indeed, in 1745 John Wesley said that his theology was “within a hair’s breadth” of Calvinism “In ascribing all good to the free grace of God. It is in denying all natural free-will, and all power antecedent to grace. And, in excluding all merit from man; even for what he has or does by the grace of God.” Wesley’s analysis of the human condition and his bold proclamation of divine grace should warm the heart of any evangelical Christian. Historically then, what the Calvinists and Armenians have disagreed on is not the utterly depraved and corrupt condition of fallen man in his naturally born, unregenerate state. They both acknowledge that the natural man is born in bondage to sin and can do no good apart from the grace of God. What they disagreed on was the SOLUTION to this problem. Calvinists argued that God’s saving grace, which is only for those born again, is always irresistible and efficacious it always accomplishes its purpose in bringing the penitent sinner to salvation. Armenians agreed that God’s grace is indeed prevenient, it comes before conversion, but argued that this grace is given to all men indiscriminately such that it overcomes the effects of the fall to the extent that humankind is now enabled to cooperate with this grace by properly exercising their free will in choosing to accept the offer of salvation, or else resist God’s grace and continue in their willful rebellion. Historically then, the debate was not over the fact of human depravity and the inability of man in his fallen condition to choose the good and to choose God. Rather it was over whether or not the grace of regeneration was resistible Arminianism or irresistible Calvinism, whether prevenient grace was merely a necessary condition for salvation, Arminianism is both a necessary and sufficient condition for salvation, Calvinism, whether God’s grace for salvation is resistibly sufficient for faith and conversion Arminianism or irresistibly efficient for faith and conversion, Calvinism. To summarize, Christians today who hold to the innate goodness of fallen, unregenerate man do not stand squarely with Scripture. But neither do they stand squarely in either the historic Calvinist or Armenian tradition. The idea that “people are basically good” simply isn’t a Christian one. For any Christian who may deny, protest, or be hesitant to accept the teaching of Scripture with regard to human depravity, I would simply challenge you to produce a single verse which says anything positive regarding the spiritual condition or spiritual ability of the “natural man” in his naturally born, unregenerate state. As far as I know, there are none. I’m okay, you’re okay, and we’re all okay: Are people “basically good”? So where does the idea that “people are basically good” come from? Certainly, not from Scripture! As discussed above, Scripture does not paint a pretty picture of the natural man and the current human condition. Where then does it come from? What about Experience? Does experience lend credence to the innate goodness of human beings? Perhaps some will say, “I know a lot of good people.” More often than not I think this confuses niceness with goodness, an idea we will develop further below. For now, I simply want to draw your attention to the daunting task of parenting. If the idea that “people are basically good” is true, then the segment of our population which should best evidence this is children. After all, if children are born pure and innocent, inclined toward good, or perhaps as a “blank slate” without any inclination toward good or evil, then we would only have to keep them from immoral influences in order to guarantee or solidify their “basic goodness.” But anyone who has raised children already has insight into the depravity of our fallen human nature, and along with this reason to reject the idea that people are basically good. As parents, we do not need to teach our child how to lie or disobey, be selfish, impatient, or self-serving. Children from a very early age, from the very moment they are able to engage in sin, not only do engage in sin but struggle not to. Why is this? Why the struggle if people are basically good? It seems we are struggling against our innate immoral inclinations. If we were born inherently good our struggle would be the exact opposite: it would be a struggle to be selfish, impatient, rude, and self-serving. But I don’t know anyone who wrestles with that problem. And why do we have inclinations to engage in immoral behavior at such a young age if people are basically good? Where did these inclinations come from? As soon as our children are old enough to disobey and lie to us, they do. As soon as they are old enough to be selfish and rude, they are. These things seem to come naturally to them, indeed, to all of us. What we do find ourselves doing as parents is working hard to instill moral virtues and right principles in our children. Again, why is this if people are basically good? Perhaps it is because human beings possess a fallen nature and are inherently selfish, prideful, and narcissistic. When things become difficult and our present situation isn’t looking so good, our first and natural inclination is to always look out for ourselves before others. Isn’t this true? We fight against those urges precisely because we are not innately good nor inclined toward moral virtuosity. The inherited corruption children possess from the womb is evidence for our sinful and fallen condition, not the idea that people are basically good. Some may respond to this by arguing it is the corrupting effect of a degenerate society that is spoiling our children. This answer is problematic: Man is born in a state of innocence, they say, but he is subsequently corrupted by the immoral influence of society. This idea begs the question, how did society become corrupt in the first place? If all people are born innocent or in a state of moral neutrality, with no predisposition to sin, why do not at least a statistical average of 50% of the people remain innocent? Why can we find no societies in which the prevailing influence is to virtue rather than vice? Why does not society influence us to maintain our natural innocence? Even the most sanguine critics of human nature, those who insist that man is basically good, repeat the persistent axiomatic aphorism “Nobody’s perfect.” Why is no one perfect? If man is good at the core of his heart and evil is peripheral, tangential, or accidental, why does not the core win out over the tangent, the substance over the accidents? To be sure, it seems hard to make sense of the war, violence, corruption, hatred, selfishness, narcissism, and general human wickedness in this world if you start with the premise “people are basically good.” Again, for those who may deny, protest, or be hesitant to accept the reality of human corruption and depravity evidenced from human experience, I would simply challenge you to answer these questions honestly: What would happen if the restraining effects of law enforcement and government were suddenly removed from societies around the world? Would we enter into a blissful state of utopia, holding hands and singing “Kumbaya,” because people are basically good? Or would we rather see anarchy and chaos break out on a worldwide scale as the true nature of fallen humankind becomes unrestrained and unencumbered? Answering these questions honestly gives us insight into the human condition. The very need for evil-restraining entities such as law enforcement and government presupposes the depravity of man. What about Evolution? Supposing the grand theory of Darwinian evolution is true, could it ground the fact that people are basically good? It doesn’t seem so. How can the truth that “people are basically good” arise from a system which purportedly produced all living things through a dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest process? A “survival of the fittest” mentality has more in common with narcissism and self-preservation than it does the maxim “Love your neighbor as yourself.” And how are altruistic virtues such as charity, self-denial, and love derived from time, matter, mutation, and natural selection? Naturalistic processes working on material entities cannot explain the emergence and existence of immaterial objective moral values and principles. Some Darwinists will argue that morality itself is the product of evolution since “being moral” can aid in self-preservation. This simply proves my point. Morality that is used merely as a means to the end of preserving oneself is not truly altruistic but rather narcissistic. This should not even qualify as a morality, nor does it lend credibility to the idea that people are basically good. What about Human History? Does human history teach us that people are basically good? To answer this I point you to an article by Clay Jones, “We Don’t Take Human Evil Seriously so We Don’t Understand Why We Suffer.” In this paper Jones quickly surveys only some of the most horrendous atrocities perpetrated by human beings, and these only within the last 100 years: 1. Soviet Union: From 1917-89, 20 to 26 million people were murdered for political reasons, including 6 million Ukrainians who were starved to death. 2. Germany: 13 million people murdered in the Holocaust, including approximately 6 million Jews. All of this was despite the fact that Hitler was calling for the death of the Jews 20 years before his rise to power. 3. China: Under the Chinese communists, 26 to 30 million “counter-revolutionaries” were murdered or died in prison. Mao Tse Tung boasted of burying 46,000 scholars alive. 4. Japan: In December 1937, over 300,000 Chinese were raped, tortured, and murdered in the city of Nanking. 5. Turkey: From 1915-23, 1.2 million Armenians were murdered, introducing the phrase “crimes against humanity.” 6. Cambodia: From 1975-79, under Pol Pot, 2 million Cambodians were murdered out of a population of 7 million in an effort to return to an agrarian culture. 7. Rwanda: In 1994, out of a population of 8 million, 800,000 people were murdered in 100 days, mostly by machete. 8. United States: Since 1973, 50 million unborn human beings have been murdered through abortion, largely though scalding alive with saline solution, dismemberment, or suctioning apart piece by piece. Reflecting on the horrible things human beings can do to one another, we may be tempted to say, “That’s inhuman!” On the contrary, humans did this! This is the human condition. Apart from the grace of God, fallen humankind is capable of horrendous evil. The evidence of human history is no friend to the idea that people are basically good. The failure of the Marxist enterprise was due not only to poor economic theory but also because it took for granted the idea that people are inherently good. For example, Karl Marx famously said, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” This assumes the innate goodness of humankind by supposing that individuals will work their hardest to ensure the greatest productivity possible, it assumes the greatest producers will act completely selfless even though the fruit of their labor will go to someone else. It also assumes individuals will not take advantage of the system by being lazy since regardless of their work ethic they will still receive their “fair share.” So if man is indeed good, as the thinking goes, all that is needed is the creation of an egalitarian society and utopia on earth would inevitably result. But the utopian dream is a myth which will never be realized precisely because it fails to take into account the depravity and self-interest of fallen humankind. Despite the failed attempts and mass casualties associated with communism, many are still attracted to this worldview. In the words of Thomas Sowell, “Socialism, in general, has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.” What about Psychology? “The Stanley Milgram Experiment:” What does psychology tell us about man? Due to space restraints, we will only look at one of the most well known psychological experiments of the 20th century, a study on obedience to authority conducted by Stanley Milgram from 1960-63: This exploration of obedience was initially motivated by Milgram’s reflections on the ease with which the German people obeyed Nazi authority in discriminating against Jews and, eventually, in allowing Hitler’s Final Solution to be enacted during the Holocaust. As a young Jewish man, he wondered if the Holocaust could be recreated in his own country, despite the many differences in those cultures and historical epochs. Though many said it could never happen in the United States, Milgram doubted whether we should be so sure. Milgram states, “It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, and daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders.” The details of Milgram’s experiment are as follows: Two people come to a psychology laboratory to take part in a study of memory and learning. One of them is designated as a “teacher” and the other a “learner.” The experimenter explains that the study is concerned with the effects of punishment on learning. The learner is conducted into a room, seated in a chair, his arms strapped to prevent excessive movement, and an electrode attached to his wrist. He is told that he is to learn a list of word pairs; whenever he makes an error, he will receive electric shocks of increasing intensity. The real focus of the experiment is the teacher. After watching the learner being strapped into place, he is taken into the main experimental room and seated before an impressive shock generator. Its main feature is a horizontal line of thirty switches, ranging from 15 volts to 450 volts, in 15-volt increments. There are also verbal designations which range from slight shock to danger, severe shock. The teacher is told that he is to administer the learning test to the man in the other room. When the learner responds correctly, the teacher moves on to the next item; when the other man gives an incorrect answer, the teacher is to give him an electric shock. He is to start at the lowest shock level, 15 volts and to increase the level each time the man makes an error, going through 30 volts, 45 volts, and so on. The “teacher” is a genuinely naïve subject who has come to the laboratory to participate in an experiment. The learner, or victim, is an actor who actually receives no shock at all. The point of the experiment is to see how far a person will proceed in a concrete and measureable situation in which he is ordered to inflict increasing pain on a protesting victim. As the voltage level on the shock generator was increased, the “victim” or “learner” would give corresponding increasing signs of discomfort: the victim indicated no discomfort until the 75-volt shock was administered, at which time there was a little grunt, and at 120 volts the victim shouted to the experimenter that the shocks were becoming painful. Painful groans were heard on administration of the 135-volt shock, and at 150 volts the victim cried out, “Experimenter, get me out of here! I won’t be in the experiment anymore! I refuse to go on!” Cries of this type continue with generally rising intensity so that at 180 volts the victim cried out, “I can’t stand the pain,” and by 270 volts his response to the shock was definitely an agonized scream. Throughout, from 150 volts on, he insisted that he be let out of the experiment, At 315 volts, after a violent scream, the victim reaffirmed vehemently that he was no longer a participant. He provided no answers but shrieked in agony whenever a shock was administered. After 330 volts he was not heard from. Upon reading this, one may wonder why anyone in their right mind would even comply with administering the first shocks. Milgram states, “Would he not simply refuse and walk out of the laboratory? But the fact is that no one ever does, a commonly offered explanation is that those who shocked the victim at the most severe level were monsters, the sadistic fringe of society. But if one considers that almost two-thirds of the participants fall into the category of “obedient” subjects and that they represented ordinary people drawn from working, managerial, and professional classes, the argument becomes very shaky, I must conclude that Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine. What were the results of these experiments? All subjects willingly administered at least 300 volts to the victim, while 65% of the subjects continued in the experiment all the way to the maximum 450 volts despite the agonizing screams and pleas of the victim to be let free. The men and women subjects of this experiment favored no differently.” Milgram concludes this is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority. Milgram was asked after the final 450-volt switch was thrown, how many of the participant-teachers spontaneously got out of their seats and went to inquire about the condition of their learner?” Milgram’s answer: “Not one, not ever!” This experiment has been replicated on several occasions with similar results. David Mantel repeated this experiment in Germany in 1970, just 30 years after the Holocaust in the very place where it occurred. He found that 85% of test subjects were willing to deliver the highest dose of voltage of 450 volts even though the victim was screaming, begging to be released, and complaining that their heart hurt. Mantel states, this experiment becomes more incredulous and senseless the further it is carried. It disqualifies and delegitimizes itself. It can only show how much pain one person will impose on another. And yet, the subjects carry on. That is at once the beauty and the tragedy of this experiment. It proves that the banalest and superficial rationale is perhaps not even necessary but surely is enough to produce destructive behavior in human beings. We thought we had learned this from our history books; perhaps now we have learned it in the laboratory. Is this inhumane? No humans do this. The point is this: if all it takes for the average, ordinary human being to inflict pain and torture on another human being is a man standing in a white lab coat saying, “The experiment requires that you continue,” then there is something desperately wrong with humankind. If nothing else, these experiments demonstrate the ease with which human beings can find themselves participating in evil. Clay Jones states, “Humans have an amazing capacity for evil, and for each person who pulled the trigger or scalded the unborn, there are family, friends, and even majority parties who knew of the slaughter and did nothing to stop it. We cannot argue that unusually depraved people perpetuate these evils. Difficulties may encourage their actions, but otherwise, they’re just ordinary folk, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. Ordinary Men! In his book “Ordinary Men”, Christopher Browning follows German Reserve Police Battalion 101, chronicling their participation in the Final Solution in Poland. This particular battalion was responsible for shooting 38,000 Jews and transporting another 45,200 to Treblinka for extermination. The title “Ordinary Men” is revealing. Often when we think of the perpetrators of the Holocaust we may be tempted to demonize and distance ourselves from such moral monsters. We reason that these heinous individuals must have been degenerate aberrations of society, brainwashed through propaganda and absent any moral constraint in order to participate in such atrocities. We think to ourselves, “I could never do something like that!” That is exactly the point. Reserve Police Battalion 101 was made up of ordinary men. Browning states, “They were middle-aged family men of working and lower-middle-class background from the city of Hamburg. Considered too old to be of use to the German army, they had been drafted instead into the Order Police. Most were raw recruits with no previous experience in the German-occupied territory. These were middle-aged men: old enough to know what Germany was like before Hitler came to power. They were family men: men with wives, children, and homes. They were working men: responsible enough to provide for their families and sufficiently well-adjusted to hold down a full-time job. They were reservists: not professional full-time military men. And yet these ordinary men from Reserve Police Battalion 101 were either directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of 83,200 Jews. Is this inhumane? No humans do this. The vast majority of genocide researches have come to the same conclusion: it is the average members of a population that commit genocide. Even in his book, Browning himself states, “I must recognize that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader, both were human.” And it is not just a few ordinary people who commit genocide, but a lot of them. It takes a lot of regular folk like you and me who are either directly participating or are simply not doing anything to stop it. What does this say then about the human condition and our nature as fallen human beings? That we are basically good? Quite the opposite! So what do we learn from this? If it is regular, average individuals like you and I who willingly inflict pain and torture on other human beings as Milgram demonstrated, if the perpetrators of genocide are just ordinary people as Browning and other genocide researchers argue, what does this say about our own inherent nature? Are we ourselves just as fallen and corrupt? Could I just as easily participate in such horrendous evil? To bring the question closer to home, “If my life had turned out differently, if I was a German living in Germany during World War II, apart from the grace of God, could I have been a guard at Auschwitz?” If I answer the question honestly, I must answer “Yes.” And if you ask yourself this question and also answer “Yes,” you are beginning to understand the depth of human depravity. Reflecting on this question you may be tempted to say, “No! I could never!” If that is your response I would challenge you with this: to answer “No” is to implicitly claim you have been born innately superior to the millions of other ordinary people who have either committed or condoned such evils in history. Not only is this claim without scientific or logical foundation, but to claim you were born innately better is the Nazi position and the mentality which fathers genocide. After all, it was the Germans who thought they were born innately superior. Back to the Bible In the book of Deuteronomy, as God establishes His covenant with Israel, He lists a number of blessings and promises for Israel which are conditioned on their faithfulness to the covenant and to their Lord. After listing the blessings, God warns Israel that if they disobey the Lord and fail to keep His commandments if they follow after false gods and engage in the practices of the Canaanites, then they will not be blessed but cursed. They will be plagued with sickness and disease, their enemies will lay siege to their cities, and they will eventually be vomited out of the land. As enemies surround and lay siege to Israel’s cities, listen to what God says concerning human nature and the atrocious behavior even otherwise “nice” people are capable of: “The most gentle and sensitive woman among you, so sensitive and gentle that she would not venture to touch the ground with the sole of her foot will begrudge the husband she loves and her own son or daughter the afterbirth from her womb and the children she bears. For in her dire need she intends to eat them secretly because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege of your cities” Deut. 28:56-57. It is during times of crisis that the true nature of human beings shines forth. Here the Lord uses the example of the sweet, innocent woman, so gentle and sensitive she wouldn’t even dare touch the sole of her foot to the ground. This same woman, when things aren’t going so well, when the city is laid siege and resources are scarce, not only is this “gentle and sensitive” woman going to eat her own children, but she’s going to be selfish about it! There are historical records of Israelites engaging in this very behavior and on more than one occasion. Josephus gives us one account from the Roman siege and destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD: There was one Mary, the daughter of Eleazar, illustrious for her family and riches. She having been stripped and plundered of all her substance and provisions by the soldiers, out of necessity and fury killed her own suckling child, and having boiled him, devoured half of him, and covering up the rest preserved it for another time. The soldiers soon came, allured by the smell of victuals, and threatened to kill her immediately, if she would not produce what she had dressed. But she replied that she had reserved a good part for them, and uncovered the relics of her son. Dread and astonishment seized them, and they stood stupefied at the sight. Is this inhumane? No humans do this. You see? If all of this is true, if human beings really are this corrupt, wicked, desperate, and depraved apart from the grace of God, then what Paul says about the human condition in Romans 3 starts to make a lot more sense: “There is none righteous, not even one; there is none who understands, there is none who seeks for God; all have turned aside, together they have become useless; there is none who does good, there is not even one. Their throat is an open grave, whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness; their feet are swift to shed blood, there is no fear of God before their eyes” Rom. 3:10-18. How could Paul have been any clearer? The Root of the Problem: Original Sin “I’m basically a good person. My good deeds outweigh my bad.” This is the most common answer I have heard from non-Christians in response to the question, “Why should God allow you into heaven?” This answer, including the presumption behind it, actually has its root in original sin. After Adam and Eve rebelled against God and brought sin into the world, they experienced for the first time both guilt and shame. Because of their guilt, they attempted to hide from God, and due to their shame, they attempted to cover themselves through their own effort. This first sin had devastating effects, not only for Adam and Eve but also for all of their posterity. Once Adam and Eve became corrupt all they could produce was corruption, they couldn’t produce anything better than themselves. And so Adam and Eve gave birth to corrupt human beings, who gave birth to corrupt human beings, who gave birth to corrupt human beings, who eventually gave birth to you and me. In that sense, each one of us is born into this world as a little fallen Adam and Eve. And like Adam and Eve, fallen humankind today attempts to hide and cover from God. But rather than sew fig leaves together, one of the most prevalent ways we attempt to cover our moral shame and guilt is by appealing to our own moral “goodness.” That is, we point to our “basic human goodness” and “good deeds” in an attempt to justify ourselves before God. Often this even becomes a rationalization as to why we don’t need God, “Why do I need God? I’m living a good enough life on my own.” Ironically then, these “good deeds” performed by fallen human beings, when appealed to as evidence of one’s own goodness or as an excuse to ignore the need for God, are a testimony not to moral virtue and meritorious character but rather to a continued state of rebellion against God. It is an attempt to cover one’s own guilt and shame by the power of the flesh, our own hard work, and self-effort, just as Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden. This is moralism, the attempt to fix and perfect oneself in the power of self, and it is antithetical to the gospel of grace. This is an important point to grasp. What I am saying is that man’s charade of “good deeds” is in reality often self-serving, and therefore not “good” at all. They allow unregenerate men and women to continue to hide and cover from God, suppressing the truth of their need for Him, while at the same time allowing them to point to their works and say, “You see? Look at all the good things I’ve done. I’m a good person.” Responding to the “I’m basically good” fallacy how then should we respond to those who reject the gospel of grace and attempt to hide and cover from God through their own good works and self-righteousness? At least three things can be said. First, everyone thinks they are “basically good.” The Police officer said, “If there is one thing I have learned while working in law enforcement, it is that most everyone thinks they are, basically good,‟ murderers, rapists, and child molesters.” Inmates convicted of horrendous crimes still manage to find a way to justify themselves in the sight of God and man: Sure officer, I made a mistake, who hasn’t? Maybe what I did could even be considered “wrong” whatever that misused and misunderstood word means. But you know what? I’ve done a lot of good things too. I’m basically a good person. Often when people say “I’m basically good” what they have in mind is comparing themselves with other people. They might say something like, well, I’ve done some bad things, but I’m not like that guy over there. Look at what he does. All in all, I think I’m pretty good. Even among convicted criminals there is a “code among thieves,” a list of do’s and don’ts, even a moral hierarchicalism by which certain actions are judged more heinous than others and by which a rationalization of one’s own actions becomes possible. The petty thief points to the drug abuser and says, “I’m not like him, I’m basically good.” The drug abuser points to the kidnapper and says, “I’m not like him, I’m basically good.” The kidnapper points to the murderer and says, “I’m not like him, I’m basically good.” The murderer points to the child molester and says, “I’m not like him, I’m basically good.” It isn’t criminals alone who are plagued by this mentality. It is the average law-abiding citizen as well. And in my experience, this type of moralism even impacts police officers, often at an even deeper level. In fact, I think moralism, in general, is more perceptible and can be a greater danger among those who work in the criminal justice system due to the simple fact that we are confronted with a corrupt aspect of society every day that others only see on TV. In the face of daily evil, it is easy for individuals involved in criminal justice to retreat to the state of mind which says, look at that guy over there. Look at his charges. Look at what he’s been convicted of. I’m not like him, that’s for sure. I could never do something like that. I work to stop bad people from doing bad things, after all. I’m one of the good guys. I’m basically a good person. Moralism can be one of the greatest obstacles to the gospel. The problem with all of these comparisons is that they do not take into account the universal corruption of sin that affects all of humankind. If fallen, unregenerate human beings are your standard of comparison, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that you are “basically good.” All you need to do is find someone a little bit worse off than you! Comparing one depraved human being with another depraved human being will always produce this result. This type of comparison has the wrong reference point. It is the same Pharisaical attitude that says “I’m better than him” and which was condemned by Jesus in the parable of the Pharisee and tax collector Luke 18:9-14. Jesus is our correct reference point, and Jesus said quite plainly, “No one is good except God alone” Luke 18:19. Paul says, “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” Rom. 3:23 and “There is none righteous, not even one” Rom. 3:10. In other words, there is none who are “basically good.” Basically good compared to whom? Certainly not God; and it is God who we will stand before on Judgment Day, not fallen unregenerate man. Second, niceness isn’t goodness. Okay, so everyone thinks they’re basically good, and no one lives up to God’s standard of holiness. But there are a lot of nice people. What about them? In short, niceness is not good and being nice is easy much of the time. Jesus Himself said, “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full Luke 6:32-34. In other words, these sorts of acts simply reflect the normal human niceness we see in almost every area of society. Someone said, “Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.” Isn’t this true? It is easy to be nice when there is money in the bank, food on the table, and sunshine on your face. We often see the true nature of fallen humankind emerge when things aren’t going so well. When the chips are down and times are tough, the “basic goodness” of humankind, more often than not, quickly vanishes. Again, does this mean that fallen human beings are as bad as they possibly could be, or that they can do no good in any sense? No. Thomas Schreiner states, “Do unregenerate human beings always sin? Is there not some good in their lives?” We are not saying that they are as evil as they can possibly be. Jesus says, “…you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children” Luke 11:13. If people were as evil as they possibly could be, they would not desire to give good things to their children. They would presumably find ways to inflict only evil upon their children. Unbelieving parents often love their children and their friends Matt. 5:46-47. They also may do much that is good for society. It should be noted that Jesus still says that they are evil. Evil people still give good gifts to their children and do kind things for other people. Evil human beings still do nice things for one another. This doesn’t mean they aren’t evil nor does it mean they aren’t slaves to sin. This is because sin is not merely outward action or inaction which fails to conform to God’s law but an attitude which fails to acknowledge God and give Him His proper glory. Schreiner explains: Romans 1:21-25 clarifies that the heart of sin is failing to glorify God as God. The heart of sin is a belittling of God and a scorning of his glory, which involves a failure to glorify and thank him Rom. 1:21. Sinners do not give God the supreme place in their lives, people “serve created things rather than the Creator” Rom. 1:25. Sin is not first and foremost the practice of evil deeds but an attitude that gives glory to something other than God. People may be loving to their children and kind to their neighbors and never give a thought to God. The essence of sin is self-worship rather than God-worship, such a conception of sin helps us understand how people can perform actions that externally conform to righteousness yet remain slaves of sin. These actions are not motivated by a desire to honor and glorify God as God. Actions that externally conform to righteousness may still be sin, in that they are not done for God’s glory and by faith. Slavery to sin does not mean that people always engage in a reprehensible behavior. It means that the unregenerate never desire to bring glory to God, but are passionately committed to upholding their own glory and honor. True moral goodness then isn’t merely being “nice.” True moral goodness is much closer to the teaching “love your enemies” Matt. 5:44 which no fallen human being can do apart from God’s grace. Again, Jesus said quite plainly, “No one is good except God alone” Luke 18:19. Niceness isn’t good, and we need to know the difference. Third, goodness isn’t even the issue. Badness is. When someone says, “I’m basically a good person, my good deeds outweigh my bad,” they are assuming at least two things. First, they are assuming they have done more good than bad. Considering that we are guilty of numerous sins every day in thought, word, and deed, I don’t think this is true of anyone. Second, they are assuming that doing good works somehow counteracts all the bad things they’ve done. This line of thinking doesn’t seem to properly take into account the concepts of law and justice. To illustrate this, imagine you are pulled over for running a red light. In an attempt to avoid a ticket, you explain to the officer, “Sir, you don’t understand. You see, before I ran that red light, I stopped legally for 100 red lights. And after you let me go here, I am planning on stopping legally for another 100 red lights. You see? My legal stops outweigh my illegal failures to stop. I’m basically a good driver. Therefore, I don’t deserve this ticket.” Or what about the murderer who appears before a judge and says, “Your honor, I confess. I murdered that man. But you don’t understand. I let hundreds of other people live! You see your honor? My good deeds outweigh my bad. I’m basically a good person! Therefore, you should allow me to go free.” We intuitively sense there is something wrong with the excuses and rationale offered by the guilty parties. So what’s the problem? It’s this: You cannot make up for breaking the law by keeping the law; keeping the law is what you are supposed to do. In other words, you don’t get a check in the mail or a get out of jail free card for being a law-abiding citizen. That is the standard you are held to! The issue is not that we keep the law most of the time. The problem is that we break it on occasion! And when we do, we deserve to face the consequences of our actions. The same goes for God’s law. Goodness is not the issue; badness is. The issue is not that we do what we are supposed to on occasion, the issue is that we have broken God’s law many times over and stand as condemned sinners before Him who deserve to be punished. We cannot make up for breaking God’s law by keeping His law, keeping God’s law is what we are supposed to do. And justice requires that we are punished when we don’t. This, my friends, is why SALVATION MUST BE BY GRACE, and why any works-oriented salvation system is doomed to failure: “For by grace you are you saved by faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not of works, lest any man should boast” Eph. 2:8-9. You can’t make up for breaking the law by keeping the law. Keeping the law is what you are supposed to do. And when we appear before God on Judgment Day, the appropriate attitude before the holiest, most perfect, most wise, most just Creator and Saviour will not be, well, you see God, you don’t understand. Let me tell you how this works. Check it out: my good deeds outweigh my bad. I’m basically a good person. I imagine God would look at us the same way the judge might look at the murderer who said, “Yeah, but I let hundreds of other people live!” And would appropriately respond, “Depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness” Matt. 7:23. When we do what is commanded of us, our only response should be “we are unworthy servants, we have only done our duty” Luke 17:10. Our attitude should be one of humility, reverence, and gratitude, one which says, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” Luke 18:13. He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit Titus 3:5. Acknowledging that we as human beings are not basically good not only frees us from the grip of moralism but allows us to fully embrace and appreciate the gospel of grace. It also has tremendous implications for the problem of evil. Human Depravity and the Problem of Evil: Human beings apart from the grace of God are capable of horrendous evils. A discussion of human depravity in relation to the problem of evil is absolutely necessary because the most frequently asked question concerning the problem of evil is this: “Why do bad things happen to good people?” This is sometimes referred to as the emotional problem of evil. To put it succinctly, the question “Why do bad things happen to good people?” is based on the false assumption that people are “good.” Given the reality of human depravity, the problem with this question should become immediately apparent. Man is not innately good: The terrible human evils in the world are a testimony to man’s depravity in his state of spiritual alienation from God. The Christian isn’t surprised at the moral evil in the world; on the contrary, he expects it. The Scriptures indicate that God has given mankind up to the sin it has freely chosen; He doesn’t interfere to stop it but let’s human depravity run its course Rom. 1:24, 26, 28. This only serves to heighten mankind’s moral responsibility before God, as well as our wickedness and our need for forgiveness and moral cleansing. So the question is not “Why do bad things happen to good people?” But rather “Why do bad things happen to bad people?” But nobody ever asks that question. Perhaps the question we should be asking is this: “Why do good things happen to bad people?” Why has God out of His mercy chosen to dispense any goodness at all on willful rebellious sinners? Christian apologists need to take the consequences of sin and reality of human depravity seriously when addressing the problem of evil. Many Christians simply pay lip service to what the Bible has to say about these topics. It’s no wonder then we are often at a loss for words when someone asks, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” A completely biblical, though partial, response is this: no one is good but God alone! Bad things don’t happen to good people because no one is good. Jesus raised no qualms about our naturally born status as sinners before God, the universal corruption and guilt of humankind, or our need for repentance. He introduced these very issues Himself in addressing the problem of evil. He took it for granted that the wages of sin is death Luke 13:1-5. Christian apologists should do likewise. When addressing the problem of evil, Christian apologists also need to present a theodicy which minimally includes the biblical teaching of original sin and human depravity. G.K. Chesterton referred to original sin as “the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” And why God allows evil won’t make sense unless we have the problem of sin clearly before us: The subject of sin is vital knowledge. If you have not learned about sin, you cannot understand yourself, or your fellow-men, or the world you live in, or the Christian faith. And you will not be able to make head or tail of the Bible. For the Bible is an exposition of God’s answer to the problem of human sin and unless you have that problem clearly before you, you will keep missing the point of what it says. The same is true for the problem of evil. The subject of sin is essential because in raising the problem of evil, the skeptic must put forth an anthropoid, justification of man by arguing that man is “basically good” and God is unjust for allowing the suffering and evil He does. In response, the theist must show these assumptions to be false, and in their place put forth a theodicy, justification of God, which includes evidencing the depths of human depravity and arguing that God has morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil. Until we clearly articulate and defend the gravity of sin, as well as the universal corruption and guilt of humankind, many of our answers to the problem of evil will largely remain unpersuasive. Skeptics, however, are often inconsistent when it comes to the nature of man and the problem of evil. They want to hold to the basic “goodness” of man and at the same time complain about the evil, pain, and suffering which man perpetuates, all the while blaming God for allowing it: On the one hand, skeptics argue that bad things shouldn’t happen to good people and that the human race consists mainly of good people. On the other hand, their very objections concern the bad things people do to one another: murder, war, rape, child abuse, brutality, kidnapping, bullying, and ridiculing, shaming, corporate greed, unwillingness to share wealth or to care for the environment. The longer the list of evil things done, the more it demonstrates the truth of what the Bible says: by nature, human beings are evil, not good. This undercuts the original argument that humans are good, and therefore it’s utterly unjust for bad things to happen to them. Since the same human race that commits these evils also suffers from them, since we are not only victims, but perpetrators, of sin, what would God’s critics have Him do? Would they insist he strike us all down immediately for our evil? Or would they have him remove human choice in order to protect us from one another? They might as well say that since we are so good, God shouldn’t allow us to be so bad. Conclusion: The Doctrine of Human Depravity Matters! How does a knowledge and understanding of the depths of human evil help us? In addition to largely answering the emotional problem of evil as discussed above, the following points prove insightful: First, it reveals we have gotten the problem of evil exactly backward: There is a problem of evil alright. But it isn’t God’s problem He is only good and doesn’t do any evil. It’s humankind’s problem because we are the ones who do evil. As C. H. Spurgeon puts it, “The Christian answer, that we have used our free will to become very bad, is so well known that it hardly needs to be stated. But to bring this doctrine into real life in the minds of modern men, and even modern Christians, is very hard.” Indeed! And a Christian won’t understand why God allows evil unless he or she thinks these things through. Second, it demonstrates God’s patience and justifies God’s judgment. If you think that people are basically good you will often be tempted to ask, “Why is God angry all the time?” When reading passages in Scripture relating to God’s judgment, the flood, destruction of the Canaanites, etc. When you begin to fully grasp the depth of human depravity, sinfulness and corruption, you instead will say, “Wow, God is really patient. Why isn’t He judging people sooner?” Spurgeon stated, “When we merely say that we are bad, the wrath‟ of God seems a barbarous doctrine; as soon as we perceive our badness, it appears inevitable, a mere corollary from God’s goodness.” Third, it magnifies the significance of Christ’s sacrifice. Jesus didn’t suffer a brutal, agonizing, torturous death on the cross because you’re basically a good person. If you were good enough to earn salvation on your own, then “Christ died for nothing” Gal. 2:21. We may feel tempted to underestimate the horrors of the Cross, because to recognize them is to admit that our monstrous evil demanded a price so horrific. To make light of our sin is to make light of Christ’s cross. Charles Spurgeon stated, “Too many think lightly of sin, and therefore think lightly of the Saviour.” Fourth, it impassions our witness. If you think that people are basically good, it will be hard for you to tell them they are corrupt sinners in need of salvation. Fifth, it increases our desire for Jesus‟ return. When we watch television and see examples of some of the horrendous evil and suffering that takes place around the world, we often cry out, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus.” Finally, it reveals the greatness of our salvation. After all, if you think that you are basically a good person, your salvation doesn’t seem so grand. We must contemplate men in sin, until we are horrified, until we are alarmed, until we are desperate about them, until we pray for them, until having realized the marvel of our own deliverance from that terrible state, we are lost in a sense of wonder, love, and praise.  The good news just isn’t so good unless we have the bad news clearly before us. “Again, it is certain,” Calvin stated, “that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself.” Certain proof in truth that men and human nature is totally depraved and to think not is too lessen the chance for any man being saved. Which is exactly what the outcome the devil wants to achieve.

[generalqueenstrawberry]

Simplifying Life By Seeing Good In Others

Seeing “good” in others not only makes you happy about their presence of others but also generates a sense of tolerance and love. If you keep looking others as “defected pieces”, (probably I shouldn’t use this word!) Then you can never feel satiated by their companionships.  In order to generate eternal relations, we must always look others with a positive window.

It’s not that easy to ignore the bad that people might have. We have been cultivated in such an environment where we get habitual of pointing out the bad in others despite their thousands of dispositions. Even if we say “this is a perfect person”, then too the word “but” is always there to point out the bad quality they have.

We never end up just by saying that “he is a good person”; rather we say that he is a good person “but” that particular day he behaved badly. Most of us do not identify people with their attributes. We look towards their negativities which constantly run in the background of our minds thereby making us behave “not so well “with them.

There have been human races who have initiated mass killings, wars, child molestations and pyramid schemes. It is definitely very difficult to have a sense of forgiveness and positivity for them. Such people have affected so many innocent beings with their heinous deeds. To make the situations worse, our brain constantly rebels with them and generates a “negative bias”.

The most common example of biasness is relationship with animals. Maximum of the people have a very positive relationships with their pets. However, once you were bitten by them, there would always be reluctance to adore them. You are most likely to feel scared and avoid them. The negative experience over captivates your brain and constantly stimulates those negative thoughts.

The “negative bias” is so deeply rooted in our minds that it rules us throughout our lives. We label people as “good” and “bad”. How far is it meaningful? Labelling a thief as “bad” is definitely correct. However, there can be some exceptions like Robin Hood who steal things from the rich and gives them to the starving poor.

Here, I simply don’t mean to protect their deeds or call them morally correct. But, what I personally want to say is that terming them as “bad” is slightly immature. The way we identify people is totally a subjective phenomenon. The generated labels can never be intrinsic or viable. Try to challenge your labels and do not take them as final verdicts.

Investigate things, self-actualise and then decide whether they are actually worth a “negative tag”? Just compare their overall deeds and look what is going on in the world. May be their level of being bad is not as high as you may be thinking. Life becomes really easy when you begin to look towards the sunshine. Be slow and substantial in your judgments. Interact with an open mind and try to grasp their mental state before concluding anything about anyone.

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from PiousPrayers http://www.piousprayers.com/simplifying-life-by-seeing-good-in-others/

[wendellrmilerus]

Simplifying Life By Seeing Good In Others

Seeing “good” in others not only makes you happy about their presence of others but also generates a sense of tolerance and love. If you keep looking others as “defected pieces”, (probably I shouldn’t use this word!) Then you can never feel satiated by their companionships.  In order to generate eternal relations, we must always look others with a positive window.

It’s not that easy to ignore the bad that people might have. We have been cultivated in such an environment where we get habitual of pointing out the bad in others despite their thousands of dispositions. Even if we say “this is a perfect person”, then too the word “but” is always there to point out the bad quality they have.

We never end up just by saying that “he is a good person”; rather we say that he is a good person “but” that particular day he behaved badly. Most of us do not identify people with their attributes. We look towards their negativities which constantly run in the background of our minds thereby making us behave “not so well “with them.

There have been human races who have initiated mass killings, wars, child molestations and pyramid schemes. It is definitely very difficult to have a sense of forgiveness and positivity for them. Such people have affected so many innocent beings with their heinous deeds. To make the situations worse, our brain constantly rebels with them and generates a “negative bias”.

The most common example of biasness is relationship with animals. Maximum of the people have a very positive relationships with their pets. However, once you were bitten by them, there would always be reluctance to adore them. You are most likely to feel scared and avoid them. The negative experience over captivates your brain and constantly stimulates those negative thoughts.

The “negative bias” is so deeply rooted in our minds that it rules us throughout our lives. We label people as “good” and “bad”. How far is it meaningful? Labelling a thief as “bad” is definitely correct. However, there can be some exceptions like Robin Hood who steal things from the rich and gives them to the starving poor.

Here, I simply don’t mean to protect their deeds or call them morally correct. But, what I personally want to say is that terming them as “bad” is slightly immature. The way we identify people is totally a subjective phenomenon. The generated labels can never be intrinsic or viable. Try to challenge your labels and do not take them as final verdicts.

Investigate things, self-actualise and then decide whether they are actually worth a “negative tag”? Just compare their overall deeds and look what is going on in the world. May be their level of being bad is not as high as you may be thinking. Life becomes really easy when you begin to look towards the sunshine. Be slow and substantial in your judgments. Interact with an open mind and try to grasp their mental state before concluding anything about anyone.

Subscribe to us and leave a comment below

source http://www.piousprayers.com/simplifying-life-by-seeing-good-in-others/ from Increase Your Lifespan? Eat Japanese Food fact http://piouspreyers.blogspot.com/2017/02/simplifying-life-by-seeing-good-in.html

[potatonuggetme-blog]

Our brain: the monster of choice, when there's no one else left to blame..

SOME PEOPLE KILL PEOPLE! It’s the hideous headline heard daily, around the world. As it turns out, we do it quite a bit: every sixty seconds, in the USA alone. In the time, it takes me to write this sentence, at least one somebody is killing somebody else, somewhere on Earth.    Let me tell you: this world can make you crazy, if you weren’t already. And if there’s one thing I hope we’ve all figured out by now, it’s that we’re all at least a little bit INSANE! People often tend to think of serial killing as a modern phenomenon, the term having only been coined as recently as the 80’s, when the escalating trend of death-crazed media darlings made such snappy buzzwords commonplace nomenclature. Some unfortunate fold find themselves bullied into madness by a world that it itself insane. Against all their better angels, they feel compelled to rise in righteous vengeance against injustice so profound that only spectacularly deranged and incendiary payback will do. Killing as sport. That’s what hunting’s all about once there’s already meat on the table. The weirder things are, the happier I get, by and large. The innocence of youth is such a tenuous thing. We tend to cherish it in our children, and try to preserve it if possible, even though grown-up prevailing wisdom says that it’s utterly useless once real life gets down to business. Of course, the business of very young children is to try to make sense of the world they’ve fallen into. They’re hungry to learn and impulsively eager to trust anyone who might help them decipher. The child inside has not forgetter what it was like before we knew, nor does she soft-pedal the painful gnosis to come. There are a few things more shattering than an unsolved crime. There’s no closure. No rest. No way to get free of the ghosts, or the hope. Until you go all the way. In trying to make sense of seemingly senseless tragedy, one of the hardest things to reconcile is the randomness of fate. We like to think in terms of cause and effect—I punch you in the nose, and the result will be hurt—because it’s nice and simple, and often true. But the only straight lines are the ones that we make. Life tends to be a lot more complex and rococo, weaving patterns so elaborate they often go right over our heads, leaving us with nothing but they question, Why? The flip side of utter chaos is poetic justice; and the more optimistic among us are prone to think that everything happens for a reason. Of course, the worse things get, the harder it is to maintain that cheerful disposition. That’s when resilience and good old-fashioned, can-do spirit come in awfully handy. Or, as the old saying goes,” Chance favors the prepared mind.” Sometimes, you just got to kill that bastard. Just seems like the natural thing to do. Not a whole lot of explanation necessary. If you knew him, you’d probably want to kill him, too. Everybody screws up once or twice. And a lot of us get caught. So, you got to respect a man who does his time, pays his debt to society, and moves on. The world is not forgiving, but you do what you can. Chalk it up to youthful craziness. And prepare to start anew.  Nobody wants to get murdered. There’s not much to like it. If it happens, it’s bound to be horrible. Unless the deed goes down in public, adds are good that the last voice you’ll hear—aside from your own worthless pleas, helpless screams, and undignified death rattles—will be coming from the person who kills you. Psychosis thrives in the open, unseen. That’s one of its most terrifying aspects. We walk past it daily. Maybe nod. Maybe smile. Never recognizing what it is that it smiling back, with a searching gaze more intimate than we would ever want to know. But love doesn’t play by ordinary rules. And obsession is confession, be it welcome or not. As witness this nightmarishly heartfelt declaration.  Most marriages, as it turns out, are not made in heaven. And the skillful eye can see a train wreck coming a mile away. Love is hard enough for the sane. Almost by definition, it makes you crazy. Once you say, “I’d do anything for you,” you’ve left the door wide open. Anything is an awfully lard word. One of the greatest crimes modern society commits daily is the dumping of our mentally ill back onto the streets with no provisions. From a fiscal standpoint, it’s utterly sound. But once you get past the bloodless number-crunching, it’s the cultural equivalent of running raw sewage through our psychological thoroughfares, and into our tap away. Drink up! There’s nothing like a perfectly good idea and beating it into the ground so hard that even the ground starts screaming. But that’s what you get when you take something nice and innocuous—like recycling. It’s always tough when families split up. Tough on parents. Even tougher on the kids. And some reunions are best avoided at all costs. They’re like ticking time bombs that only explode upon contact. But I suspect that few are so thoroughly designed for mutually assured destruction as the thermonuclear family gathering depicted.  Once again, through the eyes of a child, we’re taken to the Bad Place: this time though eyes so young that they can’t even begin to process the morality, but only experience the crazy as it comes. When you don’t believe in the powers-that-be, you make your own rules. You make your own way, and prepare to defend it. Prepare for the worst. That’s the survivalist code. Don’t you just hate it when people touch your stuff? Especially when they don’t wash their hands first, and then you must wash your hands, and all the things they touched, including the scissors you just stabbed them in the neck with repeatedly because they WOULDN’T STOP TOUCHING YOUR STUFF? You can tell a lot about people from the way they treat their pets. Excessive pampering implies certain kinds of crazy. Obvious cruelty, on the other hand, draws a straight line to the dark side.  Have you ever watched a little kid who really likes to hurt things and gone, “Oh, this is not going to turn out well”? all through my life, I’ve taken note of them as they crossed my path, and wondered who they turned out to be. Or, more specifically. What they wound up doing. Having spent the last billion-odd pages naturalistically laying out the details of our human dilemma, the time has come to ask the trillion-dollar existential question: What does it all mean? Is there a point to all this suffering, madness, and horror? Are the optimists and spiritually inclined among us right when they say that all things happen for a reason, and that’s just part of God’s divine plan? Murder is a sin. Of course, it is. But there are little loopholes and provisions encoded into every religion. “Thou shalt not kill, except…” and then there are those systems of belief that can’t be bothered with pussy-footing around. Their gods walked in slaughtering and never looked back. To do anything less is to see things unclearly. You can call their adherents extremists or true believer. Call them saints or psychotics. Doesn’t matter to them. They know what is true, and you don’t. Suck it up! So, what have we learned from all this? Whether you feel that life has intrinsic meaning, or only the meaning we ascribe to it—or even no meaning at all—in the end, the human hope is to somehow make peace. Find a way to reconcile both our beautiful and terrible truths. To both live, and then die, as best we can.