Mere Cognition

October 2024

• Return to Sender

  I don't think that you have any insight whatsoever into your capacity for good until you have some well-developed insight into your capacity for evil. ― Jordan B. Peterson Origins This is going to sound much more harsh than it should. That's unfortunately how text-only strips the context from things. I think Rick Thomas will be a piece of the puzzle in helping you fix your worldview I'm not sure how that's going to fit, but he has clarity in ways that I don't think I've seen before Regrets I don't want: https://rickthomas.net/three-life-choices-you-dont-want-to-miss-before-you-die/ I couldn't see it before. All glory to God, now I can. Reading his articles and listening to his podcasts is like listening to a wholly new and completely different thing. It's actually amazing. I really wish you would re-read that now. Several years ago, I had an interesting interaction with you when you came to visit me at work. I know well the perception you maintain; it's been seared upon my memory just…

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April 2024

• Refined in Trial

  It's every so often, I wonder. How the mind gets so twisted, and turned around, driven, as if listening to the words of a serpent cunning and conniving adnamrofeR repmeS sand or rock on this i will build things but not higher like babel Instead fortresses mighty destined to feel cold cleave of steel on stone break and break against siege after siege but He is risen not this bread; he said for life is not taken but given nesir si eH until the return, no sense denying; it's just a dirge for the new day's trials refined.

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March 2024

• On The Turning Away

  To repent is to "turn away from". It is not a passive action, it is an active walking away from that which is wrong. You do it not because it is easy, but because it is right. Repentance is almost always difficult because oftentimes it requires excision of that part of you that craves and condones that thing you need to be rid of that's slowly killing you. This is the basis for the understanding that repentance is granted from God; it's not something that we can do. Because oftentimes, we are too blinded or myopic to recognize the things that need repenting of. And even if we are aware of them, the allure and comfort of that familiar (no matter how completely it poisons us) is so overpowering that we will willfully walk back to that comfort that we know even if we intellectually recognize the danger. And the more you give in and feed it, the more ingrained that pathway becomes and the process is easier and easier to do, and harder and harder to walk away from. This is what…

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• It's Friday... But…

  its-friday-but-sundays-a-coming

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• Oswald Chambers…

  He must increase, but I must decrease. —John 3:30 If you become a necessity to someone else’s life, you are out of God’s will. As a servant, your primary responsibility is to be a “friend of the bridegroom” (John 3:29). When you see a person who is close to grasping the claims of Jesus Christ, you know that your influence has been used in the right direction. And when you begin to see that person in the middle of a difficult and painful struggle, don’t try to prevent it, but pray that his difficulty will grow even ten times stronger, until no power on earth or in hell could hold him away from Jesus Christ. Over and over again, we try to be amateur providences in someone’s life. We are indeed amateurs, coming in and actually preventing God’s will and saying, “This person should not have to experience this difficulty.” Instead of being friends of the Bridegroom, our sympathy gets in the way. One day that person will say to us, “You are a thief; you stole my desire to follow Jesus, and…

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• Suffering is a part…

  Suffering is a part of the process by which the sons of God are sanctified. They are chastened to wean them from the world, and make them partakers of God’s holiness. The Captain of their salvation was ‘made perfect through suffering,’ and so are they.

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• The Hard Sayings of…

  These Psalms can be hard to reconcile. We always want peace, and want to think God is only a God of peace. But he's not either/or. He is both/and. It's often those of us that have experienced the traumas of the world, and those that have suffered His painful corrections, that seem like we understand this to a fuller extent. It hasn't driven us to vengeance and hard-heartedness, by no means. Instead, almost paradoxically, it has driven us closer to Him, causing us to give up our vain pursuits for what is righteous. We seek that which is pleasing to the Lord, asking Him to drive further from us iniquity, even if that means the road ahead is difficult for us. We must decrease, and Christ must increase. Imprecatory Psalms and prayers are indeed for the wickedness present in this world. But it is not for vengeance, for that is the Lord's. It's also a reminder, meant to drive us into the arms of our savior.

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• On Perspective

  Someone else shared this with: "This is how I understand man’s autonomy/responsibility and God’s sovereignty. The Bible freely uses language that supports both views, which makes me think it’s a 'both and' kind of thing." Perspective. Things look different from different viewpoints. Information decoded from one view often looks different when decoded from another. It's because we don't have the ability to see a thing completely all at once. It's not until we view it from multiple angles that we begin to get an accurate mental model. Understanding bias and accounting for it is an important concept in critical thinking. And in every professional, well, profession I've worked in - thinking critically and perceiving perspective have been incredibly important, both for people making retail purchases and for lives hanging in the balance. It's rather amazing how God made man to work, and how much he can push through to do that work. If there is no accounting for other perspectives…

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• What's in a Name?

  I've been thinking about names lately. God tasked Adam with naming. Have you ever considered why? That delegated authority has significance; consider how God spoke things into existence and how giving something a name likely influences the thing named, through whatever latent power exists in that delegated authority. Naming things is important. God renamed people. Jesus renamed people. Does it seem consistent that naming our children is also important? What is your name's meaning? How do you think it has influenced your life up to this point?

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January 2024

• On Neglect

  Hey there, mere cognition blog thing. It's mostly been a minute. A long while back, I was going to write as I went through the epistles. God decided life needed to get weird again. So the writing went by the wayside. A lot has happened as I neglected you. There have been ups and downs and lefts and rights. Somewhere along the way, I thought about the nature of being and God's design of us - how we propagate traits down family lines. I thought about a lot of other things too. Most of all, though, I thought about a jewel that is most precious to me. Not more precious than Christ, but close behind. I think I shall make time to begin writing again. That jewel will need to know things at future times. The best time to plant a shade tree is twenty years ago. The second best time to plant a shade tree is now.

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• On Ravi Zacharias

  Defending Ravi - Open Letter: https://defendingravi.com/2024/01/01/open-letter/ This is a rather sobering and not-unexpected response from Ravi's family. It is always best to examine single-sided accounts with a healthy grain of salt and critical analysis of the holistic picture. I will admit when things first came out, I callously and jadedly thought, "sin never surprises me anymore". With more discernment and conversation, though, the more I see the work of the enemy to try and destroy the legacy of a faithful servant. It takes a nontrivial amount of work to examine the motivations of involved parties because you have to do a deeper examination of what intrinsically drives a person to determine what their default trajectory is likely to be. Being Reformed, this is only marginally easier because we can start from the natural tendency towards total depravity. Bringing the evidence into contextual relation of a holistic overview gives us a better overall picture of what we're…

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