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The Irrelevant Conscience

At best, the conscience is irrelevant.

“And looking intently at the council, Paul said, ‘Brothers, I have lived my life before God in all good conscience up to this day.’”
Acts 23:1

Paul spent a great deal of time persecuting the Church before he was converted on the road to Damascus. Yet he still says that he lived in “good conscience up to this day”. How can a man who persecuted the Church make such a statement? Simple: because he legitimately thought he was doing what was right. Was he doing anything right? No, absolutely not. But he felt like he was doing right.

The Bible is very condensed compared to secular history. Of all the things that have happened in all of history and to the characters in the Bible, what we have recorded in Scripture is all we have. It is not that much compared to other recorded history. We do not have follow-up volumes to clear up difficult passages. We do not have extra information given to us.

Therefore, it must follow that everything in the Bible is there for a specific purpose.

There are no wasted lines in the Bible. The purpose of Acts 23:1 is to show the irrelevance of conscience. This idea flies in the face of both the popular conservative and liberal logic.

Church people have always passed down “knowledge” about the usefulness and necessity of conscience.

I say “No”. Conscience is irrelevant. Why?

Because based on this passage, we can have our “heart in the right place” (a truly stupid statement), we can “feel” like we are doing what is right, we can have warm fuzzy feelings in our heart and still be taking the worst possible actions.

Paul’s conscience was fine, yet he was a persecutor of the church. Would his conscience have saved him on the day of judgement had he never repented? No. Conscience alone, without correct action, does nothing. Conscience alone is just another emotion stacked on the big pile of worthless emotions. Worthless meaning that without accompanying action, they do not generate any results.

Sure, conscience can be used to direct people to the right actions. But this assumes that their conscience is functioning properly. Many people have malfunctioning consciences. We must reject the dogma that teaches the necessity of the conscience.

A malfunctioning conscience that can lead you straight to hell is not necessary. A conscience that tells you that you are doing what is right when you are definitely doing what is wrong is unprofitable. This was the state of Paul’s conscience. A conscience that convinces you that you have salvation when you live in opposition to the Word is a conscience that should be promptly executed, burned and the ashes buried.

If this teaching makes you uncomfortable, it is because of the dogma you have been force fed your whole life.

Parents, preachers and teachers have always told you that conscience is important and vital. Their teachings go against the explicit examples in the Word.

Did God give us conscience as a tool? Of course. But just like anything else God has given us, we as humans have learned to pervert and manipulate it to our will. This is why many forms of conscience must be rejected immediately, because they have no grounding in reality.

Prepare yourself, because we have more to say on the absurdity of conscience tomorrow. Reject the emotionalistic, ostentatious self-judgement that the weak call “conscience” Be a Man.

Mantra

Action matters. Conscience does not.

Application

Don’t worry about your conscience. Conscience is irrelevant. Nothing matters besides action. Having our hearts in the right place, feeling good, having a good conscience; all these can do nothing to save our souls without obedience. Are those emotions good tools? Sometimes. Are they necessary all the time? No.

Kick to the curb the idea that you have to both have and use your conscience. The truth about the morality of an action can be determined with logic and without involving weak emotions such as conscience.

This is your task: Don’t judge the quality of your actions by how you feel about them, that is for weak men.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men

Don’t Divorce Emotion – Use Them As Fuel

It may be your impression after reading a portion of this material that Spartan Christianity is Anti-emotion. After all, we do spend a great deal of time talking about the ways emotion affects the minds of men negatively. But that is not to say that all emotion is bad or useless, in fact it is not the case at all! The principles that are presented here are meant to motivate men to first build a foundation of logic that is later supplemented by emotion rather than using emotions as the foundation.

To help illustrate this, we will look at a few non-religious examples where emotions are used before skill or logic is developed, and how it typically ends in disaster.

Here are a few examples:

No doubt you have seen a singer or watched one of those television singing shows and seen someone who was clearly filled with passion and excitement about singing but had absolutely no skill in it whatsoever. He may have had a certain amount of talent, or some potential that could be built on through training, but he had no appreciable level of skill with music.

Yet he still tries out for the show thinking that passion alone is enough to allow him to fulfill his dreams. This is not the case, passion can only be added after a respectable skill level has been reached.

Also consider the aggressive man who exercises and channels all his anger into his physical training, but injures himself because he lacks proper form in exercise. No doubt aggression improves the intensity of training, but only if an appreciable level of skill in training has been established first.

Proper body mechanics must be established before aggression or other emotions can be unleashed.

The best singers in the world or the best athletes in the world undoubtedly have high levels of passion for their skill. But they also added that passion to an already high level of pre-existing skill. The best singers in the world are the ones who have high levels of technical skill built on hours of practice that they later supplemented with passion. That passion provides the human element that allows music to be a connecting experience between people. But the value of a man’s passion is stifled when he obviously lacks technical skill in music.

How many times has one of your favorite songs been ruined for you because someone played or sang it badly?

The best athletes in the world are the ones who know their exercises, drills and sports plays so fluently that they do not need to think about them. Their skill level is so high that they can go on mental autopilot and then focus on concentrating massive amounts of energy, aggression and passion into the sport.

The Spartan Christian must be the same way.

It is absolutely necessary to have supplemental emotions for your faith, but you must not build upon them as the foundation. Emotions alone are not enough. First you must cement in your mind what it is you believe through logic and rationality. Upon a Foundation of rationality you can add your emotions to make your faith unbeatable.

Once you understand the evils of sin, you can concentrate your aggression into crushing those evils. Once you mentally appreciate the magnitude of gifts and blessings that God has given you, then you can thank Him with tears and emotional joy.

Emotions are jet fuel for the mind and for action.

But you must first build a functioning plane before the type of fuel even begins to matter. What good is the best jet fuel if your engines blow out two minutes after takeoff? What good is jet fuel if you can’t even “crank up” your plane?

The greatest structures in the world started out as logical blueprints on paper. Those blueprints later became a concrete foundation and stable wooden frame. Creating the beautiful appearance of a building is the final thing to be completed. You cannot have a beautiful building without a strong foundation first.

Your faith must have titanium architecture built on logic before you can add the beautiful aesthetics of emotions.

Even God designed parts of the human body to be the same way.

Consider all your bones. Bones are 50% collagen and 50% ground substance, which is made up of minerals like calcium. Both pieces are vitally important for the structural integrity of your bones, and your body wouldn’t work without this combination.

The collagen gives the bones flexibility. If we didn’t have collagen, our bones would crumble and break because they would only have calcium and other salts. It would then be as easy to break a bone as it would be to snap a calcium pill in half with your fingers.

But the calcium is still important. It provides the bone with rigidity and strength. Without the calcium and other bone salts, your bones would bend and snap like a sapling.

But when combined together, the benefits of each substance create bones that pound for pound are stronger than concrete at a fraction of the weight.

Emotions are the same way. Our emotion must be combined with logic for there to be any appreciable level of strength in each one.

Emotions are not strong without logic, and logic is not strong without emotion.

Emotions alone will crumble under adversity. How strong is the faith of an emotional person when those precious emotions fade to nothing? How faithful is the emotional Christian once it is no longer safe or convenient for him to be a Christian? Most people leave the church as soon as it becomes dangerous to be a Christian.

Logic alone is not enough for some men to maintain their faith. When atheists seem to make such great, logical points about the origin of the universe many men must call on emotion to maintain their faith.

This is the main point: emotion and logic are complementary.

You will be weak if you have one without the other. But many Christians today are so concerned with increasing their emotions or their passion that they neglect logic altogether. At Spartan Christianity, the purpose is to increase logic in a world of men who worship emotion.

Build your faith with the mind before you add your emotions to it. This is the Spartan way. Once your faith is built, then add emotional conviction and become unstoppable.

Lust – Sex in the Mind

“But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
Matthew 5:28

“But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.”
Galatians 5:16

There is more to lust than sex alone, even though sex is a huge part of it. Some of the most effective temptations of the devil are manipulations and perversions of the basic drives of man. The need for sex and intimacy becomes lust. Satan does the same thing to women. Women tend to get addicted to soap operas or social media. These outlets exploit the female need to be involved in the lives of other adults, and as a result they waste the majority of their time.

Lust for sex is biological.

The devil has been manipulating the biology of man since the birth of the earth. Why do you think Israel repeatedly abandoned God for idols in the Old Testament?

Two words: Cult Prostitutes.

Part of the heathen worship ceremony was sex with prostitutes. What man would say no to that? Imagine how many of your fellow Christians would abandon their faith if they had the option for sex in worship. Even if the Israelite man had witnessed amazing miracles, his sex drive overpowered his rational mind. Biology will trump conviction unless a man has a will of iron. Do not allow your ego to tell you that you would have been different if you were alive in the days of Israel, because you likely would have been just like everyone else.

Logically, Israel’s rejection of God for the Baals makes no sense. It was stupid to abandon God. Israelites would go from worshipping the one true God to worshipping multiple false gods, so it is obvious they wanted to worship something. It just so happens that if they worshipped Baal, they also got sex. This is a manipulation of the nature of man. Satan used that manipulation to lead men astray thousands of years ago just as he does today.

Lust of the flesh permeates the Church, and no man has the testicles to talk about it.

Porn ravages the Church. Premarital sex is rampant in the Church, far more than any good Christian mother would want to know about.

Kids know more about sex than their parents, and they probably have more sex than their parents as well.

Fathers no longer educate their sons about sex, so the world educates sons for them. I guarantee that parents will not like what their children are learning.

Lust lives and thrives in the world. Women no longer wear clothes. You can’t go anywhere without seeing a billboard that shoves breasts in your face. You can’t walk in a shopping mall without going past a Victoria’s Secret. Men can’t walk in Walmart without seeing a woman showing her bra or seeing some braless breasts and hanging out with nipples poking through the shirt; every single man knows precisely what I am talking about. Then those same women wonder why they are sexually objectified.

Gentlemen, we need to be explicit about what is out there.

Because for generations men in the Church have refused to talk about it, and now young men are unprepared to live in a society that throws gasoline on their already raging sex drive.

You have to prepare for this level of temptation. You have to TRAIN to avoid the assault of sexuality that society throws at you, because it doesn’t come naturally. To resist your sexual desires is to stand off in opposition to your own biology, which is what makes lust so difficult. Man is one part divine, and one part earthly. The earthly part must be brought under subjection, for it desires evil. It desires sex constantly.

Lust of the flesh must be obliterated. If that means destroying your technology, so be it. Literally, break your computer and burn it with fire. If that means you never walk into a book shop that sells magazines again, so be it.

Remove the enemy. Purge that evil from your soul. Real men do not give in to the lust of the flesh, which is the reason why there are so few real men in the Church.

Mantra

Obliterate lust.

Application

Kill your technology, or at least control it. Download internet filters and give the passwords to someone else, that is easy. The rest of the problem is handling your mind when you are out in the world.

You have to be in total command of your own thoughts. Left to your biological nature, you will look at every female you come in contact with and imagine having sex with her. This is the essence of lust and it must be defeated.

How is it defeated? It begins with awareness.

You cannot stop natural thoughts if you are unaware of them. Once you become aware of them, you will be shocked by how frequent they are. This may disgust you, and that would be appropriate.

There is so much momentum behind your highly sexual thoughts that you will need a long time to curb them in the slightest. It may take you years. Do not be discouraged by this, just get started Now. The sooner you start, the sooner you win.

Employ the “Bounce the eyes” method. It’s cliche` to talk about it, but it works. This method only works if you are aware that you are leering at women. First acquire self-awareness, then develop the ability to instantly avert your eyes away from a woman’s breasts to some other item. Stare at the sun for goodness’ sake (not really, but anything is better than what you were looking at.

Kill your lust. Be a Man.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Radical Liberalism

Liberalism taken to an extreme becomes pure emotionalism.

“In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.”
Matthew 15:9

“God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
John 4:24

“And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’ When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord.” And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.”
Exodus 32:4-6

Liberalism pushes for progression in worship. They want more welcoming Churches and more “enjoyable” worship services. They tend to place the focus of worship on emotion, how they personally feel or the spiritual high they get while “worshiping”. This becomes a problem because it makes the individual the primary object of the worship service instead of God.

You are no longer worshiping God, but are merely using the worship as a tool to feel good about yourself.

Liberals enjoy anything that promotes emotion and that rejects negativity or feeling bad. They use negative emotion only as a tool to promote guilt. Because guilt is obviously a highlight of a good Christian.

Liberals love to feel guilty and “broken” and in need of a savior. The problem arises when liberals begin to wallow in their brokenness yet do nothing to fix the problem. God demands improvement and progression of faith. This,“I’m so bad, I need Jesus so much. I need grace so much” mentality is emotionalistic nonsense. It promotes no growth, and it generates nothing positive.

Liberalism is fundamentally effeminate.

Liberalism is feminized religion.

Weak, emotional men tend to gravitate towards this because it makes them think all their emotions are okay and should even be applauded.

It is okay for these men to cry and break down because they have bought into the feminist lie that a “vulnerable man is an attractive man”. (A Strong, masculine man is an attractive man).

It is okay for them to express emotion like a child. They think it is okay for them to get all emotional and touchy-feely about worship. They think it is fine to have no mastery over emotion and to just let it all out when anyone so much as mentions the name of Jesus. This is all nonsense.

This is not spirituality, it is emotionalism masquerading as spirituality.

Forms of liberalism are also beneficial. Without some element or progressiveness, nothing would ever change. Radical conservatives would have been unwilling to adapt to the modern times of technology and the Church would be stuck in the bronze age. Progressiveness is the reason we can accept PowerPoint and microphones in worship. The push for new things can bring about many benefits. But we should never try to make progress purely for the sake of making progress, which is the mission of the progressive. Progress should be made when newness is truly needed.

Radical liberalism has just as many problems and pitfalls as radical conservatism. Both should be avoided at all costs. We are called to be Christians, and such we should be. Reject these labels of extreme Christian genres.

Mantra

To embrace a label is to kiss death.

Application

Again, all labels must be rejected. After this, emotions must be controlled at all cost. Emotion may be fun and enjoyable, but it is neither productive nor rational, and is the birthplace of all kinds of problems.

You have heard about crimes of passion: emotion pushes individuals to kill.

Emotion pushes Kids to have sex before they are married because they think they are “in love”.

Extreme, unbridled emotion is a root of all kinds of evil and there is no need to bring it in the worship assembly.

To reject emotionalistic worship is to reject selfishness, because one who focuses on emotion in worship cannot also be focused on God. Emotions are not to be applauded, they are to be warned against.

Be willing to recognize overly emotional traits within yourself and start working to reject them. If you are an “emotional man” acknowledge that this is a weakness. Other men will exploit this trait if they ever discover you have it. And when it comes to something as apparent as emotions, they will certainly discover it.

You have to ask yourself difficult questions:

Am I concerned with worshipping God or merely with feeling good?

Do I make decisions based on logic and the Bible or based on emotions?

Do I tend to try extra hard to justify ideas or actions that I cannot support with reason or Scripture?

Be a man. Control your emotions. Be Serious with your faith.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Radical Conservatism

Conservatism is valuable until it radicalizes. At that point it becomes tradition focused.

“So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter.”
2 Thessalonians 2:15

“See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.”
Colossians 2:8

The problem with any ‘genre’ of Christians, (liberal, conservative, Anti or what have you) is the fact that at some point the label will supersede God. Meaning: Conservatives will put defining conservative characteristics above God in importance. Liberals do the same. And this is what we mean by becoming radical.

A Radical individual places what he believes above God in importance.

Conservatives will place tradition and liturgy above God, forgetting that God is the very Being we are worshiping, not tradition. Liberals will place emotions above God, using worship service as a chance to get a “spiritual high” from a theatrical performance based “service”. Obviously God should be placed above everything: tradition, emotion, liturgy, performance and especially SELF.

The subsequent problem with all genres of Christians is the fact that they are viewing their ideas as the most important items, rather than God. Preserving and protecting the labels becomes the goal for these individuals. People strive to preserve their conservatism and neglect truth as a result. .

The defining traits of a radical conservative are highly apparent and include the following:

Resistant to progression or change of any kind.
Resistant to positive or happy emotions, choosing rather to focus on negative emotions such as death and the thought of eternal destruction.
Blatant Self-Righteousness.

Conservatives believe that positive emotions will cloud the judgement of man and cause him to make poor decisions. Emotions will lead us to think that the status quo is just fine, when God clearly commands us to improve over time (Romans 12:2, Ephesians 4:22-24).

Conservatives tend to acquire an inflated sense of self-worth and as a result become self-righteous unless they are extremely careful in guarding themselves against it. They tend to minimize topics such as grace, because the liberals twisted the grace of God to the point where they no longer think they need to take action. Conservatives want to avoid that at all costs, knowing that a faith without works is dead (James 2:20).

Conservatives tend to focus on doom and destruction.

The inevitable death and punishment of man approaches and is constantly on their minds. Continual focus on negativity is unwise and breaks down the mind. It is unwise to constantly have negative thoughts festering in your mind without a productive use for them.

One problem that results from a conservative’s hyper-focus on works and a minimization of grace is the false idea that they have somehow “made themselves right with God”. There is absolutely something to be said for man’s role in his own salvation (Phil 2:12), but we also cannot minimize the importance of grace and the fact that we are lost without it.

This was not an exhaustive list of the conservative traits, but it gives the most common traits that you will see. Looking above at these traits from a detached, objective perspective, you can see that they can become problematic if left unchecked. Each of these characteristics can grow out of control. These ideas also become problems when they depart from the actual Word of God. Minimization of grace is a departure from scripture. Fixation on death and destruction is a poor evangelism technique.

Do not Place anything above God. You are a Christian before you are a conservative. Force your ego into submission. Be a Man.

Mantra

To be labeled is to allow the mind to die.

Application

First, be sure to understand that we are avoiding RADICAL conservatism, not conservatism itself. Remember from earlier that an individual is radical if he puts his personal beliefs above God in importance. So in this section, we are avoiding the tendency to put the traditions of man above God in importance.

Again, the foundation for defeating radical conservatism is awareness. Whether you are liberal or conservative, you MUST be aware of the downfalls of your “genre” of Christianity. Do not place the characteristics of your personal religious leaning anywhere above God in importance. Avoid attempts to preserve tradition at the expense of God. Do not focus on hell at the expense of the souls of others.

If you ever place anything above God in importance, you have just radicalized.

Your masculinity is diminished by radicalization, so this must be avoided at all cost. A radical man refuses to think for himself and blindly holds onto his current beliefs. You need to develop the mental wherewithal and humility and recognize your personal biases and then manage them properly.

Reject radical conservatism immediately, it is a problem. It promotes isolation and mechanical, superficial worship and interactions. It can cause individuals to develop cult-like behavior. The Church already has the reputation for being cult-like, make sure you are not contributing to that unsavory public image.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

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