I – Humans are religious by nature, all of them will worship something.
In the modern world, people have resorted to worshipping the earth, which is the environmentalist movement. Atheists worship themselves. The common man worships sports or his career.
People have worshipped nature, planets and other deities they craft in their minds for thousands of years. It does not matter what it is. If something exists, some group of humans will find a way to turn it into a god and worship it.
It does not matter who you are, you will find a way to worship something and dedicate your very existence to it.
If a man tries to oppose this nature he will be depressed. He will be acutely aware that he is rejecting some integral part of his very nature by trying to worship nothing. Few men ever make it to the point of worshipping nothing. Most people have a religion of some kind.
II – Atheism is a first-world luxury.
Men cannot become atheists without incredible fiscal backing and times of luxury and peace. The same applies to religious and political liberalism. these philosophies exist because man is so well off that he has immense free time to sit around and think about his life and existence. He can then work to rationalize any genre of belief that he wants. This is one of the reasons that there were so few atheists hundreds and thousands of years ago. People were too busy working and dying from diseases to worry about arbitrary rationalizations of the world.
Some atheists want to make it sound like humans have become more rational and scientific over time and this is why there is increased atheism in the world. But this is not true. Not just because atheism violates the laws of science but because it violates the laws of nature as well. People stopped worshipping God or other various gods. Instead, they began worshipping science or the earth.
People never cease to be religious.
The religious nature and the desire for religious experience permeate human nature. It does not matter who you are or what you do, you will always have a religious nature and you will use it to worship something.
Religion overall will always ebb and flow. It will look like it is decaying and then there will be a revival. It will seem as if people are becoming less religious, then some major evil will shock us back to religion.
Wars or major crises in the world shock us out of our complacency and force us to think about the bigger picture. We are forced to think about the things that matter in life. Those things tend to not be the issues proposed by atheists and liberals.
III – Atheists typically worship themselves. Sometimes they also worship sex, but this is usually just a byproduct of that self-focused worship.
They worship themselves because they place themselves as the highest good to be attained and preserved. Everything they do is for the benefit of the self. While I am in complete support of masculine self-interest, what atheists do does not benefit the group at all.
Usually, if a man takes care of himself, he will indirectly become better for the group (his family/society, etc). But the atheist does not care at all about the group. The atheists would steal food from the group just to preserve their own life.
This is all because atheists worship themselves. This is one of the most basic principles to understand. Remember it and use this knowledge as leverage when you talk to these people.
For true, lasting fuel to motivate your endeavors, you need enemies. When you are knee-deep in the comforts of life and the world, you can forget what made you work hard in the beginning. Sometimes you will not be willing to work hard out of ambition or the desire for gain, sometimes you need more. You need the energy that comes from having an opponent.
Comfort provides no energy. But if you have an enemy, you have a wellspring of eternal energy. There is nothing more motivating than having someone who wants to go to war with you. At that moment you can channel your natural warlike nature and convert it into energy for success.
You do not have to go to war with people directly. That may bother the sensitive conscience of many Christian people. You can, however, use the emotional fuel from that enemy to motivate yourself to success.
Take advantage of the fact that people will inevitably want to go to war with you. If you do this, you will have limitless power. Having an enemy gives you purpose, direction, and a clear-cut destination. Every one of your actions begins to have real meaning. All of your work is energized. What once fatigued you is now nothing more than a bump in the road. Take advantage of the energy reservoir that comes when you are at war.
II – Having an enemy is a part of life.
Sometimes it is a consequence of our poor decisions, other times people just want to go to war with us. There is no need to complain about this because it is actually a useful tool. Use enemies to your advantage.
Look at the stories of David. This was a man at war for his entire life. This was a result of his own actions (2 Samuel 12:10). He wrote many psalms about his enemies. He would write about them surrounding him at all sides. And he would also write about crushing them in battle.
Make no mistake about it, those who hate God and hate our religion are our enemies. They hate the Bible and they hate everything that Christians stand for.
III – Do not make enemies directly unless absolutely necessary.
By biblical law, we need to be at peace with all men, as possible. However, if someone decides to make war with us, we should use that energy to our advantage.
“If possible, so far as it depends on you, live in peace with all people”
We should not go out of our way to start wars. But if wars are started against us, we have the right to defend ourselves.
There is this popular notion in Christianty that tries to paint Christians as pacifists. People think that Christians will do nothing as their families are tortured and killed by governments or other enemies. This is not true. Christians have the right to self-defense just as much as anyone else. We should not go out of our way to attack others directly, but we can retaliate to protect ourselves.
Some Christians twist “do not resist an evil person” (Matthew 5:39) to mean that we should never lift a single finger to protect ourselves or others from war. This is not true. We have the right to go to war. Humans will always go to war and we may have to be a part of it. There will be war from now until the end of time, it is in human nature. It is built into the very DNA of men.
You do not have to go to physical war yourself, but you must take advantage of this programming that you have. You need to learn to channel this natural warlike nature into productive pursuits. That Is how you begin using enemies to your advantage.
IV – Be at war with the devil
If it bothers your conscience to wage war with enemies who started a war with you, you have options. We are all at war with the devil and his angels. This is an inescapable part of life. He hates you and wants you to fall, and you are at war with him all the days of your life.
Activate your apparatus of hatred. You were given the emotion of hatred for a reason, for there is a proper use for it. While we should not hate our fellow men, we are to hate sin and the devil. That is the greatest possible outset for this emotion of pure hatred. It is one of the most valuable emotions we have.
Oftentimes the Bible gives parameters around hot emotions such as anger. For example:
We are allowed to experience these emotions, but they must be controlled. Using our hatred and directing it towards sin and the devil is the parameter that we must follow.
V – Recognize Camoflagued Emenies
We have more enemies than we think we do. This is a sad and unfortunate reality, but we need to be aware of it. Others hate us and we may never know it, but we should be on the lookout for it.
Even inside religion, there are people who teach principles that oppose what we know to be true from the Bible. They teach that the Bible does not mean what it says. Or they teach that there is no need for you to behave with the extreme discipline that you do.
Either way, they are teaching contrary to what the Bible teaches. Paul writing to the church at Galatia has the following to say about the men who teach principles that oppose the Bible:
“As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse!”
That sounds like a serious bit of phraseology. The Bible makes it clear that those who teach another gospel are cursed. They are our enemies, and there is no way around this.
Because of this, we should work hard to understand the true principles of God so we can crush these arguments. Notice I do not say we should crush the people making the arguments, but rather the arguments themselves.
Crushing others directly does nothing but give us a few seconds of satisfaction. But we set ourselves back by damaging the relationship and damaging rapport. When it comes to people who are already religious, we have to be more careful with how we handle them. They may not know that they are fighting for the enemy with the things they are teaching and preaching.
Take advantage of your enemies. You are going to have them all the days of your life. All you can do is make the best of it.
Popular gym franchise Planet Fitness has made a name for itself by providing affordable training grounds to the common man. The business model is genius. Owners can expect upwards of 2000 people to register for their $10 per month membership. At the same time, the total capacity of each gym is actually a fraction of the membership number.
Planet fitness functions and profits as a business because most of the members never show up to train. And the membership fee is so low that it would be more of an annoyance to drop the membership than to just passively allow a few dollars per month to come out of your bank.
I have nothing against that business model. It is brilliant. Trap human beings between their own laziness. Too lazy to train and too lazy to cancel the membership to the gym they never use.
Besides the business model, the culture and mentality of Planet Fitness are one of no judgment and no excellence. You are allowed to do whatever you want and look however you want without being punished for it.
All this makes planet fitness look a lot like religious liberalism. Here are a few reasons why planet fitness is liberalism incorporated.
I – It is a “no-judgment zone” – where people are very judgemental to those who are on the outside.
Like many of the modern groups who espouse tolerance and goodwill towards your fellow man, they can engage in some serious hate towards those who are outside of their group.
I’ve rarely met people more hateful than homosexuals, liberals, and ethnic people, yet they sling accusations of “hate crimes” at everyone who so much as looks at them funny. This is arguably another one of the projections of liberalism. You hate that which you truly are.
Just like Planet fitness tries to create a judgment-free zone, churches of liberalism do the same thing. They do not want to be judged for anything but will judge you with vicious intensity if you speak one wrong word to them.
They talk about grace mercy and peace, but if you decide you want a lifestyle that involves a little more discipline and effort, you are ridiculed. “Everyone is going to heaven“, except the people who take the harder paths.
II – No accountability
Even though I am not a fan of accountability as a long-term intervention for enforcing good behavior, its usefulness as a short-term tool is apparent. The church of liberalism is uninterested in accountability. They are uninterested in it because it requires two things that the effeminate men of this world hate: a standard of behavior and confrontation.
Accountability requires a clear-cut definition of what is right, what is wrong, and of a man’s duty and responsibility. It also requires us to hold one another’s feet to the fire when we are failing to live up to that standard. It is for this reason that for all the time we spend talking about accountability, no one ever enforces it.
No one holds his brother accountable because most people care more about being liked than they care about their brother. This sounds dark and cynical, but it is true. If “He who spares the rod hates his son“, then he who spares the confrontation component of accountability hates his brother.
III -No personal standard of excellence
As mentioned before, the church of liberalism has no personal standard of excellence. “You are perfect just the way you are, bro“, each man says to his friends as they collapse into a bro hug complete with the tears of pseudo-repentance.
When you decide to become a Christian, you accept that there is a certain standard of behavior you are expected to maintain. As much as the church of liberalism hates to think about it, there are several “Thou Shalt Nots” and “Thou Shalts” involved in Christianity. There is a degree of discipline that you must have at all times if you are to maintain your faith properly.
The church of liberalism hates this because they are not interested in working and improving. Their philosophy is one of hippie-like laziness and complacency. They see no need to improve, so they waste no time doing so.
The reality is that Christianity has a hard standard of behavior. It requires discipline to maintain the lifestyle and not everyone can handle that. Everyone understands that reality. Just like not everyone can handle the discipline required to train the body and improve themselves, so they go to a place where they do not actually have to train, where they do not actually have to improve themselves, and where they are accepted and even applauded for doing so.
The church of liberalism is the same – They do not want to work to improve themselves. They are uninterested in personal discipline, but they still want to get all the good emotional feelings associated with the church they have transformed into a social club.
IV – No congruent lifestyle decisions – pizza night
Planet Fitness has pizza nights on occasion. Basically, pizza nights celebrate the antithesis of what the building is supposed to be encouraging. Instead of promoting personal improvement, they promote blatant hypocrisy and the celebration of that hypocrisy. They reward people for pretending to work out by feeding them food in direct opposition to their goals.
The church of liberalism also does the same, by celebrating failures and encouraging and rewarding you for failing to live up to your standards of behavior. Not only do they not even work to try to improve themselves, but they actually wallow in the failure and turn it into a pity party.
I’m sure you can think of more ways that the church of liberalism is like planet fitness, and feel free to leave those in the comments section below.
If fun is the goal of your bible study, you will get nothing out of the study except fun. You will forget everything you “learned” and you will not benefit.
Nothing has to be fun in order to be productive.
I have been to a few bible studies where it became very apparent that the purpose of the “study” was socialization. We “studied” for about a half-hour and followed it up with two and a half hours of socializing. Now there is nothing wrong with socialization, but that is not the purpose of something called a study.
The goal and purpose of a bible study is to increase the knowledge of the Bible. Sometimes that is enjoyable and sometimes it is not. It does not matter either way. This is because study and training, even the study of biblical subjects, can be likened to your training in the gym. Sometimes it is fun to train and other times it is a drag. Sometimes you are motivated and the process is enjoyable, and other times training is simply focused work. At times you may have to spend most of your focus and energy just to maintain a moderate level of effort.
None of that matters. How you are feeling before, during, and after your study is irrelevant.
What matters is if you accomplished the goal you set or not. Did you complete the appropriate volume of work or not? Are you making progress towards your end-state goals or are you becoming stagnant?
The philosophy of liberalism teaches you that you are good just the way you are. The philosophy of the hardcore Christian should be one of constant improvement. Day in and day out you are taking steps towards your goal. No matter how small or insignificant those steps may seem, you are taking steps. That puts you miles ahead of the person who believes they are fine just the way they are. Those people have sat down and may never get back up to work towards their goals.
Productivity in the study of the Bible will never be limited based on the fun-ness of that specific activity.
Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman talks about effort and learning in the podcast linked above. One of the most interesting things he notes is that when you are studying or trying to learn something new if you want to enter a period of time of aggressive, focused learning, you have to first walk through a barrier of mental discomfort. When you are first settling in to learn and are getting frustrated with the material, your brain releases epinephrine, which is also called adrenaline. This epinephrine release is what gives you that feeling of frustration and mental agitation.
But if you continue to press on and work through that feeling, you can enter a period of relative smoothness. It is not that your work suddenly becomes effortless, but you are no longer “out of the groove“, so to speak. You are in the groove and ready for efficient action.
Imagine that, in order to enter a state of hard focus, you must walk through that initial period of agitation and frustration.
And any human being who has attempted to learn something and has hit that wall of frustration knows that it is not fun.
But when it comes to our Bible study, we want everything to be all happy and fun and fine and dandy. But if our goal is results, mental improvement, and an increase of the knowledge of the Bible, we need to acknowledge that we will have to walk through those moments of frustration in order to get in the groove of working.
You have to train hard enough to induce muscle growth, and that is not always fun.
How does muscle growth relate to bible study? Here’s how:
Most people are familiar with the fact that if you want muscle growth in your body, you have to train hard enough to trigger the muscle growth process. In Exercise Physiology this is called the “stimulus threshold“. The basic idea is that you have to push to a certain level of effort in order to “flip on the light switch” of protein synthesis – otherwise known as muscle growth. And below this threshold, you will see very little, if any, muscle growth for your alleged “efforts“.
I postulate to you that your Bible training must be the same way. It must be to a certain intensity so that an increase in Bible knowledge is stimulated. You must push yourself so you can “flip on the lightswitch” for learning any subject, most importantly the subject of the bible.
If you decide not to train hard in the gym or in your study, you simply will not improve, it is as simple as that.
And this is where those who subscribe to the philosophy of liberalism find themselves time and time again. Theirs is a philosophy of comfort and ease. “Why push yourself to improve when you were built to fail?” the liberal may rhetorically ask. The merits of that argument can be discussed on another day, but the results of that attitude are brazenly apparent.
When you approach your study with a lackadaisical attitude motivated by the hippie-like philosophy of liberalism, you will not make any improvements for years. You may “read your bible every day“, allegedly, but you will make no progress. Because you simply did not push yourself hard enough to give your mind the necessary stimulus for growth and improvement.
When fun is prioritized over faith, you have the dysfunctional youth group model where no one knows anything.
The priority in the Bible study training model should be the improvement of biblical knowledge. When fun is made the priority, no one improves. And people fail to improve for years at a time while being around others who fail to improve for years at a time.
We call this the “youth group” – where fun is prioritized over faith. Where parents believe that 2 youth activities per week will stop their kids from having sex before marriage. And it comes as a great shock to them when their kids leave the church because they had no substance or foundation for their faith. They had no intensity imposed on them by their teachers. There was no need for the improvement of the individual because there was no enforced accountability – as low-value as accountability is.
But what will always happen is people will resort to the type of “work” that provides them with the most comfort in their lives. They will never pursue what seems overtly difficult or what will require the most effortful work.
This is why people gravitate towards the philosophy of liberalism – because it is one of ease and comfort. It is a philosophy of social acceptance and personal acceptance. There is no need for you to work on yourself and improve in those groups. Everyone is just as broken as you are, why move on and improve yourself and your life?
Fun should never be prioritized over your faith. The priority should be discipline, personal obedience, and personal improvement. The priority should be on the systems that create results rather than on the social events that provide nothing.
Set rigorous standards for yourself. Push yourself to read and focus more.
A small amount of Bible reading is better than no Bible reading. Even better is a small amount of bible reading combined with intensity. Arnold Schwarzenegger has famously stated that he could do one set of one exercise for one muscle and have it be more productive than someone else’s entire workout. He attributed this to the focus and intensity with which he would approach that single set. Another bodybuilder, Mike Mentzer, popularized a training protocol of one set per muscle per workout, as few as 2 times per week. Each set consisted of an all-out, max intensity effort that pushed the muscles to absolute failure.
Your Bible study can be the same way – put massive effort into a smaller volume and you will make progress. An extremely intense reading of ten verses will be more effective than a cursory reading of 4 chapters.
II – Incorporte memory work – you need to be writting the commands of God in your mind.
It is popular in Bible study to do these cross-reference exercises where you link various passages to other passages in the Bible. This is a good exercise. But even more valuable is the memorization of Bible passages. There is no faster way to cross-reference the Bible than to have the entire length of the passages in your mind.
III – Hold yourself to a higher standard of behavior. Do not associate with people who mock at the strenuous life.
Enjoy the strenuous life as a man. You need to dive into the work with focused intensity. Others may look at your effort and what you are doing and try to discourage you. Some people will always try to discourage you from training too hard, working too hard, or trying too hard to succeed. This is only because your work ethic makes the feebleness of their work ethic painfully obvious to them. They never want to work, so they do not want you to work either.
If you start working you call into question their lethargy. They are forced to acknowledge that they are either lazy or that you are crazy for your effort. And much of the time people will remain in their fixed mindsets and call you crazy for your effort.
You must reject these people. Split from the pack. Do not worry about being a part of the group, you do not need the group. Your main concern is with the improvement of the self. If the group comes into conflict with that goal, you need to separate yourself from the group. Invest in your effort and it will pay you dividends always.
There are a lot of Bible reading programs out there that want you to read several chapters of the Bible every day. I think that is awesome. It is noble and a good hard mental workout, so to speak.
The problem is that most people simply do not have the mental fitness to tolerate that kind of program yet. It would be great if they did, but it is simply too hard for them.
Most Christian are not reading their Bibles at all. So to go from zero verses a day to several hundred is a massive step.
Would you expect a person who has never worked out before to be able to start a professional-level training plan? They would kill themselves just attempting it. But even though we understand that you have to gradually build physical fitness, we forget that we have to do the same thing with mental fitness.
Sure, you could do that “all in” approach and make your training into a military boot camp. But most people will fail if they attempt to do that. It is just too much work. Even in military boot camp, the recruits sustain stress fractures because the workload is increased so dramatically compared to their baseline fitness that their bones do not have time to recover and adapt.
People start these Bible reading programs and almost instantly get stress fractures of the mind. The second they hit Leviticus, their motivation wanes and their new habit fails. This is because they did not have the habit built strongly enough to sustain that difficult section of reading.
Instead of slowly building up their ability to read and forming the habit of reading every day, they just right into a sprint.
Have you ever seen what happens when someone tries to jump on a treadmill that is already at top speed? The result is hilarious 100% of the time. Many people do the same thing with bible reading and have the exact same subsequent faceplant when it comes to their habits.
What is a man to do?
Here is a core principle for you to remember. 1 Verse per day is infinitely more than 0 verses per day. How much more work does the person who reads one verse per day complete compared to the person who reads zero verses? He does infinitely more work.
Reading just 1 verse per day already puts you ahead of 80% of the religious world.
Just 1 verse per day makes it easy and simple to get into the daily habit of reading your Bible.
Of course, you do not want to indefinitely just read one verse per day. Once you firmly establish the habit and become the type of person who reads the Bible every day, you can start to increase your workload. And that is exactly what you are doing: you are becoming the type of person who reads the Bible every day. Get out of your mind the idea that you have to read massive amounts of scripture at once. You do not need to start out that way – but you do need to work up to it.
Start building the habit each and every day. There is no need to make a massive change. Make the smallest change that you can maintain with ease.
Starting a habit should be easy. It should not stay easy, but it should certainly start easy. Starting easy allows you to build momentum and confidence. It ensures that you are not missing any of your daily repetitions. Repetition is the key to habit formation.
Once you have been able to string together at least one month of Bible reading without fail, then you can start to add volume to your reading. It will be challenging, but it will be much easier and more sustainable than if you had tried to add all the reading onto your plate at once.
I love any kind of habits that can put you above average with small amounts of startup cost. this is one of those habits that will pay dividends if you can learn to create it.
Stop making excusing and living as one of the 80%. Pick up your bible and start putting in one verse per day. Increase the reading volume after 1 month, and never look back.
