Christianity Archives - Page 28 of 37

The Crutch of Accountability

Accountability is useful up to a point, after which it becomes a crutch.

“But let each one examine his own work, and then he will have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another. For each one shall bear his own load.”
Galatians 6:4-5

“He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor.”
1 Corinthians 3:8

Accountability is overrated, and it is the opposite of ownership. Accountability means someone needs help from others to get things done or to stay disciplined. People won’t stop looking at porn unless they have “accountability”. They will not commit to disciplines and do the work without some kind of accountability hanging over their head.

Now I am not attacking pure, isolated accountability; I attack the ideas of men who use accountability as a crutch rather than a tool. Men who cannot do anything without someone having to babysit them.

Ownership in Christianity is the ability of the individual to be autonomous in his integrity and character.

The Man does not need to be chauffeured around by his accountability partners, he is self-moving. He does not need the support group to stick to his disciplines every day.

Accountability partners exist merely to alleviate the guilt you feel when you fail to be disciplined in your life. Fail to quit drinking? Confess to the accountability group and the guilt is gone. Fail to quit having sex with women who are not your wife? Confess it and you are free. There is nothing wrong with confession, but if you confess like that then you are using confession as a tool to alleviate your personal guilt rather than a tool to improve yourself.

Are there situations in which men really need help, situations where men truly cannot move on their own? Yes. And I am not attacking those situations. But are those situations the majority? No. They are the exception, not the rule. Most men simply use those situations as an excuse. They say, “Well that’s me. I need the support group. I need the 12 week rehab program”. No, you need ownership. You need discipline. You need to stop outsourcing your discipline to other people like the rest of the naked mole rats around you.

If you condition yourself to only do what is right, to only work when you have accountability, then you are setting yourself up for failure.

Because there will arise tremendous tests in your life and you will be unprepared. Why? Because you had too much accountability, and not enough ownership.

Your character does not have the structural integrity to stand on its own against the hurricane of temptation, so you crumble. Excess of accountability weakens men. It converts them to weak boys. Men don’t sit around talking about their problems, they just take action.

Stop the accountability, you don’t need it. Start taking some ownership. Invest in yourself rather than in the group. Then in time you will be more valuable to the group, should you choose to go back.

Mantra

Own your problems. They are only yours.

Ownership. Responsibility. Accountability.

Application

Take personal responsibility for every single detail of your life. You are not allowed to place one drop of blame on anyone but yourself for the way your life currently is. If you don’t like the way your life turned out, look in the mirror at whose fault that is.

You have to commit to small disciplines every day. Take responsibility for your own behaviors and actions and start working to improve yourself. Build disciplines that you keep always, without fail, this is the construction of character. Performing these disciplines alone, with no help is the result of ownership. And Ownership is the very thing you need. You will never get to a point where you can stand on your own in great endeavours unless you begin to be disciplined every day in small endeavors that no one knows about.

That’s right, tell no one about your disciplines.

No one needs to know unless they ask directly. This strategy opposes the popular “Tell everyone what you are doing so they can hold you accountable” philosophy. If you need external motivation to complete your disciplines, you do not have enough ownership.

Memorize scripture daily.
Read no less than a minimum fixed amount of Bible every day .
Read a fixed amount of secular non-fiction, informative literature each day.
Train the body.
Write.
Think.
Contemplate and Meditate.

Have discipline in any of these areas, then add more discipline.
Keep to these disciplines with no help from “accountability partners”.

Be a man. A man can be a man without help from other weak men.

Conduct yourselves like Men.

Masculine Self-Interest

There is nothing wrong with self-interested action. Society improves by transactions of action, and those transactions are fueled by our interest in the self. Men get jobs, go to school, build careers because they want success. They want success because women are attracted to success and more women will want to have sex with them if they are a high performer. This is reality.

Is self interest positive, negative or both? Leave your comment below!

“The Lord has made all for Himself, Yes, even the wicked for the day of doom”.
Proverbs 16:4

Contrary to the popular Church dogma which informally adopts Rousseau’s idea that man is a “noble savage”, everyone is working an angle and there is no such thing as doing something “out of the goodness of your heart”. Even God made man for Himself, and we may never know the reasons why. To deny this is to deny reality.

The Bible clearly states God made man for Himself and therefore took action in His own self-interest.

If God took self-interested action by creating man, then by definition of the nature of God, self-interested action cannot be sinful (Habakkuk 1:13). This is not to say that the creation of man was exclusively in the interest of God, obviously God also takes action in the best interest of man. People have angles they are working, folks, and it’s not a bad thing.

Every bit of small talk you have engaged in has been directed towards advancing your angle. Contrariwise, every time someone engages you in conversation they are advancing their own angle as well. This could be as simple as building enough rapport with you to allow them to ask you for a favor. Or it could go much deeper, and their interest in you is motivated by money or power. Just because people in the Church are Christians does not mean they are above the petty power struggles innate in human beings.

Working angles is not always evil either. We need incentives for everything we do, or we would never do anything. In life we barter with time and money. Less known is the fact that we also barter with our actions. We are pushing agendas. We manipulate. Every action is a manipulation. Even the Latin root for manipulation means to “fill with the hand” – to use the hands to change the orientation of an object. Take some time and observe yourself in action, you will see that everything you do has some personal angle. Maybe it’s not immediately apparent, maybe you have to look a little deeper, but there are benefits to you.

Key: No man takes an action that does not have at least one benefit for himself.

There is nothing wrong with self-interested action (Here is a great article at gynocentrism.com. Society improves by transactions of action, and those transactions are fueled by our interest in the self. Men get jobs, go to school, build careers because they want success. They want success because women are attracted to success and more women will want to have sex with them if they are a high performer. This is reality.

Self-interest only becomes a problem when it inflicts suffering on others. Accept your non-sinful self interest and you will be freer and more successful.

Mantra

I accept that I have an angle. I bend the world to my will.

Application

Observe yourself and observe others today. Look deeply to understand the reason behind why they take the actions they do. Look long enough and you will find their angle. Once you find it, manipulate it to your angle. Most people are unskilled at hiding their personal agenda from others because they lack even the slightest hint of social intelligence. Pay attention to who talks to you and why. What subjects do they bring up?

If they come up and begin small talk and proceed to talk about themselves, you realize that that this individual wants attention. Do they talk about themselves in the past or present tense? Most men you encounter in the Church will talk about themselves in the past tense, especially before they had children. This is because their best days are behind them and they have to look in the mirror to see the “good ole days”. These men have had purpose sucked out of their lives and their ambition is gone. Realize that these men want attention, praise and for you to covertly tell them how “cool” they were and to make them feel special. This is how you begin to manipulate them. Slowly praise them in small ways, because you can guarantee they are not getting any praise from their wives. Ask about their past and direct them to continue talking about themselves. By the end of the conversation you have said very little and now they think you are a “great guy”. Continue employing this strategy of ego stroking and attention giving and you will have a loyal follower.

When women talk to you they will primarily bring up their kids, unless they are single and assessing your capacity for success, which is your sexual market value.

Women talk about kids because they have invested the prime years of their lives into creating new human beings, and they are very self-conscious about this. They know they are judged by their kids. Mothers, and sometimes even fathers, will determine their own self-worth by comparing how well their children are doing compared to other people’s children. This is an area of sensitivity and a good place to concentrate your manipulation. Dote on her kids. Compliment the aspects of the children that normally are not noticed or that you see the mother is working very hard to improve. Do not waste time saying her kids are “cute” or “smart” or “funny”, those are a waste of time because they are too commonly used. Attack the flank with your compliments, find ways to actually compliment the mother instead of the kid, or compliment both mother and kid in the same line. “You are doing so well raising your son, I see his behavior improving because of you every week”. Or, “You are working so hard, it is really paying off with his behavior”, and then try to cite specific examples you notice so your compliment doesn’t look like a mushy schmooze. Use your warlike tactics to dominate the social sphere.

Understand: this is not a wicked manipulation.

This is what all people do, simply not at a conscious level. These are just two examples of basic manipulations. Use the basic blueprints to build more manipulations depending on who you are dealing with. Every individual and situation is different so you will have to construct your strategy accordingly. Simply ask:

What does this person value?
What does this person want?

The answer to these two main questions will give you most of the information you need to maneuver through various social interactions. And concentrating on others outside yourself has the added benefit of reducing your anxiety, because you are no longer “living in your head”.

Make your agenda look like their agenda and your allies will be much more interested in helping you to achieve it. Rid yourself of the moralization of amoral characteristics that weak Church males force on you.

Common Church Quibble: “How dare you encourage young men to manipulate people?”

Simple: because everything is a manipulation. Take, for example the interviewer who has a celebrity guest and is asking him questions. He carefully selects questions designed to elicit particular responses. He knows that if he gets these responses he increases the chances that the video or article of the interview will go viral. If the interview becomes popular it drives more customers to his interview platform (website/video channel etc). More people on his website or reading his articles means more money for him or the company. This is a manipulation. It is not that people consciously think in these ways and purposefully go out of their way to design manipulations, but this is how we structure ourselves. Manipulations are part of everyday life, therefore, you might as well be conscious about them and use them properly.

Social Media and Men

What are you using these platforms for? Are you using them to become more of a man, or are you using them to distract yourself?

Social Media – Where the sheep come to drink from the pool of digital validation.

“For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.”
Galatians 1:10

“For they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.”
John 12:43

“The Lord is on my side; I will not fear. What can man do to me? The Lord is on my side as my helper; I shall look in triumph on those who hate me. It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man. It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes.”
Psalm 118:6-9

“But just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, so we speak, not to please man, but to please God who tests our hearts.
1 Thessalonians 2:4

Instagram – Where the serf presents the illusion of complete happiness and of a perfect life.

Facebook – Where the monkey performs for the mirage of an interested audience.

Twitter – Where the peasantry labors under the delusion that their opinion is important.

YouTube – Where the sycophant lives vicariously through the fabricated lifestyles of others.

There are more social media platforms, obviously, but these are the big four, and they serve as examples of what we are to avoid as Men.

These platforms can be used for marketing or communication, but so few people actually use them for that.

What most peasants use them for is listed in the descriptions above. Instagram could be a site to promote product images, but most use it to deceive others about the state of their life, capturing a mere snapshot of a brief moment of “happiness” rather than the full image of a life, and then those same people draw validation from the number of “likes”.

Facebook could be a place to connect with individuals, plan, coordinate, but most use it as a soap box from which they rant about politics and believe they are right if they cross a certain threshold of “likes”. That is blind mob mentality and tacit approval.

Twitter could be a place for anything other than whatever garbage it is currently being used for.

Youtube can be used as an education platform, but the majority use it to live life through someone else, or distract themselves from their own meaningless existence.

What are you using these social media platforms for? Are you using them to become more of a man, or are you using them to distract yourself?

Is Instagram a tool, or is it somewhere you can see pictures of basically naked women with breasts hanging out everywhere? Are you using Facebook as a tool or a rant box for racial and political division? Is twitter a tool or an outlet for you to voice your current, irrelevant, unintelligent and uneducated opinion? Is YouTube a tool for amassing knowledge or a place where you waste the waste majority of your day?

Be a man. Cut social media. If you cannot cut it, make a determination to use it only as a tool, not for entertainment and porn.

Mantra

Use tools to build the life I want, not to escape the life I have.

Application

Every time you want to use social media, ask yourself if it is because you want to use a tool, or because you want to be entertained. If it is the latter, just don’t use it. Try to delete one of these social media accounts. Just one. See how you feel. Then systematically cut out the rest of the social media outlets. Make it happen.

Good Uses For Social Media Bad Uses for Social Media

Using YouTube to listen to lectures and sermons.	Mindlessly scrolling through other people’s lives (Makes $0 per hour).
Using youtube to learn how to build furniture, make knives or cook.	Comparing your life/body to others and getting depressed because you are a loser.
Use instagram to show the new book you wrote or piece of furniture you built.	Using instagram to check out naked chicks who aren’t your wife.
Use facebook to set up a family reunion	Use facebook to get into a giant fight with people on the opposite political aisle as you (I’m sure you’re changing tons of minds).
Using LinkedIn to find job opportunities, grow your connections and put yourself in a better business situation.	Use social media to stalk people you know so you can judge how they are living thier lives.

Conduct yourselves like Men.

Demagogues – Enemies of Logic

Demagogue – a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument.

“Be sober, be vigilant, for your adversary the devil roams about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour”.
1 Peter 5:8

The Church is riddled with demagogues. The basic definition applies to political people, but you are ignorant if you do not think the Church is political. You don’t have to be an office holder in the American government to make political power plays in whatever institution you are a part of. Demagogues plague the news media. No one in the news media can get paid without forcing stories that make you angry or afraid. Their funding is based on getting you to react emotionally to what they are saying.

Demagogues in the church are the foundation for mega churches.

Even the faith of most Christians is founded on emotion or tradition rather than logical fact. This is why 90% of Christians cannot defend their faith rationally and logically.

If you want a mental image of a demagogue, think of a Joel Osteen character. An individual whose message appeals to your self-interest rather than to your rational mind. There is nothing wrong with self-interest, and taking action out of self-interest (I assume you are interested in the personal benefits of heaven), but we run into problems when we sell religion cloaked in emotionalism and materialism.

People don’t listen to Osteen because they think he is telling them the truth, they listen to him because he tells them that they can have faith and salvation while focusing their entire lives on their wealth.

Again, nothing wrong with wealth. But there is something wrong with placing wealth above everything, or using God to sell a wealth-based gospel.

It’s not only large-scale churches in which this type of materialism happens. It also happens in the small Churches: the local Community Church, your local Baptist Church, you find emotionalism and demagoguery.

This fact is very common for Baptists, who tend to value the name “baptist” above the gospel. They even have their own mantra that they repeat in closed circles: “Born a baptist, live as a baptist, die a baptist”.

Does anyone see anything wrong with that type of thinking? Is there a problem with people placing their name and tradition above the truth? These individuals have huge ego investments in their tradition. They have so much pride in their name that they cannot see anything besides what they believe. What they are saying with that mantra is that it does not matter if the truth were to be revealed to their eyes, they would not forsake the name “Baptist”. John the Baptizer did not die for your sin, so why name yourself after him? This weak thinking is the result of traditionalism and emotionalism. You can call it neo-renaissance liberalism if you want. If you are a baptist, you should meditate on this.

Any speech that appeals primarily to the emotion of men is irrational.

That is the point of emotions, they are not rational and they cannot think. Arousing the emotions of individuals in order to sway their thinking is a breakdown of one of Aristotle’s rules of rhetoric. He labels these emotions as “non-essentials”, because all that matters is the facts.

The majority of sermons and lessons given today are based on feelings. This is not masculine, rather it is stupidity. Because if your faith is ever tested by fire, emotions will be inconsequential. Most church-goers never will have a heavy test of faith, though they may think otherwise.

Denominationalism has its foundation in emotionalism and demagoguery. People form new religions to suit what they feel is right, not based on what can be known based on the Word alone. Or someone in the Church gets their feelings hurt by the truth so they leave and form their own religion that better caters to their personal likes; where they can leave out the “unsavory” doctrines that offend them.

All the aforementioned situations are a result of emotions overtaking individuals. Rational thinking then takes a backseat to feelings. This must be avoided at all costs. Emotions stand in opposition to rationality, and as a result they retard masculinity.

Mantra

Be alert for those who stir up anger and fear.

Application

The Bible speaks often about vigilance and being aware of evil (1 Peter 5:8), this is because the foundation of resisting evil is awareness. You must be aware that there are individuals in the religious world who want to use your emotions against you. They aim to cause you to lose touch with rationality so that they may win you over to their camp. This can be combated by simply calling it out.

When you address someone’s tactics and bring them out in the open, they are no longer an ethereal concept; meaning they are no longer hidden in a vapor, unable to be touched.

By your words you force demagoguery into a tangible material that can be destroyed. Just as God spoke and the world was made, we may, on a significantly smaller, non-miraculous scale, speak and materialize what we have spoken. Against this extraction the enemy seldom has a defense. Demagogues rely on being camouflaged and spreading their parasitic idiocy from their hiding places.

Also, you must be aware that you yourself may attempt to use emotions and demagoguery to beguile others and win arguments. This is not how men argue. If you must resort to emotion, your argument is pathetic and should be bolstered by this strange entity known as “Fact”.

Be aware of yourself, you are not as Noble as you believe.

Facts should always prevail over emotion.

Reject Emotionalism.

Reject Traditionalism and Dogma.

Assault the arguments of the enemy with Logic.

Force the demagogue to show himself.

Be a Man.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Silence: A Tool of Men

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him.”
Psalm 62:5

“But the Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him”
Habakkuk 2:20

Noise is around us constantly. It permeates every pore, it seeps into every crevice like a disease. Noise is medication for some. Those who cannot bear the weight of silence must fill every void with chatter or some kind. Silence is called “awkward” for this reason, people cannot handle quiet because it requires them to think. Men can handle silence. Men love and crave silence, even extroverted men. They know that tremendous power rests in silence, for in it every dark query of the mind can be answered.

Sound vibrations accomplish very little, unless you are one of the few whose livelihood depends on speech or music. Most of those individuals have not even properly mastered speech themselves, and the result is that they utter empty sounds that just take up space and the attention of men.

You, however, are a master of silence.

If you master silence then you will have a great power in your back pocket. The beta is uncomfortable in silence, because he knows that through it, others can sense his thoughts. They can smell his weakness and lack of masculinity. All of his insecurities come rushing into his mind the moment he can no longer distract himself from his insufficiency by using noise. You can know a great deal about a person based on how they deal with pure quietness.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Mantra

None. Be silent.

Application

Sit in silence. Just for 120 seconds. Or take a walk outside and say nothing and do not look at your phone. Get comfortable being quiet, it is a great power. Through this quietness you are forced to deal with the darkness in your heart without distraction. You train yourself to be comfortable with it. This will benefit you when you need to negotiate or extract information from other people. If you ask someone a question and you can tell they only gave you a partial answer, just be silent for a moment. Most of the time, other people will crack from the lack of sound and tell you everything you want to know if you just give them a small moment of quiet. Silence is a weapon for better communication.

Conduct yourselves like Men.

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