Your mum's still dead, or The Case against Sinning

Any Christian is at risk of coming into contact with some variant of the following question, because it is as popular as it is silly:

"If everything can be forgiven, why bother with the virtues? Why not sin for most of my live and then repent last minute?"

There are two answers. The first, and somehow popular one, goes something like the following:

"Sin affects your disposition/hardens your heart/etc. -> You won't seek the forgiveness you will need."

There is no short way to express that, and it opens the door to more questions about how the Bible defines the heart versus how the medical community does it, et cetera ad nauseam. Lucky for us, the second answer is much shorter:

"Your mum's still dead."

Let us say that someone unjustly kills your mum, be it normal murder or drunk driving or whatever. Yes, you can forgive them. But that does not resurrect your mum. To use longer words and impress midwits, sin has irreversible temporal consequences.

You can fix a car, but you cannot un-crash it.

Even if getting absolutely plastered once and never drinking again may spare you the liver damage, you still spent a whole night being retarded and a whole next day hungover. You are not getting that time back.

The examples abound, but the conclusion is simple. Sin cannot be fully undone. What you do matters. Therefore, you matter. You matter so much that an omnipotent creator of everything found you worth dying for and actually went and did just that.

Much Love!

Notes on the current persecution of Christians

Are Christians being persecuted in the West?

The short answer is: well yes, but actually no. The long answer follows.

Yes, there are some intrinsically impotent imitations of a persecution. They're not done by the best bureaucracy of its day - the Roman Empire. Even if they were, their petty prince can't take your soul without your consent. This putridly pathetic 'persecution', on the other hand, is being done by HR Karens and DMV troglodytes. All they have is high school drama. And we have God. Is it a coincidence that the greatest labor shortage since the war draft coincides with the threat of being fired over the dead baby demon-juice needles? You can easily get another job. The Lord has already provided, you just need to waltz over to the buffet. You are the horse that's been led to the water, now bottoms up!

Let us assume, simply to humour the blackpilled bedwetters, that Christians will be legitimately, effectively persecuted by someone who has half their act together in the foreseeable future. So what? Nothing grows the church like the blood of martyrs. It's evangelisation on roids and meth, at least historically. You want your descendants to live in a genuinely Christian nation? Being persecuted for the Truth and His Commandments is how you get that.

There is tremendous opportunity in every persecution, even this one. Get kicked out of social media over the basic Truth? Now you get to make real life friends and prove to them by your example that life as an authentic Christian is not only possible, it is also a good time. As St. Francis of Assissi put it, 'preach the Gospel at all times, use words when necessary.'

There is even more opportunity in a legitimate persecution. The fastest way to make Christian friends who are also street smart is to go to jail yourself. The Gospel is not locked in with the criminal underclass, the criminal underclass is locked in with the Gospel. Yes, I had to read that comic in high school. Probably still better than the other stuff people have to read in other public schools. Not that a genuine Christian will be in the slammer for even a fraction of his/her sentence, if the Acts of the Apostles are any indication.

Finally, permit me to address the people who sincerely believe they would buckle under persecution. Some of you are going to be on the physically and socially weaker side, and/or struggle with mental health. I do not want to mock you, because the world probably does enough of that already. Instead, I want to encourage you. You see, our Lord has a weird way of using the weak and downtrodden for his greatest feats. The stone that has been rejected by the builders shall be the cornerstone, et cetera. Heck, the king of kings himself found it prudent to come into this world through a probably-illiterate peasant girl in some shed in some backwater. His crowning moment, as it were, was being executed with two petty thieves. Between those two events, he routinely performed miracles on the lowly and outcast, presumably to emphasize the point that what this world thinks is irrelevant. If you keep the faith, you are more likely to experience a miracle than to succumb. God does not abandon those who stick with him. You will not be forced to succumb. You are more likely than most people to get saved in a really spectacular fashion, if need be.

How to start smoking pipe: a review

Full disclaimer: I did not get paid to write this. I did not even get a discount on the pipe or anything, since nobody had any idea that I would be reviewing it. I decided to review it when it arrived.

This is the long-overdue review of Kade's Small German Clay Pipe-Green Bit. I ordered one of these a few weeks ago, and it shipped a lot sooner than I expected, which is always nice. Please find below a picture of the product, with a zippo for scale:

As advertised on the website, it is a compact pipe design that fits into basically every pocket. The bowl is also small, lending itself to quicker smokes. So far so good. But how does it smoke?

It is at this point that I must preface that I am a beginner to the fine art of the pipe, and to smoking in general. I picked up my first pack of American Spirits three months ago, and this is the first dedicated pipe that I have ever owned. The reason I feel qualified to review the pipe is that Kade describes it as "perfect for beginners". I am as beginner as it gets, and I will not write how many times I had to re-light this tiny bowl, because the number is shameful.

The pipe smokes well. I used some lousy tobacco that I bummed off of my roommate for free, but I still enjoyed the smoke. It's easy to operate, but still pleasant to smoke. That being said, I have had more pleasant smokes with nicer tobacco out of nicer pipes. To Kade's great credit, he does not pretend that this is a fancy pipe. It is exactly what he says it is: a beginner's pipe, good for quick smokes and trying new tobaccos, since the clay does not retain flavor.

Therefore, I recommend that anyone trying to get into pipes buy one of these. If you are already into pipes, consider getting one anyway, since they are cheap and they can be used to try new tobaccos without risking the retention of a lousy flavour in one of your fancy pipes. I for one will definitely keep it around, first to practice my technique, then to try new tobaccos.

Out of five stars, I give this pipe all five. Not because it will blow your mind, but because it is exactly what it purports to be, and a good deal to boot. Show our man Kade some love!

Staffing the next system

 As most of you will know, a lot of people are choosing something right now that will kill some of them [1]. You also know that this excess mortality might be intentional, somewhere on the chain of causality. Let us assume that it is intented to work as it apparently does, for a thought experiment.

If you've ever created anything, you understand that certain specialist skills are required.

Would you like to make a website?
Someone has to code that.

Care for central heating?
A whole lot of people need to build that system.

How about a functioning war machine?
Add several orders of magnitude more infrastructure.

As the storms in Jacksonville shows, complex systems will collapse simply by people taking a day off [2]. It gets considerably worse when the specialists in question are six feet under, as the bad weather brigade can be convinced to come back and eventually train the next generation, whereas a bunch of rotting corpses cannot.

Consider also this historical precedent [3]. Stalin's ballistic implementation of cancel culture did not take out nearly as many people as the famines or the war did; he only caused the execution of various paper-pushers that had fallen out of favour in Moscow. Nevertheless, the combined loss of talent and experience destroyed the Red Army in 1941, to the tune of 4 million men lost in 6 months [4]. It can be concluded that whoever decided to push some random poison knows perfectly well that you can't just take out the talent and expect to run anything. Hence the question:

How will the next system be staffed?

There are two answers I can think of.

First option: certain groups of people and their families are getting their "Your papers, please" without the associated Faucian Roulette needles. It would also explain Newsom's odd behaviour; maybe his daughter did not make the list and is earmarked for the aforementioned Faucian Roulette [5]. This would leave the required staff alive and well for the next system to run reasonably smoothly.

Second option: they don't care. Everyone gets the same mixture of God-knows-what. Since the Prince of this World is hardly fond of human life, maybe system-wide collapse and mass slaughter is the actual top-level plan.

Personally, I am torn between the two, because option one is something already explored in popular media [6], whereas option two makes perfect sense in the supernatural analysis.

Muth Be Nice: Musings on privilege

Privilege is real. It does not take the forms that we are asked to check, and it is often situational. Nevertheless, privilege exists, and the Christian needs to understand what this means for his or her individual situation.

For the purposes of this post, privilege can be defined as an advantage which the individual happens to have at the outset. Examples include height in men, visual beauty in women, as well as wealth and high intelligence for both. It should also be noted that privilege is never good or evil: that would be a category error. The whole point of privilege is that one does not choose it, so there is no moral element. Yet.

Similarly, most privileges are situational. Being a giant among men is all fun and games in most sports, but not in most buildings, cars, or shower stalls. High intelligence is a pain when interacting with the cognitively normal. Nevertheless, privileges exist. So what is the privileged Christian to do?

More.

That's the short answer. Luke 12:48 elaborates: " And unto whomsoever much is given, of him much shall be required: and to whom they have committed much, of him they will demand the more". Christians who have received more than average, have to do more than average. This provides two valuable insights.

First, there is no need to feel guilty about being born rich, handsome, intelligent, tall, or anything else. It's part of the plan, and not in the Qtarded sense of the term. Life is not unfair, at least not in the sense that matters.

Second, there is no need to be envious of anyone who has it better than you do. Sure, they got a nicer house or car or whatever, but they also have more asked of them. Every time you get done in by circumstance, you know that God is giving you an easier time of it. If you'd gotten that promotion, pay raise, gold medal, or whatever, then more would be required of you. So thank God, and move on with life.

This begs one final question: do more of what? Love more, that's what. Love God more, and love thy neighbour more. It's the greatest commandment, so it's as good of a general direction as you're going to get. Got funds to spare? Support your church and community! People listen to you because you're good at rhetoric or just an Alpha? Tell them the truth, and the Truth! People trust you with their problems for no reason at all? Listen to them, it literally helps them! Humans are weird like that.

Whatever you got, love God and neighbor with it. It's both simple to understand and hard to do, but you got the Almighty on your side, so you should be fine.

Much Love!

PS as PhilosophicalBear on SG put it, the biblical term for "privilege" is blessing.

A Vaccine for Rhetoric

Disclaimer: The following is not entirely clean speech, due to the nature of the topic involved. A clean TLDR is provided at the bottom.

There is a vaccine that actually works, and the side effects are not life-threatening! Of course, this vaccine does not involving injecting God-knows-what into your bloodstream. As the title suggests, this vaccine prevents any and all damage from rhetorical attacks. Here's how to get this vaccine.

Call yourself the term.

That's it. Just start using it on yourself, and use it often. It's a combination of exposure therapy and hyperinflation. Own the term and make it meaningless at the same time. Trump did this to great effect with "deplorable". But we can do it with every other term too.

For further evidence, one but needs to consider the term "queer". This used to be a playground insults for boys who acted weird. Now it is one of the Qs in LGBTQQKKKNSDAP. How did this happen? Easy: the freakshows just started using it on themselves. They got vaccinated against "queer". It's past time for you to vaccinate yourself against "racist". Much Love!

TLDR: Use the rhetorical device on yourself, and use it often. Just call yourself the "-ism" or "-phobia" du jour.

How to dress well with minimal effort/funds

Many of us never got into dressing up. And why would we? Our jobs require more practical clothing, and there are much better uses for surplus funds anyway. However, as Christian men, we have a moral obligation to be a role model to the young men in our congregation. When we were young, we looked to the adult men for role models, for someone to aspire to be like, especially when our Boomer parents did not provide much direction.

But now we are the adult men. Now the young men and boys look up to us. Let us all strive to never disappoint them. Let us, among many other things, present ourselves properly in church. Let us make our 'Sunday best' be pretty good.

This guide will work from the bottom up, starting with the cheapest/simplest setups, and building from there. This will allow every man to commit as far as is appropriate for his situation.

Stage 1: the absolute basics

Get a light blue or white dress shirt and navy blue chinos. If you get both colours of dress shirt, this should still be around $100. Definitely buy these in person. Make sure that they fit properly. It is a better use of your money to get the cheapest stuff altered than to buy the slightly nicer ones and have them not fit well. What does a good fit look like? It looks like the dudes on the pictures displayed in the store. They were all fitted perfectly for the photoshoot. If needed, work on your posture. Good posture saves money in the long run, and it makes almost every outfit look substantially better.

Stage 2:

Get a charcoal-grey sports jacket and a tie. Stay away from fancy patterns. With alterations, this may set you back up to $300, but then you are covered for every occasion.

Stage 3: 

Get a pair of khakis and a white polo shirt. This is essential for warmer climates, since the polos have short sleeves. Do NOT get a dress shirt with short sleeves/Hawaiian shirts. Leave those for the celibate vocations and the Boomer filth.

Stage 4: further reading.

A lot of men dress a lot better than I do, and some of them have written about it. Below is a list of links for your perusal. Note that I do not vouch for their adherence to clean speech rules.

https://pushingrubberdownhill.com/2015/12/28/a-non-idiots-guide-to-idiot-advice-on-getting-dressed/