Category Archives: Metaphysics

Atheism, Ayn Rand, Catholicism, Christian Libertarianism, Faith, Forgiveness, Free will, Freedom, Heaven, Hell, Hope, Hypocrites, Justice, Materialism, Memes, Merciful Grace, Monism vs Dualism, Nihilism, Salvation, There is a God!, Uncategorized

‘Good Atheists’ and the seriousness of sin. Good God/Evil world. 6

Wednesday 25 March 2015 Tim 5 Comments

good atheists

Several things today have stimulated me to write this post, the second being that Meme above which was posted to my Facebook page by an Atheist friend.
She commented that she actually likes ‘this Pope’, and from this meme it is easy to see why he has impressed unbelievers, and Heretics/Protestants.

On face value…. in the ordinary sense as a Protestant Libertarian I’m impressed too by the simple fact that it is a far cry from the sort of Tyrannical dogma the world has come to expect from Pontiffs, and thus it appears such moderation is a good thing for peace and harmony between The Catholic church, and the rest of us.

Yet on another very important level these Liberal sentiments which appeal to my atheist friend betray some of the most important spiritual truths which are fundamental to understanding The Lord, which leads onto the central topic of my post… The seriousness of Sin.

This Meme is true…. using a yardstick of ‘comparative goodness’.
There are/have been…. comparatively speaking…. many Good atheists, and many Evil doers whom have called themselves followers of Christ.
Eg Dawkins may say with confidence to me “I’m holier than thou!”… and indeed this may be completely true.
I have done many wicked deeds to which Dawkins may have not even come close… I know not his secrets.

Yet ultimately this rationale is a deadly trap!
Why?
Because it is using *the wrong measure*.
The true measure of Goodness in this Universe is not out shining our peers… but is Absolute Holiness… of which we all fall short.
This True measure means *We all* need the Salvation of God which is in Christ.
By God’s perfect standard… “There is none righteous… no not one…”
“For all have sinned and come short of the Glory of God”.
Thankfully God is Rich in mercy and has made away for us to be saved from the righteous judgement of our wicked deeds, yet which still satisfies the demands of Justice, and allows us ourselves the liberty to choose redemption or reject it.

“For God commendeth his love towards us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
“…whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved…”

good

I have written on this train of thought before and you can read a more expanded veiw here>>> Hell is for the Self Righteous, Heaven is for Sinners.<<< Of course it is a very peculiar thing for atheists to claim to be 'Good' given their world view denies the veracity of ethics! This is a testament to the fact that many many atheists have not the Steel to countenance the depressing 'reality' of their own Amoral Cosmology. The hardest, most real of them look at the chaos and misery which befalls humanity and say it is a testament to the truth of their assertions... "there can be no God in such a world"... there is no right or wrong... either in Earthquakes, or Rape, or genocide.... any such feelings of injustice have no objective reality... they are merely the pathetic wimpers of Soul-less machines who have no more intrinsic value... or rights... than the stardust of which they are composed. Many simply believe you may as well Kill yourself... return to the painless meaningless nothing that you are. stephen-fry

These ideas are the subject of my first blog post in this series ‘How can a Good God exist when there is so much evil in the world? (part1) Atheist Nihilism.’… Click >>>Here<<< to read more. Yet it is the less consistent portion of the Atheists whom I seek to call out tonight. The ones who think their own moral virtues exonerate them from any possibility that even if they are wrong.... and it turns out that there is a god... that it is morally unthinkable that they might face damnation for their sins. As mentioned earlier via the Self righteous Rationale that comparatively speaking, they deem themselves to be not morally inferior beings, but in fact far more moral, and enlightened, and tolerant, than the great horde of savages whom have flocked into churches over the millennia. Having already pointed out the grievous error of such comparisons (first 1/2 doz paragraphs above), I would like to progress further into these disastrous rationalisms, and lay out some more Objective facts about sin, and atheist inconsistency. Setting aside the fact that Atheism is fundamentally an Amoral world view, and that therefore atheists have no 'higher ground' upon which to stand to pass down condemnation upon God and his followers... we all know that this does not faze the bulk of them from proceeding to do precisely that! Their hypocrisy goes much deeper. With one breath they will play down the seriousness of their own moral short comings as 'trivial', yet with the next shake their fists at Heaven decrying the weightiness of the manifold evils of everyone else... and curse God for his inaction! While they think nothing of their own blotches on creation, They boldly declare that no Good God would allow Hitler to rampage across Europe... as if their own existence could not be an affront to morality... yet Hitler's evils... they are God's fault! God is a Bastard on Hitler's account... but not on theirs... they are better than God, they have the right to Judge God, they conciser themselves the innocent victims of God's Amoral inaction. It matters not that all Hitler's actions stemmed from his atheistic world view. They busy themselves trying to make out Hitler was a Christian!...(a topic for another time and an interesting psychological behaviour in itself). hittttllllrrr

Having said all that I may now get down to my main points…. Our personal culpability, and the seriousness of sin.

You see the reality of things is quite different from what these atheists assert… esp the idea that God does not give a toss about the evils of humanity.

God takes sin very very very seriously!
Way more seriously than all these self-righteous God hating atheists do!
Just because God has set up the world in such a way that we human beings have moral responsibility for our own actions… which means he has left us free to act with extreme goodness or extreme Evil *does not mean* he does not care, or intends evil doers to escape Scott free.
God has declared that in his time he will balance the scales and reward everyone their due.
Hitler has not escaped judgement by fleeing to Argentina!
So these notions that God does not care, are simply false.
He has good, valid, righteous reasons, for allowing Humanity to ‘act out their own vain imaginations.
That we are freewill moral agents living in a moral universe, means that our deeds have *moral weight*…. both for good, or ill… and when we do evil… innocent people suffer… that is what it means to live in a moral universe… It is in fact impossible to claim any goodness in a reality in which evil is impossible.
That is why Robots are amoral beings… whether they perform surgeries which save lives or slaughter thousands… they have no choice in their deeds.
The moral responsibility for the actions of Robots falls back on their free-will creators who made them, and so too would God be responsible for all Hitler’s evils… if Hitler was a robot… yet he was not a robot.
In all his deeds Hitler exercised his own freewill.
Thus it is absurd to blame God for Hitler’s deeds.

I have written more on this topic… ‘We are not Robots Ayn Rand. We are Moral Agents.’ Click >>Here<< and another... 'Monism: Evolutionary Psychology and the Death of Morality, Reason and Freewill.' click >>>here<<< So it is folly to suggest that Human evils are evidence against the existence or goodness of God. When Adam sinned, God took that with such seriousness that he separated himself from Mankind, and condemned us all to death! You see Adam's sin... had great moral weight.... affecting countless billions... though many will not be able to appreciate the mechanics of it... how what they see as a small act of disobedience by one man could bring such calamity upon posterity. Yet that is how serious the consequences of Sin are! They upset the entire hierarchy of reality... When Adam disobeyed God, not only did he loose faith in God's Good Character, he was dethroning God and establishing himself and his will above Gods! a little leven leveneth the whole lump! Humanity has been doing that ever since. This is part of the reason why... the pragmatic portion... of why The Standard for Goodness is 100% Holiness... not comparative goodness... not a 'statistical mean/ scale of goodness' The other portion is simply because God himself is Holy. He sets the *Ideal Goodness*. Yet God has sworn eternal Judgement upon sin! Despite what the liberal Bible doubters say... there is a hell! There is eternal damnation. Yet everyone who ends up Damned, will be damned by their own Hatred of God, their pride, and rejection of God's mercy. Jesus-Facepalm

God has seen every act of evil we all have committed and is reserving his judgement.
Yet still God is loving, compassionate, and merciful.
We may say “It’s not fair that I was born into this cursed world!”… and indeed if we were born without hope… then this may in fact be a legitimate accusation against God’s character… yet he has not utterly abandoned us to Damnation, but instead immediately set in motion his plan to redeem us… and his modus opperandi reflects his absolute justice, The seriousness with which he condemns sin, and his love and mercy…. all displayed in the crucifixion of his sinless son Jesus Christ.

In Christ’s crucifixion we see God himself suffering a grotesque fate at the hands of evil men… he is not, nor has ever been completely insulated from the sufferings of evil himself.

dawwkkknnnzz

That God deemed such a grotesque means was necessary for the payment for sin shows just how extremely seriously he takes sin to be, and how he will not allow his love to violate the principle of Justice… an eye for an eye… tooth for tooth…. The wages of sin is Death… Jesus took the full penalty of our sins upon himself.
He was not guilty of any sin himself and thus he was not subject to the penalty of death… for his own sins.

When Christ rose from the Dead, this was a testament to his victory over sin and death, and his resurrection altered the course of human history!

the-crucifixion-detail-Matthias_Grunewald2
To receive Christ a person must appreciate the gravity of their own sins.
By it’s very nature the proud will reject the crucifixion as un-necessarily barbarous.

And the greatest sin anyone can commit is to *reject the sacrifice of Christ!*
For all their fuming against God, they prove they themselves dont take sin seriously… deeming themselves to be not guilty before God.
It is a hypocritical folly of the highest order.

Yes folks it is appointed unto us once to die and after this, the judgement!
At an appointed time the dead will stand before his judgement seat, and all whose names are not found
written in the book of life shall be cast into the lake of fire… with their Father Satan… to spend eternity where they chose to be…. separated from God.
The reality of hell is a clear demonstration of how weighty a matter God considers sin to be.

In the light of these facts we see the tables turned on the atheist… the reality is *they dont consider sin to be anywhere near as serious a matter as God does….for all their accusations… it is they themselves whom are found wanting in ‘the righteous indignation department’.

Yet millions of sinners like myself will enter paradise… not because we are more righteous than our atheist friends and family, but because we simply received the Gift of God… he placed our sin upon Christ, and clothed us in Christ’s holiness.
And we will see God face to face and sing God’s praises for eternity.
Amen.

Ditch your foolish pride my neighbours, my friends… my family!
get a grip that you are a creation of God… a Moral agent.
Choose Christ and join us in the love of our Holy Heavenly Father!

Tim Wikiriwhi

The second greatest man who ever lived

Friday 20 March 2015 Richard 3 Comments

The Superstitions of Materialist Orthodoxy, and their conflict with scientific progress and inquiry . Rupert Sheldrake – The Science Delusion BANNED TED TALK

Sunday 5 October 2014 Tim 1 Comment

heehaw

a more extensive (better) version of Sheldrake’s speech below…

In the jar

Thursday 31 July 2014 Richard 9 Comments

Once upon a time I was a real philosopher. I wasn’t a very good philosopher then, and I’m certainly not now, but here’s an argument for the truth of Christianity. If you fancy yourself as a philosopher, feel free to shoot my argument down in flames. But if you fancy yourself as a real philosopher, do what a real philosopher would do. Improve my argument, so that it’s as good an argument as it can possibly be. And then shoot it down in flames!

Okay, so here goes. Lately, something called the multiverse theory has become popular in atheist circles. It purports to explain why the universe we live in appears to be fine-tuned for the existence of life, without the universe we live in actually being fine-tuned for the existence of life. Because what best explains the fact that the universe we live in is fine-tuned for the existence of life, if it’s the only universe, is the existence of a creator God. If, however, our universe is only one of trillions upon trillions of other actual parallel universes, each with different physical laws and constants, then we can find the explanation for the apparent fine-tuning of the universe we happen to inhabit in the so-called anthropic principle. Basically, we’re here because of sheer, dumb luck and the probabilistic resources of a multiverse.

As far as I’m aware, there’s no empirical evidence for the multiverse theory, but it does at least explain why most atheists believe in pink unicorns. So there is that. Now, my argument appeals to the idea of multiple possible universes. The possible worlds heuristic has been a mainstay of academic philosophy for a very long time. Since I’ve been around, anyway. I think my argument only depends on the existence of a finite number of possible universes, and not on the existence of an infinite number of actual universes, but I’m not sure. But the question is, if there are multiple possible universes, but only one actual universe, which of the multiple possible universes is the actual universe we live in?

Well, it could be that the universe we live in is, in actual fact, contained in a tiny glass jar placed neatly on the shelf of an alien child’s room. It’s a logical possibility. The thing to note about this possibility is that it’s a possibility that our universe is contained within another universe. Thus, this possibility is a variant of what I have elsewhere called supernaturalism. Naturalism, as I define it, is the view that the world we know is a stand-alone affair. It’s not contained within anything else, or a product of anything else. It’s self-sufficient from go to whoa. It just is. Whereas, supernaturalism is the view that the world we live in—and all it contains, including us—is an artefact.

Now consider all the logically possible universes. Logically speaking, what is the likelihood that the one-and-only actual universe is a self-contained universe, as opposed to a universe contained within a greater reality? Bear in mind that the the universe inhabited by the alien child, in whose room our universe is contained in a jar on a shelf, could itself be contained in another jar on a shelf in some uber-alien child’s room. That’s right, for every possible self-contained universe, there are an infinite number of possible nested universes containing that universe. So it’s highly likely that we live in a nested universe.

God is eternal. The claim that God is eternal is often taken to mean (as I take it to mean) that God is “outside” time and space. God is outside the time and space fabric of our universe, which means that our universe is “inside” the outside reality in which God dwells. If Christianity is true, we live in a nested universe.

There are two types of possible nested universes. Those in which the creator in the containing universe has communicated with the inhabitants of the contained universe, and those in which the creator hasn’t. What would our world look like if we lived in a universe within a universe? Moreover, one in which the creator outside had communicated with us in the jar? It would look exactly like this one looks if Christianity were true. Therefore, Christianity is true.

Perhaps my argument, such as it is, is a variant of an argument that C. S. Lewis presents in Mere Christianity. According to Lewis, we should expect the unexpected.

Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.

So, there it is. It’s not an argument I’m about to write up and submit to a peer-reviewed academic journal any time soon, but hey. I’m only a jar of clay.

Atheism, Bogus Science, Consciousness, Cosmology, Easy Listening, Evolutionism, Faith, Heaven, Hell, Hope, Indoctrination, Keeping It Real, Liberate your Mind!, Love, Monism vs Dualism, Personal Identity, Philosophy of Mind, Psychology, Quandaries, Rationality, Revelation, Science, There is a God!, Zombies

Space Truckin: Dead for 45 minutes.

Sunday 25 May 2014 Tim 10 Comments

reaper

From >>>Here<<< A trucker in Ohio shocked hospital staff after coming back to life nearly an hour after he lost his pulse following a massive heart attack — but it’s what he claims to have seen during those tense moments that has him sure there’s an afterlife. Brian Miller, 41, was opening the lid of a container when he knew something felt wrong — he immediately called 911 and told the operator, “I’m a truck driver and I think I’m having a heart attack.” Sure enough, his main artery was completely blocked — causing what’s known as a “widow-maker” heart attack He was rushed to a local hospital where doctors managed to revive him and clear the blockage, but after regaining consciousness and feeling the pain dissipate, he developed ventricular fibrillation, when the heart starts quivering wildly and is unable to pump blood. “He had no heart rate, he had no blood pressure, he had no pulse,” said ICU nurse Emily Bishop. “I mean think about that.” Doctor’s performed “strong, hard, fast CPR” and shocked Miller four times to try to revive him, but had no luck. trrrkk

It was during that time that Miller said he slipped away into a celestial world, “The only thing I remember I started seeing the light, and started walking toward the light.”

He described walking down a flower-lined path into white light — until he came upon his step mother, who had died recently, “She was the most beautiful thing when I seen her, it was like the first day I met her, (she) looked so happy.”

Miller remembered, “She grabbed ahold of my arm and told me, ‘It’s not your time, you don’t need to be here, we’ve got to take you back you’ve got things to go and do.’”

After 45 minutes his pulse returned “out of nowhere,” Bishop said. ”His brain had no oxygen for 45 minutes, the fact that he’s up walking, talking, laughing, everything is amazing.”

Glad to be back amongst the living, Miller now says there is one thing he is sure of, “There is an afterlife and people need to believe in it, big time.”

********************

mag5

I read an article recently that suggested that as many as 20 million people had had Near Death Experiences, and that despite Materialist monists fervent denials, there has been accounts which have ‘independent’ corroboration, and also other interesting ‘anomalies’ such as blind people ‘Seeing things’… for which the term ‘Mindsight’ was coined.
These experiences suggest that consciousness, thought, memory, etc carry on after Zero brain activity…. which supports the Dualistic theory of Body and soul… thwarting Monism which insists all our personality and consciousness is generated by the brain.

I find the article is interesting because it articulates my own scepticism about Materialist scepticism for Spiritual realities.

The truckie story above is a classic example of *What really happens at death* … ALOT!…. which Materialists have to reduce down to illusion.

I actually have a Jewish friend who died in a Car crash… was dead for several hours… and revived.
She reported seeing Jesus (which was a surprise… being a Jew), and meeting her Gand Father who said Nanna will be ‘here soon’.
She reported all this to her parents, and within a few weeks… Nanna had passed away.
None of this is explicable via notions of ‘hallucinations of a dying brain… loss of oxygen, etc’… Monitors detect Zero brain activity, and when people temporarily black out from lack of Oxygen they experience confusion and or memory loss, not Lucidity of thought… not vivid memory… and their black outs are not *Life altering*…. *perspective Game changers*…. which is a very common result of Near death experiences.
Objectively speaking, these experiences ought not to be written off as delusion simply because they don’t fit well with the common assumptions of the Material paradigm.
The Free thinker will be open to consider greater possibilities…. even if the evidence demands a person to forsake their cherished assertions.

Tim Wikiriwhi.

What is real?

Tuesday 20 May 2014 Richard Leave a comment

The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. (NIV)

In what sense is the world “real”? What are we asking, when we ask that question?

Anna Salamon doesn’t know. I don’t know. Perhaps Jordan Peterson knows.

I’m going to talk to you today about a different way of looking at what real is.

It’s not easy to figure out what real is because we don’t really have infinite knowledge and so we’re always making some sets of presuppositions about what’s most real.

It really matters what you assume is most real because you base the decisions that you make, that run the entire course of your life, on those assumptions, whether you recognise it or not. And if you get the assumptions wrong, or even if you leave them incomplete, you’re going to pay a big price for it.

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Mankind is on the verge of creating Sentient artificial intelligence? BULLSHIT!

Monday 5 May 2014 Tim 19 Comments

mimicking-biological-synapses

It amazes me just how ridiculous are the myths of Materialism!
That all life forms are the result of mindless accidents.
That ‘unguided’ evolution can change a worm into a human with the ‘magic wand’ of time.
Etc Etc.
And this fundamental superstition of Materialist Naturalism has multitudes of whacky spin-offs… one being that Human consciousness is simply a product of a complex arrangement of atoms.
Following this rationale we end up with Sci-fi movies like the Terminator, whereby Machines have become self aware and decide that Humanity needs to be eradicated.
Now while I like a good sci-fi movie, It is tragic that the computing scientific community have been making such bold claims that they are on the verge of creating Humanoid Artificial intelligence, and are proposing such absurd moral dilemmas as granting their created so-called smart machines ‘Rights’!

Check out this link >>>> ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE is already here. But how will the singularity, or the point at which machines achieve sentience be received by humanity?

How they can say such things with a straight face…. and why legions of otherwise intelligent people actually believe these are serious Moral questions which are eminent is a testimony to just how unfathomably deep their faith in Materialism really is!
They seem to accept the Idea that consciousness is merely a product of material complexity as axiomatic… only questioned by religious nutters who cling to primitive notions of a Super-natural reality.

Forget the fact that the latest scientific discoveries in Physics actually proves that our universe is not absolute, but finite, and that therefore a more primary reality *must exist*, and from which our universe was caused.

And the latest discoveries in scientific understanding of the Brain is also rendering Atheist materialism more and more absurd…. and exploding any delusions that Humanity is about to create sentient computer-beings.

Read the following….

Human brain has more switches than all computers on Earth.

Researchers at Stanford develop a new imaging method that enables visualization in unprecedented detail of the myriad connections between nerve cells in the brain.

The human brain is truly awesome.

A typical, healthy one houses some 200 billion nerve cells, which are connected to one another via hundreds of trillions of synapses. Each synapse functions like a microprocessor, and tens of thousands of them can connect a single neuron to other nerve cells. In the cerebral cortex alone, there are roughly 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies.

These synapses are, of course, so tiny (less than a thousandth of a millimeter in diameter) that humans haven’t been able to see with great clarity what exactly they do and how, beyond knowing that their numbers vary over time. That is until now.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have spent the past few years engineering a new imaging model, which they call array tomography, in conjunction with novel computational software, to stitch together image slices into a three-dimensional image that can be rotated, penetrated and navigated. Their work appears in the journal Neuron this week.

To test their model, the team took tissue samples from a mouse whose brain had been bioengineered to make larger neurons in the cerebral cortex express a fluorescent protein (found in jellyfish), making them glow yellow-green. Because of this glow, the researchers were able to see synapses against the background of neurons.

They found that the brain’s complexity is beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief, says Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology and senior author of the paper describing the study:

One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor–with both memory-storage and information-processing elements–than a mere on/off switch. In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth.

More nous, less nows

Saturday 1 March 2014 Richard Leave a comment

A friend gave me this excellent DEMOTIVATOR® from Despair.com several Christmases ago. And, recently, I finally got a round tuit. I put the damn thing up on the wall of my home office!

The poster represents an ever timely life lesson.

Perhaps life’s greatest lesson is that life itself is a lesson. That was my ex-wife’s sort of New Age spiritual viewpoint, in a nutshell, anyway. She had a firm intuition that we are each thrown into this mortal sphere of existence for a reason or reasons—to learn our spiritual life lesson(s). Of course, being a committed atheist and moral nihilist at the time, I mocked the idea. It’s only now, a repentant worldview and a decade of divorce later, that I’m wondering if she was right, after all. (And kicking myself for not asking the obvious question at the time. If life is a lesson, who sets the curriculum?)

Or, perhaps, life’s a Stanley Milgram experiment.

A test of your Moral character and conviction.
The decisions you make throughout your life are all being observed and recorded.
One day you will be asked to give account.

God as teacher and/or God as experimenter? I don’t think that Tim’s suggesting that life on Earth is, quite literally, an experiment. So I will! (A misbegotten experiment, perhaps? No, I’ll leave it to a detractor to suggest that. Also, I’ll leave it to the apologists for God’s supposed omniscience to explain this.)

How did you do? If life’s a classroom and every day’s a school day, did you study hard? Or did you just fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way? If life’s a Stanley Milgram experiment, did you go with the Word or go with the crowd?

One day you will be asked to give account. If life’s a lab running a Stanley Milgram experiment, you will be judged on how you used your God-given faculty of free will. Did you make the right decisions, and evince moral character and conviction? (The decisions you make throughout your life are all being observed and recorded.) Whereas, if life’s a classroom, you will be judged on how you used your God-given learning ability. Were you a willing, conscientious, hard-working student of life? Did you learn and practise the right things? (Everything you learn and practise goes down on your academic record.)

Classroom or lab? Are we God’s students, or are we his experimental test subjects? I suggest that life’s more lesson than lab, for the simple reason that we do not have a faculty of so-called free will, God-given or otherwise. The concept itself is a nonsense. What we do have is the God-given ability to learn and to change our behaviour. We also have the curriculum and the learning objectives. You’ll find it all in the prescribed text.

(Is Christianity complicated? Please don’t protest that God didn’t make it clear what are the right things to learn and practise. He did. The Bible contains massive redundancy. You know, like how the Ten Commandments are repeated in Deuteronomy, just in case you missed them in Exodus.)

Now, back to the DEMOTIVATOR® at the top.

(Did you see what Despair.com did there with the wee ®? They threatened to send their statist cronies around to your place to sort you out good and hard should you ever decide to go into business selling your own DEMOTIVATOR posters!)

The poster represents an ever timely life lesson. And the life lesson is, learn the power of delaying gratification. Rejoice and be glad!

the children who were best able to delay gratification subsequently did better in school and had fewer behavioral problems than the children who could only resist eating the cookie for a few minutes—and, further, ended up on average with SAT scores that were 210 points higher. As adults, the high-delay children completed college at higher rates than the other children and then went on to earn higher incomes. In contrast, the children who had the most trouble delaying gratification had higher rates of incarceration as adults and were more likely to struggle with drug and alcohol addiction.

How to learn delayed gratification?

Rather than resist the urge to eat the cookie, these children distracted themselves from the urge itself. They played with toys in the room, sang songs to themselves, and looked everywhere but at the cookie. In short, they did everything they could to put the cookie out of their minds.

So, learning to delay gratification is not at all the same thing as learning to resist temptation. The results even suggest that any direct attempt to resist the urge to eat the cookie is worse than futile, it’s counter-productive. And, note, we’re talking about a non-starving child and a cookie. We’re not talking about a methamphetamine addict and a bag of P. And we’re certainly not talking about being offered all that you could ever want in the whole world and having it right now.

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”

Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’” (NIV)

Nope. Staring down temptation and simply commanding it to go away is way too hardcore for mere images of God! We can but pray, “Lead us not into temptation” in the first place. Give us this day our daily distraction!

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. (NIV)

The poster represents an ever timely life lesson. Delay gratification, do some work, and get your shit sorted. (Thanks for the round tuit.)