Lots of heresies in the “standard fare”, as they’ve by and large all capitulated on abortion, gay marriage, women’s ordination, unitarianism, etc — all things their own founders would be horrified by and would no doubt be left in deep repentance (which is what we should all be doing).

I agree fully with where you’ve set your house, and I came to much of the same conclusions.

Where I struggle is that the doctrinal drift is inevitable without real church authority (pointing to Christ).

The conservative Reformed churches that still try to hold the line (and God bless them) lack the means to stop this drift, and I’m unfortunately left with near zero confidence that by the time my children are adults those same churches (if they still exist) will be conservative and traditional, on the contrary you can expect female pastors advocating for abortions at all of them, causing yet another schism of conservative reformed somewhere else, leaving the most unholy congregations in their wake.

It pains me to say it but it’s clearly a pattern of bad fruit, and I’m left with trad versions of Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholicism, humbling myself as it were to churches with apostolic succession (where the gates of hell have not prevailed).

Love truth, wherever it may take you.

The only justifiable reason to hate central banks or fiat or zionism or whatever -ism is because it’s speaking in lies, and the only reason lies and deceit are offensive is because Truth exists, and can be known.

What we call paganism or “neopaganism” is not what was celebrated in ancient times.

Paganism involved animal human sacrifices, especially child sacrifices — and not for wanton cruelty but deeply embedded into their theological systems.

Aztecs and Mayan are the most recent and well known, but even the old Norse rituals were horrendous, see the Uppsala Temple Sacrifices, or Blot, or the funerary rituals involving rape, torture and execution of a sex slave, or the infamous“blood eagle” executions.

These kind of human and animal sacrifices (often mixed together, and often with an element of perverse sexuality, such as rape before execution) are surprisingly common in pre-Christian “pagan” traditions.

It was often labeled “satanic” because “satan” just means “adversary” or sometimes “accuser” depending on the context.

And while most ancient religions were folk or indigenous to a specific place and people (a local deity), the big pagan religions we know of (Greek, Norse, Roman, etc) were universal and had syncretic means to incorporate other religions/deities.

Most famously the Romans would put every god of every conquered city in their pantheon and give them Latin names. They would sacrifice to these deities of conquered people. The Hebrews and their “one God” being the most famous exception (which proved intolerable to the Romans).

The early Christians were actually called “atheists” by the pagans for refusing to acknowledge the pagan gods as gods, and the early Christians (mostly Jewish Christians) saw these “gods” as created spirits, usually fallen, unclean spirits, demons.

“Demon” didn’t have a negative connotation amongst the pagans (see Socrates’ daemon), the negative connotation came later, most likely as a direct consequence of the bloody pagan rituals themselves, which were adversarial to Christianity in those days.

Remember the Romans fed Christians to lions as entertainment, and made it a point to persecute them, executing them in humiliating ways (e.g., Peter was crucified upside down).

Much later, in our modern age, the secular view saw ALL of these religions as “spiritual” expressions where things like rationality and logic and truth are claimed to be supreme. Hence all religions are treated as a list of mythologies rather than worldviews people lived by.

Turns out, those concepts (logic, truth, and even beauty) are the fruits of Christendom. No ancient pagan culture understood “truth” as an attribute, e.g., “Veritas” (Latin for “truth”) was a pagan goddess, same with Aletheia (Greek for “truth”).

Truth in the ancient world was not an attribute, not a what, but a who — truth was a person, a deity. The Christians understood that Truth was Christ (the way, the life, and the truth).

And nowadays, as the fruits of secularism die off, as people question whether truth even exists, maybe it’s all subjective, maybe it’s all “will to power”, maybe we’re in a simulation — you’re witnessing a return to the ancient worldviews, including the barbarism and ugliness that became associated with “Satan” in the first place.

Think about this as you’re plugging in to the chaos of modern life. The pagans used to say that we are the playthings of the gods. Christians simply claimed those “gods” were demons, and they offered a way to truth, and not to be a plaything of demons.

And now in a world removed from Christianity (in the Nietzschean sense) we get to rediscover what it’s like to be a plaything of arbitrary “gods” (principalities and powers).

All of this, to a large extent, is why people are looking at ancient religions in the first place, including ancient Christianity (which has answers to these questions of truth and meaning) and rejecting modern secular Christianity or the lifeless new-atheism in favor of some kind of spiritually that can explain actual life experiences. It’s why neopaganism is a thing or why occult practices are popular, people are seeking, and those seeking *truth* inevitably find their way to Christ (not the antichrist of secular Christianity).

Sharing a draft of a related essay (I’m in the middle of thinking this through, but the gist should be clear).

There’s unfortunate flaws within Protestant churches, especially reformed churches.

They begin with undeniable power, forging Christian communities that stand as historical triumphs. E.g., the Puritans in the early America colonies built disciplined piety, near-universal literacy, and covenantal societies, the very foundation of what became the United States — this is the goal of today’s Christian nationalists, and proof that Reformed elements (Scripture-first, accountable laity, lived-out faith) are necessary for a church to thrive.

Yet these same elements prove insufficient for multi-century fidelity.

They simply do not stand the test of time. Harvard (1636, Calvinist seminary), Yale (1701, same), Princeton (1746) all slid from robust Calvinist/reformed theology to secular and antichristian, not just abandoning their roots but now openly fighting against the mandate of their founders.

Denominations repeat this process: PCUSA held the line into the 1950s, then green-lit same-sex marriage by 2011; the UCC, born of Pilgrim covenants, now platforms transgender clergy as doctrine.

This is no fluke or one off, it’s the same depressing story over and over.

It goes like this: democratic sessions and assemblies invite progressive capture; confessions erode from strict to “essentials” to optional via majority vote; conservatives, boxed out, schism away, gifting the husk of their former churches to antichristian liberals who parade it around like a skin mask (e.g., former Puritan/reformed churches are today funding abortions).

Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, despite their many issues, have mostly escaped this antichristian fate.

And every Protestant, especially reformed Protestants, should understand what is missing such that their churches repeatedly fail the test of time:

1. Insulated hierarchy — authority is vested in life-tenured bishops, with permanent synods whose legitimacy derives from apostolic continuity, not electoral cycles.

2. Sacramental ontology of office — ordination confers an indelible character; public heresy severs the minister from the sacraments and from the Church itself, not merely from a paycheck.

3. Irreformable canonical tradition — Holy Scripture is interpreted within the unbroken patristic consensus; no majority vote can redefine marriage, the Trinity, or the creeds.

4. Schism — formal separation is excommunication, not a strategic rebrand with the building intact.

Reformed churches typically secure none of these. History’s verdict is merciless: absent these orthodox guardrails, liberalization is not a mere risk but the inevitable fate of every conservative reformed church.

Know them by their fruits — the founders of every mainline Protestant church would (by their own writings) admit that the gates of hell prevailed on their churches.

And worth pointing out that ALL of this was made possible by the great schism between east and west (cemented after the sack of Constantinople, by the west, during the fourth crusade).

Meanwhile the gates of hell have not prevailed against Eastern Orthodox (despite murderous/genocidal attempts from communists), and the same is true of Roman Catholicism (despite numerous scandals that by all accounts should have destroyed them) — and thus it remains an absolute tragedy that His church remains in schism, all while some of the most pious and impressive Christian theologians in history have ended up in reformed movements that ultimately seeded the ground for antichrist churches.

I’m not a Catholic but this just isn’t true — and I don’t just mean in the ancient pre-schism catholic church, I mean even today in the latest Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), this isn’t true.

There’s much to complain about with the RC church, but one nice thing is that their “magisterium” systematically articulates every aspect of their theology with painstaking precision (dating back pre-schism, with later innovations that they refer to as “doctrinal development”).

The east may criticize that the west over intellectualizes the mysteries and misses the “phronema” (the heart), but from a western and especially reformed perspective RC provides an exact articulation and exegesis on these topics.

For example:

Salvation is initiated and completed through Jesus Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, which provide infinite merit for the redemption of humanity (CCC 1992; Hebrews 7:25)

Justification begins with faith and baptism, infused by God’s grace (CCC 1987–1995; Romans 3:24). Good works are necessary as a response to grace, not as a prerequisite or independent contribution (James 2:14–26).

And where it aligns closer to Calvinist/reformed confessions goes back pre-schism, to Augustine. Catholicism explicitly rejects Pelagianism (and semi-pelagianism) and affirms there is no human effort towards salvation without grace, that God is 100% responsible for your salvation, and man is 100% responsible for sin and rebellion against God.

The seeming contradiction was resolved earlier in Chalcedon (5th century, pre schism), that the person of Christ, fully human and full God, has a divine will and human will — and a “synergoi” between the two, that is, man and God cooperating (from man’s perspective free will, from the divine perspective complete sovereignty).

The Catholic rebuttal to reformed confessions (and TULIP more generally) is similar to the eastern (e.g., confessions of Dositheus) — basically a series of anathemas that most reformed theologians actually agree with, such as explicitly stating that God is never the author of evil.

The concerns from EO and RC are about these edge cases where Calvinism leads to moral determinism, or deism (clockmaker God) — and it’s important to point out that this is exactly what happened, e.g., to the Puritans (the most hardcore Calvinists and Christian nationalists to ever exist — whose theology I love, but the bad fruits of Harvard and Yale are undeniable).

Similarly, I’d be careful about the “violating free will” line, even staunch Calvinists reject that way of thinking as it leads to the view that God is the author of evil. The reformed position on this is technically not that different from the EO and RC position (despite all the Internet strawman versions). I think best articulated in that Jonathan Edward’s quote.. which RC and EO fully agree with.

What happened to the Puritans?

It is perhaps the greatest irony imaginable. And a lesson for today’s conservative churches.

The Puritans embodied Biblically centered, ultra-conservative Christianity: orthodox, rigorous Calvinists, aiming to forge a “city upon a hill”, founding what became a large part of mainline American Protestantism, founding universities such as Harvard and Yale to train orthodox clergy and uphold divine covenants.

Puritans built tight-knit communities with strong Biblical social structures, that were an undeniable foundation to the American colonies and eventually states (especially in New England).

At first this appeared successful. The exact goal of many of today’s conservative Christian nationalists.

But what is the Puritan legacy? Secularized institutions now championing theological liberalism, Unitarianism (rejecting the trinity), Universalism, churches promoting LGBTQ+ “rights”, environmental “justice”, promoting atheism and humanism, advocating for abortion, funding abortion, and claiming the murder of an unborn baby is “healthcare”.

If you see a church today with rainbow flags and clear woke propaganda, openly advocating for abortion, there’s a good chance it is a descendant of a Puritan church.

The “fruits” (Matthew 7:16) of Puritanism are directly antithetical to their own Biblical conservatism.

Did the gates of hell prevail?

One imagines not a single Puritan founder could look at the legacy of their churches and congregationalist communities and not be horrified.

Not just a failure, but a kind of demonic mockery of Christianity, arguably the worst and most antichrist churches and institutions that have ever existed have come from the Puritan lineage.

The lesson is hopefully clear, one needs more than Biblically centered Christianity, one needs more than conservative principles. This might be a hard lesson for today’s staunch Calvinists (it was for me), but the rotten fruits are clear.

Very well said, there’s also a religious angle to this, as central planners hit the so-called “pricing problem”.

It is the same whisper from that old serpent, “ye shall be as gods”

What prices are measuring is the continuously changing and subjective values of all people in a market, it makes what should otherwise be unknowable (pure chaos of all of our whims and passions and wants), not only knowable but quantifiable. Thus to overcome the “pricing problem” central planners would need to “be as gods” and fully control the continuously changing and subjective values of all people, denying even the pretense of free will, a kind of total totalitarianism.

It is, to be clear, impossible for central planners, both logically and Biblically, and the Bible is really clear on the beastly horrors that await those that go down that path (which our entire civilization is running towards).

It is fascinating how all is being revealed.

The demons, the objective evils of the world, are on clear display as if a veil has been lifted — and now we’re witnessing that the lie of the antichrist (that you earn your way to heaven and don’t need Christ) is starting to be revealed, which creates the opportunity for the gospel to be proclaimed to all.

It’s called “good news” for a reason.

Because *you* and not just Trump are indeed not bound for heaven, and never were. And deep in your heart you know that.

It is only through Christ that those gates will open, and only to those that repent and truly follow Him. It was His perfect faith, His death on the cross, His resurrection, and His ascension to heaven (both as God, and as a man, “behold the man”) that made this straight and narrow path a reality — the good news is that there is a way to salvation for all of us sinners.

Christ is Lord

Christ is King

Life is really confusing. And Christianity even more so.

The plain truth of Christianity becomes easily obscured by the chatter of the various “Christianities” and especially the chaos of easily falsified interpretations that have become the norm online. If you find yourself engaging in this chaos, repent, this is not truth-seeking, and it is certainly not Christ that you are participating in.

The very existence of the different denominations, all the way back to the great schism, is heartbreaking, tragic beyond measure, that our pride (east and west and every reformer) our own egos and political ambitions, became more important than Christ who is in our midst. If we want iron to sharpen iron, it must begin with humility to Christ.

In His mercy God allows these harmful schisms (harmful to us), a divine patience that is impossible for me to understand.

Like with the parable of the prodigal son, neither brother was “right”, the older brother was rebuked, and only through profound humility did the younger find his way back to the loving embrace of his father. And when I see sincere Christians misrepresent or ridicule other Christians, assured their interpretation is “right” and all other denominations are wrong or that you just need a Bible (or inversely, pretending they’re all right), we may need to stop and reflect that we are *all* wrong (all of us), for if truth was on our side who could be against us? There wouldn’t be schisms if truth was what we were seeking.

All lies die. Only truth remains in the end.

Only through profound humility can one even find truth.

You cannot debate or ridicule or coerce or deceive your way to truth (those just put more beams in your eyes). And yet how often do we faithfully acknowledge or even understand truthfully other denominations? How often do we misrepresent other interpretations, or criticize them while being blind to the faults in our own?

All it takes is ONE passage in scripture to falsify your interpretation, yet people will cherry pick only what serves their interpretation, their ego as judge of Christ and His message.

Obviously the schisms continue to exist because of this— truly it is a way to humility.

Let yourself be proven wrong, whether your non-denominational or reformed or Baptist or Catholic or Orthodox — let yourself *be* wrong, because you are not God, for only Christ is *right*, and to the degree you are actually right, you are at best the older brother to the prodigal son, and at worst lost in outer darkness.

That’s obviously true, but not what I’m talking about.

Yes, he’s referring to anarchy in the classical sense of no rulers or authority, voluntarism — which is a shallow philosophy and can be applied to economics or politics, sure, but when he says “Bitcoin is anarchy” this is just false, presupposing mathematics and an orderly universe, a network protocol, a monetary system, even a stable game theory, how the state will react over time, how new economies will form, none of this is “anarchy”

It’s like saying a bicycle is anarchy…

You can’t have “nothing”, truth is always grounded in something— especially mathematics, believing in the mathematics is believing in the order and stability of the universe of which you are a part.

It’s incredibly shallow thinking to call that anarchy.

It’s like staring directly at the face of God, the very word of God, and saying “there’s nothing here”

Because both are true.

If Christianity is true, then Christ rules in the midst of His enemies, and the powers and principalities of this world will hate him, and they will attempt to destroy His church, to pervert it into a church of the antichrist. The attacks against Christianity will come from both within and without, and liberal Christianity is the most obvious attack from within. This is why the push for female pastors and all the usually gayness of liberals.

If Bitcoin is true, then the unholy power of seigniorage and centralized economic control will fail, as people can opt out of their control, and they will attack Bitcoin from within and without, exactly as leftists have done with everything and not just the economy (from universities to school boards)

While it’s easy to find scripture passages that appear to support ANY given theology, logically, all it takes is one contradictory passage to falsify an interpretation. Dispensationalism fails badly here, but this is also where the strict versions of Covenant theology will run into difficulty — ultimately the Bible does affirm ethnic Israel as well as the gentiles grafted on, and a prophetic mass conversion of the ethnic Israel at the end times.

There’s also Christ making the old covenant obsolete (Hebrews 8:13), and not just fulfilled— which can be a challenge to both dispensationalism and strict versions of covenant theology, especially the subdivisions of legalistic covenants (Noahide, Abrahamic, etc)

All told, dispensationalism should be in the trash bin, especially as its fruit has become known. And strict legalistic versions of covenant theology will run its own risks. The old covenant points to Christ, not just partially but completely.

the goal is always Christ (the way, the truth, and the life), where we often find a “both-and” solution to these kind of dilemmas, which is reflected in early church fathers on this topic.

That said, the early church fathers did not mince words about the Jews, who lost the authority granted to them by God (the binding/loosing that Christ gave to the apostles), and that Jews had partially hardened hearts (God giving them over to their own sins).

See Chrysostom’s “Against the Jews” to get a sense of how Christians traditionally approached this subject — ethnic Jews are to be loved and the patriarchs and prophets honored, but Jews were seen as obstinate, blind to truth, and their synagogues filled with demons. And it is this group they believed will be saved in a mass conversion event at the end times.

Thank you for your time. I’ll not waste any more of it.

There is no “your truth” or “my truth”

There is only THE truth

And truthfully, the thing I fear most, and fear so deeply that it’s the only thing I do fear is God at the day of judgment.

“Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.”

~ Matthew 7:22-23

Trying hard is irrelevant. I could just as well be describing a mathematical proof, the soundness doesn’t rest in persuasion.

You’re directly assuming you understand what proof is, what truth is — while demonstrating you have no idea and couldn’t even explain what I just said.

In your worldview, what is truth? What is justification for knowledge? Or he’s an easy one, what is good? How do you know something is good or bad? Right or wrong?

My point is that you do have one, but you have no idea what that is and clearly have no idea what people mean by God.

Well, the answer is far deeper, think depth rather than the breadth you are describing.

You’re presuming you have access to truth, and that’s because you are coming from a culture that arose from a Christian ethos.

That culture is however being “deconstructed” before your eyes, and if you ask a philosopher at any university today, they’ll explain that there is no objective truth, you can’t really know anything, what is truth? Some might say “my truth” as if it’s relative. But they also can’t answer what a woman is… But if instead you have “faith” that there is objective truth (the truth), dive deep into that and see where it takes you.

What you were originally asking is verification for salvation, which is not a math problem, it’s a relationship with Christ. It’s like asking for verification that you truly love your wife. It’s not math, but it can be verified by anyone taking the time to learn about the relationship and carefully discern the fruits of that relationship.

The “trust me bro” version of salvation is wrong, not biblical, and the truth is a much deeper (and rewarding) question that is very much worth pursuing.

Sorry, I meant that by definition — that’s just a simplified definition of “belief”, what’s true (what’s real) and what’s not. That’s just the standard definition of “belief”, it can be supernatural or natural or mundane or axiomatic or whatever, belief is just a belief.

Knowledge is not self justifying, belief is required. You can’t have knowledge of something that you don’t believe in, what Aristotle defined as “justified true belief”.

Psychologically, the source of what you think of as knowledge is effectively your god, that is, the first principle (or the God archetype if you’re into Jung). For naturalists this is reason and empiricism — but there’s a reason (pun intended) that naturalists only exist in Christian cultures.

For some simple examples, there is no natural explanations for truth, goodness, beauty, or even numbers nor mathematics — we refer to these as transcendent categories. They’re real, and we can have knowledge about them, but only with Christian presuppositions about knowledge, outside of a Christian epistemology it’s all just word games (as postmodernists are want to point out). Our cultural bias is so thoroughly shaped by these Christian presuppositions we don’t even see it, like water to a fish, we just act like these things are obvious (but there’s a reason this only emerges through Christendom)

It does, but go deeper for an answer — where does your definition and understanding of “truth” come from? How do we *know* what is true?

All ancient cultures understood “truth” as a deity. Veritas, the Latin word for truth, was a pagan goddess.

The Greeks got a little closer but Aletheia is also a pagan goddess. Socrates had his daemon. Plato a demiurge. Aristotle had a profound insight that there must be a first principle (a first cause that cannot be explained) and that it must be the logos (the divine word) of what he called the unmoved mover. But this was ultimately transcendent and unknowable to us mortals.

The Hebrew thought of logos as creator with a radical notion that humans are created in the image and likeness of God, and Christianity innovated with Christ as logos made flesh, connecting us mortals to the transcendent, to the spirit of truth (made flesh).

The presumption of objective and knowable truth is entirely born of Christianity. It is one of many “fruits” of Christendom than we tried to preserve but without the tree from which it grew.

We question Christianity with an implicit Christian ethos, exactly at a time when that ethos is disappearing in the west. And the consequences is that truth itself reverts to its old pagan relativism. We become playthings of gods (ideologies), and can’t even answer what a woman is.

But if you want actual epistemology, the radical view that humans can know truth, then you have Christianity, and only Christianity, as the source.

Yes, and unfortunately that kind of “cheap grace” version of Christianity became common in the last century, and has turned away a lot of honest truth seekers, especially young men. It was certainly promoted though, but so was Keynesian economics and a gender spectrum.

I think the new atheist critiques were apt to reject such silly versions of Christianity, the problem of course is that’s not historic Christianity but a modern secular version.

The deeper issue is that secularism is producing nothing but chaos and nihilism, and its core presuppositions are incompatible with Christianity. And of course our entire civilization and morality (such as universal human rights) is built on Christian presuppositions (this points back to Nietzsche’s famous death of God criticism, accurately predicting the atrocities of the 20th century)

Epistle of James is pretty clear on this (and this will upset many modern Christians), but “even the demons believe”, faith without works is dead, and “a man is justified by works, and not by faith only.” — this is the line that Luther famously tried to remove from the German translation of the Bible.

Man is saved by faith thru grace, but more specifically in Scripture man is saved by Christ’s perfect faith, not our own.

Faith is best understood as “faithfulness” (as in marriage) and not mere intellectual agreement (which is what James is clearly dismissing).

There’s a ton of verifiable historical evidence for the person of Christ as well as fulfillment of what He said would happen, as well as the miracles of his ministry and around the church. And plenty of saints such that we can have assurance are “in heaven”, but you’re right that the deeper mysteries of salvation as it effects you personally is not as clear, although in the negation it is — everyone knows what kind of life they could lead to not be saved. And if we’re very honest with ourselves we know the kind of life we should be living, what we’re called to, and that Christ is knocking.

Evil is not a thing per se, not a power in itself, by definition evil was not created (“And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good”), but rather evil is the absence of God and His grace.

“This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.”

~ 1 John 1:5

Exactly as darkness is not a thing, not a force, but merely the absence of light. And our rebellion from the true light of God is the “evil” in our fallen world, a God-shaped emptiness in our hearts (for we are made in His image, icons of the source of all that is good — our rebellion is the empty darkness we call evil).

“For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.”

~ Romans 7:18-19

I haven’t seen it. Seems slightly out of date but I’m not sure much has changed (maybe Google claiming they have up to 50 error correcting qbits)

Rapid does not mean magic. And “open” does not mean make-believe.

Technology is grounded in real engineering, not hype. Quantum computing is a cool concept, like cold fusion or Alcubierre warp drives. I’m hopeful for each of those, especially QC.

But until there’s a practical breakthrough it remains in the realm of fantasy, especially with respect to reversing hash algorithms and elliptic curve cryptography. Theoretical threats deserve theoretical countermeasures.

The framing that it’s advancing rapidly is just simply false, we’re short an actual breakthrough of scalable stable qubits. I don’t doubt such a breakthrough will happen, but I doubt very much the fiat-funded researchers and academics will be the ones to do it.

The early church understood this, and articulated this exactly in line with what you’re saying.

Death is best understood as an unnatural state, our souls were not intended to be separated from our bodies— such unnatural separation is entirely a consequence of death, which Christ overcame, in the flesh.

“If He had no need of the flesh, why did He heal it? And what is most forcible of all, He raised the dead. Why? Was it not to show what the resurrection should be? How then did He raise the dead? Their souls or their bodies? Manifestly both.”

~ Justin Martyr

“The Resurrection is the reconstitution of our nature in its original form. But in that form of life, of which God Himself was the Creator, it is reasonable to believe that there was neither age nor infancy nor any of the sufferings arising from our present various infirmities, nor any kind of bodily affliction whatever.”

~ St. Gregory of Nyssa