Geoffrey Wood

If we can keep the Christians thinking of themselves as sinners not sons and daughters, we can make them view their relationship to The Adversary as a negative-sum-game: They fall in a hole, He pulls them out, they fall back in, etc... That way they never get anywhere; they__e always either standing next to a hole or down in it.

Even if their guilt actually does produce a good action, it will be the saddest good action you__l ever see, and it will be of no use to them because their goal is not to obey, but to feel less guilty, thus nothing about their souls will be reshaped.

You see my point? The average person has a very average notion of goodness to which they aspire averagely. To aspire to goodness in any remarkable way would be __ndemocratic_.

If they ever envision Goodness as a thing that exists outside them, some real thing they__e been called to participate in by their actions, well then, we__e headed right back toward The Virtues.

For example, your man might think: I don__ steal. Maybe on my taxes, everyone does that, but not in the way I heard so and so stole from his company. See? Those men for whose opinion he cares approve of embezzlement in one area, not the other. He uses them to maintain a claim on goodness while at the same time stealing.

Indeed if they ever once saw the endless supply of eternal opportunities The Adversary offers them every temporal moment of day after day of their fuddled little lives, they would stagger at the sheer industry and prodigality of His efforts. Conversely, if they ever gained a glimpse of how their ordinary actions actually effect and shape things not only under time but without, the very vast weight of that would almost certainly end in their becoming humble.

If God gives you a hundred bucks, you better bet He__ going to ask you what you bought.

This is why we apply the LCD Principle or Lowest Common Democracy. In short, this is social interaction based not on the best possible good, but on the least possible offense. Without saying so, the parties involved have entered into the following arrangement: What is the least we can all agree on and still get along? Of course, you can see this means no one is pleased.

Courtesy, not control, that was His means. Just as He requested the stars to sing and they leapt into bright being, so request was to be their rule over bird and beast, seas and trees, mountains and moons and all the dancing distances between the heavenlies filled with the unending song of Creation.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happy hour, the long weekend, the all-inclusive island resort, the sunny beach vacation. Happiness is somewhere else, someplace with boat drinks, some secret, distant state of bliss which if they were given would bore them in minutes.

Where faith costs nothing, faith loses respect, even to those who possess it.

I say __llusion_ of choice because, in many cases, the nature of their choices hardly reaches the level of will, but of merely perfunctory activity. For the most part, their desires are not too strong, they are too weak, apathetic and easily placated. They often can be tempted into doing Nothing.

As a rule, Americans are big on that word __hoice_ and some souls can be captured simply by dangling before the creature a continual, lifelong supply of things from which to choose.

Finally, slowly, drippingly, degrade the term Choice down to its most meager means: The red car not the black one. The 9:25 showing, not the 7:15. Ritz not Wheat Thins.

They all want to be happy. They all think they should be happy. And they__e quick to trot out their most cherished document and point to where they were promised __ife, liberty and the pursuit of happiness._ But you__l find that though they all parrot that little phrase, they think none too hard about that word __ursuit_. To follow, to chase, to inquire, to hunt, to seek. To track in order to overtake and capture. This they don__ do. Instead, having been offered a promise of happiness, they progress to a feeling of entitlement for happiness, then make the leap that happiness should, therefore, be easily won, automatic. There__ too much wrong in there to even scratch at that!

Life, liberty and the pursuit of gratitude, now that would__e worked. They would have been readily led to contentment, which would__e then better lead them on to happiness.

Never let them try out this gratitude, for they would immediately discover that it supplies the first and most important component to happiness: Contentment.

It seems The Adversary needs neither their guilt nor their request, but simply their return. In other words, since repentance is the process whereby guilt is turned into gratitude, He doesn__ mind if they skip a step and go directly to gratitude.