"He Who Controls The Default, Controls How The Game Is Played"

"He who controls the default, controls how the game is played"

-Cubicmetre

A fair point, in minecraft and real life.

By default, Windows computers will show you a news article on startup.

It's subtle and unobtrusive, most people won't really notice them, much less think about them or dislike them.

Of course, if for some strange reason you did, you can always take the 1 or 2 minutes to google the very specific part of settings you need to go to to turn it off. Problem solved!

Do you see the problem? MicrosoftTM can show everyone using their computers any article they so choose. Of course, most people won't read it. Some might just read the headline. But, far more dangerously, most people will only register it subconsciously, and almost nobody will bother to turn it off.

If, God forbid, MicrosoftTM had a narrative they wanted to push, this gives them an incredible power to do so without people even realising.

Incidentally, the last 3 articles I saw before I took the time to figure out how to get those articles off my start up were all telling me about the wonderful things AI is doing for humanity. Funny right?

Hear me out, but I think the university system has become one of the most effective indoctrination systems possible, producing the desired mindset in the student near invariably.

Firstly, there is agenda setting. The topics of debate, the options presented. We debate not whether God is real but if He is good, not whether Big GenderTM is good but how it interacts with post-colonial logics, not whether humans are logic-drive consumers but how we can harness this to efficiently consume our way to Nirvana. Every department, module and academic has centuries of layers of preconceptions and ideologies baked into what they teach, and the don't (nor could they, in fairness) disclaim this. It takes the grace of God and hefty extracurricular study and the right friends to understand this as fast as it is being taught to you.

Second, and building on this, there is the myth of neutrality. Most departments are obsessed with appearing scientific, and objective. They want to be like maths or physics, merely relaying the facts of the matter. They can and will deduce the truth of psychology, of economics, of ethics, even of poetry through technical language and shoehorned mathematical diagrams.

However, it is my firm conviction that this approach is mythical: not only can politics or ethics not be solved in an equation, but neither can science. They both involve stories.

At the beginning of every scientific endeavour is a human mind that desires an answer to a question that interests them, usually because they want a specific answer, because it fits a specific story. The same is true of every poem written, every political theory constructed. They are all telling stories, whether true or not. Let us not forget the scientific method came to Descartes in a dream. Science is inextricable from narrative and rhetoric. Maybe, MAYBE scientific data itself is unbiased, (but even then we must ask who gathered it, how, and for what reasons?) but as soon as a human mind touches it, organises it, draws conclusions, it becomes part of a story. That story will fit the worldview of the scientists almost every time, except for supremely objective scientists faced with data that undeniably contravenes their worldview (but in most cases, an experiment like this would simply not be performed). I'm not suggesting that science is largely wrong (in fact it's mostly right), but that it is not the whole truth - it is selectively pursued and used to show that which fits the narratives of those doing the science. That's just how humans work.

And so in our materialist culture it is no surprise that psychology will tell you religion is a delusion, neuro-science that human minds are a bunch of neurons firing and that love is a chemical reaction, biology how man rose from sheer probability and will continue to rise to near Godhood, physics how the universe created itself and will one day be reduced to nothing, ethics how God is evil and mans intuition is sufficient for morality, history how Christianity is evil, politics how we will solve human conflict by taking justice into our own hands, economics how we will achieve heaven on earth by building it ourselves.

All these disciplines have a story they want to tell quite divorced from any scientific data, and God, if He has any role at all, is the villain. Of course, nobody knows the answers to the mystery of consciousness, the origin of life, the origin of the universe, the purpose of humanity, what it means to be good, how humanity might be saved. But whatever those answers are (and we'll definitely calculate them soon just give us one more century!!!!), they certainly do not include God, and you will be derided for suggesting it. Most material these disciplines produce will show God doesn't exist and is evil, because that is obviously true to the people producing it. And they will sell you this as objective, neutral information.

Third and most importantly, every piece of work you produce is in no small way a pass/fail for your future. Actually failing an assignment whilst maybe not something that would get you off the course would almost certainly restrict your future job or study choices. The pressure is immense, and subconsciously you know exactly what story your marker wants to hear. People give higher marks to academic writing which agrees with their worldview (or at least is a plausible option in their worldview, I read one ethics paper which laid out possible arguments for a position and casually said 'of course, religious arguments can be excluded since they are not reasonable'). They just do. Nobody is impartial. It's not a thing a human can be. So nine times out of ten without realizing it you buy into the preconceptions, the worldview, and the ideology of the module and you pick a safe option and you re-tell the story they want to hear. Because your future depends on it, because it is presented as neutral fact, because the options given were vetted from the start, and because this is all happening in a subconscious, momentary flicker of hesitation.

And what's more, you believe it to. Because you can't just write a 4000 word essay interfacing with some of the most complex ideas around and be convincing and do enough research without it leeching onto you. You can't just tell them what they want to hear but privately disagree - you come to the forefront of that narrative and you actually build and develop it. You smash your mind over the rocks of these ideas. It becomes ingrained and second nature because you immerse yourself in that ideological space because that is the only way you can write a good piece. You will write the essay they want to read, and you will fully believe every word of it.

So, your options are 1) resist fully, lose friends, status, grades and future by suggesting in writing that humans might have souls or that love might be real or that there is a God who has a place in the mechanics of the universe. 2) try to appease both - write a story that is within the scope of the modules plausibility area, but still good and true. Lose some grades, lose some of your integrity. Despite your best efforts, swallow some of the story they are teaching you. 3) Try to ignore the story, sit on the side lines. Focus on an area so small and insignificant that it doesn't affect any big ideologies at play. This is easier to do in some subjects than others. But, if you do it well you can get pretty good grades. But you will be censoring yourself and you will not find much truth or satisfaction in your studies. You will also buy at least some of the story they are telling you. 4) Go along for the ride, accept what they teach you, teach it to yourself. Get good grades.

This is a choice you can only make for yourself, I don't know what the best way is. For most people, 1-3 aren't even possible. How would you realise you're being indoctrinated if you already agree with the story they are telling you? If you have no other convincing, detailed, and evidenced story to tell the university, then maybe they're right. Trust the experts, after all.

Which brings me to the fourth, and most genius part of this apparatus: the people most indoctrinated, who have fully bought the story of their department, who sing it sweetly with all their hearts - they become the new academics. Dissenters are marked away - they become irrelevant, and importantly, stupid. The intelligent zealots are promoted to teach a new generation.

I honestly think that you are intellectually bludgeoned into conformity from day one of university. I imagine this is true of the southern Baptist seminary through to oxford. To keep your faith through this is hard. You need a solid foundation going into it, and state education is loath to provide that. To change it would be even harder: the people aware of the problem and willing to resist aren't exactly given tenure. I think we need more honesty and humility from academics, and more diverse options available across different institutions. In any case, we need the grace of God.

Invariably the most exciting features added to Minecraft are the ones that make it even more of a sandbox, they allow greater customisability, easier modification, new possibilities, new abilities. The more basic and technical the better - the copper bulb (and everything it does for technical Minecraft) generated far more excitement than the armadillo! Custom enchants, data packs, custom paintings - these are the exciting updates; freedom. Options.

I wonder if God felt the same way designing us and our world. Giving us opposable thumbs, laws of nature which mostly follow neat mathematical rules, neural plasticity, customisable genetic codes, a system of elements and chemicals we can write on a spreadsheet and manipulate in an equation.

We live in a world far more richly customisable than Minecraft, with even more coherently designed interlocking systems that we can understand and utilize with our current tools.

There's a reason half the technical Minecraft community has 15 PhD's and turned down a Nobel prize - technical Minecraft is a (much simpler) form of the same scientific endeavour: exploring, understanding, and pushing the limits of what the world's mechanics allow.

Bonhoeffer, writing in Weimar Germany, talks about how one can live a comfortable, secular, Bourgeoisie life whilst still being respectable and 'Christian'!

Not so anymore! There is much secularism must answer for, but I will say this in its defence - it will eradicate the normal, respectable, dead Christian. "Churchianity", cultural Christianity, and nominalism are all dying rapid deaths amidst secularisms' derision, lies, mockery, and cultural persecution.

More and more these days, if someone tells you openly they are a Christian they bloody well mean it.

Praise God!

Saying something is a metaphor and then proceeding to ignore what was meant by it is still disagreeing with it!

If I say 'don't worry that 30kph sign is a metaphor' and then proceed to gun it through a residential area, I have still ignored the meaning of the sign!

Saying 'oh Jesus' sinlessness is a metaphor' 'the resurrection is a metaphor' 'the final judgement is a metaphor', and proceeding to live in sin/unrepentance still means you're ignoring the teachings of the Christian faith!

If you're gonna be Christian, actually believe the Christian faith. Heresy packaged as textual criticism is still heresy.

Desperately need a book set in the fens of old England, following a family's experience of the enclosure act and industrial revolution ripping their community and way of life apart over the course of maybe a century, perhaps with a time skip to their descendants living in the now dry, industrial, unrecognisable Norfolk. Maybe with a hopeful glimmer at the end or something.

Seriously. This setting is incredible I don't know why more people's imagination aren't captured by this. People lived in cottages miles apart and used stilts to walk across swampland between homes, most were subsistence herders. Think of the folklore, the culture, the community, the oral, ancient practices still alive in that strange land. And this is only what, 400 years ago?

England had 'natives' once. And what happened to them is happening to all the other natives still left around the world.