2,000,763 Page Views - Five year evaluation of this blog - The theme of motivation

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Apparently, this blog passed two million page views some time overnight - an extra half million since last August when I last announced the numbers.

This seems like quite a lot. But this total is for 3252 posts accumulating over the past five years, and there is a plateau/ slight decline in monthly views and the average impact of new postings; so my impression is still one of gradual decline.

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It is now five years since I was sacked from the editorship of Medical Hypotheses, and I began daily blogging.

Since then, the blog has spun-off three small books, and launched the information that simple reaction times (hence general intelligence) has declined substantially since the Victorian era.

But my main work and justification has been to make a daily Christian resource to encourage and help potential Christians 'across the line' into self-declared faith.

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During five years my own Christian preferences and focus have changed more than once (although mainly in the early era, and not much over the past two and a half years); and this has been due to the same factors that I deal with in my postings - i.e. confronting some of the specific and personal stumbling blocks to faith, and inconsistencies within the faith, to try and reveal and simple and coherent core to Christianity.

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My belief is that Christianity ought to be understood as simple and coherent enough to satisfy and self-motivate simple people (including children) in a common sense fashion; and when explanations get complex and paradoxical, I think we have probably strayed and are in danger of paralysis.

However, at the same time we must accept that any simple and coherent explanation will certainly be incomplete and biased compared with reality (in fact this also applies to even the most complex and paradoxical explanation - compared with the incomparably greater complexity of reality) - but the point is that the most important aspects should be coherent, and the simple core should be the best possible basis for a Christian life.

My hope is that this will help people to be strong in their faith; since a Christianity which has a significantly sub-optimal focus, or is not readily comprehended by everyday reason, seems likely to be weaker and less effective as guidance - this is perhaps why professional theologians seem so often to have done more harm than good (especially to themselves).

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My main social theme, running throughout five years, has probably been motivation: the belief that mass demotivation (as a result of alienation, nihilism, despair...) is perhaps the primary psychological problem in modern society, the major deficiency-state; a conviction that only a religion can motivate sufficiently; and that only some among religions, and only some types of Christianity, motivate sufficiently and in the proper direction.

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The psychological end (or aim) of my theorizing is motivation; but as with all difficult situations thing have to get worse before they can get better. And it is the daily, moment by moment, micro-motivations which get people through the day that become the addictions which destroy us and our society - I mean the obsessions and addictions to the mass media, to sex, to mortal earthly status.

I regard man as living in the End Times because our situation is unique in world history, and there is no pendulum swing we can depend upon-to correct the potentially fatal problems - we are in a positive-feedback state where errors are not self-correcting, but instead error leads on to more error of the same kind.

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The problems of modernity are well known, and have been described for more than two hundred years; yet thanks to progressive Christian apostasy nothing effective has been done to address them, and people are mostly paralysed by the situation - with a small but influential minority actively making things worse. 

The root of the modern problem must therefore be spiritual warfare, purposive supernatural evil - where evil is defined and conceptualized as destruction of The Good - destruction of truth, beauty and virtue in harmony.

We inhabit a world where Goodness has been inverted to a truly extraordinary degree - nowhere is this seen more clearly than the sexual revolution: that battering-ram of modern evil.

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In a world of deadly, soul-sapping, demotivating bureaucracy - where most people are themselves bureaucrats - sex masquerades as Life, Life as Freedom, and Freedom as transgression and inversion.

Sex has been detached from The Good, marriage and family elaborately re-defined as oppression; sexual transgression, inversion (and recently disease) are relabelled 'tolerance & diversity' and promoted - zealously, aggressively, with fanaticism - as The New Virtue.

Due to the scope and reach of the mass media, very few are unaffected, or significantly undamaged, by this; there is confusion, paralysis, zombie-obedience; the forces of darkness are winning.

That is what I mean by End Times. 

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But, thank Heavens, the odds are stacked in our favour!

This world is temporary, and in the context of eternity - thanks to the work of Christ, and with His help - each one of us without any exceptions can (if we wish) withstand everything that the combined forces of darkness can throw at us - and emerge triumphant.

So, although there is every reason for pessimism, there is no reason for despair - but rather invincible hope should lend us indomitable courage.

And there can be no problem with a Christian finding motivations for action in such a world as we currently inhabit!

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