Christianity . Essays . Opinion . Politics
The Link Between Christian Nationalism and Nazi Germany
On April 5, 2026 by Jonathan Zdziarski“Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”
– Pope Leo XIV
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation reports receiving hundreds of complaints from U.S. service members alleging commanders have framed current military operations in Iran in terms of Christian end-times prophecy, namely God’s plan for Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus. At a recent Pentagon service, the Secretary of Defense War prayed for overwhelming violence against those who deserve no mercy.
The United States is not the first to embrace apocalyptic theatre as a major driver of foreign policy, and as a former evangelical familiar with this worldview, it is deeply concerning. There’s a stark parallel to history we must take seriously.
For the first several hundred years, Christianity largely took a posture of mercy and martyrdom. The concept of a violent and militant Jesus probably had its origins in the medieval period. The idea was first formally codified at the Council of Nablus in 1120, where Canon 20 permitted a clergyman to take up arms in self-defense without bearing any guilt; this was during turbulent times when Christian pilgrims were often massacred by the hundreds along their journey, leaving their rotting corpses along the road from Jaffa into the Holy Land. This one concession, intended to be a temporary measure, seeded militant movements in Christianity starting with the Papal legitimization of the Templars movement (“God’s Holy Knights”) and their involvement in the Crusades, extremist groups such as Alfonso I’s Brotherhood of Belchite, the Pastoureaux, and eventually reached into modern day militant Christian ideals.
Modern evangelical end-times beliefs are just shy of 200 years old, and stand largely upon a populist theology called dispensational hermeneutics, which I’ve written about at length. This once fringe approach to Christian theology grew out of a small movement of aristocratic separatists in Ireland in the 1820s named the Plymouth Brethren, of which a lawyer named John Darby was a leader. Darby had a disdain for formalism and rejected all prior scholarship, including the work of the reformation, which he believed was markedly deficient. As an anti-cleric, his flavor of nuda scriptura Christianity called for strictly literal interpretation of all scripture, and in isolation from patristic authors (church fathers), historical writers, or other sources outside of the New Testament. Rejecting church doctrine established for more than a thousand years, Darby built his own theological belief system referred to today as dispensationalism, which fundamentally altered how the Bible was interpreted. This interpretive framework forces a very specific worldview that restructures much of the New Testament around a militant and advancing Christianity. Prior to Darby, the book of Revelation had been largely considered a book of hope relevant to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD (the antichrist referring to Nero Caesar). Darby’s new theology forced Revelation to be interpreted as both literal and future prophecy. He also believed in a form of Christian exclusivity, considering his followers to be “pure” in an evil world, and the only true believers among an otherwise “ruined” church.
Darby’s fundamentalist theology gave birth to many of the concepts adopted in evangelical low churches today such as a secret rapture, a terrifying tribulation, and a third temple in Israel. These ideas were first preached in the United States in 1870, and fell upon the ears of Dwight Moody, who embraced it. With Moody and the help of his longtime friend Cyrus Scofield (notably also a lawyer), this tiny separatist group ultimately influenced Christianity in the Americas and helped create what most associate today with the Evangelical Church; the arm of the Christian church in America today largely claiming Christian nationalism. While strong modern evidence suggests Scofield fabricated a fake Doctor of Divinity degree, dispensationalism heightened in popularity around 1910-1915, with the publication of his Scofield Reference Bible which attempted to authoritatively indoctrinate Christianity with a dispensational interpretation. This following was positioned to gain appeal from events across the next several decades. As Kim Riddlebarger writes in A Case for Amillennialism, “Several important social and cultural factors made dispensationalism popular among American evangelicals, who had been overwhelmingly postmillennial just a generation earlier. The horrors of World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the tense Middle East situation can all be explained by the dispensational system. When people are uncertain about the future and afraid of what might come to pass, dispensationalists assure them that when things go from bad to worse, the church will be raptured from the earth and Christians will not be around to experience the great tribulation or the wrath of the Antichrist. In this way, dispensationalists offer comforting answers to painful questions.”
The 1918 Influenza breakout had killed millions and birthed a spiritual madness for seances and the occult. The more pessimistic society got, the more it was open to accepting a fiery, terrifying end of world theology. Common recurring themes in the world such as inflation, war, disease and genocide are seen by dispensational Christians as a concise sign of the end of the world, even though these concepts play out over and over again throughout history. Reinterpreting an end times to now be set in the modern day had obvious appeal. No one could blame society for being tempted to parallel the Antichrist to Hitler, or the sufferings of the Great Tribulation to the horrible sufferings of the Holocaust, especially with a relatively new form of theology circulating that fit with current events.
Essays . Machine Learning . Opinion
The AI Learning Plateau
On November 2, 2025 by Jonathan ZdziarskiThere’s an old 1985 sci-fi series I remember watching as a kid. In Otherworld S1E1, the Sterling family, on vacation in Egypt, winds up in a parallel dimension where they encounter a civilization of self-evolved AI androids. Parts of the episode were amazingly spot on to how today’s LLMs are playing out. In the episode, the teenage son (Trace) falls in love with an AI, and the android itself is entirely convinced she not only has a soul, but is genuinely in love with him too. While this android city looks relatively human-like, and performs similar tasks (such as eating, working, etc), the show highlights some peculiarities where they’ve attempted to copy human behavior, but failed in eerie ways. One of my favorite scenes is where the Sterling family matriarch (June) visits the grocery store in this strange civilization, and finds only cans labeled, “Meat” and “Good Food”. The AI world seemingly lacked a crucial connection with humanity to develop creativity beyond a superficial level. The insults that robots cast at each other were humorously corny, such as “get your unit checked!”; when they asked if you were born yesterday, they literally meant it because that’s all they understood.
Essays . Machine Learning . Opinion
Can AI Compute Empathy?
On March 29, 2025 by Jonathan ZdziarskiEmpathy is often defined as understanding another person’s experience by imagining oneself in that other person’s situation: One understands the other person’s experience as if it were being experienced by the self, but without the self actually experiencing it.
Hodges and Myers, Encyclopedia of Social Psychology
Asimov’s Three Laws have long governed behavior for robotics, in both science fiction and as an accepted truth in the sciences. At the core is that a machine should ‘do no harm’. What was left out of the Three Laws is exactly how a machine should evaluate harms.
Today’s ML decisions are largely driven through reinforcement learning. Reinforcement Learning is a modern AI technique where a system can learn a sequence of actions leading to the most optimal outcome for itself. It essentially works by giving the AI a set of objectives (and sometimes penalties), and allowing the machine to learn from its own experiences what actions work best at accomplishing the objective. It’s how AIs can teach themselves to play video games, solve complex problems, and perform more sophisticated tasks as well. Reinforcement Learning is likewise one of the more concerning areas where catastrophic value alignment failures can occur. This is because it is largely centered around simplified human abstractions of rewards and penalties. As far as the machine is concerned, its job is to find the most rewarding means of accomplishing a task, with penalties only being considered if they are explicitly enumerated. Yet if control theory has taught us much, it’s that hazards cannot always be sufficiently enumerated.
Essays . Forensics . Machine Learning . Opinion . Security
The Shifting Power Dynamics of AI
On December 22, 2024 by Jonathan ZdziarskiOne of the focus areas of my graduate research is artificial intelligence. In my foray into adversarial game theory, I became acquainted with AI’s value alignment problem firsthand. In the development of a strategy-theoretic AI Chess agent project, I decided that it should lose points for allowing its pieces to be in jeopardy. The change resulted in the opposite effect I had hoped – significant losses, which puzzled me at first until I realized that the agent was killing off its pieces to prevent them from being put in jeopardy (once this was worked out, the strategy-theoretic approach dominated all other AI techniques, as it provides accurate non-terminal RL feedback). In the grander context of artificial intelligence, the potential for a catastrophic value alignment failure is all too easy to create as the result of short-sighted policies (such as my Chess strategy), or other simple miscalculations.
It’s in everyone’s best interest for AI to behave rationally, however many believe that – in the context of modern AI and deep learning – AI can never be formally verified to the degree that its actions can be deterministically predicted to be responsible. We tend to treat AI with the same sense of dualism that we treat reality, yet the one thing we do know is that AI is an entirely materialistic universe, and not dualist at all. Determinism of AI systems is based upon pure mathematics, with predictable causation. It is true that we can not always observe why AI behaves a certain way, however here we can learn much from classical Stoicism. The early stoics asserted that all qualitative states are explained by specific factors, even if those factors were not always observable. All subsequent qualitative states are likewise determined by the prior states and additional factors. No change can happen without an explicit cause. Whether it’s the logical determinism built through training data, alignment of real time with processing cycles, or reconciling other factors, every single micro state within a configuration of the machine can be observed with enough work. While modern philosophy essentially rejects the stoic concept of fate (of humanity), “fate” in computation falls square within the realm of an entirely deterministic material universe. AI lives in a material world, and she’s a material girl.
AI is largely unverifiable today because industry hasn’t created an affordable way to provide the computing power to observe all factors that contribute to a system’s qualitative state. Despite the inability to verify AI, industry has plotted a course regardless of edge cases that may sometimes be life threatening. Incredible progress in artificial intelligence has all but guaranteed it will be ubiquitous one day. There is little doubt that autonomous vehicles will eventually outperform human drivers, or that machine learning can more accurately diagnose a health problem. There is, on the other hand, great doubt that industry will act responsibly enough to ensure sufficient safety controls intervene when things go wrong. AI will likely never operate with rational judgment 100% of the time, nor will it ever understand the ethical implications of its action; they will always be prone to value alignment catastrophe. Of course, humans lack ethics and rationality as well, and so society controls this by holding us accountable for our actions. Unlike humans, however, industry is treated differently. This is particularly true with emerging technologies and even more so of those that we don’t fully understand. After all, how can one hold math accountable? Dismantling a broken robot does not solve the problem, particularly if the code is replicated across a million others. The connection between what holds true in a computer system and the outcome that is “fated” to occur is “based on an ontological foundation in which certain elements from logic and physics coincide” [6]; Chrysippus wrote of the close relationship between “what is true” and “what is in motion” long before AI in his Bivalence theory. A modern take is simply this: an AI’s “fate” is the direct result of a system’s physical configuration and sensor inputs. Imagine if he were alive to have observed AI, or even a good quality toaster.
Essays . General
Good Medicine for Imposter’s Syndrome
On July 21, 2023 by Jonathan ZdziarskiMuch of what we perceive about others in the workplace is their performatory character – what others are inviting you to believe about themselves; it’s an attempt to become the idealized version of ourselves by acting the part. Most of us are very competent in the field, but even still everyone gets imposter’s syndrome from time to time. For the self-taught professionals in tech, it can be the dead body we keep dragging around with us even while making advancements in the field. Some university graduates, too, have struggled with this decaying corpse that plagues the tech world. Left unchecked, it often leads to a devalued sense of self, depression, and even triggers other mental health problems – even in those whose performatory character would otherwise make them appear well put together. I got into professional tech work at the age of 16, some 32 years ago, at a small computer shop building PCs. Having never had the opportunities others had to go to college, I’ve had to grow and adapt my skillset over the span of my career. Imposter’s syndrome – and depression – has been along with me for much of my adult life. Even with what continues to be an excellent career at Apple, I’ve struggled with self-worth. Work environments can be nurturing and stimulating, and bring out the best in you; they can also be demotivating and devalue you – imposter’s syndrome can follow you around through both. I’ve figured a few things out about myself over the past 32 years that have helped me navigate some difficult environments. Nobody develops imposter’s syndrome overnight. Any sickness that is chronic requires a long term cure. There’s nothing anyone can tell you that will simply fix imposter’s syndrome; there are incremental ways to slowly recover from it though.
Oxford’s definition of imposter syndrome is the persistent inability to believe that one’s success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one’s own efforts or skills. In tech, this usually means we feel stupid because we don’t think we have the understanding or mastery we think we should. It’s interesting, though- people tend to often feel like it’s because they’re not smart enough. We are definitely smart enough to do this job. The reason we don’t have understanding isn’t because we’re missing brain cells. One thing that computer science is good at is abstractions, and that allows us to work with and learn higher level concepts without needing knowledge of the world beneath it. One might say it’s what makes computing so great. Imposter’s Syndrome seems to prey on the benefits afforded to us by abstractions to introduce uncertainties about our abilities. But there is a way to think in such a way that allows for these abstractions to exist, where X can remain unknown and it won’t bother you, but simultaneously see a universe where X fits in.
If you look at a lot of the brightest minds in computer science, there’s a distinguishable acumen about them that goes beyond simply knowing the subject matter. They have a scientific mind; able to not only explain something, but they’re able to theorize and reason about it, and able to analogize. These are the kinds of skills that make for not only a good scientist, but a good engineer. It’s these same qualities that seem most desirable when we measure ourselves up, and often what smart assholes do such a terrible job trying to mimic. But this acumen doesn’t come from reading source code, mentoring by coworkers, or from reading The Imposter’s Handbook. These qualities come from a combination of foundational knowledge, methodical reasoning, and discipline. Things a lot of self-taught people like me don’t initially get a lot of exposure to. What I think a lot of people want to feel is that they are legitimate. That their knowledge isn’t fake or piecemeal, and that they are armed with the discipline to reason, make advancements, and solve complex problems. So here’s the pat on the shoulder: You’re probably very good at the subject matter you’re trained in, and you are no doubt intelligent if you are working in tech. Here’s the hard: The abstractions we work with in computing have allowed us to develop gaps, and those gaps make us feel really dumb sometimes. To treat your imposter’s syndrome, we’ve got to work at this.
Christianity . Essays . Opinion . Politics
On Abortion and False Piety
On November 16, 2022 by Jonathan ZdziarskiThe priest shall bring her and have her stand before the Lord. Then he shall take some holy water in a clay jar and put some dust from the tabernacle floor into the water. After the priest has had the woman stand before the Lord, he shall loosen her hair and place in her hands the reminder-offering, the grain offering for jealousy, while he himself holds the bitter water that brings a curse. Then the priest shall put the woman under oath and say to her, “If no other man has had sexual relations with you and you have not gone astray and become impure while married to your husband, may this bitter water that brings a curse not harm you. But if you have gone astray while married to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a man other than your husband”— here the priest is to put the woman under this curse—“may the Lord cause you to become a curse[d] among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell. May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries. Then the woman is to say, “Amen. So be it.”
Documented use of an Abortifacient, Numbers 5:16-22
In May 2022, white evangelical Christians woke up to some rather unexpected news. A draft opinion had somehow leaked out of the Supreme Court, suggesting that Roe v. Wade would soon be overturned. Shortly after, it was. I single out white evangelicals here because, according to a recent Pew Research study, they are twice as likely to want to see abortion outlawed than other Americans (including other Christians). It would be an error though to conclude this means white evangelicals are the most pro-life. No no no, this is not the case at all. White evangelicals are no more pro-life than other religious groups, Christian or otherwise – they are, however, the most autocratic. Yet those who would use the Bible to institute government sponsored morality seem to have forgotten where the bodies are buried: also in their Bible.
The concept of abortion is nothing new. The practice of inducing an abortion as punishment for unfaithful women was once conducted as part of priestly duties in pre-Christian Judaism. A woman suspected of adultery, yet maintaining her innocence would be partially stripped, treated as an animal (right down to the presentation of an animal’s meal offering), and made to drink a type of holy water concoction; it was believed an unfaithful woman would abort her lover’s fetus and die within up to three years were she guilty (Mishnah Sotah 3). Holy water has a long tradition of being used to cleanse and purify, and so the implication was that the illegitimate fetus was evil, and therefore must be purged from the woman. Behind the scenes, this seemed to have more to do with the financial aspects of marriage contracts and intimidation than it did holiness, and the practice was eventually ended prior to the destruction of the second temple. Today’s American evangelicals take the opposing viewpoint of their ancestors – namely, against all forms of abortion – yet still firmly hold onto the practice of controlling women in much the same way. Yet while many other Christians value life just as much as autocratic evangelicals, we differ greatly from them particularly on a solution to the number of unwanted pregnancies in the country. The earliest Christians opposed abortion by adopting others’ discarded and unwanted live babies – a Roman practice known as “infant exposure” would leave abandoned babies in the trash or otherwise discarded after birth, left to die or be raised as slaves and prostitutes by others. It was this practice that many early writers condemned as “the worst abomination of all” (Philo of Alexandria). They wrote about Roman abortion practices far less. Yet while early Christians put their faith into action by sacrificially taking in these babies to save them from such a fate, today’s evangelicals largely believe opposing abortion through politics and legislation is the only solution. Most others believe it is an ineffective and dangerous solution – perhaps just as dangerous as the ancient practice that once caused them (or at least was perceived to; the practice’s effectiveness was highly questionable among rabbis).
Forced morality is likewise nothing new either. In the book of Chronicles, King Josiah breaks down the altars of false gods, tears down carved images, and rids Judah and Jerusalem of the ungodliness of the time. When his priest finds the Book of the Law, Josiah tears his robe and imposes moral rule according to the laws of the book. The chronicler Ezra writes, “Josiah removed all the detestable idols from all the territory belonging to the Israelites, and he had all who were present in Israel serve the Lord their God. As long as he lived, they did not fail to follow the Lord, the God of their ancestors.” An often overlooked detail in this story is that in spite of a society living under (and clearly practicing!) moral law, God tells Josiah that he will take his life early so that he will not see the disaster God plans to bring about. A useful object lesson can be found here: perceived morality counts for little when it is compelled. At the center of today’s controversy is not really Christian doctrine at all (there is no Christian doctrine concerning abortion), or even morality, but rather the same desire for power; today, that translates to the church’s desire for socio-economic power.
Christianity . Essays . Opinion . Politics
Evangelical Christianity is Broken
On November 15, 2022 by Jonathan ZdziarskiIn the beginning wickedness did not exist. Nor indeed does it exist even now in those who are holy, nor does it in any way belong to their nature.
Athanasius, Against the Heathen
I’ve devoted much of the past 30 years as an evangelical Christian “layperson” to Christian studies to try and become an educated one. Greek, theology, the patristics, and Christian history should be in the wheelhouse of every Christian, yet many never study their own religion, and merely live confined to the prison of their own prejudice. Most Christians can’t tell the difference between culture and doctrine, and often conflate the two. It is, therefore, of little surprise that what Christianity has become in America is more or less a product of a news cycle, and less about a gospel of a meek savior. Evangelical Christianity in America broke in 2020, though perhaps some would say it’s been broken longer.
Ever since, the church stopped being recognizable – even to many Christians – in her embrace of racism, hostility, and misinformation that many Christian believers proliferate. It often failed to resemble a church at all, but rather a counterfeit designed to resemble Christianity in name only, almost certainly alien to what was truly being worshipped. The year 2020 brought some of the worst out in the mainstream evangelical church – relatives, friends, and people I’ve grown up with – who were once a much-needed example of Christianity to me – have severely disappointed in how they’d conducted themselves, causing me to question if they ever truly understood their own faith.
Essays . Politics
How to Write Meaningful Assault Weapons Legislation
On May 24, 2022 by Jonathan ZdziarskiI originally published this in 2012, after the Sandy Hook shooting, and dust it off every time there’s a random mass shooting in the news. This post has seen the top of my feed year after year, as politicians continue to offer nothing, failing the majority of Americans who want to see new laws passed on firearms, prioritize mental health care, and integrate police more closely with schools to protect children, rather than compete with Wal-Mart to protect merchandise. I am deeply saddened by the recent mass shootings in the news, but even more saddened at what ineffective, impotent leaders we continue to elect in this country year over year.
I’ve been a long time responsible gun owner, by the old definition of what that used to mean. Like a majority of them, I’ve wanted more controls on semi-automatic rifles – particularly, assault rifles, for a long time. There’s idiocy on both sides of this debate, and both have some questionable notions about them. The extreme left seems to have developed an irrational fear and hatred of all guns and the extreme right ignorantly believes the only solution to guns are more guns. Consider this more sensible perspective from someone who spent over a decade shooting and working on guns, held NRA certifications to supervise ranges and carry concealed weapons, and up until some years ago – when I sold the rights to it – produced the #1 ballistics computer in the App Store.
While often obscure to most, there is – today – a system in place to perform intensive checks of individuals looking to own firearms categorized as highly lethal; the problem is it isn’t being used to control most assault rifles. Introduced in the National Firearms Act legislation, this system was applied to machine guns, short barrel rifles, silencers, sawed off shotguns, and other types of firearms that individuals can still legally own today, but with more than the casual regulation of AR-15s and other firearms. It could be changed to include semi-automatic rifles with the stroke of a pen. In my opinion, it should be, and in this post I’ll argue why I’d like the President and legislators push for this.
Christianity . Essays
Christianity’s End-Times Conspiracy Theories
On January 1, 2022 by Jonathan ZdziarskiWhat more is there for their Expected One to do when he comes? To call the heathen? But they are called already. To put an end to prophet and king and vision? But this too has already happened. To expose the God-denyingness of idols? It is already exposed and condemned. Or to destroy death? It is already destroyed. What then has not come to pass that the Christ must do?
Athanasius, On the Incarnation
Christianity introduced me to a God who interacted with humanity to offer a life greater than myself. This made a lot of sense to seventeen-year-old me. It still does. Christianity in America comes with a lot of baggage, though. Along with the powerful message of the gospel come a lot of strange ideas about the creation and destruction of the world. Depictions of a violent and terrifying last days are often portrayed in both Hollywood fiction, and often on Sunday mornings. I spent many of my younger years friend to a fireball end-times preacher, who sadly died of COVID recently. Having been immersed in a church community with end-times motifs often present, it became apparent over time that evangelical Christianity seemed to have conflated faith with magic, losing touch with historical Christian beliefs. Modern interpretations of end times prophecy have become increasingly more embellished within many churches, incorporating new themes from current events into a sort of theological composite to explain present-day unrest. This modern belief system has altered the entire world view of the evangelical church to adopt a militant, warfare-influenced mindset. The history behind this is quite fascinating.
The concept of a violent and militant Jesus probably had its origins in the medieval period1. The idea was first codified at the Council of Nablus in 1120, where Canon 20 permitted a clergyman to take up arms in self-defense without bearing any guilt; this was during turbulent times when Christian pilgrims were often massacred by the hundreds along their journey, leaving their rotting corpses along the road from Jaffa into the Holy Land. This one concession, intended to be a temporary measure, seeded militant movements in Christianity starting with the Papal legitimization of the Templars movement (“God’s Holy Knights”), extremist groups such as Alfonso I’s Brotherhood of Belchite, the Pastoureaux, and now reaches into modern day militant Christian ideals. End-times theories today evolve periodically within evangelical churches to reinterpret current events into an apocalyptic context. It sometimes attracts fringe groups with similar mindsets, as the ideology includes similar elements – oracle-sourced apocalyptic theories that lead to violent, anti-establishment outcomes. Today’s evangelical end-times worldview seems to have inadvertently given cover to white supremacy, replacement theory, and anti-government extremism. Yet this system of beliefs is in conflict with the teachings of Christ and hundreds of years of church fathers about martyrdom, pacifism, and government non-involvement. The obvious contradiction of a Christianity asserting a struggle that is “not against flesh and blood” somehow ending up with a literal war against flesh and blood is the result of a theological evolution that influenced how the church interprets scripture and forms doctrine today. To not believe in a brutal and imminent end times means, in many churches, that you don’t have a Christian faith at all.
Theories about masks, vaccines, the World Health Organization, and a new president were popular topics of end-times discussion during the COVID pandemic. The idea that anyone can speculate on end-times prophecy has attracted conspiracy groups like QAnon, which represent up to 25% of white American evangelicals (according to a 2021 survey). Denominationalism, while having some benefit, has also become a significant enabler of confirmation bias in the church, allowing for tribal systems of otherwise fringe beliefs to find support. End times beliefs tend to become stronger with political climate, or as a result of social dysfunction, and deep divisions in politics. Beliefs about masks, vaccines, and other current topics are today loosely joined to end-times concepts of one world government, the mark of the beast, eternal punishment, or other themes in Revelation. Conspiracy theories within the church’s walls have had very real consequences. A 2021 study from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) showed that some 58% of evangelicals believe scripture provides a reason to refuse the COVID vaccine. The same polling organization found that 18% of all Americans believe in the QAnon conspiracy the “government, media and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation”. As one evangelical pastor put it, “Right now QAnon is still on the fringes of evangelicalism… but we have a pretty big fringe.”
The modern-day evangelical end-times posture can be walked back to a shift in theological interpretation of the mid-1800s. The interpretive biases that posit this theology have altered Christianity in many significant ways. Concepts of a sudden secret rapture, seven years of tribulation, and a thousand-year earthly kingdom all rest upon a theological interpretation that is relatively recent, and of questionable origin. Such last days concepts find little support in historic Christianity, and are divorced from Christianity altogether in many denominations. American evangelicals, having been raised in this mindset, have denied vaccines and frequently have died on the basis of the theological system under which they were taught, firmly believing that they are honoring God in doing so. Yet it is not Christianity to blame, but a very flawed system of theology that has found support. Let us attempt to tease those two concepts apart.
Christianity . Essays
On Christianity
On December 25, 2021 by Jonathan Zdziarski“For no property of God which the mind can grasp is more characteristic of Him than existence, since existence, in the absolute sense, cannot be predicated of that which shall come to an end, or of that which has had a beginning, and He who now joins continuity of being with the possession of perfect felicity could not in the past, nor can in the future, be non-existent; for whatsoever is Divine can neither be originated nor destroyed. Wherefore, since God’s eternity is inseparable from Himself, it was worthy of Him to reveal this one thing, that He is, as the assurance of His absolute eternity.”
On the Trinity
St. Hilary of Poitiers
I’ve often been asked why an intellectual type guy such as myself would believe in God – a figure most Americans equate to a good bedtime story, or a religious symbol for people who need that sort of thing. After about 35 years of life as a Christian, my faith in God is the only thing that’s peeled me off the pavement through many hard times in my life, and helped keep me grounded during COVID. What God has to say about me – as a human – having intrinsic value, and deserving love (even in times when I didn’t love myself), is likely the only reason I hadn’t frankly pulled the trigger a few times in my life. But it is far from a crutch; it has pushed me to conquer my own selfishness as a human, to learn to forgive, to suffer myself to be defrauded for the sake of my testimony, and to serve something greater than myself. Striving to understand God, especially through all of the American nonsense that is in the church today, has been a thought provoking and captivating journey as well. I wasn’t raised in a Christian home, nor did I have any real preconceived notions about concepts such as church or the Bible. I didn’t really understand Christianity at all through my youth, other than from the perspective of an outsider – all I had figured was that he was a religious symbol for religious people.
Today’s perception of Christianity in America is that of a hate-filled group of racists that are too stupid to take a vaccine, and expect the world to end any minute. A title that many so-called Christians have rightfully earned for themselves. This doesn’t represent Christianity any more than the other extremes do, though, and even atheists know this. There is a real standard we are called to meet as Christians, and much of this country has fallen short. It doesn’t mean that God isn’t who he said he is, and it doesn’t move the bar of accountability for those that profess to be Christian. There are countless people who are not of this stereotype, who strive to love and to do good, who won’t judge you, and who try their best to walk out a life worthy of the Christian faith.
I’ve been a Christian since 1993, and am convinced, based on my experiences and my understanding, that God is more than just a story. But it takes looking outside of the white American evangelical culture that’s often portrayed as de facto Christianity to understand what God is about. I think most people already know in their heart who God is, and that’s why they’re so averse to the church. In recent times, there has been a cognitive dissonance between historical Christianity and the way the church behaves. Christians are equally mystified by this – but it does not invalidate everything that’s been written about God.
Essays . General
On the Psychological Demands of Working From Home
On March 22, 2020 by Jonathan ZdziarskiAs the angst and stir-craziness start to set in from the world suddenly being forced into lockdown, I’ve seen a lot of articles about working from home, by people in all walks of life, from programmers to astronauts. Most of them offer practical beginner advice, like go outside, plan a schedule, etc. etc. That’s all good advice to take in, but after a few weeks, you’re probably realizing there’s a lot more to making this work well. As the reality of our predicament is starting to sink in, it’s important to start thinking about the psychological demands of working from home. I’ve spent the better part of my 25 year career working from home, and when I started thinking about what, if any, wisdom I could share on how to make it work well, found that I’d come up with a lot of the same things I’d already shared in a post two years ago, Living With Depression in Tech. Working at home has some fantastic benefits, but also challenges that go far beyond basic discipline development. Being productive and successful at home comes down to changing your perspective – focusing on the impacts you’re having, believing in what you’re doing, and finding ways to grow and thrive on your own so that you can maintain your drive over the long haul.
Christianity . Essays
Christianity and the Cult Phenomenon
On August 1, 2019 by Jonathan ZdziarskiJoshua Harris, the author of “I Kissed Dating Goodbye”, recently renounced his faith and apologized for his awful book. I remember when it came out in the late 90’s, and still see the lasting damage it inflicted on two generations of young men and women. Harris ended up creating a toxic culture inside the mainstream church that would take two generations of Christian men back into the dark ages of devaluing women based on their level of sexual indiscretion, and helped fan the flames of homophobia and exclusion. His “sexual prosperity gospel”, as it’s been called, led to a life of guilt and shame for many, and created lasting scars that caused some to abandon their faith or their marriages later on in life.
Christianity teaches that a person’s worth has nothing to do with their sexual history (or orientation), but from Jesus, who was willing to die to reconcile humanity to God. We’re not defined by our sins, and we’re not defined by our past; we are defined by Christ. This is a far cry from the cultish fundamentalist legalism that Harris’s church taught for decades; the purity movement amounted to nothing more than a way for Christians to measure themselves and others up. It’s no surprise that Harris renounced his faith; if the faith he was practicing was grounded in such a flawed understanding of grace and intrinsic human worth, then by any measurement it was not Christianity. The truly sad part is that he convinced millions of Christians to adopt this same world view for more than 20 years, allowing it to hurt a lot of people before it became popular for leaders to finally speak out against it. Sorry, Josh, but an apology doesn’t let you off the hook.
But this failure wasn’t just of Harris’s own making: It was the complete failure of church leaders everywhere in elevating Harris’s status to a Christian leader. Harris was a mere 21 years old, and hadn’t even been to seminary yet when he wrote the book. Rather than rightfully dismissing his book as yet more of the trash writing of that era, the inexperienced youth leaders of that time (many of whom also lacked formal training) saw a way to get kids to act responsibly, without considering the consequences of his legalism. From piecing together accounts online, Harris’s own church reeked of a world of deep-seated problems, including sexual abuse coverup, abuses of power, control and manipulation of their congregation, and legalism running rampant. The church had become so damaging, much of his congregation ended up leaving, and there’s an entire blog dedicated to victims trying to recover from Harris and the rest of his church’s leaders. Indeed, it’s very telling to see the kind of culture his book came out of, and the horrifying fruits of it. When you read that Josh Harris has departed Christianity, this appears by all accounts to be a very good thing for Christianity.
Essays . General
Living with Depression in Tech
On August 22, 2018 by Jonathan ZdziarskiI’ve been trying to avoid writing about depression for a while now. Almost nobody in tech wants to talk about things like this. A stigma still very much exists around mental illness, and in tech with all its flaming, trolling, and fragile manhood egos, people have learned to be thick-skinned. It’s taken me years to realize that I never stopped struggling with depression throughout my dysfunctional childhood, and I’ve carried it through my teens and adult life with me. I was diagnosed and medicated as a teen, but didn’t fully understand that it still haunted me, playing the same old record grooves in my brain in adulthood. As my thyroid disease began accelerating, I needed to work even harder to maintain balance or the world would come crashing in. Struggling through my career and relationships, things became easier after I understood what was going on inside of me. I feel a certain responsibility to bring to light what is likely a widespread issue in the tech community.
Depression can manifest itself in various forms for different people, and my story isn’t “everyone’s” story. I can only write from my own personal experiences. Most of this has had lifelong personal struggles unrelated to work, and while one can probably deduce this, the focus of this post is handling professional challenges. You might identify with some of these issues, and that’s great if this post helps, but it also shouldn’t be used for self-diagnosis. Depression has been far worse than the details I’m willing to share publicly, and if you think you may be depressed, you should seek professional counseling.
I have no background in psychology; I’m just sharing what works for me. I have no background in medicine either, and having been on and off medication, I can’t recommend one way or the other. I do know that all medication has its limits, so learning how to cope is an important part to having a complete life plan. At the end of the day, I can’t solve your depression (or mine), but I can share how I’ve coped with it, and won some victories. This is a survival story that hopefully might have some meaningful advice for others.
Essays . General
How Social Media Changed Us
On March 23, 2018 by Jonathan ZdziarskiThe current young generation will soon have grown up without ever knowing what it’s like to not have social media. They’re also growing up without a sense of how society was before social media came into play. Whether you use social media or not, it’s likely affected your life because it’s changed how people relate to one another – including you. While there are many good aspects of social media and the concept of bringing people together, there are also many negative changes it’s had on how we relate to one another.
I’ve spent a lot of time observing others and how social media has affected them online over time, and seen the problems it can create. For me personally, I’ve never been happier to be off of social media than the past year or so when I finally ditched Twitter for good. Twitter is a creepy and toxic place, which seems to be exactly what their CEO wants it to be. I found that I didn’t like the person I had to become in order to stay on it. Most social media is a dumpster fire, but Twitter was a particularly awful experience. It simply isn’t worth the stress and distraction in order to relate to a bunch of randos on the Internet whose only goal in life is to cause misery. Social media doesn’t deserve to have the power to change you, but they do. Getting back to the humanity of relationships is almost like waking up from a bad dream: you’d almost forgotten the goodness in what normal relationships with others (professional, friendships, etc.) feels like.
So at the risk of the next generation never knowing what it’s like to have a normal relationship with others, I’ve written down just a few of the things that are important in building friendships and other types of relationships – things social media seems to have endangered… at least, from the perspective of this old Gen-X’er. Writing all of this makes me really miss how people were before social media existed.
Essays . General . Opinion
On the State of Open Source
On October 3, 2016 by Jonathan Zdziarski
I was just a teenager when I got involved in the open source community. I remember talking with an old bearded guy once about how this new organization, GNU, is going to change everything. Over the years, I mucked around with a number of different OSS tools and operating systems, got excited when symmetric multiprocessing came to BSD, screwed around with Linux boot and root disks, and had become both engaged and enthralled with the new community that had developed around Unix over the years. That same spirit was simultaneously shared outside of the Unix world, too. Apple user groups met frequently to share new programs we were working on with our ][c’s, and later our ][gs’s and Macs, exchange new shareware (which we actually paid for, because the authors deserved it), and to buy stacks of floppies of the latest fonts or system disks. We often demoed our new inventions, shared and exchanged the source code to our BBS systems, games, or anything else we were working on, and made the agendas of our user groups community efforts to teach and understand the awful protocols, APIs, and compilers we had at the time. This was my first experience with open source. Maybe it was not yours, although I hope yours was just as positive.
It wasn’t open source that people were excited about, and we didn’t really even call it open source at first. It was computer science in general. Computer science was a brand new world of discovery for many of us, and open source was merely the bi-product of natural curiosity and the desire to share knowledge and collaborate. You could call it hacking, but at the time we didn’t know what the hell we were doing, or what to call it. The environment, at the time, was positive, open, and supportive; words that, unfortunately, you probably wouldn’t associate with open source today. You could split hairs and call this the “computing” or “hacking” community, but at the time all of these things were intertwined, and you couldn’t tease them apart without destroying them all: perhaps that’s what went wrong, eventually we did.
Essays . General . Opinion
Free Software Always Costs Something
On March 19, 2016 by Jonathan ZdziarskiBack in the late 1960s, University of California, Berkeley, published its first public BSD licenses promoting free software that could be reused by anyone. A few years later, in the 70s, BSD Unix was released by CSRG, a research group inside of Berkeley, and laid the foundation for many operating systems (including Mac OS X) as we know it today. It gradually evolved over time to support socket models, TCP/IP, Unix’s file model, and a lot more. You’ll find traces of all of these principals – and very often, core code itself, still used 50 years later in cutting edge operating systems. The idea of “free software” (whether “free as in beer” or “free as in freedom”) is credited as a driving force behind today’s technology, multi-billion dollar fortune companies, and even the iPhone or Android device sitting in your pocket. Here’s the rub: None of it was ever really free.
Essays . Politics
Why You Should Uninstall Firefox and do Some Soul Searching
On April 3, 2014 by Jonathan ZdziarskiToday, I uninstalled Firefox from my computer. There was no fanfare, or large protest, or media coverage of the event. In fact, I’m sure many have recently sworn off Firefox lately, but unlike the rest of those who did, my reasons had nothing to do with whether I support or don’t support gay marriage, proposition 8, or whatever. Nor did they have anything to do with my opinion on whether Brendan Eich was fit to be CEO, or whether I thought he was anti-gay. In fact, I would have uninstalled Firefox today regardless of what my position is on the gay marriage issue, or any other political issue for that matter. Instead, I uninstalled Firefox today for one simple reason: in the tendering of Eich’s resignation, Mozilla crossed over from a company that had previously taken a neutral, non-participatory approach to politics, to an organization that has demonstrated that it will now make vital business decisions based on the whim of popular opinion. By changing Mozilla’s direction to pander to the political and social pressure ignited by a small subset of activists, Mozilla has now joined the ranks of many large organizations in adopting what once was, and should be considered taboo: lack of corporate neutrality. It doesn’t matter what those positions are, or what the popular opinion is, Mozilla has violated its ethical responsibility to, as an organization, remain neutral to such topics. Unfortunately, this country is now owned by businesses that violate this same ethical responsibility.
Corporations have rapidly stepped up lobbying and funneling money into their favorite political vices over the past decade. This radicalization of corporate America climaxed in 2010, when what was left of the Tillman Act (a law passed in 1907 to restrict corporate campaign contributions), was essentially destroyed, virtually unrestricting the corporate world from holding politicians in their back pocket through financial contributions. Shortly before, and since then, America has seen a massive spike in the amount of public, overt political lobbying – not by people, not by voters, but by faceless organizations (without voting rights). What used to be a filthy act often associated with companies like tobacco manufacturers has now become a standard mechanism for manipulating politics. Starbucks has recently, and very rudely, informed its customers that they don’t want their business if they don’t support gay marriage, or if they are gun owners – in other words, if you don’t agree with the values of the CEO, you aren’t welcome in their public business. This very day, 36 large corporations, including some that have no offices in Oregon, are rallying in support of gay marriage in Oregon. The CEO of Whole Foods has come out publicly in protest of the Affordable Care Act. Regardless of your views on any of these, there’s a bigger problem here: it has now become accepted that corporate America can tell you what to believe.
Essays . General . Politics . Security
On Expectation of Privacy
On April 25, 2013 by Jonathan ZdziarskiMany governments (including our own, here in the US) would have its citizens believe that privacy is a switch (that is, you either reasonably expect it, or you don’t). This has been demonstrated in many legal tests, and abused in many circumstances ranging from spying on electronic mail, to drones in our airspace monitoring the movements of private citizens. But privacy doesn’t work like a switch – at least it shouldn’t for a country that recognizes that privacy is an inherent right. In fact, privacy, like other components to security, works in layers. While the legal system might have us believe that privacy is switched off the moment we step outside, the intent of our Constitution’s Fourth Amendment (and our basic right, with or without it hard-coded into the Constitution) suggest otherwise; in fact, the Fourth Amendment was designed in part to protect the citizen in public. If our society can be convinced that privacy is a switch, however, then a government can make the case for flipping off that switch in any circumstance they want. Because no-one can ever practice perfect security, it’s easier for a government to simply draw a line at our front door. The right to privacy in public is one that is being very quickly stripped from our society by politicians and lawyers. Our current legal process for dealing with privacy misses one core component which adds dimension to privacy, and that is scope. Scope of privacy is present in many forms of logic that we naturally express as humans. Everything from computer programs to our natural technique for conveying third grade secrets (by cupping our hands over our mouth) demonstrates that we have a natural expectation of scope in privacy.
Essays . Politics
On Mental Health: How Medical Privacy Laws Destroyed Dad
On December 18, 2012 by Jonathan ZdziarskiI don’t normally write about such personal topics as family illnesses, but it is my hope that those who have gone through a similarly dark cooridor in their life – whether as a result of government control, or just plain ignorant doctors – would know that they are not alone in such frustrations, and to explain to the general oblivious public and incompetent lawmakers the consequences of their actions.
Essays
Do What Defines You
On February 15, 2010 by Jonathan Zdziarski“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Howard Thurman
A friend of mine was going on about really knowing people; “people… are not defined by what they do”, he said. The point he was making was not to judge people by the cover of what they do in life. But the deeper point that he may not have realized, was the tragedy in the truth of that statement. How tragic it is that we aren’t defined by what we do. It seems to me that, given the finite amount of time we have to live and become, that we spend more of our lives thinking about what we want to do than actually doing it.