No Bad Malarkey Puns

Unless you only get your news exclusively from official Southern Baptist sources or Charisma Magazine, you've probably heard that Alex Malarkey, the boy whose 'visit to heaven' was chronicled in the book "The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven", has finally gotten word out that the book is his father's embellishing of stories he told to get attention. In other words, he never went to heaven (duh), told some wild stories, his dad turned them into a book and made off with loads of cash. Also, we found out that the publishers and bookstores knew this years ago, but continued to peddle it for filthy lucre.

Many pixels have been and will continue to be darkened over this saga, and frankly there will be better places to get news and commentary than here. My main contribution here will be to clarify one talking point and preemptively shoot down another that's sure to come out.

1) The publishers/bookstores just found out this was a fraud. I've already linked Phil Johnson's documentation showing that Tyndale House knew that Alex disputed the book as far back as 2011, despite their claims that they just found out last week. But that's not what I mean here.

I mean that they knew it was a complete load of garbage the instant they saw a manuscript, or even heard a pitch for the book. Seriously, this isn't Discernment 101, this is like the intro to the syllabus for Remedial Discernment.

Did Alex Malarkey die, go to heaven, and come back with a report for us? No. Did Colton Burpo or Don Piper? No. Did the next person to make this claim, or the next, or the next? No, no, and no. And so on.

They didn't just find out this was a fraud. They just found out (in 2011) that Alex was recanting his story. But they should have known all along this story was a bucket of horse manure. (On the bookstore side, the SBC officially condemns this type of book as heretical nonsense, yet their bookstore chain (Lifeway) continues to sell them. This is one of the major driving forces of #the15, a push to call elites to account for things like peddling heresy for profit.)

2) Unbelievers are slandering the church because of this. I have seen this lament, due to how many news and faux-news organizations are covering this and how the reprobate are openly mocking. But what I anticipate - I'm surprised I haven't seen it yet - is that this will be thrown at #the15 and the like. That is, they will say that the reason people are mocking Christ and his church is that they pushed to get the truth and make it known. If we had been content to leave things be, they would have no cause to mock.

I would suggest they take it back a step further - the cause for mocking here isn't that the truth came out, it's that the book was produced at all, then peddled and bought en masse. The problem isn't that Pulpit and Pen got the backstory to the book, it's that Tyndale House published it as if it were a Christian book at all. The problem isn't that people pushed Lifeway to discontinue the book, but that they ever sold it in the first place.

My crazy idea is that there would be less to mock if Christian publishers and bookstores showed as much discernment as a moldy tangerine, and reject obviously anti-Christian books like this outright. People aren't mocking because we've spoken when we should be silent, but because they were silent when they needed to speak.

Theology? Ain't Nobody Got Time For That!

Over the weekend I saw numerous reports of the death of Myles Munroe. At first I thought they were talking about this guy:

...which is odd, since I thought he died before the 138th episode spectacular, but I digress. Myles Munroe was a prosperity shill and heretic extraordinaire; your soul would probably have been in better hands with the incompetent Simpsons psychiatrist.

One of the clips making the rounds in the wake of Munroe's death puts the heretical focus of his prosperity teaching on full display:



Pure evil. This is prosperity teaching showing its true wickedness: Christ is at best a bit player in your quest for kingdom authority and blessing. Reprehensible.

Now that we have that out there, let me ask: just how different is that from the ministry philosophy of many churches in America today? This isn't an issue just in the extreme fringe that comprises 99.44% of Charismania; a (milder?) form of this problem hits even ostensibly orthodox churches all around us.

Preaching about "felt needs" at the expense of doctrine. The Willow Creek model of saccharine bare-minimum (aiming down to the lowest denominator, and often overshooting) sermons on Sunday, withholding any imitation of doctrine for mid-week services for the super-spiritual. The Saddleback model wherein everything is about you finding your special purpose, where somehow the book of Daniel is about dieting.

Youth ministries where scripture, if taught at all, takes a backseat to games and fluff messages 'to help them get through school this week'. Churches that never preach anything but how to have a better life - better friendships, a better marriage, doing better at work, better sex, better sleep, better breathing, better fitness, better whatever.

If I remember correctly, I was once told not to bother teaching about the doctrine of providence because people don't care about that, they just want to know how they're going to make it through the week.

So yeah, this Munroe character was a reprehensible heretic, and his idea that we shouldn't tell people about Christ and the cross is poison from the deepest pits of hell. But don't be fooled into thinking he was alone, or that his heresy died with him. That same wicked attitude permeates the church all around us.

Diet and Discernment

One simple step we can take to drastically clean up evangelicalism is to take how much we care about what we eat, and start caring about how we feed our souls at least a quarter as much.

But first, a word. Taking care of your body is good, idolatry is not. Burdening people with extrabiblical law is abominable. If you think the devastating effects of gluten are worse than the effects of sin, or that diet/exercise can overcome the curse of Genesis 3, you've got a huge problem.

Anyway, maybe you've seen this play out. Someone posts on Facebook about his latest dietary hobby horse, then not long after shares some 'inspirational' babble from Joyce Meyer or Tony Jones. Point out the foolish inconsistency of caring so much about what he eats while so casually imbibing spiritual poison at your own risk.

I'm not calling for everyone to give up eating well - though for some this is no doubt an idol requiring repentance. Nor am I suggesting everyone become discernment bloggers with the word "heretic" always at the ready. All I'm suggesting is, if you wouldn't eat an Arsenic Bar (now with real hemlock!), you shouldn't fill your mind with the spiritual equivalent. For example:

If you won't eat any food with artificial colors, but read and share the artificial Jesus quotes from Jesus Calling, you've got a problem.

If you throw a conniption over a picogram of gluten, but swallow prosperity teaching by the bucketful, there's a problem.

If you judge people who take their kids to McDonalds, but go to a church where the Biblical teaching is shallower than VeggieTales, you have seriously skewed priorities.

If you make fun of someone else's poor diet, while attending a church that serves up a weekly dose of cotton candy (think "life tips" with a verse or two to 'sanctify' it), it's time to grow up, on both counts, actually.

If you won't dare eat anything that isn't certified 100% pure organic all-natural, but gladly consume and promote a foreign gospel, like the modalist/prosperity sludge of TD Jakes, the word-faith tyranny of Joel Osteen, the "it's all about ME!" narcissism of Steven Furtick, or, well, pretty much anything on TBN, there's an issue. And you have no one to blame but yourself.

Guilt By Association - False Prophets

Scripture contains several tests for prophets in passages such as Deuteronomy 13 and 18, and Jeremiah 14. The people were to evaluate the prophecy for accuracy (did it come true?) and fidelity (was he directing them to false gods?), as well as the character of the prophet (would he speak presumptuously in God's name, while contemptuously disregarding previous revelation?). Any prophet who failed these tests was to be rejected, the evil purged from their midst.

As Michael Beasley points out, the part that is easy to miss is that these tests were for the people every bit as much as for the prophet, if not more so. "For the Lord your God is testing you, to know whether you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul" (Deut 13:3b). Will they love God enough to purge the evil and follow Him wholeheartedly, or will they despise God and allow the false prophet to remain and lead people astray?

"In the end, fallible prophecy relabels false prophecy under the pretense of a genuine gift. By redefining prophecy as that which includes both truth and error, one must wonder how any of this communicates the supremacy of Christ and the New Covenant in His blood. In all of this, a very crucial message begins to emerge: those who declare themselves to be a prophet of God are making an extremely serious claim. Not only was it important that such a claimant be evaluated via God's prescribed tests, but the congregation was to be tested by means of their action or inaction. In the case of their inaction, they were counted as accomplices of the false prophets, worthy of the anathema of God."
From The Fallible Prophets of New Calvinism by Michael Beasley, Kindle location 653

The test is no less relevant for us today. There is no shortage of false prophets today, people claiming "thus saith the Lord" when the Lord most definitely hath not saith. Do we love God enough to purge them from our midst (via excommunication and warning the flock), or do we allow their false prophecy to metastasize and lead people astray?

Make no mistake - if we do nothing and let them stay, we invite the judgment due to them onto our own heads. God has made it clear that He enforces guilt by association. If we choose to allow the continued presence and influence of those God says to remove and silence, we become accomplices and share in their wickedness. But if we love God, we will purge false prophets from the church.

A Common Word Between Christians and Sabellians

Friends, it's time for something I rarely participate in - some hardcore, full-throttle ecumenism.

A big stink is being raised - yet again - over a Trinitarian church group mixing with Sabellian (or modalist, or oneness pentacostal, whichever you prefer) pastors. This time the group Phillips, Craig, and Dean, consisting of three modalist pastors, has been invited to lead worship at a Southern Baptist event. By now you can probably predict the arguments being made on both sides, from the "we shouldn't be led in worship by pastors who preach damnable heresy and worship a god who is different from the actually-existing God" to the "come on, aren't they Trinitarian enough?!?".

Enough already! All this divisiveness is just so... divisive? Anyway, I think we can all agree that this bickering over things like "should we extend the right hand of fellowship to rank heretics and false teachers in gross violation of scriptural commands" just needs to end. What we need is a solid middle ground, somewhere we can stand with one foot firmly planted in both camps. Here is my modest proposal for an awesome solution which should make everyone happy:

One God, two persons.

Genius. It's so incredibly brilliant, I'm surprised the team writing for the sock puppet known as the 'Mark Driscoll' didn't propose it sooner.

I suggest we all agree to this immediately, and work out the fine details later. Does God eternally exist as two persons, or manifest himself in two forms at various times? I guess we need to pass it to find out what's in it!

Just think of the alternative! We'd have to go on carefully considering scripture, practicing discernment, learning from church history, parsing statements designed to deceive to reveal the true intent, putting up with whining and accusation when we warn that someone's favorite teacher/musician is a wolf trying to lead astray God's people with destructive heresy, and worst of all, thinking. It's just so... so... so... HARD. Ain't nobody got time for that!

No friends, this is clearly the way forward. You're welcome.

Bug or Feature?

Is it a bug or a feature? Anyone who's worked with new software or has a programmer friend (and if you do, God bless you) will be familiar with the concept. The shiny new program does something... unexpected... and you joke about whether it's an error, or a feature they just neglected to tell you about. Some are wonderful, but often it's something wrong.

Anyway, I thought about that when I saw this tweet from Adrian Warnock defending(?) the Charismatic movement in the wake of the Strange Fire conference:

If we researched & criticised all the crooks, cons, and cookies in the Charismatic Movement we'd have no time for anything else #StrangeFire
— Adrian Warnock (@adrianwarnock) October 17, 2013

So first off, I'm not sure if he's offering a defense or conceding. Wasn't it a large part of the Strange Fire case that the Charismatic movement is overwhelmingly full of "crooks, cons and cookies"? It would be tempting to just say "you're exactly right, now what are you going to do about it?" and move on.

But we need to press a step further.

It's obvious to anyone (except maybe discernment masters like James MacDonald and Mark Driscoll - who, lest we forget, absolutely should know better) that this movement is overrun by heretics and charlatans. It's nice to see Warnock agree. But the question remains, is this a bug of the system, or is it a feature?

Is the flood of "crooks, cons, and cookies" a bug - an error resulting from a few bad lines of code in an otherwise sound program, that can be fixed by a simple patch? Does it just need a minor recalibration, maybe a reboot, and everything will run smoothly? No doubt this is where Warnock stands - it's a good program, but inevitably something goes wrong somewhere, and BOOM - heretics!

Or is it a feature - is it how the system is designed? Is this overwhelming amount of heretics exactly what you'd expect when the system works? I think, and I believe MacArthur and friends made the case very convincingly, that this is an utterly predictable result of the distinctives of Charismatic theology. It's not an occasional aberration; the faithful ones like Piper, Grudem, Warnock, etc are the aberrations.

What else would you expect from a system that promises ongoing divine revelation apart from scripture? People will say all kinds of garbage and claim it's God. Or some will define prophecy down, so God's word will become errant and/or can be ignored at will. Gee, what could possibly go wrong with that?

What else would you expect from a system that teaches a second-tier, higher-plane experience for only some believers, which manifests itself in a particular physical act? Do you think maybe people will try to make themselves do that, and fake it till they make it?

What do you expect when such obvious fakery cannot be questioned under fear of blaspheming the Spirit?

We could go on, but I think that's sufficient for now. Why would we expect anything other than an overwhelming number of blatant false teachers, when all the distinctives of that theology promote the faking of supernatural revelation and signs? Another programming saying comes to mind - garbage in, garbage out.

Nebuchadnezzar and the False Prophets

We could learn a lot from a pagan king.

Now, I don't mean that in a Willow Creek "let's ask wicked business and political folk how they do things and model our church after that" type of learning. I mean, there's an example in scripture where a pagan king gets something right, something that we in the American church all too often get wrong. I'm talking of course about King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon's dealings with false prophets in Daniel 2.

There were a whole bunch of magicians, enchanters, sorcerers, etc in Babylon, people who claimed to have supernatural powers, access to the divine, blah blah blah. They enjoyed a pretty good living and formal government sanction. But then one night, Nebuchadnezzar had a dream that was clearly of divine origin. He brought the dream to his supernatural specialists for an interpretation - and that's when their problems began.

Because it was such an important dream, Nebuchadnezzar wanted assurance that he could trust the interpretation. So he devised a simple test - the one who could tell him the dream was the one who could correctly interpret it. After all, he reasoned, if this dream is from a god, surely it would be a trivial matter for that god to reveal the same dream to his chosen interpreter. He put the challenge before his divine experts - and they didn't fail, they didn't even try.

Nebuchadnezzar drew the only logical conclusion. They were frauds. For years they had been collecting their money and putting on a little show, but now he really needed them. Now there was something truly significant that he desperately needed to understand, and they didn't even pretend like they could do anything about it. They were utterly worthless when it really mattered, so what good were they? Worse, this was the first time they could show their true divinely-granted power, and all they could show was that they didn't have any. They had been lying to him, and if there's one thing tyrants don't like, it's finding out they've been deceived. They were deceitful false prophets, claiming to speak the words of gods when they didn't, and he reasonably decided to kill every last one of them.

Of course, the story doesn't end there. The dream was not from merely a god, but from the actual God. And there was a true prophet in their midst, Daniel. God revealed the dream and its interpretation to Daniel, who proclaimed the very word of God to the pagan king. Nebuchadnezzar was a great king, but his kingdom would fall and others would rise in its place. But one day would come a kingdom established by God, which would crush all the kingdoms of this world. As John would record centuries later, "The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever." At the name of this Lord of lords, every knee will bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. Amen.

But back to Nebuchadnezzar - what can we learn from his example, even though he was still a wicked unbeliever? He had no tolerance for deceivers who claimed divine power and divine words. Once it was clear they were charlatans, he decided to get rid of their poison. Why don't we?

The church is full of frauds who claim supernatural powers they don't have. False prophets who claim to speak for God when they don't. Charlatans who claim they can heal but can't. Wizards and magicians of all sorts who claim to be extra-special conduits of divine power, whose miracles elicit laughter rather than awe, whose divine words of wisdom are bad pop wisdom, whose prophecies which aren't outright false are less impressive than Ed Glosser, Trivial Psychic. Deceivers defaming the name of Christ with their wicked shenanigans.

Why do we put up with it? Why are we so much less discerning than a wicked king of olde? Once he knew they were deceivers, he went to get rid of them, through execution (the same punishment God ordered for false prophets in Israel). Once we know these charlatans for what they are, we should get rid of them through the New Covenant parallel - excommunication. Unless and until they repent, goodbye, and good riddance.

Does that seem too harsh? Suggest for me a more appropriate way to deal with those who say "Thus saith the Lord" when the Lord most certainly has not saith. Name a more suitable punishment for those who claim divine inspiration for advice that is worthless at best and destructive at worst. Tell me how best to handle those who mock the Spirit with wretched shows like this and this, or those who put on displays of 'power' accompanied by rank heresy, or those who claim a stream of divine revelation apart from scripture.

Really, I'm open to suggestions. Because a century or so of playing wait-and-see with a tumor doesn't seem to be slowing its growth.

Should We Follow Gamaliel's Advice?

Acts 5:38-39 reads:

"So in the present case I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone, for if this plan or this undertaking is of man, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God!"

Recently I've been seeing this come up over and over, exhorting us to stop fighting against perceived false teachers, heresies, and unbiblical practices. If it's not true, the reasoning goes, it will die out and go away. And if you're wrong and it actually is true, well, you don't want to oppose God, do you?

Is this an appropriate use of this passage? I think not, for numerous reasons.

First, it's an inference drawn from a narrative which is exactly the opposite of direct commands, such as Titus 1:10-11 and 1 John 4:1-6, as well as descriptions of the church such as Ephesians 4:11-16. In interpretation, the clear always trumps the unclear; clear doctrinal teachings explain the narratives. To subvert clear, unambiguous teaching by making it subordinate to possible inferences drawn from narratives is twisting the Bible on its head. It's a sure-fire recipe for disaster.

But even if that clear teaching wasn't there, would this even be good advice for Christians? True, it's the words of scripture - but it's the words of a blasphemous enemy of the church plotting the best way to eliminate any memory of Jesus Christ*. Well guess what, the words "He has uttered blasphemy" are recorded in scripture about Jesus - should we therefore hold that Jesus is actually a blasphemer? Of course not. Nor should we swallow this utterance unquestioned. At the very least, we need to have the same skepticism we use for the speeches of Job's friends.

And putting that aside, is it even good advice? Really, how often has "just ignore it and it will go away" worked? Maybe with an annoying little sibling you might get lucky occasionally. Maybe. But a health issue, a weed problem, a leaky faucet, Milton, or a subversive movement? Not likely.

No, I don't think this was good advice we should emulate. I think it was providentially terrible advice, just as God providentially made Absalom listen to Hushai's awful advice rather than Ahithophel's counsel. God protected his people by making their enemies act foolishly. By the time they got around to full-on attacks, it was too little, too late.

This advice of Gamaliel's is directly contrary to God's commands, was aimed at destroying the church, and proved to be spectacularly awful. Why, exactly, should the church follow his advice now? Oh that's right - it's those who are promoting unbiblical nonsense and want it to go unchallenged who suggest we should. How about we just obey God instead?

By the way, do you think they actually believe what they're promoting? Here's a test - go to one of their churches and start teaching, say, the full gospel, the sufficiency of scripture, etc. Do you think they'd let you go unopposed or shut you down? Exactly.


*Because he had been mentor of the Apostle Paul, I've often heard people speak of Gamaliel as if he surely must have been a Christian himself. And maybe there's some early-Christian literature describing his conversion, I dunno. But in this story, he's clearly not a Christian. He compares Jesus to some rabble-rousing nobodies and schemes how to make people forget about him, too. Certainly he doesn't speak up affirming Jesus as Lord and Christ! And a few paragraphs later, when we see his great disciple Saul, what is he doing? Assisting in the murder of Stephen, and going on a Christian-killing rampage. So his top man was a persecutor, he rejected Jesus as Messiah and wanted the church to just go away. We think he was a crypto-Christian... why, exactly?

Honor and Disagreement

Election night, about three seconds after my Facebook news feed lit up with the bad news, this article showed up in my Google Reader feed. (Yes, I still use an RSS reader. So what?) There were countless others like it, but that's the one I bothered to read, so it's the one I'll interact with.

First off, I don't totally disagree with anything in the article itself. We can debate whether that should have been the very first thing to write about - this election was a total disaster and will have horrible consequences, and it wouldn't have hurt to spend a little time lamenting that. But as far as the truth - yeah, it's all correct. We are unequivocally called to honor the President, just as Peter exhorted his readers to honor the emperor even as he was lighting them on fire. Let's face it - as bad as I believe this is, and as bad as it's going to get, it's tough to say we have it as bad as Nero's victims.

Let's not pretend we're exempt from the numerous commands to honor those in earthly authority over us. Someone else's sin never excuses my own. So this brings a dilemma - how do we honor someone in authority over us with whom we vehemently disagree? And this applies not just to government officials - how do you honor your parents, your employer, your church, when they do something you disagree with, especially if it's outright sinful?

The answer, as it usually isn't, is not "balance". As in, "we need to balance speaking the truth with honoring them". The big problem with balance is that it requires two things to be in opposition. Here's a hint - if God unequivocally commands two things, they are not in opposition. They are to be obeyed always, fully, simultaneously. We don't have to decide when to be full of grace and when to be full of truth. Grace always, and truth always. Same thing here - always honor whom honor is due, and always stand for what is right. The question is not how to balance them, but how to do both simultaneously.

This is where I throw it to you, dear readers. Here's your assignment (for the next four years): how do we object to sin without sinning ourselves? What does it practically look like to stand against the sinful (or unwise) actions of those in authority over us, while giving them the honor God says they are due?

There are numerous Biblical examples we can consider. The apostles before the Sanhedrin or Roman authorities repeatedly throughout Acts, Daniel and friends serving pagan kings (and pronouncing judgment on them!), John the Baptist confronting Herod, Nathan confronting David, and many other prophets standing against kings of Israel and Judah come to mind. So pick an example, and tell us how he stood for righteousness without tarnishing his witness through sinful action or attitude.

Declaring a Moratorium

Today I would like to submit a modest proposal.

I believe we should declare a five-year moratorium on pretending Brian McLaren is a Christian and letting his anti-faith teachings have any influence in the church. If, after five years, no clear evidence of repentance has been displayed, the moratorium will be extended.

Discernment and Yardwork

One of the most sorely lacking disciplines in American evangelicalism today is the discipline of discernment, simply knowing the difference between right and wrong. The proliferation of prominent false teachers and faulty gospels (prosperity gospel, oneness pentacostalism, openness, etc) speak to the general disinterest among professing Christians towards sound Biblical teaching. In fact, one of the fastest ways to find yourself on an island is to question a popular teaching or teacher by comparing their ideas to scripture.

It's not a fun thing to do my any means, but it's completely necessary if you care about your own spiritual development or your church's health. In fact, one of the strongest warning passages in the Bible harshly rebukes those who do not "have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil" as immature unrighteous infants. So God takes the practice of discernment very seriously, and it's worth taking some time to look at here.

But first, some musings on my life as a homeowner.

After we got married two years and a couple days ago, Tricia made the move out to Chicago with me. We stayed in my tiny one-bedroom apartment a few feet from the train tracks for a couple months, then took the plunge and bought our first house. This of course introduced me to a whole new world of responsibility - maintenance, especially the yard.

We had looked at this house several times before buying it, and it seemed that some landscaping work had been done by the previous owners. But because we were looking in late fall and early winter in Chicago, we never actually saw the yard before buying it. Every time we looked, it was covered in snow. Even the day we moved in, there was a major blizzard. It wasn't until around March that all the snow finally melted while we were there (it may have gone away a few weekends while we were out of town, and promptly snowed again), whereupon we discovered additional landscaping in the back yard. Nice.

Here's the thing though. That spring, when plants started growing in the landscaped area, we had no idea what was what. We had never seen what plants were supposed to be in there, so we didn't recognize which sprouts were good and which were weeds. So that first year while we were learning to recognize what belonged and what was an invader, we had to let things grow a bit longer before trying to pull the weeds. This year, now that we know the good plants and some of the weeds look awfully familiar, we can get the evil ones rooted out much faster. And new types of weeds we didn't have last year - well, they're clearly not the good plants we want, so they're easy to spot and make go away.

That's not to say weeding is easy now. Far from it - it's one of the most persistently annoying things we have to do. Getting them all up takes effort, and it hurts, and some of them have nasty thorns, and there's a lot of other things we'd rather be spending our time on, but if we want our garden and flowers and stuff to be healthy and productive, we need to eliminate the weeds that choke the life out of them. It's hard work, but it must be done.

Oh, and the weeds keep growing back. This is especially true if you just pluck what's above the surface and don't dig down to get the root. If you just deal with the visible surface, it'll keep growing back in the same place over and over and over and over and over and over... No, if you really want to get rid of it, you need to dig out the root. Find the place where it draws its strength, and attack it with a vengeance. That'll stop it from growing back there immediately, and just as importantly keep it from reproducing and spreading.

But no matter how well you clear your yard, weeds will come back. All it takes is one kid in the neighborhood blowing dandelion seeds in the air, and you'll find them. You can have a pristine yard with nothing but full healthy grass, but if you let your guard down at all, you'll have nasty weeds before you know it. Diligence is key. It's not enough to root out the weeds once and be done with it. It's something you have to continuously watch for, and every time it looks like they're coming back, you need to put a stop to it before it takes root and reproduces. Know what your lawn and garden are supposed to look like, and aggressively attack anything that doesn't belong.

Oh yeah, discernment? See above.