{"id":298,"date":"2007-03-02T10:47:54","date_gmt":"2007-03-02T16:47:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.homecomers.org\/weblog\/index.php\/proportional-discipleship\/"},"modified":"2007-03-02T10:47:54","modified_gmt":"2007-03-02T16:47:54","slug":"proportional-discipleship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/homecomers.org\/weblog\/proportional-discipleship\/","title":{"rendered":"Proportional discipleship"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This heresy, which I&#8217;ve called proportional discipleship, mandates that a person&#8217;s commitment to the kingdom of God should not exceed the average spiritual level of the surrounding society by more than one standard deviation.<!--more--><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/homecomers.org\/350px-Standard_deviation_diagram.svg.png\"  align=\"right\"\/ alt=\"Diagram from http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Standard_deviation\" \/><br \/>\nAccording to the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Standard_deviation#Rules_for_normally_distributed_data\">empirical rule<\/a>, usually 68% of the population is within one standard deviation of the norm. That means that, according to the principle of proportional discipleship, we can be 34% more dedicated to God than the average, and still not be too different. And that&#8217;s good enough, isn&#8217;t it? <\/p>\n<p>This principle has profound effects in the areas of Christian ethics. It suggests that God doesn&#8217;t really expect us to follow him in any area where we have reason to believe that less than 85% of society will tolerate his position. After all, he is an understanding god, and knows our weaknesses. Anybody in the remaining 15% has gone too far in devotion to God (statistically speaking), and deserves whatever they get. <\/p>\n<p>Check my math. We may be onto something.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This heresy, which I&#8217;ve called proportional discipleship, mandates that a person&#8217;s commitment to the kingdom of God should not exceed the average spiritual level of the surrounding society by more than one standard deviation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-common-heresies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/homecomers.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/homecomers.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/homecomers.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/homecomers.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/homecomers.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/homecomers.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/homecomers.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/homecomers.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/homecomers.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}