Here at Kiln of the Soul virtual parish, there are several things your pastor emphasizes. I start from the position that God has called me. Then I lay out the things He has called me to share. You are quite welcome to come and pick from this buffet what appeals to you, or just sit back and watch the show.
Here’s what’s on the menu:
1. The broad superiority of Ancient Near Eastern civilizations over Western Civilization. Not that we pretend we can resurrect those ancient civilizations, but we can learn a lot from them. Indeed, God created them as the proper setting for His revelation, so if we don’t understand them, we cannot possibly understand His revelation. I invest a lot of time explaining why you can’t ignore this.
2. More specifically, Hebrew civilization and culture, plus the ancient Hebrew mystical approach to religion, are the proper model for our understanding of the Bible. I note in passing that Judaism bears almost no resemblance to that ancient religion, but this isn’t about hating Jews, just rejecting their claim to represent God’s truth. If they actually returned to the Law of Moses as taught by Jesus, we might take them more seriously.
3. We are not under the Law of Moses, and we do not balk at understanding the rest of those ancient civilizations. There’s nothing to fear from pagan religious learning, since the Bible showcases several people outside the central thread of narrative whose knowledge of truth was obvious, if only partial. When something they teach shadows the ancient Hebrew understanding, we remember that all truth is God’s truth.
4. It should be obvious that we reject mainstream Western Christianity, largely because it has already long ago rejected what we strive to teach. Neither their theology, nor their ecclesiology, is even vaguely similar to what the Bible teaches. Church History shows an early, rapid drift from the New Testament teachings, and things have only gotten worse.
5. From these foundations, we build a radically different approach to reality itself (epistemology). We have a different anthropology about what makes us human, what is and what should be the model for “normal.” We talk about heart-led living because we don’t let our minds rule. I talk about “quantum reasoning” as a far more pragmatic approach to thinking, including thinking about thinking itself. We seek to plumb the full depth of our human faculties, while recognizing their limits. It naturally results in a different approach to, health and wellness, along with psychology and other behavioral and social sciences.
6. I favor radical Open Access to information. If we have a broken view of reality, we won’t have any truth in the first place. If we strive to build on a better understanding, we have nothing to fear from what others think. The ultimate choices should not be made by the intellect in the first place; we have better equipment than that. In more practical terms, digital content cannot be controlled and it’s immoral to try. As a corollary, I support open networking access, too — not necessarily free, but open.
7. I favor Open Source software. This ends up being one of the hardest things I try to explain, because I don’t fit in with the Open Source crowd. Neither coders nor promoters really understand what they have and why it matters, and it’s only marginally better than other software, if at all. The mainstream Open Source folks have no clue what it means to love people and seek to set them free, only the freedom to do as they please (in terms of software design). It’s a strange religion. The theory of Open Source approaches moral goodness, but the implementation really sucks. Still, it’s just slightly better than other software, if only because it puts the user in control of a few things that matter to the user, compared to near zero control from commercial software development.
8. I don’t support activism as commonly conceived. I support struggling to help people as individuals. We cannot save the world and should not try. We cannot change the current situation to make things better. We can help people to see more clearly the truth and let them decide how to respond. I realize this is very unpopular, but is the future. We aren’t going to fix our current reality, but build a new reality. It will be, and it will draw whom it draws; we are not in charge. Our truth is a living thing itself, the ultimate Person of persons.
To people who aren’t drawn by this, it sounds airy-fairy. To those who hear its call, it is the most practical and useful way of living. You will need to make your own list. People who embrace any one of these things I promote will be closer to the God I serve, and that’s all I care about.
Addendum: In response to an offline question on #3 above — Over decades of study, I find that the kind of pagan activity condemned in Scripture is confined almost entirely to idol worship and fortune-telling. Almost all the stuff labeled as witchcraft, sorcery, magic, etc., is actually a reference to attempts at forecast the future for the purpose of planning your human behavior choices. Paul’s New Testament emphasis is that you don’t let demons help you decide how to live your life. He said that reverencing any deity but God is tantamount to demon worship. The whole point is acknowledging the One Creator as Lord exclusively.
Learning about the nature of things and conceptualizing how Creation works using different parables and symbols is not inherently sinful. Furthermore, there is nothing sacred about the Western calendar, particularly in the solar emphasis that ignores all the other markers God provided for us to note the passage of time and how to take advantage of His provision. God commanded us to use a lunar calendar in the first place. The Bible says He provided all the heavenly lights for our grateful use.
