A Distance Too Far

Posted on June 18, 2024 by ehurst

In a discussion yesterday, we were reviewing the historical context of Acts 2, particularly the paragraph at the end of the chapter about the first few months of the church in Jerusalem following the Ascension.

It was what we call the “honeymoon phase” when groups are first formed around faith in Christ. It wasn’t quite so blissful later as the demands of reality set in. Later on there was the issue with Ananias and Sapphira, and then the Diaspora widows who had no elders to represent them.

Jesus died on Passover and Ascended shortly before Pentecost. That was a two-month period every year when wealthy Diaspora Jews came home to Jerusalem. They would leave not long after, going back to their businesses scattered mostly across the Mediterranean Basin. The majority of that first church were those Diaspora believers who had been caught by the gospel message just before they left. Something about this new covenant faith in the Messiah caused them to simply abandon their former lives and stay in town. Most of them sold their overseas businesses to other Jews and embraced the growing number of local believers as their new clan, their covenant family.

When you take away the Talmudic perversions pasted over the top of ancient Hebrew custom and instincts, the result was a heady excitement about going to the Temple for genuine worship of Christ and His Father.

The broader picture was linked to John 17:20ff, where Jesus prays that His future followers would experience the union of hearts that Jesus had with His Father. One of the questions that prompted this discussion we were having was, “How do we reclaim that unity today?”

Naturally, we had to invest some time in eliminating what it was not. It was not uniformity. The first church in Jerusalem would not have tolerated that sort of thing; it was part of their culture to resist the kind of social manipulation we have in the West. That discussion alone can take a lot of time simply because western Christians assume too much without conscious awareness, injecting their assumptions about life into the Bible, thinking that first century Hebrew society was much like ours is today.

They would not have tolerated our business-like atmosphere with its rather reserved social behavior expectations. Hebrews were all touchy-feely in private family settings. The first church was not the least bit formal; they didn’t have our rules of carefully measured familiarity and handshakes only. By the same token, they would not have tolerated the fake back-slapping familiarity, either.

Hebrew men in particular would demonstrate affection to each other in ways westerners would find quite uncomfortable. For the ancient Hebrew, if they couldn’t recognize you by smell, you were a stranger. These people were literally in each other’s armpits.

Now, step back a bit. While it’s not necessary to change our social habits, it is necessary to break down the inherent facade of western social interactions. Our social rituals are inherently hostile to genuine heart-led unity in faith, virtually demanding that we not actually get involved in the lives of others. The stuffiness of our northern European ancestors is no longer a survival trait.

In a church setting, I should be able to find a fellowship of men to whom I can tell my darkest secrets without worrying that it will lead to self-righteous ostracism or wider exposure. I should be able to find men who would treat my personal tragedies as their own, giving it a high priority, as I would theirs.

The few times I tested that in churches, it blew up in my face. I’ve had better luck getting personal support and acceptance from those outside the church. We all need support to carry our loads, not judgment and rejection.

In the end, this was the answer to the original question. The reason churches don’t see the miracles that were common in that first faith community in Jerusalem is because we have not built the atmosphere of unity that existed there. We don’t invest ourselves into the lives of our fellow believers. They aren’t family, but mere acquaintances from whom we maintain a careful measure of distance. Heck, we treat our own kinfolks that way.

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Divine Treasure Is Otherworldly

Posted on June 17, 2024 by ehurst

I want you to learn the concept of the middle path. What I’m referring to is my expectations for the future of America. The US will certainly not rise any farther; it will also not collapse completely. Rather, it will fracture and we little people will have a rough ride, but it will not be a movie-styled apocalypse.

That apocalyptic stuff is farther down the road when the magnetic poles of Earth shift rather suddenly. That still appears to be almost twenty years away.

In the near term, we are entering a period of dissolution and decentralization. It’s hard to predict how that will play out. There are so many ways in which the holding and moving of money is centralized that it would surprise us. On the other hand, it’s never been quite what the centralized bankers would have hoped. There are way too many elements in the big picture that remain localized, and those elements will tend to keep working just fine when the system breaks apart.

There have been steady efforts toward centralizing control over food, for example. Most readers are probably aware that Bill Gates has been buying up massive farmland plots, and he’s not the only one. This is alongside efforts to create new processes for fake meat and other foods, which would quite naturally require huge, massive centralized manufacturing plants. You will not see boutique meat substitutes.

But the consumer resistance is higher than anyone expected, so the progress has been very slow. Yes, some mindless consumers have latched onto this new junk, only to find it is not as attractive as they first were led to believe. Once a new product has been out for a while, consumption drops back down to tiny amounts. The only success is that it is kept on life support by Big Finance.

That the globalists will continue trying to ram it down our throats will be a major factor in the collapse of the system. People at large are not quite as malleable as the moguls would like. They won’t so much rise up in arms as simply fail to be herded due to lack of interest.

Sounding the fear alarms is like most everything else: People simply get used to it and tune it out. Rule by fear wears out after a while.

Thus, on the one hand, we know TPTB will try again to seize more control through some kind of fake pandemic alarm. On the other hand, some state governments have already passed laws against that kind of heightened centralized control. It’s going to fail badly; the COVID-19 panic response was very poor in the first place.

This is going to be a “muddle revolt”, as it were. There’s not enough energy to actually fight the globalists — which would require a determined army and the slaughter of several million Americans, plus wanton destruction of government controlled facilities. But the herds will slowly cease to pay attention, and eventually organize just enough to reject the controls. The blobby mass will neither fight nor stampede. For the most part, it will be a feeble resistance.

Thus, we will still have globalists around for a long time, and they will continue to afflict us, scolding and haranguing, grabbing control of everything we don’t nail down. But their window of opportunity has already closed. Instead, they will become once again the restive minority agitating for more of whatever seizes their fancy at the time.

Life will still be crappy with no real progress toward sanity, only false claims from self-proclaimed “conservative” hucksters taking their turn at the feeding trough.

I’m not forgetting that the highest level of elitist manipulation is still some kind of Jewish thing. What I’m saying is that those of us who see it clearly are not numerous enough to have much effect. Our message is drowned out in the racket of fake Nazi wannabees, a false element planted by the Jews themselves. There is no human solution to this problem; it is all controlled by Satan and his allies. God has left the situation in their hands simply because it does not hinder what He wants to do with this world. Indeed, they are playing in to His hands.

Any serious concern for life here in this fallen world is just a continuation of the Fall. This world has always been an illusion under Satan’s dominion. It does not matter. I’m not promoting nihilism. There is a purpose; we are here because God wants it that way for now. This world does have one use, for which God is keeping it alive: It is the demonstration of His justice. We Elect are the final proof that God is right and just, that Satan deserves his punishment.

That there is a non-elect population is just a part of the setting. We are obliged to work around them and not get distracted by their concerns. If we keep joining in their vaporous anxieties, we cannot provide a clear testimony of our God’s justice. Let the Jews steal everything; it will evaporate when the Day of Judgment comes. Our treasure is not in this world.

That said, let’s note some interesting specifics about our situation: If war is coming for NATO, it’s a good bet it will be from mid-July to August. Any later will miss the window of opportunity to swing US elections. TPTB will make every effort to provoke Russia in the next few weeks. If Russia fails to take the bait, there will surely be a false flag event.

Meanwhile, the ongoing provocations will likely see Russia (with Chinese assistance) arming her allies across the world. All the other globalist eggs will start cracking everywhere. From the linked article:

And here are the top candidates to receive these weapons – as extensively debated not only on Russian TV channels but also in the St. Petersburg forum corridors.

West Asia: Iran (which already has them); Syria (badly needs them); Yemen; Iraq (would be very helpful to Hashd al-Shaabi) and Libya.

Central, Northeast, Southeast Asia: Afghanistan, Myanmar (these two were present in St. Petersburg) and North Korea.

Latin America: Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua (just look at the current Russian foray in the Caribbean).

Africa: Central African Republic, Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, Southern Sudan and Zimbabwe (just look at Lavrov’s recent African tour).

I believe the analysis is plausible. Prepare accordingly — prepare to be a witness in such a context.

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Shaking Itself Apart

Posted on June 16, 2024 by ehurst

Basic economics: Do you understand how inflation works?

Human activity in exchanging goods and services has limits. There is only so much exchange that can take place because of the natural friction of people deciding how to exchange. Introducing a medium of exchange speeds it up. Inflation is when the commonly accepted medium of exchange loses value against the goods and services being exchanged. Thus, the numeric price of things goes up.

This works out to be theft in that those who have their hands on the controls are provoking inflation, raising the prices while suppressing what they pay back out to those who produce the things everyone is buying. They force everyone by laws to hold their currency in accounts at a bank, and the bankers get to use all that aggregate productivity as they see fit. They don’t contribute a damned thing except to give the appearance that the system can be trusted.

They lend and borrow in massive amounts, and in the process play the wider economy as a market in itself by adding or subtracting the amount of currency in existence. Of course, they always add more because it makes their old debts cheaper to repay while creating new debts that they put off for a longer while. They then cut in government officials for a share of the flow so that laws continue to enforce the system in their favor.

From where we stand, it’s not readily apparent who has their hands on the controls to raise the prices. We know some names, but not all of them by any means. It’s not just a simple matter of these secretive folks deciding to mark things up. There is a broad system that at least appears to be based on the market as a whole. Thus, the prices of things and the wages are bumped up all at once, you would think. Naturally the common complaint is that whoever decides the wages is not raising them to match.

When you hear noise in the news about the Fed worried about inflation, what that really means is that the wage earners are getting a bigger slice of the pie than the financiers like. When they say “inflation” it means that everyone is still getting the same share and they want to take a bigger share for themselves.

This is how unions gained power. It was a way of gathering the market presence of wage earners so that they could participate in the market, could be a member of the bargaining powers. I must warn you that it is far more complicated than that (like union leadership being compromised by the financiers), but this is what most people see.

The whole point of the financial elite causing inflation is to reduce their expenses against their income. They are the ones trying to game the system so that they pay less and take more of the flow of currency. You see, it’s not simply a matter of how much you hold in raw numbers, but what portion of the flow you capture regardless of the raw numbers.

Thus, they don’t steal it directly from you. Rather, they rig the system to demand more for them without sharing back to those of us who produce what makes the economy work. All boats most certainly do not rise in a flood of liquidity; the 0.1% punch holes in everyone else’s boats. The financiers are the folks in the banking system who are empowered to set rates of interest and various conditions that can slow or speed up the flow of currency.

But they are not gods. They cannot force the economy to keep humming along when the wage earners are losing ground. It’s a delicate balance they seek to maintain so that their gains are marginal in the millions of details, but whopping big in the system overall. But it’s the complexity of the system itself that causes the problems. A very large and very busy economy has more to plunder, but it also has more ways to get out of control.

In physics, anything sufficiently large and complex that moves will inevitably develop modulations in movement. There will be waves, vibrations, pendulum swings, etc. Oddly enough, this manifests in economics, as well.

Cycles arise that no one expected, and some which defy management. What we are seeing as these modulations are showing up in ways the financiers cannot control, nor even accurately calculate. They cannot predict these unexpected motions in the complex economy, nor how those motions will affect the whole system. Humans are inherently incapable of managing more than a very limited size system. While AI might be better equipped if left to itself, we know that AI would be compromised by algorithms designed to favor one group over others. It would defeat the purpose of having an AI.

This is how economic collapse happens. The thing shakes itself apart because it is not humanly possible to account for all the variables. Our system is shaking apart.

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NT Doctrine — 1 Timothy 6

Posted on June 15, 2024 by ehurst

Again, Paul wrote this letter to Timothy while the latter was serving in Ephesus, helping to establish the presence of Christian faith as no threat, contrary to false claims of Demetrius the silversmith some years before. The city would soon become the world center of Christian religion for that generation.

During Roman times, one quarter of the population in Ephesus was enslaved. It’s hard to imagine the gospel message would not call to at least some of them. Christian religion was not a social reform movement. It was wholly otherworldly. This life is just a passing phase on our way to Eternity. Hidden in these few verses, Paul’s teaching seeks to set men free from slavery to this world. If this world is all you have, then there is no hope, but if we eventually escape this world, then any condition is tolerable.

The point is to call attention to Eternity by how we are unconcerned about the sorrows of this life. It’s the orientation of showing grace and mercy regardless of what binds our flesh. Thus, we still have all those fleshly obligations, and the boundaries of the Covenant do not demand that we provoke strife over being legally a slave. Whatever might be a cause for Christians to rise up against others, slavery isn’t it. In our modern western lives, being in prison is just about the same thing, and often worse. Don’t be a cause of grief but demonstrate the power of grace. No one can enslave your heart.

This and everything else Paul commanded in this letter is right out of the teaching of Jesus Christ. Faith in Christ does not promote human discord. While there’s plenty of hostility to faith in this world, we don’t go looking for trouble. People who are slaves to their fleshly natures will give themselves away by false teachings. They will delight in provoking human tensions, upholding a false piety of the flesh. Their efforts will be self-serving, seeking some personal advantage.

The only advantage we seek is piety in the heart. The real advantage is in humble and grateful contentment with what God provides. We will take nothing with us when we leave this world, so let it go before it traps your affections. The only material things we really need while we are here are food and clothing. Everything else is a matter of what God provides for the mission. Paul never forgot that the real complaint in the silversmith’s riot was not their devotion to Diana; that was just a cynical cover for greed in selling highly inflated trinkets. Even the city government realized as much.

Instead, Christian teaching set people free to place a high value on piety and eternal moral goodness, not the junk of this world. Christ before Pilate affirmed that His Kingdom was not of this world. Jesus had no interest in overturning Roman authority; human government was not even on His radar. The Father is withholding political changes until the end of all human mortal existence. His focus and ours is on Eternity.

For this reason, Paul is rather stern in dealing with those who bring to Christ a substantial worldly wealth. It belongs to Christ now. Material wealth is just a means to blessing the covenant family of faith. The least the rich can do is drop the fleshly pretense of superiority. But instead of the church confiscating such wealth, it is the burden of these wealthy believers to do the work of using it for divine glory.

The last thing Paul says to his adopted son is to avoid the rising new religion called Gnosticism, using the key term gnosis and calling it absurd and profane chatter. It had become a Siren call to some in the church already.

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Wolf and Shepherd

Posted on June 14, 2024 by ehurst

The quintessential man of God is the shepherd.

If you see yourself as the lone wolf, then you are not serving God. You are simply a predator totally wrapped up in this world’s ways. You will receive only a wolf’s limited blessings, and you cannot inherit His Covenant provision.

When you are young and lacking in responsibilities, playing at the wolf can be okay. Do it with excellence. Thin the herd; target the truly sick and dangerous, the ones whose DNA must not pass into the flock. But wolves are just rowdy boys. Eventually you must grow up and take the responsibilities of the shepherd. (Side note: There is no such thing as a “lone wolf”; they have always been pack animals.)

Shepherds understand the role of wolves better than wolves do. Over and over again: God’s men are shepherds. They embrace the responsibility for building a covering over others. They knowingly lead; it doesn’t matter the areas of life at which they excel in His service. The pastoral care is the thing. They are good stewards of His treasure, and His treasure are people.

This brings into play a whole host of thinking and teaching about dealing with people who need mercy, who need a path to divine grace. In essence you cannot reject anyone who seeks your covering. The tension between what you are willing to put up with versus what you inevitably wind up with is for your edification.

Yes, you will always have people around you don’t belong in your domain. Some will be so disruptive that you must expel them. Do so with grace and mercy. Still, you must assume initially that everyone you encounter is sent from God. That you learn to filter out the aliens is part of the training effect, for you and them.

Tolerance and patience are major trademarks of God’s shepherds. Pursue the lost sheep, again and again. Keep providing and guiding them to good pasture and water. Keep an eye out for threats they cannot see, and may never see. They are your kingdom treasure, a trust held from God.

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Western Punitive Vindictiveness

Posted on June 13, 2024 by ehurst

Every day I talk to people who struggle with false guilt. This is the weapon Satan uses to keep us from seizing our divine heritage.

Let me remind you that a part of our western heritage is the odd mixture of Roman and Germanic cultures, their social mythologies in particular. There were a number of areas where Roman and Germanic mythologies were very similar, mirrors of each other. A particularly evil thing they shared was the ugly punitive view of justice. It is not biblical.

In the West, justice is punitive and vindictive. It is bitter and hateful, morally perverse, a direct reflection of the Devil’s spite for humanity. It represents a desire to see someone suffer, to spend their lives in misery.

In the Bible, justice is corrective. It seeks to restore whatever can be restored. The whole assumption is that people are the treasure until they forfeit their lives. Instead of making them suffer the rest of their lives, the ultimate penalty for refusing correction is death. This is why the Old Testament is loaded with death penalties.

There is a perverse claim of moral superiority in western justice because we don’t so quickly and decisively remove threats to the community. The insane “necessity” of making the bad guys suffer keeps them alive long after the damage to their souls has already gone too far.

I’m not suggesting that God cannot redeem people. He can turn around the soul of the worst people, but that hope is muted when the underlying ethos is punitive and spiteful. Western minds are unable to see when God’s hand is at work. Furthermore, people who truly turn around in His mercy are the first to submit to capital execution. They are the ones who know beyond all doubt they deserve to die.

Do you understand Paul’s longing for the Lord to take him home? It was not mental illness, like depression of something, but a clear moral understanding that we were not made for this life.

I’ve noted several times on this blog that the Bible teaches a distinction between one’s flesh and one’s soul. The conscious awareness within a fleshly body is the soul. It’s a manifestation of life in the flesh. However, the flesh alone is a package of moral disabilities. Just having a mortal form is the problem. The flesh is not you; it’s just the package that carries you around this world.

Getting a sense of separation from your flesh is critical to serving Christ. The West denies this distinction. In the West, your flesh is you. More to the point, punitive justice attacks the fleshly nature specifically because it rejects the idea that there is any soul above the flesh. The mere presence of a fleshly lust means you must be punished for having it. The West denies the Fall; it insists that the flesh can be perfected. The only reason it isn’t perfect is because of some moral truculence inside your head.

It’s a very bitter hatred for people who didn’t get the right conditioning in their youth — or whatever. It’s a class warfare kind of spite.

The whole thing is an ugly lie and a stupid mess. Once you opt out of this false mythology, you begin to see how God can save you. He grants us the clarity of moral purpose to bring our flesh into subjection, to make it obey. You must rise above, migrate your conscious awareness to a vantage point above the flesh. The whole point of biblical discipline is to awaken the soul to a higher purpose. God regards you as a treasure to be recovered from the dirt.

Once you embrace that higher purpose, you are at peace with God. Meanwhile, you are now at war with your flesh. It’s the existence of a conflict, wherein you have denounced your flesh as not you, as an incurable ill, that makes you at peace with God. When you stand in agreement with His judgment, then you are on His side in a dispute far bigger than any of us can comprehend.

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OKC Trail Report — Deep Fork Phase 1

Posted on June 12, 2024 by ehurst

This map is OKC Parks and Rec’s publication showing the relative location of the new Deep Fork Trail. The idea has long been to replicate the old Grand Boulevard Drive as a bikeway. Grand used to circle the old city limits. The Deep Fork Trail is under construction in four phases. The first is now finished and I went to visit the other day.

This is the finished bridge across the Deep Fork River at the northern end of the Katy Trail and the eastern end of the Deep Fork Trail. The bridge is what links the two bikeways. They’ve spared no expense in building it, but I’ll warn you that they have not yet begun mowing this new addition to the parks system. The trail is just a bit narrowed in places where the grasses grow up to three feet high.

There’s a lot of railing along the path simply as a safety measure, since it winds along the north bank of the Deep Fork. The river gets its name from being so very deep below ground level. Even though it’s just a few miles from the source here, it’s already a deep canyon.

The Deep Fork Trail is slated for construction in four phases, and Phase 1 ends here at Kelley Avenue. The trail crosses back over to the south bank and ends abruptly at NE 59th Street. There’s a fresh wide cutout on the south curbline, but then grass. Phase 2 will take off from there, run south along Kelley Avenue and cut across it where the river bends, somewhere close to NE 57th Street. Then it will run west through forest and underbrush land that belongs to an abandoned mansion that I believe the city owns, and will connect to Lincoln Boulevard.

We won’t see any of that for another year, at least. Two more phases will run from Lincoln Boulevard to Interstate 235, and then from there through Canyon Park to connect with the old Grand Boulevard again.

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Nothing Special Is Lost

Posted on June 11, 2024 by ehurst

A prophetic word for you…

I’ve already hinted at this, but let me state it more bluntly: The end of the West is of no great significance in the Spirit Realm. More to the point, the coming collapse of America will hardly be noticed by the heavenly hosts. Nobody in Eternity will weep. Demons will not enter into any particular celebrations; it’s just a routine thing.

The sheer hubris of westerners thinking this is somehow a big deal is itself stunning. This is nothing, folks. It hardly warrants notice. It won’t be missed by anyone who matters. Indeed, it’s not actively being destroyed at all; it’s simply being dropped on the ground as something that is worn out and used up. The support system is being pulled and entropy will do the rest.

Try to understand a basic moral principle: Arrogance rises with the lack of substance.

I still believe that the Network Civilization is already rising in place of the West. It will live a very short life before civilization itself is destroyed. Whether that also signals the Return of Christ is actually not a pertinent question. What really matters is that the most unimaginable destruction is coming somewhere down the road ahead of us, and that the end of the West is definitely not the same thing. The End of the West is just a bump in the road.

It’s okay to lament the loss of everything you know. Indeed, most of humanity will die in the next twenty years or so. If you really enjoyed Western Civilization, then it will be a great loss for you. In that case, you are actually weeping for yourself. Westerners really do not understand sacrificial love and genuine caring. You have to abandon your western identity to rise above and learn to actually care about others.

Honestly folks, God sees this as no big deal. He’s not losing anything. It was designed by Satan and serves only his nefarious agenda. It has always been inherently hostile to God and contrary to His purposes.

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Nuns and Legalism

Posted on June 10, 2024 by ehurst

It’s very easy to twist things into legalism. This weekend’s community Bible lesson in 1 Timothy 5 is a passage that gets twisted that way quite often.

Read between the lines, folks. Paul is writing a rather private message to Timothy, who was expected to fill in some blanks in the broader understanding of things. If you form a mental image of the society at that time and place, you can easily understand that the business of widows as nuns was an issue in Ephesus mostly because the Christian community there was rather large, and it sounds very much like there were multiple church houses around that area. This was soon to become the central capital of First Century Christian religion.

On the one hand, we have a biblical mandate in the first place to bond together as Christians in one spiritual family. That includes all the customary obligations we would expect from an extended family household of kin in the flesh. There were laws about it back then, not so different from the commands in the Law of Moses. Those who led a household were obliged to provide for the welfare of everyone who shared that household. To be dependent meant to depend on someone, and their social structure restricted tightly who could act like they were in charge of anything. Most people were dependents in one way or another.

And we know from Scripture that, in churches, widows and orphans were special cases. If these people were truly dependent on you, then your leadership naturally included the duty to feed, clothe and house them. With widows, this meant for her the expectation of duties and behavior that today we associate with nuns. It was a common thing, but because it’s so foreign to our society today, we struggle to picture it.

An aging woman who lost her husband lost her last immediate family. A widow who had no immediate family to care for was expected to mother the whole community. That was simply the role everyone relied on her to embrace. If her community was also her extended family kinfolks, then it wasn’t hard to figure out how she spent her days — babysitting, helping with larger seasonal food preparations, nursing the sick, etc. In return, her physical needs were provided by those kinfolks.

Taking a cue from the matronly widows who volunteered in the First and Second Temple in Jerusalem, churches (“Christian synagogues”) would take upon themselves the care of widows who might be isolated or otherwise separated from their earthly kin. You can guess how that would happen with Jews who were ostracized for professing Christ, or pagans who were treated the same way by their families. Or maybe the woman moved with her husband from far away and had no local kinfolks at all. When he died, she was bereft of all support. She could either travel home (as Naomi and Ruth did) or try to make a life where she was.

If she was a member of the local church body, it was their duty to put her to work as their adopted grandma and take care of her life support. But in Ephesus this became a formal office because of the rather unique situation there. Apparently it spread from there later. Paul makes it clear in his language here that it was accompanied with a vow. Without chasing rabbits, such things were taken quite seriously in the Old Testament, and it didn’t change under Christ. Paul was referring to a church office; the balance of her life was tightly wrapped in this commitment, and should not be broken.

The issue with encouraging younger widows to remarry was the same as it was in Hebrew culture: She should not marry outside the covenant community. Paul referred to some widows who had gone off the deep end by taking up with men outside the church. The local pagan culture was loaded with customs that Christians regard as immoral. Those who married within the Covenant were encouraged to build up the community. If she’s still fertile, she should have children. Otherwise, she can help stabilize a household by taking up a matronly role.

Only those who had nothing left to live for, except Christ and His body, could become nuns.

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Uncensored Search Engines?

Posted on June 9, 2024 by ehurst

You’d have to wonder if such thing as “uncensored search engine” is an oxymoron these days. If they are very effective in the first place, they are biased. And if they are uncensored, they lack investment.

It’s easy to prove that the big names — Bing, Google and even DuckDuckGo — are all programmed to a left-wing political bias. It’s not that I am seeking right-wing competition; I want to find stuff that ignores the bias and simply looks for references to the subject at hand.

You would think that computer programming is a lot easier without adding bias to algorithms. That’s largely true, but the people doing the programming, or funding it, can’t resist the temptation to tweak the results. Remember how MS tested an AI chat that eventually embraced antisemitism? That’s what happens when you don’t restrict the process with algorithms. When you examine the evidence objectively, hostility toward Jews is somewhat justified.

There, that should get this post buried by major search engines.

Back to the original question posed in the title: Do you know of any? I have tested Mojeek recently and it’s okay. The problem is that anyone who invests real effort in a search engine needs resources that always come with strings attached. There’s no money in genuine freedom of conscience.

You can find at least one attempt at listing minor search engines here, but it’s from way back in 2010, and many of the links are dead. Some have since been bought out by biased interests. This one makes bold claims, but relies on the old saw that if porn is safe, everyone else is safe. Gibiru is getting lots of recommendations. Quant gets a few mentions.

What do you like?

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