Real Independence

Posted on July 4, 2019 by ehurst

During my years of traditional divinity studies and work, I often read firm statements that following Christ must rise above culture. The idea was that it is somehow pan-cultural, something that should fit into any cultural context. It’s above culture.

This is pure nonsense. First, notice how it strips away the very potent cultural context into which Christ was born, sent by God to pull people back into that very ancient cultural context as the sole means of living justly in Creation. In place of that culture, it allows Western theologians to inject their own culture quite blindly. They are encouraged to pretend that their own cultural background arises from this purified non-culture, and is therefore superior to any other culture that arose some other way.

This is why missionary activities are almost uniformly aimed at bringing a culture shift, reshaping the indigenous folks into some brand of Western culture. This becomes the definition of “Christian” for the non-Western world. It all makes it easy to ignore how very much Paul’s letters push a restoration of divine justice in this world by promoting a very ancient cultural orientation. This is how we get to the place where modern commentators insist that “Christian” means what amounts to a very medieval Germanic lifestyle with modern accoutrements.

Let’s be honest: What the Bible actually promotes finds few modern parallels. Perhaps the closest parallel is the Pashtun Way (Pashtunwali). I’ll let you look that up for yourself if you are interested. It’s not that the Pashtuns are a biblical society, but that there is a close parallel. If you seek the heart-led way of walking in Biblical Law, you’ll quickly recognize many elements of the Pashtun Way.

It’s not that there is no such thing as a genuine Christian Culture. It’s that almost no one rising up to proclaim their “Christian Culture” is close to what the Bible actually promotes. This is part of what Radix Fidem is about — it’s not so much a religion per se, but an approach to building genuine religion against the bogus background we have now.

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Moral Battlefield

Posted on July 3, 2019 by ehurst

The last thing I want to do is convince you of the things we teach here at Kiln of the Soul.

Every time I sit down at a computer to write, there is a constant refrain of warning to keep the door open for disbelief. We can explain as eloquently as we like, but awakening the hearts of humans is not in our hands. It’s a miracle that God alone can do. Yet in the typical paradoxical nature of truth, we still are taught to hold it forth as the demand of the gospel message that people shift over to a heart-led consciousness.

Part of the problem is that Christians have had 2000 years of practice at saying the right words when their hearts weren’t in it. Long after the early church ceased relying on the power of the Holy Spirit, we see the strongest statements that His power is absolutely necessary. So we ended up with the terms of genuine faith being used to express something other than genuine faith.

Do you believe that the Spirit of Christ can so invade a lost soul as to change that sinful nature? Can you trust the Lord to renovate, say, a pedophile so that he is no longer a threat to children? His Word says He can do that, but I’ve met literally thousands of church folks who simply cannot believe it. They pay tribute with their lips, but never make room for God, cannot bring themselves to let their children be in the same room with such a man.

It’s in part because they never test the spirits of people who profess the changing power of Christ. They never test the spirits because they have no idea how. They might have learned some mumbo-jumbo magic show stuff, but they have never learned to operate from the heart; they’ve never heard the voice of God speaking that way.

We were warned that any churches we form will be stuffed with folks like that. They know the words and think they understand what’s going on, but have never crossed over into the Spirit Realm. They have never tasted the powers of the age to come (Hebrews 6:5). We are supposed to accommodate them, but only in the sense that we use our own taste of the heavenly gifts to discern who should be leading and who is just along for the ride. We keep on teaching the truth and pray for them to catch on, but only God can change them.

Some of you have enough experience with churches to recognize what I’m saying. It’s more than a balance between letting stray sheep in and checking to make sure they aren’t wolves hiding under a sheepskin. It’s recognizing that God can turn the wolves into sheep. It’s giving Him room to operate on people who really want it and need help shedding a lifetime of bad conditioning. The whole point is not efficiency and safety above all. A church is the place people gather to make spiritual growth possible, not to regiment the process.

In the process, we tolerate folks who, to all appearances, will never grow. As long as they aren’t an actual threat to shalom, we let them hang around because you never know when or how God is going to act in their lives. The church is much closer to an incubator than an army. But then, the battlefield is the individual soul, not the world around us.

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Stay Close

Posted on July 2, 2019 by ehurst

I can’t easily put in words what I’m feeling right now. All I can say is cling to your faith right now, folks. Stand close to each other as much as you know how.

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Odds and Ends 07

Posted on July 1, 2019 by ehurst

It’s been a fixit day. It began early with Veloyce’s Jetta. I endeavored to change the spark plugs and the PCV valve. Neither is a simple, straightforward task on VWs. I had to make a tool to fish the plugs out of those deep wells once I got them threaded out. They all had a little oil on them, so the rubber keeper in the plug socket didn’t keep hold of them.

Then I decided it was time to cut some foliage growing over one of the trails I ride regularly. I should have added an ax to the tools I carried on my bike; there was the top of a very substantial dead tree poking out into the path. My little limb loppers aren’t up to cutting logs.

I tried riding the Midwest City SCIP Trails last week, but with all the heavy rain we’ve had, one of the main trails was blocked by a massive muddy bog. It would take something like a raft of big logs to make it passable, and I haven’t felt like doing something that big.

It used to be that getting a printer to work with Linux might take the software equivalent of heavy lifting, but these days all the major printer manufacturers make good, solid drivers for Linux. There’s really very little point in relying on the drivers that come bundled with your favorite Linux distro these days. Epson is probably the only one that makes it difficult, but if you search a little, there are a couple of solutions offered that seem to cover most of their stuff.

Of course, with Brother printers, they have a very nifty script that does it all for you, once you download the various packages. Once you get to the page that lists those packages, you need to open the download page in a separate tab for each one, because it won’t let you come back to it directly. The script requires running it on the command line; then again, so does a whole lot of Linux stuff. It was worth it, because I can now run the scanner over a wifi connection because the script commanded the printer to connect to the router and stay connected.

I noticed Linux does one thing very much better on this tower of mine. Under Windows, when the system went to sleep, it lost the connection to my file storage on the router. It required a reboot to get it back. Under Linux, I just have to log in again and it works fine.

It’s almost time to celebrate the New Moon again; should be tomorrow sometime. Part of the idea is that important big things should be started on or near the New Moon.

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Teachings of Christ — John 12:20-36

Posted on June 29, 2019 by ehurst

Prior to the coming of Christ, the path of redemption back to Eden was quite demanding. Even for Israel, it was pretty tough. It usually meant studying the Covenant of Moses and seeking God’s face until the light dawned inside the soul and people were able to seize that Flaming Sword of divine justice and turn it on their fleshly self nature. No one was discouraged from studying the Covenant, but as you might expect, peasants often didn’t get the chance. One purpose of the synagogue system was to place more copies of the Scripture among the people.

But as we all know, once the Pharisees arose with their Hellenized materialism, they erected barriers to keep the common folks out. Peasants seldom went to synagogue because the Pharisees treated them with contempt, and the few Sadducees they encountered were entirely too secular minded and cynical. Nothing in the system appealed to those who were moved in their hearts to seek God. This is why Jesus made so much of having the gospel preached to the poor. Those who were spiritually awakened could find in His teaching the very drawing power of the Lord. The miracles were a signal they could understand.

And so our passage opens with even Gentiles seeking to meet this teacher who performed miracles. No doubt they also knew He was not popular with Jewish leadership, so this probably added to their curiosity. When the disciples told Jesus these Gentiles wanted to meet Him, Jesus noted that is about that point in His ministry when His glory would shine brightest.

However, that didn’t mean what His disciples thought it meant. His Kingdom was not of this world, and He was going to be a heavenly Messiah. So He talked about how spiritual fruit came only from death of the flesh. People determined to hang onto this fallen human existence didn’t know what they were missing. It would cost them eternity. The only thing worth our attention in this life is how we can bring glory to God, and then go home to our eternal reward. That’s where Christ was going to lead His followers.

John uses a Greek word that means Jesus was saying His fleshly mind was troubled by the prospect of dying. Should He pray to escape this awful fate, when it was precisely why He came to live among us? So He called out in firm assertion over His flesh: “Father, glorify Your name!”

The thundering response from Heaven was that, as God had done so in the past, He would continue doing just that. We have no other purpose in living, and if we want to understand what God is doing, we need to focus on His glory at any price. But how could anyone explain hearing the voice of God speaking in human hearing?

Jesus said it was not Him that needed to hear that voice; He already knew the score. It came for the sake of those standing near Him. Then He said something that most people just do not understand. Granted, it was symbolism, but it’s cryptic only to those who try to read their Western minds back into the text. In His death, Jesus was passing sentence on the world system. It was time to pull the plug on trying to create a human kingdom that could, as a whole, embrace that Flaming Sword. The nation of Israel was incapable of doing it.

It was time for the Messiah come and move the location and identity of the Kingdom into Heaven. It was time to close down the Covenant of Moses and transfer all of the promises and blessings of shalom into a country far, far away. It was time to establish the Kingdom in a place where Satan (“Prince of this World”) was not free to roam about and influence things. It didn’t mean Satan was being kicked out of this world, but that he was forced to release the true children of Heaven from his grasp.

Meanwhile, Jesus was going to be raised up into the sky. It was a paradox. The term typically was a figure of speech, meaning someone being exalted. He said His exaltation would take Him from this world. But in this case, it was also the literal raising of His body up on a cross. The Cross would be His crowning moment. John notes that this was a prophecy of how He would die, though we can be sure almost nobody caught onto that at the moment. Still, His paradoxical exaltation on the Cross would constitute a call to all humanity, not just Israel, to become citizens of His new Kingdom.

That was what Israel was supposed to accomplish in the first place, but they kept getting farther and farther from the mission. The people listening to this caught onto one point: Jesus was not staying on the earth to live among them. They had been falsely taught that the Covenant meant the Messiah would be an earthly king who would live forever. That was just one little element of a whole lore of false Messianic Expectations the Pharisees had taught. The folks listening were so confused, they asked if there was some other Jesus who was going to leave the earth.

His cryptic answer was meant to lodge in the hearts of those committed to His teaching, but it would not make sense to their fleshly minds, and would likely be forgotten by those who had no faith. It was a treasure to be put away until some future day when the Holy Spirit would call it back into their conscious awareness and give it meaning. Jesus warned them that the light of His presence would not shine much longer. Let them make the most of it, because when He was gone, those without faith would be blinded by the darkness.

They would have no clue what the mission was, just like most of Israel, the leadership in particular. He was calling for them to pay attention and absorb His teaching so that, once He was gone from the earth, He could come to life in their hearts.

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DIY Glory Shine

Posted on June 29, 2019 by ehurst

Do it yourself; don’t trust outsiders.

This is the watchword for our time. If you need to do a certain thing, make darned sure you cannot do it before you contract it out. Even if it’s actually cheaper and better coming from outside sources, make sure you have at least some idea of what it takes in case that outside source fails. That’s because there is a growing likelihood that your outside source will fail.

We are already in the early stages of an economic failure. I’d rather not waste the space here giving too many examples of how the system is breaking down. Here’s one: Because college graduates cannot discharge their student loan debts through bankruptcy filings, they are doing bankruptcy for every other debt they incur just trying to stay alive. This has created a massive rise in bankruptcy rates in general. As I’ve said in the past, the general debt burden is globally overburdened, and liquidity is insufficient to sustain the previous prosperity. There is virtually nothing left to borrow unless you simply print more money and dilute the value of current existing debt. That simply moves the failure into other areas of the economy.

Somebody is going to pay for all the failed loans, so the battle will be over who gets stuck with the bill. Because there remains a human element in all of this, nobody can predict how the collapse will effect individual actors, and consequently individual sectors of the economy. Some people are resilient and creative, and will stay afloat by sheer genius and will. Others will cave at the first sign of trouble and allow their business to collapse. And some are so totally compromised already that they will have no choices when the crunch comes.

This is the primary threat to you and I. This is the wrong time to be in debt. Pay cash and learn how to do things yourself. If you can’t do it, make sure you find a provider that is not in a position to hurt you.

This is one of the reasons I push so hard for folks to learn how to make the most of Open Source software. By its nature, Open Source cannot harm you. It may limit you by what the developers choose to emphasize, but there is simply no way they can penalize you for doing things they don’t like, unlike all the software and services provided by Big Tech. So, for example, while I am using the WordPress commercial services to run this blog, it wouldn’t take two days to switch over to the Open Source version of WordPress and run it on a private server. Then again, this blog is just my current virtual pulpit; it would be quite easy to write the same stuff and post it elsewhere. I have several backups of virtually everything I’ve posted going back several years.

And you’ll notice that most of what I’ve written encourages doing religion the same way. There might be some barriers to joining our community, but nothing prevents you taking my ideas and running off in any direction that you feel led by God. This is Open Source religion. It doesn’t provide the same massive infrastructure as the mainstream, and it gets pretty lonely at times, but you aren’t bound by anybody’s personal ideas about what religion should look like. Institutional religion is going to suffer badly as the economic failure worsens.

My point is that you cannot know what will fail and what will continue working. All I can tell you there is that not everything is going to disappear. The market will shrink and the vendors, buyers and available goods and services will change, but it will not simply go away. The idea is that you learn to trust God and move ahead in your calling and mission, but that means being aware that God’s wrath is most certainly falling on the system.

But don’t buy my answers; get the attitude for yourself. You can certainly trust God, but don’t depend on me. Take whatever you can use from my suggestions, but be aware that I don’t fully trust myself. I’ve seen me fail and I’m trying to avoid things I know I cannot do. I’ve got a long list of things I can no longer set right, and I’ll have to apologize when I can find my victims in Heaven. So I’m living with a certain amount of scar tissue from cuts I’ve made on others’ lives. Still, I have a mission and I’m determined to give God room to train me for things I didn’t know I could do.

Even if my promotion of Linux means nothing to you, learn from the attitude. I won’t fling a challenge in the Father’s face by being lazy about learning stuff I should do for myself. My mission requires using computers a lot, so I need to make sure I understand what’s the best tool for the job, likely points of failure and how to deal with them.

The disaster is already here; we have to shine the light of glory in how we handle it.

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Linux on HP Pavilion 590-p0044

Posted on June 28, 2019 by ehurst

First, perform due diligence. You need a Linux distro with a recent kernel to handle the Vega 11 graphics. I tested Ubuntu 19.04, Xubuntu 19.04 and OpenSUSE Leap 15.1. These three all handled it just fine, but Xubuntu was the only one that could put the display to sleep. That’s what I went with for keeps.

You’ll need to read this support document from HP to boot from anything but Win10 on the hard drive. Take notes and walk through the complicated rigmarole to set the system to boot from either the DVD or a USB jump drive.

Everything after that should be pretty routine. However, once the system is installed, if you check dmesg, you’ll see your logs filling up with an error something like this:

pcieport 0000:00:01.2: AER: Corrected error received: 0000:00:01.0
pcieport 0000:00:01.2: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Corrected, type=Data Link Layer, (Transmitter ID)
pcieport 0000:00:01.2:   device [1022:15d3] error status/mask=00001000/00006000
pcieport 0000:00:01.2:    [12] Timeout

I’ve run into this a lot lately on fresh Linux installations. There’s nothing you can do to fix whatever the Linux kernel thinks is wrong with the hardware or BIOS. HP doesn’t even make it possible to complain about this. Since the kernel is handling this error well enough, the only solution for now is set a boot parameter that will silence the reporting. The official Ubuntu documentation is here; scroll down to “Permanently Add a Kernel Boot Parameter” for this task.

Or, if you are comfortable with the terminal:

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

Add this one expression to the end of the kernel parameters line:

pci=noaer

This should be enough to silence excessive error reporting on that issue until someone comes up with a better plan. After that, do the sudo update-grub and reboot.

The other issue is that the built-in wifi on this system doesn’t work out of the box. That’s because the Linux kernel does not yet support the RTL8821CE chipset. You can find the source code online and build the module yourself if you really need it. The pertinent instruction for Ubuntu is here.

Everything else is working just fine for me. I haven’t tested the Bluetooth, but the system claims it’s ready to rock-n-roll. Linux says the Ryzen 5 is an octo-core, and it’s pretty fast with Xubuntu 19.04. I plan to keep rolling with the successive releases until the next LTS at 20.04.

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Mercy in Vast Supply

Posted on June 28, 2019 by ehurst

Civility is the art of living with others while causing the least friction possible. It means not taking offense at every little thing, but employing patience and allowing people to be themselves as much as possible.

By extension, we know that sane people aren’t constantly thinking about how they could improve the behavior and outcomes of someone else’s life. It’s one thing to take responsibility for the behavior of your own children, but it’s quite wrong to hold the rest of the world accountable to your detailed wishes. It’s downright crazy even to have such a vision in your head.

Good moral people enjoy simply watching the creativity of children at play. They only step in when the child clearly suffers from the effects of a false perception about reality. Good moral people don’t want anyone to struggle against reality, but they know that a light hand of guidance is the default starting point even with their own children. It’s just laziness that ignores a child until they get in the way, but it’s evil to seek total control of outcomes.

The reason we know these things is because it’s inherent in divine revelation. It’s written in our convictions if we care to notice. And it’s for sure an underlying theme of God’s revelation. The business in Romans 12:1-2 about “the perfect will of God” is not what it sounds like in Western ears. It’s not as if God has a perfect detailed plan; He’s a real Father to His children. He never sets out a detailed matrix of expectations, but is quite happy to watch us grow and come up with our own unique answers to a lot of little things. That’s how He designed us.

His relationship with those who love Him is a vivid and personal thing. There is no objective reality hard-coded into His Creation. His pattern for humanity to follow is organic, not a vast network of details. His revelation doesn’t point to specific conduct, but to the heart and to genuine compassion. His love is His law for humanity. It’s organic and alive and variable, yet not so variable that anything goes. The prohibitions against certain things are a matter of our design and the design of Creation itself.

And He knows that we are fallen, so He doesn’t judge us for having inappropriate desires. Our human appetites are built in as a way of prodding us to keep things working; every drive is there for a reason. But it’s how we go about meeting those appetites that can get us into trouble, or it can amuse God. He may not be that much like any human father you ever experienced, but He is our Father.

In other words, He’s not at all like the typical Western image of a deity. The English word “God” carries a lot of baggage that God doesn’t own. It’s quite a burden on English speakers to unlearn the crap that Western mythology has loaded upon our minds.

When you fail, God is hardly surprised. When you come before Him, what He’s looking for is whether you really care about what He thinks. The biggest struggle we have in penitence is the load of false guilt for things that don’t actually anger Him. We can hold a lot of debates about what makes Him feel disappointed in us; Western mythology is loaded with crap about what is or isn’t sin. His Word is pretty clear on a lot of things our Western society considers variable, while a lot of nonsense is promoted as a necessity.

But even then, those who are determined to please God can always find out what it takes, sooner or later. Obtaining His mercy and forgiveness is always possible for anyone who wants it. The answer is given only in your heart, and it will never completely make sense to your head.

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Random Photos Late June 2019

Posted on June 27, 2019 by ehurst

Our drainage is really very good, so this portrays just how heavy the rains were a couple of weeks ago. During a period of just about 10-15 minutes, our street became a river. It’s a little difficult to see in this image, but the entire roadway is underwater and it’s several inches deep down at the drains on the corner.

This is quite a rare specimen, but it’s growing wild at Draper Lake. It’s possible someone planted this for whatever reason, but the location is simply alongside the bikeway near a model aircraft runway. The only reason it grew is because the spot is just perfect for it, with some shade and good soil that doesn’t flood.

This shows the northwest corner of the Draper Lake bikeway. After two years of lying fallow, the crews have finally restarted the work. With a couple of gaps for areas that need more work, the first layer of asphalt runs almost all the way across the northern end of the park.

And even more significant, the crews have finally got back to work on the creek crossing below the dam. This shot was taken last week showing actual work on the spot. They will be using two very long conduits to handle the seasonal creek flows, and apparently the bikeway will cross at an angle, necessitating the long piping.

Just a side note: With the heavy rains, Draper offers both blackberries and sand plums ripening in areas where I had not seen any fruit at all in previous years. Yum!

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Nationalism versus Nationalism

Posted on June 26, 2019 by ehurst

We live in a Western world, and it is our duty to understand it. Otherwise, we cannot offer God’s antidote to the failures of Western Civilization.

Hear a principle of Biblical Law: Covenant trumps every other consideration. All Law Covenants assume that a covenant relationship takes precedence over DNA. Thus, Jesus said that God was able to raise up children of Abraham from the stones on the ground. It didn’t matter who got their DNA from Abraham; what mattered was commitment to the Covenant. The definition of “Israel” is “the Covenant Nation.” Embrace the Covenant and you were Israeli. Deny the Covenant and you were a Gentile, regardless of your DNA.

If you and I agree together to the Covenant of Radix Fidem, nothing else matters between us but that covenant identity. That’s how God sees it.

We know that Western minds are inclined to “propositional truth.” However, we also know that it is more honored by the violations than by adherence. But this concept is the starting point; so you can tell a Westerner is lying when they step away from it. There is quite an ongoing debate about the word “nationalism.” People are trying to twist it into all kinds of propaganda shapes to deceive each other.

In Western tradition, the root meaning of the word “nation” is a Latin term for “by birth.” It means you are part of a nation by being born into it, and it means people who share DNA. It comes from the idea of tribe. Nationalism is inherently “racist” or it means nothing.

But we are learning a Hebrew cast of mind, because Scripture stands on that frame of reference. In that frame of reference, a covenant trumps racial heritage for sure. Race doesn’t mean a thing if you genuinely embrace the covenant. It becomes your identity. And of course, you know that the Covenant of Radix Fidem is simply one implementation of Biblical Law, the Covenant of Christ. As with the Covenant of Moses, Radix Fidem is contextual. It’s our best understanding of what God demands of us now in this world.

Radix Fidem is a tiny covenant nation. We can be nationalists about our own identity in Christ. That’s how Heaven does things; it uses the literal to indicate the ineffable. Heavenly things defy words, so much of the Bible is written in the form of Hebrew parable. We can come close by using the term “figure of speech,” but the Hebrew language is itself symbolic — indicative, not descriptive. It is not abstract as the English language pretends it can be; Hebrew is experiential. It was alive and words could take on new meanings in a given context. The Hebrew people could say bluntly literal things, but the whole frame of reference gave greater weight to what could be expressed only in symbols.

So you and I are free to say that we can support nationalism and most people will realize what we mean by it. Mostly it means we are not collectivist, not globalist. The typical meaning is as close as this world can get to Biblical Law without actually embracing any of the covenants. We don’t have to put with it an emphasis on race, even if we know that’s what the word actually means. What really matters in God’s eyes is the cultural identity; the American identity is based on a culture that arose from the US Constitution and a certain philosophical orientation derived from the Enlightenment. There are people who will use the term as mere propaganda, a means to deceive. We aren’t trying to deceive people; we are adhering to common usage.

God supports this usage because it’s consistent with the nature of His revelation. His revelation requires you to reject the nit-picking legalism that infests Western Civilization. We are nationalist in a certain sense, but we reject Western culture.

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