The World versus God

Posted on June 7, 2018 by ehurst

There’s really very little we can do to help this fallen world. All I can do is offer my best moral counsel to those who are members of this Kiln of the Soul parish, who embrace the Radix Fidem covenant.

Hatred is not a sin; it’s a human emotion. The problem is who/what you hate and why. God says there are things He hates, and depending on how you translate the original languages of the Bible, there are people He hates for various reasons. Study those passages and understand His wrath, because it points to His divine character and how He acts. Sin is defined as arguing with God.

Racism is not a sin; it’s human instinct. You should understand that from the Tower of Babel. God intends for us to live in small tribal communities. Only via the Covenant of Christ do we transcend DNA and live in covenant communities. But it remains a moral necessity that we live in small tribal communities where we only have to deal with folks who share that daily life under moral terms we all embrace. Jamming together people with conflicting moral values is a sin of oppression. God’s Law demands that communities with differing moral values and cultural flavors have some space between them.

This is why churches are encouraged to come together strongly in clannish togetherness and put distance between themselves and outsiders. So your urbane club-like church with its corporate structure and a body of folks who merely attend as members is all wrong. It’s not a church as the Bible defines it. A church is a body of folks who live together as a clan, an extended family household in an eastern feudal structure. It’s not necessary to live together inside the same building, but to the degree the conditions permit, live together as a small village in close proximity. Your neighbors should be like cousins with whom you were raised. That’s a command from God.

It is inevitable that different churches in different places are going to develop their own internal cultural habits, customs and traditions. There’s nothing particularly holy and righteous about your clan’s customs and traditions, but if they aren’t important to your identity, something is very wrong with the situation. You need to leave and find a better context, but only if the Spirit leads you that way.

But the whole social milieu must remain feudal and covenantal. Because society as a whole tends to reject all of this, each church must determine how to uphold their uniqueness as a testimony. To outsiders, this will look like racism. There is literally nothing we can do to prove otherwise. Even if our covenant family includes multiple ethnic groups, we cannot escape the false charges of racial hatred.

That’s because the outside world is not a covenant community. It cannot be made into one, either. Valid covenants require feudal authority, and each individual adult must embrace it personally. (Children are included under parental authority until they become adults.) To have any real hope of actually working, each adult must also be spiritually born and heart-led. We have precious little means of actually filtering out those who fail either of those requirements, but there is at least a conscious presumption of those necessities. Plus, we acknowledge that the heart-led part is a matter of ongoing development, a process of discovery that has to start somewhere.

There is no way the world will accept those terms. A fallen nature does not permit bowing the knee to God and His revelation. The only way to deal with racial tension is through the Holy Spirit and the Word of God. It requires the power of heart-led living. That’s because racial tension is just one more facet of fallen nature. The real issue is a lack of trust on any grounds at all, and God’s Word is very strong about the terms of trust and the proper grounds for distrust. And distrust of fallen humans is most certainly not a sin; on the contrary, distrust is a requirement burned into your heart by the Holy Spirit. We don’t even trust ourselves.

The other issue related to racism is exclusion, treating folks differently based on different levels of trust. It’s morally evil to demand everyone trust everyone else on all the same terms. Otherwise police badges, for example, would mean nothing. And it’s just damned stupid to expect the mass of fallen humanity to be conditioned against their own instincts. All you get is a world full of people who aren’t free to discuss their inner thoughts so that no one can possibly get together and work out differences and terms of cooperation. Instead, everything is imposed by evil people who pretend they aren’t evil.

But it’s impossible to explain this to our society. So we don’t bother to explain to their deaf ears and blind eyes; we also don’t hide it. Unless the Lord seizes their consciences, nothing will change. We seek to live by His divine will and let the world go to Hell, because the only alternative is to open up to the world and let them drag you down. Only the Devil will tell you that it’s possible to gain God’s favor and that of the fallen world at the same time.

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Apartment Living and FedEx

Posted on June 6, 2018 by ehurst

First of all, members of the parish, the replacement tower has arrived. It’s nothing amazing, just an Optiplex 780 with moderate specs. It works; I’m using it to write this post. It was a simple matter of swapping out the hard drive from the dead tower and nothing was lost. Debian had no trouble adapting to the new hardware.

[Update: I eventually figured out it was loading the “fb” driver (framebuffer) for graphics and not the Intel driver. It required that I actually force it to write an xorg.conf file and change the driver to “intel” to get it to work right. Otherwise, no problems.]

Now I’m going to whine, but you don’t have to read it.

When UPS delivers to my apartment, it’s always the same MO — the driver knocks or rings the doorbell and takes off, unless I need to sign something. DHL has never delivered here, nor have any of a dozen other small shippers. US Postal Service typically does what they are supposed to do, with the bonus of trying to deliver to my door packages too large to fit in the locked cubicles standing next to our community mail boxes. Again, ringing the doorbell or knocking.

Most FedEx drivers are cool, but we have one of about three or four who is a lazy idiot. Company policy says they have to try my door first, but this one guy never does. He always tries to save himself some work by dropping off everything at the office for the entire apartment complex. That’s two blocks away. And he has done this twice — with the biggest and heaviest packages, of course. Except, yesterday he came when those two gals in the office were out for a long lunch, so the office door was locked. Then he lied and reported that he couldn’t deliver my package because I didn’t answer the door.

This time I looked it up and called FedEx to file a complaint as soon as I checked their website with my shipping number. This morning the company called me back rather early and promised to speak to the guy’s manager. I think it must have worked. While I was sitting in my recliner waiting to see if he was going to do the right thing, I didn’t hear a knock of doorbell. I just barely caught the sound of the door handle rattling. I got up and checked the door and there stood my package on the floor of the breezeway. He’s not just a jerk, but he’s a coward.

Anyway, the tower is up and running and I had enough left over from the generous donations to get a pair of low-end audiophile headphones — noise canceling, steel construction and trimmed in hardwood. My, but they do sound good. They were a customer returned new product, package open, so it was half-price. We are back in business, folks, and I am grateful for your prayers and support. Thank you.

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Call on Him

Posted on June 5, 2018 by ehurst

It’s downright scary to think about it.

All other things being equal, were it not for America’s obsession with guns, our government would have long ago sunk this country into the depths of Hell. Our government system has bred the most spitefully oppressive regime in human history. But it is held in check by the mere fact that the people would rise up and slaughter the government officials if they crossed that invisible line (a line that lives and moves on its own across the awareness of the whole nation).

It’s not as if gun ownership were some glorious God-given right; it’s a dire necessity. It’s a necessity because of the horrifying brutality of American culture itself. You see, while we do have a problem with an evil elite running our country, it wouldn’t matter if you replaced that elite with other people — it would still be the same awful mess. The poor oppressed mass of Americans would all be just as bad if you suddenly made them government officials. We can all be decent people until we are given power within the system.

It’s the evil system, a system that arises directly from our culture. Indeed, there’s really no point trying to discuss which came first, because the government system grew alongside the culture, and they are inextricably bound. We are the most violent and abusive nation on this earth.

And we export this brutality everywhere we go in the world. The only people we don’t oppress are those who are armed to the teeth like our own home folks. America is not good and just; it is hideous and demonic. That we do some good things only serves to hide what should be obvious to anyone paying attention. Everything you think you don’t like about life in America is because Satan is the father of our nation. Our civility is a thin veneer covering a deep and dark writhing hatred for all humanity. We even hate ourselves in this crazy culture.

I’m not going to bother arguing the specifics. If this prophetic warning is not self-apparent to your heart, there’s nothing anyone can do to help you understand until God burns it into your awareness. There is not a thing any human, or group of humans, can do to make America right. This is why we prepare for God’s wrath to fall on this nation. His patience has run out. If there was any justice to His wrath on Sodom and Gomorrah, then we are next.

We can know this only if we understand the jarring difference between what God has ordained against what we have built here in America. Compounding this awful truth is that we have an ocean of people praising the American culture and form of government as God’s ideal. This is a blasphemous lie, spitting in God’s face. His revelation is all too clear on this issue, but Americans as a whole have closed their hearts to the truth.

So all that’s left is for those of us living for Christ here to seek a path out of American culture, out of the Hell of self-deception about what God calls good and right. In 9+ years of blogging here the message on this has not changed: God’s plan for humanity after the Fall is biblical feudalism. It’s more than just a proposal for our consideration; it’s the fundamental nature of His divine character woven into Creation. This is the character of reality itself. Oppose it and reality will eventually crush you.

Return to this feudalism, to the heart-led way of God’s truth. His wrath is upon the nation, but you can escape some of it by marking you life with His divine moral nature, a sort of blood of the Lamb on the doorposts. Call on Him and embrace His revelation.

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Carving the Carcass of the Fall

Posted on June 4, 2018 by ehurst

Over the years in my reading of scholarly literature about Church History, I’ve noticed a major problem with the literature. The whole sweep of Church History published in English, and even a great deal of translated works from other languages, presumes the rightness of the Western viewpoint. If you try to research how Christianity was westernized, you’ll be awash in justifications for it. Even those who admit there were mistakes in the process still tend to offer corrections that keep Christian religion entirely too Western. They describe the original Hebrew brand of Christian religion as if it were far more Westernized than it actually was.

The westernizing of the gospel message is called “inculturation.” It’s a term used to indicate that a universal gospel truth has to be worked into the existing pagan culture of the audience, seeking ways to make the gospel seem less alien and more acceptable. That sounds innocuous enough, but the question is: How far can we go before we have changed the gospel message into something else? What is essential to the teaching of Christ?

The answers vary widely among those who seek to answer that question. Yet the one thing they all seem to have in common is the emphasis on rational content as the root of the question. Everyone is seeking an orthodoxy and an answer that can be expressed in propositional terms. This is the fatal flaw in the whole debate. There can be no right answer because the question is addressed on the wrong level.

The meaning of “Messiah” is rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures. If you don’t get the Old Testament right, the New means nothing. The New Testament churches considered the Old Testament their Bible until much later, and the Old Testament was good enough to confirm the teachings of Christ. The New Testament documents arose in the context of the Old. Jesus didn’t abrogate the Law of Moses; He fulfilled it in the sense of meeting all its requirements and bringing it to life in human form. Jesus was what Moses was pointing to, the full maturation of it’s ancient intent to reveal the character of a very real and personal God Almighty.

Scholars claim that Acts 15 was the first attempt at inculturation, when the New Testament leadership recognized that Gentiles could not be bound under Hebrew cultural habits enshrined in the Law of Moses. There had to be a way to bring Gentile believers into God’s favor without turning them into Jews, because not everything in Hebrew culture was appropriate for the rest of the world. You didn’t have to be a Jew to follow Jesus; there was something in His teaching that was universal moral truth beyond the cultural packaging. This was behind Paul’s admonition to discern the Old Testament from the higher moral meaning (2 Timothy 2:14-16).

In that letter to Timothy, Paul flatly denies the importance of semantics and legalism. The endeavor did not rest on precise wording of Scripture, but upon seeing beyond the words to the heart of God. This in itself was the core of discerning universal truth outside any culture. This is Mysticism 101; don’t get trapped in the particulars discernible to the intellect alone. If the whole point is stripping away the power of fallen nature, then it means moving the core of conscious awareness farther out of the reach of human sin. That means moving out of the intellect. The single greatest heresy of Western Christianity is that the intellect is not fallen, but can be redeemed and perfected here in this life. They’ve turned spirituality into a cerebral exercise.

Those of us who follow Christ could change the world somewhat. Indeed, our presence as true mystical followers of Christ will provoke some changes; it is inevitable. However, it was never the goal of the gospel to change this fallen world. Rather, it has always been to escape the Curse of the Fall, which means a process of being less and less connected to this world. This world is doomed; the gospel is otherworldly in nature. Not so much leaving the planet as leaving our fallen existence on this planet, we are seeking to reconnect to the divine perspective even as we live here.

The best we can do for society is offer ways to stabilize things, in part by demonstrating the only way it can be stable. We create a covenant fellowship in microcosm and show how it can work against the fallen context. We show not only the powers of our shalom but a changed orientation that makes shalom possible. We have no plans for wholesale conversion of populations via converting cultures. We offer the truth and give God room to draw the people who can be drawn.

So when you read something like this Religion Wiki article on inculturation, you’ll get all kinds of historical data, but the underlying orientation presumes that Christianity was meant to be a culture, instead of something “not of this world.” And this scholarly treatise offers a wealth of research into the details and sources that show how the gospel was modified to appeal to the Germanic hordes invading the remnants of the Roman Empire. It still assumes that the failure — if any — was a matter of orthodox intellectual content. It comes close when it asserts that biblical faith is world-rejecting against the pagan world-accepting outlook, but even there it misses the point. The article assumes a frame of reference about the whole thing that was born after the churches left their ancient Hebrew mystical orientation.

That second linked article assumes “otherworldly” to be an intellectual position. This is false. We as Christian Mystics are deeply involved in the here and now, but we do so from a higher moral perspective. We don’t worry about tomorrow; we eschew the long-term managerial viewpoint of Western Christians. We seek to experience the living joy of our Creator in the here and now and strive to keep that alive for as long as our flesh retains our souls. We know that this is how we take care of all our tomorrows.

We don’t view the afterlife as a radical departure from the whole of our current existence, only the part where our fallen nature gets in the way of experiencing what’s actually here. The afterlife will include the same planet, but one that has been freed from domination to the delusion of the Fall. There’s nothing wrong with the natural world, but something deeply wrong with us. The Second Coming will change human nature, not nature. The author draws a distinction based on a false understanding of Christianity.

That false understanding is the common lore of mainstream Christian religion in the West today. It’s the basic assumptions behind almost all of the work in Church History in the West. Christ didn’t tell us to win the world; He told us to go and tell the world the truth. What the world does with that truth is not our problem, not a part of the Great Commission. It’s far more than rolling back the Western missionary habits of evangelizing Western “Christian” culture as if it were the gospel; it’s a whole new image of missions. We simply want people free from the Curse of the Fall. That means we have to recognize how the Curse is manifested in every cultural setting, and dare to demonstrate a life without those manifestations, whatever they may be. We apply the Sword of Truth and rightly divide what matters from what doesn’t.

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Mysticism Needs No Defense

Posted on June 3, 2018 by ehurst

Mysticism is the only way you can hear God. Symbolism — also referred to as parable, or parabolic language — is the language of conviction, faith, and of the heart. That’s how God designed it.

We refer to “the world” not as a literal planet Earth, but as the fallen state of humanity as a whole. To be “worldly” means pulling away from the spiritual and moral, and hunkering down into the fallen nature. Fallen nature is blocking out revelation. It means a commitment to trusting human capabilities apart from connecting to the Spirit Realm. It means trusting the senses and reason. And despite conscious efforts to the contrary, it inevitably means emotion/sentiment has a dominant, if unconscious, position without the blessing of divine guidance.

So we have another symbolic term: “the flesh.” It isn’t a matter of literal bodily composition, but a term indicating the human predisposition to silence our capacity for faith and commitment to divine revelation. It includes the effects of emotion, senses and reason unrestrained by the heart of moral conviction. Human reason is utterly fallen and cannot be redeemed in this life. The only way to handle it is to subject it to the heart.

In other terms, a worldly disposition means having none of the moral vision God offers. It is a state of deep impairment, unable to catch even a glimpse of the divine moral character of God that pervades all of Creation. It’s a condition of moral blindness, having to make up our own moral evaluation of things without the guidance of the Creator. Indeed, it typically means completely unable to see that there is a moral element in Creation. It relies on reason and social pressure to maintain a thin and unstable moral pattern that seldom matches reality. We are taught to believe that morals are imposed artificially over an amoral universe.

We are born in this fallen world with a fallen disposition. It requires the grace of God to overcome. But His grace makes demands. Those demands include a restoration of our natural link to His divine Person. That relationship is depicted — in symbolic or parabolic language — as eastern feudal dependence on God as Father and Lord. It requires learning to trust our native ability to connect to Him through faith in the heart, in a feudal commitment to Him.

And the whole business of being connected and aware requires an openness to revelation and perception that will not pass human logical and legal muster. Faith demands you trust in things that no one in this world can prove. Indeed, the world’s system is filled with the means to disprove anything faith can tell you. The system is rigged to prevent faith.

Prior to the birth of the West, we saw a bunch of cultures building efforts on chasing substitutes for Jehovah. By no means had He been silent over the countless centuries since mankind was expelled from the Garden of Eden. But the primary trick of Satan was to provoke people trusting in any semblance of the Creator that was just far enough off the mark to confuse things. It still left the door open to finding God because it was a system that had people prepared to submit to Him in truth.

With the birth of the West, we have a system that removed everything that made possible serving the Creator. This is the system we face today. It seeks to lock humans under the Fall by making the deception in the Garden into the very fabric of human assumptions about reality. It’s not a matter of serving the wrong god, but of having no god at all. That is, no conscious commitment to a god, in part by having a very confused notion of what that means in the first place. Instead, it’s an blind default of serving all kinds of petty gods by denying that it serves any god at all.

And then this whole thing is established as a demand placed on religions so that they are neutered a priori, or they aren’t allowed to operate at all. There is no faith, so there is only sentiment. The West says the heart is not a capacity for moral discernment, but a repository of mere human sentiment. Religion, particularly Judaism and Christianity, are both locked under the demand that they build their structure using human reason. What believers ignore, but is obvious to everyone else, is that this leaves them with no foundation at all. It leaves the basic assumption of starting from Scripture wide open to attack. Why apply logic to revelation when logic denies revelation in the first place?

But if you do use Scripture, it can be read only as propositional truth. We have a massive cultural Christianity that has precious little to stand on in the first place, so it becomes a law for them to avoid any symbolism. Parables become mere allegories. By no means can such Christianity defend the use of parables, since everything they have to say can be reduced to propositions in the first place. And they miss out on the vast range of truth and wonder because they refuse to let God speak in parables.

They cannot comprehend this: Law in the Bible is direct communion with God.

Let me recommend a couple of artistic manifestations of what we believe.

1. The Misunderstood Mystics by Cindy Powell.

2. Sound of Silence performed by Disturbed — the singer’s enunciation is flawless and clear.

Finally, is anyone surprised at the rage of so many performing artists against mainstream organized religion in the West?

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Teachings of Jesus — Matthew 16:1-12

Posted on June 2, 2018 by ehurst

Most people miss what Jesus is saying in this passage, because it’s all one thing: The Jewish leaders trusted in logic instead of walking in faith. Their legalism insisted that they must adhere to the Law of Moses, but they insisted that it had to read and understood via human reason and legalistic construction.

In the previous chapter, Jesus had traveled with the Twelve to the coast of the Mediterranean, to Tyre and Sidon. Then they had returned to the vicinity of Galilee where, upon the side of some unnamed hill or mountain, Jesus fed the 4000. From there, they went down to the coast of Galilee and sailed to the westernmost shore, to the village of Magdala. It was here that yet another group of Jewish leaders harassed Jesus.

For once it was not a tag team attack; the Pharisees were allied with the Sadducees in attempting to box in Jesus through His teachings. This meant it was a higher ranking bunch than previously; men with more legal authority. Their challenge to Jesus was to prove His claims as one teaching the truth of God. Since His teaching was clearly not orthodox, perhaps He could provide some miraculous sign to justify the radical departure from common standards? This was a legal challenge. If He could do miracles before their eyes, not by some sleight of hand as so many mavericks had done before, then they would certify Him as approved. At least, that was the ostensible objective here.

They were wholly unlikely to accept anything He might do. These were colleagues of the Sanhedrin bearing an encyclopedic lore of dealing with charlatans, so their whole mission was to tag Jesus as just another one. The Lord said He wasn’t playing along. They demanded a sign of proof, but had long ignored the signs of prophecy. One more sign was clearly not going to help them recognize the Messiah. It was the same refusal He had offered a couple of previous delegations coming to examine Him, the mockery that the pagan Ninevites had repented at the preaching of a foreign prophet in the name of a foreign God, but the Jews couldn’t be bothered to grasp the full revelation of God’s will they had long held as His own people.

So Jesus and His disciples sailed away across the Galilee toward Bethsaida, on their way farther north to Cesarea Philippi. They arrived at the port of Bethsaida and the disciples realized they had failed to pack food for their trip. It would be hard to buy that food now, since Bethsaida was a tiny village with no farmland anywhere nearby. Fish aplenty, and maybe some fruit, but there was no bakery. This was where Jesus had fed the 5000, and they had previously noted then that it was impossible to get enough food to feed so many in such a remote area with almost no facilities. This would mean a long hike without any bread.

In the midst of this gloomy discussion, Jesus said something totally off subject. They were so absorbed in their immediate discomfort that they struggled to fit His comment about the leaven of Pharisees and Sadducees into the context. Was He fussing about their neglect?

Jesus had to stop them. Look around, guys — this is where He fed the 5000 when the only food on hand was the small lunch of a young lad. And on their way here He had fed another 4000. And both times they had full baskets of food for the next day or so. When did bread suddenly become a significant issue? He got their attention.

The Jewish leadership wouldn’t recognize a miracle if it slapped them in the face. Their doctrine was legalism — the Law of Moses pushed through the grinder of human reason. It blinded them to truth, so that miracles made no difference. The Father’s power was not subject to logic; it didn’t not operate on a scale that human minds could manage. The Lord provides. If Jesus needed food, He could get it from nothing. That’s all part of the promises of the Covenant. The Jewish leadership no longer had a clue what was in the Covenant. They had abandoned the Covenant long ago.

Let’s not make that mistake. Let’s restore the mysticism of the ancient Hebrew mind. Faith is far, far above mere human reason.

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A Dearth of Sanity and Trust

Posted on June 1, 2018 by ehurst

Ostensibly, we pay attention to things on at least three different levels. First is the ambient culture in which we live; we can’t escape it completely and being aware of its foibles is necessary if we are to have a witness. Second is our heart-led consideration from the perspective of Biblical Law (the character of Christ). We stand ready to advise folks based on divine wisdom revealed by God for this fallen world. On a third level, we experience an awareness of things in the eternal spiritual realm, where words cannot go. This is the heart and spirit sharing together the ineffable truth of God. It has a powerful impact that results in convictions that often defy reason.

While I developed the habit back in my younger days serving under a legalistic religious context, it turns out that it remains proper for me to avoid situations where I am inside a private space alone with a woman not in my family. I’m reluctant to even be in a car with one. In turn, I would advise all females in my family to reciprocate by avoiding being alone with non-family males.

Our society generally chokes on this, though folks do understand it as a matter of appearances. For example, it shows up in police procedures for giving a civilian of the opposite sex a ride in your patrol vehicle, which requires reporting via radio your destination, starting and ending mileage and time. And if it goes to court, you’d better have a written record of the details noted somewhere. But then, I really didn’t want to patrol with a female partner in the first place unless there was a moral covenant relationship first.

I seldom told anyone the real reason: I trust very few women in our society. Having direct experience with how they can abuse the system for any number of motivations, it only made things worse if I said as much out loud. Now that I’m some twenty-five years beyond those days, things have gotten only worse. I suppose building trust begins with a woman not feeling insulted when I reveal my concerns.

Who hasn’t already heard way too much about the recent public ruckus of women reporting various forms of sexual abuse at the hands of VIP men? The whole business of what is and isn’t appropriate is a moving target, varying greatly from one woman to the next, and sometimes varying between the different men she encounters in her life. It seems as if the whole thing is structured to make men afraid to be men on any terms.

And for those in positions of authority, it’s almost impossible to do the right thing when a female reports something like rape. This is a very bad time to be in such positions of authority, particularly if the authority has any secular component. That means any position of authority exposed to secular regulation. The courts are all over the place on what they view as sensible and appropriate.

Under Radix Fidem, there’s really precious little we can do to help bring sanity. Any of us could pray and seek the Lord on what might be sensible in a specific case, but nobody in our society will like our more substantive moral answers. Our world is so remote from Biblical Law that it’s like being in different galaxies. I’m reading in religious news how various mainstream religious institutions are also all over the map, so it’s no safer with any organized church. You can’t afford to be relaxed and friendly outside a genuine covenant community.

This is a part of the madness, the symptoms of demons set loose in American society as God’s wrath falls on us. You shouldn’t expect much sanity any where.

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Prayer Request: Another Tower System

Posted on May 31, 2018 by ehurst

Update: A system has been ordered and is on the way. Thank you all.

————

Reminder: My tower system has a big problem and can no longer run in graphical mode. The GUI keeps locking up on random events. I need to replace it. Here’s the justification: I’m struggling to process my photos on this laptop. My large 20-inch screen works a whole lot better for that. Trying to set up an external monitor for the laptop is very clumsy. Also, I cannot run my printer from the laptop; there aren’t enough USB ports.

But I have no need for something expensive. So if you have a used tower from the Vista days or later and can donate it, I’d be glad to take it (no, XP boxes don’t have enough power). Just about any consumer grade box will do. There are no big plans to run services from it. I still have all the peripherals from the previous system: monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, speakers, etc. Just the tower itself is all I need. If no one has one to give up, I’ll start saving my PayPal donations for it.

Pray with me for the Lord to provide.

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Fret Not 01

Posted on May 31, 2018 by ehurst

This is likely to become a periodic feature, so I’m numbering these attempts to restore sanity.

1. Tommy Robinson (real name: Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon) was arrested by British police while reporting outside a courthouse. There’s a lot of noise about how the UK has gone full Orwell over this apparent repression of journalism. But Tommy Robinson is no hero; he’s been a right-wing activist for years. His arrest was due to his flat out refusal to abide by the rules for journalists in the UK about ongoing trials and the presumption of innocence. Those rules are not the same as in the US, but they have been the rules there for a very long time. Mr. Robinson was simply acting out his animus toward immigrant suspects of crime, hoping to stir some hysteria about those nasty invaders destroying British culture and life. He was trying to provoke an arrest and succeeded.

Yet there is a massive problem with child sex trafficking in the UK, and officials have struggled to keep it under wraps, because among them are the worst offenders in the land. It’s part of British elitist tradition going back centuries, though seldom mentioned. Too much noise about immigrants trafficking in children would lead to noise about prosecuting the UK elites. It’s the ultimate hypocrisy to decry child sex abuse in public officially, whipping up a Victorian public frenzy about it, while it’s considered a standard part of elite privilege. At least with the accused Muslim immigrants Robinson was trying to expose, they come from a broad middle eastern culture that says it’s no crime at all, but a basic right of Islamic manhood.

2. There is a very large and powerful Islamophobia lobby in the US. It has an awful lot of money. That’s not to say there are no problems with Muslims migrating to the US. We know from experience that relatively wealthy Muslim professionals have moved here and seldom cause trouble. It’s the refugees fleeing wars (that we cause) that are the problem. Anyone paying attention will tell you that those refugees, whenever they can amass a significant presence in any location, consistently agitate for changing laws and enforcement to favor their harsh brand of socially repressive “shariah.” It’s this rowdy rabble living in high concentrations that are the problem, but the Islamophobia lobby runs roughshod over the obvious distinctions and confuses the issue.

The solution is to limit their numbers and keep them dispersed — that’s according to Biblical Law. I’d swear that the Islamophobes’ cartoonish attacks against Muslim immigration was funded behind the scenes by someone hoping to create a false outrage, as if they are trying to polarize things intentionally, just like the ADL does with Judaism. We will have yet another theatrical side-show blaring the woes of an imaginary oppressed minority.

3. And it’s used as part of the tool-set to attack Trump. Trump is quite likely to destroy the US, but that’s his appointed mission from God. The US is under God’s wrath. Bad as it must be, things will be far less painful via Trump than the other route we could have taken, a route that would have been much closer to Armageddon. So let’s be thankful for this somewhat less painful road to the inevitable end of the US. Part of the necessary collapse of the US federal government is the ongoing hysterics about Russian influence, as if the US has never tried to influence elections and governments in nearly every country in the world. Get used to the noise and drama; something this big and this evil does not pass quietly into the night.

Don’t get wrapped up in discussions about “rule of law” and what’s reasonable under the US Constitution. Trump is a lightning rod; he’s supposed to get zapped. His enemies won’t stop voluntarily. The only way to stop this idiotic nonsense is bloodshed — someone will decide to start killing the lefties. Get ready for it; this is where things are headed and there’s no other way out. There’s no going back to honorable and vigorous debate of ideas in the public forum — as if we ever actually had such a thing. The pretense is wearing through and the substantive conflict is boiling over. Brace yourself for civil war; peaceful coexistence is no longer possible.

Addenda: I tend to rewrite stuff like this multiple times until I post it. Sometimes I miss something, as I did above when it was first posted, and I changed it because one of my regulars objected to what it seemed to be saying. I’m not rejoicing in this coming chaos and evil; I won’t be cheering on anyone. You and I should stand ready to offer a better way, but we should hardly be surprised when the majority of the world ignores us. Their path leads through bloodshed; let’s pray that it doesn’t take too much of it.

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Photography: Chandler, OK

Posted on May 30, 2018 by ehurst

It was a lie. The lakes around Chandler were not really worth the time to go see. Both of them are fishing and boating lakes, but you had best not get caught so much as wading in the water. That adds all kinds of expensive water processing to make it drinkable. This first shot is looking across Chandler Lake; the far shore is lovely. However, the water is a murky green and the fixtures for the boat dock were crumbling.

Bellcow Lake is slightly nicer. I took this shot (left) from an artificial causeway. It was an unusual still day and at midmorning nothing was biting. There were fees for just about everything except parking and taking pictures. The water was a little nicer in this lake, still green but not so murky. There are mansions visible from the lake up near the dam, and the scenery is generally more picturesque (right).

So I consoled myself with taking a few shots around the town of Chandler. It has the distinction of being one of earliest sites settled after the Land Run and has kept a lot of truly old structures intact. Roughly 20 items are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. I’ve only picked a few that were easily found, like the old high school (image left). It has a slightly more modern addition on the backside, but the whole thing was abandoned for a new site that was much larger down in the valley on the west side of town. This old stairway runs up from that valley floor, which once was a very busy place.

The bottom of the stairs is quite near a very large area previously used for the annual National Guard camp. This tiny building perched on the hillside was their statistical office, built sometime around 1909.

The city decided to restore as much as possible the old Highway 66 Phillips 66 gas station (right) out near the north end of the main drag. This next shot (left) is just one section of downtown and captures their museum and the old Chandler Bookstore, among other things. A lot of the historic buildings are right on the main street through downtown. The historic homes are typically just a few blocks west of this street.

Outside of Chandler on Route 66 to the west in Warwick is the Motorcycle Museum. At this point it was getting too hot to stop anywhere for very long. It didn’t appear to be open anyway. But on my way back I did manage this time to capture the historic Captain Creek Bridge just west outside of Wellston on US 66B.

This turned out to be a decent trip despite my disappointment with the lakes.

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