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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The Theology of Division

Posted on May 30, 2018 by ehurst

There is so very much that we simply cannot see unless God shows it to us. I’m not sure there is any way to draw a line between heart-led moral perception and a direct move by God to point something out; I don’t think words can delineate the boundary line. But I’m convinced there’s a huge difference between those two together versus human intellectual capability.

Stop for just a moment. Let’s understand something; let’s get our minds used to how this works. Review: There is no objective body of truth out there. Ultimate reality is rooted in God’s Person. Reality is flexible in the sense that the only thing that matters is what God wants you to do. And that includes realizing that God may want others to do things entirely different, and that leading them into that path may require giving them a radically different perception of things. Perception is reality in the sense that your reality is as good as anyone else’s so long as you are confident in the Lord’s guidance. So the key is not what is objectively real, but what fits into your sense of mission and calling.

Fallen human minds cannot grasp ultimate reality, so the question of what is ultimately real is a waste of time. We can’t get there, not even in theory. What we need is enough to move forward and act in serving Christ. This is the divine moral equivalent to “need to know.” The difference is that God is not like the government, keeping hidden a supposed body of information that is actually true. God isn’t hiding anything; He’s been trying to reveal Himself and His Creation since the Garden of Eden. The only limiting factor is our own internal resistance to His truth. Our minds reject the notion that they are limited and fallible.

This is why the idea that faith can be reasonable is so very wrong. True faith — commitment and trust in God — is entirely unreasonable. It demands things that no human reason can possibly justify, since human reason cannot grasp the true nature of God’s intent. Only the heart can handle that sort of truth. It won’t hurt you to be aware of the deception by which the rest of the human race lives, but we cannot live there ourselves.

Mainstream organized religion subverts faith by insisting that faith be reasonable. Whatever they have after passing it through the intellectual filters is no longer faith. They seek to build unity on the basis of shared logic, not the Person of Jesus Christ. (This is the same mistake of Judaism, confusing the orthodox image of God with the Person of God.) How many of you, after having experienced mainstream religion, struggle with the idea of fellowship and unity that doesn’t require having the same intellectual understanding of things? How many of you are prepared to work with a brother or sister who holds a different theology? We are taught to believe that such is not possible.

This is what happens when you build religion on presumed factual knowledge. Mainstream religious leaders assume the facts are immutable, but even if that were true, no living human is capable of knowing the facts in full. Not even in theory can any human mind really lay hold of the facts. Instead of seeing the ineffable truth of God, they chase the presumed factual historical basis of certain events, when those who recorded those events worked under no such delusion.

It’s not as if the mainstream religious leaders are so devious and capable of foreseeing this enslavement of billions of souls. This is merely the net result of Satan working through his agents over centuries. But make no mistake; this is not some dark evil plot predicting every move men have made; it’s opportunistic. The Devil is quite happy with any answer but the right answer. That’s what makes his job so easy; all he has to do is keep you away from God’s calling on your life.

I got close enough to religious leadership to see this stuff up close and personal. There is a great love for talent, but that talent has to be recognized by the right patron. It’s pure politics. One rises in the system solely by sucking up to the right people. What isn’t so obvious is how there are several different routes; it’s not always just one right group of people. One need only gain any sponsorship that can grant momentum; the system is based on herding, not shepherding. Popularity comes in many different forms, but without some kind of popularity, there is no advancement. The individual in question need not be ambitious himself, only sponsored.

People who still attend churches I once did have asked me why I don’t come back. Of course, their question assumes I’m wrong for following the call of God instead of knuckling under the current leadership. Somehow I must be rejecting Jesus and His gospel. I don’t tell them that they don’t know Jesus, only that they don’t know Him well enough to grasp that He can call people outside of the existing institutional churches.

Here at Kiln of the Soul virtual parish, the only membership requirements are that you look at my teaching and say, “I can tolerate that.” It’s this instinct to correct everyone who thinks differently that kills genuine spiritual fellowship. It you can’t tolerate the teaching here, do your own thing. If you are following the call of God, He’ll make sure you don’t have to work alone. But by all means, have enough faith to do it alone if necessary.

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Bits and Pieces 33

Posted on May 29, 2018 by ehurst

Got a new headshot. I’m still letting the hair on top — such as it is — grow as it will. But despite all my best efforts, the beard was not viable. It wasn’t just itching constantly. Even when I trimmed it back, it was itchy and downright painful. Some of the hair follicles on my face began to close up and swell. So I cut it back to the minimal length so I could see to shave all but the parts I simply cannot shave (nor grow).

We are having unseasonably hot temperatures here in Oklahoma. Before the heart problem, I never gave it much thought, but my research indicates there is now some greater risk for me with hard workouts when it gets much above 90°F (32C). The trick is to get out and ride early enough and get back before it gets too hot. Right now, it gets too hot by 10 AM. I’m substituting longer hikes as my primary workout, because I can finish that before 9 AM. Then all I have to worry about is putting an ice pack on the bad knee.

I can still drive out to Draper and take pictures of the progress on construction of the bikeway. I’m also not worried about those longer trips I was making, except for the places where a lot of hiking is necessary. Walking some is not a big deal, but climbing on rocks and so forth is ill advised in our wilting summer heat. What held me back was the sudden rise in gas prices and one final front-end part that needed replacing. It’s fixed now and I plan to drive out to a couple of lakes in the near future. Up near Chandler is a pair of lakes close together, named Bellcow and Chandler. I’m told it’s worth seeing.

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Technology: Keep Watch

Posted on May 28, 2018 by ehurst

We need to prepare for tribulation, which will include a vicious rise in censorship on the Internet. Here in the US, various government agencies have long practiced limited forms of disinformation and squelching those who told the truth. Now they are becoming more active in blatant silencing of select groups.

We’ve always had political conflicts; now each party is becoming more determined than ever to “take back the country” from the others. There’s less and less talk of compromise for the sake of preserving the system. But nowhere is the battle more nasty than in cyberspace. Recent information warfare fired by partisan agendas has seen the rise of actions that will spill over to those of us not directly involved. Many of the most popular services used by millions, even billions, of ordinary clients have begun silencing voices that dared to go where politically correct censors don’t want anyone to go. The changes in how these various services handle this endeavor have come so frequently that it’s hard to keep track.

If you take the time to contemplate this in your heart, you can discern a very disturbing shift in the moral realm. Some of us saw this coming a long way off, but now it’s quite close upon us. I can’t offer a timetable of any sort, but this is going to get worse. Your elders here at Kiln of the Soul virtual parish have taken steps over the years to reduce our reliance on the more dangerous services. For example, several of us who were previously on Facebook closed our accounts some time ago. We sensed the futility of trusting such a service to keep open the channels of communication for us there.

While that did mean reducing our exposure, it also meant reducing liabilities. I’ve elected to pay for the service on this blog to improve our chances of keeping it open as unseen forces work to shut down messages like ours. We’ve opened the Radix Fidem forum as a place for you to interact without having to worry about having your own blog. We still hope to see more of you join us there. Jay is hosting this for us and there seems for now little likelihood his provider will pull the rug out from under him.

But things are very unsettled on the Net. There are several simultaneous efforts to squelch freedom of expression from different angles. I’ve warned that we are headed for a genuine bloody civil war here in the US, and we have already seen how most of the early battles have been on the Net so far. This is going to get worse with each side seeking fresh advantages to silence the other. In the process, their huge and clumsy weapons could fall on us without them even noticing.

One of the biggest threats right now is one you don’t hear much about: blocked access at the consumer level. There are several ways different actors may deny you the freedom to read this blog or even visit the forum. This could remain up and running, but that doesn’t mean your local ISP is going to allow you full access even if you keep paying the bill. This is just one way things can go bad for us all. Try to understand that almost everything we do right now is via the Internet; we are a virtual parish. If this community of faith means anything to you, be aware that its existence is currently fragile.

This is in part why I’ve been trying to teach in such a way that you can keep going on your own without my daily blather. This is not about me keeping you on a leash. I’m not a cult leader seeking to control others. This is about you reading and learning enough to stand on your own. Our current level of ready contact could disappear without warning.

I remain firmly convinced that God changed things sometime ago, so that we are on a different track than before. I called it a “shift in reality.” Instead of a truly apocalyptic experience, we are simply in for some tribulation. It’s still tribulation; it still means human suffering and governments collapsing, along with the failure of many non-government institutions upon which we rely. His wrath is falling on America right now. But I feel certain the Lord has promised it will be bearable for us, if we seek His face on what it takes to be ready.

We’ll keep an eye on things and do what we can to maintain open lines of communication. If something happens on your end to make it difficult, we’d like to know. I still have five email addresses, one of which is posted in the right column on the blog interface here. You can also click the big icon for the Radix Fidem forum and post a comment there. Jay keeps an email address in plain sight on his blog (look at the top line). Try to get hold of either of us if things start getting blocked on your end. Maybe we can help you get around it for awhile at least; we’ve learned a few tricks over the years of messing with computers and software.

Still, understand this: As the world around us gets crazier, it also gets more open to hearing our message. If God permits you to be isolated from us, it’s likely because He’s preparing to build a literal church around your faith. Keep watch.

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