Another Case of Mass Hypnosis

If you fear that you have too much to lose, then you have nothing to gain.

Think about the countries the US treats as enemies. The two biggest “threats” (Russia and China) have something the US does not: Neither of them have this mindless drive to export their culture and policies. They simply want to protect their ways for themselves. The US can’t leave anybody alone because it demands unlimited and exclusive access to everyone else’s resources. Thus, you’ll find China and Russia engage other countries by invitation only, while no one can get rid of the US.

Oh, but we spend massive tax revenues on “national security.” Do you understand that the primary function of the CIA is not spying, but to wedge open other countries so we can rape them? Meanwhile, the State Department complains that we are paying too much for everything. These are established facts, but the government strives to hide it from us. I’ve oversimplified things, but this is the essence of what happens. All our warfare and so-called statecraft are aimed at economic plunder behind the scenes. America is the greediest nation on earth; our alleged generosity pales in comparison simply because we allow the government to hide from us just how rapacious we are.

I write such things so you’ll understand what we should expect from God’s wrath. It’s a basic moral principle that the nature and character of a nation’s sin is reflected in how God’s wrath plays out. For example, on the battlefield, the bulk of our current military activity has failed, and will continue failing. First, there’s this huge cover of deception on why our troops are where they are. There is no valid military objective, just lots of activity that serves a non-military purpose. But it’s a sick and perverted method. Instead of simply taking their resources, we insist on forcing these countries to install puppet governments so we can pretend to do business freely. The essential element is the pretense, and it’s twice damned because we already know that no one is fooled by this — oh, except for a major portion of the US population.

Meanwhile, goat herders with ratty old rifles have figured out they can defeat our troops, supposedly the best military in the world, by refusing to play by our rules. The fundamental nature of how our military operates forces us to make enemies and engage them in the least effective ways possible. The real enemy is hatred of the US, something that can never be eradicated by military operations, because it’s the military that provokes the hatred in the first place. Try to understand, Brothers and Sisters, that America is nowhere close to God’s moral standards. We violate Biblical Law in every way possible.

God is patient and gives our sinful nation enough rope to hang itself. Already our troops are defeated in the sense that they accomplish nothing but provoking greater resistance. The harder we push, the more we lose. The more we spend, the more it costs. At some point in the near future, we will face catastrophic losses; look for it. In terms of economics, when the whole thing rests on mass rape, eventually you run out of fresh victims. Okay, that’s a metaphor. Our economic system demands a constant supply of untapped resources; the whole thing requires rapacious growth or it dies. But we’ve bumped up against the end of untapped resources, at least in terms of what is easily grabbed. What’s left will cost more to get, and the marginal return doesn’t simply shrink — it suddenly reverses into net loss. In other words, our military and our economy both will collapse under their own weight.

Yes, it’s very easy to find more sensible plans, but the people in charge aren’t listening. There’s nothing anyone can do about that; it’s the nature of their peculiar brand of evil. They are driven by blind imperatives. It’s a cultural identity not subject to amendment. But wholesale destruction is not God’s plan — I believe it would destroy too much of the rest of the world prematurely. I believe it’s apparent God has plans beyond the end of whatever the US has become. So instead of wholesale, apocalyptic destruction, it will be a break-up of the behemoth into something more manageable.

It’s hard to picture the US broken into smaller regional states simply because we can’t pick out from among the many possibilities just what it is that will cause such a break-up. As you might expect, the proximate cause(s) of such a fracture will determine where the new borders are drawn. But there are already so many ways we are divided, and implacably so, that it’s hard to guess. I’m betting that the federal bureaucracy will fight tooth and nail, but go down whimpering in impotence. I’ll let somebody else make the money taking bets on which wedge issue(s) will cause the break, but I’m pretty sure it will come as a shock to most folks. That’s because the effort to keep the populace blind with that insane patchwork of secrecy is partially effective. There will be a tremendous amount of noise about it, but the fragmentation is well along, fractures under a thick coating of paint.

Just so you’ll understand where I’m coming from: I had some clearances in the military, but was in a position to surmise far more than I was told. That was due in part to having several close spiritual brothers who had those really high clearances. It’s what they didn’t say, but which leaked out of their anguished souls, that taught me so much, and the rest was the Lord working in my soul to help me see what was rather poorly hidden. People didn’t want to know what really mattered; they kept obsessing over what they thought was “cool” and flashy secrets that didn’t actually exist. It was all about the paint job and imagination. It’s part of our artificial culture to focus on entertainment, and ignore the substance of things. People are taught to be bored with the truth.

What is even less obvious is how the overwhelming mass of petty bureaucratic secrecy is a primary symptom of collapse.

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Secrecy Lies

Let’s explore another value shift: secrecy.

In the Bible, secrecy is a valid tactic, but is immoral as a strategy. That is, you can deny your enemy knowledge of the facts of your tactical plan, but you cannot hide from him your final intentions. That’s when secrecy becomes a dirty lie, and our American culture and government are built on lies from Hell.

There is only one valid purpose for life in this Fallen Realm: to shine the light of God’s glory. Redemption from the Fall includes recognizing that you cannot come up with a solution to the Fall. You can’t fix it; you must escape it. That’s the whole point in mysticism and the otherworldly viewpoint: This world is not the real thing. The Fall is not a curse on Creation itself but an affliction of perception. The Curse means that we are born morally blind, locked inside our human capabilities, our intellect ignoring the heart-mind. The intellect cannot possibly arrive at the truth of things when separated from the higher faculty of conviction and faith. Redemption is not improving the mind, but subjecting the mind to the heart.

And then we have to clarify that the heart is not the seat of sentiment, but of the will; it’s the part of us capable of engaging true faith. The heart is a sensory organ in its own right with a mind separate from the brain — that’s the factual science part. We never allow this teaching to slip away from a central position in what we do here at Radix Fidem because it’s directly contrary to a vast ocean of false cultural imagery about what the heart is and what it does. It’s been hijacked and we have to restore the biblical truth that the heart is the seat of the will, not sentiment. Sentiment is just another component of the intellect.

Here we have the first example of why you might need to delay telling someone as much as you could. Understand the basic principle: Deception is a matter of intent. It’s based primarily on seeking a competitive advantage over other people. It’s an attempt to deny them the truth and manipulate them into some course of action that gives you an advantage. This is not morally valid. Our Creator has provided more than enough to prosper and enjoy life, even after the Fall, but that life must embrace His remedy. A critical element in redemption from the Fall is to stop trying to win against other people, and to restore fellowship and communion as our fundamental design. It’s not deception to give people a chance to digest something simple before you shock them with something hard. Your intention is to get keep them moving on the path to Eden.

Saying it that way is clearly a rejection of the analytical approach to reality. It simply reaffirms our fundamental assertion that human nature is broken. The rational approach to reality is inadequate, and it is the rational approach that posits objective truth as the true God-in-effect, when there is no such thing. The notion of propositional truth is a lie. Truth is a living Person; truth is the moral character of God Himself. He’s alive and not at all aloof from our condition. The problem of the Fall is the human tendency to trust the intellect, which is fatally flawed from the start. We don’t hide the fact that we reject the entire epistemology of the Western world as wholly inadequate for human existence.

But if that were our whole message, we would help precious few people. So rather than deceive people, we delay the whole truth until they are ready to face that Flaming Sword at the Gate of Eden. We aren’t protecting that Gate, keeping it only for a precious few who earn their approach. It’s meant to be universal and there’s enough for every living soul ever born. The Flaming Sword itself is the selector. But we don’t throw pearls to pigs. It’s not that they are pigs by nature, but it’s where they are right now. There has to be some progress along the path of moral awareness. They have to recognize that Flaming Sword as salvation, that the death they fear is actually their friend.

You may recall a very popular Internet meme with Jack Nicholson as Colonel Jessup yelling at the lawyer in court that the latter can’t handle the truth (see A Few Good Men). What’s behind all of that is the elitist arrogance of some special group set aside to do the dirty work of defending everyone else, as if the world were so evil and threatening to a holy system of government. It’s an elitist viewpoint that rejects the Fall and rejects revelation as a whole. It’s a rational position built on lies. It’s also exactly what the plutocrats think, that they have something so precious that it must be defended at all costs. Our complaint here is not the cost in resources, but the moral costs. So Jessup’s rousing speech is a lie from Hell, but it’s also the American way.

Yet it’s also the American way for likes of Navy Lieutenant Kaffee to act as if propositional truth is some kind of deity, and that secrecy is inherently wrong, even if sometimes necessary. It’s this internal conflict between the two implacable demands that makes for profitable entertainment, because it polarizes between doing and being. There is no unifying moral fabric in such a system; we are forced by necessity to embrace the nasty as necessary because the alternative is worse. So we have a culture and system of government that demands we accept the existence of dirty secrets in order to survive and keep our decadent materialistic way of life, or surrender to become a third-world hellhole. That’s a false dichotomy. It means all manner of evil is done on behalf of the people, who then bear the full burden of God’s wrath without a clue as to why.

It’s a false dichotomy because revelation says the whole system is from Hell. The first and biggest mistake is materialism, the worship of Mammon. It’s not that you can’t have good stuff to use in making a comfortable life, but that having it is a result, not a valid goal. It stands as a rejection of shalom as the promise of God for doing things His way. You and I can plainly see we aren’t going to fix a culture that was born in sin. Scripture judges a lot of other human civilizations, but up to now, no other civilization in human history has so fully epitomized the Fall as Western Civilization has. The very core value of the West is embracing the Curse, the choice to trust human fleshly capabilities and shutting down the supremacy of the heart and moral conviction. In the West, the heart is the seat of mere sentiment, and “faith” is just another word for intellectual belief. It does not permit a genuine direct connection to a higher realm of spiritual reality because no such thing can exist. The personal God of the Bible is exchanged for some lifeless “objective truth.”

This is the source of an abusive and dehumanizing secrecy in government.

(Note: We are not globalists; we have no objection to nationalism. We encourage boundaries and national identity. But a nation that flatly rejects Biblical Law is doomed.)

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A Shift in Values

Some of our biggest challenges arise from overcoming bad conditioning.

Our society has an obsession with “saving time” — by which is implied not wasting something that is precious and hard to get. There are a whole raft of assumptions behind this image that are just plain wrong. This presumes an accountability to all manner of authorities, but none of them are ordained by God. Further, it presumes a type of accountability that is contrary to divine design. Oddly, a major element in this obsession is that if you don’t cram your time with efficiency in maximizing measurable accomplishments, you aren’t taking control of things. The real truth is that if you embrace this obsession, control is the last thing you’ll get.

We get all kinds of shock and dismay at the notion that people can be property, but in Scripture, everyone is owned by someone else. But you are always accountable to a person, not a nameless, faceless, disembodied thing that turns out to be most cruel and uncaring master of all. That thing becomes the excuse for the most rapacious and cruel demands leveraged by any number of people who fancy themselves agents of it. They can reject all accountability to you because that thing stands there as the false god who is unmoved by individual plight. It’s a deity with thousands of names that you might recognize: society, common sense, social responsibility, the community, the law, etc. The myth of “we the people” as government is just an excuse to ignore the plaintive cries of the abused.

The Bible presumes a lot of patience because God doesn’t demand a thousand little checkpoints of accomplishment. The bigger issue with time is getting you to move inside your soul from your natural fallen state into full communion with your Creator. There are no goal posts; it’s really up to you how far you let yourself be driven. But there is no other point for being alive, so it really doesn’t matter what you accomplish in other terms. The stuff you do is merely the side-effects, not the point of it all.

There’s no sin in filling your time with distraction, unless that distraction itself leads to sin. The morally best way to fill that time is in worship and direct communion with God. My long bike rides? That’s worship time that uses a physical activity to permit the mind the focus on God. If I had a job that matched my physical limitations and temperament, it would be about the same thing. I could go about my work on the simple basis that work is a good way to pass the time while I reflect on my Lord. It’s an added bonus that working usually benefits others, so I can be even more grateful, but the real objective is not what I accomplish. It’s all about the glory of my Father. If He grants that I have gainful employment, I’m blessed in one way. If my circumstances force me to fill the day with other things, I’m blessed in another way — “a house-husband’s work is never done!”

We have to find our incentive with God. This is the biggest challenge of all. He owns us; He is the ultimate point of accountability. You can know in your heart when things aren’t what they ought to be, and pray for relief. You can learn to be patient with situations that are less than ideal, and make the most of the time God gives you to glorify His name. You can be content until He moves you somewhere else. You don’t have to love what you do or the people you have to face; you have to love the Lord who put you there. Be cynical; Christ was cynical about a lot of things. You aren’t going to change anything that matters except what’s inside of you. Suffer the afflictions of mundane human obsession with grace, because there is nothing more important for you.

I’m not doing what I really want to do right now, but I’m waiting until the fruit ripens.

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FYI: Soulkiln Server Down (Fixed)

Not sure what’s going on with the static server but if you are using the email address at soulkiln.org, I can’t get the emails. Please notice that the problem is not with mail delivery on the blog address (soulkiln.blog). The email address posted here on the blog interface under “Contact me” (middle right) is working just fine. The problem is you may also have trouble getting any documents that are linked on the static server, as well. There’s nothing I can do about it right now, but I’ll let you know if anything changes.

Update: It’s been fixed.

Second Update: The static site will go away permanently early in 2020.

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Adjust Your Perceptions

You cannot know Christ without your heart. It may well be you are His, bought with a price, but you cannot truly know Him without a mystical encounter through your heart-mind. It’s not a question of sentiment, though it will most certainly have a strong emotional impact. It’s most certainly not cerebral, because that you only brings knowledge about Christ. You must know Him as the core of your convictions, a personal loyalty only the heart can hold.

We are born under the dominion of Satan. That’s part of what the Curse of the Fall means; we are born in sympathy to his agenda. His agenda is to deny you the heritage of blessings, to keep you away from the Flaming Sword at the Gate of Eden. As long as you keep eating from the Tree of Knowledge, you cannot eat from the Tree of Life. The Forbidden Fruit is your commitment to trust your intellect over your heart; it’s the rejection of God’s revelation.

Nothing else in all of Creation changed at the Fall. What changed was human perception, now locked under the intellect, under senses and reason and emotions. In pulling those faculties out from under the dominion of the heart, those things were broken. Even their own native capabilities are hindered by the deception of the Forbidden Fruit. That term “Tree of Knowledge” refers to “knowledge” in the sense of being the judge, of deciding what is good and evil without reference to divine revelation. But of course, good and evil are not decided by humans; they are written into the fabric of universe. Humanity together is not capable of legislating what good and evil should be; moral truth existed in Creation before mankind was made.

It’s still there, plain to see, but not with the eyes of the flesh. Only the heart is capable of discerning it. Unless you are a priori committed to Christ in your heart, you cannot hope to understand anything about reality.

Don’t be a fool — it hardly matters if you know Him by that name. He was there in Spirit from before Creation and has always lived in the moral fabric of the cosmos. His birth of the Virgin was simply an incarnation. He was always within reach of the heart under any number of names, and still is. That never changed. The advantage now is that He took on human form and demonstrated it. So painfully clear it is that the last bit of excuse was wiped away.

He is the personification of Biblical Law, the personal living will of God. Sure, the specific Covenant of Moses is ended, but the Biblical Law that ever lived behind that covenant has never changed. Try not to get hung up on the English translation of the New Testament when you run into the term “law” — it could indicate any number of things. It could be a reference to the Talmud, which was little more than the civil law of Judea, something pasted on top of the Covenant of Moses. Or it could be a reference to the Covenant of Moses as a specific example of Biblical Law in a particular context. Or “law” could have other meanings best understood from the context.

Don’t be deceived by the moral decay in the natural world around you. It’s polluted by the folly of humanity ignoring God’s revelation. Natural decay was a part of nature from the beginning, the cycle of life God designed. The defilement of human sin afflicts Creation as a whole, including our own bodies. Don’t look for the cycle of natural decay and rebirth to change after Christ returns. Look for Him to heal the moral decay and defilement resulting from human evil. There will be some massive changes, but they will all be a matter of restoring God’s original design.

Nor will time and space end; “eternity” doesn’t mean what you probably think it means. What will change at His return is how humans perceive time and space. Indeed, it’s virtually impossible to explain in words. It will be a reset back to the way it was in Eden. But we will take with us the experiences we have had since the Fall; this will prevent a second fall. Then the Lord Himself will return to walk in the Garden with us once more. Try not to get hung up on some alleged literal meaning in 1 Corinthians 15:50-58 and 2 Peter 3:10-13. They are summarizing what it will look like to anyone living at His return. The effects of sin will be burned away.

Test these declarations against your heart.

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Glossolalia and Such

This tends to be a sticky issue because too many people take themselves too seriously. As a consequence, they take their positions on things too seriously, and get mightily offended if your position is different. I’ve had considerable experience working with folks who espouse these gifts, and frankly a significant portion of them are unpleasant company.

You can read 1 Corinthians 12 for a discussion of the gifts (with a wider context of 1 Corinthians 12-14), but I take the position it’s not a closed list. I’ve experienced too many things myself that don’t fit on the list, but clearly arise from the same kind of encounter with the Holy Spirit. I’m convinced Paul was simply discussing what the Corinthians had experienced, and his guidance to them based on his own experience. I don’t think it’s wise to try limiting God to Paul’s advice to them in their context. He also mentions different categories of gifts and I’ve written about those, as well. The emphasis here is on manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Naturally, this leads to talk about the “baptism of the Holy Ghost” and similar terms.

Let me make one thing clear: The Radix Fidem covenant ignores this issue. What you will get is my leadership on this issue, for the simple reason that something like this is a moving target. After I’m dead and gone, it’s quite likely there will be new conflicts arising from new teaching and practices. Meanwhile, I’m hoping I can set a wise example in avoiding boundaries that exclude people on the wrong basis. A certain amount of exclusion is unavoidable, but I take the position it needs to be functional, not a matter of orthodoxy and calling each other names. If your home cell group is “charismatic,” that’s fine. But if you want to remain affiliated under the Radix Fidem covenant, you can’t stir up trouble for other members who aren’t like you.

I reject the common test you run into in charismatic circles (Pentecostals, etc.) that says you must speak in tongues or you are somehow spiritually second class. There are plenty of places and groups where you can find that, so stay with them and leave us alone. I also reject the notion that the charismatic gifts are inherently fake. Granted, my experience has been that way too many folks who flaunt those gifts are fake, and their practices tend to bring moral rot. But let that be the basis for building barriers. Our whole purpose as a community is to encourage moral purity, so your charismatic expressions have to serve that purpose.

The charismatic gifts are optional.

The Scripture flatly says you do have control over letting them show (1 Corinthians 14:32-33) and that you should seek shalom, not self. Furthermore, the proof of the Holy Spirit’s presence in your life is not some ecstatic manifestation, but the Fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:13-26, 1 Corinthians 13). Show me your humble devotion to each other first, then we’ll talk about your gifts of the Spirit. Furthermore, in broad terms I reject the common doctrines about the term “baptism of the Holy Spirit.” Don’t try to drag that into Radix Fidem. Your personal ecstasy does not grant you authority; authority arises from the simple fact that God’s people follow you. It’s a matter of moral instinct, not some imaginary legal right. Meanwhile, we do have a covenant and it’s pretty open, but the emphasis avoids making too much either way of the charismatic gifts.

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Sermon on the Mount 15

Judge Not 7:1-6

Jesus cites another Talmudic teaching. Matthew uses a neutral Greek word for “judge” (krino) — it’s meaning is entirely contextual. Thus, Jesus puts that teaching into a clear context regarding the hypocrisy so common to Scribes and Pharisees, the ones also most likely to quote the Talmudic lore in public. The context Jesus offers is in the sense of minding your own business, something Scribes and Pharisees found difficult.

The turn of phrase is first a stark kernel of truth, followed by a parallel statement in expanded terms. It’s that second parallel statement that tells His audience where He is going with this. Don’t try to inflate your social position by talking down to others. Later in the New Testament, this is stated in terms of going to your brother first in private, because your intention is to seek his welfare, too. You may not know the whole story, so assume the best of your brothers and sisters until you have a compelling reason to start putting up barriers. If they refuse to repent, then maybe you can go public with great care and humility.

Furthermore, there’s too good a chance your brother has been minding his own business about your flaws. If you establish the pattern of building up each other’s lives, it would make for a far stronger fellowship and shalom. Jesus is more blunt in warning that it’s downright stupid to castigate someone in public for a small mistake, because those listening are going to wonder if the only reason you know so much about this problem is because you have it even worse. Even if it’s not true, your attempt to build your reputation will have the reverse effect. We all know that people tend to project their own failings onto others, and it’s most likely the cause for pious public warnings.

If you deal with your sins and obtain God’s mercy, you’ll find yourself far better prepared to help someone else with that same weakness. And if you are humble and penitent enough to get right with God, you won’t be seeking that inflated reputation in the first place.

Granted, the Scribes and Pharisees often performed such public upbraiding under the pretense of sharing “a Word from the Lord” that the poor perpetrator needed to hear from the rabbi’s treasury of deep wisdom. So Jesus quotes yet another Talmudic teaching about holy things tossed to dogs. The context is rather involved on this one, as the meaning is quite specific. Let’s say you designate a particular animal as an offering for the Temple Altar. But something happens before to degrade the offering before it can be surrendered to the priests. It remains holy and cannot be bought back and used for secular purposes. You are stuck with it; you can’t even turn it loose, lest it become the prey of the wild dogs that roamed that part of the world. You have to assume that God had some reason for putting that burden on you. Thus, the ancient rule was worded, “You cannot give offerings to dogs.” It extended to other, metaphorical meanings, as well.

The business of not throwing pearls before pigs was a more jarring image, but still a parallel statement, and one that had seen other uses. Very early in Roman rule, a strong resentment rose among the purists and patriots who didn’t have the guts to actually engage in violence against Rome’s occupation army. These chickenhawks would warn others against explaining the Talmud in ways that these Gentiles could understand. So they used these kinds of phrases about holy stuff and dogs, or jewelry and pigs, to remind each other to keep the Talmudic teachings secret. So secret, in fact, they were seldom shared with common Jewish peasants, for whom rabbis and priests often barely disguised their contempt.

Jesus turns these parables on their heads. He says it in a way that mocks these arrogant chickenhawks. He is warning His despised Jewish peasant audience not to let the rabbis understand the true message of God’s Word, because they are unworthy to hear it. Don’t bother going to them privately with the intent of helping them to understand how their public preening was having the opposite effect of making them look like dogs and pigs. Don’t attempt to lead them to repentance. Just mind your own business and let them be found unworthy when the Messiah comes.

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It Was Never Real

Churches that emphasize changing the world are little more than political institutions.

Such churches have chosen to participate in God’s cattle-herding of those oblivious to His will. This has nothing to do with whether they might actually be the sheep of His flock; they have strayed away from His pastures. They have joined themselves to the wrong herds.

The real battlefield of spiritual warfare is your own soul. There is nothing you can do to change the nature of this world. The one thing God does permit us is to change ourselves. Even then, the only real contribution we make is desire. We have to want what God is doing with us, want it every moment of every day. It’s a path that calls to us, not a place we live. On this path, we are permitted to see His handiwork up close and for what it really is. Nothing actually changes except our perception, our choice to stand with Him in His declaration of what’s real, what’s true, what’s good.

So there is no godly plan to systematically relieve poverty, for example; there is only you and I individually doing justice with whatever God puts in our hands. If there is any hope of helping those in poverty, it is persuading them by our testimony to walk in the heart-led path. Once there, God can steer them where He intends them to be. Poverty itself means nothing. Like death, it’s just a circumstance. Until people see that, nothing can help them; they are doomed.

Let’s not make Radix Fidem a place to get lost in trying to change the world.

We are not in this to save human life as it now is. Without the heart-led way and a commitment to divine justice, every human is already dead. That is the default for the entire human race ever since the Fall, so it’s already too late for most of them. This also has nothing to do with their eternal destiny. Every person living on this earth is just a heartbeat away from discovering their eternal destiny, but they will never be ready to face it without a commitment to Christ in the here and now. And following Christ means Biblical Law. And Biblical Law means living from the heart.

Biblical Law also means that the only good change we make in this world is to take people out of it. This assumes you understand “this world” is a doctrinal term for wallowing in the Fallen Realm, human existence under the Curse of the Fall. It is refusing to see what God made and how it actually works. We don’t give them something they don’t already have; it’s there waiting to be born. The Curse is merely the default rejection of God’s revelation. Our one hope while we live is to awaken the truth in ourselves and get as far as possible into divine justice and so we can help others make the same escape. We are here to get people out of this world, in the sense that the root of their existence will be in the Spirit Realm.

There’s nothing else we could do that matters. Without that, we have done nothing; we would not have obeyed Christ. The gospel message is creating a communion of souls who steadfastly reject the fallen perception of reality. When Christ returns, Eden will be restored and the Lord will once again walk in His Garden. Heaven is living eternally in His Presence as His family; Hell is living in His Presence as His enemy, knowing full well it didn’t have to be that way. We have only the duration of this life to accept His free offer.

There’s nothing wrong with the rest of Creation; the flaw is in us. You cannot remake the Fallen Realm because it was never real in the first place.

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Eternal Outsiders

We of Radix Fidem and the heart-led way do not see ourselves as a nation or tribe among others on this earth. Rather, we are a tribe and nation on a totally different level. Our tribal communion is in the heart, and has nothing to do with human political and national identities. Nor do we reject those national and political identities; our religion encourages no interference at all in such matters. We leave those things in the God’s hands.

We operate in the Fallen Realm, but our orientation is on the Spirit Realm. Our hearts are alive in the moral realm where the Two Realms overlap. We sense with our hearts directly the moral truth to which most humans are utterly blind.

We have seen the ugly effects of religion as politics. The record is clear; we are now at the end of a political “Christian” empire known as Western Civilization. It is a very ugly record. But the record clearly shows that we would be just as miserable if our world was ruled by political Islam, or political Hinduism, or political Buddhism. For the past two millennia we’ve seen how political Judaism has played one off against the other, particularly the Muslims and Christians.

As it is written: “There is none righteous, no not one; there is none that understands, there is none that seeks after God.” (Romans 3:10-11)

You might imagine that a good life is possible under any of them, but the problem is fallen human nature. So each of those religions, and other isms that function in the place of religion, are just varied excuses for people walking on each other. We have no home in this world.

This is what frees us to participate from what appears to be an objective position on human aspirations. We could never be true believers under any flag or religious symbol, but we could be the most true and honest servants because our ultimate loyalty is to a divine justice that transcends every human care. This is what “mysticism” truly means: We are very much involved in trying to make things right because that’s why we live, but we approach the question from outside this world.

We don’t have to hide anything; no one believes us in the first place. There are precious few souls in this world willing to stand above it the way we do. We have no discernible agenda in anything because we live only for a justice that no one embraces. For us, it’s the process, not the results. So while there are things we’ll refuse to do, we know better than to think we can make anyone understand unless they can rise out of their intellects and operate in terms of conviction.

Get used to it, Brothers and Sisters. There is no place to rest in this world. It won’t matter who runs the show or what flag they wave, we remain aliens. Shine the light of glory wherever you are.

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Tech Update: Intel CPU Flaw Mitigations

All the recent noise about Intel processors having flaws boils down to two specific issues. The tech community has nicknamed them Meltdown and Spectre. Meltdown was not so very hard to deal with, which is a lucky thing, because it was the easier of the two for someone to exploit. Spectre was a flaw more deeply burned into the processor itself, and Intel was in panic mode trying to come up with a fix for it, despite how complicated it would have been to actually use. Sure, replacing all the CPUs would do it, but more expensive than anyone wants to think about. It would likely bankrupt Intel to go that route.

So along with the efforts to fix the Meltdown issue, everyone was trying to come up with ways to at least slow down Spectre. The big web browsers did their part with some changes because the easiest route of attack would be through them. Operating System makers shipped some more changes, as well. Microsoft is having to force the AV vendors to quit doing some tricks they used to do by getting their fingers too deep into the Windows kernel, so this is a big mess for the AV and other security software companies.

Ubuntu made the news because their first attempt to issue a fix broke things. That includes my new laptop. I had to learn how to tell the boot controller (called GRUB) to load the old kernel unless told otherwise. What the new kernel broke was suspend, hibernate and shutdown. None of them worked as they were supposed to, so I had to manually shut the system down so I could tweak it to run the old kernel. Eventually Ubuntu fixed the mess and issued yet another kernel update. All is well again.

Finally, Intel came up with something that could be loaded into the OS that mitigates things even further. Instead of having to update all the various BIOS and UEFI loaders built into the processor and motherboard, Intel has a way of loading certain kinds of fixes at boot time in a package they call “microcode.” This is something that talks directly to the CPU and changes its behavior. As soon as Intel made this available, the Linux developers grabbed it and included it as an option. This package of microcode is pretty complex, with a bunch of different stuff depending on which version of which Intel chip you have. Mine is called Kaby Lake, and it’s covered in this update which came out just today. So far as I know, for Windows you need to wait until Microsoft comes out with a special update for this, because it’s a little more complicated working it into that system.

While a lot of folks were fussing about how it appears these combined fixes would slow down how computers worked, wiser heads suggested that most consumers would never notice the difference. So far, I haven’t seen anything. This XPS you folks so generously helped me buy is still awfully fast. However, I’m reading that these fixes do seem to make a difference with a lot of servers, especially those used to run cloud computing services — which is just about every big tech company operation, among others. There’s a lot of background noise about having to buy a lot more hardware just to catch up to where they were, and next time it will be with AMD processors.

Since nobody has caught crackers using these two flaws, it remains to be seen if all these mitigation efforts will work. If it succeeds, nothing happens. If it fails, we won’t know until someone catches it in action. The Spectre problem in particular makes it possible to leave no trace, so that’s the one that has everyone really worried. But the fixes come with a certain amount of testing from hard-core security experts trying to use those flaws on running systems, and so far it looks like it’s working. Whew! The technology world dodged another one.

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