Photography: Draper East Shore

Posted on December 1, 2017 by ehurst

There are a few areas on the east shore of Draper Lake I hadn’t explored last year. Yesterday was the right weather for resuming that. The map shows a substantial peninsula connected to SE 119th Street. The lavender numbers indicate the location where I took the following images, and also indicate the approximate route of my wandering. Please note the image shows a higher water level than I found yesterday.

That street isn’t actually open to motor vehicles west of Stanley Draper Drive, but it’s still clear cut through dense woods. I shot this image back up the hill from the shore of the lake. Aside from patches of bare sandstone, the ground is just fine-grained sand. I was standing right in the curve where the trail drops south. To the right of where I stood taking this shot was a large hollow where the Parks Dept. had pushed soil up on the side of the road to inhibit vehicles from accessing the shore. While it’s been dry quite some time, it still had some residual moisture, making it a thick mud hole. I was just barely able to skirt it. I had to push my bike across a lot of soft sand to another steep rocky climb like the one in the picture.

The satellite image is a few years out of date. It shows a trail chasing the shoreline that is no longer visible. You could probably discern a roadbed in the terrain, but it’s socked in with trees and shrubs, not to mention lots of thorny vines. I did get to Point 20, but not that way. Just a little further up and over the ridge is a trail that has seen some use in recent years. To block it, Parks Dept. put down a pile of truck tires; you can still see them if you zoom in on satellite images. They weren’t much hindrance to me pushing my bike past them.

There is where the adventure began. In the satellite image above you can see an open field just off the road on that trail. That’s where I had a the first flat ever on these hybrid tires. So I stopped, pulled my tool bag of the handlebars and inverted the bike. I carry a spare tube, so didn’t try to repair the flat one, just swapped them out. I also carry a very small hand pump that works well enough if the user is patient and persistent. I checked the tire and found no foreign sharp object; it must have been from some of the metal debris dumped out there over the years. Back on the trail, the way was just barely passable, but I rode almost all the way back down to the shore. I missed my intended turn toward to the far end of the peninsula, though.

Instead, I wound up on the shore almost straight west. I was treated to this delightful view of a collapsed bluff. I was able to walk all over it, but because some of the rocks wobbled under my weight, I didn’t feel safe trying to carry my bike over it. Instead, I had to navigate the thick underbrush to go around this.

This next image shows how the bluff cuts off the shore. But the shore was quite ample and clear beyond that and I decided not to try an immediate return back up the trail. I just kept going around the shoreline. It was a delightful choice at first, with numerous places where the underlying bedrock extended out into the water. But I had to walk the whole way, because there was just too much loose sand.

So I kept trudging, hoping to glimpse a trail opening. Keep in mind that I no longer have my iPhone, so I didn’t have access to GPS and satellite views, only my memory of out-of-date imagery. I never saw a usable trail leading away from the shore. I kept walking all the way around the peninsula, clambering over the rock outcroppings.

I did encounter some black sandstone here and there. It’s harder than the red stuff, but still just sandstone. There were places where it lay on the sand in large fields of fist-sized stones. I was ready to get out of there long before I was able. I ended up having to hike all the way around up into the deep swampy inlet you can see on the south side of that peninsula. It happened to be dry enough to walk on yesterday, and just as the shore turned back south is where I finally found a navigable trail. It was mostly ridable and I was glad to get off my feet. I came out onto the route marked “Westminster Road” which looks just like SE 119th above. At this point I wasn’t exactly sure where I was on the map because I had no map. I was actually just a hundred meters from where I had first rode off into the woods.

Still, I turned south and stayed along the shore I hadn’t yet explored. Eventually it led me to SE 134th and I knew then where I was. I was very whipped at that point and faced a long slow ride home northward on Stanley Draper Drive (which turns into Post Road) because I also had a headwind. But I did okay, and felt as tired as I normally do after those 50-mile rides.

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…And Furthermore

Posted on November 30, 2017 by ehurst

This continues the previous post.

Patriarchy is written into human DNA. As long as there are X and Y chromosomes, and their presence results in physiological differences, nothing on this earth can change masculine dominance. It exists when it is denied. It can surely be done wrong in culture, but it cannot be removed.

By the same token, matriarchy is also wired into human society. These are not competing systems, but parallel. There would be no human life on earth without both of these. All you can do is make life miserable by trying to ignore or hinder their essential natures. Instead of taking umbrage at how God decided things should be in this world, it works a lot better to understand how each of these two powerful forces of nature operate.

A primary failure of the West that it does not balance the two. As just one example, the doctrine of a man’s castle-home is contrary to Biblical Law. In the Bible, the woman owns and controls the living facility. The castle is hers; the man focuses on defending the family, not the facilities. Yet, even in saying that, the Western mind will twist it into something contrary to human nature itself. It’s not that men can’t have forts, but that the fundamental design of living quarters is not a man’s forte. Housing architects and residential planners should all be female.

The whole business of human government requires a division of labor between men and women. There are some things men do better, and some women do better. It’s not that women are confined by men to certain roles, and whatever the men don’t want to bother with is their problem. It’s that wise heart-led men know better than to proceed without feminine support and counsel. A woman’s place of honor is no mere pedestal; feminist polity is matriarchy overreacting to masculine folly. Western Civilization is larded with false dichotomies.

For similar reasons, a genuine patriarchal government always keeps the door open to meritocracy. They need not be mutually exclusive. Doing this well prevents mere ambition from taking over. At the same time, nepotism is not a sin; like everything else, it has its place. Indeed, belittling and making nepotism illegal hardly prevents something so utterly natural. Just because you can put a label on something to disparage it doesn’t mean you understand what’s going on. There will always be some human activity that simply cannot be improved.

There will always be people who govern best by knowing when, and to whom, they should pass the buck. These have historically been the greatest rulers in human history. At the same time, this never works well in war. Any combat leader who isn’t the first to face enemy fire is the leader who sacrifices his troops for his own petty personal comforts. The reason someone like King David lived so long while leading in that fashion is because God protected him. A critical element in that protection was that readiness to lead from the front. In peace, he was the first to pass the buck. He failed most as king when he failed to distinguish between recognizing a particular issue as a matter of administration or war.

Whenever Americans work alongside other nations and cultures on anything at all in this world, Americans are notorious for two things. One is the utterly hidebound worship of rules and regulations as written. Two is the frequent failures that relate to keeping the rules when they don’t matter and ignoring them when they do. A related issue is the consistent deception about why certain rules exist. Nobody in their right minds will trust Americans for anything that really matters because they consistently lie to each other while pretending to worship honesty. A genuine and honest American really stands out in foreign countries.

The single greatest moral flaw of the West can be narrowed down to the assumption that human behavior can be made efficient. This is false even if you completely ignore the Fall. The very concept of efficiency is an abomination to God, so one of the greatest heresies is the idea that God does things that are reasonable. Faith in God is inherently unreasonable and extravagant, because God is not bound by human reason and He has always been extravagant. But you notice how many folks are disappointed because they reasoned that God should do or give some particular thing that made sense to them. They assume God is conserving resources, because otherwise they are logically forced to accuse Him of lying. The real issue is that Westerners refuse to bow the knee with enough extravagance and self-sacrifice.

Reason, when it stands alone, is the Devil in disguise.

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Discerning the Real Problems

Posted on November 29, 2017 by ehurst

I’ve gotten some questions that indicate a need to paint a clearer image on a few things.

As noted in my recent “God’s Law” series, Biblical Law recognizes two kinds of government — imperial and national. But the latter is defined radically different from common understanding today, and the former is highly restricted.

By definition, a “nation” is not a matter of size, but of uniformity in culture. It’s a bunch of people living together with a strong common culture and set of social customs. Without that common culture, government is not possible. That is, any “national” government based on the assumption of mixed cultures is inherently oppressive. It is utterly impossible to govern human life in such a context without somebody being crushed by alien and repulsive moral values. Somebody will always be crapped on. Multiculturalism is an abomination to God.

And by definition, an imperial government stays out of such things. It’s all about the tribute and defense, not regulating human behavior. In America today, we cannot imagine a life where more than a tiny community of maybe 1000 or so could live under the same culture and social milieu. And we are taught that it’s creepy. This bad moral orientation is a part of what draws God’s wrath on the US.

Creation itself is designed in terms of Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) tribal feudal social structure and government. Biblical Law presumes it. Nothing else can satisfy God’s requirements. Everything else is inherently evil. We cannot state that clearly enough.

This is why the US as a political entity is doomed. We would naturally struggle with the question of how much will God tolerate and how long. That’s moral discernment as an art form; you need a strong sense of moral conviction based on Biblical Law plus a strong sense of timing and seeing God’s hand at work.

One thing is for sure: Had America remained a cohesive cultural nation, it would surely not be facing doom right now. This is not a question of whether American culture is good or bad; all cultures have flaws, some worse than others. Rather, my focus is on the critical principle missing from everyone’s calculus in politics: God’s wrath falls very quickly on any government that tries to compel people to live together in harmony when they aren’t united already by common culture and social expectations. In other words, if immigrants aren’t compelled to conform and adopt the culture, they should never receive any of the benefits of citizenship. From the very birth of the first colonies, this has never been done right.

That American culture is based on the Enlightenment was already a huge strike against her. That she then diluted it for imaginary economic goals simply ensures nothing will work for very long. That’s two different sins there, though they are connected by the initial mistake of such a powerful secular philosophy. It guarantees that everything will be done wrong, that nothing will be done right. Creation itself was against us from the start.

To some, this may sound like I would prefer something akin to the cultural homogeneity promoted by the likes of the KKK. It’s not my preference; it’s a matter of what I can point to as the lesser of evils. The existence of the KKK is inherent in the worldview of the Enlightenment, as is child sexual abuse and lot of other evils. Such things are woven into the fabric of American identity. The honest truth is that the KKK is closer to what God demands than multiculturalism. This has nothing at all to do with skin color or ethnicity. If people do not adhere together under an established social and cultural expectation and sense of what is morally right, it won’t matter what race they are — their nation is doomed. Lack of social coherence guarantees the doom comes sooner than later.

This is not about racial segregation, but cultural segregation. A natural part of America’s doom will be the breakup of the federal system, and the formation of regional governments along broad cultural lines. While God may have other specific plans, without a direct revelation of those plans, we should expect America to be broken up into smaller countries. The imperial (“federal”) government has gone too far, pushing into territory reserved for governments closer to the people. God is not pleased, so it’s entirely natural that a civil war is brewing in America, and there is not a damned thing anyone can do to stop it.

Worse, it will be an ugly and chaotic breakup as various locations see the unconscious formation of proper nations on a small scale engaging in turf wars. People will either capitulate or be driven away. It’s not pretty, but it’s also not some evil to be eradicated; it’s entirely natural and necessary. Social stability, the ostensible goal of Biblical Law, is not possible without cultural partitions. Law must arise from a common cultural expectation, and enforcement is inherently oppressive otherwise. Somehow this all must pass through a very messy transition until it reaches a new equilibrium. We should expect it to be only marginally better than what came before.

That’s a matter of prophetic sensitivity. Without a totally different culture, one based on the heart-led way and Biblical Law, no nation on this earth can stand very long. The common availability of instantaneous global communications will guarantee instability. But it’s not the fault of technology; it’s a problem with false assumptions about how humans should be governed. I’m not sure the Westphalian State will last much longer on this earth with the rise of the Networked Civilization and the radical change that brings to human consciousness.

Don’t let the propaganda blind you to the inevitable.

Addenda: People cannot be governed by reason (i.e., democracy, communism, etc.) and not for very long by emotion (i.e., fear). The most effective rule is by covenant (i.e., religion, traditions and customs) under a feudal extended family social structure. Every other system will fail.

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Photography: A Pleasant Surprise

Posted on November 28, 2017 by ehurst

First, let me note that the laptop fund has received $100 already. We give thanks.

Today’s ride was seeking an appropriate place to pray about that laptop. This first shot was the view from my prayer chapel of the day. I was standing right next to the mouth of Crutcho Creek were it empties into the North Canadian River. It seems obvious that whatever justifies needing a new machine must be something more than just business as usual. I’m still puzzled and still seeking the Lord on this.

I was also praying for my friend Danny; he’s going in for a heart stent Monday, but there’s some risk it could turn out to be more. I’m praying for my Mom and Stepdad; they both are facing some medical trials. For my wife, she’s engaged in a new position at work and it’s full of challenges and surprised. But I also gave thanks because my bad knee is being pretty good right now, and my shoulder injury seems already on the mend. It’s less painful today. I feel like I’m standing on a rock as solid as this one on the bank of the river.

As I rode back toward the road, I decided to cross under the bridge. I noticed the road leading down to the new flood bank was very well used. So I rolled on down and up the other side. That old muddy trail along the river had been closed for at least a year, but now it’s open again. Yipee! I promptly took off down this trail and it’s very well used, easy to follow. Instead of mud, it’s now sand, quite loose in some places. Still, I got this shot looking upriver near where some agency did a lot of work on the bank two years ago to prevent washout.

The rest of these are just random shots I’ve been holding in my camera over the past month or so. This next one is the fruit of our mystery tree after a light frost. About half of those berries are soft and gooshy, while the rest are more like fully ripe apples. I never could get hold of any local arborist or other botany expert. I’ve decided that Linda’s instincts are correct: It’s some kind of hybridized crab apple tree. Those are popular here in Central Oklahoma.

This last one was just an experimental shot following the dam bank on Draper Lake. There were two lines of water marks showing previous lake levels this past summer, but they didn’t turn out quite so obvious in this picture. If I understand correctly, those boulders are all granite from the southwest corner of the state. While it’s somewhat dry, what water courses running out there are the cleanest in the state because they run across that kind of granite for miles.

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Aging and Fitness Failures

Posted on November 28, 2017 by ehurst

This is just a minor note on what I’m dealing with. Maybe there’s a lesson in here for you or someone you know.

My right shoulder has bothered me my whole life. As a kid, I often wondered why it hurt to throw balls the way other kids did. As an adult, I really took to weight lifting as a form of exercise, and by age forty that right shoulder started hurting in a particular way during any variation on the bench press. I blew it off as training pain, pushing too hard with high weights. But not long ago I realized it was visually not the same as the left shoulder; it’s not shaped normally and the whole right side of my shoulder girdle is misaligned.

So sometime around age fifty it suddenly got stiff and sore. It hurt to reach in some directions. After awhile it settled down and simply began making noise. I quickly learned that the only way I could continue the same workouts was to pull my elbows in close to my body to avoid the most painful angle. When the left should repeated that cycle recently, I figured it was just a matter of aging. It, too, eventually approached somewhat normal activity and I returned to the elbows-in push-ups and so forth. Until yesterday.

During a high-pressure exercise, pressing my own body weight on a declined surface, the right shoulder crackled audibly and began to hurt. So I stopped. It had been a little stiff over the past few days, but now it hurts to raise my arm in any direction. It’s obviously an issue with the tendons. Avoiding any resistance work that resembles a push-up or bench-press will probably see it calm down, but at this point I’m pretty sure I won’t be doing that kind of exercise ever again. I may be able to return to the tension exercises, but actual resistance is likely now a permanent no-no.

So I’ll continue the hard workout in the park without any kind of push-ups. I can still do bar-dips, and I imagine when it calms down I can do overhead pressing with the bungee cord. I’m not one to take painkillers for something like this. I suppose the hardest part right now is that I tend to sleep on my right side, and that is simply not possible for more than a few minutes at a time. I’ll have to learn to sleep flat on my back, and I’ve never done that much during my whole life.

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Guarding What Was Entrusted to Our Stewardship

Posted on November 27, 2017 by ehurst

Thus far in our study of the Sermon on the Mount, we’ve already come across a trio of statements by Jesus often misquoted in English to pervert His teaching. We have His words about making peace, about turning the other cheek, and loving your enemies. Each of these belongs in a context not obvious in any English translation.

Nothing in Jesus’ teaching prohibits violence in itself. He does suggest that you need to be very careful about it, because it’s too easy to let your human lusts crowd out the glory of God as your primary motivations. No two of us can possibly have the same approach to this issue. Still, any image of Jesus that doesn’t account for His use of a whip in a violent clearing of the Temple Court of Gentiles does violence to His teaching.

The real problem is human motivations. Has anyone noticed that John the Baptist never told the Roman soldiers to desert their uniform? Yet Jesus endorsed John’s message. Repentance does not require pacifism as popularly defined. There are lots of posers who claim the label “pacifist.” Do you know that a true pacifist will fight valiantly to prevent a senseless war? That comes closer to what John and Jesus taught.

The real problem starts with rejecting the doctrine of the Fall, along with a completely false view of the meaning and the place of death in the order of things. The natural world is filled with death, but not with murder. Only humanity is fallen, and only humans see death unnaturally. It’s impossible to understand Creation without the Creator’s revelation. The silly intellectual orientation that ignores the Two Realms is a source of horrors on the earth. In one sense, God never intended that we die. In another sense, death is just a circumstance. The English language comes chained to a deeply confused moral grasp.

Let’s cut to the chase: There are times when it is entirely righteous to take another person’s life. By extension, violence itself is not a sin, but a mere tool of human interaction. It has nothing to do with whether some government commands you to war; if anything, that’s more likely to be evil than good. Rather, it’s a matter of divine calling. Your mission from God could require defending your domain, the domain He granted to you.

That may include defending the innocents in your care, defending your own person, or defending some bit of property essential to the mission. Or it could mean none of that. You are the one who knows what He requires of you, and no other human can judge what your heart of conviction tells you. Granted, you already know you’ll face the improper and ill-informed judgments of men in making those choices, but that has nothing to do with how God judges things. Our whole purpose is not some excuse for violence. It’s all about obeying Him who is the ultimate Judge of all things.

So what kind of violence, and how much, does it take to defend your mission from God? That’s how much we should be ready to use. When the attack stops, so does the defense. In other words, it’s nothing personal. Only you in that moment can know for sure, but such is the general guideline. Nor is it a question confined to whether He will deliver your enemy into your hands, but whether your convictions demand that you try. The rest is just a question of mere tactics and methods.

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Donation Box Is Open

Posted on November 26, 2017 by ehurst

I’m only going to post this once: I’m praying for donations toward the new laptop. The goal is $1100. If you do PayPal, click the donation page tab above. Otherwise, I’ll be glad to share my mailing address via email, text message or a phone call to (405) 503-1692. I hate fund-raising; the only way I’ll mention this again is in praise and thanksgiving for how it turns out.

I’ve got relatives and acquaintances saving up to buy guns; I’m looking for a new laptop. Sure, I’d love to get a really nice firearm, but that’s not my priority. Given the way things are going, a good firearm isn’t a bad idea, but my mission and calling demand something else. Whatever warfare is ahead of me will be fought via virtual space. My ammo is the message I share. I’m not excited about new toys; I’m looking forward to the adventure on whatever terms God deems best for His glory.

There’s no big hurry. To be honest, I can’t understand with my head why it feels so important, but my heart seems to think it’s a big deal. The old hardware is chugging along just fine (mine’s a quad-core with nVidia graphics). I’m confident that I’ll be able to give it away to someone who needs a decent machine; it’ll keep working for a long time to come. However, I felt moved in my spirit to open the door for donations. More than money I need your prayers. Stand with me in faith that God will supply what He requires for this mission.

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Keep Your Eyes Open 2

Posted on November 26, 2017 by ehurst

It’s plain as day to anyone with half of a brain. The current system of government and economics in the US is completely dependent on a particular culture. That culture was derived from the Enlightenment. That culture must dominate the US population for this thing to work.

That cultural dominance is gone. The thing itself has been degraded by a tragic change in the education system, a change meant to turn out millions of docile and nearly ignorant workers, easily pacified by various entertainments and distractions. The culture, and thus the system, has been hollowed out. On top of that, there has been a massive influx of people who don’t share that dominant culture, along with a burgeoning alienation from the culture internally. Further, most of those who don’t belong to the previously dominant culture never will belong. Instead, these resident “foreigners” prey on the dominant culture and the system they reject.

The result is the disorder and violent chaos in cities like Chicago and Baltimore. So long as the current system remains in place, it is impossible to make adjustments necessary to restore and maintain social order. The resources for making the necessary changes are not there; it requires a different cultural base to handle these people who refuse to adapt. Further, it is absolutely impossible for the current economic system to continue working. Thus, we see it slowly grinding to a halt. Even if the catastrophic and impossible debt could be flushed out of the system, the cultural mismatch will prevent any significant economic recovery.

This train wreck cannot be stopped. It won’t be an apocalypse, but it will grind to a halt until the chaos forces changes, changes that are not possible with the current system of government. It means that the US government must be replaced, and in the process a break-up of the current union of states. It also means there will be some racial conflict and people driven out of some areas in an attempt to reduce the internal friction.

So much is just a matter of understanding human nature on a grand scale. It’s a waste of time to label any of this good or bad; it simply is the way things work. Mankind is fallen and some problems cannot possibly be fixed. One man’s utopian dream is another man’s nightmare, and it is simply impossible to change aggregate human behavior.

A part of the fallout from this breakdown will be the birth of the Network Civilization. There is a whole new generation of folks already stumbling into this nascent civilization. Already they have turned to the virtual world as the home of their souls. A handful of major tech companies will displace a whole range of functions currently associated with government. Government will become increasingly dependent on Big Tech, and increasingly unable to control these technology giants.

At the same time, I foresee a great deal of new conflicts with Big Tech trying to take control via growing individual human dependencies on technology. The current networking infrastructure will provide leverage for a control that many will find oppressive and painful. This tyranny will result in the rise of an independent internet of sorts, likely based on community mesh networking. Big Tech is already moving toward blatant censorship, and this is the first battle that must be won.

So far as anyone can predict right now, the only way to unplug the corporate and government owned wiring is with an enhanced form of ubiquitous wifi. All it really needs is overcoming the problem with long range linking; you should count on the technology to be there soon enough. Once there is a de facto internet independent of the ogres in Big Tech, the new Networked Civilization will take off.

As always, the point in sharing these things is to help you prepare for future opportunities to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. We infiltrate and exploit the openings God makes for us.

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Sermon on the Mount 8

Posted on November 26, 2017 by ehurst

Justice for Enemies 5:43-48

Jesus isn’t really arguing with the Talmudic traditions here. He’s arguing with common Pharisaical behavior. It’s hard to find anything resembling “hate your enemies” except perhaps in the Qumran Scrolls, where the Qumran community taught something like that. But it isn’t hard to find Talmudic teachings that suggest Gentiles are to be treated as animals, not people. It’s kind of schizophrenic, because the Talmud has teachings that mention the righteous among Gentiles, but we know that there was a strong element of spite during Jesus’ day. This was extended to Jews who bought into the Roman tax-farming system — paying up front a certain flat fee to Roman officials for the legal right to collect that back with interest from their own people. Such tax collectors were treated as traitors.

What Moses actually said was that your enemies should receive equal justice. It’s commanded in several places, including that strong statement in Proverbs about shaming those who are abusive to you (25:21-22). It’s not a matter of “being nice” — it’s a matter of being just regarding human need. You can afford to be gracious to those who are tightwads with their mercy.

Thus, Jesus is using standard Hebrew hyperbole, interpreting how the Pharisees acted when He suggests His audience had been told to hate their enemies. It’s a valid rhetorical tool in Hebrew culture; He did that often enough that it shouldn’t raise an eyebrow. Matthew selects the Greek term agape, commonly implying kindness and compassion, a sacrificial love. The focus is on divine justice, the moral character of God that open hearts can discern in all of Creation.

Thus, He starts by pointing out a range of ways to climb above the petty hostility so typical of the human race. Don’t respond in kind; don’t let their hostility infect your soul. Be the strong one. That’s how genuine Children of God handle things. There’s that feudalism again; learn to act like someone who operates in the power of a great and mighty sheikh. Have you noticed that His divine provision doesn’t wait for someone to get right, but stands there established and waiting for souls to move toward it? Don’t take the abuse personally. They treat God that way, too.

Then Matthew translates Jesus’ words about compassion and giving that formal Hebrew greeting with the hugging and familial kiss on the cheek. In our Western cultural context it’s like shaking hands, for example. If you treat that like a special greeting in a closed society, you are no better than those tax-collecting “traitors.” Don’t do it like you are too stupid to discern who your enemies are, but do it like someone who is too strong to be pulled down. Shame them by your moral strength. Where divine justice reigns, people tend to change. If they act like a beast, pull them out of the mud pit, or help them rise under their heavy load of life.

Finally, Jesus pointedly says we should be of the same moral character and maturity as the Father. Would you like to restore the Covenant and welcome the Messiah? Create a home for Him in your life, a place that reminds Him of Heaven.

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Tolkien’s Bad Mythology

Posted on November 25, 2017 by ehurst

As a younger man, I was captivated by The Lord of the Rings and the fantasy world of Tolkien. The author began his work prior to WW1, but the bulk of it was published around the time I was born (which was 1956). It’s the kind of legendary stuff that remains popular even today, though it’s now less about the books and more about the movies and epic computer games.

To be honest, I now find the whole thing overly wrought, with too much detail and lacking coherence. There’s simply too much free form magic with no rules, no way to predict how a fresh branch of the tale will go. There are too many holes in the canon, and it’s too easy to sprout discontinuity when people try to add fresh material. I’m not fond of storytelling that invites the storyteller to be an arrogant smart-ass, throwing out curve-balls that no one can predict. You can’t be a nit-picking purist with Tolkien’s world. Thus, nobody notices much when the movies and games depart from the original story line.

But at least we can trace to some degree the underlying mythology. It’s obvious Tolkien was heavily influenced by European Medieval History and mythology, but wanted something not too far from English Christianity. Having lived through the horrors of WW1, he found industrial technology repulsive. Fair enough, since that first world war was a horrifying mismatch between primitive tactics and modern weapons. Troops were required to play by the rules and die in massive numbers. When smart people tried to introduce better tactics, they were treated worse than the enemies. So if the generals were determined to conduct war by their bogus fantasies, why should we not entertain ourselves with more human fantasies?

I’m not sure how conscious on intentional it was, but Tolkien’s work does a marvelous job of supporting the doctrine of the Fall. Despite the whole thing being a thinly disguised representation of Anglo-Saxon Christianity, he does get one thing right: No matter how hard and heroically you try, the Devil (AKA Sauron) will always come back again and again.

Oddly enough, the character of Sauron does a great job of warning us about the evils of scientism as a religion. The myth is that Sauron loved order and was rather patient about imposing his particular brand of order. He was exceedingly intelligent about what it would take to bring others under his control. It was all about the efficiency and effectiveness of things, and he could not imagine a better world than one that adhered to his sense of order and stability. This depicts quite nicely the world of globalist and imperialist dreams, ruled by a technocratic regime. But in Tolkien’s world, it just happens to include a certain amount of magic in place of technology.

So, on the one hand, you are supposed to absorb the virtue of heroism. On the other hand, it won’t make that much difference in the long-term outcomes. I suppose if you are really smart, you’ll see that it promotes moral virtue as an end in itself, simply because it is a part of goodness to oppose what is clearly evil. You’ll notice how it seems every manifestation of magical power carries a huge risk of evil, so that power is to be shunned by most. It’s almost a Luddite view of magic. It’s not a bad thing if a precious few specialists with immense moral strength can keep track of this knowledge, if for no other reason than to resist outbreaks of evil, but it’s best if we keep a lid on such knowledge. So Tolkien seems to pine for the days when math and technology were the domain of a very few wizards and priests and seldom used. The world is better and safer with only the power of heroism.

But if we break away from the Anglo-centric outlook, then it changes everything. Anglo-Saxon Christianity is a radical departure from the Bible. Scripture says the only real heroism is internal. That is, while you might spend some time swinging that sword against literal enemies, real heroes are much more concerned with fighting the enemies, Orcs and dragons inside their own souls. The one thing Tolkien gets right is identifying the temptation to compromise for the sake of some practical advantage. It’s better to die doing the right thing than to survive and bring evil to power. But then the Tolkien mythology stops there and doesn’t carry the image to its conclusion.

The Wraith Realm is not the sum total of what’s beyond death. This is the fatal flaw in European mythology: There is no sweet Heaven. There is no God directly active in His Creation from His bright courts above. There is no real motive for trying to be a good guy aside from a certain pride in leaving your name as a legend. Everything beyond death is dark and gloomy; the Other Realm is spooky and unpredictable.

The Bible says this realm is the big lie. It’s bathed in deception; it’s not ultimate reality at all. The whole point in digging into the moral powers of goodness is to catch glimpses of that sweet ultimate reality our God created in the first place. It helps us to tear away the veil of deception and see Eden. We must die to get there, but we get to sample it’s joys if we strive to defeat the deception within ourselves. And it’s altogether predictable, because the whole lore of moral power here is derived directly from moral power in Eden. Thus, our daily effort of life is peeling back the lies so we can discern the real truth of things. The mighty miracles here are simply the rather mundane reality in Eden.

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