A General Rant at Linux Developers

Posted on November 1, 2017 by ehurst

It’s hard to single out anyone, or even a team that works together. The problem I see is a broad attitude that is fairly consistent across the whole community.

Stop advocating Linux if you refuse to deliver what users want and need. If your whole effort in Open Source development is simply to advance the technology, then there’s not much I can say. But for those of you who claim you want Linux to be competitive, and to eclipse the commercial software vendors to become the operating system of choice, stop kidding yourselves. You may think you want to take over the software world, but you are blind and stupid about how to do it.

For at least the past few years, Linux has been in the position to overwhelm the likes of Windows and even Mac, but developers and packagers keep shooting themselves in the foot. Every time there’s a choice between fixing bugs and adding features, you always go for the latter and introduce new bugs. Even when you know how to fix your product and it’s not that hard, you still don’t release a changed package. I run into this all the time, where the package tracker shows a problem that is easily solved, but the attitude is “won’t fix” for reasons seldom clearly stated. Thousands of users are left in the lurch.

(I can say this because I’ve rebuilt those packages myself using well known patches and they worked fine. I’m not a coder, just someone who knows a little about patching and building.)

You folks are so deeply focused on the technology that you have no sense of scale in terms of users. Nobody thinks about the users. I know for a fact that a large segment of the developer population actively despises average users. It’s that technology elitism thing that never goes away. And whoever organizes these developers, you are no better. It’s precious rare a project shows an interest in the human side of things. Hint: Without mass appeal, your software will always be a private hobby that nobody cares about.

In case you don’t get it: Ignoring users is a sin. It’s morally evil. This is written into the code of the universe, as it were. You cannot hope to win and become the PC OS of choice until you care about the users. That’s immutable.

Over the past couple of days I took the time to test a few distros that weren’t foreign to my habits. Q4OS? Great idea, but it’s not ready for prime time. It couldn’t come up with a workable GUI on a standard Dell laptop. Sure, I know how to walk through the procedure for fixing this, but no one in 2017 should have to use the commandline to fix something like that. We got past that crap fifteen years ago. Yes, the people at Q4OS do know what’s wrong, but they haven’t bothered to fix their ISO.

I still think the Trinity Desktop is one of the smartest ideas out there; my user testing shows that Windows refugees love it best of all, but it’s short on resources and developers. So the Trinity Ubuntu release sucks and refuses to install.

Even CentOS 7 refused to complete the installation on that same machine; it hung on the post install tasks. And Debian vanilla pays very little heed to the desktop users’ needs; it’s all about the server stuff. I had to manually install the touchpad driver afterwards, and then make all of my configuration via a very long list of synclient switches. The defaults suck. No GUI touchpad config on XFCE? How come Ubuntu and friends can make it work so nicely using your same code base? You can’t backport their tweaks?

Yes, they do know about these problems. No, they have no plans to fix them. They are too busy chasing some other internal priorities, but users don’t matter. Why does Mint stay at the top of the Distrowatch chart so long? Because they do pay attention to making the clueless user feel welcome. There is precious little you have to fix on Mint. The only drawback is the weird attitude about holding back upstream kernel security fixes from their users. If you ignore their advice and take the kernel update, it will sometimes break something because they refuse to make the updates work with their distro tweaks. Mint isn’t the best, it just sucks less than everything else.

I long ago despaired of the Linux community ever understanding the concept of “customer service.” Until they get it, Linux will always remain as a tiny minority of desktop PC OSes. There will never be a year of the Linux Desktop.

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Styling the Shepherd

Posted on October 31, 2017 by ehurst

Consider the first few chapters in Genesis. Think about it from a Hebrew mystical point of view. On the one hand, it’s plain that Creation is just a typical expression of God’s divine personality and character. We learn to think: That’s just like Him to do that. On the other hand, it remains a complete mystery why He did it. There is not enough revealed about that, and no language to explain much of what we might apprehend about it.

In a certain functional sense, we do recognize that humans were the pinnacle of Creation. For one thing, it’s obvious that everything is explained in terms of what it should mean to us. And right there it says: “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion…” (Genesis 1:26). A few verses later He says he has given us all the vegetation for food. In the next chapter it repeats this language of feudal grant: “Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend and keep it” (Genesis 2:15). Those last two verbs are translations of Hebrew words meaning simply to work in the sense of using and employing it for productive purpose on behalf of one’s lord.

This helps us to gain some vision for our purpose in existing. This isn’t some backyard garden plot; it’s everything we as humans can reach. We are stewards of however much of Creation that we can put our hands on, but it has to turn out as He likes it. And an awful lot of the rest of the Bible explains how He likes things, and to some degree, how He does not. Still, it’s clear that we are intended to manage things on His behalf.

Just so you’ll know, the Hebrew word translated as “garden” refers to a rather substantial private estate, more like a park. The idea is that it remain accessible and amenable for the owner’s recreation. This is closer to a managed and protected wildlands than a tightly controlled ornamental hobby. A critical part of this image is feeding ourselves from the work we do; we are unmuzzled oxen treading His grain.

A critical element the story of the Fall is how we lost the knowledge of His will and the blessings inherent in the job. We lost access and were driven out. That Garden of God still needs care, but suffers a lack of management. No one has been brought in to replace us. In this sense, Creation suffers from the Fall; it continues doing what it does without guidance and management. It’s mostly okay, but it’s not what God had in mind.

In Mark 4:35-41, Jesus engaged in a little of that management. There’s nothing evil about storms; that’s how Creation is designed. They serve a valid purpose. Indeed, Jesus was apparently untroubled from His nap by the whole thing. What woke Him up was the whining of men who knew only that such storms could kill when you are in a boat on the Sea of Galilee. These were seasoned professional fishermen, by the way, not whiny dilettantes. Still, Jesus Himself was comfortable with the situation, but intervened for their sakes. Granted, there’s more to this than meets the eye; there was a specific divine purpose in showing His Father’s glory here. Still, that doesn’t change the wider context that this was a normal and natural process. Jesus stepped in using that ancient authority of stewardship from the Garden to manage the situation.

Those men were a part of Creation, too. While in their fallen state, they had lost their connection and communion with nature, but they were still part of nature. And as intended managers, they should have been able to moderate the storms for themselves, but their fallen natures prevented that. It’s not that Creation should have been left to do what it pleased, but that there was no one else there who knew how to handle things and keep it all focused on God’s purposes.

We do not reverence Creation, but the Creator (Romans 1:25). Nature is unfallen, but we are supposed to be in charge. Granted, Creation is a person and a collection of persons, and our greatest treasure is always the people we lead. That leadership is symbolized by shepherding, the eldership that is love and devotion to the welfare of the flock, yet with an eye to the purpose of providing bounty back to the Lord who owns it all. We are not part of the Green cult worshiping nature.

As part of redemption from the Fall, we pass through that Flaming Sword at the gate of Eden. We desperately need to unlearn all the bad habits and get back on track to treat Creation as family. We may be struggling with a badly broken situation, but each of us bears a divine grant of feudal dominion over some portion of His Creation. As the good shepherd elder cultivates tenderness and communion with those in his household, we act in Creation as gentle masters on God’s behalf. If God places it in your hands, you are the manager. Your human needs are in the same basket as everyone involved. The purpose is God’s glory, but we are in charge of things.

The only question, then, is your personal style under God’s leadership.

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You Get What You Ask For

Posted on October 30, 2017 by ehurst

There’s a lot of economics posturing out there, and the noise gets louder as things get more difficult. That is, it gets loudest when one special interest or another isn’t happy with their share of the loot. Something you need to keep in mind: There is no such thing as an altruistic advocate on economic policy. The Myth of Objectivity is a lie from the Devil. That’s not to say all the participants in the debate are individually and consciously evil, but it’s always the same kind of rationalization we expect from self-deceived fallen intellects. There is always some kind of personal interest in there somewhere, hidden or otherwise.

Your elder does not promote any economic theory. I will point out how the various theories are symptoms of moral failure. There is no solution to economic troubles because all of the a priori assumptions are wrong. Until you draw near to Biblical Law, you cannot discern what’s real, so you cannot imagine what will work. All we have left is to observe human economic behavior and understand why it will inevitably fail.

Understanding why it will fail requires understanding the basic Law of God as manifested in the Law Covenants. There is only one way to get this right, one hope of making the most of our human condition after the Fall. We’ve covered it here before. The biggest problem is the failure to grasp how Creation as a whole is wired for Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) feudalism. There can be no secular state; there can be no “public” entities. Until we get that one thing right, all of mankind’s dreams and ferment of activity are futile.

So this business of advocating the transfer of wealth for “a more equitable” outcome is a lie from Hell. Not because it’s socialism or communism, but because transferring wealth requires threats of violence from a morally invalid authority. It ignores how the process of transfer is inherently destructive of wealth. Vast quantities are consumed in the mechanism and will never get to the supposed recipient. This in itself is an intolerable evil.

Worse, the process of transfer invariably destroys the recipient. It has never once been done in such a fashion as to preserve the humanity of anyone involved. It is inherently dehumanizing to all involved, but particularly to the alleged beneficiary. It reduces them to status of pets, at best. There is simply no way to make this ennobling to anyone. So anyone who proposes a system of wealth transfer should be treated as demonized and insane.

But by the same token, the economic libertarians are turning shalom on its head. They want to reduce everyone to an individual before an objective legal system, when God’s Word flatly says — repeatedly — that people need the protection of their tribe or clan (either by DNA or by covenant). In a libertarian system, the individual is stripped of all protection and left to the whims of any cabal that manages to displace the natural protection of the tribe. It breeds covenants of evil because there is no restraint on the natural human urge to control and pad one’s own nest. God’s plan was to restrict those urges under ANE feudalism. Whatever failings you might imagine there are in His system, everything man dreams up is far worse.

So it doesn’t matter what mixture of economic and social freedom-versus-control that you propose, you are fighting reality and fighting God. It never has worked and it never will. Worse, you will have promoted Satan’s power to oppress and enslave no matter which path you devise and pursue. All such theories are lies from the Devil.

Because we know that there is no hope of mankind to embrace the truth of God, we are left with the mission to infiltrate and humor whomever thinks they are in charge. There will be no significant measures of divine justice, so get used to it. Understand why and how it is all evil so that you can point it out in those teachable moments of God’s glory. Don’t get lost in the disputes and debates about all the various theories; it’s nothing more than comparative sin. None of it will work and God won’t bless it. Some of it will appear to work because Satan’s mission is to deceive those who reject God’s truth.

It may even appear to work quite well, but that’s no different than why “black magic” seems to work in parts of the Bible narrative. Creation is far more powerful and alive than Westerners are willing to admit, and Creation will tend to give you what you demand from it in a certain sense. But when the things you demand are inherently destructive, that’s your problem. Your elder will never attempt to rule over you, but is duty bound to offer his heart-led insight. This is eldercraft, and every human who seeks God’s favor will eventually face the call of eldership on some scale; it’s highly unlikely you’ll escape it. Be ready; ask for wisdom.

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‘Tis the Season

Posted on October 29, 2017 by ehurst

Some you may remember I’ve mentioned my old post about Life Church being the single greatest traffic draw on this blog. It still is; that post five years ago still gets more hits than any other single post. As you might expect, among those who come here for that post are quite a few who have their own horror stories to tell. This weekend I got a private email from someone alleging serious sex crimes committed by the staff at one of the many Life Church campuses. It appears to have been swept under the rug, but maybe not for long.

Notice how that fits in with the current social media trend? It’s as if this is the season for that sort of thing. I’m not surprised about any of it. We already knew Hollywood was a moral cesspool, and government has always been rife with such shenanigans. And I can assure you that there’s a lot more of it among big religious organizations than you would imagine. On the one hand, there’s a lot false allegations about it among people who are innocent, while the folks who are guilty often face no such suspicions.

But we can expect the revelations to keep coming. It’s just a small part of the hand of God on America. It’s a standard feature of tribulation and wrath for evil secrets to be shouted from the housetops.

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Sermon on the Mount 4

Posted on October 28, 2017 by ehurst

Matthew 5:21-26 — The Forgotten Treasure

The Sermon on the Mount explains repentance and renewing the Covenant in anticipation of the Messiah coming. In this passage, Jesus repeatedly refers to “your brother” as a reference to your covenant kinfolk. It’s a matter of emphasis. We notice that the Jewish leadership is never so hard on anyone as they were the Jewish peasantry, particularly the poor. The arrogance of status under this highly perverted view of the Covenant justified all sorts of moral abomination.

A critical element in Jesus’ teaching was restoring the ancient Hebrew mysticism of heart-led moral awareness. This was not merely offensive, but shocking to the Pharisees. They often played dumb, using semantic games and legalistic posturing, as if Jesus couldn’t possibly be serious about returning to mystical symbolism, something they abandoned three centuries before. Sometimes Jesus threw it back in their faces by pointing out the logical conclusions of what they were saying. Thus, Jesus’ teaching was often shocking to your average Jewish peasant, as well, in how it contradicted everything they had heard in synagogue.

Jesus enters into a series of comparative teachings: “you have heard…” The first is the common teaching against murder. This was prominently featured in the Ten Commandments. Jesus hardly disputes this law, but says the literal meaning doesn’t go far enough. It’s pretty obvious that you can’t have shalom with folks killing each other in the Covenant community. Very ancient Jewish tradition had proposed distinctions in penalties for different types of homicide, and the Pharisees expanded upon this a good bit. And yet, they used the legal definitions as an excuse for all kinds of destructive spite, short of homicide, against those they were supposed to be leading. The people of God were His treasure on the earth.

We could easily weary ourselves cataloging the equally silly modern legalism about “being nice” and worrying about people’s feelings, but Jesus’ teaching doesn’t justify anything like that. Rather, His emphasis here is a heart-led determination to make shalom, not simply avoid getting into trouble. In verse 22 He hammers out how easy it is to get lost in avoidance and restrictions. How much “don’t do” shall we pile up? Jesus points out how the Pharisees had made it flatly illegal to call someone raca (Aramaic for stupid and troublesome) but not illegal to say the same thing using the Greek word moros (the root of our English “moron”). As far as Jesus is concerned, that’s a pretty silly distinction — you can stand before the Sanhedrin for one, but face God’s wrath for the other. Which court is the higher authority?

It’s not about the words, but the needless tension that threatens shalom.

Turn this around, says Jesus. Think in terms of reducing tension when possible. Say you are about to present your offering in the Temple, and then the Holy Spirit takes advantage of your penitent frame of mind to remind you that you have offended your Covenant brother. Do you suppose that you can try to reduce tension with God when your conscience is still burning like that? Stop. The ritual of offering will wait while you turn around and search for that brother there in the crowd of worshipers. Make amends as best you can, then come back up to where you set aside your offering and seek God’s favor with a clear conscience.

On a human level, it’s the same thing. In ancient times, you probably would have very little warning if someone filed a civil case against you. Almost everything was done orally and without a lot of bureaucratic nonsense compared to modern times. It’s quite likely you would get short notice that you were a defendant in most civil courts, and summoned to appear as soon as an officer could find you. So it’s a very common wisdom to approach the plaintiff before the case is called and try to find out what terms of redress would prevent things going any farther.

If you would do it in a civil matter, why not for a purely moral issue when you stand before God? In the former case, you are notified by God that something is an offense worth His attention, and it smites your conscience. In the latter case, it’s something that a human court decides is worth its attention and you are under civil threat. Either way, the heart-led wisdom is to maintain a readiness to make shalom, not nurse your pique at someone. Sure, there will always be folks you cannot please no matter what you do. Nobody suggests you have to placate them, but nothing justifies spite either. Build the habit of keeping your cool when someone offends you, and you promote shalom for everyone under the Covenant.

This is a return to that Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) feudalism, wherein the greatest earthly treasure of any man is the people who love him and seek his welfare. And because they are your treasure, you’ll return the favor, seeking their shalom as well. When you stand before God with a clear conscience, you can afford to stop worrying about the legalistic Pharisees.

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No Good Politics

Posted on October 28, 2017 by ehurst

In response to a query…

I should have thought this was obvious by now: Jesus was neither conservative nor liberal in the context of His own day. In both religious and political terms, the Pharisees were the dominant conservatives. The Sadducees were secularized liberals (mostly priests, by the way). Thus, as a point of reference, the High Priest at Jesus’ trial was a Sadducee, but he colluded with the Pharisees to protect their positions against someone who threatened the whole thing.

Jewish religion was controlled by this cabal of plutocrats. They had a strong say in Jewish politics, but there was also the deeply cynical Herodians (actually Edomites politically absorbed a century before who cynically adopted Judaism as the price for admission to political power). And the whole thing was under the watchful eye of Rome.

Both the Pharisees and Sadducees as philosophical forces in play arose from the Hellenistic drift that was ongoing from around 323 BC when Alexander the Great swept through the Levant (that eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea). There were other smaller players in terms of social influence, but Judaism was not a genuine extension of Old Testament religion. It was a sharp departure from the ancient mystical Hebrew outlook, in the sense that the mysticism was kept as mere window-dressing, while the core commitment was to Hellenized rationalism.

Hellenism is pagan. Not in the restricted sense of religious categories today, but in the sense that it arose as a natural implication of Greek pagan mythology. I won’t take the time here to trace that out; better writers have done it long ago. It’s not that hard to see how Plato and Aristotle drew their underlying assumptions from the value system espoused in Greek mythology. Hellenism is defined as the whole culture and religion of ancient Greece. Alexander the Great consciously evangelized it. It is the very root of Western rationalism.

Jesus called for a return to the ancient Hebrew mysticism. He was on another planet when it came to social and political implications. Given that our Western Civilization is very much the product of Hellenism, you can bet that the full range of our political and social frame of reference is very much a product of Hellenism, and unquestionably distinct from that of the Bible. If you properly understand Jesus as calling for a return to the ancient Hebrew outlook, then you cannot possibly associate His teaching with either major thread of political and social influence in the US today.

The same goes for our political parties; no one in the public sphere is promoting anything resembling Biblical Law. Yes, that ancient Law of God does apply to us today, because the Law Covenants were never meant to be read with typical Jewish legalism. They were mystical parables; everyone in the Ancient Near East understood that. Indeed, it’s an equally huge mistake to think you can learn the structure of that Law by reason and analysis. In the general meaning of the terms in our American culture, neither the letter of the law, nor the spirit of the law, are the proper approach. Rather, the proper approach is the Law as a Person: Jesus Christ.

On some rare occasions, quite by accident, something you see in law, politics or social events will approach Biblical Law. It’s okay to celebrate that brief flash of good moral sense. It’s not okay to then conclude that you should support any of the various political theories or parties existing the US today. They are all irrevocably wrong, in part because the whole system itself is wrong. And that in turn is because Western Civilization is wrong.

But you cannot simply make the blanket policy of withdrawing from the whole thing and hiding out. This is part of that quantum moral reasoning, where you see things on multiple levels. If you personally are called to withdraw, do so. Most of us will be called to get involved in a cynical infiltration of the system. We understand it; we can teach it to others. We know what the system requires of us, but we don’t actually commit to the system. We agree to play along; we humor those who truly believe.

That’s what Jesus taught; see Matthew 23:1-12.

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Feudal, Covenantal, Personal and Contextual

Posted on October 28, 2017 by ehurst

Creation is alive, sentient and willful. I could as easily use the noun “reality” and it still fits. We could say the same with Biblical Law, because it is synonymous with “the Word of God” and “the will of God.”

For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12)

Creation is endowed with the moral character of the Creator. It’s only natural that what He makes will reflect His personality. Know God and you will know reality, and His Creation is not a mere inert mechanism. The Bible is full of language asserting that Creation is living and responsive to His voice. God didn’t make inert matter — that’s a cultural myth from outside the Bible. God breathed His own soul into His Creation.

I use the term “Biblical Law” to emphasize the fundamental nature of how we should deal with life in general. Biblical Law is an aspect of how Creation responds to us as individuals. It’s nature is feudal, covenantal, intensely personal and contextual. Don’t memorize the text of Biblical Law as it appears in Scripture; absorb the personality of how it acts in this world. The record of Biblical Law is not the Law itself.

In the deep symbolism of Hebrew Scripture, Biblical Law stands at the entrance back into Eden as the Flaming Sword. The broad context of Biblical Law helps to shape sane choices in this life under the Curse of the Fall so that we can move closer to Eden, our human existence as God intended it. Biblical Law is the path of Life. It demands you take the heart-led approach to knowing and doing. It’s the only hope you have for making it work. This thing requires that you connect back to it on a level of faith, a faculty that is far above mere intellect.

Each of us as individuals must become acquainted with God and with His Creation. No two of us can possibly experience exactly the same thing. The demands of His Law overlap for all of us, in the sense that God is who He is. But the implications will never be precisely the same for each of us, since He has placed each of us on our own ground. We each have our own grant of dominion to exercise on His behalf. The individuality is His design choice. We all share a certain amount so that we can commune together with Him, but the image of uniformity is alien to this thing.

This is why we must be circumspect in how we represent Biblical Law in our fallen world. We have to be aware of how those around us will see this whole thing. The heart is able to see far more than the eyes, and a heart committed to the Flaming Sword can discern the thoughts of those around us, at least sufficient to have a functional awareness. Even if we find other people puzzling, we can discern enough to carry out the mission of shining the glorious light of truth.

Don’t let yourself become dependent on the things this world offers. If, for example, the Internet becomes highly restricted, be ready to work around it. Yes, the US government is striving to control the Internet, even as the Internet community is destroying the US government system. Don’t limit your thinking; don’t be captive to what’s popular — Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. Use them, but treat them as mere tools that may or may not be appropriate to your mission.

You shouldn’t imagine that you have a vested interest in how this complex situation morphs. This is why I discourage activism; you can’t get involved without compromising your mission. We can share a vision of what is morally right according to Biblical Law, but we cannot allow ourselves to get sucked into the ways of human manipulation. We, of all people, should never forget how the final choice of each individual must follow the heart-led way. Don’t dehumanize people by treating them as a mass to be herded. Offer your moral leadership personally and individually; give people incentives to come under your feudal dominion in some way. Otherwise, you cannot do anything for them.

Biblical Law is feudal, covenantal, personal and contextual in nature.

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One Source

Posted on October 27, 2017 by ehurst

I’m not going to tell you that is no power outside the biblical Covenant of Christ. When Moses stood up in Pharaoh’s court, we see that the magicians were in some ways on par with Moses in terms of wonders. No one was demanding that Pharaoh abandon his pagan beliefs, but that he respect Jehovah’s claim over His people.

Throughout the Bible, we see the narrative sometimes condemns various magic acts as fakery, but some it seems to take seriously. Those watching the drama between Pharaoh and Moses would have seen wonders performed before their eyes on both sides (up until about half-way through the Plagues). It was a different world entirely than ours today.

On the one hand, Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:19-20 teaches that any power not arising from the biblical covenants arose from the worship of demons. That’s not to say the wonders attached to pagan religion are due to some evil magic of demons. Satan and his demons report the truth when it suits their interests, and they have revealed the way of Creation to a lot of people who don’t love Jesus.

I’ve already said you can be heart-led without the Holy Spirit. I’m hardly the first guy to write that Creation is alive, sentient and willful. While I learned that from my pursuit of biblical studies, the idea shows up in a lot of pagan literature, too. Looking back over human history, the brief window of Western Civilization is the only period when any significant portion of humanity did not regard the heart superior to the intellect. The heart-led way is a gift of God to all humanity; only in the West has the Devil been allowed to hide it at all. It’s the default of humanity, even after the Fall, to trust the heart over the head.

And even without a clue about Jehovah, the God of the Bible, the heart tends to lead people to some measure of truth about reality as God made it. So one may ask: What difference does it make?

It’s in the word shalom. Without the biblical covenants, you cannot have peace with the Creator. The honest truth is that you can have a lot in this world with direct knowledge of God. But by the same token, we have a substantial record of people finding God without the Bible. I suppose that in standard Western English we might say the heart is a necessary element in full redemption, but not of itself sufficient to bring redemption.

Take a look at Isaiah 43:1-7. That’s a part of the Covenant of Moses, implied as part of the Covenant of Noah, and now part of the Covenant of Christ. It’s a part of what’s included in shalom. But shalom itself is now available only in Christ. There may be an awful lot of good heart-led lore there outside the Bible, but you aren’t going to get Isaiah 43:1-7 without Jesus.

Satan would love for you to believe making Christ Lord is not necessary. He has been granted a significant amount of power to give to those he deceives. But those powers stop at the boundary of faith. Those snakes in Pharaoh’s court could not hurt Moses and Aaron. We do see Job having a tough time, but he’s the extreme example. We also see that Satan tried hard to hijack Jesus from the path of a mystical Suffering Servant Messiah (Luke 4:1-13). In other words, the last thing the Devil wanted was for Jesus to die on the Cross.

In broad general terms, you don’t need to worry about repeating the experience of Job, and Christ alone could shed blood for sin. You’ll have your own unique cross to bear, but you’ll be granted the faith to handle what comes with it. That’s the key; humans cannot simply summon faith from any other source. The power of consistent trust in God working in Creation comes only from God. Through it all, nothing can remove God’s favor on you. The real power of shalom is what’s inside of you, and there’s only one source: Jesus Christ.

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Fear Not Great Evil

Posted on October 26, 2017 by ehurst

There are no masterminds. The people with power over us are not somehow gifted with brilliance and intelligence significantly above the rest of us. What distinguishes them is a serious lack of moral wisdom. They are damaged people, not supermen. Good moral people would never seek power over others. So their only advantage is access to a deeper knowledge of the system kept secret from outsiders. They are allowed to cover their tracks. At the same time, they are inherently more evil; they are actually weaker.

Even their evil is rather mundane. How many of us would not succumb to the temptation if we were brought into their council? Even in this, it’s a middle class kind of thing. The plutocrats with any real talent and intelligence aren’t in government, but are driven to private and corporate positions of power. The system of government is wholly owned and run by quite average greedy thugs, who are steered and manipulated by the folks with real talent. People with real genius are too smart to burden themselves with all the complications of actual government.

Real geniuses are not morally better. The non-government elite still keep some smaller portion of the truce of elite privilege for their own convenience. This broader plutocrat agenda is mostly a matter of protecting their privilege. Among the government officials, it’s all about the privilege itself. With the truly talented, it’s privilege as a means to their dreams. It’s patently obvious they compete amongst themselves over the spoils of oppression, but up to now they have maintained an uneasy agreement to protect the system of privilege that binds them together. It’s a symbiosis that works for now. However, you should understand that the people in government positions are all replaceable. The system itself will spawn new thugs to replace those who go down.

The real geniuses are driven to restrict their control to things they actually want to handle. They follow their own rarefied dreams. There are limitations on genius, as well; the broader system restricts their options. On top of that, there simply is no possible way any human can hold the kind of genius it would take to actually rule the world. Genius itself tends to focus on particular threads of human endeavor.

What’s left is a bunch of mythology about some imaginary Antichrist figure, elevated above other humans and subservient to Satan. But this is not in the Bible; it is no what God’s prophets warned us against. This myth is part of the wider Myth of the Great Man, something restricted entirely to Western culture. It’s foreign to the culture of the Bible. The image of the Antichrist was a symbol of the Devil’s influence over fallen humans. No one in the Bible took it literally as a particular discrete human who would arise some day. If you can ditch the mythology, you’ll understand that Scripture is pretty clear that Satan is not allowed to work that way. He can only spoil, twist and pervert humans. Moral evil is degrading; it cannot result in someone being superhuman.

Like nuclear radiation, it is always inherently destructive. It cannot possibly result in improvements. The silly notion that there could somehow be a mutation that creates a higher and more effective adaptation is foreign to the Bible, and arises only in Western mythology. It is certainly not science. Moral evil is like that, too — always fundamentally degrading. Creation (reality) itself is alive and will not support anything that departs from God’s moral character.

Let’s restore biblical doctrine. A part of what happened in the Garden of Eden was God granting stewardship to mankind. Not control, but management of operations — it was a matter of feudal privilege. This feudal grant was forfeited. What Satan gained was the consumption of human energy in ways we cannot comprehend, but he didn’t gain control over any part of Creation itself, only us humans. That control is restricted, but the only way we can possibly understand the whole thing is in terms of Biblical Law. Satan’s only real power is in our reliance on anything other than the heart-mind. If we are heart-led, his power over us is greatly weakened. He can tempt and deceive, nothing more.

Thus, his power is purely degrading. He cannot lift in any way. A critical element in his deception is the myth that he is permitted to raise up an anti-Messiah with superhuman powers. There is no anti-Law; every power of Christ to perform miracles was contained within Biblical Law. That would obviously be true of His Apostles. The only “secret” power in this universe lies in Biblical Law itself. The “dark arts” mentioned in the Old Testament were mere deceptions. I’m not saying it was fakery in the sense of Western “scientific” thinking, but such arts are fundamentally deceptive with very powerful results for the people who were deceived by it. It could never really harm the heart-led servant of God.

That’s the whole point here: God will not permit genuine harm to His own glory. It’s entirely possible you’ll lose things, and suffer in some ways, that will cause you human misery. But what God allows to happen in your life promotes His glory. It is inherently in your best interest. Don’t cling to the things of this world. Be ready to endure pain, but know that physical discomfort itself is not a part of the Curse of the Fall. It’s entirely natural and has its own purpose in Creation. You need to learn where it fits — your heart will tell you. And your heart will also tell you that nothing mere humans do will ever hinder the blessings of His glory in your life. Satan can’t take from you what you don’t willingly surrender.

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The Path of Resistance

Posted on October 25, 2017 by ehurst

Without a shred of doubt or shame, I assert that there is no God but Jehovah. He is the Creator and Lord of all things. Further, the only accurate portrayal of Him comes through the Bible. The people and culture behind the Bible were created by God as His one means of revelation. Every other tradition and culture of humanity on this planet is, in varying degrees, a less accurate portrayal of His truth.

That’s not to say they have no value in clarifying His truth, or that people cannot come from those cultures, or pass through them, and not find God. All truth is God’s truth. He is able to draw those who seek Him anywhere and under any context. But the Hebrew people were the one chosen nation raised up by God as His personal family. They eventually abandoned all of that, but it was theirs first. The Bible says they were the one and only people of God despite themselves. The final end of that long history of revelation was God’s Son, Jesus Christ. You cannot pretend any knowledge or understanding of Christ without His personal Hebrew heritage.

Should it be that the only education you get in this life covers the Bible and its Hebrew background, you have done enough. There’s nothing wrong with studying any and all other cultures and traditions and religions of mankind, but you must never forget that they are all judged and evaluated from the grounds of Biblical truth. Furthermore, all pretense to science and objective study of reality must first bow the knee to Christ or it is damned. Nothing mankind could discover about the universe will mean a thing until it is morally discerned by Christ’s gospel truth.

Do you realize that this is the core tenet of Christian Mysticism?

Mysticism is the assertion that ultimate reality rests above sensory data and reason. You cannot claim to really know what is via intellect alone, much less can you claim to know what matters. The only way any person can approach the ultimate questions of living is to encounter the Divine personally. That is the starting point. Nothing else matters until you go there first.

You can be sure that the entire range of Western Civilization, despite the occasional twinkle of good morality here and there, is inherently dark and evil at its core. You can tell me you love it, but it’s damned. The West is the child of dying Greco-Roman Civilization and the invading hordes of uncivilized Germanic tribes sacking what was left of it. Both were inherently pagan in nature. Whatever either of the two branches of the Roman Church might claim, both were deeply corrupted by Greek and Roman pagan influences to the point that the Hebrew Christ disowns them both. They quickly drifted far from the Hebrew mystical roots of Christian faith. It’s not a question of them being evil, just stupid. Once they compromised even further with the pagan Germanic tribes, all was lost.

It’s no different from militant Islam, Buddhism or Communism — it’s just another cultural influence seeking to impose a milieu of life on others. All of them are in opposition to Biblical Law.

Those two branches of the organized Christian Church take their place alongside the secular governments in history. They are simply another brand of human oppression, defying Biblical Law regarding the fundamental structure of valid human organization. They have consistently hindered the true gospel and the true Kingdom of Heaven. The Roman and Orthodox Churches are mere reflections of pagan cultural habits and practices. But like every secular political structure dreamed up by mankind, God uses them to herd the human cattle who deny His divine call on their lives. Further, all the various sects of organized Christian religion that broke out of those two churches never really left their fundamental sins of clinging to some pagan culture or another and painting Bible verses over it.

And quite unlike all of those churches and sects, we refuse to get involved in anything resembling a campaign to remake the world into our image of perfection. We don’t have an image of perfection in those terms; Christian Mysticism denies the existence of such a thing. In accordance with Christ’s teaching, we play along with secular authorities, including those organized political influences that call themselves “church.” Our mission is to infiltrate and demonstrate the truth by how we live and speak. We each have our individual calling from God, our own unique set of gifts and talents, our own means and methods, our own locations and organizations as mission fields, but we all have the calling to go amongst the rest of the humans on this planet and live Christ’s gospel message.

As we deal with the various human organizational structures, we have to keep in mind the heart-led truth that all of them are damned. There is no good side to any dispute or debate. There is only the one good answer from the Bible versus everything else. They have all uniformly rejected Biblical Law, so the best we can hope for is to find threads of human activity that begin to approach the truth. You can safely embrace those things to the degree they approach Biblical Law, but you must recognize that you will never likely find a real home on this planet. Perhaps for brief moments of your time in the company of unfallen Creation in nature, or with other heart-led believers acting under Biblical Law, you can rest your weary soul, but then you have to return to the pagan world of oppression and carry on the mission of divine witness.

This is what we mean by disentanglement from this world (my third pillar of mysticism). Christian Mysticism is inherently otherworldly because this world is hostile to God’s Word. The term “this world” is a code-phrase meaning those who live under the Curse of the Fall. The path back to Eden is resistance to this world while living in it.

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