Implications of Vault 7

Posted on March 14, 2017 by ehurst

Re: The American Media Hide From The Truth by Paul Craig Roberts (I’m not sure anyone can stand a full hour of Assange so you might want to skip the video.)

Let’s review some background of moral truth. If you digitize anything and store it on an electronic device, you must regard it as universally open. Sooner or later that digitized material will be accessible to the Internet. Nothing digitized can be permanently private. The primary flaw is not the medium, but the humans handling it. No matter how brilliant your attempt to hide something, there’s always somebody smart enough to find and/or decrypt what you have hidden/encrypted, if they take the notion to try.

So for example, if a gal takes a risque selfie, it will eventually become public. Don’t do it unless you intend to make it public, ladies. Further, there is no such thing as private communications on a cellphone.

From the day of its inception, the CIA has been the single greatest threat to Americans. It’s creation was inevitable. It’s demise will come along with the destruction of America. However, that won’t solve the problems created by the CIA, because there will always be intelligent people with no moral compass. Get this through your head, Americans: The CIA is your enemy. Whatever good might flow from their existence is purely accidental. The mandate to offer certain kinds of protection, and the regulations to empower it, ensures they will only protect themselves and their interests.

Further, it is utterly impossible for this organization to care about our real interests. That’s because it is utterly impossible to create an institution that is loyal to some noble idea. If you try to understand God’s Word from the perspective of the people who wrote it, you’ll realize that humans are hard-wired for one kind of loyalty: individual personal loyalty. That’s as good as it gets with humans. While there is a mythology about loyalty to the flag and all that it supposedly represents, the people who are loudest in promoting that idea are the most deeply deceived about how it actually works in practice. All it does is make you a sucker for obeying faceless psychopaths running hive-minded bureaucracies. Without individual personal loyalty between persons, there is no genuine loyalty to anything at all.

Instead, human loyalty and trust becomes perverted into a hive-mind paranoia that gravitates to secretive efforts to control anything and everything that could possibly affect the institution itself. This is why laws don’t mean a damned thing to the CIA. All Congress can do is force the CIA to hide stuff they aren’t supposed to do. And because of their position as primary guardian of their own secrecy, the CIA will simply lie to anyone and everyone about what they do, and somehow still imagine that they are being “loyal Americans.” The mindset is so wholly detached from the rest of the world that it matches the definition of “delusion.” These people are in another universe altogether.

The Wikileaks dump labeled “Vault 7” contains stuff up to sometime last year that was left exposed on a server somewhere on the Net. Nobody should imagine that the CIA is so very good at what they do. I tend to favor the speculation that it was left there by some contractor, because the CIA loves to use contractors to buffer their agency against public backlash. This time it failed.

But the backlash isn’t from the mainstream media. Why would we have to say it again: The CIA controls as much of the mainstream corporate media as they want. There’s plenty the CIA doesn’t care about, so there’s no need to think it’s all CIA propaganda. But for those issues that the CIA worries about, the media would never go against the CIA’s wishes. Any supposed exposé is always carefully packaged to keep back the really important stuff. Whenever a particular reporter or editor gets out of line, they end up dead. The CIA will not hesitate to murder anyone, anywhere, any time. Those who are not psychopaths by birth are driven into it by the culture inside the institution.

Worse, there are a surprising number of alternative media outlets that they control, as well. Still, the CIA does have limits and so the message of their unaccountable dirty tricks has come out. Another divine moral principle: God will eventually expose sin. God hates secrecy. This is something flatly stated in Scripture. If you cannot carry out your nation’s defense without secrecy, then God will not allow you to defend your nation. You cannot argue with God; do it His way or prepare for divine wrath. And if I have to explain the difference between short-term tactical stealth and harmful secrecy, you really don’t understand morality. God’s Word promises quite literally that those nations who follow His truth will always win their battles. Those who ignore His moral truth will be herded like cattle and eventually slaughtered.

Now, I have some serious skepticism about what Assange is doing with this big pile of CIA secrets. He acts first and foremost in his own personal interest, and Wikileaks is his project. If you ask me, he’s doing his best to support Trump while he petitions the White House secretly for some kind of safe passage out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in the UK. I can’t blame him. But you shouldn’t imagine that we are getting the whole truth from him, either.

We are in a time of tribulation, folks. God’s wrath is upon the USA and what we have seen so far is just the beginning. The key to understanding how this nation will be destroyed is watching the voters who put Trump in office and continue to support him. Trump is just a figurehead, folks. His principles are flexible because his convictions are shaped in terms of keeping the business alive, and he’s running the government like it was any one of his corporations. He’s a salesman extraordinaire. He’s not the President in that sense, but the CEO of America. Meanwhile, the actual changes in America at the ground level will come from the rising nationalist anger in the population. At this point, folks are ready to destroy the system because, as the recent revelation of CIA dirty tricks indicates, the system is broken beyond repair.

On a personal level, your electronic communications were compromised long ago. Anything networked (Internet, cellphone system, etc.) is vulnerable to varying degrees. Given what was revealed in the Vault 7 dump, it looks like Linux (and BSD, etc.) users are generally safer. All cellphones are wide open. Microsoft keeps back-doors in Windows on purpose, so that’s always open. And if the CIA wants to snoop on you, lacking those kinds of devices won’t help; it just makes it a little more work for them. The answer is not better systems with better encryption; the answer is destroying the CIA, and with that comes the end of America.

We knew this was coming, so prepare your mind for it. Reduce your dependency on the system; it’s not sacred and can’t be trusted. The end of the USA as we know it won’t be quite the trauma most people imagine. We still have our divine calling and mission to touch the world around us with His mercy and grace. All this tribulation is just background noise.

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Nagging Memories

Posted on March 13, 2017 by ehurst

There’s something troubling me.

On the one hand, your sense of moral conviction does not reside in your physical heart. The lamp of spiritual truth would burn just as brightly if you depended on an artificial heart to pump your blood. On the other hand, there is simply no way to deny the unique ability of the heart as a sensory organ. If it’s not your physical heart pushing out that powerful electromagnetic field, then something in your body near the heart is doing it. The field has been measured and it emanates from that spot just to the left of your sternum and inside the ribcage. I suppose the question of whether an artificial heart takes away that measurable field is something that hasn’t been tested by the medical researchers who discovered the heart’s sensory field. Thus, I am not able to explain just exactly how the literal sensory heart connects to the metaphorical heart of moral conviction, only that there appears to be a connection.

What I can declare without reservation is that when you make a conscious effort to connect your awareness with that sensory field in your heart, it changes your whole perspective on reality. It’s more than my personal experience; it’s amply testified by others on this blog and in other places on the Net. Further, once you’ve entered that realm of awareness, there’s no going back without something inside of you dying first.

As part of that shift in consciousness comes a sensitivity to moral health. Not just your own, but the environment in which you live. More to the point, it pulls you into a place where your moral health becomes deeply connected to the moral environment. It’s not a question of dependency, but the interaction is there. Your sense of internal peace can be afflicted by what’s wrong around you, and there comes a call inside of you to deal with it in some way to avoid going insane. Each of us in our unique calling from God has to discover what we were meant to do about the context in which He has placed us. Between you and the Lord, no one else can fully understand just where you will find that balance point between bearing up under sorrow and taking some action to reduce the sorrow.

But there are some common elements for all of us. A part of that is healing old moral wounds. That is, the Spirit of the Lord works through this moral sensitivity to heal those wounds, but the means of doing so is where things tend to be unique. A part of the common experience is how the ghosts of bad experiences come back to haunt you. Pay particularly close attention to something that makes you feel out of sorts, as if you were being pulled out of your normal self. In the mirror of such moments of torment, anything that makes you feel like someone you don’t really know — someone you may not like — there is a signal in the heart to seek the Lord’s face for an answer: What does this torment signal for me?

I can assure you that sometimes the answer may literally take years before it reaches some point where your conscious mind knows what to do about it. That’s not meant to scare you, but to assure you that there is always an answer. You have to realize that it may require moving you a very long way before you are in the place where it starts to make sense.

Over the years there have been a handful of troubling experiences that play over in my mind, creating a very disturbing atmosphere in my soul. It’s not some sort of guilt, either false or justified. It’s an unanswered question: Why does this still trouble me so much? Why does it provoke deep emotions that conflict with each other? I replay this event and test variations, changes in how I could have responded, to see if any different choices make better sense. Could I had done it better? Sometimes that’s enough to find a solution and I get peace about that thing. Sometimes it continues beyond that, typically because it’s much bigger than my own failures. When something from the past makes me angry enough to kill, it’s a signal that there is an unanswered question with a much wider implication.

What’s troubling me today is something that merits a separate blog post.

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Goons with Guns

Posted on March 13, 2017 by ehurst

Reminder: I’ve served as a Military Policeman long enough to reach supervisory positions. A big part of that job was securing facilities and controlling access. I’ve spent some years getting it wrong sometimes, but generally getting good reviews for doing it mostly right. What doesn’t appear in those reviews is how very much I hated such work. Not because it was boring; I knew how to handle that. It’s because it made me feel dirty so often when I was required to be such an asshole.

Let me be so bold as to assert that it was not a simple mismatch between personality and job, but something truly awful about the thing itself.

Surely you realize that a major portion of humanity is terribly uncomfortable when confronted by someone with the means and permission (on some level) to use physical force against them. If the context of that encounter includes elements of surprise and no graceful way to avoid it in the first place, the agitation is even higher. On top of that is the Orwellian impossibility that this perfectly normal agitation is taken as a sign by the armed guard that you are up to no good.

This is a paradox security folks deny publicly, but it’s written into the security guidelines and becomes a joke among members the guard force. If you don’t make it a joke, you’ll refuse to do the job. In other words, it’s a diabolical plan to put the squeeze on folks for no good reason. You sucker them into approaching and offer no graceful exit.

Meanwhile, we all know that people who are a security threat won’t give themselves away that easily. Sure, fools can be trapped and manipulated into doing something they’d rather not do, but it doesn’t take much training to recognize their agitation as quite different from the agitation of a fearful victim of abusive security procedures.

On top of all this, the more poorly paid and trained the guards are, the worse they treat everyone trying to enter this supposedly secure facility. Trust me; I’ve read the high-level studies aimed at reforming bad security procedures. The large bureaucratic institutions actually wallow in human misery and cannot imagine a serve-the-customer attitude. Inspiring confidence in the security system? The bureaucrat cannot imagine such a thing.

And I’ve been on the receiving end of this abuse, as well. It was all the more infuriating because of my professional knowledge of how wrong it was. Trust me: Good sensible people would refuse to work in security operations. What’s left are thousands of idiots who are morally unfit, who by their overwhelming presence help to shape the worst of security policies. Most guards are either blithering idiots or sadistic goons who enjoy making you cry.

I took a lot of heat for refusing to conform to that image, but somehow it didn’t show up on paper. By the time you get into the higher ranks, you become cynical. My superiors knew I was very frustrated but that wouldn’t justify a bad review. Toward the end, I did everything I could to make it comfortable for people coming through that gate. That’s when my superiors recommended me for other specialized work.

Here’s the dilemma for us today: Private security is the worst there is, and it’s a serious growth industry in America today. You and I will encounter it more and more every where we go. It’s already in a lot of places where it can do no good at all, but it makes the bureaucrats comfortable. It’s going to get worse.

I cannot reach out and make you less fearful about this. What I can do is trust God to use my words to help you see a way through these tribulations. By explaining the background, I hope you’ll see through it more clearly than before. Let your sense of conviction guide you through the coming days.

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The Taste of Truth

Posted on March 12, 2017 by ehurst

We are wired for narrative.

The Hebrew culture was mystical in nature; it was part of the Ancient Near East (ANE), which is a collection of cultures and civilizations that shared a mystical orientation. Westerners have struggled to make sense of that peculiar brand of mysticism because it is so very alien. Our language and culture makes mystical things “spooky” and dangerous, whereas the ANE folks took it for granted and were entirely comfortable with it. Their “unknown” was never threatening; it was where man could find God.

It’s further exceedingly difficult to get across to Westerners that there is a third level of awareness beyond first, fleshly wiring in appetites and emotions, or second, intellect and reason. This is why genuine faith and trust in God is so very difficult for Westerners. What Western Christianity ends up with is a requirement for orthodoxy (“right thinking”) to force pre-approved outcomes. We simply cannot have something open-ended like faith is meant to be. Thus, it provides a phony “faith” that is some form of iron logic, which is supposed to conquer the flesh. But it cannot conquer flesh because intellect is still flesh; it’s still man doing something the mind imagines is God’s work. To be “spiritual” means some better quality of cerebral exercise in reason.

The only real difference between that kind of belief versus atheism is simply a matter of starting assumptions. It rests entirely in the fallen flesh. It’s all the same kind of thing. People choose their assumptions on some grounds they cannot comprehend because reason cannot admit to dependency and need. The seeming power of reason is too enthralling to ignore; intellect cannot choose to surrender the myth of superiority in all things. It is the God-complex woven into the human soul. In other words, you cannot start from logic and arrive at truth because there is nothing on which to stand. Logic is a tool; it has no substance in itself. Thus, the choice to believe or not is nothing more than subconscious sentiment.

This remains the sad story for the vast majority of those seeking to practice Western Christian religion. Especially as the size of the organization grows, the portion of people in it who are simply believers without genuine commitment on that third level grows higher because the size of the crowd makes it easier to hide the weakness. There’s so much shared enthusiasm that it feels like it must be the power of God; it didn’t come from within the self.

This, despite the rather flatly literal teaching in Scripture that genuine faith in the individual defies the whole world if necessary; even the end of reality itself does not vanquish true faith. Move those individual members to a hostile environment and their belief suffers. Something nibbles away at the edges of the fragile belief. It requires a constant exposure to that mass enthusiasm to reinforce those cerebral boundaries. There’s no fountain of life welling up within.

Nobody says the mind cannot be strong; it’s never strong enough. It can’t bear you into God’s Presence. We don’t need more teaching. There is no truth in explanations that meet the tests of intellect. I use it here in our virtual parish only to deconstruct, to indicate how you shouldn’t rely on it. I use the tools of reason and intellect to poke holes in what the brain can do by itself.

The truth of God isn’t in teaching. The closest we come to divine revelation in human language is parable and narrative. Do you understand that two or more narratives can conflict on the facts and still tell the same truth? Two people can come away from a narrative with entirely different experiences, but still stand in the same faith. Narrative brings with it a whole raft of experiential truth that touches the places mere data cannot find. And it’s those other places in the soul where we can provoke or crush genuine faith. A well told story that rests on certain assumptions will convey those assumptions by drawing the listener into them. It becomes the reality in which that soul stands for a time.

Thus, the very concept of communication and language in the ANE was all about the narrative, drawing us into the place where we can find truth. We are wired to absorb that truth. Once we get used to this, we can detect lies because they bring us to the wrong place, a place that feels alien and hostile. But only if we are used to thinking in terms of the narrative and its purpose as communication. As long as we hang everything on the data, anyone can slip vast deceptions into the narrative and we’d never know it.

A morally strong narrative finds a witness in your convictions. It feels like home; it restores your faith. It tastes like something eternal.

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Bearing Their Folly

Posted on March 12, 2017 by ehurst

It’s the damnedest thing: Dispensationalism is easily one of the biggest dividers of American Christianity. Those who believe that heresy are easily the most pestiferous element in religion. It comes with a vast pile of nonsense, and the bigger the pile, the more obnoxious the advocacy.

It comes from the flesh; you can’t even claim it’s bad scholarship. You and I could pile up all the evidence necessary to win a debate on intellectual grounds, but that accomplishes nothing with Dispensationalists. Rather, it’s a prime example of rationalizing — using reason to justify one or more from the trinity of fallen appetites [PDF].

These people are possessed of some fantasy about being born into a special status, of being specially chosen by God to experience great and miraculous upheavals on this earth. These wild predictions of apocalyptic events “in our generation” has been a problem with Western churches for a very long time. Humility gets tossed in the trash. It’s a lot easier to chase that dream than to invest yourself into learning actual holiness. This is part of what Paul meant by referring to busybodies who don’t do anything useful (2 Thessalonians 3:11). They are too wound up chasing one thrill after another trading with each other the latest wild nonsense from some ignoramus teacher trying to sell his book.

Most of the time I don’t even bother to comment when I hear that crap. When I fail to show sufficient enthusiasm, I typically weigh just how much I might say to get them off my back. I’ve been pretty harsh a few times because they just wouldn’t leave me alone.

I’m not selling anything, but I’ll give you my prophetic belief: Modern Israel is going to jump the shark, probably sometime in the next few years. Whatever it is will mean a painfully obvious denial of Dispensational eschatology. It may even mean the nation of Israel is destroyed. This will cause a major breakdown in the political structure of the American churches. I’m convinced the leadership of the biggest churches and organizations — the institutions with all the money, people and political influence — is being hijacked by a cadre of folks who don’t give a damn what’s true.

When this big mess hits, they will not be penitent, but will do everything they can to save that gravy train. So we can expect a certain level of exodus from these organizations. And I believe I’ll live to see this.

But rather than snickering about it, I’m deeply concerned that it will shatter the faith of millions. It’s bad enough that mainstream American Christianity lacks a clear vision for claiming the promises of God, in part because they simply can’t be bothered to understand the Bible from a Hebrew point of view. So a great many believers are held in some mental prison about how their organizational participation is required by God. Theirs is a vicarious faith, second-hand from people “really used by God.” They end up sensing somewhere below the conscious awareness that their sainthood is second-class.

We have a lot of work to do preparing to handle that exodus, lest some waste years or even the rest of their lives no longer able to believe and trust in God. We have to be patient with their folly until then.

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Psalm 122 (Updated)

Posted on March 11, 2017 by ehurst

Though written by David whose palace sits in Jerusalem, he assumes the perspective of a pilgrim who has come from the farthest distance.

We have arrived! We are here in Jerusalem and the first thing we want to do is pay our respects to God. This first verse is very popular, though seldom properly understood in context. Instead of seeking rest and recovery from the journey, the pilgrims hurry to seek God’s favor. The anticipation that energized them on the journey brings a demand that cannot be denied. Meanwhile, they pause just a moment to celebrate the fact their feet are now inside the gates of the city. You can almost see them bowing down to kiss the stone pavement. This becomes a song to Jerusalem as the capital of the nation and the symbolic home of God’s Presence among His people.

It’s not just any city; Jerusalem is a most winsome place. The word typically translated as “compact” carries the connotation of communion, a place where the whole nation returns to their spiritual home. It signifies the sense of moral fitness, that everything is in its place, and that the whole universe is in proper balance under God’s favor. It’s a primary meaning behind shalom. The sense of unity in the vast nation is a testimony to God’s greatness. Surely we can all share our gratitude to Jehovah. How proper it is that the City is also the seat of government, the City David won for himself from the Jebusites.

So while we are in the House of God, let us pray for the continued shalom of this lovely place. Given what it represents, let the Lord’s favor rest on those who love to be here. Let there be that powerful sense of peace and rest and vivid life that demonstrates God’s promised blessings. And even if David has to write it himself, there is a standing command from God to pray for the welfare of the king.

Meanwhile, lest we imagine that David is tooting his own horn, he explains his true motives here: David is still the shepherd boy serving his Lord. All of this is for the sake of his flock, his tribe, his nation, his brothers and sisters Israel. If there is peace in the City, it’s a whole lot easier to insure that peace rests on the whole kingdom. So it is for the sake of God’s great name on the earth that David seeks the well-being of his whole nation.

Note: Keep in mind that when David wrote this, there was as yet no Temple. The “House of the Lord” would have been the Tent of Meeting standing in the courtyard outside his fortress-palace.

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A Shift in Emphasis

Posted on March 10, 2017 by ehurst

This is a “get to know me” post.

I really thought I was coming home from Europe to become a church pastor. I had been ordained for a decade and had been quite well received by the chapel folks in the military. But as soon as I got back to the US, I ran into all kinds of trouble. So I distracted myself for awhile in secular education work, but then I really stirred up trouble, so I quit that work. Once I had time for contemplation and study, I found myself completely out of place in the mainstream of religion. The harder I tried to make things work, the more they broke. It finally hit me that I had long been an outsider, so I began reaching out to those who had been similarly disenfranchised from religion.

That’s how my online ministry started. The virtual nomadic hunter-gatherer life was far more fruitful in spiritual terms, while the domesticated fields were full of toxic rot. This engagement of the fringes manifested in all sorts of ways — switching to Linux and Unix, learning about obscure networking stuff, developing a writing style to captured like-minded readers. But in the process I began turning over a lot old rocks and ruins, and discovered that whatever “mainstream” meant, it was all very wrong. I moved farther afield and discovered that a lot of non-Christian folks were using stuff that reflected the more ancient biblical viewpoint. A lot of real weirdos and kooks starting hanging out with me (in virtual space).

Too be honest, I really believed we could still find some place to stand near the mainstream, if not inside of it. But after more and very consistent rejections, I gave up on that. It was pretty lonely for awhile, because nearly everyone who really liked what I was doing were people I’ll likely never meet face to face.

Those who were too conventional became scared off by my explorations. You should imagine that process brought even more radical changes in my outlook. Eventually, I began to discover where I really belonged. Oddly enough, this space became its own new “mainstream” in the sense that I was ready to starting working on a whole new society. In other words: While I was at one time reaching out to marginalized folks, there came a point when I moved out there on the margin and put down roots. So now I’m reaching back into the mainstream to pull out folks who need to escape. The field of focus remains folks who are marginalized, but it’s people who aren’t self-consciously so. They aren’t standing out on the margins intentionally. This change wasn’t a conscious decision process; I’m not self-absorbed enough to think I can create a new reality all by myself. This thing coalesced around me bit by bit. Now I look around and realize I’m not alone; I’m not some kook raging in the wilderness. There’s a village growing up around me.

And that village keeps looking at me for clues. Personally I wonder if they haven’t all made some huge mistake, because I’m not sure I can do them that much good. But this thing persists and I refuse to just run away. This is where I belong, so if you’re going to keep hanging around, let’s try to make the most of it. This is what’s behind the recent series on building a new Christian Culture. The interaction I get seems to call for this kind of effort and no one else seems to be working on the question.

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Cycling: North Harrah

Posted on March 10, 2017 by ehurst

I was feeling a lot stronger yesterday, so decided it was time for another long ride. Essentially it was a big rectangle: east on Reno Avenue to Harrah Road, then north to Wilshire Boulevard, then back home. I clipped corners by zigzagging but it was still a full 44 miles. Plus, it had plenty of really tough hills, and I faced a headwind all the way back. Needless to say, I was wiped out when I got home.

Our early spring green-up continues. You can see the carpet of henbit flowers above and this farm field was just starting to turn green. In fact, I ran into several acreages of henbit with blazing purple in sun, but that front yard was easier to approach.

In this pasture scene, you can see that some trees are sprouting leaves, but the oaks will come last. But it was such a warm day that the pines and cedars were offering up their fragrance in generous portions whenever I got downwind of them.

There was plenty of those conifers on Harrah’s bike trail. The northern end of the trail hits the middle of their high school campus and the entire sports complex has been torn down for replacement. That meant that part of the trail was just packed gravel, and I need to hurry through to stay out of the way of moving equipment, so I didn’t get any pictures of that mess.

A lot has happened since the last time I passed this way. More of the land has washed away on the north bank, so the county put up new barriers and dumped some rubble to reduce the washout. There was also one blessing here: Some agency finally got around to sweeping the margins of the road over the bridge. I saw very little shattered glass that normally infests the safety lanes.

I rode on up to NE 63rd to cross the hills and passed through the Seventh Day Adventist campus. They had this gorgeous redbud in full blossom. They often fare well when properly tended; most of the ones I saw in the wild weren’t this full of red. Those dogs in the background are a new addition, guarding a very large fenced area that appeared ready for plowing, likely for a vegetable garden. The store manager once indicated to me they would prefer to stock their own produce.

Down from the ridge, the valley floor is abloom with all sorts of early crops. This is where I saw a couple dozen acres of henbit. I hadn’t noticed this antique tractor before, so I assume it’s a new decoration in that yard. This whole area is one of the loveliest sections of the North Canadian Valley. I knew I would have to go south or north to cross the river, and I opted to take it up to Wilshire just because I love this area.

Over close to the State Center school I stopped to picnic in this shady spot. I prefer any rising surface because it’s easier to sit down and then get back up with my bad knee. I sat on a carpet of chickweed. This may be the last time it’s this easy, because during the warmer weather we have too many chiggers and ticks unless someone mows the greenery down low regularly.

This was the point where I was starting to get tired. I stayed on Wilshire out to Anderson Road, then dropped back down to NE 63rd again. Given the vagaries of how the ridges and streams run out this way, that meant one last brutal hill facing a headwind and it wiped me out. I decided to take a final rest stop on the bridge over the river at Midwest Boulevard. That made the last five miles a little less onerous.

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What We Are

Posted on March 9, 2017 by ehurst

Continuing my encouragement of parishioners in building a Christian Culture, let’s look at some things people might notice.

We aren’t Greens, but we have a powerful affinity for nature. You cannot distinguish between peace with God and communion with Creation. You cannot experience God as a Person without experiencing nature as very much alive and conscious of your communion. Such a thing does register in your consciousness, but not in your senses. It pulls at your awareness from a different angle.

We know that Creation suffers abuse at the hands of fallen humans struggling to live in moral blindness. Nature desperately needs us to find our way back to God. You and I view nature in terms of redemption, of restoring God’s intent, and it’s impossible to unwind that from our own restoration to Eden. We respect our own flesh, and we respect nature as an ally that isn’t fallen.

But one of the biggest issues people will have with us remains that business of eastern feudalism. Our culture and our internal society rests entirely on the foundation of the extended family household. Westerners will call us “patriarchal,” but that would be missing the whole point. This is not a Western patriarchy; this is a shepherd society. Headship is all about the heavier responsibility, the high burden of care, not some mythical privilege. We don’t have rules about a gender-based division of labor, but we do insist that male and female are wired differently and not at all interchangeable.

So while the priestly function is always male-only simply because God said so, you cannot have a male elder without a supporting female elder, even if she prefers to hide behind the scenes. In our culture, the male elder would feel crippled without a feminine voice to keep him sane. And women can certainly take up other significant roles, not just the ones traditionally acceptable in Western culture. For example, in our society women should be in charge of facilities, logistics and life support; quite a bit of planning and engineering could benefit from a female approach to things. We want our ladies involved.

You aren’t going to hear us talking about the “age of accountability” regarding children in religion. That whole question arises from the presumption that people can push the right buttons and make themselves somehow spiritually reborn. Instead, we talk about social and religious apprenticeship, a privilege from God worthy of energy and resources. We give our children every chance to discover their own spiritual destiny by maintaining a culture that actively fights the perversion of Western culture. We don’t strive to prolong childhood, but we also know that the earliest steps in moral responsibility are difficult until someone has lived long enough to begin handling abstract logic. Then we encourage them to question everything, in part by preparing to answer their challenges. We want them pass through the stage of abstract logic to a higher moral awareness.

We aren’t big on assertive authority, but try to equip everyone for volitional moral engagement. We have to discern their moral boundaries. Insofar as they won’t walk in the grace of moral truth, then we must handle them according to Biblical Law. What was meant to be a parable becomes their reality, but it always remains their choice. It still comes off rather friendly and accommodating, and without patronizing, but we can never forget that they have chosen a lesser existence. We must respect that choice and give them what they demand.

And we aren’t fooled by the social mythology of human nature. Sure, people strive with the pretense, but we can discern the moral truth of how men and women react differently to various experiences. While we might hear what they say, we also keep track of what we can know of their true motivations. I must note here in passing that there is a lot of truth behind the so-called Red Pill movement. Not in their predatory abuses and manipulation, but we agree with their assessment of human nature and how thoroughly it is tied to sexual identity. We may play along with the social games up to a certain point, but when our spirits are provoked to act on some teachable moment, we do what God says, not what maintains the social facade. We also teach these things to our children and anyone who listens, so that people are more free from manipulation.

Do these things and the world will catch a glimpse of God’s glory.

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Photography: Converging Flows

Posted on March 8, 2017 by ehurst

Hello! This is Ed. I’m out of my mind right now. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

Actually I’m just having a low energy day today. I wanted to ride, needed some time out in isolation to pray, and it was beautiful, if windy. While I could have ridden much farther, I suppose, my heart wasn’t in it. So I took Midwest Boulevard north to the river and jumped off on the south bank. Today is the day I would explore down to the mouth of Crutcho Creek. If you want to see it on a map, the coordinates are [35.521407, -97.388000] on Google Maps. Crutcho Creek runs in from the SW and snakes wickedly all over the place, so that in the last quarter mile of geographic distance it adds more than a half-mile running distance. This is all east of Midwest Boulevard.

My ostensible goal was to see the mouth of Crutcho Creek (image left, flowing from the right). I knew that I was permitted to move along the river bank, but I didn’t get very far. At first I dropped down onto the sand bank and walked all the way to the end of the sandbars (first image above) and took a shot of the bend in the river, but the mouth of Crutcho was still out of view on the right. So back up I went and tried a few other trails, but they kept ending in thorny vines. Finally I just went out onto the margin of the mowed area and notice I was hardly the only one to do so. It led to a very wide trail through the woods (image right). I could tell I was the first to pass in several days, because the passing brief rain showers from Sunday had left a fine stippled pattern in the sand. There were no tracks of any sort breaking that pattern until I got there.

My curiosity satisfied, I came back out and poked around under the bridge just a bit. OKC Parks had laid a heavy woven burlap on the soil, but I don’t think they seeded it with grass. Already there are places where the red clay ground had washed out under that cover. What’s growing through is simply native foliage that sprouts randomly. The water level is moderately low today, so it there are some deep pools and not a lot of flow. It was a good thing the crews dredged it out there under the bridge; it encourages fish to hang around within easy reach of folks who stop on the bridge above. However, I’ve seen more turtles than anything else.

On the way back, I stopped and caught this image. See those clumps of bright golden grass waving in the wind? Those are friends of mine. We have over a dozen native species of grass around here, but this is the only one that calls my name. I caught it here at the end of it’s hibernation season. It turns gold like that in fall and stands in shocks of lovely amber all winter. We’ve hand an early spring warmth, so in the next few weeks the base will sprout green and the golden stalks will fall over, and eventually break off, mostly. By summer the gold will be gone, replaced by a brilliant green.

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