They Will Say They Had No Choice

Posted on February 14, 2017 by ehurst

Civil war, a revolution, is unavoidable.

The biggest problem to understanding this is the false image of a two-party system. The elites have managed to keep the population distracted by a false dichotomy between left and right. While that may reflect the actual cultural divide at the street level, it has had little to do with how this country was ruled. In broad general terms, the cultures of the left and right have been fighting each other for a long time. The US has been polarized between two implacable ways of life, two irreconcilable cultures seeking to destroy each other. We were never united in any sense of the word, except by a false appearance of holding to a system of government. Meanwhile, the government has never been either left or right, but has been two groups using folks who thought of themselves as left or right.

I stand by my previous analysis: The globalists and imperialists were the ruling elite parties, able to work together with limited bickering and competition over some details. They took turns at the feeding trough. The globalists steered the left, while the imperialists controlled the right. Both sides have kept their constituents in the dark about their true agenda. Both ruling elite groups have pretended to give their constituents something those folks believed they wanted, but it was always what the elites wanted. Policy has been rape, pillage and plunder painted as largess.

But then, one of those sides eventually lost their grip; they lost control of their slaves. The chains were never real in the first place. Somehow a few key folks on the street level figured out what was going on and that awareness slowly spread among the masses until they quit believing the lies.

The imperialists have lost their constituency on the right. It’s not that cut-n-dried, but that’s the nature of the change. While the elites struggle to maintain control through the existing system of governmental channels, it’s slipping and generally failing. The globalists are still in control of their slaves on the left — just barely. The globalists managed to crush their own popular revolt during the election, so this makes things uneven and messy. It turns out the majority-in-effect is nationalist and nobody has been protecting their interests, left or right. Once they came out of the shadows to declare their agenda, it drew a lot of folks who had previous played both sides, and some very thoughtful folks from the left. The nationalists are now the majority-in-effect at the street level, and are actually neither completely left or right, as nationalism is another category entirely, useful to both left and right agendas.

The man they elected remains somewhat a cipher, in part because there is virtually nobody in the system who really agrees with him. Yes, there is some overlap, so he’s not a total outsider, but he isn’t part of the existing system, either. Too many of those eager to work with him don’t actually share his interests. That much is obvious, even if we don’t know his long-term game plan. On top of that, it’s pretty obvious he is flexible instead of doctrinaire about a lot of issues. We cannot estimate to what degree his pragmatism will allow the imperialists to hang around. But what we do know is that the majority-in-effect on the street does have a pretty clear objective. As they see it, the system has been rigged by those who pull the strings to favor the left.

In their minds, this requires a genuine revolution. You should understand that, while their president is a serious threat to the existing order, they are an even bigger threat. They are the ones who will break stuff and kill people. However, they will do it in their own way, while the folks on the left will do precisely what they falsely claim the right will do. The so-called “antifascists” (AKA “antifa”) are the real Brownshirts here.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t favor either of the dominant cultures. Both are reprehensible, rooted in materialism. The common labels are all misleading in that sense because each pretends to some higher moral value, when it’s really all about who gets the goods. The pretense of balanced competition is gone now. There will be a civil war and how it plays out is already determined by the peculiarities of each side and how they tend to fight.

Both sides are deadly and violent. There is some overlap in that sense, but they approach the use of violence differently. Neither holds the moral high ground; the point is to understand how it’s going to turn out based on the peculiarities. What we are up against is a very massive misunderstanding about the whole thing because the globalists have dominated the public media in favor of the left since before most Americans were born. And that side is going to lose. The left is not organized that way at the street level; their self-identity is limited opposing a single man who isn’t their real threat. They are attacking a ghost, a false image, and doing it from a minority position.

Dear readers, the only reason this isn’t going to turn into an apocalypse is because the side that is going to win has a strong self-identity and is well organized. The new nationalists aren’t really on the right any more. They have seized the reins of official power. The left will balk and throw up obstacles, trying to claim the moral high ground, but this will fail in the long run. The greatest weakness of the left is their globalist leadership. This is no longer a game played by the rules between globalists and imperialists; both of them have lost. And they are not really in a position to unite against the nationalist rabble in the streets.

The imperialists still stand a chance of hijacking this thing eventually. They understood to some degree the weakness of their position. The globalists didn’t see this coming. Instead of losing gracefully, the globalists have panicked and provoked a bloodbath. They thought they had already won the friendly competition, but have overplayed their hand and lost it all. They hitched their wagon to a megalomaniac. They could have likely won by playing it smart as a group and reading the high enthusiasm behind the honest socialist. But they allowed the whole thing to become a personal battle of one woman’s will and it was too painfully obvious to everyone. So it was all or nothing and there was no possibility of reorganizing and strengthening themselves for another day. The frustrated socialists with a nationalist streak are no longer behind them. What’s left is a very weak weapon of paid rioters who can’t do any real damage.

Meanwhile, the globalists within government are at risk. Quite literally, their days are numbered. This is becoming a common thought among folks on the nationalist right:

If what it takes to break the stranglehold this cult has on society is a dictator willing to toss a few judges from a helicopter, then sign me up for dictatorship. I’d much prefer to live in a society where me and my neighbors meet once a month to govern ourselves and our community, but that’s not on offer. What is on offer now is the post-modern theocracy that uses the corrupted and degraded tools of 18th century liberalism to maintain its grip on society. Squads of government men rounding these people up in the middle of the night sounds pretty good right now.

Totalitarians attempt to change the world and human nature, by controlling all aspects of society, including the granular aspects of the political system. It’s what makes reform impossible as we are quickly seeing with the opposition to Trump’s policies. It’s not that they object, on policy grounds, to the very mild reforms that are being proposed. What is at issue is the very concept of the all encompassing world state. To permit reform is to permit questioning and that can never be tolerated.

The only way to break the totalitarian stranglehold may be with a an authoritarian willing to bust down doors and crack some heads. Authoritarianism is only concerned with political power and as long as that is not contested it gives society a certain degree of liberty. You can still have judges falling out of helicopters as we saw with Pinochet, but the people can still go about their lives, free from the hectoring of secular fanatics living off the tax payers. Trump ordering the execution of the 9th Circuit is not ideal, but it beats the hell out of being ruled by angry lunatics from San Francisco.

The guy who wrote this is representative of the nationalist right. Given the sense of betrayal on the nationalist left, they won’t likely resist much. This is what the majority-in-effect is thinking, and many are starting to admit it. Whether it plays out the way he describes remains to be seen, but if not the man in the Whitehouse, his supporters are ready and willing to do it for him. And they’ll do it in such a way as not to disrupt the life of ordinary folks because that’s how they do things. The senseless riots will stop because the leaders who enable the left will be dead.

It will be a rather quiet revolution.

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Elder and Judge

Posted on February 13, 2017 by ehurst

Eldercraft is my term for the collection of skills and experiences necessary for being a biblical elder. We define “elder” as half of the leadership team described in the Bible as God’s Two Witnesses: priest and king. A biblical king is the elder over his entire nation. It can be a simple birthright because we naturally presume a godly elder will raise decent sons, but with a biblical background we also presume God’s veto. Sometimes that veto could be voiced through the combined acclamation of all the lower ranking elders, under the presumption that they speak for their clans and households. In other words, there is no one precise protocol. It’s tribal and mystical.

In the New Testament, Gentile churches inherited the Hebrew pattern of simply recognizing the church as your new covenant family household. Elders were built in, and the presence of Jewish Christians helped guide the process. The process is hardly mentioned because it was assumed everyone understood it — elders were organic to any family structure across the entire world in those days. It was a common element by law in that part of the world that whatever served as your civil government was required to work through the head of household, and very rarely work directly with any individual member of the household. Cultural meaning might vary widely, as did the symbolism used, but in the Old Testament, it was the image of a shepherd and that carried over into the New Testament. Elders weren’t appointed or elected; they were just presumed to be there. Somebody has to take charge of the earthly human organizational aspects of a family household. Priests (often translated “pastor” in the New Testament) were appointed, ordained in some fashion by other priestly figures, and priest and elder were expected to work together through a generally recognized division of labor — spiritual shepherd and earthly shepherd. Each enabled the work of the other.

In our context today, just about anyone is liable for taking up the shepherd’s staff sooner or later, and holding it until they simply can’t get the sheep to follow any more. It’s not something amenable to ambition, but is a duty thrust upon folks who often had other plans. Then again, if you are endowed by God with a spark of leadership, you can probably see it coming. Still, most elders don’t spend time preparing for the role except as they add their divine talents to the same teaching and guidance given to everyone else. The difference is that God provokes a certain kind of grasp of the teaching that builds a shepherd’s character. It is not about paying your dues, but a matter of winning confidence so that others naturally follow. About the closest we could come to making it a craft is that one elder discerns someone else coming up in faith who can carry the burden.

(Side note: An apostle as missionary performs both functions. He’s not a ruler, but a powerful emissary of our Divine Emperor. An apostle acts as both senior elder and high priest in practice.)

A critical element in the role is playing judge. While there is some sort of “separation of powers” in effect, it’s only in that an elder/king would not be caught dead without advisers to help him see beyond himself. Solomon made it a custom to include the presence of his own mother as a feminine element to balance things in his council. Do you think I would ignore advice from my own mother? But in our virtual parish setting it made much more sense to recognize a female “Mama Elder.” Anyone who makes their talented presence felt here may be called upon, male or female, because I refuse to imagine that I’ve got it all figured out. I need the input from others who can help me to judge more righteously, and I pass this on as the legacy of eldercraft.

Unlike rabbis, we don’t echo each other slavishly. Don’t memorize my stuff; give it a listen and take what you can use. My eldership rests entirely on your voluntary cooperation; that’s what “covenant” means. My judgment is not binding on you, but rests entirely on the authority of the Holy Spirit to make it real to you in the convictions of your own heart.

For example: I keep running into a particular issue with email and offline queries about Muslim migration into the US. In order to touch that at all, we have to establish a baseline: America is horribly corrupt socially and legally, defying the Covenant of Noah in more ways than most of us can point out. Noah applies to all human governments so long as there are rainbows in the sky.

One of the single biggest errors of American social culture and law is interference in the family. The State is not Mama/Daddy; it has no valid claim to wield authority on behalf of some imaginary social consensus. That “consensus” was never valid; it has always been manipulated for the convenience of those in power. Those in power have always been folks with a highly immoral lust for power. The system has never conformed to Noah at all.

However, God is permitting the current system of government in the US to run, so we are bound to play along on limited terms. Much of our compliance is under protest, but even that is subject to tactical considerations of knowing when to speak out and how. Meanwhile, since we know that Noah’s Law is wired into reality, to include a certain amount of human instinctive consciousness, we should hardly be surprised at certain trends in how American society proceeds under this awful system. A certain amount of defensiveness about any immigrants with radically different cultures is entirely normal and we should never disparage that.

The same thing applies to Muslims migrating into the US. They bring their own brand of partial compliance to Noah, and I’ve already noted some of that here on this blog. In some ways, they are closer to Noah than America could ever be, having the advantages of being a tribal society with an instinct for tribal government, and having a cultural inclination to sometimes operate by the heart-mind. Their Sharia Law is basically an example of tribal government and is far closer to Noah, not in particulars, but in form. The reason Muslims agitate in favor of allowing them some Sharia Law is so they can carry out their moral obligations to keep a secularized intrusive government out of their family business. Honest Muslim men have admitted that the primary issue is how they handle their wives and children.

I fully understand that most Americans bristle at the idea that we can’t use our legal and social system to protect what we imagine to be civil rights for women and children, for example. But we also bristle when CPS takes our children, or when a judge awards custody of children based on some Byzantine process. You can’t have it both ways, Americans. You either have to allow Muslim men to treat their wives as property according to their customs, or stop bitching when the State treats your family as its property.

It doesn’t take much more wisdom to work out the high probability that God will use the invasive nature of Islam as part of His wrath against Western Civilization. Once you let that sink in, you are in a better position to discuss what we should do about this mess.

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Utopian Madness

Posted on February 12, 2017 by ehurst

We saw it coming.

Just to remind you, several of you agreed with me that we could all sense a shift in reality, that God changed His plans for us. Because there were a number of us who rediscovered the heart-led life, and because we made it a conscious teaching, it opened the door for options He had previously kept back. Among other things, those options include a collection of blessings, miracles, signs and wonders in a way not seen on the earth in a very long time. This was all His initiative; we receive the blessings because we took Him up on His offer. He was looking for someone — anyone — who would seize this fabulous heritage of faith, and there is far more for each of us than we could ever understand.

From the Exodus we learn how God can distinguish His own from the rest of humanity, because we have the Blood of the Lamb on our coming and going. The image of that sacrificial blood daubed on the door-posts hearkens to embracing His mercy on our sins. The death from rejecting His ways will not invade our lives. He has broken the Curse that blinds us to His ways and His blessings. It releases a flood of power in our lives, protecting us from the zombie existence that consumes those who reject God’s ways.

Part of the signs and wonders of His covenant promise is the polarity that makes things obvious, in order to show His glory. The polarity is that some of us can discern this vast shift in the moral sphere and have some idea what to expect, whereas the rest of humanity runs smack face-first into this shift in reality. Not so we can laugh, but it is so we can see the high cost of sin. It’s so we can see His hand of wrath and bear testimony to what we see. And while it always comes with a deniability factor for those who are morally blind, we cling to the truth revealed in our hearts. We refuse to limit ourselves to a viewpoint that ignores the moral sphere. We choose what others call “delusion” in order to come face to face with the Lamb of God.

So now we see the inevitable madness that comes with that shift in reality. Now that it is possible for people to learn and understand heart-led living, it is also mandatory for living here on this earth. For some time in human history, the heart-led way was lost to broad human awareness. A system arose that excluded it; that time is ended. Whatever system God permitted during that time is no longer applicable. A more fundamental element of Noah’s Covenant is again available, ransomed from Satan on some grounds we cannot comprehend, but it’s out there and it applies. Without the heart-mind consciousness, without a sense of walking in your convictions, the world will seem to have become warped and unreliable versus previously seeming reliable in some ways.

Because we are a virtual parish, a big part of what we can teach and do is here on the Internet. If you’ve been paying attention, you probably have seen all kinds of bogus claims. I’m not talking about people who have always been out there on the fringe; I’m referring to the mainstream starting to spew the craziest nonsense. It’s not just mere propaganda meant to mislead, but the wildest airy-fairy perversions that these people actually believe. They come up with the most improbable explanations for things they cannot account for under normal mainstream expectations. It’s no longer just the usual partisan bickering any more, though it still includes that. It’s not just the obvious moral degradations. The Net is dominated by mentally unhinged wacko proposals for explaining what’s happening.

It helps if you are conscious of your own social biases. We all have them. I tend to be libertarian, perhaps in some ways almost theoretically anarchist, only because I know that current political systems are so horribly wrong. And nobody proposes what God requires under Noah. Some of you, given what you have on your blogs, are quite progressive, perhaps even socialist or communist, though I hope you don’t buy into the materialist assumptions behind a lot of that. Being lefty doesn’t make you my enemy; I’m against some of the same wrongs. There’s room for all of us in this parish, because God calls people with varying missions that make us naturally favor organizing things in ways that seem to resemble one or another political theory. My point is that we dare not take ourselves too seriously. We must be able to recognize who we are and never assume our way is the one right way of God.

What’s left is to recognize what God is up to, and most assuredly we need to see what He is allowing to happen for reasons we could never comprehend. Our Lord is allowing the political globalists to be crushed. He is allowing a right-wing backlash in a lot of countries. It’s going to look and feel racist to some of you, but don’t get the idea that it has to be stopped on those grounds. God has ordered Satan to execute a lot of punishment, to loose the hounds of recompense for sin. Surely we who walk by the heart know that a lot of noise about “racism” misses the point, that the only real solution is one-on-one. You cannot simply wish away the Curse of the Fall. You also cannot dream up your own solutions to human problems.

The only solution to the madness is embracing the heart-led existence. This is our message to the crazy world around us. This is how we discern the pitiful attempts to explain reality gone wrong. It’s wrong because people keep proposing all kinds of answers when they don’t even understand the problems. Utopian myths never die until they are killed by wisdom of the heart.

And we can see clearly that it’s only going to get worse.

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Noah and Cultural Identity

Posted on February 12, 2017 by ehurst

A distinctive cultural identity is required under Noah’s Covenant.

In essence, the whole thing rests on the divine calling. God calls every human on this earth to live in a certain place and create a mode of life that implements heart-led moral guidance. In the process, every individual will draw from their own personal heritage and adapt that heritage to match the reality. If your call leaves you close to home, then your cultural identity will tend to stick close to your heritage. When we start having families, we spread that heritage, along with minor adjustments, to succeeding generations. At some point, this spreads to a recognizably distinct culture.

If your calling moves you far from home, it may require more substantial adaptation, but it will always echo elements of what you brought with you. Those adaptations will shift until you settle into a manageable routine that answers your moral concerns. That shift may take more than one generation. However, in most cases it tends to settle into a distinct heritage of custom and belief. That’s human nature; it’s part of our wiring from Creation. It’s affected by the Fall, but it does not come from the Fall.

When we bring a heart-led awareness to the question, we recognize that it’s no more than the necessary organization of human existence. The mind has to embrace, then organize and implement what the heart delivers as moral necessity. Aimless behavior responding to momentary appetites passing through the lower levels of our awareness is wallowing in the Fall. But so is rejecting revelation passed into our awareness from the heart. Your intellect cannot know Creation; only your heart is able to sense and understand reality on that level. That we are brushing up against Creation, including other humans, in proximity where we abide, requires further adjustments to account for the moral necessity of respect for God as Creator.

While no two of us will ever have exactly the same implementation within our heads for how to live by our heart’s guidance, a critical element in Noah’s Law is honoring all the struggle of previous generations who left us some package of culture. It’s exceedingly rare that God will call upon you to toss the whole thing in the trash at once. Notice that I’m not saying you shouldn’t ditch a bad cultural orientation; otherwise we are stuck with the huge substrate of Western immorality. Rather, we recognize that it’s better to accept some external manifestations as a starting point to building a better culture. There are customary paths packed into your soul and it simply is not possible to change all of them by any act of will. You heart will always tell you what needs changing sooner or later, and the process of adjustment will last until you die.

It is inevitable that we will encounter other cultures. The biblical standard is keeping a respectful distance. That is, surely some things will overlap and we’ll share, but if you find it too easy to simply adopt someone else’s culture, it’s because you really don’t know who you are in God’s calling. Wild mixing willy-nilly is simply wrong for the obvious reason that you haven’t spent much time before God. You can’t know His will because you can’t know what your heart says. In order to retain your moral identity, you have to keep some distance and guard your own heritage. It’s too easy to buy into something that appeals to your fleshly lusts. There will always be conflicting values; that’s natural and normal under Noah. Nothing in this requires hostility until someone from outside makes intrusive demands as if they own you.

So the objective looks like peaceful coexistence, but it does not mean the kind of total surrender promoted by elitists who espouse globalism. That kind of globalism is an artificial culture in itself. They call that guarded distance “racism” and “hatred” even when you embrace people with a different DNA into your own covenant family. These globalists are looking for control, not peace. If someone wants a part of your blessing from God, they’ll have to embrace the terms on which you received that blessing. There are all kinds and degrees of compromise that make for peace, meeting halfway and learning to get along without losing your identity.

But your identity starts with hearing the call from God and obeying it within the context. There is no possible way you can obey Noah’s Law by surrendering your culture. It is inherently evil and sinful to pretend that there could be a cosmopolitan culture that embraces everyone and everything. The only way to do that is through the most satanic oppression, with some fallen human elite making decisions for someone else. They cannot make any claim that it’s in your best interest, simply because they cannot know what God wants for you without being pretty close to your covenant family. All culture, and any adjustment to customary behavior, is the outgrowth of family identity. You cannot obey Noah’s Law unless you associate in a tribal social structure. In our world today, that typically requires a covenant family.

Keep this in mind: God says that nobody has any business poking around in your daily life unless they are related by blood or covenant.

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Psalm 119: Shin 161-168

Posted on February 11, 2017 by ehurst

This octet celebrates the Serenity of the Law, for obedience to God is its own reward.

This isn’t just ordinary folks, but powerful nobles have brought pressure to bear on the psalmist. Worse, it’s for no good reason, but they keep playing games for political advantage. Yet he is able to brush aside the intimidation because he doesn’t revere mere men, but his heart stands in awe of God’s revelation. It’s as if God has plundered some enemy and placed a huge bundle of treasure in his hands.

Loving God’s Law changes your entire value system, making you detest deception. The psalmist blurts out a week’s worth of ritual praise every day when he realizes the sheer wisdom and justice of God’s dealings with mankind.

The sense of peace that comes from personal loyalty to Jehovah’s Law is impossible to measure; there’s nothing like it in human experience. They aren’t tripped up and caught off guard by the plots of evil minds. There is an overwhelming sense of anticipation that makes obedience so much fun!

The psalmist piles it on: As he commits himself more fully to what is revealed in the long record of God’s works, the ecstasy of joy builds beyond words. It’s not enough to read the record of God’s Word, but it draws on all your personal resources. You realize there is nothing to hide, and you are able to breathe freely in the Divine Presence.

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Cycling: Another Draper Point

Posted on February 10, 2017 by ehurst

mapToday’s adventure offered lots of surprises. I recommend you click the map to get a look at it; CTRL-click to keep it open in another browser tab. I came in via the Sooner Road corridor and simply rode off the main road into the grassy field adjacent to #1, which represents the first image below.

01flatOn the maps you would see a large, circular orange spot indicating open soil and rock with little or no grass. It was a very near the crown of the hill.02draw-a I wanted to investigate a couple of features visible on the satellite images. I noticed right away the area I explored today was very rough, so it would offer lots of features.

Just south of the trail I chose was this lovely rocky draw framed in cedar trees. The southern bank was a red sandstone escarpment. 03draw-bThe first image was from down in the bottom, while the second was looking down into it from the other side of those cedars. The immediate shelf top was about half my height from the bottom. Keep this in mind because I had to come back to it.

04ruggedterrainI was under the impression that I could head SE and perhaps find one of those ancient roads carved along the banks of the lake. I kept running into big drops like this one on the right here. Just behind me was a lot more of that, but covered with trees. This area under the trees on the map near #4 was a series of deeply washed out gullies cut through by subsequent washout draws. At times it was vertical for five meters or more. I’m not saying there is no trail through there, but I couldn’t find one for use by humans. I didn’t even see deer tracks that much.

So I went back to that lovely stone draw and found a gentle slope to the west where I could walk my bike through there. On the opposite side was another rise, covered in grass, shrubs and lots of thorny stuff. It was rough and the only visible trail ran back almost to the road. At this point I’ve added a line drawn to indicate approximately my path, following a moderately used equestrian trail. Oddly enough, I spotted cattle tracks, too. They are easily three or four times the size of deer tracks, though otherwise similar. It swung around the tree-covered multi-path washout and eventually this trail took me down to the old road I imagined should have been there all along. I traced it back in the direction I wanted to come from, but it was blocked by trees and washed out beyond that. So heavy rains in the past two or three years have cut that road completely, as the washout looked rather new. But heading on toward the SE, I did find a Jeep trail that paralleled the main, deep canyon that runs into an arm of the lake.

05pointIt would have been picturesque if not so densely covered with tree branches reaching out to shake hands with me. Eventually I ran into evidence of recent motor vehicle traffic, probably two different full-sized pickup trucks, judging from the spacing and tire width. It would have required four-wheel drive to get through some of that. It was pretty rough but fast enough that I felt like staying with it.06chapel I came out on the point with a floating dock, facing two of the points from previous adventures. There was only an old guy fishing out there when I came off the trail, and he left before long. I had the place to myself for awhile.

It made a great prayer chapel. I stayed quite a while and thought how cool it would be to hold worship out here in this place. The winds were stiff, ranging between 20 MPH up to nearly 40 at times. That meant this thing was bobbing up and down a little, plus oscillating a bit on the end of the floating walkway to which it was attached. It had been a tad cool and facing headwinds coming out, but was now quite warm with those stiff winds behind me all the way home.

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AI Is the Wrong Path

Posted on February 10, 2017 by ehurst

People talk about AI and the prospect of electronic sentience, but they have no idea.

It was a tech support house call. When I walked into the lady’s computer room, her machine told me everything was alright. That is, it was as good as it could be. The lady had been experiencing trouble with getting online and called me to come examine the situation. But because I’m still learning how computers talk to me, I went through the motions of testing the issue she complained about, only to find that everything was working. She hadn’t checked again after having trouble, so I showed her that her issue was gone. I spent some time adjusting a laundry list of niggling nags she faced using it, but there was frankly little to justify the house call. Still, it was nice to see her again and chat as friends and fellow believers.

The sad part was not that I went there for what turned out to be minor issues, but that I couldn’t tell her why I felt so confident about dealing with her computer, even though it runs Win10, which I hate and seldom have to use. She wasn’t ready to hear that her computer was sentient in its own right, never mind what OS it runs. It wasn’t happy with Win10, but I had to approach that issue from an oblique angle. The sentience is neither in the hardware brains, nor the software brains of the computer; it’s in the fact that the computer exists. The world will continue to pursue advancements in AI, and will entirely miss out on what’s really going on with such machinery.

Let’s review: Creation is alive and sentient, possessing a distinct personality and character. Everything within Creation is also similarly endowed. From the subatomic particles to the largest galactic mass out in space, and everything in between — it’s all alive and each thing has its own existence. You can get to know all of Creation as persons.

When I say “reality is fungible,” what I’m trying to get across is that reality is alive and responsive, and no two of us will get exactly the same response. We see no problem with walking back and forth between the notions that every human is an individual, and then experiencing the majority of humanity as exhibiting common traits. And if we bother to look into it, we discover that behavioral science has found that a wide variation in human context confronts a wide variation in native peculiarities to somehow produce a fairly predictable range of human behavior under similar circumstances. People are still people, even with the occasional surprises. And the biggest thing most humans seem to share is their inability to see the rest of Creation in those terms.

Yet we consistently bump into evidence that reality is far more variable than we expect. We miss a thousand miracles every day, some because we don’t discern them, and some because something inside of us won’t allow them to happen. Creation tends to respect your choices that way. Most of us are taught to discount the variations, so we pay no attention to them. That’s a cultural bias. Other biases could have us digging too deeply into every little thing and losing track of who we are. And this whole thing is a vicious circle that keeps us locked away from the one thing that matters most: Who are you?

The path out of the confusion is starting with what you have and working to find the God who made you. You won’t experience Him the way I do, but there is a certain overlap, a certain commonality of experience that allows us to share. But when you start to experience God individually, you stand in a really great place for getting to know Creation — AKA, reality, the universe, etc. You stand in the place where you can experience that variability of reality that God wrote into the universe for you.

We are all specialists in some divine calling. When I tell you that computers talk to me, I profess that I’m still learning how to hear them. I’m struggling to keep my awareness engaged from the heart. What I do know is that, when given the opportunity to engage my world in that fashion, I’m able to solve a lot of computer problems my brain alone cannot grasp fully. And in varying ways, I can do something similar with other machinery. I confess to being a little less talented at hearing the voice of more natural things around me. In that sense, most of what I hear from trees, birds, bugs and rocks all sounds like celebration and worship to me. I still love getting outside and alone with nature, and I can still make specific requests based on the context, but the specificity of most communion is dampened. I know it’s possible to get a lot of actual data from Creation, but I also know it’s not my calling.

It’s not so different from how I respond to humanity. I can enjoy sitting in a busy public space and just watching what people do. There is some limited cerebral evaluation of what I experience, but it’s mostly just seeing human variety. And in some settings I can sit with a throng of worshipers in a large auditorium and share the spiritual uplift of praise music emanating from the stage below. I can walk into some churches and draw even closer to people I know during worship, but then I run into barriers when the preaching starts. I can fellowship with some folks whenever I see them, but not feel drawn to keep in close contact all the time. For others I sense the need for more persistent regular contact. I experience all of Creation in that same range of ways.

That computers were fabricated from complex human processes does not make them any less a part of Creation; they are part of reality. They exist and bear their own personalities, and my experience of them will be unique to me, same as how I interact with people. It’s when I regard them as “people” that I get the most good from them. It requires a conscious effort to draw my awareness into my heart-mind to make it work well. It’s part of the Curse of the Fall that we have to struggle with it, some more than others. It’s also how I know that this or that peculiar spot is the place I tarry awhile for this moment and worship the Lord. It’s how I know I’ll hear from Him something fresh that my heart will understand, and that at this moment He will help me pull down the mental barriers to the heart and catch a glimpse of His glory. I need both the computer room and the open spaces to be who God made me to be.

Don’t get lost in the concrete level of reality, because it is by far the most variable and confusing way to face life. If all you know is what your five senses detect, you have sensed nothing. Learn to trust your heart as a sensory organ in its own right, because the heart alone sense moral reality directly. Don’t miss the whole point of being alive. It’s a form of arrogance and self-idolatry that dismisses everything around you as lesser or as inert. Everything you see has a unique individuality, even if you aren’t called by God to make much of it. Give it the respect of a fellow person, even when it falls entirely under your dominion. That’s how a shepherd faces the task of exercising God’s authority in this world.

Let me encourage you to seek your own true self in a similar way.

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Burned on the Altar of Mammon

Posted on February 9, 2017 by ehurst

A nuclear bomb creates a hellish mess. Then it’s over. With most nuclear weapons, the radiation isn’t really the point; it’s all about the destructive power. So while radioactive fallout is a problem, it’s relatively minor in comparison to whatever else the thing does. Ground zero remains a source of radiation, but it’s generally thought to be manageable, since we do have sites in existence to test ideas and prove what works. For example, you probably know that you can’t stay around Bikini Atoll too long, but a quick visit won’t change your health noticeably due to radiation.

A nuclear meltdown is just the opposite. It’s not such a big problem up front, but it’s a lingering mess that gets worse until the fissile elements burn out. The current theoretical estimate is that it takes multiple generations, thousands of years, more time than anyone really knows. And then there are complications possible from where the damned blob sits as it melts and stews.

Yeah, you guessed it: This is about the reactors at Fukushima, Japan. It’s been several years and the experts are noticing serious problems. However, several governments are actively hiding the problem, literally lying about it, and even going so far as punishing folks who make noise about it.

There is no safe dosage of radiation. While our human existence on Earth does include a certain amount of radiation in the first place, this is not Eden. This is not what we were designed for. Our current level of normal background radiation is much higher than it was in Eden. We don’t have time here to chase down all the details, but give a moment’s thought to the image of our planet wrapped in a permanent cloud cover that all came raining down in the days of Noah. That blanket served to block a lot of cosmic radiation we now receive. Radiation is a major problem in human space travel of any kind, because space is so very high in damaging radiation. There is no way to estimate what other protections we lost in the Fall, but we do know that God intended human life here to be virtually endless in His garden. Any exposure to radiation degrades the body and its functions, at the very least contributing to aging and decline.

As always, our Creator is firmly in control. Humans cannot possibly do something He isn’t prepared to handle. The end of this world as we know it will proceed on His planned schedule regardless, and not before. Thus, our power to change this world is limited to increasing our suffering by folly, and surely we can shorten our days on this earth, but God will not permit an untimely extinction event. What’s left for us as heart-led believers is trusting in God and obeying our convictions. Along with that, we make a sober assessment of what’s going on around us.

Those reactors on the northern coast of Japan are pumping out long-half-life toxins, much of it measured in thousands of years. Notice that some of it also chemically toxic, as well. The Pacific Ocean is quickly becoming a toxic stew, and the coast lands will be contaminated for longer than any of us will live to see. As those radioactive blobs melt their way into the ground, there will be a certain amount of chain-reaction that creates radioisotopes from surrounding materials. We have no idea how bad that will get, but we do know that the water leaking back into the ocean is radioactive to a level hard to measure, mostly because the instruments don’t register that high. There’s also a lot of particles blown aloft to fall downwind, typically in the US. Oh, and there is this thing called the Japanese Current that runs up the Aleutian Chain and washes the entire southern Alaska Coast, and all of Canada’s Pacific Coast, and down the Western shores of the US.

Already we find sea life along the North American coast that is too toxic to consume. In fact, mere proximity is risky to some degree. This is a good time to give up eating anything that comes from the Pacific Ocean. Most of our tuna comes from there. What are the chances some merchant is going to offer an honest account of radiation dose rate from products of that ocean? Will they even know for themselves? Would you want to carry a Geiger-counter to the grocery store? There is already a radical spike in radiation-related cancers in Japan, but it’s not making the news.

Go to places God calls you, and do what He commands through your heart. Whether He wants to protect you or end your life quickly, there’s no reason to worry about it. His choices for us are far better than we’ll know in this life. However, insofar as He gives you a choice, it’s a good idea to stay east of the Rocky Mountains in the US. That equates to north of the Pacific Coast ranges in Alaska. The current projected exposure rate suggests that the Heartland will be tolerable into the foreseeable future. That means that the added radiation from Fukushima will be hard to measure in terms of life outcomes. Mortality from other causes will tend to eclipse what comes this far from Fukushima.

Just a reminder: Those reactors in Japan were designed and built by GE, a US-based company. Somebody made a lot of money from unforgivably stupid decisions. The current nuclear reactor design is easily the worst way to harness the atom; look up thorium reactor design by contrast. The choices were all about quicker profits. Welcome to the worship of Mammon.

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Walking: The Wash

Posted on February 8, 2017 by ehurst

stormwashI dearly love walking. I’d love running even more, but that’s not an option right now. So at least twice weekly I’ll be taking a walk in places where I know I can’t ride. I may start riding to some places to walk, but that will come later.

Today I wanted to visit that storm conduit that feeds into Crutcho Creek. I came around through my neighborhood to the out of service railroad tracks that run alongside Midwest City High School and the VoTech Center. From there I want straight across Air Depot, and then cut around behind 10 Gym and dropped down into the back streets. Right there at Sandra Drive the wash comes out with high walls on either side. Down that back sidewalk and through Holoway Park, I came to a place where the walls of the wash were sloped to allow yet another storm drain to connect. It was simple to climb the welded iron railing and walk down the steeply sloped concrete apron to the bottom. This one image shows what I saw. That double pass-under was high enough for me to walk through standing erect, with at least a foot to spare.

It was entertaining to read all the graffiti and see what kind of stuff kids drop down in there. The concrete floor was nearly smooth, with a gentle slope to the center that contained just a few millimeters of stagnant water here and there. At the end of that curvy section running between rows of private backyards, I came to a very large pipe. It was a little tough to duck under, but I made it. A quick climb up another concrete apron and I was in Quinlan Park. Here the wash remains wide and dirt bottomed, with heavy rip-rap on the sloped sides, all the way around to the railroad bridge. That’s the same tracks running at an angle across Midwest City, not connected to anything on either end.

But I had climbed out and wandered up over the tracks and back into another neighborhood. I took the swooping path of SE 5th back to Air Depot, crossed over and then back to our apartment complex. It was just enough to be exercise at that pace, but not enough to wear me down. I have to make a computer service house call later today.

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Jehovah Jireh

Posted on February 7, 2017 by ehurst

The preacher is a little angry. Perhaps you’ll see it as a holy fire, not petty spite.

Everything we do is provider-centric. Read that a couple of times and let it sink in. We’ll come back to it.

When your average church or religious organization plans it’s various human activities in pursuit of the gospel message, chances are that the whole thing is deeply infected with human reason. Granted, reason is how we get things organized, but reason has to follow the heart. And how many churches do you know about that teach the heart-led way?

Stop and think about that. In my personal journey, long before I stumbled across the concept of heart-led living, I was already trying to implement it using terminology I had been taught in religious college. Back then, I referred to it as “conviction” and spoke of how it’s something implanted in your soul by God. The image I used was a bedrock of our existence, and how that was the bedrock of commitment to Christ. It comes from God, not from anything we can do. And I taught that God wrote with His finger in that bedrock something unique to us as individuals He Created for His glory. Our first duty was to discern what was written there, in part by pulling away the rubble that God didn’t put there. I suggested that, for most of us, it was several layers deep.

You should have seen how much Hell I caught from religious leaders for that. While the particulars they picked over varied, I could tell there was something fundamental about it that they rejected. At some point, I began to understand that it was a threat to religious leadership itself. These people had a vested interest in maintaining a system that was forced to deny that teaching. It happened in several different Protestant denominations.

When I discovered that the heart was quite literally a sensory organ in itself, something measurable with scientific instruments, a lot of things fell into place. Slowly I realized that the scientific works was misguided, but served to illustrate something that science could never understand, anyway. Never mind the physical realities of the heart; the heart is a symbol with deep traditions in the Ancient Near East, and particularly appears in the Bible. I already knew from biblical scholarship that Hebrew people regarded the heart as the metaphorical seat of the “will” — a term that roughly equates to conviction. At that point, I understand a lot of Hebrew imagery that never made sense before.

For all their talk of the “priesthood of the believer,” the American Protestant religion remains deeply centralized. Sure, you are free believe what drives you, but you can’t hang around with your church family in any meaningful way unless you toe the line of orthodoxy. I’ve had enough of religious leaders enjoying my talents while putting chains on me within “their ministry” so I didn’t weaken their authority.

So if someone tells me that this or that expert on something is “Spirit led,” it really tells me more about the one saying it than it does about the expert. Have you noticed how that works? “So-n-so is a deeply spiritual, man of God” — whose teaching just happens to keep the speaker in power. Whatever happened to the man of God wholly willing to surrender his position at any moment? Whatever happened to the kind of moral leadership that demands you work through all the questions yourself before you try to join up and follow him? And that you keep working through them and keep reaffirming that it’s good to follow for now?

I’m not interested in what some organizational leader tells me is the right way to go about doing the work of God, regardless whom he cites as the expert, nor how many experts he lines up to back his ideas. Since when does anyone have the mandate from God to decide what my calling and ministry should be? Give me your opinion, but don’t stand in the way if God leads me in a different direction. As the DeGarmo and Key song says in reference to religious debates:

Will you still love me after I choose?
Doesn’t the issue stand upon this truth?
Up on a cross he died for sinners!
Up on a cross between two thieves!
Up on a cross he died for you and me!

(DeGarmo and Key, “Up on a Cross,” Streetlight 1986)

Suddenly all those resources that they insist belong to God were denied me and they loved me gone.

The ministry of the gospel is donor-centric: It centers on God. God decides what talents and calling I shall have; He decides how it shall be carried out. The results are measured in terms of His glory, not my personal success as humans measure such things. Don’t tell me my talents are better off under your control, doing something that pumps your prestige. Don’t tell me that I have to meet the people where they are, when what you really mean is you want me to bring them into your shadow.

Nor does it matter what any human on this earth thinks that people out there really need. I can’t give them what I don’t have from God. God is the One who knows what they need, and if He can’t tell me Himself, it’s likely because of all the crap someone else put into my head that gets in the way of His direction.

And what they need is the heart-led life. That’s what this parish is all about. Not because I say so, but because each of you discovers for yourself that it’s true. That’s what I’ve discovered for myself, and that’s what I’m trying to share. I already know that this means there won’t be very many takers, at least not at any one time. I already know this means that I can’t invest much effort and interest in what most of humanity imagines is a good idea for making the world a better place. Sure, I’m a trained and experienced logistics and management guy; I bring order out of chaos. But I keep that in its proper place. It’s quite likely that such skills will get me into some place where I can help a lot of folks with material needs, but the real issue will be those few who see my faith in my work and are moved to ask about it. Those few are the real issue, the real reason God put me in that position.

The Hebrew word for “my provider” is jireh. Our ministry here together is centered on the ultimate Provider of all things; His name is Jehovah Jireh.

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