Just an Idea

This would be a really great time for some entrepreneur to create rival services to Facebook, Twitter, and etc., that favors everything those two try to censor. The entire gamut of legacy globalist media is going to be crushed one way or another, so you might as well make some money from it. We don’t need fly-by-not junk, but something solid and useful. It will grow if you just keep it transparent and honest.

Mike Krieger Rages At The ‘Fake News’ Debacle: “It’s An All Out Media War”

If we can’t have people giving an honest expression of their feelings and philosophies, regardless how repugnant you find them, then someone is going to block you from sharing yours. Give the individual users the tools to do their own personal blocking and leave it at that.

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What Should We Expect?

(Oh, I am full of it today!)

If you embrace the idea of heart-led moral awareness, you realize very quickly that it’s not a question of concrete events, but of moral trends reflected in human behavior at large. You also would bear in mind that “acknowledging God” means embracing His revealed Law for human existence on this planet, and no current human government is doing that. We can see how God herds human politics when they refuse to acknowledge Him. There’s nothing wrong with using an academic understanding of social sciences as the means to organizing what we can discern morally, so long as don’t trust the intellect for any kind of meaningful answers.

When you make the mistake of enthroning human reason, you step into a trap. The human mind is incapable of arriving at moral truth on its own, so the only thing it has is unrecognized internal bias that somehow looks like obvious moral truth. This is why Western Civilization suffers from such spiteful political divisions; everyone is promoting his own personal bias as absolute moral truth and can’t take his opponents seriously.

Thus, all “news” is propaganda. It all arises from a moral viewpoint that is itself subject to debate. However, it’s part of the game of propaganda to never discuss a priori moral assumptions, but to couch the whole presentation in terms that presume you cannot argue with their moral assumptions. This is particularly true of the largest media companies and all of their various outlets. Granted, they tend to admit being “left” or “right” but those are mere window dressing, very shallow labels that mean almost nothing in terms of actual policy. In fact, both the alleged right and left in US government brings forth nearly the same policies, and the only difference is who gets to profit from them.

Thus, you’ll see the propaganda term “alt-right” in current news trends. It’s a term cooked up by the lefty “social justice warriors” (SJWs) as a code-word for the KKK and various fictional horror images of racist white Americans. It doesn’t take much to realize that SJWs are inherently anti-white racists. If there’s anyone acting like Nazis, it’s the Clintonite rioters. Keep in mind that “Nazi” is the abbreviation for National Socialist — it’s a left-wing socialist movement with a nationalist emphasis. Both “right” and “left” can be nationalist, though nationalism is currently out of favor with the mainstream press. Clinton was a global socialist, and the so-called Democratic Party is dominated by that sentiment.

Most of the Republican Party is dominated by National Imperialists. Try to get your head around that. It’s not just “America first” but “America only.” It makes a lot of room for neocons, who identify Zionism as the true American identity.

At any rate, the mainstream press sees the mass of neocon big shots grandstanding about how they are under consideration for Trump’s cabinet. Trump isn’t saying much, so it’s just noise; he has announced few names. But because the mainstream press with SJW sympathies sees the KKK in every non-SJW Caucasian face, they have declared some of his announced picks as “alt-right.” And they cannot imagine Trump as he is, but insist that he is “alt-right” himself. What’s really going on is that Trump is actually rejecting a lot of neocons. He is himself rather Zionist, but that’s not the same as neocon. He’s not an imperialist. He’s mostly nationalist. However, if you are going to understand Trump, the one thing you never forget is that he is a business tycoon and will never be anything else. He’s not an ideological kind of guy, but an opportunist. He’s also the ultimate Alpha Male and will do what he damned well pleases. Finally, you can bet he’ll keep his promises if at all possible.

But that doesn’t mean we are heading for good times. The real issue here is not who’s running the country, but that Trump has dropped into a context that made lots of room for him to stand up and take the lead. The context is a nationalist resurgence that will crush the globalists. Further, this nationalism is leading the way in using the virtual world far more adroitly than the globalists.

The virtual world is inherently Open Source. A critical element of that is being personally open, as well. Secrecy is not the same as privacy; the Net can accommodate privacy, but is hostile to secrecy. Globalism requires cynical secrecy the same as neoconservatism. Both pretend to be demigods herding the rest of mankind for their own good. The Internet Community cannot avoid being hostile to both; it’s fundamental to the nature of networking.

Right now, a lot of humans are waking up to the fact that you cannot win arguments about racism. So instead of disputing such nonsense as “all whites are racist” (and the implication that minorities cannot be racist), they are ignoring the whole debate. Have you noticed how no one opposing the SJWs is defending themselves against accusations of racism? The word “racism” doesn’t really mean anything except what the SJWs want it to mean, something subtle and indefinable but always sinister. The word itself is pure propaganda.

When you dump the false moral mythology, you are able to see what’s going to happen. What I refer to as the right-wing backlash or resurgence actually represents a middle-class cultural movement that recognizes the Internet and has changed to accommodate the inherent Open Source necessities. It’s no longer quite the prissy bourgeois pretense of early American middle-class culture. It’s still quite materialistic, so it’s not a complete change. It will demand a cultural conformity that promotes economic prosperity, and the SJW agenda is waste, fraud and abuse of economic resources in the blind pursuit of globalist La-La Land.

You can expect the old Global Warming crap to face a bloody death. You can expect political correctness to be crushed. You can expect rioters to face violent crack-downs, and not a few private individuals shooting at them. But because of the vast ocean of money behind the riots, they will continue and get more violent themselves. This time I suspect the “color revolution” will fail and the financiers to be arrested or put to flight. Globalism may not die, but it will be suffer a major setback. You can expect a renewal of the social reverence for police and troops. However, the kind of pressure that gave birth to the pro-gun patriot underground will fade away. Leftist police leadership will be purged, though it will not happen overnight. The leftie urban leadership will fight hard and we are likely to see something resembling a constitutional crisis in fighting them. That fight will likely be one of the bloodiest of all, but if the lefties don’t find a compromise, I suspect they will lose catastrophically.

Had Clinton won, you and I here at Kiln of the Soul would have faced outright persecution. I’m sure they would have shut down this blog eventually under some kind of speech codes, and hounded us in meat space as well. Now our only threat will be Zionist demagogues. And until Israel herself attempts some kind of Internet takeover, Zionist pressure will remain little more than verbal sparring. Given how the Mossad has infiltrated so much of the technology industry, I have no doubt Israel will try, so it’s only a question of when, not if. Mossad front companies, in cooperation with the CIA, have bought out a surprising long list of major technology providers, such as firewall and antivirus companies, and have built their own technology hardware manufacturers. Israel will not be happy with how the current warfare in places like Syria will turn out. Israel was a sponsor of ISIS and other terrorist organizations. However, even while Obama is still in office, much of our clandestine support for the Syrian rebels has simply stopped. Trump’s peace overtures with Russia means Assad will eventually prevail, though Syria will never be the same.

At any rate, there will be global upheaval in that the current system of backdoor government control will be shattered. A whole generation of banking oligarchs will pass into death or forced retirement. There’s no place for globalist and imperialist cults in the Network Age.

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A Better Mythology

The word “mythology” is associated with “mythos”:

mythos: 1. Myths collectively; the body of stories associated with a culture, institution or person (see: mythology)

2. A traditional story accepted as history; serves to explain the world view of a people (see: myth)

3. An orientation that characterizes the thinking of a group or nation (see: political orientation, ideology, political theory)

This definition comes compliments of WordWeb (available as a separate application for Windows and is part of the Artha application). In academic terms, we need not limit ourselves to the popular denigration of “mythology” as something inherently false. Of course it’s not fact, but mythology addresses itself to things far above mere fact.

In this sense, it becomes easier to recognize the root mythology of Western Civilization as mostly Germanic. That is, while the Greco-Roman Civilization gave birth to the West, we are not Greco-Roman, but derived from the Germanic nations that conquered the last vestiges of Rome. After the Middle Ages, European (Germanic) scholars began rediscovering the intellectual traditions of Greece and Rome and fed this back into their own intellectual traditions so that whatever it means to be “Western” reached its peak with the Enlightenment period of Western history. Even terms like “Post-modern” refers to a mythos that still stands squarely on the Enlightenment. So if you give time to reading about such things, you become aware of Western Civilization possessing its own mythos separate from the mythos of other cultures.

The primary failing of Western Christianity is a failure to recognize itself as trapped inside of Western Civilization. Further, for all the Bible teaching that warns this is not the same as the Hebrew mythos, the average Western Christian you encounter will still be thoroughly Western first and foremost. Further, they are likely to hold an unspoken assumption that Western is Christian by definition. The acorn of Reformation didn’t fall very far from the Catholic tree. Worst of all, virtually every Western Christian regardless of sectarian background will most certain operate from Western intellectual assumptions that push their doctrine and theology into the realm of “religion” as something that is nothing more than a single thread woven into the tapestry of Western culture, and competing for attention and political dominance.

For all their religious rhetoric, Western Christians demonstrate no effective genuine commitment to things of the Spirit. They have secularized the concept of “spiritual” down to just a more accurate form of intellect. But it requires stepping outside Western mythos to recognize this. As long as you remain within the Western intellectual traditions, you cannot possibly escape the confinement of awareness.

We need desperately to come up with a much better mythos, a better mythology than Western mythology if we are going to restore any part of God’s revelation. You cannot follow Christ and remain Western, because Western is inherently inimical to His teaching. The West didn’t arise from His teaching, but was a nasty perversion of His teaching. Since mythology is just a working model for the mind to organize and implement a faith response within reality, let me suggest something.

Basic assumption: Our current world is not ultimate reality. Indeed, our world is just a confining bubble within the wider Creation. The bubble itself is our fallen awareness. It limits our ability to really understand Creation. Thus, we assert a terminology that says “world” is not just our planet, but a particular level of existence, a fallen plane of existence. It’s a different category from the term “universe,” which implies the full limits of physical existence itself. But Creation is far bigger than either of them, for it includes the Spirit Realm that God created around Himself, housing angels, for example. Again, while we are a part of Creation, we are the only part of Creation that is fallen.

So let’s pick out anthropology and generate an example of a mythology that might bring us closer to God’s revelation. In doing so, we’ll have to counter the prevailing mythos.

At the lowest level of human existence are the mere appetites, a brutish emotion-driven life. Don’t call it “animal” because animals aren’t fallen. It’s merely what unenlightened humans imagine they see in the natural world of animals. Such a life consumes the mind with the tasks of survival out of fear that there is nothing beyond such an existence. There’s a good bit of that in Western mythology.

On a higher level is a mind that also uses formal reasoning processes. While we have a Western cultural myth that envisions rising to a life of pure reason and logic, it is neither possible nor desirable. It is the sum total of what mankind can discern with the full use of all human talent and capability. It denies the fall, so it’s not likely to bring much success, but it also insists that humans can eventually reach some kind of Nirvana by making the most of reason and analysis as the basis for exploring the limits of what man can do with physical reality. It asserts that physical reality is all there is. In Western mythology, “real” means concrete reality; it asserts that humans must use their senses and abstract formal reasoning to understand what’s “real.”

The biblical mythos posits that there is a higher realm available to human awareness, and abstract reason can’t take you there. I call it the “moral realm” without capitalizing because it represents the overlap between the Fallen Realm and the Spirit Realm. The moral realm is not simply a better intellectual clarity and reason, but a humble recognition that reason alone is not enough. This higher awareness is moral in nature, because the biblical mythos denies that morality is nothing more than a cultural construct; it says that morality is fundamental to existence itself. Ultimate truth in this universe is moral truth woven into Creation before we came along. Indeed, moral awareness rests on the assumption that the whole of Creation is alive, sentient and has a will of its own, and that it all reflects the character and moral nature of the Creator.

Thus, in proper mythology, Eden is not Heaven; Eden in the world free of fallen nature. Eden is still there all around us, but we are morally blinded by our hubris — a hubris that rests on denying the Fall. In that sense Eden never was in this world, because this world is defined by fallen human awareness. You have to remove human intellect from the throne and make it serve some higher faculty. That higher moral awareness is what we here at Kiln of the Soul call heart-mind or heart-led living. And this heart-led living prepares us for the final migration of the soul to the Spirit Realm.

There is nothing we can say about the Spirit Realm. While we can use parables to discuss the moral realm of human awareness within the fallen world, even parables fall short of genuine spiritual matters. The best we can do is inculcate a familiarity for the intellect of moral things in parables to indicate something about the nature of genuine spirituality. The whole point is to generate a desire to go there as soon as God lets us come home, and we gain that desire because we start down the path of communion with Creation on a moral level. That’s a taste of communion with the Creator.

You tell me: Do you suppose this alternative mythos makes it easier to share a redemptive life together in the Spirit?

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Photography: Hidden Features

satelliteview-aAs always, click on any image to see it full-sized. CTRL-click will open the image in a separate browser tab.

I drew on today’s satellite image. The ellipse at the top is an area I wanted to see on the ground and it turned out nothing more than just a few shallow, broad washouts running down all sides from a peak.01cattails The only real oddity here was the unexpected patch of dessicated cattails growing in a bowl near the peak of this ridge. They didn’t have a chance to gain full height, but some of them do have small puff tails. It was just one of those unexpected delights, and I’m pretty sure not many people know they are there. It shows up on the satellite image as a sort of football shape near the middle left edge of the ellipse.

02canyonHaving gotten into that spot from the roadbed along the northern edge, I came back out and rode south on the road to the cut for the high tension lines. This was terribly thick grass mixed with oak shrubs and spindly long blackberry vines. Yeah, I got scratched up. I had to drag my bike through this about 100 meters to find a place to hide it. Then it was a long trek eastward and downhill. I drew a dot with a lavender outline to show where I stood to take this picture. The dashed line east of my position was the bottom of a canyon. The perspective is a little off; just to my left in the foreground is a two or three meter drop. I thought I might be able to clamber down on this side, but I had doubts about climbing the far side. I’ll probably come back to this by starting back up in the area where I drew the ellipse and try to come southeast a bit through the overgrown trail visible on the image. That will bring me out on the high side across from where I stood today.

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Oklahoma Heart Hospital Is Grossly Incompetent

Let me make this clear: You may well receive very good medical care from Oklahoma Heart Hospital. However, their accounting and billing operation is so pitifully incompetent it borders on criminal negligence in my opinion.

Let me explain. We all know that American medical care has become outrageously expensive, and Obamacare has made it worse. In light of this, one of the few real benefits for Veterans is the free health care that exempts us from Obamacare. It works really nicely for us disabled veterans. Not long ago Congress added something to the pie, called the Veterans Choice Act. In essence, if you aren’t close to a VA clinic/hospital or your facility can’t perform certain services, or can’t do them in a medically timely manner, the VA can refer you out to a contract insurance agency and you get that missing care from a civilian supplier. The VA pays for it through the contracted insurer.

The day of my appointment for an echo cardiogram, I showed them the card I had received from the Veterans Choice offices. They didn’t perform due diligence; they didn’t check to see what was involved. They simply billed the wrong agency. They naturally got a rejection and sent me the bill for about $300. That sounds about right, but they billed the wrong person. So I called the good folks at Veterans Choice and was patched through to TriWest; these are the folks contracted for handling claims. I was put on hold while the lady called Oklahoma Heart Hospital and she told them the right information. You would reasonably think that was the end of the matter.

No. Oklahoma Heart Hospital persists in ignoring this information and has sent me another bill. This time it was $1495.90. Do you suppose that sounds like bill-padding? Yeah; it’s also called criminal fraud. Once again, I went through the drill of calling and being passed around until someone called OK Heart again and gave them the correct information. I won’t bet on them doing the right thing.

Here we see how a major health care facility treats disabled veterans, most of whom are financially vulnerable. At this point, I have zero confidence in Oklahoma Heart Hospital. Further, jacking up the bill that way indicates some kind of criminal intent. So all I can say at this point is that if you find yourself hooked up with Oklahoma Heart Hospital, watch out. You’ll find your credit ruined and yourself out on the street homeless before these bloodthirsty vampires are through you.

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Globalist Google

While there’s nothing new, I wanted to refer you to an article that nicely sums up what I already knew about Google: Julian Assange — “Google is Not What it Seems” — They “Do Things the CIA Cannot”.

Everything Google touches is used to promote the globalist agenda. All the data they collect, including what’s leaked back to them through their Android OS, Chromebooks, their browser and the various services they sponsor, is used to promote that agenda. They eagerly share with various agencies of the US government (and others) what they learn about people through their services. I say that, not to provoke fear and loathing of Google and their stuff, but to ensure you are making an informed choice. Use Google; don’t trust Google.

It also bears watching whether any kind of backlash will bite into their profits. Google is huge, but vulnerable because of their politics.

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Photography: Another Draper Trail

Source: Google Earth

Source: Google Earth

As always, click on any image to see it full-sized. CTRL-click will open the image in a separate browser tab.

01trailI’ve got nothing better to do right now but poke around Draper Lake’s hidden treasures. Today I wanted to examine the trail at the far NE corner of the lake area up near Post Road and Interstate 240. I came in off Post Road (eastern edge of the satellite view). It’s a climb up from the road, but the trail is pretty clear — except where Parks and Recreation cut down some trees to fall across the trail.02washout It makes sense because this is one of the most remote areas and people were still riding motorbikes out there long after it was closed for that purpose. So I parked my bike up in the trees and climbed over the barrier and started walking. 03creekbottomThis was a very clear trail as that picture above left shows. There was a major washout at one point (above right), and I had to walk atop one of the ridges to get past it.

The satellite image shows a white spot about halfway along; that’s where someone dumped a huge pile of roofing shingles sometime in the past. That’s another good reason for the felled trees across the head of the path. It was just one long slope down toward a flat creek bottom (above left). 04lakeoverviewAt that point there was no easy path to go any farther. So I trudged back up the hill to my bike and came around on the new road, but followed the old road bed to a high spot I wanted to check out. That’s where I shot this wide image across the a narrow arm of the lake. Near there the construction crew had finished paving one of the numerous end points that runs out on a spit of land. Here the trail was obviously heavily used; it was the first time I saw the shoe prints of other humans.05shoretrail At the shore I saw the trace of the old lake shore trail, mostly exposed bedrock here. It’s not passable on every part of the lake.

The crews are still ripping some of the old asphalt but at least this time my way was clear all the way around to the bike trail up on the NW corner. My bike’s disc brakes were squeaking and dragging, so I stopped at Dick’s Sporting Goods where I got the bike and the technician was there. He tuned it up for me and adjusted the brakes, pointing out which fitting to turn to center them over the disc. All covered by the warranty, of course. It worked a lot better the last two miles home.

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Photography: Super Moon

01supermoonThis was just a practice run. The camera did well enough considering the awful conditions shooting from an urban setting with street lights and such. I’d have to drive quite a ways to get out of that.

02supermoonIt actually peaks in the morning, so I may try again tomorrow evening and take a walk to a slightly better area. What I cannot do is explain how it feels like the moon reaches out to grab you when it’s like this. You can sense it pulling on you.

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Psalm 119: Cheth 57-64

This octet of verses is the Song of Loyalty. The psalmist is fully committed, wholly owned by his Sovereign, a loyal servant who shares in the inheritance as a son. That’s the meaning of the first line, and he as offered the ritual of covenant binding, giving his word to live by the Law of his Lord. He held back nothing in secret, but cast his whole being on the favor of Jehovah. He knows there is no master among men who would be so merciful because the Lord for His part gave His word on it.

Upon this commitment, he gave long consideration to his own ways and determined to bend his path to following the ancient markers of God’s eternal road of truth. There was no hesitation at all.

The wicked pay no attention to revelation as they devise a system that favors their comfort, and they have tried to hold the psalmist accountable to their man-made laws. But he simply cannot absorb their false ways as the truth of God echoes down from Heaven into his heart.

It was considered normal in ancient times for adults to awaken at least once in the night and stay up for a while, often doing things that are difficult to do in daytime. It’s a quiet time of private matters, and our psalmist finds his first impulse is to give thanks to God. This is not something you can fake. He finds his mind drawn back to all the amazing things God has revealed in His judgments of what is morally good and bad.

His loyalty is overwhelming, so wherever he encounters someone who lives by a heart-led commitment to Jehovah, the psalmist is that person’s friend and ally without question. When he witnesses someone acting consistent with God’s Laws, he wants to share in their burden of work. Everywhere he turns, there is a vision or song marking God’s mercy; the earth itself trembles and hums to the divine glory. He asks that God use those echoes of mercy to goad him into a life that God outlined long ago.

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Of Goats and Chamber Pots

Don’t follow the folly of this world.

Matthew 26:52 is often misquoted. It’s a peculiar Western concept that one could “live by the sword.” It almost sounds poetic — live by the sword; die by the sword. But this places a false emphasis and takes the thoughts in the wrong direction. The Greek translation of His words is more nuanced: If you take the sword, it will take you. Choose your tools carefully, because they will restrict your choices later. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s all you have; there are lots of tools, so don’t let any one thing become a false god. Notice that He didn’t tell Peter to throw that big knife away (for that’s all it was) or surrender it, but to save it for a better time. Jesus was not coming to assert political authority, which is what swords are for, but to assert a moral authority that outlives this world. Let the dead bury their own dead, for we celebrate eternal life as spiritual beings who outlive these bodies.

But we do understand that there is place for goats to lead the sheep of His pasture. That’s another parable from the previous chapter of Matthew (25:31-46). Goats are placed in a herd of sheep because they are more likely to notice predators and take defensive action. Sheep are “stupid” in the sense of being too focused on other things, but the sheep are far more valuable. Goats have their place; they represent those who take up the sword in this life. The Covenant of Noah most certainly gives place to the sword, and the goats are the primary audience for Noah’s Law. God calls His sheep to submit to the leadership of goats in this world to make those awful decisions that His people should not have to make.

This is the hardest things for Western Christians to grasp. A part of the reason God doesn’t call every soul to redemption is because redemption makes us unfit to rule in a fallen world. It makes us very fit for a lot of other very critical tasks in the wider process of redemption, a process that includes the whole of Creation as we encounter it, but the secular task of ruling is for the unredeemed. That’s a general observation of how God does things, not a hard and fast rule. It reflects the nature of God’s moral character, and thus, our expectations of how things will go in this world.

We pray to Him regarding our rulers and seek their best interests according to His wisdom in our hearts. We know that George Soros represents a very pernicious intent to overturn everything God has done up to now in this world. His agenda is well established and easily discerned as poking God in the eye. In the long run, Soros and his allies will fail. We could oppose him, but we have to choose the tools of that opposition carefully. Whatever we use will take part in laying the path available to us in our redemptive mission. We have to spread the Word against his lies. The Sword of the Spirit is not the same as the swords wielded by the goats of this world. Keep your swords and guns, because they have their place, but not every problem requires slicing and shooting. Opposing Soros is more subtle than that.

But we should understand up front that when the goats respond to the predatory approach of Soros and his allies, it will be messy. Our Sword of the Spirit cuts precisely enough to separate between matters of the hands and matters of the heart (Hebrews 4:12). The sword of the flesh is less discerning and cuts what stands in the way, whether the impediment blocks by intent or by mere happenstance. In order for our secular rulers to defend against Soros and his hired revolutionaries, a lot of innocent blood will be shed. There’s no avoiding it. When you have to use troops and policemen to shut down rioting, eventually it leads to bloodshed. That this is part of what Soros hopes to provoke has no bearing on the results. He’s paying fools to do his dirty work and they are cannon fodder. He’s hoping for a propaganda coup, a mass of sentiment against those he forces to use violence when he paid for violence in the first place.

When we consider decrying violence, we have to consider carefully what our message will say in the ears of the world. We have to stand with Jesus, who never was anything like the propaganda Jesus of the American Left. But He is also no part of the American Right, either. So-called “conservative Christians” are not really following Christ. The Right imagines that we can and should make liberal use of enforcement, but with a properly certified professional standard, of course. It won’t happen like that because it cannot. The only professionalism involving swords is mere expertise in slicing. Tying troops up with rules about when to shoot or don’t shoot ends up making very little difference during riots. This I know because I took very specific training in shoot/don’t shoot. It does not improve moral subtlety. It’s just about as sensible as a blanket condemnation of all violence versus Noah’s Law, which specifically requires violence against crime.

Say it bluntly, to yourself if no one else: Human life is not precious. Of course, that’s soundbite against the false soundbite of our perverted society. By the same token, human life is not trash, either. That is, human life is in itself a neutral element. Human life is the canvas upon which we hope to paint a living personal image of God. Our time in this world is a means to an end. It’s value in God’s eyes is the degree to which it reflects His glory. There are whole vast herds of goats to whom He will eventually say, “You don’t know Me and I don’t know you.” It’s not that we gladly discard their lives under some presumption that we can know their value to Him, but we should never forget that He is the sovereign who decides. He flatly says that some are born for the most obscene purposes in a much larger plan we’ll never understand (2 Timothy 2:20-21). Some humans are nothing more than chamber pots in God’s plans, a highly disposable commodity. Others are precious gold to Him.

He does give us some broad hints about how He finds some humans more precious than others, but we can rest assured that anyone burdened with Western Christian values isn’t going to understand, whether they be liberal or conservative in their religious expression. We can be sure that outward religious expression itself has nothing to do with God’s evaluation. Ritual is not truth; it’s just an expression of truth, or it could be lies. Just getting a mere inkling of what God thinks requires ditching human reason and sentiment in favor of heart-led conviction. And even then, all we can really hope to guess is the value of someone in our own calling and mission. This is what we stand up for when we prophetically address the world.

We don’t address it with the sword of the flesh. We might use one now and then, and we know well it’s probably all some of those goats will see and understand. But we don’t confine ourselves to their level of understanding. We might be aware of their limited perspective, but we don’t expect to meet their standards of reason. That in itself is a critical element in challenging their dullness. Our opposition to the likes of Soros should leave a few folks befuddled so the Lord can work in those moments of wonder and doubt. We can be sure that Jesus’ open rebuke of Peter, followed by a miraculous healing of the victim, left a lot of questions in the minds of goats who might become sheep, or chamber pots that might be re-molded into some grander purpose: “break me, melt me; mold me, fill me.”

God is moving in our world now, adjusting reality in ways we cannot comprehend. Some elements of reality will never change because they are fundamental manifestations of His divine character. But there is a lot of contextual change and we are blessed to see it clearly and share in the task. Prepare your mind to see a shocking explosion of violent crack-down as globalism takes a major hit. If not here in the US, then surely in other places of the world. Don’t get lost in the mechanics of these events. Don’t get trapped in the goats’ viewpoint. These are things we cannot influence. What we can do is pull back the moral blindness that keeps folks from understanding just how natural it is. Let His glory shine through your efforts to respond morally.

We are His sheep.

Addenda: According to some observers, this business of rioting could well turn into violent revolt rather like the various “color revolutions” sponsored in other countries.

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