Answering 08: Forget the Results

Posted on April 12, 2016 by ehurst

A primary emphasis in ancient Hebrew language was to narrate an experience in vivid fashion so that the listener(s) could experience it for themselves on some level. While there is an obvious intent to sway the listener by adding a moral slant to the telling, we know from anecdotes in Scripture that the heart can filter it out and gain a different moral viewpoint. However, that occurs within an atmosphere that takes for granted things our culture insists cannot be — analysis took place in the heart-mind.

We can’t replicate that environment, but we can reclaim that moral discernment. Answering the world’s questions about our faith includes an indictment on how wrong the world is now, and how it is wrong. It indicates a path to moral truth without any attempt to define or dictate the results of taking the path.

Christian Mysticism presumes a direct encounter with God. He has made it fairly clear that no two of us will experience His Presence in the same way. Overlap, yes, but He makes each of us with our own DNA and our own individual character. The net result is that we each have our own circle of people with whom we overlap enough to share, as God intended us to be social creatures. Tension is natural and not a threat.

Indeed, I often make the case that the fundamental focus of all the Law Covenants is social stability. The image is far larger than the words, of course, but I am convinced the tag fits. Notice in the Law of Moses how much is aimed at shaping the way people interact by drawing moral boundaries. It’s such a critical element in understanding God that it dominates the Old Testament; it’s a major element in how we relate to God. He takes as a personal insult our abuse of others.

There’s a lot less about how we relate to the rest of Creation, and yet we can tell from passing mention that it’s just as important. To me, it suggests that dealing with nature is a lot less complicated than dealing with other people. And indeed, we know that humans are fallen, but the rest of the universe is not. The physical realm around us is under the Curse of the Fall only because God designed everything with us as stewards and managers, so nature is waiting for us to claim that divine heritage and do it right. Nature is difficult only because we are.

But if you can get yourself into the firm grip of moral justice among people, it’s awfully hard to violate nature at the same time. It’s so hard that it took a massive conspiracy between Satan and a million human lackeys to create an entire civilization devoted to anything but doing it right. Western thinking kills nature, making it passive lump awaiting our whims and direct mechanical control. When we aren’t worshiping the creature as deity, we are destroying it for what we imagine is our personal comfort. The unique blindness of Western Civilization is getting everything morally backwards, and calling that perversion “morality.”

Those miracles of Jesus? He was reclaiming divine justice denied to the victims by a national leadership that violated the Covenant. Reading between the lines of Noah’s Covenant, we discover that if man will keep a good moral order, nature will follow God’s intended natural order. Get to know the individual trees — they make great friends — but don’t be blind to the forest as a forest. The trees are alive, too, and self-aware as a community; that’s in God’s Word.

We can characterize shalom as the harmonious concert that brings social stability, which in turn results in certain symptoms. We see reasonable material prosperity, safety from both natural threats (disease and disaster) and human threats, and a resonance of even greater social stability. There is a sense in which moral peace is peaceful because people are stewards of nature, but still part of nature. The goal is to harmonize ourselves with God’s moral character as woven into reality itself. The goal is not locking things into a convenient stasis.

A fundamental issue with the conflict between Western thinking and divine justice is the blame game. It is a peculiar sense of Western mythology that you can hold other people accountable on the basis of your sense of loss. Who took/broke my stuff? Who is responsible for replacing it? We become vindictive and spiteful toward others on material grounds without a clue to the moral questions. This approach sees only the lowest level of moral consideration, and asserts a false moral valuation even there. This business of “justice” defined as forcing someone to “pay their debt to society” is peculiar to the West. It is not in the Bible, though Westerners read it back into the Bible narrative.

And it’s a peculiarly Western response to throw up a false dichotomy: “So we should just dismiss restitution?” The question comes with vocal tones and dramatic posturing that is calculated to provoke a highly emotional reaction, dismissive of the suggestion as somehow evil. Binary thinking is burned into Western culture. Biblical moral reasoning compares favorably to the notion of quantum reasoning that is not bound to binary choices and singular threads of calculus. It’s not a bad figure of speech to get folks to move beyond the mental prison. The answer to that spiteful question about restitution is warning people to stop acting as if some kind of loss promotes them to the status of a deity who must be satisfied. Suffering does not gain you virtue and privilege.

The divine moral approach is not to demand what we might imagine that we deserve, but to seek what God had in mind for our response. Don’t assume it has to make sense on a human level of reasoning. Have you ever noticed that in Western political theories, everything hinges on rights concerning material property? Libertarians revere individual ownership as the ultimate deciding factor. Conservatives simply add into that a broader community loyalty. Liberals fluff about some kind of imaginary justice on a broader “human rights” scale, and socialists tend to agree for the sake of managing property. Communists simply hand the bureaucratic state all power and assert that it will turn out for the better. Some of those groups pretend to care about people, but none of them cares about a morality that is rooted above the material plane. Divine justice clings to a higher moral consideration that sees material property as mere tools, as leverage to a greater question of the One who made all things. Creation is fundamentally feudal in essence, but it’s an Ancient Near Eastern feudalism.

And by no means do we imagine that everyone will come up with the same answer from their communion with the same God. Not because those who disagree with us are perverse, but because God is too mysterious for us to grasp. We are truly fortunate that we know what He demands of us individually; the burden of negotiating with others remains a primary mission from God. We should presume that other folks will see it differently because God demands that we devote more attention to that social stability, and not worry so much about the stuff itself. In other words, it’s not the outcome but the process. The “goal” is in the just negotiation process, not the final decision made by humans in concert. “Divine justice” is a term that refers to the commitment, never mind the outcomes.

You might find Westerners paying lip service to those words, but the fundamental frame of reference and resulting actions show they don’t believe them.

The process of divine justice includes varying levels of provisional cooperation, a dynamic and living organism of a shared existence that is never static. Seeking stasis is a perverted desire of the fleshly mind playing god. Social stability is not static in the biblical mind, but a living and active thing that pulls on all our resources and then some. The joy of living in Christ is the power to give and suffer and take and bless and… It has nothing to do with making sense of things according to reason. We don’t need a resolution that is intellectually satisfying; we need no resolution at all. Tension is not evil, despite being uncomfortable. The heart looks for some kind of harmony in the making of music, but the song never ends.

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Defacto ANE Family

Posted on April 11, 2016 by ehurst

The original first churches under the leadership of Jesus’ disciples were defacto Hebrew families.

Consider the historical cultural context. The Hebrew people lived under ANE feudalism. Their immediate government was their family, and any higher political power was obliged to work through whomever was head of the extended family household, up through clan chiefs, etc. Over centuries the tightly knit structure suffered a bit of dislocation, and by the time of the Exile, they realized they needed to replace the natural system based on DNA and intermarriage. So they came up with the synagogue, partly to fill the ritual needs for worship and study of the Law of Moses, but also to give that clan structure back to the people. This was their normal, not something imposed on them; they felt lost without it. There was a sense in which, lacking a genuine kinsman to whom you could give your allegiance, you could shift your allegiance by covenant to someone else as your kinsman-in-effect. They would all adopt each other under a covenant according to ancient rituals and customs going back too far to trace.

In the Nation of Israel, your elders were heads of various levels of this family organization, whereas your priests were always members of the priestly tribe. Priests were distant kin, but not family like your elder. Get the feel for this in your mind.

Christ came and in His teaching showed it was the end of the Covenant. The Priests had long since become secularized (see how the Sadducees tended to act), and Christ taught how that old order was dissolved. However, the basic structure of daily life did not die on the Cross. So you can imagine that the first churches that organized after the Pentecost simply followed the pattern of synagogue realignment into new extended family households, a clan in effect. The priestly function was taken up by pastors; in this case the Apostles were senior “priests” of this new world with their new small-scale political loyalties following that ancient pattern.

These “priests” had a cultural obligation to withdraw from too much of the family politics and allow the elders to run the show. The priests focused on full-time study, prayer and ritual stuff. This new covenant under Christ called for an awful lot of work to ensure they knew how to proceed.

We come to Acts 6 where the Hebraic Jews were the old home folks in Jerusalem already interconnected by a mass of common habits and political structures that Rome didn’t mess with. A lot of Jews born outside Palestine came for the annual Passover celebration and stayed around a month or so (if they could afford it) and many of these were also converted to Christ. Many felt obliged to do their best to join in the local social and political structure of these churches, but they were clearly outsiders without the proper reflexes. The locals already had their habits of mind tuned to this, while the Hellenistic Jews (Diaspora) were completely out of place. So while a few individuals and small households did okay, the business of taking care of the widows was not so simple.

Local Hebraic widows knew how to use the system and get themselves adopted under some elder’s care. The Diaspora widows were isolated and no one picked up the responsibility for them. “She ain’t in my household.” So the Apostles said that their time was already consumed with priestly stuff and these Diaspora folks needed to learn from the old synagogue system and just pull themselves together into households. If there’s one thing they had in common, it was their common alienation from the clannish local culture. So they formed seven households (“synagogues”) and selected elders to represent their interests. Don’t call those seven men “deacons” (attendants) — they were elders. They were the new first-echelon government for these Diaspora Jewish Christians.

I’m not going to suggest we have to ape this in every detail, but this shows the basic moral structure of how God made us to live together in churches.

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Answering 07: Paranoia

Posted on April 11, 2016 by ehurst

Again, we call it Christian Mysticism — with my eyes fixed on the Cross of Christ, I tell you in all seriousness that I find more kindred spirits among other types of mystics than I do among other types of Christians.

Less than a hundred meters from my front door is a tall iron fence. Within the cultural expectations of folks who live around here, you could examine the physical context of this fence and discern not so much it’s purpose as how it restricts your choices. You can probably guess that this fence is not now what it once was, because a pedestrian gate has been completely removed and the gap left open. There is evidence of heavy human traffic across the ground through that gateway. Next to it is a vehicle gate the is locked and somewhat rusted. So you can figure that pedestrian access is open, but vehicle access is not. You aren’t kept out, only your motor vehicle.

The business with fencing falls under the broad term of “physical security.” We imagine that a computer firewall serves as “cyber security” as a figure of speech. In our minds we tend to erect fences between things we can tolerate and things we cannot. A fence is passive security; it doesn’t require your constant attention. It probably does require some attention, in terms of placement and maintenance, because threats are seldom static. But we use a fence to prevent having to invest energy in a highly active defense against threats. At the least, it will slow the attack, and perhaps make the threat itself somewhat vulnerable.

A major element is asking the question: What constitutes a threat? A closely related question is assessing the vulnerability of what you guard.

In a post on my other blog, I referred to the increasing tendency of public schools to treat even parents of the students as a threat to the children as a whole. Actually, it’s not a matter of threat to the children, but a threat to the bureaucratic control over those children. Despite the propaganda, the school officials are not protecting the kids from anything. The kids are just the excuse for creating an adversarial atmosphere. The school officials are genuinely convinced that this conforms to reality. In their minds, parents have gotten increasingly wacko, exhibiting a declining competence at parenting, and seriously in need of their professional guidance.

This is not merely a question of risk analysis. I can point to a body of scientific research behind the business of risk analysis. Insurance companies rely on it heavily to make a profit. They calculate the broad net costs of prevention against loss, and set policy rates based on the estimated risk assessment measured in terms of money. Figured in is the cost of labor as well as physical property. Risk analysis builds on assumptions that it cannot supply of itself. Those assumptions arise from a valuation of what actually matters. Insurance reduces this question to a monetary figure, even as insurance companies train their agents to handle the highly emotional response of people who invested a value in something that cannot be be measured in monetary prices.

Companies that calculate on sentimental values simply charge a whole lot more coverage. They are assessing the fear of loss, which is frankly the real human value of just about everything in this world.

The bureaucratic hive-mind is founded entirely upon fear. A single emotionally painful anecdote outweighs ten million harmless transactions. The valuative price of terror is higher than the actual replacement costs of everything upon which the system relies. That is the nature of bureaucracy. There will be hell to pay from your superiors if you let just one thing slip, so you are actively prodded to build excessive security that makes everyone else your enemy. It serves in part as a self-fulfilling procedure, because the barriers create resentment and hostility that appears to justify their existence.

It’s cancerous. I can recall some years ago passing through law enforcement training that specifically aimed at deescalating tension. Today we see evidence that such training is rare, because police are now trained to demand total, degrading, dehumanizing submission at all costs. They are quick to pull the trigger these days. How do you make sense of shooting someone who is attempting to commit suicide? This represents the deepening paranoia of bureaucratic demand for total submission.

All of this reflects the Curse of the Fall; it is not a part of redemption.

If my fundamental frame of reference is the cultural fearfulness of bureaucratic systems, then God is frightening. Western Civilization draws upon a mythology whose chief deity is a grouchy sonuvabitch who torments people for his amusement. He bears no resemblance to the God of the Bible. Yet Western minds read that grouchy SOB back into the Bible. They tend to operate from the same bureaucratic fearfulness that characterizes the principle who called the police on a parent who walked into the school building to meet and escort his children out. To varying degrees, Western churches buy into this mindset when developing their theology and practice. They build all kinds of exclusionary barriers and refuse to explore what’s outside that fence.

It shows up in the work of Bible translation. Word choices are culturally derived, and a team of translators working with the the collected body of manuscripts that represent what’s left of the original texts of Scripture can make some horrific mistakes because they are working within that frame of reference. Despite what they might say about fresh rendering, they still work from the grounds of historic Western Christian religion that was long ago captured by secular concerns. They read that paranoid exclusivity back into the Law of Moses, for example. Blame it on the success of the Judaizers: Christian translators have bought into the fraudulent legalism of the Pharisaical Judaism that has radically perverted the ancient Hebrew mindset. Hebrew intellectual traditions presumed a heart-led orientation, and Pharisaism flatly denies it is possible, much less desirable. Never confuse any English translation with revelation itself.

What kind of evangelism is it that demands submission, despite the nicey-nicey covering? If you think about it, religious and cultural liberalism is loaded with its own paranoid demands for submission. What are you not permitted to criticize? Christ did not call sinners to a life of paranoid middle-class American culture. How can I reflect my Father’s glory if I deceive the world about His moral character? Self-deception does not excuse being deceived; it only makes you more culpable. The only reason we have so many people who prefer a non-Christian approach is that some part of them senses it’s not the real thing.

No, it’s not black or white. Only Westerners think that way. The God of the Bible portrayed Himself as One who grants divine privileges according to the measure of commitment. When some disciple of Aleister Crowley can cite a moral understanding consistent with the ancient Hebrew religion (some of them do just that), contrasted against mainstream Christians whose morality arises almost entirely from the likes of Beowulf, don’t tell me that such a disciple is my enemy. Paul flatly says in Romans that pagans can rightly discern God’s moral character from nature. We should expect them to mix in some moral confusion, if only because today they are looking for a path that is outside a mainstream Christian religion that is so obviously immoral. Creation itself witnesses to their hearts that bureaucratic paranoid exclusion is not right.

The power of my Savior’s blood and resurrection compels me to walk through any valley of death to seek souls hungry for the message of mercy and grace.

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Answering 06: Freedom

Posted on April 10, 2016 by ehurst

The truth will set you free.

If all you have is mere factual knowledge and analysis, it won’t matter how much or how deep is your knowing, you are still trapped in this world and on the way to Hell. Whatever redemption does, it includes awakening something above the intellect and linking your soul outside this realm of existence. While we do refer to the resurrection of the spirit (AKA “born-again”), our brains and conscious awareness have no direct link to that part of us. Instead, the heart and it’s “brain” is the part that mediates between the Spirit-spirit communion and the intellect. You would have no spirit were it not united in Life to the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God writes His truth into the convictions of your heart.

The intellect can implement morality; it is utterly incapable of discerning what is and is not moral. Compare that statement to they symbolism of the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” in the Eden narrative. Eating from that tree symbolizes the choice to place the intellect on the throne of moral decision — the Hebrew word for “knowledge” in this context includes the concept of judging and deciding. Since the intellect is incapable of the task, the results are what we see in our chaotic world today. Train the brain all you like; it is wholly incapable of rightly matching decision to reality as God created it without the guidance of the heart-mind.

So intellectual talent means nothing against the moral necessity of letting the heart rule. Among those who share this higher faculty, there is no discernible difference in ability or talent. There is only the difference between the moral choice of commitment. That word “faith” is just another word for the trust and obedience that comes with commitment. Moral choice is what distinguishes the power of faith from one person to the next. The potential is effectively equal as far as we can discuss it. We might struggle to discern it, but a complete imbecile can have faith to move life’s mountains.

Further, what you might have done to develop your intellect (and your physical talents) mean very little against the measure of faith. Don’t confuse moral character with talent. If your faith is strong, God has promised to fill in the rest and use you for mighty works for His glory. Faith is more important than talent, insofar as we can discuss relative merits. If you have high moral development, nothing else really matters much. So this is the thing we believe is most important and every other distinction we might gain in this world is valued only in how we can harness it to the heart-mind and moral truth.

And the best part is that moral truth is self-verifying. That is, for it to work at all, you must have your own “proof” internally, your own moral conviction that God Himself constructed in your soul. I can share my own experience in that realm, but you cannot possibly repeat it in detail, only in the broader sense of moral verification. Does it conform with the burning Presence of His Spirit in you? The threshold of moral verification is entirely different from intellectual factual verification. Your heart can tell you if what I say is accurate and applicable, and how much. You’ll hang out here because your heart tells you it’s a good moral environment for your moral development. You become morally independent from humans and as you become morally more dependent on God, the one who created all things. Conforming to what’s valid and real in the moral sphere means seeing it from the moral sensory faculty of the heart. Your intellect is just along for the ride.

Contrast this to the likes of factual verification for the intellect. A good scientist will give you sufficient information about the process so that you could falsify his results. That is, scientific proof is the failure to falsify when you specifically set out to prove the scientist wrong. That’s the standard protocol and good scientists love it. There is a scientific standard, and commonly accepted protocol of inquiry and testing so that no one “cheats” and stands up to beat their chest showing false data. That kind of competition is moderated by the agreed upon standards of testing and so forth. (The competition is not absent; some of the most petty rivalries can be found in the scientific research community. These days, deception is rampant in scientific journals because people are too lazy or too cheap to verify.)

However, the actual use of the results of scientific inquiry demands a moral frame of reference. Just because I know how to vaporize a whole city doesn’t mean I should test this at random. There is a moral decision involved and science cannot produce that. Lots of people pretend that a good scientific mind can discern the answer to moral questions, and that it can even discern what questions to ask, but you’ll find the resulting debate over what constitutes good morality ranges all over the place. Moral consensus on such things is nearly impossible. Yet, such moral consensus is necessary before we allow someone to do such a vaporization of cities. Who gets to decide to use it? On what grounds should they be permitted to choose one target over another?

And did it ever occur to anyone to wonder what moral good comes from knowing how to vaporize cities in the first place? What kind of morality seeks such a weapon?

Maybe you can make the leap to how this leads to human political endeavor. Government, whatever it might be in any given context, is the way we make decisions that affect larger numbers of humans. It’s not so much moral reasoning but a moral instinct (wired into human nature itself) that we can’t just make unilateral decisions for others without some kind of justification. Raw power has been tried and it’s effectiveness has limits. There is always somebody out there big enough or smart enough to trump however much raw power you have.

In these latter days, most government has sought to create a faux voluntary compliance. Messy, but far more efficient in the long run. To work, it requires various means to get folks to surrender their natural inclinations to ask too many questions. Most government today enslaves you with a sort of programming, and it presumes you have no heart-mind. All their efforts at control and manipulation aim at the intellect. To the degree those rulers are aware of something more powerful than intellect, they try to keep you from connecting your intellect to that higher power.

So we find ourselves with a whole range of people trying to build a structure for asserting authority over others so as to play God. It goes back to Cain over Abel and later the Tower of Babel. One of the fundamental questions in moral consideration is how we get along with other humans; it’s part of the wider question of how you interact with reality itself. In reality, there are other humans and we can’t count on them to dance when our fingers twitch. We have to make our way through life with a sort of moral calculus that recognizes there are other people who may want something different from what we want. They are not mere abstractions of our personal will. If someone can rise up with some kind of authority, they can cut out a lot of frivolous dissent and fighting so that we can find some range of compromise between conflicting wishes and needs. The problem is coming up with a model that meets the moral requirements woven into reality. We have to let God be God and limit our exercise of authority to boundaries He says He will enforce one way or another.

However, while He exercises most of that authority out of our direct view, to the degree He tells us anything, He shows His hand of power primarily through people who have that moral awareness that comes from a dominant heart-mind over the intellect. He tends to let the vast majority of people fall under the sway of despotism and slavery for reasons only He knows, but we do understand that the escape from that is to awaken the heart-mind. He has preserved through such people a record of revelation. People over the centuries have learned to revere that revelation, even if they tend to have trouble getting their mind to obey the heart. And a lot of folks are just faking it for all kinds of reasons, but mostly because it looks like a good system to use for asserting their will over others. They abuse the reverence for revelation by cloaking it from people’s full grasp.

I don’t pretend to know whether this or that religious leader is heart-led and morally aware. I don’t have to know. By my own heart leading, I know to presume distrust of myself first, and a similar distrust of everyone else. I can verify factual information well enough to grant a grudging trust to factual authorities. Maybe I can’t replicate the inquiry because it’s too time- and resource-intensive for me to repeat the whole thing. I can afford to trust someone who meets some minimal standards that represent a verification. As previously noted, factual data is not so important beyond it’s usefulness in my calling from God. It has no inherent value on the moral plane of reckoning, which is where I intend to live. But verifying moral authority cannot work that way, because the moral questions are the ultimate questions. Moral consideration requires I verify everything down to the smallest detail, because the effects of failure are eternal. Mere facts don’t have much effect on Eternity. Someone claiming moral authority must be ready and willing to engage me with a trust that I can test their message that way.

When a presumed moral authority hinders that kind of verification, they surrender all moral authority. Moral truth itself presumes the necessity of each actor having their own full freedom to choose voluntarily. Morality is meaningless without free volition on some level. Shortcutting that voluntary choice by pulling the question down to an intellectual level where verification might be far more expensive is immoral in itself. God provides all the resources necessary for each and every one of us to verify moral statements, so there is simply no excuse for shortcutting. A moral leader who tells me I must put my trust in his special talents, talents that he insists I don’t have, is a liar.

The biblical prophets never presented a word from God like that. Independent verification was always available, and we see examples of it where someone went off to check with another means to test that message. There were rules under the Law of Moses for such verification, but someone with a solid heart-mind awareness didn’t need that. Their hearts would witness the truth because it was written in their own convictions. If the prophet lied, the listeners’ hearts would know, regardless whether the intellect could work it out.

I strive to engage you with a demand up-front that you test my words against your own heart.

(Editorial Note: This series has been greatly enhanced by the probing questions of commenter Mr T. Convictions tend to be silent until there is a question to answer; good questions pull forth deep and satisfying answers. Some of tell me that God has blessed me with a good talent for writing those answers. The whole issue in this series is discerning how we should respond to questions about our faith. Religion is an organized implementation that responds to the calling of faith, so if you question my religion — including my blather about it — you strengthen my awareness of what faith demands. We all need to contemplate how we will answer such questions. God bless you, Mr. T!)

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Cycling: Route 66

Posted on April 10, 2016 by ehurst

FarmHefnerDouglas1I’m really quite happy that the threatened heavy El Niño rains have not materialized in flooding rains. Instead, it has worked with other factors to bring an extended period of cooler temperatures that hit Oklahoma with daytime highs between 50° and 80° (10C – 27C).FarmHefnerDouglas2 With a modicum of rain this means a very potent green-up. The fields are verdant and most of the trees are well on the way to full foliage. These two shots were in the vicinity of Hefner Road and Douglas Boulevard.

ArcadiaLakeWaterTreatYesterday’s ride was aimed at simply getting up to the old Route 66 in Arcadia. That’s only a mile or so north of the NE 164th, and crosses Post Road (the nearest point I can ride to) at what would be NE 180th in OKC. So the ride took me north on Midwest Boulevard to Hefner, east to Douglas, north to NE 122nd, east again to Post and straight north from there to the intersection. The skies were overcast, and there was nothing really new until I got past NE 164th, which put me just below the dam on Arcadia Lake. Upper left is Edmond’s water treatment facility there.DeepForkPostRd Where the original course of the Deep Fork River continues below the dam, this portion of the river’s course cuts through more soil and less rock. This is a broad flat fertile valley and the riverbed looks more like a gully. That’s because the really deep sides are pushed out on either side of the valley.

Hwy66PostRdSo the actual old Route 66 is just a short ride north of the river crossing on Post Road. That was 16 miles from home. In this shot we gaze northward across the legendary road to that northern valley ridge. There’s a lovely climb on Post Road just off-camera to the right. It will have to wait for another day. This summer when school is out and Veloyce doesn’t need the car for work, I’ll take off with the bike carrier and park up near this intersection so I can explore the Arcadia backroads and take more pictures. There are some photographic treasures up this way and I can’t simply ride up here, and then ride around and still come back home without tightly restricting the exploration portion of the ride.

NCanMWB1But I do have something to report on the heavy work around the North Canadian bridge at Midwest Boulevard. Here are three updated images I captured on my way home. I noted on a previous photojournal that the work had simply stopped a few weeks ago and was left for quite some time unfinished. Suddenly they were back this week and moving countless tons of dirt to finish the landscaping. The first image shows the shape of the new bank on the northerly bend that cuts through that strangely walled field. Just off-camera to the right is an area I can’t get close to right now, down behind that enigmatic wall, but I can tell you they are constructing some kind of access point for high-pressure natural gas lines that run at an angle across the valley floor.

NCanMWB2This second shot looks southward along the bank toward the bridge. We can see the workmen have added an awful lot of fill dirt behind the rocks to create a stepped bank that matches what we see in the previous shot.NCanMWB3 In this third shot I moved to the south end of the bridge and tried to show how it appears they are going to fill in that huge section behind the rocks after all. Moving that much dirt won’t be quick.

The new mountain bike is still scheduled to arrive Tuesday. I’ll take pictures of the process of un-crating and assembling things. Then you’ll start seeing more off-road shots here.

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Psalm 96

Posted on April 10, 2016 by ehurst

This is a Restoration hymn. It’s very hard to argue against the Septuagint’s comment that this was written on the occasion of the rebuilding of the Temple after the Exile. It reflects too much the rather unique viewpoint of the prophetic tag-team Haggai and Zechariah serving during the Second Temple construction. Zechariah in particular offered a fresh emphasis on the global scope of Israel’s mission, and made more of the coming Day of Judgment than any previous prophet.

The flavoring is somewhat less of the ancient eastern nomad sheikhs and more of the experience they had with Babylonian and Persian rulers. From our perspective, the difference is subtle, but it works best to think of a Mesopotamian ruler in his palace. From what we can tell, there is a far broader exposure to different music styles and instruments than before the Exile.

Thus, this psalm hammers home the call to sing and rejoice. Forget the exaggerated myths of Solomon’s Temple; we have obeyed His command and He is pleased with the results. We have a proper imperial court for His divine Presence among us, so let’s observe the proper protocols and present our tribute and ourselves.

Much of this psalm quotes older psalms with a renewed emphasis. All of it is rather familiar and we need not review line by line the language. Rather, it’s critical to see the familiar imagery in this new context. Thus, along with traditional calls to worship and celebrate His majesty as one might the greatest of earthly rulers, the emphasis is on doing so particularly for the reason that the whole world needs to know. We see no particular marshal call to conquest, but to impress the nations with their devotion to Him.

The whole human race is His domain, so we need to make sure they see our example, along with the miraculous blessings we reap from our devotion. Overwhelm the heathen resistance with the sheer weight of His glory. They claim their gods are in the heavens, a figure of speech for the higher realm of existence commonly understood across the Ancient Near East. However, Jehovah made that heavenly domain, along with all of the earth, so it’s His home, not theirs.

All of Creation will join in with us when we render due honor to God. Nature is alive; this is no mere figure of speech. We need to be about this mission of His glory because all too soon He will come in wrath to judge all the earth.

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Calm Down

Posted on April 9, 2016 by ehurst

This is your elder/pastor writing, the shepherd who loves you because God taught him how to love: You need to calm down.

Okay, some of you need to calm down, or maybe you can try to help folks who aren’t in on this virtual parish. Let’s offer a gift of love that doesn’t really require our religion to understand. Honestly, it’s already been explained, but we live in a culture that values moral outrage as a distraction from moral living. The Spirit of God brings peace, not tumult.

Once more: I’m citing Glennon from his book, National Security and Double Government. Not his words, but the contextual awareness that our society is under the thumb of some broad collective consensus so that we cannot blame any one person for the insanity of our government. It’s intentional — create an atmosphere that dehumanizes and instills a petty fear in just that one sphere of human activity of people in the workplace as bureaucrats in government service. I have served in this atmosphere; I did so after getting a very good education in psychology and other social sciences. Not only was I morally aware of the serious danger, but I could trace the very structure of this thing from several angles. Glennon’s book simply added a refreshing explanation that helped crystallize what I already knew.

Example: Over the past few years, we have seen stories where public education officials have called police on parents who had the gall to approach the school facility as pedestrians. The parent(s) notified us all via news stories and social media of this utterly senseless act. When someone managed to get the school officials to explain, it comes out that it is a security policy: You are required to approach the building in a motor vehicle, even if you live across the street. You may not exit this vehicle while in the proximity of the school facility, but must wait for school employees to direct your child(ren) to your vehicle. You are considered a threat in this environment.

I understand this. That doesn’t make it sensible.

Please, try to understand that these officials belong to that Trumanite bureaucratic culture. They exist in an alien environment detached from the reality almost everyone else experiences. The bureaucrats do not realize just how freaking insane it is, and will flatly argue that you are the one who is nuts. The world of bureaucratic consciousness is an alien place, rather like Hell. I mean that literally in some ways — Hell. This beastly state of mind is precisely what Satan wanted and he loves it. Bureaucrats are the true Church of Satan. Everyone who worships at that shrine — every bureaucrat — does not realize that their lord is Satan. They are convinced it’s all impersonal, that it’s just “common sense.” They cannot imagine why in the world you would object to their policies, but they sure as Hell don’t mind punishing you for it.

Here in the US, we are particularly devoted to this peculiar insane religion. Think of the worst horror stories of government oppression in, say most European countries, and that is our routine. This is why I often say nasty things about child welfare policies in the US. On average, even by state policy definitions, the handling of children while in direct custody of the government is often worse than whatever “abuse” they are trying to resolve. In other words, social workers are some of the most horrific bureaucrats in the world, utterly lacking in anything that resembles a conscience. The process for vetting foster parents guarantees that hard-core child abusers are often the first ones approved for the program. Again, this is by the state’s own definition of what constitutes “abuse.” People with a functioning conscience find the child welfare programs abominable. Good moral people cannot tolerate the system, and only the low-level psychopaths will tolerate the bureaucracy.

You want to change this? Make sure you understand what Glennon says: You would have to slaughter at least 100,000 bureaucrats just to get their attention in one state. Want to reform the federal government? I estimate that it would require the public execution of roughly 2 million bureaucrats. That means every single armed, badge-bearing federal enforcement officer, and the vast majority of those who rely on their armed presence to force us to obey their edicts. If you somehow managed to isolate any particular individual from the herd for a long enough time, they might be saved from this insanity. Do you have the resources to do that to some 2 million all at once? Because it’s worse than any drug addiction you’ve ever seen. From personal experience, I’m telling you with all seriousness it is just that bad.

Now, take a deep breath and think: This is the “normal” for our world. It might be less of an issue in other Western countries, but still bad enough in their own way. And our God says in His Word that He is in charge and we are not to attempt changing this situation until He gives us a calling and authority to carry it out. Are you willing and able to slaughter a few million folks? That’s the only way you can change things in this fallen world. If you believe God has called you to that, don’t say it publicly because you’ll be a target for all kinds of awful. God has not called me to that, I can assure you.

God has called me to help my fellow believers learn to live with this. Part of learning to live with this is that you stop reacting with shock and froth. Yes, it’s crazy, but we can do without that “Ain’t It Awful” game. That distracts from the work of mercy in our lives. Instead, get used the idea that it will get steadily worse. The bureaucratic hive-mind cannot turn around; it can only run farther down the slope into Hell. Bureaucrats are increasingly out of touch with the folks they rule. And while the bureaucratic hive-mind is aware in the sense of making intelligent preparations for resistance, their discernment is limited. They simply do not realize that there is a breaking point. Their calculus excludes the very notion that this could all come to a screeching halt. Their bureaucracy is sacred; they aren’t allowed to imagine it ending. They will all be utterly shocked when the society they rule erupts and starts destroying the system.

The only question left is just how discerning the revolt will be, and thus the accuracy of their targeting and tactics. I predict that the populace at large is no smarter than the bureaucracy, so it will be long, ugly and painful. In fact, most folks will not discern when it starts or when it ends, nor much of what it really meant.

Now, one more complication: Bureaucrats will fight with each other. That is, once a bureaucrat is outside his/her official domain, they tend to become rather ordinary victims of the other bureaucrats in other domains. So the shit-head principal at school who had you arrested for walking up to get your children will complain and threaten to raise hell when the county raises his property taxes to give a pay boost to some other bureaucratic office. Now that is really insane.

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Answering 05: The Moral Sphere

Posted on April 9, 2016 by ehurst

You don’t have to take me seriously, but I am so confident in my message that I’m willing to stand alone against all of humanity at the same time. Insane or not, I assert without a hint of embarrassment that my conscious awareness is directly connected to the moral fabric woven into Creation. I am vividly in tune with reality as God made it.

My intellect struggles to keep up. I struggle to find ways to express this stuff. I does not surprise me in the least that the vast majority of folks who read my blog can’t quite connect with the concept of a moral sphere of reality, because while I am certain I got it, I’m not certain I can tell you. On the other hand, I’m quite certain you’ll discover it on your own terms, maybe even despite my writing, because it flows from the Holy Spirit. Near as I can figure, all I’m doing is helping you bring it farther into your conscious mind so you can bend your own intellect to the task of serving God.

The genuine truth of God could never be merely propositional. God is a Person and truth is rather like His skin. Truth is a part of Him you can’t simply abstract away and study without doing some violence that kills it. You don’t get truth without God; you can’t know truth as an object separate from God.

In other words, truth is not some understanding based on facts. Reason can’t get you to truth. You cannot make truth an objective in itself. You can either know God or be false in yourself. That’s because truth is inherently moral in nature. It’s the fundamental question of what is right and wrong, not what’s factual. Factual is subject to revision at God’s whim, but morality is His own character. So if someone brings to you a body of teaching and they wrap it up in moral garbage, they are lying. Western rational analysis is inherently wrong by assuming that truth can be objectified despite the packaging. Package and content cannot be separated. Truth is personal character.

This is not a question of whether flawed men and women can teach God’s moral truth. There aren’t any other kinds of men and women available on this earth; all are flawed. That’s not the question here. The question is to what degree their presentation is dirtied by their human flaws. We are cautioned in Scripture quite plainly that it’s not a matter of artistry or clarity of content, but the moral flow. Truth could never be packaged in the words themselves; truth is measured by the broader impact of the message. If the net effect sets you free to find your own path, there’s not much harm. If the effect of the message is to bind you to another human’s “expertise,” it’s a lie by definition.

Sometimes people can read the paragraphs above, and while they grasp it intellectually to some degree, they can’t make it work. The hardest truth for people to grasp in our English-speaking world is the nature of truth. If you come to me with a message and I can’t sense the moral presence of my God, I’m not going to buy it. There is no objective measure here. It’s personal and that’s the nature of truth. Nathan verbally body-slammed King David with the accusation regarding Bathsheba. David’s moral failure was a serious problem, but you’ll notice that David was responsive at some level and agreed that Nathan was right. Painful it was, but it was truth. Nathan’s message set David free from his own sin. While I’m hardly in David’s league, if you can establish the same level of moral character in your approach to me, I will be morally captured by the truth itself. You will have brought the Person of my Lord and I can’t reject Him.

It was not in Nathan’s words. It was in the moral power of Nathan’s message using whatever the words might have been. It was in Nathan himself. The words were mere symbols, signposts for David to explore something he had been avoiding.

And all of that is psychobabble to a mind still chained in the dungeon of Western rationalism. The previous post in this series pointed out that you and I cannot make someone understand this stuff. We can only offer it. Had King David been a lesser man morally, he could have rejected Nathan as impertinent and tossed him out. So the issue is not the facts, but the moral impact of what we say and do. A preacher who rips at that moral fabric by elevating himself as some special source of insight is a liar. Sharing a word from God is not a matter of data content, but moral content.

So we realize that the hardest thing to do is help people grasp the notion of this “parallel universe” right here alongside the one we all live in together, an “alternate reality” that is moral in nature. When I look at events around me, I don’t see the same thing as those with no heart-mind awareness. I see fundamental moral questions, not facts to be leveraged for some imaginary improvement of life. The morality of the West is materialistic in nature, and denies the God of the Bible a priori. If His claims do not conform to the moral apprehensions of the Western rational mind, then the claims must be rejected. They don’t match the apparent facts. We reverse that; we say that what’s apparent is a matter of mere shadows. The factual world is fake, a mass deception. What Western minds see as “reality” is for us not so real, only apparent. We don’t trust our own senses, nor our own reasoning about what we sense, because we know that sense and reason can never escape the fallen desires of the human self.

I invested a great deal of time and resources studying the core nature of Western Civilization. I’m not establishing myself as an expert, just trying to save you some time and money. Feel free to replicate my explorations for yourself; go farther if you like. Maybe I can dig up the curriculum for you — it would be pretty expensive these days. I could not have bought all those books without a generous financial aid package (common in those days). My point is that I became quite sensitive to the nature of the West first from within its own frame of reference. But then I spent an awful lot of time and other people’s money studying other civilizations and began to compare. I’ve developed a very strong awareness of Western against other traditions. And I can tell you that when it comes to serving God, the West is the worst. It sucks big time, and I’m doing all I can to escape it. Serving God also puts limits on what I can do in terms of that rejection, but that focus shows up strongly on this blog.

I’ve had enough of the West, thank you. I’d like to get closer to God. So you feel free to examine all you like of Western stuff, but if you ask me to comment on any of it, you should know what to expect. At the point where a speaker or writer sounds too Western, I’m done with them. The whole thing is morally objectionable. Whatever content may be packaged in their presentation makes no difference, because it arises from moral sewage. How many flavors of stink do you want? I’ll try to help you see my objections, but the whole point of this blog is to help you climb out of that. Not because my answer is the only right one, but because I am morally bound to give the answer I have.

But the one thing I hope you see is that I set the moral example of finding your own firm footing. I know where I am supposed to stand; do you know where you are supposed to stand? We can’t begin to answer a questioning world if we don’t at least have a solid anchoring point in our souls.

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Mysticism and Trust Models

Posted on April 9, 2016 by ehurst

In Christian Mysticism, models for trust have no significance.

It’s hard to break a system that doesn’t exist. Our “system” manifests here, but isn’t rooted here. By moving everything of importance into the moral sphere of the heart, human frailties are of no real consequence. You do not have to trust yourself, much less anyone else. Our whole operation places full trust in God, who stands outside all systems. We invest everything in Him and leave the results in His hands. We accept whatever returns to us from Him. There is nothing to lose, so trust is not an issue between us.

Each time I write and post, you are morally obliged to filter that post as if it were a fresh application for your attention. Anyone can spoof my name; a few could spoof my writing. God alone can make you believe it. My investment in time and resources goes straight to God as merely my obedience to Him. You owe me nothing. The discretion to cease paying attention rests within you. My payoff is in the obedience itself, not your response. Your payoff is an affirmation that improves the dominion of your heart over your mind.

And it doesn’t hurt that I regularly warn you to test my words — all the more so when we look at the actual security leaks from similar services. If I don’t own you, I can’t lose you. If you choose to stay linked, you retain full authority to disappear without notice and without fear of retribution in any form.

There would be a stronger emotional link if we met in the flesh. Our online format makes that exceedingly difficult, so that bonding requires a far stronger impetus from God. Yet you remain aware that my involvement is subject to sudden end without notice, for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with my wishes.

All that’s left is the immeasurable changes in each of us, something that represents our trust in God in the first place. It might be emotionally uncomfortable to cut this virtual link between us, but the link itself presumes to teach the strength to get past that.

Whatever requires protection cannot be guarded on our level. We have a hard enough time communicating something that is beyond words in the first place. We are forced to encrypt our discussions in the moral language of parables. Genuine communication requires a moral decryptor built into your soul. People unable to operate on the moral plane could hardly grasp any of it, so we can be wide open about everything. Anyone who can understand can’t possibly threaten us.

Learn this well, because should God ever grant you a fellowship of like souls in meat space, you’ll need the armoring in your soul to prevent the folly that has ruined religion for millions of people in times past.

Keep this “trust model” for religion outside this virtual parish.

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Tracks and Transparency

Posted on April 8, 2016 by ehurst

You have my permission to bail out any time. You can cut and run with a rant or silently. The only thing holding you to this virtual parish is your own heart and mind. If following Christ means you stop reading this blog, you had best move along. And if you someday return, you can pick up where you left off.

And if you stay, you can disagree on anything or everything. You can tell me about it or just run your own filters silently.

Obviously some elements of what I teach here will never change. But if you were crazy enough to read back the 7+ years of posts here, you would see that some things most certainly have changed. I’m not embarrassed by those changes, though I am a little annoyed at myself for allowing certain follies to hold me. Sometime in the future I’ll look back on some of the things that I write now and grimace. That’s a part of having a flesh still bound by the Fall.

Right now I still have this brightly burning flame in my soul about this virtual parish growing. And I still have no precise idea what that will look like, but I still believe in faith that God intends to bring alongside some major players we don’t yet see. The number of folks who post comments regularly will grow, I suppose. The blogroll will get longer, but I can accommodate other writers who would rather post here. And they don’t have to stand in any echo chamber to gain that privilege. I can’t draw precise boundaries because it has more to do with persons than concrete ideas.

I’m still waiting for some kind of demand for services that will require I use the tower as a parish server. Right now, we aren’t even close to that. I’m eager to do it, but not if we don’t need it. As previously noted, I don’t mess with computers for fun any more. I’m getting less and less interested in technology stuff like that. You can’t just forget it all, so I still keep an awareness of the issues, but the childlike enthusiasm and excitement for new “toys” has moved onto to other departments. So until it’s needed for the Lord’s glory, I’ll keep using it as a workstation for my activities in this parish. Do I have to mention that I don’t have any other significant activities online? Even my political reading is always tinged with an eye to what I can tell you about politics in light of our shared faith. Otherwise, I don’t care. No real interest in tinkering with computers is new in my life, to be honest.

Somehow, in the past couple of weeks I have stumbled onto a different path. Not in the sense of changing any core beliefs, but in the sense of what holds my attention in the daily routine of life. It’s not the service that has changed, but the means of service. Maybe I can’t characterize it very well, but I can tell you that something has shifted and everything in my conscious awareness has a different resonance. Does that make sense to you?

There are factors I want you to grasp, but it’s mostly parabolic, so put your heart in charge of your reading.

Some changes like this come because they represent the ripening of fruit. That is: What does it take for God to get you in the place where you can seize upon a better grasp of the mission? I had some unfinished business in computer land. Suddenly, my heart tells me that mission is complete. If you believe I took your donations fraudulently, just tell me and I’ll try to give it back, but I now doubt that I’ll be using this tower as a server any time soon, if ever. Still, I don’t use it for anything except parish business. I’m not sure I have any other business, because every thing I do comes back in postings here. You folks own me in that sense.

Some changes like this come because God is not static. He’s alive and can be persuaded on a certain range of things. While we can imagine them as inconsequential differences in His greater glory, some of those little things can represent a serious shake up for you and I. And right now, I’m convinced that something in our prayers has changed His calculus, as it were, in ways we might not have expected. Okay, it has certainly changed things that I didn’t expect. Divine moral consequences are very hard for a human mind to predict. And there is a measure to which God stands back to see what someone is going to do, and responds with variable implementations in His agenda that we could never comprehend. This is parabolic because there is no way we can comprehend how the mind of God works and what He sees about the future of our world. But whatever it is, stasis is not a part of God’s character in our considerations of Him.

Net result: All that blather about networking technology and various services is stacked neatly and stored away. I’m still ready to do almost anything I can understand, but I now sense this stuff is mostly in place already. I have no regrets about how money and time was spent up to now, but it’s finished. And instead of saving for another laptop, I think I need to get a better camera to go with the new bike (expected for delivery Tuesday). So I’m saving the PayPal donations for something that will allow much better shots of things that the current camera does poorly. For example, I can’t do botanical, animal or telephoto shots. And the crazy part is that I’m not sure why it matters, only that it does. I’m really driven hard to focus on cycling and camera work, along with lots of review-rewrite-reformat of some of my previous writings.

So I’m wiping off some tools and putting them back in the box. I’m pulling out different tools because the work is different. I’m telling you openly so there’s no needless surprises. I’m giving you the chance to decide if you care to stick around or if God has other business for you. Either way, I love you just the same. Meanwhile, leading this virtual parish is more important than ever for me.

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