Not Green

Posted on April 8, 2016 by ehurst

My favorite color is orange.

While I’m like most humans with an aesthetic preference for blue (it has to do with the mechanics of vision in our eyes), I would rather wear orange. That’s because when I’m on my bike, orange makes it easier for drivers to see me. If not, it makes it easier to find the body later on.

And I have come to the point where my bicycle is more important to me than any/all of my computers. Think of it as a wheelchair in effect, in that all the hiking and running I used to do is no longer possible, but biking remains possible. The real issue is getting outside and doing something solitary and physically demanding so that my heart can push through the clutter and get my brain’s attention. It’s a blessing, a means to draw closer to God and hear His voice. His Word promises that He generally encourages that sort of thing and after all these years of riding my bicycle in motor traffic, the Lord still protects me. I suppose angels are riding alongside on ethereal bikes.

A part of me is aware that my bicycle is far less harmful to my fellow humans, in terms of pollution, than my car and all my computers. I’ve already stated bluntly that I like computers as the one means to finding fellowship with my fellow believers. My particular religion is esoteric enough to mean the fellow believers are few and far between. The Internet is the only way we can find each other for the most part, since the same thing that gave us computers is what has made us so rare on this planet. Nothing personal, my sweet parish family, but if there were people in geographical proximity who shared my religion, I wouldn’t have gotten involved with the Internet very much. But you came first, so even if a church grows up now in my area, I’d still keep the channel open.

But let’s be honest: Computers and the Internet are pretty hard on Creation. The economic realities of connecting globally means cranking out some truly nasty toxins into our world. Much less so than a bicycle, but bikes aren’t pure as the driven snow, either.

Unlike the Greens, we do not worship “nature” itself. We do not fall down to the creature (Creation), but to the Creator. We know that He gave us the means to do stuff in this world that allows us to share our devotion to Him. He knows that it means we have to use some of the resources in nature in ways that are distinctly unnatural. He made the world capable of absorbing and self-cleaning a certain amount of that. But does anyone really need to explain that humans have long pushed beyond the limits of what nature can absorb long-term?

When I post pictures on the other blog of the North Canadian River or other water features, I would like to remind you that the beauty of that water, so pleasing to the eyes, always comes with an offense to the nose — the water is polluted somewhat. Always. You can’t drink it safely. In it’s natural state prior to the settler invasion, the natives didn’t have that much trouble drinking it. Yes, some water sources are naturally toxic, but these days most of the water in the world requires some clean-up on a scale unimaginable before massive human exploitation of natural resources.

I imagine we could rediscover some kind of balance, some kind of homeostasis with nature, even with our current world population. But going that route would probably reduce the population somewhat as a natural result. I’m not eager to see a die-off like that, but a part of me knows it’s for the sake of something better. We aren’t likely to see it.

Even less likely are we to see the Green Dream. Theirs is more than a political agenda; it’s a heathen religion. Their religion calls for the extermination of the vast majority of the human race. Only a tiny handful of their religious elite are worthy of living in a pristine natural world, as they view it. Hand them the power and you can be sure wars would ratchet up to a new global density of slaughter that we can’t fathom. They have a jihadi’s zeal for their gods.

For us, the Law Covenants explain what God intended for us. Not so much in the sense of Eden, but in the sense of making the most of what’s left after the Fall. The Laws tend to sound superficially Green to some degree; the Laws reflect a respect for Creation as a living being. While I feel no sense of personal guilt about having computers, I do share in the broad common human guilt of abusing God’s creation — I’m still fallen. But when I’m out riding my bike and hearing the trees and grass alongside the road calling out to me with celebration of God’s living character, I’m far more alive than I am sitting here typing on this keyboard. I have to take that ride so I’ll have something to type when I get back here.

And it’s not so much that I really have to be alone on those rides, but I can’t really share that experience with anyone around here who might be otherwise interested in riding with me. If some of you were cyclists in my area, we could have church on the wheels, worshiping and singing as we pedaled along. No church experience I’ve had would come close to that. I can dream, can’t I?

But I would recommend we all wear orange in such worship, not green.

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Answering 04: Radicals

Posted on April 8, 2016 by ehurst

We are more radical than radicals.

The world “radical” implies a plan to cut things back to the very roots and try to grow a better crop the next time. What we do here in our parish is more like plowing up the old roots and planting something entirely different. There is a very real sense in which we seek to pass back into the Garden of Eden, to embrace that Flaming Sword and leave this whole world behind, because Eden was never on this earth.

In my book, Heart of Faith, I laid out in chapter 2 the science that admits to some manifestation of the ancient truth of Scripture about learning to operate from a heart of conviction (rough draft posted here). Yes, I have some of the source documents for that science on my FTP server, and I can email copies of that stuff at your request. The sad part is that most of the people involved in that research are still stuck in the West, and have no real idea how to use that information. If you take what they say as they say it, you won’t get very far. I’m hoping that you don’t need that much proof to enter the world of heart-led living. I’m hoping you are already primed and waiting to hear it so you can seize upon it and use it.

Most of the people you encounter in any given context will be like the scientists who know the facts but not the truth. You can sit down with a reporter and give them all these facts, and maybe you have enough data to help them see how it relates to the biblical approach to thinking from the heart, but you cannot begin to explain conviction to them. They know the word, but unless they have experienced the hand of God awakening their spirits, they won’t know conviction itself. That is, unless they know it already.

Our world is populated with two broad types of humans. A few will have that sense of awareness, either potentially or fully engaged. Indeed, most of them will be in the potential stage. But the other type we call “not today.” They might have it later, but God alone knows because God alone holds the key to awakening dead spirits to life. But in our daily awareness as heart-led people, we have our sensory heart attuned to discerning whether they are like us not. We have the Law Covenants to help us grasp a broad sense how to deal with those folks who are not like us. Our hearts will know how to make use of the guidance in the Laws beacuse the Laws are parabolic in nature. But a few will have those Laws written in their hearts as conviction, and we can deal with them on a heart-to-heart basis.

And everyone who doesn’t have that will think we are being elitist. You can try to explain it, but that’s how they’ll receive it. They’ll think we are cultic, that we are trying to hide the truth of all the crazy things we do behind closed doors. We can make a good faith effort to remain totally open and exposed to investigation and inspection, but a dead spirit can’t discern spiritual truth.

If we could spend a while together in class, I could show you how it wasn’t always like this. There was a time and place where the prevailing culture made room for heart-led living. That might not have raised the count of those who had a full connection between heart and mind, but there was a presumption that it was the norm for human life. Much of the Bible presumes this awareness and has harsh words for those who don’t even try. The Bible stands as such in a much wider Ancient Near Eastern culture that shared such a presumption. This is the same bunch of folks who built ziggurats and pyramids and things we don’t even know about. Indeed, we still grasp how they arrived at the placement of these structures, and are only vaguely aware academically that they used some kind of calculus long lost to us. Heart-led awareness hardly hinders math and science; they aren’t incompatible. The failure of the West is much more fundamental. The West wants all the benefits and none of the moral responsibilities, and I can tell you that some portion of the ancient achievements were built on a sense of moral awareness. The West rejects such a thing a priori.

I won’t suggest that heart-led living solves all the problems. Some of the ANE cultures that were ostensibly heart-led could also be morally depraved. So awakening the heart-mind link isn’t sufficient to find Christ, but necessary to serve Him fully. Where the ancients got lost was what Christ came to resolve, and it’s a side of His mission on earth that no one understands without that heart-mind connection. Previous to the Cross, you had to wade through a lot of learning that presumed a heart-mind link before you might find a spiritual connection with God. People did experience spiritual birth and Jesus’ mentioned at a presumed necessity for Old Testament religion. That interview in John 3 was a discussion of life under the Law of Moses. But Jesus came and offered that connection up-front so that you could do all that learning afterward. Today what we call “born-again” refers to that free entry into the heart-led way.

So can you see how Western culture has crippled that? We have millions of church folk presuming they have that heart-led spiritual connection to God because it’s been packaged as a cerebral (psychological) conversion. It’s been dumbed down. I refer to this condition as “spiritually stillborn” — morally dead and powerless. How do you convince someone who is “born-again” by mere conversion that they really aren’t spiritually alive? It stinks to them of arrogance. And among those who probably could get it because they are spiritually alive, it still sounds alien and foreign to their lifetime pickling in a cerebral religion. In other words, they are spiritually alive but still crippled without a conscious awareness of the heart-mind.

We have an uphill battle to make our case. At the very minimum we have to manifest a power over moral failure that these people recognize but don’t have. The quickest way to grab their attention is genuine heart-led moral power for living. That mystical otherworldly emphasis is our single most powerful tool. That’s where His glory shines brightest. So my whole point in all this blather is to encourage a change to a more glorious life, so that even if they intellectually dismiss our talk, they can’t ignore our power. With that moral power comes a vivid response from Creation as a whole, and all kinds of things they don’t expect to see will follow us around. Yes, it means you will experience genuine miracles that defy any kind of earthly logic. Most of them will be invisible, but if you mention a heart-led prayer request and God fulfills it, people will know that God favors you. That’s the one form of elitism no one can complain about.

Let’s make this commonplace among ourselves. Let’s build something that no one else has, not by the subterfuge of ginning up something weird, but reclaiming something men threw away long ago. It’s still there in the dust, waiting for us to put it back to work. It’s bigger and more powerful than the Pyramids, because those piles of sandstone will eventually crumble. Genuine conviction from the Spirit-spirit communion outlasts the universe.

Yeah, it’s a radical proposal.

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Gratuitous Cycling Post

Posted on April 7, 2016 by ehurst

TinkerAFB-VORI’ve had two long rides since my last cycling post. First, I went out to Draper, but wandered a bit on the way. I decided to run past the north end of Tinker AFB. I noted previously that the US Air Force bought out the entire Glendale neighborhood just north of the runway after one-too-many plane crashes into the houses there. So they bought it, scraped it clean of housing debris and turned it into a “training area” and storage site. They left the pavement and some of the streets are almost usable still. I’ll be poking around it a little more later once I get the mountain bike, but for now I wanted to point out this thing we used to call a VOR back when I was pretending I could afford flying school. It’s actually part of the landing guidance for the runway, which is directly behind me where I stood shooting this picture (upper left image).

They also wiped out another, smaller neighborhood nestled up against the NE corner of the main airbase property. It’s been replaced by a long “defile entrance” (military term) to the Hruskocy Gate, which used to be right off the corner of the runway itself (just to the right off-camera). HruskocyGateThis defile runs a quarter-mile around that hill and then down a ways before turning back into the parking area. It’s a way of pulling off the massive number of cars from the main civilian routes as thy are processed for entry. There’s a huge civilian workforce here doing aircraft maintenance. The main facility is over a mile long running parallel to the runway, which itself is about 2.5 miles long.

DraperNewBldgThat new structure at Draper Lake is almost finished. That is, they are doing the landscaping outside, while some massive installation takes place inside. That they have a small transformer substation for this building indicates a lot of heavy equipment.

TripleXBridgeToday I wandered eastward a bit. I was hoping the northeasterly winds would protect me from the heavy allergens I usually encounter out that way. I’m doing okay so far. This was one of those days when I made up my mind on the route only a mile or two ahead of me. I ended up on Triple X Road where it crosses the North Canadian River. The road is still closed because the Army Corps of Engineers still hasn’t granted the county permission to fix the river bank where that house was swallowed by the floods. So the I stopped on the bridge and sat down on the yellow line and just prayed awhile facing into the wind. I really like wind when I can alone like that. This shot shows the scene looking back south along the east side of the bridge. I also stopped a few miles later where the river runs under Wilshire Boulevard. Again, it was a peaceful moment facing into the wind.

SwimmingTurtleFrom there I stayed on Wilshire all the way across to Spencer-Jones Road. I took that south to NE 63rd and rode down to eat my snack on that bridge near Spencer. I caught a glimpse of this massive swimming turtle, easily 24″ (61cm) long hanging out in a deep pool below the bridge. (Someday I plan to have a better camera.)

CrutchoCreekEdit: I forgot to include this image of Crutcho Creek. This is where it turns sharply under a railroad bridge and very close to Midwest Boulevard. This pool is highly unusual in creeks around here, as it turns sharply off to the right of the image.

Folks, it’s already been a pretty busy day in my part of the universe, and I really needed that time out in the wind and solitude of the back roads. I’m looking forward to riding some of the off-road areas I know about starting next week.

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Answering 03: Flavoring Matters

Posted on April 7, 2016 by ehurst

There is a tension that is not easily resolved here.

I look back over my own personal journey and I’m embarrassed — at times painfully so — at things I thought and said even just a few years ago. I’ll tell you that this is not some pride thing where I can’t stand the idea that I’m less than perfect. I don’t take myself that seriously. No, it’s a painful recognition that when I say something stupid, it misleads others and delays them on their own journey. I’ve embraced the heavy burden of responsibility for leading only because I can’t make myself stop leading, but I take responsibility for the wreckage I’ve left in the lives of others. The deepest scars on my soul today are from the injuries I’ve left on others.

There’s a little bit of child in all of us. God help me if anything I say or do tends to squelch creativity and the joy of discovery and exploration. At the same time, God help me if I make no effort to stop you from pulling the trigger on a dangerous weapon because you simply don’t know what it will do. I’m not above you, just somewhere down the road in ahead of some of you. Allow me to share my worries with you as your elder, but take it with a grain of salt.

Emphatically and repeatedly we reject Western Civilization and all the associated habits of mind. On the one hand, I can really dig this computer stuff that would not have arisen without Western thinking. On the other hand, using computers is simply making the best of a horrible situation where the moral landscape has been plowed down and paved over with lies. If I could reach out and touch your life without the electronics, I’d ditch all of my computer stuff right now. I’ve spent half my life working them as a central element in my daily existence, and I still hate them. So all this computer technology stuff I’ve posted on this blog is not from a love for computers, but my compassion for humans who deserve better. Just because I understand it really well doesn’t mean it’s all fun for me. I’m doing my best to waste less and less time on computer technology.

Moral truth operates contextually, and it recognizes multiple levels of consideration in all things in this world. Could we construct a better, more ideal life for humans on this planet? Yes, yes, a thousand times, YES. That’s what revelation is all about. Is it likely? Not at all. Then again, perhaps in the microcosm of your own existence, it is plausible that you will travel a path that brings you much closer to Eden than where you now stand. The whole universe will cheer you along and encourage you, because it is not fallen and desperately desires to see us rise above the Curse as far as we can (Romans 8:22). But Jesus pointedly said that most of humanity at any give time simply will not choose that path (Matthew 7:13-14). So any silly notion that you can drag the whole human race along behind you is sin; it’s picking an argument with God.

Scripture likens the fate of humanity to lambs for the slaughter. It likens it to herding cattle who do not comprehend their fate nor much of anything except their petty concerns for survival. You cannot take your rational judgment back into the Bible and pretend God is responsible for being more efficient. You can acknowledge that He is God, all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving, but you can’t reconcile those concepts with the results. Why doesn’t He….? That’s the wrong question. Come back when you are God’s equal and maybe He’ll discuss it with you. He’s not accountable to you. Meanwhile, you are accountable to Him. Start with the what He says is the starting point: You are obliged to seek peace with Him on His terms. You can pretend to construct a system that forces some few humans to obey your will for a limited time, but in so doing you make yourself part of the soulless herds that God uses for His inscrutable ends, but you will not be a part of His family when it’s all over.

Or, you can stop and take the time to fall on your face before Him. You can ask Him to awaken that divine faculty He placed in us so that you can begin to see things from His perspective. And you can begin that long painful journey out of your fallen human conditioning and start thinking like someone who is on the way to Heaven.

We don’t have time or space here to chase studies in Comparative Civilization, but I can assure that almost anything is better than the West. The West has this nasty, burned in concept of the universe as fundamentally inanimate matter. That flatly contradicts Scripture. The whole universe is alive with the character of our Creator. When I walk out into the yard in front of my apartment building, I sense the singing life of the grass and dirt under my feet. Even the concrete talks to me, because every subatomic particle is imbued with some of God’s essence. However, the grass and trees and birds and clouds and wind are all relatively unaffected by human meddling, so their voice is much louder in my soul.

Maybe you would struggle saying that to the average Westerner who asks about your faith, but let’s do this one thing: Try to avoid analogies that lean too much on Western technology. That in itself tends to be misleading. I tend to think this is not just an intellectual opinion issue. If you want to train your mind to obey your heart, you can’t keep allowing the mind to work as it did before. Somewhere very early in this process you have to grasp that all of Creation is a living being, and every identifiable constituent element is a “person” in its own right. That bird and that clump of grass are each your friends. God is your Father, not your embodiment of Objective Truth. Truth itself is just a word for an aspect of God’s Person. I may be tied to the English language, one of the sorriest excuses for communication in human history, but we are damned if we can’t rise above its limitations in our thinking.

I don’t have any easy answers to the tension that comes from living in a world that rejects the truth before it wakes up in the morning. Somehow we have to alert folks to the truth that we can grasp their level of awareness, but we aren’t there any more. As long as we look, act and talk like these people, we have no message. I can see that there’s a time a place for that, but there comes a time when you must signal a difference. There is a sense in which we have to lead them out of that awful atmosphere into another place where they can at least begin thinking in different terms. Jesus spoke in parables knowing that the majority of His audience wouldn’t get it. He talked about Himself as the Bread of Life (John 6) to purposefully sift out the folks who were looking for the wrong thing from Him. Somehow you have to adapt your witness to thank kind of sifting.

Here’s a clue: “analogy” is a Western thing. The Hebrew language is inherently “parable” — learn the difference between the two. Analogy is conceptual comparison in concrete terms, where items match one-for-one. Parable calls you up to a higher level and demands you apply the symbols far beyond one-for-one. It’s not about discrete objects, but about moral influence in varying contexts. This is why we insist on using the sensory capabilities of the heart as superior to the five senses. And the logic of the heart is superior to that of the intellect. Train your mind to deal with parables. Let’s do computers and technology as mere tools, things we’d love to drop and leave in the dust as soon as God gives us a better means of communication. Please, please, avoid talking about faith in ways that compromise too much with blind souls. That was the sin of the Western Church when the German tribes came crashing through the remains of the Roman Empire. The priests rewrote Christian teaching in terms of the heathen mythology and values, and it wasn’t Christ at all any more.

We are not aiming at some imaginary efficiency in converting minds. We are aiming at living as channels for God’s truth, mirrors to reflect His glory. He chooses who will come to us for His truth; we do not at all pretend we can simply process the whole of humanity through some cerebral renovation. We don’t advertise, but we confront a blind world by living His truth. Few can see that glory in us. In our society today, it might be a good thing to be just a little reticent about it, somewhat evasive until our hearts tell us that the other person has some hope of understanding.

I’m not going to write rules for you, as is typical of Western religious instincts. I’m asking you to breathe life into your witness by making it just a little demanding. The worst thing you can do is let someone believe they got it when they don’t. It’s not a secret requiring a strange coded language like cults do, but the gospel is a mystery that God must open for them. Be careful that you do not package the gospel in ways that suck the life out of it.

The gospel message is not ideas; the gospel is you.

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A Word for Men

Posted on April 7, 2016 by ehurst

The biggest problem is not so much what we do as it is how we abuse God’s wonderful gifts.

As always, what follows assumes you have already recognized the grand failure of Western Civilization. As much as possible you must disentangle your mind from a vast substrate of lies that serve as the foundation for modern Western thinking. I know — it’s a tall order, but if you don’t get started you’ll never make any progress in walking with Christ.

From my experience, America is the epitome of all that’s wrong with the West. Whatever other Western countries might do wrong, America seems to do it even worse in terms of violating God’s moral character. Thus, as I write with a prophetic castigation of American culture in particular, it may or may not fit that well with some other Western society outside America.

In America especially, the model for male consciousness is some grouchy Norse deity with varying names. He’s always capricious and obnoxious, perpetually looking for an excuse to explode with rage, and softens only when he’s drunk. The model for feminine consciousness is derived from the very worst elements of Oester mythology — solipsist to the core, she manipulates with the utter conviction that she is by far the superior sex, the only thing that saves humanity. Variations on these two don’t change how they have pretty much shaped our entire consciousness of sexual identity.

So let’s resolve one thing up front: We are all pussies in God’s Presence. No living being could ever be more masculine than God. And while there is a boatload of blasphemous nonsense about it in Western religion, God is also feminine and nurturing more than any woman could be. He made women, too, and they reflect His divine nature in their own way.

But the one thing Western guys need to understand is that when we come to Him as Lord, we are all the Bride of Christ. Men, we are wired to do this. We have within us the capacity to operate as a female in spiritual terms as His Bride. Sex is a very pale comparison, but it still symbolizes the rapturous communion with God in our spirits. The problem comes when men don’t realize how that wiring exists for that purpose and take two general tracks into abuse of it.

Most Western men have a phobia about this, so they try their darnedest to bury it. This is partly why men can manifest that grouchy Norse sonuvabitch deity aspect. Instead of simply going away, this marvelous gift from God oozes and extrudes and manifests involuntarily because it cannot die. So the instant a man has a clue what it is, he overreacts to stomp it back down into the basement where he never goes. The result is some really stupid reactions from what men don’t understand about themselves. When you fight your own nature in one way, you tend to fight it in other ways.

The other common track men take is obvious: homosexuality. If you doubt that God says it’s a sin in all contexts, I cannot help you. The problem is not that men aren’t supposed to feel or act like females at all, it’s that we have only one right place for that wiring, and that’s in spiritual communion with God as part of His Bride. Submit emotionally to God, not other men.

But you’ll notice that we are not under the Law of Moses and that a man who can’t or won’t understand why some other men go that false route, such a closed mind is not fit to lead as a shepherd of His pasture. It’s simply a bad way to do something entirely natural for men as males. Get over it. Meanwhile, it also means you have no excuse for not understanding how your wife feels about things, at least on some level. But that grouchy Norse deity is not the God of the Bible, and Western social structure is inherently anti-Christian.

I will let you explore the implications on your own, but this is a prophetic Word from God.

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Answering 02: Two Realms

Posted on April 6, 2016 by ehurst

(This is a reblog linking back the other way, for once.)

How do you explain it?

In my mind there remain a handful of people who seemed to understand. They were on their own path and knew it, so I offer not a word of criticism about their choices. Most of them chose to stay in the churches I simply had to leave. I can recall one good church and a segment of time in a military chapel when things were delightful. Military chapel congregations vary because of the mandatory turnover, so the character of that kind of “church” is a broad snapshot of time and you wouldn’t recognize the character of the group later. One such snapshot brought together a truly amazing congregation at a critical time in my spiritual development. The rich atmosphere faded before I decided it was time to move on, but I stayed past that point because of a few fine people. So in general, I can say I miss certain individuals, but I don’t really miss the churches that much.

About a decade ago was the last time I gave mainstream organized Christianity a try. I’ve stayed close enough to observe, but far enough away to avoid entanglement. Over the years one truly amazing and disconcerting feature remains constant: The jarring disconnection between words and actions. Not the typical hypocrisy you hear or read about from most critics, this is something far more subtle, and far more damaging. So subtle it is that you might not be able to agree with me, even if you grasp the nature of this thing.

To read the rest of this post, click this link to Do What’s Right blog.

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Answering 02: Two Realms

Posted on April 6, 2016 by ehurst

How do you explain it?

In my mind there remain a handful of people who seemed to understand. They were on their own path and knew it, so I offer not a word of criticism about their choices. Most of them chose to stay in the churches I simply had to leave. I can recall one good church and a segment of time in a military chapel when things were delightful. Military chapel congregations vary because of the mandatory turnover, so the character of that kind of “church” is a broad snapshot of time and you wouldn’t recognize the character of the group later. One such snapshot brought together a truly amazing congregation at a critical time in my spiritual development. The rich atmosphere faded before I decided it was time to move on, but I stayed past that point because of a few fine people. So in general, I can say I miss certain individuals, but I don’t really miss the churches that much.

About a decade ago was the last time I gave mainstream organized Christianity a try. I’ve stayed close enough to observe, but far enough away to avoid entanglement. Over the years one truly amazing and disconcerting feature remains constant: The jarring disconnection between words and actions. Not the typical hypocrisy you hear or read about from most critics, this is something far more subtle, and far more damaging. So subtle it is that you might not be able to agree with me, even if you grasp the nature of this thing.

A critical element in Christian Mysticism is a powerful sense of Two Realms. Not in the sense of my doctrinal teaching, but I refer to a full apprehension burned into your awareness. With rare exception, all of the Christians I’ve ever met ascribe to some version “Heaven” as somewhere different from here and now. But it seems most of the time a mere idea. It’s not part of their calculus of life. They act as if it’s not real; they talk and write and construct a whole framework that denies it. This denial is pervasive. The belief is not a truth, but a mere fact for them, and has precious little effect on how they operate. It’s always out there somewhere and they aren’t striving to connect directly. It’s an orthodoxy without faith.

I can recall a session in the NATO chapel with a bunch of teenagers from those military families in the chapel. I tried to convey the concept of our universe as a mere bubble with distinct boundaries and a distinct lifespan existing within a broader existence that has no such boundaries. I used a lot of jargon common to science fiction from those days. I suppose some of them got it, because you could see the proverbial light bulb flash on their faces. But these were kids just a few years from legal adulthood. Why was this so new to them? So I tested the idea against their parents in a different setting, and it was a similar experience. Military adults don’t respond the same way as civilian crowds, but I could see it was news to many of them. These weren’t new converts and not ignorant within their own sectarian backgrounds, but even the typical American evangelicals seemed surprised.

It’s not that anyone argued with me. It’s the sort of thing where, if they got it, they recognized it instinctively as true. Some of them began to exhibit noticeable changes in their moral existence. It awakened something in them.

To this day I can’t explain where the concept came from. I’m pretty sure my youthful obsession with Science Fiction and the theory of dimensional physics was part of it, and I suppose that was the fertile ground for when I began reading Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) literature and academic explanations of the ANE intellectual background in college. It must have all fit together neatly because I can’t recall any moment when it dawned on me, only that I had assumed it for quite some time. It crystallized when I felt compelled to answer some sharp questions.

By now you probably recognize that people can’t get this concept if it’s not already true inside them in some way. All it does is give some kind of intellectual shape, pulls it into conscious focus from where it stood in the shadows. It was already there or it isn’t something people can accept. We believe that Creation is much bigger than our universe and that some part of us belongs to that higher dimension, but there seems no way for us to actually create the connection, only recognize when it’s there.

We have a distinct cosmology and anthropology. Without them, this whole religion dissolves into mist. We assert by our very lives that there are Two Realms and that we are designed to connect across that dimensional boundary. I can most assuredly tell you what it’s like to lose that connection; God allowed me to experience it briefly and it was worse than dying physically. A lot of things died during that time. The experience was the final destruction of a lot of goofy theology for me, I can assure you. Without these fundamental differences in cosmology and anthropology, our religion doesn’t exist, but we have to be ready to live with the simple fact a lot of folks will never get it. We can do our best to offer some kind of explanation that may or may not work, but we can’t make them see something that doesn’t exist for them.

Answering questions about your faith can mean having no answer for some folks.

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Answering 01: I Believe

Posted on April 5, 2016 by ehurst

Sometimes it helps to reduce the shock for others if you can say something that shows you aren’t entirely outside all familiar Christian doctrine. As always, you are supposed to recognize that this is just my own beliefs in my own words. The idea is that you see beyond the particulars and strive to express your own beliefs. However, to the degree yours and mine coincide, you are welcome to use my words for your own. By hanging around this virtual parish, this is what you’ll get from me. At any given time, I might say it differently based on the context, but for now, this should help indicate the flavor of my soul.

I believe that there is only one God, Creator of all things. The commonly accepted English name for Him is Jehovah; you can call Him whatever you like. The whole point is that we do call on Him as our God. I believe His Person is rooted outside our universe.

I believe that all of humanity suffers from a native tendency to ignore our duty to Our Creator. We are born with an instinct to place our own reason above His revelation and refuse to connect back to His divine character that has been woven into all of Creation. I believe that Creation itself calls to us to acknowledge Him as Our Maker and we are unable by ourselves to engage Him as He demands. The initiative for resolving this conflict lies in His hands alone.

I believe that Jesus Christ was His only literal Son and our Savior. Jesus lived without sin by His own Father’s reckoning, utterly fulfilling the purpose of all the Law Covenants. He died unjustly in our place, murdered by human sin and absorbing the penalties for all such sin. He arose literally from death by His own moral authority over life and death. He lives now in another realm of existence so that we can all commune with Him regardless of our space and time limitations. However, we can commune with Him only on the grounds that we embrace His death in our place, and so offer Him the life we have left. I believe that this communion resolves the conflict between us and Our Creator.

I believe that every human soul is designed for redemption but that most simply will not. I am utterly convinced that no living human can comprehend just how it is God chooses and redeems some of us, but that apparently the majority of us will miss out on this gift of grace. Those of us who find ourselves aware of His redemption in our lives owe Him our very existence and so have no other purpose for living in this world other than to reflect His glory. I am utterly certain we cannot possibly comprehend what fate awaits those who die unredeemed.

I believe that someday this whole universe will be redeemed, that our space-time continuum will be utterly changed so that we will be unable to distinguish it from total destruction. The changes will affect both this and the higher realm which is our ultimate destiny, so that they are somehow merged, which is most certainly not the case now. In some sense, it will restore the original design God had for us and all other things.

I believe that our just response to all of this is not found in trying to change this doomed existence, but to change ourselves by His power into the likeness of His Son. We can surely enjoy some measure of His intended peace for us now, because Creation is not fallen, but suffers the limitations of our sinful nature as His stewards of this world. Our struggle to rediscover His glory in us serves to restore some measure of communion with His divine character in Creation, but the broader sweep of human history and human future is not ours to understand fully nor to alter.

(Hint: You could as easily substitute any of the classical Christian Creeds from Church History if they express your beliefs.)

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Between the Lines

Posted on April 4, 2016 by ehurst

Sometimes I cruise the various Christian News sites.

It’s always politics, just a peculiar voting block. Some of the most vicious and spiteful commentary on the planet shows up on those sites. The majority of them oppose Donald Trump. I’m no fan of his but I am really seeing a major hypocrisy about it. The one theme that kept showing up on most of them that mentioned him at all is a professed puzzlement at how he garners so very much support from evangelical voters.

I’d give them a hint, but I sense they are actually lying about it and just looking for an excuse to bully and shame the average evangelical reader. They know why he’s popular: He’s honest. In reading through the Christian oriented news sites, I am struck by the huge number of big names that are wallowing in controversy over deception. There might be a lot of more serious problems, but it’s always involving some level of deception, often simply an attempt to hide the scandals. It’s as if you can’t trust any of them.

So it’s obvious that Trump has their support because he’s apparently honest. So far, there’s no dirt on him that he hasn’t openly admitted. Dirty or not, he seems to be transparent over the very things others try to hide. You know pretty much what you are getting. The one thing we haven’t had in politics so far is people who tend to do what they say or give an awfully good honest explanation of why they failed. I really doubt anyone’s fooled about the shadow government any more, and how the faceless bureaucracy will throttle most of his promises, but he won’t play the game of looking for excuses. He’s not a bureaucrat; he’s not one of Them.

Given the dirty tricks already in play with the GOP, I’m not sure he’s going to win under their banner. Most of them are fully committed to the bureaucratic consensus. They aren’t going to go away because there are so very many of them and the are the real government. Still, it’s just possible that some kind of backlash will arise this summer and the GOP leadership might be forced to stand back and let him win.

Evangelical leadership tends to favor the bureaucracy, too. I could name some bigshot pastors right now who are stupid enough to preach about the evils of supporting Trump in the election. Do you suppose this thing will be nasty enough to contribute to some kind of shaking loose of the churches’ membership?

Sometimes it is such a relief to be away from that crap.

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Bike (Updated)

Posted on April 4, 2016 by ehurst

The mountain bike has been covered. Thank you all for praying with me and God bless the donor. Tomorrow I’ll update this post with a picture of it. Now pray with me that I can find a suitable recipient for the hybrid.

Update: The best deal I could get was online only. Such is life. It should ship to my home in a week or so and I get to assemble it from the crate. Having built a few from scratch, this should be no big deal.

It’s a “GT Adult Ricochet Comp” with 29″ wheels. I’ll have to add a few accessories for the way I ride, but I’ll make a fresh post for all that when I get it. Thanks again for all your prayers.

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