Cycling: Grand Blvd Loop

Posted on March 28, 2016 by ehurst

I really enjoy pairing the Grand Boulevard Trail with the Ok River North Bank Trail. Today was just a ride for the exercise. I’ve done this a couple of times since I started taking pictures, so there wasn’t a lot new to shoot.

2000blkSEGrandBlvdWay back when I was a kid OKC built a housing project here. Lots of big apartment buildings, but it was all wrong. There were no stores and no bus lines ran through here. Trosper Park wasn’t too awfully far away, but the only other thing out here was heavy oil field equipment yards. So being assigned an apartment here by the Housing Authority was like being sent out in the middle of nowhere. It was a high crime neighborhood, of course. Eventually some of the buildings burned down and nobody fixed them. So they were emptied and bulldozed and that was the end of a very stupid experiment.

I35-NboundGrandBlvdPast Trosper Park (kinda busy today) and some semi-industrial stuff, I hit Interstate 35. This is easily one of the worst stretches of highway in the Heartland. There are way too many exit ramps in a short distance, merging into one another at times. Downtown it takes a huge wicked jog eastward where it meets Interstate 40 before continuing north and it is congested most of the daylight hours. About two decades ago this was all under construction as they were adding a lane, generally widening and regrading the underpasses. The crash fatalities shut upward doing the construction, and I recall watching a couple of them happen just in the short time I drove a taxi here in OKC.

CapitalHillHS Farther along the Grand Boulevard Trail at Walker Avenue is the old Capital Hill High School. It’s literally “old school” because the building is ancient. When built, it was a high class white neighborhood. After a while it declined a bit and the dope dealers and hookers moved in. It is currently dominated by Hispanic students. Capital Hill became “Little Mexico” for a very long time, but it’s now seeing some other folks moving in and the place is showing some renovations and even a few new homes replacing some old ones. The all-Spanish signs are being replaced with bilingual stuff. This part of Grand Boulevard is truly ancient in terms of OKC’s life so far. The cycle goes round and round.

MayAveBridgeOKRiverOnce I got to the end of the Grand Trail I turned west and took the Portland Avenue Bridge to cross over. This is the far western end of the North Bank Trail. From there I headed back east and stopped for lunch at the dam just before the May Avenue bridge. I found a seat on the boulders lining the bank and watched cormorants and geese flying around. The cormorants especially hang around this dam more than almost anywhere else along the urbanized river course. You can see burgundy redbud trees on the far bank. This dam, just visible in the edge of the shot, starts the middle pool reserved for commercial boat rides during the tourist season. There’s another set of gates farther downstream near the start of the rowing regatta section.

My rear tire went soft just as I turned into the Bricktown Area, but I couldn’t find the leak too easily. This being a self-sealing tube, I pumped it back up and hoped for the best. I made it home okay and it was a decent workout. (I really need to save up for a decent mountain bike; this hybrid gets way more flats than any bike I’ve ever owned.)

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Perverted Professional Standards

Posted on March 28, 2016 by ehurst

There’s a burden on my mind about church leadership.

I’ll pick the occasion of Tullian Tchividjian’s professional meltdown for my opinionated screed. The linked story includes more detail than most accounts in the popular media. Let’s pretend it’s accurate, though I am no fan of the site. What matters is not so much this famous pastor’s experience as the entangling mess that made this whole thing worse than it should have been.

First: Don’t confuse pastors with elders, and don’t confuse deacons with elders. In the Bible, there have always been Two Witnesses, the king and the priest. Part of our problem is a horrific confusion over what those words mean, so perhaps it works better if we say sheikh and shaman. That helps you understand that the Bible is an Eastern document that presumes you already grasp that humanity is hard-wired to live in that moral milieu. Studying the Bible means first and foremost that you learn how to think like an Ancient Hebrew and ditch that Western intellectual model.

This link is typical enough of mainstream evangelical thinking about qualifications of a pastor. Right away we see that it confuses elder and pastor. I suppose it would require a genuine revolution with actual bloodshed before we get organized religion to do what’s right so I don’t expect this to change. But a pastor should be the ritual leader, a priestly function that calls to mind the higher meaning behind the symbolism we use in our worship and practice. The elder is the household ruler — the Bible presents the church as a defacto extended family household. The only time you see the two offices merged is when the church body is too small and too new to this whole game-change. Someone who operates in missionary mode approximates what the Apostles did and they were typically both pastor and elder until things got rolling. A deacon is a male or female attendant who helps both pastor and elder get things done, bearing some middling measure of authority.

The pastor is generally a full-timer, set aside for his mission. The elder might be full time as well, if the body can afford it, but he’s often a retired fellow who is already respected enough to rule. Pastors are appointed; elders arise naturally. In Judea, the first churches already had a protocol for selecting who among the various family chiefs would become the senior elder. The working relationship of the pastor and elder varied just as it might for an ancient sheikh and shaman.

But because Western Christianity has been doing it wrong since at least the time of Constantine when he suckered the church into participating in secular politics, we see some serious and painful side-effects. Not least is that a church organized as a Western bureaucracy or corporation will always be the wrong shape and size to meet genuine moral and spiritual needs. It cannot possibly do the work of God, not on purpose. His miracles will happen, but largely in spite of the perverted model.

The next most obvious flaw is the Western Myth of the Great Man. This is wholly absent in biblical thinking. While that linked list of qualifications is a proper quotation, it’s not a proper understanding of most of the Bible passages mean, because they are pulled from the specific context in which they were written. Still, it’s not hard to figure that you don’t want corrupt and violent thugs running the church. Charisma is the last consideration, not the first. Paul fought with that because he had precious little of it and people struggled (especially cultural Gentiles) with responding to him as a man of divine authority. I challenge you to tell me about the pastor of some monster church whose position doesn’t depend on charisma first. Paul would never make in Western Christianity.

On top of this, the profession comes with a false aura of moral superiority. The one bright spot in Tchividjian’s story is that he refuses to run and hide. I’ll let you decide whether that’s because of chutzpah or because he’s honestly trying to do the right thing and buck the broken system. I don’t take issue with his divorce or pursuing a fresh romance; I take issue with the apparent moral standards of his new girlfriend given her choice of costumes. I suppose we should wait and see if she improves on that. Still, his words approach the proper response to this mythology of church leaders as better than the membership. Biblical leadership is a matter of moral character, not performance to some artificial standard that few can sanely match. I can testify that being placed on a pedestal like that is a primary factor in temptation.

Not least is that you will try to hide things that normal people do. This is exacerbated by the perverted view of human sexuality held by most of Western Christianity, a view that arises from heathen mythology, not Scripture.

I’m starting to see glimmers of truth here and there in non-traditional churches, but nowhere near enough. Things are shifting quickly and I cannot guess how far or in what direction it will go, but what we see in the mainstream is ripe for collapse because it can’t keep up with the pace set by God’s wrath. It’s built on the wrong foundation and the flood will come and wash their sand away.

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The Established Religion Crucified Jesus

Posted on March 27, 2016 by ehurst

The Devil is in the distraction.

It matters not what the fundamental issue is; if we focus on the wrong cause, we will take the wrong action. Satan has perverted God’s natural order of Creation so that we take personally things that are common to all humanity while dehumanizing other people. We put the personal in the wrong place, and remove it whence it belongs.

Ephesians 6 is an extended reminder that our real battle is with our own sin nature, not the broad sin nature of humans. The battlefield is on our knees in prayer. We are fighting our own fallen flesh that allies with Satan’s agenda. We can’t do justice if we condemn other humans for doing what we all do. So when you go to war against sin, it’s yourself that you need to defeat in that sense. Clobbering others, regardless how good you might be at it, won’t change anything if you take it personally in the wrong sense.

I cannot lay down for you neat and simple rules for something that is rooted in the moral sphere of God’s own character. All I can do is alert you to the presence of a vivid and living dynamic of good versus evil, and point out exemplary failures in our modern social culture that so cravenly fall at the feet of Satan. However, there is a broad general sense in which we need to personalize promoting justice and depersonalize responding to evil.

When I laid out the concept of The Cult, I took pains to warn readers that it wasn’t a matter of persons, but a perverse influence that stands out in history as the footprints of Satan. I wanted people to stop looking for individuals to blame. In my recent reactions to reading Glennon’s National Security and Double Government, I again noted how he correctly sums up that there is no particular individual or group that we can blame for this sorry situation. Our biggest problem is our tendency to go along with this crap. The political solution is not in mass slaughter of targeted individuals, but refusing to participate in a system that is inherently evil.

When surveying the wreckage of my own past failures, I can easily see that the worst moments were those when I came closest to surrendering to the depersonalizing forces of bureaucracy and middle-class perversion. The most insane moments were those when my heart knew I was wrong but my conscious mind could not hear that voice of truth. The inner conflict kept me close to suicide for long periods of my life. Persistent clinical depression was merely a symptom of my awakened heart and my brain’s ignorance of that moral voice. I knew I was wrong and had no clue how or why, and even less clue how to climb out of that pit. Those who exhibit no sense of conflict in this fallen world are truly dead already.

This is why we teach that the best way to handle fools is seize hold of whatever ground you can defend in that context. When you have no power, cynically play along when possible. When dealing with ostensible equals, refuse to react; engage tactics that surrender nothing. Don’t let them push your buttons, but respond from your own internal authority. When in authority, act within the moral boundaries against the sin, not the person. Always stand ready to hold out the olive branch except in those rare moments when the Spirit tells you to close the door and keep your distance.

From this ground it’s not hard to awaken a prophetic awareness that the West is doomed. Further, it’s quite easy to see why it’s doomed, and to shape your actions to exploit any changes in this world for the glory of the Father of Light. Western governments are not in the individual leaders, but in the bureaucratic fear factory. Yes, there are individuals who do astounding damage, but only because they have proven their loyalty to the damned consensus of the herd. Hate the global banking system? Those bankers are just the leaders of the bureaucracy; they are bureaucrats. We waste time blathering about the Rothschilds and Warburgs and Rockefellers and Morgans because whatever it was they started, it has long been hijacked by the same amorphous faceless bureaucracy. Yes, the basic agenda is the same, but the names are now mere symbols. They’ve been displaced by the likes of the Dulles Brothers who were but minions to a far deeper darkness than they themselves knew.

Today’s greatest powers are not charismatic individual geniuses with vast influence, but rather ordinary folks who are mere manifestations of the mass will of the bureaucracy behind them. Killing each of them would accomplish nothing at all, because the same awful evil will come through some other chosen servant. This is a spawn of The Cult and it takes a similar shape as an impersonal force that we must discern wherever it starts to leak into the work we do for God.

But the victory over this creeping death is to personalize redemption. Redemption is restoring the individuality of each person. We can offer divine justice only to individuals. You can’t pass compassion through a bureau without perverting it. To the degree any redemptive service participates in “good management principles,” it becomes a tool of Satan. This is why churches are generally dead, nearly useless against darkness. While good moments of redemption do take place in churches and their activities, those moments come despite the corruption that shapes the organization. Bureaucracy is inherently corrupt because it is death personified.

As you prepare your heart and mind for the rising tribulation of our age, one of the first victories you must win is breaking free from the deception about human organization. This is why the New Testament churches were inherently personal and familial. In this is life; calling your fellow church members “brother” and “sister” won’t breathe much life into the dead carcass of mainstream organized religion. The only real church is where an Eastern feudal family forms around God’s chosen leadership.

The bureaucracy will call us insane and eventually try to crush us. The only escape from that is to conform. Even in churches you’ll be labeled an evil sinner simply because you don’t conform to the bureaucracy and its false morals. Don’t. Trust God to show you the tactics that fit His glory at the moment, but never surrender to the soulless bureaucracy. The heart-mind cannot fit into any human organization.

The typical church is frankly a distraction from walking with Christ.

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Cycling: The Giant Loop

Posted on March 27, 2016 by ehurst

I40-overNCanOn my second run at it, I took a clockwise route. Starting from home, I rolled west on Reno to the entrance of Eagle Lake. Once on the actual bike trail it runs along the North Canadian upstream toward the Oklahoma River boating complex. The image on the left is the view looking south along that riverside trail where Interstate 40 crosses over. The riverbed is full of old pilings and such going back through at least four iterations of bridging at this site.

Hwy66overNCanThis being a Saturday and decently warm, I encountered dozens of other cyclists, plus joggers and walkers, once I got past the dirt road onto the Oklahoma River Trail. The rowing teams were out practicing and several coaches were giving instructions over bullhorns at several locations. While I didn’t pass too many cyclists going the same direction, I was overtaken quite regularly. My bike is a touring machine, not a racer, and I’m just about average in my normal speed. Having taken so many pictures along this route, I didn’t see anything new until I got close to the north end of Lake Overholser. This was the first time the weather and visual conditions inspired a couple of shots of the old Highway 66 bridge that crosses the upper North Canadian River.Hwy66Overholser The bike trail crosses over the old highway, but then drops down under the newer concrete bridge (on the right side of the image).

From there it runs across a dam and today the water was flowing into the canal up toward Lake Hefner. The bike trail essentially follows that canal. There were far fewer riders on this section between the two lakes. I was quite alone for the two miles running past Wiley Post airfield. As I drew near Lake Hefner I began seeing more cyclists and joggers. On the Lake Hefner Trail itself I was entering the trophy wives territory. This is a social phenomenon common in expensive parts of OKC. Even if you don’t see the housing at all, the real estate price can be estimated by the ratio of ladies who look like models in their expensive and stylish athletic attire. At the same time, the ratio of those likely to respond to a greeting decreases. Them is some high-maintenance gals. So as you might expect, Nichols Hills was loaded with such sights.

AmPetPvtGymSpeaking of high maintenance, this is a private corporate gymnasium owned by American Energy Partners (image to the right). The facility is ringed with a nice blue jogging track, too. If you click the link to the corporate website, you’ll be greeted by an image of the recently expired Aubrey McClendon, the man whose death saw the growth of an extravagant monument at the site of the crash. The website tells you he was the company founder.AubreyMcClendonMemorial Here’s the picture I took of the memorial on a previous ride in the North Hills.

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Psalm 94

Posted on March 26, 2016 by ehurst

It stood as a basic assumption in Hebrew minds that God’s sense of timing was not like theirs. In the ancient protocol of the Divine Sheikh’s court, asking “how long” did not mean for them what it means to us. It was rather like asking if God intended to put up with something; was there an endpoint? Did God intend to act eventually or should they get used to it?

It was also assumed He would act on the grounds that this was His domain and He wouldn’t let someone else abuse His people. Ancient Near Eastern feudalism was about people, generally a sense of familial kinship between the ruler and His real treasure, his household. A final paramount issue was His divine reputation. Was He going to let them insult Him this way?

It seems almost certain the psalmist refers to domestic troubles arising from bad leadership, and not some foreign oppressor. He opens with a reference to Jehovah as the God of vengeance; saying it twice adds dramatic emphasis. If there is to be revenge, it must come from the throne of God. It is His prerogative alone. Let the God who avenges shine like the morning sun! He, who is the final moral authority of all Creation, let Him blast with withering glory to expose the arrogant who dare to usurp His authority.

Here’s the main question, again repeated for emphasis: Do you have a plan to deal with this evil situation? These folks in power don’t bear much resemblance to Your servants. Their actions aren’t helping to build up your domain. It looks like they are wasting Your resources on their personal comfort instead of developing and making Your provision do more work. When was it ever just to kill those who are defenseless?

These people have the gall to suggest You aren’t paying attention, Lord.

Listen, you lowlife thugs: Do you need to be thumped with a divine clue? The God who gave us ears isn’t likely to be deaf Himself; the designer of the eye is not blind. Our first awareness of God was through His power to punish and destroy heathen nations. Do you imagine He won’t keep His own people in line?

God can read any man’s thoughts, all of them at once. To Him it surely seems petty and small. The only folks with any sense at all are those who pursued His revelation. Lord, Your demands of us are a blessing in themselves! If we can just obey You, no one can harm us. You consistently deliver on the promise to give us respite from human predation. Meanwhile, the predators will fall into their own trap.

No, we are Your treasure, O Lord. Sooner or later Your justice will deliver from sorrow those who honestly seek Your favor. We will march in glorious array in the train of Your divine justice. And if God lets things slide for awhile, there is nothing I can do but wait. But the moment I am in real danger, He’s there to deliver me. So I’m going to count my blessings to pass the time until He acts. There’s no way I could ever see God making alliance with these evil rulers, not as long as they violate His Word right in front of Him.

A whole kingdom of evil rulers is not enough to frustrate God’s promises to me.

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Bureaucratic Cancer

Posted on March 26, 2016 by ehurst

Our modern bureaucratic coward is easy to trace as the final stage of middle class culture.

Whatever it is communists mean by “bourgeois,” that’s not the right image here. It’s loaded with too many emotional and mythical ideas. Instead of the French, we might be better off using the German “burgher” as the label that best conjures up what I’m reaching for, even if it is essentially the same word. We want to observe and discern without staining it with repulsion.

The essence of the middle class arose in the Western Middle Ages when some of the peasants distinguished themselves in battle. That’s when the nobles noticed them and began offering them privileges denied the other peasants. The attached privileges turned into economic advantages. And while there was a longing pretense to nobility, there was an entirely different morality involved. These wealthy peasants wanted the social privileges on their own terms.

You would hardly say the nobles didn’t care about material wealth; it’s that they presumed such wealth as God’s grant to their superior bloodline. Nobody else would know what to do with that wealth, so it was in everyone’s best interest that they control it. But nobles were quite willing to use it extravagantly with some simulacrum of simply not being too concerned with it. They preferred to emphasize nobility as an ethic: brave, intelligent and cultured. They were quick to war, though not violent buffoons, they believed. They were the guardians of high tradition and justice. And if God didn’t supply that day what they were used to in some urgent pursuit, they made do with what was at hand because they were so very creative and smart, of course. Their self-image was highly flavored with a concern for higher things than just groveling over material goods.

The middle-class were bean-counters by comparison. They wanted to find ways to restrict and regulate violence by what they imagined was reason. This was where the broad fear of death arose most strongly in culture, with a matching belief that life was “sacred” in that fearful middle-class way. The rediscovery of classic literature and art (Renaissance) and the human impulse to spread learning was critical, but while some fully embraced the grandeur of the past, most burghers pulled out a narrow selection of that rich heritage that offered some materialistic advantage. And they realized quickly that their superior numbers was their primary advantage over nobles and artisans who seemed utterly out of control.

Thus, they formed towns and managed trade with a wholly different mindset. They even went to war with a different approach (see the Hanseatic League). It was all to protect the stability of their family life because they really didn’t believe in the afterlife. Whatever Heaven meant to them, they had a defacto religion that was confined to this world. They did have their own brand of nobles, but it came out in the entrepreneurial spirit of risk with investments and goods, not with life itself. Because this did most certainly generate wealth, they seduced the royal-noble class into granting special privileges to towns, cities and various other groupings that would fit into royal charters through big tax payoffs. “Take our money and leave us alone.”

That was the end of European feudalism. The natural result was the rise of middle class political power. Most of the time, this devolution of power passed rather peacefully, if for no other reason than that keeping around powerless nobles and royalty gave a national identity, as Glennon noted in his book, National Security and Double Government. The burghers learned early not to flaunt their power lest the even lower classes revolt (like that mess in France where the middle-class wasn’t actually fully in charge). The burghers still needed workers.

America is the quintessential middle-class nation. Despite the Enlightenment Anglo-Saxon pretense written into our US Constitution, it was shaped by a mixture of European refugees with a broad sampling of varied middle-class culture, lightly seasoned with some disenfranchised nobles who suffered the effects of primogeniture back in England. The Constitution reflects the narrow interests of the Alpha-Male entrepreneur, but the actual work of government was always done by the socialist burghers. This alleged conflict between libertarian, capitalist, socialist and communist brands of economics is simply a dispute between cousins over which of them shall be blessed with the advantages of law and policy. What keeps them together as family is their shared materialism.

For complex reasons Glennon covered fairly well, America doesn’t do her socialism well. We are wholly dishonest about it, lacking the frank acceptance of the label that pervades the European version. It’s not that socialism doesn’t work as well as capitalism, it’s that you can’t have one without the other. You cannot have a system totally socialist and bureaucratic because there would be no one to keep the economic growth going. But the fatal flaw is this business of worshiping consensus; that is the seed of destruction. It displaces our hard-wired need for family loyalty. In fact, it’s so crazy that the bureaucratic brand of cowardly loyalty filters back into our cultural conception of family loyalty.

There is no compassion anywhere in the mix.

God’s moral character is woven into the fabric of the universe. It’s not the god of the burghers and Anglo-Saxons, but a God they could never comprehend. He is a shepherd God and His compassion is the key to how things work. It requires a fundamentally otherworldly approach. There is no place for genuine compassion in this ugly materialistic Western world and we cannot connect in any way with the shepherd morality of God. So obviously this whole thing will eventually push and push and push until it breaks, because the bureaucratic culture is a metastasizing cancer. It can’t stop itself; it recognizes no boundaries but its own.

When you talk about American government, you are actually referring to Glennon’s Trumanites. That is the US government, and it’s dying because the host for this cancer is dying.

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British Israelism

Posted on March 25, 2016 by ehurst

Theology class today.

If you have never heard of this wild heresy, I find little to dispute with the description on Wikipedia. It’s all well and good to call it a heresy, but if you think about it, you realize that this weirdo religion is nothing more than a bluntly honest conclusion from the whole of Anglo-American culture.

Maybe you could take a moment to refresh your understanding of The Cult, too. Keep in mind that this is not a particular bunch of folks but a moral influence that appears as consistent in character across multiple generations. I maintain that my analysis of The Cult is as much as we can know for sure, and plenty for us to build an understanding of what we face today. The reason it matters is that Westerners are deeply infected with the fundamental subconscious assumptions behind what British Israelism dares to say openly.

The Cult’s primary weapon is the two-edged dagger: elitism on one side and secrecy-deception on the other. This is visible starting with the Pharisees, through the Judaizers and Gnostics, up through the capture of the Church under Roman government, the later survival of the Church after the government fell, and the eventual rise of what we now call Western Civilization. I’ve noted repeatedly that Western Civ is the marriage of Aristotelian rationalism, by way of Pharisaic legalism, and German Tribal mythology. By far the strongest thread of Germanic Tribal culture yet alive today was the Anglo-Saxon branch. Anglo-American culture is the bastard child The Cult hoped to raise up as their thug to take over the world.

If you want reliable servants for evil, it helps if they are an ignorant copy of yourself — ambitious but without the full bag of secrets. The Cult has withheld their secrets, but injected their elitist secrecy tendencies into the very soul of Anglo-American culture. The Cult created a ravenous beast that doesn’t quite understand it is actually the servant, not the ruler. The Cult still holds those invisible reins in their hands.

All the blather about the hidden power of the bureaucracy merely reflects the natural tendency of Anglo-American cultural assumptions about justice and government. The business of injecting that moral system back into Scripture is inherent in British Israelism, that the Anglo-Saxon culture was a better grasp of divine revelation. Thus, we have Ruckmanites who claim that the KJV corrects bad manuscripts and that the scholars who translated it were all the very saints of God. Nazism? Another offshoot from the same roots. (Zionist leadership delights in Jewish persecution.) Feminism? Just another branch where the Germanic Tribes venerated Oester. Socialism? That’s just cowardly bureaucracy in it’s most honest form, where tribal loyalty rules all. Communism? Just socialism on steroids. It’s all easily traced back to the mythology that the Anglo-American culture is a near-perfect manifestation of God’s own character, because the Anglo-Saxons are just Israel with a minor case of amnesia.

This has been used to justify the elitist arrogance behind the broad Anglo-American conquest as yet ongoing in the world. If our cowardly bureaucratic consensus government says America should have control of the whole world, but only in those things we want to control, then that is the sacred and only sensible policy anyone living can imagine. Doubters must of necessity be evil for not seeing the obvious blessings of such an agenda. This is God’s work, doncha know?

I haven’t even scratched the surface. How about that Stone of Scone? Ever heard the legend that Peter traveled to Britain and founded the Church of England? Given just a little time and study, you could easily trace this same nasty root system of British Israelism as behind all kinds of moral sewage in our world today. However, it is most persistent in reading Anglo-American morals and sense of justice (in all its flavors) back into the Bible.

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The Fallacy of Activism

Posted on March 25, 2016 by ehurst

This is a postscript to Institutionalized Cowardice. I apologize in advance for the length, but I hunger and thirst for your freedom from deception.

A major element in my enthusiasm for Glennon’s work is that it removed some mental blocks for me. It was an answer to the prayer that I could further subject my intellect to my heart. Long mental habits that participate in the social mythology of our age are the biggest threat to our moral progress. The heart knows the truth, but the brain is still blocked up with trash, so we are unable to implement the truth we have.

It’s truly difficult for most of us to discern the difference between strong sentiment from that Western mythology versus the convictions of the heart. Because our conscious minds read conviction through the conscience, a perverted and confused conscience can hinder a clear signal. The fires of Hell mimic the blazing light of glory in places where we don’t really have eyes. If it burns deeply enough, we have scar tissue that will not easily heal without serious pain and disruption to our sense of who we are.

Most of my life I struggled with intense, white-hot fury at things that were wrong, but which things I had been taught were right. So I bore a further false load of guilt over a wholly justified anger, which only confused things further. This made me somewhat a slow learner. But the power of our Lord to heal is bigger than all our injuries, and I am a testimony that fools can move toward wisdom.

The vast evil conspiracy of our world is not entirely the work of some alien force. A big part of it is us. If you can spare the time and attention to Glennon’s work in conjunction with the likes of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, then you begin to grasp what I mean. All of the blather that objectifies the evil of our world and the “Deep State” or shadow government or TPTB is a cover story, a mythology meant to hide the truth: You and I are just a step away from being part of that evil shadow government.

I know this because I recognized myself in Glennon’s description of the Trumanites. I was a previous participant in the massive bureaucracy that hamstrings constitutional government even as it must of necessity keep those elected officials around for cover. The elected folks often ask, “What are you going to do about it?” The obvious answer is that, unless your heart is actively in charge of your conscious mind, you have no defense against the smothering cowardice of the bureaucracy. Not just the actions and policies, but the very soul of bureaucracy leaks into the minds of elected officials and they simply become a part of that world.

There is no one to blame. Try to understand that. Our instinctive thirst for justice has also been hijacked by this system. As Glennon explains toward the end of his work, this problem is inherent in the system itself. “If only the people were better educated and held their own civic virtue!” Perhaps this is the point at which we can understand why it’s impossible, because the power of the people lies in having their heart-minds awakened. But if their heart-minds were awakened, they’d have never cooked up a system like this. This is the feet of mixed iron and clay in Nebuchadnezzar’s vision of the Statue (Daniel 2) — it’s brutal while riven through with crumbling (and bumbling) cowardice. It makes no sense at all.

The blessing of heart-led faith and a commitment to divine justice reminds you that you cannot possibly objectify government. We are hard-wired for eastern feudalism, that form of government that shields you from the power of anyone who isn’t family. The perversion of this is that bureaucracy masquerades in the soul as family. It’s not quite the same as making a god of the State, but it’s giving that blood and covenant loyalty to some broad and impersonal thing that grants the sense of identity that normally comes from a feudal family household. It’s like that virus that arranges its outer appendages to map neatly into your body’s receptors and hijacks your own body processes and energy to kill you. Every cell in your body contains the means to self-destruction. It works the same in our psyches.

This why the bureaucracy seems alive to us. It maps to our moral receptors and hijacks our sense of justice. Only with your heart-mind awakened and ascendant in your soul can you begin to detect the lies. After reading Glennon’s description, I suddenly realize why I find certain people morally repulsive and can’t make myself be nice to them: They are willing servants of the soul-sucking institutional cowardice, to the point of a perverted “bravery” and forcefulness in dealing with victims who complain. You deserve your sorrow because you aren’t going along with the institution that gives them their identity. It’s far more than just that paycheck; they aren’t mercenary but morally hijacked. We face the same mindless abuse from all kinds of smaller bureaucracies in business that mimic the government.

Aside from our advantage of discerning through the heart-mind the moral failures of it, we also have one great ally in the Internet. The bureaucracy survives on secrecy, but it’s shot through with shocking incompetence. It used to be easy to hide that stuff because there was no way to publish what you might discern. Keep in mind that the bureaucracy owns the entire gamut of publication aside from the Internet. But now we have truth leaking out all over the place. Without the Internet we would not know, for example, about the murder of Kenneth Trentedue here in OKC and how that leads to a lot of loose ends in the official narrative on the Murrah Bombing. While the system has mostly shut this whole private investigation down, you and I get the one remaining benefit of seeing an undeniable justification for doubt. That is, we see exposed the cowardly brutality of the bureaucracy.

It’s not brave and noble if you take no significant risks, but the bureaucracy rewards brutality like bravery.

While most of those who see the facts leaking out respond with a predictable outrage aimed at tracking down the perpetrators and holding them accountable, you and I know that it is simply not possible. For one thing, if it weren’t that specific group of thugs carrying out the will of the bureaucracy, it could easily have been others in vast army waiting for the command. The system exists precisely to avoid personal accountability; all the actors are generally interchangeable. The only difference is varying levels of expertise at tying up loose ends and protecting the secrets. Punishing those who murdered Trentedue would change nothing and would not accomplish divine justice. That truth is something that the common citizen rabble will never grasp, because in their minds the old heathen Anglo-Saxon justice is God’s own character.

Much of what we see on the Internet either feeds the monster or serves to distract from the awareness that we are being devoured. Most of the keyboard commandos are actually serving the bureaucracy by keeping alive the fundamental mythology that creates it. No justice is possible from within the system, and the vast majority of activist noise on the Net still belongs to the system by default. You have to shed the whole system before you can even begin to understand. Learn to discern when something shares the nature of bureaucracy.

We can still infiltrate and use all things for His glory.

Postscript: Dr. Bruce Levine notes that virtually the entire field of medicine and counseling psychology is made up of compliant type individuals. “Having steered the higher-education terrain for a decade of my life, I know that degrees and credentials are primarily badges of compliance.” Thus, the likelihood that someone who is anti-authoritarian (demands to verify authority as to validity, competence and trustworthiness) would seem utterly alien to doctors and counselors is virtually guaranteed. To them, the anti-authoritarian is truly insane.

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More Admin Changes

Posted on March 25, 2016 by ehurst

Okay, parish, the Spirit of the Lord is driving me hard right now and I can’t sleep.

Let’s assume for now that this blog service isn’t going anywhere soon.

First, here’s the vision thing: This parish is about to get busier. That is, we should begin to see more people needing what we do. That means more pastoral services, but it also means more fellowship with some of you. If you aren’t into that kind of thing, now is a good time to stop posting comments with your real email address. This is also the time to tell me if you would rather not have your site or blog in my blogroll. That will become a list of affiliated blogs for folks who want to fellowship with others who have similar interests. That’s what churches do, even if they are virtual churches.

Second, this blog will function more specifically as the parish parlor. Think about what a parlor used to be in homes before there was TV or radio. It’s where we entertain guests, keep a bulletin board, and our parish offices will be here. I’ll still post my photos and computer networking tech stuff, but there will be a stronger focus on serving people as a fellowship point and offering practical guidance. This is where I’ll wear my “elder” hat. The other blog will remain the prophet’s pulpit.

Third, I’m still utterly convinced that we will be receiving refugees from mainstream organized religion. I’m not trying to drag folks out of their churches, but I am sure by now you realize that I see problems with most of them. Instead of rehashing a list of what’s wrong, let’s allow the folks decide from themselves why it ain’t working for them. What we do here is prepare to help them build a faith that starts with a whole different set of assumptions. For example, I’m all about that House Church thing. God takes it seriously, so we should, too. If you do anything like that, prepare to share how you do it.

Fourth, if you need to share something and don’t want to have your own blog, let’s talk about guest posts and maybe some other ideas. If we have enough active chatter through this nexus, maybe I need to construct a parish forum? And you should expect the parish staff to expand, too. Right now the only people with anything resembling a title is Sister Christine (“Mama Elder”) and yours truly (Pastor/Elder). We need a real pastor because my calling is actually elder, with a strong prophetic component. If someone has a strong pastoral talent and a site or blog, I’ll link to that appropriately from here.

Fifth, I will maintain the same broad openness to other teachings, but don’t expect me to soften the boundaries I’ve already established. The boundaries for working through this blog are summarized in the Radix Fidem tab above. My services as elder are still open to anyone who isn’t an enemy, just be aware I can only do what God calls me to do.

Finally, if you like to keep an eye on what’s coming down the road, there are some obvious things to look for. Somewhere someone with a higher profile than this blog will start talking about what we teach here. In particular, watch for someone writing about heart-led living and Christian faith. If their chatter in any way resembles what you see here or on Falling into Grace, then we have an answer to that prayer. It’s a good thing by itself, never mind whether anyone acknowledges this blog. If you see something with a more specific linkage to what we do here, that should signal things will start popping.

Now, I’d pay for the premium service to get rid of the advertising at the bottom of my posts, but that’s $100/year (US). I can’t afford that right now; I’m paying that much for the other site (gone as of early 2020). I’ve already given you instructions on how to block ads if that bothers you. However, if we should start drawing a lot more folks, I’m guessing the support will come with that.

I’m all in on this. I’m invested in making this as much like a meat-space church as possible. The bridges are burned and I’m not planning on doing anything else. To some degree, we are blazing a new trail, so don’t be shy if you have some ideas for improvement. I already have plans to change my “About” page and some of the blogroll links. Let’s do church!

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Institutionalized Cowardice

Posted on March 24, 2016 by ehurst

A book recently published is getting a lot of attention: National Security and Double Government by Michael Glennon, Professor of International Law, Fletcher School, Tufts University. I found a paper he published which seems to be the precursor of the book [PDF], if not an exact copy.

First, I have to encourage you to read it for yourself. I’m keeping a copy of the paper on my FTP server. Second, I’m not reviewing it so much as reacting with a characterization based on my personal experience as filtered through my faith and moral grasp: The vast bureaucratic secrecy reflects the underlying cowardice of the average human. Glennon refers to two threads of power in government. One is the official face of government, leaders with all the pomp and glory. Here in the US, he calls them “Madisonians” because Madison was the chief architect of constitutional government. However, it was Truman who founded what we experience today as the “Trumanite” bureaucratic machinery that actually runs the government.

There is a clear and simple reason why the Trumanites run things: They are consistent across the whole history of leadership, both good and bad. The Madisonians don’t actually do anything but posture before the voters and vary wildly from one to another for dramatic effect. It’s the Trumanites that run things because they own the entire mechanism for implementing whatever the Madisonians demand. The fundamental nature of this Trumanite bureaucracy rests on the overriding concern for “national security.”

Because everyone — the entire “national security team” — is accountable, no one is accountable… Its cohesion notwithstanding, the Trumanite network is curiously amorphous. It has no leader. It is not monolithic. It has no formal structure. Its actual membership blurs at the margins. Its ranks reflect the same organizational, philosophical, and personal rivalries and fissures common to all bureaucracies. Blame avoidance ranks high among its priorities.

You have to experience it first hand to truly grasp the perverted mix of heroism and institutionalized cowardice that comes from serving in the military. It’s not that real military leaders do nothing, but that they are permitted to act heroically only in the areas not under Trumanite control. This is also why the Madisonian politicians can do some stuff that hurts and hinders every day life (or by accident, helps), but it’s only those things that the Trumanites don’t care about.

We can build stereotypes, but they don’t always work. Some elements of the CIA are real life action heroes who do some of the most insane stuff, taking physical risks we can’t imagine. But they are heroic in obeying a deep institutional evil. Thus, we have CIA agents arming and training Al-Qaeda and ISIS to kill our heroic uniformed troops. Yes, somewhere up that chain of command are people who know this and keep it going, but it wouldn’t happen without an army of cowardly bureaucrats.

That cowardice percolates into everything, from every angle. The secrecy itself is cast in bureaucratic cowardice. Even if someone gave you clearance to the deepest layers of government secrets, the whole thing is written from the cowardly mindset and you can’t touch it without the perversion creeping into your soul.

It’s all about the status quo. “Trumanites have no time to re-examine the cosmological premises on which policy is based.” This cowardice percolates upward, too. Thus, we see it expressed ever more often in the Madisonian branch. When was the last time you got to vote for a candidate you actually believed in? Are we not herded into believing in someone we would never choose, but who has positioned themselves to the closest proximity of our beliefs? Both parties are now run by Trumanites.

Addenda: This is why all that chatter about firing, or even executing, all the members of Congress or other manifestations of Madisonian government is meaningless. It would change nothing. It’s a waste of energy even to think it. Changing the course of American government means executing the thousands of Trumanite bureaucrats first and dismantling the entire system. That is a task almost no one would undertake and rightly so. The only way out now is for the whole thing to implode, which is what we see now taking place in slow motion. The problems of American government will die with the institution itself, not before.

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