Painting Signs

Posted on January 14, 2016 by ehurst

You can’t defy the Creator.

Don’t think in terms of absolutes or you’ll never get this. God operates on the basis of proximity in His Creation. So you will find yourself in relative terms close to or far from Him, and like any genuine living relationship, it varies with the context. The point is that you can’t stand in His place, but you can sit in His lap. Or, you can just wander off. There are boundaries of a sort out there, and crossing them means He takes certain actions, but by the time you test the limits you are no longer in a position to know what He thinks.

The image of sitting in His lap is contextual; it signals a level of closeness based on our commitment to His Person. You don’t stay there. You go out and take care of His business, and then return to commune with Him in whatever degree of closeness you strive to hold. You don’t get closer by success, but by desire and surrender. It’s personal; success matters, but it’s more of an effect than a cause of closeness.

What we see around us now is hardly what He intended. By no means could anyone put into words exactly what the situation is, but Scripture offers more of that same imagery indicating some useful structure, some way of grasping enough of it that we can decide and act on it usefully. One of the first things we have to grasp is that you can’t really trust your intellect to handle much more than mere planning and implementation of our human response. None of this can even begin without making sure the mind has stepped down from the presumption of ruling.

In fact, the mind is both the best tool and worst enemy we have in the endeavor to serve the Creator. A lot of stuff can happen before we come to this place of sensing a need to draw near to Him, and that stuff can create a pervasive conditioning in the mind, a matrix of assumptions and expectations that are false. Not utterly false in every exhaustive detail, but false enough to confuse us. So we end up stumbling along in some measure of darkness, trying to feel our way along. Part of what we find includes doubting what is already on our maps.

In that sense, I am in the same boat as the rest of humanity. We are all exploring what God made and gave to each of us, and trying to gain a better grasp of what it is. The mere interest itself signals that we grasp on some level that what we live with now is not what God had in mind for us. This is not what He designed us for and not how things ought to be. It’s rather like exploring and mapping the territory of reality, though with the complication that no two of us will ever draw exactly the same map. Each of us has our own territory, as it were. Naturally the nature of the terrain does overlap; God tends to do things rather consistently between one creature and the next. Still, there is a level of variation that we have to figure into our mapping, in the sense that we become aware of others.

As pastor of this virtual parish, a part of my map is a calling to understand the mapping process itself. I’m a cartographer or sorts; I try to understand and teach mapping to others. I’ll show you my map on the premise that yours will differ in details.

A handful of you have availed yourselves of this service. You’ve written emails or called me and told me of your confusing explorations. So far, I’ve been able to help most of you who asked, although it wasn’t always quickly. Still, it appears God has chosen to give me some insight into this process of feeling our way along the broad territory of blessings He granted us. And when you come back to me with the inevitable rejoicing over your better grasp of things in your world, it makes my heart sing. If this were the only joy in my life, this would be enough.

Granted, sometimes it’s not a monumental breakthrough for you. Most of the time it will be just a minor refinement. Again, if this were the best I could offer, it would be pretty good joy by itself. It would be enough to help me drive through all the stuff I run into keeping the mapping school open and teaching. Once in a while I need to hear back from you. Don’t think I’m begging for some outpouring of feedback all at once. This is not a “make the pastor feel good” post. Rather, I’m asking you to be aware that, even if we are comparing notes on our different understandings, it helps me keep going with joy. Also, be aware that the extravagant batch of recent donations says a lot in itself. God is at work in and through you folks and it’s hard to express my gratitude.

However, you should never get the impression I’m bugging you to contact me without God prompting it. There is one good reason for that: I’m driven very hard to keep searching and writing and posting it where you can read it. This goes beyond obsession in the sense that none of this arises from my human desire. I can’t be silent. If I were the only person reading it, this ministry would continue one way or another. That was the basis on which this blog was started. I’m just tickled that it seems to have touched a few other lives and I can at least imagine myself as a conduit for His glory.

I’m not giving you anything God didn’t already place in your soul. The answers are already in you. If you are hearing from God in the first place, all I can do is help you with the mapping as you feel your way across the terrain of your own existence. I refuse to take credit for anything more than that. Some of you could just as easily help me find my way, as well. That’s how it works; that’s part of the common terrain we all share as humans. I’m painting signs to point out features you might not notice and I want to see the ones you paint.

When we seek His face as Lord, He delivers to us more than we could ever hope to discover.

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Refuse to Play 2

Posted on January 13, 2016 by ehurst

This should be short; for some of you it may even be sweet.

I’ll try to avoid propaganda terms and stick with moral truth: Everything we discuss has to stand before God, which is the same as saying it has to come from God and reflect His moral character. Western Civilization rejects virtually everything necessary to understand God, and presumes a range of notions about God that are ludicrous perversions of what He revealed. There are a lot of false gods in Western thinking.

You’ll notice the Bible says nothing that supports modern discussions of racism, for example. Most people who talk about that word think the Bible is racist itself, or they ignore large chunks of revelation so they can cherry pick the words they like to support their particular bogus ideas.

With God, the issue is unjustified animosity.

Wariness is not a sin; we are hard-wired to be wary of folks we don’t know. We are hard-wired to be even more wary of folks who come across as different, particularly when those differences represent something that has hurt us in the past. Granted, it’s easy to twist these natural inclinations, but the wariness is human nature that can’t be trained out of us. It’s a sin to suggest wariness is somehow evil.

I’ve already hammered home repeatedly that there is not a single morally just society in our world, nor can there be until we go back to the ANE feudal society. That was God’s design and any other idea is sin — period. So if you want to talk about reducing the wariness, it has to rest first and foremost on a shared tribal identity as defined by God. All the other demands thrown at us are inherently invalid.

So you and I face a world with no hope of ever getting it right because God’s answer is precluded in every way possible. What we have left is a crap we have face, a galactic-sized pool of lies. And we aren’t going to solve the world’s problems, or any nation’s problems, nor even our neighbor’s problems. We will be lucky if we can gain enough moral awareness to work through our own individual problems. No matter where we live, no matter what the ambient culture, we are aliens because of our commitment to heart-led service of the Creator. He is the source of all our understanding.

It’s just possible we might offer some glimmer of wisdom to folks who ask us. If you fail to grasp that there is a vast concerted evil plan at work in this world, then you do not understand God’s Word at all. It really doesn’t matter how you envision it as people colluding to hurt others; the Bible clearly states that there are cosmic demonic forces at work and they are as much purposeful intelligence as we need to grasp to proceed with the task of glorifying Our Lord in the midst of what we see around us.

So you can blame all the humans you like, but we can be sure Satan is pushing for some folks to make decisions that will hurt other people. And one of those decisions involved herding a bunch of folks from one part of the world to another part of the world. And a critical element in this plan is to destroy the place to which those folks are being herded. The radical difference between the culture at the destination and culture of the folks going there is impossible to understate.

And there is nothing particularly virtuous about either the folks there or the folks going there. We mustn’t forget that there is no society of which God approves anywhere on this earth. Some are a little closer than others, but not a one is righteous in God’s sight. Meanwhile, there will be a horrendous conflict in the clash of cultures that is entirely natural. Your calling and mission to glorify God means you will need to reach out to everyone in this mess while keeping an awareness of their particular moral needs. We will have mercy on all because we are the true aliens among humans, and we are the only ones truly at home in Creation.

We aren’t at war with people, despite whether they may regard themselves at war with us. We are at war with moral darkness; we reflect the light of God’s glory.

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Refuse to Play

Posted on January 12, 2016 by ehurst

The only difference between them is artificial.

The political left in the US (liberal, progressive) reflects the overt worship of that amorphous goddess of feminist mythology. The political right (conservative and/or reactionary) is simply covert about it. Both presume a mythology that men-as-males are some flavor of trouble and that women are closer to the presumptive deity. Political debate boils down to the particular balance of power between male versus female.

Even though I wrote a book about it, I still struggle to define the perverse way Satan has suckered us into something that seems real and which mimics in some ways what God created, yet so fundamentally false. At the very least, we note how the West drives the heart-mind into the territory of the subconscious. It seeks to divert the natural dominance of the heart, and the natural reliance of the mind on the heart, into some false state where we simply imagine that our minds rule.

Poll the ostensibly male leadership of conservative social institutions, particularly mainstream evangelical churches, and you’ll find that there is some desperate effort to keep men in charge. They say it should be the natural order, but everything in the structure of the organization presumes otherwise. You should see the propaganda in men’s Bible studies bearing a burdensome presumption that they are somehow obliged to defend manhood. There are no women around to level any kind of accusations, but there is this unconscious pool of feminist presumption that everyone simply accepts as the default. Worse, men are defending a false manhood in the first place.

The fundamental Western image of manhood is the immature boy, the fellow who never quite grows up and could not tie his own shoes without some corrective guidance from a woman. So he climbs out of his mother’s lap and into the lap of his wife. He remains in desperate need of mothering, and as Freud noted, he continues through adulthood seeking to make his wife his mother. Freud was right only because our culture is so very wrong. The only difference between left and right in our day is whether we should assume that men can be tamed or not. In order to rebel against social convention, the man must play the bad boy. He’s still within the same frame of reference.

This is quite the opposite of the Bible. The man of the Ancient Near East (ANE) in today’s social structure simply ignores all the nonsense and rejects the whole narrative. He neither is nor does manhood, but assumes it on a moral level far deeper. He lives it as the fundamental moral truth against a whole world of deception. He might be willing to explain it in terms of manifestation in his own life, but it defies definition and debate. He’ll walk in it because he simply cannot deny reality.

Western women are steered into solipsism. They demand the moral high ground for whatever it is they want at that moment, and only an evil miscreant could possibly argue. She is taught to demand that the whole universe bow at her whims, but redefines them as moral reality. Meanwhile, any man who refuses to go along with her demands is being petulant and irresponsible. She is the manifestation of moral truth itself. She would find an ANE man utterly impossible and dismiss him as uncivilized (even as she is drawn like a magnet to his masculinity).

The ANE as the broad cultural background of the Bible did have a problem with feminine deification, but it was an entirely different kind of mythology. We have almost no words for explaining the difference because the full impact of subconscious assumptions are radical. There were some elements in common with what we see today, but little of that spiteful resentment between the sexes fundamental to Western mythology. Ancient pagan goddess worship still valued manhood for itself as essential to cosmic balance. There was nothing in it aimed at extinguishing masculine identity.

Western mythology presumes that men are some brand of inherent evil, something that would have shocked and saddened every ANE devotee of goddess worship. Yes, there were infamous departures, but those did not affect the cultural background. In the broad general trend of ANE goddess mythology, nothing prevented a devotee from totally surrendering to her man. She didn’t worship a competing deity, but stuck to the natural realm of womanhood within the assumed framework of male dominance. The fundamental question was not whether men could be tamed, but whether and how each individual woman can be tamed. There was a presumption that women are the weaker ones, not just words to that effect with a sarcastic twist. The Bible presumes women in general are morally vulnerable, not just physically so.

The most serious problem in the Bible with worship of Baal and his consort Ashtarte was a whole range of things we utterly fail to see, because we read back into the Bible our Western assumptions. It was as much a matter of Ashtarte as the grounds for pulling men into Baal worship as anything else. Moses was up against the pervasive premise that there were multiple deities, as opposed to multiple images of the One Creator. The broad moral difference between Jehovah and the various manifestations of Baal is virtually invisible to Western minds. Baal worship did not challenge the shepherd image of manhood, but called for a series of blasphemous deviations from God’s revealed character within that broad ANE cultural background. Nothing in our culture today resembles Baal worship any more than it resembles genuine faith in Jehovah.

As previously noted on this blog, ANE male dominance was entirely different thing from what is imagined here in the West. Again, we struggle for the words to point it out with sufficient impact. ANE manhood included a deep compassion that compelled men to take up the office of leadership against a great personal reluctance, but no one questioned whether he would and could be that compassionate father figure. Moral failure was a matter of self-will and pampering of an entirely different sort than we recognize. It was more a failure of self-sacrifice within those alien cultural norms. The image of the grouchy Norse deity or the playful man-boy of Germanic legend would be ludicrous to ANE men, even the worst of them.

Scholars point out that our Western society doesn’t even get sexual perversion right. We label entirely natural urges as “perverse” and create a whole new range of perversions that never existed in the ANE. We can’t even get homosexuality right, but invest it with an aura that never existed outside Western Civilization. Yes, it will always be a sin, but we are so perverted about perversion itself that we bind God’s redemptive hand by a priori rejection of it.

Men, don’t fight for your proper place before God. Let the heathen Cult of Oester fester and wither without you. Let Westerners imagine you as they wish. Every encounter with moral conflict is a matter of measuring tactics, not perceiving a threat that suckers you into resentment. Refuse to play. Refuse to buy into the fundamental assumptions. Take up your Cross with Christ, but leave behind all the false mythology and find the image from which God made us. Learn to live by your heart and you will eventually discover it for yourself. It won’t happen in a day; it won’t be finished when you die.

Women, your escape from Western mythology is also complicated, but for an entirely different reason. You have far more to sacrifice than Western men. Nothing in Scripture pretends that the Cult of Oester lacks depth and a range of things that appeal to our sense of beauty. Nor is this a question of the silly absolutism that so thoroughly cripples our understanding of reality; we aren’t required to trash every detail of the imagery. Rather, we have to understand that the Western roots in the Germanic tribal society and their particular, pernicious brand of Oester worship is not reality. It requires dragging out a vast depth of falsehood that prevents women from surrendering that last element of themselves to the God of the Bible. The Western Cult of Oester is just a mask for denying God. He does not offer to explain or justify why He chose the masculine image for Himself, so it’s not something up for discussion.

Just as a side note, any discussion of how our image of God might include feminine aspects is wholly polluted by our false Western understanding of male and female identity. We set aside such discussion until we are certain the participants are cleansed of false notions about sexual identity.

When we rebuild our understanding on the imagery of Scripture, we begin to understand why we cannot possibly participate in the silly political debates of our time. It’s not a mere question of refining the agenda, but a wholesale rejection of all the assumptions about reality itself. You cannot possibly take seriously any part of the current scene, and certainly no political candidate or partisan agenda, because all of it simply reaffirms the slavery of our minds to the Big Lie. If you participate at all, it’s with a cynical resignation that your choice is merely some tactical approach to the lesser of evils, taken from a field that is wholly and relentlessly evil.

There is no objective reality to which you can appeal. We pretend that this or that figure or agenda is more reasonable on some imaginary basis of morality, but it’s a morality bearing little resemblance to the character of Our Creator. Until you turn to your heart-mind as the starting place for ruling your mind, you cannot know what God wants for you, never mind what He might want for humanity at large.

You don’t need to know what I might say about this or that political assertion; you need to see how wrong the whole thing is before we can compare notes.

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The Server

Posted on January 11, 2016 by ehurst

Be aware that this post will remain the reference point and is subject to updates.

After reviewing what’s involved with RAID on servers and so forth under Linux, it turns out we could spend less on a high-end workstation and get something actually easier to run. The durability rating is just about the same on both types of machine. So I finally settled on a Dell Precision T3400 that came with the mouse and keyboard. It does have some zip, but I was looking more at flexibility than anything else. It’s listed as fully compatible for Linux. This thing is considered suitable for CAD and could push two monitors, but that’s overkill for our needs. It comes with a single hard drive, and it won’t be hard to get another later on and run a fairly simple software-based backup mechanism that creates an on-going “ghost” copy of the original.

I made it a point to avoid anything that had an OS already installed; there were dozens based on this model. This thing was the most for the money in that product line, and certainly cheap enough. The blurb offers some details:

Dell Precision T3400 2x Intel Quad Core 2.40GHz, 1TB Harddrive, 8GB RAM

I found a matching Dell 20″ monitor with some of the balance of the account.

Both items should arrive around 18 January. All we need now is a battery backup unit and those are easy enough to find locally. The PayPal balance is enough to get the smallest of decent quality, but if you want to help us get a larger unit, you can still contribute toward this project.

And I received another $100 toward the battery backup. You people are soooooo generous. I can’t thank you enough.

More than the money, I am grateful that you folks were praying. I felt the strong hand of the Lord guiding me through this process and that’s something you just cannot buy.

Update 1: 12 January afternoon — notified that both items have shipped. The monitor comes UPS and the server itself via FedEx. Both notices say NLT 19 January.

Update 2: 14 January noonish — the monitor arrived via UPS. No tracking was offered by the vendor, but I guessed the day correctly, just not the hour. Ordered the battery back-up but the vendor’s website malfunctioned and turned my in-store pickup into shipping to my home in three days or so with no means to fixing it. Office Depot is no longer on my list of good guys.

Update 3: 14 January — FedEx claims the computer was delivered, but I never got it. Hopefully it’s just a case of the driver too lazy to do his job and maybe he dropped it at the office of the apartment complex. Another company I never liked much and now even less. At least UPS could read the address and dropped the monitor at my door and hit the doorbell. And I gave up a nice long ride on the best riding day so far this month for a passel of frustrations (trouble with my netbook, too).

God bless you all.

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Prayer Request: The Server (Updated)

Posted on January 10, 2016 by ehurst

I believe we are at the point where we can make this an official prayer request: Our new parish server will be the virtual church house.

The “building committee” has done some research and we figure the emphasis is on reliability, not flashy horsepower. The latter is okay, but we are mostly concerned that the machine have some fail-safe built into it. For techies, that means we are more interested in RAID and durability than lotsa CPU and RAM. It won’t do a lot of intensive computing, but what computing it does perform, it has to do 24/7 and we have to make it unlikely as possible that any trouble arise. It needs solid hardware far above a mere functional level.

Some of you probably know that installing Linux can turn any device into a server because of how Linux is structured, but we aren’t going to run this from my netbook because this poor thing would likely burn out before a month has passed under that kind of heavy workload. Worse, there is nothing to protect the contents if the single notebook drive starts failing.

If you can help us get one, that’s a real blessing. Otherwise, we have to come up with a minimum of around $300 just for the machine itself, never mind the peripherals (monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.). That buys on eBay a minimal and old machine, so more is better, of course. I’m not a predatory fund raiser, but this is what we have found so far. God can use anything He likes, and anything He doesn’t like will fail, but we would be irresponsible if we didn’t do our homework based on the blessings of experience and expertise He’s already granted us. And if I’ve misstated things here, correct me, folks.

If you worry about me slavering over expensive toys, you wouldn’t be taking me serious in the first place. This is the vision I have and I’m all for keeping it modest. Were this just a cover for fulfilling my personal fantasies, I assure you it would require lotsa CPU cores, high speeds and terabytes of RAM with a gamer’s video card. And a few weeks later I’d be bored with playing on it and start installing other operating systems, etc. This is all about work; we want solid, not flash.

Update: And we have our first donation of $50 toward the server, thank you.

Update 2: Another donation for $300. This is getting serious, folks. It will be a few days yet as I learn to evaluate what constitutes suitable hardware. If you are adept at this, I’d be grateful for that kind of support, as well. I’m going to use as much as I receive for the tower and report back to you here once I have it in my possession.

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In the Cosmic Jail

Posted on January 10, 2016 by ehurst

Pay no attention to the propaganda until you start from the assumption that it’s propaganda. Back off; divest yourself of any interest in taking sides. When you operate from the divine moral plane using the moral logic of God’s character that is alien to Western society, you don’t buy into the categories and labels. You simply note them for what they are, as attempts to short circuit moral convictions and hijack the drive we naturally seek for shaping our lives.

Forces of Darkness use human agents to hold the veil of the Curse in place so that we cannot see the light. Our human nature is wired to seek a sense of conviction to guide our mental processes. Darkness supplants that with a false conviction, all the while convincing us that we are guided by reason and logic. It is merely a false belief that we can be ruled by reason; what’s actually happening is that we are still ruled by convictions, but disconnected from our heart-mind, supplanted by the mythology of objective reality.

Set aside the mainstream narrative of history. For example, the birth of the KKK in the South was merely an alternative means for the existing government to assert their previous agenda in competition against the new ruling regime in Washington, DC. Both sides of this conflict were evil men answering to their lust for unjust power, different uniforms on the same team, whether they were conscious of this or not. But the idea of the Klan seemed useful for the tiny handful who were aware of this basic truth about unjust power. So in our day and time, the KKK is just a fake “rebellion” that is designed to capture a segment of the population disinclined to obey the official government.

The so-called “Oregon Occupation” by Ammon Bundy and his crew is a similar operation. If men won’t easily submit to the official government with the standard mask, then let them submit to it with a different mask. There may well be genuine militia types out there, but I assure you that there is not a single organization, regardless how shadowy, that has not been infiltrated and is currently guided by someone who represents the interests of the ruling class. That it may well include real human slaughter is not the point. Should these militia folks actually win, kill a bunch of federal agents or simply drive a popular dissolution of the current system of government, it will still be the same people in charge when the new government is formed. Nothing significant will change.

I note in passing that the ostensibly more responsible militia groups that refuse to participate in this madness are generally not focused on fighting the government so much as protecting the people. They are taking a bigger bite of the shepherd’s call. God works with proximities to His character, not in absolutes; none of us is perfect. Some of these groups have engaged in their own brand of corruption, but they are not the same as the folks involved in the Oregon standoff. If you don’t grasp the difference between rebellion and defense, it’s hard to explain why we haven’t already seen the likes of assassinations of major evil figures in government power. Virtually all the rebels are false flag operators. But while I assert that these more sane organizations are still misguided by their commitment to the visionary propaganda of some American founding fathers, their aims are at least a little closer to divine moral justice than “fertilizing the Tree of Liberty with the blood of tyrants.”

The entire range of political debate in our world today is fake. The folks on the ground may well be genuine believers, but the people who shape this thing are determined to rule and keep their perquisites at all costs. They believe only in themselves, and will say whatever it takes to keep the little people occupied. Sometimes you can tell a politician is fake, using whatever opportunity arises to seize the imagination of the citizenry. But their real passion has nothing to do with the political agenda they espouse; their passion is their own power.

Are you aware that the Republican party leadership would rather have Clinton than Trump? She is on their team; Trump is building a new franchise and they don’t own it. It’s not that Trump is morally better than the existing collection of plutocrats — he’s one of them. He’s simply jockeying for a better position in the game. His opponents fear a genuine loss, but it won’t remove them from their positions of privilege. Their losses would be relative. The corruption and abuse won’t end. It will simply taste different to us as the gravy flows in a different direction for awhile. Give it time; as the new ruling team gets bigger and better structured, the same level of oppression will return with a new flavor.

The teaching in Psalm 82 stands eternally: God has revealed His character as the definition of justice. The fundamental requirement for a blessed life in this fallen world is Eastern feudalism. All other forms of government are blasphemy, rejection of revelation. So long as those in power refuse to honor their divine obligation for love and familial compassion for those they rule, no government is acceptable in His sight. Every other form of human organization is property of Satan.

But let’s follow this a little farther. Perhaps you are familiar with the ugly verbal dispute between the Holocaust Industry and some Revisionist Historians. In much of Europe, for example, you can actually go to jail for saying or writing that you don’t believe the official dogma about the Holocaust — the death and destruction of European Jewish communities leading up to and during WW2.

On the other hand, genuine and honest historical review does not support the government approved dogma. Many are careful to avoid saying Jews didn’t die in the camps in large numbers, for example. Many deny that herding Jews into the work camps was justified in any way. Yet because they don’t repeat the mantra of “Six Million Jews” they are subject to government oppression, notwithstanding the Jews’ own census organization shows that 6 million is about all there was in Europe in the first place.

So as a backlash against this heavy-handed persecution of diseenting voices, we then have this substantial underground anti-Jew movement that not only uses this Revisionist history data, but present various flavors of, “If only we had killed that many; we wouldn’t have half the problems in our world today.” By now you probably understand that this backlash is almost surely funded by various agencies, to include a lot of Zionist money passing under the table.

Do we support the apparently sane Revisionist inquiry into the facts? Not really, because they are calling for a mighty effort to press their arguments and somehow force governments to back off, as if that would make things better. We note in passing what is likely the truth, but none of this is worth more than a nodding acquaintance for us. The outcome of the conflict won’t change anything that matters. The real issue stands where it always stood from back in the Garden of Eden: Who is committing their whole self to embracing the Creator and His revelation? I have yet to meet a single Jew who stands for the heart-led pursuit of God’s glory. I’ve not encountered too many Christians embracing it, either, for that matter.

Whenever and wherever we do find people living with their conscious awareness on that moral plane of the heart, Creation itself calls out to us that we should seek to fellowship and commune with them. Show me one human secular government that promotes heart-led living and I’ll beg for citizenship. All others are unworthy.

So we support neither changing current evil government in Europe, nor do we support the modern State of Israel, nor any other government. And we don’t bother with fighting them, because God is in charge of them through the proxy of Satan, and we don’t engage Satan that way. Christ forbade us from mixing with human politics because He came on the cusp of the final break with God’s direct involvement in human government. The Covenant of Moses died on the Cross with Christ; their rejection of His message was the final incontrovertible proof that it could not be done through a human government. God turned all human politics over to Satan in terms of legal dominion.

As individuals we may seek whatever advantage God grants to us from human governments, but we make no pretense that there is any hope for righteousness there. We were warned to be cynical about even genuine Eastern feudal church government, because we are commanded to be cynical about ourselves. So we seek to keep it small, personal and below the radar of human government notice, as much as possible. However much blessing God offers through His eternal moral Law comes through nothing beyond the congregation of spiritual family in feudal communion.

Everything else is just Satan herding humanity under his dominion. Don’t confront it on Satan’s own terms. Infiltrate on God’s terms.

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Psalm 83

Posted on January 9, 2016 by ehurst

There are numerous historical and geographical references, but this Psalm does not refer to a literal historical event. Rather, it’s similar in purpose to John’s Armageddon: a parable indicating a moral condition that never changes.

In a series of Hebrew parallelisms, the psalmist throws at us contrasts and comparisons drawn from the well known lore of Israel’s troubles. He begins by throwing at us three different images of God taking His time. Keep in mind that speaking is often a symbol for action. Thus, he depicts Jehovah as quiet, as holding back when people are begging for Him to act, and as taking a rest. Contrast this with the rowdy and raucous behavior of those who have always been quick to blaspheme the God of Israel. Does He not hear their insults?

Nations have fought each other since human memory, but it seems there is one thing they can all agree on: Israel and her God had to go. The author lists all the neighbors on every side, including Israel’s cousins: Ammon, Moab and Edom. Some of these nicknames are unfamiliar to most readers: Hagrites are the descendants of Hagar AKA Ishmaelites. Gebal refers to a Phoenician city north of Tyre and Sidon on the modern Lebanese coast (Byblos, Lebanon today). And we can’t leave out Assyria, of course, the brutal empire centered in today’s northern Iraq. At any given time in Israel’s history up to the time this psalm was published, one or more of those nations was agitating to humble her. The psalmist insists this is driven by a hatred for Jehovah, and hints at the envy for His rich provision to His people.

But for all these threats, there is an equal number of historical incidents where God’s rich provision included crushing some of them. The psalm cites some of the more famous victories under Joshua and Gideon and others during the period of Judges when Israel’s possession of the land was none too certain. So the psalmist calls on God to reduce them to dust or chaff in the rather stiff and constant winds blowing across Israel. Burn them until there is nothing left! Turn their own nature deities against them, as it were. We are given an image of great armies and their leaders standing defeated, disarmed, naked and ashamed.

Why? The only valid cause is the reputation of Jehovah, the One who claims to be Creator of all things.

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Virtual Redoubt

Posted on January 9, 2016 by ehurst

This is another one of those wild visionary rambles. You’ve been warned.

The global economic system is in collapse. There’s turmoil and increasing social instability in our world, particularly in the Western countries. Some very powerful figures are provoking it willfully and intentionally. It’s not hard to see that the US in particular is being set-up for the American version of the “Arab Spring.” If you had time to read certain CIA manuals and other sources on how to destabilize a country and bring down the government, you would recognize the patterns at play here.

I’ve proposed a parable: The Cult. Our language and culture isn’t the best at this, but I’ve tried to shape an entirely different understanding of moral forces at work in our world. Some of you struggle with it still. That’s no surprise and I can’t blame any of you for that; we were all born under a smothering blanket of blindness in a civilization that is wholly unlike anything before it. But that world is dying and we can’t drag with us all the baggage of the past.

The teaching and faith in Radix Fidem and Kiln of the Soul parish won’t work using the old descriptive legalistic approach to religion. It’s easy to get wrapped up in specifics and chase all the wrong things. That’s the siren song of the Fall, the lust for human primacy that corrupted Old Testament faith into Judaism. It’s the fabric of our society today and all the noisy nonsense about what we are experiencing. So long as you buy the big lie, you’ll chase false solutions. I’m not a prepper, not a survivalist, and certainly no militiaman. Were I any part of that, I would have left that mobile home park and moved farther into the wilderness off the grid, and I would have built myself a small fortress with a huge store of food, supplies and weapons. Instead, I moved into an urban apartment complex and have almost none of that prepper stuff (though I wouldn’t mind having some more canned food). It’s not that I am in no danger at all, but that physical danger is simply not much of an issue either way. Whatever happens with human governments and terrorism and militias is just background noise.

The divine mission and calling is not to survive, but to trust God for the whole question of human existence while I pursue this virtual pastoral ministry. So long as He needs me alive, no one on this earth can take my life. When it’s time to bring me Home, nothing on this earth can keep me here. Christ hung on the Cross until the mission of redemption was accomplished, and then He died simply by leaving His body. It’s our desire to become so close to the Father that we treat death as a relief, a joyous reward for pleasing Him. But it comes at His command.

The biggest threat to my ministry is not turmoil, armed conflict, or poverty. The biggest threat to my ministry is online for the simple reason that the ministry is online. It’s not actually me but my testimony that echoes of divine truth. Attacking me in my home won’t stop what I’ve started; the Internet never forgets. Attacking my online presence is a different story, and it’s currently a little more exposed and vulnerable than I like. I’m not building a physical fortress; I’m hoping to build a virtual dominion of Kingdom service that is exceedingly difficult to silence.

Most of the turmoil that we see in the news is drama. It’s real enough in one sense, but in itself the results of each dramatic episode will not change the reality of our human condition. This is the old “bread and circuses.” The Cult is trying to distract us through total absorption with all sorts of diversions. Mostly it’s aimed at trying to keep everyone too stirred up to pay attention to genuine heart-led faith or any other pursuit of the Creator’s glory. The moral battlefield is not where bullets fly and blood runs. That movie (The Matrix) had it backwards; reality is the big lie in moral terms. The future of moral conflict will be mostly virtual — cyberwar will be the primary path for subjugation. The rising Network Civilization will be totally different from Western Civilization.

But it gets more complicated. What I wrote about The Cult may be partially obsolete already. It appears there are some folks who seek to hijack some portion of the script, rewriting things based on this massive shift in human perception. At the very least, some of the servants of The Cult have departed from old methods, and the plutocrats we know about are in genuine distress. There is a new generation rising in those circles, same as with the rest of us. I confess that I can’t discern whether it’s just the servants or The Cult itself that is in turmoil. For the first time in human history, we have a generation of people born with an awareness and expectation of instant global communications. We can already see how it changes human behavior in the aggregate. Even if The Cult itself doesn’t change their commitments, they won’t be able to pursue them in quite the same ways because the mass of humanity they seek to manipulate won’t respond to the same precise bag of tricks any more. The task of enslaving humanity has quickly become a totally different game for them. There’s a new layer of abstraction that could make it both harder and easier.

In parabolic terms, imagine that the earth has fractured and whole continents have shifted in a very short time. Most of the people surivived and their relationships are unchanged, but it’s not the same world and only the most nimble ruling class can adapt quickly enough to maintain their position. As you might expect, there is turmoil in the ruling class, too, as some take advantage of instability to jockey for a better position. That series of tectonic shifts symoblizes the dramatic cultural shift brought on by ubiquitous global networking. The old national borders are gone, in the sense that they are meaningless relics of the past. We are also seeking to exploit this situation for the glory of God by restoring lost moral vision.

The moral perspective from ancient times stands ready to help us understand how reality works. “We war not against flesh and blood” it says in Ephesians 6:12, reflecting the ancient moral understanding. It doesn’t matter who the people are if you grasp the driving motive that shapes a consistent and discernible power in our world. We are in the moral stream or out, but it’s not about us. Get this and you are in a position to grasp your own divine calling in terms of a counter-force driving you to expose the moral truth. At that level of perception, you and I aren’t important — it’s what drives us, our convictions and commitments that matter. It’s a question of our moral identity. That’s what we really “are” in that sense, fungible manifestations of moral influence.

Whatever that means for anyone else who adopts some measure of what we teach, I am quite certain of what it means for me, and that’s exploiting the nature of human online engagement, the virtual society of the Internet.

What happens if current efforts to regulate the Net take on reality? How vulnerable is this ministry if someone blocks access, changes the contents or simply erases my account here? Those things could happen easier than you might think. If I put together a shadow server in my apartment, running just like a regular Internet server, but not exposed to the Net, when stuff happens it should take less than an hour to completely replace the virtual infrastructure of this parish. In virtual space, copies are just a matter of possessing storage space on a device, so that an entire virtual city can be multiple places at once.

Having a protected copy of the parish infrastructure requires a real server with all the implementations not possible on my little netbook. We can keep our working copy on a rented server account that is exposed to the Net. Should someone attack that copy, we simply replace the entire virtual church house and all the furnishings in the time it takes to push the data across the wires. For short periods, the home server itself can carry the full load if necessary (the details are too complicate to note here). The point is that my convictions demand I strive to work for this vision, this kind of preparation for tribulation.

At the same time, this home server will foster our continued work on ways to bring into our lives that vision for a virtual parish family. Maybe I don’t know exactly what that looks like for now, but we sure can’t find out without trying some ideas. I’m willing to schlepp through all kinds of things that don’t work on the way to what does. While it’s me doing the work on my end, this is really about the thing that binds us in moral space. It’s not as if we can’t individually proceed on our own, but Our Lord indicated it works a whole lot better if we come together for mutual support. That in itself is a major element in manifesting His glory, that we can congregate in a moral structure stronger than any other form of human association. And if you have a better plan, jump on it. It could work just fine without me, but while I yet breathe I intend to serve you better as virtual pastor. It is inevitable that “better” means “different from what we have now.”

Given what I can see and understand about the matrix of changes at work in our world, I am confident that I can ride out the worst of human misery and social turmoil for as long as God intends to use me. What concerns me is being silenced in the one most fruitful mission I’ve pursued in my whole life up to now. This is the ultimate adventure! You want in on this?

I hate the utter lack of physical contact with you, but somehow this virtual contact is working. God is blessing this; people are finding their own hearts and serving Christ in ways no physical church affords. I don’t hate those churches, but if you and I are going to bring back to human awareness how the heart-led existence is the biblical norm, we can’t trust them to receive the message, much less spread it abroad. Nothing I work with here suggests we should hijack those institutions, and nothing prevents visionary leaders among them from adopting some measure of what have here. But as a whole, mainstream Western Christian religion as an institution is just one more element in the secular meat-space context in which we pursue Our Father’s glory.

We belong to a new reality.

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Yet Another Funeral

Posted on January 8, 2016 by ehurst

Verna Mae Hurst, 6 December 1935 – 3 January 2016

If things go as planned, my elder sister will pick me up for the long ride back out to Tahlequah, OK today. The last time, I officiated at my father’s funeral. This time I will attend my aunt’s funeral. She was the last of Dad’s siblings; the only survivors of that generation are his brother’s widow and my mother.

Against social convention, I remind folks this is actually a good time to die. For those of us who still have a mission for Our Lord’s glory, we keep watching in stunned silence at things we could never have imagined we would see. Keep a good grip on your divine calling.

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Broken Windows Pain

Posted on January 7, 2016 by ehurst

I had a rough day; I worked on a Windows machine.

First, let me assure you that Windows 7 is often faster and smoother on the same hardware than just about any version of Linux. The drivers work better and everything seems much nicer — until you deal with the least little trouble in the Windows Registry. I’ve never seen anything in computer technology so damned fragile, and so nearly impossible to repair. No wonder the Geek Squad and other common computer tech support services are so quick to reinstall from scratch. The diagnostics take forever and tell you almost nothing useful.

All afternoon I ran the official tools from Microsoft, trying to fix a borked update. That has become the single biggest factor in all my Windows tech support work. Windows Update can destroy a system faster than any malware or virus I’ve ever seen. Sure, there are lots of systems running just fine, but if all you deal with are just a handful, you may have no idea how bad it can be. Among six regular clients scattered around the county, four of them have faced a borked update. That is, the Registry got corrupted and dropping it back to the last known good state simply pulls in that same damned update that broke it in the first place, and most of the time it breaks things again.

There are just too many ways for it go wrong from the silliest, most insignificant thing someone does with their computer that just may not be perfectly alright. Again, it has nothing to do with malware or viruses, but some ordinary end-user activity that shouldn’t be a problem, but it is with Windows. I’ll try a lot of fixes the Geek Squad won’t bother with, but I do understand their reasoning for refusing to waste so much time with it.

So Linux can be more difficult to use in a jillion small ways, but at least it isn’t fragile. Diagnosis is so very quick and easy by comparison, not to mention awfully rare. You can keep your broken Windows; I’m tired of bleeding from all the shattered glass.

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