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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Odds and Ends Again

Posted on January 7, 2016 by ehurst

I once wrote a humorous story about how my opinion might not be worth as much as a rat’s butt. The price of rat’s butt has gone up…

Malheur National Wildlife Refuge: That business in Oregon of militia types holing up in an unused BLM building, supposedly in response to the Feds playing too rough with a rancher and his family, is not what it appears to be. Some of the folks inside that building are known federal agents. Even from a position totally outside the patriot militia movement, or the larger so-called Liberty Movement for that matter, I have no trouble spotting them. This whole thing is drama, and while it is a form of terrorism, some part of the US government is sponsoring both sides. The Cult doesn’t care how it turns out because it’s just one more bump in a long, rough road. Don’t get involved, not even verbally, with what appears to be an actual dispute; there are no good guys in the primary dispute.

As a side note, you won’t hear much about a third party — at least one Native American tribe is affected by all of this. The BLM holds a lot of tribal claims in so-called custodial care. The BLM plays rough with refusing to give the tribes proper access and use, but won’t properly protect their interests by going after violators. Instead, the BLM simply abuses everyone except those inside the federal government. If you can’t understand why a heart-led religion pays so much attention to native tribes, you don’t understand heart-led living itself. On the other hand, I’m not impressed with the rhetoric from the tribal representatives.

It’s not that advertisers don’t get it; they have no intention of listening. You have to be some part psychopath to do what advertisers do, particularly online.

The war against ad blockers didn’t start when users began using the software. It started when online outlets refused to understand that content is advertising and advertising is content, and if any part of that equation is bad, the whole thing falls apart. There’s a reason why users use ad blockers after all: many online ads suck harder than a vacuum cleaner looking for love. But they don’t have to. Everyone has their stories about ads they have liked or loved. Some readers will always block ads, but not most of them. If ads were good and fun, they wouldn’t need to be blocked and users wouldn’t want to block them. Fix that and the war on ad blocking can be retired.

The biggest issue right now is the abuse of online ad services as the vector for malware. The people who run the ad services on the Net generally refuse to make any effort to prevent crooks injecting malware through the service. The technology already exists to block almost all of that. In my opinion, until the “drive-by malware infections” stop entirely, it won’t matter if advertising gets more entertaining. I’ll block as much advertising as I possibly can, and help all my ministry clients do the same.

In the real world, managing apartments can make your hair turn gray early. I consider myself pretty realistic. The maintenance guys recently fixed a leak under my kitchen sink. I started it by replacing the cut-off valve that was leaking. Then a much smaller leak developed in the supply hose attached to it. You start moving that older stuff around and it can break. But they didn’t just fix that little leak; they replaced the faucets and supply lines altogether. On the other hand, they would hardly fix the beat-up facings on the front door-frame. They aren’t paying the electric bill. So some of your donations go for things like wood epoxy putty to rebuild a battered door facing, and new insulation trim around the door frame or on the door itself. The local hardware store takes PayPal for online orders that I can pick up from the store same day. Now the front door is the smallest source of draft air in the place.

Contrast that with Walmart’s online store. They must have out-sourced the whole thing, because I can watch as my browser status bar flashes the bits and pieces feeding into each page on the website, coming from different servers scattered all over the place. One page displaying a selection of products in response to a search term consists of content pulled from over a dozen different servers. And I was hardly surprised when the images failed to match the actual items. Recently the descriptions began mismatching. It starts to look like fraudulent advertising. To beat it all, their checkout engine (“virtual shopping cart”) is provided by someone who created a static-sized splash page that refuses to scroll so that I can find all the controls and actually pay for the merchandise using my netbook. In other words, somewhere in the chain of severs rendering that page on my screen, one or more is completely failing to notice the size of viewing portal. How can they ignore something so fundamental to website development?

Several folks released various kinds of tools that helped get rid of the Win10 harassment on Windows. However, I think this one is actually worth recommending: GWX Control Panel. It’s the simplest to use and does the whole job of removing every part of it, if you so desire. The provider’s blog page offers about as much explanation and guidance as a human could possibly use, and it’s free. This is one of those things about the developer community: They are willing to do the hard work for you in exchange for reputation and venting their own fury at things none of us likes.

Finally, here is another new Windows tool I can recommend after testing it myself: SlimCleaner. The free version does more than you would expect. It does everything CCleaner does and adds a few useful tricks like Defrag (with extra options), checking on updates for stuff you have installed, checks to see if you have any junk services running in the background and something called “Hijack This!” That’s a legendary malware detection tool, with equally legendary complicated scan results. SlimCleaner will parse these rather complicated results and let you know if it finds something suspicious. No, they didn’t pay me to advertise; I like this sucker.

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The Only Constant Is Change

Posted on January 6, 2016 by ehurst

Try to relax. Very little of the Lord’s work is done in panic. It might require vigor and creative surprises at time, but even those elements work better if you approach your divine mission with confidence and serenity.

In the final analysis, we all stand alone before the Lord. Any comfort and joy we have in fellowship is a bonus in the sense that sometimes we have to face our demons without human support. The seeds of full spiritual communion are planted in the fertile soil of commitment to Christ, and most of the fruit will not come in this life. Our virtual fellowship here on this blog is just a taste, the fragrance of blossoms just barely peeking out of the husk. Be encouraged because the best is yet to come.

I got one comment on yesterday’s post and a couple of private emails. That doesn’t mean only one person cares; it means the rest of you aren’t worried about it. But I had to ask.

There are several schools of thought about how to handle the rising turmoil in terms of virtual ministry. Did you know that other ministries were talking about it? There’s some lively debate about this. On the one hand, it would be easy for me to withdraw, pulling everything possible into this little netbook I’m using and prepare for high mobility in physical terms. That comes with a certain amount of baggage, such a trusting a lot of virtual services to respond consistently so we can keep this ministry alive in the clouds. The other extreme is trying to pull it all together somewhere else, hosting everything from my apartment with very little reliance on the cloud and near zero mobility. And there are places in between where we could take our stand, as it were. No choice is morally superior in itself.

I have no strong personal inclinations for any spot on this imaginary scale. Whatever works for our fellowship is fine with me. The mission and calling come first; we have to shape ourselves to match. We strive to identify the meeting point between the size-n-shape of faith (conviction in the heart) and what seems actually available. It also means some measure of readiness for the intersection to move at times, if only in terms of our awareness. God is merciful and patient with us because our awareness is essential for a great deal of our service. I’m at the point where I believe I know how to proceed.

For now the goal is getting our hands on something that I can use as a home server. However, this thing will be a “shadow server” — the originating machine for all the other stuff. It’s the place where I’ll learn and test ideas, store the work I do, and then launch the results onto some Net-facing service over which I can assert more control than I have now. Indeed, I’m trying to identify a local webhost here in the OKC Metro that will tolerate our low budget and the experimental nature of things at first.

As much as possible, I’ll try to migrate this entire blog to that service without disrupting anything you experience as my virtual congregation. That’s the goal. I’m starting to run into issues with the free service here and I already know the folks who run this thing aren’t interested in my concerns. Not brutal, mind you, it’s just that they have way too many other users for my voice to be significant. And I don’t want to disrupt those who are happy with things by playing the crank who diverts too much attention and resources to himself. But I can’t keep doing things their way, either, so I’m trying to move the actual physical home of this blog to some place much closer and under my direct control. But it depends on too many unknowns at this point as to whether you’ll notice any difference. At the least, I’ll bet the URL will change.

I’m content with Gmail and Outlook.com for what they do. I’m not happy with my ISP’s email service and I sense it won’t get better, so let’s avoid my Cox email account, please. Maybe I’ll need to run my own mail service someday, but not yet. I’m putting a higher priority on things like making it easier to download my books and pamphlets. If more serious challenges arise and I have to make substantial changes in those plans, I suspect I’ll be addressing a different audience, anyway. That is, whatever makes sharing my stuff more difficult will also mean I’m going to lose a lot of my current readers regardless of my efforts.

I’ll have to assume that issue is in the hands of God. For each of us, we have to maintain a continual assessment of what we believe we see coming at us. Right now, official censorship of any sort isn’t likely here in the US. I can’t guess how things might change for some of you out there on your end. Snooping from various government and private agencies is a given, though. I’m not planning on rolling out encryption on anything — at least, not yet. While I can imagine situations where I should, we aren’t even close to that. What my affiliates and I teach attracts depth of attention, but precious little in width. Jesus said the gospel was polarizing in that sense. I remain wide open and will gladly answer to any genuine inquiries, but the message itself tends to draw only a few who are ready for it.

My assertive anti-activist position on most popular subjects is genuine, but it’s also our primary buffer against the wrong kind of attention. Indeed, I get more harassment from mainstream Christians than anyone else, and I don’t foresee any of them using US law as a silencer. Given where God has led me during my life, handling them is no big deal. The only other likely threat might be Zionists, and our teaching offers precious little provocation to them, in the sense that they could use it in their propaganda war.

So our biggest area of concern is so-called cyber threats. The technology by which we commune here is trouble enough for anyone. In my estimation, economic shrinkage will bring down some very popular services. You would be surprised how many tech companies are already zombies, and that includes some of the biggest and most popular services. This rubs against the current very substantial efforts to make Internet access even more ubiquitous. But that ubiquity comes at the price of sandboxing: Most of the newer and cheaper access comes with more crippled devices (if only by means of a more crippled OS).

While there are a relative few predatory souls salivating at the power that comes from such restrictions, the sandbox arises as a side effect, not some evil plot. The objective is amassing data on users — tracking, profiling, indexing certain habits, etc. While the government is thrilled by this, of course, the tracking is driven by the market. The oligarchs of business don’t want your body, only your soul, as it were. The goal is nothing less than full behavioral control in terms of enticing your self-enslavement with borrowing and buying. Along with that is market consolidation, or what we call oligopoly.

A feature of this drift is squeezing the middle to polarize the market. The great mass of computer literate folks is aging, and everything works to dumb them down. Just recently there was a powerful pitch to make everyone some portion of computer geek. Visionaries were talking about kids learning to write software code instead of grammar. But that was a ruse, because by the time we moved into that territory, it was actually some layers removed from actual computer expertise. Kids can code trendy apps using highly abstracted developer kits without a clue to how the device actually works, not to mention the networking protocols. We were sold fine art schools and received coloring books.

But TPTB don’t always succeed. The community of determined geeks is growing, in part because the cultural shift is creating more geeks. But that’s another story. What I’m getting at is that my sense of calling is to invest more effort in the hard-core computer geek stuff. Whatever future ministry I have includes a heavy measure of running a server. I’m not sure what part it plays in the bigger picture, but the path before me runs through Linux system administration, not just the desktop stuff I’ve been doing for two decades. I seriously doubt I can keep that away from this parish blog, but that’s nothing new. I’m still focused on what is implied by the title: Do What’s Right — the theory and practice of morality.

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Feedback Request: Virtual Parish

Posted on January 5, 2016 by ehurst

I realize not every reader and subscriber regards himself/herself a member of this virtual parish, but on my “About” page I promised to treat you as one. That is, you hold all the same privileges as any other member; the only limit of my service to you is your involvement.

Today I’d like to ask for just a tiny bit of involvement from any and all of you.

As you might expect, some members are pretty active and we carry on conversations via email (try ehurst909@gmail.com or br073n@outlook.com) and other means of communication. A topic that naturally comes up is the background administration of our virtual parish. It’s virtual, so that means the bulk of that work is online. Right now we are all using common carrier type services: this is a free WordPress account, those are free email addresses, the ebooks are published by someone who charges no fees for free books, etc.

Do you suppose it might be advisable to self-host some of this? That is, do you think it would work better if Brother Ed ran a server from his house and hosted this blog with full control, and maybe offered a free parish email service, etc.? Which services would you like to see that I might add to our parish if it were possible?

Be aware that this is something that would not happen tomorrow even if we had the money for it. We would have to obtain a good server box, and then I’d have to learn more about systems administration (Linux, of course), and eventually I’d have to pay for upgrading my Cox broadband account to a commercial grade connection, because standard home Internet service blocks almost all of that stuff. No, I can’t promise it would be quick, but I’m quite willing to try for the sake of this parish and my ministry to all of you.

Even if some of you would pony up some donations for it, I still need some assurance that a portion of my readership gives a rat’s patootie either way. So come on and speak up; I need to know if it will bless you to, say, get rid of the ads that show up on this blog.

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Moral Logic: Human Need

Posted on January 5, 2016 by ehurst

Biblical moral reasoning proceeds from the heart, not the head.

We live to reflect the glory of our Creator back at Him. Broadly speaking, human conduct glorifies Him by adhering to His revelation, both in the doing and in reaping the promised blessings. In parsing His promises to a different culture than His initial revelation, it would be fair to say that if we embrace with our heart-mind an unconditional desire to live this way, He will supply a moderated level of success. That is, the desire is more important than the human ability to carry it out, but He empowers a growing success rate over time as our desire grows. Absolutes as human minds imagine them are not in the picture. He makes note of our devotion, and works to improve our commitment.

Further parsing things He has said to His servants, we recognize that all Creation must be treated as a living thing in itself. Unlike us, Creation is not fallen, but suffers under the influence of our fallen nature. Obedience to His revelation sets Creation free from our sin. As we cling to His divine moral character in our heart-minds, Creation itself operates according to that character and on His behalf will touch us and enable us in ways entirely impossible for those whose conscious awareness remains in their heads. Creation will speak to us of His holiness and show us things from His written Word. Thus, obedience to the heart-led intent of His Law Covenants will result in a friendship and support from all Creation.

This living connection to Creation is shaped by our calling. Each of us will commune with Creation in our own unique way, same as we each commune with God individually. A major element in all of this glorious vision of power and purpose is that we foster a social stability that encourages people to engage in the same heart-led existence. As stated in the previous post (linked above) it is utterly impossible to grasp the moral nature of His Law Covenants without the supremacy of the heart over the mind, and a general broad focus on relating to other humans in terms of Hebrew feudal family structure. All the whole Law of God starts with that, and cannot be implemented without it.

So in the midst of a world that brutally suppresses His truth, by insisting we cannot live by the heart-mind, our world also insists that nobody in their right mind wants that ancient Hebrew feudal social structure. Even Jews don’t want it, but at most something with only a vaguely superficial resemblance to it. The main missing ingredient is that familial compassion we can see written into the Law of Moses, for example. It is our duty to find ways to slip His Laws of feudal relations into our existence any way we can.

God says all human need is summed up in that kind of human relations. The sum total of the gospel message is in there. The “good news” part of that is we no longer have to join ourselves to a covenant nation and study the Hebrew mystical intellectual traditions first. We can claim the open door to heart-led existence and then spend the rest of our lives studying how to live. Jesus taught us a return to that ancient Hebrew feudal social structure as the best way to handle human life. He also spent a lot of time correcting false notions about the Father and how He relates to us, but spreading the gospel message means learning to live by the moral heart-led intent of the Law Covenants.

Yes, it is inherently contextual in nature. So you cannot pretend to reason your way to some objective truth about basic human need. God says flat out that it changes with the context. The context is whatever you as moral kinsman have to offer. This is why we eschew the language of human rights, because that’s just a perverted construct of human imagination in rejection of God’s revelation. God says you shall strive to treat other humans as your kin. Granted, a great many will pull away from that and you won’t be able to serve their needs. That is, they will refuse to accept the terms God Himself declared for such human interaction. In order to be counted and treated as kin, and their needs assessed against what is available from this family, they must come under the dominion of the family head.

Context itself places limitations on that dominion, but the ancient Hebrew feudal structure is God’s own standard for as long as men breathe air in this fallen world. This is the core measure of His hand of redemption to pull us out of Satan’s slavery. We are fallen; we will serve someone. If not God through His appointed shepherds, then you will serve Satan. But it’s not as if you are doomed to a life under the dominion of your natural parents. That would be ideal, but is simply not the point after the Resurrection. That part of the curse is broken. You can at some point hear the call of the Spirit to join yourself to a spiritual family. You come under the dominion of the elder and pastor (each in their own sphere; joining the two roles is actually supposed to be rare). Your church senior elder is the “king” or chief of your spiritual clan. The pastor is your priestly guide in rituals and worship. Both should be able to teach in some way, but the pastor in particular must carry that mission for sure.

Human need is not measured merely in terms of survival and material prosperity, though those things are a symbolic target. Sometimes obeying God means you approach a certain death, or any number of discomforts short of death. At the other extreme it could mean you have every reason to expect some help getting a cellphone, for example, if such is part of how your spiritual family does things. Obviously your church family has no duty to offer the same treatment to strangers who refuse the Creator’s command by remaining outside the family domain. There will be some effort to meet the human needs of strangers as a means to showing that compassion, but God alone is the source of calculus working through the leadership of that church family.

Again, the whole question of human need is contextual. The minimum to sustain life or to participate meaningfully in the prevailing culture (common standards in secular discussion) bears little relation to what God demands His churches offer; only by accident do they bear any superficial resemblance. Sometimes the prevailing culture is the last thing you want to get involved with. We who live by the heart-mind will pay little heed to what man’s reason and the secular society considers the needs of humans. They cannot know because they do not live by the heart and are surely living in sin because of it.

Just as evil are those who imagine that the greatest human need is some memorized sales pitch to provoke a psychological conversion to a particular set of intellectual assumptions. Emotional manipulation is not the work of God’s grace. The greatest human need is being courted with compassion and offered a chance to join the Family of God on God’s terms. Human need is answered supremely by embracing the Covenant of Christ, which in itself requires shifting the focus of awareness from the head to the heart, and coming into the dominion of some spiritual family. The word “evangelism” is just a label describing everyone in the family doing whatever it is that God called them to do toward putting on display the divine moral compassion of ancient Hebrew feudal relations. Evangelism includes letting people see how you reap the blessings of God through your close fellowship with His Creation.

For you as an individual servant of God, serving human need is whatever your heart tells you.

As an addendum at the end here, we note the prophetic element is not simple. We know we can condemn the local electric monopoly for rapacious rates and practices, but even most Western Christians are going to misinterpret what we might say. For example, the electric utility has the same cosmic moral obligation to treat rate-payers as family that your local pastor has with his parishioners, though just what it is they are responsible for in that care differs by context. That failure of familial compassion is the grounds for almost all of our prophetic warnings to those outside our religion. It’s not so much the mechanics of delivery, and it is most certainly not an issue of economic and political theories, but it rests on the fundamental obligation to God to treat those under our dominion as family, and to share our resources on that basis.

So the electric company is under God’s wrath already as part of a damned civilization, but we condemn evil practices on the basis that they don’t care about their customers, and they are willing to gouge and live high on the hog. It’s not communism; it’s loving feudalism that we promote. We want everything to change and become consistent with God’s revelation, but we are willing to start with the issue at hand. We have no problem recognizing a highly limited dominion and duty from service providers, and we run a very high risk of being misunderstood and lumped in with certain activist groups, but castigating corruption and any dehumanizing abuse is simply part of the gospel message.

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The Holy Order of Gatekeepers

Posted on January 4, 2016 by ehurst

The concept of gatekeeper is as old as humanity: a wholly unnatural restriction to genuine human need, maintained by horrific injustice.

(We can save the debate about what constitutes a genuine human need in God’s eyes for another day.)

At least one commenter at TechDirt understands what is going on with so-called copyright protection laws:

Stopping piracy isn’t actually the goal, and is instead merely the excuse, the justifications for their actions… Methods of distribution like file-sharing can be used for piracy, yes, but they can also be used for artists not affiliated with the major labels to get their music out there, all without having to go through a middle-man. Books not affiliated with major publishers can be shared and read, and movies put out by indie studios can be shown without ever having to go through the theaters.

You have to understand that there are quite natural monopolies out there, resources people want that cannot be delivered any other way. Something in the nature of the source or means of delivery simply requires that there can be only one vendor. When people object to natural monopolies on the grounds of some silly mythology of “fairness” you see all sorts of artificial regulation and unjust confiscation of assets. The most common area for this is delivery of wired or piped services. The act of placing pipes and wires is so disruptive and expensive in places where they are most demanded that the social costs become too high to reopen the routes every time a new entrepreneur comes along. Even if we discuss government providing these paths of delivery, we still have the problem of political favoritism and unjust exclusions when the thing itself has to be processed down to the level of end-user consumption. Some things simply cannot be done without a single monopoly provider.

So the real problem is not monopoly itself, but an artificial and unjust monopoly, particularly over resources and delivery that in no wise lend themselves to a natural necessity for singular ownership. To some degree, the same applies to oligopoly. The fundamental nature, as previously noted, is the cost of production and delivery. Stuff that costs a lot just coming to market tends to be monopoly or oligopoly early in the game, but once the technology rises to make access cheap, there simply is no excuse for keeping the entire market in few hands. It becomes tantamount to poking God in the eye, because it is defiance of His divine moral character in reality.

It’s no secret that I promote an approach to religion that makes most organized religion obsolete. Consider it in terms of resource marketing. The demand is provoked from Heaven itself; the initiative for spiritual awareness rests with God. That’s an obvious monopoly in terms of source. However, the access is controlled in terms utterly beyond human grasp. What’s being offered here is not a limited resource for consumption, at least not in human terms. We quickly come upon the sheer arrogance of some humans who claim that they are the only authorized dealer. On the one hand, God’s revelation indicates it is not universal access as we think of it, but that we cannot even grasp the means of limitation; limitations are handled on a transcendent plane. We know only that there is a limitation and it has nothing to do with human agency.

Mark 9:38-41 addresses the false gatekeeper syndrome. This assumes you are in a position to understand that all who partake of the Divine are family; that’s the way God describes it at the fundamental level. The whole business of the Law Covenants is all about dealing with family as a social structure, how to keep it stable enough to engage revelation meaningfully. Revelation means virtually nothing outside the presumption of a family structure; denying that foundation denies revelation itself. It includes learning to recognize who isn’t family and on what terms the whole thing rests. All human activity is meant to rest on household stability as the key to a wider social stability that draws in others who don’t share very much DNA. There were covenants from the roots of human existence, covenants that regulated how we deal with folks who aren’t blood kin, but who rightly exercise some of the natural privileges of family.

Need I note how God repeatedly asserts that any human government or regulatory restriction that does not treat the governed folk as family is a violation of His fundamental requirements? You blaspheme when you insist that any government failing that standard is somehow okay with God. That He makes use of human perversion does not equate to approval.

Religion is the ultimate expression of this moral image of household integrity. In religion, we bring together diverse humanity as covenant family. The organization of religion, says God Almighty Himself, must take on the character of an ancient Eastern clan or extended family household. Claiming the terminology as cover for the fantasy human systems of government won’t cut it. Has anybody ever actually encountered a church organized like a Hebrew feudal household? That was the only model for the First Century churches. As a covenant family, folks are free to come and go as the wind of God moves them. The Spirit knows when, where and for how long folks fit into a given family structure. The thing itself is alive, so artificial restrictions on that natural effervescence are blasphemous. In other words, gatekeeping is the hallmark of Satan’s preferred structure for churches.

We rightly condemn the rights-holder mechanisms of the past in media of all types in our nascent Networked Civilization. That crap is just plain old sin, a work of Satan. The linked comment cites the obvious logic of why this regime will collapse, with a brilliant grasp of what everyone wants to deny. Big Media is archaic gatekeeping at its worst, meant to prevent an entire new system arising, a system wholly justified before God in displacing the old. Given the typical nature of how people do things, we can predict the old system of gatekeeping will implode, collapsing in impotence once enough people realize gates have no place in the new social contracts (AKA acceptable customary behavior).

And as you might expect based on human history, organized religion will be about the last institution to meet this fate of oligarchical gatekeeping. The current structures were built on the false assumption that access and production of the resource demands restricted access. Organized religion has cowered behind the logic of the secular Western reasoning about the market for way too long. All the oligarchs are self-appointed, playing by the rules of a system that was veiled in glorious robes of propaganda, when it was always a nauseating abortion from the start. There’s nothing to say you can’t participate in this religion market for practical reasons, so long as you realize it’s entirely artificial.

The gatekeepers of religion are no different from the copyright terrorists at big media companies.

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Review: Led by the Heart

Posted on January 3, 2016 by ehurst

Let’s start with a reminder: The science is not hard to find, but it seems hard to use if science is all you have. I’ve been disappointed in searching for application material. There are surely better writers for this subject, but the single biggest project attempting to use the science (Heart Math Institute) still clings to a Western mythology that pegs the heart to emotions.

The heart is not emotions; emotions are rooted in the “butt brain” or “belly brain” — the lower end of your spine where the nerves and collected activity of organs forming your basal physical existence give rise to a certain form of intelligence that most humans tend to misunderstand. You heart is an organ that pumps blood, but the independent neural network connected to the heart is the seat of a faculty far higher than emotion and intellect. It is not that the heart as a “mind” replaces or ignores the reason and emotions, but harmonizes them by weaving them into a sense of purpose. That faculty alone is capable of bringing order from the chaos of human existence by mediating between the various elements. The heart-mind allows you to sense the fabric of Creation itself, the fundamental nature of reality.

The heart-mind has an entirely different logic from the intellect. It’s more than a construct of reason; it is the nature of life itself. The logic of the heart is moral and contextual in nature. It allows you to sift things in terms of their very real cosmic importance. The coherence from the heart is a matter of conforming to a very dynamic and living reality that is formed by the overflowing glory of Our Creator’s person and character. There is nothing static about it. In other words, we can’t describe it in words, only indicate something of its nature. We are forced to speak of it in parabolic language, using symbolic logic. The heart itself handles the things of this life that way.

As you might expect, everything changes when you begin to move the focus of your conscious awareness into the heart. At a minimum, you begin to distrust the things that once led you — senses and logic. They aren’t evil so much as unable to answer the final questions.

A critical example is in the area of religion. We understand religion as the net human response to some spiritual apprehension, a sense of duty and obligation to some higher reality beyond this world. If reason is the highest level of consideration about this spiritual apprehension, then you will imagine somehow that your logical conclusions (theology) about these matters are binding in the sense that they are the only proper grasp of spiritual necessity. If you operate from the heart-mind faculty, you realize that your theology is merely your own personal organization for implementing your response to that divine call. You realize instinctively that it matters not a whit whether there is some objective truth out there, because you don’t trust your own reason to apprehend it.

Without the heart, about the highest awareness you can achieve is that dull, aching recognition that you had better do something to appease that sense of conviction that you have sinned. The religious term for that is a sense of condemnation. With the heart at the helm of your soul, you realize that the nature of God includes mercy, and that the mere awareness of conviction is a call to redemption. You become aware of the path to that redemption. Thus, you aren’t driven by a search for salvation. You are driven by a sense of gratitude and joy for what the Creator has revealed. There is no worry about going to Heaven, but a determination to make the Father of Life smile. You already realize that somehow that is connected to Heaven, so there’s no nagging fear.

In other words, fulfilling the comment Jesus made to Nicodemas in John 3 about spiritual birth is fulfilled in part by moving your conscious awareness into your heart-mind. The human mind is unable to grasp, and human tongue unable to tell, how it all works, but we know that a genuine touch of God always awakens the heart-mind awareness. Our problem is the vast lore of Western intellectual bias against what the heart was actually meant to do for us in this world.

If you continue working from your intellect, demanding that religion bow the knee to reason and logic, you cannot possibly know if the Father’s favor shines on you. The mind can never really know the ultimate truth of things, because your mind is not eternal; it’s just a manifestation of our fallen human form. Whatever should be there in charge of our awareness is far more than mere intellect. Your heart-mind is eternal in nature; it is your only conscious link to God.

************

And for those who would benefit by the same teaching from a different angle, let me suggest you drop by to catch up with my dear sister and pastoral associate, Wildcucumber. She covers it so nicely, it would be an insult to God if I didn’t alert you to it.

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Nobody Is Tempted to Serve

Posted on January 3, 2016 by ehurst

For those of us who live heart-led, it’s not too hard to untangle the mess.

This figure tells a story that is no way surprising to anyone who has worked on software projects before: demand for fixes and features is rapidly outpacing the supply of development time invested, and so the issue tracker is no longer serving as any sort of meaningful project planning tool.

In all but the most well-funded, high functioning, and sustainable businesses — you can expect some degree of tension along these lines. The business side of the house may blame developers for not moving fast enough, while the developers blame the business for piling work on too quickly and not leaving time for cleanup, testing, and long-term investments. Typically, both sides have valid concerns, but they don’t do an especially good job of communicating with one another.

I’m including this excerpt because the website is also a mess. On my netbook, the page is partially obscured by a huge godawful “modal” at the bottom of the page that discourages people from visiting the site. I suppose the webmaster or someone imagines this is what passes for pressuring enticing you into staying longer on the site and absorbing their excessive advertising. The info is still easily accessed in a “crippled” browser like Links2 (or you can simply disable JavaScript).

It’s not that we ignore the materialistic foundation of Western Civilization; we understand it better than Westerners and that’s the whole point. We also reject it. We realize that a certain level of profit is necessary for business, but we aren’t willing to compromise divine moral character for the sake of profit. We believe that if God directs us to engage in some enterprise, it isn’t necessary to embrace the materialistic motive, but we go into business for the wholly different motive of serving human need. And we evaluate that need by gazing upon it from an entirely different ground of assumptions.

If you happen to hold the focus of your awareness in your heart-mind, you have no doubt noticed that the simple necessity of serving human need as the means to conforming to cosmic moral imperative is not a factor in most business planning. We are perfectly willing to let the business fail because we don’t pretend to control every factor in a profit calculation. We allow God to bless us with a profit or not, or even a catastrophic loss, at His whim because the whole point is pleasing Him — that’s how Creation operates. That countless business and entrepreneurs seem to be succeeding from their own viewpoint makes no difference; they all seem to have virtually no moral profit. They aren’t blessed by God because they don’t operate from the heart.

And they ignore or even defy the certitude of eternal accountability. You can’t live heart-led and ignore Eternity. In our case, the problem is so pervasive that God acts more on the civilization itself rather than each individual business. That scale of things takes a little longer to show His hand.

Aside from a little markup in HTML, I know nothing about coding software. Sometimes I can almost parse a little code, just enough to make very minor changes some real coder suggests when I try to compile something from source, but I could never write the stuff. All I have is some vague awareness of how it works. On the other hand, I know a great deal about management and marketing. I know enough to point out in detail just how utterly perverted and immoral it can be in practice. When it comes to software as a business, the two sides of the business are alien cultures, in that both are inherently narcissistic for different reasons. Compromise is rare. In the end, some of the greatest ideas and projects ever installed on a computer anywhere have been lost, not just abandoned, but locked up under IP laws because of the damned pigheadedness and greed. That is, software that really did serve human need in the ultimate moral sense is often gone forever.

We who live heart-led are left to shake our heads in sorrow, because we know beyond all doubt that the business world is actively hostile to the notion of genuine service of human need. They’ll use the image of human need in marketing and manipulation of human choice, but it’s nothing more than a myth for them.

God has not seen fit to put me in a position to act on my understanding; nobody is going to hire me as manager of software development. I could volunteer on Open Source projects, but even that has some strange barriers, due to the whole thing making demigods of developers. Believe me; I’ve tried. The Open Source projects I’ve checked simply cannot imagine the concept of serving the end user, so those involved have no interest in my input. But I can blather here and pray for things to get better some day.

Meanwhile, we who are heart-led are hardly surprised by the complaints raised by the author of the original article.

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