Not Born-Again

Posted on October 28, 2015 by ehurst

Please don’t convert to my religion.

One of the hardest things to explain is the perverted trap of Western mental habits enshrined in how language is used. I’m not the first person to notice the huge difference; I learned this from folks who know way more than I about linguistics and philosophy. I’ve been blessed with a rich education. I admit to using their information differently than they do, but the odd thing is that escaping the prison of Western Civilization is entirely possible with the use of Western scholarship. All it takes is a sense of calling from a higher plane for the clues to take on meaning.

Western linguistic process attempts to confine you. Language is presumed to contain information, and you are constrained from taking liberties with the significance of the words. Any creativity must be narrowly confined: “Words mean things.” That becomes a veiled threat of punishment if you step outside some imaginary boundary; you’ll be punished by those who claim to have a vested interest in keeping things as they are — with them in power. At the very least, you will be marginalized in various ways if you don’t conform.

The people who wrote the Bible would reject that frame of reference. If you think the Law of Moses was strict, it’s because you don’t understand it from a Hebrew mindset. Western scholars will tell you that Hebrew language, as a member of a class of Semitic tongues, was structured to use words not as containers, but as signposts. Semitic languages were indicative, not descriptive. They did not confine your thoughts, but introduced ideas for contemplation. In English I’ll ask you to take a moment to consider what kind of difference that represents in how we handle our existence as humans on this earth.

Instead of seizing control for the sake of efficiency toward some imaginary common good, I’m inviting you to explore something for your own sake. I’m perfectly willing for the results in your head to take entirely alien directions. That’s because I have trust in something far bigger than myself, and by extension, trust in something far bigger than my reason and logic. The moral burden of leadership is to let you wander while I provide some measure of protection as you browse whatever catches your fancy — shepherding. Follow me on your own accord to green pastures and still waters. My power over you is largely the power to rescue if you trust me voluntarily. The goal is to rescue and set you back on your own feet, not to bridle you and drag you around. This is genuine free range, not a feedlot experience.

At sheering time you stand before God, not me. I’m just His servant feeding His sheep.

A common element shared by cults is breaking you down through some crisis experience and reshaping you into their preferred image. Most evangelical church activities are aimed at creating some level of internal crisis. It’s the psychology of conversion, where you are made helpless so you can be controlled. That’s what I was taught to do in evangelism training back when I hung out with Southern Baptists. It looks really sweet and gentle, but underlying the presumed patience is the hard-coded image that at some point it will hit you all at once and your current existence will shatter. They cannot imagine a spiritual birth without it; there absolutely most be that moment in space-time you can stake out as the reference point of your spiritual identity. “When/where were you saved?”

While that kind of psychological crisis is common enough in human experience, I see nothing in Scripture that demands you pass through that checkpoint. Rather, I suspect you will pass through several of them because that’s how we are wired. Why should one be more meaningful than another? Aren’t all of them miracle blessings from God? The Spirit of God is not confined to time-space reference points. The importance is the change in your consciousness, not the events that accompany them. Where are your convictions right now? Westerners are obsessed with this universe and assume that time and space are cosmic absolutes, whereas divine revelation flatly states God is not bound by them. The people who wrote the Bible cultivated a sense of time and space as more like a prison for fallen souls.

I honestly believe it was a huge linguistic and doctrinal error to translate Jesus’ comments to Nicodemas (John 3) using the term “born-again” when “spirit-born” does more to capture what Jesus meant. It was Nicodemas who missed the point by suggesting Jesus meant “born anew from your mother’s womb,” so why shouldn’t we prefer what Jesus was trying to say? If Nicodemas was going to make sense of all the miracles Jesus performed in the context of what He taught, then the old scholar would have to step away from the Hellenizing intellectual influences of the past three centuries and return to the ancient Hebrew mystical understanding of things. The truth was not in this realm where stuff was happening, but in a higher realm where the Power was that made this world and these events. If He is not present in your soul, you can’t hope to grasp any part of His work. Your dead spirit has to rise with His life. How could anyone presume to control how that plays out in your soul?

I offer my religion as an example, not a straight-jacket.

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Photolog: Marking Time

Posted on October 27, 2015 by ehurst

This is the hardest part of moving. Our apartment is not ready yet. And while the mortgage company does consider our debt paid off, it’s an example of why we despised them all along that they require some three weeks lag time to pull together the paperwork and issue a lien release. That means 12 November before they even act. Meanwhile, much of our stuff is already packed and stacked around the mobile home here waiting.

FieldHarrahRdSo for yesterday’s ride I was moved to seek some solitude. I opted for a shorter ride on the old Harrah Loop. Just south of my picnic spot on Harrah Road are a couple of fields on the west side used for various crops. Last year I recall seeing sunflowers with giant seed heads. This year one part was watermelons that were never harvested. They still sit out there rotting. Next to that was something that I didn’t recognize. At first it looked like some kind of squash, but then the plants developed little pods the same color and size as small leaves. A couple of weeks ago the pods turned red. As I passed by yesterday, I saw that it was cotton, but a type I’d never seen before. As a child here in Oklahoma, all the cotton I ever saw was more thinly spaced in the field, and the plants were spindly with a single thick stalk. The cotton bolls were green balls that pointed upward until they browned and burst open. I never would have guessed the field in this picture was cotton.

When I reached the crown of the ridgeline on NE 50th and pulled up into the driveway of the orchard (closed for the season), there was very little wind. It was a light breeze from the north that hardly touched me. Worse, there was too much traffic along the road and in the driveways near me — not very much solitude. I tried, but couldn’t get into any contemplative frame of reference, so I rode off down the west side of the ridge. However, once I got past the as-yet closed section of Triple X and headed west toward Indian Meridian on NE 36th, I glanced over at a very large pond south of me.

Cranes aren’t rare, but they seldom stay here long in Oklahoma. I don’t know the various breeds, only that they appeared all white with black edges wing and tail, with a wingspan a little less than two meters. This was noonish, warming after a rather cool morning. A lone crane rose from the water and began circling clockwise, climbing. From what I could tell, the breeze aloft got much stiffer just a few meters above the ground. The crane would glide on the upwind part of his circle, then flap his wings slowly on the downwind side. Right behind him was a couple more, then a dozen. They all circled and climbed for quite some time. As they rose, the wind pushed them southward. It seemed a couple dozen total, but a great many more still in the water. After the first group was well aloft, this larger group rose up almost at once, mostly circling in the opposite direction.

My angle of view changed as I hit Indian Meridian and turned south, but also because they continued to climb. The first bunch eventually formed a ragged V and flew straight eastward a ways before stopping to climb some more, and I could barely see them. The much larger group that rose behind kept climbing. Suddenly an even larger group of a couple hundred met them from the west and they all began circling together. I have no way to estimate their altitude at this point, but it was quite a sight with these large birds and their slow flapping and intermittent gliding. I passed briefly under some thick tree limbs and emerged to see them in a ragged overlapping multiple V formation all heading southeast.

That stayed with me the rest of the day, in some indefinable way.

DopplerRadarSiteToday I decided I wanted to get a look at the single largest Doppler Radar site in this part of the state. If you watched our local news channels, you would see the radar beacon centered somewhere southeast of OKC. That communications tower behind it has a couple of dishes aimed line-of-sight to the OU School of Meteorology at Max Westheimer Field in Norman. Should you spend much time out here in the Draper-Thunderbird Lakes area, you’d see this facility often, since the white dome is perched on the highest hill out here. For me, it meant a brutal hill workout, of course. I zig-zagged out to Triple X and then southward. It was a good chance to see SE 119th and the Hog Creek Valley again. From there it was just another mile south.

13328SE134thWI was hoping I could see the hidden airstrip out there parallel to Choctaw Road and south of SE 134th, but I took a wrong turn. Still, heading west on 134th was a real hard workout. This shot was taken from the second razorback ridge I hit between Choctaw and Hiwasee Roads. As you can see in the photo, there was yet another waiting on me before I got to Hiwasee. I kept going and made another pass through that beautiful flat valley with all the expensive homes and turned back north in Anderson Road.

9315SAndersonThere was no good way to get a shot of the Schwartz Cemetery where I stopped for a snack, but I did get this gratuitous hill-n-valley shot almost across the road from it, facing west from Anderson Road near SE 89th. By the time I got home, I could feel the burn.

I sure hope we can see our new digs soon.

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Manhood: Mastery

Posted on October 27, 2015 by ehurst

If inebriation changes your social behavior much, you already have a problem.

Granted, human resistance to the effects of alcohol vary widely, but the point is that the primary effects of any central nervous system depressant should not change your moral character. Using alcohol as the most common factor in human experience, we note that the wiring in the heart is not on the same circuit as the brain. While the heart is affected by metabolic processes, it’s nothing like the huge change it has on the brain. The brain-mind is far more fragile than the heart-mind. The intellect is the chief part of our fallen nature.

You cannot be a real biblical man unless your heart rules. All of our Western behavioral science denies the heart as a factor. A genuine biblical psychology is so radically different that it naturally elicits scorn from Western behavioral scientists, including those with sufficient background to understand non-Western psychology. Exceptions are rare. Even those who acknowledge the heart as a sensory organ still tend to build from the Western mythology of what the heart does, which is little more than some stronger and more substantive repository of quasi-emotion. To the degree their programs work, it’s entirely by accident that discrete elements in those programs happen to coincide with reality.

Let’s remind ourselves that at least one thing we take away from the Genesis narrative is that God’s character defies human reason. The Fall was fundamentally the choice to rely on reason first as somehow superior to revelation through the heart-mind. Redemption — pulling yourself together into some thing closer to God’s design — demands that biblical man subject his whole being to comparison against God’s ideal. That starts with trusting the heart-mind, because it is the last organ to fail as the safe harbor for the focus of your conscious awareness. Your heart can reliably decide the good moral path when your mind is totally confused.

The question is not dominance over the world, but dominance over yourself.

Thus, when things get hairy and stressful, you must already have the frame of awareness that emotions are a servant, not a master. The Bible clearly says there is a place for all things, rather bluntly in the words of Solomon, and echoed in the pop song, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” (thanks, Pete Seeger). You don’t simply turn your body over to the mastery of your feelings, but you do grant your emotions some slack in the reins to get things done that require extra energy. Passion has its place, but never as commander. You can let passion squelch your intellect at times, but never your heart.

Did you know that stone-cold dispassion is a passion in itself?

I said in a previous post that generosity is not a character trait; it’s a tactic in the business in building a life that glorifies God. Given the context, generosity tends to see more use than the tactic of slaughter, for example. But slaughter has its place, too. The character is not in the thing itself, but in how they are used. It’s that business of reflecting God’s character, shining His revelation into the context. That’s the ultimate passion. As previously noted in this series, compassion does not equate to granting everyone what they want or claim that they need. Compassion is bringing divine justice, and God alone defines that in your soul.

The context determines the specifics of what it looks like. Depending on who is doing the screaming and yelling, one of the most powerful tools of justice is refusing to be drawn into it. That might range between a bemused half-smiling and gentle silence or a stone-cold stare, keeping full eye contact without a flicker of reaction. It could also mean simply ignoring them and pretending they aren’t even there.

The ultimate test is when your body registers a high level of agitation, but your decisions still follow your heart.

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Manhood: More on Boundaries

Posted on October 26, 2015 by ehurst

We try to bring the lies of this world into the light and examine them as lies. This is no small task. Our society doesn’t simply make competing claims, but spitefully drowns out alternative ideas.

Worse, it is hardly monolithic. There is nothing wrong with using the tools of social science — based entirely on the academic concept of justified generalizations — to deal with common elements of our daily experiences. However, you can’t really make good use of those generalizations until you recognize their limits. As you struggle toward the redemption of God’s personal revelation of Himself to you, everyone you encounter will naturally offer some measure of resistance to your struggle. You should never completely trust any one, not even the guy in the mirror. Just so, don’t rely on everything I write as your guide. See through my humanity, too. Truth is not objective, but the Person of God; your experience will be unique to you.

This is the reason I emphasize you knowing your own domain. God as Sovereign grants to you a unique calling and authority to act in His name. You are accountable to Him and no one else. It may be hard to discern from how I write at times, but I don’t hold you accountable to my ideas and my teaching. I spill all these words in an effort to help you look past me to see God alone. But I can easily point to others who write such words and mean something entirely different. Chances are you can discern that at some point in your journey. I can’t count how often I’ve encountered folks who use that kind of language but still assume I cannot depart much different from their own brand of spirituality without entering in their minds the territory they label as “unchristian.” Thus, they kept hammering me to conform to their narrow vision.

The secular world does something similar. You’ll get all this blather about being a unique individual, but you damn sure better conform to their vision of uniqueness and not depart from their imaginary boundaries. There is no place in Western social mythology for a direct encounter with God Almighty (or whatever some people imagine performs the function of deity). Everyone has to bow before some priesthood or another. Even the language of “priesthood of the believer” excludes believers who don’t enter the correct priesthood. Radical individuality is always defined by someone somewhere who isn’t you. However they define it, at some level the community imagines it owns you — ranging between the local dominating official of whatever institution confronts you, all the way out the state and even global governments. There will always be some imaginary objective standard in their minds, and everything they say presumes you already accept that notion.

That’s the basis of shaming language. “You don’t want to be uncivilized, do you?” Substitute any number of manipulative terms for “uncivilized” and you get the picture — racist, homophobic, greedy, etc.

The best defense is: “Call it what you like, but I know what my God requires of me, and you aren’t Him.” You don’t have to know it in some imaginary final sense, only that you are certain of where His boundaries are for you at any given moment. You should assume boundaries will shift with the context. You should also realize that there is a lot of variation of things demanded of you that you can afford to surrender because they don’t actually deny the boundaries. God will tell you in that moment what matters to Him, and everything else is just a matter of exploiting the context to His glory.

Don’t let someone use their imaginary standard of consistency against you, either. This thing is alive. In a very real sense, what was right yesterday is wrong tomorrow. Right and wrong cannot be defined by human reason (ref. The Tree of Knowing Good and Evil), but by the character of a living God in the context. It is self-consistent on a higher level that human reason cannot handle. All you have to remember is that you see no inconsistency, and sorry about anyone else who rejects your faith.

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A Long Way from Home

Posted on October 26, 2015 by ehurst

The biggest lie is a half-truth.

The whole of Western Civilization was inspired by Satan to destroy the full depth of a biblical culture of heart-led living. Westerners imagine that they can be so deep and wise because the foundations of our intellectual heritage slices off everything that requires you get personally involved in God’s revelation. God revealed Himself as a Divine Sheikh because that’s how He wants to deal with us. We are hard-wired to live in that Ancient Near Eastern feudal relationship with Him. You can choose to keep it shallow, but He invites you to join into His personal counsel because that’s the only way you can really understand this world. Western heritage claims that reality is not so personal, that we should handle it as impersonal and objective. The cosmos, as part of Creation, is intensely personal in nature, and the only real path of depth is to engage it in that fashion.

So while the Western individual is left standing alone to shape his own destiny as something malleable in his hands, the biblical individual is never alone, but relates to his destiny as a living thing itself. The biblical soul accepts destiny as a gift from God, a partner in His service. The only part we can shape is our depth of involvement in the joy of seeing clearly what God is up to in His Creation. Even our thoughts about clarity can be wrong. Such clarity is not merely on some sliding scale that we can dial up or down, but is a living and breathing thing itself that we can feed and nurture or let wither and die. Westerners struggle to breathe life into their fundamental thinking, but that’s how God talks about it in His Word, so pay attention to that factor. The very frame of our thoughts demands a major revision before we can really claim our divine heritage in this world.

Allow me to refer you to this Western attempt to correct current social mythology. If you like what Brandon Smith writes and it starts to feel good doing as he suggests, I’m glad for you. It’s certainly better than what we see dominating the cultural landscape of our day. However, I warn you that he doesn’t go far enough. What he suggests is only slightly more mindful than just coasting along with dominant social and political trends. It’s a start, but it won’t take you anywhere. He says you can make a whole new world in the next generation, but the one following that will simply head back down the same bogus pathway our world is already treading now. The problems he describes and attempts to solve are little more than backing up to some earlier point in the same road that is Western Civilization. His suggestions aren’t radical enough to answer our real need.

If you confess the God of the Bible, then cultural and intellectual baggage is not a mere matter of taste. The proper use of intellect in serving our Creator is not found on some smörgåsbord of flavors to delight your palate. You cannot walk closely with Christ from a Western mental approach. He’s not there. That territory leaves you in Satan’s domain.

Brandon Smith fits right into the American “Red Pill” Men’s Movement stuff, sometimes referred to as Game Theory of Socio-Sexual Status. While some elements of the literature does approach biblical morality, but it’s just new clothes on the same old secularist approach. The only reason you find any Christian involvement is because Western Christianity itself has long been compromised simply by being Western. Christianity is an Eastern religion, folks; Jesus was an Eastern man. To Westernize it is to destroy it’s fundamental nature. While it is possible to bypass embracing the whole cultural package of Eastern living on this earth, you can’t do that until you understand the Eastern nature of the Bible so as to “rightly divide” the elements that should be taken as context. Whatever it is the Red Pill guys seem to want is not consistent with Jesus’ teachings.

I can’t make this a simple jump for you. Peeling away vast layers of bullshit requires a serious investment of your human consciousness, a heavy time commitment. When I wrote that book about Biblical Mysticism, it was just a highly summarized introduction. It could be enough for most readers, but only if you think of it as a warning to leave the path you are on now and seek another way. If I abstract such discussion by talking about Quantum Reasoning and Quantum Morality, some of my readers might begin making the required changes, but a great many others will simply dismiss it as trendy chatter. However, the whole point is that it won’t matter how you pave the path if you get back to the truth. If we can just get folks to start operating from the heart’s mind and logic and stop relying on the intellect as the measure of things, I have no doubt Our Creator can fill in all the blanks. Your heart is already far wiser than anything I can put into words.

Go ahead read the Red Pill stuff; it’s certainly better than where our world is right now. However, it is still very, very far away from reality as our Creator made it. Use the likes of Brandon Smith and his approach as the first step in a different direction, but don’t stop there. If you can’t see the difference, then either you aren’t paying attention or you lack the background for recognizing it. I can’t make this any easier for you.

Start on a new path. Go ahead and camp out on your new discoveries until it’s familiar, but don’t build a castle. Keep moving; you have a very long way to go.

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Manhood: Out of Bounds

Posted on October 25, 2015 by ehurst

Know your domain.

Second-guessing God is a fool’s errand. One of the most important strategies in manhood is keeping the focus on your mission and calling in life. A critical element in that strategy is portraying the sense of certainty and drive that comes from seizing your calling in both hands. Few things portray manhood like a drive harnessed to a purpose.

Most of us don’t suffer from an excess of talent, but many of us are distracted by mere interests and entertainments we mistake for talents. A task of manhood is discerning the difference. We know instinctively that our mission and calling should be something that we love to do, but our social conditioning teaches us to be vulnerable to distractions. It takes conscious effort to discern between diversion and opportunity. Wisdom teaches us ways to gracefully withdraw when something goes the wrong way and begins to compromise the deeper sense of mission. Generosity is a tactic, not a trait.

It’s not that boundaries cannot move, but we must strive to keep an eye on them as expressions of our character in context. Character means distinctive, obviously different from the rest. It is not a goal in itself but the natural result of paying attention to what God actually demands of you. The point with character is recognition, not some artistic pursuit in itself. Don’t get lost in dreaming of some romantic and heroic vision of what you would like to be; invest more effort in discovering what you are.

Learn to say this: “It doesn’t matter what you need; this is what I have to offer.” Human need is boundless — you are not.

On the one hand, we cannot deny that events beyond our control will shape us. We learn to treat those things as the hand of God, despite whether we find them pleasant. However, we do have more authority in rejecting unjustified demands than our society would like us to believe. Nothing and no one in this world has some “right” to demand things God didn’t give you. Some vaunted analysis of what is needed is not your guide. You will inevitably find yourself forced tactically to play along with some things, but don’t actually buy into the lies that shape the context. Retain your awareness and seek opportunities to slap things back into place.

Assert your God-given boundaries.

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CompSec Note: DoJ Warrants and Licensed Software

Posted on October 24, 2015 by ehurst

Just a quick note for some of you to ponder. The DoJ is not happy that Apple has made changes so that search warrants to decrypt Apple devices may be impossible to execute. That is, Apple has intentionally made it more difficult by designing things to put full control in the hands of folks who buy Apple stuff. Up to now, nothing in US Law prevented that kind of change. However, the DoJ is now taking an entirely new tack, something privacy watchers say is unprecedented.

The government’s new argument that since Apple owns the software, it is responsible for it, could have far-reaching implications if it is not struck down by later, higher courts. Internet companies which do not allow customers to own their data, in particular, could then be vulnerable to NSA snooping in entirely new ways.

What the FBI can get with a warrant the NSA can simply take when they feel like it, provided they have the technical means. So if the DoJ can demand Apple (and others) maintain some kind of backdoor subject to warrants, the NSA can figure out how to use it regardless of a warrant.

But that’s not the whole issue. It indicates that unless you run Open Source software that you actually own completely — you can change it in any way you like and recompile from source without having to get permission — your data will always be open to government inspection without notice. There is good reason to believe Linux and BSD (for example) can be made quite difficult to crack on purely technical grounds. Plus, if you run Open Source, there is no one to pressure for a back door. The government has to come to you individually and demand decryption, and it’s not too hard to include an auto-wiping element in your operating system. Further, there are recent rulings that bring into question when the government can force you to give up your passwords.

Granted, I have yet to see any use for encryption. It’s inconsistent with my divine calling. However, one thing can lead to another, and if this argument wins out, it means there most certainly will be back doors in your commercially produced operating systems (Windows, Mac, Android, etc.). This guarantees a permanent attack surface for malware and other forms of criminal mischief.

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Psalm 73

Posted on October 24, 2015 by ehurst

Book 3: Psalms 73-89

A shorter collection led by Asaph, one of David’s chief musicians, plus a few others from the Sons of Korah (Levitical musicians) without individual attribution, and a handful of others. A general theme tying them together seems to be the power of worship in the sanctuary.

Psalm 73

Asaph points out how worship can bring you peace over perplexing questions. Taking us back to the basic question addressed in Job, this is not simply a rehash of the question and ultimate answer, but how clarifying your heart’s commitment to God can help you see things in this world differently.

He begins by celebrating how God cares for His people, but is particularly mindful of those who seek Him for a pure heart. The image evokes the simplicity of commitment to God’s revelation. Then follows a stirring story of how easy it is to lose that faith. Asaph denies that he is better than anyone else. For example, he was caught in the vicious circle of common reasoning about the wealthy who were wicked.

For several verses he goes on about those who are worldly and successful. They serve the god of their own comfort and advantage. Why does walking in God’s Law not consistently pay off that well? Why do those who seek righteousness always catch hell? Asaph was at a loss for words; he couldn’t bring himself to confess against the Scripture, but he struggled with the misery and apparent failure of the promises.

That is, until he spent time with God in ritual worship — and then it all made sense. We are supposed to pick up on the subtle point that worship brings your consciousness above the mere physical realm of sense and logic. It pulls you up out of yourself and into a higher realm of moral awareness.

While it may seem the wicked wealthy are comfortable, they are morally blind. They don’t see where their lives are headed. When they die, they face the terror of God’s eternal wrath. Once he recovered this higher moral awareness, Asaph felt ashamed of himself. Please notice what a contrast that is between Asaph, and by implication anyone else who is morally aware, versus those with no moral awareness at all. We who walk in moral enlightenment see ourselves for what we really are as fallen creatures. We live in the land of penitence.

By this we know that God has chosen to accept us, because He keeps His holiness and mercy alive in us simultaneously. We know that our sense of unworthiness is a mark of His favor. So Asaph rejoices that his eternal destiny is with the Creator. No one else can do it for you. It matters not who we have known that might go to Heaven if we don’t individually know the God who made it all and revealed His divine justice.

Meanwhile, those who lack a sense of torment over their sinful nature are dead to eternity. This life is all they have, and they really don’t even have that. They are dead already and don’t know it. Asaph celebrates his trust in God and willingly speaks of His glory.

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Manhood: This Is Mine

Posted on October 24, 2015 by ehurst

I own it. You will own yours, guys, or it won’t be manhood; it’ll be something else.

The foundation is the Hebrew Shepherd image of manhood, the sense of calling and dominion, plus the awareness of divine justice via your heart-mind. The teaching here is unmerciful about pushing those things in general. I want to bring up a handful of things that proceed from all of that. What we need here are tactics as we brush up against a world that despises a heart-led life.

Learn to say this phrase: “The God I serve.” This is how it was for Abraham. The question of whether there might actually be other deities was not an issue. You’ll notice that Moses addressed Israel in those terms. In Deuteronomy 32:16-17 he refers to the nation’s forefathers as worshiping demons when they pursued false gods. That was a comment more aimed at how wrong it was to leave the God who called them and made them a great nation. Never mind whether those deities were appropriate for someone else; this is Our God.

Let’s not entangle ourselves with impertinent questions. A lot of folks you encounter will insist what we teach here isn’t about the “One True God®” — don’t go there, because it surrenders your moral foundation. Know the God who calls you and what He requires of you. Know that it requires you depart from Western Civilization and the intellectual poverty on which it stands. We know Him in our hearts, and logical definitions will always be little more than personal mental organization.

“Pursue your God and leave me to serve mine according to my own convictions.”

We are not antisocial, but aliens in this world. If God awakens your heart to supremacy over your mind, it will be very difficult to remain immersed in Western Civilization. From the very roots, the West is hostile to a heart-led existence. We cannot afford to remain entangled in the worldly concerns of Western people.

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Backup and Disperse

Posted on October 24, 2015 by ehurst

As noted previously, the issue with our virtual activities is control of the machine and control of data. If you can handle the challenge, I still say you should examine using Open Source software and operating systems because they have proven so far to offer better and easier control. However, there are plenty of other considerations.

A real world example of why backups and off-site storage matter:

The University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights was recently burglarized after they filed a lawsuit against the CIA for refusing to release declassified documents to the public. Data and equipment were stolen from the office, and it is suspected that the CIA may have had something to do with the break-in. The specific documents in question that the group was filing the lawsuit over were also stolen from the office.

How convenient for the CIA. While the researchers did have backups of the data, they are still worried that a lot of their own first-hand sources were compromised. Such is the case for encryption of data even on your own system. While we know that government bureaucracies do lots of things backwards, I can assure you that high security information is handled very carefully with all sorts of protections and compartmentalizations to prevent easy compromise.

Which brings us to the second point that you should disperse copies of things among those you trust. If you can’t trust anyone, you really need to be far more paranoid about the data you handle. This is just an outline describing professional IT standards on data security, but it’s not too hard to grasp how it applies to your private stuff.

Granted, for us in our spiritual pursuits, the best security is having nothing to steal. The nature of our mission is publicizing everything; we have no secrets. And in the case of this virtual parish, our religious activities are almost entirely virtual and written with precious little need for privacy. Furthermore, we are inherently decentralized by avoiding the need for a registry of who’s who; I’m just a writer. My leadership is a matter of mere influence for the most part. Take me out and God will call someone else to fill the role. All you lose is my peculiar flavor and character in writing.

The only other issue of significance is shared sources. That is, I have some material I’ve collected that informs some of my writing. Most of it is not hidden, just not easily found on the Net without having a lot of clues about search terms and so forth. Some of it is frankly “pirated” material that is difficult to find and risky to pursue if you can’t pay for it (okay, it’s risky if you run Windows). Maybe you have no need for exploring this stuff, but a significant portion of what I write here is informed by these sources. If you think it matters, you can ask about some of my sources and I’ll be glad to share with you. I can’t give you the education I gained before the Internet was in my reach, but that’s part of what my writing is all about — distilling the things I’ve noticed and making it somewhat coherent. Nothing replaces one-on-one sharing in the flesh, but God can work in ways we cannot imagine.

In the final analysis, you need to make up your own mind whether any of this computer security stuff is pertinent to you. It’s not as if we are writing Scripture here, just commentaries that might help understand the Bible. The sacred truth is God’s own hand writing into your life. The rest of what we do is simply the means to communion in sharing that mark of God with each other.

Final note: The “CIA spokesman Dean Boyd” is paid to lie. That’s what the CIA does; it’s so fundamental to their mission and nature of the agency that you should be shocked when they actually tell the truth about much of anything. Further, the agency insiders often have no clue what each other are doing, so there’s a high probability he could honestly say what he said and it still be utterly false. These people avoid knowing the truth as part of their deceptive work. The CIA has absolutely no grounds for complaining when someone suggests they would commit such a criminal act as this. But we have no intention of “fighting for justice” against evil government. Our mission is to expose and develop a holy cynicism.

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