Proverbs 16 (Part 2)

Posted on August 12, 2015 by ehurst

(Divided into two posts because it’s long.)

17. The way of the upright is to turn away from evil; he who keeps his way guards his way. This is simply a flawed translation, rendering three different words as “way.” It draws the image of moral wisdom as a highway, and as good maintenance on an important road. The third “way” is probably a typo, because the Hebrew term is closer to “soul.” Highways were all about making commerce and defense possible. If those things matter to social stability, even more so does a commitment to divine justice make life worth living.

18. Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. This is a very popular quote in Western literature. In typical Hebrew fashion, it addresses both the individual and society. Your stupid arrogance can hurt a lot of other people, not just yourself.

19. It is better to be of an humble spirit with the lowly than to divide the spoil with the proud. Almost as popular as the previous verse, this one continues the same thought. Divine justice seldom operates on the same time scale as human awareness. It serves well to remind people that humility might not make you rich, but it will help you avoid most calamities in the long run. Arrogance carries a high risk, and even if you win, you can’t keep it forever.

20. He who handles a matter wisely shall find good, and whoever trusts in the LORD, happy is he. This restates the theme of this whole chapter. You really cannot understand the Law Covenants until you adopt the higher moral value system behind them. It’s not mechanistic and the rewards cannot be measured with human senses. However, it is what we are designed for, so if you want to really enjoy this life, you’ll have to address it from the realm of moral justice.

21. The wise in heart shall be called prudent, and the sweetness of the lips increases learning. More of the same, the emphasis here is on what you are able to speak. Whether you say little or much, people will have a much greater respect for you if your words reflect moral justice. The only way to get that is to let your heart-mind rule over your intellect. The heart retains a vivid awareness of things the mind could easily forget.

22. Understanding is a fountain of life to him who has it, but the instruction of fools is folly. English translations often lose the full flavor of this verse. In a land where water can be scarce, digging a well counts as a very heavy investment of resources. If it results in a supply of water, it’s worth fighting over, but also morally incumbent to share generously with anyone who isn’t a threat. Moral prudence is like that, in contrast to the polluted ooze of someone who can’t be bothered to see past his own lusts.

23. The heart of the wise teaches his mouth, and adds learning to his lips. This is a quintessential eastern notion of wisdom. Your heart is a separate faculty above your intellect, and far superior in grasping moral reality. Let your heart rule your mouth, and by implication, your conduct.

24. Pleasant words are like a honeycomb, sweet to the soul, and health to the bones. This continues the theme of bringing moral justice into your social intercourse. People who truly see what God intended in Creation have a tendency to reveal that insight, and regardless of initial or surface reactions from others, it’s a blessing to them.

25. There is a way that seems right to a man, but the end of it is the ways of death. Echoing verse 2 above, this is often quoted improperly by Westerners. They get the English words right, but fail to grasp what Solomon was saying. It’s not a question of how smart you are in your individual choices, but a cynicism about human nature itself. If all you have are common human faculties, it won’t get you where you need to go in this world. And if all you have are common human faculties, you’ll probably die without a clue because you’ll be morally dead long before.

26. He who labors works for himself, for his mouth craves it from him. A weak translation at best, this is one of those statements meant to apply differently on different levels. In the Hebrew, “he who” is the word for soul, and “himself” is actually the same root word as “mouth.” The words for labor and work both carry the flavor of discomfort. Thus, the soul that toils in sorrow serves the “blow hole.” Depending on the context, it may be simply noting that this life is inherently sorrowful in some ways. You could use this to emphasize the sorrow of slavish devotion to mere human appetite, which would be more to the point of this chapter.

27. An ungodly man plots evil, and his lips are like a burning fire. This echoes the thoughts of the previous verse. Your character determines where you expend your energies because they are bound together in what you value most.

28. A perverse man causes fighting, and a whisperer separates chief friends. Again, more of the previous verses in the sense of a specific example that calls us back to the awareness of social stability. In your social awareness, avoid people who have a knack for stirring up strife without seeming to get caught in the middle.

29. A violent man lures his neighbor and makes him go in a way not good. In the same theme still as the previous verses, this is calling something what is because of its effects. If you lure people into things that get them killed, you have blood on your hands.

30. The gray head is a crown of glory, if it is found in the way of righteousness. The reverse of the previous verses, this uses a Hebrew figure of speech. Gray hair implies you’ve been there, wherever “there” was. If you got your gray hairs by living a morally good life, they serve as a crown of glory. Chances are you had to put up with a lot of crap along the way so wear them proudly.

31. He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit is better than he who takes a city. Still on the same theme of social interaction, this also restates the previous verse from a different angle. You can be a vigorous man of action and conquer whole cities single-handedly, but someone else can come along and take it all away from you. If you can simply restrain your own emotional urges by moral wisdom, then you have a greatness that whole armies cannot assail.

32. The lot is cast into the lap, but the whole disposing of it is from the LORD. Right back where the chapter started, this parable relies on a common Hebrew symbolic image. So far as we can determine, casting lots is a reference to having several pebbles of the same size and shape but different colors. They were tossed into a fold of the garment, and one was fished out blindly, with the decision being based on whatever choice was associated with the color. In Western culture it randomizes choosing one among more-or-less equal options, but for Hebrews it was consciously deferring to God. Even if the matter itself seems inconsequential, it’s best to trust in God over your human abilities.

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Proverbs 16 (Part 1)

Posted on August 12, 2015 by ehurst

(Divided into two posts because it’s long.)

This chapter addresses divine sovereignty from the unique worldview of a mystical Hebrew mind, fully aware of the complexity of human nature.

1. The ordering of the heart in man, and the answer of the tongue, is from the LORD. The intent here is to make you ponder the ambiguities of human awareness. We tend to believe that we can make various kinds of choices, but the heart does only what God designed it to do. The mind is somewhat untrustworthy. Thus, by the time your thoughts reach your lips, God can still intervene and you’ll end up saying something you didn’t intend. Whether or not your words reveal the truth of your heart is for the listener to decide.

2. All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes, but the LORD weighs the spirits. You can rationalize almost any course of action, and most people tell themselves that their choices are the best for everyone. However, God sees things that we tend to hide from ourselves and His personal evaluation is what matters in the end.

3. Roll your works upon the LORD, and your thoughts shall be established. Green chose here a more literal rendering of the Hebrew concept often translated as “commit” with the image of rolling things up in a bundle for storage. If you maintain a conscious awareness that your Sovereign will call you to account for your actions, it helps to clarify the direction of your thinking. On the one hand, God is watching every moment; on the other hand, our human awareness of His wrath tends to be periodic.

4. The LORD has made all for His purpose; yea, even the wicked for the day of evil. This continues the thought in the previous verse about periodic awareness. Just because someone else seems to get away with evil doesn’t mean God won’t call him to account sooner or later. Some of our human experience will remain inexplicable in this lifetime because of the limits of our awareness. In your mind, let human evil be God’s problem, and mind your own business. Give God credit for wisdom, insight and power beyond your own.

5. Everyone proud in heart is hateful to the LORD; though hand join in hand, he shall not be unpunished. This is more along the same line of thought about the limits of human awareness. Human evil is bad enough, but sometimes it can feel as if our whole world has conspired against us. Give God time to work out His divine justice for His own glory while you pay attention to the domain He placed in your hands.

6. By mercy and truth, iniquity is purged, and by the fear of the LORD men turn away from evil. The word translated “purged” comes from the Hebrew concept of covered, as something that has been dealt with and is no longer an issue. It comes from the image of daubing pitch on a surface to stop leaking, halting any further trouble. Whatever the problem, now the healing and restoration can begin. In the typical Hebrew parallelism, reverence and respect for God’s reputation prevents all kinds of trouble.

7. When a man’s ways please the LORD, He makes even his enemies to be at peace with him. This assumes a covenant community where “enemies” are folks who make life difficult and you aren’t in a position to simply eliminate them. As before, just pay attention to your own duty toward God and let Him handle things, because walking in His character will fill your whole existence with His power.

8. Better is a little with righteousness than great gain without right. The apparent material substance of our human existence is deceptive. Drag your awareness up into your heart and see all things from a moral perspective of divine justice. You should expect to pay a material price for moral riches.

9. A man’s heart plans his way, but the LORD directs his steps. This restates verse 1 above in different terms. You are fortunate, indeed, if you can subject your conscious awareness to what your heart can perceive in the moral sphere. The image of “plans” is weaving or plaiting loose ends into a unity of sorts, getting your disparate human elements together behind a single purpose in life. That’s as much as anyone can do, so let God take care of how it turns out.

10. A divine sentence is in the lips of the king; his mouth does not transgress in judgment. This is hardly calling for blind obedience to your superiors, a concept wholly foreign to the Hebrew culture. It continues under the assumptions previously stated, that you understand God will work in you and through you when you embrace His character. Thus, when you come before a king, God will use his mouth as an oracle (“divine sentence”) even without the king’s conscious awareness. The king’s intent may not matter if you pay attention to God first, because He won’t allow human fallibility to hide His justice.

11. A just weight and balance are the LORD’s; all the weights of the bag are His work. This continues the same thought as the previous verse. Trust God for the things you cannot control. Walk in personal holiness and know that God is at work in ways you may not see. In the final analysis, He will ensure the scales of justice balance out because His weights are the standard.

12. It is a hateful thing for kings to commit wickedness; for the throne is established by righteousness. God finds government misconduct disgusting, and won’t protect an evil government. This is the other edge of the same blade of truth in the previous verses. It’s not as if God demands blind support for bad government, but it is our duty to trust Him for things we cannot change.

13. Righteous lips are the delight of kings, and they love him who speaks right. This hearkens back to the definition of royalty. A truly regal man will prefer servants who are morally upright. Even evil kings find such people useful, and God will use your presence on His staff as leverage to expose sin.

14. The wrath of a king is as messengers of death, but a wise man will quiet it. In general, it’s pointless to provoke rulers. This serves as a warning to smart-alecks who think they know everything and try to act like Truth Police. Righteousness is not found in objective facts, but in understanding that the primary mission of moral righteousness is social stability. Causing trouble can hurt innocent bystanders.

15. In the light of the king’s face is life, and his favor is like a cloud of the latter rain. This continues the previous verse. Not in the sense of playing yes-man, you should honestly seek the king’s welfare within the limits of your abilities. Chances are people are going to know if you genuinely care. In dealing with rulers, peace is good for everyone else, too.

16. How much better it is to get wisdom than gold! And to get understanding is rather to be chosen than silver! This echoes verse 8 above. Wisdom and understanding are synonymous with moral insight, so let your heart lead with moral vision and don’t worry about how well it seems to pay in material terms.

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Photolog 16: Thunderbird Lake

Posted on August 11, 2015 by ehurst

This time I wasn’t going to accept failure. After using Google Street View as a sort of recon, I decided to take a different approach in case the washouts weren’t all fixed. Today’s ride began like the Brutal Loop, heading south on Hiwasee toward Stella, just a mile east to Norman’s 108th Avenue NE (AKA Henney Road) and south the six miles to Alameda Drive. Alameda is the east-west route that runs along the north side of the main body of Lake Thunderbird. From there, it was just two miles to the drive that drops down to Fisherman’s Point. The return route would be taking 120th Avenue NE (AKA Choctaw Road) if the washouts were fixed.

They were fixed. In fact, lots of washouts are finally seeing repairs, though some are less thorough than others. For example, here we see that the Hog Creek washout on Hiwasee is now complete and resurfaced nicely. HiwaseeHogCreekFixed The rest of the way south to Stella saw some half-assed efforts to resurface some of the roads. Maybe you’ve seen it before: A layer of asphalt is dropped but it’s the cheap stuff with lots of big rocks. This stuff is poured sparingly on the surface, scraped and rolled quickly. It leaves lots of linear striations where the bigger rocks squeegee the thin asphalt as the scraper drags them. The whole thing gets a final coat of tack sprayed on top and whatever lines they might decide to place is painted on top of that.

It would be easy to miss the entrance to the 108th Avenue corridor from Stella Road. It looks like all the other side roads. Unlike the more widely used 120th Avenue route to the lake, this one doesn’t feel so oddly alien. While I still had the sense something natural was missing, as if eradicated, it lacked whatever invasive species were added on 120th. I passed a young woman walking with two toddler boys. They stopped and stared. As I approached, I queried whether it was so uncommon to see bicycles out there, but the woman replied it was simply the matter that her sons loved bicycles. A short time later I spotted another cyclist ahead on the road quickly leaving me behind.

While it doesn’t stink, I could smell the lake before I saw it, despite contrary winds. Today we had the highly unusual northeasterly breezes. Alameda Drive approaching the lake facilities is very heavily forested and entirely natural. It was two miles to the visitor’s center and a short lane south to Fisherman’s Point. TBirdLake The image shows the boarding dock, while the boat ramp is out of view to the left. The actual fishing wharf is a couple hundred yards farther left, but this dock was deserted. I went out and looked it over, then sat on the gently rocking platform just off the walkway. By facing to the right in the picture, I had the breeze at my back and it was very peaceful. Then I went to find some shade and sat on the edge of the parking area for lunch.

One of the things visible from the dock was the monitoring facility run by an odd agency. ConservDistFac Up on Alameda you pass this massive double iron fence, automatic gates and a cryptic sign. The largest letters say simply, “Headquarters.” In smaller print ringing a peculiar logo you discover that this is the Central Oklahoma Master Conservancy District. Basically it’s a multi-city thing — Moore, Norman, OKC, Del City and Midwest City along with Tinker AFB. It is parallel to the better known conservation districts in the state, and amounts to a political lobby that cooperates with federal and state water agencies. At any rate, I am told the signs off of that massive structure on the lake warn you to stay back some distance, but it’s about the only part that you can actually see from public areas.

There is a dumpster next to the small public restrooms, so the facilities are at least decent. After lunch I headed home. It was just a mile back to 120th Avenue and I had noticed on my way past earlier that there were no barriers or “road closed” signs. 120thAveNEatGander So I proceeded north. I crossed a rather small patch in the road covering a fresh repair that expanded the previous water passage from a small single and made it two large tinhorns. Farther north I ran into the washout that blocked my previous excursion to the lake. While it was drivable, the county had opted not to pave it just yet. They did put down some extensive rip-rap and concrete buttresses on both sides and did an awful lot of dirt work for quite some distance uphill. What’s left is a raised patch of caliche. 120thGanderFix Cleveland County had almost as many washouts as Oklahoma County, but nowhere near as much money for repairs.

I rode past a fellow who was putting down that new bagged asphalt by hand on his driveway. In my usual jocular demeanor, I yelled, “Howdy, neighbor!” My Edgewood is a very quiet bike and he was startled by my voice. He looked up and asked how I was doing. My answer to that is always, “Life is good!” He grinned and asked if I was “good on water.” I thanked him and affirmed I was. I think he will end up buying quite a few of those bags of cold asphalt, but he was doing it right, moving loose debris before applying it.

There are quite a number of private roads that the county can’t even afford to deliver dirt and gravel. Most of the time you can get the county to take care of the aprons to private drives, but they must have been really swamped (pun intended) by the massive number of washouts this past spring. LagoVistaRoad This is Lago Vista Road, part of a loop that runs up the hill and back out on another road. At the edge of 120th was a massive sandbar where all that loose soil had washed down. It stopped only because there had been a very large pool already standing, as was obvious by the evidence of water marks and debris. So I was standing in deep, soft sand to take this picture, and it stretched along both sides of the main road about a hundred yards. That’s an awful lot of lost sand, but sand is about all there is in this area. Where the vegetation holds it in place, everything’s fine, but it seems in retrospect a silly place to build without a lot more work to prevent sand drift.

Parts of Choctaw Road north of Stella had seen the same cheap layer of asphalt, so while it was fresh and black, it was still a tad rough. After crossing under Interstate 40, I could see evidence of serious preparations for widening. I have heard, but cannot seem to find official confirmation, that much of Choctaw Road is being widened from 1-40 all the way to NE 23rd. The stretch between SE 44th and SE 59th got it first, and now they are working on the stretch south of there to I-40. That should be a glorious fine mess and traffic boondoggle once the surface work gets started.

It took 3.5 hours for a distance of 35 miles plus stopping for lunch and pictures.

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Peace versus Absolutism

Posted on August 11, 2015 by ehurst

If this life is all you have, then absolutism makes perfect sense.

Just over two years ago I wrote Contextual Justice and it’s been getting a lot of hits lately. I’d like to restate the message in different terms: You can’t have peace if you keep seeing things in terms of absolutes.

You can reach for God’s peace — shalom as a Hebrew term implies all the things God promised He would do for people who embrace His revelation. It certainly applies to this world, for the simple reason that all Creation is wired with God’s character. If your orientation in life is focused on Him, you will have a tendency to understand the demands of reality. But instead of the Western mechanistic view of an inanimate universe, you’ll see the universe as a living thing populated with life on multiple levels. All Creation hums with the personal attention of the Creator.

That viewpoint is necessary for divine justice.

God’s revelation comes mostly via parables, or parabolic language, symbolism. Revelation is couched in a world of assumptions totally foreign to Western thinking. God’s Word assumes you realize that all of the most important stuff can only be characterized. If you characterize reality as dead and largely inert, then you find yourself in a world where absolutes are an obvious necessity. If you characterize reality as a vivid expression of God as a living being, with His hand constantly involved in every particle, then absolutes become little more than a conscious abstraction. You can talk about absolutes without taking absolutism seriously because some part of you knows there will always be contextual limits, even if you never experience those limits.

And while I may get you to learn all of that intellectually, chances are you’ll spend many years afterward struggling to retrain all those unconscious mental reflexes to keep expecting hard absolutes in a literal sense. A Western mind has no room for Eternity; the entire matrix of mental operations is wired to exclude it. Western consciousness ends at the boundaries of what we can observe and analyze physically. That sort of thing reduces God to a mere abstraction.

Thus, it’s no surprise that very few Western Christian believers experience God as a Person. Even the one human manifestation of God — Jesus Christ — becomes an abstract figure, a body of facts and analytical product. Spiritual birth seems to change that very little. A genuine encounter with God finds very little space to plant roots in their consciousness. It can be so confusing and this causes me to bear a sense of pity for Western Christians. The bondage of absolutism is very hard to bear, and very painful to watch. Once you get free of that, you can vividly see the battle in their eyes.

For those of us who have escaped the chains of absolutism, let us pray fervently that others can be set free to grasp the multiple layers of reality. You and I are able to sense all the layers of divine justice in most contexts. Something in us calls out to what is appropriate for the context. Westerners tend to dismiss this as relativism because they don’t understand it. They don’t understand the active tension of life itself, and so cannot see that tension in the moral necessities of human existence.

My joking comments in yesterday’s post has a serious point: My eventual practical choice in each situation rests on the divine calling of God and the unpredictable results of interaction with other humans. If someone were to ask my advice on something, my response depends on what I perceive to be my duty to that person at the moment. My duty to God contains multiple layers of divine justice, but what I eventually tell that person cannot be codified in mere proposition, as if God can be confined to one concrete answer in all contexts. The question depends on my grasp of how God wants to use me for His glory at that moment. Demanding rational principle flushes you out of the moral realm altogether, and blinds you to reality as God revealed it.

There is no room for simplistic absolutism in the Kingdom of Heaven.

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More Asylum Visit

Posted on August 10, 2015 by ehurst

Oh, you’re still here? Let me tell you about another delusion…

I’m pretending that someone who supports Trump has hired me to give some advice. Of course, you can probably guess how much someone would know about all of that sitting in a nut house.

You see, Ron Paul’s candidacy failed. I suspect part of what he did was to prove that playing by the rules won’t work. Nobody else in the system plays by those rules. In fact, I seem to recall at least one of his convention delegates was murdered en route, and some others were hijacked, as it were. That’s just the beginning of skulduggery.

If Trump expects to get anywhere, he should already be playing by the real rules. He has to disembowel/hijack the Koch Brothers’ political machinery, for starters. They are part of the banking-financier elite; Trump is part of a different team. They have waaaaay more money than he does. So he needs to hire at least a handful of folks as political sappers. Don’t go after the big names; go after the folks they depend on. Every face you see in the MSM has at least one utterly essential helper that makes their position tenable. Take out that background helper and things start to fall apart.

On top of that, Trump will have to disrupt the system itself before he gets in there. As a previous heavy duty campaign contributor, he should be aware of at least some of that nasty stuff going on in the background. It can be done with a relative handful of people and money, but it has to be done right and it’s already a little late in the game. He needs true believers in his program. They aren’t that hard to get, but they have to be experienced, or at least creative, resourceful and quick.

And in this day and age, he really needs some savvy IT folks. He’s got them, but he needs them working near the backbone level and frankly hacking the competition. His opposition has been doing that for a long time, but I sense he has better resources in this area. They need to get on the ball and start grinding down the opposition data and communications. Dig up that dirt and dump it in the open via some imaginary “Anonymous” or other established hacktivist label.

Does it sound immoral to you? Then you don’t understand genuine biblical morality. I’m simply describing things from a perspective of divine justice. Don’t attempt to organize revelation as some objective body of reasonable truth. It’s personal. I’m standing back here, completely out of the fray and explaining what I see from a heart-led moral perspective. At the highest level of moral justice, I’d nuke the whole system. That’s not on the menu; God calls me to consider things on multiple levels below that. Divine wisdom says that if Trump wants to win and harvest any portion of God’s blessings under the system as it now exists, he’ll have to do those things and more. Following that advice would bring the American people a few small increments closer to shalom from where they are now headed.

In other words, the measures I suggest are about as morally appropriate as it gets in the current system. I also stand utterly convinced that God would bless such efforts, if only on the general principle that it comes closest to the moral fabric of reality. Without specific prophetic insight into God’s plans, I feel certain Trump would prosper in these things and that God has already exposed the others to such attacks. Western Christians could never get this, because they still buy Plato, Aristotle and all the silly Enlightenment and Victorian “morality” that helped to create this stinking mess.

I feel like I’m some kind of alien visitor from another galaxy.

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Visitor’s Day at the Asylum

Posted on August 9, 2015 by ehurst

Oh, do come in and read my mad ravings! Let me describe to you the delusions of my poor, benighted soul. (This is merely my personal wild speculation on things as they seem to be at this point, and not at all on par with my regular stuff.)

If HR Clinton gets anywhere near the presidency, I suspect she will provoke a genuine bloody revolt. As it is, there appear to be other reasons the elite are ready to throw her to the dogs. The other Democratic candidates are safe, but we are supposed to be ignoring the machinations of that party for now. Instead, the MSM are making sure we don’t ignore the other wing of the ruling party.

We have a handful of nobodies who could never win. However, the majority of those with actual potential are all the same in one respect: They will most certainly kiss the right asses and let the Shadow Government rule as it wishes. It’s possible Trump is just play acting and would do the same, but I doubt anyone believes that.

It seems more likely he will attempt a genuine corporate takeover of the US government. While it’s unlikely he will destroy everything, he would most certainly try to shut down whole chunks of the federal bureaucracy, sell off the assets and put thousands of useless bureaucrats out of work. He has that kind of experience, though it would tax him to the limits. Very few of the usual sources would provide personnel to help him carry the load. It would mean an awful lot of new staff, because it would require fielding a vast army of spies loyal to him alone who would ferret out the genuine political resistance to his plans. The resistance would be real and bipartisan, but I’m pretty sure he would try, and he should already have that in the works or it won’t happen. I’ll bet he has the genuine intention of resurrecting the economy. That would make in both more famous and far richer.

That could mean all kinds of crazy stuff, but an example would be shutting down the Federal Reserve and instituting a national bank. That is just about the only way it could be done. The banking elite can see this coming. So while they have the MSM trying desperately to clobber his bid, Trump will likely survive even a genuine assassination attempt. Don’t be surprised if an attempt is made; be surprised if it’s very obvious.

The only other way to stop him is to destroy the economy before he can do anything about it. Keep your eye on the interbank lending rate, because that would be the easiest way to shut down the entire global economy all at once. It would take only a few days, as much of it is more-or-less under American manipulation. It would just about have to come down all at once. If they succeed, Trump will lose an awful lot of money. So will a bunch of other folks in a position to challenge the bankers. The kind of economic collapse they plan will leave them still wealthy and with a measure of power that grants them some room to set up something else I can scarcely predict. However, the traditional viewpoint is that they plan to make life so painful for everyone that we will all beg for them to save us on just about any terms.

It remains to be seen what those terms might be, but I can assure you it won’t be smooth sailing for them. Too many folks already know and have their own ways of making it too expensive. My personal expectation is that the global takeover will fail generally, but not totally. It will start a whole new round of conflicts and proxy wars with a whole new set of flags and so forth.

Welcome to my madness.

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Moral Clarity, Befuddled Reason

Posted on August 9, 2015 by ehurst

This will sound at first like I’m wandering, so buckle your seatbelts.

A significant portion of the global elite have made a religion of melding mind and computer. You’ll run across the term “singularity” most often in this context, where either computers can become conscious or linked directly to the mind so that human learning becomes a mere matter of transferring data. This is tied to the notion that there is nothing above the human intellect except more intellect or a better version of intellect. You’ll see the same nonsense in lots of Science Fiction.

I teach that all of this hearkens back to the Fall, where mankind believed the lie of Satan that human innate ability could handle ultimate truth. All it has done is take us farther and farther from genuine insight. This is the same false God of Pharisaism and of Western Civilization as a whole. In every age of recorded human history, the single point of failure is this same particular brand of hubris: We refuse to submit to the Flaming Sword guarding the path back to Paradise. Paradise itself is merely an image of the human condition as God intended it, as God created us to have.

You can’t get there without that Sword of the Spirit. And you can’t use the Sword of the Spirit until you first turn it on yourself. Specifically, you have to undo the Fall in the sense of returning the intellect to its designed function of serving something far higher. It’s at this point that human language breaks down and we are forced to rely on parables or symbolism for things beyond the grasp of intellect. Even in my attempts to use clinical terminology, it still ends up being something other than literal. At the same time, I assert that God placed in us a form of intelligence and consciousness that exceeds mere intellect. You cannot activate it fully without surrendering and embracing the self-death of revelation.

Any HOWTO I offer will remain little more than my story, my personal awareness of a journey from where I was to where I am now. The best we can hope for is to make such narrative indicative of things you can experience in your own terms. You have to reach your own personal consciousness because God is a Person who works with individual persons. There is no intervening objective body of truth that we can all share. The closest we come to that is a characterization of how it looks in this fallen reality when folks begin to share a common realization. That is, a community of people with some measure of similarity in their background experiences can overlap just enough to fellowship and commune like a highly spirited and raucous household. That’s about as good as it gets, because any more uniformity than that is almost surely false.

“Domestic peace” is a relative term. It implies a commitment to common welfare that reflects a fundamental stability, in that the people involved do care. You can’t regulate that by rules every well, though you can just about get it to work if one person becomes the focus of guidance and leadership. Unanimity will be rare and usually applies to things of no consequence, or it applies in a very subtle “blood is thicker than water” kind of rowdy love. Except, in God’s design, it’s the Blood of Christ that binds us, not mere DNA. Christ warned the arrogant “Children of Abraham” that the Father could turn stones into such progeny. That kind of parable has multiple applications on multiple levels because it’s a moral truth that stands above our fallen realm. The point is that this bogus Abrahamite crew shared no more with their acclaimed progenitor than the rocks on the ground did.

You want peace by human rule? That happens only when everyone is dead. If the system in which you live was designed by a human mind, it cannot last. It is not a divine plan. It stands in opposition to God’s revelation simply because it’s not what He said. God designed and created a setting for His revelation based on Ancient Near Eastern feudalism. That’s not a system, but a relationship. If it ain’t personal, God isn’t pleased. But because of our mythology of objectivity, that’s how we structure things. Thus, if you want to understand what is happening in human politics on a moral level, pay attention to the systemic changes, not so much the people involved. People without God are not free moral agents, but are steered unconsciously by higher moral influences. Human behavior cannot escape fundamental moral boundaries.

The Internet or something similar will survive any upheaval because too many of the ruling elite have made a religion of computers as god. These people aren’t going to go away; they are a solid part of the human future. They don’t think like or hope for the same things as the old ruling elite, and they are just as rich and powerful. God has granted to Satan the authority to raise up this next civilization of technocracy — that’s my prophetic sense of where things are going. But there’s a lot of stuff that has to crash and get out the way first. Don’t focus on the people, because plenty of them will make the transition. Instead, notice how the very banking elite themselves depend on the networking, and that networking is controlled by the rising priesthood of geekery.

It’s not that this somehow forms a literal fulfillment of John’s Apocalypse, but that it fits the moral pattern that John revealed in his symbolic imagery. Humanity will always be ruled by a combined mechanism of king and priest. The bankers (rulers) cannot afford to alienate the geeks (priesthood) and vice versa. There is no loyalty, just a mercenary bond, and it’s pretty shaky. That is, the geeks are smart enough to play various would-be kings off against each other. For any ruling elite to stay on top, they cannot afford to let some usurping gang gain an advantage over them by pulling away the geeks. But the geeks cannot rule by themselves without sacrificing their unique position. Rather, you can expect them to throw their support behind anyone that takes them seriously.

It is, in effect, very much like having a shaman to appease the various inexplicable forces and keep away the bad juju. Precious few humans are able to master both political power and full technology expertise in one brain. Those who do are usually smart enough to avoid playing the pointless game of politics itself, but use that skill in managing other kinds of human enterprise. The time is not right for that kind of shaman-king.

Yes, the imagery breaks down at some point, but I suppose you’ll get the point. Don’t invest yourself fully in anything attached to this realm. All Creation is a tool for His glory, so recognize that you can exploit any and all human activity in the same broad sense if you can see the moral forces at work. Feel free to use my blather any way you like, if it appeals to something in you, because that’s the way God does business whether we like it or not. People who try their hardest to sell you something and scrape off some income will, to say the least, miss out on the most precious blessings of God’s hand. They have traded moral authority for material income. It’s not that they are necessarily lying, but that you can’t trust them. They have already chosen to focus on the wrong level of understanding.

Yes, I tend to think a lot of status quo will change in the coming months. That came to me first as a broad perception in my heart. It may not be that soon, because even if the bankers and/or other elite are plotting any kind of action, God can change their plans on His whim. Rather, I sense the moral tension in the universe itself. God has clearly revealed that He suffers nothing from our temporal sense. Time in the Bible is a matter of “when the fruit ripens” and not rational scheduling. Maybe I’ll see world turmoil just in time for my birthday (18 September), but that doesn’t make the timing morally auspicious, just whimsical. Instead, we should recognize that more than one big lie is running out of room to lead us all on a merry chase after nothing.

Learn to sense things with your heart-mind. Shift your consciousness to a higher level where morality (God’s character) is the fundamental fabric of things. Learn to ditch the Anglo-Saxon mythology that influences us. For example, God is not a grouchy Nordic deity and the world is not a dark and dreary place. Death is not your enemy and youth is not your friend, much less a goddess to worship. This world is nothing more than a moral staging ground in one sense; in another sense it is a beautiful gift of God loaded with giddy blessings and all manner of things pointing us back to His character. People don’t have to think like you and talk like you to be your brothers and sisters.

Learn how the virtual world is different from meat space because God has great things to do in the future in the virtual realm. You have to be ready to work in both worlds by understanding what He says is real. Don’t trust your senses and logic too much, but do learn to trust that inner voice that will not be quiet. Even if you get the message wrong, especially in the early stages of transition, learn to trust that voice of moral perception.

Got it?

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Psalm 62

Posted on August 8, 2015 by ehurst

David dedicates this song to Jeduthun, a man who served him as leader of a choir of musical priests with prophetic gifts. This psalm is built on the image of faithful retainer, a warlord serving some mighty sovereign. Whatever David might have been in the eyes of men, he was just a servant of Jehovah.

He stands quietly in courts of his Lord, waiting until his master should take a notion to call him. David asserts no one else is worthy of that level of devotion. But instead of the Lord needing his battle hardened experience, it is the Lord who protects David. For this reason, David does not tremble at even the most shocking threats in this world.

And there are threats aplenty against David. Will they never learn, these fools who plot ceaselessly against God’s anointed? He would outlive them all. Their petty maneuvering reminds David of a stone wall that has begun to sag; it’s just a matter of time before it collapses under its own weight. In David’s court he never lacked for yes-men who gave mere lip service while seeking any opportunity to betray him.

So David repeats his first refrain with but slight modification in the wording. David is serves at God’s whim, and God is the only One able to guard him against human foes. It’s like standing on a high rocky cliff looking down on his enemies. David calls out to all who hear his voice: Trust in God alone! Place no trust in human power and authority.

From the lowest to the highest in social status, they are all still mere humans. Pile them on a scale against God and a brief morning vapor outweighs them. Could a man assert violent power over others and confiscate everything they own, piling up all the things men value, he would still have nothing. It could all be gone with the dawn, like that vapor.

Turn your heart to trust in the revelation of God. All power comes from Him and He decides anything and everything that matters. But the Almighty is also merciful. He sees and knows the hearts of men and their moral commitments. So He responds to them, for they can hide nothing.

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Brief: Politics and Moral Perception

Posted on August 8, 2015 by ehurst

Just a short explanation to help you think for yourself…

On the one hand, we are pretty sure that previous political theatrics were scripted by the global elites. We also understood that it doesn’t mean every detail was foreordained as some kind of complex plot all written out beforehand. Rather, it has always been a matter of the system itself. Don’t be distracted by the nitty gritty of tactics and battles, but try to see the broader war of keeping us in our place so we don’t hinder the elite enjoying their “entitlements.”

It’s never been so simple as having the elite inside a clear boundary, another boundary for their servants, and then the rest of us. The most sinister part of all this is how it all blends and feathers out. See it as a dynamic role-play. The servants of the elite aren’t always knowing and willing to serve in every detail of their consciousness. It’s not a question of identity. That’s the wrong question. A proper understanding is to see the moral influences that keep the system alive, with people as tools in an infinite variety, featuring multiple gradations of usefulness in different ways. They don’t see the higher moral interplay of demonic influence that steers their lives. The ultimate control is not people and the interplay of concrete decisions, but demons and their influences. Even referring to the elite is misleading in the sense that we tend to think it’s a coherent discrete collection of persons. The term is best used as a handle for the net effects of some moral evil that lurks in the background of human existence on this planet. It’s not a question of recognizing this person as this or that kind of thing, but seeing their actions as manifesting the moral winds of demonic pressure mocking them.

The whole thing boils down to Satan keeping us in bondage to him, which means at the same time keeping us from the blessings God promised if we live by His moral character. When we miss out on the blessings, we miss out on God’s glory. Keep your eyes on this higher moral interplay.

We live in a time when the old system has run its course and is coming apart. Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the harvest is ripening for Western Civilization. A primary manifestation of that is the means of that destruction: the Internet. While the content presented on the Net can be just as confusing as any other medium, there is the additional factor of genuine truth sneaking out, something that TPTB could previously hinder. The key to discernment is your own sense of divine calling and moral consciousness. If your heart is awakened to moral consciousness and your mind has begun to learn how to serve that higher awareness, then you are in a position to begin filtering out the lies.

It’s not a question of factual accuracy. That’s the wrong question. We are wired to perceive from a higher level where facts are fungible and broader moral truth is the hard reality. Put the details in perspective. Furthermore, put the reporting of the details in perspective the same way. See the moral fabric of God’s character as you watch the various stories unfold. All of human existence is a collection of narratives, each told by someone who can’t possibly see it all.

As you watch the political noise reported in varying narratives, there is something to watch for that does matter: The winds of change are blowing at gale strength already. Assess the people from that higher moral perception. For example, there is no good candidate for the US presidency. Keep your holy cynicism strong. However, some candidates represent a shift, a break in the dreary pattern of elite control. Not because the elite are losing control, but the elite are at war internally. The single greatest sign of serious change in our human condition is when the elite can no longer cooperate as before. Their system is breaking down. Some of the elite are tired of the same old game, and are ready to see things break. Don’t get lost in their motives, as if we could ever get an honest report of that. Look at how the structure for deception and control is breaking down.

Don’t see the political contest as good versus evil; it’s all evil. Rather, see the contest for what it is in moral terms. Ditch the mythology of some individual or small group chosen by Satan to bring about his Dark Kingdom on the earth. That ain’t happening, at least in the popular Western mythology about such things. Satan is consuming their life energy same as ours, but they are blind enough to think they stand to gain by working from the top of what humans imagine to be “ruling.” In that sense, they are more deceived than you and I. Sooner or later their value to Satan ends; sometimes it’s a simple matter that God still pulls all the strings. What we see before us is not just the end of this or that individual or group, but the end of a whole system. This is a cycle ordained by God and easily explained in Scripture if you’ll stop reading it with a Western bias.

In the political campaigns, watch to see if the loose canons are tossed overboard, or if they are lashed back down into place. If they manage to fire off a few rounds, this can get quite entertaining. God may even allow for the sinking of the ship; that will come sooner or later.

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Foul Winds

Posted on August 8, 2015 by ehurst

The fundamental concept of sin is arguing with God. In terms of the Law Covenants, God places a very high priority on social stability (shalom). His revelation obliges us to act consistent with His character, which is woven into the very fabric of reality. When we seek that, we will naturally build shalom and reap it’s blessings. In our Western society, there seems to be two primary areas in which people most often disagree with revelation and destroy shalom: persons and dominion.

We’ve already noted that the West depersonalizes Creation as a whole. Reality itself bears the stamp of God’s character. The Bible says we should treat reality as a living thing and include it in our society. Indeed, Western intellectual assumptions typically depersonalize God by raising the myth of objective truth as a separate entity, and Westerners make arguments as if holding Him accountable to this imaginary body of truth. Folks, there is no truth outside of God. While that Western fallacy is bad enough, a primary manifestation of this is dehumanizing people. The Bible consistently uses the language of people as made in God’s image, and this is what makes the Fall so tragic. In fallen arrogance, many become self-centered, treating others as less worthy.

Jesus made a big deal of loving your neighbor as yourself, then went on to define “neighbor” in terms of morality. Notice that this isn’t about mere prejudice, which misses the point. Rather, Jesus was saying that if someone does you no harm, you have to assume they are your neighbor, deserving of all the inclusive social stability efforts. It’s not about the people and their identity. The Samaritans were a mixed bag of heathens imported back when God permitted the Assyrian Empire to destroy the Northern Ten Tribes. The Israelis were dispersed Mesopotamia and a bunch of other folks were brought in to occupy their place, starting around the old capital of Samaria. These imports adopted a highly corrupted version of the Books of Moses on the grounds of simply placating the local deity. Without wasting pages recounting the whole sordid tale, we note that these Samaritans had a long-standing antagonism with the Southern Tribes (Judea). Jesus’ point was that none of it mattered — religion, nationality, history, etc. God has revealed Himself in the fabric of all Creation, and He can touch heathen hearts without the Bible. When you see someone walking in some measure of conformance with the moral character of God, they are your neighbor.

The standard is God’s moral character. If someone acts the part of your enemy, pay attention to the moral failure and deal with that, but don’t hate the person. Commit your whole loyalty to the moral character of God, not any lesser thing cooked up by mankind’s fallen imagination. Let your religion be your very best personal response, being faithful to the God who calls you, but never treat your religion as a definition of God that constrains Him.

The other issue is dominion: What does God say is your business? What does His Law indicate are the limits of your control in this plane of existence? We can be sure that Westerners seldom come even close on this one. The whole question presumes you have sought an awareness of your divine calling from God. There is no waste in God; if He made you, there is a reason and He’s the One you ask to discover that reason. You would think Western Christianity should have a clue, but most Christians are just about as perverted in their understanding as were the Hellenized Pharisees. Westerners are worse than Hellenized, because they also have embraced the heathen Germanic mythology to mix with Greek rationalism. That’s the definition of Western Civilization. Westerners are clueless about dominion, and only by accident do they ever come close. A primary manifestation of Western failure is a false sense of entitlement or elitism. Westerners virtually always stick their nose in someone else’s domain. Your divine calling comes with a limited dominion granted by God, and it is a critical element in divine moral consciousness.

If we can just understand these two fundamental elements, virtually everything else wrong with Western Civilization fades away to insignificance. Put your life in the same basket as all human life — indeed, all Creation. Hold it all as a unified consideration in pursuing divine justice. Yet do not presume on things God did not place in your hands.

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