Virtual Virtue

Posted on August 1, 2015 by ehurst

The previous post shares my vision of virtual pastoring under a mystical religion. Contrary to the mythology of Western intellectual bias, this religion is intensely practical. It has to be; while anyone can absorb the teachings, the communion depends entirely on Internet technology. My books are ebooks and this blog is the sole earthly manifestation of the parish (at least for now).

And in the post before that, I made it clear that we simply cannot make the most of our shared faith without recognizing that there is first a firm necessity for engaging the Law Covenants of the Bible as the Laws of God for humanity, and that these Laws apply differently between meat space and virtual space. If the fundamental nature of all Creation is revelation of God’s character, then it stands to reason that His character comes across differently between these two parallel realms of existence.

I assert that virtual space is a thing unto itself. It is not the result of the hardware and software upon which it is manifest to us. Rather, what we can know of virtual space is revealed through the hardware and software. Virtual space is a reflection of God’s character, same as meat space is.

Just as men flagrantly reject God’s revealed will for us in meat space, we see men trying to force their own fallen will on virtual space. Perhaps you and I aren’t confused about the Internet being the network versus virtual space as the indefinable thing that we can touch through the Internet, but most Westerners don’t get that. They confuse the two. You can really mess up the Internet, but you can’t change virtual reality. What I’m getting at is the utter necessity of understanding that reality is fixed in God’s mind based on His divine character. Failure to understand it means your decisions and actions won’t pan out as you expect. This applies to both meat space and virtual space, though we would implement some elements of His Laws differently in each.

Now, the Internet has become a really huge thing that’s difficult to change because it comes so functionally close to virtual reality. You can hinder human connection to it, but actually changing the Internet is a monumental task simply because it crosses all the conceptual boundaries of government and business controls. Up to now, there have been standards of a sort, but some businesses have tried to ignore those standards for the sake of profit. Those businesses have come up with competing standards and tried to use market dominance to bypass the standards. If the actual users pay no attention to the standards, what difference do standards make? But while the users and clients might get blindly sucked into that trick, the folks who run the servers are another matter entirely. A significant portion of them tend act as if those independent standards were akin to canon law in a network religion. That their religion is closer to God’s moral character than the merchant’s worship of Mammon means geeks eventually win.

It is their independent streak of so very many system administrators that has given life to a growing geek culture among users. There are simply too many smart ways to undermine the attempt at monopoly, and the historical moment has passed. When the merchants tried to subvert the geek culture, the best they could do is rent some portion of geeks’ loyalty, and ended up giving them enough inside knowledge to eventually subvert the merchant controls. The merchants will be there as long as humans want or need more than they can produce on their own, but their dominance on the Net, at least in that shape, is currently fading. However, that is in part because the newer monster businesses are building on top of the independent standards so there’s not as much resistance.

This is where we are now, with things in a state of flux as newer businesses with some measure of geek influence are struggling to redefine the market. For each new idea, there is a golden mixture of merchant and geek and most don’t hit it right away. But what matters is that the kinds of things people regard as life essentials will tend to be at least network-aware, if not somehow embedded in the virtual realm. Should the current Internet hardware suffer a major loss, it would simply be the excuse to recreate something better with a stronger reliance on mesh networking. And it will tend to work on older hardware because the folks who build that kind of thing aren’t wealthy enough to chase the latest and greatest devices. Plan on seeing this thing outlast the civilization as we know it today.

Meanwhile, you should expect more computer technology chatter on this blog. You should expect to see it presume, if not discuss directly, what I understand to be divine moral imperatives of virtual space. The single biggest difference between meat and virtual space is that copyright is flat out evil in the latter. That is, while I can ask you to voluntarily honor the concept of attribution for my writing, I would be the last person to seek enforcement from anyone but God Himself. Once something is in a digital format, it becomes nobody’s property, in the sense of controlled access. It is totally voluntary, and it tends to work out pretty well.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Virtual Virtue

Not a Movement

Posted on August 1, 2015 by ehurst

One of the things I confront often enough is the unconscious expectation that the religion of Radix Fidem could become a movement of some sort. That expectation is part of the activist urge that traps people’s minds, in the sense that it keeps the intellect in command of conscious activity.

This is the soul of our calling to humanity as a whole: The answers are not in your head, nor will they ever be. It requires a higher faculty, a mighty leap most people will not make, never mind why. If we could explain it, we wouldn’t be talking about mysticism, but something else.

Talking about mysticism is exceedingly difficult. Demonstrating it is only slightly easier. It is deeply, fundamentally personal, as is the nature of reality itself. If I tell you that reality itself is alive, conscious and has a will, you would have to recognize that saying so is more than metaphor, yet not entirely literal. All I’ve done is characterize our experience with it, not something in the nature of the thing itself. The thing itself is impossible to express largely because it is so personal; it builds on the very nature of our individuality. It depends entirely on our uniqueness, and this is what is so very hard to translate between any two individuals.

So we can share a consciousness of communion in the results, and perhaps something in the path to that result, but only in the sense of what we all have to reject. It’s part of our shared fallen nature: We are so utterly cut off from our Creator and so unspeakably isolated and lonely that the pain is impossible to process without committing suicide. We are left with the only “sane” choice of denying it and acting as if we could create that lost communion some other way. We refuse to let the Flaming Sword at the entrance to Eden do its work out of some instinctive fear, but it’s the one form of “suicide” that actually brings relief. The communion we gain as believers is some ineffable gift that drives us onto that blade of revelation, and having been changed by it, we realize there is something we can share. We might still be stuck in the Fallen Realm, but a part of us has moved beyond that.

So name I give my religion — Radix Fidem — is just a handle, not the thing itself. Call it what you like, because you can’t deal with it unless you come up with a handle that fits your grip. Even if you adopt my label, it still has to have your own hand print, a mark of your unique individuality. God calls individuals into His Realm, not masses. There are some general characterizations we can offer to help you make sense of it, but God does not offer exactly the same terms to every individual. No two of us bring the same precise collection of wounds.

Yet there remains a certain tendency to share common experiences such that some of us are closer to each other than we are to the rest. We have to get over our silly mythology of fairness and equality imposed as an orthodoxy. I can’t love everyone the way I love my wife. By the same token, she cannot own all of my time and energy when God demands I give some to others He calls alongside. God has revealed certain general boundaries — I won’t have sex with other folks — but that leaves an awful lot of other ways we can express affection and communion. Some of you will always be closer than others, and nothing I can do will ever quell any feelings of jealousy in fallen humans. All I can do is help you fight them for yourself.

So the really tough part of this is the half-in/half-out nature of our existence in the Fallen Realm while belonging wholly to the Eternal Realm. That’s what the Bible addresses, that in-between existence and how it can be so utterly sweet and loving. That’s what we try to share. I was sickened at the sight of book title in a Christian bookstore yesterday. The title obviously insists that holiness is a matter of orthodoxy — right thinking. The blurb on the cover and advertising material asserted that all your emotional problems could be settled if you would just make your mind accept the right propositions. That’s the foundation of movements, things conceived and built by man under the false assumption that it reflects God’s requirements. Cerebral religion serves a false god of the intellect, a god restricted to what men can control.

So long as God enables it, this blog as the point of contact with the Internet for my faith, will continue. This is the door to our parish church house, insofar as such a thing could be. That’s about as close as we will come to the shortcut of “invite your friends to church.” And if you have your own blog speaking your own faith, there’s nothing wrong with asking about linking, but there’s also nothing wrong with simply promoting your own message instead of mine. It might be amusing to someday have a webring of sorts, but I’m not sure I want to be the one who decides the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. If you sense a call to sponsor something like that, then you draw the boundaries. Please don’t see it as whining and begging if I tell you I am a little short on resources for more than what I do already. I’ll tell you the sad tale of my relative poverty if you like, but I refuse to make any fund-raising appeals. It works a whole lot better if you come up with that idea on your own, between you and God.

Much more valuable to me is when you share with me any report of how your faith is stronger from sampling my writing here. Better yet, tell others who read this blog. Throw me flowers if you like, but let’s keep the focus on the faith we share. Help me avoid all the failures and bondage of mainstream Western religions by avoiding the obvious bad habits. You honor me best by having your own story to tell. That’s because our greatest benefit is to share in His glory, not our own.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Not a Movement

Virtual Communion and Witness

Posted on July 31, 2015 by ehurst

It’s a favorite theme of mine: Don’t take yourself too seriously. We are all for the most part simply along for the ride in God’s revelation of Himself. In His measureless mercy and grace, He allows us to participate in small ways. When Scripture refers to us as vessels for His cleansing flow, it means He can pour us out at His discretion. We are not vending machines with internal controls that allow us to charge for the privilege of parceling out His blessings.

Thus, we are taught not to judge the worthiness of others on the basis of our human perceptions. The nice thing about the Internet is how it strips away so much of what fallible humans have used in the past to restrict human communion. This is a two-edged sword, of course. We are obliged to pay more attention to those few factors that do come across and shape our Internet persona, but it also makes it easier to ignore things we should in the first place.

This changes the meaning of social charisma. It demands a whole new range of social skills. It raises up a new class of social elite who are able to make the most of what the Internet permits in terms of touching others’ lives. By the same token it creates a new class of social outcasts as those not adept at working this different social structure. This is reality, though we often call it “virtual reality.” Still, the effect on human existence is much the same.

Just as there have been subcultures in meat space, so they will manifest in virtual space. You can be just as provincial and ignorant on the Net as people have been in the real world. God can still use anyone He chooses. What has changed is that some elements of how we form our self-image no longer apply, and new elements have been added. The difficulty is that we are living in two parallel realms of existence. Not two different levels, but two different kinds on the same basic level.

It’s the failure to grasp that basic fact that destroys our witness on the Net. It’s bad enough that whole eras of Christian history have seen believers trapped in a false understanding of reality as God revealed it. We now have twice the liability from false assumptions. While our meat space reality is ruled by the character of God, regardless how well you do or don’t understand His revelation, the Net has yet another expression of His moral character. Western Christians have really missed out on the lion’s share of God’s blessings by insisting on a whole range of false assumptions about reality as God made it. Now we have the added failures of people who drag their bad meat space assumptions into virtual reality for a whole new set of missed blessings.

The single greatest barrier in both meat space and virtual space is refusing let God pour out our witness. You can’t be filled afresh if you don’t let Him use what you have now. It’s not that we can all run out and be wholly cosmopolitan in the sense of the mindless “diversity” proposed by Social Justice Warriors. God made us to operate in tribes, and a tribal identity is critical to functioning in this world, but the biggest problem in Western Christianity is focusing on all the wrong elements of human nature for constructing our tribal identity. Don’t add to those mistakes by doing even worse on the Net. None of us is called the shepherd the whole human race; we have our own flock, as it were. Stop grabbing at sheep that don’t recognize your voice.

If your heart should rule over your mind in meat space, even more so should it rule in virtual space. The Internet does yield to heart-mind operations. Would you believe that the same heart-led communion our Sister Wildcucumber experiences in nature is possible with technology? The only reason I get repeat calls from the same computer ministry clients is not because I work for free, and certainly not because I’m such a great technician, but because the Lord allows me to see and understand things my rational mind could not comprehend by itself. Just as elements in the flora and fauna call out to Sister Wildcucumber, so the modern technology often calls out to my heart-mind why something isn’t working right. I get stuff right far beyond my intellectual capabilities with computer tech support as well as other fields of human activity to which God has called me.

It works the same for you, regardless of your awareness. The one thing we can all share is the same personal witness of how God works with us, mostly because of the fact itself that He works with anyone who seeks His face. Give Him room to glorify Himself in you.

You might get a strong impression about my personality if you were to spend time with me in meat space. It’s not the same personality you’ll see in my Net persona, though the two will converge over time and with greater exposure. It’s not a question of whether I’m the same guy in both realms, as if there might be some element of dishonesty. Even to the degree I might be hiding anything, there’s nothing you can do about it — and this is entirely reciprocal. Indeed, we hide things from ourselves, so how much do you really want to make of it? Take what you can discern of me however it is you are wired to perceive. Do the same with everyone on the Net. There is no such thing as objective truth in either realm of existence. This is only God’s perception and however much of His viewpoint He can hammer through our fallen nature.

If you sense a calling from God to walk this path with me, then let’s learn how to commune via the Net. Let’s take what God offers in the way He offers it here. And by all means, take the time to communicate, because that’s part of communion. I tend to believe you get a better version of “me” on the Net. That I might have some measure of charisma in meat space is not the point; the extra filtering of this medium allows me to do a better job of getting my flesh out of the way so His glory shines brighter. He will do the same for you, so stop hiding behind your false fears. Trust Him and share a word or two, because data is the sole treasure of the Internet.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Virtual Communion and Witness

Not the Apocalypse, Part 3

Posted on July 30, 2015 by ehurst

It’s personal.

You can’t make it otherwise. The very fabric of Creation itself is personal because that’s how God makes it and remakes it every day. It wasn’t made and then allowed to run on without Him; it continues only because He very actively holds it together. This is the hardest thing for Westerners to grasp: Nothing about our existence can be objectified. That it appears we can is largely the result of seeing things through a very dark mythology. If your daily existence appears randomized and impersonal, it’s because you don’t have your consciousness connected to all your faculties. Life is very personal because life is the process of dealing with the Creator. You cannot objectify Creation away from Him. It’s not subjective in the typical sense of the word, but personal.

In one sense, the single greatest failure of Western Civilization is the obsession with objectivity, to the point it depersonalizes everything. Worst of all, it dehumanizes people made in God’s image. God is not mocked. In accordance with His ineffable wisdom, He has turned the tables. Do you imagine He is not actively involved in things? He works daily to enforce His own character in human existence. That includes the Internet.

The ultimate dehumanization of mankind results in the paradox of destroying the force that drives it. The ultimate weapon for commoditizing people behind a screen of devices and assigned numerical identities with time and space indexing is at the same time the ultimate democratization of the power and authority.

For centuries of human history, the one distinction of the elites was the first the talent for violence, and secondly the means to make violence more effective. At the dawn of human existence, anyone could pick up a rock, but only those with skill and talent could make it deadly with any consistency. But as weapons technology advanced, the matter of skill slowly declined as the cost in resources climbed. Any fool can shoot a gun, but they are still fairly expensive. So it required body armor and even bigger and better guns for government to retain the monopoly on the use of force. Eventually the arms race collapses because the fanciest high-tech weapons become useless.

Have you noticed that nukes have become nearly impossible to use? Think about it. There is virtually no realistic scenario under which they’ll be employed any time soon. Anyone who decides to push the button now will be a fool with nothing left to lose. All the bullshit saying otherwise is sheer propaganda from those with a vested interest in keeping us subject to the secular state government system, but that system is dissolving before our eyes. And even as higher tech weapons appear with price tags climbing out of sight, there is no meaningful field of battle for them. Today the greatest threat to any government is the thing government invented for its own convenience — the Internet. That’s because governments can no longer govern without it.

Nothing has been more democratizing than the Internet. The barriers to exercising technical proficiency are almost non-existent. We look back over history, particularly European history as the core of Western Civilization, and see how great shifts in the human condition came with the democratization of things. When meat became a commodity, it leveled the playing field greatly between the elite and the commoners. I’ve already mentioned firearms as another democratization factor. Movable type? How about democratization of the printing press, and then typewriters? Now it’s the Internet.

It’s more than democratizing communications and weapons used on the Internet, but the thing itself. Every element of it is within easy reach of any fool with discarded equipment and very little instruction. The Internet is now the very fabric of a new civilization and precious few people in this world can’t get a device that connects to it in one way or another. Given just a little more time and technological advancements, we’ll see a network that no longer requires cables and routers, because mesh networking is already old hat. Most people simply have no clue what’s coming.

What we consider today as the mainstream media, regardless of the means of delivery, is the last vestige of middle class structure. Facebook and Twitter don’t represent the new civilization. They are the result of Boomer habits imposed over the Net. Understanding this new world is not going to be that easy. All this carping about how socially unacceptable it is when folks bury their attention in their cellphones misses the point. Something in that much-maligned trend is the future of humanity. Boomers and those still under the Boomer influence don’t bother to understand what they don’t like and can’t at least pretend to control with money and prissy middle class social strictures. When the Boomer influence dies is when we’ll see the new social fabric.

Stop carping and start understanding. There is a social structure, but the new geek culture depends on an entirely different kind of social glue. It breaks all the rules and categories to which Westerners are accustomed. Inasmuch as the West can’t comprehend previous civilizations, it is even more bewildered by the future one.

It matters. For those of us who cling to God’s calling and the demands of His glory in our lives, we have to see where God is directing things. Sure, there will always be a segment of society that prefers Facebook, and we have to keep our witness active for them. But they will never be the shapers of tomorrow, and their numerical weight will shrink considerably. Granted, the boundaries are very hard to see, but that’s part of the fundamental necessity for being ready to touch the future with our Father’s love. The old categories won’t work because the geek world ignores them entirely, blending across the boundaries. The new boundaries will remain invisible unless you back out of the blind alley of middle class Boomer thinking.

Part of what I do here with a virtual church and DIY religion is trying to meet that rising social structure. I’m hoping to reach the geeks where they are. Something in how humans are learning to relate over the Net is fundamental to where humanity is going, and the glory of God requires we think about religion in radically different ways. On the one hand, I’d love to meet each of you and give a hug and let you look into my eyes to see His love. The power of that isn’t going to die away, but if we don’t figure out how to share our faith and even our religion without that physical encounter, then it won’t be a religion that speaks to the Networked Civilization.

However flawed the future civilization may be, God will ensure there remains a path to keeping it personal.

Posted in religion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Not the Apocalypse, Part 3

Not the Apocalypse, Part 2

Posted on July 29, 2015 by ehurst

Until relatively recent times, the ruling elite didn’t bother with most of the daily details of their subjects’ existence. With the rise of the middle class to political power, we see a matching rise in both nit-picking intrusion and a spiteful attitude toward those who somehow failed to embrace the materialist “virtues” of the merchant class.

The contract is sacred writ for them. They can be unconscionably bloodthirsty, but they contract that out to lackeys equipped with badges. The idea of getting their hands dirty from violence is reserved for the very worst of the worst, and only when they can gang up on the victim so that useful resistance is utterly impossible. They reserve their most violent rage for those who can argue effectively using their own logic against them. And the dirtiest secret of all is that it won’t matter where they fall on the commonly accepted scale of political and economic theory; they are all materialistic and ignoble when in power.

Anyone can see the rising police state atmosphere as a symptom of civilizational decline. What we have had for a few centuries is already dying, and another civilization is already rising from between the rotting roots, a parasite civilization sucking the last bit of life from its host. Meanwhile, we face a long series of insults and injuries from those yet in power over us.

While it’s possible that government itself may well be involved, it would seem almost beside the point. What we call our official government and its various agencies isn’t always the actual regulatory mechanism that most affects us. There are lots of ways official governments can make room for defacto “governments” to oppress us, typically because the latter simply pays the required tribute. Yeah, it’s always about the money. Regardless of the excuse for demanding yet more control, it always comes back to money.

The mere existence of the term “middle class” and related concepts itself arises from the obsession with material wealth. The entire meaning of Western Civilization has always been materialism, so the rise of a middle class culture and political power in the latter stages of this civilization is simply the final expression of that obsession. In its place we now have a growing population of folks completely alienated from it. An awful lot of what we see now will die with the Baby Boom generation. Even the concept of referring to generations that way will probably pass in less than a century from now. Human self-concept is drifting quickly toward a new blend of things, and while you can find plenty of critical analysis about it from Boomers, it misses the point entirely. Boomers, as the pinnacle of Western materialism, see everything in commercial terms.

We see this in the current conflicts over the Internet and computer use, in general. Some of it you read in the news, such as the rhetorical posturing over encryption. It would seem the moment of threat has passed now as major figures have taken the side against the forced backdoors on encryption software. A part of the resistance was one of the most ignored factors in the entire question: the geeks who make all of this possible. What the government spokesmen demanded is technically impossible, but they lacked the background to understand what is so painfully obvious to computer geeks.

Whatever we might think of the various weaknesses in the computer nerd personality types, they are becoming the dominant species in what is yet Western society. In Socio-sexual Game terms, the Deltas are being replaced by Gammas. If not so much in terms of concrete demographics, it is most certainly true in terms of how people in general relate in society. The definition of Delta is drifting, as it were, to be more like Gamma has been until now. It is the Gamma personality and value system that shapes the rising Network Civilization.

And the middle-class Deltas aren’t going down without a fight. The encryption battle is just the most recent example; look for both official and defacto government to seek ways to crush the nerds. They will fail, but it will be ugly in the meantime. Already we can see manifestations of this in other forms.

Do you read Slashdot? It’s dying, nearly dead. It was once the ultimate nerd forum. Some merchant assholes misunderstood and decided it was such a large audience, surely they could monetize the attention? They borged it and ran off everyone who made it what it was. They tried to push changes in the appearance to something closer to commercial sites. It failed. The same people also bought Sourceforge and screwed it up even worse, forcing advertising ware into popular downloads for Windows until many projects moved away and Firefox started blocking users from going there. While you can still find some interesting geek discussions at Slashdot, even erudite at times, the density is now much lower and the audience has long since moved on to other sites. But instead of one or two replacements, it’s more like a diaspora for now. My previous comments on Reddit are based on a similar geek factor, though of a different flavor. This represents three bruising battles and requires you understand victory in different terms to realize who won.

We can’t easily explain the odd mixture of carping endlessly, simply walking away, or actually hacking the service, but you can begin to outline the nerd response and how it’s spilling over into a much wider activist community. Don’t get hung up on traditional partisan affiliations; notice what they value and how they express it. Materialism fades more and more from consideration. This serves to draw the greatest ire and most spiteful attack from the merchant culture, though often hidden from public view. Every time something nerdy is hijacked by the merchants, you can see the complete lack of geek common sense in the product.

Have you heard about the Stagefright bug in Android? Okay, so Google patched it, but you can bet that virtually none of the actual providers using Android will distribute the patch. Do you see what an abomination that is to the geeks? What will it take for the merchants to get a clue? Money.

Windows 10 and the mandatory updates? More and more control passed from the user back to the provider is the theme of Microsoft. Thousands of computer nerds work there, but the policies come from merchants. Back doors? Hah; it’s loaded with multiple unlocked front doors. I keep waiting for some legislative idiot to suggest it should be mandatory that folks with common devices run some version of Windows, Android or Mac. Meanwhile, the continuing incestuous orgies between government agencies and the big three (Google, MS and Apple) guarantees the differences between them are purely for prime time entertainment.

I’m convinced we will see quite a few skirmishes in the news, and even bigger and uglier stuff only in the more narrowly focused technology news. Some of it may never see publicity at all. That’s because a corollary of materialism is overwhelming pretense. At the same time, the worst stuff is simply too hard to believe without seeing it first-hand with sufficient background to understand it. I am convinced the merchant folk are getting riled up and planning something even worse against the geeks. A critical element in this is unadulterated hatred for what the merchants simply do not understand. I’m also convinced the geeks will win.

Keep your eyes on this; the war has just begun.

Posted in globalism | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Not the Apocalypse, Part 2

Not the Apocalypse, Part 1

Posted on July 29, 2015 by ehurst

We don’t care whether it was the chicken or the egg that came first; it won’t make any difference on the moral plane. We know how it works here and now and mucking around with it only causes problems. God has provided and we must use it for His glory, not to serve the false god of human pride in accomplishment. The moral fabric teaches us all we need to know about life, if we only listen.

Never mind whether I call myself a “prophet;” the Lord has granted me a prophetic temperament and the net effect of my ministry calling tends to be prophetic. This ministry includes all the talents and skills I bring to the task here and now. It’s not always easy, and sometimes is downright pointless, to separate between the various influences inside my soul that lead to the written results on this blog. When I can discern that something I write is pure personal speculation, I’ll say so. When it’s a strong application of Scripture, I’ll try to justify that with my explanation. Sometimes it’s not so easy to explain that way because our culture lacks both the language and custom for what God’s people once regarded as the norm.

I’m still struggling with the lasting effects of the loss of that legacy of how God speaks to His servants. When you read this blather, you’ll likely participate in the struggle in deciding how to use it. My attempts to describe in clinical terms the experience of God working in my awareness don’t always make for easy reading.

In our struggle to find the human norm that God designed for us and revealed in His Word, I find we are often hindered by imagery that may echo the Bible, but is so highly filtered through our Western mythology that it becomes disfigured and perverted beyond recognition and certainly beyond usefulness.

For example, in the past few days I’ve been hit with a powerful moral anticipation that invades both my sleep and waking hours. Until I had ruminated over it and shared it privately with a few close friends, I wasn’t sure how to share it with everyone else. In one sense, it was hardly new and prophetically hard-hitting. It’s been discussed since Roman times as a human tendency. It’s been examined over and over with all the varied tools of human academic and moral analysis. Try to avoid seeing this as God having sent one of His angels to me at some particular time and date with a specific dispatch of prophetic revelation. Rather, see it as God working with my human background. Sometimes something will hit me out of the blue, as it were, when it was actually a very ancient moral truth to which I just now caught on in some new and meaningful application.

Maybe it will also be fresh and new to you, and at the same time, it may also be a new meme for us to face the coming days. At any rate, this is what struck me a few days ago: I have a strong vision of elitists preparing to declare some new policies which will, in effect, criminalize a large segment of the population overnight. Some range of normal human activity will suddenly become illegal for no valid reason whatsoever, and it will provoke some pretty ugly resistance.

Sure, nothing dramatic there. Indeed, most of us are under the impression the ruling elite have file drawers of this kind of crap just waiting for an excuse to shove it down our throats. It’s their nature; they can’t bear the idea that we commoners should conduct our affairs without their (s)mothering. It’s been going on since before Roman times, but it seems Rome first perfected it’s use as a means to spitefully pissing off everyone at once. The elites will tell us its for our own good, but we can see through the veil of pretense, even if the elites themselves are blind to their own hatred for us.

Still, I suppose the reason it might qualify as a timely word from the Lord is the business of the ugly resistance. We’ve seen only a little of it in most of what gets our attention these days. For example, I’m wondering just how far California can go with mandating vaccines for adults before it causes a backlash that really makes world news. Could it be Californians are so used to this abuse that they’ll just make some token resistance and play along for the most part? I’m sure you can think of other examples.

It’s entirely possible that you’ll experience this in one or more areas of your daily existence, but for me, I sense this thing applies especially to something in the field of computer technology. Even if you have little real interest, perhaps you can read through this and absorb something of the pattern for things you consider more important. I’m separating this into parts because it’s a bit long, and also so that casual readers who don’t subscribe can still make use of it.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Not the Apocalypse, Part 1

Cycling: Casino Loop

Posted on July 28, 2015 by ehurst

Today I pushed the envelope again. The planned route was 35 miles and took me out around the Firelake Grand Casino.PlankBridgeSE44th I started from Henney, down to SE 44th, where I once again crossed that rare wooden bridge still standing. Then it was straight out to Dobbs Road (a mile short of Harrah Road) so I could drop down to SE 59th and see if there was any way to shoot a picture of Newalla. Turns out to be the wrong time of year, because the foliage hides everything. Maybe later in the fall, but for now it was down another mile south on Harrah Road to SE 74th and back east again.

The difficult part was that the outbound leg was against the blinding early morning sun. I could see well enough to navigate safely, but the scenery was hard to catch in its fullness. Thus far the route is little different from that long ride out east a few weeks back. I was able to cross McCloud Road and navigate WesTech Road without too much difficulty. It looks as if someone did some work on it, because the worst of the loose gravel was off on the edges, and the main surface was fairly well packed caliche. If you’ve never seen that, it’s rather like a very low grade of concrete with way too much loose material, but still manages to pack hard. Around here it’s usually crushed granite mixed with sandy lime. This part is only a mile long before the asphalt reappears for the last mile to Dale.

It’s funny how they call it that, because the English word “dale” is supposed to represent something not so large as a valley (or vale) but wider and flatter than a draw. This is the south bank of the very wide, flat North Canadian River Valley. At any rate, the actual townsite is another mile east and I turned south toward the casino.

Here’s a view from the northeast.CasinoNEside I can recall back in the 1980s when the first stage of the plan was a massive rebuild of the interstate overpass. It went from a tiny 2-lane to 4-lane, plus turn-lane and wide shoulders. While the state and federal regulators supervised, the Pottawatomie tribal government provided virtually all the funding. Once that was done, there was little to stop them building the casino on their own land right there just north of I-40. So far as I can tell, they’ve been continually adding to the facility ever since. Aside from the truck stop, the massive steak house, the grand casino, hotel and convention center, they have their own water tower and complete water treatment facility. Way out back is a large tribal clinic and more stuff on the way. This second shot is from the overpass.

CasinoSEsideA lot of stuff that doesn’t make the major venues in the big cities is hosted out in these casino convention centers. For example, the next big fight in women’s UFC will be out there soon, and the marquee advertised a big rap music show, a couple of not-quite-washed-up country singers, etc.

The exploration part of today’s ride was seeing this far end of SE 89th. As noted in previous posts, get away from any lakes and the hills out this way aren’t that tough. It was just rolling land for several miles. Aside from a few older houses (mostly small), there is plenty of those expensive new developments going up out here. What was notable was the character of SE 89th itself. The foliage is very heavy, with trees and underbrush often growing right up to the edge of the road and leaning out into the traffic lane. Lots of greenery had the telltale signs of whipping from passing vehicles. For a considerable portion of this stretch, I was forced by the greenery to ride out near the center of the right lane.

But eventually I got back in the hills, starting around Harrah Road.SE89thnrPeebly In this image, the distant crest is just above Peebly road where SE 89th deadends. There’s a fairly large new-generation Baptist church there on the corner and Peebly drops quickly along the west side of that to pass under the interestate. As I rolled down into the bottom, I spotted a collection of police vehicles clustered along the lower end of the off-ramp on the south side of the highway. Seems they found some human remains in an unlikely place. They had the crime scene tape up and were milling around out there off the side of the pavement. Having been a Military Policeman myself, I saw no point in stopping to gawk and provide yet another distraction.

From there I rode up Peebly to SE 59th. By the way, Peebly Road southbound from there is a major through route to old Highway 9. It’s also the route to the dam side of Thunderbird Lake. It’s usually quite busy south of I-40, but considerably less so north of it. Turning west on SE 59th, I rode over the increasingly difficult hills until I hit the monster just before Henney Road and upper Hog Creek Valley. It was a decent climb out of the valley and a couple more miles home.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Cycling: Casino Loop

Divine Exploitation

Posted on July 27, 2015 by ehurst

We exploit tribulation.

Does anyone have to tell you that our current situation, at least here in the West, constitutes the condition the Bible calls “tribulation”? Not merely a social discomfort, but we are in the beginning of a global assault on the human terrain. This sort of thing comes in waves. You can’t just pin it down to any one thread of decision and evil plot; it’s far more complex than that. By the time I could write a book just outlining the little that I know or suspect, the situation would have shifted too much to make it meaningful. We are in a state of flux and it will bring more suffering.

In order to make the most of Our Father’s glory, we have to take counsel together. I’m not the sole expert by any means. Some of you see things more clearly and with better understanding than I. What I do see I am obliged to declare as my divine calling. Let’s share what we see and encourage each other to make His character obvious.

That’s the starting point: His divine character. Indeed, it’s the whole point — we are called to participate in revelation by acting out that revelation in our individual contexts. It requires we first have our hearts leading our consciousness, giving our brains the orders to organize and implement the moral imperatives God pours into our hearts. The Bible often characterizes this as living by the Law, or walking the Spirit of Christ (He was the Law in human form), a moral consciousness that places demands on the flesh — “flesh” includes the intellect. The flesh will fail, but God measures the intent of your heart to obey as holiness. He discounts the failures of the flesh; to the degree we succeed at implementing what the heart demands, we reckon it as His miracle gift to us.

The paradoxical truth is that when things are easy is when we are most likely to fail. When tribulation comes, it empowers us in ways we hardly comprehend. That’s because tribulation is merely the shadow of His visitation. When His divine Presence draws near, it is the commitment of the heart that determines whether you feel His wrath or His sweet blessing. It’s all the same thing from His perspective; the difference is in us. His Presence destroys sin, so the question is how deeply wedded we are to sin, and in what ways.

I don’t pretend to know if this is His final visitation before utterly destroying what we call Western Civilization. I suspect it is, but He may not be finished demonstrating His power anytime soon. Whether it represents an end of all things in this plane of existence is a silly question. Don’t ask and quit thinking about it that way. It offers no avenue to approaching His glory; it hinders our service in divine justice.

Today — every moment of every day — is the time to reassess and make sure we have let go of things that He says don’t matter on the moral plane. As with all Creation, use what you have for His glory and let Him worry about whether you should attach any further value to it. If He says it’s important for your mission, then hang onto it for His glory’s sake. Otherwise, treat as consumable, expendable. By all means, ditch the instinctive valuations our society teaches us, because precious little of that system coincides with the revelation of God’s truth. Even that little is by accident, so it’s best to assume they get nothing right, but might have something briefly useful in some limited contexts.

Your heart already understands all of this, but it is the intellect that stands in desperate need of training. Your heart sees through the veil of fleshly perception and desire; your heart already makes perfect sense of the moral fabric woven into all of life here. The true moral perception is there, so learn to let it rule.

As John the Baptist said in his own day, “The ax is laid at the root of the tree.” His cousin Jesus took up that message, and while it took a few more years for the meaning to become obvious, the actual historical end of that metaphorical tree took another few decades. I can’t explain why, but I believe our situation will move much faster than that. I doubt it will take very many strokes of the ax to fell this rotting mess.

So your pastor today says you shouldn’t fret, but keep your eyes open for an opportunity to highlight His glory in ways you otherwise could not.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Divine Exploitation

The Logic of Radix Fidem

Posted on July 26, 2015 by ehurst

(See the “Radix Fidem” tab above for an explanation of the label.)

The mystical mind need not be impractical.

I just wanted to offer a quick review for all the new subscribers to this blog. One of our biggest problems is the Western intellectual tradition. It is dominated by Anglo-Saxon cultural assumptions about reality, with a healthy dose of Greco-Roman logical reasoning. That these two major influences overlapped in some ways would be obvious to a historian. That they are fundamentally wrong is well nigh impossible to get Westerners to see. Today, virtually everyone you encounter whose mind was shaped by current Western thinking simply assumes they represent the human default, or at least what ought to be the default.

You cannot reason with such people. Every day I have to wade through mountains of blasphemous intellect that sings the praises of Western Civilization: “Finally, God got it right!” I’ve asked questions of some folks who pump out this sewage and their response is more or less to the effect that it’s simply not possible for a thinking person to not fall in love with their particular brand of Western ideals. I’m referring to likes of Lew Rockwell and his associates, some major names in evangelical church leadership, and even some folks who weren’t born in a Western country.

On top of this is the vast ocean of nonsense about what it means to be a Christian Mystic. I have no quarrel with folks who realize that their story is their own, and that it’s more a matter of comparing notes. But from those who love the West, we struggle against a major Straw Man Fallacy regardless of what they think mysticism is all about. Part of the problem is that the average writer who bothers to think about it at all assumes that the psychobabble and gobbledygook chattering from Westernized mystics is a fair representation of the rest of us. Mysticism is not violating grammar and language as a cover for mere subjectivism and empty emotionalism.

The essence of mysticism is a distrust of one’s intellectual capabilities, and a search for a better source of understanding for reality (see this and this for a fuller explanation). Needless to say, that distrust applies to all human intellect, but it starts with the mind in the mirror. Superficial abuse of language is not mysticism. I’m sure you’ve read your fill of silly babble pretending to be deep and profound, upon which some fool has stuck the label of “mysticism” while giving us the airhead happy dance. More than once I’ve concluded some websites were just being smart-assed, and in one case I came to a sure conviction the site was intended to make genuine mysticism appear stupid.

Mysticism is not a departure from logic; it’s a departure from Western logic. Rather, mysticism is a different kind of logic. That’s where I get the business of yakking about quantum reasoning — we reduce reasoning to it’s fundamental element. You take input and process it. Mystical reasoning is symbolic, not analytical. Mystical language tends to be indicative, not descriptive. By the way, those explanations also describe ancient Hebrew and biblical literature, not to mention almost the entire range of Ancient Near Eastern cultures and civilizations. It is also the whole point behind several things Jesus said. For example, Jesus told the parable of the Sower and Matthew ends it with this:

“He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

And the disciples said to Him, “Why do You speak to them in parables?”

He answered and said to them, “Because it is given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of Heaven, but it is not given to them. For whoever has, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance. But whoever does not have, from him shall be taken away even that which he has. Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they see not, and hearing they hear not; nor do they understand.

“And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah which said, ‘By hearing you shall hear and shall not understand; and seeing you shall see and shall not perceive for this people’s heart has become gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and they have closed their eyes, lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.’

“But blessed are your eyes, for they see; and your ears, for they hear.” (Matthew 13:9-16 MKJV)

Naturally, Jesus is using parabolic language to explain parables. The Twelve had some inkling of it, but it was fading fast in the sense that for some three centuries their leaders and teachers had been trying to replace the Hebraic symbolic thinking with Hellenized concrete thinking. The shift was slow, but among elite segments of Judean society, symbolic reasoning was nearly gone. Among the peasants it took a little longer because the leadership was contemptuous of them and excluded them from a lot of things. If you weren’t an activist and hung out at the synagogues every spare moment to rub elbows with the politically connected, you were nobody.

This elitist segment of society was the target of Jesus’ comment quoted from Isaiah. They had closed their souls from hearing with the heart. In so many words, Jesus was telling His disciples that He was training them to think from the heart, not trusting the limited perception of the intellect, which could only handle concrete analysis and literal language. The heart could process non-literal moral reasoning just fine. Parables are the language of the heart, the language of moral perception. Those whose hearts were awake and seeking the truth would hear it in the parables, picking up on the symbolism. Those who relied only on their intellects would miss an awful lot.

This was part of the problem Isaiah and other prophets faced, as even back in their days, the Israeli intelligentsia rejected humility and heart-led living, preferring their own human capabilities and demanding things be subjected to concrete analysis. Even if we go with the idea of abstract reasoning, it falls short of heart-logic. Abstract thinking simply abstracts the concrete details of things that can be compared and related. Just because you can interpret the symbols we call letters and numbers doesn’t mean you understand symbolic reasoning. It’s two different uses of the term “symbol.”

Abstraction has its place, but it’s not a very important one. Moral symbols do not yield to abstraction in that sense. Surveying sensory data for rational processing only gets you just so far. God seldom addressed humanity on that level; virtually all of God’s communication was on the moral level of the heart. Only the heart-mind could process what God said. The intellect is not only part of our fallen nature, the intellect led the way to the Fall. To give the intellect primacy in decision-making is itself the essence of being fallen.

Barring a solid background in reading on the subject, it’s pretty hard to help folks understand where we are coming from on all of this. Rather, we do a lot better simply demonstrating how it works. People who are already capable of processing genuine faith like that will then begin asking questions and you can explain. This is part of why my books are free, and why I make it a point to advertise two of them on the blog page itself. Those two represent a sort of minimum academic explanation for what Radix Fidem is all about.

A religion is simply the practical expression of faith.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Logic of Radix Fidem

Psalm 60

Posted on July 25, 2015 by ehurst

The header references a tune David called “Lily of Testimony” and events narrated in 2 Samuel 8. We catch only some vague hint that David’s source of trouble is likely something to do with Edom. We might reasonably guess that Israel’s cousins southeast of the Dead Sea pulled off some sort of coup that should not have been possible, harming Israel is some way. Many scholars speculate that Edom attacked from the south when David and his army were occupied battling the Syrians up north. This would be typical of Edom’s spiteful actions until they were finally absorbed.

Whatever David’s mistakes, we see nothing to indicate that he ever disputed the justice of God’s wrath. Rather, he begins by crying out to God in proper protocol, confessing that the burden is on him to make amends on behalf of the nation. His words draw a picture of Israel in shock, bearing a sense that the world itself is irritated by their violation of God’s character.

But God made preparations for this. He made sure that His people always knew where to turn for help. David personally found Jehovah the mightiest of protections from those who rejected the divine revelation. David and his people have nowhere else to go.

David makes note that God had often indicated He was the ultimate sovereign in all things. Perhaps it is hard for us to imagine, but God announces that He could hop up and dance for joy when it pleased Him. The small and very ancient city of Shechem nestled between Mounts Ebal and Gerizim could be handed to anyone or any number of heirs God chose. It was important as one of the few east-west passes through the central hill country, and was occupied when Abraham first arrived. Somehow it became one of the only cities in Canaan hosting a remnant of Abraham’s descendants when Israel migrated to Egypt. Succoth (“tents”) probably refers to the spot in the Jordan Valley were Jacob pitched shelters for his cattle against the sweltering heat. It became the town that Gideon had to discipline with thorns for hindering his pursuit of the Midianites during the Period of Judges. Both cities represent images of God turning things on their heads when it suited Him.

Then God mentions the three largest tribal homes in Israel — Ephraim, Manasseh (western half) and Gilead (Manasseh east) — politically aligned and powerful. They were often a source of some trouble in national affairs. They would later lead the Northern Tribes away from the reign of David’s grandson. Meanwhile, God said He could turn them into a useful battle helmet (major military asset) when it suited Him. God had appointed Judah the royal tribe, in part because his elder brothers had so completely sinned as to lose their status in turns. Meanwhile, whatever Moab might have been, God could use it as his foot bath, while Edom would be the rug where He tossed His sandals. Grammar suggests He includes Philistia in this offhand dismissal. Having troubled Israel at least as much as any other, despite having been there for such a short time, God would allow Israel to celebrate their descent into insignificance.

Knowing all this, David has to ask: “Who will lead us to defeat Edom now?” David notes God didn’t support them the last time they had trouble there. Without that, no amount of human support is enough. Whatever it takes to regain His favor, David is eager to get on with it so they can put a lid on this boiling kettle of trouble. He wants the make Israel the source of God’s glory, not divine embarrassment. Otherwise, there is no hope for the nation’s survival.

Posted in bible | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Psalm 60