Photolog 10: More on Draper

Posted on July 11, 2015 by ehurst

Today’s ride was the typical Draper Loop. It’s nothing special, but during the summer, it means facing the headwinds on the outbound leg, and getting a tailwind boost on the way back when I’m tired.

I rode out on Hiwasee to SE 74th, but the barricade is still up for southbound traffic from there. I can just make out a digger sitting down at the West Branch Hog Creek washout, but I suppose it’s not progressing hurriedly; it was there last week. Straight west on SE 74th dead ends at Post Road because of the lake, of course. It also reminded me why I’m not too fond of the Edgewood in steep hills. It’s just not geared for that, though vaguely possible for a hard-head like me.

Heading south on Post Road I pass the mountain bike trails facility. They claim to offer some 10 miles of wandering paths there northeast of the lake, but it’s way too much soft sand for the Edgewood with it’s narrow hybrid tires. A short distance beyond where Post Road bends a bit east, it morphs into Draper Lake Drive, which is a loop, starting where SE 89th comes into it from east.

By now the sand plums have virtually disappeared and only in a few sheltered spots do we find a few late crop blackberries. Virtually nothing like that produces during the heat of our summers. I did find plenty of ribwort, which is fading around my house, but still easily found around the lake. I took the lake drive clockwise today, so it meant staying southbound, more or less. This being Saturday, I encountered quite a few other cyclists. Most of them appear to be all serious about it with their expensive road bikes and fancy competition clothing. I look quite the duffer sitting upright and wearing a baggy t-shirt billowing in the wind.

DamValleyThe drive winds all the way down around the southern tip of the lake before we get to the dam, which sits on the southwest corner. While there is no good camera angle, the view down the primary valley dammed for the lake is neither majestic nor ugly. There are plenty of scraggly and dead trees standing well above the common foliage height, and you can tell there was a serious fire at some point that killed off some of them. This is easily the windiest spot for miles around. Oklahoma is windy enough already, but the dam stands quite high above the southerly summer winds.DraperMonitorTwr In accordance with Bernoulli’s Principle, the wind driven up the valley and against the dam is compressed and moves at a higher velocity at the new ground level of the dam. Of course, looking back the other way, you have a vast flat water surface to allow northerly winds of winter to build up to full surface velocity to make it windy for a different reason. So regardless of the season and prevailing wind direction, the air is virtually never still on top of the dam. Here’s a shot of the water column monitoring structure showing the view back across the lake.

It’s a good few miles before we reach the point where the lake drive turns back east across the north end, and where the bike path runs west toward the pending better organized bike route across Del City. I turned right onto the section that has been under reconstruction for the past year. Several passes in the past few months went from watching them plow up the old road, then landscaping it from scratch. For quite some time they worked the soil and completely rebuilt the two water crossings — those took up lots of time by themselves. Then several layers of gravel and a stabilization fabric.DraperDouglasBlvd The last was to add what I thought were concrete curbs. Turns out it was the fill line, so that means we have several inches of fresh asphalt, heavy enough for just about anything with wheels. This shot looks back across the point where Douglas Boulevard comes from the north and dead ends at the lake drive. It’s a study in contrast between the new and the old.

On the one hand, Draper Lake is one of the best developed for recreational use. While there is officially no swimming permitted, there is ample boating facilities with a marina, several boat ramps and docks. Despite being right in the Tinker AFB southern flight path, there is a long standing model aircraft facility, Baxter Field. Way back some forty years ago I remember coming out to run on the dirt-bike trails. There was still a lot of that when we returned from Europe in 1993, but since then it’s all been closed off.DraperTreatment Now there is a devoted area on the west side with fancy parking and camping facilities for off-road riding and it requires a permit you can buy at the marina. Meanwhile, there are stables in the area and extensive horse trails where the dirt-bikes used to be. However, we must not forget the primary purpose is water treatment, much of which is sold and piped off to Atoka Lake some 100 miles away to the southeast. I wasn’t able to get a good angle to capture the massive field of white pipe segments they use for this kind of thing. They had to be at least 4 feet (1.22m) in diameter.

Eventually I rolled over the dilapidated road section between Douglas Boulevard and Post Road where I came in; the lake level is still just a foot or two below the road surface in places. This is where the hills are the steepest on the lake drive. Turning north on Post Road, I decided to stay on it so as to pass the old home place, roughly 4000 block of Post Road. When we first moved down here from Anchorage, Alaska (c. 1973), we rented a mobile home in a park now long gone, until my parents could take possession of a new mobile home they ordered from Chickasha Mobile Homes (can’t find a listing for them as a business any more). The house was sited on some land that was then quite rural. Our spread was 20 acres; my dad owned half, and the other half was split between his two brothers. We were the only ones actually living there. Today you could probably find the septic system I had to help dig as a teenager, but you’d have to know where to look and poke around for it in the ground. Meanwhile, a beautiful house stands right about where we had a huge pigpen. Nearby, lots of old homesteads have been replaced with housing developments.

PostRoadnI40 At any rate, I was surprised to discover that sometime in the past few months, with no fanfare at all, Midwest City designated Post Road as an official bike route. Those signs are brand new, and you can see them at least once in each mile section starting near the lake. And since Post Road’s hills aren’t that big, I suppose this will become the new best approach to Draper Lake for me. Of course, the signs end at SE 29th because there’s a multi-use path running along the west side of the street for quite a ways north. However, my route home means turning back east at SE 29th.

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Friday Extra: We Call It “Solipsism”

Posted on July 10, 2015 by ehurst

It’s a tough game when you apply individual psychological assessments to whole nations. But if I offered you a government document and asked you to read the tone via standard psychological assessments, you’d get the idea. It’s not as if we suggest the whole government — everyone involved in this particular function — suffers the exact same mass malady. Rather, the bizarre tone of some documents so typical of some government policy statements demand that we stop and think about what it says at least about the folks who composed them.

You can look up the term “solipsism” on the Net and get pretty much the same standard definition all over the place: extreme egotism. That is, measuring all reality against one’s internal wishes at that moment. It’s a sort of, “This is what I want in this situation. How could anyone possibly want something different? That’s evil!” They project their wishes as some objective standard that is manifestly obvious to any sensible person. You get that when a single individual, the only one who seems to be the least concerned about something, keeps using “we” to discuss their personal discomfort with something you do or say.

You can easily see solipsism in the policy papers of some governments by how the problems are stated as threats to national security:

The document announces a shift in focus from terrorists to “state actors” that “are challenging international norms.” It is important to understand what these words mean. Governments that challenge international norms are sovereign countries that pursue policies independently of Washington’s policies. These “revisionist states” are threats, not because they plan to attack the US, which the Pentagon admits neither Russia nor China intend, but because they are independent.

Be sure to grasp the point: The threat is the existence of sovereign states, whose independence of action makes them “revisionist states.” In other words, their independence is out of step with the neoconservative Uni-Power doctrine that declares independent action to be the right of Washington alone. Washington’s History-given hegemony precludes any other country being independent in its actions. By definition, a country with a foreign policy independent of Washington is a threat.

This is from an article that discusses the latest US national military strategy statement. How could anyone dare to imagine that there might be another set of standards? Why, no government in their right minds could justly desire something different than what the US wants!

Do you get the meaning of that weird picture of some soldier praying to the US flag? We see in history where various leaders demanded they be treated as divine, or even as deities themselves. In an age when most humans believed in multiple deities, it wasn’t too hard for most of them to accommodate — with the notable except of Christians persecuted for rejecting Caesar’s demand. It’s a big leap to decide that a state is god without any particular human focal point and no allowance for any other deity, at least none that matter.

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Heart-led Church

Posted on July 10, 2015 by ehurst

If you live a heart-led existence, you’ll probably recognize this as the truth. However, I’ll make mention that this follows Scripture, provided you grasp the uniquely Hebrew approach to language and thought as it applies to divine revelation. You’ll have to intentionally distance yourself from Western assumptions and historical customs. If you are fan of Western Church History, you’ll get everything wrong. What would a church look like built on the tenets of Radix Fidem?

The Hebrew Scriptures establish the image of Two Witnesses to the revelation of God: priest and king. In historical terms, a king is just a tribal chief, the head of the big family. Both of these trace back at least to the time of Noah, as they are the assumed social leadership roles behind all Law Covenants. You cannot possibly have a just society according to God’s revealed character without a tribal structure and these two separate offices. You want His shalom? Build on this assumption.

We can’t actually do this, of course, except in the private life of the church. Most Christians read the New Testament with a Western bias and fail to grasp the full meaning of the discussions of church organization. Just as the king had the final veto on human organizational choices, so it is with the ruling elder of any congregation. Regardless of actual shared DNA, the senior elder of the church is the family head of the covenant congregation. He is not appointed, but rises naturally and organically from the membership. Like any family, his leadership is crippled unless he has at least one “mama elder” working alongside (it matters not whether she is actually his spouse). Both are an utter necessity long term.

The label of “pastor” describes the ritual leader, the New Testament equivalent of a priest. The image of pastor-led churches is part of the Hellenistic corruption that led to allowing the High Priest of Judea to become de facto head of government. A proper priest confines himself to ritual and spiritual considerations. It’s a male-only role and this fellow is appointed by the elder.

Both offices would include attendants or some kind of appointed helpers who assert a kind of leadership in their own right. We call these folks “deacons.” Their function may be general or specific, and their authority matches the job. Gender is immaterial, but you would expect prevailing local custom to influence who does what. Any or all of them can and should be paid for their work, but it obviously depends on organizational resources.

There are other ways people can express their callings with ad hoc offices or roles such as a dean of religious education, appointed prophet, missionary, etc. Those are not organic to the fundamental concept of a church, but every congregation has full freedom in the Spirit to come up with what brings together calling and need. In other words, we don’t create an organization on paper and then grab bodies to fill the slots, but we discover what each person can do against the perceived needs. You look for ways to enable the gifts to operate.

Do I have to explain the danger in human ambition? For example, the senior elder of a family in ancient times would be the guy who realized his duty and rose to the occasion. You would prefer someone who isn’t ambitious at all, but someone who believes he has better things to do. If he’s not a little reluctant to take up the burden, he’ll be the wrong man for the role. Still, he needs to have a knack for it. If the sheep don’t follow, you aren’t much of a shepherd.

That the pastoral role is actually secondary is what would seem heresy in Western churches. On the other hand, it seems the first person to draw any pay from the budget is the priestly guy. He’s not the boss, but the first hire of every congregation. The elder is saddled by virtue of being the guy folks will follow, and while he should be paid, that comes later. A good elder already has resources of some sufficiency. You pay him as the burden takes up more of his personal resources.

The last thing we want is a pretense of objectivity. It’s all very personal and subjective every step of the way. The whole purpose in having a church is not something you can put on paper and evaluate by standard measures. The whole purpose is to study and embrace the character of God and bring change in individual lives so that the congregation gets stronger as a whole. Bigger may not be better. We make room for all kinds of hangers-on and people who really don’t belong, provided their presence does not interfere with the basic mission. That business of study includes lots of time in prayer, contemplation and various ways of learning how to exercise the leadership of the heart over the mind. You cannot possibly objectify awakening the heart as a sensory organ and as a higher form of intelligence.

Objectivity is just the intellectual mythology of a mind seeking to usurp the heart. That’s the very foundation of the Fall, where the mind becomes the executive, the little god inside each of us that defies our Creator. Logic and reason are the means to cut off the heart, and the heart is the only element in your soul that can discern the character of God in this world. So the church could be characterized as the place where we all herd the minds and bodies into some confinement while we seek ways to enthrone the heart again — that’s what redemption is about.

Given this is what church is all about, as an extension of the Law Covenants viewed through Christ, how could you possibly take seriously any human political system that takes any other shape? Just today I read of some noise made by some fellow in Congress, the birth of whose political career I observed first hand. He retired from the US Army all famous and joined the one most politically active church in the area of his hometown. I don’t know much about the man right now, but I got a good whiff of his character very early and it stunk. I see no reason to expect it got any sweeter since then. He’s a model of all that’s wrong with the US, not to mention Dispensational Christianity.

I’m neither his enemy nor his supporter. I’m completely outside his orbit. I submit that fully embracing the heart-led faith of Christ makes you an alien to just about everything around you, in particular the most sacred concerns of human politics.

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The Confusion Is on Our End

Posted on July 9, 2015 by ehurst

God is not silent, but His voice can be hard to discern.

We can’t turn back the tides of human civilization. God allows certain things to go in certain directions according to His own inscrutable and ineffable plans. However, He has revealed more than enough to those determined to understand. I am at peace with my progress in that direction and I’d like to share it with you in some hope you’ll find your own peace.

We are at a crucial turning point in the human story. I’ll use a concrete example to indicate something much broader.

The US Army has announced troop cuts of 40,000 and a reduction of around 17,000 civilian employees. This is on top of the other planned reductions based on the sequestration already in place — automatic budget cuts that kick in if Congress fails to hash out a more specific plan. The sequestration would mean an additional 30,000 troops lost just from the Army alone. Some say this announcement is designed to scare the average American voter into demanding Congress “do something” about the defense budget reductions.

That should be obviously true, but I say it’s also part of a longer term plan to shift more and more operations into the mercenary contracts. Since the reductions will, on paper at least, reduce the forces below the minimum required for the missions they have or will have mandated, it will mean the necessity of letting out more military contracts to cover the mission gaps. Thus, big defense contractors will supply personnel for an increasing number of deployments. These contractors are seldom under direct military control. They are handled more or less like allied forces, with some kind of coordination starting at the top, and rules applied down the chain for coordination on the ground — in theory, at least.

Trust me: The defense contractors would love to take over the whole thing. So far as I can tell, in the long run it’s actually cheaper for the government to go that route. For example, there is no Veterans’ Administration involvement in the mercenaries, which is easily one of the most expensive add-on costs for keeping a standing military. As you may have heard, US military veteran care is a scandalous failure already. I suspect part of the noise in the news about the vast number of veterans mishandled by the VA is another part of the effort to steer us all to the idea of relying on a more flexible mercenary force where the human element is no longer part of the budgeting process.

We don’t have room here to explore how the commercial defense industry treats mercenaries because it varies wildly, depending on multiple factors. My point is that larger strategic decisions are increasingly steered by the commercial military industry. To suggest that they are lobbying for such changes is a ludicrous understatement.

And the broader point is to indicate how more and more of what we face as our government is nothing even vaguely resembling democratic policy. There’s noting in this that reflects the considered will of the people. Global government has already morphed into a mere expression of commercial imperatives. The plutocrats are about the wealth, and political power is just the means. There is a certain amount of salesmanship at work, but that’s hardly any correlation to the original concept of offering some kind of moral guidance through leadership and statesmanship.

Think about the way this has morphed. In ancient times your government was your family. By degrees government has become farther and farther separated from us. Now we are on the verge of government that responds to us as mere data. Only what shows up on that computer screen makes any difference at all to them.

The coming tribulation will be quite mundane when contrasted with all the mythology. The plutocrats are steering the culture, too. We are highly conditioned by films like Take Shelter to expect that the coming crisis will be utterly disorienting and devastating to all we know. They love John’s Revelation, so long as folks take it literally. The idea is to keep us fearfully glancing about so that we don’t notice the more mundane changes in the system that structures our lives. By the way, dystopian movies and books about living under a corporate government are also bunkum. It won’t be like that, either. Neither should you expect a world defined by ideas presented in the Terminator movie franchise (think SkyNet), nor anything that removes vast stretches of human population.

All of that nonsense is based on Western intellectual biases. God is not constrained by such assumptions. To have any hope of predicting the future, you first have to understand God’s Word and the intellectual assumptions in which it was packaged. Of particular interest is realizing that Satan gains little from the death of the wicked. Western Christian visions of Hell are not from the Bible, but rooted in a mixture of various heathen mythologies. Satan will end up in eternal damnation, too, and not as the ruler. He gains most from human misery while we live, and willingly disposes of us when he’s gotten all he can. We don’t have a language for describing how that works, but my point is that predictions of mass human exterminations are a fear factor use by the Devil, not his actual wish. If anything, he’s frustrated by human mortality.

Again, this world is the trap. Prolonging our time here is where Satan profits, so the nightmare is any effort to make life longer without God’s blessings. A long life arising from obedience to God is another matter entirely. Satan intends to make us focus on the apparent effects without the fundamental commitment. That means perverting and faking everything God does in this world, keeping us from any hope of understanding how to embrace the character of God and seeing the moral fabric in Creation. Look for the plutocrats to seek ways of artificially making life longer and more tightly controlled for their personal profit — and only the controls necessary for profit. They’ll get plenty of things wrong and changes will come when some lackey is able to convince them for the sake of their profits. Things like thought control are a fake threat, a tool they would use only if they believed it would bring profit.

Perhaps now you understand why I believe the coming civilization can be characterized as the Network Civilization. I’m convinced that the plutocrats see a vast global cellphone network as the best means to control for the sake of profit. For now, that network depends entirely on the Internet, so they are looking for ways to control that, too. God alone knows how that will turn out, but that He has an interest is utterly certain. Satan’s only creativity is in creatively perverting what God has revealed. The vast delusion we call “Western Civilization” has run its course. God was able to keep His truth alive despite the smothering intellectual atmosphere. Satan has some limited permission to steer things on a new course of deception, trying his best to capture as much of human existence as possible. God will continue to assert His sovereign limitations on things.

He will not be silenced in His own Creation.

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Getting Intense?

Posted on July 8, 2015 by ehurst

Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

We all know that the MSM reports news with the intent to steer attention. The procedure is mixed to keep you guessing. Once in awhile it’s genuine news and rather objective. Most of the time the story is slanted by leaving out pertinent details, while emphasizing things impertinent. Sometimes it’s a flat out lie. At other times it’s accurate but entirely unimportant filler to avoid reporting what really matters. They have other tricks, but you get the idea.

Alternative news sites often do some of the same crap. All too often it’s sheer nonsense to see who takes the bait. However, you can typically count on a different bias with them, still leaving out important details and offering a slanted emphasis on other details. They vary all over the map on which bias package they bear. It tends to reflect more the individual reporters and their tastes than some broad corporate editorial policy. That is, except for the ones we know for certain that are run by controlled opposition. You are also more likely to see mindless devotion to certain personalities in the alternative press.

The biggest problem is that few of us are in a position to really know about some things. As long as there is money to be made in the news business, there’s always a risk of compromise and corruption. Yet the honest folks are seldom in a position to even get an accurate assessment because it requires money to get close enough to see what’s actually happening. And then there’s always the very problem that what you see might be what someone wants you to see and it means nothing. Honestly confused reporting is not that helpful. I still laugh when some ordinary fan of conspiracy theories will post a video of old scrap armored personnel carriers on rail cars being shipped to a recycling plant and blather fearfully about “tanks!”

At the point where you have to ask God what you should do with all this noise, it helps to remember that He does not hold you accountable for being deceived on some levels. This is why we teach that you should learn to obey your convictions and your heart-mind, because on that level of moral consideration, you can pick up on things your mind cannot comprehend. God promised that He would never fail to guide us that way. It’s not even a question of whether you end up where you hope. The moral sphere of life, the invisible plane of truth that flows outside the reach of your intellect, is more about eternal outcomes. It’s not likely to make much sense intellectually even up to the moment you die. Don’t expect that following your convictions will ever make sense on that level.

Instead, aim for the sense of peace that can come over you only from your heart-mind.

Today the news will tell you that China’s stock market is crashing despite all efforts by the Chinese government to control this mess. You’ll probably hear multiple conflicting statements about the situation in Greece. Maybe you’ll realize that they are still making it up as they go along, because even some of the plutocrats are surprised by the turn this took. One commentator suggests Tsipras was expecting to lose that referendum, and then he could resign and let someone else take the burden. Now he’s stuck. And you won’t hear much about Puerto Rico right now, but you probably have heard that the New York Stock Exchange has shut down over a technical issue. Meanwhile, the Dow is flailing like a goose that can’t float but won’t get out of the water. And then the precious metals market is under very heavy manipulation through the paper contract market that is based on metals (there is far more “paper gold” than real gold). And do you get the feeling that massive refugee migrations into Western countries from diseased backwater hell-holes is actually a part of the plutocrat scheme for fomenting chaos?

So try this: Pray and consider from your heart what justifies your attention in pursuit of God’s glory. What is your mission and calling? What do you currently sense as important for that calling? It’s a broad general principle of the divine justice that you give priority to the material things that you know you’ll use in that calling. Stop thinking in terms of what you have invested and what you stand to lose in that sense. Think in terms of your ultimate commitment to His glory. Make your best plans to be faithful until your exit, which exit is typically not at all what your mind would expect.

How will you walk with Christ and exploit this situation for His glory?

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This World Is a Trap

Posted on July 7, 2015 by ehurst

Let’s review: Most people are aware of the basic concept that fear tends to make you dependent. Social chaos and instability have proven very strong factors in creating fear and dependence.

For example, the fundamental factor in Western feudalism was the chaos after the Fall of Rome. People who simply wanted to stay alive were seeking the means to defend themselves from all sorts of known and unknown predators. They knew how to feed themselves, but the business of defense was more complex and required a lot of specialized training. Indeed, martial ability was so expensive in terms of resources and time that only the very wealthy could do it. Thus, throughout human history, people have banded together for protection, and anyone with a talent for handling predators of any sort was encouraged to focus on that task. The rest would support that one, making him a sort of petty king in effect. His first mission was fighting, not growing or gathering food, so everyone else would kick in food to keep him capable and free.

The defender’s expertise gave him priority over whatever choices others might make. He was pampered to keep him in a good fighting shape and mood against outsiders, not the insiders. Actually, this worked pretty well in some cultures, but not so much in the Germanic culture in Europe, the culture of those who destroyed Rome. There was no place for the shepherd’s divine moral calling in Medieval Europe because it was totally absent from that culture, and disparaged when it was mentioned. Western feudalism saw people surrender effective ownership of their lands and livelihood to someone able to protect them from predators. The net effect was choosing one predator over others. In principle, you weren’t directly enslaved, but enslaved to the means of production. Your life was bound to the means of production itself and you were part of the package.

When the peasants began to discover ways to maximize their income through various kinds of trade and means of exchange, they also discovered that the hereditary nobles could be bought off. Thus, we had the rise of the middle class urban traders. But these became the new nobility in refusing to change the assumptions about what kind of authority their new municipal governments could exercise over the residents. All without having to exercise any pretense of actual nobility in the moral sense. (See Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society for a solid explanation of the social history as experienced by those on the lower rungs of society.)

It’s not hard to see how any place under Western influence will exhibit competition for that kind of unaccountable power. The pretense of consent and mandate — managed by removing the perception of any real choice — was all it took to justify the most egregious moral abuses. It was a hideous, nasty form of prissy middle-class oppression over those who preferred actual freedom of choice, and a cultural damnation of any real creativity and human proliferation in uniqueness of character. Lock it all down and take away all the options that don’t keep the burgers in power. “Well, that’s what it means to be civilized!” This was the birth of crass materialism and a very repressive and oppressive middle-class culture. Communism is just the other edge of the same blade shared with capitalist republicanism, while socialism is little more than a compromise between the two. It’s all meant to restrict the question to who gets what, not whether any higher considerations matter at all.

As long as you can be trapped behind the fear for your children and how they might suffer the loss of some imaginary perfect childhood, you cannot follow the God of the Bible. So it’s no surprise that someone dreamed up nifty ways of hijacking Christian religion itself. The whole of Western Christian religion is tied up in knots about questions that arise only from a materialistic approach to reality. Religious leaders have so defined “holiness” to exclude anything that doesn’t mean bigger memberships, budgets and social-political influence.

Keep it if you like. I’m taking a different path.

In our religion of Radix Fidem, we recognize that there will always be predators seeking to control the rest of us because those predators are wedded to materialistic assumptions. Their control rests on keeping the majority of their victims within those same assumptions. They read history, same as everyone else, but with an eye to how this informs their predation. Unlike the nobles of the Middle Ages, and the burgers who ended that brand of feudalism, these predators realize that actual peace and security is impossible for the masses. Instead, they hold forth the same promise of security and prosperity, but as a false hope.

Meanwhile, they will do everything they can to stir up conflict among their victims so that everyone fears losing whatever it is they think is precious to them. Everyone has bought into the materialism and it’s just a question of various flavors of worldly fears. They have implemented a system that makes peace and security utterly impossible.

Unlike the nobles, the plutocrats don’t exercise direct police control, using the system of hired thugs devised by the burgers. In recent decades the stark cultural division between police and citizenry serves to keep tensions high. Meanwhile, the means to feedback and accountability is now gone, because there is a highly developed system in place that rejects it. Some people are suckered into a military that is full of total Orwellian doubletalk and psychobabble that sees them used up and sent home as agents of random chaos. And if some enemy “out there” is accidentally vanquished, they have to fund the creation and training of new ones. Any enemy will do, but the more fanatical, the better. The slightest chance of successful resistance to the program demands infiltration and neutralization.

Maybe at some point these plutocrats will offer some kind of all-encompassing salvation from the Hell on earth they strive to create. Meanwhile, the more hellish they can make it, the better their control.

Do I have to write a book with all the details? Don’t fall for this stuff. Do you understand why I am willing to invest so much effort in proposing a religion with no organization? Question my competence if you like, but try to understand the utter necessity of offering a way to escape this mess while still having a reason to live until that escape is fully realized. And not just a reason to live but a way to live.

Learn about your heart-mind and how to live heart-led. Learn how to implement the revelation of God through His Law Covenants. Learn how to put His glory first in all things as the sole motivation, and allow everything in and of this world to fall free from your anxious concern. That includes your children. Yes, you have a dominion over them from God, but that has been fiercely restrained by human laws and our culture, so you’ll have some hard decisions to make about all that. Yet, at some point you have to let them go into God’s hands and turn your attention to other things. Nobody says you have to stop caring and providing what your conscience says you must, but you cannot save them. Only God can do that. Draw a line somewhere, adjust it as you find yourself moved by the Spirit in different contexts, but at some point you have to let them go.

The same goes for everything else in this life. Let it go, or you cannot find redemption. Make God your true feudal sovereign under a totally different kind of feudalism that is based on the model of the shepherd, as revealed by the Shepherd of our Souls. You will most certainly serve someone greater, but you do have some choice in that matter. Choose Christ.

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Controlling Obsession to Control

Posted on July 6, 2015 by ehurst

Obsessions enslave us.

It’s a direct insult to God — poking Him in the eye — when you seek control over things He said were His to control. That goes for weather, climate and the earth in general. We aren’t supposed to control nature in the broad main, but simply use what God has provided. I admit it’s hard to agree on what crosses the line in some places, but there is no question that control over other people is an evil human obsession.

It’s not just Westerners who fail to grasp the subtle nuances of divine justice in exercising the dominion God grants each of us. This is a universal trait of humanity. Redemption on this issue is more than an art, but a major element of faith to recognize the contextual limits of dominion wired into Creation. Your heart has to respond to the boundaries God draws on-the-fly; He’s a living God and His Creation lives, too. The instinct to seek stasis proceeds directly from the Fall and represents a critical element of the Curse. We want to usurp God and demand that things be simple for us so we don’t have to think too hard. Subjecting your mind to the rule of the Spirit through the heart-mind is hard work.

This is how we come to understand all the evil exercises in control. Even the recent furor at Reddit is best understood as someone trying to force their damned personal prejudices on others. Having the actual power to enforce such prejudice does not make it good and right. It’s evil in the sense that it captures and destroys the vast investment of thousands of individuals who suffered a bait-n-switch in effect. Granted, much of what we see posted on Reddit can be called “immoral” on many levels, but it’s not our place to enforce our personal prejudices, either.

All the more so given this is the virtual world where meat-space moral perceptions are often completely out of place.

Do I care about Reddit? Not at all. Nor do I really care how this mess turns out. I’m not an activist and can’t advise the disaffected members, aside from suggesting they invest some of their resources on a community system that can’t be hijacked so easily. There are plenty of examples how to do that, but they require a level of commitment against a pattern of behavior that suggests most Reddit users are just whiny. No, Reddit is hardly a noble community of virtual freedom fighters.

The issue is perception: We have to understand how God views these things. Sinners will sin but divine justice insists we give them a lot more room to do so than most folks are comfortable with. Fallen nature imagines it can construct a morality that is consistent only in how it varies all over the map without ever coming anywhere near what God said. The people who insist on monetizing Reddit in this fashion will destroy what makes it viable and show senseless contempt for the people who make it work, not to mention soil the names of those who gave more than just a little time for something that was meant to grant room for human creativity and self-expression. But the most important failure here is rejecting the revelation of divine justice.

Do you imagine Scripture is silent on such things? Then you would fit in very nicely with the Pharisees who worked so hard to kill God’s Son. Noting the oppression and deception is just the beginning of sins here. Whether they can “legally” get away with this was never the issue.

May God’s wrath fall upon them.

Update: For historical reasons, it’s worth noting that Reddit’s CEO Pao resigned, perhaps in part because of the unbearable spite of so many users. It was announced through many technology news outlets around 10 July 2015.

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Background on Greece and Debt

Posted on July 5, 2015 by ehurst

First: Let’s remind ourselves that Greece is a county like other countries in that there are lots of people with conflicting desires, plans, hopes and dreams. I’ve often panned the Greeks in historical terms for poisoning the world with their philosophers. However, Western Civilization is not Greek in flavor, but actually rather Germanic. It’s a blend of the two major influences, so it’s really quite unfair for us to judge the Greeks from our Germanic social mythology. Let’s also not forget that within living memory, Germany plundered Greece (during WW2) and has steadfastly refused to even admit doing so. To say that it no longer matters is a flat out lie: The current German good fortune, such as it is, includes a lot of stolen wealth. Part of what’s wrong with Greece’s economy was the crippling blow from which they never quite recovered.

In other words, there are no good guys so put away the gilding brush. The same is true with just about any analysis you read about the current business between Greece and the European banking system — all of them are giving you a slanted story. I’ll offer one link that comes about as close as anything else to the facts of the matter: Greece — The One Biggest Lie You Are Being Told By The Media. Please note how the same basic story applies to some other countries now on the edge of having to fight the same battle.

Yes, the Greeks are notoriously less interested in aping the dour German work ethic. But then, the Germans are no longer that way, either. Still, they tend to get things done with less corruption than the Greeks. The difference is that the Greeks were less interested in systematic sharing of the plunder, whereas the Germans are somewhat more democratic about it. The alleged “Cradle of Democracy” is anything but.

Still, the Greeks were doing okay before all this stuff went wrong, and the blame rests far more heavily on the banking lords than on the corruption so native to Greece. Corruption is a fact of human existence, only the flavor changes, like with the cooking. The Greeks were used to playing a tough game with each other and sometimes with outsiders, but the Eurobankers are thugs without any of the Greek charm, just cold spite and the most insidious lies.

Keep in mind that, while the government of Greece does have some regulatory power over the banks in Greece, the bankers have zero loyalty to the people. They are on board with the Eurobankers generally. The Greek banks have shareholders, but as you might expect, most of them are the same plutocrat psychopaths you see holding shares in banks everywhere. You saw what happened in Cyprus — the so-called “bail-in” — and it will probably happen in Greece, Spain, Italy, et al. If so, it will eventually happen in the US.

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The Otherworldly Call

Posted on July 5, 2015 by ehurst

Dear readers, I’m pretty sure most of you realized long ago that our official governing institutions are not really the human government over any of us. The structure we see is a facade, though the people involved are surely dangerous enough to you and I. There are very real people who make the real decisions; their identities are partially hidden. Some are hands-on but plenty prefer the shadows.

So if you revolt against the ostensible government, even if you win, it won’t change anything. The same lies that hold you where you are will be used to put other people into some other structure. Your revolution will be infiltrated before it gets off the ground. Someone else will step up to serve the same masters, regardless of the apparent system. While the control is not so total and steely as many imagine, this shadowy ruling class does have a rather firm grip on all the factors people tend to believe are necessary for our existence on this planet.

It’s not impossible to remove them from power, just wholly unlikely. First, there are an awful lot of them, so it would mean a massive slaughter simply because we cannot be quite sure who has to die to break this thing apart. Not even the plutocrats know everyone in their society; there is no central registry because they aren’t going to yield to the kind of tracking they foist on all of us. Even more confusing is that membership in that society experiences the same kind of flux you might expect for us plebes and our social institutions.

Powerful, very much so, but keep in mind that these are mere humans. These shadowy rulers are very well-informed and highly intelligent. Declaring that demons are behind all of this won’t change the human factors we might discover were we somehow granted full access to their world. Nor should you imagine that these people are especially endowed with some kind of arcane access to Satan’s councils. He is the Prince of Lies, and lies to them, too. Satan is constrained by the God who made him. Some people watch too many movies and TV shows that flatly contradict the Word of Truth, imagining some kind of communion between humans and demons that God said He won’t allow. Satan’s position and powers are far more mundane than he would like for you to understand, and so are the abilities of his willing servants.

From Scripture itself we find plenty of wisdom to understand what’s happening in our world today. In general terms, these plutocrats are using a collection of nations and their economies and military forces to sow instability in all the other places in this world. At some point, those same tools of instability will be themselves destabilized. The US is being herded down to into chaos quite intentionally. With the US will go all her allies to one degree or another. Having once served its purpose, the fearsome beast must be destroyed. Don’t get lost in the details, but see the larger pattern.

Global government requires control, and the simplest path to control is creating dependence. With artificially induced chaos, we will be of necessity dependent on something — anything — that appeals to us as “salvation.” That fake salvation is sold in every form imaginable. It could be any number of a thousand things so long as it is not the one thing that works. The greatest threat to global government is a sense of internal peace, and the greatest sense of peace is not taking this life too seriously in the first place.

The single most powerful weapon you and I have against all of this suffering and sorrow is our commitment to His truth. Walk in the footsteps of His Son and you can’t go the wrong destination. In more concrete terms, take up the communion of your heart with Creation and teach your brain to obey the heart. Learn to see the moral fabric of God’s character in the world around you, and cling to what is righteous. If it ends your existence here, so much the better. Until that moment when He calls us Home to His side, we are called to walk in His character here. Creation itself will support your choice, so learn how to commune directly with it.

Learn to accept what is optimal within the context. Stop pursuing false visions of some objective ideal. There is no specific program for victory that will work with everyone. We are all wired differently regarding the kinds of things on which we can and should focus. The most important thing you’ll do is make your own individual peace with the Creator, and then with His Creation. That means you’ll learn to abstract the divine character of God from the various Law Covenants in the Bible and know Him as only you can know Him. If you don’t understand how Jesus was Himself the Living Law of God, then you cannot really grasp the meaning of the preceding Law Covenants. The ancient mystical approach to reality was the one God designed for proper human existence on this planet, so embrace it or stay in the living death of perverted Western rationalism.

Don’t go chasing after false messiahs. The only real Kingdom of Heaven on earth is in your heart, not your mind or your body. It manifests in communion, not conformity to some human-designed structure. Do what God calls you to do and accept fellowship with others where it appears in your path. However, keep your eyes on God and with your conscious understanding forever consign this world to destruction.

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Psalm 57

Posted on July 4, 2015 by ehurst

In the header we learn this was written during the time David hid out in the Cave of Adullam, referring to events in 1 Samuel 22. At least one cave in that area offers a very large inner chamber after passing through a smaller vestibule at the entrance, and other caves have surely served as fortified keeps at various times. David was seldom actually alone, virtually always having at least a few friends and supporters in his entourage. We should not imagine that he wrote this song only of his own personal need. The courtly language always assumed the man plus all those for whom he was responsible.

The reference to the type of song as al-taschit refers most likely to the title of a popular tune that translates as “you must not destroy.”

The initial cry for mercy uses words that imply someone great bending down to notice a supplicant prostrate on the ground before him. As far as David is concerned, it is not so much a cave where he hides, but his heart is focused on taking refuge in God’s divine justice. Someone is surely breathing down his neck with a lust for murder. So the sovereign God of Creation alone can finish what men may have started.

David knows his problems aren’t imaginary. Oddly enough, instead of typical Hebrew hyperbole, this poetic description of Saul’s pursuit is rather accurate. The still reigning king is no slouch in battle and his troops outnumber anything David could gather. Yet the man was driven by demons of madness, so David knows the Lord of Heaven is not in this. Rather, Jehovah is there to cover him until this blows over.

What to do when your pursuit of God’s glory gets you in hot water? Don’t stop now! David calls on God to exalt Himself in plain sight of all humanity. From the human standpoint, there is no escape for David. Yet God can make David’s enemies fall into their own trap. So David refuses to panic or surrender his commitment to God’s justice.

How does God’s man face his apparent end? By keeping the focus on God. Several modern songs were taken from these final verses. David’s message here is timeless. In dramatic imagery, David calls to his heart where God’s glory registers on his awareness, and calls for his musical skills to attend this moment of praise. Well before dawn David plans to awaken and the first order of business is singing God’s praises. Let the whole world know David owes it all to his God. Could we float up into the sky itself, we would still see but the trailing end of His glory behind Him, the power of His divine character. Let God take His rightful place before the adoring eyes of all people!

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