Strokes of Glory

Posted on April 28, 2015 by ehurst

Reason is treason.

More precisely, identifying an objective or justification for something means you have already surrendered to the Enemy of Souls. It means you’ve gone over to the Dark Side and deserted your God and all He gave you.

Today I am hoping the rain lets up for awhile. I intend to get out my mountain bike and ride a couple of hours, maybe more. I don’t really have anywhere to go; no matter which direction I choose, I’ve already seen it all because I’ve been doing this for years.

I’ve been doing it in part because I sensed a burden on my heart to become more physically fit. It was a moral demand of God on me. And at what point could I say, “I am fit and have completed the Lord’s command”? It’s never complete, because no matter how fit my body is, I could do more. So the call from God to engage in fitness training has no end point in this life. And who says the riding has to meet some intensive fitness goal?

Why would it matter to God in the first place? How does my fitness struggle bring Him glory?

If you know anything about fitness, you realize it’s a joy in itself. The powerful sense of connection you gain, even without recognizing the existence of your heart-brain or butt-brain, is hard to explain. It’s a sense that you are truly alive in a way otherwise impossible to experience. It’s not a question of how much you can lift, how far you can ride or run, or how long you can march down the road with only what you can carry. It’s the doing itself, never mind whether you reach a measurable goal.

Can you imagine how I treasure the adventures through which I’ve passed? Sure, I’d love to go back and do it all again, but I’m too old for some of it. I regret being such a fool and not stopping in the moment to rejoice, but then, I could not have known then how much it would mean when I could no longer do that stuff. Waking in a tiny crowded tent filled with stinking sweaty soldiers on a frosty morning atop the wind-blown Umtanum Ridge (Yakima Training Center) to a barely warm meal of low-grade institutional food — at least the coffee was hot — was part of an adventure I’ll never repeat.

Indeed, whatever the US Army was then is long gone and will never come again. Despite how I might long for some small taste of that time, it would be outright evil for me to go back into military service now, even if I could. It would require ignoring a vast forest of moral contradictions bigger than redwoods. Even if I say it was more a desire to be with the people in that setting, I can rest assured the context is now too radically different, and so are the people. This I know first hand by talking to folks still in uniform. The world I knew is long dead, in that sense.

I cannot glorify God on that path.

This is the whole point in bothering to live in the first place. Would I join in some other organized human activity to fulfill the sense of adventure? Sure, but how much of it isn’t mere political theater? Just about every major demonstration or protest suffers major infiltration from government agents. If not up front, it comes eventually until the thing either dissolves in contention or is shut down when some mole figures out the organizational central pillars on which the whole thing rests.

Since I could remember, some part of me has always known that the substance of life is living itself. Not just existing or surviving, but a vivid sense of “am” in God’s Presence. This is the essence of His glory in us. We need not justify anything He calls us to do. Our lives write a narrative of His glory in us.

It was never about the uniform or the flag; those were never symbols of God’s glory. He is already at work destroying the US as an institution. Nations come and go at His whim and none are precious in His sight. The US has been quite short-lived and is now devolving into a farce of hatred and global bullying. It’s never about the results by which humans measure things. Those are all lies, deceptions to keep us from seeing God’s glory as He revealed it.

My life-long sense of adventure has always been a symbol of His purpose in me. It never was a question of accomplishment, but a vivid life exploiting existence itself as the means to bringing Him glory. Seizing a fully conscious occupation of my own body and soul needs no justification, and my epitaph should not depend on a series of titles, awards and other meaningless stuff. Rank and ribbons? Feh. Just tell them, “Oh my, how he lived!”

As noted in my book, Expectations, Hopes and Dreams, the Hebrew language is all about the narrative, a vivid and dramatic recounting that takes you back to that moment. It does so that you may understand what He can and will do to all who seize upon His glory. His glory is that we bring to reality His promises in how we live by His character.

I’m not just riding a bicycle, but pedaling and peddling His glory. I have no idea where I’m going and it doesn’t matter.

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The False Norse God

Posted on April 27, 2015 by ehurst

The sheikh of the clan expected it, could feel it coming. Some decision he made for the welfare of the whole family didn’t go as one of his nephews had hoped. The younger man came storming in and bellowed like a wounded buffalo in his frustration. His uncle sat impassively, simply absorbing the verbal abuse.

The anger was natural. It was unlikely to persist. Even if his nephew turned it into a permanent grudge, it didn’t change anything. And if the nephew turned it into a political intrigue to have him pulled from his role as family head, it was a good time to retire and let someone else put up with all the shit.

The sheikh was a good man who never really wanted the authority in the first place. It was endless headaches balancing the needs and demands of everyone in the clan. There was always two or three in ten jockeying for more of one thing or another. There was never enough for everyone to have what they really deserved or needed. And oh, how hard it was to explain to some that the energy they expended on one impossible thing could have fed their own household with extra left over to share.

There were different expressions he might wear at moments like this, sometimes bemused, sometimes gently waiting, sometimes a stony stare or just gazing blankly at whomever was throwing a fit. A raucous family with passions made for good fighters when things got tough, so he made sure his inflamed nephew could see he was paying attention. At the point when the younger man began repeating himself for the third of fourth time, he knew this thing was burning itself out, so he raised a hand. It was the standard gesture calling for silence.

The nephew sputtered and went silent when the two largish young guards shifted their weight a bit. “Is it my turn?” The sheikh had a sense of humor.

********

Have you ever yelled in anger at God? I’ll give you hint: He portrays Himself in Scripture pretty much as the sheikh in the story above. The primary difference is that God can’t retire without all Creation dissolving into oblivion.

How does this contrast with the standard Western image of the grouchy old Norse deity? Westerners don’t even have a clue about manhood, much less of a loving God who sent His own Son to die on the Cross. His patience is not endless, but if you are held in the grip of a desire to know and please Him, it’s pretty hard to get Him angry back at you.

Instead, you waste a lot of time and energy that could have been used to gain more freedom from the Devil. You would hardly inconvenience God or hinder His plans. He’s quite willing to work around you if you insist, or He’ll simply get you to do His will without the sweet blessing of intentional service.

In Western mythology, it is a sin to even feel anger at God’s decisions. We have to hide the crazy false guilt from ourselves by inflating the anger into fury. We don’t even have a genuine anger. Try showing irritation at someone with authority who takes himself too seriously. He’ll pour out wrath on you for having the audacity to hold any independent thoughts in the first place, never mind the unthinkable gall to actually be anything but thrilled at your superior’s brilliant decisions. Westerners don’t know how to be men without castrating each other.

“Be angry and sin not” (Ephesians 4:26). Anger is just a feeling, but if you nurse it, the devil will own you. If you learn to read anger as a signal you have some unnecessary baggage, you’ll go looking for the cause and jettison things that don’t belong.

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A New NSA Attack on Crypto

Posted on April 26, 2015 by ehurst

Actually, the attackers are unknown in concrete terms, but it requires the kind of networking access and resources possible only with something like the NSA. That means the attack is injected at the backbone server level (the dozen or so servers that provide the ultimate level of control on all worldwide Internet traffic).

Good Crypto sounds the alarm on a form of attack that simply kept most people from getting the software by intercepting the packets on their way to the downloader’s computer. As noted, neither the server nor the client were aware of the problem because the browsers they used never saw a problem. Who expects packet tampering at the backbone level?

Granted, this kind of thing has to be specifically targeted to work that well. However, it could work on a wider scale, in theory at least. The folks who run those backbone DNS servers are not going to tell the NSA “no.” This is one of the reasons some developers are working on decentralized DNS to prevent offering such a narrow point of leverage that gives bad guys control over almost everything.

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Naked and Invested

Posted on April 26, 2015 by ehurst

Humans do have instincts. Conceptually, it’s probably useful to think of them as part of your lower brain at the bottom of your spine, what I jokingly call the “butt-brain”. It’s the center of your body consciousness and the functions that don’t require reasoning to work as God intended. It’s not that reasoning about those things is a problem, but that we are designed to connect to those instincts in moments when they aren’t needed so that we know what to expect when we do need them.

There’s a lot more in that part of us than mere instinct. One of the things anchored there is the collection of impulses that result in those powerful emotional responses. Part of our need for conscious connection to the butt-brain is to keep track of what triggers the emotions, and what enables us to act appropriately in the context when those impulses send their priority message to the mind. The emotions were not intended to rule, per se, but we are supposed to keep a tight link to them so we can use their power for things that require an extra boost. It also prevents foolish actions.

Yes, in the big mix of things we also have to peel away our Western mythology that places bogus value assignments on things. For those born and raised in the Western social structure, it’s a lot of work untangling false moral signals.

For example, anger — the majority of the time, anger comes as result of loss that some part of us believes was unjustified. Keep in mind that I preach and teach quantum reasoning, the absolute necessity of grappling with complexity. Despite what you may have heard from a bunch of idiotic Euro-centric heathen babblers, we have an instinct to avoid being naked in certain contexts. The most obvious is when we face inclement weather conditions. There are other contexts that affect us the same way, so we do have an instinct to stay covered when something tells us there is a measure of uncertainty. It’s a part of our sense of privacy, that getting inside the barriers requires earned trust. People with no sense of propriety about exposure are either deeply conflicted internally or they retain a childlike lack of wariness that isn’t fitting for adults. Anger often results when we sense that someone else has stripped us of our protections, exposed us to threats.

Our sense of comfort and protection includes a lot of things for which most folks carry no conscious awareness. If you invest a lot of time and effort in something, having it stripped away brings a sense of loss. If some part of us can imagine an agency that did it to us unjustly, we get angry. If we sense that our situation is hopeless and that justice is simply never going to happen, it quickly shifts into sorrow and depression. Again, it’s complex; the anger may well still be there, but not in the forefront of awareness. It gets even more complex when we include heavy layers of social conditioning that defy our wiring, in the sense that the social conditioning is inconsistent with God’s character.

It helps to keep a conscious accounting of our sense of investment. Be aware of the sense of moral gravity you impute to things that may not really matter. Most of us suffer from competing value systems in the first place, but striving to learn God’s own character as He revealed it in an alien intellectual environment really complicates things. This is the reason for the Bible promoting prayer and contemplation. What Westerners consider a dangerous waste of time and as inefficiency of human resources is something God says is precious and carries a high priority. What we accomplish in terms of standard human measures is ephemeral vapor in the eyes of God. What He wants us to value most is internal progress that brings us closer to what He intended.

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Psalm 47

Posted on April 25, 2015 by ehurst

This second song in a trilogy has become the source for quite a number of hymns and praise songs in recent decades. The first half serves to justify the rest.

In these first four verses, this psalm written by the Korahites calls for both Israel and all nations to praise our Creator. Far more than the rowdy exuberance of fans whose sports team have just won a match, this is more deeply thrilling like a nation who have won a hard fought war under the command of their king. However, in this case, it is their God who has demonstrated His mastery of all the earth. Thus, He could have chosen any place on earth for Israel’s inheritance, but this Promised Land was the one place He wanted to make His earthly home. It is the homeland He shares with His chosen nation.

So with all the boundless pride and the matching grateful humility, the second half of the psalm exhorts the nation to extravagant formal worship. If this paints the image of standard protocols demanded by earthly potentates during special celebrations, how much more so the God who made all things. Of course this is all symbolic imagery, but it’s the only way to get a worshiper in the proper frame of mind.

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Closer Is Better

Posted on April 25, 2015 by ehurst

Here at Kiln of the Soul virtual parish, there are several things your pastor emphasizes. I start from the position that God has called me. Then I lay out the things He has called me to share. You are quite welcome to come and pick from this buffet what appeals to you, or just sit back and watch the show.

Here’s what’s on the menu:

1. The broad superiority of Ancient Near Eastern civilizations over Western Civilization. Not that we pretend we can resurrect those ancient civilizations, but we can learn a lot from them. Indeed, God created them as the proper setting for His revelation, so if we don’t understand them, we cannot possibly understand His revelation. I invest a lot of time explaining why you can’t ignore this.

2. More specifically, Hebrew civilization and culture, plus the ancient Hebrew mystical approach to religion, are the proper model for our understanding of the Bible. I note in passing that Judaism bears almost no resemblance to that ancient religion, but this isn’t about hating Jews, just rejecting their claim to represent God’s truth. If they actually returned to the Law of Moses as taught by Jesus, we might take them more seriously.

3. We are not under the Law of Moses, and we do not balk at understanding the rest of those ancient civilizations. There’s nothing to fear from pagan religious learning, since the Bible showcases several people outside the central thread of narrative whose knowledge of truth was obvious, if only partial. When something they teach shadows the ancient Hebrew understanding, we remember that all truth is God’s truth.

4. It should be obvious that we reject mainstream Western Christianity, largely because it has already long ago rejected what we strive to teach. Neither their theology, nor their ecclesiology, is even vaguely similar to what the Bible teaches. Church History shows an early, rapid drift from the New Testament teachings, and things have only gotten worse.

5. From these foundations, we build a radically different approach to reality itself (epistemology). We have a different anthropology about what makes us human, what is and what should be the model for “normal.” We talk about heart-led living because we don’t let our minds rule. I talk about “quantum reasoning” as a far more pragmatic approach to thinking, including thinking about thinking itself. We seek to plumb the full depth of our human faculties, while recognizing their limits. It naturally results in a different approach to, health and wellness, along with psychology and other behavioral and social sciences.

6. I favor radical Open Access to information. If we have a broken view of reality, we won’t have any truth in the first place. If we strive to build on a better understanding, we have nothing to fear from what others think. The ultimate choices should not be made by the intellect in the first place; we have better equipment than that. In more practical terms, digital content cannot be controlled and it’s immoral to try. As a corollary, I support open networking access, too — not necessarily free, but open.

7. I favor Open Source software. This ends up being one of the hardest things I try to explain, because I don’t fit in with the Open Source crowd. Neither coders nor promoters really understand what they have and why it matters, and it’s only marginally better than other software, if at all. The mainstream Open Source folks have no clue what it means to love people and seek to set them free, only the freedom to do as they please (in terms of software design). It’s a strange religion. The theory of Open Source approaches moral goodness, but the implementation really sucks. Still, it’s just slightly better than other software, if only because it puts the user in control of a few things that matter to the user, compared to near zero control from commercial software development.

8. I don’t support activism as commonly conceived. I support struggling to help people as individuals. We cannot save the world and should not try. We cannot change the current situation to make things better. We can help people to see more clearly the truth and let them decide how to respond. I realize this is very unpopular, but is the future. We aren’t going to fix our current reality, but build a new reality. It will be, and it will draw whom it draws; we are not in charge. Our truth is a living thing itself, the ultimate Person of persons.

To people who aren’t drawn by this, it sounds airy-fairy. To those who hear its call, it is the most practical and useful way of living. You will need to make your own list. People who embrace any one of these things I promote will be closer to the God I serve, and that’s all I care about.

Addendum: In response to an offline question on #3 above — Over decades of study, I find that the kind of pagan activity condemned in Scripture is confined almost entirely to idol worship and fortune-telling. Almost all the stuff labeled as witchcraft, sorcery, magic, etc., is actually a reference to attempts at forecast the future for the purpose of planning your human behavior choices. Paul’s New Testament emphasis is that you don’t let demons help you decide how to live your life. He said that reverencing any deity but God is tantamount to demon worship. The whole point is acknowledging the One Creator as Lord exclusively.

Learning about the nature of things and conceptualizing how Creation works using different parables and symbols is not inherently sinful. Furthermore, there is nothing sacred about the Western calendar, particularly in the solar emphasis that ignores all the other markers God provided for us to note the passage of time and how to take advantage of His provision. God commanded us to use a lunar calendar in the first place. The Bible says He provided all the heavenly lights for our grateful use.

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Elements of Human Nature: Systemic Overview

Posted on April 24, 2015 by ehurst

My previous post on human nature is a little dated and takes the counselor’s moral viewpoint. This post takes advantage of my continuing research and shifts to a systems approach.

The manifested behavior of humans at large sometimes needs a little explanation. While we cannot reduce human complexity to a small snack for the mind, we can cut this tough steak into chewable bites. Today’s post constitutes just one bite you should mentally masticate for awhile and contemplate the implications. We inform the mind so that it knows how to respond to the demands from a higher power.

At the lowest level of human existence is the bulk of signals we all “appetites” and is associated with emotions. In essence, the biblical view is scientifically correct in placing your emotions and sentiments in the gut. What seems to remain almost a medical secret is that your guts have a mind of their own, quite literally. There is a nexus of nerves, a node of processing down there amongst those lower organs at the bottom of your spine, which takes signals from all of them. By becoming aware of this, you can begin paying proper attention to all the marvelous things it can tell you about yourself.

Of course, that depends on the health of your guts. That is, if your stomach is choked with processing a bunch of crap, your lower brain cannot process all those signals with any useful clarity. I’ll defer to Sister Wildcucumber for details on how to better manage your gut health. For now, let me toss out some quick generalities that I use: no modern wheat or GMO foods, no artificial sweeteners, no carbonated beverages, fermented foods good, wild foods good, etc. When you eat, your stomach itself needs some consideration, too. If your stomach has been crippled up and abused by modern allopathic medicine, we can still hope for making the best of a bad situation, but do keep an open mind to ancient wisdom about your guts.

The point is that we already have a lot of points of failure in communicating clearly with our inner selves that we don’t need to make things worse by neglecting the foundation of self-knowledge. We make jokes using the word “ass” as a metaphor for the rest of our bodies, but that brain down at the bottom of your spine is no joke.

At the other end of the spine is the standard mind-brain our culture recognizes. In fact, our culture pretends that this is all that matters. I’ve already written so much about this it fills books. In the future this blog will see the term “quantum reasoning” regularly because the term assumes paying attention to input from the whole spectrum of human nature.

Within your mind is a receptor for that bottom brain, and it often registers as emotions. At least, that’s what we are used to believing. The signals from your butt-brain can be a lot more nuanced and useful, but only when you get used to the idea. Your brain is supposed to process input from the various sources and estimate the best way to proceed, then organize and implement the actions indicated. We already know our minds can take input from the senses, and can reason in both concrete and abstract terms to arrive at some useful organization of things.

What almost no one in the West recognizes is that the heart also has its own brain. Further, that brain in your chest is inherently superior to the one in your head. It can handle all the things necessary for living that your brain cannot. Your heart can read all those invisible fingerprints God left on Creation, and is the only faculty in humans that can understand His character and His will. He does not communicate directly to your intelligence except in the most rare occasions, but communicates directly to every human via the heart all day, every day.

Even if you do not believe in God, it is your heart alone that is capable of grasping the fundamental nature of reality. The heart corrects and guides the intellect, so making the most of your human faculties also means making your mind subject to your heart. That also means a huge mountain of work in our Western culture getting used to the idea.

For Christians, your heart is the only part of you capable of touching the Spirit in your spirit. While we could deduce from the Bible that the heart is the seat of the will, it is much more than that. The Bible refers endlessly to the power of the heart-mind to understand God’s will, but by implication, that includes everything He wants to say through His Holy Spirit living in you.

We have much more to say about this, but I’ve already covered enough to choke most people with exceedingly high demands. I dare say the majority of people who read this won’t be able to do much with it. I’ve been faithful to God’s calling on my life in trying to put it within reach.

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A Christian Heart Is Deeply Cynical

Posted on April 24, 2015 by ehurst

On the one hand, rational objectivity is a myth. It’s a myth in the one most important sense that you’ll never see evidence of it when humans make decisions on behalf of others, that thing we call “government policy.” The theoretical existence of rational objectivity means nothing at all against the very real oppressive decisions of those who use scientific lies as an excuse for enforcing something that benefits them.

And I’ve seen it repeatedly on the smaller scale, where someone simply offering advice to another has clung to things that were contrary to the objective proof and the attendant rational analysis that was painfully obvious to everyone else. There comes a point when theory means nothing because you can’t find any real examples of what your theory says should be or could be. Persistence in believing your theory then constitutes a less than rational bias in itself.

This lies behind some of my blather about quantum reasoning. When you reduce something to it’s bare minimum in practical terms (the meaning behind the word “quantum”), not just theoretical terms, the resulting ground of assumptions will bring you closer to reality. On top of this, I assert that common Western thinking resists complexity. That is, we have been trained to develop a knee-jerk reaction seeking simplistic answers, that “truth” consists of simple linear conclusions drawn from whatever input was acceptable at the time. Quantum reasoning assumes complexity as the norm.

Thus, a thousand different choices in any context might work well enough without having to nail down one single answer as the absolute truth. Culturally, this is an abomination, as you can tell from everyday conversations. The same snooty elitist who complain about this are the people doing their damnedest to make sure the masses remain thus ignorant, carefully avoiding even the slightest effort to reach out to the masses with anything that approaches effectiveness. What you end up with is a thousand flavors of snooty elitists mutually accusing all the other flavors of ignorance.

In essence, most of what people push as science-based government policy is actually bad religion.

So here’s the result: the Drug War is a religion. There is the appearance of success on measures the holy warriors admit, but desolate failure in the broader claims of doing moral good for society. The destructiveness of the Drug War outweighs the destruction arising from drug abuse itself. That the Holy Drug Warriors will continue against all evidence can be seen in how every anti-terror policy has been subverted to simple anti-drug police work.

For example, we have the alleged blanket privacy of the Tor Network. We have propaganda released from certain key leakers that insists the NSA is frustrated by the success of Tor at hiding “terrorist” networking activity. Back when Tor was first designed secretly in government labs, it was supposed to protect government agents and their communications. When it was first promoted, there was an open admission that this would be most effective if this government traffic was inflated and masked by frankly criminal traffic.

Side note: Only a fool imagines that there is any real difference between criminal and government activity in moral terms. The difference is little more than permits from the official government. More important to note is that the private criminal enterprise is overwhelmingly larger in volume of traffic than the officially permitted government stuff. There is a vast gulf between popular moral policy agenda and the end point of government agent execution of said policy.

But you might imagine that all the government funding of Tor (in essence, no other funding at all) would indicate the possibility of government hackers trying to reserve for themselves methods of breaking the supposed anonymization of traffic when it suits government purpose. This was alleged long ago by minds far brighter than mine. However, I did include the notion in some of my fiction writing, and my guess at the method turned out to be consistent with the criticisms — it’s possible to track threads of traffic based on what happens at either end. In other words, if we can detect something happening on one end, it matters not where it goes in the middle. We can deduce from the events on one end what the traffic on the other end looks like, and check the various nodes until we detect that deduced traffic pattern. Then we trace it from the entry point back to the individual.

So while it may not be possible to disentangle the whole volume of what crosses the masking network, it’s not so hard to pick out something specific. On top of that, we are quite sure that there remains some internal means of capture even more precise than that. Not because of leaks that serve only to confirm the propaganda, but because of real-world results. You see, the Holy Drug Warriors couldn’t resist betraying this by their seizing upon the trickery to fulfill their divine mandate. The official transcripts in court of the evidence against Ross Ulbricht, and how they got that evidence, is sheer bullshit to anyone who understands networking.

Fortunately for the Holy Drug Warriors, they don’t have to tell the truth in court, and judges and juries are seldom savvy in networking, especially if the prosecuting attorney objects to having networking geeks on the jury.

I’m not defending Ulbricht nor his alleged business. I’m attacking the vastly more harmful methods that appeal to the baser religious instincts of humans. We most certainly do have a powerful government-approved religion at work here.

19 April 1993, Waco TX: forget not — Is your church BATF-approved?

You can answer “yes” to that question only if your church tends to support the government’s own religion. In common Christian language, that’s “compromise” as opposed to “holiness.” The latter term means separated, devoted solely for God’s use.

By now perhaps you could have guessed it: Heart-led living makes you very cynical because you grasp the Fall at a very fundamental level. We owe it to our hearts to peel away the vast smothering layers of Western mythology from our minds or we cannot begin to walk in the righteousness of Christ.

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On the Road Again

Posted on April 23, 2015 by ehurst

For the past month, our car has not moved. My wife managed to get use of something else temporarily while we tried to get some help diagnosing the problem. Lots of promises that turned out to be vapor. Finally we felt we had about enough money we could at least consider taking it to a shop.

So I asked around and it turns out the one closest to us seems capable and said they were willing. I very nearly came to the point of simply letting my wife steer while I manually push the thing a half-mile, since it was mostly downhill. That’s because we had more empty promises of help towing it. Finally my son came to the rescue with an old battered pickup from his employer.

Volvos are not made for towing. I’ve done this dozens of times in my life with all kinds of vehicles, often for other folks, and over far longer distances. This was the toughest in a very long time. There are no good attachment points and it was very difficult to keep everything smooth, despite using a stretchy tow-strap.

But it’s there and the mechanic seems to think he can fix it. It’s a relief just knowing we are that one step closer. (As I was writing this, they called and said it was fixed at a cost of $85.)

Most disturbing about the whole experience was how some of the shine was worn off a couple of friendships. There was a time in my life when such things would have really been disturbing, but God has moved me beyond that. When I wrote about emotional disentanglement as a pillar of Christian Mysticism, I had already been standing on it for some time. By God’s mercy, I have for some years been able to step outside of my own emotions, especially when I have time to prayerfully reflect. If I can invest enough prayer before I get started, most things never get emotional.

So there’s no particular feelings about this, just a realization I offered a couple of folks more trust than was appropriate. It’s not a matter of judging them, but seeing how they accept trust or don’t. It’s their choice and merely a signal of when to stop investing resources there, and direct them elsewhere. It’s still a matter of seeking God’s glory.

I can still say: “Life is good.”

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No Virtual Covenant

Posted on April 22, 2015 by ehurst

You know the drill: This blog is a virtual office for my ministry. I can’t do everything, so some things are excluded by necessity. I’m only human. By the same token, you need not buy into everything you see here.

But virtual space is surely different from meat space, despite the use of metaphors. A primary example is that I only have to write a book one time; it can be multiplied endlessly, in effect. The cost of the resources required to make virtual copies is minuscule by comparison to that of physical copies. And a thousand of you can crowd into my virtual space all at once and nobody has to smell anybody else.

Paul was accused of being harsh and dictatorial in his letters, but wimpy and unimpressive in person. Near as we can tell, Paul had no charisma or charm in the flesh. I suspect this was his “thorn in the flesh.” His written persona and fleshly persona appeared as two entirely different people unless you got to know him well. Just so, my physical presence might bear little resemblance to the impression of me you get here on this blog. Most people who read my nerdy computer stuff are shocked by my very un-nerdy physical presence. You’d have to know me rather well to see the consistency.

This reflects the nature of my calling. I decry activism until it comes to the question of Open Access. Even then I’m not so much an activist as a practitioner. Most activism is religion-in-effect. In my case, religion controls the type and extent of activism I engage. I’ll support your publication of hatred for my religion because I have nothing to lose by Open Access, and everything to gain. In my religion, I don’t set the boundaries of membership and I don’t even imagine I can change anyone’s mind. God handles those things. I’m just along for the ride. I make noise because I can’t be silent, but I have no interest in silencing anyone else.

So I write nerdy computer stuff as an expression of my mission in virtual space. You can ignore that stuff. Alternatively, feel free to ignore the religious stuff and read my technology posts. Take what you can use. But I don’t confuse methods and means with the mission. My religion demands Open Access in the virtual context.

Scripture did not anticipate digital content. However, it does address itself to oppression and limits to governing authority. God sets my domain. What He does not place in my hands is not mine to control. The godly flavor and feel of dominion is determined by the context of the Bible narrative, not our current civilization and social structure. It was necessary for me to write several books trying to explain just how different that is, so I’ll simply note the fact itself here. What most people associate with godly dominion is nothing like God’s character. I am required to operate by what I know of His character, and it does not permit the kind of controls commonly used by governments and businesses. The biblical concept of property ownership is radically different from that of Western Civilization.

In essence, the issue is unjustly externalizing the costs of your convenience. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” Jesus said. The nature of the Internet is that everyone and everything is all one level. Once access is granted, all participants are equal in certain ways. Influence and power is voluntarily granted in the minds of humans to other folks, but the Internet knows no such thing. You can control specific access to your machine, but not to anything digitized and sent over the Net.

If you can encrypt it, fine. If you can control access to the decryption keys, fine. You and I know that private stuff between few parties is pretty easy to keep private that way. If you intend to manage access for a much wider audience, it breaks down quickly. That’s reality, but it also reflects a deeper moral principle of God’s character — covenant boundaries. Our world refuses to recognize covenants, but God enforces them anyway. God can rewrite covenants; you aren’t God. Once a covenant is established, it binds all parties except God (though He has been known to bind Himself voluntarily). Private sharing between a few is one kind of covenant. Attempts to sell access violates covenant principle, because God does not permit cash-based covenants.

Covenants are personal in nature. If we are not bound together before God in covenant, then there is no covenant. Contracts don’t qualify. Depersonalizing something makes it also inherently dehumanizing, and God hates that. So attempts to sell keys for decryption and related restrictions on digital data are damned. Attempts to control how data is used once released outside very personal boundaries is an abomination to God. It’s not about the technology, nor the money, but God is looking at the personal factor.

So, for example, if my server transmits something to your computer for display in a browser, God condemns any effort to keep you from saving a copy once the digital content is on your machine. As far as God is concerned, the digital content has entered your domain and you can do what you like with it. Any controls I attempt to assert is evil, and your attempts to circumvent are holy, to state it in the simplest terms. And if I write crappy software controls on my server that you can circumvent to access something, it is evil to make laws in meat space that punish you for it. Once that computer is on the Net, it’s entirely on me to protect the content from your snooping.

By the same token, demanding you submit personal private information for digitization puts on me a very high burden to protect your privacy. If I fail, I am culpable for all losses you suffer; I have in effect become partners with the snoops. Cracking is not immoral in itself. It is just a question of technology. If governments can engage in electronic snooping and sabotaging your system, it is morally legitimate for anyone else. In other words, meat space authority cannot be forced upon the virtual space without bringing God’s wrath.

And we have no business claiming some inherent “right” to digital privacy that excludes attempts by government agencies to access that data. If you did manage to agitate until Congress made laws to stop the NSA from planting spyware on your computer, the NSA would simply lie about it and do it anyway. Get this: The government is loaded with demonic slimy bags of shit. That’s the nature of the secular state. God will punish them for their evil, but cracking your vulnerable Windows computer is not evil. Microsoft personnel will be punished for their deception and marketing practices, monopolistic behavior, and their unjust abuse of Windows users. But if you refuse to learn how to use anything else, what you get is what you deserve. Their evil is no secret; if you tend to holy cynicism, you would know about their sins.

God calls all humans. Those who acknowledge Him can decide in their hearts what He requires. If you sense no call to deal with the complexities of computer technology, but must use computers anyway, you’ll have to trust God for the results. If God afflicts your conscience about it, take appropriate action. However, it is evil to demand other humans invest their resources for your convenience and profit. All the more so if you refuse to acknowledge God in your heart.

So it works both ways. The attitude that you shouldn’t have to exert any effort to get what you want is not from the Holy Spirit. In virtual space in particular, no other agent on the Net is obliged to you without a personal covenant.

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