Psalm 44

Posted on April 4, 2015 by ehurst

Western scholars seem to be unsure whether the Sons of Korah wrote this or if it was simply dedicated to them. English translations vary on whether it is “by” or “for” them. Even more disturbing is the insinuation by Western scholars that this psalm accuses God of failing Israel when she was faithful. While they observe no other psalm seems to say this, they are shocked by the apparent sarcasm aimed at God, despite having nowhere else to turn.

Here we need to repeat the lesson of Job: Sometimes God does stuff that makes no sense to us, and we have no reason to expect He is accountable to us. If there is one lesson Israel most needed reminding of, particularly leading up to the Exile, it was that no human entity has God over a barrel. Even God’s Chosen People face suffering and sorrow that seems entirely unconnected with anything they understand, and it has not changed after Christ. Our God portrays Himself as a mysterious and imperious Eastern Potentate, with concerns far beyond our imagination. He is God and we are not. That this seems so foreign to Western sensibilities should serve as a warning that Christians need to pay more attention to the cultural background of Jesus, who was an Eastern man founding a new Eastern religion that was built on top an ancient Eastern religion and culture. Despite the tone here, we have no reason to suspect the psalmist isn’t aware of the bigger picture, but is simply telling how it feels.

So the psalm starts out describing how the nation had a long record of God’s covenant faithfulness. The Conquest of Canaan Land was all about God’s power and glory. The army of Israel was just along for the ride, going through the motions as commanded. Then it gets personal: “You are my king!” This is followed by a call for God to repeat in that time what He had done during all those past centuries, showing His power over the enemies of Israel. This is the boast by which Israel taunted their vanquished enemies.

Then comes the anguished cry. What happened, Lord? Now we are being slaughtered in battle. The psalmist feels the nation was sold cheaply. And it is now the enemy who taunts Israel in the name of their heathen gods. The psalmist insists they have been faithful and cannot imagine how they might have transgressed the Covenant in such a way as to bring this upon their heads. Did God fall asleep on them? This is how it feels when the inexplicable things come into our lives, and very much how it felt for Job.

The final verse is a renewed call for God to rescue them on the basis of His own character. They aren’t going to get help anywhere else.

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Heart of Faith: Intro

Posted on April 4, 2015 by ehurst

It’s a tragedy of Western culture that relegates the heart to a mere metaphor of human emotion. Ours is the only culture that does that; every other civilization seems to have understood that the heart is quite literally the seat of a higher level of understanding. Recently scientists have discovered that the heart has a sensory field more powerful than the brain, connected to a parallel neuron network of its own. It’s not simply a figure of speech when the Bible refers to the heart as the one place where you can hear the voice of God. He doesn’t speak to the intellect, so if you don’t have your heart attuned to His voice, you can’t hear Him at all.

Early Christians were very Hebraic. This is not the same thing as the Hellenized Judaism of Christ’s day and that we still see today. Rather, Christ was calling His people back to the ancient Hebrew perspective that predated Greece and Rome. He called them back to the Ancient Near Eastern intellectual assumptions about life and reality itself. The Old Testament arose within that frame of reference, and simply cannot be understood from a Western viewpoint.

The Bible speaks consistently of the heart as the seat of the will, the driving sense of commitment to eternal values and questions of morality. Scripture further presumes the reader understands that the heart is superior to the mind. Human intellect was treated as an extension of the fallen fleshly nature, incapable of dealing with genuine moral considerations. Rather, the heart was where real decisions in life were made. The mind could smother the voice of the heart, but it could in no wise do the same work.

Whatever it is that God has to tell us, He speaks to our hearts, not to our minds. In order to understand how this works, we need to go back and rebuild the ancient Hebrew cosmology and anthropology.

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Heart of Faith: Front Matter

Posted on April 3, 2015 by ehurst

Serializing the draft of my next book under the working title “Heart of Faith.”

Smashwords requires an advertising blurb for each book. They want a long and short version.

Short: Your heart is not simply a metaphor of feelings, but a genuine sensory organ. It also has its own parallel neuron network and even a brain. Biological science can tell you that much, but for Christians, the Bible revealed long ago that your heart is the only part of you capable of hearing God’s voice.

Long:It’s a tragedy of Western culture that relegates the heart to a mere metaphor of human emotion. It’s the only culture that does that; every other civilization seems to have understood that the heart is quite literally the seat of a higher level of understanding. Recently scientists have discovered that the heart has a sensory field more powerful than the brain, connected to a parallel neuron network of its own. It’s not simply a figure of speech when the Bible refers to the heart as the one place where you can hear the voice of God. He doesn’t speak to the intellect, so if you don’t have your heart attuned to His voice, you can’t hear Him at all.

Preface

It is impossible to write this book without at times stepping into a first-person narrative. The very nature of what I hope to accomplish requires that you understand the intensely personal nature of God’s truth.

God is a Person, not some impersonal force out there in the cosmos. Further, all truth is a reflection of His character. There is no objective body of factual truth except in the wild imagination of Western rationalists. The Bible says flatly that God can remake reality on-the-fly and that all things are wholly subject to His whim. When He decides to let us see Him doing it, we call it “miracle” — otherwise we would never know the difference. All of reality remains entirely dependent on His attention, and Scripture affirms His interest does not wax and wane like ours does.

While there is a vast body of common experience in Christian faith, there is plenty that is of necessity entirely unique to the individual. The Western reflex to emphasize the common can literally smother the unique. Even Western liberalism trades one set of enforced conformity for another against Western conservatism, so this is not a question of those competing philosophies. The Bible is neither, but a wholly different kind of approach to thinking.

That’s what I aim to show you in this book, but I can only tell you what I have learned and experienced first-hand. You are bound to find that some of this simply cannot apply to you. It is between God and you. God makes His own path in each human soul.

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Proverbs 7

Posted on April 2, 2015 by ehurst

Solomon has seen it all. While at her pinnacle the Kingdom of Israel was never large enough to be called an empire, she was the single most stable and prosperous nation in a sea of instability. Previous empires had already declined and those not yet born suffered internal chaos. The timing was perfect for a man of unprecedented wisdom and good fortune to draw the attention of numerous foreign powers there at the crossroads of three continents. What he had not seen directly, Solomon learned from the constant flow of traffic seeking his court.

If the New Testament hammers home the message that human sexuality is easily one of the greatest gifts of God, and at the same time, the single greatest threat to personal holiness, the authors learned it from the likes of Solomon. If any man knew such danger, it was the man with far too many wives and concubines. In the midst of this, he still found such a severe threat from adultery that he continues to hammer on it from every possible angle. In this chapter, it’s all about the personal weakness to temptation.

He begins by echoing the symbolic references in the Law of Moses about tying God’s revelation on your arms and writing it on your forehead. However, Solomon makes the point that if you don’t write it on your heart — if you aren’t fully committed with a strong moral fiber — all the revelation in the world won’t help you. Make God’s truth your best friend, he says.

Please note that, while he might imagine he has cause for demeaning women in general, Solomon is careful to confine his repeated warnings to adulterous women. This translates well into the modern recognition of what some behavioral scientists refer to as “hypergamy.” While our modern Western culture denies it, woman are wired to always seek a better mate. Feminine ambition in nest-building is popularly portrayed as an anomaly, as if it’s some kind of perversion from the more natural “pure” female instincts. Mosaic Law recognized the truth by building barriers against that very normal instinct. However, with all the strictures, we see that Hebrew society remained relaxed enough for adultery to be a problem.

It’s not as if Solomon portrays women as the greater threat to social stability. Rather, it is the difference between how the two sexes threaten shalom. It’s easy to forget that the Law of Moses came from the mouth of our Creator. It reflects reality as He made it. When it comes to sexual immorality, the biggest problem with men is their passivity. In the Hebrew society, there was a complete absence of the mythology of a man pursuing a woman’s favor. Lacking that myth, men were more likely to restrain themselves than women.

Thus, the archetype for adultery is the wily woman seducing a foolish man. Solomon paints a very sharp, detailed portrait of this. As is typical of Hebrew literature, there are elements of hyperbole. Still, the essence of the image rings true, particularly in the final result. In ancient Hebrew society, the man who surrendered to such enticements was doomed in every way. If he wasn’t executed outright with her, he became financially liable to the husband. The fool was making himself a slave to the woman and her husband’s justified wrath. That his wife was fundamentally the cause didn’t change things; it was hardly unknown for a man to marry a loose woman as a social pretense to cover his predatory scheming.

Solomon finally warns his readers to keep their hearts in charge, and not allow the mind and lusts to take control. The mind has no inherent morality, and will simply serve to implement whatever the will chooses. If the heart is silenced from its moral awareness, all that’s left is mere logic, and that’s not enough to keep us from sin. Further, we dare not forget that adultery itself is also an image of idolatry in general. All kinds of sweet temptations can turn into an adulteress-in-effect.

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Heart Mind

Posted on April 2, 2015 by ehurst

Just a quick note…

Part of the failure of the various scientific approaches to understanding the heart’s neuron network is that they don’t go far enough. The secular scientific approach recognizes the heart has a very active and powerful sensory field, but they leave it at that. They don’t go on to recognize that the heart has its own form of intelligence.

We really don’t have the language to describe it. How do you describe something superior to intelligence? God gave us the heart to lead the mind, so even using the language to call it a superior form of intelligence tends to weaken the concept. The heart is far more than another sensory organ, but internally for it’s very like the difference between human intellect and divine wisdom. God created human intelligence, so there’s no comparison between God’s kind of thinking and ours.

The heart’s “thinking” is more like God’s in the sense that it “thinks” in terms of eternal moral necessity. God designed the heart, not only to perceive His character directly, but to process that perception for us independently of the brain. If the brain is alert and ready to submit to the heart, then the brain can be guided in its inferior kind of reasoning and logic to implement our effort to live according to ultimate reality.

The heart is quantum intelligence. When the mind surrenders to the reign of the heart, those lesser intellectual capabilities are enhanced. You gain a kind of assurance and purpose that clarifies everything. The mind is inherently more effective when the heart rules.

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Next Project: Sensory Heart

Posted on April 1, 2015 by ehurst

I know it’s April Fool’s Day, but I have something serious in mind here.

This won’t work if I put it together like my other books.

God is a Person; His revelation teaches us to treat His Creation as a living thing. Revelation also points us to a communion with Creation as each of us is a part of Creation. It’s not a “doing” nor precisely a matter of “being.” It’s an “I am” kind of thing, though when describing it in English, the difference is hard to state.

We aren’t lost or absorbed, per se, but voluntarily immerse ourselves. There are elements that outlive our human existence because they are eternal. We are connecting ourselves to Eternity, and it simply isn’t possible unless some part of us belongs to it. However, there are other elements of this that remain ephemeral and momentary, in that it requires an active effort to drag the resistant flesh around as Eternity moves us through this world.

We cannot pretend to really understand it all; human language breaks down under the strain of describing it. The Bible presents it mostly in terms of covenant relations with God. The two primary Law Covenants (Moses and Noah) don’t offer much direct reference to what they really mean. You are supposed to realize that on your own. There is something in the covenants themselves that call to your higher faculties. It’s really up to you how much of that you seize upon and connect to what’s behind it all.

The Bible was written by mystically minded people, in a mystical language about a mystical grasp on something forever beyond mere words. Christianity was born an Eastern religion because Old Testament religion was also Eastern in nature. The Hellenization of OT religion into Judaism was a damnable perversion, and the Westernizing of Christianity is likewise damnable.

There is no such thing as “propositional truth.”

So it’s not crazy and weird to suggest that what our Creator intended is all mystical and ineffable. That’s His nature, insofar as any part of His Creation can even pretend to know Him. That means you and I.

It is not that we are the purpose behind the rest of Creation, but that God’s witness to us required all the things we experience in our universe. The vastness of Creation is pitifully tiny in God’s reckoning, something He put together with unspeakable wisdom and skill in just a few days. You can immerse yourself in what your senses and logic can grasp, but you cannot get to know God that way. You have to rise above human reason and intellect, because relying on that is the very essence of the Fall. You have to awaken higher faculties. You have to connect on a different level, so that your mind becomes a mere servant, an executive organizer that implements what God requires. God does not address Himself to the human intellect. He speaks only to the spirit and heart.

The heart is a sensory organ with it’s own “brain” and is far more powerful than the intellect. That much is simply scientific fact. You can read the highly academic papers and books of Stanford University biologist Jan Walleczek and associates; they are hard to find and often expensive to access. You can also find the much more accessible Heart Math Institute, so long as you realize that it’s wrapped in a high pressure sales pitch. I’ll point you to the landing page for their basic explanation, but warn you that it’s all about drawing you in, almost like a cult.

For our purposes, it is enough to simply note the facts for those of you who simply cannot proceed without a valid factual basis: The heart has a measurable sensory field and interacts with other fields, particularly the measurable energy fields around other living things. The scientists can detect a field presence extending about ten or fifteen feet (3-4.5m). What they cannot tell you is that your own heart can interact with living creatures in Creation much farther out. In general, the scientific approach doesn’t yield a whole lot for the investment. It requires a massive cerebral effort for a tiny improvement in your existence. If your mind remains in control, you really can’t get very far. I assure you it’s better than nothing, but nothing like the approach hinted at in Scripture.

The Bible points you to a path that takes you face to face with God. It cannot be factual; it is wholly personal. There will be obvious similarities with those who share this gift, but as a whole, it grows as something utterly unique to you. That’s because the whole point is to awaken parts of yourself that have been silenced by science and all that it represents. We don’t give you something you don’t already have. God put it there. So far as anyone can tell, He put it into every living soul, not to mention every other creature that lives. Indeed, it connects directly to matter itself. This connected-ness is fundamental to Creation, and is a direct reflection of God’s own personal character.

So when I begin putting this together, it will of necessity be in the first person voice, for example. It’s personal. But I’m not willing to confine this to what I have experienced myself. It will inevitably include some of the work from Sister Christine. I’ll be including some of my wife’s story. Some of you could probably write or at least relate your own experience with this awakened communion with Creation. If you are willing to share your own witness to the truth with us, let me know.

Sure, you can fake it. A decent writer could splash out all sorts of goop that sounds like what I’ve written above and the rest of us would never know. There’s no way to prevent that. But those of you who understand what this is about will surely grasp how there is no particular interest in exercising that kind of editorial control and “fact checking.” That’s because, in the final analysis, God knows the truth about you. If you use His name in vain to manipulate others for some imaginary personal gain, He won’t let it slide.

But the whole point is my firm conviction that this particular part of God’s ineffable truth is within reach of all humanity, including those who remain spiritually dead. There is something about the mercy of God expressed in His Law Covenants that calls to all of humanity with a measure of redemption. That was the purpose of the Law as Law. You can decide how much of it you want. I am convinced that you need not be “born again” to experience the living moral sphere of God’s Creation. What’s missing is the background that permits folks to be open to such a sphere.

We can’t remake society, and certainly cannot correct the massive deception that is Western Civilization, but we can give people an exit ramp that takes them off that vast highway to Hell on earth. There is sufficient scientific research to draw attention to that ramp. Everyone living can surrender their intellect to the higher faculties of the heart, which is really the only way you can properly understand God’s Word. The Bible itself frequently refers to this faculty, but Westerners have been taught to read it as a figure of speech. We need to awaken this thing in every soul that we can possibly touch with the truth.

Nobody will make any money from this project, and the resulting written product will remain free, available in multiple formats. Nothing is aimed at controlling the outcomes. Nobody will be asked to join anything, only commit themselves to what they can discern from their own heart-mind. Go ahead and write your own book if you like; it’s not a competition for some limited resource. This stuff won’t change the world. It could awaken a few more souls to what the world actually is. It won’t take much for readers to realize why it’s worth any investment of our personal resources. How can we who sense this reality keep it to ourselves? The moral fabric of Creation itself demands we do this.

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Unintended Confirmations

Posted on March 31, 2015 by ehurst

One of our fundamental teachings here is that God’s character pervades the whole universe. Regardless of apparent facts, you won’t really begin to understand reality until you characterize it on some level as a living thing itself. On some level, reality itself is dynamic, and any perceived entropy is the result of moral blindness.

While human morality is going downhill as we approach the end point of God’s patience, you might be surprised to find that virtually nothing that shocks the conscience today is all that new. There is abundant evidence on a mere human level of understanding that this stuff ebbs and flows and is often simply hidden from popular perception. So we end up having to discard our notions about just what it is that will trigger the final judgment of our Creator, recognizing that it’s nothing you and I could possibly understand. What the Bible does reveal are symptoms of decline. The cause is something more fundamental and less overt, something which reason alone is simply not sufficient to discern. Human depravity is not exactly cyclical in itself, but it’s more a matter of what we notice.

Thus, John’s book of Revelation is not actually about events, but fundamentally about types and trends.

There are distinct boundaries written into human nature, just as they are in the rest of Creation. There are any number of myths about how far Creation can be adapted by human intelligence, as well as myths about how concerted effort could eventually change human nature itself. We are both the pinnacle of Creation and very much a part of it. Fundamental to our fallen nature is rejecting the Fall. So you’ll run across any number of reasonable-sounding theories about where the human race could go if only we make a few adjustments. But that’s been tried and failed repeatedly in history. A primary example is the Tower of Babylon.

Not as proof, but we cite such things as symbolic examples that illustrate the truth. Truth becomes self-evident if your heart can make itself heard over the programmed cacophony of fallen human imagination. We see it in recent history and we can see it at work today on multiple scales.

If you read much at all about Scientology, never mind whether there is any truth in L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics and related theoretical work, you realize that the organization currently has hit the wall. Efforts to control and regiment in minute detail all outcomes is unraveling. Statistics are hard to pin down because of organizational secrecy, but one gets the impression there are growing waves of defection and the membership numbers are suffering. The income streams are threatened by the church’s inability to avoid negative publicity. Whether or not it’s about the money might be subject to debate, but there’s no doubt the organization as we know it would cease to exist without the vast property holdings.

Indeed, many defectors argue that the real power of Hubbard’s teachings are buried behind the courtship of celebrities and relentless doctrinaire pushing of failed projects. That a significant portion of the membership is unaware of the inner workings is manifestly obvious. My point is that the organization as a human entity has reached the failure point in part because it ignores the limits of human tolerance, both among members and outsiders.

You might have noticed their lawyers aren’t fighting nearly as hard today as they have in the past. There was a time they were able to intimidate the IRS into making a deal over their tax exempt status, but these days they seem unable to sustain the protracted avalanche of legal pressure against even small private organizations, not to mention local and state governments.

Lots of cults have come and gone during my lifetime. We’ve already seen the rise of numerous major splits and splinter groups in mainstream religious institutions, as well. Some of you may remember the Anglican Church not long ago shifted official policies about ordination and lost whole congregations, and rival hierarchy offices that undercut the old geographical structures with parallel identities. The traditional leadership offices are losing their claim on legitimacy. The older organization was already in steep decline, but the splinter groups are often quite active and growing. This is one step away from total separation, and the euphemism for this is Anglican Realignment.

Historically we recognize the Anglican Church as the first successful organizational departure from the Roman Catholic Church. That is, Anglicans were “protestant” only in being out from under the Roman Pontiff, but otherwise hardly that different in terms of how things are done. Of course, over the centuries the two have drifted farther apart. Meanwhile, the Roman Church still suffers from splintering. Ignoring protests from any significant identifiable minority, or simply failing to accommodate them, guarantees schism, regardless of whether one considers them justified. Today in Brazil a significant splinter group of bishops and priests are demanding a return to conditions prior to Vatican II. They are partly reviving a previous splintering that claimed the name of Pope Pius X; their current label is “The Resistance.”

At the other end of the spectrum, we have any number of notorious American Catholic nuns demanding even more liberal reforms. One has to wonder just how little it would take for a complete split of American styled Catholicism from the Roman hierarchy, with so very much passive resistance to the ancient traditions already boiling beneath the surface. This stands against the background of a very shaky federal grasp on the states and any number of rising resistance movements.

In each case, you could as a member of the organization pretend that there is something sacred at work, that God is on one side of the debate or another. You could insist that any failures are simply the work of the Devil. Try to convince outsiders if you can, but you’ll likely run into a skepticism and even cynicism that you are lying, that it’s mere propaganda.

From a secular point of view, it would be very easy to get lost in analyzing all the details. We can’t predict the point of failure until we get much closer to it, when the people involved finally decide they can’t go any farther. That’s my whole point here: When leadership refuses to recognize that people have hard-wired limitations in their adaptation to demands from the system, the system will surely dissolve. When it does, internal pressures can be sufficient to cause explosions of some sort.

And to what do people turn as their instinctive safety net when all Hell breaks loose? It’s always some form of tribalism. That simply demonstrates how we are wired. But if you embrace that truth and go back to discover God’s revealed form of human government, you’ll find that no shepherd-led social structure ever fell apart.

It’s not that we are any better. Our only claim is that we never expected much in the first place. When any human activity starts down the path of organization, there is a fundamental moral fabric at work that you cannot ignore. Ignore that and your efforts are doomed. Embrace that and you at least won’t have to worry about internal failure. There are plenty of organizations in this world I consider evil to varying degrees, but they persist purely on the grounds that they remain tribal in structure.

Humanity continually confirms the Word of God, despite itself.

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Prayer Update

Posted on March 30, 2015 by ehurst

First, God alone knows how grateful I am that some of you are praying with me. I wish I could tell you, but it’s off the scale.

The torn muscles in my left leg are almost healed. I am very near to previous activity level, so thank you for joining in that prayer. It’s working!

We finally got a starter relay for the car. You’d be amazed how confusing the websites are about what they have decided to call it, versus what Volvo calls it. The old one was bad, but it didn’t fix the problem. Later today I’m pulling the starter and I’ll take it to the parts house to see how long it takes to get another (approx. cost is US $120 $150). At least this is fairly easy to access.

The old static site is now closed. If you run across a broken link in my older blog posts referencing soulkiln.org, let me know. I’ll be fixing the links for a long time to come, I suspect, since we are looking at more than 5 years’ worth of posts. Reason for closing it? The thing ran its course and served its purpose, but the ministry has moved beyond what I could do with that site. I pulled all the content into my books or here on the blog, including some PDF files. My heart told me it was time to let that old project die.

For now I’m going to continue with posting the chapter studies in Proverbs and keeping an eye on things I’ve been called to watch. Always, always always — I am your pastor if you need. I’m semi-retired and have plenty of time. Check my “About” page for a link to my resume if you want to know the various ways to get hold of me.

Thanks again for praying with me.

Update: Got the new starter put in. It tries hard to turn the motor, but the engine won’t spin at all. Now I’m stumped. This calls for someone with more expertise.

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Blindfolding

Posted on March 30, 2015 by ehurst

It’s disturbing.

Fundamental to the concept of civility is that we recognize the difference between private and secret. That is, we keep from others only what is private — stuff that, best you can tell, does not affect them and is none of their business. We already have way too much crap coming at us, so elimination of somebody else’s private stuff is good and right. It’s also morally righteous.

But paranoia is not a gift of the Spirit. The presumption that others must justify any information request is not morally righteous. A critical element in civility is trust and people need to know something about you to trust you. There has to be a measured exchange of privacy in order to include people in your orbit and you in theirs. So we build rules and customs to define what is and is not appropriate to share. Despite my fundamental rejection of Western Civilization, I still am forced to live in it and I let a lot of my moral objections slide because I have to start somewhere with folks who don’t know me. Thus, I remain aware of the necessary elements of trust from a Western social perspective, along with an awareness of how it has radically degraded in recent decades.

Quantum Morality means operating on multiple levels and knowing when divine justice means we play along with the context and when to fight it, and how much and on what particular issues we fight or don’t fight.

So we see a trend where some particular institution or organization drifts from at least a pretense of openness (which correlates to accountability) to paranoid control. The more people involved, the more such control requires emotional abuse of the membership. It demands a sharp awareness of leverage and control, and how far you can push to keep your victims passive and unresistant. It means turning their world into a hellish nightmare, in part by convincing them it’s only worse outside the gates.

So I read the allegations about several religious institutions that have drifted toward autocracy and internal paranoia. And it’s just like most governments and other forms of human organization. But who would have thought Google, of all things? I would have thought it, because I’m cynical. Don’t make the mistake of thinking I love libertarian theory, or that I am such a big fan of AntiWar.com. I read the site some, but I am not enlisted in their particular mix of causes, and certainly not their fundamental philosophy (it’s entirely Western).

BTW, let me plug once again the duck as a far better option for your own personal sanity when you need a search engine. And I’ll let you know that recently Mozilla (responsible for Firefox browser, one of my favorites) defaults to Yahoo instead of Google now. Google has the gall to press Firefox users to dump Yahoo. And frankly, Yahoo is making a bit of a comeback, in part because people are starting to smell the moral stink that now clings to Google, whatever one might think of Yahoo.

The instinct to play gatekeeper and control others by any means at all does not come from God. We who find ourselves in shepherd’s call are eager to make sheep less sheep-like. That’s what this blog and my books are about, and it’s why the books are free. It’s why I publish through Smashwords, because they are the least encumbered outfit I can find. So my books don’t make Amazon because Amazon demands full control, but you find my stuff through most other major distribution services. This is not about organizing boycotts or exercising market leverage; I really want you to stand free and strong. How can I not offer you the same mercy that was given to me?

I want you to find it disturbing when someone demands you wear their blindfold.

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Quick Review: DIY Religion

Posted on March 29, 2015 by ehurst

Kiln of the Soul virtual parish is a concept, nothing more. It becomes little more than a label on my willingness to act as pastor to anyone wandering by this blog. Parish membership is just an artifact of your own mind — and that’s good enough. We need no concrete reality to build faith. Faith is the starting point. Religion is merely your internal response to bring that faith to reality.

Yes, I do claim to follow Christ. While it began as a cultural reality into which I was born, I have had plenty of time to test and reshape that until it is now my own personal reality. You can be sure I studied plenty of other stuff along the way. In the end, I went with that internal voice that comes from far above my own soul. More real than my own sense of identity is this powerful call to claim Christ as my Savior and Lord.

The basis for my pastoral ministry is simply sharing with you my personal experience. Take only what you can use. If you don’t have some reservations, then you really don’t understand my story. God forbid you should attempt to treat me as an authority figure, all the more so since this is all virtual. If we were gathered in meat-space, it would be a different story. However, even there you would discover I expect you to be yourself, not a clone of me. My best friend and the love of my life — my wife — has her own mind on some things, and that is as it should be. In a sense, uniformity is of the Devil.

The soul of religion here is first and foremost voluntary, every moment, every step of the way. The nature of this religion is demonstration. I express my response to faith; perhaps some my response will help you make up your mind about your own sense of calling. If you have no personal sense of calling, then we have to have an entirely different discussion. For that case, we have God’s Law Covenants. You still have to understand their nature and abstract what applies to you, but at least it is universal in the sense that God put it where every living soul could reach it.

Nothing I teach here is aimed at helping you find or obtain eternal salvation. God, and God alone, can do that, and He has revealed that it comes entirely at His discretion and on His initiative. I don’t pretend to understand how that works. What I do pretend to understand is what you can do with it once you discover that it has you. I do try to help people discern it, but neither of us can do anything here on this level to change it. Thus, you need not prove anything at all, nor even affirm it in any form of communication to me or any other person on this earth. Indeed, you could not prove it. You can, at best, indicate it.

Faith is not about proof. Nothing of any real importance can be proved to another. It can be indicated, and Jesus made it fairly plain that only a limited portion of any audience will ever really get it because that’s how faith works. The ultimate truth can be expressed only in parables, in symbolic language that helps only those whose spirits are fully alive. There is a certain amount of literary meaning that can be extracted on the conscious moral level, because (I believe) the heart can be awakened for any human. The Bible indicates that’s not true of our eternal spirits, that some will never come to spiritual life for reasons we cannot possibly grasp, but that everyone could theoretically have a fully conscious sensory heart.

So the heart and it’s mastery of moral awareness is the thing I aim at for the most part. I use the background of Hebrew culture (insofar as I can grasp it) to understand the Hebrew Scriptures (the New Testament is still essentially Hebraic) and work hard to set aside the Hellenized or Westernized intellectual approach. If, from your other personal religious background, you discover some parallels and useful indicators for your own faith, there’s no reason we can’t fellowship on those grounds. If you have no religion at all but simply like what I write, there’s no reason we can’t be friends. I’ll still be your pastor any way you like it.

There is little real distinction between God and His revelation for us. All truth is His truth, and is merely an expression of His character. Ultimate truth is His Person, and He cuts His own path through human souls. I’m just along for the ride. All I can do here on this blog is tell you about my experiences. If you don’t experience your own faith, mine will hardly be any use to you. Build your own religion. Your spiritual identity is written in a higher realm of existence, and merely read here on earth by your own faith.

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