Empathy’s Sweet Power

Posted on December 15, 2014 by ehurst

Having a masculine tenderness and empathy won’t keep you from lopping off a few heads, but it will teach you to approach the dirty task with greater moral justice. Popular images of Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) justice are rife with modernized perversions. We all recognize how Israelis and Arabs go after each other, but we forget that Judaism, Islam and Christianity have all been heavily Hellenized. While specifics vary widely, the broad underlying effect is obvious. What we see in the Near East today often bears no resemblance to the ANE. When you read a wider selection of ANE literature, you realize most of the talk of severity was just that — talk.

Have you ever noticed how many capital crimes in the Law of Moses required being caught in the act by two or three witnesses? That’s not easy to arrange for most things. Going to judgment with only one witness requires some pretty strong evidence before a judge under the Law can justify a full sentence. Most lesser penalties were bad enough, but I dare say the Law of Moses was far more merciful than most Western governments are today.

This is the whole point in masculine empathy. It’s a shepherd’s care for the whole flock, the entire community under your dominion. You measured all things in terms of shalom: How does it build and preserve social stability? How do the actions threaten it? Virtually no one in the position to judge was eager for the authority. It was a burden of care that required far more energy than most men wanted to exert for the role. Real ANE men of justice weren’t eager to take the responsibility for God’s moral peace in a community. It invariably meant having to play hard with someone you loved. It meant you had to disengage for that one person the unspeakable joy of open communion with the cosmos. Those men had something Westerners can’t even comprehend.

Men, I assure you: Once you’ve tasted that cosmic empathy, you’ll discover what a cheap trick cathexis has been in your life. In cathexis, your ego boundaries collapse and you are in love with the whole universe. It’s euphoric, but it doesn’t last because it doesn’t involve the heart. It is just hormones and emotions. It’s not voluntary and the ego boundaries will reassert themselves. When you finally understand the resonance of your heart with all the rest of Creation, you understand the difference between a passing cheap thrill and the voluntary connection with God Himself through His Creation. To find within yourself the indescribable moral competence of having your empathy and tenderness properly attuned to your being, your calling, your role in God’s plan for His glory — there are no words. Yet we find evidence that a significant portion of Hebrew men experienced this when the nation was compliant with the Covenant.

David knew this incredible power. It made him both patient with human weakness and yet unstoppable in battle. You see how he was too often overly indulgent with his own kin, and you understand just how hard it is to execute God’s wrath on your own. It ain’t supposed to be easy. It gives us a sense of how God feels withdrawing His protective covering from us when we sin. David erred to the side of caution and it cost him plenty, but God said David was a man after His own heart. How much did it cost God to be so incredibly patient and long suffering with Israel?

Look for this symptom: When moral justice is joy and peace, even if you had no active role in creating, you’ll know. When doing justice is not merely a nagging conscience but a pleasure that tells you unfailingly when you have hit your boundaries, you’ll know. When significant portions of your humanity argue with that sense of justice, yet you find yourself able to discern the true peace of Christ, you’ll know.

Be warned that it will make you do some of the craziest things, perhaps some of the very things you once ridiculed. It makes a woodsman hug trees and a farmer lie partially naked in the soil. It makes a hunter talk nicely to his prey and a warrior respect his enemy. It is nearly impossible to explain to Westerners with dead hearts. Yet, once your soul has taken this path, you’d rather die on the Cross than turn away from it.

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The Long Road of Tenderness Recovered

Posted on December 14, 2014 by ehurst

One of the deepest perversions of Germanic mythology feeding into our modern Western culture is the destruction of masculine tenderness. Men are wired for tenderness. We have no trouble understanding that David and Jonathan were buddies, but our entire cultural orientation refuses to understand that men can be so very close and affectionate without some perverted notion of homosexual entanglement. In our minds, it simply is not possible for men to be tender without an erection. The only purpose of male tenderness in the West is cajoling for sex.

So far as we know, no other civilization or culture is so deeply afflicted with this. Today you can travel across the Middle East and see un-westernized men embracing and kissing, even cuddling, with nary a hint of sexual desire. Their culture understands the dire necessity of human nearness and the unique way that male hearts resonate with each other in a distinctly masculine way. Western hearts are dead. David and Jonathan were close enough to recognize each other by smell and it was like the breath of divine Presence. The full immersion of sensory entanglement was entirely natural in the sense of being consistent with cosmic moral righteousness.

While we cannot simply pretend to forget a lifetime of social conditioning, we are obliged by the redemptive power of God’s Laws to start moving in that direction. If there is one most troublesome element of Western mythology that men must fight, this is it. Not only can men learn to be tender without sexual arousal, but they absolutely must do so to establish their sexual identity. We are hard wired to fellowship with other men in tenderness and commitment and we cannot possibly create any part of God’s shalom in our Christian communion without it. The full power of God’s moral character in us depends on establishing this first. If we don’t fix this, we cannot possibly have a male sexual identity consistent with Christ. Instead, we’ll have a false Christ.

By the same token, godly manhood itself demands that each man find his own path to recovery. If we start down the path of me providing for you the specifics of psychological recovery, then your manhood remains dependent on mine. That’s the wrong answer. Making you aware of the failures of Western social mythology and the existence of a better answer is as far as we can go cognitively. Christian manhood is the result of self-definition within the revelation of Christ.

Manhood requires a certain amount of intensity arising from shared experience. Men in war, in the hunt for game or in the daily drudgery or hard work together build a resonance that cannot be gained any other way. Could we share even a month or so of such intensity, I would be in the place to pastor you and counsel you closely on specifics. Otherwise, we will both have to rely on Christ Himself to miraculously provide the firm anchorage out of this vast ocean of human failure in which we live today.

Aside from this, each man must cut his own path through the wilderness of lies. The man who does not have his own sense of calling to the truth has no truth. You must discover it on your own terms. This alone helps to explain why my writing is loaded with moral generalities. Your moral power arises from your personal discovery of moral particulars. No one else knows your life as well as you, and joined with Christ, you both know it best of all.

God help us; the distance we have to go is beyond human imagining.

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Psalm 28

Posted on December 13, 2014 by ehurst

The greatest threat to David and his people was not some external nation or empire, nor some insidious spy in his court working for some other interest. The greatest threat was departure from the Covenant. More specifically, the greatest danger was that Israel would lose her moral power to live in this world. Obeying Moses harmonized her life with the moral fabric of the universe. Lose that and she can’t defeat children throwing spit wads. Keep that and no power on earth can oppose her. Other nations could come and go at random, but the only reason Israel existed in the first place was her mission to reveal God’s character in how the people lived.

Thus, David cries out to God with the assurance that if his or the nation’s sins have raised a barrier to God’s favor, they might as well dig his grave. Chances are the image of a holy temple at this point would be the Tent of Meeting in David’s royal courtyard. It was a symbolic gesture in the first place, raising the hands in supplication to some great power. David recognized only Jehovah as his ruler.

It stands to reason David was facing a rash of crimes by deception. That is, people were playing politics and currying the favor of their neighbors while plotting to destroy the social stability God granted as a covenant blessing. It didn’t matter what the plotters thought they might gain; their actions would destroy shalom. David was counting on God to read the hearts of deceivers like that and keep His promise to root them out. Often such a cleansing came from a direction the plotters never dreamed. God’s sense of poetry and beauty always flavored His justice.

This is a God worthy of all praise. His Law included a generous measure of mercy for human weakness in those who genuinely loved to serve Him. David counted himself fortunate to be included in God’s favor. Every time he turned around, God was once more fulfilling His promises in ways that left David marveling. It was for the sake of His own divine glory that God protected David and the Nation of Israel. His tenderness for Israel was bigger than the legends could tell.

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That First Step

Posted on December 13, 2014 by ehurst

Jesus came to correct the false understanding of Moses’ Law. There were plenty of things the Jews of His day got right. For example, there was no blatant idolatry. It wasn’t much of an issue, so Jesus only noted in passing that there was a subtle form of idolatry in the obsession with material wealth among Jewish upper classes. Still, there were plenty of other things Jesus didn’t have to address because it wasn’t a problem.

Another of those things is homosexuality. There was a lot of trouble over romance and marriage, and lots of trouble with adultery and prostitution, but Jews didn’t struggle with being gay. That is, the Law of Moses was pretty blunt about homosexual relations and even cross-dressing. Those with gay tendencies knew it was a sin. That’s nothing special, since lots of human desires are sinful and we just have to live with that. There was room for forgiveness with most things, but homosexuality was a serious threat to social stability as God defined it. It wasn’t having a gay orientation that got you killed; it was giving in to the temptation that made you dangerous to the Hebrew social structure. The history of Hebrew experience with it was enough proof of that.

Even then, homosexual relations in the Ancient Near East was an entirely different thing from what we have in the West. We can’t even get that right. For the most part, ANE men of power and wealth would have sex with just about anything; most people hardly gave it a thought beyond the standard dirty jokes. The real issue with specifically preferring sex with the same gender was typically a matter of heathen religion. That is, whenever it showed up in Hebrew history, it was invariably an expression of idolatry, and idolatry was often connected to what we would consider a partisan politics. If anything was a threat to the covenant with Jehovah, that would do it.

Consider how shocking a difference it was that Hebrew women were granted ownership rights over their husbands’ sexual energies. This against the background of Canannite depravity that even Greece and Rome found disturbing. Sexual depravity was a religious requirement in the worship of Canaanite deities. This is part of the prophetic grousing about worship of Baal and Astarte in that land.

However, it doesn’t take much to realize that a normal tribal society cannot tolerate that kind of thing because it cannot tolerate any sort of sexual impropriety. But more than the obvious social disturbance that arises, it’s a serious threat to the moral power of adhering to God’s character. How blunt does it have to be? In the Garden narrative, there was one man and one woman. Genesis makes much of this and is careful to note they had nothing to hide being nude in their sinless state. The Fall ruined everything, in part by removing from their normal daily consideration the revelation of God written on their hearts. By placing the human intellect on the throne of decision, the heart was blocked from having much input. Nudity became a problem because humans no longer had that power to live morally by instinct. It now became a matter of privacy and covering. They had to have clothing because they were now morally stupid, and human sexual relations became very complicated.

Yet, one of the few outright open gifts of the moral fabric is the possibility of having a wonderful marriage and sex life. As previously noted, getting this right is pretty much the key to getting everything else right. It’s not a question of locking up your sexuality behind harsh restrictions, unless you have serious trouble with uncontrollable hormonal urges. Rather, the issue lies in settling almost every other human difficulty by getting the foundation of human life correct. A proper sexual union based on your clear sexual identity is the power to live in communion with Creation. Get this right and most the Laws take care of themselves.

This is the path to securing the two things Jesus said to summarize the Law of Moses: A right relation with our divine Father Sheikh and proper engagement of our fellow humans. The key to that is getting your sexual identity on the right track by embracing God’s revelation.

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CompSec and Browsers

Posted on December 12, 2014 by ehurst

The pastor seeks to protect his flock and mine is virtual, so computer stuff is essential as the means.

There was a long period when Internet stuff was largely predictable. Even though aware of new threats arising every day, I found things had an entirely different feel a decade ago. The changes in browsers and websites were incremental over long periods of time. Now there are huge leaps and radical changes at random and frequent intervals, and the unintended vulnerabilities multiply exponentially. We used to have an instinctive knowledge about the Net that worked well enough, even if it was theoretically inaccurate. Now, even power users feel like confused neophytes. But it’s not just perception; the Internet really is changing radically.

There is no single force driving this. Today’s new capability becomes tomorrow’s requirement, all supposedly driven by the user demand for some change in what’s possible, which again drives new capabilities and new demands in a vicious cycle. All the while those who have actual authority and power to control things have their own demands, nowadays seldom published but pressed even more forcefully. There’s a distinct lag in response when an entity becomes very large, and government/corporate entities are simply way too big for anyone’s good. It takes big to do some kinds of good, but I don’t know of any big outfit of any sort that is run by good people — big is always bad in our world.

So it’s up to us to protect ourselves as best we can with full cynicism about those who provide what we cannot do for ourselves. When it comes to computer stuff, we are virtually all highly dependent. It shouldn’t be this time consuming, but it is. Distrust of everyone is wise, and eclectic solutions are probably most effective.

Our biggest problem is advertising: It’s the single biggest threat vector of all. That is, since it is so ubiquitous, criminals and governments are using it as the richest field of opportunity to seize control of private computing devices. Along with that is virtually every “cool” factor people put into their websites, in that what draws the masses is what draws the computer crackers. If what you seek is primarily entertainment, you are a victim waiting for a thug. I’m sorry, but the entertainment factor of the Net makes you a fool. It’s one thing to toss in some gratuitous decoration; that’s just human nature. It’s another thing to compete for attention through entertainment. To be blunt: Entertainment as a human desire is the root of all Internet evils.

For us here at Kiln of the Soul, we cannot afford to be seduced by the Lust of the Eyes. I’d love to share that message in the wider world, but you can guess how strong the resistance is. So I keep track of work-arounds with constant checking for the latest technology and threats for my computer ministry clients, particularly because the majority of them, even as ostensible Christians, do not embrace much of what I teach. For my parishioners and regular readers, I won’t be so easy on you.

Use the minimum browser possible for the task. Learn how to use more than one browser and restrict the cross contamination between them. Cripple the advertising as much as possible. Don’t tolerate the abuse. It’s not just a matter of inconvenience, but this is a genuine threat to sanity and peace with God. These people and their power are threatened by virtue, and nothing is worse for them than our brand of Christian Mysticism. Conventional Western morals are not good enough for us. Screw them and their implied social contract. Block all that crap as much as possible.

I could, just barely, run this blog from a plain text browser. It works okay for an emergency, but most of the time what I do here warrants opening up to most of the graphical features. I’ve resisted the pressure from WordPress to use their latest admin interface in the Dashboard and in the “enhanced posting experience” — which is pure bullshit because it restricts and removes certain controls and options the old one offered the blogger. Even WordPress is loaded with damned liars trying to sucker you into things that make it convenient for their controls and profits. So for now I use a standard graphical browser with all the regular features and some efforts to cripple advertising.

That happens right now to be Opera’s Beta browser for Linux — on Windows that’s the new standard Opera browser. This runs the same engine as Google Chrome (WebKit), but with a smarter interface. On some sites, the tools like Adblock and Ghostery break some functionality. You get less of that with Opera. For general surfing and viewing sites where the graphics is sort of the whole point of the presentation, I use Debian’s spin on Firefox, called Iceweasel. If you don’t know about it, it’s a long story. Basically it’s Firefox’s ESR branch with none of the Mozilla branding, possible because Firefox is Open Source. For Windows, I can recommend Pale Moon or Waterfox if you don’t like the ESR branch.

Even better is the Seamonkey Project in terms of protecting you and giving you control. However, it is more demanding of the user, as well. It has a lot of other goodies built in, like an email client, an HTML page builder, etc. The mail client is pretty much the same as Thunderbird. I’ve used it and recommend it for most people, but I prefer the old Opera browser with the built-in email client. For Windows, that’s offered separately as Opera Mail, not yet available on Linux.

Clean your browser cache, often and as completely as you can stand. I used to recommend CCleaner, but they’ve added very annoying features that are very difficult to turn off these days. Nifty powerful tools in there, but it’s very annoying to use. So now I typically recommend BleachBit for most folks because they don’t need all that extra stuff in the first place. A great many threats to your system are lurking in the browser cache, and BleachBit wipes that stuff away before it can hurt you. Run it at least once daily; pay attention to the configuration options.

But the vast majority of the time I use Lynx. You can chase older blog posts here about Lynx and find out how to get one of several versions that work on Windows. However, to be honest, the best way to use Lynx on Windows is to run Cygwin. That means learning how to install and use a whole new set of tools, I know. It’s essentially Linux stuff that runs on Windows in a semi-Linux environment. The reason for using Lynx is that it’s all about the content. Just tell me what you’ve got the say. Yes, it’s tough to navigate some sites in Lynx, but you get used to it after awhile. A few sites reject Lynx connections, so I also have Elinks on my system. It’s never been bounced, and it does the job differently than Lynx. You can learn more through search engines, but the point is avoiding all graphical display elements. This also avoids the majority of threats and annoyances.

A fair compromise that allows you to see still images is either Links2 or Dillo. I’ve covered them in the past few months on this blog (use the search function) and Windows versions are available (Dillo becomes D-Plus), if a bit cranky at times.

The point is, brothers and sisters, stop acting like Westernized secular-minded fools. The Internet is a tool we use rather like Paul used the Roman transportation infrastructure. We can’t change it and it’s here for now, so let’s take advantage of it for Christ’s glory. But by no means should you be a sucker for the enticing entertainment factors in our damned society.

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Fundamental Lies

Posted on December 12, 2014 by ehurst

Jesus is the personification of the Law. The curse of the Law was that it was so very difficult to wade through the Law to see the character of God. In Christ, that character takes on a human form. It doesn’t get any clearer than that. Review for a moment what I taught in Confusing the Two. The coming of Christ did not make eternal redemption any different than before His birth; it was always the sole initiative of God and nothing done here can affect it. Rather, Christ came to bring us the power of the Law without the obscurity. So we have to set aside this huge lie of Western Christianity.

The popular phrase “Jesus saves” does not mean what most people think it means. People did not suddenly start going to Heaven after the Resurrection. Jesus talked about people going to Heaven before He died, and talked about Hell, too. Those two elements of Bible teaching had been around for several centuries at least. It might not have been the common understanding of most folks in the Ancient Near East, but it was old truth when Jesus came along because His people had been aware of both as “places” people went long before His birth.

Let’s say it again: Jesus came to perfect what the Law was meant to do. The Law could never grant you eternal life, but it could grant you as much redemption in this realm as could ever be possible. It was always about the glory of God. The Law could give you the rich opportunity to claim the full blessings of the character of God within His Creation by walking in harmony with that Creation. Jesus came to earth under the Law and fulfilled its purpose. His death on the Cross did away with the ritual portion of the Covenant, and it ended the monopoly of Israel on God’s revelation. Christ came to spread that truth to all mankind. His work did not alter divine election to eternity.

So when we dig into the New Testament, we need to avoid confusion about the meaning of their use of the term “Law”. In the context of their day, there was the Law of Moses and there was the Traditions of the Elders (which eventually became the Talmud). Jesus said the latter as bullshit. It was contrary to the Law of Moses because it blinded people to the character of God. Judaism worships a false god, a perverted image of Jehovah. In some contexts, what the New Testament writers fuss about is this false, perverted image of God and the Talmudic teachings as “the law.” It was the valid law of the nation in a certain sense, in much the same sense that the High Priest was the legitimate civil ruler of the Jewish people. That is, those things were true in the sense of fait accompli — they were the facts of their human condition. They were not legitimate in the sense of God’s revelation.

Walking in the teachings of Christ did not change the awful situation of the Hebrew people under a deeply corrupted and perverted religious rule that itself was largely responsible for being under the oppressive boot heel of Rome. Walking in the teachings of Christ ameliorated the situation in the sense that you would have understood what was possible and what was not. You would understand what God really wanted from You to bring Him glory, and you would not have chased your tail in pursuit of things He was not going to do. You would understand quite well what battles to fight and which to avoid, and which you expected to lose even if you were supposed to fight. Your faith — your commitment to Him — would tell you the difference. Faith resides in the heart, not in the head. Your heart is what can be attuned to reality, the character of God. Your head can only organize and implement obedience to the heart or it can get in the way.

Your heart is what understands Christ and is what grasps the nature of the Law.

If I had a magic wand to awaken the hearts of men and women, I would have tried to wear it out by now. That thing would be in my hands day and night, twitching in my sleep. However much and however strong is my natural empathy, it’s enough to make me weep every day for how I watch people fighting God’s Law. The one thing most painful is watching twisted human relations.

Your sexual identity is not merely about your marriage or romances. It is fundamental to every encounter with all humans on this earth. It is fundamental to every waking moment of your harmonizing with nature. Your power to live on this earth in God’s glory starts with your sexual identity, because without some reflexive awareness of that in every move you make, you will make the wrong move.

Our biggest problem is that Western Civilization has learned to hijack the very language itself. That’s why we struggle when reading about what the Law/law can and cannot do in the New Testament. Western Christianity has hijacked the language, and those who established the entire frame of reference for Western Christianity learned from the Judaizers who hijacked organized Christianity. The Judaizers fanned out across the Mediterranean Basin with the intent to hijack Christian religion for much the same reasons their predecessors hijacked all the Old Testament scriptures and perverted the very language and thoughts of Hebrew people. Somehow they came to imagine that God had appointed them to correct revelation and bury the original. Our problem is that the particular flavor of lies we face are Post-Enlightenment in the sense of wholly controlled by how the Enlightenment welded together Aristotle and Germanic mythology.

From the very beginning, God has revealed that men and women are not interchangeable. Their fundamental design down to the very wiring of the system which transmits impulses through the body is different. How the elements of our nutrition are absorbed and used in the body is different. There might be a lot of overlap in effects, but the essence is different. Our hearts resonate differently. That’s because at the very must fundamental level of what holds our reality in place, it is God’s truth that men and women are different. If Western medical and biological science can’t tell the difference, it’s because that science is blind and damned. It’s for you, follower of Christ, to embrace what God made you to be.

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Moral Power

Posted on December 11, 2014 by ehurst

Divine justice is reality. It is not a restraint in the sense that you cannot sin, but that you cannot understand what sin is, nor the consequences of sin, without understanding God’s Laws. Everything He did in Creation follows His character and the Law Covenants are simply expressions of His character.

When He worked through humans to reveal His character, there stood a set of common assumptions that were part of that revelation. God built a society and intellectual context for His revelation, and we live in a society and intellectual context that is far removed from that. Our assumptions about reality are alien to God’s revelation. We tend to think of Law as legislation, whereas Scripture presents Law as a loving personal imperative. God portrays Himself as an Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) sheikh, and our natural element as humans is ANE feudalism. ANE feudalism is how we are designed to operate, and it reflects the fundamental design of Creation, or reality itself.

The critical point of Adam in the Garden was not that he worked, but that he was God’s servant as caretaker. The powerful bond of love between God and man was fully engaged and Creation acknowledged it, depended on it. Nature didn’t need fixing but guidance. Adam was instinctively compliant with God’s character and his mere presence was an expression of God’s Presence. His faithful commitment to God’s character was his power to shape the Garden. He communed with Creation in ways we can scarcely imagine in our current world. If all the Garden did was feed Adam and Eve, that would have been enough, because it was God’s provision for their existence — His Garden for His Life in them. His Laws are a part of that gracious provision.

God has done everything necessary and useful in revealing Himself to us. We can know as much about Him as we desire, and that’s the whole point. Without that desire to be His child and to represent His interests, we have no life here. We have mere existence. It becomes the painful fight to survive wherein we shall eat our bread by the sweat of our brows. The importance of the Curse is not the legislative fact of the Fall, but how it represents alienation from God’s rich provision. You can stumble around trying to intellectually discern how nature works, or you can embrace God’s character and let nature work for you.

The crazy part of this is that Adam and Eve had all of that from the start. Yet, somehow Satan convinced them that it was some kind of insult to be told what’s real and morally right in this world, when they were such finer stuff and capable of judging what was real and right from their own faculties (see Genesis 3). What Satan didn’t tell them was how such a decision to become one’s own god was tantamount to shutting down the heart and the spirit and ignoring their communion with God. The power comes from the love of God; you cannot demand that love on your own terms. This is why the Garden no longer fed them, and Adam had to eat by the sweat of his brow, and nature resisted him. You might say he lost the understanding of how to eat the thorns that had always been there, and certainly had no idea how to guide them any longer.

But a critical part of the curse is revealed in what God said to Eve. Previously, the two were united in their natural understanding of their roles as husband and wife. In their embrace of human faculties, they lost that unity because it cannot be found in the intellect. It can only come from the heart and its communion with the spirit-Spirit nexus. The sensory heart isn’t just about nature, but our human nature as well. All of our talk about the heart in matters of romance only confuses things because as Westerners we have no clue what the heart is and how it works. We use a deeply and disgustingly perverted symbolism that cripples our understanding of reality. The heart is not the seat of emotions and cathexis; the heart is a higher intelligence than the mind, a sensory organ that connects directly to the living Spirit of God.

Cathexis is not love, but unguided affection. It is raw emotion and hormones. It is the power to pervert your life and destroy you, making you an enemy of nature. All that business of pagan magic has been pursuit of what Adam and Eve lost in the Garden. It’s the wrong path, attempting to sidestep the Flaming Sword. There is only one way back into the Garden and that is the revelation of God’s character that Adam and Eve cast aside. Included in the rich and sweet life of Eden was the immense and powerful love that bound Adam and Eve together, and gave them mastery of their world.

With my books and previous posts here, we have plenty of chatter about the falsity of feminism and social mythology arising from the dreary Germanic Tribal folklore. The entire range of Western Civilization is deeply infected with a foul heathen deception. What we have not explored much so far is the vast moral power of God’s Laws in understanding sexual identity. Yeah; there’s more coming on this.

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Scripture, Serenity and Sexual ID

Posted on December 10, 2014 by ehurst

Some of my readers still suffer from the effects of legalistic literalism in their education. Writing here on this blog, I often use certain terms loosely because of the necessities of parabolic language. I could nail down with precision that my use of the term “Law” (capital L) typically means the Covenant of Moses, and that adding an “s” (Laws) expands it to all the known Law Covenants. This is tough enough against a whole bunch of confusing ideas fed into our New Testament reading from mainstream Western Christianity.

The Law of Moses (see, you understand that variation) is one thing; the Talmud is another thing. In fact, the Talmud is many things, because Judaism officially discourages Gentiles from reading the Talmud. However, they are embarrassed by that prohibition and offer for public consumption a highly redacted version. Then again, within Judaism are multiple factions that include and exclude varying portions. I have neither the calling nor interest to examine all the details, but I am aware that much of Orthodox Judaism actually does include the Kabbalah (multiple spellings possible) literature as part of their Talmud. For someone trying to dig through Judaism and back into the Ancient Hebrew intellectual viewpoint, that’s a lot of crap to wade through, in part because almost everyone you meet will believe the Jewish claims that their current religion is precisely what Moses meant to teach. Secular scholarship (and some religious scholarship) disproves this easily, but it’s a scholarship highly obscured by politics.

This blog is not about picking on Jews or Judaism, but I also won’t bow the knee to their claims. I would rather they continue ignoring this blog and what I teach. If/when that changes, I’ll do what I can to remain open and honest, but make no mistake: Political Judaism could shut me down in a day, easily, and just about lock me out of the Internet through background influences. I teach that we aren’t here to challenge the system, but use it for Christ’s advantage.

The same broad political influences seek to blind us to anything outside the officially approved orthodoxies on just about every topic. For those of you who can tolerate my teaching here, you should understand that a major and critical component of our understanding God’s Laws (AKA: moral fabric, divine justice, God’s character, ultimate reality, quantum this-n-that, etc.) is sexual and gender identity.

We challenge Western mythology about that. We do not accept the stereotypes that arise from Western cultural foundations — largely a mixture of Classical Greco-Roman thought and Germanic tribal mythology. We know that the Enlightenment voices generally claimed a return to more-or-less pure reason and Aristotelian logic, but it was distinctly jaundiced by the world view of the folks who gave us Beowulf. Thus, we have a full range of background assumptions about reality that close off a great deal of investigation. In particular, it marginalizes and ridicules a far larger legacy of culture and intellectual history from the Ancient Near East (ANE), not to mention other civilizations around the world in human memory. The biblical view of gender and human sexuality is quite different from what dominates Western Civilization.

It is almost impossible to discuss much of anything in God’s moral justice without some reference to your gender. It is the fundamental context within which you must determine His will for you. Scripture flatly states — repeatedly — that God made us different and that you absolutely cannot come to grips with reality until you first settle any confusion on that issue. Everything we understand about our world today from God’s revelation requires a solid grasp on what He first and foremost says about sexual identity. Fix that problem and a vast majority of world ills would go away.

To come back to the Bible with Post-modern Western mythology and question revelation about its assertions on the topic is easily the single most egregious stupidity we face today. But pretending we can fix other people’s sin on this issue is almost equally stupid. It’s our calling to wait until that teachable moment when the Spirit power arises to open hearts and minds to the truth. Until then, we cynically expect some of the most devilish nonsense from those around us.

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Hectic Cathexis

Posted on December 9, 2014 by ehurst

Cathexis is a big fat liar.

In the study of human behavior, cathexis refers to the tendency to fall in love in the worst sense. Most of us wander through life with an appetite for certain things, a sense of longing for things we don’t have. It’s an ally of temptation. Were it not for that, we would still be living in Eden. Instead, we have left the Garden of God and written a long history of humans building, destroying and killing each other. In recent times, we see an explosion of new ways to tempt that sense of longing.

Cathexis is the fundamental element in teenage romances with all the dramatic tragedy that makes up the lore of popular music. It is the very heart of self-deception, striving and giving your resources for something that cannot be. It’s gotten to the point we actually idolize the worst parts of it as normal. Your whole sense of evaluation, the very radar of your daily attention to life, is wired for seizing on things that simply do not matter. Consider the ultimate irony of a new country music act, Maddie and Tae. Their first big hit, “Girl in a Country Song,” bemoans how country girls have to be pin-up models to get much attention from country boys. It’s not that these girls have no talent, but you and I would have never heard of them unless they were able to come across as hot babes in the first place. Without those pretty faces, there would be no recording contracts. It’s all about the money and manipulating the folks into buying. It takes cathexis to sell a song bemoaning cathexis.

Do you suppose I could pull the same stunt? Would I sell more books if I played that angle? If I grew my hair long, it would curl. All I have to do is wear a hat to hide the bald spots, and let my beard cover more of my face with a more fashionable thickness. Maybe hit the gym a little harder and take more pictures with my shirt off, in dramatic poses doing manly stuff. Or maybe record videos and take advantage of some measure of acting skills and charisma, tweak the wording of my lessons to make them more dramatic. You’ll have to speculate whether I could pull it off, but I will tell you I could. And how much difference would it make? More attention for me, but not much on the message.

And I would feel worse than a big vat of raw sewage.

There is nothing more precious than a clear conscience, which itself is the symptom of obeying your heart. Not the heart of American country music, a vast wasteland of mythology for what never was, nor could ever be — never mind how much I like some of that music — but the heart of David in the Psalms we are studying.

It’ll take us several years to get through them all. Every step of the way, the core of their meaning hinges on knowing something about David the man. If there was ever a man torn between cathexis and his own spiritual nature, David is type. We are told he wasn’t all that large physically, but nobody matched his courage, born of a passion to follow God’s moral character. Sure, there was talent and personal charisma, but we’d never have heard of him without that passion for divine justice. That was his covering, the thing that kept him on the throne. He had plenty of troubles, each easily traced to some human flaw in his own character, but then we read his psalms.

You can have a silly cathexis for the Scriptures, as evidenced by the wacko behavior and writing of a huge number of evangelicals. A significant portion would tell you, for example, it’s somehow immoral to sip coffee next to your Bible, and God forbid you should splash a few drops on those precious pages! Or that you fail God somehow if you don’t memorize vast sections in their favorite English translation. The fetishism is embarrassing.

They misinterpret David’s words when he says he loves the Law. They say he’s talking about the Bible, but in their minds they pervert that to mean a cathexis for a physical object along with a jingoistic passion for the English rendering. They may not be disciples of Ruckman, but way too many of them run very close to thinking it’s all about the words, as if the words were a magic spell against primitive evil. No, David is saying that he treasures his moral awareness, that clarity of vision for God’s character woven into reality. Despite his frequent failure to obey it, David’s own instincts had been reshaped by reading the Books of Moses. He absorbed the moral impact of that Covenant into his very character.

So when David said he listened to his heart, it wasn’t just poetry, but pretty near literal. While the Hebrew people might not have said so in words, they knew instinctively that the heart was a sensory organ with a form of awareness far above that of the mind. The Hebrew language and the whole culture was given to stripping away the distractions of this world and contemplating in silence enough to still the mind so that it would obey the heart. After centuries of living in houses, the Hebrew people still idolized the nomadic shepherd’s life of pitching small tents in the rocky wilderness. We owe that to the fact David probably spent more time in a tent than in any solid structure for much of his life as a shepherd in his own family’s existence in the region of Bethlehem.

I tend to think a study of Psalms should take years, given how alien it is to our modern culture.

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Virtual Hang Out: Seen

Posted on December 8, 2014 by ehurst

Edit: The Seen.is account was closed because it was a pointless waste of time. However, the email address (broken at unseen dot is) remains active, ostensibly as a “lifetime member.”

Original post below:
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Parish members, I have an administrative message for you.

Okay, so Facebook became untenable for me in this ministry. It was too much of the wrong stuff and virtually none of the good stuff. Read about the technology changes on various tech news sites and you’ll see where FB is increasingly just a tool for surveillance. New rules make it more likely FB will shove garbage at you without any restraint and the door is wide open to any government agency. It was already way too time consuming on useless noise, so that was enough to close the account.

But I still want to open the door for some kind of chatter and friendship contact. This blog is too highly structured and maybe a bit too public. Email is too private sometimes, though still quite useful. I suppose I could run a mailing list but that is simply not suitable for fellowship as it once was. And I don’t see enough traffic to justify a dedicated forum site. However, I still want a chance for random folks to find me and chatter about things that might interest the rest of the parish.

So I learned about something similar in concept to FB but far more secure and private: Seen. It’s hosted in Iceland, which requires a whole lot more work for surveillance to take place. With less than 30K members, it’s still pretty small and quiet. You can find my profile here. If you feel the need to chat with me on an occasional basis, could I recommend you sign up there? It’s really got a low entry barrier and you don’t have to give up much more than what is absolutely necessary for it to work at all.

I’m doing my best to lower the barriers for accessibility to myself and each other.

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