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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Serenity in Tribulation

Posted on December 8, 2014 by ehurst

It’s not your concern.

When you manage to dismiss from your mind a broad range of things you cannot and should not try to change, it’s much easier to keep a solid grip on that serenity necessary for God’s glory. You still have to interact with people, even the worst of government thugs, but you no longer pretend it’s your job to change them or their bad behavior. So you can relax and make the most of the interaction by showing them mercy and grace. (Maybe this is a good time to review my three pillars in my book.)

I mentioned in the past how the US federal marshals destroyed my positive attitude about the enforcement of drug laws. At the time of the incident, I had just finished serving in the US Army Military Police and as DARE Program Manager (anti-drug education program) where I was stationed. I would have been the last person to hide their fugitive, and the first to have cuffed him and called the police to come get him. I was a gung-ho drug warrior guy. That is, until they destroyed my return to the ministry.

I forgave them. While they didn’t set out to destroy me, they were utterly careless, even willfully stupid, in lying about me. Telling folks in that little town that they already knew I was a patriot underground cult leader showed they had no idea who I was. It was a desperate ploy to get folks to talk about me because they knew nothing about me. They already knew it would ruin things for me, but were under the gun to find Mr. Thompson. My life didn’t mean shit to them. Just a single day’s search of federal databases (the federal government had already stolen the software for such a search) would have yielded my military records at the least. And some years later they continued falsely insisting officially that I was a cult leader. Still, I let go of the bitterness and resentment. There was nothing to gain by seeking to correct them as individuals, the institution and it’s policies, or the government as a whole. The wrath of God was already in motion and it was too late for any of that. What’s left is to shepherd them the same as anyone else.

Of course, that shepherding is limited to how much anyone in the context allows, but the mission remains and is the focus of my attention. I make jokes about being a cult leader and snicker to myself about the egregious stupidity of their “police work” but it serves no purpose to taunt them or in any way convey my opinion of them. I try to grant to them whatever they seek the same as I would anyone else, tempered only by what I am able to offer.

It takes some patience when working with idiots. The sense of entitlement so common in our culture has no place in serving Christ. Cynicism and simply not expecting much from them is appropriate, but there’s nothing to gain by distracting them from their scripts. Their programming makes no allowance for raising their level of consciousness. When God wants their attention, you’ll see it with your heart, and you’ll know how to take advantage of it. Always be ready for that, but don’t be surprised if you never see it when dealing with government officials.

On the other hand, never buy into the notion that they are anything but idiots for so long as their attention is on their government duties. That is the nature of Western government. It forcefully excludes the mere probability of anything not already on their menu of considerations. They will never take our faith seriously. It takes monumental arm-twisting and threats just to get them to make allowances for more conventional religions. If those religions don’t meet certain minimum requirements, they don’t even get that much. We cannot and will not ever meet those requirements, because it means denying the very nature of faith itself.

Never forget that this world as we know it is damned. It’s not for us to put the brakes on anyone or anything hurtling toward the abyss. We can only help to rescue those who cry out for deliverance. Not because they kneel to us, but that they recognize us as representatives of that Higher Power. Be aware that in the mixture of those you touch will always be the stupid puppy-dog types who will gobble up any kindness and never change one iota. They’ll hang around absorbing resources, never adding anything at all and often destroying mindlessly what they touch. You’ll have to decide when and how to deal with each individual case, but they will always be there.

Precious and few are those who genuinely respond.

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Just Thinking — Or Not

Posted on December 7, 2014 by ehurst

This is your chance to get to know me a little better. I share what follows as a consequence of my divine calling, but this is not central to my message. While there are prophetic elements, I’ll note carefully when so that you don’t mistake this whole thing as a prophecy. It’s just my opinion.

We are on the threshold of martial law here in the US. This is by design. Remember what I said in the past about our ruling elite as ordinary humans with way too much power and wealth for their own good. There are precious few genius psychopaths; plenty of geniuses and plenty of psychopaths, but most of that is on a sliding scale. The Western image of Antichrist is just a myth. Let us never forget that reality itself adheres to God’s character, so Creation won’t permit a “Rosemary’s Baby” scenario. That crap isn’t in Scripture, but we are in for a rough ride.

Keeping in mind that “the powers that be” (TPTB) aren’t always wholly united in their planning and goals, we still have to deal with the common assumptions held by the ruling elite. Their greatest fear is that we will discover we don’t have any use for them, and that it really is pretty easy to knock them out of power. Unfortunately, the very nature of our Western mythology determines that we’ll always have bad government, even when it’s not apparent. Good people in general instinctively avoid governing in our civilization. So what we have is a broad expectation of how government folks operate because of the nature of the system and how power itself concentrates in few hands.

The Western secular state will always demand what cannot be. The entire basis of Western civilization is a lie, so government naturally fails at the one thing it most desperately wants. So long as government officials take themselves seriously, there is no way to avoid a series of crises as power-seeking reaches a crescendo only to completely fail. Virtually the entire range of political theory is bullshit, but people are so totally convinced it works that way. It won’t matter what kind of people rule and which basic theory they choose from the buffet; it’s all lies.

So when I say that the current chaos is by design, I mean that it’s all a cynical ploy. We have thousands of agents infiltrating every resistance organization, seeking to push them far enough off track to create a certain kind of social disruption. Their mission is to prevent folks actually doing what might work — that is, what the elite fear might actually work — and steer the activities into paths guaranteed to justify a crackdown. Most of the hysteria about police brutality and unaccountable violence is actually promoted by the elite. The fear and anger are intentional. That there are a great many willing idiots playing along is the beauty of the tactic.

Meanwhile, there remains a continuing effort to draw the armed patriot types into a violent confrontation. While there are plenty of gun owners willing to do that, you can bet the vast majority of those sounding off in various virtual forums are just government provocateurs. It’s much the same as realizing that virtually every KKK outfit is run by some agent of the government or ADL or what have you. In the wild cacophony of the Internet, you can still find evidence to prove this notion. The official documentation has been leaked too often, and wiser heads have caught them in the act and filmed it. Most of the wackos can be traced if you took the time, and they are either government infiltrators or some brand of useful idiot. It’s not that no one really believes that crap; it’s that the people truly capable of harming government operations aren’t that stupid. What TPTB fear from that direction is loaded with inaccuracy.

I suspect those with delusions of saving the United States and the Constitution are long gone, at least from among the armed militias. Instead, we have a body of folks who see their best bet as breaking from the Union. They aren’t quite willing to engage local police forces or assassinate local politicians just yet. They are saving it for slaughtering enough feds to make secession actually plausible. The survivors of past conflicts with the federal government are too smart to be drawn into the conflict at this stage. Somehow it seems too many of those among the elite believe their own propaganda about the underground patriots being drooling southern whites. If anything, you’ll see the militias show up once martial law is set in place, and it won’t likely be what TPTB expect. I’m willing to bet the resistance will be pretty effective and successful. You haven’t yet seen the kind of firepower these folks can bring out, never mind how smart their tactics can be.

As previously noted: This is not our fight. Let me point out that my prophetic statement is limited to two issues — (1) this oppression is God’s wrath on our national sins and (2) direct resistance will be fighting God’s hand. Don’t get caught up in the wild notion that you can resist this. Instead, invest your prayer efforts in understanding what a rich opportunity it is for Our Father’s glory. I can’t overstate that. You will be inundated with chances to demonstrate moral clarity like never before, with the certainty that there will be a very high ratio of folks who will see it. Whether they understand it is not the point; the point is that you obey your sensory heart and take every disaster as an opportunity.

You can’t stop the disasters; don’t panic. What you hold in this life is already forfeited on the Cross. Just play your part and earn your ticket Home, as it were. Stay detached. Enjoy this holiday season while you can, but don’t get hung up on what you think you have on a human level. Keep your eye on the Spirit Realm.

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Psalm 27

Posted on December 6, 2014 by ehurst

Scholars suggest that this is two psalms concatenated together because it seems the tone changes about halfway through. However, Hebrew literature is known for surprising and dramatic turns.

David begins by joyfully asserting that Jehovah is his light and deliverance. He was not at all a conventional thinker. We know of no other place in the Old Testament where God is called Light in this fashion; some English translations struggle to give it a different meaning. David gave his whole reverence to God. With the moral clarity that such a commitment brought to him, it’s no surprise he had little fear and no respect left for his enemies, typically defined as those who cared little for such high moral reverence. If God intended to deliver David over to anyone, it mattered not whether they were few or many, there was nothing David could do about it. He intended to fight as if God had already granted him victory.

Given what we know of David’s religious life, we can understand the claim that his main interest was living in God’s Presence. It’s another way of saying that all he cared about was God’s glory. As previously noted, there was no Temple, so David refers here to the image of being a member of God’s household and hanging out in His courts. It’s a good place for your heart to stand when things get rough. No one can get to you there.

So what would sort of noises would one make in praise to God? First, we acknowledge that God is our only hope. Thus, David suddenly cries out to God, as if in desperation. He’s providing a model of how one approaches the Lord. When we listen to our hearts, we cannot avoid the desire to seek divine favor. It’s certainly within God’s authority to cut us off, but we should not expect it. Either way, there’s nowhere else to go. We might as well learn all we can about His character because life can be no better than walking in His ways. When you stick with God’s path, it’s hard for your enemies to find a place for an ambush. What a dreary life it would be without God’s revelation!

So David ends by asserting once again that nothing works like relying on God. This is all the power you need to face life in this world.

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American Apocalypse

Posted on December 5, 2014 by ehurst

In case you haven’t noticed, the Police State is here. I suppose a significant number of us living here in the US have seen it coming for a long time. Some part of me knew it way back in high school, I now see in retrospect, but it took a direct attack from the state to wake me. The federal marshals had me kicked out of a church where I was serving as Music Director, shortly before the turn of the millennium. Up until that point, I was consciously active in supporting the US government, generally. They threw me under the bus.

But I’m by no means active in now opposing that government. I was at first, but got over it rather quickly. That’s because I knew in my spirit that God’s hand was at work. What I saw more clearly than anything was that America was doomed. It was past the point of repentance, and the wrath of God was irrevocably set loose on this nation. There was no turning back then, even less so now. That was more than a decade ago, and more recently I warned openly that this was God’s wrath and that political resistance was nothing more than supporting the system God intended to destroy. So political activism in opposition to government policy is, in that sense, a sin against God. We have asked for this, and God has granted it.

That includes all the heart-wrenching stories of innocent folks murdered by government thugs. Frankly, not all the names you see in the news qualify as innocent, even in a fairly generous sense of ordinary American justice. However, even the guilty are supposed to get a better deal than what some have gotten.

What we see are the death throes of a nation that has served as the pinnacle of Western Civilization, and as the climax of the evil it represents. I maintain the position that America was evil in her birth, arising in rejection of God’s ancient truth.

As I’ve noted in the past, it may not touch you very much. All the more so if God has use for you through, and on the other side of, this mess. If you repent and renounce Western Civilization, you have a good chance of discerning the moral justice at work so as to avoid the worst of it.

And none of this is news to my regular readers.

However, I wanted to note my perception that this Internet thing has been strongly affected by all this, and much worse is coming. It’s not merely the Snowden revelations about government spying and hoovering up all our personal data, but a rash of oppressive controls most of us would not have imagined. This is something I see in my heart, confirmed with daily reports in the tech news that I read, so I can’t predict specifics. Rather, I warn you that the flavor of things will shift.

You are perhaps aware that most of the Internet is supported by advertising. There’s a lot of “free” stuff that comes at the cost of your eyeballs and attention, not to mention a certain amount of your computer power to process the crap for your browser. With that comes a higher price in security threats, because there is no discernible difference between criminal attacks and government snooping. And advertisers are now alert to ways they can get in on the same game. You can get all the free content for the price of selling your soul, as it were. This is going to turn so ugly we just cannot picture it.

Some of you will simply pay the price and keep on trucking — for awhile, at least. It really depends on your level of tolerance. Mine is not the sensitivity of the Internet activist, but the servant of God who wants to get the message out. My primary need is writing, and my hands don’t tolerate quill and paper too well any more. So I’ll always need that electronic keyboard. Using that same device to get the message to others makes it better than a typewriter. That’s the primary reason I even keep access to the Net. But some of the current “free” stuff is getting too expensive for me. At some point, the message is overwhelmed and no one hears it any more. I’m reaching that point with Facebook, for instance. I suppose by the first of the year I’ll be out of there.

I’m hoping that this blog isn’t so badly affected too soon. I don’t hear from more than 1-2% of you, but that’s better than nothing. Some of what I’ve already heard includes grousing about some of the adverts that show up at the bottom of my posts, and there’s not a thing I can do about them. I’m using a free account here and WordPress doesn’t value my content enough for its own sake to treat my readers any better. At any rate, I’m hoping we get some warning if things start to go crazy here.

I suppose you would guess that all of this signals other kinds of changes in our world. There will always be unintended consequences of just about every policy change. Some of the Internet stuff is only threatened, with no real intent to carry through. Other things are a more serious, if more subtle, threat and will await the inevitable hackers’ responses. The virtual freedom fighters have the advantage right now, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy for us to use.

All I can say right now is pray and remain sensitive to your hearts. Stay nimble and don’t over-commit to anything that is so easily taken from us. God will preserve what His message requires, but it demands we be ready for just about anything if we hope to stay involved in divine business.

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Confusing the Two

Posted on December 5, 2014 by ehurst

The underlying mythology of our age is rabid materialism married to a grouchy Norse god. This god’s moods range between cold indifference and implacable rage, smiling only when he has played some heartless cruel trick on someone. We think of justice as blind and indifferent to human capability, and runs to excessive cruelty and inhuman demands. We talk about a loving God of the Bible, but in the back of minds reigns this ugly heathen image that belies our nice talk.

It’s that same old nasty mental habit, in which our minds are pickled from birth. It matters not a whit that we give lip service to the truth, when every thing we do, and everything we build, serves the lie from Hell. The very reflexes of our mind won’t allow us to even think as if it’s true that there are Two Realms and that they are distinct.

What gets people into Hell? Human birth. By default, we are all born for damnation. Nothing at all can we do to change that. It is the initiative of God that changes things. No human words or thoughts can explain how it works, but God says it starts with Him or it doesn’t happen. Jesus Himself said there were some folks who were going to Hell and some who were not. Universalism is a lie.

By the same token, it is not possible for anything you think, do or say to remove your spiritual awakening. Since it does not come from this earth, nothing on this earth can affect it. You didn’t save you, so you cannot lose you. It’s not as if God ignores rebellion; the consequences are explained, chief among them being an early death. On the other hand, we are told to suspect that folks who stray too far from moral goodness probably are spiritually dead in the first place.

So much for the truth of the Eternal Realm. Now for the Fallen Realm.

Some sins are worse than others, particularly in terms of consequences. That is, the more completely you surrender yourself to the Enemy of souls, the more it’s going to hurt you and a lot of other folks. However, it is not an issue of some sins are worse, but that some sins are worse for you, while others are worse for me. God’s justice is not blind. We don’t live in the same context, so ranking sins by human logic will fail. Instead, we live with a revelation of broad generalities, a flexible standard that takes into account all kinds of things we don’t even understand. That’s how God’s moral divine justice works.

The issue really stands on the glory of God. How your actions affect your mission and calling to bring Him glory is the primary measure, and God says it’s He alone who gets to make that calculation. Nor are the primary consequences what you might imagine, but it has more to do with how much of our share of shalom is reduced. Again, it is contextual; you and I are different folks, with different callings, and different standards. We each have our own part to play in His glory, and the primary method is working toward His definition of social moral stability.

So there are scars on my soul today from things that would not have so much as gained your notice. And you’ve done some things that I would never have done. Yet we both stand before His Laws as individuals. My sexual restraint means little if I have fantasies of raping little kids (Matthew 5:27-28). That’s because, while having mere fantasies might not hurt any kids, it sure would leave some nasty holes in my moral strength, because the Law will notice. The Law reads your mind and motives (Hebrews 4:12-13). The Law is the living character of our God. It also knows if something in my background created a moral weakness, and it knows that if I confess before God that I am by nature deeply perverted, but hoping desperately that I don’t hurt anyone, that also has an effect on the end results before divine justice.

On the other side of the imaginary room here is someone who probably never dreams of such hideous things, living a silly and shallow life of pretense. Not doing much bad to anyone, really, but deeply self-absorbed. I can find peace before the Laws of God, but this other person has no awareness of God’s moral justice. Instead, this person thinks they understand traditional evangelical theology and obeys all the good church rules of behavior. All things are measured in that mind by human standards of religiosity. That person stands condemned before God’s Laws; they cannot share my shalom.

If you have ever engaged in sex that was not morally optimal, you have lost something that cannot ever be returned. You will forever miss out on a certain measure of shalom. Then again, having repented and turned to walk in God’s moral truth with all your heart, maybe you won’t miss it much. God’s Laws measure from the heart, not from some imaginary objective standard of conduct. The Law forgives; there is mercy written into the Laws of God. There is no point system. We might like to pretend that we can grasp the notion of intent, but we hardly know our own hearts, so we cannot judge another. Standard Western Christian rules are built on a false mythology, a moral blindness that cannot comprehend God’s Word. Sometimes things work out okay under that bogus system, but only by accident. Chances are you’ll never know either way in this life if you stay under that system.

Don’t confuse the Two Realms. Your spiritual birth is eternal — period. Your moral conduct will reap very real blessings in this life. The two theoretically mesh through moral awareness in the sensory heart. However, nothing about that is simple enough for the mind to grasp. We have to pretend some folks can gain the full advantages of the Laws of God and never see Heaven. We have to pretend that some folks will waste every moral opportunity granted them here and still see Heaven. There is a correlation between spiritual awakening and a growing moral awareness, but that’s about as much as you can say for sure.

Our Father is a doting ANE feudal sheikh, given to quick humor. He has a deep and abiding interest in each of us as individual people, knowing us better than we could possibly know ourselves. He lets us choose whether we will enjoy the blessings of His courts or the lies of living in Satan’s prison.

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Growing Pains

Posted on December 4, 2014 by ehurst

Over the pasts few weeks I’ve hit hard on fundamentals. It’s one thing to tell you how humanity has gotten some wrong ideas, but it’s another thing altogether to chase out how those ideas bring us into a wholly different reality. It’s not enough to register in your awareness that your spirit has awakened and crossed over into Eternity. You have to bring that change to life in your bodies here on earth. As Paul noted, we are awakened for a reason (Ephesians 2:10). It’s our destiny in Christ to live as God intended as a message to the world.

Having served in more than one major evangelical denomination as ordained clergy or in similar capacities, and with all the training and education to go with it, I cannot help but see the huge differences. It seems to me I was deceived, and sometimes I know for a fact some fellow in charge knew he was not telling me the truth. It was always because of politics, some imaginary necessity of keeping some system in place because they found the alternatives unthinkable. Despite finding in my soul the scars of abuse from all of this human political maneuvering to distort the gospel message, there is no room for animosity. They have their rewards, and their punishments are coming. I don’t have time to stand around and watch how it turns out, though I’m sure I’ll hear about it later.

It should be easy to see in my writing how I distance myself from the fundamental flaws in their thinking, even while I may well continue using certain applications. This is not your story, except perhaps by accident, but my story of seeking the truth. However, I’ve tried to offer several books that I hope point out what can be common ground, issues I believe are not unique to me. Nobody here is pretending that I am some latter day apostle, founding a whole new religion. I hope simply that we can build some level of teaching and awareness that sets people free around the world. I’m not that interested in someone else’s institutions.

Related to this is the natural implication that folks would stop doing things the mainstream way, perhaps like those I left behind, and do things differently. A critical element in that is doing church differently. Not just individuals here and there casting off from their socio-religious moorings, but establishing a new point of anchorage in this world. We have to find something that holds us together and makes possible concerted action in this faith. Somehow we have to find common ground. This is flatly commanded by Jesus in quite literal terms. We don’t choose to be alienated from the mainstream, but they would not tolerate us long if they knew what we believed. Let them decided the boundaries of cooperation for themselves, but be prepared for those boundaries to rise up and become substantial as you grow in this ancient faith.

This is not some imaginary unspoiled return to every aspect of the ancient ways of the earliest churches. Too much of their context has departed this world. But the teaching here strives to find, by whatever language possible, ways of indicating the character of God in that setting and bringing it to life here and now. We have to seek His face in building what should have been all along, not doubting that much of what we have had didn’t come close. Not because they rejected the truth, but simply didn’t see it. Nor do we pretend to be so much smarter, but I know for myself I cannot keep walking in their narratives. My connection through my heart to the Spirit-spirit communion demands something truly different. Thus, this blog and its teachings.

But it’s not enough to simply set out for your consideration a different set of thoughts. Too much of what Christ demands cannot happen via virtual connections. It’s a start; over the past six years on this blog I’ve developed a growing clarity of vision that seems to have drawn some small audience. There are nearly 500 subscribers, and at least a couple dozen must see something that calls their hearts. We cannot rebuild His church on rejection of someone else. We cannot rebuild His church on their rejection of us. We cannot rebuild His church on things we can discuss and declare that we believe. There has to be genuine redemption.

This is not a silly call for artificially puffing up some long suppressed trauma so that we can all lock together in our collective self-pity. This is not some regimented plan of conditioning based on emotional conversion. However, it is unavoidable that genuine redemption will dig up old ghosts of the past, demanding that we finish unfinished business. Show me a human who does not suffer from the sins of others and I’ll show you a casket of bones. The only folks with no tension in their lives are not alive. We accept the doctrine of the Fall and assume it means there is some mess to clean up in every life.

How do you engage one heart with another across thousands of miles of space? The sensory heart requires a certain amount of proximity to have its full effect. I can tell you that genuine physical contact is also necessary, but that’s not the point. Giving you a literal hug simply ensures that our hearts are physically close enough to entangle their energy fields, which is in turn merely the physical manifestation of spiritual communion, insofar as it possible on this earth. If you aren’t longing to meet with me in meat space, you can’t claim to care about me or my story here. I’m certainly anxious to meet every one of you who read this blog. That’s the way God designed things.

But unless some wealthy sponsor steps forward and enables my travel all over the world to meet each one of you, that ain’t happening. So far as I know, there’s not a single reader subscribed to this blog who is within affordable driving distance of me. (Then again, I don’t know of any way I can access my own subscribers’ list to check under this freebie plan.) This faith should not depend on me in the first place. There ought to be people in every location who rise up as shepherds, but I am not aware of anything like that happening just yet.

Who is there to shepherd when someone stumbles across the inevitable ghost of the past? Who is there to see your life and help you across difficult places where you need another set of spiritual eyes? God is gracious and His power unlimited, but He designed us and commands us to gather in meat space communion. Tell me, dear readers: How do we do that? What is necessary for us to create a fellowship and communion that fulfills all His commands? These are the growing pains of this faith. We need more of us in every place. If we don’t plan for it, we are likely to miss divine opportunities.

This is what my prayer request is all about.

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Global Stewardship

Posted on December 3, 2014 by ehurst

A proper understanding that we do not own any part of this world teaches us to be vastly better stewards of God’s blessings. Though it is we who are deeply flawed and unable to touch Creation as God made it for us, that does not mean we cannot repent and participate in redemption. In one sense, it is a practice run here below for our future Life in Eternity.

Acknowledging God as Our Creator begins in acknowledging Him as the source of life in all things. All the world around us echoes His holiness. The world is cursed by sin, but Creation did not sin. We are the problem. It need not continue in that fashion, but we must recognize that absolutism has no place in spiritual reckoning. Absolutism is the obsession planted in our minds, a fatal flaw from the hands of our Enemy. It is suitable only for children who remain in the mental womb. Our Lord calls us to grow up and embrace the complications of His divine revelation.

We who follow Christ are greener than the Greens, whether they be political or philosophical Greens, or both. They blindly make a religion of this earth as it is under the Curse. While they correctly identify humanity as the primary problem, their solution presses toward exterminating humans (except for their elite selves). They deny that this entire universe was made for us, but somehow imagine it exists for its own sake. It is not that the whole Creation is about us; Creation extends far beyond our universe. Rather, this universe exists now solely as the place of proofing in regards to humans, as to how they relate to the Creator. This is the true Purgatory, insofar as there is one. But in accordance with His revelation, the only purpose we can attach to the continued existence of this universe is a place of proofing, a testing ground for souls He awakens to eternity.

In rejecting the Green religion, we are not forced to become polluting Capitalists, nor embrace any other religion or political philosophy of this world. We reject all current ownership philosophies. None of them represent the truth of God. All are in the service of Satan. However, if we are not mindful of our world as the property of God, and we as His stewards, we cannot hope to understand how revelation works.

No human philosophy or religion in the current world reflects that divine truth. Some partake of pieces of the truth, mostly by accident. There is no lie so insidious as the one standing closest to the truth, while denying that one missing element. Even more sinister is that some of those systems were cynically devised and are promoted by people who never actually believed any of it. But we who are Spirit-born realize we cannot hope to encompass ultimate truth in our minds. We are self-cynical enough to recognize our best and brightest ideas can only approximate a functional model.

The key is not the beauty and integrity of the model we construct, but whether it brings peace in pursuit of our calling. It’s not as if there can be no doctrine, but there is a huge difference between fairly obvious statements in Scripture and some theoretical abstractions of the mind as a consequence of reading those statements. We struggle enough to reclaim the intellectual traditions of those who wrote Scripture without injecting our alien concepts back into Scripture. It is possible to acknowledge a body of common teaching with which our models must be consistent in order to bring peace and to share that peace with others.

This we endeavor to do here at Kiln of the Soul. However, no one pretends we will all agree on every point. It is a question of whether we agree enough to cooperate, and on what level we can cooperate. I contend that a healthy starting place is recognizing the deeply buried deception of ownership of Creation. So long as that false notion remains unconscious, like all the other lies of Satan, it can bind and hinder true spiritual fellowship. Servants of Christ will use the earth as a precious gift. Yes, should that model of understanding dominate, we would probably live a completely different world. It would be a far nicer world, but let’s not waste time chasing dreams of our own making.

There is no doubt that Rome did some serious ecological damage in building those ancient roads and all the other infrastructure to support imperial power. Paul’s position was that it could still be used in good faith as the quickest way to spread the truth long denied by humanity in the first place. Use what is in your hand unless your conscience refuses. Realize that your conscience is meant to be adjusted as you live by the truth and dive deeper into the mind of Christ.

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Prayer Request: Fellowship

Posted on December 2, 2014 by ehurst

Kiln of the Soul needs a meat-space manifestation. I hope I don’t have to explain why it matters, but I suppose one prominent issue is having a real life laboratory for what I teach. Otherwise, yours truly is simply famished for physical fellowship.

It’s not as if I haven’t already tried every way I know how in my current location. We’ve advertised our house church worship off and on since moving here 5+ years ago. It ain’t happening. Nobody in this area wants what we are doing. That’s not a failure of faith, either. You’ll have to trust me on this.

Nor should you imagine I’m determined for this to take the shape of any standard congregational setting you may have seen. It could be just about any setting where other folks are exposed to my faith such that a bond of fellowship takes shape in meat space. It doesn’t matter what erstwhile activity creates the atmosphere. To be honest, if I were still eligible for military service, I’d go back and do that. It was a wonderful mission field in the past, so I can’t knock it. However, that door is closed, so it has to be some other thing that creates the occasion. I really don’t care where, who or what.

At any rate, I sense the mission calling and I’m praying Our Father will create the opportunity for me to get involved in His harvest. This is not an appeal for mere brainstorming, but a call for genuine spiritual service. Thanks for praying with me.

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Natural Justification

Posted on December 2, 2014 by ehurst

I can teach you something, but unless you use it, the teaching means nothing.

It’s not enough to put the mind at rest about the logic of some particular problem and solution. The mind is not in charge, though it wants so very much to pretend it holds the competence to understand and solve the world’s ills. If your “truth” is generated in the cerebral cortex, it’s too easy for someone else with a different life of inputs to come up with a countering logic and argument. When your truth and your answer arises from cosmic moral reality, it’s puts the onus on the mind’s rebellion, the real source of human sorrow.

The counseling profession relies largely on the advantage of mass hypnosis. That is, most counseling advises you to engage in self-training and conditioning. By building a mental habit based on embracing the prevailing social mythology, your behavior at least conforms more or less to social expectations. Any problems arising from that can then be blamed on externalities, but your internal guidance is now consistent with those around you.

I am familiar with the numerous schools of psychology, but virtually every one of them presumes the dominance of the intellect. So the whole thing is based on the interplay between body and intellect — appetites, conditioning and various elements in the mental registry — but they all bluntly or tacitly deny the existence of the heart as a sensory organ and as the seat of the will, much less as the gateway to the Spirit Realm. The various brands of Christian psychology are all just minor variations on this fundamental failure, for much the same reason that virtually all organized religion misses the point. None of them operates from a biblical anthropology.

One of the greatest lies, resulting in immeasurable harm and evil, is the Western concept of material uniformity. The presumption that life is little more than physical particles abiding by certain physical laws breeds the hideous assumption that human variations are mostly the result of malevolence. There is this narrow, thin definition of “normal” based on the unconscious materialism of the West that has done more to please Satan than almost any other thing you can name. What binds us together and defines us as human is not even in range of the intellect in the first place. It’s a fundamentally moral issue. You can approach the truth if you train your mind to accept that level of awareness, but as long as your mind is essentially Western, you’ll never grasp any part of it.

Western materialistic assumptions place the highest value on the material. The only value of life is our existence here in the Fallen Realm. Physical expiry is the ultimate evil. But the whole thing is wrapped around some obscene moral assumption that every life has to justify it’s presence here. While the application of that logic wanders all over the place, the whole mess assumes that there is an ownership interest in our shared resources in the realm of existence. That assumption stands against the ultimate truth that this plane of existence nothing but a pack of lies.

Let’s back up a bit in our biblical understanding. We have to dance around it because precise language won’t work here. We have to use indicative language to raise an awareness of what’s beyond the human horizon. As God created it, this world was utterly beautiful, a gift of grace beyond words. We were granted stewardship and we fucked it up completely. So this round of existence has a terminus, because God has decided that it cannot be redeemed as is. Don’t get lost here: The underlying reality is still God’s beautiful Creation, but there is a layer or element of falsehood superimposed on it that spoils everything. God is going to have to do it all over again, and removing our filthy mess means remaking things. It means a kind of reset that, from our perspective, amounts to dissolving everything down below the level of subatomic particles and starting over. The real problem is us, and somehow the whole curse of the Fall is inside of us, but it affects what God has made. The problem is our connection to Creation, but fixing it would, at the very least, seem to us total dissolution of current reality. The actual reality of what God will do with the substance of this existing universe is beyond comprehension.

No, it will never be simple, but we can work out some implications on our level. We are to treat our existence here as temporary, terminal and of no significant value. On the one hand, we can gain some limited restoration of Eden through the divine moral justice revealed as the character of God. You can get a taste of Eden by peeling back at least some of the layers of the Curse. We can’t remove the Curse in that sense, only ameliorate it. Eden represents for us an image of what the ultimate remake will be. We have to pass through the Flaming Sword of revelation to get back just a vision of Eden. A full reclamation of God’s intention for us will not happen within this reality. Think of it this way: A primary indicator of the Curse of the Fall is our constraints under time and space. Redemption will include a relief from that limitation; we will escape this dimension.

So within all this comes this gracious statement of truth from our dear Sister Wildcucumber: “That’s the lesson Creation teaches me, that each of us, and each creature, tree, weed, microbe, just is. Nothing and no one has the need to justify their existence, we are what we are and no more needs to be said.” Do you see how this negates the entire Western mythology of materialism? We don’t own this universe! We have no valid claim, except in the sense that we are responsible for this filthy situation. But no one has any business acting as if they can demand your compliance with some imaginary justification for taking up space and using resources. Whatever it is Western folks imagine each human owes the world is pure bullshit. This is what I mean when I say some folks have an inflated sense of entitlement. I don’t owe you a damned thing; it’s to God that I owe a debt I cannot possibly pay.

To the degree we humans might be responsible for destroying a “fragile” ecology and making this world uninhabitable, it will simply play into the hands of God’s eternal plans for His Creation. Otherwise, we humans are entirely incapable of destroying anything more than our own lives here. This does not mean that God will not hold us accountable for pollution, for example, but that the stakes are not what most Greenie Meanies imagine. It does not justify watermelon politics: Green on the outside, red communist on the inside. Respect for Creation is rooted in a totally different set of assumptions. You can commune with nature as God’s Creation because of what it once was and could now be, but not as an excuse to browbeat folks into justifying their existence.

Do give full and frequent consideration which of your choices best reflects the ultimate glory of Christ, with an eye to His ownership of Creation. Respect His claim on this world, not any human claim. This is one of those areas where a violent response just might be justified in Christ if someone interferes too much in your mission for His glory. It really depends on how and how much they intrude into the dominion God has granted to you. But you don’t owe them shit in terms of justification, nor any other human on this planet. If they transgress the dominion God granted you for His calling, it is they who must justify something.

If a particular choice brings you peace with God, that is all the justification you need.

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