We have wheels.
Thank you for all who prayed with us and contributed in other ways. Tonight’s Bible lesson on Psalms will be put off until we can finish the brake work. It’s not tragic, just something neglected by the previous owners. Let’s just say the price was below what we had saved up and we had money left over to fix what wasn’t quite right on it. Otherwise, it appears maintenance was fairly proper.
The vehicle is: 2000 Volvo S70 SSE (basic model), silver in color.
I have crappy days, too.
Would it surprise you? Much of my ranting about the Germanic mythology and the sour mood in things like Beowulf arises from having inherited a major dose of that sourness. That is, I live with chronic depression.
Yesterday was a day when it arose to flog me again. There is no theological answer to this. We are accountable for sin, but there are a great many things we bring to God for which He does not point the finger of accusation. Depression is a wound on my soul that will not heal in this life.
There is no magic bullet. I remain functional because the Father has use for me. I’ve learned to live with it as that “thorn in the flesh” that keeps my humble.
If you are curious, it was set off by having so much trouble exchanging something of value for the cash needed to help buy another vehicle. Our old Jeep was picked up by the salvage yard a couple of days ago and I’ve been riding my bike in frigid weather to get things done. It wasn’t the riding part, but the troubles I had chasing a buyer. The resolution to that was not at all a good deal. Still, I have confidence that God is still in control of the final results. We pray what we find today reflects His divine care for us.
This would be as much as I might do toward ritual worship on a blog. Kent Henry is a master worship leader and this is a medley of two songs. The first bears a little of the Hebraic sound while the second is more conventional Western style. Both call us up out of ourselves into the Presence.
This part doesn’t fit into the document I’m constructing about our online parish, but is evoked by the discussion.
Rome built some really fine roads across Europe and the Mediterranean. The primary reason was to move troops and other government traffic as quickly as possible, particularly when things went sour somewhere in the empire. No one was ignorant of the side effect of commercial traffic also using those roads, as well as sharing knowledge. Having troops all along that road helped reduce highway robbery. Paul and the other Apostles took advantage of the Roman imperial government’s provisions to carry the gospel message abroad.
Our Roman Road system is the Internet. Rome was crushed by an invasive immigration that used their roads, but didn’t really care much about preserving civilization. It was an anomaly in may ways, because the invaders cannibalized what they found and gave no thought to how much work went into making it. The invasive hoards of today depend very much on the infrastructure of civilization, and they intend taking it over in situ, more like the conquests of more ancient times. Rather than disregard the massive human investment in the Internet, the conquerors are steadily investing more into it as they take over.
So the bigger threat to the Internet is the scorched earth policy of those who bitterly resist the conquerors. That’s because the culture behind what destroyed Rome is the same basic culture that is now being eclipsed. The senseless truculence of the West is being laid bare once more. They would rather plow up the Roman Roads than allow anyone else to use them.
I’m not sure how far this will go before the power to destroy is taken from their hands. But the genie is out of the bottle, and instantaneous global communications is now taken for granted as essential to human life. What is destroyed will be restored or replaced in some way. What we are looking at is the transition across that boundary layer. It can get pretty hairy for us who use it as the fabric of our parish. Most of what threatens our virtual fellowship is behind the scenes and very difficult for any layman to follow. Some of it is well beyond my grasp, and I don’t get the picture until it’s left as graffiti on the wall.
Part of the confusion is inherent in the battle itself. There are a many big players promoting and protecting their own interests. Way too many of them still think in terms of turf, as if their prosperity can come only at the cost of someone else losing theirs. The Internet simply is not like that at all. It can already work just fine without the current physical infrastructure, though temporary disruption is a given. Wireless protocols and transmission technology are exploding. Jamming is possible, but that threatens the oppressors, too, and it’s much easier to simply eavesdrop for now.
Here’s the take away for you, dear members of this virtual parish: Prepare your minds and hearts for even more decentralization. I am not the parish. My work here may well be the nexus for communion, but it’s important that you connect to each other. Work through me while it’s possible, but establish your own links. I doubt I’m going to die any time soon, but I am stuck in the middle of a turbulent context in terms of networking. I’m not targeted specifically as in the past, but the political context here in the US is crazier than most people realize. I’ve tried to warn you all that the real story is not what appears in the MSM, for sure, but even the alternative news sources seem to be missing the point. I assert that both halves of that equation are under a level of control that’s not always obvious.
All the current political chatter about Internet privacy, security, and controls do not constitute a genuine debate. Both sides are working toward the same goal of total control. The only question is the flavor of control and who gets to profit. Very few of the technicians involved see this just yet. Most of them still personally believe in the system. When it becomes apparent to them that they are being played for fools, we can expect networking to break free from most controls in radical ways not yet seen. This is an area where revolt can actually work, and in part because the tyrants don’t get it, plus the rebels are much harder to threaten. In terms of networking, the situation is exceedingly volatile.
The tyrants have already pulled a lot of stunts. Recent revelations about NSA and other alphabet agencies are just the first blush of uncovered evil. The take-down of stuff supposedly protected by Tor has riled a lot of folks. Even within the establishment, folks are pissed beyond words about the secret abuses, and the response has already begun. The battle back and forth has plenty of surprises, and much of it will be anchored here in the US.
Build your faith and your connections to each other now. Prepare to work around my absence, and that of others who may be disconnected for a time by the conflict. I am not the source of truth here, just someone who calls attention to it and begs you to take your own share.
(More on the peculiarities of this ministry.)
We are held together by a most gossamer thread.
So far as I know, none of the members have met in the flesh. A handful of us chat through services like Facebook. A few of us have spoken by phone and exchanged items by postal or other package service. There may come a day when some of the more active members could meet, but it seems unlikely in the near term. Most of us are widely scattered. Indeed, a major portion of active readers are on other continents. Precious few readers even comment on posts.
This is not the ideal; it’s simply what God has granted us for now. The disadvantages are obvious, the advantages less so. However, it is almost an overriding necessity, since the nature of what we share is so esoteric as to be thinly distributed across humanity as a whole. What binds us together is a sense of calling that is exceedingly rare among people of this time.
The first advantage is that this message is already spread far and wide. Those who embrace the teaching here enough to feel a part of it are already globally scattered. Spreading the message geographically will be relatively easy, in the sense that members of this parish are not geographically concentrated. We don’t have to wait for God to call us and raise funds for protracted travel to distant lands. We are already there.
The second advantage is our very lack of organization: We can scarcely be targeted for persecution. Hindering the message would require a concentrated attention and effort just to identify who we are, never mind cook up some imaginary concept of how we are a threat to anything. In general, we simply do not attract much attention in the first place.
The very nature of what I teach is anti-activist. That is, we don’t organize anything resembling political activity. We apply no direct pressure to any human political process. If anything, we might spend some effort simply avoiding notice on that level. Too much of what we do does not even resemble traditional religious propagation. It’s really not a matter of ideas. We teach acting as morally as we can and allowing that in itself to draw whatever notice it will. We seek people with a rare faculty for sensing with something other than mere intellect. People who don’t share this rare faculty are unlikely to conceive any interest at all in what we share here.
What we share takes place on two levels. First is the general orientation, a fundamental concept of reality that is far different from the mainstream. We work at establishing a sensitivity of the heart and non-intellectual faculties. We also teach a long history of human understanding that predates any part of the West. Second, we teach Christian faith from that perspective. This in itself is on two levels. First is the moral law, the character of God woven into Creation. Second is the ineffable Spirit Realm and how to reach out for that higher reality.
All the other chatter in this ministry feeds toward that broad purpose. There’s plenty of techniques and technology, but only because those things make possible the ministry itself. I’ve published a bunch of books to support all this. I have a static website (gone) more or less devoted to materials that won’t fit into book form easily. But it’s really not about me and all my bright ideas about religion. There is at least one closely affiliated leadership blog and several others that actively support the same or similar message. There is always room for more.
This is how we “congregate.”
We probably should have seen this coming: Firefox users, get ready for ads in your browser. I don’t think AdBlock or it’s friends will help you with this. Granted, it’s not as if you have no options at all, but they won’t be easy to find or use.
So your options now are Pale Moon, Seamonkey, or any of a half-dozen other derivative projects, depending on the OS you use. I suspect some of the various Linux distributions will chop out that functionality, as is their right under the licensing.
If you switch over to Chrome, you still have to deal with Google tracking you like a mean bloodhound. It’s getting harder and harder to escape the greedy corporate jerks these days. This is partly why I love Lynx (plain text browser) and a few other similar projects.
(I’m preparing a document to help explain the peculiarities of this ministry. What follows is a first draft, but there is more to come.)
We are a virtual parish with no physical organizational manifestation. Strictly speaking, we do not claim any theology or theological tradition. Our doctrine is Scripture read through Ancient Hebrew intellectual traditions. We have no affinity or affiliation with any existing organized Christian tradition. We are wide open to anyone wishing to participate and claim the limited blessings available through online association and fellowship. The only requirement is partaking of the chatter and not hindering things.
Whatchamacallit
I don’t know what else to call this; all of the good names are taken.
Over the centuries when and where English was in use, propagandists have not rested. It happened in other languages that dominated various past civilizations, so it’s nothing new. A primary tactic of deception is hijacking terminology so people can’t tell the truth without making up new words, or even a new language. Our battle is not with flesh and blood, so I’ve decided not to fight that battle too hard. Rather, I begin the battle by calling attention to the nature of the warfare and its goals.
We aren’t going to wrangle over words. I am no Christ. I have been crucified with Christ and He lives in me, but our language offers insufficient support for symbolic logic and parabolic writing native to the Christian gospel message. We have to improvise and trust in the Lord for the rest. I have confidence that my Heavenly Father can bring about clarity of understanding to His Chosen hearts, just as He did through the parables of Jesus.
Nor do I pretend to be any of the Apostles, though my calling is apostolic in nature. It’s also prophetic, though I won’t use the label “prophet” to describe myself. I do a lot of pastoral work online, so “pastor” is an appropriate label for my virtual persona. However, in meat space, a better term is elder. In the English New Testament, a pastor is actually more like priest (ritual leader), whereas the elder is closer to moral or organizational ruler. It’s the standard division of sacrament and law within the covenant household. The two roles overlap a great deal, and seemed mostly combined in the role of apostle. However, it gets pretty muddy when there isn’t a meat space congregation over which to exercise the moral leadership or ritual leadership either one. While we could discuss in theory what we might do in meat space given the opportunity, this article is more about the virtual parish.
In virtual terms, my mission is apostolic in the sense that I’m forging into new territory like a missionary. Like Paul, I’ve shaken the dust off my feet of the standing religious organizations. Where I should be able to share the truth of God, I’ve faced some pretty boisterous rejection. Instead of calling to members of established organized religion, I call to those who have likewise been cast out, pushed out or simply made unwelcome. While some church folks are surely going to participate on various levels, my primary calling is to the un-churched, as it were.
That doesn’t change the message, but it does change the language and the rituals. There is no sacred lingo from God, and rituals are fungible. I’m quite comfortable using the ambient cultural images, particularly that of the technology sector. To me, the Networked Civilization already exists as a rising force for change in our world, and as a counter to the moribund Western Civilization. Still, the two have much in common. Both are the shared context of the message and if I ignore the cultural milieu, no one will hear.
For example, what was once considered foul language is no longer so shocking and foul. In every culture, the shock value of particular words and phrases drift and we have to make up new ones. Right now, given that we are near the end of Western Civilization, and the nascent Networked Civilization has already begun distorting English into something else entirely, we aren’t likely to see any new cuss words. Like any other Netizen, I’ll use the ones we have, though perhaps with an eye to skill and flavor, not as punctuation. They are part of a rather large vocabulary and have their place. Only prissy legalists, who are a favorite target of my invective, but by no means likely to engage me meaningfully, still rant about potty-mouth words. These days, suggesting someone is foul-mouthed is easily the least effective criticism you can offer.
Over the centuries of English language usage, all the labels we might choose to effectively convey something about us have been hijacked and are in use by someone else, so aside from the subtitle of this blog, we don’t have any handy names.
Babylon is fallen, but has not collapsed.
Babylon is the fallen world of human commerce, of human achievement. It symbolizes unjust dominance and all the trappings of oppression. Dominance is not evil in itself because it’s essential to human nature that one among many must hold sway or we remain just animals. Worse, while animals have their natural connections to the rest of Creation, humans without a just government are utterly disconnected from even the little good we can have from the Laws of God. The blessings of the Laws are limited, but they are as much blessing as some can ever see.
The entire range of Western political theory is based on lies. First and foremost is the lie of materialism, founded in turn on the myth of the unitary universe. Communists, socialists, capitalists, welfare statists, fascists and populists are all materialistic in nature. They all assume that everything important is in this universe.
All it takes is a thoughtful reading of the letters and recorded conversations between Karl Marx and his associates to discover that he didn’t even believe in what he taught. It was a put-up, a fake propaganda mythology designed to provide a false opposition, a place of intellectual refuge for the growing proletariat. He served other masters whose plans were to keep society stirred up and in conflict. His letters show he did this knowingly. It’s not that owners of capital were not evil, but that there has always been a better answer than class conflict.
Libertarians are just as evil. They are deeply self-deceived, and in some cases I am convinced their intellectual leaders are intellectually dishonest, as was Karl Marx. Good people rarely rise to economic dominance because good people won’t do that it takes. Calling the captains of private industry “heroic” is evil in itself, in that it brushes aside what God says about human nature. It’s not a question of government versus private, because any concentration of wealth is de facto power, a government in effect. The vast majority of those with such economic power have been evil. Libertarians are just as materialistic as the communists.
The proper place of restraint in this world, commanded by God, is in the family alone. All else is Babylon by biblical definition. The mythology of the goodness of the American people pokes God in the eye, because our leaders have always secretly plotted evil. Just a little research and you’ll understand that the likes of Operation Northwoods was not an anomaly, but standard operations in US government planning. The only difference is that the few limits they once observed were completely removed early in the previous century. Lucky Luciano and his slaughter of more principled mafia dons was actually late to the game; civilian government had already committed that kind of massacre.
Think about this: Everyone in government knows that torture does not produce actionable intelligence, but they insist on using it for the simple reason that they cannot possibly retain power without terrorizing those they rule, here and abroad. The other purpose is to provoke outrage and create enemies. Yes, there is no honorable intention to win wars, only to have war as nasty as possible and without end. Our Western governments are hopelessly evil to core; they all engage in torture under various justifications.
We who are spiritual understand this. We also understand it is not our place to fix things. We are surely supposed to pray about these things, seeking to change what He will change. Most of the time, that change is inside us.
My post yesterday about the tools of the heart was, in places, nearly incomprehensible. I know that, but it’s so very hard to put God’s truth into any language, and English is easily one of the worst for the job. It’s all I have. I want so very much for you to understand in your mind how to restrain the human capabilities and make it serve the Spirit Realm agenda. This world is an irreparable evil, a place of shadows and lies. You cannot escape while keeping the confinements; you must shed the lies.
Part of that is peeling back the layers of deception, exposing the truth. The reason we share revelations of government evil is not to drum up action against government. Any such action is sure to be no less evil than that of government officials, exchanging one evil for another. Instead, we seek to shed any dependence on human capability to answer any need. This is the call: Use what this world provides as disposable tools — the entire universe is itself disposable with a distinct “use by” date God has established for Himself. What matters is His eternal glory.
The path to that divine glory is through activating your heart as the proper locus of being and operations. Babylon seeks to keep you in your head, seeks to keep you tied to this world and some dream of human achievement to reach the stars, as if the stars had any real power over anything. They are confined to this universe. The real power in this universe comes from outside of it. Babylon seeks to anchor your soul here, away from God.
Depart from Babylon.
The Elder reminds you: Holiness is voluntary.
Our society completely lacks a moral frame of reference consistent with God’s character. Our best is way off on another planet by comparison, so I don’t take seriously anyone’s moral posturing on any subject. The question is not what is right or wrong because there can be no right in our world, short of a vast and inconceivable renovation. Here and there we will catch glimpses of God’s glory and rejoice when His hands force the issue, by whatever means, but we are wholly cynical of what this world can produce compared/contrasted with God’s revealed justice.
I’m not a bomb-thrower by nature, but that doesn’t mean eviscerating pompous jerks verbally is out of bounds. I bother with the topic only to illustrate the point above.
Gamergate continues to simmer. Today I’m going to react to a whining SJW White Knight. We all know the only reason any man would defend the feminist position is because the females lied and promised he might — just might — have some vague hope of getting nooky if he plays by their rules. He’s a complete loser before he ever put his fingers on the keyboard. I quote the latest White Knight challenge, interspersed with my responses:
Gendered bigotry against women is widely considered to be “in bounds” by Internet commenters (whether they openly acknowledge it or not), and subsequently a demographic that comprises half of the total human population has to worry about receiving rape threats, death threats, and the harassment of angry mobs simply for expressing their opinions. This needs to stop, and while it’s impossible to prevent all forms of harassment from occurring online, we can start by creating a culture that shames individuals who cross the bounds of decency.
There is not a single verbal expression that is out-of-bounds on the Internet. There are no freaking rules, you idiot! When some whiney bitch jumps into the middle of a juvenile cauldron of sewage, she has no inherent right to win. Her demand that all the punks bow down and kiss her toes is insulting beyond words, and too ludicrous to justify her continuing the fraudulent waste of oxygen. Yes, she does deserve all those awful and hurtful words. She’s lucky those basement dwellers lack the physical courage to crawl out and actually do what they say they would.
We can start by stating the obvious: It is never appropriate to use slurs, metaphors, graphic negative imagery, or any other kind of language that plays on someone’s gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. Not only is such language inappropriate regardless of one’s passion on a given subject, but any valid arguments that existed independently of such rhetoric should have been initially presented without it. Once a poster crosses this line, they should lose all credibility.
You just lost credibility, Mr. Butt-wipe. Everything is fair game because it’s just a freaking game in the first place. You aren’t the Truth Police and you have no standing to lay down rules of combat. You didn’t write the game software so who gives a rat’s butt what you think.
Similarly, it is never acceptable to dox, harass, post nude pictures, or in any other way violate someone’s privacy due to disagreement with their opinions. While most people would probably agree with this in theory, far too many are willing to access and distribute this humiliating (and often illegal) content. Instead of simply viewing stories of doxing, slut-shaming, and other forms of online intimidation as an unfortunate by-product of the digital age, we should boycott all sites that publish these materials.
If you digitize it, you cannot possibly control it. Any attempt to place limits on digitized material is poking God in the eye. If the stupid whining sluts have pictures and other details of their human existence on the Net, it is most certainly fair game. You see, your personal moral posturing means nothing more than a brightly colored target marker on your ass. If you lack the means to enforce your edicts, you are just another pitiful piece of scenery to be shot up.
I’m not any kind of gamer at all, but even I can understand what a crock of bullshit this guy is waving around.
It does make a difference, but it’s not paramount.
There is a sense in which human awareness is the primary field of operations for what God does in this world. Yet, human intellect is not what sets us apart from the rest of Creation; it is not the ultimate faculty for awareness. Our intellect is apparently above that of the rest of God’s creatures on this plane, but it’s not even a significant element of what will survive the passage into eternity.
Most of us are vaguely aware that this human body must be transformed into whatever it was Jesus was using for a body after the Resurrection. This flesh cannot cross over. What almost no one in Western Christianity grasps is that the intellect is sourced in this fallen flesh. God created the mind as a servant, not as the master of human existence. The Fall was in essence the human choice to usurp the Spirit and place reason on the throne.
A critical first step in redemption was the long path of learning to reassert the prominence of the heart over the mind. We don’t really have the words to describe this process because we lack the facility in English heritage to operate on the level of the heart. We don’t have a rich lore of parabolic expression because the language itself is crippled; nothing in the development of English ever passed through the kind of learning that was common to the ancient world of Scripture. So while men could spend time relearning how to operate from the heart in ancient times, we have much farther to go just to get to their starting point, never mind the long path the ancients took to find ultimate truth.
Adam in the Garden served as God’s agent. We don’t have the language to describe how he did this, in part because we are missing an entire range of understanding. We have a massive mythology, so popular with evangelicals, that Adam spoke God’s Word with his mouth and the Garden obeyed. They take that quite literally, rejecting the existence of a parabolic meaning. As God’s agent, Adam was inherently obedient, a living expression of God’s character on this lower level of existence. Adam was God’s proxy, and Creation responded accordingly. Creation bowed the knee to God’s authority living in Adam.
It was perhaps only in the most superficial sense that what Adam did might resemble management as we think of it. Adam projected God’s Presence to renew the frame of reference so that the Garden would remain a reflection of God’s design. Adam did this through the power of his heart, because Adam naturally lived in his heart, not in his head. The heart itself projects a measurable field of influence on Creation, and receives communication back. If anything, the Fall was a shift to management by the mind, and Adam’s mind was never up to the task.
With all our depth of science, our minds will never be up to the task, either. So long as we remain in the mind as the root of our awareness, we will be wrong about everything. We can see the vast details and the pattern of their operation, yet understand nothing of why Creation does what it does. Only the heart can grasp at the purpose and fulfill God’s design.
To reverse the Curse is to dethrone the intellect, and move back into the heart. For us today in our Western Civilization, that means a very hard and painful path of conquering the intellect. Our entire civilization vehemently denies that the intellect is fallen, and that anything of value can be found outside the reach of reason. The very best I can do is paint the picture of the heart in analogs of the intellect. The heart has a form of awareness, a form of operation that could compare, just barely, to logic and reason. The heart has its own way of arriving at a decision, including a vast reach of input that all of Western Civilization denies is even possible, much less desirable.
Were your heart in charge and your spirit awakened, your intellectual development wouldn’t account for much either way. Being a primitive ignoramus would not keep you from Heaven, for sure, but it would also open up the faculties Adam used in the Garden before the Fall. Not all of it, but the fundamental nature of operations would be much the same. Making the heart your master over the intellect is absolutely necessary to live a godly life on this earth. You become a very productive sheep in His pasture.
Add to that condition your lifelong efforts to understand with your mind the absolute necessity of making the heart your master, and training your mind to serve, and you are a by nature a shepherd. That is, while He owns the sheep and it is His voice they follow, your mouth will sound with His voice and the sheep will tend to follow you. What you have is an expanded and vivid awareness of how things really are, the ultimate reality of things in this Fallen Realm. You can tell others of this reality and help them formulate their own path of obedience. This is a genuine godly education, what the learned elders of ancient times held and preserved for us.
What chokes us today is how that record comes to us in a language and intellectual discipline so utterly alien to what is common today. Reading and studying the Bible from a foreign mind will bring foreign results, and Satan would love to do everything possible to falsely confirm that approach. Down to the very wiring and appetites, we don’t have a clue what’s in our best interest, nor what’s possible. We have a monumental task just overcoming that vast ambiance of deception. It’s just barely possible to bypass that if the learner isn’t fully aware of the meaning of their Western heritage, if their heads aren’t already loaded with Satanic garbage, but still rather empty.
The difference is in the calling. If you sense a drive and compulsion to learn this stuff, you had best get to work. You are appointed as an under-shepherd and the sheep need your help. If not, then stop chasing such an education and bend your will to the other tasks at hand. Let your mind listen to your heart and obey the imperatives and your body will do what’s best.
The mind is just a tool.
Sister Wildcucumber will probably have a wild fit about this, but it’s the truth.
Let me explain. As a child, our family income never amounted to much. We ate lots of homemade hamburger patties for dinner. I’ve never gotten much of a useful answer from Mom, but she always seasoned them generously with garlic. Every time. Which meant three or even four times a week I was choking down a garlic burger to keep from getting punished. My Dad was pretty intolerant about some of the smallest things. He was the one who slapped me backwards out of my chair if I dared complain about Mom’s garlic burgers. Then again, I seem to recall Mom saying the equivalent of STFU, too.
Even when we were better off, Mom still offered them weekly. If anything, the garlic got even thicker. Smothering with ketchup just didn’t work any more. So as a teenager I often used my meager teen income to seek out burgers seasoned with just about anything except garlic.
Don’t get me wrong; garlic has its place. If I ate bread, I would still like garlic toast. It’s good with spaghetti and other Italian foods, but I consume no wheat at all, so I see very little of it. It has no business on burgers.
I suppose I could make a moral lesson about not screwing up your kids, but that’s far from the whole story. I’d rather not try to tell much more about the dysfunctions of my family in my childhood years, because some elements of my childhood were just dandy. I will tell you that I recall thinking I wouldn’t do that to my kids, despite doing plenty of other things wrong. I suppose it’s part of why I tend to take kids seriously when they say they like or don’t like things, even when I know I have to force them to eat better than they normally would without guidance. It also contributes to my willingness to see things from the other person’s point of view.
However, it’s more important to note how some of the smallest things can make such a huge difference. One of God’s greatest gifts to mankind seems to me like punishment, and I can’t break that association in my mind.
