You’re Supposed to…

Posted on October 6, 2014 by ehurst

Context: Yes, I use Linux and Open Source stuff and I like it. Generally I prefer it; I hate the entire claptrap of corporate greed and materialism. However, that doesn’t mean Open Source development brings us to computing nirvana. Quite the opposite, simply because the essence of Open Source development caters to the worst of human moral failure. It makes godlings of developers with talent, when said talent all too often accompanies the most implacable arrogance about the way things ought to be.

Greed we understand. If a man is unwilling to take the risks of violent seizure of things he wants, then he becomes a manipulative slimeball who suckers you into giving him that money. When it comes to computer technology, you can bet the latter far outnumbers the former. In an effort to pull in the big bucks, the corporate guy will at least try to convince you that he’s offering what you want. We’ve learned to be wary of those who are playing head games, so it’s not too hard to find corporate software that meets most of your needs, provided you can adjust to the dominant market paradigm. Gamers get what gamers tend to want, as do consumers of other entertainment, while business managers and government drones get what they want. That’s where the money is. At some point on the scale of accommodating unusual demands, it starts to cost providers too much to and they simply don’t respond. Then there are a host of niche market providers who extend the original product or even make a whole new product on the cheap.

When you know how to develop the software for yourself, you don’t have to worry about what anybody else wants. You can follow your own vision. Chances are you can get a few others to work alongside and develop something really nice to answer your needs. I suppose no one really knows exactly why, but there is a powerful correlation between software developer talent and social stupidity. That is, it would seem a great many geeks are so very good at computers precisely because they are so very bad about dealing with people. For some reason, these two seem to come in the same package a great majority of the time. I’m not suggesting oddballs hate the rest of us, but they often don’t have a clue just how alien they are. But give them some power over those others that they do not understand, and suddenly it becomes a primary form of entertainment to abuse everyone who isn’t like them. Pretty soon, you find a significant portion of them revel in perversion.

So instead of designing software that tends to meet the broad human need of common users, they develop software with the intent of herding folks into some private or sub-cultural computer orthodoxy. “Well, that’s the way you ought to be doing it!” There is none of this business of dealing with the reality of what is actually out there. Instead, it’s a highly unreasonable demand that the world change to conform to their vision of perfection.

While the corporate software guys tend to be just as freakish, they have managers who keep them in check. If the weirdo developer wants a paycheck, he’d better produce software that the marketing dweebs can sell. There is no restraint on Open Source developers, unless you count the tight club membership in certain projects. Social skills are often not a high priority for project managers in Open Source. That’s okay within the development process, but there is also nothing to protect the end user from the hateful arrogance that pervades way too many projects. They only hear from each other and maybe a few devoted fanboys permitted to hang around. This remains a pretty incestuous environment.

It’s the fanboys who pretend they are marketers of the resulting product. They also don’t get it. The product they love and understand, but the wider audience they do not. Mostly they succeed in alienating the world, but you would think they have no idea what effect their noise has on the rest of us. They have a religious zeal that drives everyone else nuts, and they get angry when we don’t bow the knee to their favorite deities. It’s not merely that they aren’t interested in what you might want or need, but they are spitefully hostile to anything that isn’t already covered by their favorite product. You aren’t supposed to want something different; the developers said so.

No, I don’t have any easy answers to this quandary. We are stuck between the quagmire of cloying corporate artificial niceness and the stony fierce sense of personal entitlement from the independent guys. Rare indeed is the software project that is neither of these. I do know that if you can get genuinely giving spiritual folks involved, it changes everything. Such folks are generally unwelcome in either of the established communities. The one thing that keeps computer technology alive is that people find it useful, but the people writing software don’t like people as people.

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Time Nonlinear

Posted on October 5, 2014 by ehurst

This is not a mathematical discussion. It’s far above that.

If you have read any significant amount of fiction dealing with time, particularly Science Fiction that seeks to use or explain a particular theoretical approach to understanding time, then you’ve had your mind twisted out of shape on this issue. That most of it takes for granted there can be no God and nothing beyond the universe (except perhaps a different flavor of the same stuff) is no surprise to us. We don’t have time to argue with them, only that we need to undo their pernicious influence.

The image is portrayed that some of the most infinitesimal actions can alter the entire following future. In a random universe where there is no God, this might be reasonable. Where there is a God, there remains a stabilizing force. Human choices do have effects, but they are not all that large. Indeed, the vast majority of consequences are poured back into our existence. Rather, God’s choices are the key to major events. The problem is not the idea of unintended consequences itself, but the magnitude of effects against God’s revealed intention to steer things to some degree.

It is utterly impossible to say how much difference your choices make. God holds the winning hand here. He steers events regardless of human intent. This is part of why I reject the notion that we can accomplish much through politics, even substantial political power. God has said in no uncertain terms that He steers a certain measure of such things. He certainly uses human choices because His power on earth has always carried a plausible deniability. Still, His Word breathes an overwhelming power to move through human decision to work His larger plan for this earth.

Because I regard our captivity under the strictures of time and space to be a large element in the Curse of the Fall, I could never give any credibility to theories of time travel. Leaping across vast stretches of space might be just theoretically possible, but I rather doubt we’ll ever find the means. However, jumping around in alternative time lines won’t happen because God will not let it make any difference.

A critical element in this is that God is wholly unaffected by the strictures of time. He created time. If God decided to rewrite the past, you would never know about it. Further, it’s generally false to see time as relentlessly linear. The linear nature of time is a matter of human perception and nothing more. That perception is part of the Fall; it is not inherent in our design. For God, all things are in His present moment, as it were, but we are unable in our fallen state to imagine an existence where time and space were not confining factors. Our Western intellectual bias makes us even more blind to the truth. It is beyond a Western understanding that ancient men were hardly so limited intellectually as we are today.

The ultimate truth is always both simpler and more complicated than just about anything we can imagine.

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Psalm 18

Posted on October 4, 2014 by ehurst

Picture him now, marching victoriously at the head of his column of troops. It’s a long hike, and David is full to bursting with thanksgiving. With his natural grand talent for what was music and poetry among Hebrew people, he burst into song. All along the path for quite some distance, the phrases kept bubbling over in his mind. Every common expression of victory heard in the Hebrew tongue was not enough, even piled altogether in one song. David sang the initial composition of this song after a series of victories that confirmed his reign, a song first recorded in 2 Samuel 22. This is a somewhat updated version of that same song.

Could we have caught any other commander in a similar context in those ancient times, he would have praised his war deity in just this manner. But David had only one God to receive this torrent of praise, a God who was also his emperor, and David his vassal. The first few verses are typical of someone bringing news of victory to his Lord. It starts with an open confession of adoration, as one did not enter any august presence with anything less. There could be no God as great as David’s Lord.

David admits it looked grim for awhile. He had been cornered more than once, but always escaped. That’s because David called out to God. Only a with a strong moral clarity and sense of calling would someone in dire straights know whether his calling on God would lead to resigning one’s spirit into the Lord’s hands or if it were a call in confidence of His deliverance. Your faith can know which to claim, but calling on God is the proper reflex regardless. It lets God decide whether He’s ready to accept your resignation.

Then David unloads a string of parabolic descriptions of God acting in divine power to save him. How many different ways can he say it? When God takes a notion to act, nothing opposes Him because He made all things. It is the same form of symbolic hyperbole when David claims to be a faithful servant of God. While it sounds in our ears like self-justification, it is actually proper protocol when standing before one’s feudal master. Declaring oneself faithful and willing to pay any price to please is a standard element in praising one’s Lord in that Ancient Near Eastern context. Notice David isn’t suggesting how wonderful he is, so much as indicating that he will stand with his God regardless how others might fail.

This leads right into describing how God supports those who serve Him. Because God is faithful and just, He grants extraordinary authority to those who genuinely love Him. This was the only reason David could offer to explain his stunning string of military victories, some of them major upsets. Thus, David ended up exercising rule over people he never actually wanted to conquer. More than a few simply begged for a chance to enter his feudal service as allies. David insists this was the work of his God. Thus, we can be sure that David began his reign on the right foot.

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Quandary: Logic and Morals

Posted on October 4, 2014 by ehurst

I keep hoping I’ve got it explained, but from time to time, questions come up indicating that, for at least one person, I came up short.

This business of moral reasoning throws people off the track. In the first place, my ranting about Ancient Near Eastern and Hebrew intellectual traditions is a historical reference, an established anchor point in human memory that remains a valid expression of something much deeper than mere history. We look back to the record of that time as a manifestation of God’s way for us, not the thing itself. History itself is a parable, a symbol of something beyond words.

You can get to that godly reasoning without delving into the Antiquities the way I have. You cannot get there from here in Western intellectual traditions except by accident, by a divine miracle, as it were. The biggest single barrier is the unconsidered assumption that ours is the human default. It is certainly the most popular approach to reality, but is most certainly not the default. It does require some history and digging into ancient literature to realize that. But once I went there and dug around, some part of me realized it was entirely possible to get there without taking my particular path.

My fiction series on Artificial Intelligence (AI) was supposed to raise that possibility. Antiquities will help, but it’s possible to create an environment and legacy of understanding without it. I am convinced that, in God’s eyes, that fundamental change is more important than the path you take to get there. The real miracle is your will bringing your mind into subjection of the Spirit. Once the intellect no longer rules all things, it’s hard to fail.

It’s a false dichotomy to assume that if we do not trust logic and reason, then the only other option is to let the fleshly emotions rule. We certainly prefer reason over unrestrained appetites, but that doesn’t go far enough in understanding how things work. There is a potential human faculty above reason, and certainly above emotions. So the whole point here is tapping that higher faculty, regardless of the flavoring.

This is why I persist in mentioning the Spirit Realm. It can register as an intellectual concept, but that doesn’t mean you get it. If you don’t somehow get a breath of that higher atmosphere in your soul, you cannot get it. A vast portion of humanity is convinced that seizing pure reason is that experience of eternity. But there is a very distinctly different effect between the two. We who have tasted of Heaven can tell the difference in how people talk and act. While it’s possible to cite some specific symptoms of human behavior, that typically misses the point, because each of those can be faked. Rather, using that same higher level perception, we can detect the absence of that higher level in the gestalt of cues. The thrill of pure reason is the taste of arrogance, but the flavor of Heaven is humility.

Pure reason is so thrilling because it’s as high as you can get without surrendering to the Spirit. You cling to the instinctive notion that you can handle things, that you hold the ultimate competence, if only in potential. You are altogether certain that, given enough effort to shed all that is less than pure reason, you can enter a realm where you become some kind of master. You can easily sublimate that as a belief in a broader human potential, but hidden in the basement is that arrogant king waiting to take his throne with a vengeance. That ugly beast in the basement shows his face in those worst moments when the human capability is stretched, and we who are spiritually ruled will see it.

It’s not as if we don’t have the same basic failings; we do indeed. But our response to that fundamental human flaw is different. It’s not that we have learned to grovel at the proper cues, but that we openly grovel at the feet of God. The differences may be at times subtle, but nothing on this earth can substitute for kneeling before the Cross of Christ. When you are kneeling there yourself, you can tell when someone shares that space.

Nor do we regard this perception as if it were a mandatory answer for everyone else, but only for ourselves. That’s the other part of the flaw of human reason: It seeks objective universals. Spiritual reasoning denies that such is possible. It’s a difference fundamental in the nature of the two different faculties. The winds of Heaven drive us to say things like, “I don’t know the answer for you, but I know where I have to go with this.”

I note in passing that the difference between implacable self-assurance on the one hand, and otherworldly confidence in God on the other hand, is not always obvious to observers. The two can produce similar behavior patterns in some contexts.

The whole point is that we don’t reason from the basis of facts, but moral discernment. We might well consider what our senses tell us and what our human capabilities can do with that sensory data, but we never trust it to give us ultimate answers. We see that as mere context. We can discern what we believe it all means, but our spiritual faculty demands we pass it through another, higher process. We evaluate the moral significance of things, as well. The trouble comes in which moral frame of reference we use. An extension on that assumption that our intellectual context is the human default also assumes our moral context is the default.

This is the other half of our struggle in teaching: We have to convince folks that what they assume are God’s morals are nothing of the kind. They are merely one narrow cultural assumption about morality, and very ungodly in many ways. It has proved so far easier to debunk the intellectual deception than it has been for the moral mythology. For most folks, some variation of the Anglo-Saxon moral tradition is morality itself. I can usually get folks to grasp the notion that people in the Bible had a different thought process, but I struggle hard against the reflexive trust in Anglo-Saxon morals.

This is the task before me. Nobody says you can’t use reason, but you have to use the right brand of logic and the biblical moral assumptions with it. The moral assumptions are the ground of all logical processing because they are the sole objective in bothering to process. The whole concept is radically different from what is common in mainstream society. We don’t lose touch with what we used to be, so folks aren’t alien to us, but we are surely alien to them.

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It’s About Time

Posted on October 3, 2014 by ehurst

One of the things that makes us human is our awareness of time. That is, we are locked into a specific experience of time. While we do understand how the passage of time can be slowed or accelerated in our subjective sense of awareness, we are utterly incapable of reasoning and thinking about existence without that relentless ticking of the moments in linear succession.

I can go farther and describe how our Western cultural sense of time is radically different from other cultures. Ours is the one civilization that seems inherently afraid of time passing, as if it were some commodity to be carefully guarded and metered out. We try desperately to cram more into it and strive mightily to prevent the obvious effects of aging. Westerners are obsessed with time.

So while I cannot say for certainty that Eden before the Fall had no time factor in the objective sense, I do know that Adam and Eve in their innocent state did not experience time as we do now. I can also say with some certainty that God most certainly does not experience time at all. He created it and nothing about it constrains Him.

A huge collection of bogus notions of God keep trying to pull Him down into the constraints of time. So very many debates about such things as predestination hinge on a false understanding on all sides that somehow time is a universal factor that limits what God can know or do. We have virtually no capability for processing this simple fact: God can know all time — past, present and future — as His current reality. That is, His knowing of the future is not limited to a prerecorded video kind of thing, but is far above that. He knows it as One who is familiar with every particle of our existence in the first place. There is nothing God does not know, but you can be sure those words are mere indicators of something far beyond our ken.

And it’s all because we have this damned instinct in our heads to deny the Fall, to deny that there are any limits to what our human reason can fathom. Our reason is loaded with arrogance, and the hardest thing for any human is to truly and actively surrender to a higher power that is not subject to our reason.

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Program Notes: Women’s Health

Posted on October 3, 2014 by ehurst

You gotta see this. If any part of your range of awareness includes women’s health issues, you should at least include our Sister Wildcucumber’s message. She has begun a series on the topic and the first two are already some of the best stuff. As with all things here and there: Nobody expects you to toe the line. This is stuff coming from the heart, sharing what God has shown us. If His Spirit convicts you, then obey Him, not us.

The Change: Ownership and stewardship vs control Women’s Mysteries – Part One Childbirth

The Change: Ownership and stewardship versus control Women’s Mysteries – Part Two – Routine Procedures

Reminder, Sister Wildcucumber serves as the Mama Elder here in our online parish. If you want the feminine side of what this ministry is about, she’s the lady you see.

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The NWO Is Older than Me

Posted on October 2, 2014 by ehurst

We already have a global government working on enslaving the whole human race.

Wise as serpents, harmless as doves: We seek to understand enough to recognize what’s going on so that we can prepare to glorify Our Father’s name. When we take up our cross, there should be few surprises what comes next. Throw aside the lies and bear your sacrifice as an honored calling in the Kingdom. Most people have a wealth of mythology about what a world government would look like and how it would act. The myths come from books, movies and TV shows, along with lurid tales from “alternative” news sources. Sometimes they approach the facts, but not very closely.

But it’s all in plain sight, at least it is now. It’s been at work and gaining power over the past few centuries. Our global government starts with the easiest thing to capture, the one path few have understood in the past century: banking. Not banking as you and I experience it, but the financial industry at the international level. It operates through banking, but isn’t merely banking, per se. Indeed, it’s not even any individual banks or banking corporations, but the system upon which they all rest.

The whole thing hinges on the various national governments, and their binding treaties to act in concert (NATO for example), recognizing the sovereignty of the financial lords. As long as governments keep coming to them, hat in hand, begging for room to chase whatever dreams each one holds, the financial lords rule. It’s not some literal control over the debt of nations, merely notional control. Still, this cartel of oligarchs have put in place an exchange system on which virtually all governments of the world are utterly dependent.

You may understand that most governments are run by folks who just can’t keep their hands out of the cookie jar. Even if they could suffer no particular personal vice, the momentum on controlling populations rests entirely on this fiat system of finance. Most economists do understand some of this, but they simply can’t let go of the baggage of past economic systems and the logic of micro- and macro-economics. There is no academic model for global financial fiat control, so it won’t much matter which economic theories you buy into. All current theoretical systems will somehow come up short of reality, sooner or later. (Hint: They all ignore God’s revelation, which predicts the current system as a type.)

There is a sense in which this thing cannot be dismantled or devolved. The oligarchs have their fingers everywhere, their stings attached to loyal servants throughout the stack, top to bottom, and around the whole world, who stand ready to destroy anyone who dares to break free. Think about Qaddafi, Hussein, and others. North Korea’s insane isolation is about the one symbol of defiance that just might be the last to fall.

It’s not about the US dollar, but about the inter-banking system itself. The masters of the US dollar are just servants of the oligarchs, so it’s current downward trend does not alarm them in any way. To some degree, they may be steering it. That’s because their US puppet government has just about run out of room to serve usefully. Our system has gotten too rickety; time has passed us by. Pretty soon we won’t be able to supply that vastly superior firepower and organized manpower, so some other nation will become the favorite as their system cranks up.

Meanwhile, there is no borrowing limit. That is, the oligarchs can keep lending as long as it serves a purpose. The entire global financial system is fiat money they created long ago, and everyone believes in it. They can drive the price of precious metals up and down, as well as every other commodity. They can spread the lie that survivalists or underground patriots can expect to have an edge in the coming chaos and get them to buy something the oligarchs can simply take with armed thugs later. Or they can simply make it impossible to use. Eat your gold and silver, sucker.

So the oligarchs are working through various agencies to keep their control over a limited trend of meta-events. They don’t want or need total dominance in every day life. They can let their clients run amok with that, and steer things indirectly. Every war currently running is aimed at destabilizing and bringing under control any government that isn’t already their client. You might be aware that getting governments into war might hinge on other apparent issues — oil, illegal drugs, terrorism, etc. — but it’s really all about forcing them to become subservient to the inter-banking system. If the finance lords didn’t want terrorism somewhere, it wouldn’t be able to get enough money to fight. If they want terrorism, there will always be willing adventurers to chase the money and the fun of breaking stuff and killing people.

So, for example, the US patriot militia folks: They were nearly crushed at one point, driven underground largely by financial troubles. They were resurrected only when a controlled opposition rose up to keep them misguided and distracted. I suspect the oligarchs don’t much care whether there is a shootout between militias and some alphabet agency, so long as the whole thing represents no threat to their banking system and controls. Right now you have gun nuts running around chasing every threat except the real one. They might even understand something about the real threat, but are wholly deceived about who to blame.

Here’s another example: Not a single Klan type organization exists that isn’t controlled by one or another alphabet agency, mostly the FBI. All the ones I know about are actually led by a mole. The fakery keeps in place the propaganda agencies like NAACP, SPLC, etc. Lots of money gets spread around that way to keep the servants fat and sassy. It also keeps the rest of us distracted.

And that’s the whole point here: Don’t be distracted. We have no intention of fighting anyone with earthly weapons. We have no intention of protesting and demanding changes, nor grabbing arms and pushing people around, or hurting anyone. We don’t even organize. We share some common ideas about how to serve God’s interests in a mad world that we hardly expect to last much longer. If the finance lords rule, it’s because our God permits it. We reject materialism and human political action because the two are inextricably linked. Get rid of materialism and you have no need to act politically. Instead, we fight the Devil where he holds parts of our lives. Our warfare is moral and spiritual in nature, and our own lives are the battlefield. We view all things in the blazing light of His moral character.

Just keep your eyes on the moral justice of God and everything else will take care of itself.

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Moral Mechanics

Posted on October 2, 2014 by ehurst

In common English vernacular, His name is Jehovah.

Never mind how we got that; it’s just a silly tail-chasing exercise to insist on using the alleged “more accurate” version, Yahweh. Everyone knows who we’re talking about, so don’t look for excuses to make trouble (written with a smirk). What matters is that the name hangs essentially on His being the Creator. Having made all things — at least all the things of which we could be aware — vests Him with a certain amount of privilege. Among those privileges is that everything we could discuss would be pointless noise if we ignore His definitions of the terms. In effect, avoiding His revelation makes every discussion pointless, an airy-fairy exchange of wild imagination.

I often say things like: “The healing miracles of Jesus were essentially a matter of restoring moral justice.” He restored cosmic moral balance by correcting the disharmony arising from the immoral decisions of those whom God vested with moral authority. I realize from a Western point of view that raises other questions such as: “Well, why did God vest these people with authority if they were morally unworthy?” If you understood biblical morality, you would never ask that question. God vests with power whomever He, in His inscrutable divine privilege, decides is the right choice. We are not entitled to an explanation.

There are hints that serve to reduce our moral discomfort if we are willing to pay attention and try thinking beyond the immediate surface of things, but most Western readers of the Bible never get that far. That is, sometimes He explains at least a part of the moral justice background on things that happened. That’s why He called prophets; He vested people with a moral vision to grasp what should have been obvious to anyone with a decent moral perception. But it fell to some extraordinary measure of calling out someone and granting them unusual moral insight to make up for the general lack. If we don’t seize upon what’s available as our share, He tends to grant someone else the collective degree of moral discernment we all reject. Some of these folks were beyond genius in their moral discernment. His truth will not suffer frustration at our general truculence.

Meanwhile, we could all be prophets in effect if we just accepted His calling. Jesus kept saying things like: “If you obey the Father’s calling on your life, you can expect to do miracles such as these, and more besides.” But that obedience includes a complete shift away from Western thinking, in our case. If your head isn’t in the right place, you can’t see what Jesus saw and act according to His authority.

How about them Hebrew boys in the Prophecy of Daniel? How many other Hebrew boys were taken into Babylonian imperial service, but failed to distinguish themselves? It’s hard to imagine there were none faithful, but Daniel rose because God chose him for a special mission. So by comparison, the rest were compromising fools against this quartet of buddies. They were the standard. They should have been the average, but gained a much higher share of God’s authority because the rest were slackers. They saw with Messianic eyes what was just and unjust according to the Creator’s sense of justice. They got results because they were able to find the intersection between Nebuchadnezzar’s wishes and God’s divine provision. They didn’t waste time complaining about having to serve a pagan emperor, but found a way to negotiate the bureaucracy in favor of God’s interests.

While there may well have been a measure of special favor, God explicitly says most of what we see in the miraculous is entirely within reach of all the rest of us. You want some of this? Embrace God’s revelation. Harmonize your mind and soul with the essence of cosmic moral justice, God’s own character, and things will change. Miracles don’t come as some special favor for those who earn the rights, as if God just starts giving them everything they want. They get their wanting fixed on His character and all that other stuff is just the natural result — natural in the sense that it’s what God does in the first place. It’s what He has been doing all along.

That’s moral mechanics.

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Open Source Lapboard

Posted on October 1, 2014 by ehurst

Lapboard1

Lapboard2

So far as I am concerned, this design is public domain. That’s because the objective of this exercise is not the specific construction, nor the design, but the process of designing. I’ve built a couple of these and everybody loves them. The other one has metal stringers on top, made from those slotted wall-mount shelf brackets (essentially a metal “C” rail with various holes and slots cut into it). I applied duct tape to the rails to prevent scratching anything. Wooden rails as depicted here remove the need for that.

Here’s what I was thinking: It has to sit stable in my lap, fit between the arms of the office chair, yet be wide enough at the knees for a relaxed posture. It needs to keep the heat of laptop away from my body, and room to breath is a good thing. Not too heavy would be nice, but the surfaces have to be smooth to the touch and not catch on things.

So you can see the planks are a decent grade of plywood, which is simply a matter of what I had on hand. Thicker would be a bit much to handle, but if you have lighter material that you don’t mind in your lap, use what makes you happy. The near plank is narrow enough to fit between chair arms, while the far plank allows my to relax my legs.

To smooth the edges, I took the wood out to a concrete sidewalk and dragged the pieces across the surface under pressure so that the concrete sanded down the edges. If you are using slender wood stringers, I recommend you pre-drill the screw holes to prevent splitting. I also glued them down to create a solid feel. The whole thing was measured by holding the pieces of wood in place where I intended to use them. The placement of the stringers was a matter of matching more-or-less the width of the laptop in question.

You can paint it, coat it with other materials, use whatever types of fastening suits you. The trick in stuff like this is having a good feel for what a piece of material can and cannot do, and being aware of how things can go wrong if you don’t prevent trouble.

Oh, and if you really need a mousepad on one side, I recommend you learn how to cut and fold corrugated cardboard. The brown side is perfect for most optical pointers. I made one that simply fit snugly on the extended end of the outer plank. It extended it out and toward me a bit larger than the end of the plank. A resulting 4″ square should do. Most mobile pointers are more accelerated than desktop models, so it takes less space to operate. I folded the cardboard around the back edge, then brought it up around the plank and folded to meet the extended underside on the edge closest to me. Then I stapled it down so that it was solid. Adding one more layer of cardboard on top hid the staples and added some much needed stiffness. It’s basically a rectangular hollow tube of cardboard with a stiff top.

Enjoy!

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Otherworldly Messiah

Posted on September 30, 2014 by ehurst

I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So the life I now live in the body, I live because of the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20 NET)

The context is Paul describing how he convinced Peter to cease clinging to his Jewish instincts. That is, Peter was so highly conditioned by the corrupted Hellenized Pharisaism of his day that he struggled to shed the false view of God. Peter still suffered that aversion to mixing with Gentile Christians. It was not what Moses taught, so the emphasis here is on the Talmudic “Law” of men. In that sense, it is not possible to please God by simple ritual observance. Jesus reinforced Moses, but dismissed the Talmud and all it represented.

Paul’s contention here does not negate the message of Moses. The Gentile Christians under the New Covenant in Christ’s Blood were, in effect, more truly Israel than Peter had been before his conversion to following Jesus. The issue was Peter’s lifelong conditioning at the hands of men who had drifted far, far away from God’s revelation. In answering this problem, Paul states a fundamental principle — quoted above — that travels well outside of the immediate context.

It’s not that Paul ceases to be Paul, but that he has become the Paul that God intended he should be. He is not dissolved into some mystical union, as some would caricature Christian Mysticism, but that he dissolved his broken and fallen humanity in the Blood. If Christ lives in you, then your existence is dominated by a driving commitment to please the Creator. You forfeit your previous human allegiances, concerns and needs, and move into a different level of awareness. You have nothing to fear from all this sacrifice, because One has gone before to open the path with His own sacrifice.

The hardest thing to hammer home to Western Christians is that your children and your dreams of domestic future were all dissolved in the Blood, too. You cannot tacitly demand by instinctive reasoning that God meet your expectations. Yet what we see all day long spewing from the mouths and keyboards of supposed Christians is that God would not dare transgress their Anglo-Saxon cultural mythology. You can get them to disparage that “it’s for the children” type of Nanny-State shaming language, but even the most vociferously “conservative” Christians still act on that very same value system. And that value system is uniquely Anglo-Saxon, totally foreign to the Hebrew Scriptures.

When you assume God cannot ask you to sacrifice your children on the Cross, you blaspheme. When you assume some predetermined channel of allowable outcomes, such that you feel compelled to engage in politics and all the human ugliness of fear and war, you surrender to Satan’s realm and his foul power.

It’s not that any particular choice in front of you is inherently evil in God’s eyes, but that any choice outside His revelation is evil because it’s outside. Whatever it is you might want to imagine about the lineage in our society, it’s the same lying spirit that compelled the Talmud of Jesus’ day (and all of Judaism since then) and drives us to pull away from the mystical life and engage in human politics.

I do not fear political outcomes. I have no need to dirty my hands in any part of that mess, trying to steer it in some preferred direction. I cannot, because God is in control in the first place. You may not like the outcomes, but it’s largely because you do not understand the Ancient Hebrew way of thinking that God prescribed for those who serve Him.

Our nation is not under any covenant offered by God because it rejects them all. Therefore, there is no particle of what see in US law and politics that is blessed in any particular way. (There is a large lore of mythology that our nation was founded on a call from God, but it was formed by people who worshiped an Anglo-Saxon perversion of God.) Every bit of our national politics is outside of His revelation; some of it vociferously rejects His ways. Therefore, our proper understanding is that American political and social affairs are entirely random, in the sense that every thread of it is steered by Satan. While it’s possible that you can detect elements of the bigger picture that seem to align with God’s Word, it’s totally an accident — the essence remains utterly damned. To imagine you can make it better by direct involvement is a delusion from Satan.

And our Lord tells Satan what he can and cannot do with all this power he exerts in American political and social life. God is the ultimate Master of what you see happening. We who follow Christ consciously choose to obey His calling within this chaotic context. If, in the process of our obedience, something in that random ebb and flow of human behavior threatens our human sense of shalom, it cannot justify trying to engage the system. We have no expectation of God sponsoring and empowering a political-social agenda anywhere on the chart. You have from God your calling in faithful commitment to do what He gives you power to do, but He does not give you power to mend or affect the system in any way. That doesn’t mean you don’t interact, as if you could cut yourself off from the reach of human laws and politics. It means you don’t take seriously the claims of the system and don’t operate within those lies.

Instead, you face the system as a resident alien, a citizen and agent of Heaven. You cannot serve two masters. You cannot pretend your citizenship on earth has any meaning when you are called to follow Christ. If you do not understand the inherent conflict between the two, you are morally blind. You have set yourself up for a whole raft of “blessings” from Satan. The Devil owns human politics because our Father has granted it to him. Remember what Satan told Jesus on that high mountain during the Wilderness Temptations? It wasn’t a lie and Jesus didn’t dispute Satan’s authority to make the offer of human political dominion. Jesus opted for a higher allegiance and tossed aside the political Messianic Expectations of the Hellenized and worldly Jewish scholars. Jesus was determined to be an otherworldly Messiah.

If your focus isn’t otherworldly, then you don’t have a Messiah.

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