EH&D 11

Posted on August 6, 2014 by ehurst

(This is a serialization of the draft for my book, Expectations, Hopes and Dreams. This is the final chapter.)

The Mission

When your expectations are consistent with God’s intentions, your hopes and dreams will rest in His glory.

A stated purpose behind the Covenant of Moses was bringing revelation to the rest of the world. God chose one nation and granted them an accurate edition of Scripture narrative up to that point, expressed within the context of their time and place. They had a mission to live in such a way that would draw attention to the glory of God. All the promises were conditioned upon faithful obedience to the Law. It didn’t take them long to forget that mission, to twist it into some obscene privilege over all the rest of humanity. Instead of compassion for the nations, they despised Gentiles. They obscured His glory by trying to consume it upon themselves. They were pointedly hostile to that mission by the time Jesus came to offer them one last chance to get back on course.

We can use the language of living for God’s glory, but that lends itself too easily to a pervasive mythology still engulfing us today. Rather, let us carefully define that mission of seeking to increase His glory as largely answered by obeying the moral character revealed in His Law Covenants. Let us then filter our understanding of those covenants through the teachings of His Son.

Doing so will almost surely require that we consciously disassociate with mainstream organized Christianity. Need I state it bluntly? Early Christianity was by the Second Century largely hijacked by Judaizers, those Jewish rabbis determined to bring Christians back into slavery to the Hellenized Jewish political religion. The Pharisaism of Jesus’ day is the essence of what Judaism is today. Zionism is little more than a secularized expression of all that. Particularly in the West, almost the whole of organized Christian religion remains captive to this political agenda through various different threads of belief. Those who claim to reject it nonetheless use exactly the same political and social formulas as the Zionists, playing into their hands.

Simply breaking away from the more overt Zionist influences is not enough. We have to go a lot farther, back to Jesus and His revival of Hebrew mysticism. It is that ancient intellectual approach that informed His teachings, and almost all of it was a restoration of what the Laws of God were supposed to mean. If we keep reading our Western context back into the Bible, we cannot hope to break free and actually follow Jesus. To the degree we retain a Western orientation, so much are we actually anti-Christian.

Correcting this is a tall order. Even if you read all the other books I’ve written and chased down all the material to which they refer, you could still miss something critical. Worse, we remain stuck in this hellish nightmare world of deception.

We cannot simply blame Jews or Judaism. Deception is inherent in our fallen nature. However you want to explain it, the narrative of Eden serves to warn us that our instinct for placing human reason on the throne of life is a rejection of God and truth. God gave us the intellect to serve as steward, or executive, not as legislator and judge. An executive carries out — executes — the program of the owners, seeking the best way to preserve their interest. Somehow we as an entire race of beings prefer to invest our minds with the authority to decide what that interest is and ought to be. We are rejecting God’s ownership, and doing our best to avoid His calling us to account for bad stewardship of lives granted by His hand.

But His truth cuts its own path through our souls, blazing new trails. Objective truth is a myth, a lie in itself. While we use words like “true” to characterize a lot of things, strictly speaking truth is not merely consistent with objective facts. Truth is moral accuracy, consistent with the revelation of God’s character.

Thus, truth must remain ever invisible to those who substitute any other meaning for “truth.” The only way we can understand this world after the Fall is to seek His revelation. The revelation includes the very intellectual assumptions behind it, so if you don’t approach Scripture from a Hebrew mystical point of view, you can’t understand revelation. Hebrew mysticism is how we are wired. It’s all part of the same package. The various Law Covenants were contextual expressions of revelation. Jesus clarified them all in part by insisting on dragging the whole discussion back where it belonged under Hebrew mystical thought. Who can forget Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemas about spiritual birth?

Thus, we don’t merely live the Laws, but we become the Laws. We incorporate that revelation into our own characters in a lifelong study that peels away the layers of crap that don’t belong. Start with the conscience you have; obey it as scrupulously as you can. Pray for the strength of commitment to do the best you know. At the same time, expect to find that, as you explore the farther reaches of commitment, your understanding will change. Your conscience is just an expression of your current level of moral understanding.

We all stand in different places along our own individual path of obedience. We should hardly be surprised when particulars vary. Uniformity is another of those big Western lies. All we need to really understand about a brother or sister in faith is how closely we can work with them at any given point in time. That we must expect to find others who share the mission goes without saying.

Our biggest problem right now is that the approach outlined here will isolate us from the rest of the world. Those willing and able to handle this viewpoint will be thinly scattered across the face of humanity right now. Still, you are hardly alone. We are restoring the truth, an alternative world that almost disappeared not so long ago. Western Civilization very nearly succeeded in wiping away the truth. But at the zenith of its power, the West is dying, rotting from the inside. This moral black hole is collapsing upon itself. What we build today with a fresh moral understanding of revelation will surely not replace it, but simply resurge in the face of whatever it is God allows to rise up after the West. Our alternative world has always been there, and will remain after this world is gone.

So it lies with us to remember this time of moral battle. We are to study and abstract the lessons we learn in this time and be ready to speak them to another false world coming later. If you know where to look, you can see what’s on the horizon. Yet none of that matters; it’s God’s problem. He has pointedly warned us we are unlikely to get much advance notice on the details of His plans for human politics. What He did give us was some general warnings on how to keep from getting lost in such minutiae. He has long warned that nature will erupt in upheavals at least as bad as the human catastrophes because humanity continues rejecting His revelation, the revelation that explains how Creation operates.

We expect things to get worse before they get better. We expect the insanity of human flight from the Flaming Sword of Eden to continue. We must turn back to that entrance of Eden. Our hopes and dreams are that just a few can respond to our moral message and follow us there. Don’t presume to choose who should respond; just live what you can grasp and leave the results in divine hands. That’s all it really requires to light the fires of divine glory. Despite appearances here in the Shadowlands, we actually belong to an Invisible Domain in another realm entirely. We see the glory of His moral truth shining through the shadows.

Our expectations, hopes and dreams are aligned with God’s character, rooted in His Realm.

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on EH&D 11

EH&D 10

Posted on August 5, 2014 by ehurst

(This is a serialization of the draft for my book, Expectations, Hopes and Dreams. In the book, this chapter will precede the one I posted yesterday.)

Global Deception

What follows was considered common knowledge a century ago, but is now regarded as esoteric. Most of the literature has been suppressed, but is nonetheless available if you know where to look.

We note that “Christianity” as a word means many things to many different people. It is natural for our minds to give words different shades of meaning and importance in different contexts, so it should come as no surprise that the word “Christian” tends to wander all over the map of human consideration. A great many things are given that label that have little or nothing to do with Christ.

The same can be said of other religious words and concepts. Familiarity with non-Christian belief varies widely, and some of it is downright esoteric. Your average Westerner knows little of exotic religions. So it’s on a much smaller scale that the word “Kabbalah” suffers highly varied meanings as well as varied spellings. One need not embrace any part of it to recognize how it is used with such flexibility, and how the meaning behind the word can seep into all sorts of little corners, flavoring the more conscious proceedings.

The term itself arises from Orthodox Judaism. Just a few moments with any good Internet search engine will prove that. There are a handful of canonical writings on the Kabbalah considered Scripture by a wide selection of Orthodox Jews, not to mention other branches of Jewish religion, along with a whole range of Gentile religion and philosophy. Indeed, Talmudic scholars will assert among themselves that the Talmud is Kabbalistic in itself. Complicating things is that Kabbalistic writing itself teaches that non-initiates are not permitted an honest explanation. Thus, a great many people who claim no interest in it are actually strong practitioners. Part of the debate is that insiders use the terms differently, and that outsiders could not possibly divine the meaning. There are conflicting editions of Kabbalistic literature. Further, there are different editions of the Talmud itself in English, with widely advertised versions that are highly edited to remove some embarrassing material included in the more privately published versions.

This could be seen as a perversion of what Jesus meant when He explained the hows and whys of parable and parabolic language. He taught that most of humanity is spiritually dead, in the sense that they are unable to process things above mere intellect and reason. Without any vivid connection to the Spirit Realm, humans are incapable of understanding the non-literal meaning of parables. A certain amount of literary analysis can shed some light on parabolic language, but it cannot possibly capture the broader moral implications. Inherent in the Ancient Near Eastern approach to human knowledge and action is that divine moral law is invisible to mere human talent. We can’t figure out God’s moral character from our human capabilities; it can only be revealed. Revelation itself cannot be expressed in clinical terms because moral truth is beyond human language. The human spirit must be active as a higher faculty to handle this. Only by long study and contemplation in a frame of reference generally long forgotten, or by some divine miracle, can the human spirit be awakened.

It’s not as if Jesus wanted to hide the truth, but that the truth was simply not available without that divine moral spark. We are told in Scripture to assume that God alone can change a heart, but in our interactions with others, we operate on the assumption that they have chosen to exclude themselves. However much any man might grasp without an a priori submission to the demands of the moral truth, a spiritually dead understanding would only work to corrupt him. If you do not first strike your own heart with the flaming sword of revelation, it can serve in your hands only as evil and destructive.

In this sense, the Kabbalah could be described as just an expression of human moral darkness pretending to understand divine moral truth. Could we fully examine the philosophical drift of the Hebrew people over the centuries from the highly educated Moses, through Solomon, and then the sojourn through the Babylonian and Persian Empires, it would be easy to understand the full depth of loss when the intelligentsia finally surrendered to the siren song of Hellenism. Kabbalism is the natural long-term result of perverting the ancient Hebrew mysticism with Hellenistic literalism.

That is, Kabbalah as it is manifested within Zionism is a natural result of influences quite contrary to the revelation on Mount Sinai, because that divine encounter included all the intellectual background that gave it meaning. In order to justify that radical departure, there is a thread of Judaism that insists Moses and/or other actors in his ministry released a verbal covenant code that was the real, secret truth of things. The current Talmud is the collated efforts to push the Hellenistic corruption of Moses yet farther in the same direction. The Kabbalah arose from the very mainstream core of Talmudic studies. Keep in mind here that we aren’t concerned with the actual teachings of Kabbalah, but rather the pervasive effect they have on Zionism.

We are not interested in exploring the various streams of Zionist thought, but the broader wash of influence on what you and I face these days. Kabbalism rests partly on the idea that words can have power on their own. This is consistent with the Kabbalistic characterization of God as just a more powerful Jewish rabbi who goes along with some of their ideas and assertions because they can so very clever. They can legalistically catch God in His choice of words. Whether this is meant as a bit of parable in itself is not the point, but that rather secretive writings indicate that outsiders must not be permitted to know about this stuff. Only the Chosen know how to use it rightly. When the writings indicate practitioners playing sharp this way with God and with each other, no one should be surprised that they are willing to play head games with the rest of humanity.

Nor should we be surprised that such manipulative gaming then flavors a great many other political agendas that are not at all specifically connected to Judaism or the Kabbalah. Such influences need not be entirely conscious. While it may well be characteristic of Zionism in particular, you can find it flavoring the behavior of some Islamic groups and any number of Western political organizations. It appears to work for them.

It’s not that deception was invented by Kabbalistic Orthodox Jews, but that a particular form of deception has become perfected under their influence, whether or not they intended such an influence. The core idea is that reality is subject to their whims in a sense hardly different from pagan magic. Some part of them realizes that reality has never been more than a matter of perception in the first place, so they take advantage of this by projecting one narrative internally and another for public consumption.

This is precisely the ugliness that shows up in some portions of the Civil Rights movement today. There is a collection of in-group words others are not permitted to use. Outsiders who use such words face the accusation of racism. But such assertions are simply racism by specially authorized parties. Somehow it turns out that racism by one group is always wrong, but others are openly encouraged to use it for revenge. It contributes to a class of Perpetually Aggrieved to whom we cannot possibly repay some mythical debt. Yet it seems a form of controlled opposition that plays into their hands when that opposing side insists racism had nothing to do with the current problems. The sane answer is to recognize that racism is the ugly side of our hard-wired need for living in a tribal society.

One of the standing jokes by Jewish insiders is based on the teaching not often noised among Gentiles that Jews consider themselves the only humans on the planet, while all Gentiles are, at best, animals. It is our duty to their God that we avidly pursue any and every Jew, begging to be made their slaves so that we can justify continuing to live. The joke is that if we fail to pursue that duty with full ardor and alacrity, we are then guilty of persecuting Jews. In other words, equal treatment is evil antisemitism because Jews are supposed to be ruling all humanity.

You can easily see this in the preposterous claims of persecution by certain Zionist apologists. This is little more than the False Messianic Expectations of the Jews in Jesus’ day. A critical element in their disputes with Him was that they were already utterly convinced the Messiah would crown them all as kings of humanity, with every Gentile begging to be enslaved to a Jew, while gleefully dragging all the wealth of the world behind them as the price to purchase the privilege of such slavery. This was openly taught in the synagogues of Jesus’ day, and you can catch echoes of it among some rabbinical circles today.

We’d be complete fools to suggest that this is how all Jews believe. Don’t sling the labels around that way. If God’s Chosen reject the mission of the Covenant, we should hardly be surprised that the Devil finds plenty to keep them busy. They didn’t simply cease to exist, but that momentum was harnessed for alternative purposes. This is not about picking on Jews, since plenty of others would be glad to fill their shoes. Nor is it hatred for them or anyone else, but wisely recognizing what’s behind the propaganda labels.

Yes, it’s personal in that individuals choose, but we can characterize the broad agreements in what they have chosen. God has obviously chosen to permit all this, and we’d be fools to fight His inscrutable plans. Nations can choose to obey Him according to the appropriate covenant — Moses for them; Noah for the rest of us. That they reject it does not automatically render them useless in the bigger scale of God’s plans, but guarantees a lot of unnecessary suffering because no one is ready for what God has decreed. God is the Prime Mover and humanity must adjust to His requirements; only those who embrace His revelation can hope for adjustments in our human destiny. There is no righteous nation on the scene. The sorrows we see in our world today reflect the moral results of every nation rejecting God’s Laws for humanity, both individually and as larger political entities.

So we need to see this historical trend as an influence in Zionist politics, and as a pervasive background in all of Western political agendas. When we resist the preposterous privileges these people demand, we should expect to see the Holocaust waved in our faces again with dark echoes of Hitler, swastikas, Nazism and everything that goes with it. I seriously doubt anyone really knows the whole story, so don’t put much trust in any historical accounts. Whatever the facts behind such imagery, it’s far more important to see how it is used. What really matters is that humanity at large cannot ever possibly settle this mythical debt. Somehow we ordinary folks will forever deserve any abuse they hand us and should count ourselves lucky we are permitted to keep paying.

Recognize this. Be aware that we can scarcely discuss it without vast explosions of passionate denunciations as evil. Most of the various powers and authorities, government and private, have been captured by this global deception. It has been forced upon most agencies affecting the human race as the official orthodoxy, even when not clearly stated. Be surprised only when those with power don’t hammer you for the mere mention of this deception.

You can opt out of this big lie. At the least, you should take responsibility for writing your own sane narrative. But along with that, we see points along our path through this life when we can call attention to this big deception as a lie. Be sure you’ll have to discern as best you can how to exercise your option to withdraw while clinging to the mission of glorifying God.

(Readers: I’m especially interested in feedback if any of this seems confusing.)

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

EH&D 9

Posted on August 4, 2014 by ehurst

(This is a serialization of the draft for my book, Expectations, Hopes and Dreams.)

Action

If the rich and powerful are aliens to the common folks, we who are spiritual are even more alien to all of them together.

Nothing I’ve written precludes taking a job with an activist organization, political party, government agency or even wearing a military uniform. The primary difference between you and your coworkers will be the significance you place on your job. Even if they are cynical and utterly mercenary, as a great many will turn out to be in some degree and on some level, you will likely be the only one with a full commitment outside this world entirely. To the degree there may be others like you, encounters will be rare, if recognized at all.

No adventure will be too risky. The only question is what’s appropriate for your mission, what fits in your narrative. Privation is little more than an annoyance, seldom worthy of comment. You’ll have some measure of immunity against attacks through the three basic human appetites, if only because you know what to expect. Instead, you’ll focus more energy on realistic and morally just mitigation. You’ll stop wishing for what you cannot have and seek joy and contentment in what is available.

Your commitment to moral purity will make you easily one of the most conscientious workers. You won’t have to fight for any secret agendas of your own, because yours are invested in Heaven. By the same token, you won’t have trouble honestly objecting to things you simply cannot do. You won’t have much trouble paying the price for your objections. You’ll remain serene in the face of all sorts of passionate claims on your loyalty, because your cynicism expects it, but your hopes and dreams will be far, far away from theirs. You’ll be out of reach of their compelling narratives. They will probably never understand you, though you will surely understand them well enough.

You won’t panic when things don’t go as planned. Your narrative is written from an entirely different angle. No human perfidy will surprise you; no depravity will shake your confidence in the mission that calls you. No grand evil scheme of oppression is unexpected. When one authority or another, including the government under which you live, threatens some new terror and oppression, your only question is where in this will you find the glory of God. That is, you’ll pray to know how can you exploit things to maintain your mission and message that this life isn’t worth much. “Okay, Lord; now what?”

Take this far enough and nothing in your personal life will shake you from your mission. It affects your choices in whom you bond with, and how you bond. Your cynicism won’t be one of doubting their sincerity, but a realistic expectation of what they can deliver. If you can learn that cynicism about yourself, you are less surprised when those closest to you fail in their promises. It’s not that you won’t love fully and open yourself in the vulnerability that love demands, but you’ll still have a reserve somewhere that functions when love has been stabbed through the heart. Your trust mechanism will be inoculated against a fatal response. If you follow Christ, no human can sit on His throne in your soul.

Your panic mode will wither. That autonomic fight-or-flight will find poor linkage to your behavior, nothing to sustain it very long.

The biggest question for us is not what can we know, what’s real or what’s truth versus falsehood in terms of intellectual content. The facts are fungible for us, but truth and falsehood are a matter of moral commitment.

Of all the words important to us, the word “faith” has been more thoroughly hijacked than most. In biblical terms, faith is the faculty for seeing our world in terms of divine moral implications. It’s our capacity to perceive and obey the Spirit of God. Our biggest single weakness is the crippling of that faculty through confusion with any other source of input. A strong sentimental attachment can easily drown out the voice of God’s Spirit. So can a strong rational frame of reference, a lifetime of education, and any number of other influences from mere human sources can be used to subvert the power of genuine faith. None of those things are inherently evil, yet all of them can cripple genuine faith when we somehow elevate them to the place of faith, or attempt to make faith dependent on them, or even consistent with them.

Commitment to Christ does not necessarily equate with commitment to your church, your marriage, your children or your career. If He is not Lord over them, then He is not Lord. If you make no room for following Him out of those things, never mind whether such is likely, you aren’t following Him. Something else is your god. If you could completely conquer all humanity, discover all the mechanisms to the physical universe, opening the doors to colonization and conquest of distant galaxies, it would mean nothing if the collected bits and pieces of your humanity have not been humbly laid at the foot of the Cross. God still plans to completely replace the universe we know, so it’s not worth any concern. The only battle of significance is in your own soul.

Having won that battle, you cannot possibly win it for others. When you nail your own human self to the Cross, it’s all you can do to keep it there. The self does not die easily and keeps trying to come off that Cross. All the decisions made by all other humans, as far as you are concerned, rest fully in the hands of God. Nothing you do here can alter a thing outside your own soul. The most important concerns in your life are now rooted in Heaven. In this world we are left with only symbols and parables to talk about the Spirit Realm because nothing there can be delineated with mere words, nor understood with any native human faculty.

If you can see it, touch it or give it a name, if in any way it is rooted in our realm of existence here below, it does not warrant your expectations, hopes and dreams.

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on EH&D 9

EH&D 8

Posted on August 3, 2014 by ehurst

(This is a serialization of the draft for my book, Expectations, Hopes and Dreams.)

Justice

Western Civilization is, so far, the pinnacle achievement of fallen human nature. It has become a moral black hole imploding upon its own materialism. This world cannot get better, only worse.

A critical element in what Jesus taught was that finding the proper exit from this world requires learning how God meant for us to live while here. Sure, you can just take your own life, but His teaching excluded that option. It was excluded by the broader general requirement of embracing His Father’s moral frame of reference.

The various Law Covenants in the Bible are not the definition of divine morality, but expressions of it. That is the Hebrew mystical understanding. Those who understood God best said things like, “Do you not realize that Jehovah wants your personal loyalty to Him, not some legalistic pursuit of ritual law?” The Prophet Samuel said as much to King Saul (1 Samuel 15:22), and it was inherent in all of the Hebrew Scripture. No surprise, then, that it characterizes the teaching of Christ. The purpose of the whole code of law was to change us individually, not the world in which we live. The Law presumed a tribal society as a fundamental requirement for dealing most effectively with those who don’t change.

The New Testament goes on in many places bluntly saying Christ saves us out of this world for a life in the Spirit Realm. We are bluntly warned against attachment to this world. A primary expression of that reorientation is operating according to something in this world that remains invisible to those who lack such an orientation. We join an invisible tribe. The structure of the tribe is the moral fabric that controls how God designed things to run. Human reason cannot possibly arrive at that understanding without first absorbing the message inherent in revelation. Once properly trained, the mind can then factor in the overwhelming power of divine moral character in shaping both expectations and results.

The world is awash in all sorts of substitutes. Foremost in the mythology of Western people is a wide variation of moral ideas arising from the Anglo-Saxons specifically, but from the various other German tribes generally as a whole. Such defines the whole of Western social morals, however varied they may seem. They are all varied expressions of the same underlying worldview. It’s a worldview radically different from that of Christ. Somewhere along the way, organized Christianity was hijacked by that pagan morality so that almost everyone today claiming to follow Christ is utterly certain the Lord’s morals were little different from the Anglo-Saxon. They persist in reading those morals back into the Bible, and can turn combative when challenged on it.

Sanity requires we bail out of that. It does require a bit of study to learn the differences (one of my longest books barely introduces it), but the morals of Christ are within reach. One of the most fundamental differences, as already noted, is rejecting the mythology of objectivity. We can share a common academic understanding of a genuine Hebrew moral worldview, but that worldview presumes a personal commitment that inevitably results in some human variation. In case you weren’t paying attention, this is precisely contrary to the viewpoint of Judean government and social leadership in Jesus’ day. They had codified and objectified God to the point it was no longer Him. They had drifted into an idolatry of some imaginary deity that responded to their logical demands. In cultural and intellectual terms, they weren’t even Hebrew any more. Judaism simply continues along that same path.

One of the primary demands on us today is that we properly evaluate the narrative of modern Israel and Judaism and Jews. Whatever those words mean today, it’s not at all a proper expression of what’s in the Bible. It’s bad enough those terms are used as weapons to compel all sorts of false EH&D, but none of the current meanings are a valid reflection of what Jesus or the Hebrew prophets before Him taught. If we return to the ancient Hebrew understanding of revelation as God gave it, we are forced to reject the claims of modern Jews on just about everything to do with any meaning of the label “Jew.” We cannot allow anyone to use that word, or related terms, to make claims on our EH&D.

Rather, all that noise is just a collection of narratives, an expression of the individual EH&D of each person making the noise. It’s neither lie nor truth, just noise, just people. Nothing in this world can demand your ultimate loyalty, and you need not invest your EH&D in any agenda claimed by anyone’s narrative. Sanity demands you make every effort to disentangle yourself from their narrative claims and put some distance between yourself and the people involved. God’s moral character demands you deflate their significance in your narrative.

There is no objectively just answer to Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians. Recognizing that such slaughter is unjust does not justify the Palestinian cause. Do not accept the false dichotomy common to Western reasoning. There are multiple moral questions on multiple levels; context is everything. The same can be said of every act of warfare transpiring in every part of the world today. You as an individual can offer a narrative of what you might do if given any measure of leverage over things, but you dare not pretend your answer is God’s answer for everyone else. Rather, you desire to make your answer as close to God’s moral character as is possible for you at any given point in time. Your answer cannot possibly bind any other human who does not voluntarily embrace your narrative, who does not voluntarily enter your domain.

Divine justice is not in the particulars, but in the broader orientation that says nothing in this world is worth your ultimate allegiance, not even your own continued existence.

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on EH&D 8

Psalm 9

Posted on August 2, 2014 by ehurst

This psalm appears to have originally been published as the first half and Psalm 10 as the second half. Together the two form a Hebrew acrostic, each verse beginning with one of the 22 Hebrew letters in alphabetic order. At some point, someone decided that it was two different songs. This part addresses external enemies, while Psalm 10 concerns domestic ones. Still, most Bibles in English have them separated.

As usual, David skillfully keeps things on topic and follows a strong logical thread of development. He begins by announcing that he cannot avoid worshiping his Lord. Were he not already required to do so by custom and specific command, David could hardly remain silent for his own enthusiasm. How could you keep something like this to yourself?

Noting that God is the ultimate supreme authority in the universe, David remarks how God never fails to defend him. Never mind what David might do; God takes it personally when folks oppose His anointed king. It was more than mere personal favor, but God revealing His divine justice. We already know David was humble before Jehovah, so it’s not a question of arrogance toward the morally defiled Gentile kingdoms around him. David wanted nothing more than what God promised, so any force opposing those promises was already on the wrong side of things. David didn’t set out the harm anyone, but stoutly defended what God had granted Israel.

So if they refused to bow before God, David had no choice but to fight. He would fight until they surrendered or there was no one left to fight. His victories would not be possible without God’s backing. Whatever God does is justice by definition. It stands to reason that those who turn to Him in trust would outlast all opposition in this world. Let them be careful to give God proper credit in full view of those nations. Let them further declare God’s generous offer that they, too, can get in on this covenant.

David rejoices with those who have turned to God in full faith and commitment. His promises never fail. David quotes their cry for mercy, and notes that it rightly includes the commitment to keep on giving God glory for their safety. That witness starts in the Gates of Jerusalem, but would naturally spread throughout the human race.

Sadly,there will always be those who reject that message. They’ll dream up various ways to resist, but will perish from their own devices. What they threaten will fall back on them. In their arrogance, they’ll be forgotten, buried in the dust of history. While they may persist long enough to make life miserable for the righteous, God graciously notices their sorrow and wisely arranges for oppression to end when the time is right.

David ends by cheering God on, thoroughly enjoying the chance to watch God’s wrath and glory manifest in human affairs.

Posted in bible | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Psalm 9

EH&D 7

Posted on August 2, 2014 by ehurst

(This is a serialization of the draft for my book, Expectations, Hopes and Dreams.)

False Activism

There is a sense in which all activism is inherently false. That’s because the concept of democracy is one of the most harmful mythologies of all. It presumes objectivity is possible, that humans can be more or less rational, and that systems of organization can restrict human venality. Those are just the most obvious problems with it.

As noted previously, you cannot separate the person from the position. Human government is people wielding power over others. Volition is required; it is the nature of the thing itself. It requires volition for one to exercise authority and volition to accept authority. There are inducements to that volition, but in the end, if people consciously refused to obey, there would be no government. There are several factors in favor of those who assume power, not least being our social nature, too often expressed as herd instinct.

Herd instinct can be enhanced by the fear of death. Short of actual physical expiry, most people dislike physical discomfort, boredom and shame. Those three are the backside of the three things that motivate virtually all human behavior: fleshly satisfactions, entertainment and a sense of significance. These three can be combined in all sorts of ways, but you can boil down almost all human aspirations to variations on those three. They are our primary appetites and our primary weaknesses. Anyone seeking to rule us has to enter through these gateways, and it becomes much easier when we tend to adapt to the human context, particularly in terms of how we can be influenced.

We are wired to seek only enough power to satisfy those three basic appetites, though that seeking is highly conditioned by the context. We don’t normally long for something that we haven’t experienced or can’t imagine. While power itself may feed our sense of significance and enable entertainment and creature comforts, it’s a lot of work in reality and can be quite frustrating to those who aren’t suffering serious delusions. It doesn’t take too much valid human experience to teach us that holding authority is a lot more work than we really want, so we wisely avoid it.

This, of course, assumes we are born into a society that answers to our genuine human condition. We are wired to live in a tribal society. Whatever flaws there might be with that, everything else is far worse. The very concept of the modern secular state requires a vast layer of delusion in which the population as a whole is drowned. Everything in our human nature fights it except the delusional power of reason. Feed the mind enough bullshit and your reason can be led to all sorts of delusions. Thus, if you convince everyone that this universe and our life in it is all we have, fear becomes a ubiquitous factor in all reasoning. It makes us ripe for manipulation through the three basic appetites.

This is what lies behind the power of the secular state and all its abuses. It causes us to imagine we can and must design a particular form of government based on the pretense of democratic assumptions. We quickly discover that democratic power must of necessity be condensed into few hands or nothing will ever move. The degree and pace of movement varies widely with all sorts of factors, but introduce any sense of emergency and everyone surrenders far more authority than could possibly do them good. As always, a certain handful of people will recognize, either instinctively or consciously, that this is a rich opportunity to reduce their liabilities while assuming vast powers. If the folks in power are selected totally at random, you will eventually have a reasonable selection of decent folks who would rather not actually rule. Only a few are likely to be ogres. Any other system of selection guarantees a predominance of those who lust for genuine godlike dominance.

Activism arises from the delusion that the victims of this dominance can do something to fix the situation. Never once will you see them suggesting the sort of change radical enough to restore our natural tribal social structure; that’s excluded before the brain cells even start signaling each other. Rather, all activism presumes we must remain within the delusion that anything is better than tribal lifestyle, and that we are stuck in this universe with no hope of anything better elsewhere.

While we are at it: If you want to suggest that any part of Western Christianity holds a genuine conviction in favor of the afterlife, compare their stated belief against their actions. The entire organization and programming of activity assumes this realm of existence is far more than a mere shadowy prison. Instead, Western Christianity acts like things in this world can be truly critical and worthy of vast expenditure of time and resources for its own sake. Practitioners seem convinced it is absolutely necessary to adjust and perfect this world.

At any rate, activism requires a religious ardor of that sort. This is no different from any government demanding respect as semi-divine at least. Activists are offering a de facto alternative government, a form of rebellion seeking to change or replace the current government. They offer a narrative that includes the delusion that we can push back and make the folks in government act differently, maybe even force them to think differently.

That delusion is by far the most pernicious and pervasive chain on humanity today. While there are many good and righteous reasons for choices that may resemble activism, what spoils it is the assumption of effectiveness and lack of broad cynicism. Don’t operate with the goal of changing the world, but of changing yourself only. Do what’s right in any give context because it is just, not because it seems effective. Instead, prepare for things to only get worse until the hand of God changes them in His way. Don’t presume on His divine agenda, as if it could possibly be understood on our level. He has warned repeatedly that this world is nasty and we should get used to it.

We are now at the point in the natural cycle of aggregate human behavior that most of the people in government are frankly hostile to any input from those they govern. We could go on at length describing the details of social psychology with all the whys and wherefores, but the fact remains that current governments in this world are dominated by an entirely different kind of people than the rest of us, a virtual alien race. For the most part, they pretend to be like us, and would love for us to believe they care. But if they cared, they would not operate as if keeping power is worth your blood. The same can be said for those at the top of private corporations. In our world, power and money inevitably pervert human nature because of how our mythology works.

So even if activism seems to have some effect, it will ever only be short lived. Some governments are more open about crushing dissent; others prefer to play head games. Some are sophisticated enough to expend considerable resources steering us in whatever direction they can by all sorts of manipulation. In many cases, they will steer their cattle in multiple conflicting directions just to keep them away from any possible effectiveness in taking away the advantages that the powerful hold.

That includes hijacking anything and everything, to include decent people who manage to find a way into the halls of power. If you can’t be hijacked, you cannot stay. The means and methods vary, but the results are the same. Jesus faced the same crap and knew better than to allow the rabble to push Him into that stupid game. He was not an activist and clearly avoided trying to fix this world. Instead, He pointed out how to exit this world, then provided a startling example of how to do it. Things have gotten considerably uglier since then.

Human politics is a delusion; activism is simply a standard feature of that delusion.

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Pertinence Attacks

Posted on August 1, 2014 by ehurst

Re: My book, Expectations, Hopes and Dreams currently serialized on this blog….

Yesterday I decided to see what would happen if I updated my resume [PDF] and submitted it in plain text form to Monster.com. It’s not that I am only joking about getting a job, but I wondered if this would supply any grist for the mill on my book.

Boy, did it!

Right off the bat I got two very fancy sales-pitch emails for sale executive positions. Notice what my resume says right at the top:

Personal Assistant/Courier/Driver/Bodyguard

No sales or accounting positions will be considered.

These messages started off with big, flattering words about having read my resume and finding it compatible with their offer. So it makes me wonder what other lies would they be willing to tell me. What kind of manipulation would they unleash to make me a slimy, lying salesman like them who takes money for nothing? No, I’m not interested in whatever they claim is the big salary and perks.

I’d rather be conscripted back into the military than work in such places.

Posted in sanity | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Pertinence Attacks

EH&D 6

Posted on August 1, 2014 by ehurst

(This is a serialization of the draft for my book, Expectations, Hopes and Dreams. Regular readers will recognize this as a rewrite of a previous post.)

Leverage

I mentioned previously the concept of recognizing the authority of others over us in varying degrees. The same concept applies to us in living out our own life narratives. We have to replace the shadows of Western mythology about authority with something more consistent with how we are actually wired.

Revelation teaches us that changing human behavior requires leverage. Any leverage we might have comes from God alone. God may permit humans to chase a lot of different approaches for gaining leverage, but His moral character restricts His servants to voluntary leverage that depends on His Spirit. It’s a question of dominion and boundaries authorized by God. If someone voluntarily enters your domain, you have only so much leverage as they surrender. We bear the burden of negotiating leverage and boundaries.

There are thresholds in the Spirit Realm not easily discerned by flesh. We are warned to keep in our mental awareness that there may come a time when we will be forced to defend our boundaries. There are no simple rules; this is one of the most difficult areas for the mind to grasp in God’s moral character.

What is not difficult to grasp is that the vast majority of what humans do stands in stark violation of God’s moral justice. If you follow any logic except that of the Spirit Realm, you cannot fail to offend God’s moral character. It’s not so much the particulars as the failure to consider the authority of revelation in the first place. If we embrace His revelation, the Spirit of God fills up the things we lack, and heals our injustice.

There remains for us a state of tension in this world. On one level we are to maintain a fierce loyalty to our Lord in all things, even as we recognize we have precious little moral leverage in a fallen world. We trust Him for the difference and seek what few opportunities we have to bring Him glory.

The Western obsession with “teaching them a lesson” is rooted in evil. The flesh imagines that it has leverage and can compel some “proper” behavior, even to the point of compelling “proper” thinking. That’s a demonic mythology. Your children are under your dominion by virtue of birth, a dominion steadily decreasing as they age; the rest of the world is on its own before God. Your only real authority from God is exclusion of those who refuse to cooperate with His calling and mission in your life.

How you exercise that mandate of exclusion is always subject to the vagaries of context. Your actual power to exclude may be highly constrained. You cannot demand that fallen souls understand your calling from God. There is a sense in which you cannot expect fallen souls to understand anything that matters. If you have a talent for explaining, use it. Pray and strive to have some kind of answer. Otherwise, be prepared to remain silent as a lamb before its shearers. The only people who can really understand much at all are those to whom God has granted some measure of enlightenment. You can speak only to what little they may have.

Nor are you required to succeed at every defense of your dominion. Rather, it is the attempt, the determination to please God, that matters most. It remains in His hands to enable any measure of success. Sometimes you know you have to grab the whip, as Jesus did in the Temple. Sometimes you seize your own Cross. The ultimate victory is leaving this life, not controlling events within it.

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

CentOS 7: Virtual Box VM

Posted on July 31, 2014 by ehurst

Folks, this is how it’s done.

Oracle may not be our favorite company, but this is one thing you will not want to miss: Oracle’s Virtual Box VM. It’s free.

You’ll find the user manual is quite in-depth. Here are the installation instructions. Keep a link to the manual itself in case you need some help on things. What follows is a quick-n-dirty HOWTO.

You will need to install the kernel-devel package and all the dependencies. You’ll also need the dkms from EPEL, so be sure to enable that respository. What dkms does is allow kernel modules to follow updates to newer kernels.

Download the correct version of Virtual Box; it will list CentOS 7 with a link to the RPM. You’ll need your root credentials to install using Yum on the CLI. What happens is that the package builds itself on your machine and creates several kernel modules. It will take a good long while as the system is quite busy in the background.

I got errors from SELinux about attempts by ldconfig to write to some directory. You’ll have them show up in little GUI popups and on the console after it’s installed you’ll see this:

Trying to register the VirtualBox kernel modules using DKMSldconfig: Can't create temporary cache file /etc/ld.so.cache~: Permission denied
ldconfig exited ungracefully
ldconfig: Can't create temporary cache file /etc/ld.so.cache~: Permission denied
ldconfig exited ungracefully
ldconfig: Can't create temporary cache file /etc/ld.so.cache~: Permission denied
ldconfig exited ungracefully

So far as I can tell, it has no effect on the outcomes, so just be aware that this represents how strongly SELinux protects you from unwanted changes to your system.

Also notice the message about adding your user account to the vboxusers group. While still logged in as root, simply edit the file /etc/group. Scroll down to the last item on the list, which should be vboxusers and simply add your user account name at the end of the line.

Launch from the main menu: System > Oracle VM Virtual Box. Upon first running the thing you’ll discover this is a very intelligent tool and much easier to use than Qemu.

You create the machine first and get it running before you install. I didn’t think 192MB was enough RAM for Windows XP. Depending on your system, you may not be able to give your VM multiple cores on the CPU. If you can’t, you’ll get errors about not having AMD-V enabled in the BIOS. My Win8 laptop was like that. However, I was able to link the machine to my own home folders right from the start; I selected the automount option and browsed to a Projects folder where I need to use MS Office. You really need to take your time and explore the various options in this manager window.

The display is considerably less laggy than Qemu. Once you install the Guest Additions, it becomes even less so. You can fix a lot of niggling issues like display, making your VM respond automatically to window resizing and such. Under the VM menu, see “Devices” and select the last item at the bottom to automatically mount the virtual ISO image and get those extra drivers so that everything can be smooth and unified in use.

A very handy feature is the row of icons across the lower right side of the window when the VM is running. You can connect and disconnect from the host USB, CD/DVD drives, etc. with ease. From the menu, you can elect to connect or disconnect things like the network connection. So you can, for example, keep your vulnerable XP VM from the Internet.

It’s pretty easy to export your VMs and reimport them on other machines running Virtual Box.

Posted in computers | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on CentOS 7: Virtual Box VM

EH&D 5

Posted on July 31, 2014 by ehurst

(This is a serialization of the draft for my book, Expectations, Hopes and Dreams.)

It’s Personal

Turn on the TV at the appointed time and you will see this talented, experienced, perhaps even charismatic newsreader offering you a dose of journalistic narrative.

These people have to eat, you know. Did you pay for this presentation to come into your presence? Maybe you bought the equipment for viewing, funded the electricity required to operate it, and maybe even a bit more for the transmission over a wire or satellite receiver. That newsreader gets none of that. Their pay comes from the journalistic enterprise that organizes this presentation, often as a subsidiary of some broadcast company.

Those companies in turn get their money from advertisers. But then, the whole thing is regulated to some degree, so there are more controls and inputs. Yet the newsreader pretends that he is merely offering a digest of significant events of the day that might affect you. Of course, on another channel or through a different medium, you’ll get an equally charismatic newsreader to report the same exact events with a totally different narrative.

Both pretend to observe the same professional journalistic standards, but any given viewer might decide that one or both is a liar.

The presentation itself has become a ritual in our society. Changing the music, the graphics and the mood on the set, along with the intonation and word choices of the newsreader, plus that all important facial expression and camera angle, can push the meaning of any give story all over the political map. Some of us recognize that the very choice of what stories to run is also a measure of the agenda, but at some point we all agree to give it our attention. It has somehow become the expected thing all decent people do.

“Don’t you watch the news?” The question itself is a narrative loaded with manipulation. And if you simply read the news in print or online, you are trading a face you can see for one you cannot. Everything else is the same pretense of journalistic integrity.

Introducing third parties between you and the events of real life does not make it a more accurate narrative. The truism — “everybody is looking for something” — was commonly used well before it was added to popular song lyrics. Your science teacher was supposed to have engaged in enough lab experience to gain a sense of what was accurate or useful theory, but then was probably handed a curriculum shot through with a political agenda. Sometimes it’s not even subtle. If your teacher prefers his job over the alternatives, he’ll stick to the script closely enough to avoid being fired. So even your amateur student lab experience was tainted by a broad set of controls that excluded factors politically inconvenient for those in charge.

Most of us are not cynical enough, not by a long shot.

We should not be manipulated into seeking some mythical body of truth, but only a tolerable truce with all the various political agendas. If you don’t seek to build your own personal agenda, you’ll end up swallowing a mixed bag of pieces from others. If you don’t have your own personal narrative, you can’t be a person. You will merely be a reflection of one or more other persons and repeat their narratives. The pretense of objectivity is just an excuse to enslave you to a narrative shared by however many agree to the standard. Even if it’s the majority of the human race, it’s still just a collection of godlings enabling each other to quash any narrative they don’t like.

Evidence can be faked. Photographs and videos are now easily altered, but it has always been possible with the right equipment and talent. If you weren’t there, you will have to decide whether the reports are accurate, valid or even important to you. If you were there, you’d be a fool not to question your own senses and logic to some degree. Computers and pure math? If you don’t understand it well enough to formulate it on your own, what difference does it make? You can’t verify what you are told; you still have to take someone’s word for it. Computer experts and even mathematicians are looking for something.

In the end, you still have to operate by your own narrative. It’s very personal.

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on EH&D 5