The Pastoral Narrative

I haven’t seen it all. What I have experienced forms the burden of my pastoral communications. The shepherd’s call is to tell what you know, as best you know how to tell it, so that others can catch a moment in your place. We don’t pretend that we could control the outcome of that brief immersion; we are simply responding to the impulse to share. All I can offer is what I have seen.

When government arises in any way outside the natural organic structure of the extended family, that government is by definition a conspiracy. It is a conspiracy to rule and it conflicts directly with God’s revealed way of life on this planet. Anything that infringes on the divine mandate of family self-management is inexcusable before the throne of God.

Point out for me any human political government today that is not an evil conspiracy.

Once we define the terms, such use of words is wholly legitimate. Poking fun at conspiracy theories is the response of evil conspiracy to exposure. Willing echoes are just part of the game. What makes it so damnably hard is that the conspiracies will trump up their own fake conspiracy theories as part of the mockery.

We take for granted that there are folks in this world determined to rule all of humanity. Remember Nimrod and the Tower of Babel? Global dominance is a standard human lust, so the idea of conspiracies to take over global government is too obviously justified. What could easily distract us is all the crap put out by those who want to get you involved in helping or hindering the mechanisms, mechanisms that are often wholly imaginary.

Without question, anything that results in some deep dark fear is not a message from God. Either you mistook the message, or the messenger is a deceiver. So much is obvious from reading the New Testament, so I shouldn’t have to elaborate. The proper message is that there are plenty of things you can’t change, so don’t get too excited when you learn about them. Again, the generalities for handling such information are adequately expressed in revelation.

So you won’t gain much traction if you try to convince me of space aliens when you discuss your global government conspiracies. The mere mention of it discredits everything you could possibly tell me otherwise. It’s not that there can be no alien life forms, but that they obviously must remain subject to the limitations revealed by the Creator of all life. They are still “people” and still fallen and still limited. Similar dismissals apply when you describe a global conspiracy of people with inhuman levels of intelligence and awareness. Depictions of literalized Anti-Christ figures totally miss the point of what the Bible says.

If you tell me the CIA’s MKULTRA program sought overwhelming power over humans, I would believe it reflexively. That’s in part because I’ve personally encountered government officials expressing the dire necessity of having such power over those they rule. Whether or not the author of such reporting gives us the facts or is blowing it out of proportion won’t make much difference. In terms of moral discernment, we should be quick to believe there are people that evil.

Reports of unspeakable torture? I could take you to meet folks who would be glad to engage in such torture if they could get away with it. But the wild stories of Satanic ritual torture of kidnapped children from the late 1970s up through the early 1990s is bullcrap. That nonsense was started by a religious huckster and it grew into a huge industry, including professional police seminars and expensive publications often not seen by the general public.

Children are tortured and sometimes by people who imagine they are worshiping something dark and evil, but that’s little more than the ancient worship of Moloch. More real and disturbing is the established record of folks who would film the long, torturous death of their own relatives, sometimes their own children, for the entertainment of privileged perverts in the ruling classes. Snuff films do exist, and a shocking portion of them are crimes committed by the family of the victim. The servants of the ancient god Moloch had to throw their own children on the bronze oven idol.

Given God’s own sense of expressed horror at such things that He would commission genocide to wipe the crime from the earth, you’d be justified in wishing to take after such people with an ax. Their blood splattered on your person would be a mark of holiness. Yes, God said as much. However, He said so within the context of an experiment, a demonstration wherein He was directly involved in a human government. With Christ, the Temple veil was torn in two and that covenant was closed. Thus ended God’s direct involvement in human government. Starting with the Resurrection, we who seek God’s favor must work in a different setting, and with different methods. You might still find His approval for stern actions individually against unspeakable evil, but He may not prevent you facing the social and legal consequences.

Most of us aren’t in the position to personally engage the pursuit of such monsters in this world, anyway. It doesn’t hurt to consider what God might expect of you if you did encounter something that evil. That’s because, along with the apparent progress of various plans for evil global government, you should expect to witness a tidal rise in human depravity in general. People in positions of power and influence have been pushing us in that direction all along as the means to enslaving us. It seems to work, but like many things in our fallen nature, there are points at which it fails. You should probably be ready for the continuing decline as well as the shocking moments when the social fabric finally tears.

Nobody knows exactly where those tipping points are, so the whole thing is rickety. We read about various apparent plans to respond, particularly where those in power are gearing up to crush any resistance. You can see where the plans are brutal, but the actual measure of brutality is often kept secret until it’s used. Yes, it’s evil. I know this because I have seen people with power and influence working so very hard to debase people they claim to represent, making them powerless so they are forced to turn to those hustlers and hucksters. The hustlers don’t actually lead, but herd their constituencies. I’m sure you’ve seen it recently in the news when these hucksters rush to the scene of reactionary riots and engage the press with propaganda that seems to justify the rioting and demand accountability from those who provoked it.

Both the hucksters and those who provoke the riots are working together. It may not always be conscious at their level of operations, but you can be sure someone somewhere is fully aware of all this and keeps both sides of this false image in place. Were it not all stage managed, some really big and important people would be dead, not working this racket into old age. Only the true believers die young because they refuse to serve the system. At whatever point the actors depart from the storyline, their role is eliminated.

I’ve seen all this. I’ve also seen God prospering people who took the time to seek His face and learn how to avoid being trapped in the deception. This is why I openly oppose most activism, because it’s just part of the storyline. The point of pastoral narrative is to help you see a different storyline that God wrote. If you know it’s there, you’ll understand that my voice is just one telling, and you should get involved and find your own.

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Deaf Ethics

I suppose it was never more than some kind of experiment. When I posted my resume on Monster.com, I seriously doubted I’d get any useful response. Out of some 20 contacts, one was genuine, but misguided. The rest were simply unethical, ignoring my pointed warning that I would not do sales work.

You could probably guess it’s always the same kind of vulture outfits: insurance companies. If there was ever a lobby that has gotten itself a license to steal, it’s insurance companies. The government requires insurance for all sorts of things. The various insurance outfits promised me the moon with high compensation. And it’s not as if they couldn’t deliver on it; all the folks I know in that business are very well off. What that should tell you is that they charge an awful lot compared to what they pay out when all the personnel are more comfortable than almost their entire customer base.

It takes a certain deafness to one’s conscience to operate that way. That’s why it serves no purpose to upbraid them. I typically answer in a friendly manner. Four times I’ve even gotten phone calls from the same outfit here in the OKC area. They keep forgetting to take my name off their list, I suppose. Twice it was the same gal; I’m guessing she spends a lot of time calling folks she doesn’t know trying to rope them into that sort of work. I noticed they carefully select women with pleasant voices. I simply tell them I’ve spoken to one of their reps and I won’t do sales.

Whoever scanned the stack of resumes on Monster paid no real attention to what they say, just searching for certain keywords and so forth. I figured they would ignore my warning on the first line of my resume that I would not consider sales. The emails were just the same, swearing up and down they had read it carefully. Liars. But that’s the nature of sales and advertising these days. The dirty secret is that there is a high turnover in insurance sales. You can make the money if you’ll take the training and do the work. You might have to shed a few bad habits, or at least hide them well, but it really isn’t that hard. That is, unless you have something inside you that just can’t keep up with the lies. I’ve met plenty of folks who, whether conscious or not, found the profitable path was somehow unacceptable and either sabotaged their own career or just got sick of it and quit. The business world is full of folks who previously sold insurance and got out of that. Lots of folks now doing manual labor were also previous insurance agents.

I suppose there are some satisfied customers out there who felt they were nicely protected from catastrophic expenses. I don’t recall too many times when I thought I got any percentage back on what I’ve paid. But I’m not going to stir up hatred for insurance folks, only notice that most of us have way more than we really ever need, and wouldn’t have it were someone not holding a gun to our heads. That kind of indirect extortion is simply the way it is in this world, so if it’s not insurance, it’s some other special interest. The Genesis narrative of Abraham makes note of similar scoundrels in his life, so it’s been around for a long time.

Abraham’s answer was to keep working and backing away until he got out of their reach. Sometimes he made some serious mistakes, trying to get insurance for things that weren’t a threat. When he trusted God, he prospered nicely.

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Not Impressed

Larry elevated his nose and sniffed twice, gently. “Man, I love the smell of oak in the fireplace.”

Larry was the new guy on the IT team, an experienced older Unix admin, looking every bit the hardened military veteran. He was a manly fellow, completely out of place in the IT department. Cindy was the receptionist in the office and Parsons was the networking guy. They were supposed to be showing him the local village amenities and they had stopped for hot drinks to answer the crisp fall climate.

Parsons had opened his mouth to agree with Larry, but Cindy jumped in before he had a chance. “Yeah, well I got my degree and Ecology and I can tell you that smell you love so much is killing us all!”

She wasn’t just pretty, Cindy was gorgeous. But her beauty was contorted in rage as she spewed forth a very standard tree-hugger rant, loaded with all sorts of shaming language. Eventually the rant trailed off as she realized Larry had not moved, during the entire sermon, still leaning back with his eyes closed and nose in the air. She huffed and took a long sip of her organic hot tea.

Larry still didn’t change his posture except to swivel his head slightly toward Parsons. Opening one eye, he could see Parsons genuinely abashed, though Larry couldn’t be sure if it was Cindy’s behavior or her sermon that caused the geeky nerd discomfort. Larry closed his eye and swiveled his back up, then brought his chin down slowly with a sigh.

Turning more naturally to face Parsons, he placed his hands around the coffee mug in front of him and took another whiff, this time of the rich Sumatran coffee Cindy had recommended. Addressing Parsons, he said with a faint smirk, “Bitch goddess two-point-O with the inflated sense of entitlement already activated I see.” He didn’t flinch in the slightest when she spluttered and splattered that expensive tea across the table.

Before she could regain her voice, he turned to her and added, “I wonder how much rain forest was uprooted and burned for growing this fine coffee and your organic tea.” He lifted his cup and took a sip.

His eyes did not follow her beautiful sashaying behind as she stomped away. Instead, he turned to Parsons, who clearly could not tear his eyes away from her. The younger man turned back to him with a look of pale shock. “Dude!”

Parsons looked genuinely pained. “Maybe you don’t know she was talking yesterday about maybe banging you!”

Larry snorted, “At what price? On her terms I would have to become a slave, as you obviously already are to her. That’s just about as enticing to me as a bar of soap and a hot shower. She’s not qualified to have sex with me, not until her entire insides are completely rewired. She’s gold-plated, diamond-encrusted poison.”

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Certain Uncertainty

I’m unsure of where to place to blame.

They thunder with obscene certainty that this or that course of action is God’s demand. While we might justly question the identity of the “God” they cite, it’s enough to note these loudmouths seek to curtail any debate. Don’t you dare question what they might seek to gain by such pronouncements. Everyone has some sort of dreams and hopes, or they cease being human. Sometimes the simplest answer is buying into those hopes and dreams of someone else because it’s less work.

Somehow this all bleeds over into our individual consciousness. There’s a habit of mind, an unquestioned assumption about the very process of thinking itself that our greatest need is certainty. The certainty is always linked to something we can control, something that falls within reach of our reason and intellectual grasp. Perhaps we already understand on some level that we would die without some level of tension, so in order to have a reason to keep on living, we have to find that something for which we struggle. It’s not the thing itself, but the mere existence of struggle by which we justify our pursuit of the three appetites (comfort, entertainment and significance).

I suppose that somewhere in the bottom of our minds is this assumption that if those appetites exist, it is God’s fault and therefore, He must be behind all this drive to struggle. It’s a sort of “God forbid” that this struggle be pointless. So we don’t mind coming up with all sorts of rules and guidelines about how we struggle, but something in our entire matrix of assumptions demands that the goal of struggle be something we can define. That the cosmos itself is hard-wired to counter that gives rise to some kind of dissonance, so we turn around and paint our goals with dreamy holiness. This allows us an escape for the certain failure, or alternatively, the sense of disappointment that comes from achieving something we thought was a worthy struggle. Some part of us knows we aren’t actually supposed to win or we would stop struggling and cease to have a reason for living.

I don’t deny that it’s been a problem since leaving Eden, but this is quite easily discerned as a major problem within Western Civilization in particular. Our innate communion with God’s Creation is broken from what we had in Eden, but elements of what makes the West unique greatly aggravate the problem. We keep bumping up against reality and our system of reckoning just doesn’t allow for the right answer. If we cannot bring the answer down under the limits of our human reasoning, we have this burning instinct to reject the answer. Thus, we are torn between necessity, uncertainty and a confusing mess of conflicting internal demands.

I cannot speak to your dreams and hopes. In the first place, too many people aren’t in full recognition of their individual drives singly or as a whole. That’s just on the human level. On top of that, waaaaay too many people have no useful awareness of the Spirit Realm. The vast majority of organized Christianity has no real clue about the spirit as a separate faculty above the intellect, never mind how the spirit feeds back into the rest of our awareness. I’m still struggling with the entangling shredded fishnet of this vast mythology myself.

That is, my own hopes and dreams keep crashing up against that invisible barrier of reality.

I’m not suggesting it’s a mistake to have them, but that we Westerners, regardless of our struggle to break away from being so naively Western, don’t know what purpose they should serve in our reckoning. While I can easily see, and even explain, how it should not work, I’m not sure I can be very helpful with how it should.

About the only really solid rock I can find under my feet, the one anchor point that never seems to fail, is all the things I’ve taught about the Laws of God — AKA, divine justice, moral discernment, quantum reasoning, etc. That part works and it seems my expectations in that direction are fairly consistent with that invisible reality. If nothing else, our corner of the world is often spared the sorrows that afflict those around us. I never expected it to be so clear-cut and brutal as the Passover and splashing blood on the door posts, but in the broad general sense that I am convinced the Bible promises to us today: A recognizable measure of God’s wrath on pervasive human sin passes over us without stopping for a visit. That’s matched, of course, with the certainty that we are camping next to our own pillar of fiery cloud.

There are a few items of specificity that do come with unquestionable clarity from my spirit. I stand by the prophecies I’ve already posted, two items in particular: The US must not go to war against Iran, and we Americans are not permitted to organize a political resistance to the rising police state. I can comfortably extrapolate those two into other directions, but I recognize them as my own work, not necessarily the voice of the Spirit for me. And I still maintain that it was God’s demand that I pursue physical fitness, though I have no clue to specific purpose in the sense that I train my body for anything I can organize logically. So far, the one most useful result is the end of tachycardia episodes. I suppose that’s as good as any other objective, so the rest is just a matter of what tickles my fancy. It grates on my military-conditioned instincts that I don’t have anything in particular to train for.

Thus, I have this overwhelming sense of mission and I’m drowning, because the mission is undefined. That is, aside from some broad generalities about teaching the Law and Christian Mysticism, and all the stuff that’s behind that, I have nothing my mind can recognize as a particular preparation. There’s nothing I can point to and say, “I’m getting ready for this.” It’s no fun, and if you have the same sense of being unguided, I can’t help you. All I can do is point you to a better grasp of God’s revelation and what it could demand of you in broad generalities.

Explore your own path. I’m still stumbling around in mine.

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The OpSec Mind

The failure of OpSec will always be a moral weakness.

We live in an age when even the most mundane human activity can come under attack. Treat your very existence as a mission. Operational Security starts in your soul. Not just your mind, but something more substantial; it’s your sense of who you are.

The mission is always first. If you take yourself too seriously, you have already failed. That is, the fundamental mission is to do what’s morally right for its own sake. Everything else you do is just a stone to lay on that foundation. Build morality first and foremost. The ostensible mission might appear to fail, but that simply means you don’t understand. By the same token, moral truth is more subtle and complex than anything you can put into words or action in the first place. In the heat of the moment, moral justice will be obvious and you can ignore the apparent cost. If you have nothing else to work with, just obey your own conscience; that’s mission enough for almost anyone.

A corollary to not taking yourself too seriously is the necessity that you discard any last shred of dignity and public shame. In reality, it often works out that those terms become redefined. However, the starting point is to throw aside what everyone may have taught you about them. You’ll rebuild them from an entirely different substance. Don’t be somebody; be the mission. You are defined by your commitments, and your pride and dignity are in the mission.

Don’t trust. Distrust yourself first, and you’ll understand how you can rely on others without fully trusting them. Anything worth doing always requires including others. There is no purity and perfection anywhere in this life, so get used to measured risks. The calculus may well change entirely with the flux of real life and you will surely fail at some points. Don’t measure success with your mind but from deep in your soul. Sometimes you go along with something you were taught was awful because the alternatives are worse, and because you cannot know how it will turn out. What you seek is not precision but peace. If you sacrifice your peace, nothing you gain will mean anything at all.

Be honest to your moral commitments. There is plenty of deception, but no such thing as objective truth. Thus, any putative debt to be honest with folks in what you say is itself a deception. The Western concept of lying is simply a control mechanism. You may not actually know the whole truth, and your understanding will surely shift along the way. It’s wise to avoid knowing things that can become a liability, but in dealing with people, don’t throw pearls to swine. Most people in any given context warrant no information at all; a great many warrant nothing of importance. Let them be wrong about you until the mission demands otherwise. Accept kindness you don’t want, as if you really appreciate it. Shrug off rudeness because it doesn’t warrant a response. It’s the mission, not you.

You aren’t any better than anyone else, but if all you have is a drive for a clear moral conscience, you will be quite alien to most of the world. Embrace that as your role. You owe the world a life of moral truth, but if they don’t seem ready for it, don’t choke them. Stay with the mission and move along as if you were mere scenery for them. Let them go about their business without ever realizing you were there; it’s often the greatest kindness you can offer the world.

Beyond all that, satisfy your sponsor. Sponsors often enable far more than they request. Give him as much honest truth as he can handle and do your honest best to bring back what he says he wants. Of necessity, there will be some measure of interpretation in that, but give it your best shot. That is a critical necessity within the larger moral frame of reference.

Train yourself to be totally unsurprised at the depth of human depravity. Predators are hoping to catch you off your guard, to shock you enough to disable the mission. Don’t shy away from your own depravity in the sense of making sure you know it well. You can explore it without acting on it. The only time you’ll face heavy artillery in terms of major temptations is at the intersection of your weaknesses with the importance of the mission. You’ll usually be surprised when someone correctly guesses what will get to you unless you tend to keep fresh in your mind just how ordinary you are. It’s not that they consider you a major target, but your mission is the real threat to them. Recognize any attempt to cultivate your ego as an attack.

Everyone has a breaking point; most people have no idea where it is. That’s because it tends to have a life of its own, and isn’t always exactly the same place in every context. Don’t be surprised when it’s closer than you thought, but don’t fear to chase it away. Moral strength often doesn’t announce itself until you are past the worst tests. You’ll recognize it in retrospect. Put your confidence in the mission, not yourself, and moral strength hangs around more.

Lose yourself in the mission.

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Psalm 10

As noted before, this continues the acrostic order of the previous psalm. However, in a sort of parallel, while the previous addressed external enemies, this one mourns over internal enemies.

It is unlikely David failed to understand, at least in his better moments, how God operated as the Ultimate Sovereign of human affairs. Some things will always remain outside our limited grasp. People will always have a measure of freedom to choose moral justice or pursue any number of other interests. We understand from His Word as a characterization of trends that His wrath falls on sin, but not always according to our personal sense of justice. Thus, David’s question is largely rhetorical. A more literal statement is that we long for His hand to execute justice that is beyond our grasp.

The psalm is a long recitation characterizing the sort of predators we find in every society. No one really expects God to answer in any concrete way just why He tolerates such creatures. Whether they suffer for their sins is not always obvious to us, as they seem to snicker at the very thought. This is the nightmare of every shepherd soul, which we know precisely David was. It is the one truly most unpleasant part of justified human political power to have to control the evil that arises in one’s own home, as it were. We note in passing that David was notoriously indulgent of his own kin who were immoral in part because he knew his own weaknesses.

Still, he stands with the righteous even at the risk of his own dose of wrath. Even looking in the mirror, David shouts: “Don’t let him get away with it, Lord!” As the chief executor of justice in Israel, David needs help carrying out the task of making divine justice more obvious to the people he rules. Here, as with the previous chapter, David ends with a declaration that God is not one of us mere mortals, and that we often need reminding of our mortality.

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Strident Media Racket and Apocalypse

This post is a bit long, so I won’t blame you for skipping it.

The only questions that matter start with moral truth. I’ll keep hammering this issue over and over, that all truth is a question of morality, not a pursuit of mythical objective reality. God can alter reality on His whim and has a record of doing so. It’s not as if He can’t plan ahead or can’t anticipate our idiocy as humans, but sometimes it’s necessary to remind us that He is in charge of this little project we think of as our universe. The question is fundamentally moral. It’s in our best interest to reach out with our whole being to His moral character, whatever His motives might be.

Thus, our mission is rooted in learning to see past our fallen natures and observe the world through eyes of moral perception. As always, that means consciously discarding our cultural morality myths and pursuing those God revealed. A critical element is discarding our Western bias for false dichotomy. It’s all narrative. Everyone talking at us, whether they know it or not, is trying to create in our minds a moral imperative to join them on some crusade. Too often, they have no intention of marching to the end with us, only get us going down some path they’ve chosen for us.

A given individual researcher will always have biases. Sometimes the biases work out in our favor. Rare is the researcher whose narrative seems consistently in favor of simply finding the best understanding and having no dog in the fight. Often it’s simply a matter of recognizing biases and avoiding this or that narrator on a particular issue.

Sometimes it’s most important to notice the competition between narrators and their stories. In many cases, the competition is only apparent, in that the competition is the narrative itself. Quantum moral reasoning recognizes multiple levels of moral objective, and simply buying into the most obvious meaning is the trap.

We could pick any number of current issues that clamor for our attention, but today I’m singling out the tragedy of Malaysian Flight MH17.

We all seem to have some grasp of the wider background story, that a rowdy political upheaval ran the previous government out of town and took over. The current government of Ukraine appears to be a badly divide junta funded and provoked by Western nations in a naked political agenda to isolate Russia, by yanking away a major asset and pulling it into the NATO orbit. Crimea was the first and most successful rejection of this new state of affairs, but some other eastern districts of Ukraine are attempting to follow the same path. The warfare between the central regime and the rebels, though brutal, frankly seems only halfhearted. We are given the impression that the rebels are hard pressed, but that the central regime isn’t so determined as they claim, perhaps because they suffer their own serious internal instability. Meanwhile, it’s fairly clear the NATO sponsors on one side, and the Russian sponsors on the other side, are fighting a proxy war of sorts.

Not long ago, a casualty of this conflict was a civilian airliner, apparently shot down over Eastern Ukraine.

If you read the likes of What Really Happened (WRH) you’ll typically find a chaotic mixed bag on some issues, but on MH17, the consensus is in favor of the idea that Ukrainian fighter jets shot it down as a false flag operation to smear the East Ukrainian rebels. I note significantly officials of that regime have seized a major source of evidence from the air traffic control facilities, which traffic control MH17 was obliged to obey. First WRH claimed that the Ukrainian regime had more of the Buk missile systems than the rebels did, which everyone believed was the most likely means of shooting down the airliner. Now WRH seems to be pressing the theory it was shot down by fighter jets that were known to be trailing the airliner.

The WRH narrative is part of a larger self-echoing narrative reflected in many alternative sites. This against the mainstream story that the rebels must have shot it down with a Buk missile system supplied by Russia. There were arguments between these two major narratives about whether the Ukrainian rebels even had access to such a thing, but that issue seems resolved in the tacit admission they certainly could get them easily enough, if only by capture from the incompetent regime forces.

I want to call your attention to something: Why does the argument seem so inconclusive? Have you noticed how much attention is given to demands for a fair and impartial investigation? Notably, the demand comes most loudly from those least likely to be impartial. It seems the evidence presented by NATO voices is carefully calibrated to be no better than what the Russians have offered. Meanwhile, there is more noise about the debate than about the actual incident.

For now, I tend to go with this narrative. I hope you’ll find plausible my claim to have no dog in this fight. My point is that it’s hard to find in either the mainstream or alternative press much of the evidence presented at that link, at least not as a collection. We note the site is largely the voice of a Russian oligarch and a political enemy of Putin. However, they have been careful to note the whole thing was one huge accidental mistake, not the direct result of malice on either side. It’s anti-Putin, not anti-Russian. Meanwhile, the incident has become valuable fodder for the propagandists, which is the whole point here. Neither NATO nor Russia stand to gain a thing from offering a factual account, so they won’t.

Along with this is a horde of other apparently disinterested parties waving the horrors of economic war, nuclear war, etc., arising from this renewed NATO-Russia conflict. It’s not as if there is no tectonic shift in trade and currency exchange coming, but you have to wonder: Why all the noise? This is just part of a much bigger mess, with incurable plagues, nuclear reactor disasters, environmental pollution incidents off the scale, earthquakes, climate shift (in both directions), and more that we simply don’t have time to read about.

A part of me wishes ardently that I could find some way to get inside the system that feeds us all this crap. Right now, I don’t trust anyone who is or claims to be inside it. If someone were inside and able to report honestly, I tend to doubt their message would get out without serious marginalization hindering it. Those who do try to spill the beans seem too obsessed with their own fortunes, so their information is packaged and sold with all the hype you get from the system in the first place. The only free access seems to be echoes through the obviously biased narratives already in place.

Let’s pray that Our Lord sees fit to raise up someone who can work within the system without being seduced, someone who can afford to report honestly in some way without the need to make a fortune from it. There is a need here; we are facing a certain tribulation with no accurate assessment of the moral implications of the various narratives. It’s not so much a need for a factual analysis of specific current events, but a moral discernment of the broader picture, a vision of genuine shepherd guidance. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a voice like the Apostle John and his Apocalypse, but written in our language? He used Hebrew symbolism to prepare Christians of his day for the coming persecution and hijacking of the organized churches. (Note: “Apocalypse” is the name of the book; it’s the story, not the event.)

Finally, I don’t pray for things I’m not willing to do myself. Sure, I’ll volunteer for what it’s worth.

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A Smidgen of Creativity

For a Christian Mystic, ritual is never more than mere symbolism. Sometimes it helps keep the doors of our souls open to offer a fresh restatement of divine intent. This is what I propose to offer as the final words for the wedding at the end of this month:

Your humble clergyman will by no means presume upon divine authority. Far greater men than I spoke for Him long before I came into this world; I can only report what they have recorded. According to their testimony, God has said that it is for mankind to make laws and ceremonies. However, from the birth of humanity itself, marriage has always drawn His personal interest. Therefore, we must presume a covenant of matrimony stands recorded in Heaven. Let no one presume to defy God’s declaration. I now pronounce you husband and wife.

Copy freely.

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EH&D Published

Cover of EH&D Expectations, Hopes and Dreams is published. Because some portions of the book may trigger some secret alarms as “offensive” to certain privileged minorities, I can’t guarantee it won’t be taken down. For now, you can get your free copy here. If all else fails, I still have copies in epub, HTML, Word, LibreOffice, PDF and plain text. I can email them for now, but I can always distribute from my static site, if needed. Thank you for your support.

As requested, I am linking to the source for the cover image: Public Domain Images.

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Don’t Surrender

You can find them all over the Net any day of the year. Here is yet another impassioned plea. Many such articles directly call on readers to take some particular action, but this is one of those “be very afraid” articles because there really is no useful protest possible.

I’ll note simply in passing that an awful lot of this stuff seems to have careful timing to draw attention away from other things that might be more activist-oriented. Intentional or not, it serves the purpose of controlled opposition.

More importantly, I wanted to note that so very much of this noise is focused on the nitty-gritty details of how it violates the Constitution. This one is directly inside the government, set up almost secretly and now operating entirely in secret. While some of us might be glad to see the likes of the EPA restrained from their property-confiscating rules, we all might agree this is not how it’s supposed to work in the USA.

If that weren’t bad enough, we have rather secretive groups outside the government also peddling influence undemocratically. In this case, it’s another progressive propaganda group we all knew had to exist, anyway, if only because the journalists have so vehemently denied any such bias exists. Again, it isn’t supposed to work this way.

So long as propagandists can keep the rabble focused on the mythology of the Rule of Law, it merely delays the inevitable revolt. Those who are whipped into a frenzy over this stuff will express their ire in carefully constructed channels. Most of the sites and forums for this are actually run by those who belong to the system, in effect if not by intent. Most of those who stand up as noble dissenting voices of genuine opposition are played for fools, because they cannot escape the mythology.

Folks, get used to the idea that your government despises you and barely tolerates your existence only because it can use that existence in ways to keep itself alive and ruling. Don’t listen to the lies from government officials about how deeply they care; they might actually believe it but they will always act in predictably oppressive ways.

A proper organic view would assess these revelations as mere curiosities. “Oh, so that’s how they do it.” The mechanism matters far less than the effects. We have come to expect this sort of thing and are only mildly surprised at the unique and enterprising techniques exposed by such news. Don’t get excited. You may have very good reasons in your mission and calling to get involved, but don’t let it own you.

Don’t pretend that there is anything sacred in the system; most of the demarcations between public, private, religious, political, etc., are artificial. If it’s organized in any fashion at all other than a covenant family body, it’s likely part of the system. Once you let go of the lie of Western Civilization, you can easily shed the mechanisms and the mythology used to keep you from walking in Spirit.

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