Job 40

Posted on May 17, 2014 by ehurst

Again we must renew our awareness that the text says Job did not sin, but that he went too far in his use of parabolic expression. He is not condemned here but corrected. Job got too wrapped up in answering the trio’s charge that he had sinned, and was seduced into verbally suggesting that he could win a dispute with God. While such a blasphemous notion is heartily affirmed in some other ancient texts of perverted teaching, God slaps that down quickly.

God asks just who it was that dared contend with Him. Job immediately denied having any standing to do so. He confessed regret at opening his mouth previously. What Job had said was that if God called him to account, he would stand innocent. God warned that this left open the dangerous idea that any human might be fit to question divine justice. God challenged Job to correct Him. The measure of Job’s righteousness was sufficient for God to hear his cry for mercy, but just barely. To stand and call God to account was ludicrous. Job’s righteousness was a robe granted by God, not Job’s by right. It would not be sufficient to judge any other man.

Then the Lord launches into a poetic description of Behemoth, a term that could mean almost any large dangerous animal. In Job’s world, it would have been most likely a reference to the water buffalo. These could be found in the Lower Jordan Valley and were undisturbed by the likes of seasonal flooding when other animals and people avoided the surging flow. But the rushing waters would hardly have swept away water buffalo, and humans were unable to capture them without serious risk to life and limb. Could Job tame one, much less create such a beast?

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Mission: Keep It Simple

Posted on May 16, 2014 by ehurst

It’s only a dark secret to those who close their eyes.

I’ve had a few ask me how to discern their mission in accordance to what I teach here. It’s not that hard. Keep in mind that I’ve often said there is nothing wrong with using ordinary Aristotelian logic where the Spirit remains silent. That translates down to this: If you aren’t driven by conviction to take one path or another, feel free to use your own best logic to choose. This is why we cannot neglect the development of that lower form of reason. It has its place. It cannot provide executive decisions about what really matters in this world because it is not capable of grappling with revelation and morals, but it does just fine with abstracting and implementing what revelation requires. Reason was given by God to serve the Spirit, so sharpen your service by developing your reasoning capacity.

Everyone is called. Not a single human was born without a divine purpose. Those who sense that calling, that drawing of a higher power, must first commit themselves to their best understanding of the moral imperatives. That’s the gateway to approaching God. When you understand His moral character and His requirements for human life in general, you stand in the place to discover all the rest. Nothing has meaning until you embrace the moral imperatives inherent in the various Law Covenants in Scripture. Once you understand them in their own context, you are in a position to grasp what God requires of all humans in other contexts.

Whether you then perceive from God a specific calling is not the point. Some do; some do not. It’s not an insult if God offers you more freedom to choose. What you must understand is that the path you choose in terms of calling was never the real issue in the first place. Too often your context of life closes down most of the various broader human options, leaving you little choice in your vocation. Take what comes, but take it under the frame of reference provided by biblical moral guidance.

Pray for guidance. It may not come in a flash of clarity, but if you seek purity, you’ll have it. That purity will help you eliminate things you simply cannot do. Your convictions exist to close some doors and open others. Test things against your convictions. While some of your possible choices will always be wrong in every context — particularly those related to human sexuality — most everything else is a matter of what your conscience will bear. Be open to a divine guidance that will eventually break through our fallen state and clarify things that we did wrong early on. That’s what mercy and forgiveness is for, to cover our human weakness. Don’t presume and abuse it, but don’t neglect it as a part of your calculus.

What you do is far less important than what you desire, in the sense that holiness is defined as the desire to be holy. Holiness makes us separated from mundane concerns and devoted to God’s requirements. The earthly manifestation of that holy desire is a lot less important than the desire itself. Take the path before you; walk in the light you have. As your perception improves, don’t be distracted by false shame that you somehow got things wrong previously. It’s quite possible you were unable to shed that bit of death until you tasted it first. That won’t excuse the urge to taste things you already consider wrong, so there is a place for sincerity. However, your understanding will fluctuate and that is entirely normal. “Search your own heart” is a phrase referring to testing things against your convictions, so that you can’t excuse intentional sin. You also can’t let it tie you down when you repent. Dress your wounds, note the scars and avoid the mistakes the next time. Pain and sorrow are great teachers, strengthening our resolve. Religion is the body of experience you carry to give sense to your actions, filtered through your best understanding at any given time.

Learn to evaluate things in terms of moral imperatives. That’s the ultimate mission and calling for us all, regardless whether we are granted some strong sense of vocational calling. Live that moral imperative, and sometimes that means talking about it when others will listen. Speaking about it won’t mean anything until it owns you, tried and tested.

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Donation Request: Win7

Posted on May 15, 2014 by ehurst

Disregard; this request is no longer valid.

The point: I need a valid Win7 key for Pro or Home Premium. I already have the installation media.

Caveat: Feel free to ignore this. It has to matter to you or it won’t work for me. I can probably save up for this, but if you can assist, it will save some time. If you aren’t moved to help, you’d be a fool to do so.

Background: A few months ago I horse-traded for a Toshiba laptop that came with Win8. I hate that; won’t use it. I’ve been running Linux on it but I’ll need to install Windows for future projects, and I know I can install Win7. I want a legitimate key because I don’t have downgrade rights on this thing. I’m not too worried about fighting with activation, but I need this to be legitimate for my own use. Should this be something you can do, send it by email or some other means that preserves your privacy, etc.

Thanks for reading. Once I have one this post will be deleted, or if you want credit for some particular cause, this post will be updated.

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Realistic CompSec

Posted on May 15, 2014 by ehurst

As always, the mission of the Christian Mystic is not changing the world, but changing the self.

It’s the same principle with things you own or use, including your computer. Most of the work I do in my computer tech support ministry is teaching compsec. I’ve always warned people that expecting policies “out there” to protect you is just plain silly and immoral. The Internet is a virtual war zone and you have to be ready for the worst.

To be honest, not a lot changed in my ministry when the Snowden files began spilling into the news. Now we simply have full evidence of what I already suspected in many ways, and I’m hardly alone. All it did was give us a more specific threat to assess and counteract. Instead of guessing, we can see some of what they’ve been doing.

You should not imagine that bugging your congressman will make things any better. Let’s get real; it would require several things to change what the NSA is doing. First, defunding, then confiscating their equipment and evicting them from facilities. Finally, it would require summary execution of a significant number of upper level management and some contractors. Then things might slow down just a little bit. You are more likely to see the US government collapse completely before the NSA stops spying on us, and maybe not even after that happens.

You see, this is all tied together. While the alphabet agencies do engage in turf battles, it’s not across the full range of their activities. Sometimes the FBI willingly does the dirty work and lets the NSA see the results. Sometimes the CIA gets involved or other agencies. They don’t obey Congress or the President, only pretend to obey the courts, and sure as hell don’t care what you and I think. They work for other people, and their whole mission is to justify their agency and keep it alive against all threats. You and I are considered threats simply because we aren’t part of their agency.

So if any part of this tangled mess wants inside your computer, they are there. You cannot stop them simply because the entire system of hardware production itself has been compromised and there are backdoors you and I could never close. The reason it’s a problem is that criminals will eventually find those backdoors, as well. No agency is so overwhelmingly competent to open a door that somebody somewhere won’t find sooner or later. So it’s a real problem, not so much the loss of privacy, but the loss of control. We have gotten to the place where some of the most essential functions of daily life are online and we have no choice in the matter. Your entire credit record, identity, bank accounts and our electrical grid are all vulnerable to eventual computer cracking.

On top of that, corporations are also spying on you in ways even the NSA wouldn’t bother. You can’t buy enough bullets to stop that kind of spying, because the marketers outnumber the government agents, and marketers have even lower morals. Hey, there are church officials I’ve met that are just as bad. Stop trusting people.

Once you adjust your expectations to better match reality, it’s not a question of stopping their crap. It’s still the same question it always ways: How to get on with the mission? It’s not paranoia, it’s assuming the worst. How much defense can you afford to engage before it interferes with your mission? Your computer activity is not the center of your life. Mine certainly isn’t and I spend more time at the keyboard than anyone I know personally. This is just the current means to the mission. Take it all away and I’ll just find another way to do this. Don’t let yourself be trapped into letting computers and the Internet represent much more than just another manifestation of a very ephemeral world.

Change your attitude. Do what you can to secure your computer and reduce your tracks online. You can read plenty of posts here about that. In the back of your mind keep a clear understanding that at some point your efforts are likely to fail and bad things will happen. If you are faithful to your mission, you can be sure God has it all under control and He cares about what really matters.

Don’t get wrapped up in the stuff of this world.

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Musical Objective

Posted on May 14, 2014 by ehurst

Aristotle was a lazy jerk. Centuries of philosophers before him were willing to do the hard work of quantum reasoning. It’s not easy to operate on multiple levels at the same time, but it results in a far better response to the moral fabric of Creation. Aristotle simply declared there was no such thing and lopped off from his consideration all the vast lore of higher moral consciousness. He preferred the comfort of reasoning only about those things he could control. In other words, he reveled in the Fall, giving people a whole system of thought that denied revelation.

Recovering that lost legacy is harder work now than it was before Socrates, Plato and Aristotle came along to shit on God’s truth. They acted like their brilliant ideas were new, when their predecessors recognized how silly and barbaric it was to reduce knowledge to what man could control through mere sensory data and reason.

The depth with which we are infected is manifested throughout the full range of our thoughts as Westerners. It makes us intellectually lazy and we are quick to seize on false conclusions. It shows up in Western Christianity with all the things labeled “sacred” as if that would require us to bow the knee simply because someone with canon authority says so.

Nowhere is this more painfully manifest than in disputes over music. Some of us are old enough to remember stern warnings against rock music as incapable of praising God. We snicker about that now, but it’s been like that since a church hierarchy arose. One generation scolds the next for daring to develop a different artistic taste.

You don’t have to like my music, and I don’t have to like yours. Suggestions by either side that the other is somehow lacking intelligence and/or moral character because they simply can’t get into the preferences of the other characterizes almost the whole range of religious debate. (It also characterizes most political debate.)

Lately I’ve been facing some emotional stresses difficult to explain to someone outside my own head. I’ve noted previously my propensity to clinical depression, which helps to explain why I understand it as well as I do. It no longer seizes me by the throat as it once did, so you need not concern yourself with my condition. Christian Mysticism in full blossom lends itself to godly compartmentalization, allowing me to wall myself off from feelings that aren’t connected with moral reality. I can deal with those feelings as mere feelings, not reality. Part of the healing process is music. Without further ado, I offer the following as the single most powerful healing agent for my troubles, and the hope it will help some of you in yours. Yes, the whole album:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp4YIAARkkw

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Chunky Love

Posted on May 13, 2014 by ehurst

I’m not special. I’m pretty ordinary. Over the past three years I pushed my aging and injured body from kinda fat to fairly fit. Call it the last hurrah before I’m too old for that stuff. Of course, the real reason was a calling from God.

Sure, it’s a good idea in general; all the more so as our civilization crumbles into chaos and a degree of oppression not seen in a very long time. The tools of both oppression and fitness are a lot better this time around, so being as fit as possible could just come in handy. But in my case that wasn’t it. This started as one of those gossamer threads of conviction that struck me a few years ago and I’ve been faithful. I enjoy working out; I like how it feels. The hard part was learning when and where to back off so as not to aggravate the old injuries. A photograph won’t show you that I’m trim and hard enough for blue veins to start bulging in lots of places on my body, and my stomach muscles are starting to show.

Yes, it also required changing my diet. There are general principles, but you have to tune things to fit your needs. None of it is a simple matter of science, because science doesn’t know everything, nor can it. God’s moral character is hard-wired into the universe and you have to pay attention to that first. You probably can’t afford a perfect scientific diet, so you have to compromise and that means having a base of convictions from which to operate. It’s not a mere matter of pragmatism, but what will God support for you.

My wife is following her own sense of calling and chases fitness, too. It’s different for her. There is progress, but her results aren’t quite as dramatic as mine. She has more to overcome. So she gets less flirting from other men than I do from other women, but I don’t love her any less. She’s still my only passion. She is still my best friend and reliable ministry partner; no one else could compete with that. Such is the fire that still burns between us.

It’s not as if other people don’t understand that, but they are still quite surprised to see it. Our culture militates against that, assumes too much other things as the norm. They especially think attraction must be tied to physical appearance. Even those who push a social agenda against it are forced to deal with the fact our culture is dominated by that.

You can try shaming all you want about it, chubby ladies, but everyone is pretty sure you could shed the weight if you wanted. I’m proof of that, all the more so with my age. It might take longer, and you probably won’t like the dietary changes required, but it can be done. It’s just as wrong for folks to shame you for being fat, but don’t ever imagine you can change the culture by shaming. It just makes you look even more of a useless bitch. We have enough of that already.

I follow Christ and He wasn’t an activist. He didn’t come to change a fallen world; He came to open the door to those who find themselves drawn to escape the Fall. Shaming language only cows fools who aren’t worth anything. Shaming about fat or fat acceptance is equally evil. You don’t change people; you change yourself. If you don’t feel called to trim the body fat, at least make yourself into the man or woman of character that God intended. A critical part of that is a realistic assessment about how others view you in terms of sexual attraction. It also means an honest assessment of how your own sexual wiring works, that our social mythology is completely wrong about what actually triggers a response in men and women. Get real and deal with it. Learn to elevate that charisma factor, because you most certainly can do that a lot easier than losing weight or gaining fitness.

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Virtual Morals

Posted on May 12, 2014 by ehurst

If you can understand the virtual world, then quantum moral reasoning is not such a big leap.

Most people do not recognize the huge difference between meat space and online. They keep trying to apply their meat-space expectations to the virtual world, and it simply doesn’t work that way:

But “Kafkaesque” seems more appropriate. The term is conventionally defined as “having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality”, but Frederick Karl, Franz Kafka’s most assiduous biographer, regarded that as missing the point. “What’s Kafkaesque,” he once told the New York Times, “is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behaviour, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world.”

I’ve already noted in previous posts that if you learn military style operational security, if you can absorb the crazy mindset necessary to live in a combat zone, then you can easily understand computer security. And if you can get that, then you are ready to consider moral security. That is, you are prepared to recognize things most humans cannot and will not see as danger. There are a significant number of moral threats — or demonic influences, if you prefer — that try to sucker you into grabbing the wrong thing. It works that way online and it works that way when you try to live by God’s Laws.

Not paranoia, but it requires a confident watchfulness. You have to know what is required of you; your mission needs to be pretty clear in your mind. From there, you are in the position of strength, but it does require vigilance.

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Job 39

Posted on May 10, 2014 by ehurst

Is it so hard to imagine that God would speak to man in his own language? And is it so hard to imagine God would use a man’s own cultural images? Some cultures and languages do lend themselves much better to the way God has always communicated to mankind in the fallen context, and here is the quintessence, the pinnacle of how God wants man to understand His revelation.

The images here are wild animals Job might have encountered in his place in history and geography. Each is cast in terms of Job’s cultural norms. Domestic goats are dependent and know it; wild goats owe no such allegiance to people. The latter probably does not eat so well and has to guard its own safety, but few can even catch sight of them at at the best of times. It was a common saying that no one had ever seen a wild goat give birth, a figure of speech indicating that some totally natural things were out of human reach. One might say similar things of wild deer. And catching sight of their young is a rare treat.

The term “wild donkey” refers to onagers, an uncommon term in the West. Before horses were domesticated in human history, onagers could be harnessed to primitive wagons, just barely. Riding them was considered impossible. By Job’s time, harnessing them had become quite rare, a dim memory of legend. They were among the fastest animals alive in that land, free and extremely troublesome to handle. Could Job, or any other man, change their habits and choice of habitat? God made them for that. Did anyone imagine onagers would prefer pulling under some driver’s command?

Perhaps more dangerous were wild oxen. Getting one of them to tolerate human presence was hard to imagine. God suggested that He could get anything He wanted from a wild ox. Could Job even get near one, much less make it do his work?

An ostrich was too stupid to care for its own eggs and hatchlings, yet it outran a horse and rider easily. And that horse — could Job craft anything so beautiful as a mane? Do war horses fear humans? A trained chariot team actually looked forward to charging into battle formations. If only human soldiers could be made so eager for battle, but against cavalry most conscripts would scatter. Rare was the infantry army trained and able to face chariots.

Yet above them all soars the birds of prey and carrion eaters. They wait their turn to clean up the battle field. Yet when men lived, they could hardly chase those birds down. Far lesser creatures, they were a frequent image of what happens when too many people are slaughtered in battle. A favorite taunt was to say how your enemy would be bird food. God made those birds that way. What did Job make?

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RHEL 7RC Notes

Posted on May 9, 2014 by ehurst

I’ve installed it and got things running. The way Red Hat does things is allowing folks to work from the RC and associated repositories without requiring a subscription. What I’m trying to do is get some experience so I can push CentOS 7 when it comes out and know something about what I’m doing. I can’t afford all that expensive Red Hat certified training so I have to get my experience the hard way.

And it’s hard. Right now there is no way I can play MP3s, for example. I’ve tried ATrpms and they aren’t ready. Too many dependencies aren’t finished and ready to install, so I get failures. I’ve also tried building VLC (stable branch) from source. I have managed to hack my way through a couple of problems, but now I have a persistent issue with a bogus error demanding I enable PIC on a library that was compiled specifically with PIC enabled (libpostproc). I also cannot get VMware Player to work, because the process for building vmnet drivers fails without any useful error reports. So far, the VM technology built into RHEL is over my head in complexity and I haven’t found any guides simple enough to make sense to me.

I’m going to try WINE in a day or two, but the point is that I can’t even use a VM to get something like XP running and play multimedia that way.

Otherwise, things are just dandy. I can’t imagine using the default GNOME desktop, so I’m running KDE. RHEL crippled the KDE PIM packages and I can’t get Kmail. It builds, apparently, but the RPMbuild process doesn’t kick out any RPMs for it. I think it’s clobbered in a patch Red Hat adds to the SRPM. So far, I’ve not been able to find anyone with enough knowledge to help me fix that.

This is definitely not a desktop OS for most people, and it’s also not ready for prime time. Yep, it’s an RC, but not gold and all the third party support is still incomplete.

Update:Building WINE failed, too. I was able to hack my way through some of the problems, but not far enough to finish. It requires having access to far more inside information than I’ll likely get any time soon.

It’s just too much. Everything remains too badly broken and apparently too much of it is intentional. That is, in pursuit of the corporate market, this thing is not for ordinary users. It’s not that I can’t deal with it, but I can’t help people this way, and I cannot afford to let the mission suffer.

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Outside the Matrix

Posted on May 8, 2014 by ehurst

Inherent in our Western mythology is the left-right scale. You can be masculine and individualist with laissez-faire economics and conservative social policies, or you can be feminist and promote Keynesian economics and socially libertine policies.

Except all of it is completely false. The right-wing is actually fascist-corporatist in practice. The left is simply a mask over socialist-communist economics. Both left and right are still entirely materialistic. As for social policy, both sides claim to be oppressed by the other, and it’s all true. The lefties are just as hateful and rapacious as the right, preferring a different brand of oppression. If you pretend you are being really intellectual in promoting feminist bullshit, it’s still just another flavor of standard orthodoxy. All you do is pick your favorites from the standard menu of issues.

This stuff is so pervasive that people constantly read their favorite flavor back into Scripture, finding justifications for their own false religion. All of it demands that God do something to fix this messed up earth, after God said repeatedly He would not. Thus, I’m not surprised when people mistake some of my work as supporting one side or the other, or I’m faced with false assumptions that as a believer I’m obliged to support their peculiar collection of biases.

Sometimes, quite by accident, some propaganda coming out of one side or the other may well sound like something God would actually promote. I might even comment to that effect, but most of the people I know are clueless how completely they are trapped within this pernicious frame of reference. I’m not better or smarter, but I am more alien than most people recognize. You can’t fix stupid and I don’t try. I simply allow them to be shocked when I say something consistent with God’s non-Western moral standards.

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