Malvertising

Posted on May 26, 2014 by ehurst

Most of you will recognize the term malvertising. It’s a technique for infecting computers with malware by using the advertising feeds found on most websites. Similar with the way TV in the US is funded by advertising, this blog is also supported by advertising because I can’t afford to pay for it. That is, the agreement I make with WordPress is that they get to run advertising on my blog posts because I’m not paying them anything.

The problem is how those ads are delivered. You would routinely find an ad on a page had passed through three or more servers before it displays in your browser. The rights to post those ads are traded in many different ways. Too often, when someone pays the fees, nobody wants to ask any questions. By the time it gets to your computer, it could be the software equivalent to a nuclear device. The issue here is that advertisers never did have morals in the first place. They aren’t willing to rob people directly because it’s no fun and it’s risky. However, it makes them feel like a big stud if their skills and artistry brings in the customers. There is no trick they won’t use, and the laws are simply advisory in their minds.

There is nothing immoral about blocking advertising on the Internet. You aren’t stealing content; the advertisers are stealing your computer resources and flagrantly refusing to deal with the risk factors. Pitchmen are slimy as a whole, and the good guys are so rare we can’t find them. All of them claim they are the finest specimens of humanity, which is part of their lying sales pitch. A rare counter example is the Google text ads; simple information about the existence of a product is not a sin. How Google tries so damned hard to manipulate you by snooping on the content of your searches and your communications is a sin.

Few Internet users will go the lengths I do for computer security. I keep track of how this stuff works as part of my computer tech support ministry. I read about it every day. What follows are some suggestions based on what I’ve tried for myself.

Learn about browser extensions: Ghostery, Adblock, Click & Clean, and tools like Bleachbit or CCleaner. Learn where they are and bookmark them.

Select your browser carefully. Use more than one for different purposes. I use Seamonkey to protect my important logins. You’d need to explore the features and settings possible to understand why. It comes with a host of extensions the same as Firefox, but offers far more fine-grained user control.

I use one browser only for Facebook (Opera’s newest line of WebKit browsers) with the appropriate extensions. I chase links from FB using the “private browser window” (right-click on the link) option to prevent FB from planting tracking in that window, and to ensure that window dumps all cache when I close it.

I use the older Opera browser (12.x) for general surfing because it doesn’t need any extensions; there is a healthy content blocking tool built into it. I can also place a JavaScript blocking button on the interface itself. It takes time to identify the URL sources for unwanted content, but once it’s in place, surfing is much safer. Start learning how to use it by right-clicking on the background of any webpage and select “Block content.” When the toolbar drops down at the top, select something you would prefer not to see and click on it. A block ribbon will appear and the toolbar will offer some fine tuning with a “Details” button. Click that and observe how the URL is formatted. For some advertising URLs, I block the entire domain.

I use the latest Opera Mail client for email on my desktop because it imported everything from my long-term email usage of the older Opera browser’s built-in email client over the years. It also has a collection of safety options, such as blocking graphics and fancy formatting by default. It also imports settings and mail across different operating systems with ease.

If you really like Google’s Chrome browser, learn how to add the adblocking extensions and learn about the advanced settings that allow you some measure of control. They are not turned on by default. Also learn how to use additional profiles to isolate one kind of surfing activity from another. You should at a minimum set up a separate profile for Facebook, which remains today the single biggest threat to privacy and personal security because almost everybody uses it. This makes it a juicy fat target rich with victims for whatever evil schemes any corporation or government agency can dream up. And the folks who run FB are all too eager to help them.

Use DuckDuckGo and StartPage search engines. The former is Yandex Search with anonymity; the latter is Google with the same anonymity. StartPage also offers you a chance to chase resulting search links through a proxy viewer. That means they do all the work and take all the risks and display the content for you. It does block JavaScript so some sites look rather funny that way, but it also protects you from bad JScript.

Learn to use Lynx browser. There are instructions on older posts here how to install a version for Windows and some of the settings you’ll need to make. For my own use, I prefer to pull it up in Cygwin, a set of tools that give you Linux/Unix on your Windows computer. While some sites will block the Lynx browser based on obsolete assumptions that it’s a hacking tool, it’s still the best way to get textual content with far less hassle and risk. Once you get used to how it renders pages, you can quickly find information you seek.

Install CryptoPrevent on your Windows computer; it will save you a great deal of heartache in the long run. It blocks malware trying to launch and install from your browser cache.

The single biggest change is inside your own head. If the Internet for you is all about entertainment and multimedia content, and more particularly gaming, you will always be at high risk. Porn-surfing is easily the highest risk behavior on the Net. I’m not telling you those pursuits are evil at this point, only that they are inextricably linked with exposure to malware. The predators who make that evil software are counting on your desire for zeal for such pursuits to hinder your risk awareness. Those pursuits are the essence of advertising, trying to sucker you into something you really want in exchange for a measure of slavery.

My blog is littered with more details on how to do some of this stuff. Use the search box built into the blog interface. The main point to remember is that, with advertisers being so rapaciously irresponsible about filtering out malvertising, you have every right to block their crap until they clean up their act. You shouldn’t expect that too soon.

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Flaming Sword of Future

Posted on May 25, 2014 by ehurst

Islamic scholars say you cannot really understand the Quran until you read it in Arabic. The issue is not making your own internal translation from Arabic into your native tongue, but translating your mind into Arabic thought. Frankly, the Bible is no different. While I won’t advise you to learn the biblical languages, I will warn you that you must gain a Hebrew mind.

Scripture says that God knows the future. Many Westerners struggle with that because of how they think of the future. Our problem isn’t really a question of God, but of time. The overwhelming influence of bad Science Fiction and basic Western scientific conceptions of time have deeply stained our understanding of a fundamental truth of Scripture. While we understand instinctively that we are bound under the rule of time and space limitations, we are taught to reject the idea that there is anything else. We imagine all of Creation, even God Himself, must be bound under those limitations.

Time and space are an element of the Fall, not of existence itself. Plenty of writers before me have tried in vain to dispel the false notion from the Western Christian mind. I say it was in vain because when we survey the theological landscape, we see easily that no one seems to have absorbed the correct understanding. Perhaps it is because the writers who have tried to take away the false idea have done such a poor job of replacing it with something better, or perhaps the resistance has been too high. As with everything else in the study of Antiquities, it’s not as if the scholars can’t tell us how Hebrew people thought on such things, but no one listens.

Maybe I’ll fail, too, but I can’t avoid trying to correct this major hindrance to understanding our world.

Time is best understood as a living thing. It grows and develops and there are thousands of genetic and environmental permutations possible at each step along the way. But it’s a mistake to focus on the fruit alone nor what we might know of the development process. God knows the future because He designed the tree on which the future grows as a fruit. It’s not correct to think of God’s mind chasing to the end every thread of probability and possibility; that’s a false image. That’s how men can know something they didn’t make. God made it all, and so His knowledge is much more personal and intimate.

Even if we start discussing divine election — predestination — we get all confused because we imagine that God’s mind is constrained by time and space as our minds are.

Large elements of our future are predetermined. However, it is wrong to think of them in terms of outcomes as Western historians write such things. The finite individual facts of human existence are not a central consideration. Rather, it is the moral outcomes that matter with God. Here we encounter our single greatest barrier, because we cast the question of morality in terms of discrete actions and various human tendencies as expressed in discrete actions. It’s the same intellectual roadblock that keeps us from understanding all of revelation.

Moral intelligence is knowing the character of God, insofar as He can be known. God portrays Himself as an Eastern Potentate for a good reason: You are expected to study Him the way some ANE feudal servant would. You have to grasp Him as a Person. The future is the broad complex of interactions between God and His creation as a whole, not just those sentient creatures He placed into this time-space bubble. Sentience is not the key. Moral awareness is the key. It’s not just primitive thinking to view Creation is alive in its own right; that’s how God revealed it.

If you want to then cast God as somehow a primitive and inconsequential deity, that’s your problem. The primitive and barbaric deity is still God Almighty and your destiny is in His hands. You can choose to participate willingly and knowingly, or you can be a pawn along with most of the other creatures. The option to embrace this is not limited to those who receive spiritual birth. We who are spiritually aware have an easier time of navigating the necessary changes, but moral truth was always open to anyone from the very beginning. Old Testament Scripture implies that chasing His moral truth does reliably result in spiritual birth, but it’s never stated in legalistic terms. You can’t create in God a moral debt to give you spiritual birth, but you can claim what He has offered since the day humanity was expelled from the Garden of Eden.

That Flaming Sword is not where the story ends. You are supposed to impale yourself on it first before you can take it in your hands. You can’t use it in this life until after you pull it from your own breast. Without the first cut in your own human flesh, its power serves only to deny you entrance to the Truth of God. Once you absorb the demands of the Truth, you can use it. Of course, a sword only does what a sword can do, so you are constrained in how you use it. It’s not a get-what-you-desire kind of grant, but a get-the-right-desire issue.

God knows the future because it’s His creation. Humans relate to Him as either kin with a vested interest, or as slaves who are strangers. He invites us to participate, but there will most certainly be limits. When we become comfortable with those limits, we can experience things for which there are no words.

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Job 41

Posted on May 24, 2014 by ehurst

If we haggle too much over what creature is marked by the nickname Leviathan, we would miss the point entirely here. Should we need something approaching a literal animal, a crocodile or any of the larger sea creatures seen from time to time would suffice. In the minds of Job and his people, there need be no particular distinction between them. Leviathan is partly legendary by necessity for a desert-dwelling folk.

We have noted already that God would not hesitate to use whatever tool is needed to get His point across. It simply is not possible for any human language to express directly what God is, much less what He thinks. Parabolic expression is the only way for God to speak, for it is our Creator addressing human mortality. Not only do we not reach outside our time-space prison, but we are fallen within it. The human mind cannot comprehend anything about God, so all discussion of Him can only be indicative, using symbolic logic.

Thus, the creature seems a bit fantastic for a pedantic literal reading. But the implication is obvious: There is much inside our time-space bubble that we cannot comprehend, much less handle directly. How could we pretend to operate on God’s level where He stands outside that bubble? We would be more successful wrestling a fire-breathing monster with impenetrable armor than to argue with God. At least we could physically approach Leviathan, in theory at least, but God is rooted outside our realm of existence. And even with today’s unspeakable weaponry, we still could not create such beasts from our limited understanding of what can and cannot live in this fallen realm of existence. That’s because we do no comprehend the fundamental moral fabric woven into all of Creation in the first place, the moral character of God Himself.

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Christian Troops?

Posted on May 24, 2014 by ehurst

If we understand that God’s Laws predict a general non-compliance by humanity, if not open hostility, then our efforts to live His Laws begin to make more sense. We are not the Truth Police and there is no human on earth appointed to enforce God’s Laws on other humans, only on our individual selves.

We surely expect with great cynicism that human governments will always arise, always be held accountable to the Covenant of Noah, and always fail. There may be periods of partial compliance, but the general run of human government is more a matter of God’s inscrutable plans for fallen humanity as little more than smart animals. Further, while we can gain an understanding of God’s preferred intellectual culture, we can rest assured it is wholly unlikely to ever return to earth in the sense of restoring what once was. The ANE (Ancient Near Eastern) epistemology of Scripture will ever remain the open secret of those few believers who try to understand the Bible from its own viewpoint.

It’s not hard to find in Scripture places where Christ and His Apostles warned us to stay out of attempts to govern, to steer government, or to rebuild the intellectual foundations of the Bible outside of the church fellowship. We are most certainly required to implement those things inside the church as a key issue, a central function of what churches do. Right now this would be a monumental task, since it would mean starting from scratch with our own congregations, because I cannot imagine a single established religious institution making room for what we believe. That’s because we must understand we cannot enforce God’s Laws outside our own calling and the domain God grants to us.

The revealed pattern for understanding that domain is the family household, either blood kin or spiritual kin. The latter is by covenant restricted to those who voluntarily remain within the covenant. If God grants us by some miracle a wider influence in the secular society, they still must submit to the covenant in order to receive the blessings of His Laws through us. There is plenty of room for ANE feudal fealty to grant provisional coverage to those unwilling or unable to accept full covenant membership, too, but it remains a matter of recognizing that you and I cannot exercise dominion in any other fashion. ANE feudalism is fundamental to human nature, and spiritual birth does not change what is required of your flesh.

We live these ancient precepts because that is how Creation is wired. ANE feudal organization is the fundamental organizing principle of the universe. It is an expression of how God Himself operates throughout His entire Creation. When fallen men seek every other possible means of organizing, it is the natural fallen response to flee the Garden entrance and the Flaming Sword of Truth. As time passes under the hand of God, mankind will wander farther and farther away.

With each succeeding generation of believers, our part in the task of revelation gets more difficult from the human side of things. We will of necessity rely ever more on the miraculous power of God to change hearts and minds. Insofar as we implement any human authority at all, it must rest on the divine model of ANE feudalism. That model presumes a tension between human volition and the move of the Spirit of God. Yes, there is a time and place when God requires of His servants to use plain old physical force, but it always answers to God’s Spirit and Law. It does not ignore how such might conflict with secular governing force, but pays it little heed.

When conflict between divine command and secular authority is certain, we generally expect to hide, flee or submit as required by God for His glory. Actual armed resistance is highly unlikely, though not entirely forbidden. You as an individual believer will have to decide in the context. Chances are, actually taking up arms will have little to do with direct conflict between the rule of God and that of human government, and more to do with simple contextual necessity. God does not forbid us joining armed revolt or suppression of revolt, but we are forbidden investing it with any sort of religious significance. It’s never a question of which side God is on because human warfare since the Cross has never been a matter of holiness. The Covenant of Moses was closed by Christ, and God announced He was no longer offering anything similar again. Thus, the individual believer engages such political warfare only as a matter of individual response that is not subject to the approval of any other believer.

Christ does not sponsor politics on any other level than within the church, and only in churches organized under ANE feudalism. Anything else in that direction is simply your personal mission and calling. Again, no flag or uniform on this earth represents Christ. Keep that divine cynicism foremost in your mind. Yes, the Christian Mystic can serve in uniform under any flag that seems appropriate at the time, but only a fool sees God waving any flags. Such a believer will never offer quite the level of loyalty the leadership imagines they should have, but will serve more as an alien who could never belong to any human nation. Professional competence is a virtue of itself, and only indirectly a reflection of personal holiness.

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Future Landscape

Posted on May 23, 2014 by ehurst

This is the unhappy part of my calling, but I’d be derelict of duty if I remained silent on such things.

The economy is already collapsing. It’s been wobbling for quite some time and is now grinding to a halt. There’s an awful lot of folks scraping off whatever is still lose before the economic activity essentially stops. Several different causes are racing to be first, but the current system will simply stop working. It appears for now the trigger will be a collapse in value of the dollar. The plutocrats are trying to grab ownership of real property so that they aren’t stuck with worthless dollars. Dollar denominated debt will become quite worthless, too.

It’s possible the plutocrats would try to enforce a new monetary system, but I don’t think that’s likely to work.

The real problem is not that folks can no longer find a way to exchange labor and goods. That’s not too hard to work out quickly on the street level. The real threat in this are those factors in our system that depend most on a flow of money: government agencies (and many non-profits). When money quits coming in or simply quits buying what governments consume, look for confiscation under the cover of tax-in-kind. This is what will get very ugly and make things unstable.

I have serious doubts those in our current government will be able to keep it all together. The officials lack the wisdom and moral fortitude to stop before pushing things over the edge. They also lack the competence to maintain control when things become intolerable for those capable of resisting. That the government will go too far is a given.

There will be no shortage of law enforcement thugs ready to fight, and this is especially sad. This is what guarantees maximum bloodshed, some areas more than others. However, aside from some very early advantages, there are nowhere near enough of them to maintain control. We can be assured the military will also get involved, but there is nothing to guarantee it will in all cases be on the side of government officials. I expect a significant number of upper ranks to face execution by their own men.

Once the old order has been broken down, the new will be a scramble. However, the power and will to fight is with the political right (which is not at all the same thing as mainstream Republicans). American lefties are communists without courage, glad to see someone else enforce their will with maximum bloodshed, but not willing themselves to face death for their ideals. I honestly expect many of them to die anyway, because it won’t be the saner version of the Tea Party folks running things at first. The kind of folks who can effectively rebel and survive aren’t nice people, and there are more of them than you know. They aren’t too rough now, but when the shooting starts, the crazy comes out and won’t go back in the bottle easily.

This assumes things won’t simply fall apart too quickly. If our ruling authorities somehow realize they have lost control and stop pretending, there will be far less bloodshed. It’s possible, but I consider it unlikely at this point. I find it hard to imagine any significant portion would be willing to recognize their job is gone and go find something else to do. I’m also excluding from this discussion the possibility of third parties getting involved.

Worst of all is that portions of the US will most certainly suffer severe ethnic warfare. It’s impossible to predict which groups will declare alliances, or on what basis and for how long. Most of it will be local in nature as gangs will be the first ready to take advantage of changes, while the more patriotic militias will be slow to focus unless they are already engaged in serious planning and intel operations. We should expect multi-party fighting in urban areas.

Some state and local governments have already begun taking the measure of things, though not widely advertised. I predict the Heartland will be relatively stable, with a lot of refugees fleeing that direction. That area is also much better off economically, currently exporting energy and food.

This is simply my personal estimate of things, none of which I anticipate with relish.

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The Cult of Success

Posted on May 23, 2014 by ehurst

One of the most pervasive and pernicious cults in the world is the Cult of Success.

Jesus died on the Cross and called it “victory.” Absorb that for a moment. How easily we forget that the fundamental Laws of God predict we who embrace His moral character will live as a besieged minority. So while I could promote the divine moral justice God revealed as the panacea for all human ills, the Laws of God presume humanity will not listen. Thus, the Laws of God prepare us for dealing with an ongoing disaster.

Yes, we who seek to live His Laws will tend to exhibit a level and type of temporal success unavailable any other way. However, the meaning of “success” changes radically when viewed through revelation. The substance of success is His glory, a paradoxical concept that defies explanation and quantifying. We are assured that our desire to adhere to God’s revelation is success, that it does bring Him glory, without ever explaining in concrete terms what all of it means.

Rejoice in the blessings of the Law, but never get lost in them. Never presume to sell the Law based on generalized results. That wasn’t sufficient to keep Israel on track. The revealed history of the Covenant of Moses survives in part to show just that. Just because you can explain how the Laws of God work and can provide the full intellectual framework necessary to understand it, and prove it all with concrete support, it does not mean people are going to buy it. Humanity cannot possibly ever be rational even to the standard of reason they can devise for themselves, much less the standard of logic coming down out of Heaven.

The inevitable conflict between our driving sense of cosmic morality and the rest of the world is a mark of “success.”

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Little False Religions

Posted on May 22, 2014 by ehurst

The word “religion” carries some ambiguity. Religion is generally defined as our personal response to a spiritual calling somewhere in our souls. Yes, there are enforced religions that don’t meet that test, but that’s not what I mean. Something isn’t really your religion if it doesn’t hold you by itself; it’s more of a cultural milieu. Your religion is a collection of habits and organized thoughts seeking to answer that spiritual call.

There are plenty of fakes, often called cults. Something in the context is fake, as if you were manipulated into claiming a longing that you really don’t have. You have joined for some reason other than your own internal drive to connect on that other level.

If I use Linux very much, it gets to be like that. I’m just about forced to deal with a very large number of people who operate as if using Linux is a form of idolatry. I take periods when I’ll stick my nose deep into the latest Linux technology, but then it gets too confining and almost perverse in the cult-like orthodoxy. I have to back off or I lose contact with the real world of ordinary people, the folks God called me to help. In the main, Linux arises from a community of folks who aren’t all that good with reality outside of computers, and their mindset can be rather contagious. It grates on my nerves after awhile, so I don’t use it all the time.

I’ve lost a friend to the full blown social communism. You know, that utopian religion that asserts all the world’s ills would be solved if we could just enforce the right social orthodoxy. The guy lived in the Pacific Northwest, where political correctness feeds the Church of the Perpetually Offended. They are always offended if you don’t get upset at the right collection of things. It would be about the same as the Tea Party cult, but the two cults have a different psychology. Communists are extremely materialistic, while righties are simply greedy.

Something in the dark storm clouds on the horizon speak to me about what the wind carries. Not much, mind you, just a whiff on the breeze now and then. It’s one of the gossamer threads of spiritual apprehension that can’t qualify as full-blown word of prophecy. A significant portion of American Christian religion is idolatrous, even blasphemous in a sense. The storms hint that I’ll be busy once they get to work, that a surprising number of people will somehow discover elements of what I teach as meeting a need. No, I won’t suddenly become famous, but I won’t be so completely alien to them as I am now. And I am wondering what it is in the storm that will cause that change, that will bring a broader credibility to my work here.

Your guess is as good as mine.

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Quantum Sponges

Posted on May 21, 2014 by ehurst

In Acts 28, Paul shook off a poisonous snake that bit him and he suffered no ill effects. The last portion of Mark’s Gospel promised such would characterize those who promoted the teachings of Christ. We have anecdotal evidence of more such events arising from the early church period. That it was possible did not mean it was normative.

Nothing in this was meant to encourage testing God. During the Wilderness Temptation, Jesus pointedly told Satan He would not jump off the pinnacle of the Temple Plaza just to prove He could, because it was wrong to fling a challenge in the face of God. Does this conflict with Elisha’s statement when he crossed back over the Jordan after seeing Elijah? It is typically translated as, “Where now is the God of Elijah?” (See 2 Kings 2.)

Regular readers will recognize the signal failure to integrate all this as Western literalism. Western reasoning excludes a whole set of logical categories understood by almost every other intellectual tradition. It requires the Hebraic quantum reasoning to see that there is no conflict. Context is everything, and context includes far more than Western minds are prepared to recognize. The people who penned the Scripture did not set out to confound us, but we confound ourselves by refusing to think outside our little Western box.

Truth is obscured by the receiver, not the sender nor the medium. That’s not to say we cannot interfere and mess things up, but if we are obedient, the Lord works through us anyway. The receiver comes after the message and is obliged to adapt, not make petulant demands based on some mythical standard that never actually existed until very recent history. Western rationalism is not purely rational, but deeply infected with a barbaric pagan mythology. The Western presumption to a rational approach is but a passing haze of stinking smoke that will eventually blow away on the winds of history.

Thus, we do not hide the message — our world hides itself from the message. Communicating the message sometimes requires that we shock the conscience of those around us. Not as a matter of course, but when the snakes bite, we have to let God discern whether that’s our ticket home or a chance to demonstrate His glory some other way. Obedience to God’s Laws, the full embrace of divine justice, is not meant solely to gain some peculiar advantage over those who cannot see the moral fabric of the universe. It is meant to ensure we stand in the spotlight of God’s fame. It is meant to guarantee that we willfully participate in His agenda, regardless of mundane outcomes.

It is fully consistent with this moral position that we have little use for encryption. Snooping on our traffic by any agency offers no threat, since perhaps the truth could seize them, too. We have no agenda for action other than living in the sacrificial love of Christ and trying to escape entanglement with this world. We engage this life only at the point of revelation. Thus, we struggle most to create opportunities to say even more of what we wish we could say, if only the world around us were ready. Yes, we hesitate at times because not every moment is right for crucifixion, and not every audience is fit for the pearls of God’s wisdom. We first have to establish the value and use of those pearls in the minds of those who receive them. Thus, our message begins with conduct, a conduct that represents in no way anything less than sacrificial love that absorbs the sorrows of this world as powerless to harm us in the ultimate sense.

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Real World Pastoral Concern

Posted on May 20, 2014 by ehurst

To my virtual parishioners and other readers: Here on this blog I remain the pastor. I’ve noted often enough my real calling is elder, but online the difference is minimal because of how virtual communication works. Were I free to choose, I’d be very happy to have someone take over the role of meat space pastor in my ministry and leave me the organizational task of elder. I remain confident this could happen. It won’t happen with our social and political context as it now appears to be.

That is, so long as people think the world will continue along its current path, no one will sense a need for what I envision. For quite some years I’ve known my training and preparation were for a more difficult life. Sitting fat and sassy in semi-retirement is not a happy situation, in the sense that it does little to stir my energies. It’s okay to come home and rest now and then, but this stuff got old a long time ago. Had I not been able to study and write, I would have continued in the suicidal depression where I was a decade ago. It’s not as if I know enough and have written it all out, but that without a change of context, there is little more I can say.

It troubles me some to realize that it’s highly likely I won’t be able to get busy with the work to which I’m called until things get rough on everyone everywhere. Pretty soon, I suspect there won’t be much of a place of quiet rest for anyone. Once the shit starts, there aren’t likely to be any breaks. I’m doomed to feast or famine, it seems, but nothing in between. Such is life; so we prepare. For a Christian Mystic, worldly sorrow is just background noise. We don’t belong here in the first place.

On the one hand, I’m prepared to play pastor in meat space, too. On the other hand, I’m praying God assigns me to serve alongside a pastor who can tolerate my beliefs. So far, no one I’ve encountered fits the bill. Actually, that’s a major understatement; I’ve faced at best humorous contempt, and often outright hostility, when I could get any attention at all. I’m not looking to be in charge of doctrine, but a partnership that makes room for what drives me.

I think it should be obvious there has to be some geographical proximity because my calling as elder simply has no meaning otherwise. If other people sense no need to hang out with me, the congregation remains just the tiny handful already involved here where I reside. The business of virtual elder-pastor brings but a highly restricted service that demands so very much of the participant. It’s doable, but not optimal. I can’t picture myself as an elitist who only works with the few who can operate on that level. The world is filled with marginal humanity who need shepherding and I can’t ignore their plight, seeing I am myself marginal in some ways. Too much of what needs doing requires physical proximity to help them.

So it’s the current structure and system that inhibits a shift I see as utterly necessary. People won’t view me as a shepherd until they sense the threat that I am trained to fight. That’s what I’m waiting for.

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Parable of Boundaries 2

Posted on May 19, 2014 by ehurst

This continues on the thoughts from a previous blog post.

Babies recognize no boundaries, particularly ego boundaries. Older children tend to project their personal boundaries as absolutes, but so do a great many adults. Sophisticated people recognize that boundaries vary widely with context and the people involved. Sanity is discerning what is and is not negotiable in your life.

Civility is a sort of social contract that recognizes boundaries across a wide swath of humanity. It’s the rules and customs by which we prevent killing each other needlessly when living in close contact; it enables us to occupy cities. That’s what civilization is. A significant variation in the rules for some signifies a class structure. Our Western Civilization presumes a certain amount of functional reduction in class stratification as good. Today we have a fairly universal presumption of democracy.

However, functional roles still grant people a change of boundaries. We grant privileges to some because of their role in society, and typically it has to do with government offices. Instead of people born to privilege, it’s based on the vestments of the official role. The notion that we can do away with privilege is a lie from Hell, so we have to decide upon what basis we can tolerate a certain amount of immunity to civil boundaries. Modern Westerners have no interest in what God says about this, so we’ll skip that for now. It’s enough to note what we are facing right now.

We have a privileged class in effect, in that a certain group of people rise to power and immunity and it tends to stick after they depart the office. Worse, the immunity tends to metastasize like cancer, taking over an ever-widening swath of offices. The very nature of how people gain that power is a wide open invitation of psychopaths. The smart ones recognize common boundaries in order to manipulate those who observe them. Government officials and functionaries who don’t bear a native psychopathy gain one by exposure, even to the point of serious schizophrenia. They compartmentalize their souls to avoid having to transgress boundaries outside their official duties. It’s just a job, after all.

Well, we have now come to the place where some of them are indistinguishable from natural born psychopaths. For example, anyone who works for the NSA. There is no limit what they will lie about, nor whom they will lie to. They’ll lie to each other because such is the workplace culture they have built. Think about it: Let’s say your duties bring you into contact with an NSA employee (or CIA or FBI, etc.). You cannot trust anything they say without verification. There is too great a likelihood that it’s their job to lie about something — anything at all. There are no boundaries. You cannot trust them on anything. Ever. They have been caught lying to everyone at some time or another about things that often make not a bit of difference, so far as anyone knows, but the insane culture of their work makes them do it.

Most people can figure that out, for the most part. We know that a certain range of government employees are utterly untrustworthy and there’s not a thing you and I can do about it. But that cancer has spread farther than anyone wants to admit. The whole damned government is that way. You can’t trust your local dog catcher, because the secrecy insanity has crept into everything. The US government has betrayed you already a thousand times and in a million ways, and your state a local officials are hardly any different.

Stop trusting them. Prepare for the worst from them, because it’s all too likely to come all too soon.

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