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Unpersuasive
I don’t write to persuade.
People can use footnotes and facts to lie as easily as to support the truth, so there is nothing special about chasing down every reference. History isn’t objective; it is merely the narrative of the last winner. That applies contextually, so you’ll have multiple competing narratives told by those who won just enough leverage to keep talking.
Most of those doing the talking are trying to herd people into one direction or another. They seek control, to reduce the options for voluntary action under the pretense of modern materialistic democracy. Move the people to get the stuff. When you can escape the damned necessity of the stuff, you no longer need to move the people. You are free to examine other motives for communications.
The valid pastoral message is to set you free, to elevate you above sheep-ness, not to herd you into some pre-defined answer in pursuit of measurable results. I claim that as my mission. I will cite one reference simply to get the thinking started: Russia Is Dominated By Global Banks, Too, by Brandon Smith. Please note that I do no endorse his primary message, but I do like some of the points he makes on the way. He states facts relevant to more than his own message.
Those facts include the false division between what we call capitalism versus communism. Capitalists funded the birth of communism as a political reality, and continue to fund the various states born from communism. It doesn’t matter whether said states any longer fit the definitions, because the labels never mattered in the first place. Smith notes that the BIS is still alive and active, but from behind the scenes, using the IMF and other forces as a front.
Please recognize that, while we may justly admire Putin, we do so the same as might any Hollywood actor: He’s competent in portraying the character in the script. You’ll notice, for example, his image is the Western manly man, not the shepherd in the Bible. Smith has no interest in such things, so after we gather his facts, we move on to a different story.
I still believe that the shadow banking empire hopes to drive us into a global government scenario. Give us enough pain from warfare and economic failure and we might be willing to run in the direction they want. What the people they manipulate believe is not the point. Putin is their agent, and who can say how witting he may be of how this all turns out? But so is Obama, who seems to know precisely who hired him and what he’s been hired to do.
And I still believe the shadow banking empire is subject to all the internal intrigue and partisanship as any other human political entity, so things will never quite go smoothly for them. Their plans may never come to fruition as currently formulated. But we will certainly see a seductive call to global government by folks who pretend greater competence than the current bunch of rulers who have been hired to play stupid, even as they falsely claim competence. It’s a lie within a lie within a lie.
Unlike Brandon Smith, I don’t pretend we can do anything about it. Yes, we can use the advantage of the Internet and free independent thinkers and writers to help us see the lies. But the idea of engaging this beast of global hegemony is another lie. Rather, it works best to simply make what preparations are consistent with your divine mission. For example, I’m gathering truly durable tools I know I will use because replacement is likely to be impossible for a period of time. It’s not that tools will be unavailable, but I expect access to money will be iffy at best in the near future.
I won’t attempt to herd you into a similar course of action. You have to meet God on the terms He sets for you, not the ones for me. Rather, I appeal to you to examine the facts from a quantum moral perspective and let the Spirit guide you to prepare wisely in the normal course of things. We may not be here, but as long as God is pleased to keep us on this earth, we act responsibly with His provision.
What does your mission require?
Posted in globalism
Tagged economics, government, history, mysticism, oppression, propaganda, survival, technology
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Lawful Grace; Graceful Law
Law is grace.
Were it not for God’s fervent and determined favor toward us, there would be no revelation. Revelation has always been fundamentally addressed to humans where they stand in a fallen world and in fallen terms. The objective has always been to offer the path back into Eden by way of mortality. Once you get used to the idea that this life isn’t worth saving for its own sake, you then stand in the place to recognize that the Laws were meant to indicate something far better than this fallen existence.
More than one Old Testament prophet mentioned the necessity of parabolic language. Jesus taught extensively on the necessity of parables, particularly as recorded in Matthew 13. Few people notice that Jesus was talking about the revelation of God’s Law Covenants as the seeds sown into our souls. The Law as taught by Jesus is the gospel. The point is not our understanding so much as our commitment, our willingness to receive and let it take hold. John notes how, right up to the end, the Twelve were hung up on literalism (John 16:17-33). They whined about the use of symbolism because it demanded too much of them.
They weren’t yet ready to sacrifice their human comfort with literalism and what little it could bring. Yet the very depth of what God could do and wanted to do for them could not be revealed that way. When Jesus restated things in more literal terms, it meant dumbing things down and removing some of the most important parts. A description of what they would experience on the human level was not sufficient to keep them faithful during the tribulation of Passion Week.
He also promised there would be a time He would speak to them with total clarity. When? Obvious from the context is that it would be post-resurrection. That is, once He was in a position to grant them direct access to the Spirit Realm through their own spiritual resurrection, they wouldn’t need to rely on what their minds could grasp. They would be able to understand at that much higher level.
When our the Lord breathes His fresh life into our dead spirits, everything is subject to reevaluation. That’s why the Apostles could write things like, “I know you understand all of Creation better than before.” And then they encouraged the people who understand on that higher level to make sure their lower level was retrained to obey that higher level: Learn the meaning of the Laws of God. Learn the lore of symbolic, parabolic language, because that’s how the Spirit of God communicates.
But it fires in us a zeal for the Laws that few could have had any other way. We become like Jesus cracking that whip in Court of Gentiles. We are determined that the message be available to anyone and everyone. It’s the one point at which we take an active, even violent, hand in the affairs of fallen humanity. We are determined that this, at least, will be justice as God defines it. All the rest is truly a matter of voluntary opening to the seeds, but the matter of sowing we will not negotiate.
The only question left is precisely how you are supposed to do that sowing. How do you expose the truth? The Laws. We live them. It’s artificial to separate out verbal communication from conduct. It’s both and neither; it’s all about commitment. Don’t confuse the issue by clinging to ancient methods from an ancient world that no longer exists. Some things do change, but it is our duty to examine through our convictions what is required of us today. If you bind yourself under limitations designed by humans, you’ll deny your calling.
The starting place is at the lowest level of conduct. Just reach out with sacrificial love. You can afford it because Heaven is your supplier. Reach out and restore that divine justice, rebuild some portion of the context that the Laws were meant to portray. Establish a pattern of just living that rises far above human justice.
When you live the Laws of God, you are spreading grace.
Posted in eldercraft
Tagged divine justice, jesus parables, law, mission, mysticism, scripture, spirituality
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Forever Pastoral
It’s not about me, so I tend to avoid divulging much.
Still, there comes those moments when it’s hard to do much unless you explain the human context. After all, I teach that the whole point of everything is people, on one level. Knowledge and reason mean nothing if they don’t serve human interest. Oddly, human interest itself is not a real human interest except as the side-effect of pursuing truth. Truth is the single greatest human interest.
And regular readers know that I define truth as the Person of God. More specifically, truth for us is whatever we can know about God. Apparently He decided that His moral justice is the core of what we can and should know of Him. Everything came across as covenant laws, but actually it was all about the covenant.
Under the covenant in His Son, the people who strive to follow Him will take on a certain organizing principle that keeps people focused on truth — focused on God. My single greatest dispute with Western Christian churches and organizations is the intellectual approach underlying how we understand that organizing principle. A genuine church will have two roughly equal fundamental offices: pastor and elder. Those are the words we use in English to translate what would, at a much higher level, be priest and king. These are the Two Divine Witnesses mentioned in John’s Apocalypse, the religious and social leadership that God sanctioned from the very beginning. Sometimes it’s pulled together in one person, rather like it was with Moses, but it remains two distinct kinds of ministry.
Both are spiritual in nature, but with a different focus of application. Sometime around age 9 (48 years ago) I knew I was called by God, but due to the confusion of those spiritual offices in my religious context, I was sure it could only be a calling to preach and pastor. For years I pursued that all the way through high school and college. I strove to gain entrance into the full time Christian ministry that way. I was ordained fairly early in the game, around 1983, and volunteered to serve while I struggled to meet my financial family commitments, hoping some day someone would recognize my divine calling and hire me for the professional ministry.
It never happened. I was paid as “lesser” church staff a few times (youth, music, etc.), but never seriously considered as pastor more than a couple of times.
Meanwhile, my understanding of the context shifted, then shifted some more and a few years ago I realized Western Christianity was horribly twisted and perverted out of shape. It is so primarily because it is Western. That is not an insignificant criticism. Organized Western Christianity belongs to the wrong civilization altogether. I assert Christ pointedly avoided participating in Western Civilization, but did so by what He said was the minimum requirement to walk in the truth of His Father. There are many historical reasons why and how Christians forgot that message, but they did forget. So I decided to belong to the civilization of Christ.
Thus, I am a “pastor” in the sense that I serve as shepherd. While I can comfortably perform ritual functions, I’m not really part of the priesthood. I’m part of the government side of the twin witness of God’s revelation. So the proper term is “elder” — that’s my true vocation. In the apostolic ministry in the New Testament, pastors were appointed but elders arose naturally from the social structure. Some felt called and some just got dragged into it, but it was organic to the human principle of coming together in the Spirit and needing a human focal point for decision.
Because of the prevailing civilization, I can’t say whether I will ever see actual meat-space service in that office. I’d love to, but from where I sit today I don’t see it happening. On purely practical grounds, I realize it would first require some sponsorship of sorts. Someone has to want this thing bad enough, to embrace what I teach as somehow reflecting truth for them, that they will invest resources I don’t have in making it happen. There has to be a real human community, a nearness of time and space.
Right now, all I have is the virtual office here. And I’m not hindered from caring and extending an eldership in the odd moments when someone opens the door in meat space. It does happen from time to time. I certainly don’t do it for the money; you can’t buy what I offer. The whole point in sponsorship is having a real human need that requires freeing up time and resources so that full time availability happens. I’m not begging you folks for that; I’m seeking God for a vision to give substance to things my mind can’t comprehend. What can I do with this that I’m not already doing? I don’t know right now, but I sure do have a fire burning too hot and bright to keep things as they are.
Nobody has to tell me that God is often disappointed in how we respond to Him, so I should hardly be insulted if no one buys into what I’m doing.
Posted in personal
Tagged civilization, eldercraft, ministry, mysticism, organizing principle, religion, scripture, spirituality, western christianity
2 Comments
Job 33
Elihu begins by noting he claims no special privilege or revelation. He appeals to Job as a fellow creature of God and does not accuse him of sin any worse than his own. Would Job listen to the words and see if they reflect his own understanding of God’s revelation? Elihu has neither means nor desire to offer any kind of threat, but help instead.
He notes that Job has overstated his case. He let the trio get to him and answered the wrong question, offered the wrong argument. It sounds too much like Job said God was unjust, and that simply wasn’t right.
What Job held forth is a challenge God would not answer. It was the wrong approach. Surely Job was aware that God speaks in more ways than any man could receive. You have to include the whole range before you claim God refuses to speak. Could God not speak to Job in the suffering, too? Was not this at the very least a message to drive Job into the Creator’s Presence? God takes no joy in human sorrow, but hardly keeps them from it, either. All of God’s work among men is aimed at driving them back into His moral truth. Circumstances may bring us under the shadow of death, but so long as our life serves any use to Him, He will surely save it. When it was all over, Job would have a testimony of salvation.
Elihu reminded Job of God’s mercy and persistence. Now would be a good time for Job to stop testing God and repent from allowing the three men to distract him. Elihu had no intention of tearing Job down, but to build him back up. He begged Job to come back to the right side of this issue.
Posted in bible
Tagged divine justice, Job, mortality, mysticism, scripture, spirituality
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The Wadi of Folly
I realize regular readers will recognize this as the same old message that constantly burns freshly in my soul. You can skip this if you want; somebody else needs to see it.
You can’t fix several centuries of stupid.
The US Congress is constantly holding hearings on all kinds of problems. Virtually every government function I’ve ever seen is run by people who have completely forgotten how their agency got started. It seems not a single agency puts much emphasis on the ostensible mission that justifies its existence, and spends far more energy and resources on simply cooking up new justifications. In other words, you cannot make a bureaucracy work at anything but bureaucracy itself.
Pair this with another basic principle: Good people don’t want to tell other people how to live. That means an office with power to tell other people how to live will always draw people who aren’t good. They are seldom actually bad people, just folks somewhere below the line of goodness.
So we end up with government that is inevitably less than optimal, and always trends to worse. Progress? That’s a fairy tale. It’s a false dichotomy that we either calcify yesterday’s inadequate solutions or rush to meet tomorrows unexpected needs. Rather, the right way is to match resources to current needs as much as possible. Needs are not the controlling factor, nor are the resources. It’s the matching that justifies all the training and expertise.
All of this presumes a wider system that embraces the more fundamental mission of government. Therein lies the sandy bottom, the first and most basic failure. We can pretend that our government and organizing principals and documents all point to some objective ideal, but we are talking about humans. The power of ideas only shows up in people who believe in ideals. Most people believe in something, but not the things that make for good government. We are all too busy with our own needs. We can’t make it a rule that people learn that their needs have to include others, not in our Western world.
Worst of all is our cultural mythology that makes us so terribly individualistic. Our pantheon of heroes does not include servants. There is no glory imputed in service. Sure, we pretend there is, but no one actually buys it in sufficient quantity to strengthen the moral foundation on which we build. It amounts to pebbles in the sand as “building on a firm foundation.” The only place we allow sacrifice is for the sake of individual greatness. Only at the far extreme of the communist anti-human I-don’t-exist do we see any kind of reduction in the myth of The Great Man. All of it posits an impersonal, objective ideal.
We have no place in our imagination for how this represents such a radical position. We have no sense of perspective, that for the vast majority of human existence on this planet things were totally different. I have been threatened for suggesting that what came before Western Civilization was better. There’s some visceral and childish bellicosity that clings to this security blanket out of fear for the unknown. But it’s not unknown. All the vast lore of human existence is dominated by a different approach that we reject. It’s known, but ignored until someone mentions it, and then the berserker’s rage comes out. Blasphemy against the god of material impersonal objectivity.
Focus your energies on fixing people, not institutions. People as individuals can move, if we peel away the rags swaddling the truth people have tried to hide. Wisdom is an alluring lady when you dress her properly. As Solomon noted in his call to his nation, she’s a lady worthy of matrimony. He knew she couldn’t be found in the best kingly rule he could build, but only by individuals in their own unique approach. He left unstated the obvious point that truth is for the ladies a real man calling for their soft surrender to his unlimited protection and support. Our Western mythology ignores the real individualism of God’s unique regard for each of us as our Creator.
Activism for change presumes the system is just fine. It assumes we can just make some minor adjustments in how our civilization pushes into the sand and things will be dandy. There’s a whole planet of bedrock out there and we keep everything in the shallow wadis until the next rainstorm washes it all away.
Can you hear that distant thunder?
Posted in prophecy
Tagged civilization, culture, government, human existence, peace, Western mythology
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Kubuntu Beta 2 Is Here
I’m downloading it using BitTorrent right now. The update was put up sometime today. I went out for a long bike ride and it was waiting when I got back. If you want your copy, go here. This is the final beta release before it goes gold sometime next month. From what I’ve read, I anticipate there won’t be massive updates after you install this one. They are treating it like an RC (release candidate).
In times past I was all puppy dog on this stuff, wagging my tail with anticipation as I downloaded the latest gee-whiz ISO of this or that. And then most of the time it would be some huge disappointment. Once or twice something I installed on whatever system I had at the time was actually worth keeping. Some examples would be old Red Hat 6.3 and 7.3, SuSE 8.2, RHEL 6, and Debian Etch. Those were the highlights in some twenty years of messing with Linux.
After some rough patches in those days, I might spend some time running Windows instead. I still think Win2K was some of the best technology for its time. Did you know there is a handful of serious developers trying to keep it alive? They are gathering snippets of code to fix genuine security risks and major bug fixes and trying to keep it viable. You can still get a version of Opera to work on it, and at least one AV vendor keeps updating the definitions for a version that works on it. I expect the unofficial updates for XP to have an even bigger effort keeping it alive.
So unless Canonical does something totally stupid, this may well be one of the best releases in a long time. Since they dropped official support for Kubuntu some time ago, I think it has really made life better. That is, I don’t have to fight with the stuff they ram down the throat of Ubuntu users. The folks who repackage it with the K Desktop are free to leave out the junk. I’m not wagging my tail, but I have some tentative hopes this will be one of the good ones, coming at just the right time to help me migrate a bunch of XP refugees over to something genuinely better.
If you have any doubts about keeping Windows on your system, this is a really good time to consider Kubuntu.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged computers, Debian Etch, linux, technology, windows
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