Our Anomaly

Posted on March 4, 2014 by ehurst

Recently I spotted a couple more stories about archaeological evidence of previously unknown civilizations, or those that were far more developed than is currently acknowledged. Indications of highly advanced technology, though surely of a different kind than our own, offers no problems for me. As a solid Bible-believing man, I’d be the first to tell you that history is hardly restricted to what the Bible tells us. I feel no need to try squeezing those discoveries into the picture. At the very least, we have no way of knowing what the Flood washed away, but the Bible is far more relaxed about reporting time passage than we are.

That in itself should highlight something: Western materialism is a total anomaly in human history. Our dogmatic literalism in communication, in pursuit of precision that seems missing from everything before us, serves to ensure we will never understand what men did in the past. We’ll stare at the ruins of grand marvels of achievement and never understand how or why such things were done. It’s not simply that those civilizations left us nothing else of their passage through human space. It’s that our civilization has no idea how to think or see by comparison.

Every time we’ve been able to discover anything at all pointing to an intellectual content, we are shown how all other civilizations have shared something we lack. So far as we can tell, only the West lacks mysticism. Even where it appears in Western literature, it is not at all the same thing. We are so utterly bone-headed about it, we think it’s just a higher intellectual pursuit that tends to come out like gibberish, and lots of irrational nonsense. Funny how all Western mysticism seems just that and seems to revel in it. Yet every previous civilization held mysticism in a much higher regard as essential to understanding the universe, and all those other kinds of mysticism were nothing like ours. It is we who lump their gold in with our dirt. In our mythology, everything that isn’t concrete falls into the slough of suspicion.

In Western mythology, it’s not possible for serious thinking and knowing to include sources outside sensory data and reason. All external inputs are lumped together as unreason and sentiment. Western reason dismisses the existence of anything higher than the intellect. And that’s why the West cannot hope to last much longer, and will never accomplish anything that leaves constructive marks that future civilizations will wonder over. Whatever it is that might be possible in our universe cannot be perceived with mere senses and logic. It requires learning how to read the stars, as it were, without the hokum.

Yes, it’s very easy to claim access to the divine. Even Westerners know instinctively there is something out there beyond the mind and beyond our universe, despite the vast effort to dismiss it. So it leaves us vulnerable to all sorts of hucksterism that only seems outside our pitiful science. Utterly lacking a genuine academic approach to higher sources of understanding that reason cannot control, we deny ourselves something God granted to all humans despite the Fall. Every other civilization before ours had tools and a lore of serious academic study of things higher than mere reason. Without the essential tools to work with those sources above man’s perceptions, we have no hope for ever touching anything that will outlast us. All our theories about the ancient monuments still standing will ever fall short because we refuse to acknowledge the very intellectual background on which all those mighty works were built.

And for someone like me who once sought to serve in the pulpits of various Christian organizations, I’ve long since shaken their dust off my feet for this very reason: Mainstream Christianity precludes the very intellectual grasp necessary to read the Bible. Even when they talk about “spiritual needs” they discuss it in terms of more intellect with some allowable emotions mixed in; there is no indication they have a clue that it means radical departure from everything they know. Though I hunger for the fellowship of like-minded believers, we are so few and so thinly scattered, it seems online is the only way we can meet. So be it. Welcome to the fringe of reality, brothers and sisters.

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Nothing Important

Posted on March 3, 2014 by ehurst

Forgive me, dear readers; more senseless brain spew.

Way back when I first started this blog, I knew it would be raw, but not necessarily fresh. The point is not polished presentation from long consideration; that’s for magazines and books. Blogging is my test bed for expression. And there are no objective standards for talent and wisdom. There is only marketing, though precious little of an open market. What catches the eye of vast numbers for reading is either what they perceive necessary for their future or what they perceive most entertaining. If you don’t think vendors manipulate perceptions, then you don’t understand marketing. To avoid that, I started from the position that my blog was simply my personal journal that others were permitted to read. I proposed blogging for myself even if no one read it but me.

I would pity you for such an empty life, but if you tried to analyze what I’ve posted here over the past 5+ years, you would detect changes in what occupies my thoughts, some significant. Living inside my own head, I would save you the trouble by offering the opinion that I’ve become increasingly otherworldly in focus. Sometimes I’m a little slow and it takes God a long time to get through to me, but I am utterly certain that He is leading me from glory unto glory.

The paradox is that, as one becomes more otherworldly, one becomes more practical. That’s how it’s supposed to work. As more of your attention is focused on things that simply can’t be expressed in any human language, the more you are forced to find expressions that apply those otherworldly visions.

You don’t know Karl Marx — he intentionally lied to many about his real loyalties — but his statement that religion is an opiate to reduce people’s involvement in the real world is part of the truth. What Marx offered as the “real world” was only one more opiate, though. Religion is a human construct in pursuit of moral imperatives, and communism is just one more religion. So is democracy and every economic theory and sports and entertainment, etc. To construct policy and goals for human behavior is inherently a moral statement, an expression that “this matters.” To then go on and construct a system to regulate the behavior in pursuit of what matters is religion in effect. You’ll be herded into one or another or even several because it is part of human essence.

Spirituality is another matter entirely. Marx attempted to deny it existed, as have many others. Denying it as much a religion as embracing it. Way too many have merely claimed spirituality is real, but then corrupted it into something far less. To embrace a level above the mind and outside this universe, a transcendent reality that is beyond human ken, bears with it a raft of logical conclusions. Unlike Marx, I’m not in the business of selling another brand of opiate and I have no interest in herding anyone. I’m quite willing to piss off everyone for the sake of self-honesty. Speaking entirely from my own wild perspective, my spirituality says things like this:

  • Christianity as we know it has become the slave of political activism. Forget the words and look at the actual emphases (“this matters”). You’ll see little more than marketing of something entirely secular. Never mind the diversity; it’s just multiple flavors of the same stuff and all of it pretty toxic to your morals, if you take it too seriously.
  • Islam is a lifestyle with similar sectarian flavors as Christianity. However, they all tend to be more consistent with the accepted Scriptures than does mainstream Christianity. Islam makes little pretense to otherworldly concerns, having absorbed some of the outlook of Judaism.
  • Judaism suffers the same sectarian divisions, but I contend it’s possible to detect an underlying core of basic assumptions about reality. That core is very intentionally hidden from outsiders; what you think you know about Judaism is just PR. At heart it is a religious assertion that Jews are the only “humans,” while the rest of humanity is some filthy perversion of animality worthy of extermination. Short of that they’ll settle for enslavement. We Gentiles aren’t permitted to analyze their documents and statements. Not exactly racist, it tends toward that. It’s not hard to prove Judaism is only the thinnest pretense of ancient Hebrew religion.
  • There are genuinely good people in all of the above, and just about any other religion of mankind. What they claim as their religious identity may have little to do with their moral preoccupations; that’s part of being human. Awareness of broad generalities will never translate well into every corner of the human heart.

The primary reason for understanding the generalizing inherent in social sciences is to answer the lies of those who use it for a propaganda tool. Everybody uses it; those who are conscious of it get their message out better. And religion is most distinctly a category of social science analysis because it is essentially an activity aimed at organizing human behavior. All the blather about how the particulars are, or express, commands from God is simply the sales pitch.

Dear readers, I make no pretense of being unbiased. I am very much in the business here of making biases conscious so that you can choose one wisely, since humans are inherently unable to operate without any bias.

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The Law of Context

Posted on March 2, 2014 by ehurst

As humans, we cannot function without context.

It’s a critical task in the stages of development that we gain some kind of context. Descartes’ thought experiment was a prime example of delusion; you cannot start with nothing when you already have context. If you could take away the context, you would take away humanity itself. Instead of having purity and clarity, you would have nothing at all. The world around us would not cease to exist without humans to perceive it, but humans cannot perceive it objectively. The assertion that such a thing is possible is a pernicious self-deception. Perception is not reality, but reality is out of reach without perception.

The task of perception is not possible without our humanity. We are hard-wired with a whole raft of physical needs. Turn them off and we die. The quest of faith was never to ignore those needs but to fulfill them righteously. Those physical needs cannot be silenced in our consideration of the world around us. Satisfy basic physical needs and other things crop up, all pretty much hard-wired in terms of how it affects us. It is only our current mythology that pretends we can sandbox our minds away from our humanity. We have to settle for what we can get and stop the peacocking.

Mythology is context, and if your mythology does not reflect reality, you’ll always be confused. You might still get some things right, but our peculiar Western mythology was specifically designed to minimize our ability to get things right. It may seem random chance, but poking around the roots of how our civilization was born will reveal that the seed for the tree was plucked from the Tree of Knowledge, not the Tree of Life. Ours is the only culture with no cross-breeding, as it were. Not all of our mythology is equally evil, as my use of the symbols from Eden would indicate. The problem is what we read into those symbols.

Paul describes the case where having a full background in revelation by itself will save neither your soul nor your ass (Romans 2). He presents the case where those with none of the Bible in their background could still find faith and obedience to God’s will and reap the benefits. They get the power of the Word without the written word. They can even go to Heaven without knowing the name of Jesus because they manage to act in His name anyway. Paul makes the point that humans are wired to seek an answer to spiritual apprehension, that it is possible we could find a desire to live morally. God is able to judge the hearts and intentions of every human from within their context and impute righteousness on His own terms. Those who do have that background in His revelation do not thereby gain the privilege of playing gatekeeper of Heaven.

Please notice the scattered descriptions of how the First Century churches handled troublesome souls. The ultimate sanction was disfellowship. You could still show up at the meetings, but you were considered an outsider and not permitted to lead or have much input. You weren’t family. The reckoning of kinship was based on something besides feelings. However, there was no thought given to more forceful measures no this plane of existence. On a higher plane, one prayed for God to hand that difficult person over to Satan’s authority for discipline.

How did that evolve into using political authorities — the sword — to compel external conformity?

That change was a radical departure from the gospel. Paul admitted that some of what he demanded as leader of the churches he planted was simply his custom. In other words, it was context, and it often meant trading one’s former context for another. There are plenty of things the Apostles pointed out as truly essential in a universal sense, things they learned from the ultimate authority of the Son of God. They admitted a certain limitation in what kind of answers they might come to when things got complicated, but there came a point when they simply had to get back to work on the grounds of some common context. It’s not hard to construct a summary of those things and understand how they apply in your context. That still left an awful lot of room for different approaches to obedience.

Even in the act of sharing with you what I consider to be universal requirements, all you get is my context for those things. I won’t even pretend to hold any universals in themselves. Given the nature of human interaction online, there is really very little I could or would do to enforce anything resembling conformity. Given my understanding of things, I have no interest in that. I can’t dismiss your different understanding, but I may have trouble handling your context. If it’s too alien, there’s not much I can do except ask you to go your way in peace. Even then, it’s a matter of avoiding areas where we cannot come to terms; you can stick around if you aren’t trying to attack what I’m doing. The morality of how we interact is itself a major element in reaching for God’s truth.

I rather like digging into the context from which Scripture comes. I’ve had the exposure to study of those ancient civilizations and how they viewed their world. Some other people invested an awful lot of money in letting me go to university, and I am unable to express how grateful I am for that. I’m doing my best to pass it on. However, the larger task is translating that into our context today. That means stripping away as much context as I can possibly understand and put things within reach of those who cannot go where I’ve gone. You can’t get from me what I don’t understand. I don’t pretend to know where the bone separates from the marrow (Hebrews 4:12) for you, only for me. Still, I’m focused firmly on making the most of removing non-essential context.

I’m specifically interested in disposing of things in our culture that don’t fit a genuine life of faith. You’ll often read here critiques of how people who claim Christ have failed because they don’t know Christ, having allowed themselves to become entirely too wrapped up in our culture. Too many missionaries are carrying cultural religion instead of Christ. So, yes, I’m at war with much of mainstream Christian religion as contrary to what Christ actually taught. The main thing they get wrong is mistaking context for truth.

It’s not as if we humans can’t actually make adjustments in some parts of our context.

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Job 29

Posted on March 1, 2014 by ehurst

Universal truth is simply not within reach of the human mind, because truth is nothing less than the Person of God Himself. Rather, any knowledge of God is inherently contextual,and we dare not assume anyone else is obliged to accept our ideas. This was the primary sin of Job’s trio of friends. It is also the primary fault of our postmodern age to arrogantly assume that our understanding of God is universal, that people who experience Him differently, or simply express it differently, are wrong. It comes dangerously close to blasphemy to suggest that the alien culture of Job, far away and long before, was somehow inferior, that God was only practicing until we came along.

It also helps to notice that Job is no longer actually talking to his friends. He recognizes that they are present, but that he now regards himself as standing in the Court of Divine Justice. The implication is that Job recognizes what wonderful things God had done for him in the past. The choice to address God in the Third Person is a recognize protocol even today. This and the next two chapters form a unit, a complaint he files with the court.

Job is not promoting himself as the model of human goodness in this chapter. Rather, he laments the loss of a very good life. Most of this qualifies as common figures of speech from his world, expressions you can find elsewhere in Scripture and in other ancient literature of that time and place. The vast majority of this whole book falls into that category. Job notes how other people treated him with respect. We should read it as hyperbole, entirely normal and acceptable in its own context. The whole chapter could be summed up in our modern expression: “What a lucky man he was!”

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Morals and Harassment

Posted on February 28, 2014 by ehurst

God said, “My ways are not your ways” (Isaiah 58). The context is a call to repent, but in the midst of this is a statement that has long carried meanings beyond the context. Rightly so, because Hebrew prophetic writing was meant to be taken expansively, and this statement is obviously universal in scope.

A few years ago I helped a fellow obtain ordination. He went back to the same organization and got some more training. I never picked on him for his oddball beliefs; I just guided him through the process. Then I helped him publish a book or two, but it required very heavy editing — he can barely spell. He has precious little of my education. Anyone would expect him to take a different tack in Kingdom service. Sadly, that tack includes the insistence that I have to agree with what he believes, that somehow he outranks me and the burning insistence in his mind is binding on me. I’ve had to tell him to leave me alone on the grounds that he is interfering with my ministry.

It’s not a question of which of us has the right ideas. I can’t use his and he can’t understand mine. You can probably guess the rest, and I refuse to name him. Could you have the time to waste chasing back through more than five years of posts here, you’ll find some have drawn major objections and quite a few debates. Well, half of a debate because I generally refuse to debate. I just answer questions and let it go. None of that makes me superior, but I’ve never once backed down. I have had to ban a couple of folks and I once deleted some truly goofball stuff that was way off topic. (I block spammy stuff for an entirely different reason.) Aside from idiocy, I’ve always had an answer because God gave me a really good education and it’s not hard to answer broken logic or broken ideas.

I have my mission and they have theirs; people with their different approach don’t rattle me. But I can’t allow interference. I find the inflated sense of entitlement exhibited by some folks truly amazing. That fellow I helped suffers from it, too. He really doesn’t even know me, largely because he doesn’t know how to listen. I can’t guess what God has in store for him, but it doesn’t include me. I sincerely hope he finds something that brings him peace.

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By Another Name

Posted on February 27, 2014 by ehurst

My regular readers know that I blather a lot about divine moral justice, the moral fabric of Creation, the Law Covenants and Ancient Near Eastern intellectual traditions.

We don’t have to call it that. Those are terms I use consistently simply to get the point across. To be honest, there are times I wished that I could think up another nickname for Jesus Christ because the reader/listener surely carries lots of improper baggage with the mainstream name and title. I’ve literally watched as my attempts to help peel folks off the broken merry-go-round horse missed completely because using that name simply precluded anything I had to say that didn’t fit the officially approved pool of meaning. It’s great if you honestly believe there’s power in His name, but not if keep riding the dead churchianity horse.

Part of what I’m doing in my current fiction work is attempting to break away from all the previous definitions and terms and simply steering the main character into moral justice without all that stuff. In the story, he encounters an entity that is a direct reflection of moral reality, which is completely different from what he grew up believing. You and I know he’s dealing with God’s divine justice, but we don’t call it that in the story. There’s no discussion of “born again” nor even the common concept for it. Rather, we have a man who comes to the point where he simply acts according the Laws of God.

He becomes a biblical moral agent but I describe it in different language.

This is consistent with my teaching that knowing the name of Jesus has nothing to do with how the Father decides to breathe life into a dead spirit. Those of us how pursue a life walking in Christ can’t really know about that in another human in the first place. All we can know is whether the power of God is manifested in their lives. When people change and move closer and closer to the Laws of God, they tend to change their act. More, the greater miracles of God come in the shape of greater freedom to obey His Laws and less fighting against the flesh. The flesh won’t die unless the spirit is alive. No change? No power.

I’m describing a human who changes, and not merely because of psychological conversion.

At the same time, the story describes spiritual fellowship without even Christian religion. It’s there in substance, but not with the same old labels. It’s a bunch of people operating by a radically different ethical assumption about how human groups are supposed to work together. If you aren’t driven by that power, your religion won’t help you. If the power calls your name, you can make up your own religion.

I don’t regard the trappings of First Century church life as completely necessary, just exemplary. You can get pretty close to the spirit of things without the precise image carried over from ancient Hebrew synagogue habits. That’s what Paul meant about “rightly dividing the Word.”

The story is writing itself, but sometimes I have to stop and let it percolate down from the Spirit Realm. I have been surprised by a couple of twists in the story line, but once written it becomes obviously correct. The rest of the story just keeps coming from some place out past the edge of my conscious mind.

I think you’re going to like it.

Update: I think I can see this may be more than a single volume. In that case, it should be thought of as Brotherhood Book 1, with the actual volume title as AI’s Minion.

Update 2: Published.

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Plans for Our Pain

Posted on February 26, 2014 by ehurst

Someone else plans to make life awful for us; we should plan accordingly.

The global banking system will not break down. At some point much of it will simply close their doors and keep our deposits, while continuing to work with the big money interests. We may not be able to reclaim the money later; it depends on too many factors to guess. All these lectures and warnings about breaking points are noise designed to create fear and doubt. Just because no one can imagine how it could possibly keep operating doesn’t mean the plutocrats can’t make it happen. What you need to understand is that they most certainly do intend to take our money, or at least keep us from accessing as we do for now.

Part of their plans is to continue enslaving us indirectly through government debt and other ways of leveraging claims against our future productivity. Certain favored multi-national industries will remain in operation, period. For example, the American defense industries aren’t going anywhere. Cutting troop levels simply means the warfare will be more automated. The robotics sector of defense research is taking off like their private Lear Jets.

If you really want to worry, worry about the US struggling so hard to find a way to provoke war with Russia or China. You shouldn’t imagine the plutocrats would hesitate once they decide things will turn out in their favor. That has nothing to do with whether the US is likely to win; we aren’t. It’s whether the American population can be suckered into voluntarily accepting the debt slavery.

Once serious chaos sets in and we are engaged in WW3, the Cabal will come out to convince us that they have a solution to all our troubles if we will just embrace their new plan for global government. I have no way to predict how much pain it will take, but some markers along the way include armed resistance followed by reprisals. The deck is stacked against resistance. Because resistance can’t possibly be decisive, we can be sure it will drag on awhile. The plutocrats have the patience to wait for things to drag along, creating serious pain. While we are waiting, you can expect increasing efforts to destabilize any country they can.

The plutocrats aren’t exactly the same as the Cabal, but they do all work together for now.

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Chainertainment

Posted on February 25, 2014 by ehurst

A major weakness in human nature is seeking entertainment.

The powerful link between intellect and emotions is more than merely a matter of the body’s physical needs and appetites. The mind itself has an appetite, which the New Testament refers to as “Lust of the Eyes.” An obvious link would be how porn works, because it is the mind seeking sexual stimulation vicariously. I don’t think it’s possible to write a computer algorithm that emulates the vicarious element in most of our entertainment seeking.

This is why any noise about the presumed virtuous nature of government servants is not simply a lie, but an egregious intentional deception. Sure, it’s possible in the standard schizophrenia that afflicts all of us that the mouthpiece making noise about the virtues of selfless service may have convinced some element of their conscious mental functions that they really believe that crap. But give anyone a moment to reflect with more honesty and they’ll admit that out of a herd of bureaucrats, the best you can hope for is a small percentage of people who tend to act with decent motives. The rest are a broad mixture of petty self-interest and deal-making with the system. Too many are nearly sociopaths or even psychopaths.

So all this happy talk about the likes of NSA being “mostly harmless” is a blatant lie. The vast majority of NSA analysts suffer the same entertainment seeking as the rest of us. Restrict what’s possible and they’ll seek entertainment in what’s left, if they can persuade themselves to obey any of the rules. This is also part of why overworked cops beat up folks they don’t happen to like. It’s not that government employees are just like the rest of us; they most certainly are not. A cross-section of any bureaucratic office will show you people who might be fairly intelligent, but have allowed themselves to swallow a significant amount of moral conditioning. Even if they tend to keep it compartmentalized — like a cop who doesn’t wear his badge on his underwear — it’s simply not possible to disconnect that very human wiring. It’s not a question of whether they are scumbags inherently, but that they are scumbags-in-effect.

Don’t even pretend that reform will really change much. Most reformers themselves suffer too much from venal entertainment-seeking reflexes. You cannot create a system that is inherently, or even tolerably, honest. Brutality in any form is just another type of entertainment seeking. This is what chains us to moral failure. Computer algorithms have no entertainment needs; it’s just crunching numbers. People cannot do that, at least not so consistently. We care, and most of our caring is deeply infected with moral perversion of one kind or another, and usually multiple kinds. So even if I present God’s perfect prophetic evaluations of every social institution, I should never expect it to change. Part of the prophetic message assumes the world cannot possibly do what’s right. Look in the mirror and lose that pretense.

One of the safest forms of entertainment is learning to laugh at yourself, but even more, to be amused by the vast human inability to conform to even that righteousness we embrace.

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Same Ol’ Brain Spew

Posted on February 24, 2014 by ehurst

I’m writing another story. You know, religious propaganda disguised as fiction.

It’s a continuation of this old thing, and will be more or less the same universe as The Chronicles of Misty and the REZ story in Mystical Tales of Romance. It starts off much earlier in the timeline of both. For the time being, the working title is The Brotherhood.

However, I’m trying to avoid using all the same terminology I use here. Some of it is unavoidable, but instead of ranting about Aristotle, for example, I’ll simply describe in more generic language the idea of putting him in his place. For those who haven’t been paying attention, I don’t trash him, but I relegate him to the margins for intellectual wimps. To my way of thinking, he tossed aside the ancient mysticism of his world because his feeble intellect was unable to handle the heavy lifting necessary to deal with it. So ignoring all the centuries of previous scholarship by far wiser men, he pretended it didn’t exist so he could get his own name in the history books. Aristotle was an intellectual punk.

Not that I’m that much smarter, but I get to call him bad names because I stumbled across some rich wisdom and guidance here and there until I found out what it all meant. Standing on the shoulders of truly impressive giants, I am able to look down on Aristotle and all his peons who ape his goofy decisions.

Okay, so I’m not really all that rude about it. Still, for those intrigued by some of my crazy notions, you might find this future story interesting. I must confess this is the first time the story isn’t writing itself all at once. In the past, most of my books drove me like a Clydesdale until I had plowed a furrow from Sacramento to Savannah. Even the Bible studies, already written in substance, required an awful lot of editing and I felt the same drive to push until all of them were done (from what I had). This story is more like an easy vacation drive, in no particular hurry. It did keep me up late last night, but that turns out to be the exception, not the rule.

So this time I’m not serializing the draft here. You’ll just have to wait until the story tells me it’s done. For your amusement, I’ll tell you this is the first time I’m composing the whole thing in MS Word 97, which runs under WINE on my Debian machine. Later I’ll bump it up to a later version of Word format because Smashwords chokes on anything older than Word XP (2002). That requires using completely different software and breaking out the WinXP VM and it’s just a lot more work and time consuming. With WINE, it all runs natively and I can pop it open when the mood strikes.

Thanks for dropping by today.

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A Path through Time

Posted on February 23, 2014 by ehurst

God’s path for me has carried me places I could never have imagined.

I seldom found God in evangelical church activities, particularly during worship services. The first and greatest error Western Christians make is confusing emotionally moving music and preaching with a move of the Spirit. You can claim that emotion is just an outward symptom, but I will counter that it is the whole point of most Christian worship.

My mind does recall a few signal experiences here and there, little snapshots of moving experiences that happened in worship. But my spirit is another matter entirely. The snapshots that haunt me most are those when my mind and emotions were least satisfied. As I think back over all those years of attending church, volunteering and working, there were many moving moments. They make good stories, but they don’t change souls, only minds — that’s not enough. How do I tell you that the entire structure of Western evangelical church activity is aimed at creating a very human addiction? Even when the religious apparatchiks fail, the objective is often bluntly stated as creating an association in the minds of attendees that makes them want to come back for more of the same.

And what’s wrong with that? It’s just a whisker away from being exactly the same thing as any secular, godless TV show. The only difference is the religious branding at church. Both of them are channeling human attention into something that is actually harmful. Both of them are pulling on a human weakness, tools of the Devil.

To the degree I need the comfort of being around a small circle of friends, I can do that anywhere; it’s often much easier and more comfortable without the religious branding. The conformist structure of every church means I can’t be myself because something demands I be a different self with only a pretense what God says He wants. In a secular setting there are fewer expectations.

Not lower expectations, as many evangelicals assume, but simply less. Western Christianity is just a different flavor within the narrow range of Western culture. You miss the point when you suggest that Christianity as a cultural milieu is the crutch we cripples need; that metaphor is all wrong. Following Christ is meant to heal us morally; the emotional and psychological healing is just a consequence. The moral shaping we need cannot come from any part of conforming to Western Civilization. Your evangelical conformity ends up serving as anti-Christlike because Christianity is an Eastern religion and so God intended it to always be. Western Christianity is western, but hardly Christian.

That peculiar Hebrew intellectual approach is the very closest on earth you can get to the Kingdom of Heaven. Yet our Western Christian theologians look back through the mists of time and, lacking discernment, lump that Hebrew tradition with all the other Eastern viewpoints as superstitious and inferior. They reject the idea that the West is a perversion. Instead they promote this very crippling infection throughout the world when they pretend to bring the gospel.

Your Western Christian “different” moral viewpoint isn’t different enough from the world. A change in mere intellectual and emotional content is not enough difference. The difference in moral structure is artificial and shallow. It has become no more than another structured social activity in which we are all good acquaintances, not spiritual family. Because the shallowness is enforced, we come away with just a hint of what it could be, and we are not filled. But church typically insists you are being filled, so we keep going back, trying to find whatever it is that is supposed to be filling. Maybe we convince ourselves it’s working, but if it does, our needs aren’t that great. It makes church just one alternative social circle among many.

Don’t offer me a mere psychological conversion; don’t tell me spiritual birth is a decision. Paul said all too plainly in Romans that no human has the ability to even want spiritual awakening. It can come only from above. When it does, it demands a rather substantial moral shift that Western Christianity has never made. Church keeps working on the wrong level, somewhere far below the requirements of actually walking with Christ.

I’m not there yet, but this path is so very long because everything that should be ahead of me was built behind me by fools who compromised with the world.

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