My Religion

Posted on October 27, 2013 by ehurst

The questions I get indicate that some folks don’t understand, so maybe I can clarify things a bit.

I worship Jehovah, the God of the Bible. I am in constant personal communion with Him.

I take the Bible seriously, so seriously that I’ve spent some years studying the Ancient Hebrew intellectual background that gave us the Bible. I strive to understand the Bible from the perspective of the folks who wrote it. (This is not the same as Judaism.)

I take seriously everything Jesus said and did as a walking, talking revelation of God. However, I try to get inside His head as a Hebrew man and understand Him in His own context. My understanding predates the entire history of church belief and the cultural dressing as commonly understood.

All of that study has put me totally outside the mainstream of organized Christian religion. Not out of hostility from me, but from Christian leaders. Having tried many years to share my vision of following Christ, there is no longer any point. It was not my decision to leave organized religion.

Nothing in my religion calls for a crusade to correct everyone else. My experience with God is singular in that I cannot experience Him for you. While I cannot remain silent about that experience, I share in ways you can avoid if you like, and only so you can be inspired in your own encounter with God. I have no problem fellowshipping with individual believers who give me a similar space to follow God on the path He chooses for me.

There are things I can’t go along with, ideas and practices that would directly interfere with my religion. There is such a thing as sin. The answer is some degree of avoidance and separation, unless the other person insists on trying to change me. In that case I’ll take action to defend my own practice of religion, and I’ll defend yours, as well. There are no particular rules for that, but as much as I’ve written, it’s hard to imagine someone can’t figure out when and where I’ll fight back, or how I’m likely to fight. Still, I won’t be sure myself until the moment of confrontation comes.

I call this religion “Kiln of the Soul”, though a broader generic term is “Christian Mysticism”. The name is not trademarked and there’s nothing I can or would do to stop someone else trying to hijack it. I refuse to negotiate with any human government for recognition of any sort. Instead, I promote a vision of Divine Justice woven into Creation and revealed in the Bible. God’s Laws stand superior to the universe and it’s our mission as humans to embrace that Justice as ultimate truth. Learn His Laws and live them; that’s my religion.

You can always ask questions, but it’s pointless to debate. I won’t defend this religion verbally because I owe nothing to any human aside from the mercy God gave me.

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Job 13

Posted on October 26, 2013 by ehurst

Job reminds his friends that they aren’t addressing an inferior, someone lacking a good solid education. Nothing they’ve said is new. For seven days they sat in proper silence until they decided to judge Job. Had they not opened their mouths, no one would have heard how silly they were. Job is addressing God, if they don’t mind. God is not like earthly rulers who might tolerate or even favor slavish lackeys who jockey for position by creative flattery. It’s not as if God’s favor is so fickle that He would smile on someone only so long as they fill the air before Him with silly superlatives. God pays far more attention to a man’s heart than to his mouth.

Here we see Job pointing out something for which his ancient tongue possessed no phrases: They had made their abstract logic into a god of sorts. They felt God was bound to their theories of justice. The Pharisees confronted Jesus with the same folly, made worse by their adoption on Hellenism, but it was hardly a new sin. The arrogance of man’s intellect is hard to measure.

Job is fully confident from the depths of his soul that if he stood before God, he would suffer less than he does at the hand of his friends. How could he do better than face God? He asks his friends to pay close attention and stop judging with such shallow thinking. Would God strike him down? If God were judging so, then all men would be marked for death. Otherwise, Job knows from within his spirit that he is acceptable in the sight of God, for simply coming into the Presence is possible only for the upright. Thus, with confidence he would approach the Divine Throne and seek mercy. He would ask God for a break from this suffering.

Unlike Adam and many other men who faced God’s holiness, Job was wide open to learn of his sins. He had no impulse to run and hide. He would ask God to explain, if He would, this time of terror and sorrow. What was there to gain from tormenting someone so insignificant? What had he done? He was ready to repent before he even knew.

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The Purge Has Begun in Earnest

Posted on October 26, 2013 by ehurst

The detachment encouraged by Christian Mysticism allows me to be entertained by events that actually threaten my physical safety.

Maybe you’ve read accounts of the harsh political purges conducted in old Soviet Russia, still done in China today, and now in the US. In most cases here folks simply lose their jobs, which is threatening enough as our economy collapses. In plenty of cases folks are murdered, but you won’t hear about it from any of the usual sources. Most of the time such things are reported as mundane accidents, ordinary crime, etc.

Perhaps you heard about the large number of ranking general officers recently fired from their positions in the military. I was unable to find out what sort of snooping was done to identify who was marked as an enemy by the White House, but no one questions that such was the motive. Now comes the story of an entirely illegal search conducted by police in Maryland. They used a warrant to search for guns, then grabbed a bunch of files that had nothing to do with the warrant. The files identify a large number of TSA whistleblowers. This is just a small sample of blatantly illegal activity to gain total control over information leaks in the government.

My point is this: The purging will affect people who aren’t directly involved. That is, such activity will certainly hit all of us in painful ways. Legality has no bearing on what the US government is doing these days. We noted long ago the US Constitution has been treated as toilet paper. Anyone engaged in resistance of any type might do well to consider whether things like encryption might keep you in the game a little longer. If you ask me, I can’t imagine journalism today doesn’t include an awful lot of computer savvy, and that means relying on encryption because you know that pinging the powers that be is inherently risky. Folks like Snowden know it; journalists need to quit thinking the law is any kind of shield against threats. Other activists even more so.

For myself, those threats are part of the game itself. Should I sense the mission requires encryption, you can be sure I’ll use the best available with long, complicated pass phrases. However, my calling generally demands I do things openly. Not as a challenge or provocation, but seeing such threats as mere background noise. Torture or death is part of the calling, and the Holy Spirit decides my methods. I’m operating on a different level, working from an orientation on the moral fabric of creation.

That doesn’t keep me from paying close attention to what’s going on — “Wise as serpents; harmless as doves.”

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A Few Management Errors

Posted on October 25, 2013 by ehurst

I’ve watched managers and leaders screw up their own position so badly that they destroyed the operation itself.

This is not guidance you’ll get from a secular or Christian leadership seminar. This is guidance that comes from the Ancient Hebrew culture. This is about shepherding; it applies to the shepherdess, too.

First thing: Never, ever give a split second of thought to what’s fair for you. Justice does not come to you; it comes from you. If you aren’t there ready to sacrifice just about everything except your own character before God, then you aren’t ready. The onus is upon you to create the atmosphere of friendship and trust and you can’t do it when any part of you whines.

Your enemy is busy work, staying so involved in the paperwork and listed duties that you never create a community. A community spirit won’t necessarily kill office politics, but without community, raw politics will eat you alive. Your first and most important function is creating a sense of community. Obviously, with my criticism of secular behavioral sciences, you can’t simply learn a method. You have to have the soul of a shepherd.

It hardly matters what you imagine your personality type to be; as leader and manager you absolutely must act like a friendly and outgoing person. Get to know everyone; don’t allow mere procedure to get in the way. You don’t have to memorize first time, every time. You can ask the same question enough times for it to stick; people are more tolerant of that than you might expect. Keep asking until you recognize the person as a person and have some idea formed in your mind of what part they play in your world. You aren’t seeking objective truth; you are seeking accommodation to how that person reacts to you in the context.

Don’t be fake. At the same time, you need not divulge your life’s history to anyone. Be consistent. People are your most valuable assets and community equilibrium is your treasure. Don’t demand artificial peace. There will be friction, give and take, and some will never be your friends. But you are always friendly and aloof from petty nonsense.

Never, ever let them see you sweat. If you aren’t prepared for the most off-the-wall baloney, you aren’t prepared. It’s not as if you aren’t allowed to have emotions, but never let anyone see you lose control of them. Even when anger is wholly appropriate, use it as a dramatic element to get someone’s attention, not some fiery energy you don’t actually posses. The one thing you truly have to control is yourself.

Somewhere in the mix, you will need the talent for activating your natural allies. Never let it be a closed group; anyone is welcome who will pay the price of contributing to community equilibrium. Recognize when someone is operating from pure self interest and harness that, because you can’t do much to change it. Take folks are they are, and give them a chance to be helpful; most folks can’t resist the opportunity. Take advantage of whatever leverage naturally arises from your personal resources.

Your weaknesses will be exploited without mercy; you cannot hide them very long. Decide ahead of time how you will live with that, how you will come to terms and make peace with it.

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Slimboat Is Better than Chrome

Posted on October 25, 2013 by ehurst

Update: There have been reports of suspicious activity from Slimboat and Slim browsers. At least one user reported a distinct attempt to download malware coming from the running process. My own experience is that using Slimboat brings on a lot of weird entries in my firewall logs on Debian. I will also add my finding that when you tell Slimboat to clean the cache, it still leaves way too much in places you wouldn’t think to look. Finally, I tend to think the forum established for questions and bug reports at the Slimboat website may be at least partly astroturfing, because a couple of reasonable comments were quickly deleted by the admins. Caveat emptor.

Original post follows…

You have to understand something about Google: They are easily some of the biggest liars on the planet. Not in the sense you can’t trust anything they say, but that you can’t trust their motives on anything they do. If Google announces plans to do something, they’ll try to do it. Often enough, they succeed. However, at the same time there is always a bucket load of sneaky and downright hateful crap they do in the background to take advantage of us. Google would sell you into slavery if they could get away with it. Instead, they’ll settle for tracking you to the point they know your habits better than your spouse. And they will sell that information; count on it.

So with full cynicism we proceed to take advantage of them. Instead of using Google Search, I use Startpage.com. Startpage is based in the Netherlands, and uses Google’s search engine without letting Google see anything about you. All Google knows is thousands of search requests coming out of Startpage, and no differentiation from one to the next. That way you always get generic search results, not something supposedly tailored to your known tastes and habits.

We know about Google Chrome browser, and some of you may know it’s built on top of the Webkit framework. Webkit developers are working hard, but they are not nice people. I say that because of how they respond to very reasonable feature requests, even when someone writes to code for them. They’ve gotten pretty ugly at times, I am told. Still, it’s not a totally useless tool for building browsers. But Google Chrome (and the Open Source Chromium version of it) are missing features that would serve better to protect your privacy and improve your user experience. For example, they refuse to encrypt saved passwords, so that anyone with a nifty script can steal them from your browser. Google is not very responsive, either.

So some time back when the EU demanded a certain amount of neutrality for browser choice, some folks came up with a couple of browsers to meet that requirement, giving them away as free downloads. Slim Browser rides on top of Internet Explorer, and handles some issues better. But Slimboat is built on top of Webkit and does a lot of things Google refuses to do.

For example, your passwords are encrypted and you can have them locked behind a master password. Adblocker is built into the browser, and is easier to control if you have a mind to do so. You can download YouTube videos without all the rigamarole I used to go through with scripts and so forth, plus you can install a free plugin and Slimboat will convert the Flash video on-the-fly for you. I’m still not happy with how they handle font choices, but I’m trying to come up with a work-around using CSS — Slimboat does allow you to install your own user CSS file to control some of its display options.

Yes, you might run into some stability issues, but less and less as time goes on. For my Debian Wheezy, I can’t use the installable version they offer. I just grab the generic Linux 64-bit, unzip it and drop it into my home directory. From there I can link to the executable file and run it with ease. Runs just fine, thank you. I’ve not had any trouble with things like JavaScript or page element placement on websites.

Folks, I recommend Slimboat browser.

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Quantum Truth; Behavioral Deception

Posted on October 24, 2013 by ehurst

One of our biggest mistakes as humans is classifying people.

We have a jillion labels we use and it makes us feel so very intelligent when we can describe where someone fits in the catalog. The overuse of Meyers-Briggs matrix is an example. You’ll notice when real people take the battery of questions, they become infuriated at how the inventory forces them into neat categories that don’t actually fit. If the Meyers-Briggs inventory doesn’t piss you off, I have serious doubts about your sanity. If you take the results of that test seriously, you’ll never understand how to deal with me.

For example, having introverted tendencies, I am deeply annoyed by people arguing, especially if the argument is petty. At the same time, I am deeply mystical in my general viewpoint on life, so I can steel myself to filter somewhat when I can’t escape the tension. MBT makes zero allowance for mysticism, and summarily rejects the very existence of quantum moral reasoning. You aren’t permitted to be more than one person on the MBT; the variations are pitifully narrow. This makes it as a whole one very ugly lie.

It’s not as if we can’t learn something useful, but it’s so disastrously stupid to take any of it seriously. That falls into the same category with people I’ve tutored who buy into my teaching with far too much enthusiasm. That sort of cathexis is dangerous, and signals a serious moral failure within the student. We don’t run through life announcing that we are Christian Mystics, waving the pennants and wearing the team colors. There’s a place for that, but in our current social structure, people take such things far too seriously.

My wife is on the same team as me. To some degree, a few other close relations tend to act like team members. The sense of identity has nothing to do with all those externals. It has to do with a sense of commitment and calling that transcends our human existence. We don’t classify each other, but strive to actually know each other. It’s the complex interaction of knowing there are certain burdens we share and foibles we accept because that’s what we face here. Unless you live in my presence, you aren’t on my team; you can’t be.

In every social context, I may well have a different answer to different folks asking exactly the same questions about me. Real people don’t fit into neat categories and no amount of effort can make us all mean the same thing by the same questions. Since I can’t see what’s inside their heads, the best I can do is answer according to the whims of the moment arising from how ever much attention I’m paying to my own spiritual nature. I’d love to have a stock answer for everyone, but it just won’t happen. Even if I fully understand the common categories and expressions, using them might be a blatant lie in itself. I often end up asking people to define what they mean, or what sort of answer they seek.

If I sense the encounter is just temporary and holds little consequence, I’ll assume some sort of dramatic persona for their consumption. While the range I choose has to meet my own internal moral tests, it still varies widely. Most of the time, my answer takes the shape of inviting people to think of me as a space alien. I never presume to ask that they not judge me; that’s not a valid request, given human nature. Rather, my point is to warn them that getting to know me might be a challenge.

Reflexively, the only thing I need to know about another person is how God wants me to handle them. This is the quintessential question the Bible teaches about all of our experiences in this life. The primary issue in all things is the moral issue. Western society scarcely recognizes the question, and offers precious little support for the approach. Instead, it often prescribes hostility for such a question. It’s not efficient to operate in quantum moral thinking. However, in quantum moral reasoning, efficiency is a very minor point of consideration. Time is not precious until it is invested; the resources of this world are meaningless outside of moral considerations.

There will be a significant amount of time that seems wasted because there is no apparent return. While that is a factor in what you decide to do at any given moment, you can’t rely on it too heavily. The whole point of discussing quantum moral reasoning is to ensure we don’t limit ourselves to any single channel of operations, but free the soul to chase multiple threads simultaneously. Your contextual response may seem simple to observers, but you can’t afford to throttle down your sense of awareness. If something in the moment draws you far away from the physical context, that’s just one of those things we face as humans. We accept it as our norm.

Human behavioral science is full of useful facts packaged in the most repulsive lie.

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Static Site Changed

Posted on October 23, 2013 by ehurst

My old static website, Kiln of the Soul (closed as of 2020), is now in its new form.

All the archives are now backed up on my system and on a couple of external storage devices. They are still available, but the emphasis has changed. Folks, I’m only doing what I sense is required by my God, so don’t get too exited.

The change in emphasis is probably subtle to most readers. Previously I had hoped to build a religious community locally, even if somewhat scattered. However, it comes to me that was a pipe dream in our current social context. Rather, the whole focus of my religious calling is more online. People who embrace any part of what I teach are on their own in meat space, though we can certainly share and fellowship online.

So it remains now to develop ways to make the best of that online connection, and not give too much emphasis to meat space until something happens to change the fake structure on which the current mainstream expressions of Christian religion rest. In a certain sense, the means to fellowship that work best online will also become the soul of what we should and could have in meat space. It’s not that there can be no fellowship with Christians who don’t understand things the way I do, but that it will not be a major focus. For the most part, they aren’t ready for it. They need time and the hand of God.

I’m sure I’ll add more material to the site to address blind spots I can’t put into book form. What can be made into an ebook will go up on the Smashwords account. Thanks for your support, folks.

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Woolgathering

Posted on October 22, 2013 by ehurst

Reviewing things I’ve seen in the past few weeks provokes a few thoughts about faith.

The biggest barrier remains the vast pool of cultural thought patterns, by which false images become associated with Scripture. People understand the words well enough, but don’t comprehend the meaning from the alien culture of the Bible. Sometimes I wonder if it would make more sense to pretend I’m not even a Christian because of the vast pool of sewage associated with that label. People just do not realize what a hideous crippling effect Western Civilization has on following Christ.

I can get people to verbally confess that they don’t really understand what is in their own best interest. I can get them to assent to the idea that God is in charge of every detail of their existence, but they immediately demonstrate not a scintilla of understanding when they go home and plan their children’s future. Even the church gets in on the act, preaching as gospel the vast pile of intellectual assumptions that somewhere among the options presented by mainstream American society can be found God’s way of living for us. When I start describing what the Bible says is proper for such concerns, they look at me like I just grew a third eye.

My home continues to be open to people who want to worship with us, but I can never go back to a regular church. The vast weight of assumptions behind what it means to be a church is so alien to my calling, I simply cannot see myself ever returning to it. We generally don’t struggle with worshiping in song and so forth, but the moment they try to preach or teach, they call forth all kinds of stuff simply alien to the Bible, but more to the point, alien to my convictions. We dearly miss the fellowship of believers, but they cannot tolerate us. Maybe some day we’ll encounter folks who aren’t so shocked by the differences.

Why do the evil prosper? Because they only get what they want, not what really matters. Why do the righteous suffer? Because they are supposed to learn how to despise this life. When we stop caring about this world, an awful lot of anxiety dies. With the decrease in anxiety comes a better clarity of purpose and resolve. When you realize that includes your dearly beloved family, and that they are property first of the Lord, not yours, then you recognize how you can love them without trying to own them. The best legacy you can leave your children is not caring about the things that almost everyone in Western society insists children must have. Don’t accept childhood materialism as the norm. Don’t accept anything the world regards as normal for anything, including children.

So while the confusion of material property with blessings is big enough, the other major issue is confusing emotions with the Spirit. There is virtually no commonly accepted language for discussing this. It’s as if I would have to pull people away from their normal daily affairs for at least a year of study in a cloistered atmosphere so they could begin to differentiate. It’s almost enough to make me start a cult.

Almost.

This is a very difficult time for the truth. Maybe when God’s wrath crushes enough lies and folks have shed their old patterns of trust in things that cannot stand, then I’ll have a chance to say something they are ready to hear. Until then, I can only make sure I understand it for myself and the handful of folks who read my stuff online.

May God set you free to see His truth.

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Double Agent

Posted on October 21, 2013 by ehurst

It’s not schizophrenia, it’s roles within differing contexts.

Online I am a pastor and prophet. It’s not as if I don’t do pastoral work in meat space, but it’s not the emphasis. The closest I come to that in the real world is my computer ministry, shepherding computers to a better performance. But I am quite certain of God’s calling and mission for me, and my pastoral mission is online. In meat space I’m just a regular guy who does other stuff, and looking for more work.

I don’t pretend to understand why the Spirit leads me this way. I have a working theory, which is precisely what almost all theology is in the first place — just a way of mentally organizing things that are far above the mental level. The way I figure it, this is preparing for future events. I’ve often written about the Networked Civilization I see rising from the collapse of Western Civilization. The protocols of human existence are radically different online than they are in meat space. You can carry all your humanity with you, but you can’t act the same. It’s a different world entirely.

It’s more than the small things we call Netiquette. There’s an entirely different mindset that’s no more obvious to the average Joe than is a different culture when he drops into another country. Human awareness makes a grand difference. The antics of people who refuse to see the difference in context can be quite annoying to those who are aware of it, often very embarrassing. But the differences are far greater than even fairly observant folks are likely to notice. People write books to explain the difference, the way others write travel guides for visiting foreign lands.

It’s almost like suiting up to visit outer space. It’s just barely possible to engage a little emotional content with your communications, but you lose an awful lot of flavor when your face and voice are obscured so completely. It strips communication down to the purity of language itself, and it surely helps if you understand the technology itself as a means of expression. It’s one thing if you know the person on the other end so well that their voice echoes in your head when you read what they type, but another thing entirely when you simply have no clue. That and a hundred other subtle shifts in how communications take place have yet to be seen, but that it will result in a radically different kind of society is not in doubt.

This is why I say so often that I am an arrow in the quiver. I may never be used as it seems intended, but if not, I am a prototype for others. The way in which I do ministry and how I communicate is already far different from what I might do if I had reason to believe current reality would continue as is much longer. Indeed, I’m discovering a whole range of elements in religion itself that have to change. But I’m not in charge; I’m responding to forces I can hardly understand, much less explain. My apprehension of divine calling carries demands that won’t fit current meat space reality. To obey the leading of the Spirit puts me out of place until I am online. There, things suddenly fit and I am free to chase that divine impulse in ways meat space will not permit. My calling awaits a change already underway, but not yet complete.

It no longer drives me nuts; I’m used to it now.

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Divine Variables

Posted on October 20, 2013 by ehurst

As a teenager, I had an adult friend once who said, “I sometimes think I should just carry around a shotgun with my Bible. That way, when someone confesses Jesus as their Savior, I can just kill them right there and send them to Heaven.”

It took years for me to understand what he was actually saying. He felt very deeply the tension between our Western assumptions about reality against the entirely non-Western orientation of the Bible. Were he to seize the message of the Bible entirely from a Western orientation, it would result in some truly bizarre behavior. Explains a lot, doesn’t it? When you survey the American religious landscape within Christianity alone, you see the most bizarre things.

We see people dragging the name of Jesus through all sorts of truly stupid behavior because they see His message through Western eyes.

What is the single critical variable in human life when following Christ? His glory. Nowhere is that glory defined, only characterized in various ways. It scales; to the degree you stand in His glory, so your sense of joy and peace are increased or decreased. You don’t determine rationally what glorifies Him. No, your mind is not capable of containing how that works out. You are fallen; the very choice of relying on human intellect is the Fall. Instead, we are to learn how to hear through our convictions, to be ready for the most unreasonable things.

There is no efficiency, no efficacy that we can grasp. Indeed, our one greatest human desire is to die. Not in the Westernized sense of suicidal obsessions, but in the Ancient Near Eastern sense of hanging around only because Our Lord’s glory is in it. The currency of our Otherworld is His glory. Nothing is more valuable to us, yet more incomprehensible at the same time. Full glory means leaving this prison existence here below, but we have a mission until He calls us home. We are assigned a feudal role and attendant tasks to increase His glory here on earth.

As I sit at my keyboard here, I know a good portion of those who read these words will nod their heads and agree, and still not understand. Not in arrogance, I say that in sadness. They might shudder at the idea my friend proposed in jest, but their actual behavior serves the same broken understanding represented by such sentiments. They engage in political activism and totally miss the message of Joseph and Daniel, neither of whom ever raised a hand to politics and change when serving their pagan masters. Yes, there was certainly grand political fallout from their actions at times, but their aim was the glory of their God, not political activism. Western Christians typically seek crowns that they cannot keep because they simply refuse to understand how God controls human politics. They chase after things God has flatly said were not important for His servants. They somehow imagine God has called them to seek human comfort and worldly wealth, and they fritter away their time on this earth, leaving here with nothing in Heaven to show for it.

How many people understand the morals and ethics of striving to gain enough crowns to throw at His feet?

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