Diplomacy and Justice

Posted on October 3, 2013 by ehurst

If you set your heart to know the God’s Justice, it will make you seem to many less diplomatic.

First, I want to offer a note of thanks to all of my subscribers. There’s been a surge in numbers recently. Your interest in my brain spew is a blessing and reaffirms that I am on message and it is significant — whether good or ill is beside the point. I must note I can’t return the favor; that’s a part of how I get things done. My calling pushes me out into what most folks think of as pioneering in the intellectual wilderness. Actually I’m just poking around ancient ruins of forgotten civilizations in terms of intellectual heritage. I really don’t have time and energy left to read a lot of blogs myself. Again, it’s my calling and personality, so don’t take it as an insult. For me to do what I do requires I take a highly unusual path, but I’m only too glad to share.

I have a foot in two worlds. It’s not that I can’t bring myself to leave behind Western Civilization, but that I have to keep speaking to folks caught up in it. If I am entirely alien in how I express myself, I might as well be writing in a foreign tongue. But the longer I stand in this weird place, the more I wish I could just go completely over. That’s the human side of things. In God’s Justice, I know I can’t just abandon the flock that way. I have to lead them to greener pastures and still waters, and protect them from predators.

Consider the case of the Three Hebrew Boys and “Cool in the Furnace” (reference to a children’s song). Am I the only person who is amused that we remember the three fellows by their new Babylonian names, but we know Daniel best by his Hebrew name? Anyway, these guys clung to God’s Laws as best they could in a difficult context and survived to God’s glory. You can too, but you have to have a bit of that Hebrew intellectual approach to things, not just some poor English translation of the covenant code itself. That’s my specialty: translating the underlying moral intelligence into our modern Western world. It’s a major undertaking. I’ll never be done, not least because I’m still dragging my own intellect into that Hebrew mold. My mind was not eager to surrender the throne in the first place, and ever pines to retake it.

With all the stuff I’ve written and published, you have to know I care about people. My heart melts at a very low temperature, but I must warn you that my demeanor does not. The longer I work at pursuing God’s moral character in His revelation, the more stoic my personal presence becomes. I’m not any less of a clown in personality, but less so in how I show it. Indeed, I’ve noticed in answering pesky comments that I tend to be more brusque, but without a sense of false guilt. It comes upon me as a penchant for gut level honesty with injustice.

Those who know me best aren’t much surprised, but some of you may begin to wonder just what sort of man I am. I’ll have to let you decide for yourself, since even I can’t really answer that. As one blogger says, “I won’t tell you about myself; I’ll let someone else get that wrong.” The problem I face is our Western nicey-nicey culture, which is frankly at odds with the whip-cracking Jesus did in the Court of Gentiles. As long as you fail to see how utterly natural that was for Him, you won’t understand the Hebrew image of shepherd manhood. I’m not going to pretend I’m following Jesus more closely than you or anyone else, but the longer I work at it, the more painfully obvious it is to me that Westerners don’t get it.

It would be equally deceptive to envision me as a Western version of “a man’s man.” I’m not that at all, any more than I am a neutered metrosexual. Some might mistake me for that brutish ogre kind of guy, simply because I’m now much more willing to show a bit of impatience with silly women, for instance. But I am the same with silly men, too. If I can discern the gender of the one I address or answer, I will most certainly tune my answer according to what God’s Word says about each. In general, men should know better when it comes to moral questions, but it’s much more complex than that. Either way, try not to be shocked if you happen to see something that seems less than diplomatic in my response to some comments here. I can only write one of the many possible answers that come out of quantum moral reasoning.

God’s justice includes mercy and love, but not as typically defined in our Western culture.

Posted in personal | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Diplomacy and Justice

Western Is Not Biblical (Updated)

Posted on October 2, 2013 by ehurst

This is parallel to my long series of writings which declare the West as non-Christian.

Christianity is an Ancient Near Eastern religion. It takes only a little bit of time to study and discern that we are talking about two entirely different value systems which result in entirely different civilizations. You can read Western analytical values back into the Bible if you like, but they are actually alien to the people who lived and wrote our Bible. This escapes most Western folks, not to mention virtually all Western Christians.

So I wrote a solid academic study and published it as a book — free download, so there’s no excuse for not reading it if you’re going to take the time to argue. Then I wrote another book outlining the implications of that study in terms of introducing what constitutes Biblical Morality — also free. Those books were serialized in draft form here on this blog some months ago. And at least once each week I post articles to discuss more of the implications.

Let’s have a concrete example. First, let’s back up just a moment and recall that morality is whatever God says it is, not what our rational minds might dream up. Secondly, biblical moral reasoning is quantum-based, not binary logic or linear thinking. It’s simultaneously multiple paths with multiple answers on different levels regarding any particular real-world event. The same action can be bad and good at the same time, depending on the context. Man’s justice is not on par with God’s justice; man’s reasoning is well below God’s revelation. This is not subject to debate in my world, so don’t bother.

So, we have the ol’ Greenpeace protesters sailing up to a Russian drilling platform and invading the facility. Fact: They entered a physical space that was secured and forbidden to trespass. In most cases, trespassers are shot. All this claim of “non-violence” is important, but impertinent. Greenpeace knew there would be consequences. They are operating like soldiers but without killing anyone. Instead, they trespass and cause trouble by getting in the way of normal commercial activity. Even under normal Western moral reasoning, they should expect to get hurt; they are taking risks of a military caliber. So all that whining about bad treatment is unjustified. When you do crazy stuff like that, you don’t send in folks who are medically fragile or have peculiar practices like veganism. Sorry, but that’s just plain stupid. It is egregiously and hatefully stupid, a fraudulent-waste-of-oxygen stupid.

But like the whiny Western feminist subculture they represent, they pretend their actions are entirely justified and no one could possibly object. Further, the world owes them all the comfort and security they can dream of. Whining about discomfort in some noble cause is not very noble. So far we are entirely within Western moral reasoning, which we note has it’s own internal conflicts.

Now let’s compare biblical reasoning. If someone is conducting an activity under the auspices of their jurisdiction, it’s really none of your business. To the degree their activities might have external costs, you weigh your options and either engage in diplomatic tussles or simply go to war. You can even operate under Letter of Mark and Reprisal if you like. But if you wish to step outside the existing government channels, you are a pirate. It matters not at all that you feel said governments are not doing their job, the very notion of “international law” is a myth in the first place. Very few governments take it seriously when it’s used against them, which makes it obvious it is sheer propaganda. None of it was sworn as a solemn vow before God, so it’s just posturing. Further, there is no such thing as human rights. That’s just a heathen religious concept, not at all supported in Scripture.

So when pirates enter a secure area, getting shot by the security folks is a given. Having their boat sunk is just about normal. They are lucky to be alive. Damn you for thinking this is uncivilized. It is a different civilization, to be sure, but entirely civilized.

Now, consider that if you don’t embrace God’s form of justice, with all the complications of quantum thinking and knowing you are setting your face against virtually the whole world, you cannot have peace with God. You also cannot have peace with His Creation, because all Creation is built on His moral character. By no means should you whine like the Greenpeace pirates if things go rough between you and humans who reject God’s divine justice. Yet do not be surprised when God prospers your hands at His business when you embrace His truth.

Update: I forgot to add this: It’s not that Scripture is against protesting itself. There are some bits and pieces of the Green agenda I can support from the Bible. It’s just that I know before I go that I could be killed, and I should hardly be surprised if I simply get hurt or at least arrested and even tortured. This is what happens when you fight any kind of war, and narrowly defined “non-violence” is no excuse for denying that such actions are a form or warfare.

Posted in prophecy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Don’t Pass the Remote

Posted on October 1, 2013 by ehurst

Quantum thinking assumes multiple inputs and multiple outcomes from a single process, as well as multiple processes for any single question.

Quantum moral reasoning recognizes humans aren’t really in control of much. People prefer to think they can remain in control; the whole issue of the Fall is presuming reality is within range of the human intellect. It is not. Thus, we use some other faculty to arrive at decisions and train our minds to surrender control to that other faculty. The mind can only organize the response. The human intellect is wholly incompetent to play the executive role.

So it’s altogether a common human tendency, as fallen creatures, to play truth police. If our mind is convinced it understands the whole picture, it will not make allowances for other outcomes than what logic dictates. We note there is no such thing as pure logic, only the imaginary belief in it. We should expect people to assume their internal logical process is more or less infallible, though some will permit that they don’t know all the facts. Since most people can’t even rise to that pitiful level, we face a plethora of senseless noise that has no bearing on what we really ought to do regarding this or that.

There comes a point when you simply can’t help someone. Sheeple deserve our best, but only so much of the best as they’ll accept. We can try, but they will for the most part whine loudly that we are being mean and arrogant. They don’t notice we are holding the door open for them to climb up to our level, but that we cannot descend to theirs. What they don’t understand must be called “evil.” Yes, if you are reading this and comprehend any part of it, you are evil as I. It’s not pleasant, but it behooves us to let it ride, since we know better than to play their game of control.

A small example: A blog is a virtual private place with a public facing element. Mine is my office, my virtual vestibule through which the world can enter my world. I control a certain amount of it because it is within my domain. My ground rules apply. Yet it does stand on the public right of way, so to speak, and I have a certain accountability in the sense I can’t expect folks to simply ignore my blather. The whole point is letting folks see what I think of certain things. Without a subscription wall, I can’t limit who sees it. I choose to leave it open; I have thus chosen to let others react in one way or another.

But the ensuing conversation, such as it may be, remains on my turf. I do not surrender control to the visitor. I do not hand them the remote so that they can direct how the conversation turns out. I am not required to accept their assertions nor their logic. They don’t have to accept mine, but they don’t get to say what’s posted electronically on my comment blocks. They have to interact with me on my own terms. I would expect nothing less when I visit other blogs. That recognition of dominion on the small scale means I tend to moderate my own words with a different tone, depending on whether I am supplicant or lord.

Sheeple don’t get that. They have an inflated sense of entitlement about their own “free speech” against mine. Sorry, but I’m not handing you the remote control. This is my domain. You’ll have to figure out best you can what I’m saying and react as best you can. Otherwise, it’s not a conversation but a shouting match. I’ll always win here, and you will always win on your blog. That’s the nature of the beast we call “blogging.” I’ll surely make mistakes, but that’s the give and take we all have. On a forum where neither of us owns the turf, it relies on other factors to win whatever it is people want to argue about. Again, we should probably self-moderate our virtual presence to match the context. Sheeple tend to carry the same attitude, flexing more with their personal sense of control instead of thinking about the effectiveness of communication. They demand certain outcomes at all costs, never understanding the whole issue is offering inputs to the decision-making process of both oneself and others.

The moral question of what we ought to do in each encounter is seldom a matter of intellectual logic, but of the moral logic that requires quantum thinking.

Posted in sanity | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Don’t Pass the Remote

No Place to Stand: LifeChurch.tv and Others

Posted on September 30, 2013 by ehurst

I’m not in control of the agenda.

I logged into my WordPress account with some other post in mind and was confronted with yet another thoughtful-yet-misguided comment on my LifeChurch review post. It’s been a year and a half, but that post still draws pretty heavy traffic (79 views in the past seven days). From their comments, I surmise almost no one who responds has read the previous comments. Precious few folks at all chase the links in the post itself, where I explain things in more detail or more clearly. By far, the majority of those who seek to dispute my claims refuse to actually engage me in conversation, but drop verbal bombs, using propaganda techniques astute readers will recognize quickly.

This is the way it goes for me here. That’s also the way it goes when I encounter other churches and religious organizations. I went to LifeChurch knowing it was a shallow entertainment operation. It’s not that I have no objection to that, but it’s what I’ve come to expect and I’m willing to look past that so I can exercise my own calling and gifts. I’m not a secret reformer sneaking in to upset things and make everyone behave according to my personal beliefs. I went there hoping I could operate on the margins. Every church has that group of people, usually not a major portion of the membership, who have unmet needs. Some portion of every population chosen at random will include folks facing pretty serious moral and spiritual afflictions. It’s no surprise any given church will have a similar proportion suffering unusual stresses.

Some churches do make an effort. Precious few are effective, but at least they try. Plenty of pastors at churches I’ve attended in the past have been only too happy when I made an effort to deal with such things. Once I describe my background in counseling psychology and my own healing experiences, they are ready to at least let me try. That background is also pretty strong on ways to avoid any of this spilling over into the rest of church activities. With a little experience you can usually tell when someone is just gaming the system and you can keep them from eating a hole in the organization. People with real needs can be steered to real solutions and begin to change.

The means to change has been the subject of a majority of my other posts on this blog, both in the behavioral science discussions of the likes of Dr. Thomas Szasz and in the discussions of culturally induced neuroses, to the discussions about fleeing the mythology of Western society and a host of similar posts. The point is: I’m not afraid to try. I have no hesitation in diving right into the needs of people who ask for help, regardless what it is. My God has consistently shown the path to victory and I am eager to offer it to anyone else.

But LifeChurch is not alone in setting a new trend of simply silencing the cries for help. The methods are many. Most often you’ll get a smothering effect by high volumes of empty happy talk, where the preacher blandly insists if you just believe, it will all work out eventually. That’s partially true, but a perversion of how it actually works. You have to persist in chasing God’s Justice and His divine moral character in Creation, then things will work out eventually. This bland and empty Christian talk that merely plasters Jesus on the outside of PMA (positive mental attitude) and secular self-help crap is not good religion in the first place. Craig isn’t unorthodox, nor does he fail to draw people’s attention with his presentation. He’s a very effective entertainer. However, his material is shallow, and his own staff says so (see the comment from the staffer on the original post). That so many people find his stuff instructive simply reflects how thin is the stuff they’ve had before. Mostly I think it’s just a quality presentation of pretty common evangelical orthodoxy, and it’s used by lots of other churches to smooth over serious problems.

What shocked me was the concerted effort by the staff at the Midwest City campus of LifeChurch to crush any efforts they didn’t fully control. Not just my efforts, but other folks got the same treatment. If you are familiar with internal organizational politics, you’d recognize immediately what I described in my original post. That’s a whole field in psychology, studying how people jockey for power and how the organizational leadership work to maintain control. The mere act of having a modern corporate structure is a problem of one kind; doing it with ugly internal politics is a problem of another kind. What I wrote about was the second issue, the use of manipulation and small group politics to prevent anyone doing anything at all that wasn’t controlled from the top.

There was collection of women who gravitated to one particular small group meeting supported by the church. These women were facing genuine tragedies, stuff Craig and his books never addressed because he sticks to pretty mundane issues. As it was explained to me, a couple of those women recalled once seeing a book that discussed tougher issues like that and wondered if the staff at LifeChurch could help them find another like it or some other source that would attack these serious problems with Scripture. The staff responded by handing them a bunch of copies of Chazown, Craig’s simplistic outline of very basic teaching. Then the staff moved the group leader to other activities and the alternate leader was told in no uncertain terms not to depart from the curriculum given. The group dissolved over the next few weeks.

That is one of several examples I experience, witnessed, or learned about from someone directly involved. The staff didn’t just ignore serious needs, nor simply sweep them under the rug; they actively opposed any effort to meet those needs. No one was permitted to suggest they had a need that Craig and his friends were not already addressing. Craig doesn’t have to play rough; his staff did it for him. So long as things fit on the script, all was well. Try to deal with stuff like incest, gambling addiction, or even just help finding a job, and you were silenced if you didn’t fit in the current program somewhere.

Is the whole organization like that? I don’t know. The shock was too great and I was unwilling to pursue things any farther. Has it changed since then? Maybe, but God isn’t leading me to check into it. You see, I stand by my original post as things stood back then, and I suspect the nature of what Craig is doing there will continue along the same lines. While I do get a little weary from defending what I wrote, I am fully at peace about it. Would I be willing to discuss it with Craig and friends? You bet, but they know what I have to say and the reason I don’t bug them about it should be obvious to anyone. I did what I could and got pushed out the door. The ball is in their court now.

Are there other churches where I might exercise my calling without the creepy control-freak stuff? Probably, but it’s now a losing proposition. I researched LifeChurch and read up on the denomination supporting them (Evangelical Covenant Church). Then I read up on the history of LifeChurch and researched the comments folks had made about Craig and his operation. I was aware of the complaints as well as the praise. I thought it might work out in spite of my misgivings. The result was a stunning disappointment. Other churches in our area are considerably less open in those terms, so I would have a harder time even seeing them tolerating my peculiarities.

I’m okay with saying I’m too much of a screwball for most churches. That’s the result of seeking to obey my individual calling. A part of that calling is sometimes saying things bluntly, of verbally slapping down whiners and propagandists. I’ll continue defending what I wrote and answer questions from folks who comment here, there or by other means. What continues to irritate me is that almost no comment so far has addressed any part of my core complaints about LifeChurch. I can set aside my entire rejection of Western Christianity long enough to show up at places like that so I can meet human needs, but to have an organization attack those efforts is hard to believe. I can even understand how folks don’t think Craig’s stuff is shallow, but I’ll be rough on them because that’s well within the bounds of what you can see in the New Testament. I’m not going to be nice to folks with tender feelings if they use those feelings as a weapon meant to silence me. So if folks want to label me as evil or whatever, that’s fine. It’s not my problem.

What I cannot do is remain silent when I see other kinds of evil; that’s not an option for me.

Posted in religion | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on No Place to Stand: LifeChurch.tv and Others

Implications and Consequences

Posted on September 29, 2013 by ehurst

Ideas have consequences; bad ideas bring unnecessary misery.

It’s not enough that we kill ourselves, either slowly or quickly, by embracing folly. We then insist that the world believe the same lies and it makes things far worse for everyone else. The truth of God has been revealed; Our Creator has not been silent. However, the world has determined to close off the truth before asking, and so cannot hear the answers.

I noted in yesterday’s post that Westerners have long embraced the lies to which Job’s friends were clinging. There and in previous other posts I have noted that life here on this plane of existence is not precious and good. There are good things in our human existence, but when I tell people, “Life is good” I’m not referring to that. I’m referring to Life in the Spirit. This world is fallen, broken beyond repair and scheduled for demolition. It was all “very good” as Genesis says at the end of Seven Days of Creation, but regardless how you want to envision instrumentality, cause and blame, it’s not good now. What God made is good; what we have now is not and we bear the burden of guilt.

So things here below often do not make sense and they hurt. That’s our reality and it will not change. The best we can do is claim the blessings of living according to our best understanding of God’s justice. We seek the path back into the Garden through the Flaming Sword of self-sacrifice. The Sword and the Cross are symbols for pretty much the same thing (parables are meant to be confusing on a superficial level because they address the spirit). Part of what the Sword and Cross destroy is our insistence on understanding everything. We have this insatiable craving to have at least some level of control on the intellectual level. We demand things make sense to our human logical definitions of reality. Things cannot be made that way because human talents are incapable of detecting the moral element within our universe. We can learn it exists and begin seeing the patterns, but we cannot detect it of our own accord. It has to come as a gift from God above.

The Sword and Cross are blessings, not curses. They are God’s loving provision for our need to die. So dying is not a bad thing, despite how much it might hurt. Dying is a blessing, a release from this prison. If you choose morally to embrace death before it comes literally, you are free to live without the fear of its power. That’s what I mean by “Life is good.” What’s good is seizing His Laws in a loving embrace and clinging to them with all my might. Nothing else is good in this world.

So we find a world of people rejecting the one good thing in this life and insisting this awful existence is precious itself, that it’s all we have. What a filthy lie! Upon this nasty deception we build a world of oppression that sucks what little good is possible from this life. Consider for a moment all the implications of making this world the ultimate good available to humanity, in effect rejecting the possibility of a moral fabric in the universe. This lie binds all humanity under the chains of deception so deep even most Christians are aghast when you tell them God’s very truth.

The issue with dying and injustice is that so many humans demand the authority to say when others should die. There is the sin: Seizing divine authority without proper accountability to God. It’s not as if God said no one could have the authority to take human life (Genesis 9), but He did emphatically circumscribe how that authority was delivered into human hands. By no means do have today more than a tiny minority of humanity even aware of the limits God prescribed for that authority, much less do we see any general observance of His limits. Not a single civil government today walks in His authority; all are evil from start to finish because they reject God’s revealed boundaries. Even when they kill someone deserving death, they do it for all the wrong reasons. Any shred of justice comes blindly and entirely by accident.

Virtually everyone today wielding some badge of government authority will stand before God on Judgment Day bearing a massive stain of sin the rest of humanity will not have to face. The mere existence of this false authority damns them. There may well be mitigation in His Justice for some, but few will stand before Him under His revealed Laws. Most will have to hear the cacophony of wailing human sorrow from unjust blood on their hands, crying out to God so loudly their attempts at defense will be drowned out. They neither see nor care what God says is justice in this world. It requires a special kind of idiocy to offer significant moral support to most government demands and actions. Christians condemn themselves, standing alongside these monsters before God, when they suggest anything our civil governments do is anywhere close to what God requires.

We tolerate what governments do because it’s not our real concern. God is ultimate Master of all things and bids us keep our eyes on Him and what He requires of us. This life is not precious; obeying His Law is precious. Our one concern is His Justice coming to life in our bodies and souls while they are yet bound under this awful existence. This is His glory for which we bother living.

Don’t cling to this life, Christian; don’t be deceived by the philosophies built by men in defiance of God’s revelation.

Posted in prophecy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Implications and Consequences

Job 9

Posted on September 28, 2013 by ehurst

Most Western commentators and readers fail to grasp how thoroughly correct Job is in what he says. The primary disconnection is between the Western value system that insists life is precious. The people of the Ancient Near East lived in a tradition going back into prehistory that accepts mortality as a simple fact. They also accept the sheer unquestionable authority of even a great many earthly rulers to take the life of a subject on a whim, and it not be counted as sin. So for Job to suggest God might do things that weren’t just by human standards is not a accusation, but a simple acknowledgment of the truth. God’s standards are far above our own; He is not accountable to us, but we to Him.

Thus, Job launches into yet another attempt to show his visitors their fundamental error. It was an error common to those poorly educated, but men with a proper background had no excuse. We can only surmise Job’s buddies were ignorant. He strives to educate them. His argument is subtle; God does not need a particular cause to destroy any human life, nor any other portion of His Creation. These men are the blasphemers, insisting that God’s justice must make sense on a human level. They simply do not understand the fundamental truth of the Fall and how it created such an impenetrable barrier between us and God’s divine realm above. God is not rooted in this universe and is not subject to the limitations confining human existence.

Job begins by sarcastically agreeing with Bildad, then asks just what it is they are talking about. How do we address the question of God’s justice among men? It cannot be a question of justice on God’s terms. God is the Creator and no part of this universe can stand His Presence because it is all under the Fall. Nothing on this level of existence could hope to restrain His wrath against sin, since it is all under the judgment of sin, all set for eventual disposal.

So while Job stands pure as the driven snow on human terms of the revealed Laws of God (up to that point), it really does not remove him from the fate of this universe. And short of that final end, God can do what He pleases without fearing what men might think of His justice. There is no sin in pointing out that God is the author of Job’s misery because it’s not the same as saying He caused it. No human can hold God accountable. Standing before God, Job’s blameless behavior will not keep his own mouth from confessing there is no suffering imaginable that is not merely what fallen men deserve.

Job says that it’s all the same — life and death are not significantly different on this plane of existence. Our expiration is not necessarily tied to our observance of God’s revelation, nor is our suffering along the way to it. He says that God mocks our sense of tragedy simply because we refuse to understand, because clinging to this life is tantamount to rejecting His divine truth. God has His own agenda, one that He seldom bothers to explain. Should we suppose evil men rule nations without His permit? That would be stupidity. Thus, Job upbraids his friends for their shallow and legalistic thinking.

Job notes his life is of no significance in the grand scheme of God’s plans for this earth. It’s little more than the faint swishing of a reed boat on the river. He could pretend his life was all happy and fun, but even if that were true, mindless celebration would be irreverent. It would be a needless provocation against God’s justice with horrific results. No human effort can remove the full weight of the Fall. No one can stand truly just before God so as to have authority to argue with Him. Job refuses to blaspheme by pretending God is required to operate by the mythology of human justice. He also notes that there is at this point no Savior to intercede before God on his behalf.

Posted in bible | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Compsec: Losing Control

Posted on September 27, 2013 by ehurst

The single greatest threat facing computer users is loss of control.

Unaccountability is a two-edged sword. It’s bad enough people in power refuse to account for their actions to those affected, but we also have a full range of areas in life where control is taken from us indirectly. That is, we who want a measure of control have been herded along with all the folks who don’t want to be bothered. That latter group is by far the dominant species in the herd.

You can look up various search terms that include “computer” and “apocalypse” and get quite a few articles. Add the concept of “false flag” and you still gets tons of articles. We’ve already seen truly major computer security threats sponsored by the US government as a tool of espionage that can’t be targeted too cleanly. In the nature of standard human negligence, a tool of espionage designed to attack one kind of vulnerability on the enemy’s computers can easily spread to every computer with similar vulnerabilities. We could easily see a form of spyware infecting a the majority of common household users all over the world.

Don’t be too sure that wasn’t the plan in the first place. It’s not a simple matter of Windows having a backdoor wide open for the likes of NSA. Windows has always been vulnerable to control from Microsoft engineers. Whatever they wish to do with that operating system will happen at their behest; if your system is connected to the Net, their controls will find you. That same path is easily shared with any agency of the US government having the gall to demand it. That means you could find your system erasing itself entirely, installing and running all kinds of software, or simply downloading and displaying by force images you simply don’t want to see. There are multiple openings of those sorts written into the system on purpose. While MS has seldom availed themselves of such controls, the possibility has always been there. People running Windows have never really had control of their system without completely disconnecting it from the Internet forever.

This remains the single biggest threat in terms of getting what you want from the computer hardware and software that you buy: It’s never really yours. Right now there is a sudden rise of threats to families from spyware secretly planting evidence of things like child porn on private computers and then alerting the authorities that you have it. More than once it would seem the authorities themselves are planting this garbage on computers. You won’t have a clue when the SWAT team bursts through your door at 3AM. This has happened already to more than just a few. Yet disconnecting is not really a viable option for most.

The system has slowly created a social dependency on computers. If you don’t have some means of connecting to the Internet, you are today isolated from a major portion of minimum social expectations. Kids in school? The school administration wants an email address. Churches, too. Just about every government agency you encounter these days does the same thing; those who don’t will be required to do so soon. Want a job? You are almost required to have a Facebook account just to be taken seriously. Because we can all connect cheaply and easily, we almost have to just to stay out of trouble.

And God help you if you aren’t part of the mainstream near-monopoly Windows OS users. You’ll get by with a Mac — just barely — but with anything else, you had better be awfully savvy. The system wants to you dumber than a rock or you might start making unique individual demands, and uniformity is a vital necessity of bureaucracy. Working to govern through computers makes that enforced uniformity even easier. At the same time, the economy is collapsing enough to make buying a new computer highly unlikely for many. So we’ve got millions of WinXP grade machines running just fine, but with insufficient horsepower to run even Win7, much less Win8. That is, run it so as to have any use of it as a general purpose PC.

Right now I’m advising a lot of people to switch to Linux (primarily Xubuntu) before WinXP drops dead in April 2014. Not because I’m pushing a new religion as with most Linux zealots; I do this because it’s a valid answer. However, along with this comes the vital necessity of them learning a bit more about computers in the first place. They’ll have to learn the different interface (XFCE) and different operation and maintenance habits. With poverty comes more work just to survive, and that means more work in every measure of life. Even if you keep XP, you still have to work harder to keep it secure and operational. Either way, you’re going to need a bigger investment of yourself into the system to use it over the near term.

[Side note: The 12.04 release of Xubuntu runs quite well on most XP-grade systems and will be supported officially until late 2017.]

If you don’t take a greater interest and assert more control, your life itself will tend to spin out of control when things get harder; computers are just another facet of this.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Compsec: Losing Control

Basic Neurosis Removal

Posted on September 26, 2013 by ehurst

Neurosis is a moral problem, not a sickness. It amounts to permission for demons to harass you because you’ve rejected some element(s) of God’s moral justice in this fallen world. In most cases we could characterize it as attempting to dodge legitimate suffering, refusing to put up with the sorrows or reality. So when you dodge that reality, you build a layer of self-deception. That self-deception blinds you to God’s moral requirements and drives you farther from His justice. In the fantasy world you’ve built, it causes more “unjust” suffering so that you build more layers of self-deception until you simply have no clue where to start.

Here are some of the most common failures.

1. There is no such thing as objective reality. Even if there was, you could never know about it because no human can be objective. We are supposed to realize the world does not share our thoughts and feelings, but most of our fellow humans have enough common experience to communicate. So we can back out of ourselves just enough to realize in what ways we are alone and how we are all too common. To the degree you have trouble with what fits into those categories, to that degree you will manifest neurosis.

2. Life is not sacred; morality is sacred. What is precious is our opportunity to embrace reality and live accordingly, but our time on this earth is borrowed from the start, as it were. The goal of justice is not improving and enhancing human life. Rather, that enhancement is a by-product of embracing and demonstrating moral truth. The only truth that matters in this world is moral truth.

3. The reason life basically sucks is that people do. There can be many kinds of beauty manifested in people you encounter, but people are not inherently good, nor can they ever be so. Some can struggle a little closer to the light of moral truth, but most will not bother. They will wallow in their chosen fantasies. Never be shocked by any human failure, not matter how catastrophic or unexpected. Cynicism is godly.

4. Youth is not sacred. It’s a unique opportunity for adults to help someone discover moral reality, but there is nothing sacred about the fantasy world of childhood. It’s not particularly evil, but it can be if prolonged. We are supposed to use the imaginative time of childhood to inculcate God’s moral truth through various forms of mythology. That’s what myths are for — they transmit moral values. The common childhood myths of the West tend to be more crippling than helpful, so a radical departure is in order, and the worst myth is the “specialness” of childhood. Stop the panicking over childhood misfortune; childhood is not a sacred right.

5. Humans pass through stages of moral development. When it comes to dealing with other humans, little else matters than to understand where they are in moral development. There’s the infancy stage where they need to learn individuation, the childhood stage where they need to learn rules and social expectations for behavior, then the adolescent stage where they develop their own formal logic and question everything, and finally they arrive at the point where they pursue moral behavior for it’s own sake by understanding why it matters. Most people never get past the childhood stage, which is characterized by legalism. A sizable minority are stuck in the nihilism of adolescence. Recognize where they are and learn to meet them there.

6. You are mostly powerless. All you can really fix is yourself. By the same token, no one else can do it for you. Most of the things that bother you can’t be changed, so you have to work on how you face it. Stop wasting time trying to remake reality; you aren’t God. Accept what He placed inside you and ask for help recognizing what you can and should fight.

That should take us a long way toward inner peace and stability.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Basic Neurosis Removal

Germanizing Religion

Posted on September 25, 2013 by ehurst

The expression of it ranges from the revolting “Aryan Jesus” to the far more common trends in Western Christianity, but the Germanic heathen influence on Christianity is all one package.

The door stood wide open after a significant number of rabbinical students embraced Hellenism during the Third Century BC. Replacing the Hebrew mystical approach with Aristotelian epistemology could not avoid drifting into legalism. God granted a law code and rituals in this Fallen Realm to point the soul back toward the Spirit Realm, but men could not resist the temptation to reverse the pointers. For them, the parable became the truth itself, and the symbol became the ultimate reality. There was no faith, only religion, trying to capture God and imprison Him in this realm. So they thought they had answered the challenge of Jesus by killing Him, but succeeded only in fulfilling His destiny and releasing Him to become Lord of all.

However many counterfeits as it takes to distract humanity, Satan will sponsor them all.

The Judaizers were more successful than anyone wants to admit. They pulled the new Christian religion back down to an earthly ritualism and highly institutionalized structure with an official orthodoxy. Gone was the simplicity of Hebrew mystical faith that lasted just a few years after the death of the last apostle. This was the first step. Once Christianity was tied to a fully human political structure, it was easy to bind it to Constantine’s political plans. When the politicized church had fully compromised with human politics, it proved the ultimate political power and withstood much of the Germanic conquest of Europe. But standing meant compromising yet again, and the Church fully embraced the German tribal mythology. So the Church was Germanized while German mythology and culture were sanctioned as sacred by the Church.

In many ways the Third Reich was a valid expression of where it was all headed. To this day modern Germany still clings to a very large core of Nazi Era law and custom. That it may not be the will of the mass of German citizens is precisely the point; German tribal custom had always been elitist. The entire gamut of abuses heaped on peasants in the Middle Ages was a glorious realization of the very fundamental morality of German culture. The very existence of institutional authority in the hands of any brand of clergy is directly related to German tradition. The pretense of superiority of clergy over secular leadership simply shows how the Church got her licks in first by embracing the system early. The clergy wrote the rules. They may have lost their political secular vestments over the centuries, but their very real power over human political activity is now greater than ever. Modern Western churches of every stripe are nothing more than another face of the Nazi Party.

Western Christianity draws almost nothing from the faith taught by Jesus the Hebrew. They use His words, yes, but avoid the full impact of what they were supposed to mean. Until the churches shed this cultural cloak from the German nomadic tribes, they will offer precious little of God’s glory to human eyes. What we have now is not the inevitable and natural result of the first century followers of Jesus. The two are so alien you could count on Christians nailing Jesus to the Cross again with even greater alacrity and brutality.

Do you suppose the Aryan brand of Christianity is so repugnant? Do you think Ruckmanites are crazy? Do you shudder at the legalistic silliness of Jack Chick’s tracts? It’s all one thing, and your mainstream Western Christian church is just another flavor of the same crap. It’s a difference only of degree, not of nature. The ANE Mystical Christian approach is not to tear it all down, but to simply not take it so seriously. The structures will all collapse in due time, but the otherworldly focus of genuine Christian faith isn’t locked up in any human expression of religious fervor. Recognize it for what it is and keep your hands to your divine spiritual calling. Detach yourself from the institutional church. You can’t remake society, but you don’t have to let it own you.

Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking any one Western religious expression is morally superior to what we now declaim as the worst excesses, because it all plots on the same scale of lies.

Posted in prophecy | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Germanizing Religion

Debian and Xubuntu for Common Folks

Posted on September 25, 2013 by ehurst

There are an awful lot of WinXP class machines still running out there and there’s no reason to throw them away just because XP will be even more vulnerable than ever once the updates are discontinued in a few months. Most of those machines can run Linux just fine.

If it weren’t for XFCE, I wouldn’t use Linux at all. I’ve made peace with Ubuntu only because Xubuntu works so very well. It’s been awhile since I installed it on a client machine. Naturally I chose the 12.04 LTS release because people should not be subjected to the upgrade merry-go-round. It’s good for another four years or so.

For the most part, it’s a matter of running from the CD to see if all the hardware is recognized. If it works well enough, I install it from there. Depending on the client, I typically set it to login automatically. The password I create is designed to be replaced anyway.

The first thing is adding the two “restricted extras” packages for Xubuntu. This pulls in all the stuff most people are used to having on their computer. I always add VLC as the most reliable multimedia player on any OS. Then I bring in LibreOffice since Xubuntu defaults to Abiword and friends. Gnumeric is really fine, but the rest of it isn’t ready for prime time, so if the machine can handle it, they get Libre. Most machines also get PySolFC and some mod-music files so it plays music. Almost everyone loves that.

I have a set of TTFs I always give them (just copy the entire .fonts folder over) and I’m careful to adjust font display for maximum sharpness. I really hate the default theme, but I wait for the client to change that. For myself it’s Trench with GTK2 Dirty-Ice colors, but you can’t easily get that on Xubuntu. I also prefer the workspace selector down in bottom toolbar, and I run GKrellM with the weather extension. My favorite theme is Blue Steel with sans serif fonts. Most people have no use for such things.

Then I add Chromium and run through basic privacy and security settings. Unless I know they don’t want it, I add Ghostery and Adblock Plus to every browser, along with Flashblock if needed. Then there’s Bleachbit and sometimes I add Wine if I know they want it.

Then I spend the time teaching them how to run it. Often I’ll show them where the settings are and what they mean, then I show them all the advanced settings in the browsers. If they want training on LibreOffice, GIMP and some of other major apps, I always throw that in. Only once has anyone asked me for the recipe to use FFMPEG on the commandline to strip an MP3 music file from Flash videos:

ffmpeg -i DnK-HandNHand.flv -vn -ar 44100 -f mp3 DnK-HandNHand.mp3

That’s an example based on changing the Flash video file name first to something I could recognize, then converting it to MP3. A similar incantation will give you Ogg files, if you prefer; just be sure to change the notation after the “-f” switch and then the file type. Also, the YouTube downloader Python script an also do the conversion if FFMPEG is installed:

./youtube-dl -x --audio-format mp3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[RANDOM]

You’ll get that [RANDOM].mp3 and need to change the filename.

Of course, SlimBoat browser makes it easy. However, you have to use the generic Linux version on Debian because of mismatched dependencies. I just unzipped it and dropped the folder into my $HOME directory and linked a launcher to the executable inside the folder. Then, when you click on the “Download Video” button on a YouTube page, select the highest quality available and check the “convert to MP3” switch. The first time you do it, the browser has to download the codecs, but it drops the MP3 into the same folder with the same filename you give the video, just changing the file extension. I’ve taught that method to one other person so far.

You’d be surprised how quickly most folks can learn this stuff if you take the time and patiently explain how it works in familiar terms. XFCE is quite different, but once you point out what to look for and run them through a few exercises, they simply get used to it. Aside from folks who simply must run certain software that works only on Windows (and not in Wine), I can recommend either Xubuntu of Debian with XFCE to just about anyone.

Posted in computers | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Debian and Xubuntu for Common Folks