Biblical Morality: Chapter 6

Posted on August 9, 2013 by ehurst

Limits of Power and Enforcement

You cannot separate loyalty to God from social stability.

The thread that ties together all biblical law regarding conduct with other humans has always been the necessity of maintaining social stability. This is the primary duty of man before God in this fallen world. The Scripture assumes you understand that starts with family integrity and stability. Your family was your society. It seems nearly impossible to get Westerners to understand that you cannot possibly obey God’s law fully without a tribal social structure. You cannot even understand biblical law without that underlying necessity. Family comes first; then we talk about how to behave as a society.

Because Western Civilization is inherently hostile to the family, we struggle to understand the death penalty for transgressing family unity. We see no problem with some government entity interfering in family business. It is impossible to overstate how wrong that is. This alone justifies God destroying the entire Western world and every human life within.

In God’s eyes, the family is your government, period. Human government was mandated by God in Genesis 9 because the fallen nature of mankind requires restraints. What most Westerners struggle to avoid is the necessity of that government restraint starting at home. The family elder was meant to be your shepherd. It was the family elder God commissioned through Noah to exercise the death penalty on murderers. Remember the warning about about men being inherently lazy when it comes to fighting sin? That figures into the passage in Genesis where God warns that there has to be some final awful penalty for the ultimate threat to social stability, and your own blood kin were supposed to carry out your execution for the crime of murder. The police are your family. It is flat out evil to pass the job off to strangers; it’s a cowardly act of defiance against God’s first Law Covenant.

Any civil government entity seeking to interfere in family business is damned. How many times do you need to read that? Anyone demanding a government that interferes with family business is also damned. Civil government is not permitted to deal with individuals if they are attached to a substantial household; civil government is required to work with the family as a single entity. Scripture regards this a self evident.

Civil laws about marriage and divorce are all contrary to God’s revelation. Laws about abortion are also evil. Having a society so horribly twisted that such things enter the picture is also begging for God’s wrath. God says all those things are the business of the extended family, and any external government is obliged to recognize the sanctity of such an arrangement. These issues are not a valid concern of any civil government. Period.

Such is God’s moral character. Naturally, we can’t pull that off under most Western governments. Jesus recognized that and so did the Apostles. They had the advantage that Rome scarcely cared about what Hebrew and Christian families did within their own boundaries.

However, Christian synagogues were regarded with varying levels of suspicion in part because the Jewish folks took deep offense at them, not Rome. Still, both kinds of synagogue followed the ancient pattern of considering themselves the only real kinfolks around. That is, your church was organized like an extended covenant family. Covenant obligations took precedence over blood kinship in God’s Laws, in that anyone authorized as head of family to participate in a covenant was obliging the family to fulfill it. Thus, the Covenant of Christ was considered more binding than any blood kinship. Your church was your real family according to God’s morality.

Things are a bit more complicated for us, since so very many of professing Christians are demanding things God calls “evil.” That is, Western Christians are easily the single loudest agitators demanding that the government destroy the family integrity. Somehow Satan has convinced a large number of Christians that the sword of evil men can somehow work God’s will, while the Christians can refuse to take responsibility for fixing what’s wrong. In God’s eyes, the people are the police, and a professional force is an occupying army of invaders. That God permits it has no bearing on the truth we are required to see.

Going back to that image of the shepherd with his limited authority and just those tools God has given him, it is upon us to rebuild what society ought to be within the limits of our authority. Sure, negotiate with the civil government if you can, but mostly it’s a matter of flying under the radar. Whatever isn’t in your hand is in God’s hands. Your commitment to His moral justice tends to bring His power to play in ways you might not expect. He may well move you far from where you planned to live, relieve you of worldly concerns you don’t need, and break lots of your personal plans and dreams.

That’s His prerogative.

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Democratization of Religion

Posted on August 8, 2013 by ehurst

God is actively involved in devolving human activity down to the control of the individual.

This does not contradict my blather about tribal lifestyle in the least. Social stability is the issue, and breaking non-family power structures is an unmitigated blessing on earth. The moral fabric of the universe works relentlessly to destroy everything God didn’t build. He built the tribal social structure; He did not build civil government as we know it. He did not build cartels and product monopolies. He did not build secrecy and systems that concentrate power and wealth away from families.

The ongoing invisible war against those evil things gets our attention once in awhile. Certain symbolic items become the focus of our attention. Not so long ago, it was the home computer, and then it was Internet access. Some parts remain impossible for the home hobbyist to build, but the market for those critical building blocks is actually devolving quickly. The Raspberry Pi is pretty wimpy as systems go, but it will do the work with common peripherals. Meanwhile, the Open Source principle bridges the gap between closed production and DIY computer operations. Thus, freely adaptable operating systems and software are just about on par with commercial offerings; they’ve caught up.

The digitized media war is just getting started. Before it’s done, copyright will become meaningless. There may well be some other system replace it in terms of how it functions, but the older concept behind copyright and patent is already obsolete. Meanwhile, the means to make your own entertainment media from scratch on par with the media moguls is already here. People are no longer willing to wait for the titans to respond from their Olympian heights. Because of calcification, the blind and doomed grinches are creating the steamroller that will crush them and their wealth will evaporate. They will never understand what hit them.

So now comes 3D printing. While currently in its infancy, it has already produced firearms, cars and an endless stream of smaller and more mundane plastic products. For now, the costs are quite high, but the market will roll along until beggars on the streets of Calcutta will be pulling functional old units from the dump to use with their repurposed smartphones. That’s about the same time the average middle class folks are producing anything you can imagine from their home product generators. Everything non-biological will be sold as digital files, plans for your home generator. Power users will consistently modify those plans to suit their individual tastes.

Right in the big middle of that I am seeking to destroy the concentrations of power in churches as we know them. Not as an enemy with a grudge, but as someone who would simply like to see folks have the means to craft their own religion to match their individual unique spiritual cravings. In my mind, I’m offering the equivalent of software and 3D printers to democratize religion. We still desperately need to form spiritual families and live in a tribal faith society, but there’s no reason we should have to license some particular brand of religion and theology that’s been around for ages.

My efforts seek to reverse engineer the underlying technology, if you will, of what makes religion a valid answer to spiritual apprehensions. I want “religion” to no longer mean something akin to a political control system. Stripped of all the human traditions, I seek to identify that underlying bedrock of communion with God. I don’t want to clone my personal religion and theology in your souls; I want to set you free to find peace with God on terms He offers you. All I have to offer is my own experience, so I’m trusting my readers to discern what does and doesn’t apply to their own needs, because I know my God is fully able to make you know and understand.

I want you to be free to deal with God face to face, since that’s a critical element of why His Son came to earth.

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Biblical Morality: Chapter 5

Posted on August 8, 2013 by ehurst

And Your Neighbor As Yourself

By now you should understand the primary mistake Cain made in answering God’s query about Abel. Cain’s question was immaterial, an attempted misdirection, so any answers people might imagine and promote are missing the point. Cain didn’t fall on his face before God, but pretended God couldn’t know what happened. God is not on our level and we are not on His. Our accountability to Him is without boundaries. He holds us accountable to Him for anything within our reach. Lots of people aren’t direct kin.

The definition of “neighbor” is anyone who isn’t aloof or an enemy.

Nothing required it, and nobody would expect a Samaritan to help an injured Israelite. The Samaritan was lucky the Romans protected him while traveling through Judea. Instead, he found he could not bypass someone injured and surely near death. What compelled him was conscience, our intellectual interface with the will, the place where our convictions are read. The Samaritan operated in the justice of God, while the most blessed of Israel couldn’t be bothered.

Who was the good neighbor? Jesus defined it as anyone who holds to biblical morality, never mind the nitty-gritty details of the written laws. Granted, His whole point was that those disputing His teaching had no clue what the Bible was really about, but that applies to most Westerners because the West takes its cues from the same place the Pharisees did. They were legalists reading a Hebrew mystical document through Aristotelian assumptions, a worldview alien and hostile to Scripture.

Some of the particular laws in Moses assume everyone realized a fellow Israelite was at least a cousin, warranting some measure of protection one might not give a total stranger. However, even strangers merited some care and concern. Yes, we have some problems with deception, but you place those things in the hands of God. You do what you know you should do. If someone is no threat and makes the right signals for being friendly, that’s your neighbor. The initiative for caring and reaching out is on you as the servant of God.

The most hateful rejection of this is seen in the workplace. If the first thoughts in your mind are “you are required to” and “I don’t have to” then you are not working from biblical morals. It makes no difference who is likely to take advantage of you, the burden of caring about your workmates is non-negotiable with God. Sure, there are times when turning the other cheek is provocative and communicates the wrong message. You are expected to seek God’s face and know the difference. Never give a thought to reciprocation itself as of any significance. That’s simply wrong. You do what’s right and just in God’s eyes even if the whole world is unjust.

Let’s remind ourselves once again the whole point of law codes appearing in Scripture: Law is a contextual expression of divine justice. Not man’s laws, but God’s revealed Law Covenants. Once you see past those provisions and understand how this merely reflects the love of the Father for His children stuck in this awful world, you also realize living in His love has distinct advantages. It’s not enough to suggest His justice is a moral fabric woven into the universe and that His justice is cosmic justice. He supports His own character by asserting divine power that change things only He can change. His love amplifies the natural process.

So justice is not a question of you getting your share against the grubby hands of others. Justice is a question of God asserting His ownership from your grubby hands. He never demands from you based on what someone else needs. He demands from you only what He has given you in the first place. One of the biggest disasters in charity planning is starting with a survey of human needs. This is evil because it’s entirely human-centered, making God a mere accessory. There will always be human need. Your mission is God-centered, to supply what you have from Him, with a careful eye to what God says is the right amount. You are prepared to be extravagant because He owns it all; it’s at His disposal. But you are also ready to hear Him warn you about throwing pearls to the pigs. You aren’t called to help everyone. Attempts to paint you with false guilt based on human reckoning of what you ought to do can be shrugged off with His blessings.

Your feelings are wholly untrustworthy on such things.

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About the Bible

Posted on August 7, 2013 by ehurst

I’m not picking on anyone in particular here.

We talk about the Bible as “God’s Word.”

Chances are these days, if some brand of English is your native tongue, you received a really bad education. You aren’t entirely to blame for a certain level of ignorance because the entire Western Civilization has tried its damndest to prevent you from understanding reality. So you bring this messed up background to the Bible.

You see it is printed with English words on paper. Naturally, you assume it can be read like any other printed material. Maybe it’s fiction, fact, fable, or a mixture of things. There’s some obvious poetry of beauty and some very dry prose narrative, and everything in between. Some of it is really good literature, fine story telling.

Some of it is perplexing, but you figure you can understand most of it. I would agree that you could probably understand the parts that really matter for someone who isn’t familiar with the message of the book. If you happen to be well educated, chances are you’ll really screw it up and not have a clue, because you’ll be reading that fine education back into an alien document. Instead, you’ll be utterly convinced you really do understand it, perhaps better than a lot of folks who seem to take it more seriously than you do. Not much anyone can do to help you understand better if that’s the case.

The part about it being “God’s Word” is that He is able to use those words to touch people, though He clearly isn’t doing that for everyone who reads it. For those whom the book touches something inside them, the distinction God makes between one or another isn’t really explained, but it is normalized in a sense. We get used to it. We might imagine there are things we can do about that, or maybe we understand it’s really not our problem in the final analysis. Either way, for some of us this book is the voice of God.

Suppose your copy says “Holy Bible” and you notice there are lots of different versions that don’t say that. Please don’t be so dense as to think that label “Holy” makes it really all that different. It’s just advertising. Insofar as one English translation is holy, all are. No group of translators was somehow holier than others; they were all humans. Yes, there are some really bad translations into English, but not very many. The most popular translations tend to be close enough that you probably won’t notice that much difference in the actual content, just how it comes across in terms of the flavoring of English. So, for example, the New American Standard is obviously slanted toward American English, while the New English Bible is slanted toward British readers.

So when a British version says “corn”, an American says “grain.” Hint: Folks in the Ancient Near East never saw that stuff properly called “maize” that grows on fat grass stalks and forms multiple heads of grain covered in leafy husks and silky padding. All their grains grew on thin, short grassy stalks and formed single heads without much covering, stuff we might call wheat and barley for the most part.

Little stuff like that can trip you up in one sense, but for the most part, it’s not a big problem. You still might not understand why Abraham demanded his servant Eliezer place his hand under Abraham’s thigh to swear an oath. But it’s much worse than that. Maybe you’ll read the book of Revelation and wonder if John was on drugs. Or maybe you’ll encounter some Christians who interpret Revelation rather literally and act like they are on drugs.

Even if you studied this stuff for years and read lots of books by really fine Bible scholars, with all their differing interpretations, you could still not have a clue what John was writing about. That’s because the majority of the Bible scholars aren’t really that much smarter than you. They know more stuff, but it’s not better stuff. They still think with that crappy Western education.

Sure, we have to take the book seriously. But the words printed on paper are not magical. Quoting it word for word might be emotionally moving for some folks, but that’s not the same as the moving of the Holy Spirit. There’s nothing magical about any particular translation, not even if you quote it in the original languages. A classical Western education in translation still misses some of the most important elements in understanding the Bible. If you don’t understand the Hebrew culture of the people who wrote it, you have no idea what the book meant to them. Moreover, if you don’t understand how the Hebrew mind operated, you really are lost. If you don’t understand how thoroughly different the Hebrew mind worked in contrast to anyone raised under Western Civilization, you are in good company, but you are still utterly lost when reading the Bible.

Yes, you’ll understand the important part that Jesus died for your sins and that He will some day come back for you, whether you are dead or alive. You’ll understand that God intends to work in your life, but you won’t have a clue what to expect. Your entire mental frame of reference is attuned to such a huge package of lies, you can’t possibly imagine how utterly far you are from what the Bible is trying to say.

I’ll give you a hint: The revelation of God in the Bible isn’t simply the words as you read them English. There is nothing sacred about any translation because that isn’t what God used to publish His Word. Nor is there anything particularly sacred about the words in their original language, nor in the original copies, because we have no originals. What we have is a reasonable and functional approximation. But the revelation of God is not simply in the words in any language, but His revelation includes the peculiar intellectual assumptions of the people who wrote it. If you have no idea what makes an ancient Hebrew mind different from any Western mind, you are missing out on God’s revelation.

Without that Hebrew mindset, you do not have the Word of God.

That’s what A Course in Biblical Mysticism was all about.

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Biblical Morality: Chapter 4

Posted on August 7, 2013 by ehurst

Boundaries

“Brother, without hesitation, my life for yours. I’ll never stab you in the back, but that doesn’t mean I won’t cut your heart out if you betray my trust.”

Had David held that attitude with his cousin Joab, the history of Israel would have been quite different. After that first murder, David should have with his own hands executed his cousin. David’s fatal flaw was not that he doted too much on his family. He was overly indulgent because he was self-indulgent. Not just a skirt-chaser, David was unwilling to pay the emotional price for putting God first. He loved the warm regard of the sheep more than he loved the sheep. He was a shepherd unwilling to cause distress by yanking his flock back from the precipice of sin.

If love is exerting oneself for the welfare of another, then David didn’t love God enough. He didn’t trust God to handle the political and social consequences of doing the right things.

This was the essence of Adam’s failure in the Garden of Eden. He wasn’t willing to face any possible emotional distress from correcting Eve over the Forbidden Fruit. Instead of dragging her back, seeking to make atonement and surrendering her to God’s authority, Adam allowed Satan to set the menu. In all things, we either serve God or we serve Satan.

Again, it’s too easy for Western minds to read that wrong, seeking some nearly invisible bright line that is always true in every context for every person. That’s entirely the wrong approach. The shepherd’s power is not limitless over every factor affecting the flock. He has tools and skills and his own compassion. Success is not even a significant issue from our end; faithfulness from the heart is what God seeks.

David passed the buck onto Solomon regarding Joab. That was wrong, and it sent the wrong message to everyone. Joab was David’s mess and it was his duty to stop the profligate self-indulgence of Joab, but he first had to correct his own. You’ll notice David correctly exercised no judgment in cases not brought to his attention. The affairs of his people were their own concern for the most part. Not every murder required his attention. There was no human with any authority to hold him accountable for the murder of Uriah. Don’t confuse God’s mercy with David’s self-indulgence in the matter of Joab and others.

Context is everything. God is the ultimate Judge of all things. Don’t misread the Law of Moses as harsh, with unreasonable penalties. Westerners simply do not understand what a serious threat adultery is to family stability. It’s like ripping big holes in the moral fabric of the universe. Let the wound fester and the cancer spreads both quickly and subtly until everything comes apart. Social stability is founded on trust and commitment. Those are essential expressions of God’s own character. A man or woman could forgive adultery and spare their spouse the death penalty, but it could also eventually cost his or her life, if not their soul. The sole issue is how much of a threat God sees to His glory, and our commitment to promote His glory. David was spared but Joab should have been executed because each presented a differing threat to God’s glory.

The difference requires understanding the limits of authority and roles, among other things. There are boundaries, but they are written in Heaven and applied on earth. It requires a heart after God, a determination to please Him. Our civilization hates and rejects the utter necessity of falling at the feet of God and giving Him full authority over our lives. We keep inserting the authority of our logic into the context, and that is simply blasphemous. We won’t let Him choose for us to suffer for reasons we can’t comprehend; we demand accountability from Him. God is in charge. Each moment of decision should bring a change within us, making us able to work smarter as we age and our bodies are less eager for exertion. Divine enlightenment is not a simple matter of God turning on a switch. It’s a matter of teaching our hearts to see what our eyes cannot.

To the Hebrew mind, the heart was the seat of will, where the convictions were carved into stone, as it were. Your awareness of those convictions — your conscience — should change over time. That simply reflects how your mind should be trained by the Spirit, who speaks through your will primarily. You are obliged to obey your conscience as the best you know at any given time, with the expectation you’ll be better informed once you’ve tested what you already have. It’s as if we seek to sweep away layers of rubble obscuring the foundations of our souls; the mind only knows what it has learned with its own powers. It does not want to obey, but it is wholly incompetent to rule. We make a conscious effort to train it for its proper role, which is to organize and implement what God says through the convictions.

David allowed his emotions too much free rein, letting them overpower the warnings of his convictions. When the mind demands a second opinion after consulting the convictions, it can’t possibly be a better answer. You cannot force anyone else to live against their own best estimate of what God requires of them, either. At some point your authority ends, and that other person has crossed the boundary outside your authority. By the same token, there is a world of folks willing to transgress those boundaries in the other direction, demanding you comply with something contrary to your convictions.

Wading through this relentless clash of overlapping authorities and demands requires you first have a clear vision of your own moral boundaries, the things for which God holds you accountable. The rest is making a habit of conferring with Him when things aren’t too obvious. That typically means testing everything against your conscience.

The reason God gave Satan so much room to operate in human space is to remind us that we cannot afford to be lazy about our duty to His Lordship.

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Net Speculation

Posted on August 6, 2013 by ehurst

There’s some pretty serious warfare on the Net right now.

I’m little more than a power user, not a real hacker or professional technician. I have a computer ministry, but it’s mostly mundane stuff any power user could fix. But I enjoy helping people and making house calls is kind of fun for me. I enjoy explaining complicated stuff to people of limited understanding. I especially enjoy spawning new power users by helping duffers get smarter.

So with my limited understanding of the Internet, it looks to me like some pretty heavy stuff happening right now. It’s not what folks typically think of as “cyber warfare” but it’s even uglier in how it hurts innocent people. That’s what bothers me most about it.

Criminal hackers are finding new ways to cause havoc. New vulnerabilities keep surfacing, some with serious repercussions for everyone simply trying to use the Net. The whole thing right now depends on a handful of authorities verifying certain things and the rest of us taking their word for it. We have no idea what’s going on in the background, but if our browser shows a page, we figure it’s what we asked for. If we get a login page, we just assume it’s the right one and type in our username and password. There’s about a dozen easy ways to hijack that process. Not just phishing with fake login pages, but ways to fool us so that our computer believes it, or even fooling our ISP into believing it.

The NSA is playing tricks, trying to spook people so they don’t trust encryption, anonymizers, VPNs, and all the other ways we might try to dodge their snooping. An awful lot of virus and spyware junk is actually produced and planted out there by the US government. And then there’s the likes of DEA snooping on the Net and not even telling the judge how they got an investigation rolling from that. And the FBI is now known to plant child porn on places just so they can trick unwary users into downloading it, then arresting them. They even disguise it as something else to catch people not even looking for any kind of porn at all. Silly kids simply looking for music get trapped by this stuff.

Meanwhile, the really big dogs on the Internet porch are fighting over ways to make advertising income and perfectly willing to use spyware and rootkits so they can get virtual ownership of your computer. And who can forget all the nasty crap used by folks who think they have the right to control every copy of something they already sold?

And the vigilantes are slapping back at big and important people and agencies, and we can never be too sure some of them aren’t government agencies playing head games again. Some character named Guccifer has been having a lot of fun cracking the personal accounts of bigshots all over the place.

The cost of using the Internet now has little to do with paying in your local currency for access and purchasing a few protective services. That won’t do any more; you have to be a pretty serious security technician just to surf the Net these days. It’s almost as difficult as it was in the old days of DOS and bulletin boards. And just about anything, including old DOS, is more secure than any version of Windows. At the same time, a great many products and services, even government services, just about require you have Net access to get much of anything.

It’s all about to come crashing down, in the sense it’s not far from being unusable.

I am aware the serious protocol experts have been engaging in some serious talks for quite some time. On the one hand, they’d like to fix some of this to alleviate the stress it’s putting on them and everyone else who really knows what’s going on. For every one that says it’s all going to be just fine, it seems there’s at least three more saying things are not good, not good at all. And then they say stuff that’s over my head, so I’m not really following the details, but I do get the sense of some scrambling to come up with something they can all agree on and see if it can be saved. Part of the problem is so very many of them aren’t working for the good of mankind, but trying to protect someone who’s paying their salary. On the other hand, a significant number are already building alternative networking systems from scratch.

I’m watching, but I’m powerless to do much. I believe I can keep my systems working in this atmosphere, but I can’t fix something like a compromised Border Gateway Protocol, since that’s all at the ISP level. I’m trying to keep track of the tricks both government crooks and non-government crooks use to snare us. Mostly I’m doing a lot of praying. This Internet thing is the bulk of my pastoral ministry right now. I’m not afraid of having to give it up, but then I’ll need to know what comes next.

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Biblical Morality: Chapter 3

Posted on August 6, 2013 by ehurst

It’s All in the Family

It’s not for nothing He said we should call Him “Father.”

In Scripture, the family is the anchoring point of all human activity. This is perhaps one of the most difficult claims to make in Western societies, particularly in the US. Anyone currently alive is unlikely to remember when American families were anywhere close to the God’s ideal. We understand it’s importance as an economic unit, but we simply have no cultural background for understanding how critical it is for grasping the moral fabric of the universe.

Family is God’s idea. Not simply the nuclear family, but the extended family. We have no concept in our society for that. Cultivating warmth we get; cultivating the divine miracle power of kinship piety is totally absent. We don’t even have a proper concept of what it means to put your family first in your life. A threat to your family stability isn’t merely a threat to you, as well, but a threat to the stability of the universe.

In ancient times, your family was the only thing keeping you alive most of the time. That dire necessity helped people to understand the fundamental welding of affection between blood kin. Even when life generally became tamer and easier, people still held to the instinct that your family was your highest human loyalty, and it was altogether an overwhelmingly powerful loyalty. In the process of living, your family was your home team. By extension, they were your identity. There might be conflicts, but no one ever questioned the necessity of maintaining the family integrity against a hostile world.

We talk today of bad marriages and irreconcilable differences. That was so utterly rare in ancient times that we cannot imagine. People didn’t simply suppress their individuality to fulfill some artificial social demand. They realized individuality could be an excuse for destroying what God built. It wasn’t airy fairy perfect happiness all the time, but the social structure of the Bible was pretty harsh on mean fathers and husbands, and simply could not tolerate a bitch. Instead of blindly making all things about yourself, you actually acknowledged a duty to other humans. You learned how to make room for other folks to be different, to be human and individual, or you ran into serious trouble quickly. No one would help you when you needed it, and it was unheard of that folks never needed help of some kind. If you don’t need help, you aren’t human, but a serious danger to other people. Petty bickering was deadly. Human existence could never be perfect and you weren’t somehow psychically damaged by letting some portion of your personal dreams slide into oblivion. You didn’t allow that fund of painful frustration to build; this life wasn’t all that important in the first place.

This business of husband and wife competing against each other is anathema. If they aren’t picking up the slack for each other, it isn’t holy matrimony. When you hear phrases like “he needs to” and “she had better” then you know it’s not a family as God sees things. It’s bad morality to take petty internal quarrels to a third party. Biblical morality says husband and wife are no longer individuals, but welded to each other as a single unit. Not a surrendered identity in His courts, but a surrendered independence from each other. The needs of one are the needs of the other. We so very much deserve the wrath of God on this point.

At the same time, it was considered a rich blessing from God that someone in a position to actually help was aware of your personal business. Isolation was inherently sinful. Snooping might lead to mischief, but in general it was benign and expected. If you weren’t paying attention to your neighbor’s daily condition of life, you were scandalously derelict in your social duties. In our late Western society, we can’t imagine that. The failure to imagine is a red flag, a warning we have a very long way to go trying to understand what it means to be morally good.

The major flaw in modern society is confusion about whom we should trust. We are trained to develop a residual hostility to the intrusion of actual kinfolk, the people who know us best. Our social instinct is to push away in some idolatry of false independence. Instead, we are encouraged to pursue opportunities to unload our intimate thoughts with people who share only the most shallow connections. We make far too much of the weakest casual links, and dump our souls out to strangers, while denying that same trust to the folks with whom God Himself placed us for those very same needs. Our society consciously attacks real kinship with talk of rights against each other. It’s hard to convey just how awful and sinful that is.

Your household should be several generations in close physical proximity. While there would surely be some privacy, it would be highly limited and that was altogether proper and necessary. Your private space was far smaller, and subject to a great many more limitations. You were treated as a threat if you got grouchy about it.

Our Western prickly confusion about physical contact among men is frankly a slap in God’s face. Tenderness in our world is reserved only for sexual manipulation, so when a man acknowledges a need for genuine masculine warmth, he has no choice but to be queer. What God says is normal male bonding included things we insist means perversion. Nobody will demand you break all the social taboos of your current context, but you need to be aware how wrong your society is, and how the biblical version is still superior. You cannot understand biblical morality without recognizing your own social mythology as wholly false.

More than that, Israel was never allowed to forget that any child of the Covenant was a brother or sister. Sure, they tried hard to pervert that into thinking only Abraham’s DNA was “holy.” God steadfastly reminded them often that it was adherence to the Covenant that made all the difference. Breaking the Covenant meant rejecting the family protection. It meant threatening society. Worst of all, it threatened to break God’s protection. With Christ, this was shifted to a higher plane, where shared spiritual identity takes precedence over DNA. While Jesus spoke in the stark terms of hating your kin by comparison, He also pointed out how His Father considered marriage a sacred bond regardless of any perceived mismatch. Your ability to be righteous with your earthly family is a reflection of your understanding of spiritual kinship.

No one can write a comprehensive guideline on how to keep peace with your Western family in a society consciously designed to destroy the family unity. All the whining about patriarchal oppression assumes a woman is not necessarily on her husband’s team. Satan loves that one. The only reason Western men are ogres is because our social mythology won’t even permit the biblical ideal of manhood to be mentioned. When we read the Bible describing men like David, we read our Western mythology back into the narrative. Flaws and all, David was man after God’s own heart, a man who genuinely sought to please His Lord. We have no such concept in our Western society. David was a shepherd to all he met.

That didn’t keep him from killing the enemies of his people, but Western society is afflicted with the most perverted understanding of war and killing of any civilization so far in human history. We have no clue about a gentle and caring shepherd male leading his household in pleasing God, which included defending by any means necessary what God called him to build. We misread how the Bible uses “hate” and believe we have to utterly despise — whipping up some deep emotional resentment against — someone who simply doesn’t understand or accept the limits God told us to guard. You can respect your enemies even as you kill them, with all the valiant bravery marching alongside sorrow at the necessity of taking their lives. We either do it too willingly or whine about it.

Our conceptual model for handling emotions is about as perverted as it gets. Our Western perversion of what the Bible calls proper morality in the family is one of the biggest barriers we have to living in God’s justice. When you step away from God’s justice, you walk face first into the Devil’s domain. Just because your senses and logic don’t see a threat doesn’t mean there is none. Recognize the barriers but don’t wait on anyone else to do the right thing.

Stay close to your family.

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Biblical Morality: Chapter 2

Posted on August 5, 2013 by ehurst

His Call

Our Divine Sheikh owns us.

You have to wipe away the idiocy of thinking you could possibly be free. That’s a myth peculiar to the West. All living beings are accountable to someone else, and eventually we are all accountable to God. It won’t matter if you want to imagine there is anything above Him to which He is accountable; that has no effect on us. We are accountable to God and there is no appeal over His head for us. This is His game alone. God reveals Himself as the Lord and we are His property under the customs of ANE feudalism.

That particular brand of feudalism is not an accident; God created that system to reflect how the universe is made. This kind of feudalism is intensely personal. The only way to depersonalize it is to make yourself a lesser slave, someone who stays out of sight and does the most menial and nasty jobs. Rising to a higher status means taking the time and effort to become personally close to Him. He freely offers to every human the opportunity to become His adopted child, but it requires embracing the role of His child.

In the Hebrew world, context is everything; among humans that means role is everything in any particular moment. Notions of fairness, equality and rights are all from Hell; they are excuses for fighting what God has decreed. You can choose to be His child, but you cannot choose where He places you. That was decreed before you were born. The best you can do is draw near to Him and discern, and then embrace the role for which He designed you.

But that divine calling is hardly static. It’s not as if you can’t fight apparent fate. His inscrutable ways include conditioning us for things we hardly understand. He holds all the cards; ask Job — some things are not for us to know. Rather, we seek to know from Him what He wants us to fight and what He says we must accept. None of that comes by objective policy or nice little slogans. There are commonalities, but the logic remains fuzzy. For humans, the primary means of awareness is in the will, the sense of conviction.

You are hard-wired with a sense of divine necessity; it is not subject to any human logic. Our reception within the conscious mind of the signals may well be perverted by cultural conditioning, but the signals do not fail. If we learn to understand those signals, we come to the realization of our own personal collection of moral imperatives. There are some things we simply must not do, or our souls will burn with unholy punishing fire. By the same token, there are some things we simply must do. That He communicates this way is not subject to debate: If you are human, you have a divine call and you can know it. Your role is defined by the contextual steering of your convictions.

Your calling is not subject to any other human authority. However, your actions and duties may be circumscribed by the necessities of their calling and role in the context. Everyone has their own role within any domain. It requires an awareness that conflict is inevitable, not because God can’t get it together, but because conflict is part of the Fall. The art of obedience is learning how to gracefully handle those conflicts. Some of them are simply tests.

Love is the Law of God. Again, it’s not the feeling from love, but the commitment to care. Your actions within your calling and role must run through that filter of divine moral imperative that you embrace the welfare of others as He does, as He defines welfare. Love defines the business of Heaven and the limits of your authority within the calling and role. The notion of absolutes that apply to all humans at all times is not a biblical concept, not part of biblical morality. There are some actions inherently evil, but we cannot view them with Western eyes or we’ll never understand how to obey God.

If you don’t obey Him, you don’t love Him enough. If you sincerely desire to please Him, you cannot fail.

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We Aren’t Ready

Posted on August 5, 2013 by ehurst

In the social sciences, we are forced to strip out threads of reality because no human can possibly grasp the totality of what happened in the past or what’s happening right now.

We do not even have an economic model for the Network Civilization. All we know is that it will be different. There have been plenty of words spilled about the information economy, but because it would be forced to drag with it the old traditional production economy, it could never take off. Just think about the hateful attempts to squelch anything that threatens the ancient paper-book and hard-copy media sales. The whole business of copyright will not benefit from any reforms. Only the complete destruction of the current system will do.

Whole sectors of the current economy will disappear, in the sense that we can hardly imagine where it’s going. How do you build a society on giving so much control to the individual, when time and place become virtually meaningless in terms of delivering “the product?”

We also have no model for the social structure that will come with the Network Civilization. It’s possible we can have some input as it develops, but something like that is far beyond human control. The whole question requires thinking about the fundamentals of what “civilization” means and all the ways humans interact. What will it mean when the majority of your friends and acquaintances are people you’ll never meet in person? How will this change social psychology? What is the mental model of a close friendship, with all the emotional warmth, and no solid visual concept of the person on the other end? We are already doing this.

And what’s the model for differentiating between a real person and some AI projection? Would it shock you to suggest it won’t really matter? In terms of how you live your life, people you encounter online can create a false self, but it will be entirely real to you. What’s the difference to you between someone who seems so real and someone who is real? It becomes a question only if we aren’t ready to deal with life consciously in the first place.

On top of all this, we still have to deal with our localized meat space reality. How to you integrate all of that, when the very real controlling factor of your future is online? How do you deal with that when there really isn’t a model for what “online” will come to mean in terms of technology and user interface? Oh, but it will most certainly change.

With all that, try to understand that I have been thinking about these very things as I struggle to build a religion that fits into this future. I’ve been working on a religion that would offer a better expression of the ineffable call of the Spirit Realm in a very different world. Of necessity that spirituality must include other people or it means nothing, and we can’t keep using the old matrices of human interaction. We have to discern the core of what it means to walk with Christ when our feet are under a computer desk. Western Civilization did a horrible job, perverting religion in ways the Apostles could not have imagined, but in ways they sensed in the Spirit.

We have to do better.

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Boomer Dementia

Posted on August 4, 2013 by ehurst

Most of us have some idea of what Dementia/Alzheimer’s looks like. What we may not know is the entire complex as we know it is dominated by the single largest group of patients suffering from it: Baby Boomers. I’m not sure I can provide references to prove why it’s more severe among Boomers, but I do know at least one factor is the arrogant materialism built into the Boomer generation.

Previous generations didn’t feel quite so entitled as Boomers, though it began manifesting during the Silent Generation as they adopted the Boomer morality. Later generations haven’t gotten old enough to start manifesting dementia, so I’m not sure what to expect of them. However, I do know my own generation is loaded with serious crazies. For example, some charitable agency bought a new kitchen stove to replace the dangerous one some old lady had in her kitchen. She bitched and refused it because it didn’t fit the decor. Her house burned down with her in it.

I have no trouble beating the crap out of people who try to lay any senseless guilt trip on me about dealing with the crazy Boomers. Most of the guilt-trippers are Boomers themselves. Boomers were so self-absorbed, it was they who starting shuffling their parents off to nursing homes to get them out of the way. The Silents and Greats went along quietly for the most part. The Boomers know what’s coming and are fighting it, but if there is any group richly deserving it, they should be placed in the most highly regulated and worst institutions in history. And they will. If you’ve ever tried to take care of a normal Boomer who needed help, you’ve suffered some the worst behavior you’ll ever see. Add in the dementia factor and they aren’t hopeless, they are downright dangerous.

It’s not a matter of lacking love; these people are genuinely hopeless. Let a Boomer tell you: Don’t be ashamed; don’t hesitate to shove us into any convenient hole you can find when we start needing that level of care. Most of us will drive you out of your mind, and you’ll end up demented just from dealing with us.

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