ACBM: Part 2 Chapter 3

Posted on July 25, 2013 by ehurst

Chapter 3 — Abraham from Mesopotamia

If you don’t understand Abraham the man, you cannot understand the Bible.

The Genesis account makes no pretense at dating anything; it simply offers pivotal points along the path of revelation. The lack of time structure reflects the broad disregard for precision in things generally, and dating in particular, among the ANE peoples. As noted previously, the earliest samples of writing were inventory records, so it’s not as if they didn’t know how to do it, but that such things were just the routine business of life. Things that actually mattered to humanity were more a matter of ripeness of time, when matters had reached a critical stage. Such things are not planned or scheduled from the human side of the equation. There is reason to believe some portion of statements about how long this or that took in years may be more symbolism than numeric facts, because that’s how folks looked at things. It’s not deception if everyone talks that way and nobody cares about precision.

They didn’t pretend to control all the factors. Life was a matter of internal preparation for things thrown at you. They would have said Westerners believe falsely that they can make big things happen, because just a short time later, it was gone and forgotten. The focus on daily thinking always carried an element of much longer time scales, sometimes even timeless. Oddly, this freed them to seize the moment when unexpected events came along. There was no consciousness of being or doing as separate issues; life was a matter of your commitments and consistent character. The highest value was knowing what role you played in the bigger scheme of things. You didn’t try to understand the world so as to eliminate and control the variables; you needed only be in command of your reactions in the sense of who you are. Measurable accomplishments had little value.

Only in Western societies do we see questions about the nature of a thing (being) and its function or behavior (doing). There is an ongoing debate about whether your identity is a matter of being or doing, and where either question takes precedence in any analytical process. In the ANE, your identity was not a fixed absolute. Aside from pedigree, biographical data might not matter much. Unless your birth name was particularly prophetic, you might well be the only person who remembers it outside your immediate family. Any person with significant authority over you could change your name according to their sense of who you were in their domain, not anything inherent in your being. If all they know is what you do, you were a slave with a functional label. Your sense of identity was contextual to the role you played at the time. A great many ancient names for people were actually titles in that sense; the question in the Western mind of who it was in absolute terms is not considered and cannot be answered in many cases.

Despite appearances, we really don’t know all that much about Sumer during the Early Bronze Age. There’s only so much you can guess from what you can dig out of the sand, never mind stumbling over any Western biases. If we take the narrative in Genesis seriously, attempting as much as possible to read it from the mindset of ancient peoples, and we attempt to collate events and descriptions with our strongest suppositions about the world in his time, we can make some intelligent guesses about Abraham. Certain things become painfully obvious, such as his high degree of education. We can’t know if he knew all the various languages he encountered or whether he worked through translators, because ancient writing would never mention such things. In fact, a man could be said to have done a great many things when it was actually all the physical labor of servants and slaves and the man was never even there. We should assume such to be the case unless something in the narrative specifically says otherwise. Still, people don’t even do the things Abraham did without some broad experience and education that matches noble status in the ANE world.

A good guess places Abraham in Sumer near 2200 BC. This is simply a matter of matching events and conditions of his life in the narrative with best-guess dates from archeology. Sumer was a mixture of Sumerians and Akkadians; since later characterizations peg Abraham as Semitic, that precludes him being Sumerian. In the tribal social structure of his times, being still attached to his father’s household past age 60 was the norm. With what scant evidence we have, the most likely occupation of his father was related to the temples and worship of the pagan god Sin (pronounced “seen”), the moon god. That’s the best explanation for his decision to jump from Sumer to Haran, since the primary connection between those two cities was the presence of major shrines dedicated to Sin. The move would have taken months of travel and was very expensive. They could easily have been in the entourage of some greater person, but they apparently had property and stature enough of their own.

Meanwhile, we know from other sources that the entire Mesopotamian Valley placed a very high value on the lore and literature of previous civilizations. This would have included a great deal of oral mythology and much that we would call Black Magic. At any given time, regardless which empire stood in that area, one could have found a very large number of scholars who would have been experts in religions of all sorts. It would have been the primary area of scholarship. Keep in mind, the ancient version of astrology was the dominant controlling factor of life, and correlations of observations and events formed a substantial portion of any library. Monarchs required administrators to have what amounts to a masters degree in this mixed religious background under the assumption that you can’t make big decisions without the necessary broad perspective of all that men had done in the past, which included a lot legend. They were conscious of the importance of mythology in forming a view of reality. Regardless of your personal beliefs, you had better understand how the rest of the world sees things.

Abraham could hardly avoid such an education. We don’t know what his religious inclinations were before the call of God, nor how routine in his mind was any supposed communication from any deity. However, we know from contextual meaning that this call was a claim on Abraham — “I am now your God; serve Me only.” We should suppose the intellectual concept of monotheism was unimaginable, even ludicrous, in those times. It was hardly different from a lesser noble being told he was beholden to a new liege lord; the call was cast in terms of ANE feudal obligations. Such feudalism would have been about the ownership of personnel. Western feudalism is all about land, and the people belonged to the turf. ANE feudalism was all about people, and turf was a matter of projecting your control through your people in subtle degrees of effective occupation and official recognition. A servant of some lord was still under that lord’s laws regardless of physical jurisdiction, as it were. This God, whom Abraham knew as El (pronounced “ale”), claimed jurisdiction over all Creation. We cannot estimate much more about how this registered in Abraham’s mind in part because we have no idea what means were used to give Abraham this message.

We can safely assume it was part of the lore of his people, so it was in some sense part of the routine traffic between gods and men. We get a hint of all this in the tale of Balaam, hired by Balak of Moab some centuries later, and what seems Balaam’s standard employment as a scholar of religions. He had an accurate knowledge of the rituals and means of communication for a known deity that he apparently didn’t regard as his own. References to Balaam in the New Testament indicates he knew even more than the Old Testament narrative tells us, because he was eventually able to get Israel in trouble with Jehovah in other ways than direct cursing. The point is this: The people in Mesopotamia knew the God of the Bible on some level with a high degree of accuracy from sources we cannot guess. He would have been one of many recognized deities. The Bible narrative, in context of what would have been common knowledge to the readers, attempts to tell us that God decided to end the long period of lesser involvement in human affairs. The time was ripe and the right man for the job was available. It needed some serious shaping to create the proper character in this man so that what he passed onto his heirs was the best setting for God’s further revelation.

If we give ourselves over to Western biases and fantasize about what we want his background to be, we cannot hope to understand anything in the Bible narrative after the Call of Abraham. Our job is to soberly seek what was likely to have been Abraham’s worldview and some estimate of what was in his mind. He was the foundation of the Nation of Israel, not simply as a DNA donor, but as a man with a particular driving vision based on a fairly well understood view of reality. If we take seriously any sense of serving the God of the Bible, Abraham’s view of reality is part of what God requires of mankind in order to please Him.

While the high degree of education and the peculiar Mesopotamian worldview were essential, the urban wallow with its peculiar prejudices was all wrong. One of the most shocking things God required of Abraham was to engage a lifestyle his people detested. For the highly civilized valley residents, those tent dwelling traders were nasty, barbaric thieves. They called them Amorites, which is only vaguely an ethnic label. In the ANE mind, race and blood were not so critical as one’s identity by lifestyle. The mention of tents and the ritual of circumcision were mere symbols of the much larger image of someone uncouth, uncivilized and untrustworthy. It was a symbolic death for Abraham to become part of this culture. Given the extensive disparaging in the Bible of those who trust in their city walls and urban lifestyle, we see how that arises from Abraham’s conscious embrace nomadic living.

The whole idea was to force him to rely on God alone as his lord and defender and not on much of anything in this world. It helped to create a type and level of mysticism not inherent in the ANE. The foundation for mysticism was there in the Mesopotamian scholarly culture, but nothing much built on it — it was not fully developed. They did appear to have a good use of symbolic logic, where the symbols were not confined to concrete notions. Nowhere else do we have such a high degree of sophistication and self-consciousness matched to a very otherworldly focus. God led Abraham through circumstances which forced him to stop caring about worldly possessions as anything more than mere tools.

The next step in the development of revelation was pulling in a much sharper focus on what that otherworld meant against this world.

Recommended readings: Encyclopedic articles on The Patriarchal Period; the Genesis text from 12-38 and the Balaam account in Numbers 22-25, noting that the last chapter reflects the advice of Balaam.

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ACBM: Notes

Posted on July 24, 2013 by ehurst

This is not to impress you with what I know, but to entice you into what you can know.

Before actually starting to type the text, I had gone back and reacquainted myself with an awful lot of ANE stuff I hadn’t seen in years. I am still fascinated by the Hittite Empire and how it figures large, yet generally off-screen in the Bible narrative. Then there are a handful of smaller powers in history, some completely different civilizations, the study of which helps to show a very broad array of what has been that virtually no one in the West can imagine.

But none of them directly affect the outcome of the story I’m trying to tell. This is not a survey of ancient civilizations nor precisely a Bible Study. The purpose of the study was to indicate the bare bones of how we got where we are, compared to where we should be. In the process, it’s important to explain how the first century Christians got where they were, but also just where it was they stood in relation to the question of worldview. For a long time I’ve been asserting these things without showing how I got them.

That’s what started this project. I kept getting requests for background. I can’t write out or point you to everything in my head, but I can offer enough to help you see some of what I went through. I’ve introduced the wider world of ancient civilizations. And for some, maybe it will help them to see why I have no fear of modern pagan religion and their sacred texts. A true mystic isn’t an eclectic gourmet; a true mystic knows first of all to what they are committed and which of the numerous claims to truth actually apply to them. If I can discern the thread of how major biblical figures were exposed to the ancient stuff and still recognized what was true versus what was false, you and I can do the same.

The whole point is trusting the God who brought you this far.

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ACBM: Part 2 Chapter 2

Posted on July 24, 2013 by ehurst

Chapter 2 — The Ancient Near East

The academic definition of The Ancient Near East (ANE) includes a portion of the earth’s surface which runs from the Caucasus on the northeast, across modern Turkey and out to Crete, down to Egypt up through Palestine and around to include all of Mesopotamia out to the Zagros Mountains. It is considered the home of humanity’s earliest civilizations.

The first problem we run into is the paucity of readable material on ANE culture and mythology below the graduate level. It is generally not regarded a subject for any serious examination without a highly specialized need. How much would someone use such a study outside the narrow pursuits of academia? Again, that is the Western bias. The entire subject of the ANE is regarded as esoteric with only a few tiny bits of any use to others. The student in this course is left hanging, trusting the material as presented unless he or she wants to really invest serious effort. This course makes no pretense of being the final answer, the one best or correct understanding of the obscure material behind it all; that would be a Western pretense. The assumption here is: If you need more, you’ll know enough to seek it out and come to your own conclusions. One can only present, and live by, what one has experienced.

Were it not for the heavy presence of Bible scholars seeking to verify basic geographical and historical facts related in Scripture, there would probably be a lot less interest in the first place.

An interest in finding the locations of cities mentioned in the Bible (such as Nineveh and Babylon) inspired the original English and French 19th century archaeological expeditions to the Near East. These sites were discovered and their excavations revealed to the world a style of art which had been lost.

[Senta German, “Ancient Near East”; Smart History, Khan Academy; accessed 21 July 2013.]

If you go on to read the following pages linked to the article quoted above, you’ll discover that the earliest human writing we have dug up so far was nothing more than food inventories on clay tablets (3200 BC). The next nearest item was Hammurabi’s Stele quite a bit later. While we might suppose similar tablets would have been used for other purposes, we just don’t have much that goes back that far except ample proof the Egyptians weren’t the only ones using pictograph records.

Yet another problem to reading directly from the ANE sources is the current cacophony of alternative theories that have appeared in recent decades. There is no way to characterize them all, and certainly no way to summarize how seriously we should take them. The course will stick with the older materials simply because they are freely available on the Net. The previously referenced Khan Academy material is very simple and worth a quick read for orientation. If the reader wants more in depth materials, the Sacred Texts website offers several free books out of copyright both online and CD/DVD orders. Their section on ANE is representative of older scholarship. A great many universities have online materials, as well — a good search engine using the key terms should bring more than anyone has time to read.

The Gilgamesh Epic is difficult at best. That is, in the very act of translation, we are given a dose of the Western bias in deciding what words best depict something from an alien world long buried in the sands of time and the literal sands of the Mesopotamian Valley. Without a certain preparatory study, you are just as well off reading a summary or someone’s analysis of it. Even though they vary some in what they conclude about the meaning of the story, this in itself helps us realize that genuine mysticism is not about commonly agreed facts but how they can be used, about the meaning of things within your own soul and the journey only you can take. The very real historical person behind the name Gilgamesh and his exploits becomes a symbol of something that touches us, but leaves varying fingerprints on each.

Stories do not need to inform us of anything. They do inform us of things. From The Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, we know something of the people who lived in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the second and third millenniums BCE. We know they celebrated a king named Gilgamesh; we know they believed in many gods; we know they were self-conscious of their own cultivation of the natural world; and we know they were literate. These things we can fix — or establish definitely. But stories also remind us of things we cannot fix — of what it means to be human. They reflect our will to understand what we cannot understand, and reconcile us to mortality.

[Arthur A. Brown, “Storytelling, the Meaning of Life, and The Epic of Gilgamesh“; part of Exploring Ancient World Cultures, The Near East section, sponsored by University of Evansville. This is one of the better discussions of Gilgamesh.]

The main reason any of this matters to us is that Abraham came out of that world. To understand any portion of Abraham’s actions and words requires we know something of his cultural and intellectual background. The identity of the Hebrew people is rooted in Abraham’s world, not simply whence he came, but what he later became after his time in Palestine. The other pivotal character is Moses, who was educated in Egypt, the other cradle of ANE civilization. Again, the difficulty is the murky meaning of the surviving texts when passed through the filter of time, language, culture and intellectual orientation. Yes, we have the Rosetta Stone, but how do we ascertain its accuracy? We also have other bilingual Egyptian texts, but the debate continues now two centuries later over what to make of them.

The one thing we need as we move forward is not merely the questions of translating obscure languages long out of use, but how they used language as a means of transmitting something worth the trouble, and why it was worth the trouble. When language was used to record legends and myths, it would seem superficially similar to Greek or Roman legends, for example. That is, we get the same feel about gods, humanity and the universe. Yet the resulting social mythology is radically different between West and ANE. So far as we can determine, the governments, artists and social behavior of the people diverges greatly, and in recognizable patterns of difference. That is, Western societies, even the primitive German tribes, all had some things in common, while the ANE nations all had a different set of commonalties.

One of the things we cannot escape is that wherever we can discern anything of ANE cosmology, it is radically different from anything in the West. We saw previously how the unitary universe was inherent in Western assumptions about reality, whereas the entire ANE believed in at least one other entirely separate realm of existence. So while there seems a degree of similarity in how the myths sound to our ears, if similar tales support an entirely different social mythology, we can only conclude there was a radical difference in how language itself was used.

While Western tongues are rather literal, even in their most lyrical use, by contrast the ANE tongues allowed for a range of parabolic meaning not present in the West. Of course there were plenty of mundane communication requiring a more or less literal meaning, just as there are plenty of places in ANE Mysticism for linear reasoning about physical realities. However, just as mysticism includes an element rooted outside the mundane realm of existence, so the language had to somehow indicate something not restricted to literal expression. The same words and images had to perform a double duty.

Thus, we describe ANE languages as less descriptive and more indicative, and the logic was more often symbolic as opposed the the Western analytical approach.

Recommended Readings: Citations in the text above should prove sufficient background reading for this chapter.

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ACBM: Part 2 Chapter 1

Posted on July 23, 2013 by ehurst

Chapter 1 — Approaching Biblical Mysticism

Our task here is hard because Western writers seldom acknowledge the mystical element in Scripture unless they are generally hostile to the message of the Bible.

Biblical scholars range all over the map with varying degrees of commitment to the underlying claims of revelation. To the degree they seem to take it seriously as given, they also discount or avoid the mystical element. They either pretend it is simply out reach to the Western mind, or try to paint it as primitive, even sinister. Western Christian scholars somehow imagine Christ and Apostles rescued revelation from the evil clutches of those demonic mystics. Exceedingly rare is the Western scholar who honestly appraises the difference and embraces it, too. Readers will be hard put to find defenders of the Hebrew Mystical approach to reading the Bible.

As we shall see, moving from Eastern to Western intellectual assumptions is rather easy. Moving the other way is a monumental task. There has never been a society without a mythology (recalling our academic use of the term “mythology” in Part 1). The human soul, by definition, cannot gear up to meet reality with any intellectual advantage over animals unless it first has some organizing principle on which to build a frame of reference. Digging into one’s personal mythological foundation is a daunting task. It tends to be quite painful. Replacing that foundation is a major struggle many simply will not attempt. The meaning of meaning is a question too few will consider.

It is rare to find a Western scholar discussing Western Civilization in less than glowing terms. We can find plenty of Western critiques of elements or episodes in Western Civilization, but virtually no Western scholar criticizes the thing itself. At the very least it is defended, and is usually praised. You will typically find only a grudging willingness to call anything non-Western “civilization” in the first place. It is also quite rare when a Western scholar discusses any previous civilization in sympathetic terms.

Most of those who do cross over to another mythology tend to close the door behind them. They find it exceedingly difficult to keep their grip on the new truth while holding the door open to others. The ability to keep a foot in both worlds is often more than a viewpoint migrant can handle. This course aims at just that.

Part of the problem is the pervasive Western assumptions about reality. Even those who claim to embrace mysticism generally cling to an Aristotelian unitary universe. There is an unbreakable linkage between having all reality within this universe and having it within reach of the intellect. Western Mysticism is generally defined in terms of a higher form of logic and reason, tends to use familiar words differently, but still stands entirely within reach of native human capabilities. The image is one of tapping into unused parts of the conscious intellect. This is a half-truth.

The very foundation of Western Civilization is the primacy of the human intellect. It rules, must rule. The Hebrew approach finds the mind a useful servant, but a foul master. The Western mystic assumes the necessity of remaining the master of the exploration and the results of it. The Hebrew mystic assumes all humans serve one master or another, and the question is a matter of wisely choosing whom you serve (it’s never properly a “what” but a “whom”).

It’s easy enough to find scholarship recognizing this very substantial difference. However, much of that scholarship is cynical about revelation and willingly appeals to documentation and archeology outside the Bible. Such scholarship places the Hebrew Bible alongside other literature of the same type academically, deriding the notion it is anything special. Within their scholarly examination, the overlap between Hebrew and other ANE cultures is too extensive, and the distinctive elements not significant enough to justify what seems to them a purely political decision to keep Christianity so dominant. Given how Christian religious leaders have handled things historically, you can hardly blame them.

Our problem is digging into Biblical Mysticism with all the applicable Western tools until the door is open far enough we can put them away. Standing outside this doorway, we must of necessity recognize that the very nature of what’s beyond is utterly different from all our Western intellectual expectations. The starting point of this exploration is recognizing that you leave behind any vestigial hope of objectivity. The very notion of objectivity was created wholly within Western traditions, and is absent from, if not ridiculed openly by, every other intellectual tradition in the world since time began. Every prior civilization of which we are even dimly aware gave no place to the primacy of objectivity, as if it were even possible for the human soul to claim it.

It’s not as if there would not be some common pool of experience we might share between us within mysticism. There is entirely too much commonality in the human experience of life itself for that. Rather, the optimal use of mysticism as an intellectual orientation requires adopting a common mythology, but doing so consciously. That was the fundamental meaning of Moses spending time on Mount Sinai. He went to meet with God face to face, as it were, to receive a clearly defined mythology selected from the vast trove of what the Hebrew people carried with them up to that point. While forcing such a wholesale change on an entire nation didn’t work out too well, a voluntary, fully informed and conscious choice to embrace it is an integral part of the message of Christ.

The unspoken assumption in Jesus’ teachings was that God had chosen to speak from within a particular cultural background, with a fairly distinctive mythology. It wasn’t chosen at random; the narrative of Genesis lays out the story of how God worked through a chain of individuals to establish that mythology. God consciously built a frame of reference for His revelation. The Covenant of Moses was not simply a short list of treaty obligations we call The Ten Commandments. It was the entire narrative history of a particular thread of events leading up to that moment, with a body of understanding about His expectations for humanity. Our task is to discern what from that covenant repository remains universally applicable once outside the historical context.

On the one hand, the rituals and customs prescribed by Moses were not radically new to the Hebrew people. It was all familiar. So similar was it to the pagan religion of the Canaanites that Israel was constantly slipping and sliding into the local idolatry. It simply wasn’t that different in their minds. On the other hand, Moses made a radical claim that simply went over the heads of most Israelis: All other deities are imaginary. There was no other god ever; there had always been only one God in the first place. To the degree that might have registered, the common Israelite had no trouble thinking other religious expressions might be a valid alternative, that Moses was being crabby and exclusive for political reasons. They rejected the idea God chose Moses as his primary representative.

The only way to quell such a natural reaction was for individuals to experience God themselves. Not indirectly, as a spectator to the mighty miracles. Despite the very concrete evidence that others could not reproduce the miracles of Moses, there remained a solid resentment against him. Some of the most earth shattering experiences could not change their fundamental thought processes. It was too easy to dismiss or associate events with a different meaning. But that personal encounter with God as your Sovereign Lord changes everything.

The degree to which that experience is available to everyone is impossible to define. We can state with certainty only that it is necessary, and indicate correlations of what comes with it, but each individual must of necessity get there on their own.

The definition of mysticism itself is not about the content of your minds, but the pathway you take to arrive at your thoughts and beliefs. In the ANE tradition, mysticism is the apprehension of truth from outside the conscious mental processes. Revelation second-hand — told or written — can start the process if the mind is ready to accept that input. However, the ultimate goal is to permit the individual their own unique connection with that higher truth from within, to establish their own individual link to that other realm of existence. This whole thing assumes quite contrary to Aristotle that this universe is not the extent of things, but is frankly a lesser existence aside from the ultimate reality. Plato and his Ideal falls short of this, because the ANE mystic assumes the human mind has no capacity to handle that Ideal. It requires a separate faculty that belongs to that other realm, a linkage initiated on the other end.

The unique Biblical Mysticism consciously and willfully embraces the cultural orientation of Moses and his nation as God’s one authorized mythology upon which to build. This is accepted as the proper frame of reference for understanding Jesus. There are complications as we shall see, but the struggle before us is the very lack of documentation supporting this approach. We are left with a combination of fragmentary accurate scholarship that is hostile to our intent and a vast ocean of inaccurate friendly scholarship. While Western Christian scholarship contains flashes and patches of accuracy, we are hard put to find anything wholly trustworthy.

The referenced reading material takes on a different flavor in this second part of our course. The student is warned in advance that the task of shifting over to Biblical Mysticism tends to be a long and slow process. Embracing it is merely the first step of a long and frustrating search. Due to the dearth of external materials, the following chapters will be longer and more in depth.

Recommended readings: Encyclopedic surveys of Eastern Philosophy, focusing particularly on ANE cultures. The author’s essay, East versus West: a Review of Epistemology, can introduce the nature of the conflict.

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ACBM: Part 1 Chapter 6

Posted on July 22, 2013 by ehurst

Chapter 6 — The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was the pinnacle of Western Civilization.

To understand the theological flavor and ritual traditions of any Christian denomination, one need only trace it’s birth. Broadly speaking, American expressions of Christian religion range between Medieval (Catholic and Episcopalian), Early Reformation (Lutheran and Evangelical), Late Reformation (Presbyterian, Reformed, Anabaptists), English Post-Reformed (Methodist, Puritan, later Baptists), and those that arose later in reaction to these various threads. There are a handful that reflect a strong element of the American religious revival around 1800, but everything else seems to rehash those previous themes. Each reflects the mythology of their birth with varying degrees of change as the social mythology drifts. Yet for the most part, virtually the entire range of American Christianity is deeply stained by the Enlightenment.

It’s not enough to understand what the Enlightenment was in historical terms. In this course we understand it most clearly from the impact it had on the intellectual climate. This intellectual movement had a dual center of gravity in London and Paris where a burgeoning middle class presence was tightly packed in exploding prosperity. They dared to challenge the Church and religion itself, along with the full range of aristocratic institutions. A new generation of aristocrats were actually willing to sponsor this social uprising, some out of sheer boredom with the constraining trappings of power. It was time to put away the old Germanic sense of duty and discipline as the only answer to a dreary world, and try to bring light and joy. They were rediscovering yet again the delights of rational thought applied to areas of life previously off limits such analysis. They were heady times.

However, there was one seriously fatal mistake in the midst of all this playful exploration. The culprit was Rousseau, sadly deluded by the conviction he could actually start from scratch in reasoning to truth. It hardly matters what he concluded or whether anyone consciously accepted his thesis; his audacity is what people absorbed. This was more than Aristotle picking through the wreckage of failed reasonings from his predecessors, but a fresh assertion of the limitless powers of human reason. But while Aristotle still allowed for things he could never understand, the seed was planted via the German mythology that crystallized the unspoken assumption that the known and knowable universe was the full limit of things. Having only the bad example of the Church and a few contentious rebels from the Church, spirituality was considered an integral part of religion and discarded as a single package. The otherworldly perspective was dispatched once and for all.

That near-universal apprehension of higher things was harnessed to the question of what man could accomplish. Previous boundaries to inquiry and exploration served only to crush the souls of men, so the rejection of all boundaries become a primary doctrine. Sin became a mere question of pragmatism. The question was never, “Why?” It was always, “Why not?” Any spiritual yearnings were dismissed as superstition. This didn’t so much happen during the Enlightenment as it arose from it; this was the fundamental effect of the various expressions of Enlightenment pursuits.

In many ways, America was the quintessential expression of the Enlightenment. The US Constitution is built directly on this intellectual movement, starting from scratch. The colonists were widely varied enough they could agree only not to repeat what had long been established in Europe and remained generally inescapable. Given the very strong but highly varied religious background in the colonial leaders, the only safe course for unity was to allow the dominance of the quintessential Enlightenment answer to religion: Deism, now known as Unitarian Universalism. While the Deist approach to the question of spiritual apprehension was entirely Aristotelian in shape, the underlying German morality was simply assumed as self-evident truth.

Modern feminist doctrine is little more than the current logical extension of this mix. Never mind the specifics of feminist politics; notice the underlying theme of materialism as expressed in the nest-building instinct of the European Earth Mother. The assumption that men are inherently troublesome boys with too much power therefore requires the women take them in hand and tame them, making them nice in the modern day extension of chivalry. Everyone has to be assumed equal and we dare not let anyone end up with a cookie smaller than everyone else got. That’s little more than the logical extension of things like human rights, democracy and equality. The West has always been inherently feminist and the chief deity was always female.

Of course, it has always been utterly impossible to level human society. The mere suggestion is dehumanizing, patting them on the head and saying it’s okay to be an individual snowflake so long as the consequences of individuality don’t interfere with the universal Mommy Spirit’s plans. At the same time, almost the entire female population can’t resist impulsively offering their favors to the tiny handful of men who are talented, yet refuse to be nice and chivalrous. Meanwhile these same women make endless justifications and rationalizations about each dalliance separately, and still demand of every other man the niceness that makes men despicable to them. They are no longer much interested in literal motherhood, but take a Nanny’s approach to all political and social questions.

We end up with a society that worships youth because it fears death. Extravagant resources are wasted on keeping bodies alive longer and longer, while life has less and less meaning. The otherworldly viewpoint is a joke among Christian pastors. With each passing year more and more churches join the new soft legalism of trying to have a better and more successful existence in the secular world. The only difference between church and secular pop psychology is the addition of religious talk and Bible verses used as a paint job. The Hebrew Jesus is suppressed with vigor and the Cross becomes the incongruous symbol of a fuller and happier life. Meanwhile, all manner of senseless political activism is sold as good religion. Christianity means nothing more than just another big, politically active entertainment business.

Forget what theologians say and teach; Western Christianity as a whole unconsciously assumes the social mythology of feminism as fundamental reality and operates as if there cannot actually be a Spirit Realm.

Recommended readings: Encyclopedic articles on the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire and the American Revolution. A survey of Victorian England with a view to nascent feminism would be instructive.

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ACBM: Part 1 Chapter 5

Posted on July 21, 2013 by ehurst

Chapter 5 — The Western Church

While reading the German legends can be a bit gloomy, the history of the Western Church is downright painful.

We recognize academically the difference between religion and spirituality. An essential element of human nature is an apprehension of things beyond the self, things which are higher and more powerful than humanity itself. The degree to which this apprehension may intrude into the consciousness, we call it spirituality. Religion is properly the organized human thinking, teaching and activities which seek to answer the pull of spirituality. The depth and breadth of that pull varies almost infinitely across humanity; so also does the question of what shape and place religion should hold in our existence. While theology is the rational inquiry into religious questions, mythology historically precedes reason and religion both. Religion invariably conforms to the mythology of the people involved, seldom consciously chosen.

German mythology offers no consistent or substantive view of the afterlife, with spiritual and corporeal existence inextricably intertwined. That is, such were their thoughts insofar as they thought much about it at all, since philosophy and theology simply didn’t exist among the tribal Germans. Once they encountered Christian teaching, the Germans overwhelmingly preferred heretical doctrines such as Arianism. In essence, Arius taught that Jesus was not co-eternal with the Father, but a distinctly lesser created being. While not directly linked to the Gnostic heresies, Arianism drew much from the broader philosophical assumptions that also gave us Gnosticism. The various theological controversies of the early church were problem enough, but they reflected something much more subtle and sinister.

Jesus was an ANE man preaching an ANE religion. It’s hard to imagine that anyone could not see the otherworldly focus of His Hebrew Mystical background. Yet before the last of Apostles died around 100 AD, we know that quite a few of those earliest churches were slipping away from that focus into a very worldly outlook. The trend continued until the church leadership in the time of Constantine couldn’t wait to receive his official declaration in favor of whatever organized Christianity had become at that time. Having drifted far from the tribal organization fundamental to anything Hebrew, churches had become increasingly Greek or Roman in their internal structure and rituals. Constantine first made them welcome in his councils; it was all too easy for church leaders to simply become part of the government. With that, the Christian religion became a slave of government policy.

Once Constantine abandoned the western half of his empire, the church hierarchy was the last vestige of Roman government still functioning. Survival as an organization took precedence of everything else, and external trappings become pretty much the entire identity of the Christian religion in the West. In the confusing mess of German tribes jockeying for power and preeminence in and around Rome, the church saved herself by compromising with whomever held political power over the migrating tribes. The Church was the sole source of social continuity for just about everyone, as the Church coaxed Germans into embracing as much of Roman Civilization as they could tolerate.

Thus, in their lust to maintain the same political privileges they held under Constantine, the Church leaders curried the favor of whomever was the secular ruler in the vicinity of Rome. At some point, the ascendant German ruler embraced Christianity as his official religion; the deeper question of much it changed the ruler is seldom examined. In relative terms, this official adoption spread rather quickly. As the Church began to reorganize within the new reality and gained a large degree of feudal power, she became the potential counterweight to any ruler. The final wedding was under Charlemagne who took the title Holy Roman Emperor.

Civilizing the rowdy German warriors was far more than simply manipulating them into a Christian confession. The Church was at pains to tame their wild mythology. Not so much the legends and tales, but the meaning of them. What we now call “chivalry” is almost entirely a construct of Church scholars putting a coat of polish, a Christian religious veneer on German tribal social customs. While there was a great deal more filler with notions of honor and civility, it retained the subtle matriarchal focus. That is, women were portrayed as inherently saintly and men had to constantly rise to their expectations. It’s not hard to see how veneration of Mary became so important, rather displacing, yet merging with, Oester as the Queen Goddess.

The question of religion at the point of a sword simply signals how religion is used. Were there no pretense that it really answered the questions of spiritual apprehension, it would have been consistent with prior human history. The Roman Church today is far nicer than she was at the height of her power in the Middle Ages. Rather early, she seized the question of spirituality, the otherworldly element of Christian faith, and locked it away in a dungeon. The Western Church had so deeply absorbed the Greco-Roman assumptions about reality that nearly every vestige of the Hebrew mystical outlook was forgotten. Over time, the mere mention of wanting to get to know genuine spirituality could get you tortured and killed.

In effect, the Church acted on the assumption that man’s intellect was not fallen. She virtually denied the existence of the spirit. All that God might think to do among humans was completely entrusted to the political organization of the Church hierarchy, with virtually no reference to the Spirit Realm. There was no Kingdom of Heaven in terms of what the phrase implied about a higher realm and spiritual apprehension; the visible church organization was all you were permitted to think of as the Kingdom of God. The phrasing “saving your soul” became the excuse for the most unspeakable terrorism. We note that Roman political philosophy was self-consciously dehumanizing, and the Roman Church absorbed this as an instinct. Where Church officials held genuine political authority, they were as a whole easily more brutal and hateful than most honestly pagan German lords.

Rather early in this process, all of Western Europe faced what they considered a serious threat of Islamic conquest. You can read about the victory of Charles Martel in the Battle of Tours in 732 AD. What isn’t so easily found is discussion of how the rather prolonged contact with Islamic Civilization actually intensified the fundamentally secular view of the West. The Muslims brought a far better organized mathematics, virtually inventing Algebra, along with advancements in medicine a range of other natural sciences. Fewer still will openly admit the Church absorbed a lot of this in their basic worldview. At the same time there was vast underground scholarship examining various Old World philosophy, giving birth to the earliest Western secret societies.

The Church maintained a choke hold on all scholarship, at least in theory. When Church leaders fully realized that these evil Muslim hordes controlled the ancient lands on which Jesus walked, they sensed a sinister threat to their control. If wandering scholars and soldiers could independently go and research some of the existing classical Greek, Roman and even some Hebrew documents and artifacts, they might counter the claims of the Church hierarchy regarding facts, and perhaps weakening her claim to moral authority over the question of what it meant to be Christian. This gave rise to the Crusades and the propaganda claim of freeing the Land of Christ from the filthy pagan Muslims.

Not only were the Crusades a strategic failure in the long run, those scholarly soldiers rediscovered a vast wealth of classical Greek and Roman art and literature. On the one hand, the Church also absorbed the classics in the guise of Thomism, the work of Thomas Aquinas consciously bringing theology under the sway of Aristotle. Meanwhile, the ferment of rediscovery and the weakening hand of the Church’s stranglehold on intellectual pursuit brought us the Renaissance.

We note in passing, again, official doctrine is less the issue than the broader impact of belief. When Dante wrote his Divine Comedy, it really didn’t matter what he intended. There is very real sense in which his allegory became a powerful influence on the Church. The behavior of Church hierarchy betrayed a sense that it was official doctrine. Even as the Reformers renounced the notion of Purgatory, for example, their net behavior and teaching still gives credence to the underlying assumptions about reality that pervades Dante’s work. Official doctrine expressed in the likes of Westminster Confession gives mere lip service to the otherworldly notions and confuses religion and spirituality.

Western feudalism carried the seeds of its own destruction. When rulers both secular and sacred found new ways to spend far more money, they found the old economics of land-based production wouldn’t pay the bills. Traders discovered they could making big profits, but only if they twisted the rulers’ arms. They did so by dangling money in front of them, purchasing charters and such. Little by little, the feudal choke hold gave way, not just on trade and self-government, but in scholarship and the arts. It was the birth of the social middle class and her pretensions to claiming the turf previously reserved for nobility. That genie could not be put back in the bottle, and the Renaissance was followed quickly by the Reformation.

Martin Luther’s 95 Theses were hardly original. The complaints were not new, having been voiced for quite some time by priests serving within the Vatican offices. His posting of them was in a manner and location that seldom elicited public notice. The Church was hardly so uniform as to suffer no debates between passionate and earnest men of good will. The whole thing could have been quietly resolved as had been done countless times before within the existing Church hierarchy. However, Luther’s questions fell into a critical turning point in European politics as a whole. The Church hierarchy felt compelled to crush all dissent, valid or otherwise. Further, his complaints were seized upon as propaganda by scandal mongers looking to make money by blowing it all out of proportion. Luther became a pivotal figure quite by accident. In many respects, Lutheran religion is not radically different from Roman. What matters more is the process that Luther as a political hot potato started.

The Reformation was, if anything, an even more cerebral kind of Christian religion. Ever more did human reason take the throne of faith. Reason became the justification for ripping political power from the hands of the Roman Church. The Reformers had their own political agenda. Without the need for political restraints of the old Church hierarchy, the Reformation leaders were free to indulge in what they considered pure reason for a purer religion. In essence, it was more of the same fundamental departure from the original teachings of Christ and the Apostles, but it was still a religion on the point of a sword. Eventually the question of spiritual apprehension reemerged as a separate issue, opening the question of what place religion should hold in human life.

Thus was born a very secular religion and secular government.

Recommended readings: Encyclopedic articles on Arianism and other Early Church controversies, Constantine and noting particularly how he paganized Christian religion, Mariolatry, Scholasticism, Thomism and Thomas Aquinas, and Charlemagne. Any brief reviews of the historical period in Europe covered by the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation would make a good refresher. If you are going to read any part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, annotated translations are highly recommended. The Westminster Confession of Faith also needs a bit of commentary. One of the best examinations of the very nature of feudalism can be found in Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society.

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Ecclesiastes 11

Posted on July 20, 2013 by ehurst

Human wisdom works best when properly informed by revelation. Solomon proposes some lessons not obvious to human reasoning, but obviously useful when examined.

It’s difficult to say whether Solomon suggests in this first verse that we should be charitable or make wise investments. Possibly it’s both, since the whole point is you have to invest yourself and your resources into this life with a long term view. Whether you hope to reap a trade profit or a moral reward, you dare not allow yourself to worry about what you give up on the front side. That’s how life really works: He who refuses to invest can’t make any profit. The second verse advises a diverse portfolio, as well. The obvious point is that bean counters always know what they have but never gain anything. It’s the wrong mentality.

Accept your lot in life; seek your divine calling where you are. If you wait for the perfect conditions, you’ll miss God’s blessings. There is plenty He won’t reveal to you; it’s not necessary to control all the factors involved to reap the benefits of His blessings. Start early and be faithful until you can’t do any more. Invest yourself fully in the moment regardless what your human wisdom may try to tell you. God is not constrained by what you can understand.

Stop every now and then and see how good life is. Celebrate the little things because joy is waiting hidden in the insignificant as well as the things we consider great. Count your blessings; learn from your sorrows. Life is empty to those who are morally blind and think only in terms of human wisdom.

Don’t wait until you are older to embrace the peace of moral goodness. Most youthful diversions are harmless enough, but don’t let them run away with your soul. Don’t take things too seriously, getting worked up over trifles and silly disappointments. Don’t plot revenge. Put your own youth in perspective. Every generation before you remembers things from their youth they wish they could forget; listen when they explain why because you are not any smarter than they were.

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ACBM: Part 1 Chapter 4

Posted on July 20, 2013 by ehurst

Chapter 4 — Germanic Mythology

The actual history of what happened starting from the decline of Rome is not nearly so important as how events shaped Western Civilization.

It’s not as if Rome was completely forgotten, but her power and influence in cultural terms were packed away for future reference. Ragged portions of Roman influence remained visible throughout the period we call the Dark Ages of Europe. The mixed Germanic tribes causing all the chaos were generally quite fond of what Roman Civilization offered, but bore with them such an overwhelming mass of their own native culture that it took some time to recover.

We can’t really call it an invasion; the Germanic nations were migratory. The chaos they brought was simply the nature of their lifestyle. They seldom ever invaded as a force, but simply raided now and then until their target was overwhelmed, collapsed to some degree, and then the raiders simply colonized what was left. No one should suggest they weren’t as intelligent as any other people, just not at all organized except in a very loose sense. Keeping track of the various groups, their names and their dialects is a monumental task still ongoing. What matters for us is the collection of common cultural features they all seemed to share in varying degrees.

Again, the question for us is not what they did, nor especially how they did it, but the effect of their time as the dominant force in the lands of Europe. We are just barely able to read from the cultural impact back into some scattered records that explain at least some of that effect. The primary element is their mythology in terms of how it so deeply and thoroughly steered their lives.

Two primary images arise for us from our stand point: Thor and Oester. We can extract from their varied portrayals the quintessence of German manhood and womanhood. These portrayals are still with us as fundamental to our Western culture today. Most people simply cannot imagine one basic fact: When it came time to pay an indemnity for lost personnel, a woman’s weregild was twice that of any man of the same social rank. Underneath all the noise and appearances, women ruled society in things that mattered most. The most stable image is that of the household matriarch, an image associated with the goddess Oester. They were the keepers of the hearth and in a very substantial way, controlled the fundamental identity and values of society. Their control was hardly absolute, but over the long term, uncontested.

The image of Thor is likewise the foundation of Western manhood. The Greeks to some degree, and Romans more so, seldom actually feared death. It was simply wired into their worldview, a fundamental duty. The subtle difference was for German men to fear it, but to still face it bravely as their duty — the point of duty being by far the substance of their bravery. The fear is seen peeking out from behind their stolid sense of duty at moments when they are caught off guard. Their primary defense against fear was anger, turning most threats into a personal insult. By comparison to Romans and Greeks, the ideal German man is somewhat of an overgrown boy. Whatever was meant by maturity was not hard to fulfill. For them, facing danger was a game. While a significant portion of their resources went for toys and buying prestige, they weren’t taken too seriously during peacetimes at home. They were sent off to hunt, cultivate and build to keep them out of the way. At times, they would gather to party and discuss their important government decisions, but these things remained highly variable and almost chaotic. The stability of their existence was still in the hands of their women.

The Nordic branch managed to preserve their legends a bit better, so that the most substantial literature is theirs. Thus, we have the English tale of Nordic legends in Beowulf. Most students never read past the first half of the story, and it’s quite dreary enough as it is. Not in the telling, but utterly devoid of the joy in living itself, just a few bits of fun and games stolen now and then from a gray existence. A serious threat comes almost as a relief; finally, something worthy of getting yourself killed. It was otherwise a society of near terminal boredom.

Aside from the virtuosity of talent for battle and frightening enemies through sheer insanity, the most highly valued art was the telling and singing about such exploits.

Recommended readings: Obviously, Beowulf, particularly the first part of the larger legend. An interesting novel with a well-researched background for the Danish warrior society is Byzantium by Stephan R. Lawhead (used copies are cheap on Amazon).

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ACBM: Part 1 Chapter 3

Posted on July 19, 2013 by ehurst

Chapter 3 — Roman Organization

Alexander’s empire had established the pattern for what followed in the West.

The net effect of what Greece accomplished was to close off forever any consideration of otherworldly inquiry. It didn’t extinguish religious yearnings, but relegated them to superstition and a lesser concern. Building an empire in such a world requires ensuring the citizens have three basic needs covered in one way or another. First, there is a sense of physical security. It’s not so much the actual security itself, but the perception of relative security from typical threats to life — starvation, disease and predation. Second is something to occupy the intellect. Greeks thought they had that worked out very well. Third is a sense of identity, an awareness of belonging to something worthy. It took Philip and his son Alexander to refocus that so that the Greek peoples were united enough to pose a valid threat to other empires and kingdoms, in pursuit of Hellenistic glory.

The Greeks seemed to understand these human needs on some level, but all their various efforts to implement such grand ideals turned out to be unsustainable. The Greeks were so preoccupied with the ideals, they never could quite tolerate the reality that human nature could not be forced to rise beyond a certain level. They understood instinctively the mass of humanity could not ascend to the understanding of philosophers, or the virtue of noblemen, or the talent of artisans. But they never quite understood how to bring their theories to reality. It required a race of people with a more pragmatic turn of mind.

This would be the Romans. Something fundamental to Roman social structure and the character of their civilization answered the need of discovering what people could tolerate for a sustainable empire.

Roman philosophy, literature, architecture and art were not uninspiring, but nonetheless relentlessly practical at some fundamental level. They were the first in the West to effectively plan around human weakness, taking for granted that everyone had a price. When you make Roman policy and expectations consistent with their best interests, using a mixture of policy tinkering and threatening, people tend to find a way to participate meaningfully and keep things working. No one gave thought to rarefied dreams of perfection, but to pragmatic discernment of what could be had in the real world.

They understood how to get the most from amassed resources to accomplish great feats of engineering, including engineering human behavior. We note in passing, for example, that Rome was the first empire in history to discover that a very high investment in military equipment and training purchased consistent victory despite surprises. An exceptionally high degree of uniformity at the lowest level of the standard infantryman, arming them more heavily than other armies provided for their more elite troops, made Rome’s legions hard to match. While the communities all across the empire had a duty to provide their best men for the army, for the individual soldier it became a high privilege. Government expenditures on the military were carefully programmed to maximize the very limits of human capability. Rome managed to invest overall quite a bit more in their military forces with far fewer sudden and shocking demands on the productivity of the people.

Without digging into the specific details, we notice the Romans seems to have absorbed the Greek Civilization without entirely plumbing the depths of what it meant. Where the Greek language and education was established, they simply assumed the administration in place. They changed only those elements of Greek government necessary to give them reliable control. Farther north and west, where the Greeks had not paved the way, the people were encouraged to learn Latin if they wanted to be involved in government and commerce. Wherever Rome sent her troops one always found her engineering, organizational and legal influences.

Romans understood the basic needs of the people they ruled. For the most part, they stayed out daily affairs. A subject could retain his allegiance to his national identity throughout the empire. Where the unique character of some little kingdom made wholesale adoption of Roman policy too shocking, the Roman administrators made adjustments. They never pushed where they weren’t willing to back it up fully with force. Extermination was always an option, but they were hesitant for one simple reason: People were primarily an economic asset.

Never mind what Roman writers and philosophers said was most important to Rome; the actions of the government always seemed to place naked economics at the center of their efforts. It was economics that finally brought Rome down. Virtually everything else she understood quite well, but restraining greed was the ultimate failure. It seemed everyone operated from the wordless demand of some unconscious god that they must have just a bit more the next time around. At some point, they failed to recognize they had reached the practical limits and were unwilling to accept the natural equilibrium. They exchanged their devotion to order for a devotion to hedonism.

The necessity of hiring more and more German mercenary armies on the frontier to fight other German tribes, mercenaries that weren’t truly absorbed into the Roman Civilization, was the path to their final failure. Rome didn’t so much fall as they were simply taken over by their own hired thugs.

Recommended readings: This is one of the few cases in this course where just about any good summary will do. Even Wikipedia’s entry on Ancient Rome is sufficient for our purpose here. If you can’t tolerate that, try other portals such as About.com.

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As always readers, I treasure your assistance in making this a viable course of study.

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Moral Hazard in Our Times

Posted on July 19, 2013 by ehurst

The fundamental moral hazard is enticement away from safe grounds.

The mythology of our day is a siren song. Out on the submerged rocks and ripping currents stands this glorious vision that if we fail to act, evil men will hurt us. It portrays the greatest threat as some massive wave of evil blown across the sea towards us, a veritable tsunami of oppression and destruction. We need to arm ourselves, or we need to disarm all the crazies. We need to make abortion illegal, or we need to make it safe. We need to protect our children from queers, or we need to be sure everyone has a fair chance at the American dream.

I posted yesterday that the entire foundation of our political system is hopelessly evil and that dreams of changing things to make the world better were all phantom lies. You cannot build a mighty castle in the clouds; you cannot make wine by stirring sugar into sewage. Everything has been tried and you can no longer deny that there is nothing in Western society that will support moral good. It is entirely fake. Your only hope of moral good is to build in the face of Western society with something real.

Had Adam and Eve minded their business, they’d still be living in Eden. Instead, they reached out for something they didn’t need and couldn’t use for their mission. Never mind why it was there; that’s the wrong question. It was there, and it’s all around us today.

Perfection is not the issue. Just stop all this hullabaloo and take a moment. Use what little moral you sense as it exists right now. Figure out what you should be doing. I’ll give you a hint: It absolutely must be limited to those things you can do by yourself as an individual. Your mission lies within you. Find it. While it will inevitably lead to you reach out to others, it must never, ever rely on how they respond. Anything that demands participation from others is not your mission. It might be your job on the human scale of things, but it’s not your mission.

The point is, once you commit to it, your vision of what it is and how you should do it will improve. If you do what you should, enlightenment must inevitably increase as a part of your commitment. That’s how moral truth works. You steadily gain in awareness and understanding as you remain faithful to the mission. Meanwhile, all the protection possible from moral hazard is wrapped up in that. Your mission is your moral safety.

All the other apparent threats sold as moral hazards are bullshit.

It’s not just your freedom, but your duty to passionately embrace your moral social orientation. It doesn’t matter if you are instinctively liberal or conservative, radical or reactionary, populist or libertarian; promote your best understanding as persuasively as you can. But the second you propose coercing others through human laws to live by your vision, you become at that moment the evil you decry.

When someone comes to you with a convincing tale of moral threats coming down on you that requires you get on board our you’ll get hurt, they are lying. They may not know any better; most don’t. That’s not your problem. Don’t believe them. The fundamental nature of moral hazard is suckering you into something you can’t use and won’t work in the first place.

Oh sure, rally the voters and change the laws. How long with that last? And just how good will enforcement be before those in power corrupt the whole thing and it ends up being an entirely pointless gesture? How long before the opposition rallies their troops to change that issue, or chase some other partisan threat because you tied up your resources somewhere else? Humanity cannot be herded in any meaningful way. Our political system is a total sham and cannot be fixed. Stop being such a dumb-ass.

The answer to averting the coming disaster is not rushing out with the right package of defenses or escape mechanisms. The answer to averting disaster is stay where you belong because it isn’t aiming at you. Stay within your moral boundaries and you won’t be harmed. You won’t like it, but the sinister threat is not what’s coming at you, but what you can be suckered into. The Enemy of Souls is trying to distract you. Don’t fall for it.

Don’t reach for that poisonous fruit.

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