Of Children and Angels 10

Posted on May 9, 2013 by ehurst

Preston noticed a local news car showed up just in time to video the departure of everyone but the sergeant and his original crew.
He and Angie did their best to hide from the reporters and their camera. The sergeant seemed to understand and allowed them to get back into the van. They sat in the back and watched until another crew came and relieved him to take them back to their campsite. When the other officers appeared to be staying, Angie and Preston moved to the middle seats for the ride back.
The sergeant said, “We saved this group of children for now. Maybe they will do well. But you know the same madmen who wanted their bodies will simply find more.”
Preston and Angie were silent. Eventually Preston asked, “I don’t suppose you know who the customers are.”
The sergeant smirked. “You don’t want to know.”
“I know the Israelis are in on this, with the possible complicity of the CIA and other national spying agencies,” Preston offered.
The sergeant turned to glance at Preston sitting behind him. “You know too much.” He drove in silence a moment. “Okay, so maybe you could guess for yourself, but most of the trade ends up serving in places where NATO, the UN and EU government bodies meet and their branch offices. Most of these kids would end up near The Hague, but working for different pimps scattered around the area. My understanding is the pimps all work together in a loose confederation. This is a very loose but very large organization. You can guess the rest.”
Again, it was anti-climactic.
As they drew in sight of the Albert Heijn shopping center, the sergeant said as if to no one in particular. “You know, Roermond is a rough city. You have friends here, but your enemies are quite dangerous. It’s probably very wise to pack and ride out away from here right away. Catch the train. Maybe ride it north to Venlo and back over to Eindhoven or something.”
The sergeant had avoided the highway, taking the secondary main routes instead. So driving north of the shopping center, he crossed under the autobahn and kept heading in a northerly direction. A bit short of Swalmen he turned and drove back down into Boukoul. He said something about not even trusting his own fellow officers too awfully much, and then pulled up on a side street where a narrow graveled lane dropped south into the woods. “It’s just a short distance from here that way.” He pointed down the bike path.
Angie and Preston already knew it came out just a few meters from where they were staying. They understood. This was the nature of their business.
They had already half packed before leaving, so getting things loaded on the bikes took less than an hour. Using it as a hint, they followed the same route back up into Swalmen. A train heading north came along shortly. At Venlo they had to change trains, but almost at random decided to head off into the German side, ending up with one change in Mönchengladbach. With only a short wait, they caught another train south to Herzogenrath. It was a bit longer there, and the ride into Heerlen was actually shorter than the layover.
Preston stayed awake while Angie dozed, curled up against him. He couldn’t have slept if he wanted. They were back at Heerlen Central shortly before dinner. Exhausted, they eventually fell into bed rather early and slept late.
While Angie went about making breakfast, Preston passed everything on to his boss. Over the next few days, they processed the footage and photos for cataloging. Eventually Gary sent an email.

One real MP, two impostors, working out of Rheindahlen. Cargo picked up at differing beaches in Düsseldorf parks, moved from the barges by skiff as you suggested. Vans decommissioned now. Final destination you were told is confirmed. Now you know why this is so hard.

Angie and Preston went to the Prancratius Church the next morning for Sunday worship.

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Conversion Is a Lie

Posted on May 8, 2013 by ehurst

Translation of the Bible into English is inevitably difficult. Virtually every translation I’ve read does something I find objectionable. That’s because knowing how to get an English word or phrase from one of the biblical languages is no guarantee you got the right one. There is a substantial culture and history translation, too. There are biases, and not a single English translation approaches it with a genuine Hebrew mindset. They make the assumption someone writing in Greek must have been thinking in Greek, when clearly some of them were not.
So we have words and phrases from the Bible that don’t mean for us what it meant for the authors in many cases. Some biblical language has been imbued with a different meaning by readers far removed, convinced their viewpoint itself is holy. You cannot build a theology from a translation; you have to learn better what the first audience would have gotten from it. Written and spoken language can never represent independent truth, as if anyone centuries later can simply pick it up and get it 100%.
Phrases used interchangeably in most Christian religious conversation: born-again, born from above, having spiritual life or spiritual birth, saved, redeemed. Sadly, those last two are not the same as the others in the Bible. In the context of the Hebrew culture, they could include saved on this level without reference to the spiritual level. In other words, the average American Christian confuses the Two Realms very badly. Even with all the help of folks like Augustine and his Two Cities, we still get it wrong because Augustine himself was a bit confused and too Platonic.
Conversion and spiritual birth are not synonymous.
Because of my years of training and experience in psychology, chances are good I could convert most people. Given sufficient time and clues to what motivates them positively and negatively, I can eventually sell one kind of religion or another. Add enough enthusiasm and it would be whole herds of people.
The problem is, it has to have some measure of falsehood in it. There has to be some sort of fundamentalist edge to it, something about it that removes very real choices from your frame of reference. If I do it well enough, there’s a very good chance you’ll be committed for life. Right up to the day you die, you will believe and act accordingly.
But what about after that?
There is a correlation between conversion and eternal life, but no causal link. Indeed, the saddest part of my imaginary scenario is a virtual guarantee that a convert will believe he is going to Heaven and it doesn’t happen. Instead, he brings his assurance that he has the Holy Spirit and a genuine faculty of faith into the church and proceeds to implement his false faith.
That’s because “conversion” is a very well established term in behavioral science. We can explain how it happens and duplicate the effect in the majority of people we encounter on the street. It’s a form or manipulation, a purely psychological effect. When I attended college as a preacher boy, that’s what I was taught to do through my sermons, lessons and various “evangelism” skills.
Who remembers Evangelism Explosion? How about The Four Spiritual Laws? Since those came out, I’ve seen a huge number of personal evangelism training curricula with all kinds of cute or edgy names. If you can package it, it’s fake. It’s manipulation, brainwashing and it brings about mere psychological conversion. It produces a vast sea of “Christians” who remain spiritually dead and are utterly certain they are not. It’s a cultural Christianity with it’s own language and habits. It explains the buttonholing manipulation programs, the memorized/canned spiel with its compelling logic, which have angered so many who aren’t that easy to manipulate.
It’s called “decision theology.” The language of “Jesus’ offer of salvation” and “invite Jesus into your heart” is not in the Bible. It’s a Western rationalist approach people read back into Scripture. It’s efficiency and efficacy from an alien perspective. It’s about bringing the mighty miracle powers of God down under human control. That ain’t happening.
I would love it if there was anything at all you or I could do that would bring about spiritual birth. Sorry, but God keeps that entirely under His hat; He refused to explain how it works on His end, on what basis He chooses. He does not surrender Himself to our sense of justice and logic. The problem is on our end. He does what He does, and the one thing He put in our hands was the call to repent coupled with the power to live that same repentance ourselves. Spiritual birth is not a choice anyone but God can make.
If I offer the truth, and do so truthfully, you remain totally free of my control. I recognize the results are not in my hands. I refuse to do the things that would bring about a result that satisfies my fleshly intellect. God alone can make His Laws winsome with or without spiritual birth, so spiritual birth is surely His alone. All I can do is talk about it and tell you what I experienced, because there is a part of me that encounters God personally on some level. I can’t afford to fake it.

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Of Children and Angels 9

Posted on May 8, 2013 by ehurst

It was an all-nighter.
They processed the videos and still images of the vans they had managed to capture that night. The prize was the footage Angie shot over the hedge. The images offered a clear visual of the MP driving the van and someone standing next to the vehicle. The building was an ancient horse barn with multiple outer doors. It was quite extensive. There was a small human sized door in the middle, and it was next to this that the van stood idling as the MP got back into it and drove off. The other person walked back into this personnel door and closed it behind himself.
They worked feverishly but with precision. Toward dawn they were nearly finished, having posted the camera files and a written summary. It bothered Preston they didn’t catch any images of what was in the vans. Still, all three vans in one night making a trip to the hidden horse barn and back out was obviously not part of their military routine. If it was, the K-Mar would know.
It occurred to Preston this might interest his friend in the K-Mar. First, he needed to confer with his boss. Waiting until dawn, he took the initiative to make a voice call to Gary. To his surprise, the phone was answered immediately.
“Great stuff!” Gary sounded wide awake.
Preston decided not to ask why, but got right to the point. “We don’t have direct evidence of the cargo. Would it be against policy to contact someone in the K-Mar with our evidence? If we are on target here, that horse barn is full of young guests who would much rather be enjoying the children’s park right next door.”
“Yes, do that. Tell them you’d like to watch from a distance and see if you can get footage of that, too. I can verify your press credentials if necessary.”
“I’m going to text him right now, so stand by and I’ll let you know.” Preston tapped the disconnect and did what he said.

Interested in catching some child traffickers? I think I’ve found a nest.

While it was quite early, and he only waited an hour or so, it seemed to take forever. Preston’s cellphone rang with a voice call.
The sergeant said with just a trace of humor, “I rather expected you were up to something. Please explain.”
Preston summarized some of what he knew, pretending to be an investigative reporter.
The sergeant responded, “We knew it was around here, but never could catch any movements because we didn’t expect such a carrier. I’ll pick you up in a quarter hour.”
Preston didn’t get a chance to explain that he wouldn’t leave Angie out of it. When the K-Mar van showed up, it took only a little arguing to force the issue. He promised Angie would do only what he told her to, and insisted on keeping her close for her own safety. The sergeant yielded that point and they squeezed into the back seat with a couple of other officers.
On the way, the sergeant spoke into the police radio once or twice, but it was abbreviated jargon Preston couldn’t follow. They rolled to a stop, then turned onto the bike path just short of their intended target. Everyone dismounted and the sergeant barked a few commands. They had Preston walk them through the woods in the general direction of the place. The three officers spread out a bit as each tested his radio quietly against the vehicle radio where the sergeant remained. It was only a couple hundred meters into the woods. The thick thorny hedge went all the way around. A bit of poking showed there was an old horse fence inside it. The officer got some scratches on the arm for his trouble.
It was quite some ways around the perimeter of this thing. Preston raised his camera overhead a few times to catch images of what was inside the hedge. It was just a standard horse barn with stall openings on both sides. There was a large square barn on one end, but no other buildings. The officer with Preston and Angie said something in his handset neither of them understood. A couple of brief responses came back, then the sergeant’s voice last of all. In the distance, the van’s engine started again and could be heard approaching on the road. In the daylight, they had seen there was a swinging gate set into the hedge on the side facing the road. The driveway zigzagged a bit so that the trees and underbrush hid even the gate from direct view from the road.
The van pulled up to the gate and the horn sounded quite loud in the morning stillness. Preston had moved around to the front, estimating the same location as the night before. He held his camera up just high enough to aim over the hedge, then had Angie stand behind him to view the display panel as best she could. Someone eventually came out to the gate, but apparently refused to open it. Preston thought he heard the Dutch word for warrant — huiszoekingsbevel — in the discussion. The sergeant shrugged, stepped back to his vehicle and chatted on the radio a bit.
This time Preston understood the gist of the conversation audible over the handset of the officer nearest him. In essence, someone on the other end had gotten a warrant already. It required the presence of some local official to execute the search, so the sergeant simply waited with his officers scattered around the perimeter for about another fifteen minutes. Then Preston could hear the approach of more than one vehicle. It turned out there were two vans loaded with K-Mar and the official. With the official standing at his side, the sergeant shouted through the gate at the building, then produced a pair bolt cutters and cut the chain. He swung the gate open.
It was almost anti-climactic. Preston re-positioned himself with Angie to record the whole thing. The vans rolled into the parking area in front, knocked on the door. No response. Four officers pulled a heavy metal ram from the back of their vehicle. There was one more shout from the sergeant through the door, then he stepped back.
It took only a few whacks and door gave. Everyone drew their weapons and entered the building. While inside, a bus pulled up on the road out front and blocked the drive. It was escorted by a Rijkspolitie van. These blocked the road and kept back the gathering crowd of onlookers from the campground and passing cyclists and hikers.
The K-Mar escorted out four men and two women, cuffed and placed inside various vans. Next came a line of kids of both sexes and varying ages, seemingly starting around eight years, followed by the local official. It was no real excitement for Angie and Preston, just the tapering end to a long tale. Or rather, it was one of the few good endings to an ongoing horror.

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A Theology of Theology

Posted on May 7, 2013 by ehurst

theology: the study of God and of the nature of religious truth; a school of thought arising from such study; an organized course of study within the academic field of religion
There is no theology in the Bible. There entire concept arises from Aristotelian epistemology. Aristotle made a god of his logic. He was pretty sure his conclusions and the very path by which he reached them were self-evident. What he really did was explain how one should go about the process. His logic demanded that human efforts to understand things should be divided into certain fields of knowledge. Thus, the majority of our entire academic curricula around the Western world owes much to Aristotle.
It’s not as if ancient civilizations before Aristotle and friends didn’t study things. It would be wholly untrue to suggest they didn’t follow logic, but it was a different logic from that of Aristotle. One more time: The logic God taught His people to use is not Aristotelian; it was surely different from Aristotle and better. Aristotle’s logic starts with the assumption there can be no revelation from God. From that assumption, his whole system was derived. If you insist on using his system of logic, you cannot force the revelation of God back into it. You are bringing in a factor that does violence to his system, because it’s a presupposition that is ground to bits by his procedure. In other words, if you read the Bible through Aristotelian logic, you will always be wrong about what the Bible actually says.
The Bible is a narrative record of what God wants us to know as humans after the Fall. The central focus of the Bible is teaching humans to see the logical system God proclaimed as the best way to understand His Creation and all He did to redeem us. It doesn’t solve the problem of the Fall; it establishes the frame of reference for His redemption.
Aristotle’s logic assumes an analytic approach to human knowledge. A fundamental assumption is giving the mind first a good education in his logic so that it can properly disregard false information, as he saw it. When properly cleared of falsehood, the mind can be competent to observe and process human experience into a matrix of truth. With the proper matrix of truth, one can act rationally and get the desired results. Because Aristotle wholly and flatly rejects the fundamental fabric of morality revealed by God as a necessary element in Creation, Aristotle’s reason will always come up short. You’ll have to generate your won morality through your experience and logic. Because God tends to operate on a much longer frame of reference, a frame including reference to a plane of existence outside this one, a great deal of critical input is missing. Adhere to Aristotle and you’ll never understand why the world works as it does, not even the mechanics of matter itself. God’s moral provisions do affect matter at the fundamental level of subatomic processes.
So a proper theology from Scripture starts with an entirely different set of assumptions about reality. The words in the Bible are meant to be taken a certain way, and you can most certainly read them wrong, simply because the words and images have a distinctly different meaning when you take them outside the original frame of reference. A proper theology starts first with discarding Aristotle as irrelevant for the most part, and embraces the Hebrew intellectual foundations on which the Bible is built.
From such a frame of reference, it is really not so hard to formulate and enunciate certain doctrines as taught by Scripture. It most certainly does offer a self-consistent frame of understanding with certain concepts and ideas rather bluntly stated. It also offers a frame of reference by which we can deduce and extrapolate for questions not directly answered by the narrative. As we drift farther into speculative territory, you are on your own. That is, given the vagaries of human nature and individual talents and experiences, you’ll inevitably develop a frame of reference which is neither denied nor supported well by Scripture, but seems to account for your direct experience of God’s hand in your life. Such speculative theology is your own personal organization in your mind of how you will obey God.
That speculative theology is what most people call Systematic Theology. It is by far the least reliable outside your own head. It is the most dangerous and shaky ground, wholly unsuitable for building blocks of cooperation with other believers. There may well be some overlap because it is inevitably culturally derived. However, the very suggestion it is somehow normative is blasphemous. A proper course of Systematic Theology in seminary should assert this up front, and keep reasserting it throughout the course of study, and remains standing when the student is finished. As you might have observed, this is the reverse of what normally happens. Someone with a talent for persuasion convinces some segment of the world that his bright vision is God’s own. He builds on the assumptions of Aristotle’s categories of reasoning and believes unconsciously that what seems obvious to him is obvious because it is the absolute truth.
Humility goes out the window.
The strong foundation of Christian faith is Hebrew biblical theology, called “doctrine” in the New Testament. On these things I tend to be unyielding, as they are the proper ground for prophetic messages. Deductive theology attempting to answer questions not directly addressed in biblical theology is fairly trustworthy, but that assumes your deduction is closely linked the well recognized doctrine. You could hold others accountable to it, but only as your faith, not your logic, demands. Anything the least bit speculative (based on analytical reasoning) is merely personal. It is wholly unsuitable for making demands on anyone outside your own skin.
Systematic Theology invariably gives us bad religion.
Addenda: An offline question indicates I could have been little more pointed.
The reason we have a Bible is so we can initiate the process of redemption on our human level. It provides sufficient grounds for whatever part we can play in the quest for escaping the consequences of the Fall. As noted, that assumes you aren’t so stupid as to reject the fundamental epistemology of the Hebrew people. We can characterize the question answered as, “What do we do now?” It answers the question of what you need to know only in passing, as the question of what we need to know addresses a condition of obedience. The point of the Bible is to inform your obedience. In the broadest sense, the only thing you can know about God — the only proper objective of theology — is knowing what God demands of you on a human level. All this business of trying to understand what we are (the question of being) is simply wrong-headed. It is not answered in Scripture except in the most brutal assertion that we are fallen, hopelessly lost and at war with the God who made us.
Proper theology: To know God is to know what He demands of us. The primary answer of obedience is glorifying His Name. The primary means to glorifying His Name is figuring out how to live after the Fall. Your proper application of intellect is organizing how you will implement that in your personal life.

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Of Children and Angels 8

Posted on May 7, 2013 by ehurst

Of course, it meant a lot of swing-shift work, as Preston called it.
For the next week, at least ten kilometers in all directions, they rode every road, lane and trail they could find. They took pictures of everything conceivably interesting, uploading them every day to the dropbox. Every unusual sight and oddball character they saw was added to the collection. They had memorized the topography in detail. They even went so far as poking around the fence line of Javelin Barracks. While there were some good telephoto shots, nothing offered a clue they could use.
After dark, they were hardly the only people about, even in the countryside. Each night they observed one or two runs by the MP vans. They counted three different plate numbers. So far, they always ran the same pattern: Running the autobahn to the Roermond-Oost exit, and then turning around under the autobahn just a short ways north. They always dropped into the Burger King on the same property as the Albert Heijn, then back out and back to Germany.
Early in that week, though, Preston struck an acquaintance with a K-Mar sergeant he saw coming out of the firing range area. He waved the van to stop. The driver at first seemed only to be humoring him until Preston spoke in his clearly American English. His first comment was to ask if who was responsible for digging the spent bullets out of the sand backstop on the range. The sergeant was riding shotgun and laughed heartily. After Preston explained his previous use of the range, the sergeant seemed quite interested in a conversation. Preston explained he and his wife were professional photographers on a working vacation. They chatted about the old days when Preston was still in uniform.
Eventually the K-Mar had to go, but Preston got his business card with a cellphone number. Later that evening, he tested things by sending a brief text message. He asked if the sergeant would have time for a dinner invitation, and could he suggest a good restaurant for it. The sergeant demurred, but thanked him. Thus began a conversation mostly by text messages about various military news items.
At one point they crossed paths again on one of the main routes when the van pulled past them, and then stopped as they rode up alongside. During the conversation Preston mentioned seeing American MP vans in the area and the sergeant acted as if it was routine burger chasing, a taste of home.
Preston and Angie had begun to despair of seeing anything different. Perching somewhere different every night, they watched with decreasing enthusiasm. On their eighth night, the van turned off the N280 heading south on the A73 ring road. They lost it of course, but decided to keep heading along the parallel road. It was just a hunch, but they rode up onto the highest overpass overlooking the area where Preston and his associates used to turn into the woods to get to the firing range.
Just at that moment, another MP van passed under and ran down the newest highway laid through the area. His eyes followed the lights far down in the quiet night, while Angie trained the camera on it. She strained to track the vehicle, but the tall trees standing alongside the road hid them after a few moments. They rode as quickly as possible along the same route and somewhat beyond where they had last seen the tail lights. They were now on the north edge of Herkenbosch following the N570. To their surprise, yet another MP van roared past them, turning off on a country lane. The taillights remained visible against the tree line across the fields for quite some distance.
Again they strove to chase it as far as they could. Some distance down this small lane running east, they eventually spotted headlights coming at them. Sure enough, it was one of the vans running in the opposite direction. They knew they had to be very close to the turn-around point where the vans had gone. From previous exploration they knew this wooded area stood just north of a sprawling camping park filled with little trailer houses. These were all pretty much identical, owned by the park management and rented to visitors. In the woods were some carved trees of various mythical figures from Dutch and German fairy tales.
Just ahead, another vehicle came out of the woods on the left. They ducked down a side path and waited, carefully noting where the van had emerged from the woods. Once it was past, they rode hastily to the spot and just past it. Dragging their bikes into the woods, they laid them in the underbrush and began creeping through the gloom toward a lighted area. It was fenced and screened by thick hedges. They were just tall enough to prevent Preston seeing anything but the roof and eaves of a long, low building. There was the noise of some activity and quiet voices.
Preston quietly grabbed Angie, stood her back to him and lifted her on his shoulders. She understood immediately and sat upright just enough and took a short video of what she saw. She tapped him on top of the head and they fled as if their lives depended on it. They continued up the same road to avoid being seen by the last MP van leaving. Just a few hundred meters took them to a bike route running the border back to the highway they had been watching all this time.
It was no surprise they spotted one of the vans heading back into Germany as they rode alongside the autobahn to their small overpass.

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Mythology of Self-control

Posted on May 6, 2013 by ehurst

Nothing is more comical than someone singing the praises of Western Civilization, when they evaluate it wholly from within Western values.
Who would be surprised that Western Civilization is good at giving us what Western Civilization wants in the first place? The critical error here is having so thoroughly internalized Western values as to be utterly incapable of recognizing any other value system at all. Brothers and Sisters, the Bible does not promote Western values. Westerners who read the Bible typically get just about everything in the Bible wrong. Jesus saves their souls and takes them to Heaven despite their lifelong battle to avoid obeying the Spirit.
More spiritual is not the same as more cerebral. Failure to grasp the difference is the very nature of the Fall. At the same time, spiritual need not be anti-cerebral, nor mysterious and impractical.
The Fall did not change the nature of mankind. It did not darken the intellect; it placed the intellect in charge where it was never competent in the first place. Adam and Eve before the Fall suffered the same physical appetites and emotions, and had the same grade of intellect everyone has today. But they had living spirits.
Eden was not and is not somewhere on this plane of existence, either. Scripture offers parabolic language when description is not possible. Above this realm are multiple layers of higher existence. They are all on the other side of the boundary of time and space, but the difference is impossible to describe. The Fall drove us out of whatever place Adam and Eve occupied into a far lower place, because they were not fit to live where they had been. Eden as a private garden is parable, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real; it just can’t be explained in human terms. God could not allow humanity to occupy that higher realm if they were going to forsake the necessary submission to His Spirit rule.
The Fall was disconnecting from the Spirit Realm, and killing the human spirit. It created a barrier between our minds and God. To choose logic as your rule, your executive function, is to shut out the Spirit-spirit communion for which we were designed. God never intended for us to make those life and death decisions without His direct leading input. He created us to be ruled by the Spirit-spirit communion. The intellect was granted as the practical means of implementing the executive decisions in spirit. It was never designed to rule.
This altered situation called for a merciful means to re-enter Heaven on any of the various levels there. Children are unable to choose placing their logic on the throne of the soul because their logic is not fully developed until somewhere around age eight or nine. Such children who die end up on some level of Heaven for something only God understands, but rather like a return to Eden, the place of innocence and innocents. So much is deduction because Scripture never says directly what’s going on with that. Those who do reach the capability for logic invariably place it upon the throne, however much the logic may be muddled with appetite.
Paul warns in Romans 5 the issue is not a formal declaration of Law Covenants. He notes people suffered from sin between Adam and Moses without the Law of Moses. That’s because while human failures are defined by transgression against revealed moral law, the problem is death was welcomed regardless of Adam’s and Eve’s failure to comprehend the consequences of their choice. The Law does define sin, but that wasn’t the purpose of the Law. God gave the Law to define the recovery process, to explain how one could begin receiving the Flaming Sword at the gate of Eden, to kill the sinful flesh and get it off the throne.
God giving His Laws was mercy. Later in that same Roman letter, Paul bluntly says the flesh, which includes the intellect, is incapable of obeying the Laws. The mind is utterly convinced it can handle the job, but even if you teach the mind all it can possibly know about God’s moral Law, even by making the mind adopt the Hebrew intellectual outlook and mysticism, it still lacks the power to act on what it knows. That’s because, in clinical terms, the human will is actually stronger than the intellect. The human will was meant to tie itself directly in faith to the spirit alive with God’s Spirit. Because it is by default dead, the will is unable to act in the soul’s best interest. It has no real power, because the intellect is not enough.
You cannot make the flesh obey the mind. A precious few exceptional individuals may somehow overpower the flesh in some ways, but the vast majority of humanity is simply unable to come even close. It’s not a failure of logic or self-control; self-control does not exist. It’s a myth. We use it as a figure of speech for something we wish we had, but in terms of clinical reality, there is no self-control without the power of the Spirit.
We are fallen. God revealed how to deal with this, and His revelation provides a broad safety net for all of humanity. If you have monumental self-control, good for you. If your spirit is alive and you use His power, great! Stop trying to run your life and simply obey by His power. But for the mass of humanity, all the blessings in this world God could possibly offer, including the necessity of repentance, are tied up in the Laws He designed for the bulk of humanity. One of the blessings He offered to His people, those who are now Spirit-born, is the faint hope of a decent life here while we await His hand taking us home. It is not available within Western Civilization because it requires a lifestyle of supporting each other in very close proximity as an extended family household. We don’t pretend to stand alone.
Our Western culture holds forth this grand vision of logic-based self-control. It’s a lie. All the knowledge and intellect in the world won’t do a damned bit of good if you don’t have power from somewhere. For most people, their entire range of self-control is a mere construct of the culture in which they live. They think they have self-control when it’s nothing more than conformance to environmental pressures. They see a profit and loss proposition and buy into it.
And it’s not according to God’s Word.
So in the end, we have precious few with any significant level of self-control and a whole host of folks with lesser amounts, tapering off toward the bottom with those who profess none. While our culture proclaims the greatness of self-control, it promotes in the very same instant all the wallowing weaknesses of the flesh.
I’m going to pick on the bugbear so popular in our world today: child sexual molestation. It’s built into our culture. Our fear of death and idolizing of youth mixed with “get it while you can” creates a tinderbox of sexual desire for children. It’s not abnormal in our Western society. It’s the paradox that the one thing parents fear most is the one thing that fear is most likely to produce. The more frantic your fear, the more likely it is to happen. It’s simply not openly admitted that we promote it. Ever notice how we sexualize our little girls with flirty clothing and cosmetics? What we consider today “cute” and minimal is shockingly risque compared to just a few years ago. So the child molester is simply being honest and giving in to what the whole world tells him he wants.
And do you imagine the primary consumers of child sexual abuse are not those in the very centers of political power? The only people who get put in jail are those who haven’t been given permission to do the molesting our national leaders get away with. Every “criminal vice” is just the same.
The means to prevention is not crazier laws and heavier penalties that will never be applied to the biggest criminals who commit these awful acts. The means to protecting your little girl from seduction and rape is to create a society consistent with God’s Laws. Our current open democratic social structure is not in accordance with our human potential. It is based on a mythology of self-control that does not exist, cannot exist and never will (among other flaws). The single most effective means of leveraging restraint is not to be found anywhere in Western Civilization, which has proven itself implacably hostile to God’s revelation. The only means for leveraging appropriate restraint, the only hope we have of keeping the wolf from our door on vice, is the rather closed tribal society of the Ancient Near East.
The church was meant to rekindle and recreate that very social structure as much as possible. It won’t matter much what your grand logic says are inherent weaknesses in that ancient system. What you have today is significantly worse and cannot possibly ever work.
Western Civilization cannot last much longer, not because it hasn’t been tried, but because it never could have worked in the first place.

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Of Children and Angels 7

Posted on May 6, 2013 by ehurst

Preston insisted on climbing into the tent to lay down. Angie knew he wasn’t so very tired because they hadn’t ridden that far, and certainly not very hard. Lying on his back, he stared up at the interior surface of the tent.
“When I was in the Army, the Military Police in Europe always had access to VW vans with the police markings and emergency lights mounted on top, just like the older K-Mar vehicles before they started getting the fancy paint jobs they have now. The US version was dark green with large white patches and big black letters. On the inside, the had a heavy wire cage wall separating the front seats from the passenger area. The sliding side door always had the inside handle removed. It was basically a prisoner transport vehicle with room for six passengers.”
Angie finally understood. She lay down next to him. “So, we do some night watching,” she suggested.
“Yep.”
Preston couldn’t sleep. He tethered the laptop to his cellphone and began researching, looking for images to indicate whether the US MPs still used such vans. Apparently there were still some in service here and there across Europe. Social sites offered photos aplenty. Then he scanned the satellite images of the area.
“Without knowing for sure, I’m just guessing the car we saw was headed right over here to that new Albert Heijn shopping center. It’s probably the closest thing of that sort to Javelin. The next nearest thing is an Aldi out in Brüggen, tiny by comparison and not any closer. There’s also the Rheindahlen Complex” Preston seemed almost thinking aloud, but Angie understood he was explaining where his mind was going. “Without knowing where they might be going or bringing the next load of kids, all we need to do is establish a baseline of routine coming and going by any Military Police vehicles at night across the border.”
It seemed to take forever, but finally the sun went down. In the dead of summer, that meant nearly 9PM. They road slowly back to the small bridge passing over the autobahn. Parking their bikes out of sight at the bottom, the didn’t climb all the way up. Instead, they sat part way up where they could just see over the side for west-bound traffic coming from Germany.
While they waited and watched, Preston and Angie chattered about almost anything simply to occupy their minds and stay wide awake. “If I were planning to run small batches of kids into this area, I’d want to make sure I had the same vehicles come and go routinely so the local and national police never gave it a thought. I’d make sure they came across the border at least once nightly.”
He also told stories of apparent corruption he observed or had heard about in the US Army. He became just a bit passionate about it to the point of distraction. It was Angie who recognized the aging VW van with white patches and emergency light bar on top heading toward the bridge where they sat. Preston turned quickly, raised the camera from his lap and immediately began snapping still images. He then stood and made sure to catch the rear license plates.
The camera told him it was pressing midnight. He decided nonetheless to send a text message to his boss, explaining his notion and promising to post a picture of the rear of the MP van with the plates visible into the dropbox.
The next morning Preston’s cellphone twittered a reply while he was getting dressed. He snatched it up while still half-naked to see what it said.

Plausible. Plates ambiguous — Rheindahlen or Javelin. See drop.

In Preston’s mind, the idea of using a small skiff to transfer from barge to van would explain a lot. Düsseldorf had a great many private havens and several kilometers of beach areas with small roads nearby. Even if an MP van would be conspicuous, other types of cargo vehicles would not. At some point between Düsseldorf and the border were any number of transfer points to switch vehicles. But it would mean someone in the MPs with the means to control and corrupt several others to keep it all quiet. That would hardly be new in the US Army.
Checking the dropbox account, Preston and Angie saw this message:

You’ll need to stay around and catch where they take the cargo. No precise location known for the breaking house. Another unintended vacation.

Gary’s wry sense of humor kept this job sane.

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Middling Presumption

Posted on May 5, 2013 by ehurst

Mysticism comes naturally for me.
It was no great struggle to adopt the idea that material wealth isn’t that important; most of my life was in poverty. It’s not sour grapes, just a different experience. When you spend so much of your time doing without, you realize what most people consider essential to life, isn’t essential. From there, it’s just a short hop to realizing life itself isn’t that essential. Thus, I say that in Scripture, life or death is just a circumstance.
You’ll notice it hardly affected my education. As with all humans, I have gaps because it’s a simple matter of exposure. At the critical time when I needed it, the school I attended taught phonics. At the critical time I could have learned it, I didn’t get very far with parts of speech. I learned grammar by feel, largely through reading so very many books up through middle adulthood. Somewhere around age 7 I discovered the power of reading as the means to exploring my world. What got me through the rest of my education wasn’t such marvelously precise grammar but a native language talent for which I cannot take credit.
Most of the lower classes understand far better than their superiors would allow. The educated poor are simply incomprehensible to the middlings. What we understand is that we can choose to be whatever comes in the package with middle class status, or remain in poverty and do what we like. Perhaps through exceptional artistry we can bulldoze through the middle class society because we have something they simply must have but cannot produce. It doesn’t happen often. But what shocks most people is the depth to which that different experience can change your perception of things.
Hostility is not at all necessary. Particularly when your poverty and education lead you to mysticism. I’m not hostile to the middle class, though I can regale you for hours with tales of their hostility to me and my kind. I won’t. The point is not what I’ve suffered, but what they suffer. A solid historical study of the rise of the middle class from the ashes of feudalism in Europe is so very informative. The middlings are the ones who burned it down. You discover the hideous materialism of Puritan religion, and how it is directly linked to the Pharisaism Jesus faced. And it’s no mystery where Charismatic name-it-and-claim-it religion comes from. The very assumption of the middle class lifestyle is the utter necessity and primacy of worldly possessions. Mammon is the god of the middle class, inescapably. All their self-professed virtues are deeply stained by it.
The endless pretense of being upper class in wealth without the social and cultural refinements is a huge blind spot. The original burgers at the end of the Middle Ages were desperate for the respect given nobility, and pretense is so very fundamental to their existence. This is easily the single greatest break between myself and the sizable collection of libertarians among the politically active middle class. They consider me a brother in arms so long as I don’t promote freedoms beyond the barricades of their narrow brand of American middle class liberties.
There is nothing sacred about dressing just so and behaving according to their social dictates. Nor is it particularly noble, but you can’t get that past their internal censorship. They see a threat in so very many things the lower classes really do like. The biggest stumbling block is contentious issue of “saving for a rainy day.” In the lower classes, rain or sunshine are mere circumstance, as with death and taxes. It’s simply part of what we face, and getting wet means nothing more than a few extra minutes here and there accommodating what it does to us. Nor is it merely the vagaries of weather, but the broader symbolism that goes with the popular phrase. We aren’t that interested in tomorrow because today wasn’t so wonderful, at least where it concerns material possessions. We are wise enough to recognize tomorrow is ruled by people who won’t let us enjoy life. It takes all we have to make it today, so saving for tomorrow is utterly meaningless.
Instead, if we can’t consume it ourselves — and we’ll try — we give it away to someone else like us who didn’t get their share. We fully expect to work until we die, and die working or begging. Begging is harder work than you imagine, wading through the stiff current of social resistance. Some of us would rather starve. Indeed, we’d rather starve than live in the world of the middle class. There is a lot of work we could do, but won’t because it’s just morally wrong. We see where the whole thing leads to a hideous, empty life of chasing things we don’t miss. Especially when the boss demands we think and say what he believes, in violent assault on our freedom of conscience. Your brand of help is a slavery too degrading to accept.
The American middle class and their virtues are no more representative of Jesus Christ than would be whales in the ocean or birds in the sky. Changing the particular mixture of minor points of virtue doesn’t change the underlying falsehood of things. You don’t like sagging pants and tattoos? Don’t look at us. Turn away; we’ll deal with that. You want to know why the suburban white kids are adopting prison gang habits? Because your social structure has made it impossible for their creativity to rise in any other way. You mean you didn’t realize you were putting such a very high portion of the lower classes in prison for no real harm, such that you have scooped up the whole of our random sprinkling of geniuses, too? Never mind your tastes compared to that of others; the suburbanites ape the prisoners because the prisoners have created a vivid alternative society, and you have forced them to be hostile to yours. That faux prison gang lifestyle is now the future, because you refused to capture the geniuses of tomorrow.
Do you think we look longingly at your fancy cars and houses? Some do, no doubt, but by no means all of us. That we don’t own a suit and tie is not an abomination to God. The only leverage you have for enforcing your dress code is not letting us work for you at your oh-so-important job. Whoop-de-doo. Meanwhile, if we can find a way to get what we really have to have by exercising our free market talents that you don’t understand, we’ll do that.
Sometime back around the middle of the previous century, a businessman with a good heart built a mattress factory in the area where the Ponca Indians lived in Oklahoma. It was the real deal, and he expected to bring prosperity and good paying jobs to them. Lord knows, they needed it. So he hired just about any Ponca who came to work. They worked until the first pay day, then disappeared for awhile. Yes, sometimes they got drunk, but that was merely a symptom of something much more important. The natives weren’t acquisitive. That is a heresy for the middle class. The men did really good quality work and turned out some really fine mattresses at lower wages than most white men would tolerate, but when they had enough for their basic needs of life, they had better things to do. It’s not a failure of work ethic; they did other work that paid little or nothing, but was the work they normally did. It was failure of greed.
You’d be surprised how much Indian blood there is among the poor whites of Oklahoma, including yours truly. Not just shared DNA, but their culture is a pure and easily identified version of what all the lower classes tend to share. We are the superstitious barbarians who find it easier to follow Jesus because we recognize things in His teachings to which you are utterly and adamantly opposed. Yes, there are plenty of predators among, same as with you. Ours share more with the middle class than the rest of us do. They want middle class stuff, but on their own terms. Instead of picking up on what the middle class say they do, the predators copy what the middle class did to them. The willingness to buy influence in politics is a classic symptom of the middle class; it’s how they got their original political leverage against the nobility of the Middle Ages.
Class envy and resentment didn’t originate with us. We learned it from you.
It’s hard to explain, but at the expense of oversimplifying it goes like this: The nobility once had access to wealth as a privilege of their position. They kept the rules and the means to enforce those rules. In the broader sense, the rules included a high degree of intellectual refinement, if unevenly applied. It was wrong for nobles to assume only noble blood could be intelligent, so this blind spot left them open to a subtle attack. They assumed no peasant was smart enough to pull any tricks, but a few ambitious and intelligent peasants took unholy umbrage at the system and vengefully attacked it. Instead of direct force of arms, they conquered the existing ruling class by other means. Still, the fundamental driving force was pure greed, not something easily found among the nobility. The latter weren’t greedy because they already had all the power and wealth, but they were arrogant. The middle class resentment of privilege and wealth, as is so very fundamental to the Puritan doctrine, made noble wealth an insult to God in their minds. Those nasty nobles didn’t “work” for their wealth, so it wasn’t possible for God to want them wealthy. It was some vast conspiracy of the Devil, and the burghers used good old Gramscian economic guerrilla warfare to take it all away. Communism is just as materialist as it’s primary ideological enemy.
The fundamental assumptions of the Enlightenment only half caught on with the burghers. They were somewhat educated, but could not tolerate the freedom of the lower classes. They didn’t depart from the nobles in their arrogance about lesser folk. Virtually the entire gamut of “quality of life” legislation, and almost the entire range of police activity today, is a direct reflection of the middle class spitefulness against other folks. Having worked in law enforcement, I can assure you the vast bulk of “crime fighting” has nothing to do with fighting genuine harm. The entire profession of civil policeman is a creation of the middle class. They enforce laws only the middle class care about. It was the middle class who realized the ability to dominate voting, so they demanded popular vote as the means to ruling society, with certain disenfranchisements, of course. Any other means to organizing government is anathema. Democratic government is holy, and only a child of Satan could wish any other form of government. Lip service to the rights of the minority didn’t last long in history, as we all know.
Aside from the rare reminders such as this one I write this morning, it’s not worth the trouble to explain our alternative viewpoint to the professional libertarians or other branches of middle class political philosophy. It’s all the same to those of us on the bottom, because it’s just an excuse to stomp on us for daring to think differently about every day life. I’m not in love with poverty any more than I care much about prosperity. It’s just a tool for things far more important than fleshly comfort or even this whole existence in the first place. There is no particular virtue in raising the common welfare through material progress. I know; shocking to say it, but there more important things. I won’t name names, but some really big shots have praised some of my other articles on this blog, but they’ll never read this one. If they do, they’ll be blind to how completely it applies to them.
Keep your freakin’ suit and tie and your material prosperity; you simply do not understand.

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Of Children and Angels 6

Posted on May 5, 2013 by ehurst

On the ride back to their campsite, Angie and Preston discussed this idea.
Angie insisted, “Corrupt officials are one thing. Local politicians are seldom clean any more than they might be anywhere else in the world. But the Dutch police seldom get too wrapped up in corruption. Gemeentes, maybe. K-Mar — I find it hard to imagine.”
Preston came back quickly. “Boy, you sure couldn’t say that about American federal law enforcement. They’re some of the biggest criminal operations in the whole country.”
He paused a bit. “It doesn’t seem the Gemeente police would be running back and forth across the border in their official vehicles that much. So that leaves the German Polizei. That’s pretty complicated. We know for certain they have been used a lot in espionage, or at least someone masquerading as them. I know the CIA has lots of friends in the Polizei. We’ve already discovered the espionage angle to this child trafficking; that’s how we got involved in the first place. But I can’t imagine the Polizei would be running across the border too freely, either. So about the only way I can see it is with them doing transfers along the many small routes in the woods.” He shook his head slowly. “Somehow, that seems entirely too risky and complicated.”
“But it seems for now that’s the most plausible,” Angie countered.
Over dinner outside their tent that evening, they scanned the maps of the border area, both paper and online maps. It became obvious that for quite some distance in both directions, the German side of the border was heavily forested. The Dutch side considerably less so, but there was that one area where Preston and his fellow troops used the firing range owned by the Dutch federal police. The next nearest border woodland on the Dutch side was a bit north of where they were camped, just on the south side of Swalmen.
They decided to divide the border region between north and south of the A52, which was the N280 on the Dutch side of the border. This was the major highway route east and west connecting Roermond with Düsseldorf.
The next day saw them angling from their quiet country hiding place down along the back roads to where the highway crossed the border. There was a farm lane connected to a small pedestrian bridge crossing over the autobahn. They turned left off the lightweight bridge onto a narrow bike path. From there they had less than a half-kilometer to the border marked by an almost unbroken treeline on the German side. It was a very pleasant ride and they were hardly the only cyclists on the trails.
On the one hand, the border was shot through with crossings, most of them south of the Javelin Barracks area. On the other hand, Preston could imagine determined traffickers could get a small van down there, but trucks or buses would be nigh impossible. By mid-morning, they decided to head back through the Dutch villages a kilometer or so off the border. There was still the large forested area and they cut it in half by taking the fairly solid lane running past the golf course. By the time they got to Asenray they were ready for a snack. Stopping at the only cafe, they grabbed a vacant table out front and reassessed the task in front of them.
Preston wasn’t exactly tired, just feeling a little frustrated. “Somehow I get the feeling trying to watch this border area day and night would be way too much. Catching them red-handed seems almost futile. I just don’t get that positive feeling about this. It’s as if our angels aren’t in on that idea.”
Angie agreed. “I think it’s a dead end, too. It seems too inefficient.”
Heading east out of the village, they followed a zigzagging route back to where the little bridge crossed the autobahn. As they rode up over the top, Preston suddenly stopped. He watched a vehicle approach from the east, pass under and cruise off toward the northern end of Roermond. Angie followed his eyes.
It was a UK Military Police car, an Opel station wagon.
Preston looked back at Angie. While his features were nearly blank, he had a very intense look, as if his mind worked furiously. He looked again where the vehicle had gone, then back across the bridge, staring off into space. Angie waited expectantly, but all he said was, “Military Police vans.”
The ride back to the manor and their tent was silent.

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Of Children and Angels 5

Posted on May 4, 2013 by ehurst

They didn’t yet know where the breaking house was, and finding it wouldn’t be simple.
Asking questions would likely cause the mission to abort and utterly fail to identify the carriers. They needed to catch the traffic bringing the kids into the area. Some part of them wasn’t too eager to know right away. It would have been too painful to think about what was going on inside and too tempting to act rashly and to no good purpose. First, they needed to survey the situation in terms of traffic flow.
They had already seen the main highway running east of there across Germany all the way to Düsseldorf. It would have been less than hour’s drive in light traffic. This highway ran along the north side of the old RAF Bruggen, now Javelin Barracks, where the old Dutch guard had told Preston was some portion of the MPs and civilian administrators that had been at Schinnen. From dim memories, Preston recalled there were small NATO installations all over that part of Germany, over a dozen within a short distance either side of that corridor.
Military traffic must be still exceedingly common in that area. He would be surprised if a significant portion of the personnel at Javelin didn’t live right here on this side of the border.
They got their gear set up and made themselves comfortable. The initial ride out from Heerlen was only about thirty kilometers on rather flat terrain, though with a significant load. Preston always carried the lion’s share, but Angie insisted on doing her part. Once the bikes were unloaded, they removed all but the main rear racks. They would need to go shopping at a minimum, and put light saddle bags on each bike. It was time to get a first feel for this ancient city.
But the ancient city had seen a lot of new construction. Preston noticed the standard online mapping services weren’t always up to date. As they headed west from the manor, they discovered the new north-south highway had cut off several ancient paths running east and west. They agreed this was different from what they had seen in most of Europe, where new construction accommodated existing routes, even old walking and hiking paths. Here, they were simply cut in two.
On the other hand, once they went around north to a major route that did cross the new highway, they found a brand new and very large shopping center. Even with the longer routing, this was much closer than running all the way into the ancient city center where the other stores were.
Still, they had wanted to do a bit of investigative sightseeing, especially some of the barge havens. They started on the northern edge of what they took to be Roermond’s sphere of influence, taking pictures rather frequently.
Some of the havens were clearly industrial and they found a few places where houseboats moored. Yet it seemed the majority were crowded with private pleasure boats; easily half were various kinds of sailing craft. After taking the highway partway across the Maas simply to see it all from elevated position, they turned and headed back down into the old part of city just south of there. Along a very old canal, they stopped for lunch at one of the sidewalk cafes.
The pedestrian traffic was quite heavy, plus dozens of bicycles, a great many parked alongside buildings. Almost all of the bikes were the standard commuter models; their mountain bikes stood out. They decided to chain them to a heavy steel barrier protecting one of the few trees that stood in one of the rare parking areas, taking a small table nearby.
After finishing their meals, they decided to vacate their table for some other customers and picked their way across the busy street to the railing along the old canal. Seeing a stairway leading down close to the water, they descended to the ancient stone dock seldom used these days. At the bottom of the steps they passed a man sitting on the last step, smoking a pipe. Were it not for the fine aromatic smell, they might not have paid him any attention. He was very dark-skinned with Asian features; Preston guessed he was Sri Lanken.
They stepped away to the middle of the dock and were chatting about what they could see. It was readily apparent there wouldn’t have been too many options for moving a bunch of kids through any of the normal havens and they wondered how it would been done. They began lining up camera angles.
This was the time of year one might overhear any number of different languages spoken among tourists on the streets. Apparently the pipe-smoker overheard their conversation and understood it. He approached, and Preston noticed the pipe aroma barely hid a strong body odor. This was not uncommon in Europe in the first place, and frankly more so among those from Asian countries. Preston thought the man might actually be living on the streets, because he wore more clothing than even most Asians might for a northern climate, since it was nearly the heat of summer. So while a part of him dreaded the possibility of enduring panhandling, the man addressed their conversation itself.
“You know, up the Roer from the Maas are several places where a skiff could easily be pulled up to a paved boat ramp, right next to major streets. If the freight can be moved easily enough, it would be nothing to smuggle just about anything into these parts, especially under the cover of darkness.” His accent was surprisingly faint, but carried a hint of the Central Asian sound Preston expected.
Angie was too surprised to speak, simply pulling her red locks away from her face where the wind had blown them. Preston decided to humor the man. “You make it sound like you’ve seen it done a few times,” he suggested with a grin.
“Done it,” the man said proudly. “But not recently, and I never trafficked in humans. The damned Euro ruined the smuggling business for me.”
Preston countered, “I’m a little surprised you would be so open about it.”
The man grinned. “Police here don’t use American informants, especially real professional photographers like yourselves. You might be private investigators or reporters, but not police.” It was obvious the man was quite observant and had seen a lot.
Preston decided to play along. “Okay, so we were curious about reports of human trafficking in the area. Want to say anything about it?”
“They ain’t coming off the river these days. Business has been pretty slow these days because Nijmegen has been pretty busy checking everything, not just for children. When cops start looking for something, they’ll be glad to arrest you for just about anything else they can find on general principle of not coming away empty-handed.” The old man’s pipe burned out and he began cleaning it with some small tool he took from a pocket. “That’s about the last of good cheap tobacco I was getting.”
Preston had seen the prices of the highly taxed tobacco in the Netherlands. Most of it was better quality than Americans usually got, but it wasn’t subsidized like coffee. Dutch coffee was the best in the world, and had always been less expensive than the American stuff. Starbucks offered expensive mud compared to what Preston had sampled here in almost every ordinary cafe or snack bar.
Preston had a sudden idea. “In your experience, what would be the best way to transport something so the police would ignore it?”
“Get some other cops to move it for you. They don’t mess with each other.” The old man grinned, then turned slowly and walked away.

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