Data Is the New Commodity

Posted on February 8, 2013 by ehurst

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is partly true. People make huge mistakes in thinking this is the whole story and in deciding what to do with it, but it does accord somewhat with observable human behavior.
If circumstances require that you spend all your time just obtaining basic life support, it might be hard for you to discover a talent for piano playing or medicine. The whole purpose behind civilization is to spread the cost among greater numbers of people so that individuals have more opportunity for specializing in things they do best. Thus, we all together have more and make more to have.
Doing all this requires a common set of assumptions about what we have to do to keep the advantages. Civilization is defined as the collection of rules and customs necessary to live in close proximity to the market without killing each other. You can’t build very much on a cultural base of “every man for himself.” Civilization is nothing without a morality of some sort that calls men to aspire to higher ideals than the self. There has to be a sense of shared identity.
A civilization is about to die when the morality wears out under the constant onslaught of plutocrat abuse. A natural result of most civilizing influences is someone realizing they can pretend to have everyone’s needs in view when they are simply in it for themselves at a much higher level. When rulers forget the morality of governing itself, they can only push it just so far before things fall apart. The cost of the common identity becomes entirely unsustainable.
Ours is coming apart; I’m hardly the only one to see that. While it’s possible to find leverage to steer somewhat the process of replacement, for the most part, this thing will take its own course as the net result of millions not thinking about it at all. Though I’ve given our successor civilization the nickname of the Network Civilization, I seriously doubt that will stick. If you read enough history, you’ll realize the consensus of calling ours Western Civilization took hold rather late in the game. It waits on the self-awareness of future generations to decide what they’ll call their civilization, if they use such categories at all.
A certain amount of content always passes from predecessor to successor. Despite it’s utter unfitness for the job in terms of efficiency, it seems some brand of English language will continue to dominate the future. That is, it will be the basis for shared communications in the larger Network, regardless of native language.
The fundamental glue of the future is what it was in the past: Transfer of goods and ideas between people. In the past, the pace of change in society was directly related to speed of information or ideas. The degree and type of variation in clothing fashion, for example, depended on people in one place seeing something eye-catching wrapped around people in another place. The reasons for deciding to adopt something will vary widely; honestly, the folks who seize upon such a thing seldom know why they like it. In a broad sense, it hardly matters. What matters is how quickly and widely the idea travels.
Such frivolous changes also come with more substantive changes in cultural assumptions and expectations. Revolutions are born of traveling ideas. Perception is reality in the sense people act on what they believe is true. Rumors are as good as factual revelations if the story ignites enough common fury. What most people never consider is how various forms of entertainment are generally more powerful than mere ideas. They may be aware of it instinctively, but even with the efforts of writers to point out how sometimes the art form itself is the message, the calculus is typically wrong. That is, those in the best position to take advantage of it usually lose control of it because they miss the point.
We’ve already proved beyond all doubt that freely sharing digital entertainment media actually increases the sales of the original product. Were this not true, AM radio would never have taken off, mutated to FM and so forth. Elvis Presley and the Beatles would have remained small time local acts. Since the plutocrats in charge of the system for entertainment distribution don’t get this, they are losing control to artists who chafe under the virtual slavery of the system.
This is the cutting edge of the Network Civilization in the sense of mass effect. Academics and artists were aware of this long ago, having worked in this direction all along, but behind the scenes. Several theologians and philosophers have pointed out how the religious establishment is often the last to notice. So while Kirkbride jealously guards their copyright on the New King James translation of the Bible, the mass of a new generation is ignoring them in favor of the likes of the NET Bible.
If most of the bright entrepreneurial minds remain captive to the current system, they will miss the biggest and brightest opportunities coming. The current model for funding information offered on the Net is utterly backward, guaranteeing they will not participate in the future. People who desire influence will have to understand that the Net is the roadway and that your trade goods travel over that road. Information is not the trade good, but the pavement. If people willingly run out and fork over money for DVDs containing entertainment they already saw and heard on the Net, enough that the producers still make a good living, then the people locking up the less entertaining data are missing something in their conceptual model of human behavior.
Open Access is the future. The commoditization of Net access, and then the hardware and software for accessing it, signals where this is going. Data is the new commodity, not some highly valuable product. The potential is there, but not enough bright minds are willing to explore what really could work. This is why the West is dying, because it cannot move beyond the old model of economics. It will be replaced as surely as day follows night.
The old morality no longer offers any benefit; the gatekeepers have abused their position and are now the enemy of life itself. The perception of what is moral has already changed. On this point, at least, the new morality is quite in accord with God’s revelation. You cannot stop this thing.

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Tool Shed 1

Posted on February 7, 2013 by ehurst

This is not a fiction series. I needed a way to signal to readers the prophetic approach to computer technology or any other means to the end of God’s Message. It could as easily be about the various cutting tools I use for firewood, or my bicycle, etc.
Background: There are four competing desktop interfaces dominating the field in Linux right now. KDE 4 is all the worst of KDE 3 but not nearly so useful. It’s got a jillion settings possible and no sane defaults. Nothing about it is designed for ordinary people trying to get work done. The developers are part of the majority who despise common ordinary computer users. GNOME 3 hates them in the opposite way, by taking away every possible option and hiding basic functions behind the most bizarre keystroke and mouse combinations. Ubuntu’s version, called Unity, is just as bad. LXDE reminds me of the worst days during the development of GNOME way back when. So far as I know, it’s the only current desktop capable of crashing catastrophically and biting holes in your file system on its way down.
So that leaves us with XFCE. It’s a little short on features, but it’s workable for most situations.
But the folks at OpenSUSE can ruin anything. They make XFCE look just like LXDE and I don’t know of any way to simply remove the idiotic SUSE defaults and let XFCE do what it does best. Then there’s a thousand little things like Lynx. Those of us who love Lynx know how to make it do what we want. SUSE has done their best to remove critical features, like disabling the option to use an LSS file to set color options. Stupid. If we don’t want it, we know exactly how to cut it out, so stop making arrogant and bad decisions for us, developers. There are good points with SUSE, but they are overwhelmed by inexcusable anti-user decisions.
After choking on this for awhile, I decided to try Scientific Linux 6 again on the laptop, but stayed with the 32-bit version this time. Everything worked as I hoped, adding a couple of extra package repositories (ATrpms and EPEL) to get the stuff RHEL doesn’t offer on the basic system. It works they way I work. Unless you have more than 4GB of RAM or run server operations, you don’t need the 64-bit version. I’ve got Word 97 working beautifully under Wine and there is some hope someone I know will come up with a version of WordPerfect that runs with it. Right now, about the only versions reliable at all are 7 (NT enabled) through about 11 under Wine.
Mint with MATE is tolerable. However, far too many of what should be MATE applications are still pulled from GNOME 3 and those suffer the basic arrogance of GNOME developers. Also, way too much depends on the anti-user decisions made upstream by Ubuntu. Probably the most hateful thing is the convoluted path to adding backports available from various PPAs (Personal Package Archives, where some enterprising packager keeps up with some particular package or related group of packages and upgrades them on various versions of Ubuntu). So if you really have to have the latest version of something, you can’t easily build it yourself the Debian way, and there is no simple, user-friendly method of adding the extra goodies. Even SUSE gets this part right, with their one-click install.
Other distros describe themselves in ways that tell me they have no interest in my needs. Those most likely to be user friendly are frankly few if you understand “user” as not exactly a techie or fanboy. So for now I still cannot recommend any Linux distro to non-techie users. If you are willing to learn, it will most certainly give you more options than Windows in terms of control over your system. However, Windows remains much easier and more reliable in the sense of fewer hassles getting things the way you probably like them. However, after Windows 7, it’s apparently going downhill fast. You may want to consider whether you wish to face what’s coming. If you feel the need to jump, I still recommend RHEL and clones (CentOS, Stella and Scientific Linux). Maybe somewhere in the near future, someone will wake up and realize there are an awful lot of users who refuse to use a cellphone interface on their systems because they have work to do.

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Trend Watching

Posted on February 7, 2013 by ehurst

The Network Civilization is upon us. Many current plutocrats will be destroyed because they don’t understand what it takes to stay in control, but they won’t simply go away when things change. There has never been a truly democratic government for very long anywhere, nor will there be in the future.
You wouldn’t like real democracy, and we’ve already demonstrated beyond all doubt a constitutional republic won’t happen, either. Communism and socialism are already dead, too. Those ideas as studied in the past will continue thinning and fading into mist. Radical versions with new names will take their place. A shift in civilization is not something you can easily see because it no longer requires a complete destruction of the old. Humans can now gain control of resources without total destruction.
There may well be a nuclear exchange, but there won’t be an all out nuclear holocaust. There will be blood in the streets — there already is, just not a lot of it. Cities will be leveled and large populations will be slaughtered. But none of this will be on the scale sufficient to end Western Civilization. The West will simply wither away. The transition will be very hard to detect.
Critical to understanding the future is seeing how the Occupy Movement did things. From a Western perspective, it remains a failure. From a civilizational aspect, it has already won. It shows people no longer follow the old rules and methods of political activity. Occupy has merely manifested what is coming. The same rules work fine for criminal flashmobbing in cities right now; criminals are often on the cutting edge of where civilization is heading. Not the crime, but the means of organizing human activity, of setting out the rules by which we can call something “civilization.”
There is precious little political doctrine as most people recognize it. Doctrinaire politics is long dead and good riddance. There are no real libertarians, conservative means nothing at all, and even liberalism is just a covering label. For example, people try to explain what President Obama believes in as policy — he doesn’t believe in anything. He believes in Obama. It’s been a very long time since we’ve had a president who actually knew his own policy. These days, by the time you get into office, you are bought and sold a hundred times. Obama is an empty suit, a figure head capable of putting on a good show, same as Hitler, but far less effective. Whatever he says is almost invariably scripted by other people. There is no dream to catch, only enforcing the interests of his handlers and owners. His policy is plutocrat all the way, with several competing agendas he moderates almost entirely by accident.
If you find your brain stuck in the old left-right paradigm, you’ll recognize elements of it in what you see coming, but you’ll understand nothing. Do you realize there are people I know still insisting Islam is highly protected here in the US? Yes, I realize there is a lot of progressive propaganda about being nice to everyone, Muslims included, but the actual results of official treatment indicate a high degree of prejudice against them. In terms of actual government behavior, Zionism is a far bigger sacred cow, but even that doesn’t reign supreme. It’s more a case of plutocrats protecting some use of Israel for their own profit. Again, nobody at the top really believes in anything except keeping their own position.
But a great many of them will lose it as things continue changing radically behind the scenes. It’s not that simple. Yes, we do have still a very large proportion of sheeple, but not everyone is sheeple about the same things. A sheeple in one place is an activist leader in another. The visionaries who steer things are sometimes part sheeple themselves. For example, most of the current feminist orthodoxy will survive. Not entirely as we know it, but elements of it have become so deeply ingrained, we can expect to deal with that for a very long time to come. Game will grow, but it will never dominate civilization. Truth is like that; it’s always held by a minority.
And in terms of computer technology, today’s laptop is tomorrow’s “big iron” dinosaur.
Think about how computer technology will invade every aspect of life. No, don’t fear it, because there will always be those who keep parts of the digital ecosystem free and independent. After all the long-standing efforts to borg the devices under government control, along comes something like Silent Circle to democratize privacy again. The rebels can’t win, but neither can the oppression.
There will always be plutocrats, but their flavor will change radically very soon, because the means to power are changing rapidly.

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Morality Bits: Open Doors

Posted on February 6, 2013 by ehurst

What most people simply cannot understand is how the power of demons among humans is tied directly to God’s Moral Laws.
PTSD is opening the wrong door. The reason so very many veterans come home completely messed up can be analyzed to death from a lot of different angles. No one seems interested in seeing how the Laws of God apply. In broad terms, the high incidence of PTSD is the open door demons have into troops’ souls because the wars are inherently immoral. The underlying question is not one of national interest as measured by all the normal Western human reasoning. The question is adhering to moral goodness as God measures it and how He revealed it. States come and go; that’s in God’s hands. We dare not resist Him, because this is how demons are permitted to flood the lives of those involved. Most American believers are flat out wrong on what God’s Laws require, so all their prayers for the troops’ safety are being largely ignored. It’s not merely the physical threats, but their souls are wide open to invasion from all sorts of demonic activity. They are freaking out because the demons have a moral permit to occupy their lives.
If your cause is just, kids with slingshots can win your battles, because God is on your side. Everything you think you know with your worldly wisdom is merely chasing shadows. The shining light of moral truth is what you need to see.
Government secrecy is closing the wrong door. It’s almost impossible to separate between government officials and the corporate plutocrats they serve. We already know the FDA, for example, is a revolving door of employment where the pharmaceutical management and FDA regulators are all the same folks, as well as the big chemical companies who want to control the food supply. Even our sacrosanct medical system is under corporate control. The very heart of medical knowledge is at risk because the medical technicians are hiding drug trials information from doctors. Too many doctors are going along with this, so it opens doors to demonic influence in the patients, as well.
The wider picture is unjustified secrecy. Deeds of evil hidden in darkness are all to visible to God. When you deny His justice, He must enforce it Himself. He would much rather set loose angels to bring blessings, but our secrecy and lies demand demons and curses. Repent; open the doors of honesty and let the light of truth shine on your actions. You are supposed to be perfect as people measure things, but morally mature as God measures them. Little demons are set loose on the victims; bigger and more powerful demons are set loose on those who cause the problems.

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Bits and Pieces 8

Posted on February 5, 2013 by ehurst

I think it’s 8…? Yeah.
I gave up on getting Scientific Linux (RHEL clone) working on my laptop. Something broke since the last time I played with it, and the STA Broadcom driver no longer builds. It’s the kind of thing not worth my trouble to dig and dig because it’s almost entirely over my head in the first place. I’m running OpenSUSE 12.2 and all’s well. Not simple, but good enough and quite secure. If I take the notion to keep it awhile, it’s at least good for some three or four years. Naturally, I’m using the XFCE desktop.
I live on a different planet than most people. I prefer it that way.
When I learned English grammar, the masculine was the default inclusive gender. I’m not changing just because a bunch of idiots don’t understand, who believe their degree and position on some college faculty gives them power to politicize the issue. When the context does not specify, any masculine pronouns are taken as randomly inclusive of females, too. That’s English. Dutch has an inclusive gender which is neither. They are welcome to it; when among them, I’ll use their language the way it stands. (I never met anyone there who didn’t speak English, anyway.) Last time I checked, German and Spanish are distinctly “sexist” like English. Get over it.
I’m back to working my way through the Isaiah commentary files in preparation for the next book. Currently I’m about one-third of the way.
Something keeps burning brightly in the back of my mind: If you are convinced God wants you to do something, let Him hold the consequences in His hands. Just be faithful. It keeps dogging me as I pray about the likes of the Open Access Guerrilla movement. I am convinced God wants me involved and even if the other participants choke on my religious stance, I’m supporting them as much as they can tolerate.
Bike ride today!

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Holy Places?

Posted on February 4, 2013 by ehurst

I tried not to waste the time I had living in Europe at taxpayers’ expense. I was constantly exploring the countryside, looking for anything unusual or unexpected. Did you know there’s a spot in eastern Belgium where you can wade and swim safely in a running stream? No pollution, either. It’s out near a village called Bütgnebach. There aren’t many places in Europe where the water is that clean.
One of my hobbies on these explorations was finding little religious shrines. Virtually all of them were related to Catholicism. Sometimes it was nothing more than a tiny little mounted cross or figurines in a shaded spot. Sometimes it was a tiny building. Once in awhile it was a small chapel and the varied architecture was always a surprise. Some of them had the date it was dedicated so you learned to predict something of the shrine based on the historical period. I found only one that was so old it didn’t include Mary or one of the listed saints; it had a statue depicting Jesus on His throne.
Reading the text of Scripture, you realize every part of this world has likely places where something about the physical setting seems to speak of things eternal, of things beyond mere human perception. Lots of little sacred groves, or “high place” which simply lent themselves well to various religious expressions. I doubt the ancient pagans would be surprised to find all the little shrines I did when traipsing across Western Europe. They would recognize the odd feeling some humans get when they encounter certain settings.
Sadly, most humans don’t really understand. I admit I consider veneration of Mary and the saints a mistake, but it’s not worth crusading over it. Those little wood and field shrines with statues don’t annoy me or grate on my nerves, most often because I sense the divine in those places myself. At the same time, I realize the place itself has nothing to do with any spiritual focus of power. It has more to do with our human limitations; it’s a question of what it takes for us to start paying attention to something which is ubiquitous when it isn’t missing altogether. That is, if you have any sense at all for spiritual matters, you are most likely to sense the divine Presence in places where you aren’t distracted by human noise, including your own internal noise.
Other people aren’t really the problem, either. If they, too, are seeking a moment where something in them turns to face the Spirit Realm, we can all share the moment, regardless of how we each interpret that event. So long as there is nothing shocking to my sensibilities, I can hear from God. It has nothing to do with their focus, either. It’s simply whether the moment itself helps break down the barriers inside me. Those of us who have invested something in seeking God’s face are fully aware of how difficult it can be. I can still stop in the middle of Times Square on New Years’ Eve and pray, but it won’t be the same as stopping to stare at the Königssee from crest trail near the Eagle’s Nest when there’s no one else around.
When God needs my attention, He’ll get it one way or another. When I feel the need to connect with Him, I certainly prefer places where I’m not distracted by a thousand other things. Isolation in some measure is essential to developing spiritual sensitivity. Given all Creation is bound under the Fall, nothing in the realm of existence is anything more than a deception. The Divine Presence is rooted entirely outside this realm, so it won’t matter where you are in the entire universe. Pick a spot; God is there inasmuch as He is anywhere at all.
No place is holy; every place is holy.

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Rehabilitating Linux

Posted on February 3, 2013 by ehurst

The mission comes first in all things.

I still use Linux. There is only one real reason anyone would choose Linux over Windows: control. MS will never yield the level of control we users would like. The nifty little secrets are out there on the Net, but it often requires arcane knowledge to work through some of the truly Orwellian obfuscations for items many Linux users do routinely. The reason is simple: MS makes money by delivering you, the user, to their business partners. They retain this power to make money because they allow some governments complete and open access through back doors to the system. That criminals also find and use those back doors is simply the cost of doing business. Unfortunately, the cost is usually born by you, the user.

The only reason to keep using Windows is the wealth of tools for which Linux and Open Source do not offer a replacement. So you like LibreOffice? Fine, but they do not have a valid grammar checker and the interface will always have serious glitches not present in any other office suite. That’s because people who really love Open Source will tolerate those glitches and the developers ignore everyone else. Sometimes it’s just a careless UI design and layout. You have to run through an extra three or four actions to get the same results as you would with, say MS Office (any version).

So here’s the deal: Which new features added to MS Office since Office 97 do you use? I don’t use any of them, either. Some of the defaults have actually gotten annoying. Did you know you can run some of those older versions on Linux using Wine? That’s a sort of emulator, allowing you to get a sometimes workable replication of Windows for some software. At various times using different versions of Wine, I’ve run Office 97, 2000 and 2003. I’m willing to bet one of those will serve most of your needs. Later versions do sometimes work, as well, but really grab a lot of system resources in the process. You can get copies of the older versions cheap or free, if you know who to ask.

So the real issue comes down to which system offers the least painful options. I’ve been playing with Linux Mint because they offer releases with long term support. It’s a step in the right direction, in part because they understand the real need for keeping the older style UIs. So you can use MATE, which is the current version of GNOME 2, so to speak. Or you can use Cinnamon, which is GNOME 3 made somewhat sane. I prefer the former. At any rate, I’ve got Word 2000 working on it and that’s good enough for my grammar checking needs.

However, I still can’t recommend Mint to Windows users unless you have the time to do some serious homework. It still is too much like Ubuntu where far too many defaults are not aimed at the most common user needs. Too often those defaults are really hard to change. Mint folks aren’t nearly so forthcoming on offering simple fixes as I have seen with Ubuntu. There are some Mint users posting their fixes on blogs and such, but too often they are aimed at elitist ends. That is, it’s one elitist Linux user helping another elitist, while nobody bothers to help those of us with more common user needs. Far too many things which should rightly be almost automated are made intentionally obscure and difficult. You have to manually update FlashPlayer, for example. That’s not simple and I’ve yet to find simple directions for it; I can do it the hard way, but I don’t recommend it.

Unless you really need the latest and greatest, I still recommend Scientific Linux/CentOS 6 for most users as the shortest and least painful path to migration. I’ve already written that up (see the links on this page regarding RHEL) (site gone). You can get Wine and it will run at least one version of MS Office. There is a provision for most of the arcane hardware drivers somewhere in the system which supports the users of RHEL and clones. There is often a way to get some of the latest and greatest when you really must have it. Best of all, it is exceptionally secure, more so than most types of Linux, because the security stuff is turned on by default and quite sane. I will probably keep it on my laptop.

Feel free to ask my advice.

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Open Access: Walking the Talk

Posted on February 3, 2013 by ehurst

All truth is God’s truth. All data is God’s data. While God moves entirely outside our human frame of reference, particularly in terms of time and space, His hand will eventually crush those who try to lock up data from others.
Privacy is one thing. Do what you can, but the moment you digitize your private life, it’s at risk. Still, exploiting the ignorance of your fellow Netizen is a sin. Withholding pertinent data is evil. Granted, it’s difficult to put all of this into words, but God is all about uncovering things. He first took the effort to reveal Himself. In so doing, He made it plain His character requires uncovering man’s secrets and bringing them into the light.
Keep in mind this entire existence here below is one big lie. God is working and pressing all Creation toward the ultimate goal of revelation, to correct the vast universe of falsehood by deconstructing it and remaking it. There is no such thing as objective truth. All human data and thoughts are stained with sin and sin must be revealed. If you are wedded to Western or Aristotelian epistemology, you’ll struggle with that concept. You’ll think of excuses such as tactical necessity for denying information.
“What if the terrorists figure out how to build nukes?” They already know how, but may not possess the huge resources necessary to do it from scratch. The knowledge is not the issue. In the grand scheme of things, the only reason terrorists exist is because we have provoked them. Had we begun with minding our own business and trusting in God to provide and living by His Laws, we would have nothing to fear. So long as you reject His ways, God will be your enemy; those of us who walk in His truth will be your enemies.
I seriously doubt the Open Access guerrillas are operating from the same motives as mine. Paul noted it didn’t matter whether those who preached the gospel did so from pure motives; the gospel was being preached. The message was the issue; God would take care of the rest, since it’s His message. I put all trust in the divine for this business. Some will serve His purpose in ignorance, but a few will always know. For them, it’s activism. For me, it’s calling and mission. Changing the system is not my objective; I’m focused on the message. I’m going to walk in the message and system be damned. I’m willing to pay the price when the people guarding the system hit back, because I am utterly certain my God is involved and will take care of things. If I obey the moving of His Spirit in my hands and feet, the results are His business.
I’m asking those who believe as I do to pray for OA guerrillas. Read the cookbook. One of the greatest needs will be storage. Someone has to house this data for future release and it could easily range into the terabytes. Pray they find people willing to host this data, that God will open the hearts of those who can provide this need. Don’t tell me; I’m not part of any insider cell structure. I’m a public face on this. If you want to get involved, decide first if you intend to use your real name. Will your participate openly or do you intend to support the underside? Maybe you are savvy enough to do both. For the underside, create a webmail address at any number of free services and pick a user name that has nothing to do with your identity. Then join this forum and engage the participants with whatever interest you have.
If God is calling you for this, commit yourself to His truth. Obey the calling and trust Him for the results.

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Zechariah 11

Posted on February 2, 2013 by ehurst

This chapter is very difficult to follow in most English translations. It was probably rather challenging to those who read it in Hebrew during Zechariah’s day. There are powerful dramatic images; it would seem Zechariah acted out some of these to symbolize a claim against the Nation of Israel as a whole. The underlying theme is destruction which came in the past, but also would come again in the future, against certain characteristic sins.
The first few verses are dramatic poetry, warning of God’s wrath. The picture is a raging fire burning all the vegetation, starting in the north, working around the east side, then sweeping south and west. Then we see the Lord calling for evil shepherds, offering the unspoken hint that His people have refused to obey the good shepherds He once set over them as rulers. Since they refuse to obey, He would appoint evil shepherds. Evil they want; evil they shall have in abundance. These shepherds would be totally mercenary in their approach, selling their own citizens to foreigners. That is, the kings would lead them in the ways of heathen nations with their pagan deities.
There are two shepherd staves, one represents the blessings of the Covenant, the other a national unity of stability and strength. The business of hiring and firing three shepherds in a single month found literal fulfillment in the past, but represents how God would create instability by rapid changes in government. None of their governments would care a whit for what God had revealed of His ways. They defied the Covenant to the point it no longer had any meaning. God would take the blessings away.
These things were fulfilled particularly in the coming of Christ. His teaching and death on the Cross broke the Covenant once and for all. His people had so long rejected what that Law meant, had so utterly perverted it, the time came to end doing business that way on the earth. From that time on, all God’s dealings with mankind would be only through His Son. Those who were paying attention realized what it meant, a small group who were afflicted in soul at the awful things Israel and Judah had done against God’s Laws.
What was it worth to the people of God that He had done so much for them? How would they receive His own Son? They offered the price of a slave gored by an ox. While this was fulfilled somewhat literally in Judas’ price for betraying Jesus, it simply points out how easily the people rejected God’s revelation. The treasure of all Creation is something they hardly bothered examining, thinking they could buy it off cheaply and make it go away. God sarcastically refers to “this princely sum.” Shortly after the Ascension of Christ, what was left of Judah dissolved in bitter divisions and warfare which took away their national identity. Thus, the staff of Union was lost.
They would be turned over to even worse shepherds who were eager to exploit them. These shepherds would be worse than predators. Then, they would also be judged in their turn.

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Preaching Repentance

Posted on February 2, 2013 by ehurst

This is strictly about religion. That is, the earthly expression of higher concerns, and issues of how to organize the doing of those unspeakable divine imperatives.
Claiming to be a Christian Mystic means nothing if I have no message. I don’t suggest we all stop and drop into some contemplative or prayerful pose and let the world pass us by, as if that were the whole answer. We do that when the internal imperative demands it, but most of the time we are still interacting with the rest of humanity. Those Three Pillars are simply an explanation of things we do in our heads to guide what we do with our bodies.
A friend of mine called yesterday. His theology isn’t much like mine, but he calls because he recognizes the power which drives me is the same as in his soul. He needed encouragement because he was fighting theological battles with others. I told him that was the wrong battlefield. His passion is misdirected. The one thing few Christians can argue against is the call to repentance. I reminded him about the message of John the Baptist and what Christ preached shortly after His baptism.
That message had a crystal clear mystical component, of course. Telling people “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” was not exactly a literal statement. Jesus had no intention of taking over the political situation, though He could easily have done so. And it would have changed very little, because that’s not how God works. That was a major element in what Christ did, by drawing to a close the one very huge failed experiment performed before the eyes of all humanity. Trying to fix human problems with a national identity and human government was never going to work. The prophets had continued for centuries offering all the ways in which it could work, in theory, if only the nation would stay faithful. But humans can’t do it that way. In some sense, that was the whole point of the exercise. The Covenant of Moses was God’s patient proof His Laws don’t have the power to change human nature. They make life better, but their best service to mankind is pointing to a way out of this life.
You have to die in order to live. You can’t do that by your own power; your resources can’t take you there.
No, I didn’t really tell my friend all that, because it’s above his literacy level. But I did say things which could help to point him in that direction. He’s still hung up on trying show how clever he is, rather like the people Jesus argued with about the meaning of His Father’s revelation. My friend’s theology is just plain silly at times, but I don’t talk to him much about that. It’s not important. What matters is faithfulness to the things his mind can grasp, which is the central necessity of preaching repentance. He can go anywhere the wind takes him, to any brand of church he likes, and they’ll accept the message that sin kills, so get out of it. He might listen to that encouragement, but so far he has spent way too much time arguing his pet theology with the pastors in this area.
There is lots of room for repentance preaching. The only reason I bother with deep discussions of Hebrew thinking versus Aristotelian epistemology is because holiness can’t be defined by the latter. It’s really nothing more than background for the call to righteous living. So my blog title is “Do What’s Right” because those unspeakable things will correct themselves if you can just grab hold of the idea that there is “Right” to be embraced. That is, if people can embrace repentance, they will find all the other stuff sooner or later.
Granted, this leaves an awful lot of space for debates. I’m willing to bet precious few preachers will understand my support for Open Access, but I insist this is the righteousness of God and most assuredly consistent with His Laws. It fits neatly into the Hebrew frame of reference, but not with Post-Enlightenment Western social mythology. And while it does seem to overlap with Post-Modern Western silliness, that’s merely by accident. Sometimes the crazy ideas of mankind will stumble into the truth, but they seldom notice.
Still, the fundamental issue on this blog is just what the title says: I want people to consider their ways. Whatever God wants to do with people starts with repentance.

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