Ancient Truth: Colossians

Finished Paul’s Letter to the Colossians today. Zipping along toward the next volume in the Ancient Truth series. You can find the results here (site gone).

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Zechariah and Feminism

The Holy Spirit surely moves here at my keyboard when I study for the Bible lessons. He typically moves differently when I teach it in person.
I added a paragraph to the text of my notes on Zechariah 5 regarding the second vision, where the winged ladies take the basket away:

We often forget in our modern Western world that the fundamental flaw of feminism is demanding control over every factor in the nesting instinct. A part of the curse of the Fall on women is seeking that control mostly in a materialistic and political sense. Zechariah here assumes such an understanding, that women of faith know they have to let go and trust their men and their God. The little goddess in the basket represents the worst of the fallen instinct in women, which manifests today as feminism. Most people don’t recognize that feminism is simply another face of middle class merchant culture, part of the symbolic identity of Babylon. Godly women would try to keep this nasty instinct out of their community, as do the winged motherly figures in the vision.

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Zechariah 5

Zechariah presents two visions of God cleansing the land. If the people turn in their hearts to His holiness, He responds by granting even more holiness.
First comes a massive scroll floating in air. The wording refers to the common image of a judgment handed down from Heaven’s throne. Not merely the Land of Judah, but the whole earth is covered by the curses of God’s Law Covenants. The Angel notes the two representative sins selected from the middle of the two tables of the Decalogue. Theft is a sin against your fellow man and deception a sin against God. If the people of Judah will cling to the Covenant, their holy influence could change the whole world. God’s curse against sin could destroy everyone on earth who clings to evil, but the faithfulness of His people releases judgment against all sin.
In the next vision, the Angel of the Lord calls attention to something departing. He first points out the thing itself, a basket roughly the size of our modern bushel. Normally it would by holding grain, a standard symbol of commerce. The Angel notes this symbolizes the most important thing in the minds of most people: material wealth. There is a lid of lead on the basket weighing a talent (30kg) necessary to keep the contents inside: a tiny female figure. She tried to get out as soon as the lid was lifted, but the Angel pushed her back down and closed the lid. He referred to her as the symbol of wickedness.
Then we see this basket is born aloft by two women with large wings from a stork, a maternal bird. They were doing the right thing, observing their proper role. They were bearing this basket away to Babylon, where a temple would be built for the little goddess inside, and she was sure to like it. In symbolic logic, there is no place for female deities except on the side of Darkness. Women are forbidden to rule over men. All goddesses are evil; women cannot handle power without harm. In this case, we have a goddess of commerce, the symbol of Babylon’s ancient fascination with material wealth through commerce. That’s where she belongs.
It’s not hard to see where John got some of the symbols for his Apocalypse. God supplies all our needs; seeking the things themselves is inherently evil. This is the fundamental claim in the Law of Moses: Seek God and He will provide all needs. Seek your needs and you’ll forget God, ending up accursed.

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Ancient Truth: Philippians Updated

The work continues apace. The next portion of Ancient Truth: Paul’s Letters has been edited. You can see the webpage version here (site gone).

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Summary of Contention

I’m trying to find fresh ways to package up my weirdness so folks can decide with minimal effort whether I am worthy of their attention. It’s not a sales pitch, because I really don’t mind rejection. I just want to make sure your rejection is fully informed.
The most important thing to know about me is my epistemology. That’s a fancy word meaning basic assumptions about reality, things we don’t debate, but we might describe them so you’ll know what to expect. I’ve outlined my epistemology before and it should answer those who really need a longer explanation.
If you were raised in any part of Western Civilization, you are under a heritage, a background of influences which include the Enlightenment. Pertinent point: Western Civilization at its core is Aristotle filtered through the ancient Germanic tribal culture. It’s not entirely rational, but carries a very deep stain of irrational assumptions. But then, Aristotle comes to us through Greek Mythology, too, so purity is simply not a reasonable point of contention in the first place. It can be boiled down to saying Western Civilization is inherently materialistic, worships youthfulness, and recognizes nothing that cannot be measured (owned and controlled) by human perception.
I cling to Hebrew epistemology (asserting it is also not the same as Jewish). That’s a particular branch of Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) epistemology. Aristotle rejects the ANE, and quite bluntly so. The ANE regards Aristotle as a subordinate clause, a lower default acceptable for very limited use. Thus, ancient Hebrew intellectual assumptions about reality include much of what Aristotle taught, but don’t give it much weight. Hebrew is not the enemy of Aristotle, but Aristotle is the enemy of Hebrew.
Thus, of particular importance to what I do here is my assertion that holding to the Western epistemology guarantees you cannot understand the Bible. Your subconscious mind will be imbued with an arrogant assumption you do understand it, and better than those who wrote it. That’s wrong. Further, the Hebraic approach is what God designed as the proper viewpoint for humans in this world, so if you don’t embrace it, you fight God.
Good luck with that.
(This post becomes a brief reference point for future discussions.)

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When the Prophet Writes Fiction

There is only one purpose: to reveal God’s truth.
I’m not aspiring to be a great writer. I write because I can’t avoid it.
I can’t explain where the stories come from, nor how they get into my head. It’s something beyond the conscious realm of my mind. Lots of stories run through my head, all day, every day. Some of them are simply dialog; some come clothed in much bigger backgrounds. The part I contribute is using words to bring the story out where you can read it, and maybe catch some portion of what drives me from that invisible inner space.
The stories write themselves in the sense I don’t work that hard on them. Out of all the silly threads running in my head, some of them grow so thick I have to tell them or it will actually do some damage. Telling the story makes it easier to handle, makes it manageable. I have too much going on in meat space to allow something like that to consume too many resources; they will do that if not told. I’m crazy enough without making it worse by such obviously stupid choices.
If you don’t like the story, don’t read it. It’s fine if you have a criticism; I may be able to do something about it. But don’t count on it. Sometimes it’s a fundamental element you don’t like and I can’t change it. Some elements come as a package deal, you see. The story ends when the fountain stops flowing, not where you want it to end. I’m not crafting much of these stories, though sometimes I have to add some embellishments because the real core thread simply does not translate well. I have limited permission to edit the script, but I’m not the actual source. The stories seem to have an existence independent of me. Some part of me captures them from that hidden space, a stream of communication rushing past in a torrent wider than the solar system.
Because I am flawed as the receiver, it can come out in my writing rather garbled. Sorry about that. Make of it what you can, or just shake your head and forget it. I’ll smile if you tell me you liked it, but I won’t cry if you hated it. Even your hating it may have some good purpose neither of us understands. Meanwhile, I can not predict consistently how or when they will come. A part of me I could hardly control participates in that torrent and my conscious mind is doing its best to serve, not run the show.
That should make things clear as mud.

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Ancient Truth: Ephesians Done

Finished the edits for Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. You can find the results here (site gone).

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Updated Request for Software Donations

I need any version of WordPerfect starting 8.0 and later, and any version of MS Word from among 2000, XP and 2003.
I’ll explain in hopes you’ll understand and can decide for yourself before God what you can do, if anything. The whole idea behind writing tools is clarity of communication. We hope to offer the best expression of precious truths; sometimes the expression itself is truth enough. While I profess to a modicum of good grammar education, that does not prevent me making errors as I pour out my heart into words. The internal traffic in my brain is not always good English grammar. If we were sitting face to face, what comes out would suffice because I could call on a wealth of non-verbal support, not least our human interaction and shared commitments. When writing for a wider audience, the precision of wording is far more important. It’s not an matter of absolutes, but making things as good as can be without wasting time and engaging too many resources.
I’d love to work with a team of human editors who could improve my output. Only for the most pivotal works (like TMOC) was it worth pulling in that much help, at whatever cost to those who helped. It was a lot of work, but I’m proud of the results. Unfortunately, I still have an awful lot of other stuff I need to write. The burden is huge; I’m driven beyond my reach, but can’t stop trying. I don’t want to burden others with helping write unless it seems important to them. No one has stepped forward to volunteer as staff editor and that’s fine. I’d much rather you obey your own driving force, regardless of how that might leave me on my own.
But there is one thing you might be able to do for me, if you feel inclined. I can get by in my work with the grammar correction offered by software. But no single grammar program is enough, as you might expect. Each is based on a different algorithm, and each is frequently right and wrong in different ways. We can’t trust them wholly or we wouldn’t need human writers in the first place. For now, I’m using the grammar checkers in MS Works 9, MS Office 97 and WordPerfect 6.1 on my Windows 7 (64-bit) machine. The latter two run in the XP Mode emulator, and WP 6 does it poorly at that. The emulator itself is a bit taxing on the computer, anyway. But I find the balance between WP’s Grammatik and MS’s grammar checkers pretty good for helping me correct what comes spilling out of my mind. I’d like to use software that doesn’t require a virtual machine, because it’s very clumsy and time-consuming.
While morally I can defend anyone using pirated software, God won’t let me do it personally on these projects. My copy of MS Office 2003 came with a pirated volume license key. I can’t use it in peace. If you have a key you aren’t using, I’d love to have it (MS Office 2003 Professional). I note the software itself can be legally downloaded if you know where to look. It runs just fine on Win7; I’d rather not use anything later than that (I hate the “ribbon”) but I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth. As for WordPerfect, I believe the breakpoint is around version 8. Those who have WP 8 say it works okay on Win7, as do all later versions. While I can download a trial copy as far back as WP X3, I’d have to have a disk for earlier versions. If you have a recent key you’ll give me, I’d love it, but if you have anything before that, could you send me the disk instead? I believe OEM versions install without a key, and I’ll be glad to use that. I have one reader working on finding a copy of WordPerfect later than my 6.1, but he seemed dubious he would succeed. Even if you don’t have anything to offer yourself, perhaps you could ask around among your our resources.
In case you are wondering, my computer was donated, not working. I got it working and it’s a marvelous tool, but I could never afford anything like it on my own. It really socked my resources just getting a monitor and hard drive for it. For those of you interesting in seeing how God answers such requests, I’ll be making updates to this post if/when the situation changes.
Update 1: I got my hands on an old copy of MS Office 2000, anonymous source. It’s functional, though updating is impossible. MS orphaned it some time ago. I can’t find a copy of that huge SR1 they released awhile back. Still, it’s working without having to run an emulator. I’m okay with this until someone offers something better.
Update 2: Found a returned copy of Corel Office X5 cheaply enough through Amazon. It’s now installed and all appears to be well. Thanks for your prayers.

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That Personal Touch

No other force among men on this earth can equal that of family bonds. No one is more influential on you than people close to you.
What made Hitler so powerful? That faux family feeling. The allies who won WW1 were vicious in victory, crippling Germany extraordinarily. The German people feared, and Hitler built on that fear, feeding and fostering greater fear while offering a false solution. Today, almost every Western government is doing the same thing. As we chase the threads of this idea back through history, we see it was not so powerful before the birth of Western Civilization.
The one best legacy of the West is isolation. The one best legacy of Hebrew society was the very opposite of isolation. The whole aim of Moses’ Law was social stability, a sense of safety and support, a context in which the revelation of God would make the most sense. Outside that context, you cannot hope to understand revelation. It goes back farther to the Covenant of Noah. Through Hebrew eyes we see the essential demand from God was for household elders to restrain their wayward children. In case you missed it, a major failure in Eden was Adam’s laziness in his calling as spiritual shepherd. The social stability God was demanding in Noah’s covenant would come with a harsher crackdown from the clan and tribal elders in a world where no other social structure was imaginable. If you didn’t live in an extended family setting, you were fair game for anyone who felt threatened by your presence. Ostracism and isolation was death.
God says that is how it should be until the end of time. We don’t see that easily from our Western perspective because it’s alien to our culture. Satan has succeeded handsomely in nullifying God’s Laws by making them impossible to understand.
Our human nature demands a safety net, a social structure which protects and gives stability. Every social system other than God’s ideal offers only a poor imitation at best. The West fundamentally destroys that tribal structure so that other forces can gain control. The pretense of objectivity, utterly impossible with humanity and worthy of ridicule, renders us all vulnerable to any number of predators. The worst predator of all is non-family government. Under the guise of public order and welfare, the most unimaginable crimes are committed, and people are taught to think of them as “good.”
Nothing — no, nothing — replaces the power of your family influence except the Spirit Realm. That Higher Plane is inherently familial in nature. When you are drawn into the family of God, nothing else on this earth matters. Since most of humanity have no genuine connection to the Spirit Realm, we who have it are obliged by God to emulate the essence of it here on earth. Every evil in human society on earth today hinges on keeping the family out of things, making a virtue of people “standing on their own”. People cannot, do not, and will not ever stand on their own. That is an idolatrous false image of what is possible. God will insist they fall. You can picture it as the nature of things or His active hand, or any combination of the two, but everything raised against God’s divine plan for humanity will fail.
Here on earth, the very closest we can come to a spiritual family structure is not in the blood kinship, but in the covenant. Kinship alone is not enough; covenant trumps kinship. The Law of Noah demands families commit themselves to a covenant of social order — that is the substance of what Scripture says in its own context. Any structure, any legal system or policy, which seeks to reduce the covenant ties among men is an attack on God.
Want to reduce drug abuse? God will support a program in which family reaches out to their own and works with the problem child until they regain that measure of self-control necessary to escape substance addictions. Teach them to lean on family, not their own devices.
Want to reduce tort liabilities and lawsuits? Make every person involved in a company personally responsible for results; remove the legal fiction of corporate “persons”. Require everyone with any portion of ownership to work personally in the business; permit no other forms of investment. This removes the incentive to abuse everyone and anyone for the sake of profit. Yet it does not prevent profit. If the entire operation is family, there can be no union-management conflicts, and abuse of the consumer is much less likely.
This won’t solve every problem, but will reduce them to manageable levels. Even warfare becomes almost sane. If we want any of the good things we claim we desire in this world, we have to radically remake our world by remaking our understanding of what God demands.
Nothing replaces that personal touch.

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Ancient Truth: Galatians Updated

Managed to finish the next section in the current working volume of the Ancient Truth series. For those anxious to see the results, find it here (site gone).

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