Recovery of Rez 11

Posted on December 1, 2012 by ehurst

His quarters were tiny. The contract placed everyone in his class of independent operators in a decommissioned hotel of sorts, itself waiting renovation. It needed it badly. Someone in the room next to his was making an awful racket during one sleep cycle, so he was not at his best the next day. He found himself waiting for a wall to be cleared and the workmen were struggling with corroded fasteners. That’s when he caught himself, too late, looking at the woman.
He had turned off his camera, and was staring aimlessly into the space above door level on a store front. Seated on a folding chair, when a figure passed close to him, his eyes followed when it stopped just a few steps away. The wild coloration of her hair was what got his attention, rather like exotic bird plumage.
She was tall, but he saw right away part of it was from prosthetics. Apparently she either used an implant for the purpose, or had been wearing this stuff a long time, because she moved quite easily and comfortably. An awful lot of people around this place had different types and configurations of such prosthetic devices, and some were clearly not yet accustomed, but this gal was the exception. He estimated some portions of her figure were also artificial but the overall effect was surprisingly pleasant to see. As his eyes swept up her body, he froze when he realized she was looking back at him.
Their eyes locked for an instant, just long enough for him to decide there was nothing behind hers, no soul. Instead, he detected that same bottomless hunger he had seen before. Inside, he shivered. Perhaps some tiny measure of his disappointment registered on his face, but he closed his eyes and turned away. He knew that very thing would be taken differently by different people. He was hoping she would be turned off by it, perceiving she had failed to impress him, which was the truth.
He was wrong. She must have taken it as challenge, but he didn’t know until later.
The workmen had finally removed the wall section exposing yet one more inexplicable device with wires running to it. He made quick work of it because his display indicated under penetrating wavelengths it wasn’t too complicated. Just a half dozen shots, and it was transmitted almost immediately over the uplink with time and location. He turned to check if the transmitter showed another assignment yet, and found her standing right in front of him.
Her prosthetics probably offered variable height, because while he was sure she had walked past slightly taller than him, she was now facing him at eye level. She held out what appeared a human hand, and introduced herself as Kehli, spelling it for him. The flesh of her hand was a little unnaturally soft, he decided. With the absolute minimum of words, he offered a pseudonym for himself. He maintained full eye contact simply because he refused to let her intimidate him, despite the black feelings lurking at the edges of his mind.
Over the centuries, various corporations had explored just how far they could go with prosthetic enhancements of their mercenary troops. Eventually such large scale modifications became too unprofitable. Given most warfare could easily be confined to machines and AI warfare, there was always a place for assassins, people who were expensive to train and equip, but highly effective with carefully selected prosthetics. However, the only barrier to finding other applications for such technology was simply costs. Someone who could earn enough pay could easily purchase whatever level of enhancement pleased them. However, most of the people who did this were the same empty souls as any assassin or torturer — psychopaths with no conscience at all. She might as well have been a demon possessed robot.
Rez was like every other young man growing up in the colonies, having passed through the same mandatory military training for defense purposes. He could never be as fast or strong as someone using prosthetic enhancements, but he understood with an absolute certainty he would probably have to use his one advantage some day in physical conflict. During his recovery with the Brotherhood, he had added back some of the martial arts practice to his regular pre-breakfast workouts. He wasn’t thinking about whether he could defend himself against a raging prosthetic enhanced psychopathic bitch, but was calculating how he could avoid finding himself in need of trying.
All of this went through the back of his mind while he was listening to her explain she was a senior executive in the management of the facility in which they stood. He was tempted to run down that hall at that moment to escape. She was theoretically in his chain of command, as it were, someone who had access to his contract. Instead, he thought of a way to rebuff her suggestion he join her for dinner after his shift.
It wasn’t lying to say he had other plans. His actual habit had been to climb the access shaft to the huge curved surface which served as a roof on the place. The wind was just about strong enough most evenings to keep him from hearing too much else. The workmen had a long pause in working on the roof waiting for materials, so he was usually able to find an isolated spot to be alone and virtually invisible to the rest of the people on this planet. He would eat a simple meal up there as he continued exploring the landscape of his newly healed soul.
Perhaps in a previous era of human society she would not have dared be so forward as to make such an invitation, but the ebb and flow social fashion here and now made it common for women to be pushy. She said with a clear note of coldness, “You need to reconsider your answer. I’ll be back later.”
As she turned and walked away, he could swear he saw her rise a few centimeters in height.

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Intellectual Ambush

Posted on November 30, 2012 by ehurst

Dear Readers: Yes, I’m full of it. And today I’m just brimming with prophetic fire. I keep seeing stuff which provokes my spirit. So while I apologize for the excessive posting, I cannot apologize for obeying the imperatives of the Spirit Realm. What follows is something I’ll be posting permanently later today, but here’s the preview. It’s an intellectual ambush on political activism:
Activism and the Kingdom of Heaven

Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. (2 Timothy 2:15 NKJV)

There can be no excuse for modern translations which change “rightly dividing” into “accurately handling”. Paul is a Hebrew man giving us a parable, and his use of Greek is no excuse for ignoring the underlying Hebrew form of communication. The image is a butcher who trims off the fat and offers a lean cut of meat.
The Old Testament was “the word of truth” in Paul’s day, not as taught by Jews and their man-made Hellenized Talmud, but as Jesus taught it and as it was in ancient times. It is the truth of God clothed in Hebrew culture, history and intellectual assumptions. Cutting off the fat does not mean ignoring all that and reading the Bible from our modern Western assumptions. That would be cutting off the meat and fat and saving only the gristle. Not much nutrition there. For the most part, Western Christianity is pretty ragged and starved because it attempts to abstract entirely too much, and loses everything of value.
The first and biggest mistake Western Christians make is embracing Aristotle and the Enlightenment, and ignoring — sometimes even attacking — the Hebrew intellectual approach to the Bible. Without the least apology, I assert with the Bible reality consists of Two Realms, the Fallen Realm of the Flesh, and the Eternal Realm of the Spirit. The latter is utterly and eternally beyond human intellect. It can be understood only in the reborn spirit of those God brings to life. The mind can learn to obey the executive decisions of the Spirit, and learn to implement divine imperatives, but it cannot hope to grasp them, and certainly cannot evaluate them. Western Christianity sometimes manages to pay lip service to this understanding, but seldom actually operates by it.
This gives rise to a vast ocean of false understanding, resulting in false conduct. In particular, virtually the entire Western Christian establishment is politically active in one flavor or another, all of which they claim is a result of Christ’s teachings, which claim is bordering on blasphemy. I would never suggest God no has interest in human politics, but His interest is clearly stated in Scripture, only to be perverted by those who approach the Bible from false assumptions.
Thus saith the Lord: If your politics don’t reflect what’s written in His Law Covenants, your politics are damned. When rightly dividing His Word in the Old Testament, you cannot possibly understand His Laws until you understand the unspoken prerequisite: a tribal social structure and tribal patriarchal politics. Not as you imagine them to be through the lens of very bad fiction, but in the reality of life as exhibited by folks like Abraham, the Patriarchs, Moses and King David. Each of these men had flaws, and the Bible wastes no time in telling us what they were. Holding Ancient Near Eastern feudal patriarchal values was not a sin. That was righteousness.
So when you see sin around you and you feel compelled in your spirit to speak out against that sin, make sure you first are seeking to build righteousness, not some fresh error. Nothing about the modern secular state pleases God. The very notion itself is from Satan. If your activism takes shape within the presumption of preserving that system, you are an activist for Hell. God’s politics are tribal.
Want to march and wave banners? Start with the one change absolutely necessary for building a godly political system. Clamor for tribal social structures, and for government which respects the demand God made for elders to rule their own extended family households even up to matters of capital punishment. Place the weight of responsibility on clan and tribe. If you aren’t promoting that ANE feudalism, you can’t do any righteousness in your political activism. Everything else is openly contrary to God’s Laws, the teachings of Christ and that of the Apostles.

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God's Justice

Posted on November 30, 2012 by ehurst

I’m not trying to build a new religion so much as break up bad religion. Most of the time that means offering my religion as a counter, but that’s because I understand my own beliefs best. Still, a part of me in the background holds open the door for you to reach out for something at variance with mine, something which you sense will work better for you, even as I help you break up the calcified junk which isn’t working for anyone.
Often I use the term “God’s Laws” and then suggest a better term is “God’s Justice.” Even that brings along baggage which makes for bad religion. Lots of cultures recognized deities associated with justice. The Phoenicians recognized the goddess Dike (dee-kay), which translates directly into English as “Justice.” A critical element in their thinking about her was the idea of comeuppance, not so radically different from karma. While I find an element of truth in that, it is hardly the whole story as I understand it from the Spirit Realm.
God’s Law Covenants seemed to say certain things to our modern eyes because we have no mystical heritage to help us make sense of what they wrote. In the Hebrew mind, there was an assumption you could recognize a higher meaning, even if you couldn’t say much about it. So the Hebrew Scriptures assume you will read between the lines. Yes, you would assay observing the Law Covenants as applicable, but you would know better than to worship, as it were, the written and conceptual expressions. The Law was not god, but an expression of His nature, a depiction of what He wanted on a higher level. It was always recognized the Laws as written could not possibly fit every context.
A critical assumption in God’s Law Covenants was the necessity of reining in the fallen fleshly nature of humanity. There are boundaries which, if crossed, would cause trouble. The Laws of God are presumed to answer a very real need of taking seriously the business of not stomping on others when you start walking toward something you want. You must assuredly account to God for how you treat others, and accept the responsibility for sharing this broken reality with others.
Your appetites are not evil, but how you seek to satisfy them could all too easily work evil. Humans are required to account to God for how they deal with their appetites in light of the very real necessity of not hurting others unnecessarily. It’s not a question of rights; that’s the wrong model. It’s the question of responsibility, accountability before God. You aren’t supposed to dream up your own way of getting there when something God has revealed covers it well enough. What He says must not be ignored in your calculus of how to proceed. His revelation includes a demand people prepare themselves to make disobeying His Laws rather difficult.
Fundamental to this whole business is limiting, and even correcting, the behavior of those who would ignore and violate His Laws. The first order of business is helping your fellow man see the error of his ways. Thus, any legal policies would first and foremost consider establishing a knowledge of the limits, and then penalties which encourage people to restrain themselves. Most people will, most of the time. It is eminently doable. The second concern is trying to restore what was taken or lost. It’s not always possible, but it’s easily visible when reading between the lines as a fundamental concern.
The critical point of failure is forgetting it’s about people and social stability, not about some objective accounting on some cosmic scale. The person holding you accountable must be a member of your family, your kinship community. There can be no claim placed upon you by a wider society. Oh, and any covenant family can serve with the same authority as blood kin. This is so completely alien to us today we can’t imagine a society where people expect this kind of thing. Yet all of the Law Covenants together as a whole make absolutely no sense at all until you place this social structure as the unspoken prerequisite.
When you hear someone using the phrase “rule of law” you can be sure they are, at best, making a god of some imaginary objective standard enforced by a secular state, if not making a god of the state. To then suggest God’s revelation has anything to do with such a concept is sheer blasphemy.
Yes, you are always accountable for your actions. It is unavoidable some of the most obscure choices you make will affect others. Some of that they’ll simply have to live with, because this world cannot be perfected. But the true measure of what is or isn’t just in terms of how we interact with others is found in that moral fabric, not in human logic. The ultimate truth cannot be arrived at by human abilities, but relies entirely on revelation.

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Recovery of Rez 10

Posted on November 30, 2012 by ehurst

It was when the academy went through the process of adding their accreditation to his identity that he realized his implant was a little unusual. It was as if he could section off that part of him and not reveal it. Standing next to the implant reader, he noticed he could call up the accreditation or push it back into some unreadable part of the memory in the thing. A little more experimentation, and he discovered he could change his ID reference code and some other interesting registers in the implant.
He chuckled, then realized, while the cause was technological and randomly in his favor, it was an appropriate metaphor for what he had gained from the Brotherhood. The odd features in it made it possible for him to alter his official identity to match what he might feel was his imperative for that moment in time. He reset everything to the standard defaults, but savored the train of thought it introduced.
One of the first things he needed to do was get a job and visit somewhere else in the galaxy. The listings revealed several jobs, but something in the most mundane of them spoke to him. There was a refurbishing project in some obscure old merchant complex, and the workmen kept uncovering odd devices which required someone capable of making and processing images of these things. Some of them were from several centuries in the past, performing functions mechanically which had long since been turned over to electronics and energy fields. Rez had a knack for knowing how to capture the best angles for quick analysis.
A little research told him the place was one endless maze of building and passages housing the widest array of niche market players in the galaxy. It was no longer a big player in the primary markets, but a huge collection of fiercely independent survivors among the various specialties from a large number of star systems densely packed in that area. He wasn’t fully conscious of why it seemed so important to him, but at least a part of him was aware it would be hard to find something which would broaden his experience with humanity more than that.
And while he doubted he was anywhere near ready for another romance, he was quite certain he knew what it would take for someone to draw his interest again. The Brotherhood helped him understand he had no business investing any emotional energy in someone so needy. It would require at the very least someone be driven by what drove him. He was not going to be a sucker for plain animal attraction again. He needed a partner, not a distraction.
The job contract provided lower class travel, a circuitous route and much more time consuming than usual. He was glad for the opportunity to become better acquainted with himself. It was the first time in his life he wasn’t bored by delays and inconveniences. Life itself had become quite an adventure, and there was always something needing just a little more time to understand. He doubted he would ever have the talent or skills with vocal communications so prevalent among the members of the Brotherhood, but he was absolutely certain he could live what they taught him. He was the message himself, as it were, and he was quite happy for the unseen forces outside the universe to steer him wherever they wanted him.
Oddly, all of this didn’t radically change his behavior too obviously. When things got crazy, he still presented a placid front. But whereas in the past it had been the blank face of utter confusion, now it was the blank face of unconcern. He didn’t rely quite so heavily on physical memory and his implant to get him through a crisis. His choices now had purpose, and he actively tried to hide the advantage his implant gave him. Only once did he turn off the implant signal to get past an automated gateway, which was designed to lock in the presence of an identifying code, but allowed freight to pass. He really didn’t want some bureaucratic ass making him miss his connection and losing a whole week waiting for the next ship heading back toward the galactic core where his job waited.
The backlog of work orders wasn’t too big when he finally arrived; he was able to catch up in just three days of working intensively and longer hours than usual. He was contented and enjoyed something which allowed him to ignore people for the most part as he went quietly about the chores. The imaging device was decent and allowed him a full range of adjustment to make the most of enhanced shots. Once he caught up, the dead time between assignments could be rather long. Rez was glad he had three days of observation to measure how people generally behaved in the place. With just a minimal interaction with the technicians disassembling parts of the structure, he was able to save them time by not requiring the odd pieces of equipment be fully exposed. They only had to be accessible to his hand.
The one thing most changed by his time with the Brotherhood was learning not to laugh so quickly when something struck him as funny. Some of these workmen and other functionaries were surprisingly easy to offend, and it required constant watching and evaluating to keep track of it all. But because of what he learned, he was able to keep a rather Stoic demeanor which seemed to work pretty well. Still, he often caught himself wanting to stare, and had to learn to use his camera and heads-up display surreptitiously.

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Accountability and Change

Posted on November 29, 2012 by ehurst

The primary failure of Western epistemology is focusing exclusively on measurable results.
The product is not always the goal or objective. The moral fabric is woven into existence invisibly, and the Spirit seeks commitment to things which are verbally and logically indefinable, but which can be indicated by imagery. Truth cannot be taught, only caught, and only those spiritually aware can catch it. Our spiritual awareness taps into an infinite supply of patience when we recognize the vast majority of those we encounter will not understand. That doesn’t affect the imperative we bear to reveal the truth in what we do and say.
Accountability is faithfulness to the truth. It’s seeking to conform to the moral fabric within creation which is both invisible to the eye and obvious to the soul. Divine efficiency is in how we escape of this world, not maximizing things in it for their own sake.
In seeking to make myself accountable to you, it’s not simply a matter of letting you have a say in what I do. I may well respond, but only if your input strikes a chord with the imperatives driving me. Rather, the issue is one of letting you choose, of openly and honestly letting you see everything so you an decide whether you want to be involved. My whole approach assumes you will have your own imperatives, and that’s the whole point of what I do here. I want more than anything else for you to feel the same kind of fire I do, not to make you a clone of me.
I can’t imagine a world where even a tiny slice would agree with me on everything I say. What I do hope to see is a small slice of humanity who find enough of my expression tolerable so that we can share some things we have in common. There is more common ground than most Western minds imagine, and more room for friendship and cooperation than most of humanity is prepared to entertain. Peace is not compelling others to do it your way, but allowing others to back away and not be involved if they find something uncomfortable.
This is entirely inefficient when you measure it objectively. Peace is sloppy and very expensive; it leads to reinventing the wheel over and over again, and massive duplication of output. That’s because the wheel and the output aren’t the point of the exercise, but human progress within their own imperatives. Granted, we’ll run out of resources long before we run out of imperatives, but how we handle that is part of the imperative. How we make room for someone else to get their share of resources we all use is what makes for peace. Nor is peace the absence of fighting over those resources, but peace is in how we justify morally the way we compete for things which we are driven to use.
Nor would I presume everyone is going to agree with my judgment about even that. Accountability says I take responsibility for not cheating you, but allowing you a full accounting of what I see and think, how I intend to act regardless of your level of accountability. I realize there is no way I can boost your accountability by reducing my own. I fully realize most of the world will not play along, but that has nothing to do with it, either. I must be accountable; that’s my victory over human failure.
My teachings overlap Christian orthodoxy, but they are hardly orthodox. Even when we acknowledge how the word “orthodoxy” is always relative to the folks deciding what is and isn’t orthodox, the whole point is not adhering to some imaginary standard regardless who imagines it. Rather, accountability is doing the best I know in letting them see and letting them honestly judge for themselves. I tread that fine line between trying to speak to their context without compromising the distinctives.
As a man driven by the parable of the shepherd, I need for you the full freedom of deciding whether you want to put any of your sheep in my care. It’s okay if you would rather not investigate and decide intelligently; it’s not okay if I try to manipulate you into that. Even in this blather I am being accountable. Do you really want to spend time reading my blog posts? Every time you read, I am hoping you include that question in the process. Why you may want it is another question, and I don’t have to know that, but it does make for good friendship and a stronger peace between us.
I am accountable. The very process of accounting demands attention and a bit of life drained from both of us, but that’s just a feature of our fallen and broken existence. This level of existence was never that important in the first place; I am seeking to reveal something which is that important. The options are limited, so how I handle them is itself morality.

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Recovery of Rez 9

Posted on November 29, 2012 by ehurst

The Brotherhood claimed they held no secrets. They had always been willing to teach anyone interested in their stuff. However, the vast majority of those who came in from the outside to learn decided it was either incomprehensible or just hokum. Yet a few seemed to understand, but were unable to enlighten anyone in the majority who didn’t get it. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood turned out a lot of patients who were made sane again, albeit always with some curious changes in their personality.
According to the Brotherhood, they simply restored the humanity most of mankind had lost. They weren’t arrogant or snide about it, but made no secret they regarded most of human space with strong cynicism, and a measure of disgust. They had never tried to take over anything and had always been content to live in relative isolation. The one thing everyone knew for sure was the Brotherhood could not be bought. This was the primary reason they were so often hounded from one place to another. What the almighty corporations could not buy was a threat when things were unsettled.
Still, they could never be stamped out. Just when it was presumed they had been isolated to a single planet, and that planet was destroyed, they suddenly popped up all over the galaxy again. Whatever it was they did and taught always seemed to outlast everything which came against them. So it was when Rez was brought to them, there had been a time of relative peace and they were doing their unique work much to everyone’s admiration.
Rez didn’t remember the first few weeks, and the Brotherhood didn’t seem to think it mattered. At some point, the pain in his soul ebbed just enough for him to realize he was scared to live and equally afraid to die. He worried if he died he wouldn’t be able to escape the nightmares which haunted his shredded mind. Some part of him knew he was never alone in the room, not for long, but there was not enough difference between the healers for him to tell them apart at first. That is, they all seemed to have the same intensity of caring while never invading his space.
His first conscious awareness was of music. It was soothing, seemed to resonate in the deepest corners of his mind. As best he could describe, it was almost as if the music squeezed on the darkness and nightmares, folding up small areas like an accordion wall and letting him see just a tiny glimpse of light. The atmosphere of peace and isolation helped more than anything else. Between the music and gentle presence of the attendants, always the same few faces, always quiet and trustworthy, he began finding the few bits of himself he could recognize. Eventually he emerged painfully from the dark place where he had been hiding.
That peace was expressed in immeasurable patience, as if those attending his needs really didn’t have anything else to do. Eventually he managed to notice the physical differences, but for a time it was the same small group in rotation. They spoke rarely unless he spoke first. It was both disconcerting and yet reassuring when they seldom answered his queries directly. Often he felt they were answering some other question entirely. Yet, it always seemed to be the answer he needed.
At some point, the questions brought longer and longer answers. The initial focus was for Rez to find himself. There seemed a lot of rooting out the mythology of others, only because it was necessary for him to write his own mythology. They didn’t seem to think reality needed to be so solid and trustworthy as was his self-concept. He learned not to trust perception and reason, but to dig for something much more substantial, to grapple with what was bigger than himself. The nightmares became silly little lies. They weren’t gone, but had no power.
None of this followed the methods of psychology which were part of his education, yet all of it was recognizable. It was recovery by paradox, something he had scarcely heard about. It was considered a joke in his classes, but he wasn’t laughing now.
“You can live only when you are ready to die. You can’t win until you no longer care.” And so it went. He never was unsure how or why, but it made sense. Some part of him was absorbing all this, turning it into something solid and permanent. They helped him understand what had shaped his past. He didn’t have to blame himself for what happened yesterday, but it was completely up to him to decide if there should be a tomorrow.
It completely reshaped all his expectations. Not simply the facts about the wider universe of which he was ignorant as a colony boy, but the moral significance of things. The whole universe was just a gauzy film which could hide things, but could never make anything clear. Clarity was to learn how to pull back the wispy curtains and see what was behind it all. The Brotherhood didn’t rehash with him the details of what the girl had done to him. Instead, they helped him see what she really was deep inside, a desperate soul without a bottom, an endless need he could never have filled, nor would anyone else. She was a moral black hole, sucking the life out of everything and everyone near her.
During one of the teaching sessions, it occurred to him to ask about the fabled Big TD and if they knew what The Boundary meant. “Rez, our human conscious minds can only exist within a certain perceptual space. We experience the passage of time and the existence of space as limits on our consciousness. Even when traveling in hyperspace, we have to carry a cocoon of awareness or we’ll go utterly and fatally insane. Yet there is a part of us which belongs outside those boundaries. Mere intelligence is unable to fathom that, so AI can’t cross The Boundary, because it’s merely an extension of human intellect. Intellect belongs inside the time-space limitations. But the human soul is much bigger than the mind, and is designed to cross that boundary. If, during your human existence, you don’t choose to start reaching across The Boundary, you won’t like what happens when the end of your life drags you there.”
Eventually, he recognized why he had survived. He came to see how she had in some ways done him a favor. Never again would he be a sucker that way for anyone. Having been to the bottom of that dark pit of human fear, he would never fear on that level again. He had nothing left to lose, but he was sure he had something left to do before things came to any kind of end. Not precisely something to accomplish, but there was something he needed to put his hands to, something which called his name. The Brotherhood denied he owed them anything, but they had given him the one piece of sanity which justified facing the insanity of the cosmos one more day.
Rez had his own imperatives, not thrust upon him by any other human.

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Ancient Truth: Paul's Letters

Posted on November 28, 2012 by ehurst

I realized I had never written an introduction for Paul’s Letters because I had written them up as individual studies. If this turns out having too many pages, I’ll have to break it into two volumes. What follows is the new introduction for the next part of the series:
********
We are introduced to Paul and his teaching in the Book of Acts. We learn as much by the false accusations of his opposition as we do from the record of Paul’s words and actions as recorded there by Luke. We learn early enough Paul sees his work merely as a continuation of what Jesus did and said. By no means should we imagine Paul regarded his letters Scripture. Yet the early churches must have deemed them too important a repository of truth to lose all of them in dust of history. We know for certain we do not have them all, only these which have been preserved for whatever reason.
The greatest threat we face today is from those who insist on ignoring the context of these letters. The burden is upon us to understand the recipients, and occasion, but most of all the broader context of what Paul taught as a whole. Paul was a Hebrew man, a lawful citizen of Judah, along with being a Roman citizen. He had a foot in both worlds. He was not simply a highly trained Jewish scholar, though he was that, but he spent years reviewing his entire rabbinical training in light of the teaching of Jesus. He did this all before he ever became acquainted with the Apostles. With Jesus, Paul rejected the Hellenized Judaism in favor of the ancient Hebrew Mysticism of the Old Testament.
Paul is so reluctant to boast, he barely tells us how he learned the gospel message. He proctored the stoning of Stephen just a matter of weeks after Christ’s Ascension. A few weeks later he’s on the way to Damascus to extend this persecution, is converted and stays there in town. From there, he hints at spending time alone with the risen Christ in Arabia, up to three years. From there, he returns to Damascus, but has to flee. It was only then he met with the other Apostles, and they agree what he learned is what they remembered of their time with Jesus. After that, he goes home to Tarsus for as much as a decade. Only later did he begin his missionary journeys.
He was so thoroughly literate in Greek, he could make up words from Greek roots and they would be understood. He used Greek expressions and modes of thought, but he consistently uses these things to express a generally Hebraic mystical faith. Thus, we see him pulling in very ancient Hebrew customs as native to first century Christian worship. It is he who reminded Timothy it was necessary to parse the Old Testament through the Holy Spirit to discern what was mere symbolism so as to abstract what was binding on the conscience of a Christian. The answer to that would surely be greater than zero.
These letters are not at all in chronological order, but in order of importance as the early churches viewed it. The actual chronology is very hard to ascertain, and may not matter in some cases. For example, we know Galatians came early, but we have only guesswork when. It would seem the Thessalonian letters came earliest, shortly after he got to Corinth estimated around 52 AD. He wrote the Roman letter while dealing with problems at Corinth a few years later, writing more than the two letters we find. We collect several of his letters as Prison Letters from Rome (Philemon, Colossians, Ephesians and Philippians) often considered 60-62 AD. The letters to Timothy appear to come rather later in his life. Most people agree Paul was released from his first Roman confinement, but was arrested again a few years later and executed roughly 66 AD.

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Moral Accountability

Posted on November 28, 2012 by ehurst

Accountability is the eternal question; it can be addressed from many angles.
My faith asserts we are all accountable to God. If there is one thing I will seek verbally in holding your feet to the fire, this is it. Even to the point I would rather deemphasize talk about God Himself if that would get you to listen, I want to press this issue. Go ahead and ignore my religious expression. If there is anything about which I would even approach being an activist, it is in promoting moral accountability.
Naturally, we’ll argue about how to derive the ground of understanding what is and isn’t morality, but I dare say most people know when something they see lacks accountability. I’ve moaned about it missing from the Open Source software community, and Linux in particular. I invested many good years Linux, promoting it myself. Frankly I feel very much betrayed, because Linux is not what I was promised by those who promoted it, and for all I can tell, they were supported by the very people who give us what Linux is. What remains is a significant collection of projects in Open Source are not simply unaccountable to users, but range between elitist dismissal of user input, all the way to very open hostility to user input. There is no sense of “customer service” because the Open Source way makes the developer god, unaccountable to anyone else.
“Code it yourself, the source is open,” they say. If we could code it ourselves, we would have no need of your projects. But we do need them, and you refuse to provide what we need. Instead, you let people lie on your behalf and we invest our time and energy, and it comes up short. So now I tell people, “Windows is bad, and Mac is worse, but you are more likely to find something you can use when you stick with the established commercial stuff.” Naturally, I do use some Open Source software, but I run it on Windows, because there are a few projects which seem to hold themselves accountable to the users. Sadly, those projects are not pivotal in whatever Linux is when you try to use it. I go so far as to say my God is angry with this abusive attitude from the people who make Linux a viable alternative, because they are making it less viable, being in many ways far worse to the user than Microsoft and Apple and all their snotty, smirky selling of users to the highest bidder. In the process, MS and Mac at least do respond just a little to loss of reputation and money. The leverage is small with the big corporations, but with Open Source, it’s just about zero.
This is not about what software I recommend, but I’ll offer this much: Opera and Chrome browsers (Opera especially for email), GIMP photo editing, gVim for text and HTML markup, Cygwin for CLI software, and VLC Media Player, FFMPEG for media conversion, PySol and jShisen for games, and the rest depends on what you seek. Some of those do require dedication to learning them, because they aren’t easy, but they work exceptionally well, offering a level of control which makes me comfortable. They do it for me.
But the church can be even worse about accountability, and that’s why I spend more time with my Savior outside the institutional religious organizations than inside. They have become unaccountable on the very most important things I face every day in my faith. In what God demands of me they want no part. So I am accountable in warning you to be aware most churches will in one way or another abuse your trust; they certainly have abused mine. While a great many Christian people tend to be rather nice, and they try to do what they sense is good and right, when you raise certain issues their souls slam shut, and no amount of facts and spiritual persuasion can help them understand they are clinging to something not at all in Scripture. The details are elsewhere on this blog, but if you need my response to specifics, ask.
I rather expect rejection of accountability from government. People who like having power over others are not good people. Good people don’t want power over others, and accept it only with the greatest reluctance. Good people try to avoid having to exercise power they hold legitimately, because they have a powerful sense of moral accountability, and the burden is weighty, indeed. But we look at the world around us with holy cynicism and don’t expect much, even as we make the clarion call to consider better things. But it’s an old saw: We expect sinners to sin.
It’s when someone claims the moral high ground we are most rightly skeptical.
You won’t catch me claiming that ground. I will confess a desire to stand there, to live there, but I don’t pretend I own it. What I do have is my experience with things, and that’s all I can offer. Yes, I will claim I am standing in a place where I do reap some serious benefits of moral probity, however limited it might be. I recognize a certain Law binding on my behavior and I see the blessings of that Law in my life. Hey, it might work for you. Maybe just a sliver is all you can use, but that’s okay with me. I can only assert how it works for me, and even to the shedding of blood I’ll cling to that.
Yet time and time again, it always seems to boil down to accountability. Answer that one great moral demand, and it seems a lot of crap dries up and blows away.

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Recovery of Rez 8

Posted on November 28, 2012 by ehurst

As nearly as he could understand, Rez thought perhaps she was only trying to prove he wasn’t so morally strong as he claimed. At first were the subtle questions, the testing which always seemed to manipulate him into saying something she could make him regret. Why she never simply left him for someone else was beyond him, but she kept making these tests more intricate and complicated. She began enlisting help from others, he was sure, but never found out who. In fact, he later realized he never even knew what she was studying at the academy, but what he knew about the curriculum could have explained some of what happened.
Knowing it didn’t help. Somehow she managed to create a false reality around him. He would leave for a short trip, come back and she would overwhelm him with an emotional welcome back. He would lose himself in her intoxicating embrace. Then just as he was sure everything was okay, she would start the game. When he was most open and vulnerable to her was when she struck hardest. It was back and forth in waves, first in passionate heat then in passionate words of distrust. She was using forms of manipulation he never understood, things which simply and plainly caused him to doubt reality itself.
There were times he had to test the floor under his feet to make sure it was solid, and then still not too sure. The technology and tricks she used literally drove him insane.
So on that one last test at the end of the term, when he was assigned to visit a distant planet system which had an assortment of old mining equipment, she demanded he not go. Of courses, it was impossible. After another session of twisting reality around him, Rez was ready to flee to the ship just to hide from her.
Things did not go well. The ship grabbed a hyperspace anchor point and spun the space past herself. Upon entering real time and space again, they encountered one of those incalculable accidents. A rather small bit of rock bounced off the hull at precisely the moment between coming out of the anchoring point and before the shields went up. It wasn’t too awfully bad, the crew thought, just a dent in the skin showed in the exterior cameras.
The cameras lied. While it was no more than a simple dent, it was in the ship’s skin adjacent to the cargo bay airlock. When a crewman entered the bay to inspect, the airlock cycled automatically. Someone back at academy dispatch forget to include a minor detail regarding the area they were visiting: It had been mined for heavy metal crystals formed in ways no one could comprehend. That bouncing rock had left microscopic slices in the hull. Upon cycling the airlock, the whole dent suddenly became a gaping hole with loose shards of skin flying around the bay. The crew had to evacuate quickly.
They waited for a bot to clean up the mess but none of the standard temporary seals would work. They had the raw materials for custom patch, but not enough for large holes. It required calculating for the microscopic details of the damage, something not typically available on a ship’s computer. It meant someone using a handheld camera, and the image would have to transmitted back to the academy. They tried repeatedly, but between the signal issues from all the clutter in the area and the unusual nature of the damage, Rez’s instructor simply could not get a proper scan. The calculations came back too imprecise.
Naturally, Rez demanded a chance to try. Viewing the screen display in his suit helmet, he was able to estimate the precise location for the camera on a half-dozen views. But there was still the issue of transmission. The captain decided to risk using their small store of slow propulsion fuel and backed away just a bit from the asteroid belt. It was all entirely too risky, especially for a training mission. So while Rez managed to save the day and they finally got it all patched and were able to limp back to the academy port, no one could save Rez. The entire experience offered a stress level few space veterans handled well, but Rez was still a bewildered student from a backwater colony.
He never remembered exactly what it was; no one else saw it. His girlfriend had managed to plant a message on his personal device. As soon as he touched it to record something for her, it came to life. Whatever it was, it pushed him over the edge. During the routine check on the personnel before coming out of hyperspace, they found Rez curled up in a ball, his personal device shattered on the floor beneath his bunk.
The actual electronics of such devices were microscopic. The whole thing was done by automation, designed and built by computers, and consisted of various strands of exotic artificial molecules. The most recognizable part was the display, which still had to produce an image which was human readable. The ship included an analyzer for most common electronic devices, standard equipment on such voyages. When Rez’s device was scanned, the computer suggested there was a high probability someone had added a 3D projection module. This would explain why so much of it was burned, since it would have drawn almost all the battery power in a single flash for just a few moments of projection.
All they knew for sure was it had something to do with his fellow students at the academy. The automated medical scanning showed a comatose young man who did not respond to any of the array of things they could do to him. Whatever was there at the academy was a threat to him, so taking him back was out of the question. After some back and forth with academy officials and some others on the planet, the only reasonable hope was to see if the Brotherhood could help them recover their huge investment in one very promising student and hero.
The ship switched to another anchor point in hyperspace and took Rez back to the same star system they had just left, because it happened to be where the Brotherhood had their hospital.

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Ancient Truth: Acts Published

Posted on November 27, 2012 by ehurst

Image depicting a section of the deeply rutted diolkos wagon road used in ancient times to carry freight across the Corinthian Isthmus in Greece

Cover art depicting a section of the ancient diolkos wagon freight road.

This is the cover of the latest in the series of Ancient Truth Scripture commentaries, this time on the Book of Acts. The image was provided by Holy Land Photos and shows a section of the ancient diolkos, the freight wagon road across the isthmus at Corinth, Greece.

You can download your free copy here. The updated web version is here (site gone). Enjoy!

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