Biblical Business Theory

Posted on May 4, 2012 by ehurst

Based on my frequent rants about God’s Laws, we can outline what a genuine lawful business would look like in the USA today.
Fundamentally, the objective is not profit, at least not in the sense commonly used in business right now. It’s about people, customers and employees. You will seek intentionally to become as bloated and overstaffed as you can afford, because people are the only thing important in this world. Extra staff generally means better service for the customer. The idea is improving life for as many humans as possible, so you balance between staffing and keeping prices low.
Pay yourself well as owner, but avoid extravagance. Wealth is not measured in stuff and bank accounts, but in people. You want lots of repeat customers who love you and lots of competent staff who love you. This will keep you alive when things go bad, as they inevitably do (the real meaning behind the Parable of the Unjust Steward, Luke 16). People are always more valuable than any other tangibles on this earth.
Obviously, selling stock and taking out big loans is anathema. Fund it yourself or from partners who have sworn a covenant oath to work together as family. Build it slowly by plowing every excess back into the business. Any partners must work at least part time in the business itself. It is a sin against God for folks to own shares and not be directly involved. Any attempt to avoid personal liability is simply evil.
Your employees and customers are family, too. The best way to handle employee motivation is offering profit-sharing bonuses with all employees. Bean counting is evil, but so is lack of accountability. If they own a piece of the enterprise, so to speak, they’re more likely to work honestly. However, never hesitate to fire verified trouble makers. You’ll have to make the rules as balanced as possible, and listen to your employees’ input, as well.
From there, it should be pretty easy to extrapolate the other details.

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Wildly Fruitful

Posted on May 3, 2012 by ehurst

So very much of life is symbolic of much deeper truths.
I love fruit; it’s my favorite type of food. I’m quite fond of jams, preserves and jellies as a way to have fruit out of season. This is the first year our strawberries have produced enough to begin the process of making jam. I refuse to spray them for insects, so some of the fruit is pretty ugly, with scars and bite marks. Still, it’s just about worth the trouble.
Even better is the wild fruit and volunteer crops popping up around here.
There’s the apple tree behind my house, slowly dying and there won’t be quite so many this year. I believe if I cut off the dying parts, it will probably regenerate, but that takes years to produce fruit. Still, it has to be done. The pear tree a mile away in someone’s front yard, which all and sundry are freely welcome to harvest, is the best fresh eating pears I’ve ever had. I gorge on them during season. I also found a volunteer peach tree and some other apple and pear trees around here.
The early crop blackberries growing in this area are already putting out green clusters. The late crop is decked with white flowers, signaling a good harvest coming later in the summer. We are getting good rains so they should be abundant. Last year I scavenged and got two gallons. During better years I can get up to six gallons leaving a lot of lesser berries for others to eat. Then there’s the sand plums, and I keep scouting for more.
All it takes is the effort for most of this stuff. Half of it is knowing what to look for, and that’s not as simple as it sounds. Late crop blackberries are best by far, but they only grow in certain areas and have vicious thorns. You can only harvest the outside edge of any patches where they grow, and that’s only in sandy soil, high ground and out in open areas away from shade. While early crop blackberries grow all over the place, only where the sun hits them to they actually produce berries. But you have to walk around to gather them, and risk all sorts of other threats: poison ivy, chiggers and deer ticks love the same areas. But I’ve learned to spot likely areas while out riding, and found some great harvests that way.
Some of the finest, wisest minds in this world — perhaps the very finest available — are not in high profile positions, known by name. The best Christian teachers I ever encountered are people you’ve never heard of, people you could hardly find if I told you their names. The deepest thinkers were not professional academics, but people who did the most ordinary things. The face of God glows behind the masks of some folks you’d never give a second glance.
If you don’t know what He looks like, and aren’t looking for Him, you’ll never see Him.

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Mysticism and Disentanglement

Posted on May 2, 2012 by ehurst

One of my provisional Three Pillars of Christian Mysticism is disentanglement.
Try to keep in mind, I don’t take seriously the particular way I think about this, in the sense I promote those three key points — “pillars” — as somehow sacred. It’s nothing more than my personal response and personal formulation based on my background. Surely somebody somewhere could say it better, but I haven’t seen it so far.
The whole point is I leave a lot of things in the hands of those making the choices. This radiates outward to an international level.
First, I need to back up just a bit and note how God Himself distinguishes between individuals and those who wield authority over them. Consider the classical theological distinction between Grace and Law. Individuals can be born of the Spirit; nations cannot. Grace, strictly speaking, is about individuals, and grace never applies to nations or governments. The Laws of God are aimed more at communities, and in that sense, at nations and governments. There are individual applications through extrapolation and abstraction, but the primary focus is the community of those who share that covenant commitment. Mysticism as I write about it rests in a totally different mental category. It’s the path to understanding both Laws and grace. Mysticism is answering the question of epistemology: How do I know what is good and right in regards to my conduct on this fallen plane?
Disentanglement means one thing on an individual level. Nothing I write or say is designed to pontificate for anyone else. It does provide a boundary marker for those who feel led to work with me, to associate with me. If you want to get close to me, this is what it takes, this is how I have to go about it. Tell me what you have to have. Maybe we can meet in the middle somewhere, do you think? Change the formula to any number of individuals collectively and it’s quite different.
I cannot bless a government which goes beyond the boundaries God’s Laws. They don’t have to understand those Laws, only the implications. While it’s better to discuss the fundamental lies of WW2, it’s okay to pick out specifics and say why they were individually wrong-headed. FDR’s demand for “unconditional surrender” was an abomination. We as a nation never had any business telling other people how to live. Our only valid concern is how they treat us. There are distinct boundaries where, though a certain behavior there affects us here, it’s still none of our business. That instinct for trying to run the whole show down to the smallest detail, so as to determine the outcome down to the smallest detail, is Satanic. More specifically, it reflects the rejection of faith in God which is modern feminism; it is not at all a masculine trait. God said women should not be involved in government because the nesting instinct leads them in the wrong direction. The shepherd protects his sheep, and lets other shepherds do their own thing.
If we give an honest examination to American History, you’ll find we wasted little time in losing our wisdom regarding this. Our proclamations never quite matched our conduct in the first place, but even our proclamations show we left behind the good moral choice often derided as “isolationism”. We may profess some grand high morality in loving the subjects of another country, but God forbids us doing anything directly with them. His Laws demand we work with whomever is running things there. It’s the same down at the level of the family. Human authorities of all sorts are required to treat the family as sacred, more so than any other human institution. You can come up with all sorts of fake moral arguments why intervention is so necessary, but God demands you respect the authority He put in place, whether you imagine it was by design or lack of intervention on His part. Just because you don’t like who’s running things in a household, the next city or the next country, it’s no excuse for messing with them. It’s blasphemy insisting God called you to fix all the world’s problems when you are the one deciding what constitutes a problem. He’s better at running things than any of us.
We are responsible to Him for our own issues, the things He says He placed in our hands. Just because we can do something does not mean we should, most especially in the lives of others. It is our duty to recognize boundaries at all levels. I am a person; you are a person. On some issues, I’m dealing with an entity of multiple individuals, and the Laws apply a little differently if I’m dealing with a family household. I presume a certain sanctity there. So it is with every unit of human conglomeration.
Do you understand all this blather about military servicemen defending our country is pure sewage? Not even the War of 1812 was a good cause, and certainly not a single war since then. In every case, our government was doing one thing and talking about another. In no case were the troops protecting the nation, but were used to assert an unjust interference in another nation. Not once did we do a good thing. I give the troops themselves some passage here because they are seldom wiser than the population at large, and our nation has swallowed some unspeakably foul and large doses of propaganda coming out the government. But once alerted, those military people become accountable for all the sins they commit at the behest of a relentlessly evil government. If you don’t by now understand the evil done in our names as Americans, don’t come here and get entangled in the discussion. There are simply too many sources out there for those who care enough to know.
The principle of disentanglement means, not only “mind your own business,” but learn what your business is.

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Time Slipping Away

Posted on May 1, 2012 by ehurst

To me it’s actually quite funny to see the mangled logic of a civilization which does not understand itself.
We have court cases where people have been found incompetent and “evil” because they don’t care enough about tomorrow. We have this wonderful phrase “time preference” by which we officially castigate people for not saving for a rainy day and other uncivilized habits of mind. What these pretensions ignore is the only real difference is the relative length of time focus. Instead of the immediate, it’s the immediate lifespan. In other words, it’s intensely selfish, and the government demands you be so.
It’s okay if you demand people pay their own way, but not when that payment go towards things people simply don’t want or need. I make much of the otherworldly perspective. When you consider the implications, it does make one seem a bit too carefree, but only from the perspective of someone who fears death and demands you fear it, too. I’m willing to put a little emphasis and resources into the now in certain contexts because it purchases something eternal, something more important than living another day.
When you cling to this life, this world, this plane of existence, it produces some really odd results when you look at it. We have this obsession with not making more children, but instead adding length and luxury to your own life. This squelches and perverts the ancient human instinct to share with another, which shouts loudest when resources are short. We are wired to care about others, and it takes a very thorough conditioning to not care. We give a lot of lip service to concern for our fellow man, but our whole civilization is built on doing your best to get rid of him.
It’s hypocrisy at its finest. Perhaps you know that word “hypocrisy” bears the long tradition of coming from Greek theater, play acting, wearing a mask to hide the reality. It’s saying one thing and believing another. However, it’s far worse, because in our civilization it’s more like schizophrenia. We really want to believe we are good and noble, but the problem is our horrific definition of good and noble.
Neuroses are so common in the West because our self-dishonesty is built into the fundamental assumptions of thinking itself.
Time should slip away. It’s not meant to be measured and rationed out carefully, as if there is something precious being lost. It simply is. It’s not what we are wired for, because our human consciousness expects a timeless sense. It’s a clue to what “fallen” means when you realize time itself is part of the penalty. That is, our sense of time and our sensitivity to it is an element in the curse of the Fall. This is not what God had in mind for us, nor was death and a lot of other features of this plane of existence.
This world is a prison we are meant to escape, but there are a lot of other exits which don’t bring us out to the life we were designed to live.

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Epistemology: Miracles

Posted on April 30, 2012 by ehurst

In the Old Testament mystical epistemology, God rules all Creation. He works in Creation, could participate in it if He chose, but is certainly rooted in His Being outside of Creation.
Thus, any “sign” from God could be no more than a natural process, well understood by today’s scientists, yet it would be the context of this event which speaks of God and His character. The whole point behind the Covenants of Noah and Moses was tying human behavior to natural and political factors outside of human control. A run of good weather was a sign from God, as was a series of natural disasters. But some of those signs were genuine “miracles” — events where this plane of existence was invaded by a power much higher and external to it.
Even those words are anathema to a Hellenist/Aristotelian. Fundamental to the Hellenist approach is to assume all things — the entire universe and anything which actually exists — is all one thing. It’s best explained as a single continuum. There might well be persons or beings above our level and our perception, but of necessity still rather like us. Maybe not physically, but not significantly different in all characteristics. Thus, we have the ancient Greek myths portraying the gods as suffering some of our human weaknesses.
For the Science Fiction writers and theorists to suggest something truly alien would be impossible to write. We have no frame of reference for something outside our frame of reference. Still, you’ll find the philosophical questions limited to creatures on this plane of existence. You’ll also see a rejection of the fundamental assumption behind all mysticism, which is this domain is inherently broken. They always insist it could be better, that there are no limits to what can be achieved within this plane of existence.
Even when people suggest other dimensions where time is a notional variable, where there can be a fifth, sixth, seventh, etc., dimension possible, it remains a part of this universe, this continuum. When theory proposes you can leave this dimension and step into another, somehow shortcutting space travel, and even time travel, it remains a concept wherein everything is connected in that Aristotelian continuum.
How would you imagine God standing outside of the space-time continuum, seeing all the universe from beginning to end as a single entity? That it remains to Him ultimately manipulable, and He can do anything He pleases, anywhere and anywhen He pleases, because there is a distinct end-point when it’s all finished and it won’t really matter? That He is more than able to account for what it means in terms of changes both forward and backward compatible, and we would never know the difference if He tested an endless number of permutations to amuse Himself. Actually, since He designed and built the whole thing, no “testing” in that sense is needed.
You see, I don’t have words for it, either. At least the Old Testament writers did have a commonly accepted body of symbolism, built into the very Hebrew language itself. Jesus called it “parables.” Yes, that means any discussion of ultimate reality is somehow other than objective, that it cannot be easily collected, analyzed and studied. It always varies with the context, including who is doing the speaking/writing, to whom, when and where and why. That’s the nature of mysticism, the underlying intellectual assumption it cannot be nailed down here on this plane because this plane is fundamentally broken and unreliable in itself. That consistent behavior of physical matter is actually an illusion, and you really can’t trust such things ultimately, but only provisionally.
Mysticism says the ultimate truth of things can only be revealed from outside this plane of existence. That is an epistemology, and it’s different, totally objectionable to Hellenist and Aristotelians. They demand control over the certainty of things, and reject anything outside that certainty under a series of labels meant to disparage it: subjectivism, superstition, etc. Sorry, but God said the only “certainty” which matters is your certainty in obeying the move of His Spirit, a spirit not constrained in any way by our universe. He said He was capable of giving to individuals all the certainty they needed to proceed, and damn what anyone else thinks. And if you are wrong, you’ll find out later, same as if you’re right. Or, perhaps we could say your certainty is the sense of peace you have, and no one on earth gets to measure or question it.
Yeah, Aristotelians hate that. Sorry folks; I can’t help you if this doesn’t make sense.

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Prophecy and One Percenters

Posted on April 29, 2012 by ehurst

You won’t have to search long in the Old Testament to find condemnations against wealth disparities.
The whole book of Amos is aimed at the ruling one-percenters of Samaria stomping the peasants. The upper classes were fat and sassy — “fat cows” in ch. 3 — while the rest of the kingdom was in bad shape. The upper classes were using laws and customs, but added a greedy abuse and violence to make sure their material progress didn’t slow down.
What Amos assumes his readers understand, of course, was the Northern Kingdom of Israel was all family. That’s the meaning of “nation” in the Ancient Near Eastern world. You can’t treat your family as dirt; it’s written in our very DNA, one of the few actual instincts humans have. This was abuse of blood kin, as the one-percenters were adopting an alienation, as if they had no accountability to God for their own.
Granted, we in the US today are hardly all kin to one another. Yet the principle of abuse by the ruling class by taking property — indeed, insisting their own comforts increase — while everyone else suffers bad economics is regarded by God on a par with murder in the first degree. This is not some communist-socialist crap about social justice; that’s another lie of Satan. No government has the right to take from one and give to another in that sense. It’s also the same as murder. Rather, we are required to adopt our neighbors as if they were blood kin in effect, and treat them with the same level of respect.
Sharp and predatory dealing is evil. There are two symbolic types in the Bible for leadership and rulers: Nimrod and David. The former is a great hunter, a predator who aimed to build an empire around himself. He used religion as an excuse for that, but any other excuse would do. David was by no means flawless, but he at least understood the necessity of loving and sacrificing for his people. He embraced his nation as his sheep, and he their shepherd.
We have built a culture which elevates the predator, and says shepherds don’t really exist, just a fable. God says such a culture is doomed. It’s not a newsflash, America: You are doomed to face God’s wrath. We are all guilty. Don’t think so? Do you watch TV; do you like it? If yes, then you are supporting that same evil culture which has destroyed everything God tried to give us. We have created a world where the one-percenters are encouraged to rape us, so we have no reason to complain. God will still judge them, but we’ll be judged along with them.
Amos warned the Northern Kingdom of Assyria’s rising power, and a mere two decades later, the City of Samaria lay in ruins. In the case of modern America, He will destroy us by our own hands. Those one-percenters are His wrath upon us, fully justified as our just desserts. So resisting them is sin, until you have first made all those radical changes necessary to stand on the grounds of His justice.
Enjoy the future you have purchased with your sin, America.

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The Efficiency of Love

Posted on April 28, 2012 by ehurst

There is far, far less waste in society where agape is a prominent feature.
This plane of existence is one big lie, and no part of tangible reality is valuable in itself. It’s only value is how useful it can be at any moment in pointing out the higher reality beyond this one. If I can use something to demonstrate agape-love to another person, it serves a purpose. Otherwise, it’s just so much trash.
Though not a great one, efficiency of use in those things which serve love’s purpose is a concern. Love is the thing, not the stuff we use to promote love. People who fuss much over efficient use of resources get it all backwards, regarding love as a luxury, with material progress coming first in their concerns. I try to use resources efficiently unless that gets in the way of love.
But it stands to reason a social structure which encourages and presumes love and trust in general will waste a lot less time and resources trying to protect resources. What characterizes a neighborhood where self-sacrifice is only for suckers? Bars on the windows, heavy steel doors, chain-link fences topped with barbed wire. What characterizes a neighborhood where love and trust are the norm? Unlocked doors, open windows, stuff left out where harmless borrowing is not feared.
When predation is the common currency of a culture, lots of stuff is wasted simply trying to obtain the bare minimum for life. When predation is universally excoriated, everyone lives better. When fakery is the rule, it’s worse than open predation. How hard is it to imagine what kinds of neighborhoods we are talking about? You tell me. Go ahead and assign racial values, because we all know what it’s like to live in fear of humans who look really different and can be relied on to act differently.
There are places where you can enter into the society and see that efficiency of love. They still exist today, where people share with insiders, and welcome anyone who wants to make the change and become an insider. Once you get past the barriers of caution against an ugly world in an ugly time, you are loved in these places. Maybe you’ve seen them, but likely not much.
Just keep these things in mind as the world in which we live continues to come apart.

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Spring Garden Shots

Posted on April 27, 2012 by ehurst

First item is the main collection. We interspersed tomatoes with peppers, and each one is different. You may be able to see some early fruit on the purple tomato vine. In the background against the fence are peas, beans, another kind of peas and radishes. Somewhere far at the rear is lettuce.
primary garden vegetables
Second is the red onions. We love them!
several red onions
At the opposite end of this patch is the strawberries. Last spring we planted one large and two tiny sprouts. The drought prevented much fruit from growing, but I watered and fed regularly, and when the rains came back in the fall, they spread out a little.
strawberry patch
In the other patch, we have a wire frame standing just over seven feet tall (2.1m), with cucumbers set to climb, and a couple of stray pea vines.
cucumbers sprouting at the foot of wire frame

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Adults in the Room?

Posted on April 26, 2012 by ehurst

The last thing I want is more dependents.
You’ll hear the joke a good psychiatrist wants you to be responsible and independent, and paying his fees is proof you are getting better. The truth is, almost no psychiatrist works to set you free, but keeps telling you to come back for the next session because you still have issues with this or that. The same can be said for an awfully big slice of all medical care. While there are plenty of doctors who do try to get their patients well, the system under which they labor makes sure they fail. Indeed, Big Pharma depends on making you dependent on one chemical compound or another.
It’s the same with software. The sales pitch from commercial vendors is how they can set you free to get real work done, and letting the machines grind out the repetitive tasks. The FOSS developers try to tell you they don’t want your money, so they are really setting you free. And hey, you can look at the code and see for yourself! If you and I could write code, we wouldn’t need any of those projects. Readers will recall I’ve moaned about how the GNOME and KDE projects have completely set themselves free from user accountability, but that’s the norm. XFCE? I recall the lead developer removed functionality from his newest series, and tartly posted on his webpage if you want it back, code it yourself. I wanted to ask if there were any adults involved in his project. FOSS simply removes the drudgery of having to report to someone who might be a bit more interested in the customer’s needs.
So with commercial software, the user is the dependent child, whereas in FOSS it’s the developers who get to play the petulant brat instead of the user. Instead of the fake “customer is always right” you have a very real “developer is always right” and “user is always wrong.” Yet I wonder why the commercial folks who attack FOSS never discuss this characteristic failure, that FOSS arrogantly and almost violently rejects accountability. The few really successful FOSS projects long term are the ones who strive to serve the user’s actual needs, and there aren’t many of those.
And megachurches? They, too, want to keep you dependent. My complaints about Life Church have yet to be answered, because what I wrote is true of all megachurches, and far too many little churches, as well. They want to keep you dependent, coming back for more. The fundamental claim of the Reformation was the independence of the Christian man to decide for himself certain issues of faith. Yet every denomination arising directly from the Reformation (Lutherans, Presbyterians, Reformed, etc.) have worked very hard to make sure you know your place, there in the pews and filling the offering basket. The only independence is that of the leadership from the Catholic hierarchy.
To the degree I market what I teach and what I do with religion, I proclaim loudly the last thing I want is have you depend on me for anything. Indeed, I often teach the content is far less important than the method of arriving at religious doctrine. I try to provoke you to do your own thing, mostly by challenging you to think about certain fundamental issues. I want you to ask questions, and I fully delight in having people disagree with me about the answers. Don’t sit at my feet, but at my table. This guarantees I won’t be building any empires. It’s not so much I claim to be better than all the rest, but it certainly seems I’m very different from them.
And yet, I hold myself accountable to you, dear reader. If you ask a question, it’s my duty to answer as best I can. I presume to teach you this is how adults act. You aren’t accountable to me, but to whomever you intend to help, inform, guide or lead. Do the job or get out of it. Frankly, being a prophet, whether by intent or by simple effect, leaves you isolated in the sense you will not enjoy at all the clinging dependency of anyone. The whole point is to make folks independent, by teaching them to be accountable to something bigger than us all, however it is you imagine that something. Hook up to the source directly on your own.
Those who reach for that will isolate themselves. If you don’t appreciate the necessity of that, you won’t enjoy your independence. Not the isolation in the sense of no interaction, but in the sense of being one of the few givers, instead of a massive taker. Not wholly independent, but simply refusing depend on others for those things you shouldn’t, and recognizing the difference. There are plenty of things you won’t do for yourself because it demands too much and takes you away from your mission. In those things you take what you can get and don’t fuss too much. These things will isolate you, because there are so few like that.
You’ll long for the company of adults because you simply won’t see that many.

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Childhood Robbery

Posted on April 25, 2012 by ehurst

One of the most pernicious cultural lies is modern silliness about “robbing children of their childhood.”
First off, let’s make it clear: If anyone is destroying childhood, it’s people who use that sort of phrase. These are not good moral people, but busybodies seeking yet one more excuse to destroy the family by government intrusion. The one best hope for childhood is the child’s own family. When government busybodies get involved, every child suffers. Whatever mythology they follow regarding morality is pure sewage at best.
Even when things are going as well as possible, human life on this planet is a mess. It’s fundamentally broken, and it can’t be fixed. Any contrary notion is a damned lie; it’s what Satan wants people to believe. That suffering will fall unevenly across the global population is the result of even more and worse mythologies, so we should hardly be shocked when some poor girl in Bangladesh gets married younger than we consider normal here, for example. No, childbearing at a young physical age is not good, but directly attacking the procedure is pointless if you haven’t fixed the underlying folly which creates such an unpleasant setting.
The same people who decry childhood marriage in places like Bangladesh are the same people who would love to sterilize whole countries to prevent them having so many children in the first place. Such fine, upstanding folks, no? Yes, and let’s force those brown people to all be like us middle class Americans, while we’re at it, okay? We’ll give them shopping malls, debauchery in movies and TV shows, and utterly artless music and all sorts of dehumanizing programming. Yes, and let’s sexualize their children so they have profligate sex with each other, of course, as a normal part of their childhood.
In the name of stopping others from robbing children of their childhood, we see an incredible arrogance stomping on the lives of millions because it makes us more comfortable here in the West.

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