Bits and Pieces

Posted on April 19, 2012 by ehurst

We used to make a big deal of the Waco slaughter, and I still recall the bumper sticker: “Is your church BATF approved?” But when independent researches pulled off the band-aid to reveal the putrid lies beneath, that sound bite missed the point. And then the Murrah Building bombing, Terrance Yeakey, Kenneth Trentadue… and now we consider those pretty minor. Not forgotten by any means, but simply the opening salvo of the war on citizens. Now it’s Waco everywhere, every day.
Some changes come slowly, and we realize them later. My self-identification as a Christian Mystic came after a decade of slow shift. Other things come as shocks. When Waco first came across the TV channels, I was on the government’s side. A few years later, when the Feds got me kicked out of my church, I realized what a fool I’d been, and tossed all my DARE Program stuff into a bonfire.
Don’t get me wrong; the Branch Davidians were a hideous bad religion. But that was not the way to deal with them. They weren’t that kind of threat. I can understand what got JFK murdered, but for all the digging, it seems Waco was just blundering into something. No real threat to anyone, just a confluence of bad trends coming to a head. There were no good guys, and too many bad guys on all sides, making too much out of nothing. Trentadue’s murder was the same kind of thing, only more stupid, a simple case of misidentification. Yeakey I understand, because he was going to blow the lid off a huge cover-up in the Murrah Building Bombing, itself something too bizarre to contemplate.
Each of these events are like old friends. If you are a thoroughly independent type person, as I am, most of your friends will tend to be the same. It’s not that I don’t care; I’m very warm and touchy-feely with those who tolerate it, and ornery enough to do it with some who don’t like it. But if whatever made us good friends goes away, we don’t stop being friends, we simply don’t have any reason to communicate all the time. So if I see my best buddy from the time I served as a Military Policeman, we’ll share a big bearhug and talk about our lives. Then we’ll part all warm and fuzzy and not talk again until the next encounter, whenever that might be. I don’t have any emotional need to keep things warm and fuzzy if there’s nothing to share. What we did so much of together in those days is no longer possible. So it is with those conspiracies. I’m not spending much time these days digging into the various cover-ups, but I’ll read any new discoveries if I run across a report about them.
And on days like today, I remember both.

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The Hardest Bondage to Break

Posted on April 18, 2012 by ehurst

While many have tried just as hard, I reject the notion anyone tried any harder.
I went through all the same doorways as everyone else. I got my ticket punched at the all the right stops. There was an ugly taste in my mouth at some points, but most of my peers never seemed to notice. The few who did seemed to have gotten over it. It only got worse for me. I kept trying every possible option I was offered, but it just didn’t work.
Most recently I gave one last shot at something which seemed untainted by all the old rules, but that’s because the rules were simply not written in plain sight. It was worse than ever. The one thing I was trying to escape was more suffocating than I could imagine.
I’ve given up. I’m moving on, and I won’t be fooled again. I cannot follow Jesus Christ in any currently existing organized church.
While that implies there is something terribly wrong with all of them, that’s not the point. Churches have always been messed up, but the worst ones take themselves too seriously. By that I mean the folks inside the group who embrace the particular groupthink of their brand do not realize all organizations are fallen humanity organized. The organization cannot be sacred, because God is a Spirit. The communion in the Spirit is not the organization. Whatever it was He said about His Church was not a statement about human institutions. On this I am most at odds with Catholics and the various brands of Orthodox, and I make no apology for calling it a heresy. (But then, who the heck am I, right?) Yet I have found the same basic assumption in every church organization I’ve encountered. The higher up the organizational ladder they go, the more thoroughly have the people convinced themselves God isn’t seriously interested in the others.
And not a one of them allows the notion you can follow Christ outside their particular organization, let alone outside all of them together. That’s okay, because I don’t need their permission. Nor do I need their cooperation.
I can be friends with, and fellowship with, any believer who takes the notion they should fellowship with me. That will always happen, because there will always be people who are loosely attached, not yet ready to let go for whatever reason. You know what’s really crazy? Way, way too many of the folks who say they’ve made the same break as I have are still chained to the same debates which characterize those inside the buildings. I have yet to encounter a single other house church group which isn’t still intellectually bound to one denomination or another. It’s one thing to be aware of the debates, and to have a unique answer, but it’s another thing entirely to think all that stuff really matters. It doesn’t matter. But the people still matter, because God can work through anything He likes.
It’s not hostility on my part. But they won’t let me walk the path I must walk while working within any existing organization I can reach. The last few weeks have seen the last bridges burnt down, and I don’t even have any matches. Lots of fire for the mission calling within me, but I can’t possibly turn that off. If it burns something, that something was tinder looking for a spark, made of the wrong stuff. I’m willing to stay away from them all for their own sakes. There won’t be any engagement either way, neither as a call to reform nor an attack to dismantle; I’ll generally ignore them and hope they return the favor.
The hardest thing you’ll ever do is, in your mind, realize almost everything you’ve been told about a particular subject is a lie. It’s the same discovery which led me to break with the mainstream in so many other ways. If this is insanity, I’m happy with that, but don’t try to lock me up, because that will get you hurt. I won’t even have to do anything; I’ve seen that often enough. More than once I’ve walked away from something, leaving broken shards all over the ground because the framework came apart without me lifting a finger. It’s the saddest thing you’ll ever see to realize everyone claiming to work with Heaven insist on using straw and dirt to reach up into the sky. If you aren’t borne aloft by the force inherent in the thing itself, you can’t get there.
I gave it a fair shot, and I simply don’t belong there.

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Rape and Mythology (Updated)

Posted on April 18, 2012 by ehurst

Perhaps the most disturbing part of modern mythology is about rape.
First, let’s review the basics. We have a certain amount of our human nature which is hard-wired from Creation. Further, the curse of the Fall adds some other features. The Laws of God (Moses, Noah, etc.) reflect our current wiring as humans. We are not bound by the Laws, but use them as a source to understand, and are encouraged to abstract principles of justice using Jesus and His Apostles as examples of how to do it. Where we stand today is atop several layers of mythology between us the bedrock of reality. We seek to strip away the intervening layers of mythology to get back to reality.
(Update: Think about what I’m saying here, folks. All of Western Civilization is crap; it’s one of Satan’s greatest achievements. I’ve been attacking Western intellectual assumptions for years and if you have just stumbled across this post as your first visit to my blog, get a clue before you bother commenting and defending Western Feminist lies. I am faithfully reporting what God has taught from ancient times, and He’s not impressed with your opinions to the contrary. Neither am I.)
Modern social and legal definitions of rape are pure crap. Rape is forced sex. The Laws indicate the basic requirement is that the victim resists as much as they dare, including a cry for assistance. Yes, we have some thinking to do about how modern criminal techniques may reduce the likelihood of resistance or raising alarms, but by no means can mere regret justify a claim of rape. Women are highly variable about such things, and all too likely to lie about it. That’s a fact. On the other hand, we also cannot imagine the necessity of a death penalty for raping a woman married or engaged. The whole thing is of necessity pretty messy and our entire cultural gloss makes things worse.
Nobody denies women can be traumatized by life, but even that depends too much on our flaky Western culture. Still, it can be shocking to the point of serious injury to the psyche. So can a lot of other things, so we cannot let this one thing stand out as deserving of some special handling, as if physical penetration of any orifice is somehow more taboo than all the other horrifying things people do to each other.
Rape is a violent act. However, that does not mean it can’t be a sexual act at the same time. Unwanted sexual intercourse is not the definition of rape. The reason we have so much brouhaha over this is because we have one of the most licentious societies in human history, and that confuses just about everything in terms of the ancient roots of human justice. So this discussion here assumes we already recognize God’s revelation says sex is just and right only when between a husband and wife, period. You can extrapolate as you like if your morals are different, but that’s where we start.
Unwilling sex does have a place a place in society. What is the old English phrase for that? “Humbling a woman.” Place this in the context of the advice given by some women in recent history, suggesting sometimes a contentious woman simply needs a hard riding and she’ll behave better. Perhaps you know a woman who is smart enough to be appropriately submissive to her man. Our cultural connotations for that are all wrong; the point is she knows whose team she is on, and doesn’t fight her own husband when he takes the lead. It doesn’t mean she’s cowed and afraid of the world. A strong woman is a gift if she turns her combativeness onto the outside world and defends her man.
Women do respond to strength in man. Perhaps his strength of charisma is enough, but when it’s not, there are other ways to get her attention. She has no right to resist her own husband. If she were too much a problem, I’d send her packing in the first place. Not all men are like that, nor do all men live in a context where that’s an option. How much force does it take to remind her? Force is not inherently evil.
We have enough problems with human wretchedness; we don’t need to create imaginary crimes.

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Unexpected Success

Posted on April 17, 2012 by ehurst

Self-doubt need not be crippling.
Without apology I claim there are processes above the intellect which can be distinguished from emotion, and superior to any formal reasoning. Most people become vaguely aware of it through intuition, a process just outside the conscious intellect by which we arrive at conclusions without formal reasoning. We intuit an answer based on something more subtle, and going with it works well enough we learn some measure of trust for it. In essence, it’s a mental shortcut, an ability to process outside the conscious mind. That’s as clinical as I can get, except to note you can improve your intuition by asserting some effort in learning patterns.
During my military training, I was fully conscious of the whys and wherefores of what they were doing to us. I disagreed with most of it, but understood why they thought it was necessary. The military presupposes the most untalented mass of humanity. Because it teaches to that level, and constructs training based on that assumption, it actively interferes with human talent. Most of your real abilities will be rudely shoved aside. You won’t be permitted to use your talents, and promotion depends on forcing your talents to fit the pattern. The point, of course, is maximum survival in combat, as it were. Everyone has to be taught to act the same so the dummies can keep up, so it’s all dumbed down. It boils down to drills which ensure approximately appropriate responses to surprises.
It works okay, but the long term trend sucks the life out of innovative thinking which keeps things improving. We are stuck with tactics that don’t work so well against our current enemies, but well enough they can get away with trumpeting their successes. Our troops tend to survive okay, but they aren’t beating anybody who doesn’t use the same tactics. We get that much only because our enemies are even less competent. A truly competent enemy would eat our boys alive, and require far less men and resources to do it.
But life remains full of surprises. We continue to see how training is okay, but only if someone in charge has an actual education to go with it. Someone has to absorb the whole purpose, and also have a broad acquaintance to how humans operate. Even with the military now requiring some college for even enlisted troops, we lose it by having such a complete failure of colleges to actually educate, and the military still assuming the lowest common denominator — doing so with a vengeance. The whole point is to make everyone with the same certifications interchangeable, which requires dehumanization. So while such training is not a waste for someone with a full awareness, we could surely do better all the way around.
At one time our education did recognize the necessity of cultivating non-conscious operations. It wasn’t in the same terminology as I use, but you can detect it by how it worked. Well educated men knew there was something some men had which could be caught, but not taught, and they made the most of it. We can reliably expect future generations as a whole to ignore it even more completely, even as a handful rediscover it. I don’t claim to have it, but I’m willing to bet I have a piece of it.
Some fifteen years ago the Internet was new to me. I made all the same idiot mistakes as most people typically do, in terms of interacting with other users. This was aggravated by a very powerful turmoil in my soul as I began shifting from the Western orientation to something long forgotten. I ran through a serious depression, among other things. In other words, my netiquette failures were far worse because of other serious issues. The symptoms were a very slender clue to things much more serious. So a serious improvement will also manifest the same.
Twice in the past few weeks I managed to respond to something far better than I knew at that time. I was confronted with something unexpected, not just in what someone else said, but in the full context. I was agitated, but the emotions didn’t get in the way of a really good intuitive response. I wasn’t fully aware of just how appropriate my response was until much later. You have to understand how dramatic a change this is for me, when blundering and making a fool of myself was previously ubiquitous for me.
This is just a small sample of other things going on in my world right now. It’s far more than mere intuition, as I strive to walk the talk of someone who claims there is a spirit-Spirit communion possible which can steer our behavior far better than mere human logic. On the one hand, I was gripped by this belief, held by it for several years before I actually experienced anything I could point to and say, “There it is.” Well, it’s starting to show up. Now I’m getting a taste of how it can actually work.
Something inside me was utterly certain of this long before I tasted it, and I knew the problems were in me, not the ideas.

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Justice: Behavior, Not Cause

Posted on April 16, 2012 by ehurst

An offline question regarding the previous post raises an issue worthy of a separate post: solipsism.
Solipsism is an orientation, a philosophy which states or assumes the individual doing the thinking is the sole reference point. There is no credible pretense to objectivity, to making room for the thoughts and feelings of others. In my religion, this is one of the most deadly sins. It’s one thing when you realize you can’t really know what goes on in the head of another, and working humbly off your best guess. It’s another to assume your answer is the only one which matters.
In its ultimate form, solipsism is psychopathy. It’s really hard to tell sometimes when someone has crossed that line, so we are better off envisioning a sliding scale. But when your entire social structure assumes certain privileged groups are allowed to get away with solipsism, that is far more serious than any substance abuse.
The problem with alcohol is not the alcohol, nor the drunkenness, but the bad behavior and harm to others. It applies in other ways. The problem with hate crimes is not the hate, but allowing oneself to let hate steer your behavior.
In my religion, bad motives are castigated, but never assumed. However, the Laws of God plainly state you can’t regulate human thoughts, only human behavior. Do this; don’t do that. In the case of the Ten Commandments, it was about results. It was legal policy and warnings against human foibles, not law per se. It was, “Keep this in mind when you read the laws.” In those times, suzerain-vassal treaties always had the policy first, then specific laws followed. Penalties were based on actual harm and only those aggravating factors which can be proved. The proofs are pretty simple, because searching out complications was regarded as a problem in itself. Thus, leniency was built in, because it’s better safe than sorry when it comes to justice.
Modern Western laws go too far in projecting motives, making it entirely too easy to escalate penalties. This is unjust in God’s eyes. We should leave the internal causes to the person with the problem, and penalize the harm they do to others. Granted, the Old Testament Hebrew cultural view of harm was radically different from ours, but we are the ones making a huge mess of things. We are the one nation with the highest per capita prison population, and at the same time one of the most fragile societies ever seen in history. The only thing holding us together is the ponderous size.
Meanwhile, there are literally millions of drunks who harm no one but themselves. You’d be scared to death if you knew how many people drove around inebriated, but never get caught. It’s not because the police aren’t trying, I assure you. It’s because these drunks manage to drive without doing anything stupid. Then there are the dopers, too. We have a much bigger safety issue with prescription drug users than from stoners. Our social dishonesty on refusing to respond to actual harm is stunning.
Internal family problems with substance abuse cannot be handled as a crime in my religion. I assure you the number one mistake we make is not having as a norm the extended family household. Without it we cannot solve most domestic issues; with it we have at least a chance of useful intervention. No one outside the familial bond has any business making decisions of that sort. This is the one and only effective means of intervention, and prevents having to develop such a vast and horrifically broken law enforcement system as we have now. We consider a social threat problems which are nobody’s business but those involved.
Finally, the single greatest problem with alcoholism is our cultural psychosis which causes so many people to act differently when they are sober versus drunk. If you’ve ever experienced a culture where the only difference is some extra sense of merriment, you realize we have something deeply wrong here. Something in our culture creates a boiling danger hidden beneath the surface which explodes openly under the influence of an inebriant. Until we start working on solving this, justice is utterly impossible, because the very foundation of our society is injustice itself.

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Dishonest Dries

Posted on April 16, 2012 by ehurst

If you ever drink alcoholic beverages, you’ll understand.
There is a significant portion of humanity who inherited a horrible weakness, making them virtually unable to control certain compulsive behaviors. The particular weakness varies. Most alcoholics suffer this sort of genetic flaw; they cannot stop drinking by their own volition. I’ve seen it firsthand too often. And as an ex-cop, I’ll tell you the number one cause of car wrecks (not counting fender benders) is substance abuse. I’m all for taking their license if they get behind the wheel incapacitated, and jailing them on the third offense, and taking their car. Of course, that’s three strikes which expire after a reasonable time limit. But the current system itself as implemented is a criminal fraud.
As an ex-cop, I will also tell you there are few industries so corrupt and powerful as the Prohibitionists, AKA “Dries”. Their presence in the government is ubiquitous. No, not honest ones; among bureaucrats, many of them do drink. But they have a vested interest in keeping the lies and laws in place. Most of the statistics come from this industry, and if you have proof to counter their lies, you can’t get published very easily. That the big beverage producers are another corrupt industry is beside the point; you’d be amazed at how much they work together with Dries.
The War on Drugs isn’t working to reduce drug use, only raise the price and make a select group of politicians and bureaucrats rich. Prohibition didn’t work because the mob and government weren’t working together as well as they do now; but they won’t try that again. Instead, they use “drunk driving” as the excuse for enacting laws which serve the same effect as Prohibition. I’ve seen a guy with a BAC of 0.10 who passed all the sobriety tests, but I wasn’t permitted to write that in my police report (BAC 0.08 is the legal upper limit). I’ve seen commanders order their MPs to use up badly flawed BAC test kits, giving known false readings because there is big money behind DUI convictions. It didn’t matter if they fell under appeal because that got far less publicity. I am told it happened in civilian police departments, too. How many lawyers would dare to fight this stuff? They get paid more to compel their clients to cop a plea.
In terms of real justice, the BAC means nothing, because you and I both know human resistance to alcohol varies wildly. There’s an amazing hypocrisy regarding other human factors which limit the ability to operate a vehicle. What matters objectively in terms of car wrecks is whether they can operate it within safe limits, never mind why not. If we had honest tests of capability, there would be far fewer convictions, and a whole industry would fold and have to get honest jobs. Here’s the kicker: The folks at the top of this mess know beyond all doubt the current system is not working, but they keep it in place because it makes more money than one which actually worked.
If that’s not bad enough, the most dishonest Christians I’ve met as a whole have been prohibitionists. They lie to themselves. Never mind ignoring the obvious meaning of Scriptures, such as where Jesus was accused of being a drunk because He enjoyed tipsy celebrations. These are the people who lock onto that false statistical data and what they believe it implies. They memorize vast reams of mythology about it. This conditioning goes so deep they utterly convince themselves if you drink at all, you must be an alcoholic. They’ll give lip service to the idea some drink responsibly, but when you see how they talk and act, you know they don’t believe a word of it. I’ve seen Prohibitionist Christians literally hang around known drinkers (though not in the bars, of course) waiting for them to confess.
Were you aware of the vast money and corruption behind Alcoholics Anonymous? Not so much from the organization itself, but the money it represents for those who make the official referrals and sell the materials. Have you heard their intellectually dishonest tripe? Granted, the original AA program had flaws enough of its own, born from a very badly broken model of psychology, but what you see today is the results of bad hijacked by worse. Some places I’ve seen it done right, but less and less these days.
At times I’ve done some volunteer work with addiction recovery ministries. AA members go from drunk to crazy. All it takes is one brush with these people and you understand the mythology: Everyone who drinks must be an alcoholic, because you simply cannot justify drinking under any terms. First, they bury themselves in the notion they can’t handle it, then they project that back on every one who dares take a sip of beverage alcohol. Usually they simply exchange one addiction for another, because the new one isn’t illegal. It’s the same business in all the different AA-based therapy models for other types of problems — overeating, pornography, gambling, etc. But the worst part is the government makes this one program compulsory, regardless of flawed implementation. There are no alternative therapies. Oh, it works, after a fashion, but it can be worse than jail if you don’t actually need any part of it.
It won’t make a bit of difference what I say about my own personal habits regarding alcohol. Having pulled the scab off this infection, I mark myself among Dries as a drunk. In other words, with Dries in general, and far too many AAs in particular, it’s like talking to a brick wall. I am not in the habit of debating with inanimate fixed objects, but I assure you it would make more sense than talking to the average Dry. They don’t even have the advantage of claiming mysticism. Dries spew forth all sorts of manufactured “facts” and deny any facts contrary to their dogma. Communists love this kind of people, calling them “useful idiots.”
The point here is not to start a debate, because that’s utterly pointless. Rather, I was hoping to add a little information about what I discovered hidden in the background so sane folks would know to be more cynical about it. Meanwhile, the whole thing reflects yet one more fundamental flaw in our schizophrenic Western culture. But when a Dry reads all this, he’ll swear up and down I’m simply “justifying” and deceiving myself.
And people accuse me of shirking objectivity.

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Burned Enough, Thank You

Posted on April 15, 2012 by ehurst

Perhaps my readers will tolerate just one more rant for the day. I promise, this one will be short.
Nobody should have to put up with me who doesn’t want to. Really. While I still have this burning sense of purpose, by no means would I impose on anyone while pursuing it. Over the 55 years I’ve been alive, I’ve been member of quite a few religious organizations. Precious few were the times I felt at home, felt I could be myself and not have to suffer the insufferable. I don’t mind absorbing the consequences for ignorance and generally blundering around; I rather hope everyone will be direct with me when I do stuff which doesn’t fit.
I’ve left most of those organizations after realizing there was considerable dishonesty behind the scenes. If nothing else, folks were simply not being direct with me. They would privately judge me stupid and useless, but were unwilling to tell me for any number of bogus reasons. Things like that will eventually slip out, and when they do, it’s a lot more painful than just telling me to get lost. I still have the highest respect for those who were honest enough to tell me I was no longer welcome, and why. There aren’t many of those in my memory, because most of the time I found out later.
In a different category are the places I left because it was all too obvious I didn’t belong and it had nothing to do with them being sneaky. I could see they wanted something I couldn’t give them, and staying would be misleading them.
For the same reason I hold in contempt men who subtext, I despise Christian leaders who feel they have to cloak their digs in subtle language. That’s not simple disrespect; it’s a form of hatred. I’ve lost count of how often I’ve run into that. It’s one thing when someone simply has trouble communicating. The world is full of people misreading each other for all kinds of innocent reasons. Most people are humble enough to accept the blame for a failure to communicate, even when they aren’t sure what they did wrong. They care, and that makes them superior humans. But those who refuse to apologize for anything at all, or are insincere about it, deserve full contempt.
I really do have a mission to communicate certain thoughts, and I’ve been willing to grovel as a novice in many organizations as a fair price for being heard eventually. Sometimes it was a bit much, but I don’t take myself that seriously. Please feel free to insult me personally here; I don’t delete those things, as you can tell from the comments in previous threads. Most of it I find funny. Loud, brash and playfully abusive is just fine. But I will get tired if you seem to pay no attention at all to my response and keep harping on the same things. This is my blog, my bully pulpit. Get your own and offer a link if it’s on topic. What I take seriously is my message.
A part of me understands, but I’m not sure I can explain why it is I am so unwelcome in so many Christian settings. Meanwhile, I have a warm virtual friendship with folks who have a different belief, a different religion, or none at all. The Bible says Jesus had no trouble making friends with social outcasts, and I’d like to think I partake of some of that. I’m just a little sad because the folks who are supposed to be on the same side keep shooting at me as an enemy.

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About Alcoholic Bevarages

Posted on April 15, 2012 by ehurst

This is a rant, not a research paper.
I expect lies from the world at large. Wherever there is profit in lies, they will most certainly be told. That’s on top of lies which really offer no particular advantage, but appear to, or are simply for the sake of entertainment. I get tired of hearing the world’s lies from Christians.
A primary example is the large temperance community among Christians.
The notion it’s a sin to indulge arises from the same people who brought us Arminian theology, sociology, the Salvation Army and liberal theology in general. (Look, the SA are nice people, but their legalistic theology and rigid structure stinks.) It’s all part of the same package. It’s the idea you can scientifically devise a climate which forces people to be moral, which then goes deeper to the damned heresy there is no Holy Spirit who can move in the hearts of men. They deny man has a spirit, insisting the human intellect is the upper limit of things. Fix the environment and the intellect and all will be well, they say. This whole mess is one of the logical paths left open when you embrace Aristotle and deny the Spirit Realm.
Yes, I’ve read lots of stuff from that branch of Christianity, and I did so well after I got my training in philosophy and logic. Read between the lines and that’s where their words take you. Notice how they implement what they say, and you’ll understand it doesn’t mean what it appears to mean. I could publish a book to show the thread of logic here, but if your intuition works at all, you’ll grasp how I got here. You’ll see how those who have swallowed this blasphemy are brothers in arms with a whole range of folks who think they can bring God’s redemption to earth by taking over the governing institutions. They seek to impose holiness, but they can’t even get that part right, because they reject all the underlying assumptions of God’s Laws.
Prohibition didn’t fail because it was poorly done. It failed because God is against it. Look, if God had a problem with drinking, He’d have made Jesus dry. Jesus did correct a lot of false ideas, showing how Moses’ Law was actually pretty loose on some things (like divorce), but if He consumed fermented grape juice, that’s because it was okay. Alcohol is not the issue. Nor can you say it’s in the DNA. Yes, there are people who have inherited a weakness for alcohol — one taste and they go berserk. There are such folks, but we can’t allow them to become the poster children for everyone else’s discomfort. Most of humanity suffers any number of similar types of weaknesses, complete lack of resistance to one vice or another, but Christians fail to include the whole counsel of God on this. I’m sitting here typing this and resisting temptations which would destroy me, because they involve things I can’t control by any human means. Yet if the control does not come from within, nothing man can do as a whole will fix that.
When a human becomes spiritually aware, when God breathes life into their dead spirits, the whole game is changed. Yes, they need help early on, but even that is a mere matter of averages. Some come into it needing less help than others. The main thing is letting each person find their own dose of God’s power. Failure is expected, right up to the end of life. Even those “born again” cannot be made perfect in the flesh, so the spiritually dead are more certainly imperfectible.
God has delineated a pretty solid structure for what can be done to give people reasonable restraints such that human life is tolerable. You don’t make it better by adding or subtracting. Temperance is not in the Bible. It arose in recent history from the very people who most vociferously rejected the Hebrew epistemology. But if you insist on reading it back into the Bible, you can run all sorts of godless crusades and add your sin to the rest of the human pot of evil.
Me? I’m too poor and a tightwad about many things, including booze. I’ll drink if it fits the occasion, but I haven’t in years. It’s not important either way, but I do like the taste of most alcoholic beverages. My body tells me “stop” after the first one most of the time, and I can’t recall the last time I had more than two servings. I can count on one hand the times I’ve been anywhere near inebriation. I just don’t care, so it’s not my weakness. I have issues, but that’s not one of them.
Christians swallowing the temperance heresy is just about as smart as using Kinsey’s filthy lies to write a Christian sex counseling guide.

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Questions of Epistemology

Posted on April 14, 2012 by ehurst

This post is a reference point for future discussions.
I keep running into the issue of those unspoke assumptions which show up in debates. It’s bad enough when propagandists are trying to avoid stating rather obvious assumptions, but when no one is willing to discuss more fundamental presuppositions about reality itself, we simply cannot proceed until that’s out in the open. All the more so when the whole point is the very difference in presuppositions.
epistemology: the philosophical discussion of what is and isn’t real, of what we can claim to know
More to the point, epistemology is the study of things we can claim to know as true such that we can act on that knowledge. Naturally, Aristotle dealt with this question openly. That’s because he was proposing an epistemology which was novel, different from what the rest of the whole human race held at that time.
The whole world believed there were things you could not sense. Aristotle acknowledged as much, but insisted it at least had to be something man could wrestle with in terms of logic. The rest of the world presumed there was a spirit realm utterly separate from this realm of existence, but Aristotle insisted it was all one thing. In case you didn’t notice, the whole of Greek culture at that time was man-centered. Thus, for Aristotle intellectually, man was the measure of all things. If man could not figure it out, it could not be “true” in the sense we could act on it.
The whole realm of phenomena which simply was not fully understood was either explained (mostly explained away) or dismissed as superstition. There was room for further inquiry, but dismissal was the default. In Aristotle’s mind, there could well be powers above human, but they were of the same type. Remember how the Greek gods were little more than extra-powerful people? It was a continuum and nothing was actually outside the universe, it was simply not entirely perceptible to our senses. Still, it fit logically, so we could “know” it, even if there was little we could do about it. It was the birth of conscious agnosticism. I note here yet again, Aristotle was fully aware of how novel this was in his time, and fully aware of how it was different from the rest of the world. For example, he was personally acquainted with Jewish scholars who held an entirely different viewpoint, and discussed it with them.
For Christians, I’ll restate that more bluntly: The entire Bible was written from the Hebrew epistemology, not from Aristotle’s. If you stick with Aristotle, you cannot understand the Bible properly.
For Westerners, Aristotle is the presupposition to everything you think. So tightly wound is the entire Western Civilization in Aristotle, most of you can’t imagine a different approach. Without a decent education which addresses thinking itself, this whole thing simply passes right over your head.
I realize I’m trying to summarize whole books and courses in philosophy here, but I keep running into people with apparently decent educations, but seeming to have utterly forgotten this part, if they ever got it. But it seems necessary to point out to people Aristotle and his epistemology is not the original, nor the only game in town. I adhere to that much older version which was pretty much universal before Aristotle was born, and remains numerically dominant despite how much of the world seems to embrace him. Most of the world is aware of Aristotle’s version, and accept it for certain things, but remain convinced his approach cannot account for everything. This is how I do things, myself.
I know where Westerners are coming from; I’m painfully conscious of it. I am aware my approach is different, and how it leads to different answers. I fully understand the logical consequences of choosing one or the other, but here’s what most people don’t realize: If you embrace Aristotle’s approach to what we can know and act on, you cannot possibly accept any part of God’s revelation. Aristotle’s epistemology pointedly rejects revelation before the discussion starts. If you want to discuss revelation and the resulting religious ideas, you’ll have to discard — or at least recognize the limits of — Aristotle.
The primary definition of mysticism is simply holding a non-Aristotelian epistemology. What I write here on this blog presupposes mysticism as valid. To argue specific points without referencing that difference in presuppositions might still get you some few answers from me if I can find them in your probable frame of reference, but if you press the case, you’ll be directed here.

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Introduction II

Posted on April 13, 2012 by ehurst

Here is a quick summary of my weirdness.

Yesterday, Karen De Coster linked one of my blog posts from her own blog and from LewRockewell.com. Occasionally my interests overlap hers, though I can’t guess how often she checks here to see. At any rate, the hits here doubled my last best, and yesterday closed with over 1200. I also got a few comments, mostly in the vein of disputing this or that. Today will see more, I’m sure.

I want to save those readers some time.

I take the position the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) society was the pinnacle of what pleases God. That includes the ANE mystical intellectual outlook, a completely different epistemology than is common in the West today. I am unmoved by Aristotelian logic in general, and care little for this world in the first place, so don’t regale me all your alleged scientific findings in support of some debate with what I write. I don’t deny science can discern some useful things, but most “science” is a concealed political agenda, and most “scientists” are still entirely human and hardly objective. Even at their best, scientists could hardly discern the moral fabric inherent in the universe, so they often miss the point. Humanity has not changed since the Fall, so the moral position found in God’s revelation of Himself, as recorded in the Bible (I prefer the Protestant canon) is the only one that matters.

It seems always necessary for me to note I read the Bible with that ANE-Hebrew approach as best I can discern what it was. That puts me fundamentally at odds with Western Christianity as a whole. I’ve burned through a world of electrons discussing the implications of that, posted the results of that on this blog, and two others (one now defunct), and my static website (now closed). As my understanding of such things grows and/or drifts, I’ll update that accordingly. That’s the bulk of what I write. I further take the position my fundamental assumptions were placed in my soul and spirit by God Himself, so they aren’t subject to debate.

I’m always glad to answer questions, but debate is a Western preoccupation which doesn’t interest me. I assert what I see God burning into my consciousness, and let the truth make its own path through your soul, or not. When I read your comments and emails, I do the best I can to discern your intent and various motivations which are common to humanity. I’ll get it wrong sometimes. It’s up to you to pursue that as you like, because I never get tired of entertaining guests. The record so far is a long conversation with one other writer running more than 30 comments to one post. Yes, I delete what looks like spam, but I do read everything. In case you are wondering, I regard myself as a genuine prophet of God, and tend to write in that mode.

I belong to no institutionalized religion. My wife and I host worship in our home, and I am known in my community as “a preacher”. That’s not exactly accurate, but culturally appropriate, since I maintain an ordination certificate just to simplify things before the law. I distinguish between elders and pastors, and I am the former. I take that to mean my calling is more at organization and management of earthly issues based on what I find the Bible requires. This brings us back to my original assertion about ANE society: God intends for us to live in a tribal community as the single most effective structure for living in this fallen world. I regard the modern Western nation-state as a blatant rejection of God’s Word, along with democracy and Western feudalism. It should be Eastern feudalism, if you must know, but no one should have much say in your daily life unless they are related by blood or covenant (marriage, among others).

Oh, and I could care less about the so-called “Primal Diet” because my concerns are not about some human measures of effectiveness and health. My body is an expendable resource for God and my diet and workout regimen reflect what seems a reasonable compromise between the numerous demands and options within the context of my life. For example, I am generally vegetarian because safe meat is not in my price range right now. Safe eggs and dairy are available at a good price where I live, so that plus lots of nuts and legumes is how I get my protein.

The last thing I want to do is dictate to anyone. I offer what I have; everyone must decide for themselves whether to join in sharing it with me. I don’t take myself that seriously, nor do I take this plane of existence seriously. I am utterly certain it will all be destroyed when God has had enough, and nothing here really matters so much as a desire to please Him.

Thank you for visiting.

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