Attention Deficit and Adaptation

Posted on March 21, 2012 by ehurst

Over the past decade we see an increasing number of people who suggest Attention Deficit (both ADD and ADHD) may be the early stages of an evolutionary adaptation.
For those who must know, I don’t deny evolution as a fact of biology in the now, but dispute even the mere possibility of using it to explain how we got here. While we experience evolution as a daily fact of life, there is no logical justification for extrapolating it beyond actual evidence. The business of juggling archaeological finds takes entirely too much unknown for granted.
The current tiny incremental changes which we measure as adaptations which seem to affect the whole population of a given species in any particular context are easily found all over the place. If we posit the context is a very high volume data world for humans, there are elements of ADD and ADHD which indicate an adaptive advantage. While you can find research into this going all the way back to the earliest formulations of Attention Deficit as a concrete diagnosis, the terminology has shifted a great deal. It’s easy to find articles addressing some of this research from an adaptive viewpoint:
Born to Explore, 1997
ZDNet/Huffington Post, 2007
The Human Imprint, 2008
Psychology Today, 2010 (rather long)
The Telegraph (UK), 2012
and most recently, a much more speculative, less careful discussion at the Activist Post the past few days.
All of this hits dangerously close to home because I have been diagnosed with the milder ADD (specifically, Adult ADD) as was my son. I find the actual hyperactive version (ADHD) is probably an overshot, missing the putative advantages by going too far. The milder form I have, particularly as an adult, is probably closer to what the articles together suggest.
I’ve noted before, the smallest natural unit of cognition for me is the paragraph. I don’t do well memorizing text as words the way most people do. On the other hand, just about any paragraph of which I can make any sense will likely find a peg in my memory in terms of content. So, for example, I can recall easily the import of the linked articles, though it required some bit of research to recover where and when I found them. I extract and internalize the content but struggle to keep track of the linkages.
More precisely, Adult ADD is a recall disability, not a learning disability. It’s easy for precise bits of data to get lost. I know I know it, but can’t find the path to it’s storage in my brain. However, if the item in question is a larger block of data, it’s always easy to recall. Further, I can make creative linkages across multiple disciplines without much effort. I see parallels more quickly than most people, though quite often those parallels are flawed by incomplete data. I may not know a lot about something, but I recognize trends easily, even if they are inaccurate. It’s how I process and store things.
The central claim is something in this change from the previous norm of human learning and cognition grants an advantage in this modern age of huge volumes of data. Instead of being overwhelmed by too much information, it’s all absorbed as structure, and more of the content is kept that way. Once the structure is in place, it’s easier to keep more of the content, and the structure is detected — or inferred — intuitively. It’s the trademark of intuition itself.
Concrete example: Regular readers know I am fanatical about the Bible, in terms of the effort I expend working with it. In one sense, I’m completely crippled from retention because it takes a monumental effort to rote memorize even small portions of text. In another sense, I’ve already memorized the whole thing. Once I gained ground in the effort to think like a Hebrew, the underlying structure become almost painfully obvious, poking at my mind, as it were. I can recall what the Bible seems to say about almost anything, even if I struggle to offer locations within the text. Naturally, I memorize the content according to my own best understanding, but I have a high degree of confidence in my ability to parse the logic and meaning.
The liability is I can’t easily limit inputs. There’s a paradox: either everything in my context gets in, or almost nothing gets in because I’m too deeply absorbed by something specific. Regarding my previous post about the hypnotic effect of video, I can get utterly lost in the presentation, or find myself deeply annoyed by the distraction. Because I am very conscious of the effects, I react internally with anger to the presence of a TV screen running wherever I am. It makes me very uncomfortable, and I strive to find ways to block them. You can imagine I hate waiting rooms, where it seems they are ubiquitous. Another example of liability is when I drive more than six or eight hours, particularly routes I don’t see often, I have to stop and sleep so my brain can process all the massive visual stimulation I’ve absorbed. Otherwise it leaks back out and I start hallucinating, and enter that half-sleep state which gets people killed in auto crashes. On an average day of reading and Net surfing, I always take a nap mid-day.
So long as our high-tech environment holds, this is fine. Oddly, those years when I played at military maneuvers, I did rather well for noticing odd details even when physically tired, so long as there was no great lull in activity. I’m pretty much useless at waiting alert when I’m tired.
But I want you to notice how the political and institutional trends of public education is fighting all this tooth and nail. Easily 90% of staff attention is given to behavior management, and only some 10% is actual learning. That 90% is contrary to the rising tide of children doing their best to be ready for the massive flood of information, adaptations harshly contrary to what educators demand kids do physically in class. It’s education which needs to adapt, now. Kids simply do not have to sit still and be quiet to learn, because while they squirm and make noise, they are still absorbing from learning activities tailored to allow such activity. I’ve seen this first hand as a teacher.
At any rate, even if we could teach teachers to change their student behavioral expectations, getting closer to reality, I find the adaptive value of Attention Deficit is hit-and-miss.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

TV and Video Hypnosis (Short Explanation)

Posted on March 21, 2012 by ehurst

There are whole shelves full of books explaining the details of this. Still, most people aren’t fully aware of it. Those most susceptible to it are those who argue loudest against the facts.
Whether originally intended that way or not, there is all too much proof the electronic representation of moving images on a screen is hypnotic. That is, using any video or TV type presentation, it is possible to change long term the fundamental thought patterns of people and some animals. It opens them to suggestion.
1. Who hasn’t experienced the mesmerizing effect of a TV playing in any room? You walk in and if what’s showing is the least bit interesting at all, it grabs some measure of your attention. If you sit down and actually watch, conversation will fade, and people coming and going may recede outside your consciousness. If you don’t recall the experience, chances are it’s more powerful than average on you.
2. Institutions have discovered there is nothing offering more bang for the buck than TV when it comes to controlling behavior in large populations. Prison management uses TV for that very purpose, and it even works on gorillas. I’ve observed this effect first hand working in various types of institutions, and it’s almost like an addictive drug.
3. In scientific terms, you are just short of an altered state when hypnotized. In the case of TV and video, you are not fully hypnotized unless you actually want it. That TV and video are somewhat hypnotic to one degree or another on almost everyone is simply established fact (linked article is a bit long, but about the best explanation available).

Research by Professor Herbert Krugman found that within 30 seconds of turning on the television, our brain becomes neurologically less able to make judgements about what we see and hear on the screen. Our brain treats incoming information uncritically. Our brain waves switch to predominantly alpha waves, indicating an unfocused, receptive lack of attention.

The details have to do with alpha waves in the brain and righ-left hemisphere differentiation.
So why does all this matter? It takes only one example to understand it is being used intentionally, with full malice and intent, to destroy the world.

As with hypnosis, watching television enhances your capacity for receiving ideas without all the bother of reality-testing. Suspending our disbelief, television slips under our neurological and intellectual radar. Watching a television screen is akin to putting yourself in the hands of an unqualified hypnotherapist whose main interest is to keep you coming back to him for longer and longer sessions, a form of ratings-driven professional conduct.

It’s not just keeping you on the hook, but changing how you think.
I would like to believe this is enough to make people wary of TV and video, but it doesn’t work. The research piece says:

Researchers at Keele University investigated the third-person effect — the belief that others are more influenced than ourselves by media messages. They found that while we are fairly accurate at estimating how much others are persuaded by media messages, we’re in denial about our own autonomy. We report that attitude change occurs in others, but not in ourselves.

Still, I keep hoping people get the message: Teach yourself to hate and distrust all TV and video presentation. Teach yourself to turn away, leave the room, etc. Be strong, or surrender and never think independently again.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Economic Equality Impossible

Posted on March 20, 2012 by ehurst

It is utterly impossible to have economic equality on any scale.
That’s not because of the laws of economics, but because of the fallen nature of mankind. It is not possible for men to think their way to solutions which would work. Every measure ever tried under any political and economic system always produces unintended consequences which constitute failure. That is, such policies invariably create new problems which make things worse.
The answer, of course, is not libertarian government with open markets. This is also going to guarantee injustice, because it simply allows the worst of human greed to run untrammeled over the bodies of those who are not part of the elite. There is no system of government devised by man which can prevent the rise of an elite who then abuse the rest.
On the other hand, there is a plan of government and economics which works as well as can be expected, but it wasn’t devised by human minds. It is built into human nature. It’s fundamental the Laws of Noah: The extended family kin must restrain their own family members. There is no other social structure which makes genuine restraint possible, which offers the single greatest degree of shared prosperity with minimal exclusions. When a family shares the wealth, the mere existence of normal familial bonds minimizes injustice to the degree possible with fallen mankind.
Nothing has ever worked better; nothing possibly could work better.
The last people on earth who are eager to oppress are your own family. Yes, we do have a cultural bias in the West which finds families going to war and defending their own against other families. This is human nature, but mad worse by the pagan nature of Western civilization. Ancient Near Eastern cultures were much more aware of the consequences of allowing your family to intrude into the lives of others. They were quick to restrain their own, even to the point of shedding the blood of their own to restore justice. It was a point of pride to permit no harm to other families, not to mention a survival concern, since the others could gang up on you. No one in the East wanted the feuding so common in the West.
Fundamental to the Laws of Noah was the requirement families restrain their own in that way. No one else has the standing to do that, in God’s eyes. We realize families members are loathe to get involved and restrain their own. Yet, no one on this earth has any business poking around in your life except those bound to you by blood and/or covenant. No one else will be so restrained, will offer you as much freedom as possible within the boundaries of common welfare. Whatever flaws you may perceive in the patriarchal tribal system, everything else is far worse.
The problem with economics is the same problem with human government in the first place, and the whole human race seems determined to avoid the only real answer.

Posted in sanity | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Economic Equality Impossible

Hideous Frame of Reference

Posted on March 19, 2012 by ehurst

Moving beyond specific instances, there is a broad and sinister trend in churches across the US.
By no means am I in favor of democratic church polity. This was never the New Testament model, and what we today consider the modern version (Robert’s Rules of Order, etc.) is entirely Post-Enlightenment, not even really what the Greeks had in mind. And what the Greeks had in mind was hardly anything at all like the Hebraic New Testament congregations.
Nor do I support the Medieval version of feudal polity, much less the Reformation presbytery. Those are all Western inventions, far removed from the New Testament (which everyone wants to forget is a collection of mostly Hebraic documents which simply used Greek as the means to transmission). The New Testament church was an Ancient Near Eastern tribal polity, a forgotten form of Eastern feudalism, which centered entirely upon people, not property.
Today we have a growing trend to technocracy of a sort. The Purpose Driven (PD) model has been widely panned, though often from a false concern for trappings. There is nothing amiss with dressing down, a casual atmosphere, using contemporary music, nor any other merely cosmetic changes. There is nothing particularly sacred about hymnals, choirs in robes and suits with ties. All of that sort of complaint serves as controlled opposition. The real problem is the Purpose Driven theology is blasphemous; it’s based on a wide range of New Age paganism. That’s fine for New Age religions, but it has no place in Christian churches.
We shouldn’t suggest Rick Warren consciously chose to follow evil. I’m quite sure he’s a true believer, even though he has been caught talking out both sides of his mouth. He’s just a man with a vision and career in church leadership which he doesn’t realize is completely wrong.
The condensed summary of Rick Warren’s work is this: There is virtually nothing about sin, redemption, repentance and turning away from this sinful world. The whole focus is on worldly success. It’s all about having a good, conservative middle class American society, not simply as a decent way to live, but to completely displace the Hebrew religion of Jesus Christ. It amounts to a peculiarly Western version of law covenant, a soft legalism which uses the full range of political corruption to accomplish the management goals. There is no Spirit of God at work, but a substitution of very human enthusiasm. There is an appearance of following the Bible by shallow application of words which appear to match the topic at hand, but which often has little to do with the actual context of Scripture. Charisma of the man is the only accepted sign of Spirit anointing, so that there is a rather soft personality cult effect. The officially chosen programming is fully enforced, though you’d never notice it without being there and seeing first hand what kind of emotional pressure is applied to those who deviate from the script. Nobody seems to notice the programming seldom relates to any actual real need, but that the participants are manipulated into believing they need it desperately.
I won’t take the space here to lay out the scientific evidence, but all those giant screens from which the preacher’s message is projected are proved to produce the effect of dampening human critical thinking process. While people can resist this effect, the vast majority are so highly conditioned by their own habits of massive TV and movie consumption, their resistance is rather effectively suspended.
Even churches which manage to keep some semblance of good Christian doctrine still suffer from absorbing this kind of structure and basic assumptions about what is supposed to happen after repentance. We end up with a rather large collection of spiritual infants never reaching any significant spiritual maturity.
This insidious beast has been long displacing genuine Christian religion for more some two decades. It’s now to the point a significant number of new monster churches and other organizations are built from this model at the start. Thus, rather than some nasty fights which make the news, the whole thing becomes the core framework up front. It is submerged from sight, with a kinder, gentler face. Yet the result is the same: It’s just a cultural caricature of genuine Christian faith. Indeed, so deeply is this thing submerged, it becomes the culture of church management thinking. The current younger leaders, the movers and shakers, are so deeply influenced, they seem utterly convinced God Himself works this way. When they read Scripture, they read it in this PD language, as it were.
The greatest disaster is not really the huge number of people deceived, because they participate willingly. It’s all quite comfortable for them, and they absorb the same subcultural bias without thinking. God alone can set them free. But there is a very large number of people empowered by the Holy Spirit to bring His love who don’t need or want this spoon-fed structure, because they are intimately acquainted with the actual needs of the people in front of them. Real human needs seldom coincide with that high-tech programming. These people are, in many different ways, shown the door. Then there is an even larger group of needy people who stand to gain from the ministry of those squeezed out the organization. I am hardly the only one who has witnessed the distressing disappearance of the very most effective ministries by truly talented people who don’t happen to have official permit to operate.
Fundamental to any genuine Christian congregation is a a regular, and rather academic, study of the Bible, balanced with a concerted effort to meet you where you are. It makes room for more than just the leadership to serve as a conduit for God’s miraculous touch. Everyone is encouraged to rise as far above this hideous fallen world as possible, and become more spiritual, less worldly. It is assumed there will be a natural degree of variation, and the standard of what constitutes a threat is not based on modern management techniques, but ancient family love and stability seeking. The only physical property needed is access to some copy of the Bible in the common vernacular of the members.
Yes, there is a bit more to genuinely following Christ than that, but even this seems alien to the latest crop of monster churches.

Posted in religion | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Hideous Frame of Reference

Management: Don't Do This (Updated)

Posted on March 19, 2012 by ehurst

Update: This is my experience at LifeChurch.tv. It serves as a review, and a warning to those who consider attending there. I’ve read other reviews and found major complaints about lack of budget auditing (no accountability) and lots of other people pushed out the door for daring to ask questions about anything. Thus, I decided it was justified to ID the organization I was describing.
Original post follows…
If your organization is based entirely on voluntary involvement, tight central control will exclude a lot of people, regardless of the methods and flavor of control.
Actually, it can be made to work, and could even look like a real church. It depends on demographics; the scripting has to match their instincts. If you hit the sweet spot on making all the Betas and Deltas comfortable by making them feel they are the real men, you’ll have a solid core of loyal followers. Anyone with Alpha tendencies will have to be neutered, because only a select few are permitted to display those traits. Sigmas are permitted to come and go without getting involved any more than they like. Because a vast investment in high technology is utterly necessary for operations, the Gammas abound. There’s even a place for Lambdas, it seems.
But I am a prophet, and Ezekiel 33 applies, so there is most certainly no place for me.
The whole thing is gentle and friendly, and the selected Alphas will make you feel bad if you step out of line. You won’t be permitted to question significantly whatever is the day’s orthodoxy. The books, videos, and all programs are the breath of God. Of course, the terminology is set in terms of how very good it is, and how disappointed the leadership are when there aren’t enough people buying into it. The sales pitch never stops, and the money is critical. If you are poor, they’ll take care of things for you, but only if you are a serious team player. The help is typically limited to high PR value items. Everyone has to feel warm and fuzzy, you see.
It’s not that good things — even God things — can’t happen. God can’t be kept out of anything. But a significant portion of the population will always be excluded. There will be no strong leaders in the membership, unless they are properly neutered by conditioning. They call it “leadership training.” Those truly hurting may not get any real answers. Anything depending on real spiritual solutions tends to fall apart more often than anyone admits. Meanwhile, the cultural mythology is embraced without question. Real growth toward a genuine biblical model is out of the question. Instead, it’s a series of discrete programs, each more exciting than the last, it seems. Excitement is critical, because that’s the primary sign of God’s presence, as they see it.
It works, but poorly. That is, it reflects the vast majority of all evangelical churches in effects, but is growing so very fast because the basic methods appeal to the cutting edge of local culture. It certainly looks good, because of all those people, all that big budget, the breakneck pace of building, and a very powerful sense of giving to human need. But those needs are carefully selected.
Honestly, I doubt it’s entirely conscious. It’s the social mythology itself which seems to limit the leadership’s understanding. They don’t intend to hurt anyone, but they can’t see past the boundaries of the world in which they live, prisoners of their times. However, I believe I now understand better how some religious organizations which are not cults can be accused of cult-like practices. There is a very subtle, yet very heavy-handed control exerted, mostly by the system utterly excluding any mention, any thought, of alternatives. There is a distinct effort to wipe away certain measures of free thinking. They are buried under noise, and the leadership reflexively pan anything they can identify as “old fashioned”. It’s not entirely different from the Rick Warren method of church take-overs, except these are built from scratch that way. You never really hear about the folks firmly escorted out the back door because they “just won’t let Jesus rule.”
Only when someone comes along fully conscious of all this does it become apparent. They love it, and are utterly certain it’s the power of God. He’s there, obviously, and will use what’s available, but when you dig into the details, I don’t think He’s really trusted to take it as far as He would like. God is patient and forgiving, and some holiness is better than none. So I’m not bitter, just disappointed by what my poking uncovered.
Granted, the ancient tribal social structure I promote is also centralized in a certain sense. However, there is typically room for a great deal of individuation. The elder’s aim is not control, but restraint from destruction, the proverbially “managed chaos.” Truth is high-risk. We allow things to come as close as we can to the edge, because that’s where the most powerful things happen, where the miracles are thickest. It’s the deepest part of God’s favor, because He has always maintained this world is broke and can’t be fixed. The spiritual symbolism of the Law of Moses pointed to social stability in the midst of expecting a lot of human mistakes; that’s what the ritual offerings were for. The New Testament version of that is freer yet. Instead of restrained by the sword of man, we are restrained by the Sword of the Spirit. Yes, we lay hands on those who threaten the very fellowship itself, but only to the minimum necessary degree. It’s better to rebuild from scratch by the power of God than to use too much the power of arms.
Against the string of videos depicting only well off, middle class people (subtle hint: if you aren’t like this, you must be irresponsible), and the promotion of meeting real needs in third world countries, I see outside my own door people who can’t get ahead. I see people whose lives are unmanaged chaos, despite honest best efforts to do what’s right. I see people next door who could never find themselves in those snappy video clips, or the dramatic recovery from unspeakable evil, because their lives are mired in a much more mundane evil. Yes, I’m doing what I can to reach them already, but it feels pretty lonely most of the time. These people can’t be reached by a high tech, tightly scripted and centrally controlled, most up-to-date loud rock worship, and TV Internet preachers with Hollywood production.
I wish them well, but I don’t want to walk through that again.

Posted in administration | Comments Off on Management: Don't Do This (Updated)

Christ Is Not a Middle Class American

Posted on March 18, 2012 by ehurst

The title is the grab line.
This is another persistent heartache of mine. With few exceptions, everywhere I go seeking Christian fellowship, I keep running into the false Christ of the Middle Class. Not entirely wrong, because the Christ of the Bible does overlap in some ways, but there is this pernicious insistence on ignoring, or even actively fighting, the portion which is not included in that overlap. They don’t see the part of God not included in their narrow little world.
Every program, every emphasis, every message, still reeks of middle class American assumptions: materialism, a certain minimum income level (anything less is somehow irresponsible), and that nasty Rick Warren brand of legalism and human success.
Today, I listened to a guest preacher who in one paragraph of his message said it so right. God’s favor is not always what you expect, so it makes a huge difference if you can learn that everything God does is “good” by definition. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s not the goodness of God. Right. Then in the next paragraph he went off into name-it-and-claim-it territory. The self-contradiction was stunning.
I’ve grown weary of dealing with the American middle class. They are so unwilling to let God carry them outside their comfort zone, even when they say words to that effect, they are still excluding a vast domain of rich and miraculous living. They just can’t let go of this world. Whenever I start working to break through that idolatry is when I get run out the door. It always happens one sense or another.
It happened again today. I’m not giving up, of course, but still sad all the same.

Posted in religion | Tagged , | Comments Off on Christ Is Not a Middle Class American

Monster Church Madness

Posted on March 18, 2012 by ehurst

Spiritual success has almost no correlation to the size of the church organization.
Put the First Church of Jerusalem in historical context. Two major items arise.
One, this takes place in the one setting where the nature of “church” is most optimal. Some of the characteristics are painfully obvious, but leading the way is persecution. Oppression was but a single feature of a failing government whose time had run out. They were tributary to another evil government whose time had not yet run out, so things were coming to a head and the church was just another tiny factor in this huge picture. Within the same generation of those just starting their families at the moment the first church was formed, they fled the city. They left behind most of their worldly property and went elsewhere, carrying the fire which was far more valuable than life itself. The one thing which made the fire burn brightest was the level of pressure which kept them honest. You couldn’t afford to be a Christian unless you were willing — nay, somewhat eager — to die for it.
Two, the early expansion was a response to pent-up demand for truth. It does not require a conscious grasp to sense things were utterly wrong, that the system was horribly broken and in desperate need of fixing. Jesus comes on the scene when a significant portion of the society knew instinctively a change was coming. While some of this we write off as common excitement, we know of a certainty some part of those people were on the verge of a genuine spiritual birth. It was this ineffable burning certainty which created the pent-up demand, which fed into the more secular fires of human discomfort.
There are other factors, but if you ignore these as you attempt to build a model in your minds of how God will work in your life, you will end up on the wrong path.
Crowds flocked to Jesus because some slender portion of that crowd had a valid reason, a very real drawing from God. They were the ones who benefited from His parables, because that living spirit inside of them received the meaning of those symbolic stories. Their conscious minds often did not, but their spirits got it, and some part of them knew this was the source of truth. So they stuck around, and their presence fired off the secular excitement of the masses. It was a circus atmosphere with miracles they certainly did not understand. The majority of those who got in on the circus did not stick with it; they were false followers looking for entertainment. They were the ones who lost interest when Jesus started talking about being the Bread of Life, warning them the party was over.
If you, church leaders, really caught onto what the Bread of Life business meant, you would realize Jesus intentionally drove the crowd away. There were multiple reasons for that, but one of those reasons had to do with shaking His body to separate the real from the fake. God does that in different ways, on different levels, periodically. As the Judean government began to take more seriously the threat of this unsanctioned rabbi, it was necessary to spare the fools and allow the real sheep to become more tightly bound together as they faced serious oppression. He came to bring a sword which cuts through the fat and breaks up human institutions, down to the very family household itself, and replaced it with a spiritual bond stronger than any DNA.
So while the First Church grew explosively despite the very messy execution of the Master, it’s because they truly believed the story about His resurrection. It called to them, as some part of their inner being could not walk away from it. And when Pentecost came, it solidly confirmed what had already begun. Something similar explains how the churches which spread from there exploded. There was a pent-up demand for truth and a chance to learn it and walk it. The demand was hardly a call for human comfort, or mere intellectual curiosity, but something worth tossing those aside.
As the gospel spread across the pagan world, the growth was a little less phenomenal. Further, there were huge problems with dragging these people away from their cultural customs into a proper Christlike lifestyle. Even worse was the vast layer of intellectual assumptions which kept twisting the truth into something else. By the time of John’s Revelation of Christ at the end of that first century, we see him lamenting how churches had drifted away from what had been so characteristic of the First Church. The Seven Churches symbolized the ways in which all the churches might have gotten off track to one degree or another, and only a few had not. All the failures were due to becoming too much like this world, and all their strengths came from suffering which fires a greater commitment.
When you build a monster church against petty and shallow political objections, all you really have is one more political institution. It has no correlation whatsoever with the explosive growth of that First Church in Jerusalem. You like to imagine it’s the power of God poured out, and you are emotionally stirred with excitement you imagine is the moving of the Spirit. That’s bogus. It’s not to say the Spirit of God isn’t moving, but you are working off indicators which bear no relation to the truth. On the contrary, given the facts of the First Church, chances are what you have is entirely human-based, and only by accident does it represent a genuine connection with God.
So you may well have a deeply spiritual body of active believers, but everything you point to as indicators of this is no proof at all. Make your boast when the government begins putting people in prison for refusing to worship the State, or confiscates all your tax-exempt property. When your congregation grows against that sort of pressure, you might have a basis for claiming God is at work in your church. Those days are coming, but they aren’t here yet. Meanwhile, the best indicator of genuine Spirit power at work in your congregation is not the size, nor enthusiasm, nor various human measures of success. It’s the radical change in people willing to forgo all those human measures of success because there is something else greater, too important to let those things get in the way. Tell me about your martyrs, the people who lost their jobs, homes, cars and such because the demands of the Spirit resulted in those changes.
Don’t boast to me of budgets, first class musical productions, massive buildings and media dominance. That sounds more like Laodicea. Tell me about people in jail for genuine Christian virtue. Don’t expect me to bow down to your superior management systems; tell me how people forsake the good life because they simply cannot help spending more time with each other. Tell me about people who ignore schedules set by this crazy world.
If you don’t yet understand how holiness conflicts with common conservative middle class American life, you really don’t know Jesus.

Posted in religion | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Monster Church Madness

Christians, We Need to Talk

Posted on March 17, 2012 by ehurst

This world, and everything in it, does not matter.
I refuse to surrender my mission. Every time I open my mouth to discuss things from the Bible, I keep stumbling over this same, damnable heresy. Sometimes it’s quite conscious, but mostly it’s buried in the assumptions where it’s never questioned. I keep trying to break the hold this lie has on so many people, but they keep clinging to the lie.
When I say something is “eternal,” does it conjure in your mind the image of time running on into infinity? That’s flat out wrong. No, not harmless, but utterly wrong. “Eternal” as a term points to an entirely different level of existence, something to which there simply is no comparison on this plane of existence. I hope I don’t need to write a book explaining how this is the Hebrew concept, the way folks in the Bible would have thought of it. There are already lots of books saying that, and you all keep ignoring them. The Bible says that, but you are blind to it. The other realm is entirely different, and we can’t even describe it. We are forced to use parabolic language, mostly to prove that point.
If you seize upon the parables and symbols as literal reality, you cannot possibly understand anything in Scripture. The people who wrote it didn’t see it that way.
When you start acting like some piece of real estate with buildings is somehow not simply land and structures, you call God a liar. When you act like a human organization is somehow different from all other human organizations, you tread on the Blood of Christ. The Congregation of Saints — church, ecclesia — is not the buildings and real estate, nor even the organization which claims to own it and use it. If you cannot conduct your business without all those trappings, you are not using God’s power to get things done. You don’t qualify for the biblical term “church.”
Let’s get this straight. We do have commands from God how to conduct ourselves in this fallen realm. Those commands are not intended to fix everything. They will result in a better life, but that’s not the purpose. The purpose is to draw attention to the other realm, from which those commands come. Things we do on this earth may well solve problems, but that’s not the objective. The objective is to demonstrate, to call attention to something far above all this world of sorrow. We do not have any mandate from God to correct this world’s ills, any more than Jesus healed everyone on the planet. There were places where He simply didn’t do many miracles. Was His power reduced? No. There was no point, nothing to be gained in terms of revelation.
All miracles were a matter of revelation, pointing out something people needed to know about God. That there was a need is taken for granted, but meeting the need was the method, not the purpose. So long as you folks keep confusing methods for the mission, you will continue frittering away every opportunity to reveal Jesus to the world. Reducing human misery is the means, not the end. You do what you can where you are, and never, ever assume someone else has failed because they aren’t taking care of the needy groups down the road. Human needs and lack and sorrow are the baseline of human existence. It’s supposed to be that way. It’s that way so you can have an opportunity to point out why it’s that way.
What part of “fallen” do you not understand? The whole universe is under a curse, and it won’t be renovated. It will be removed. All you’ve done will go “POOF” all at once. All you’ve accomplished will be dissolved into nothing. The only thing recorded in Heaven is how well your choices revealed or obscured the God who called you. If you keep chasing the objectives of social work and politics, you cannot possibly reveal the Christ of the Cross, and you have no idea what the Resurrection is all about.
I could go on at length, pointing out all the heresies of Christianity today which result from this entirely false understanding. But until you get this one thing right, nothing I or anyone else could say, nor angels, nor God Himself, is going to make any difference. Get this, and a lot of other crap will collapse.
Jesus said it so bluntly, “My Kingdom is not of this world.”

Posted in religion | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Seeking Romance, Part 2

Posted on March 17, 2012 by ehurst

By now, you should have understood this was mostly a joke.
The whole point was to show what happens if people were actually honest about their personal ads. No one sets out to become disabled and poor; not even I planned on that. I took what came my way, then obeyed what I perceived to be the leading of the Spirit. Were I more interested in selling myself, I’d have left off all the negative things and lied about some other things.
Precious few people dare to be real, and when they are, everyone runs away. Yet, by playing such silly games, you guarantee you’re hooking up with someone willing to deceive for their own ends. And you show yourself willing to deceive for less than honorable ends. We want it so bad we’ll steal it, but the only thing you can possibly steal is worth less. It may well be worthless.
What I wrote is brutally honest, both good and bad, and my conscience is clear. I’m trying to imagine a woman who could possibly have been interested, and probabilities are high she wouldn’t have access to a computer.

Posted in sanity | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Seeking Romance, Part 2

Thought Experiment: Seeking Romance

Posted on March 16, 2012 by ehurst

THIS IS FICTION! It’s fiction in the sense I am most certainly not in the market. This is strictly for entertainment purposes and an exercise in thinking about the whole question. Your response is most certainly welcome, so long as it accepts those assumptions. Let’s pretend for a moment something awful happened and my wife is dead. (Update: Fixed broken link.)

Widower Seeking Lifelong Partner

I’m 55, balding and on the heavy side, not to mention other afflictions common for men my age. I do work out, watch what I eat, and my doctor thinks I’m a model patient. My economic status is below middle class, with no ambition or interest in changing that. My current income is my VA Disability pension. I spend most of my day reading, thinking, and writing, primarily about my Christian faith and some social commentary which results from that faith. I’m utterly convinced this is what God requires of me.

It won’t matter to me if you have no income of your own. We won’t be having any children, but if you bring any with you, I’m ready to make adjustments. Naturally, I’ll love them as my own. What I will not do is willingly depend on the State any more than I already do, so consider carefully. Any assistance from any government agency means the kids are de facto wards of the State already, as would be their mother, and nothing I can do will make your life any better.

While I have my own tastes, same as any man, I consider it icing on the cake if you happen to be physically attractive to me. Far more important than what you look like is whether you can embrace what keeps me struggling with this fallen world. You can learn about my faith here (site is closed) and decide whether it calls to you. If you can make my mission your mission, all that’s left is working out the details. For me, it’s all about partnership in the mission, the strongest foundation I know for building a romance. I’m sure there are a host of things each of us would have to decide whether we could live with each other.

Love is a willful commitment to the welfare of another. I’ll make sure you never forget you are number one with me. I have a solid track record of 35 years’ fidelity to my first spouse. If you understand you aren’t her replacement, but her successor, let’s talk.

Some of my hobbies and interests: Psychology, History, Economics, cycling, minor car and home repairs, Classical Music. I generally hate TV and movies.

It should be obvious I would be striving to eliminate a lot of unrealistic candidates. I’d rather live alone than be trapped by a painful emotional dependence. Equally obvious is feminists would hate me.

Posted in fiction | Tagged , , | 1 Comment