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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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Born-Again Idiocy or Why Sectarian Division

Posted on March 16, 2012 by ehurst

Having a powerful spiritual awareness does not automatically redeem the fallen intellect.
I belong to a couple of religious discussion forums. Yes, it’s worth it. Sometimes. Most of the time it’s pretty harmless, not very helpful. Too often it’s repulsive idiocy. I’m including myself in that, because surely feelings are mutual. This is not a matter of who’s right or wrong; I’m trying to explain why there is so much debate among Christians.
Never mind theology. This is purely clinical psychology of religion, from one who walks inside and is fully aware of what outsiders see. The most important fact: We are utterly certain this stuff really matters. Never mind whether you think it does; our religious belief grips us more strongly than mere superstition and sentiment. If you don’t grasp that, there’s no point in reading any farther, pretending you’re going to understand. The content is not what’s at issue, but the power it holds over us.
You will not see me discounting the power of religious belief for any other religion, primarily because I’ve experienced it with my own. Yes, I could share with you the flaws I see in every system I don’t already accept, but I see flaws in my own in-groups, too. And if you’ve read here much, you know I can see my own face of folly in the mirror, as well. I don’t take myself that seriously.
Far too many Christians do take themselves too seriously. But that’s only one problem. Even most of my fellow born-again believers suffer from a blindness to their own cultural mythology. I’ve pounded that pulpit here often enough, but I’m offering a clinical explanation why sectarian division is utterly natural. I’m assuming you understand religion is ubiquitous in humans, in part because everyone has the ability to seize upon something which seems to help them face the world, such that even rejecting all religion is itself a matter of faith — a commitment to things for which there is no obvious concrete proof. (Logic alone is not proof in that sense.) This is part of the clinical lore, a necessity for understanding humans at large.
Getting as close as I can to clinical terms, whatever takes place in the spirit of a person is separate from the intellect. The whole point of religious community is bridging that gap. Nor does religious experience remove character and personality. It will most certainly reverse some bad traits, because those traits were good ones turned inside out. I’ll leave it up to you to discern which way is which, but most of us know what we like about how some folks treat us, and what we don’t like about other treatment. A religious conversion does not sweep all that away. On purely psychological grounds, even the most dramatic conversions only cover a certain amount of the soul. A solid biblical example would be Saul of Tarsus (AKA, Apostle Paul). He surrendered fully to his new understanding of God, but spent no less than three years exerting full effort to reconsidering everything he had learned in light of this change. He had to rewrite his entire PhD education.
Over the centuries since that day, a certain amount of mythology Saul discarded crept back into those whom he tried to teach this new religion. In relative terms to outsiders, the whole debate was some pretty narrow hair-splitting differences between Judaism and Christianity, if all you see is trappings of religion. The real difference is not readily apparent, largely because it works in places where human language doesn’t. Any genuine transforming experience of any religion tends to exceed the capacity for verbal explanation. Heck, even falling in love does that. So most of the religions of the world recognize the importance of parabolic and symbolic language. The real difference is not in the symbols, but in what they come to mean at that non-verbal level. What Paul was fighting, clinically, was dragging people back into a form of religious expression which interfered with genuine progress.
On human terms, he lost that battle to a large degree. The majority of Christians today suffer from some measure of hypocrisy on the same terms Jesus meant it in reference to the Jewish religious leaders — claiming to be the sole representatives of God while fighting His plainly stated purposes. While Paul’s former work as enforcer was no longer an option to those he abandoned, his former team mates found even more effective ways of recapturing those who fled the reservation. If someone was going to claim the name of their God, it was necessary to force them to use it properly, so Gentiles who claimed Christ had to become Jews, because it was not possible to make them stop using the Jewish God’s name. They sent out some very talented and charismatic preachers, against Paul’s notorious lack of such talent, highly schooled in rhetoric and verbal manipulation. But in some sense, they succeeded only partially.
That is, what they managed to shoehorn back into the churches was not so much of Jewish religious assertions, but the same epistemological corruption which caused them to leave behind their own ancient Hebrew roots. Rather than repeat all that means here, let’s just notice the clinical effects. That same disputatious nature of doing religion took over the churches. Whatever normal human variabilities those new Christians carried into their new religious was magnified by the additional religious belief intellectual details mattered. Read the New Testament narratives from the viewpoint of a scholar of Antiquities, and you can see what Paul and his fellow Apostles asserted was a very narrow selection of orthodoxies compared to the stuffy Scholasticism just a few centuries later. Further, the original New Testament teachings were intentionally imprecise and largely parabolic, versus the heavy duty systematic theology of later times.
Lest it sound like I’m trying to justify my own brand of Christianity against all others, I ask you to notice this one thing: When any religion relies too much on intellectual processes, you get more and deeper controversies over what constitutes orthodoxy. The question is spirit versus intellect, a distinction clearly visible in clinical psychology. To the degree questions are cerebral, they must of necessity give rise to conflict as the natural expression of human variability. If you are one of those Utopians who insist humanity can be made uniform by careful management, such a religious assertion is part of that problem. No two of us could possibly think alike; not even monozygotic twins do that. It’s not religion itself which puts men at war, but human nature using religion as an excuse.
When you see religious infighting and sectarian divisions, that’s just human nature at it’s finest. It really is no reflection on the religion itself. Whatever justification any Christian uses for following one sectarian path or another, even when they claim it’s “the original” path, it’s not the result of spiritual experience. All of that comes too easily when there is no spiritual experience at all. Thus, I am hardly surprised when someone, who may well have experienced the same spiritual transformation, clings to some of the most alien ideas I’ve ever seen. Having to face that sort of tiresome crotchety pontification is, unfortunately, par for the course. Frankly, it’s bad religion to expect otherwise.
For much the same reason we do it in secular things, I have to wade through a lot of sewage to find nuggets of gold in religious discourse and discussion.

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When Nice Is Wrong

Posted on March 15, 2012 by ehurst

He couldn’t think. There was an awful lot of noise in his head as he sprawled on his back. That back-elbow blow was vicious. Finally it all slowed down a bit as felt to see if any part of his face was broken. “Why the hell did you hit me? I’m not your enemy!”
The man who punched his lights out had already turned his back and started walking away. It was only later when he found his assailant in a better mood, sweeping the storage area. “Is it safe, now?”
“Your sarcasm is duly noted. Safety is always relative, but I’m not likely to punch your lights out again.” He said all this without a hint of humor, a total lack of emotion.
“Why’d you do that? I was just trying to get you to calm down.”
“Who are you to decide when my emotions aren’t allowed to boil over? Someone did their very best to provoke me and it worked.” His utter lack of emotion at the moment was almost jarring.
“But you shouldn’t let them get to you that way.”
“In due time, they won’t. But my feelings are my business. I was doing quite well until you decided to horn in.” He didn’t even look up from sweeping.
“I just wanted…”
The broom froze in mid-air as he snapped his gaze toward the man whose right eye was just starting to swell. “You wanted! What about what I wanted? Did it not occur to you the one thing I needed most was time and solitude? That your attempt to control how I was feeling was an even worse attack, a bigger insult, than what those idiots did?”
He had no answer.

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Spring Cleaning of the Soul

Posted on March 15, 2012 by ehurst

Eternity hopes you’ll spring.
Being jumpy isn’t so good, but being ready to jump is. During my military service I never had a chance to experience a static line parachute drop. Let’s pretend someone decided I should do this, and provided the means. Would I? Of course. I’m crazy enough to try almost anything.
It’s not so much I’m brave, but I just don’t care about the consequences in comparison to the opportunity. There’s a risk something could go wrong and I’d get hurt or die. Getting hurt is hardly new, and dying is just a circumstance, as I view it.
Right now you can get some really good aerial surveillance equipment cheaply. Anyone can. A remote controlled helicopter with a decent video camera is less than $200 now, and the the price is plummeting. It’s not just government agencies, but commercial entities and all sorts of idiots are buying or building these things.
You probably already know about the ways you can be tracked online. Maybe you know it’s possible to use off-the-shelf equipment to track just about any cellphone number, though I realize the expertise is not yet common. The point is, anyone can do it if they want to learn and pay for the equipment. The price of this is also plummeting, and the threshold of expertise, as well.
Indeed, competence and interest is about the only thing preventing everyone and his dog keeping track of you or I. There was a time just a few years ago competence and interest kept most folks off the Internet, but now Facebook is approaching one billion members. That’s about one for every seven humans on this planet. Factor out the non-individual accounts and it’s more like one in eight. It is now the primary means of checking on anyone, since so many people likely to draw such attention happen to have an account there.
That’s not the reason I avoid Facebook; it’s because the folks running that thing are themselves filthy scumbag liars. Primarily, they lie about what they offer, and what they’ll do to change what they offer. They do all sorts of things they know will hurt you and try to keep you from knowing about it. Whatever good they might claim to bring is utterly spoiled by their psychopathic treatment of users. There are enough psychopaths in my life already. It’s not fear but a powerful sense of annoyance.
My privacy was compromised long ago when I signed that enlistment contract. But you can limit the encroachment of global surveillance, for now. The primary limitation is the number of people doing surveillance, and their capacity to process all the data. From what I’ve seen, you’d have to be viewed a pretty serious threat to warrant a genuine effort with any degree of competence. Most of us simply don’t count for much, but as capacity to automate these things rises, the threshold will plummet. You can be nobody doing nothing at all and still be under surveillance.
The best defense is stop caring. There’s not much you can do to stop it, and it gives rise to an awful lot of opportunity to entertain ourselves. Be creative; be a distraction and put on a good show, doing something totally off-the-wall, out of character. Even if all you do is post something online with some the surveillance terms — “human to animal,” “collapse,” “outbreak,” and “illegal immigrants” — and do it persistently to mock them, it’s worth polluting the system just for the entertainment value. You can’t change what other people do, but you have a perfect right to claim all the humor they refuse to enjoy.
The other important factor is making sure you know what you are doing is completely good and right by your own internal value system. Neurosis is any number of layers between your conscious mind and self-honesty. You are the only one who can change you, at least in the sense you have to first identify things you don’t like before you can decide whether they can be fixed. Some things you just have to live with, but plenty of things moulder in the basement unexamined.
Under current rules and laws, I could never go back into the military. I’m hardly the kind of journalist or VIP who would be invited to come play so I can give them good PR. With my arthritis and permanent injuries, versus my current efforts to remain as fit as this aging abused body can be, I probably don’t qualify physically for such fun. But I would go in a heartbeat, and it’s about the same for a lot of other unlikely things. Then again, I go down into my soul’s basement pretty often and keep it swept clean. Judging by the number of people who suffer obvious neuroses, that must be one of the most courageous things we can do. So They can surveil as much as they like, because I can’t allow such things to affect my behavior; I’ve got plenty of internal drives to satisfy.
It’s not that I don’t care about the world. Following my conscience and convictions is, by definition, in the best interest of everyone.

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