Not My Objective

Posted on January 2, 2012 by ehurst

When Jesus came to the Temple, He was one of the few there who actually reached out and touched the extended hand of God.
Look what it got Him. They said He was crazy, had demons, and was a terrorist. He was executed for insurrection against the established order.
When people ask certain kinds of questions, I am likely to tell them to save themselves some time and simply regard me as an alien, a creature from outer space. I’m not actually an alien, but alienated. I don’t consider the world crazy, just badly broken and I’m trying to show there might be another way of looking at things.
The problem is I wind up having these conversations with my fellow Christians, the ones who should understand the symbolism of saying “not of this world.” I don’t expect pagans, secularists and other “sinners” to understand, but often they do better than the people who claim to follow Jesus. These days I am more hesitant to open my mouth in church than among the general public. Yesterday’s worship service was one of the moments when I was totally out of place among the Jesus People because I’m totally convinced they don’t understand certain things about Him.
As I’ve noted relentlessly, that’s because I say Western Christians are too Western, and Christianity is an Eastern Religion. Yesterday was a painful reminder, when I endured a message by someone who clings to the West. Worse, I could deconstruct his sermon to show how he clings to this world. This man apparently does not understand the meaning of “take up your cross.” He was too busy talking about success in this world. What part of dying unjustly in such a grisly execution, for daring to suggest the system was wrong, is “successful”? Jesus didn’t come to change the world. He came to prepare folks for the painful transition to some other realm of existence.
Today, a whole range of other religions are now infected with Western thought. How often do you find references to the Tetragrammaton? It can be traced to the period in Hebrew tradition after Judaism embraced Hellenistic rational structures, dismissing their ancient Hebrew Mysticism. Most references to the Tetragrammaton objectify the power of the letters of God’s name. In the ancient Hebrew Mysticism of the Bible, that would be ludicrous. His Name has power only because it is His name. If He were to arbitrarily choose some other name, it would be just as powerful. There is no particular power in the letters or their arrangement. It is Western epistemology which objectifies things like that.
To suggest parts of the Bible are allegory is also silly. Allegory is the West’s poor excuse for not grasping symbolic logic. In allegory, the elements of a narrative exhibit a one-to-one equation with something else recognized in more common terms. In Hebrew parabolic language, the elements in the narrative are alive. They are not confined to reason and analysis, but take on a different cast of meaning with each new context. Allegories have to be rewritten when you change the context; parables stay the same. Once again, it is the Western mind which demands things be objectified. It puts them under human control.
In Hebrew thinking, Truth is simply a nickname for God. Ancient Hebrews would never regard Truth as an entity separate from God. Truth cannot be objectified. Truth cannot exist apart from the Person who gives it meaning. Again, objectification is a Western obsession. Even though we tend to speak of God’s Laws as somewhat objectified, that’s only because the promises of the Laws are objective themselves, applying only to this realm below. The Laws themselves point to a higher domain of truth, with a living Justice which cannot be objectified. Justice can only be exemplified in Laws; the Laws are a parable.
Why it is so very many churches embrace what amounts to a Christian flavored Pharisaism escapes me. When the Jewish scholars embraced Hellenism’s analytical frame of reference, it became an excuse to place their fallen human intellect on the throne, and fulfill the ancient temptation: “you shall be like gods, judging what is good and evil” — that Boastful Pride of Life. They no longer had to rely on a God who remained incomprehensible, whose truth remains ineffable. It put them on the divine throne, and they got to say what God was, and who He was allowed to be. It was why they rejected Jesus, the Son of God; they had already passed judgment on God Himself. They didn’t simply make the Law of Moses their god, but some Hellenized analysis of that Law, which we now call the Talmud. Jesus rejected the Talmud as mere human reasoning, hardly on a par with any Scripture. That was precisely opposite of the Jewish claim the Talmud took precedence over Moses. The way Christians cling to their Aristotelian Systematic Theology, it’s just another Talmud, just another pile of human intellectual analysis more sacred to them than the actual Bible.
Unlike Jesus, no part of my calling includes debating the church officials in public, or even in private. If they didn’t get it the first time around back 2000 years ago, there’s not much I can do to help them now. What I can, I do; I write. I keep trying to find fresh ways to say something they have so far refused to hear. I’m more like some of the Old Testament prophets. I’ve been watching the storm clouds of God’s wrath on the horizon for some time. They don’t see them. Maybe I’m just a nut, after all, seeing something not actually there. Maybe not.
The way I see it, whatever bad which happens to the rest of Western Civilization, it’s going to be much worse for those who should know better, those we collectively call the Church.

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The Psychology of Psychology

Posted on January 1, 2012 by ehurst

Some things cannot be fixed, and it shouldn’t be tried.
Most people sense things could be better. A few actually make some effort to make things better. Both times when I was in college, few fields of study drew helpful minded folks more than psychology or related social sciences. Most of those who go on to publish books or programs which become famous are generally guilty of one thing: They cling to a single model. That’s on top of being deeply welded to Western Civilization. So they have a one-trick pony which can only be ridden on one surface. I don’t doubt that’s enough for their individual needs, but they tend to extrapolate that to the whole universe. If they are also good at communicating it, they manage to sell it. But I’m not sure they’ve actually done that much good.
I’ve read most of the biggest and brightest programs which came to public acclaim during my lifetime — Transactional Analysis, Parent Effectiveness Training and related extensions, Logos Therapy, etc. The last one I read was the one which broke me free from all that crap: Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. I still have a copy. Peck had the wisdom to avoid having a model, per se. Rather, what helped me most was his tendency to simply explain how people operated. He wasn’t much on fixing up their problems, but felt the only useful thing was to simply get a rough idea what to expect from people. He was also wise enough to avoid making too many applications outside his own experience. I read his other books, but they didn’t make nearly the same impact. After that, I quit reading such literature because I no longer felt the need.
I don’t doubt a great many folks understand as well, or perhaps even better than Peck. The difference was his ability to tell me and millions of others. Aside from that was his unique brand of self-knowledge. That example by itself was worth all the other books I bought and all the time I spent reading them. All that other crap made sense, in that I knew the limits of their models’ usefulness, which was a darn sight less than how they were sold. It’s not just eclecticism, but something fundamentally different, a wholly other level of thinking. There aren’t nearly enough books like that in the world.
I have taken a broad interest in more different areas of human knowledge than I can begin to list, made more false starts down the path to hobbies for which I was wholly unsuited. In the end, even writing is just a hobby, but it’s the one I’ve taken most seriously, and stayed with the longest. Even longer is the actual time engaging one particular field of interest. Psychology is simply a supporting cast member. The star of the show remains Religion. To do any good at all, I had to understand human nature, which is pretty much the point behind all the Social Sciences. Once I managed to cast aside some of the Western bias (thank you, Philosophy), I was forced to trash an awfully large library.
I don’t miss much of it. It didn’t go all at once. I still have books and still read them, but it’s not the same at all. For those who have a computer background, you’ll understand what it’s like to switch from Windows to anything based on the Unix structure. You can hack Windows, but your explorations are highly limited by the lack of options. Unix systems are a whole other game, because the entire thing is hackable. But I don’t really hack computers and software; I hack religion. It came in bits and pieces over many decades, going all the way back to my first stint in college, but once I realized the limits of the Western bias, most books, even language itself became a serious limitation.
Then again, had it not been for all those books I read, I doubt I could have considered writing. Talent means nothing if you don’t channel it into expressions people understand. So, yes, 90% of the arts I’ve encountered is meaningless crap, and I have no patience with it. Art History is cool, but Art Appreciation (AKA Humanities) is often torture. The whole point should not be saddling people with what the pointy-headed elites say art is, or ought to be, but helping people discover art which has lasting impact over many generations. Like everything humans do, art is spoiled by politics. We don’t tell people what art is; we let them discover what beauty can touch them in places with no name. We become exposed to people like Leonardo da Vinci, who could see and draw things — capturing the full motion of birds in flight — others can’t even see. So writing as art is simply helping people discover something they might not have already considered, but it has to follow the channel of being readable. When some painter tells me he has a painful awareness of variations in hue, tint and saturation, I have the same painful awareness of people chasing fantasies about human nature and fixing what’s wrong with the world.
My empathy is overdone. If you relate an unpleasant experience and I tell you, “I feel your pain,” chances are I may well feel it with more depth than you. The sorrows of others can produce literal suffering in my flesh. So there are times I simply have to turn it all off and get away from people. This is probably the primary reason I’m introverted — I care too much.
What has prevented suicide during several rough episodes in my past has been incremental steps of learning how to step outside of this reality, something the West wants desperately to take away from me and everyone else, and see things from that other, mystical perspective. Without that, I am unable to approach any suffering with any hope of perspective about what is actually doable. Most of the time, my efforts in counseling are nothing more than pointing out reality, and destroying a few fantasies. That’s always the biggest job. Almost everyone I’ve ever known was capable of finding a workable solution to everything bothering them when I helped them eliminate what wasn’t possible.
For the most part, Psychology can’t be fixed.

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Blue Eyes Whining

Posted on December 31, 2011 by ehurst

Human eyes suck at blue tones of light.
Be advised it’s necessary to dumb this down somewhat, but it’s still fairly accurate for most of the human race.
If you could check the rods and cones on your retinas, you’d discover each receptor is tuned to some particular color — red, green or blue. That should explain a lot. We don’t actually see yellow for itself. The problem is only 10%, on average, are designed to see blue. Worse, our brains are wired to absolutely need blue in perceiving the shape of things. Take any photograph and filter out the blue, and we can’t tell what the image is. Filter everything except the blue and we can tell quite well what’s in the picture.
If you want to see this as the result of evolution, you have to realize evolution is not an unalloyed good.
Either way, we suck at blue even as we desperately need it. So we have come up with artificial ways of helping our eyes. You remember all the rage about those “Blue Blocker” sunglasses? The lenses were varying shades of brown or yellow. Actually, the best ones were orange, though faded orange tends to look yellow to us. The point is, orange is opposite blue on the color wheel. The objective is not to literally block out blue, but to shift the perception of our brains. Our internal visual processing simply adapts to any color lenses as much as possible.
Any lens will cut down the amount of available light. Our native sun is generally yellow. An orange lens makes everything just a little darker, which is actually good for your eyes. As we age, things become rather fuzzy and light-shot. That’s the vision’s wear pattern. Avoiding overexposure to direct sunlight over the course of your life is a good thing. Orange lenses make green and red easier to distinguish. They make blue more like black, which is just fine with our brains. As we age, adding a yellow-orange tint to the field of view helps most people. It shifts the hue range down and makes all details sharper.
That “Blue Blocker” fad was actually one of the few which had it right.

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Year End Economic Tea Leaves

Posted on December 30, 2011 by ehurst

This is actually a rather minor note to clarify things of which most people seem unaware.
You may understand the noise about WW2 fixing the Great Depression is pure nonsense. What fixed the Great Depression was the US was about the only country of any size which had not suffered major destruction. We got rich because we were the only supplier selling to those rebuilding. The war itself was a major drain on our economy, and had it run longer, we would have joined the ranks of the starving. A wartime economy sends production outside the system with no significant payments or exchange coming back into the pool of wealth. Whatever plunder their might be is no longer granted to the troops who take it home to spend.
If you get that, perhaps you understand why the US dollar is okay right now. If you want to read tea leaves, you’ll get as much useful information about the future as you would from trying to use the standard analytical tools to project more than a week or two. All I’m offering is an explanation of what I see right now.
With all the bad news about the Euro and the Asian economies, investors are jittery. Right now it appears the dollar is safe. Thus, people are buying up dollar denominated investments. Demand for the dollar is up, which itself is subject to the same laws of supply and demand as anything else.
So behind the scenes, we see the relative supply of dollars has been shrinking. Ballooning government debt has failed to replace all the other forms of debt, so that the actual usable supply has been shrinking. Even with Bernanke fronting so much through the Fed to Europe, the supply is simply not keeping up with demand. Only the strictures of how the system actually works is keeping the supply low; dollars can’t be offered in quite the same way as other goods due to regulations they aren’t willing to ignore just yet.
Temporarily, at least, we can expect the price of stocks, gold and other dollar denominated investments to go down, because the dollar is stronger; it buys more. What that means at the same time is we are entering an actual deflation. Even if that deflation is relative, it’s the same net effect. It’s not as if Keynes was right about the economy being controlled to any degree by “animal spirits” — the animal spirits are being driven by whatever the bankers and financiers wish to tell them.
Again: There is absolutely no way of independently verifying anything the banking moguls and government officials tell us. This truth was reinforced when everyone discovered the Fed was moving oceans of dollars outside the borders without bothering to notify anyone. Further, Bernanke and friends bluntly lied about how big TARP was, and every bailout since then. Only they have any real idea what happened and what numbers were involved. The information we do have leaked out entirely by accident (so far as I can tell) long after the fact. We still don’t know the half of it.
So if the Euro voices whine, everyone in Euros weeps with them, having no idea if any of it is true. We know more about China’s economy, if we bother to look, than we do about our own. Granted, I could be completely wrong, but with all the differing theories and stories going around, nobody has to be right, but somebody has to be wrong. What I’ve laid out here helps to explain why I don’t bother to make any major adjustments in how I plan to face the New Year. From what I’ve seen in my 55 years of life, this seems the most realistic explanation, and all the other approaches have failed miserably. I’m lucky to be alive, in that sense. The only reason the dollar is up is because every other currency seems to be in trouble.
Their control is not absolute, but it affects my life in ways which I dare not try to read any tea leaves and make strong predictions. Given it’s all so arbitrary and opaque, and I get a hint the soup just isn’t ready yet, I plan to keep muddling along as is. What is most likely to happen are things I simply cannot account for, so it’s pointless.
But I’m watching and listening.

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Unaccountable Hell

Posted on December 29, 2011 by ehurst

When any given system begins too much to favor one party or another, no one should be surprised when the victims start shedding blood.
That could be literally or figuratively. For an example of the latter, modern Western marriage is dead. The reason is simple: No sane man will commit to something with such outrageous risk for such a small gain. The price of marriage for a man, particularly in America, is simply unreasonable. All it takes is one false accusation from a peeved wife, and he loses his children, his home, his livelihood, and just about all the other reasons for living. He has to lay out an awful lot of money to bribe the system so he is permitted to offer some proof she is lying. After the fact, of course.
The answer is simple for American men: Don’t ever marry a female afflicted with any part of modern feminist culture. Avoid those you believe could ever become that way.
How about student loans? Nothing you stand to gain is worth it any more. It’s outright illegal for you to file bankruptcy to discharge the debt, and in our modern economy, only a few government sinecures can pay enough to discharge the debt in a reasonable time. Yes, I’m including Med School graduates, because like it or not, almost all of you now work for the government in one way or another. For most, the promised high-powered education is the biggest fraud of all.
I rather expect the cut throat collection system in modern Israel to be adopted here in the US, little by little. Except, trigger-happy Americans will start killing collectors rather like some men already kill their ex-wives, and for pretty much the same reason. Okay, so perhaps the business of shedding blood is more literal than I first suggested.
You ain’t seen nothing yet.

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No Golden Age

Posted on December 29, 2011 by ehurst

In the Old Testament book of Judges, we are told there was a cycle of behavior which characterized the tribes and Nation of Israel. During the judgeship of some charismatic leader, they would behave rather justly. After the judge died, things declined until the nation was wallowing in evil. Then they would suffer some devastation, some national trauma. At that point, they would realize they had forgotten their covenant oath and would seek a path of repentance. Then God would raise up another judge. (Please note: The term “judge” is not a good translation of the term or concept, but is commonly accepted.)
Crazy as it sounds, this system was what God had intended, despite knowing in advance Israel was easily the worst nation He could have chosen for the mission. His own prophets said that repeatedly. So when they begged for a king, it was a form of rejection. God being quite tolerant, gave them their king, and that first was a real loser. Handsome and regal, he violated the Covenant with casual disdain. In other words, Saul’s character was no different most of the Israelis of his day. His reward was a demonic insanity we can hardly imagine.
The story is well known that his successor was David. With some justice we view his reign as some kind of golden age for Israel. But how easily we forget, as great as he was as a warrior and ruler, so great were his failings. His only saving grace was his humility. Get his attention and he would do the right thing. His successor was far wiser, and far greater in his own sins. In other words, it was hardly all that different from the system under the judges. But David was the balance point between a king who held court under a tree, and a prissy smart boy who wallowed in gold, silver and feminine flesh.
David rose to power at a time when every imperial power around him was on the wane. Egypt was facing chaotic times. The old Hittite Empire was fading, and the Assyrians had yet to get well organized under a single ruler. And David was a man’s man, able to rough it in the wilderness while still humble before God. Though not bluntly stated, the prophets imply the salutary conditions for Israel of that time faded because Israel went downhill fast from David’s relative justice, as the last king who truly understood the nature of Hebrew culture and religion.
But truthfully, the Scripture refers to that time as the biblical golden age of the past because that’s how everyone afterward saw it. Truly, the Covenant was written for a tribal society for whom the closest thing to a king was the warlord who rose up only when needed. Fundamental to human nature is a great need for being left alone as much as possible. But it must be paired with a culture which makes the most of human talents, avoiding the worst of human weaknesses, by virtue of being a culture which reflects the actual facts of human nature. In no uncertain terms, the Covenant of Moses was structured for a people who had no king, but were ruled by clan and tribal elders. What we mistake for chaos and inefficiency is actually the natural human state after the Fall.
Americans like to imagine we had a golden age. Most today put that in the 1950s. A relative few scholars understand it as the period prior to our War Between the States, before the Constitution was perverted by the Whigs/Republicans. They correctly grasp the utter necessity of keeping the central government weak. Fewer still understand it was actually even more free under the Articles of Confederation.
Indeed, by God’s Laws, Shays’ Rebellion was largely justified, and Washington was utterly wrong to enforce the process of concentrating the wealth of the country in fewer hands. But to be honest, we had no golden age. From the very earliest flutterings of rebellion before the American Revolution, we had it all wrong. In many ways it was the Puritan fire which breathed life into the Revolution. Puritans had this notion God intended people to be middle class, and that any system interfering with that was evil by definition. If working hard couldn’t bring middle class prosperity, it could only be Satan’s hand preventing it. It’s the heresy of materialism.
Let’s not forget all those who extended loans to make the migration to these shores took huge losses, in part because the rebelling colonists were in no mood to repay. Much of the details over which the colonists were fussing was against royal franchises for things they refused to do without. In other words, it was all a matter of going back on promises to abide by limits they had already agreed to accept. Once the Revolution was over, the exact same cruel inequities were forced on the citizens by their new government.
How was the oppressive taxation of Solomon any different than the raiding theft of the Philistines, or any other neighboring kingdom, for that matter? How is the manhandling of TSA any different from the nagging fear of imaginary terrorists? How is the brutal police state any different from Muslim Sharia Law? If we bothered to actually think about the answer, we might conclude shocking things. By clinging to some theoretical sacred Constitution, we blind ourselves to what’s really happening to us as humans. It never was more than a piece of paper by which the masses have been manipulated into the most awful idiocy.
There was no golden age in American History.

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Predictions for 2012

Posted on December 28, 2011 by ehurst

Things will get worse than they are now for most humans on this earth.
That’s about as close as I can come to a real prediction. If you ask me what I’m doing to prepare as the new year comes around, it works out a little differently.
As noted in my previous post, I could care less what arbitrary names and numbers others apply to a particular day. My only interest is in how others refer to it so I can communicate. It’s rather like choosing to use English; there are certain accepted conventions, grammar and spelling, vocabulary, etc. Most of my readers make reference to various well-established holiday names and dates, so I use them.
The US government, as well as other folks among TBTP, use the common Western calendar for their stuff. If past activity is any guide, a great deal hinges on the finance cyclical planning and government bureaucracy planning. If Half Past Human predicts March 2012 will see major changes, that’s not hard to guess without all the expensive algorithms. Why do you suppose it’s called “March”? In most of the Northern Hemisphere, that’s the earliest time you can march — put troops in the field. Despite all the fancy seasonal training, you can bet most Western military planning takes weather cycles into account. If your activities, military or otherwise, require lots of bodies moving all at once in certain areas, March is about the earliest time of year it’s becomes more predictable.
Congress has already signaled the intent to do bad things to us. Not that there’s any real news there, but TPTB have to deal with a lot of balky servants. Put it on paper and some folks will do almost anything, because they somehow believe, almost like magic, they can’t get into trouble. Most of those who serve the Dark Side are whiny and want their butts covered. Granted, it can get complicated. Right now there is a turning tide regarding SOPA and PIPA, as the sponsorship is crumbling. Congress may be embarrassed into backing off putting on paper what the government already intends to do with the Internet. This means fewer lapdogs will bark and bite on cue, so it won’t work out quite the same. It’s not that they won’t take over the Internet to satisfy the corporate thugs, but they’ll have to use a more expensive and time-consuming plan for it. Meanwhile, as more and more people interact with the Net via cellphones, it becomes much easier to close off large collections of sites for the critical mass of human awareness. The old Internet will become irrelevant for most people, and the phone-centric Net will become the major target of interest for them and TPTB.
I wrote previously I don’t believe the economic system, particularly in reference to banking and currency controls, is subject to the apparent laws everyone else is discussing. That is, you would think sooner or later the amount of debt would bring the movement of currency through the system largely to a halt. But I’m convinced TPTB can decide how much is too much, and things won’t collapse until they decide it. It’s not subject to the vagaries of mass human perception, but the other way around. Human perception will be manipulated by public pronouncements which may or may not have anything to do with actual numbers and such. So while things may well come apart globally in 2012, they don’t have to, and none of the popular chatter by even the most savvy commentators about it means anything at all. That is, too much of the popular chatter is based on whatever the bankers wish to say about something they never have to honestly report because they are the only ones who know; it’s whatever they say it is.
As for my actual planning: I’m going to pretend the economy will limp along for at least another year. My activities here in Rural Flyover America predict we will muddle through. It’s not that I have no backup plans, but that’s simply because I figure if this is the year for chaos of any kind, I can’t predict the flavor or shape of it. I know what I hope I can do, but there are simply too many surprises possible, even likely, should TPTB decide to create a little excitement. My calculations also include the very real hand of God doing things He hasn’t bothered to discuss with anyone down here. With so many hucksters claiming to speak for Him, I generally avoid pronouncements of every voice except the one in my head. If God doesn’t take the same measures He has in the past to get my attention on something, it probably doesn’t apply to me. Naturally, I’ll blather endlessly here if I think that changes.
So I can safely guess we’ll have some more warfare in the Middle East, moving troops to places we haven’t sent them recently. More trillions of dollars will be wasted on killing brown people who dress and talk funny, in places with names we can’t pronounce, much less spell properly. We’ll use increasingly expensive equipment with increasingly more problems, and fail more gloriously on the field of battle, even while proclaiming we somehow won. We’ll send our best and brightest, only to have them come home missing pieces, on drugs, or in boxes, bags and straitjackets. That’s what we’ve done for a long time, and there’s no reason to expect it to change.
Since the electoral process is highly controlled and manipulated, it won’t matter if 99% of America votes for Ron Paul, he won’t win anything. In the last primary some of his delegates mysteriously disappeared or died on the way to the Republican Convention. Those who made it there safely were coerced, beaten and silenced in other ways by the system. He’s the best man, which is why he can’t win. I predict he’ll end up third party. Barring major surprises, Romney will be the nominee and Obama will win again. If not, it won’t make much difference.
We are soooooo screwed. Happy New Year.

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Resolved: No Resolutions

Posted on December 28, 2011 by ehurst

This is my annual rejection of mainstream rituals regarding the Western observation of New Years’ Day.
Over the centuries of human awareness, every culture and civilization has had their own reckoning of when the cycle ends and starts over. There is really nothing compelling about the arbitrary date chosen by the West. The whole thing was pretty much an accident.
I don’t make New Years’ resolutions because I am utterly certain the best thoughts don’t come at any single time of the year. And when they do, most of us are hardly equipped to keep with any particular pattern choice for just about anything we do. Why wait until the end of your calendar cycle to implement a good idea? The brightest minds in the world are equally scattered among those who can make up their mind once and forever about any particular thing, and among those who change their mind every few minutes. However, we can find by historical survey those who have the most fun are closer to the latter group.
I’m already working on making a couple of significant changes, but both are defined as investigations of what sorts of changes are effective for various purposes. I’m still tweaking my fitness regimen to match better what I can do versus what I can estimate I should be able to do. I’m still hoping my brother can fix the Latitude so I can have a Linux laptop on the side with this one running Windows 7. Neither of those endeavors will ever reach a steady state, because that’s the nature of how I do things, and it’s the nature of the endeavors themselves.
I tend to dismiss all holidays for that reason. When my fellow Christians debate whether to worship God on Saturday or Sunday, I settle for what Paul said: Won’t make much difference if you are following the Spirit where He leads you, and not trying to ape someone who isn’t you. Instead, I prefer to worship Him every day alike, alternatively whining or screaming or laughing and dancing, because all of them and more are found in the Bible.
I treat Christmas with the same disdain. We all know Jesus wasn’t born in winter, and we can be sure that particular choice of day was pure politics. Constantine was a confirmed Sun worshiper, and wanted the Church to adopt all his favorite Solar festivals. It was easier to tame the Church that way. Indeed, these days most of the modern Western corruptions in Christianity started with his pagan ideas. He funded heretics and made their heresy the established doctrine, engaging in the most egregious influence peddling in the Early Church Councils. I don’t need a winter celebration to decide it’s good to give to others.
Happy New Year.

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Game Propaganda

Posted on December 27, 2011 by ehurst

I don’t keep secrets.
When I write fiction, I confess openly it’s propaganda, wherein I promote a particular world view and set of values. If I could devise or design games, I would be even more blunt about it. With just a little digging you can find all sorts of documentation I’ve written explaining and defending that viewpoint. If I can’t persuade, I’ll settle for entertaining you, but I doubt any of my regular readers are confused about my beliefs.
Not everyone is that honest.
In particular, you’ll find those promoting socialism and that peculiar brand of fascism by which the US is governed. Does anyone argue the vast bulk of academia is vehemently progressive and liberal, which is to say various flavors of socialist and communist? It dominates every college, even here in the Bible Belt state of Oklahoma. Our red state politics is just a paint job, because all of our republicans are socialist, with but a few exceptions. Socially conservative, yes, but almost none of them are economic conservatives. They all support big government. So it should not surprise you the very Christian school known as Oklahoma Baptist University was no less a liberal socialist institution than any other.
Every time I tried to tell a Baptist church what they were paying for, I caught hell from the school administrators. That’s because the school caught hell from those who paid the bills. But of course, nothing changed. My soul, even the Religion Department was that way, with the only biblical conservative a woman who had never seen a single promotion from associate professor her entire career there. The head of that department could not tell you about his “personal salvation experience,” an absolute necessity among anything labeled “Baptist.” He was, if anything, an anti-religion professor.
The whole Social Sciences division was that way, of course. So my first encounter with economics was stained with socialism. I won’t name the guy, but my professor was a slimy weasel who taught precious little actual economic theory, and lots of socialist crap. He wasted three whole weeks of our precious class time on some stinking role playing game which was all the rage in those days. I had seen it in high school in Anchorage, AK — that entire state education system is run by a blatantly communist union. But my college professor was too cheap to buy the fairly expensive game, and had made himself a pirated facsimile with a hand-painted game board and knock-off tokens and cards.
The game is slanted in that, the only way you can get anywhere is to embrace progressive social policies. There is no place for personal morality; your morals are handed to you in the game. There are no options for doing something intelligent. You are born in “da hood” and you are forced to play by the morals of your average drug dealer. All females are required to roll the dice to get pregnant and have babies. You are permitted to invest your hours in various pursuits. Differing characters would have differing numbers of hours to invest. Otherwise, everyone is assumed to be the same low-life swine.
There was no escape whatsoever. You could go into crime or you could invest your hours in communist community improvement activities. Only if you raised taxes, got tons of police on the streets, and generally turned it into a socialist paradise, could you then hope to turn your ghetto into some kind of Utopia. There were no valid business opportunities, education was a joke, and simply saving up and leaving was not an option. You couldn’t even join the military.
I hated it both times I went through it. I still hate both of the teachers, because I’m pretty sure they knew exactly what they were promoting. Let’s just say I grew up part time in each of cities, small towns and rural countryside. We move often, no less than twice each year. Until past age 10, we existed in grinding poverty. Nothing in my experience mirrored what I saw in that game. Our road out was a combination of personal morals from religion and a couple of miracles which opened the door of business opportunities.
If you are going to spew propaganda, the least you could do is be honest about it.

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Humor: Starting My Own Cult

Posted on December 27, 2011 by ehurst

You can’t take me seriously on this one.
When I am out riding through the countryside, sometimes I get bored and steer my bicycle into the cityscape. There are lots of little side roads, back streets and alleys to explore.
Consider also that I spend a lot of time praying and contemplating, to the point I won’t bother to define the difference. It’s how I stay sane, so humor me. As I walk, ride or whatever activity which leaves my mind somewhat idle, I am talking to God and to myself, and it all blends in and out of full consciousness.
I passed by a nice old glass fronted building, which I believe was originally a car dealership a few decades ago. It’s held many different endeavors since then, none long successful. The last occupant was a collection of so-called antique dealers, folks who sold collectibles and such. This is not a good economy for that.
So I pedaled past and in the swirling fog of my numerous thoughts out popped the statement: “Lord, I need that for my new church building!” I envisioned a sign reading, “Your Local Generic Church” because any existing institutional denomination would be aghast at what I believe.
Besides, I no longer regard myself clergy, per se, but administrator and teacher. That I consider myself a prophet is another matter entirely; it’s not a church office in my mind. But I would grandly fail as a cult leader because I don’t want people dependent on me, I am not motivated by money and property, and I don’t take myself seriously. I just like to write and talk, and otherwise make noise. And I’m willing to speak to empty rooms.
So after announcing that out loud — nobody was near enough to hear me chattering to God or myself — I rode on laughing. That building will await the next entrepreneur, or be knocked down so the land can be used for some other purpose. If you are dying to see it, perhaps you can catch a glimpse of it from a few years back on Google Maps or Google Earth on the street view function. It’s around 8913 SE 29th, Midwest City, OK.
More likely I’ll end up in the FEMA camp which rumor has it will be built just a bit west of there on the land Tinker AFB bought up and fenced off as a training area. I guess they got tired of the tort claims from aircraft crashing among the houses there just off the north end of the runway. It used to be called Glenwood Community. The objective of my ride was to hug the fence line and take a fresh look at the area. Up on the north side of that fenced area, where the old railroad track beds remain nestled among new municipal buildings, looks just like a hobo hotel among the thick trees. Nobody there during this time of year, but lots of evidence from previous occupation.
Not much accounting for what drifts through my head on those long rides.

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