Ego Suspension

Posted on September 29, 2011 by ehurst

Been powerful sick the last couple of days. Something I ate wreaked havoc in my digestive system, shutting it down except for sheer physical processes. Not fun. It has hindered my writing because I couldn’t leave the house.
Most of my endless blather here arises from bumping into an experience or something I read, maybe several of them together, which triggers a response outside my conscious mind. Usually that includes some time spent praying over the issue to make sure I know my own heart.
I should clarify I don’t often pray on my knees physically because they are messed up and can’t take the pressure from the front most of the time. The cartilage behind the knee caps is all chewed up. The only space large enough for prostration of my substantial form is a high traffic area, and my yard grass just isn’t that nice. So I often go off and on a walk, bike ride, or just get off alone to myself. Then I talk out-loud to God. You can decide for yourself whether or not He pays me any mind, but it seems to me He surely does.
The issue here is not shutting off the intellect. It’s shutting off the ego. Without nit picking over the vocabulary choice here, the point is to suspend my overt volition by distracting it with some other simple task. For whatever reason, that’s when I get a sense of peace about things one way or the other. I don’t get that peace when I struggle too much with direct logic, because the issue does not arise from direct logic.
Sometimes all I can tell is I have some nameless itch, some sense of burden, something that I have to chase down in my spirit. I’ve got one or two such things right now that don’t seem to have any perceptible answers just yet. So I keep bringing them up in prayer. Then there are some things I know I can’t write about, whether I get peace or not about the thing itself. I also need peace about what to say.
I claim to be a prophet of God. At least once of twice since coming to that conclusion, I’ve wanted very much to keep something inside. Didn’t want to write about it. Drove me nuts. Shutting up is not an option unless I do something to destroy the last shred of credibility I have in that claim. I don’t consider it giving advice, just having my say, doing my job. After that, it’s between God and whomever reads it.
There are times I get such a charge out of it, I don’t have words. It’s one of the few things I really wish I could write, but I’m not sure it would make that much difference in the long run. Still, I’m just yammering to clear my own conscience, to seek my own peace. Madness it may all be, but it’s the best I know.

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Collection of Asides

Posted on September 28, 2011 by ehurst

Several small things on my mind today.
1. I’m a little concerned about official belligerence toward Pakistan. This won’t be the same as bullying Iraq and Afghanistan, or places like Libya and Somalia. I tend to think China doesn’t kid around and back down from promising to treat an outright invasion of Pakistan as an invasion of their own territory. The concern is we have such a large number of plutocrats who think this is a good idea, that war with China is worthwhile. If this proceeds any farther, I will regard it as confirming my predictions regarding a major change in things close to my birthday. This is really stupid and will bring about an apocalyptic change in things.
2. The Freedom Box is a little closer to reality. It’s a tiny home server, plugs into the wall as a single block about the size of a fat paperback novel. The box comes with software already to run, and the whole thing has scripted setup and configuration options so you really don’t have to know anything more than what you want from it. It has the capability of creating a local mesh network. If any one machine in that mesh can connect to the Net, you can share it with the rest of your local network. Best of all, it restores the balance of power to the user, by taking away the central points of surveillance. If every home has their own server, with built-in encryption, it cripples the government and corporate surveillance programs. The predicted price point ranges between $30 and $50 (US).
3. I’m watching with some interest the shenanigans in Europe regarding complicated deals to create a fund which will keep the banking system alive in the PIIGS countries (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain). So far, every proposal has died for one reason or another. The situation is hopeless, anyway. Even the bigshots are saying Greece will default soon. Just how soon that is no one is saying, but it’s almost time to get out the popcorn and watch the show. Most experts believe when Greece defaults, the Euro currency will go down the tubes, and most of the European banking system will take a huge shock. It’s possible a great many banks will collapse and it will affect ours here.
4. In my series on the Oracles of Marriage on my other blog, I emphasize the Fall and how it affects the marriage covenant. I was asked if there was any way around this. Of course there is; grace trumps Laws every time (and by extension, trumps Game). We aren’t doomed to live with this totally. The problem is no one in the flesh will ever avail themselves of the full extent of grace’s power. The division is not cut and dried. So I use this handy rule: If your spouse, or anyone else, acts in the moment as controlled by the Fall, treat them according to the Laws. If they tend to show the effects of grace, give them more grace in response. A husband or wife showing no Fruit of the Spirit should be treated as bound under the Laws of God, and your expectations of their behavior should predict a lack of grace. Use Game strategies to handle them until they show the Fruit. Then make adjustments in your strategy to match so much as they have changed their response.
5. Yesterday’s rant about the Bible does not mean I don’t believe, I simply don’t worship the artifact. The biggest argument here is not whether I intend to obey the Scriptures, but how to read and apply them. Using the Bible like a book of magic, as if the very words themselves have some miraculous power, is contrary to what the Book itself has to say. Any comment which reflects the contents of the Book has the same power, because truth is truth. There’s nothing objective about this at all. Declarations about infallibility and verbal inspiration are moot points, because we don’t have any originals. But I hold myself accountable to the revelation contained in that Book as it now exists, and I find this one of the primary keys to how I discern whether someone should be treated as spiritually awakened.

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Worth Doing

Posted on September 27, 2011 by ehurst

My frequent attacks on Aristotelian epistemology do not mean the whole thing is utterly useless. I’ve often said it has its place, however limited. I’ve also said the ancients would recognize it if they had encountered it, because it was the proper means for addressing things lacking any mystical component.
A rock falls when you unwrap your fingers from it; if you find something really important in that, go ahead and analyze it using direct logic. Measure it and extrapolate the forces involved, etc. Theorize and build better rocks, if it seems compelling to you. Nothing wrong with bringing better weapons to the battlefield, since humanity will never cease fighting. That’s the whole point, though. The type of direct analysis you use for falling rocks will not help you understand humans are permanently broken and will do all they can to improve on the process for both war and commerce. Doing science is one thing; understanding why humans do science is not itself within reach of science.
Not that such truth as prevented scientists from trying. Therein lies the problem. People are so enamored with what science can do, they seem to forget there are things it can’t do. Keep it where it belongs, and you’ll never get a complaint from mystics.
The limitations on analytical and deductive reasoning are generally unrecognized. It gets to the point most serious scholars assume what mystics do is actually just a form of deduction. In the very process, they throw out everything on the other side of the line of conscious reasoning. That’s the primary bone of contention. It gets to the point I refuse to offer any apologetic discussion of my belief. I simply declare faith is inherently unreasonable and get back to the work of faith. My blogs have had their share of verbal attacks on this very thing, and it’s a waste of time. If you insist on denying there is anything worthwhile beyond the boundaries of conscious intellect, then I will state you don’t have sufficient education to understand what I would have to say. You can’t keep throwing pearls of truth at piggish minds.
My hardest work is against the mass of Christians who actually start off agreeing with the Aristotelians. In their struggle to keep faith inside that constricted envelope, they have to come up with a lot of sheer nonsense, stuff which violates both direct and indirect reasoning.
How many Christians do you know who maintain a full consciousness Jesus the man was dime-a-dozen in His world? There were countless prophets and oddball rabbis in His day, and not a few were killed by one government or another, claiming to be the Messiah. Nor was He the only one crucified in that time. To someone outside the whole discussion, using the best historical data, His personal name “Jesus” was common, even among several others claiming to be Christ. Contemporary references ignore Our Savior for good and valid reasons. He purposely avoided being famous, and the few things He did which brought any fame were hard to swallow by the cynical minds which bothered to record events among His people in that day. Further, there were similar stories about miracles and wild teachings circulating regarding other fellows. The Gospel record states bluntly it was His wish: In human terms, He was utterly unremarkable.
So it remains to this day. In terms of direct logical analysis, everything can be explained as within the norms. Whatever historical data exists external to the community of His followers is scant, contradictory, and hardly remarkable. Very early on some people did their best to paint on extra layers of remarkableness, which pious frauds only confuse things. It is this extravagant bullshit piety which is the single greatest threat to the genuine article.
The crazy theories and doctrines about “propositional truth” are in the same vein. [sarcasm alert] We simply cannot have a revelation of divine truth which isn’t first and foremost factual. We can’t have a holy writ which isn’t first provable objectively. So an awful lot of finite resources go into nailing it down, as if by some means sinful humanity can be compelled to accept the narrative. Wait a minute — isn’t all this verbiage regarding things outside this world? It’s as if there is no Holy Spirit, since His discretion or whim is not sufficient for our war against evil, as if we could hold God accountable to our performance measures.
Recently Google announced the Dead Sea Scrolls have finally been scanned and made available on the Net. How nice. While studying these manuscripts is not a total waste of time in adding to human knowledge regarding some very highly disputed events, they probably don’t add so much to our actual exercise of faith. Faith originates on the other side of the line. Those fragile bits of animal skin stained with ink are not the originals, nor have we found any other scribblings which purport to being the autographs of those who first composed them. The implication by some these scrolls were somehow withheld, kept away from the public for suspicious motives is plain silly, as if some secrets in them will serve to either confirm or deny the claims of Aristotelian Christian assertions.
Let’s try a little reasoning about this. We assume God doesn’t make mistakes, and certainly has whatever it takes to execute His wishes. Could He not have preserved the autographs, were it critical to His plans? That He didn’t should speak volumes. Maybe whatever it was He had to put before this world in terms of revelation did not require such pedantic precision. By the very logic of the Aristotelians, you cannot have propositional truth if the exact words are in doubt. Obviously we must conclude whatever “truth” is, “propositional” is not a proper adjective. And obviously everything which depends on that argument collapses, too.
Perhaps it would make a lot more sense simply to take what we have as sufficient, and accept that idea in itself as somehow critical to the process. You may recall Jesus said something about taking His message into all the world, including a future world which was radically different from His day. That echoes some things written in the previous revelations, the texts of Scripture He quoted Himself. Shall we presume God’s very consciousness was somehow trapped in our little historical time bubble, that He could not foresee the vast proliferation of human languages? And should we then somehow deduce we would first have to teach all humanity the ancient biblical languages by compulsion so we could then present the Scriptures in their original texts? And just how much is lost in translating “propositional truth” into utterly foreign cultural contexts? Are we going to compel them to learn all the Hebrew historical and cultural background, too?
I often wonder how these folks miss the very fact they themselves are reasoning with intellectual processes foreign to the folks who wrote those Scriptures. We still haven’t found the Garden of Eden. There is no place on earth where those four rivers come together, at least if we understand the names correctly. If topography has changed that much since the time the narrative indicates, then we should hardly be surprised there is so little archaeological evidence for some parts of the narrative. Who’s to say the names of the rivers weren’t later applied to other actual rivers for some peculiar reason? Or maybe — just maybe — the reference wasn’t meant to be taken literally? Could it amount to saying subtly, “It’s not any place you can find on this earth”?
My human intellect is bothered by the lack of notice my teaching material gets. The other part of me realizes the Son of God Himself got even less respect. I’m not likely to be crucified, nor in my wildest imagination can I envision my stuff being read by other folks even fifty years from now. But maybe — just maybe — I can create a small trend of thought among a few of my fellow believers that we’ve been barking up the wrong tree on a lot of things. I don’t have the drive and human ambition to be a reformer, but I rest comfortably in the assurance: If my stuff is at all on track with what God has tried to tell us, I won’t be the only voice saying what I’m saying.
Otherwise, I’m just entertaining myself and few friends, and I don’t consider that wasted time.

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Climatic Recompense

Posted on September 26, 2011 by ehurst

We spent the entire summer in drought, with temperatures above 100° F (38C) more than 50 days (our previous record). It was rough, but not dramatic. Rare is the summer we don’t see such temperatures at least some days, so this was just more of them. Granted, we did see it reach 120° F (49C) once or twice and that’s rare. Still, it was not really remarkable.
What is remarkable is almost this entire month has been quite nice. In Oklahoma, we typically have a brief spate of comfortable days, usually three weeks tops, before we fire up or drop off into nasty weather. But we’ve had decent weather the whole month. The air conditioning has been off almost the whole time, and I put on long sleeves for a few brief hours one morning. For Central Oklahoma, a whole month of that is like heaven on earth.
The only thing still making me frown is all the apple and pear trees in this area produced bitter, pithy little knobs. They should be ripe about now, but they are inedible. I just managed to get a decent crop from our early apple tree out back by watering it every day. The tomato plants were almost useless, and lots of other garden vegetables just did not take the heat well. The strawberries survived and are now taking over their end of the garden. We still have bell peppers producing. That’s it.
All in all, though, this long spell of mild weather is just about fair recompense for all the heat. The weather folks expect it to stretch up into next month a ways. It’s almost like living in a civilized land.

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New Series for Prophecy Students

Posted on September 25, 2011 by ehurst

For those who follow my Prophet’s Academy training stuff, I’ve started a new series on marriage and the family household on my other blog.

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Watching Economics News This Weekend

Posted on September 24, 2011 by ehurst

Because most people know so little about economics, TPTB don’t knock out the alternative econ-news sites so quickly as the others. That’s a good thing if you know economics, but it’s opaque to the sheeple. What little they do know is mostly mythology.
Vox Day has been predicting for quite some time we should end up in deflation, not spiraling inflation. The key is credit. It won’t matter if the Fed “cranks up the presses” because the actual physical currency comes out of the US Mint. What the Fed does it create imaginary money to loan. What happens if no one borrows? It won’t matter how liquid the banks are if no one is using that liquidity. Over the past few years, consumer debt, new and old, has dropping like a rock. The government can’t borrow fast enough to counter that drop, and businesses only borrow when consumers spend. Consumers in America only spend when they can borrow, and they don’t have any reason to do so.
Yes, I’ve oversimplified, but it should help you understand things happening in the background, and out of the MSM. For example, did you know the price of gold dropped a bit the past few days? It’s not as important as it seems. The greatest single item to indicate economic trends is copper, and the price of copper is really plunging right now. That means businesses are not buying, because they aren’t producing, and they are getting ready to lay off more workers, etc. Gonzalo Lira tells us what should be stinking obvious:

[T]his fall in the price of copper confirms this notion that the general economy is going down.
And remember: Market sentiment can not only be a predictor of future economic performance, but its determinant. If today the markets feel that the economy is going to suck tomorrow, often that very sentiment is what makes the economy suck canal water…. [T]he fall in the price of copper is deflationary: Less demand means that the prices fall — meaning the dollar acquires purchasing power….
Ben Bernanke is famous for being terrified of deflation… Deflation is supposed to be bad because it shrinks an economy…. Notice: It’s not that Bernanke will do anything to alleviate deflation — he will do anything to alleviate his fear of deflation….
This dramatic fall in the price of copper signals that the markets do not believe reactivation is anywhere near eminent — not for at least 9 to 18 months. To the traditional twin Federal Reserve mandates of price stability and full employment, Bernanke has added a third mission: That of “growing the economy” — whatever it takes, however unorthodox or reckless the measures.

He notes in passing, “the fall in the price of gold … was just a combination of options expiration coming up, and gold positions being sold to cover losses in other asset classes”. Don’t watch gold and silver; watch copper. Watch Bernanke go absolutely berserk. Watch it all come crashing down around his ears. Lira thinks it could come as early as next month.
I tend to think Lira knows what he is talking about.

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Google Censorship

Posted on September 24, 2011 by ehurst

You can Google for censorship and get a lot of information, but you aren’t likely to find much about Google’s own censorship actions.
No one should be surprised effective political dissent will get results, and those results aren’t the political reform suggested. The results are more oppression, usually targeted at the dissent. Savvy Net users already know Google was built on covert funding from the CIA. They lie about such things, but have a powerful connection with the US government. Effective dissent requires two things: content and traffic. Genuine flakes don’t get much traffic, and controlled opposition won’t have the content. Sites using Google’s services, particularly Blogger, run a high risk of being summarily shut down if they are effective in dissent.
Such is the case with Activist Post. A couple days ago, they were shut down and Google is not answering their contacts. If you really want that content, you’ll have to visit them at Before It’s News. As a side note, I despise sites like Before It’s News because they love heavy JavaScript and have refused to answer my complaints. Their front page is so loaded with ponderous scripting, it takes several minutes to load, not because of a slow connection, but every browser I have has to run hot and heavy to process that crap. I hate JScript, and I don’t think much of people who think it’s great stuff. The folks at Before It’s News are downright truculent about it, and all their content is controlled by it. You get zero content without allowing them to hammer your system through your browser. This is almost as bad as censorship. Let’s not forget, there are a surprisingly large number of blind computer users, and most of them user browsers which don’t process JScript, so sites like that are closed to them. The point here is, censorship by the government isn’t necessary when the site is crappy to begin with. Activist Post made a really bad choice using Blogger, but sharing through Before It’s News is little better.
(Update: The domain name for Activist Post now resolves, but they are struggling to get it working properly as of midday, Sunday 25 September 2011.)
But like the pirates who have been chased off the mainstream services before us, we who engage in truth seeking and hoping to be effective in our dissent need to start planning for hard times. While it’s possible the various governments will conspire to shut down the Net as we know it, more likely is they will simply wall off effective dissent from the masses.
Consider this: Most sheeple aren’t interested in truth, but they might enjoy some dissent. As long as their dissent is based on false impressions, it’s just fine with the government. The controlled opposition sites will advertise bogus censorship, but the real thing is actually quite effective. As with many other things, if you hear a lot about censorship, it’s not actually happening. Those who strive to bring genuine dissent within reach of the sheeple will be hammered quickly, as soon as the government bureaucracy gets around to them. It’s based on how the government evaluates the threat. I’m not sure what Activist Post did which triggered the shut down, or if it was just the case it was finally their turn. Those with real threatening information, like Cryptome and Public Intelligence are always at risk, and have fought this constantly since the beginning. Others are put in prison on trumped up charges, like Edgar J. Steele. His site is out of date, but you can use any search engine to learn more about his current status. A few dissenters, it seems, have been assassinated via covert ops, but you’ll never learn that from the MSM. Being too successful at breaching the consciousness of sheeple with elements of truth will get you in trouble. But we dare not stop.
Those of us who want to know the truth will have to work a little harder in the near future to keep up with this stuff. Those of us who want to tell our own truths need to keep an eye on the options. Even WordPress seems to have caved to political correctness from time to time, shutting down blogs for daring to be too controversial. But for now, Blogger and WordPress are the two biggest free blog services, and are the best place to get attention. There are lots of lesser known services, easily found with any search engine, but any use of free services like this runs a risk. Track record means a lot, and bad publicity against Blogger and WordPress has been censored, too. I also use My Opera for my my other blog, and they only censor truly alarming pornography or shocking content. It has to be pretty extreme, but I’ve never heard of them hitting mere political dissent. Then again, they’re based in Norway and most users are not American, and the site works best with Opera browser.
I have tried to use one other service: Free Conversant. They’ve been around for more than a decade, and are vociferously committed to free expression. However, the site is pretty obscure, and it requires some serious coding skill to modify, particularly CSS. Even then, the options are limited. However, they do offer a good chance to learn and they will respond to emails.
How long will such services remain? It’s hard to say. Economics is the main question right now. For example, can they afford the bandwidth for a surge in popular traffic? So long as the backers are viable, the service is likely to be there. You can always follow the pirates’ example in chasing down “bullet proof” hosting solutions, and not all of them are expensive. There are plenty of cheap hosting services which will tend to resist political pressure, and not a few will adamantly require a court order. Then the question is how likely are you to face such a thing. Most of us are safe right here at WordPress. I’d suggest Activist Post do a little research and take their domain name to another provider, someone with a greater degree of political independence, and perhaps with a strong Unix server package which is harder crack. The situation is fluid and we all would benefit from at least thinking about back-up plans in case things get worse.
Things will get worse, but I doubt it calls for paranoia. Still, if it’s worth doing, do it better.

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Music and Self-Deception

Posted on September 23, 2011 by ehurst

I’m not a real musician. I just happen to be able to sing some, and can almost read music — I can pick out the correct notes on a keyboard, but can’t actually play. People tend to like my singing, but my baritone voice is highly unreliable due to capricious and persistent allergies. It’ s not often I can actually use the full range, which is nearly three octaves. I’ve led singing in church worship a few times, once or twice in a regular position. My primary weakness is remembering the intervals between notes well enough to reproduce them, all on pitch. The best way to work on that is sing the intended song a capella until it sounds right.
I’ve worked with youth choirs since the last time I was young enough to be in one. A primary and growing problem with kids singing is most of them learn what little they know by singing along with their favorite artists. Typically, they wear headphones, or worst of all, earbuds. The effect is to become absorbed in a sounding atmosphere which masks their own voice from their ears.
I suppose if you watched the premier episodes of X Factor on TV the past few nights, you were confronted with people whose singing shows that sort of bad self-training. They can’t carry a tune on their own because they’ve never heard themselves without that poor quality of music blasting in their ears. Most modern recordings are almost completely lacking in dynamic range. Granted, a few contestants appeared utterly tone deaf, but several sounded like most kids trying to sing without any formal training.
It’s bad enough folks never really hear themselves the way others hear them. Our voices echo partly inside our own heads, and what we hear in our ears is never quite what comes out into the air. If someone records us singing and we hear the recording, the first few times we are shocked. I’ve had just enough formal training to get away with singing in public. I know I don’t hear the tones you hear, and I have to make sure my mouth and neck are in proper physical position for sound to come out as clean and pure as it can. Then I have to consciously relax my throat in certain places and breathe carefully. A lot of folks auditioning have never learned any of that.
One particular choir instructor I worked with made much of getting the kids to hear themselves as they actually sounded, then correcting all their stupid habits, habits which arose from trying to sound in their own ears like those they mimicked. I learned an awful lot from that guy, and I’ve never forgotten much of it. I can be as lazy as anyone else, but if I intend to be heard by others, I always go through the mental exercise of doing it right. It’s hard work when you do more than two or three songs in succession. Almost no one instinctively breathes correctly, so keeping your stomach muscles working that much is tiring. A depressing number of kids give up before they have a chance to learn much. Some simply refuse to learn, and insist it’s alright because it sounds okay in their ears.
So the next time you observe and hear someone making an utter fool of themselves in public, auditioning with gusto and making sounds which violate your sanity, it’s usually one of three things. It takes a lot of moxie, but you can go too far. (1) Some may simply suffer from blind narcism. (2) A few are tone deaf; they simply can’t tell the difference. (3) Most have simply never heard themselves a capella, never had anyone play their recorded singing back to them.

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Womanhood: The Big Western Lie

Posted on September 22, 2011 by ehurst

Fundamental to our modern Western notion of what men and women ought to be to each other is the Western Medieval Mythology of Mariolatry.
Please note: I don’t attack revering Mary as the mother of Jesus, and this is not about religion, per se. What I refer to here is the social mythology which arose from the primitive version of Mariolatry which lurked about in the Middle Ages. If you can’t recognize the differences between current teachings of the Roman Church (and others) on Mary versus the typical mythology some nobles and churchmen exploited during the Middle Ages, you won’t understand what I’m trying say. Mother Mary as a figure of religious devotion is one thing; fallen human women are quite another. Medieval noble and royal women aspired to divert some of the reverence for Mary toward themselves. While I don’t subscribe to Catholic teachings on Mary, I also won’t waste time attacking it.
The point is some women and men with a hand on the cultural pulse of their Medieval world exploited religious devotion to create various false idols, seldom because of any grand altruistic motives or actual religious self-denial, but because they found it useful in promoting their own welfare is some way or another.
Scripture makes clear we cannot possibly know the motives of another without a revelation from God. However, we are encouraged to discern probable motives based on behavior, and apply the standards of God’s justice accordingly. The Laws of God have always offered lots of room for mistaken perceptions, misguided beliefs, and mixed motives, all with ways of cleaning up your mess so as to claim whatever blessings God offered under His Laws. Further, He still requires victims to generously offer absolution for most human foibles, and demands a vigorous pursuit of restoration of good relations.
Now is the time — it’s always the right time in the mystical sense — to fix past mistakes. We can’t pretend any crusade to correct the rest of the world will ever accomplish any good thing. But we can always proceed with fixing our own mistakes, and we should do so whenever they are made apparent to us. I invite you to examine the good, clear explanation offered by Vox Day on the big lie of modern femininity. Human nature has not changed since the first day we were kicked out the Garden of Eden. Lots of externalities have shifted, but the root nature of humanity is immutable from where we stand. There is no such thing as evolution on that level.
I assert this without apology as the Word of God. Vox’s explanation, best I can tell, reflects that Word of God:

First, you can’t argue with the facts and you can’t really hold people morally responsible for the vagaries of biological chemistry. The reason women were never permitted to vote or be involved in government isn’t because ancient men hated ancient women or got their kicks out of oppressing them, they simply lacked the ability or the desire to permit abstract idealism about sexual equality to trump what they observed in their daily reality….
Second, understand that society is extremely vested in deceiving men and taking advantage of them for the benefit of propagating both the species and the society. If most young men truly understood what a little slut their pedestalized picture of ideal young womanhood actually is, even if her sluttiness is only in her own mind, they would tend to recoil. All are fallen… and Eve fell first.

He goes on to say lesser men would not marry the gal who was finally ready to settle down if he knew where she had roamed before she met him. What he doesn’t say is the whole thing simply excuses immorality, both in the profligate evil of uncommitted recreational sex and in deceiving the bulk of men to manipulate their behavior. There are very good reasons the Ancient Hebrews had such a straight-laced social structure: It restrained human evil efficiently. If we pretend there is no human evil to restrain, we call God a liar.
Men with a mission do not particularly like claiming abandoned, well-used female flesh. There remains a very high risk she’ll continue seeking opportunities to sate her own brand of lust. This is far more than simply having to face the risk of raising someone else’s children. Scripture imbues the whole thing with a much higher, mystical quality, while bluntly rejecting the doctrines of Gnosticism:

Or do you not know that anyone who is united with a prostitute is one body with her? For it is said, “The two will become one flesh.” But the one united with the Lord is one spirit with him. Flee sexual immorality! “Every sin a person commits is outside of the body” — but the immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price. Therefore glorify God with your body. (1 Corinthians 6:16-20 NET Free Bible)

It matters. Taking sex lightly is evil. You can nobly choose to overlook the former indiscretions of someone truly penitent when it comes to selecting a spouse, but don’t be a fool. Look at it realistically, and toss all the cultural mythology in the trash. Women are what they are, and men are no better, just different.
A good man is not boastful, but does what he says. He tends to avoid discussing himself in the first place, but makes himself known by his efforts at pursuing his mission. He has a strong conviction what that mission is, even if he can’t or won’t tell you. Where things don’t matter, he absorbs a lot of crap and doesn’t take himself too seriously. On the mission, he is resolute and will die before surrendering. He selects a woman who supports his mission as her own, and is contented with whatever gifts she brings to that. He could do without her, but prefers facing the mission with someone he can trust beyond the bounds of this life.
A good woman knows her own weaknesses, and willingly submits to a good man. She knows the fire of envy burns in her own soul simply because she is a woman, and can’t trust her own feelings, even as she knows her variability is part of what make her so fascinating. She takes advantage of her youthful beauty to build a deep and lasting love that will outlast her looks. Her salvation is in building the nest, and she knows it, knows the nest is always bigger than just her own household. She never forgets she can’t do it alone, and patiently waits for her man to reach some sense of accomplishment because that’s what makes him worth her admiration. So she encourages him to drive on with whatever he can’t put aside, and does her best to fire his quest with full devotion, while never pretending she could possibly decide for him what it is.

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Clueless: Tulsa World News Site

Posted on September 21, 2011 by ehurst

Where I live in Oklahoma, the state capital is just a few miles west. It’s a busy place with all the horrors of any modern socialist bureaucracy. Some of the buildings are almost tolerable, but most are ugly as sin. They stand as an island of power and prestige, with too little public parking, and half surrounded by poverty and decrepit housing. Awhile back some big politics and private investment turned some of squalor back into decent housing for upper middle class liberal folks. It meant kicking a bunch of poor folks out, of course. In other words, pretty ordinary place as smaller state capitals go.
The real money and power in the state is mostly in Tulsa, a couple hours’ drive northeast of here up Interstate 44. It’s a different kind of stupid there. It’s where most of the big church money is in this state, too. The big church money here in OKC area is divided between liberals and conservatives, but in Tulsa it’s just about all conservative, though of different versions mixed together, and lots more zeros in their bank accounts. But it’s still stupid.
A primary example is the website of a big newspaper, the Tulsa World. Not too long ago they upgraded their site. Now, you are not permitted to visit their web pages unless you accept a huge collection of predatory tracking cookies, and allow them to run all sorts of very annoying and distracting JavaScript animations. I’ve tried a couple of times to ask them if they realized their site was not simply non-compliant with standards, but openly hostile to blind users, for example. Never got an answer back.
It’s their site. They can do what they like. But it’s everybody’s Internet. I’m not one to grab an attorney and file an ADA lawsuit, which would probably get some traction, since that newspaper pretends they are public servants and the local governments are required to post certain public notices with them. Instead, I’ll simply try to embarrass them a little by making some noise here on my quiet little blog.
But if you bother to read this whinygram of mine, perhaps you’ll give some consideration to pressuring the Tulsa World and other similar cranky websites. These people do not get it. They are still operating under all the assumptions of a paper-printing operation, and can’t imagine the Internet is any different.
Oh, and while I don’t have to run a business, nor a whole website of that size, I do have friends who do. Advertising is one thing, but I am assured by some pretty honest and ethical folks there is simply no valid excuse for demanding people accept tracking cookies, nor requiring them to tolerate dancing and spinning graphics just to make a profit on their news presentation. Tulsa World folks are greedy slimeballs, the sort who would sell their mothers for the right price. I say that, of course, based on other information I have about them which has nothing to do with the Internet. Hey, this is the MSM, after all.

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