Weddings Are So Much Fun

Posted on September 8, 2011 by ehurst

I’ve only performed a few weddings in my ministerial career. Each one has been so much fun, though, because I always do custom ceremonies.
Today I did one which was really no ceremony at all. My mother married a fellow named Douglas, and it was simply an affirmation in the presence of witnesses that they had sworn a covenant before the Lord. The marriage certificate took longer. That was what they wanted.
It’s not so radically different from the very credentials upon which I performed the ceremony. You see, God is the only real Guarantor of such things in the first place. There may be some ancient social aspects, but we are so very far removed from that it almost makes no difference how you play that out. The only other element is satisfying the demands of civil government. My ordination is from an organization one step above an ordination mill. They understand it’s really nothing more than getting some kind of government approval for something which really isn’t any of the government’s business.
BTW, for folks who wish, I can write any custom ceremony for anyone. Just ask; I never charge for serving God.

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Taming the Beast: Scientific Linux Imperfections

Posted on September 7, 2011 by ehurst

I’ve come to really love Scientific Linux, and their version of RHEL 6 is really good for desktop use. This may well be the last great desktop Linux, since we have lost GNOME and KDE both to the eye-candy fanboys who love change for the mere sake of change. Nothing appears set to replace the business-like mainstream desktops we had with GNOME 2 and KDE 3. I note the Trinity Project is keeping KDE 3 alive for Debian-based distros, but the only GNOME 2 forks I know about are either too weak or died aborning. That the upstream RHEL 6 will be viable for quite some time is about the only reason I still use Linux. I will cannot tolerate rolling release nor mandatory punctuated release. I prefer the business-oriented long term support of five years minimum so I can get work done. I don’t use Linux as a hobby or a mere toy. Red Hat and clones are Linux for grownups.
But there are still a few things where SL comes up short of my personal needs. It requires a little research and willingness to get your hands dirty hacking a bit to get everything you might need. Aside from my series of articles still getting heavy traffic here on this blog, I wanted to address some of these more obscure concerns.
When you fetch from outside your repos, or build an RPM yourself, it works best if you keep Yum in the loop. Instead of RPM from the command line, use variations of:

yum localinstall –nogpgcheck some.rpm

SL does not include support for mounting NTFS. If your machine has multiple drives or partitions, or you use recent external hard drives, you’ll need to get that support working. For now the simplest measure is grabbing the package from RepoForge. What you’re looking for is the latest version of their fuse-ntfs-3g for your architecture (i686 or x86_64). It should install without any issues:

yum localinstall –nogpgcheck fuse-ntfs-3g-2010.10.2-1.el6.rf.i686.rpm

The reason I don’t include RepoForge as a regular Yum repository is they dropped libmikmod, among other things I consider a mistake. I need it for things like getting PySol to play background music. For this reason, I prefer ATrpms. You can install their Yum repository directly from the SL repository for Yum packages. I tend to avoid ELRepo because they have an admitted lack of interest in keeping upstream compatibility, and seem almost hostile to the notion of working with any other repositories to minimize conflicts. If you use ELRepo, you really cannot use any other repo. You may be able to pull specific packages and make them work, but most of my use for them is their source RPMs.
Be aware, though, you can often get later versions of most things by scouring the Fedora Core repositories. While RHEL 6 and clones were built mostly from a combination of FC12 and FC13, you can often get SRPMs from later releases to build without hacking the SPEC files too much.
I really do like the way ATrpms includes support for Nvidia drivers. Just run:

yum install nvidia-graphics

It saves a lot of time and hassle compiling the driver yourself, but the RPMs will not fix your Grub menu. You have to manually change the kernel line in your /boot/grub/grub.conf by adding these two items at the end:

rdblacklist=nouveau nomodeset

I noticed Elinks was added to the SL repository, and it’s apparently better than the one I used to build myself. I use it quite a bit, along with Lynx.
I always build the latest Lynx browser from a source RPM. Then I change some of the default colors in the /etc/lynx.lss because magenta is hard to read in great quantity. So I change the li to yellow. But since the current active link is also yellow on black, I change the background to red, thus yellow on red is cursor. I also put another line in my .bashrc to prevent strange formatting some pages, which see Lynx centering whole sections:

alias lynx=”lynx -center”

This is a toggle to turn off centering.
I don’t know why Xterm is not included, but I can’t stand using GNOME-Terminal. You’ll need the bitmapped fonts to make it work properly:

yum install xterm bitmap-fixed-fonts

I usually create a launcher on my upper panel (“toolbar”) using this incantation:

xterm -fn 9×15 -bg black -fg lightgray -cr skyblue -sl 2000

That parses out to a 9×15 font for anything larger than a tiny 800×640 display resolution, black background, lightgray default text, a sky blue cursor, and up to 2000 lines of display I can scroll back. I also don’t like plain Bash prompts, so I set this line in my .bashrc:

export PS1=”\[33[0;36m\]\u@\h\[33[0m\]\w\[33[1;33m\]>\[33[0m\] “

This gives me my username at the abbreviated machine name, and the current working directory path, with all that in aqua text with a bright yellow right angle bracket (>). For root, I change the text color to red:

export PS1=”\[33[0;31m\]\u@\h\[33[0m\]\w\[33[1;33m\]>\[33[0m\] “

More variations can be found in the Bash Prompt HOWTO.
The standard GNOME games are not included by default. Worse, they are split into two groups. You’ll need to install gnome-games and gnome-games-extra.
If you want the official Flashplayer, you’ll have to get it direct from Adobe. You’ll get an RPM labeled adobe-release. Make sure you select from the dropdown the YUM version. Install as noted above. This adds Adobe as a repo, and allows updates.
Red Hat has moved away from Aspell and Ispell, in favor of Hunspell. But if you install Opera, for example, you’ll need Aspell. You can have all three spell checkers if you like.
If you want to edit the GNOME menus, you’ll have to install alacarte. It won’t show up in the context menu if you right click on the menu buttons, but it will show up as an item in your System Preferences as “Main Menu”.
For multimedia support, there are two basic routes, and I use both. At a minimum, you’ll need the following:

yum install libdvdcss2 libdvdnav libdvdread lsdvd

The first path is bolstering the bundled Totem player. If you select the following packages, it should pull in all the dependencies necessary to make it play almost anything:

yum install ffmpeg gstreamer-ffmpeg gstreamer-plugins-bad-free-extras gstreamer-plugins-ugly

The second path is using MPlayer and friends:

yum install mplayer

Then you’ll need to get the latest set of codecs from MPlayer HQ. Look for the “all” package with the latest date; the format it YYYYMMDD. For 64-bit, just grab the “essential-amd64” package because it’s all you should need. Unzip and untar, them move the entire collection into /usr/lib/codecs.
I could go on at length, but I’m sure any serious user is likely to find their own customizations. What are yours?

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Open Line Tuesday: Ask Your Questions Here

Posted on September 6, 2011 by ehurst

Post questions in the comments section regarding any topic I’ve covered or one you imagine I might be able to cover. Answers may appear in the comments or a separate post. You can also use this as an opportunity to carry on a conversation with others in the comments.
————
By the way, I’m still convinced this month will reveal the end game for the US, at least. There are plenty of interesting things scheduled this month. Aside from the start of new fiscal year in the US government, there is that vote on Palestinian statehood coming up the 20th. A few folks are convinced it could easily start WWIII. I’m watching the banking and currency meltdown in Europe, and listening to the babble of Israeli government whining about Iran as it seems to reach a crescendo. Things are heating up between them and Turkey, and Egypt is beginning to back out of niceness with Israel.
I’m also watching as our black ops agencies are destroying Mexico. They fund and arm the narcotic traffickers while our public branches are pressuring their government to fight them. But of course, that’s how we have been doing it on this side of the border. I’m not smart enough to evaluate how all this will play out, neither as individual threads nor all together. But I reiterate I sense September will be the month of change, as I had sensed a few months ago. My point is not boost my personal credibility as a prophet or anything, but to point out once again such things are within reach, that a human talent for estimating where things are headed is more broadly distributed than most folks realize. It’s not simply inductive and deductive analysis, but intuition and other non-conscious processes we’ve been taught not to trust.
My intuition keeps offering the term “end game” — not the end itself, just the departure point from which there is no return. Maybe none of us will know how to characterize it, but those of us paying attention will recognize it when we see it. As I promised last year, if nothing happens, if it turns out all wrong, I’ll shut up.

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The Limits of Human Power

Posted on September 5, 2011 by ehurst

Current plans to take over the world will fail, as usual.
It’s offered as some key piece of evidence, something never before seen: NWO Plans EXPOSED by Insider in 1969. Actually, it’s one several such exposés I’ve seen over the years. For example, if you read John Taylor Gatto’s reports, you’ll realize some of these plans were formalized before the creation of the Federal Reserve. Keep reading back, and you’ll find plenty of documentation of such thinking all the way back into the 1700s.
It would seem we are still chugging along the trajectory established back there by the Rothschild family (actually the name was Bauer). I’m not sure how much control they maintain over the whole enterprise, and I tend to think they are hardly the only ones involved. I’ve said often I’m convinced there is some division of interests up in that stratosphere of human rule. There seems to me more than one plan for global rule, though I’m pretty sure they all arose from the original thread started by that family.
But if you trace the thinking espoused by Amschel Bauer’s writing and reports of his thoughts, you realize it goes back even farther. In other words, it’s been around since humans began recording anything at all. It doesn’t take much to discover a long list of worthy efforts which didn’t quite make it. We now read them as empires of history, though some come through in highly garbled and questionable accounts. For example, the most dubious chronology today is that of Ancient Egypt. While most people agree on a working assumption about it, those who really understand it admit there is much room for debate. But the one thing no one questions is the firm belief these people had in their destiny to rule all humanity.
So the current run at this global rule seems to be somewhat fragmented. That is, the really big shots involved are having trouble keeping themselves on the same sheet of music. The linked article recounting a speech by Dr. Day is one thread of this story; I’ve seen material suggesting conflicting goals. There is a huge overlap, though. Certain elements are recognizable in both fiction and factual reports, because they represent borrowed wisdom from ancient attempts and failures. The whole point behind the Social Sciences, which includes History, is a broad attempt to understand human nature. What seems to be a point of limited debate between the plutocrats is the best way to take control. Even bigger is the disparity between the apparent reasons why they want it.
In the theology to which I adhere, the Devil offers varying lures to anyone who can be suckered into wanting such power. His own objectives are incomprehensible, but certain patterns do come through. One of them is the lust for causing human misery in general. In this, the plutocrats are making great progress right now. But another pattern is the assurance any measure of success in holding such great power will be short lived. It seems people can be harnessed to some grand vision with all manner of cynical brilliance about human foibles, and keep that wisdom alive across several generations, but when they are on the verge of gaining what they seem to seek, they somehow lose their hunger, lose their sharp sense of situational awareness. Something else kicks in and they do something stupid, and the Devil gets to laugh at his suckers. The whole thing comes apart and somebody else gets to start the cycle afresh.
I’m pretty sure we haven’t hit the break point yet. Whomever is currently working to gain that universal power is still hungry, still pretty sharp, but the flies are buzzing around the cauldron. One or two have already fallen into the mix. It’s not going to turn out quite as they hope, but they’re too far into it to change directions much.
The problem for them is, you can’t see this very clearly unless you disentangle yourself, divest yourself of any real interest in the whole thing. By no means is my intelligence in their league, but I simply don’t place much value on this level of existence. I’m hardly alone in this, but I do find myself pretty lonely, in that there aren’t that many of us. I’m not sure any of us can explain it, but the mere awareness itself somehow works to weaken this vast dark cloud of evil hovering over our heads. We aren’t blind, just not worried, and we refuse to contribute any fear energy to the process. A part of my weirdo theology indicates Satan’s power is affected by the level of fear he can create, and when people begin to lose that fear, even if only a few people, his efforts run out of gas. His only real power over us is our willingness to accept his story; when you become skeptical of it, the effect is somewhat more than mere counting of noses, but is exponential. That’s because the truth reflected by such skepticism is simply far more powerful. The simple truth in the minds of just a few that life on this plane is not the real story is enough to weaken the whole plan.
In the midst of my holy cynicism and skepticism is a very high confidence God can and does show at least as much to others as He does me. I don’t award myself a very high rank, as it were, in this wisdom. I’ve brushed up against too many who were way ahead of me. But the very moral fabric which rules this universe responds to just a little truth in the mix, and my faith is richly rewarded. I’m watching, along with others, as this whole big plan or global rule starts coming apart just as it seems successful. Things are altogether ugly right now, with a broad, fat layer of misery resting on humanity as a whole. It’s a lot worse than it has to be; anyone can see that. But there is a significant trend of suckers becoming unstuck from the big lies. People can be pretty smart when they want to be, and I’m watching a trend of folks waking up, if only partially. While their efforts will mostly be aimed at the wrong things, insofar as I can estimate, their awareness alone is making a powerful difference they probably can’t quite see. The divine principle here is God rewards a good desire by making things work out to our good in the end.
This is my Father’s world, and He gets the final say in things. It won’t matter how much or how well we understand that, only that we live as best we can accordingly. This is just another round at the Tower of Babel, and it will end the same as before, in mass confusion.

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Laboring on Labor Day

Posted on September 4, 2011 by ehurst

Our favorite American communist celebration, Labor Day, is tomorrow. Most folks get the day off to celebrate the rise of labor unions. I’ll be working.
Today, I discovered what a “weep hole” is on automotive water pumps. It’s an opening in the cowling of the water pump which allows the coolant to leak away if the pump shaft seal begins to leak.
Yeah, I gotta replace the water pump on our Jeep. I can just about afford the parts and gasket. It’s supposed to take four hours or so, which means I’ll be at it all day. I predict three scraped knuckles, several cuts and plenty of spilled coolant. I might even get it done.
Heh.

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Updated Firefox Build on Scientific Linux 6

Posted on September 3, 2011 by ehurst

This update applies to some degree to CentOS and RHEL, but some details will vary.

Fetch your source from the standard FTP. The basic URL is:

http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/

From there, dig down into the current release folder, followed by the “source” directory and grab the large bzipped tar-ball: firefox-6.0.1.source.tar.bz2 as of this writing. The canonical method on RHEL clones is to build stuff in your home directory, because $HOME on a standard desktop install is larger than your system partition. You should build from your user account, and only use root to install. I created a src folder in my home directory.  Open your terminal window and join the Brotherhood of the Command Line. Navigate to your build folder and:

tar -jxvf firefox-6.0.1.source.tar.bz2

You’ll need to make sure you have the necessary dependencies, and it has changed a bit since FF4. The simplest is to grab everything at once the way it’s described for Fedora on the Mozilla Firefox Simple Build page, with some modifications specific to RHEL clones:

yum groupinstall ‘Development Tools’ ‘Development Libraries’ ‘GNOME Software Development’

yum install autoconf213 glibc-static yasm wireless-tools-devel mesa-libGL-devel

Then, by experimentation I discovered we needed to add a few more items:

yum install startup-notification-devel libnotify-devel alsa-lib-devel libIDL-devel

Finally, you’ll need to update Yasm to the latest. Visit your favorite Fedora Core 15 repository and pick up the SRPM. If nothing else, you can get it here. Use the standard RPMbuild instructions to produce RPMs. Install both the main and “devel” package.

That should cover the dependencies. Navigate under your user account into the directory created by unzipping and untarring the source package (usually the folder is named mozilla-release). There, use your favorite editor to create a file named “.mozconfig” — make sure to have that leading period. Paste this in it:

mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS=”-j4″
ac_add_options –enable-application=browser
ac_add_options –with-system-jpeg
ac_add_options –with-system-zlib
ac_add_options –with-pthreads
ac_add_options –disable-tests
ac_add_options –disable-debug
ac_add_options –enable-optimize
ac_add_options –disable-installer
ac_add_options –enable-default-toolkit=cairo-gtk2
ac_add_options –disable-strip
ac_add_options –enable-pango
ac_add_options –enable-svg
ac_add_options –enable-canvas
ac_add_options –enable-startup-notification
ac_add_options –enable-libxul
ac_add_options –disable-crashreporter
ac_add_options –enable-safe-browsing
ac_add_options –enable-libnotify
ac_add_options –disable-necko-wifi
ac_add_options –disable-cpp-exceptions
ac_add_options –disable-updater
ac_add_options –enable-url-classifier
ac_add_options –enable-gio
ac_add_options –disable-gnomevfs

That first line is suitable for dual core or twin processor systems. Generally, the “-j” switch should be a number which is twice the number of processors or cores you have on your machine to get the most from it. Everything else reflects the standard features used in the Red Hat world, and they seem to work pretty well.

Now run this command:

make -f client.mk build

Barring any surprises, it should proceed to build and will take awhile. Don’t expect to get much done on your system while this is building. Once the prompt comes back in your terminal window without any errors, you are done. As root you can now install:

su root
make -f client.mk install

I notice lately some pages with heavy JavaScript implementations in FF6 will bog down my computer. I’m not the only one to notice, and I have no explanation for that. It may be simply the hardware combination or something specific to the way RHEL clones do things. Who’s to say it will continue being worth the trouble to do this?

To be honest, I’ve found downloading and installing the generic build for Linux works about as well. Instead of chasing down the source code on the FTP server, simply this page and click the big green button. Once you unzip and untar the bundle, simply move the whole thing to /usr/local/ and link your launcher icons to run the script: /usr/local/firefox/firefox.

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Not of This World

Posted on September 3, 2011 by ehurst

It breaks my heart some of the biggest threats to life, safety and sanity in this world come from people who claim Christ as Lord.
Over the past couple of years I’ve been researching from time to time the Dominionist movement and related theologies. The problem is, Dominionists are more directly honest about their intentions than the rest of organized evangelical Christianity. That is, almost all of them make the major mistake of forgetting or ignoring that unmistakable statement Jesus made to Pilate at His trial: “My kingdom is not of this world.”
Jesus struggled with getting His disciples to see that prior to His death. That silly song from Jesus Christ Superstar captures it perfectly: “What’s the buzz… When do we ride into Jerusalem?” They had no argument with the false Messianic Expectations, but were simply on a different team than the establishment. For them, it was conquer or displace the current Jewish government — using all the miraculous powers of Jesus, of course, all peacefully — then fulfill that grand vision of Israel ruling the world. Bread aplenty, dazzling powers and world domination, the very things Jesus told Satan He would not do during the Wilderness Temptation. That was in part because those things were precisely what Jewish mythology demanded of the Messiah.
And they are the very things so very many evangelicals are determined to do.
It’s a false dichotomy to say we are either otherworldly completely, or deeply involved in this world’s needs. That’s a part of the Gnostic Heresy. The very reason for getting so involved in people’s lives is because we are supposed to be so otherworldly. It’s the paradoxical logic of Heaven. We embrace suffering for ourselves even as we engage relief of others’ suffering. It’s how we manifest the love, and expose the hatred, both of which put Jesus on the Cross.
Yet the vast majority of American Christians believe they have a mandate to actually rule the world.
The majority of evangelicals are lost in a rather gentle challenge to the current political system, seeking to impose their moral agenda (much of which perverts the morality of Scripture) through the system. They talk all day long of the holy Constitution, which was a muddled mess from the beginning, and we have never actually done what it seems to say from the day it was ratified (itself a questionable thing). That “sacred” piece of paper has no effect on tyrants and thugs raiding dairies and Gibson Guitars or every other effort to supply human needs and wants. And should the whole nation suddenly grow a spine and remove that evil government, the replacement would be no less evil, just a different flavor. Even if we obeyed the letter of the Constitution, we’d be wrong before God. It certainly doesn’t reflect His Laws. Thus, we have mainstream evangelical Christians seeking to take over through the broken system itself, while denying any hostile intent.
Then there are the marginal, but growing, groups who honestly promote a hostile takeover. If you chase down references to “Joel’s Army” you will find something downright scary. These people believe God plans to grant them miraculous powers to obtain all manner of creature comforts, cow everyone by glorious miracles, and crush the political system, slaughtering the sinners (or enslaving them). Sounds familiar, no? The same three items Satan offered Jesus in the Wilderness.
The problem is there exists no clean separation between these two. There is a huge overlap. It’s not just they have in common some perceived mandate to change the world politically, but they share the actual planning and funding of these takeover efforts. They cooperate outside their theological differences, via various purely power-seeking groups who will use both kinds of religion. Not every contributing member of CUFI agrees with Hagee’s theology, just his politics. At the high plutocrat level, this is all the same bunch who have been secretly tainted by the cover-ups which make Ted Haggard look tame — The Franklin Scandal, among others. Do you think Rulon Jeffs has a corner on that market? It’s less than six degrees of separation between your average Neo-Pentecostal, Dick Cheney and his Neo-Conservative friends, and all the marginal cults.
It’s just a matter of offering enough flavors to please every palate. The aim is to find some leverage to subject humanity to yet one more hideous means of tyranny and oppression. You can march it right along side the reds, humanists, fascists, and what have you.
I’m literally weeping as I type this, considering how many people are so deceived, so committed to their own sorrow. They cling to a perverted literalism in reading Scripture, even while they ignore the most blunt statements from Jesus Himself about such things. It’s so much more fun and entertaining for them to dredge up fanciful interpretations of something too obviously meant to be non-literal.

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Can't Trust Chrome Browser

Posted on September 2, 2011 by ehurst

Google lies about how the Chrome browser works, and works against user privacy in other ways.
I’ve been testing Chrome on both Windows and Linux, and checking the results manually in terms of cookies and other privacy issues. First of all, Chrome ignores some of your preferences. After specifically telling it to consider all Google domain cookies as session cookies only, it still keeps them as long as Google wants them set. You can set Chrome to delete all cookies at the close of session and that will work, but if you try more detailed settings, by trying to manage how different domains are accepted or not, there are certain domains where it will not work, including “google.com” of course.
It works the same with several major advertising domains and their tracking cookies. Even if you specifically set the manager to block cookies from, say, doubleclick.com, Chrome will accept them and save them. You have to go back and manually remove them.
This all follows from a couple of years ago when Chrome developers removed the prompt which allowed you to make your choices on-the-fly. The Google developers, working with the Webkit folks, have steadfastly ignored any requests for putting that feature back in, and do not respond to complaints the cookie management does not work properly. For all the potential good Chrome offers as a better browser in general, you have to understand Google has become hostile to user interests.
Google does evil.

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Ghost of a Chance of a Ghost

Posted on September 1, 2011 by ehurst

The West has made a religion of secular science.
It’s an obsession, as well, but it becomes a religion by seeking grounds to crowd out every other religion. It’s a sort of, “Believe what you want, but if you want the real truth…” This is a fundamentally religious claim, despite efforts to deny any “religion” at all. Isn’t it funny how most people in the name of secular science and atheism or agnosticism claim to be seeking objective truth, when it is established by science humans aren’t capable of objectivity? It’s a religious doctrine to say all religions are false.
By the way, agnosticism is simply a way of saying, “Since we don’t know, we can’t act on religious assertions.” But it supplants “religion” with something which works the same as religion. We all act on things we can’t prove, nor even properly explain, to others. That’s not always because those others simply can’t rise to the intellectual challenge of understanding. Plenty of things we don’t understand ourselves, but a favorite deception is to pretend such things don’t matter.
Modern Western theology tends to assert ghosts don’t actually exist. The Scriptures indicate each of us has a spirit potential and an eternal soul. The popular definition of “ghost” pretty much centers on a soul without a regular body, but hanging around here in human space. In the Bible, there is no precedent for a disembodied human soul hanging around except directly sent by God for some specific purpose. All other manifestations are simply demons masquerading as human souls, trying to enslave folks to their fears and guilt. This has something to do with the pedantic literalism of the assertions typical of most Western theology.
We are all aware of the literary symbolism in the term “ghost.” It refers to our own subjective feelings and commitments regarding someone who has died. Separation is torment, even when it brings some measure of relief. The point is well captured in the term “significant other” — someone whose presence looms large for good or ill, and usually some of both. That we are illogically conflicted should simply taken for granted, and is poorly accepted as the norm in modern Western culture. In other words, only the more literary and intelligent folks accept the idea it’s good and right for humans to be self-contradictory that way. It’s part of what gives meaning to the literary term “ghost”.
When we are haunted by some ghost, it simply means there is unfinished business in our souls regarding that person. It has nothing to do with their actual status on the other side of death, but our sense of disturbance and guilt and all sorts of other things natural to healthy human psyches (as healthy as a human psyche is likely to be). That we are dealing with them is the healthy part. Running from them simply adds another layer of neurosis.
Fictional portrayals of facing our ghosts is very good therapy. The mythology each of us holds regarding such a thing is immaterial. Choose your technology, rituals, etc.; it won’t matter much, so long as you face it. When folks tell me some place is haunted, I’m altogether eager to explore it. It’s not that I know no fear; it’s because I’ve been facing my ghosts for quite some time, and I’m comfortable with the emotions involved. I don’t need a ghost whisperer nor ghost-busters. It is not possible for haunting to be an objective fact; it simply has no meaning as such. But I’ll be glad to go with you and take your feelings and sense of haunting seriously, because the effects are just the same. You can surely die from such internal conflicts. Just because I can’t sense precisely what you sense has nothing to do with it; my empathy makes it possible to sense them on another level. That’s usually about all it takes to help someone put their ghosts to rest.
Whatever else is required is wholly a matter of the person who is haunted. I can teach them about such things, but only what I think I understand. You’ll still have to find your own path, your own peace.
There are an awful lot of things in this world for which a factual scientific explanation is really no answer at all.

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Arguing with God

Posted on August 31, 2011 by ehurst

The definition of sin is arguing with God.
It won’t matter what your arguments are, when you disagree with God, you are asking for His wrath. Granted, if you don’t believe in Him nor His revelation, then it won’t matter to you what I might claim God has to say. That’s okay, because I’m sure God has plenty of issues with me, too.
There’s a lot of stuff passing before my gaze in this world, and far too much of it thrust in my face, which is pretty easy to mark as “sin” by that definition. Not in the absolute sense, because I can only know what I can discern from my own spirit, and when I label something “sin,” it’s more about my understanding of God’s revelation than it is about God. My theology is nothing more than my attempt to formulate a response to something I can’t really describe. But that’s all God requires of me. He demands I wrestle with the issues using whatever limited talents and faculties I possess, and when I find some sense of peace about them, I am permitted to declare, “Thus saith the Lord.” All I’ve said is this is what I believe He tells me.
How you respond is entirely between you and Him. Go and do your own wrestling, if my words provoke you. But if what I say provokes you not at all, then ignore me. I’m fine with that; I encourage it. Don’t trust me. If what I express does not move you, it’s not for you in the first place. That doesn’t mean you’ll escape His wrath, but it means He’s not trying to get your attention through my words, so maybe He has other plans for you. The point is, it’s not my problem. Nothing I do or so or imagine can make it my problem. I won’t get into trouble with God because you don’t listen, if I can’t get your attention. All that’s required of me is to be faithful with what I have.
So when I say things about LGBT issues, I stand where I best understand God requires me to stand. I care not a whit how you feel, nor the feelings of anyone who claims any part of that. That’s because my feelings don’t matter, either.
Most of the time I don’t address it at all. It’s not as if folks have never heard about the Bible or what it has to say about such things. There are plenty of misrepresentations about it, but most of that is in regards to what we are supposed to do with it, not what God calls “sin.” His viewpoint hasn’t changed since before folks used writing. It’s almost tiresome to talk about it anymore, and I have no great urge to preach about how it will destroy our civilization. Sorry, but the foibles of human sexuality are merely a symptom of much greater sins. You can’t simply pick out crossing gender lines as the whole problem, because that’s just a tiny part of it.
But the greater sin is demanding civil legislation which addresses the issue either way. Until we get fundamental justice on the right track, there’s not much point cherry picking polarizing topics for legislation and propaganda. It’s nobody’s business what the creature called Chaz Bono thinks it is. So long as that person isn’t poking around in your home life creating trouble, it’s just a distraction to put their face and name on TV. People silly enough to watch much TV aren’t going to get much right in the first place. Frankly it’s a much bigger problem having nearly naked women cavorting on the screen with men in clearly sensual poses and moves designed to cheapen sex, and then making it a high-paid business. We’ve got serious problems, and the only problem with the likes of Chaz Bono is a political agenda which seeks to make my faith and calling illegal.
The reason that agenda exists is because those who claim to represent God are doing such a poor job of it. Sure, Chaz wants to argue with God about what He had in mind at birth. Most Western churches argue with God about what He had in mind at the birth of churches, too. Churches want to use human laws for all the wrong purposes, so the LGBT Lobby does the same thing. The grace of God cannot be accomplished by human power. So often and so bluntly has God said that, it’s pretty easy to add, “thus saith the Lord.” There are some Laws God revealed, but we aren’t even close to getting that working right here in the West, so we best leave that alone until we understand the fundamental assumptions behind all God’s Laws. Chaz Bono doesn’t need therapy, corrective surgery, jail nor acceptance; Chaz needs to see God’s truth in action. I dare say that hasn’t happened yet.
When we quit arguing with God ourselves, most everything else takes care of itself.

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