I'm All I Know

Posted on August 16, 2011 by ehurst

Ultimate Truth is ineffable.
While I can tell you I’ve met God face to face, there’s no way I can tell you much about it. My brain got lost before it got started. The human mind is not capable of processing that level of experience and existence. So it was some other faculty of mine which did it all, and I sincerely wish my brain would do a better job of listening to that other part of me. But in the end, all you can get from me is my pitiful attempts to organize how I’ll respond to the imperatives of that encounter with God. Whatever I have to say will of necessity be merely my reaction, my response.
Having read and discussed interminably the various systematic theologies of some really smart people, I can tell you they take their brains too seriously. They somehow imagine their minds can work out all the necessary details, so if they can just get you think like them, the job is done. There is no way any human on this plane of existence can tell you God’s nature, or much of anything at all. They can only tell you what they are going to do about it, how they are going to think about it — if they really encountered Him at all. So every grand theological construct is no more than the personal experience of one or more folks making the best they can of implementing their own imperatives. In that sense, there isn’t a one of them really right about it, such that you need to go along with their story. Go ahead, take a look at what they’ve got to offer, but don’t ever buy the notion you have to swallow the whole thing. It’s the same basic fact we all have some common elements as humans who share so much, but of necessity each of us must have some unique choices and ways, or we die.
I will warn you every religious organization I’ve encountered or heard about is far more exclusive, and on the wrong grounds, than God likes.
But it’s not simply what appeals to your fancy. You can’t trust your brain to accurately discern what’s really true; it can’t know. It wasn’t designed for that, though it loves to boast it can handle everything that matters. No, it’s just a tool for organizing something it can’t really understand, and it can’t understand anything that really matters. Its rightful place is to take its cues from another part of you which does understand as much as any thing in Creation can understand. When you examine the story told by anyone else, all you can do is compare notes, and embrace things you recognize. You will inevitably find someone doing or saying something better than you do, and it’s good and right to pick up on that. Still, whatever you come up with, whatever you hold at any given moment, must be completely and totally yours. It must be the best you can make of something utterly impossible, yet utterly necessary.
Even saying all that is just the best I know for me.
On the other hand, having struggled so hard to follow the inscrutable twists and turns of where this has led me, I can honestly say I am utterly at peace. The only thing gnawing at me is the urge to share it, that I’ve never quite done enough, or done it well enough. It’s not like I’ve arrived. Every moment is a fresh call to struggle, but I figure I’m engaged in the right struggle, and that’s what I have to try to tell. It’s that paradox which says the struggle itself is my peace. I didn’t find some treasure trove of answers; I’ve found the right question for me to ask. The question itself makes more sense than anything which has come before. Not that I could put that question into words you might grasp, but perhaps you’ll at least get the idea there’s something worth chasing, that whatever it is I consider being utterly at peace is possible for you.
Don’t mistake someone else’s peace for your own.
If you are curious about it, I can tell you for the last decade or so I’ve known I was just an arrow in the quiver. Whatever it is I’m really supposed to be doing can’t be done right now. All that vast pile of stuff I have written so far is just a tiny slice of what’s possible, not because I’ve failed to try, but because the context doesn’t exist yet. By no means will I pretend to know what it is I’m waiting for, but I do know it’ll be pretty obvious what it comes. The other faculty in me has told my brain that. For all I know, the right context may never come. I am assured that’s not the right question. Rather, it’s all about making sure I’m ready for it, in the sense I’m looking for something really different from what I see right now. As you might expect, this is a big element in some of the other stuff I write about here.
I don’t take myself that seriously, and neither should you, but if something I write rings a bell, take it for what use you can make of it.

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Moral Economics

Posted on August 15, 2011 by ehurst

To ignore moral considerations in economics is slapping God in the face. He gets tired of it after a while.
The symbolism of Babylon is, “Everything has a price, and that’s all that matters.” It’s the bedrock of materialism, that we can construct a worldview and system which ignores God, replacing Him with something far less. The original Babylon chose a misleading astrology over God’s revelation. It won’t matter what that some else is; anything other than God is lesser and ineffective. But God deals with humanity on a longer time scale, for the most part, than any human life itself. It’s just as well folks don’t live so long as Methuselah any more (969 years), because it would only add longevity to our weaknesses and folly. But we are fully aware of that longer time span, when we choose to rise about the gorilla level of intellect — creatures which essentially start from scratch with each new generation. We have history, if we dare pay attention.
There are certain moral absolutes which we have ignored for ages: Do loan or give to your neighbors; don’t charge interest; pay day laborers at the end of the day without fail; wipe all system debts every generation; etc. Significant accumulations of wealth are a sure indicator of immorality, because the only reason God permits prosperity is because we are supposed to share. We are morally obliged to give away enough to keep us from becoming significantly more powerful than our neighbors. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is not simply a sweet platitude, but a summation of all our dealings with our fellow humans. Their needs are your needs. (The meaning of “neighbor” is also answered in that context.) These things are not subject to debate; they are absolutes for which God has left no doubts in His revelation. And the Apostle Paul makes it clear you don’t have to know about Him or His name to get it right. He permits a wide array of belief which excludes Him, so long as it arrives at the same basic conclusions.
So it won’t matter what your theory is. If the results don’t match those standards, you are doing something wrong. Human sin kills, but not always immediately in the literal sense. You can be morally dead long before your body tumbles into the grave, and kill a lot of other folks along the way. By the same token, what help we see offered these days is subtly designed to keep on killing. The modern Western theoretical framework for charity is as abominable as refusing to help. It is all cynically designed to enslave. We don’t have room to describe a course of correction here, so I’ll leave it at this: We need to start from scratch almost everything we do regarding economics.
The fundamental assumption is you should get by, and do well enough, but extravagance is a moral red flag. I care not a whit your favorite economic theories and what you call it from your frame of reference — America has raped the world economically. We seem to have absorbed the notion we earned it all simply because we were able to get our hands on it. If whomever was sitting on it didn’t want to use it, we felt justified stomping them into the ground on our way to claiming it for ourselves. Our Enlightenment based assumptions of what’s fair and moral in the process offers no protection from God’s wrath. In essence, what we have done is absorb the natural productivity of others and walked off with an inordinate share. Not content with that, we also stole from our own future. We didn’t simply accumulate an immorally high share of resources, but consumed them with profligate abandon. We have created an appetite by which we simply cannot conceive of less as justified. “Dammit, the world owes it to us!”
In simple terms of economic reality, the system we constructed was unsustainable. In case you haven’t noticed yet, we done sucked all the juice out and it’s going dry. The refill rate won’t keep up with our consumption, but we have truculently rejected any discussions of what that refill rate was. Like most people, I’ve had it up to my ears with silly talk from the Mother Earth worshipers of Greenpeace, Earth First, and the like. We were commanded by God to explore and reap the harvest of His provision, including petroleum and whatever else we can find here, but get it without destroying everything in the process. Deep ocean drilling is not inherently immoral at all, but doing it with reckless disregard for safety is immoral. God expects us to find and use, not make a stinking filthy mess for someone else to clean up later. He’ll do a lot of it Himself, but that may come at the price of vast losses in human life.
That the blood of that loss is on our hands cannot be disputed. In the Court of Heaven, we are culpable. We can’t claim ignorance. Until He is ready to end this situation and conduct that almighty reset of His Creation, He’ll continue to run Creation as He sees fit. It won’t matter if you believe in Him; we are all accountable. This world has built-in corrective measures and ignoring them because it can’t be quantified in our science won’t save us any sorrows. You can characterize it as you wish, but the best way to understand and predict what’s coming next is to realize we have blown our limited opportunity by wasteful living, by demanding more than our share, by rejecting the notion there is such a thing as a fair share.
In more than one religious tradition in this world, to shorten your neighbor’s rations so you can lengthen yours is equivalent to murder. It’s our turn to die now.

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Recipe for Riot

Posted on August 14, 2011 by ehurst

A comment from Old Jules on the previous post got me thinking. I know, it’s dangerous, but it sparked memories from my studies in social sciences.
First, the basic principle behind all social science: We can observe a mass of human behavior and detect certain general patterns which are generally accurate and never precisely true. Some of what follows cannot apply with perfect accuracy to your experience, yet will provide a model which accurately predicts certain broad events. Don’t forget, I always throw in my own flavor of prophetic viewpoint, so take me with a grain of salt.
As a case study, the riots in London should serve as a warning to all of us. We share enough context with the UK to get similar results from the same inputs. The first riots began as a simple protest, rather orderly at that. It won’t matter what the motives are or whom you would prefer to blame. What makes things ripe for riot are the present in the US. All it takes is something to set them off.
This crazy business of class envy didn’t start with communist theory and the workers’ uprisings. Class warfare was a specific intent and motive of the middle class against those they saw below them. They despised anyone not like them, mostly in the sense they wanted everyone to be as phony. The middle class got that way when they were powerless under the control of the nobility. That was some serious class envy. The merchants in Europe wanted all the prestige but none of the responsibilities which tend to draw a few folks up to act somewhat more noble. And with the nobles, it was a very ugly and powerful origin of class consciousness. They went from lucky in battle, thus the clan warlord, to imagining their position was more a matter of inherent virtue and better DNA. It was the nobles, and by extension royalty, who drew first blood in this battle. Oppression began with the simple ability to oppress, and it’s as old as mankind.
Thus, class envy is not merely an isolated problem, a contextual thing worthy of some particular spite. When people feel like they have too many footprints on their backs, they get tired of it. When the cultural context makes no virtue of being a carpet for others, you should not expect a noble patience among the poor and oppressed. One quick look at predatory lending, riding on the back of manipulative materialistic advertising, in a legal system which sells justice to the rich, and a genuine armed revolt is wholly justified by God’s Laws.
But most of our oppressed aren’t that organized because they aren’t that bright. That is, they’ve been denied a good education, having their heads instead filled with marketing mush and fables. Technology they know; thinking deep is foreign. Most of them could become entrepreneurs, but the system genuinely seeks to prevent it, and most of the worthwhile jobs have been shipped overseas. And if you could read the philosophical and doctrinal discussions about law enforcement from the past half-century in the US and the rest of the West, and if you could understand what they were getting at, you would find a vast shift in thinking which forces the police officers to become schizophrenic. Put on the badge and everyone without one becomes your enemy, a criminal just waiting get caught. Yes, this is intentional; this is what the folks in academic ivory towers wanted. This is what we have now.
A significant minority of the US population believes the system owes them, calling their supports “entitlements.” The middle class rail at the welfare mentality, but suffer from the same schizophrenia they like to see in their policemen. They knowingly cultivated the very rules they demanded for offering it, just so they could turn around and spit on the folks forced to accept those rules. This is not theory, dear readers. I’ve read the crap they wrote when discussing the theories behind the current political system. The words they wrote justified the system; the attitudes they harbored, but refused to admit consciously, justified hateful implementations. The hook was set and our reputation for heartless torture of our captured “terrorists” is simply an extension of how the American mainstream views anyone who doesn’t suffer the same brand of madness.
So the system shreds all dignity from people who can’t bring themselves to adopt middle class cultural schizophrenia. Being honest is the best way to get into trouble, decency is punished. Is anyone surprised a significant element of the underclass is predatory? That’s because the middle class is no better, but prefers to use uniformed professionals for their violent thuggery, while the underclass is more DIY. From the moral standpoint, the mainstream are the aggressors.
Thus, we see a growing number of people who have had their patience and wisdom stolen, their morals intentionally crippled, and now what little creature comforts and conveniences they could squeeze from the system is being increasingly denied them. As more and more benefits of economic activity are funneled ever more tightly to the flaunting wealthy few, and not only the pitiful rotten jobs are fading, but so are all the other ways folks could occupy their time, they really don’t have anything better to do. The first time some genuine protest of grievance hits the streets, these folks will come out in droves so as to grab the few things which they have been made to believe matters to them. You shouldn’t imagine the race riots the MSM have been trying to cover up and describe as mere “flash mob” entertainment is not a symptom of a boiling pot with the lid on too tight.
The stage is set. Many of us old folks would gladly work if we could, bearing our share of economic decline, but there aren’t any jobs for us, either. We have been told, and rightly believe, what we have left to survive on is our right, because we paid for it from our pockets or because we gave up some sizable chunk of our very beings for some cause we were told was noble. Take away what the system really does owe us, and we’ll protest. Old or not, we’ll march on Washington, DC and everywhere else. When we do, the rioters-in-waiting will turn out and things will get messy.
I’m praying I got this all wrong, but I honestly expect full on rioting in some urban areas very soon.

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Budget in Blood

Posted on August 13, 2011 by ehurst

I was going to save this for tomorrow, but it feels like an elephant lying on top of me.
Congress is slated to come up with a fresh federal budget come end of September. That’s next month. By then, the “Super Congress Committee” (or whatever they call it) will be well established. Whatever evil has been lurking in the backs of their minds will be all too easy.
Keep in mind: In theory, all the money for Medicare and Social Security is supposedly already fully funded for quite some time, since they’ve been sucking it out of our wallets for quite some years. Yes, I know Bill Clinton had it all shifted over into the general accounts and called it a “budget surplus” that year, leaving only a stack of worthless IOUs in the accounts being held in our names. They have yet to confess they have stolen all our savings, yet they are already talking about cutting payouts under Social Security and Medicare. They have also been rumbling about cutting expenses for military payouts to retired and disabled service members.
I’m hardly the only who figures they’ll try to pull this off. Keep all the funding for Israel and our current wars, most enforcement agencies, and their own expenses, of course, but cut everything else. But I am sensing here they won’t be as slick as they believe they are. Something in my intuition expects them to bumble and fumble through this, needlessly provoking everyone. Then again, maybe it will be on purpose. I think the London riots will look pretty tame compared to what we’ll see here in a matter of weeks.
Given the plans, equipment and personnel are already in place for military suppression of riots here in the US, I’m expecting literal blood in the streets. Lord have mercy; I hope I’m all wrong about this.

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Jesus Favors the Poor

Posted on August 13, 2011 by ehurst

Mammon is the god of Western churches.
When your mind is closed a priori to something, you have no moral right to reject it. If you examine it and find it’s not for you, that’s great. At least you know. But refusing to consider something simply by virtue of dropping it into a neat category for exclusion from your mythology, you defy the real God of Creation.
It’s not as if there aren’t some things He prohibits, but He always leaves significant clues as to why they are prohibited. He does not prohibit examining these clues, but He does prohibit rejecting His revelation out of hand. Those of us who believe in this God of Creation are not the ones holding people accountable for rejecting His revelation, though. None of us are the Truth Police; we simply offer His gift of revelation. God still offers good things for people who reject His revelation, and we are foolish for not participating. That’s the reason I make so very much of fully understanding the difference between the Two Realms, between Laws and Grace, and knowing how they interact. We offer so much of revelation as people can grasp, at whatever level they wish to examine it. The burden is upon us to understand what matters to them, to speak their language, and meet them where they are.
If you read the Gospels and don’t see how Jesus favors the poor over the wealthy, you simply lack reading comprehension. You could try to bury that in the context of His time and place, but it’s no excuse for missing how it applies to us today. He was rough with the wealthy and powerful. Not uniformly so; He was pretty decent and gentle when any of them genuinely sought to understand. To Nicodemus of the Sanhedrin, He gently broke the news His teaching was incomprehensible to the intellect. It required a spiritual awareness, available only if the spirit was awakened or born from above. Nicodemus struggled with the literal meaning of the words, when Jesus pointedly used parabolic language. To be a ruler and teacher of a nation born in mysticism, Jesus found it hard to swallow such a man had no comprehension of Hebrew symbolic logic.
To the Rich Young Ruler, Jesus warned a clear conscience and peace with God required not making a god of his wealth. If the young man was unable to throw his material possessions aside in favor of the otherworldly life, he could not even comprehend peace with God, much less obtain it. It wasn’t the possession of wealth and power, but the fear of losing it which mattered. The Hebrew poor were much more likely to be otherworldly. When you consider what went into their condition and their thoughts about it all, they knew instinctively they had not gone out of their way to offend God, yet found themselves in misery. When Jesus explained misery was normal in this life, and that another life was available, they had no trouble deciding which was the better deal. The path to discarding this life in favor of the other was wide open to them. The wealthy and powerful had a huge barrier to cross.
This is not simply some cultural mythology; this is universal truth.
Modern Western Christianity has striven hard to turn this on its head. The bulk of Christian teaching, particularly in America, is all about getting ahead in this world. Like the Twelve at any time prior to the Cross, they simply have no place in their minds for the otherworld. Talk is cheap, and all the slick theology about Eternity (the Pharisees had plenty of it) means nothing when the bulk of religious education is about constructing a mainstream which amounts to little more than self-righteous materialism. The American evangelical experience is bathed in political agendas and cultural warfare, as if to ensure the crucifixion couldn’t happen again. Yet we are assured, when we read between the lines of Scripture, that politics was the whole motivation for prosecuting Jesus. It mattered not the particular agenda; all the parties agreed He had to go. Until we acknowledge the very real truth we are all carrying the hammer and nails for His crucifixion, we can’t drop them. Everything He taught challenged not only political power, but the desire for it in all cases; He literally fled from having it forced upon Him. The politics of man cannot accomplish the grace of God.
There is a godly political regime, only in the sense of Laws, not grace. It required a cultural and intellectual foundation the Judeans had long discarded. That foundation was Hebrew mysticism, the sense that things in this world aren’t to be taken too seriously. When I see a politics built on that, I’ll be first to sign up for the party rolls. Jesus would, too. Every argument He had with the political leaders of His nation can be reduced to telling them they were no longer Hebrew, no longer the nation God called “My People” because they had rejected the fundamental definitions. They had constructed a vast philosophical matrix which could not accommodate the ancient truth, and they were hostile to the explanations of the Law of Moses offered by the very Son of God, who personified all God sought to reveal through Moses.
Meanwhile, the poor were quick to embrace afresh the ancient ways. The middle class agreed with the wealthy and rejected that otherworldly approach. The middle class were the ones who choked on His teaching of the Bread of Life. Those who despaired of this world found in such teaching the one thing left making life worth living.
If the Western churches do not change their ways, they will be destroyed. Not merely the organizational structures, but the lives of every member who has been deceived by this vast lie. During my own lifetime I can recall when churches talked about how this world was not worthy of much attention, and before I reached adulthood, such talk was gone. I can recall professors teaching preacher boys to focus on this life and forget about Heaven, that it was a myth — the secularization of religion. Those professors will bear a mighty burden of guilt when the Day of Judgment comes. Look around you today and you see all the Christian outreach to the poor assumes there is something wrong with them because they don’t care to adopt the money-grubbing ways of this world’s wealthy. This is evil. Yes, there are greedy poor folks, but those not greedy are lumped in with the rest by policy. What will happen to such churches when the material prosperity and “success” to which they cling evaporates? It doesn’t take a religious mind to see it’s happening as you read this.
A church which cannot exist without vast holdings of property, cannot function without pouring resources into political campaigns, cannot organize their activities without their own worldly politicized internal structure which mimics the tools of the psychopaths who rule us today — these churches are not deserving of the label “church.” Thus saith the Lord.

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No Magic Wand

Posted on August 12, 2011 by ehurst

Even non-Christian magicians understand it: If the power which calls you does not own you, you’ll never see it.
We expect children to be childish. We expect adults to nostalgically long for some of the reduced burden of responsibility children have, but we also expect those adults to recognize when it’s not safe to indulge in fantasy. A critical part of growing up is recognizing what parts of childhood aren’t supposed to die, because they arise from something universal in the human soul.
So a child will paint themselves and put on costumes because it allows them reduce the fears and discomforts, to retreat from the painful, boring reality to some place where they are actually in control. Or they’ll simply watch videos and cartoons which allow them to ignore reality for a while. An actor will paint himself and don a costume because something inside him calls out for expression, something bigger than himself and his fears. He doesn’t retreat into fantasy, but offers a taste of it to others. It’s not about the artist, but the art itself. He’s no longer the child, but plays to children and helps them build a sense of reference.
The magic wand is a fable, more of a parable than some long lost real power. Real supernatural events are seldom so exciting, seldom with spectacular displays and thrills. The greatest, most powerful miracles in the world are the ones eyes can’t see. Sparkles, tinkling bells and flashing lights as dirt turns into gold are childhood fantasies. The real thing isn’t some violation of natural law, but is reaching for a higher law of nature most people refuse to recognize.
The basic principle of human brokenness includes three fundamental weaknesses. One, we are driven to satisfy mere physical desires by raging hormones and body signals, cast like thunder and lightening into the conscious mind by our emotions. Two, we have a bottomless curiosity and appetite for spectacle, a tarnished sense of beauty we must to consume with our minds. Three, we are driven to control all things as if we were gods. By these things we approach our world as something to conquer so we can indulge our lower desires. By these things we seek magical control which never existed, except in fairy tales.
The real deal, the genuine exercise of divine authority, is nothing like that. First, it rejects human appetites as utterly untrustworthy. The self must be put in restraints. It’s not the world around us we control, but the world within. That gnawing appetite for control, for satisfaction of desires, must be fought, killed constantly, again and again. Nothing within the human frame can be trusted with any power. Second, it seeks to transcend that dead frame. There is something higher, something far, far better. The human self simply can’t go there on its own, so it has to die, in a sense. It has to be subdued, dragged along as an unwilling participant. Divine authority operates only on divine purpose, not on human driven need or desire.
Yes, know that human nature fully, because that’s necessary to know when it rears its ugly head, intruding once again on something too precious for human will to appreciate. Receive and absorb that otherworldly agenda, that higher purpose and understanding. Turn the Sword of Truth on the self or you’ll have no power to wield it. Once you have killed your lesser self with it, you realize it can only be used in that higher realm. Changes wrought by divine power in the higher realm always manifest in the lower realm, but seldom as human intelligence expects, and never as it desires.
Yes, sometimes it manifests as miracles the way Jesus healed thousands by the Sea of Galilee. For the most part, He simply reasserted His Father’s divine will over things denied by those who had the responsibility, but refuse to take it. We call them signs and wonders because they signify something we should have already understood. It was there, has been there since the world began, but people keep thinking they can sneak back into the Garden of Eden by some human talent or skill. They want the thrill and arrogance of control over the Garden Adam exercised in innocence. They don’t want the power and control exercised over the human self in that other garden, Gethsemane.  They forget — truculently deny — Adam was merely executing the Creator’s revealed will before the Fall. He lost it all when he surrendered to that insistence he could decide what was good and right, and didn’t need to keep a constant reference to revelation.
Signs and wonders are merely the restoration of what ought to have been, what could have been all along. If you have no idea what ought to have been, you’ll have a tough time seeing such power come through your hands. You won’t get there by reason, because the Fall was fundamentally a choice to rely on human reason and intellect. You must toss reason aside, put it back in its lower place as servant of the divine impulse, the mere implementor of things, not the executive.
There’s no magic wand. You don’t see signs and wonders because you reject their nature.

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Just Another Idiot Chattering about the London Riots

Posted on August 11, 2011 by ehurst

There are so many things wrong on so many levels, I struggle to get started.
I’m watching the senseless blather, looking at random photos and videos, along with reading from writers who live there. Since I don’t live in the UK, and don’t have friends living near the riots, I can’t really address things from a detailed level. I’ve checked several different viewpoints, because you learn a lot from what reliable biases have to say, or not say. Take it all with a grain of salt, especially my own ranting.
However, I do believe I know social history pretty well. For example, I know racism, in broader terms, is a much bigger problem in the US than in the UK, but it’s hardly a non-issue there. The real problem is how the ruling elite play the races against each other. If you really want to understand, you’ll have to back up several centuries. Of all the lands which passed through Western feudalism, Britain never really left it. Granted, the culture of the English and their immediate neighbors have accomplished some wonderful things. Oh, how I wish I could afford to visit the British Isles, to see all the historical treasures! It also represents the very quintessence of arrogance and hatred. No, nobody is pretending all the Brits are that way; just those who run things.
My experience with UK citizens during my time in Europe was quite pleasant. I prefer their company to that of Americans. But those I met in Europe were a narrow slice, mostly military and related bureaucracies. Actually dealing with the bureaucracies was uniformly ghastly, worse than American versions of the same. For all their revulsion against their own bureaucrats, the Brits seem to have this inexplicable habit of keeping them insufferable.
It helps to demystify their history. That business at Runnymede (Magna Carta) was simply one set of psychopathic thugs telling another to make room at the table. To suggest this somehow contributed to the rights of common folk is obscene. It gets worse if you want to pretend something in there reflects God’s sense of justice. English History is loaded with great and powerful actors, but precious few we can justly call “good.” Same for here in the US.
Consider a government run by servants of someone else who intends to use and abuse the population for money and power. The real government, the secret one hidden in the background, aren’t likely to take any heat from the abused population. They can afford to let their minions believe they are so very important and deserve some wealth and comfort. It’s the sense of entitlement that makes them bend to the will of those others hidden in the background. Despite all the fantasy of social and political reform, the stratified class system in the UK never softened. It did change hands to a new crew, but the system passed through merely cosmetic changes. Accountability is even less now than it was in the Middle Ages.
In short, it seems policemen and other government officials consider it their duty to oppress. All the more so when the people being oppressed express some disinterest in becoming culturally the same as their oppressors. It’s the kind of arrogance that would try to put God on hold. They live in their alternative reality, demanding all the universe adjust itself or bug off. How it is their military generally makes more sense than ours, when the entire civilian bureaucracy makes less, is still a mystery to me.
Still, we do share one strong affinity: Both our government and theirs do really love insufferable thugs as policemen. They are not the least different from foreign occupying troops, given the way things are handled in context. So whatever you see in the lying MSM reports on the riots in the UK, please keep in mind it surely includes a measure of racism, unspeakably oppressive police, the same knowingly destructive social policies as the US and worse, along with a dose of genuine underclass thuggery. Saying it’s merely the latter is typical British bureaucratic bold faced lying. “It is because We say so.”

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On the Fringe of Christian Unity

Posted on August 10, 2011 by ehurst

One of my favorite recordings includes these lyrics:

When will the world
See that we need Jesus?
When sister and brother
Love one another as one.
When will the world
See that we need Jesus?
Will we ever understand
Jesus is the Son of man?
We must live in the shadow of His love.

From “We Need Jesus”
John and Dino Elefante and Scott Springer
Petra Praise 2: We Need Jesus, Word, 1997
Good teaching. Over the decades of my Christian service, I’ve been haunted by the call to unity among Christians. Prior to discovering the Bible was inherently mystical, I struggled with the dire necessity of maintaining my theological identity against the call unity. Only in my earliest years did I suffer the truculence that “our way” was the only valid way. Eventually I outgrew that.
But for quite some time I was still pretty raspy to anyone who tried to say unity was a real possibility here on earth. I had no intention of giving up my position, and knew others wouldn’t give up theirs, either. All discussion of unity always seemed to start with a sweet song and dance, but ended up with one particular organization or tradition snuffing the rest. I got tired and cynical of such unity efforts. I was particularly wary, even defensive, when the efforts hinted at using any measures of force. As if humanity had not already seen enough of that.
Only in recent years did it finally dawn on me the whole problem was almost every call for unity presumes a human solution. It’s nice to hear pretty words about God’s solution, a spiritual solution, but those words always seemed to conceal the sword of human politics. The song noted above points out how it must be voluntary. They offer no particular vision of how to execute this unification, and no expectation of how it will turn out. Rather, it simply notes our message is hindered without a better unity than we now possess.
So here’s what the prophet says, one more time: When we can set aside our Western obsession with reason and human intellect, unity becomes possible. Yes, there are some things we have to share in terms of doctrine, but the Bible requires no analytical frame of reference to embrace and apply. The essentials are covered, and they don’t have to make any particular sense, they simply have to be. When we can all turn and embrace the Bible on its own terms, as an essentially Hebrew document requiring an ancient Hebrew frame of reference, the whole thing makes as much sense as needs be.
No organization or identifiable Christian tradition owns me. There is no expectation of subsuming all others under something I can claim as “mine.” I really don’t care what you believe, for the most part. When you walk in the Spirit of Christ, cooperation is unavoidable. Until we conquer our intellectual peculiarities, dismiss our Western obsession with rational and intellectual theology, and simply work together, there will be no unity. When you combine the teachings of the New Testament on the issue of Christ’s Return, there is one solemn warning: He expects to come back and find His Body unified. Not around doctrine, per se, but functionally unified, able to work together at random with just about any other follower of Christ.
Nobody says you have to surrender your personal experience with Christ. For example, I fully realize my favor for Calvinism is little more than a reflection of how I encountered Him. Your experience might well make you Arminian, or something else. I’m not worried about that. Show me your spiritual fruit; that’s all I have to see. That would include a sensitivity to Scriptural guidance and penitent heart. Everything else is negotiable. Most especially do I reject the necessity of any systematic theology; all of it is simply man-made ideas. All organizations are man-made, too.
Yes, I know this puts me out on the fringe of Christendom. I also believe it puts me in the center of His Kingdom. The boundaries of Christ’s Kingdom cannot be drawn by the hand of man.

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Can't Take the Linux Desktops Seriously

Posted on August 9, 2011 by ehurst

As I’ve said before: There will never be a “Year of the Linux Desktop.”
I’ve been following the commentaries, both big names and nobodies, on the new GNOME 3 desktop, as well as more comments on KDE 4. If you are a fan of either of those, you will hate this, and it’s likely any comments you make will end up deleted. Proceed at your own risk.
As you might expect, most of those who bother discussing it at all are serious fans of Linux and the various desktops. These are the ardent computer lovers, for whom choices such as Linux distro and desktop approach a religious devotion akin to the ancient VI versus Emacs wars. Even those who can’t make up their minds tend to be quite religious about other aspects of the discussion. There is some overlap, but for the most part, it’s easy to pick out the folks for whom computer use is important, but choices of OS, desktop, etc., are just a matter of what suits the purpose. We could safely generalize it by saying, “Never the twain shall meet.”
Computer users don’t really understand all that religious devotion erupting from the fanboys, the serious hobbyists. The latter are almost hostile to regular users. At best, it’s like the monster church pastor whose only real interest in you is adding numbers to his prestige. Waxing rhapsodic about their own favorite, however joyful and friendly, masks a near rabid hatred for anyone who doesn’t buy their line. I used to be one of those rabid fanboys, so I know what I’m talking about.
Then I grew up and realized the world is full of real people, with real needs, and computers are simply one tiny aspect of what they do to meet those needs. Now I find myself back on the outside, looking back in at this insane show. The names and faces change here and there, but the plot never changes. They don’t seem to notice no one else is paying any attention.
There was a time the GUI was just a way to use the programs you run on your system. Messing with the system itself required a console terminal of some sort. Eventually we rose up from that to having some parts of the system integrated into the GUI. We are very nearly to the point where the GUI is the whole thing. That’s okay, because it’s really convenient and consistent with the way the mass of humanity prefer to use their computers. Right now, all the energy and development is going towards the cellphone/tablet interface. That’s partly justified, since it’s the fastest growing segment of the computer market. If not already, any day now those mobile devices will outnumber all other types of general purpose computers combined, except servers. The workstation is dead.
Except it’s not. There are still millions of them out there, still in use, and for businessmen and bureaucrats, they aren’t going anywhere. The dinosaurs aren’t all dead yet. Indeed, the most ignored market of all is the workstation users, both in business and home. Ignored, I say, by Linux desktop developers. You see, all this crap about GNOME 3 and KDE 4 is because they both cater to the cellphone user, and everyone else be damned. Yes, the latest Linux newbies, and a narrow slice of those who use computers in ways most of the world cannot even imagine, will continue with KDE 4 and GNOME 3, totally in love. Comments from this crowd range from dismissive to openly hostile at the suggestion either of the major desktops are somehow not quite perfect.
If you happen to be anyone else in this world, just ignore them. Let them continue down their happy virtual path. Further, let them take Linux with them. They will, anyway, if they can. Aside from the tiny few Linux distributions which understand the importance of the workstation — mostly Red Hat and clones, CentOS and Scientific Linux — Linux has moved away from it’s one chance to capture the computer desktop market. No, Ubuntu is no better, having gone down their own cellphone interface path. Of course, if you are a competent computer geek, you can make Linux do what you like, but most people who use computers don’t want that, and don’t need it. If you use a smartphone, you’ll encounter Linux a great deal. Otherwise, you can forget it.
For myself, I’ll keep using Scientific Linux and CentOS until I see whether they and Red Hat are going to join this madness. I hope not. We have the 6.x release and it’s good for at least seven years (in theory). I’m not a big fan of Red Hat; it’s just the only way I can get something sane for my laptop. FreeBSD just recently added support for hibernation, but they insist on rolling release, which makes it useless for anyone who needs the GUI. You’ll end up rebuilding it monthly. That’s okay for the underlying system; two hours or less on most workstations and you’re done for awhile. GNOME was never less than four hours for the most basic stuff, and KDE has never been less than twelve hours to build. I want my computer to work for me, not the other way around. From what I’ve been able to see, nobody in the BSD world comprehends in the least the value of stability in terms of patching, versus constant upgrading. But I like the way their stuff works, so if you don’t mind being chained to the server room, it’s okay.
Maybe Haiku OS will become usable some day. Yes, I still hate Windows. Mac has never been my forte; it’s not hard unless you switch between Mac and other OSes. Since Mac does so little of what I want to do without costing more than a new car, it’s just not worth the trouble for me. I gave up long ago on the idea someone might actually develop the console interface for Linux. For all the really large number of folks begging for it, all we get is a bunch of jerks who don’t understand why the likes of Screen is not a hit with ordinary users. The fans of Screen belong in the whacko fanboys group. I’ll type extra slowly for them: It does too little, and what it does is not friendly to ordinary users. Nothing can replace a good TUI, and nobody who knows how wants to make one.
Yes, there’s XFCE, which may eventually include the functionality of GNOME. Enlightenment is not a desktop, just an extended window manager. FVWM will never move away from the obscure textual configuration files, and God forbid it should ever link in system functions. There are others, but they are either mere window managers, or so arcane nobody will understand them. Businesses and governments will use workstations for awhile longer, but only one major distro cares about their needs. Unless Red Hat can come up with something which does what GNOME 2.x did, I wonder how much longer than can pretend to have a workstation offering. Servers they can do; most distros can do that decently. The days of Linux as a computer workstation OS are already passing.
But, of course, I belong to a passing generation. Aside from the captive Windows audience, people under forty can’t wait for us dinosaurs to die so our resources can be spent on something else. I was blessed to pass through life while Linux was a viable workstation alternative, and pretty good on laptops. By the time I die of natural causes, should I be so lucky, people will be using implanted computers and call them something else.

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What Kind of Crash

Posted on August 9, 2011 by ehurst

Because I’m a nobody, I can afford to be blunt and say rash things. For example, I refuse to give any Keynesian economist the dignity of being at all sincere or honest believers, unless they are willing to admit they are complete morons. I’d be willing to say that on national television, in the faces of the biggest names associated with such economic foolishness, but no one is going to ask me.
There are several big names much smarter than me sharing the metaphor of the US economy being an airliner which has run out of fuel. They all agree it won’t simply fly into the side of a mountain or plummet from the sky and crater the ground. Rather, we will come down in a nice flat glide in a place which doesn’t happen to be a runway. We sold the landing gear for extra fuel (along with seats and our luggage), so we’ll be coming in, ripping and tearing everything near us, eventually destroying the aircraft, too. It’ll be a rough landing. By God’s mercy, perhaps we won’t burst into flames where it comes to rest.
It didn’t have to be this way, but the flight crew were listening to the wrong ground control station. We could have flown in a better direction, through far less storms, and come down on a proper runway. Why anyone ever believed it was possible to simply stay up in the air is beyond me, but that’s what Keynesian economists believe. That’s why I don’t take them seriously, and they return the favor. I’m sure I’m in good company on that, but if you keep probing what I believe about such things, I’ll end up way out in wilderness, nearly alone.
You don’t have to study economics and the other social sciences to realize instinctively flying around in the sky is not a place to build an economy. You won’t crash land if your feet are on the ground. Maybe it’s not so adventurous and exciting, but keeping a simple economy which aims to sustain a decent life for the largest possible number of folks limits the risk to those involved. And what have we gained by flying?
Will we be fondly remembered as some great nation? It takes a special delusion to imagine that. We are already hated by most of the world, and justly so. Maybe we have discovered a lot of amazing things, but most of them haven’t made life better, just more complicated. Tell me how many people you know really involved in this modern existence who actually have internal peace? That is, assuming they gave it much thought at all. We can do all kinds of wild and unimaginable things, but we can’t seem to improve on the technology of building a good family life and sending forth wise children into the world. Our nation has a few, but they hardly characterize us.
I can’t authoritatively say this is the crash landing I keep thinking is coming. I’m pretty sure I can’t explain exactly why I believe it won’t be all at once, even though I’ve read some good analysts who can say. I think each one is missing a thing or two, and I can’t buy their scenario completely. But I’m pretty sure the Dow Jones Industrial Index won’t drop all at once, nor will the dollar crash overnight. They’ll both lurch and scare everyone, repeatedly, but something inside me insists this is going to be one long, painful slog.
As a side note, honesty compels me to reveal I’m expecting a big surprise for my birthday. It’s part prophetic sense, part intuition, but for the past couple of months I’ve been sensing mid-September will bring some fireworks not entirely anticipated. Even I don’t have a big enough ego to think God is doing this for my benefit; it’s just a divine coincidence I’m expecting. We’ll see.

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