Some Interpersonal Implications of the Three Pillars

Posted on May 8, 2011 by ehurst

Basic principles will always be the same, but the implications will shift with the context.

For those of you just catching up, you can review the Three Pillars in detail here. For those familiar with the concepts, I’ll be offering a brief contextual reminder. I was asked some questions today and it sparked a bit of thought. For those living in a Western society in general, and here in the US in particular, there are some interesting implications of the Three Pillars in how you face your daily existence.

Because we do not trust anyone, we do not divulge anything more of ourselves than the context demands. You should enter every situation bearing with you an element of mystery. You should be aware there are some things you couldn’t divulge if you wanted, but you should be hesitant to volunteer even when you can vocalize it. Of course, in a civilized world we always avoid burdening others with more than they need from us, and that basic rule reflects the other face of our natural distrust. You can’t avoid making yourself a target for any particular abuse in this world, but you need not make it particularly easy. That’s not self preservation so much as the natural result of keeping the focus where it belongs, on the truth and away from yourself.

There is nothing wrong with folks having a false impression of you. Our commitment to truth is not about us, but about the truth. Correct the impression if it’s necessary in revealing the truth, but otherwise it’s really not your problem. Preventing wasted effort or waste of resources can be a good reason to explain something not obvious about yourself. For example, I’m a vegetarian for the most part, so when some activity involves food, I’ll decide whether my preference matters for the sake of time and efficiency of materials. For a one-time deal in a mass feeding operation, my peculiarities don’t matter. As a guest in someone’s home, they need to know as soon as possible to avoid embarrassment. Truth has a function; it is not an absolute value.

The mission always comes first. If you have no idea what your mission is, that’s the first thing to figure out. Everything else in your life can wait. Your convictions will set limits on what the mission can or can’t be, what it can and can’t include. Your mission may well be something which never changes, but most often it will drift with the context. Divulge as much of yourself as necessary for the mission. You’ll always be learning how to estimate that. The mission is simply a term to describe what you really must do in your personal commitment to the truth. It includes discerning honestly your talents, weaknesses and willingness to take risks. What drives you?

Every moment of every day you are evaluating how you can make your mission. All human interaction must serve that. How you open up or don’t will be a matter of your personal character in pursuit of that mission. You are the means to revealing some element of truth, so be as true to your mission as you know how, because otherwise you don’t matter at all, and neither does any one else. Be aware of the feelings others will surely have, as you will have your own, but feelings are not there to rule, nor even to vote. Truth rules, and your mission is the obligation you have to truth.

Even for those closest to you, the one best thing you can ever do for them is meet the mission. For most of us, people are the mission, in one way or another. We are always ready to sacrifice for others, even in futile gestures, if what we do meets the mission. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but you. Truth at its deepest is seldom logical by any human standard.

Be prepared for folks to think you a fool, and prepare yourself for the misery of those you love most failing to understand. You love them enough to take the hit, and wait for the time when truth vindicates you. It will; it always does, though not necessarily while you live. The treasure of truth means you can afford some personal loss, so make the mission first in all things. Realize not every part of any given situation is in your power, but work with what does rest in your hands. Don’t let your tenderness for someone be an excuse to compromise the mission.

There are some who will make themselves the enemy of your mission, enemies of truth. Some of those people might live in the same house with you. Changing people is never the mission. All you can do is point out the path to change; it would never be truth if you could force someone to accept it. When necessary, you may be forced to take advantage of your enemy’s weaknesses. Not in the sense of abusing them, but understanding their foolishness so well, you manipulate them just enough to protect your mission. Speak whatever language they’ll hear, but don’t be deterred from the truth and your mission. It’s on your conscience to decide what that manipulation can include, and what shape it might take in a given context. Never do it when some other option is available to you. Never apologize for the mission, but always be prepared to heal any wounds, whether it’s your fault or not.

In the end, each moment of each day offers you an opportunity to pursue the mission. Success is not in what you accomplish, but in your commitment.

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Truth Is Personal

Posted on May 8, 2011 by ehurst

Truth is a Person, and can be communicated only person to person.

Aristotle’s insistence truth can be objectified served merely to guarantee the most important things we can know will never be addressed. The existence of all the universe is directly tied to the existence of a living being. Envision it as Creation, or however you like it, but the whole reason for the universe is a place for life. Given we know only the life on our own planet, there’s not much point speculating about other forms of sentient life on this plane of existence.  The problem is Aristotle in essence denied there was any other plane.

That we are detached from the higher plane is the result of choices made far away and long ago. We are born into a broken world, and before we can develop any sense of being ourselves, that brokenness is absorbed and forms a part of our nature. But if we do not absorb the brokenness, we are simply animals. Humanness comes from dealing with other humans, however many the barriers are between us. We all experience those nameless urges for some Other, despite how our communion with other humans never quite satisfies.

The only way we know anything at all is because of our contact with other knowers. I’m sure Aristotle and his friends were well acquainted with the various mystical religions of the world. We know those religions had representatives in that part of the world, and it’s hard to imagine their documents weren’t available in one form or another. Thus, it was a conscious choice of Aristotle to reject anything they suggested about knowing on a level beyond the conscious intellect. For those who accept the Bible narrative as any reflection of the truth, this was nothing more than affirming the Fall. Whatever else we take from the Fall narrative in Scripture, we can see that business of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was about taking the presumption of judging what was good and evil. It was the choice to place the intellect on the throne, and this was what severed our direct link to the higher realm, and to higher knowing. The stain was indelible, and spread to all humanity.

For a Christian, this means asserting truth can be propositional is simply asserting the Fall was the right choice, the Eve was right in taking the fruit of that forbidden tree. Agreeing with Aristotle is agreeing with Satan as to what our destiny in Creation should be. I find most of the ones who insist faith has to be reasonable are folks who simply fear the unknown ground of mysticism. They hate it because they can’t assert their control over it. The Fall is partially wrapped up in denying God’s authority, and seizing control over the business of knowing. There is evil to be found in exploring mysticism as an approach to knowing, but there is no truth in knowing without it.

A primary doctrinal assertion of our ministry has always been the utter necessity of person to person communication. We see historically how written communication can serve a useful purpose in either provoking interest, or reminding someone of an experience of personal contact, but nothing can replace face to face communion. That’s what we lost in the Fall, and we have to reestablish it to the degree possible. So while I am willing to put my ideas out here on the Net by writing, you will not ever see an audio or video recording. Those things build a false link; they give the impression of knowing another person, but it’s artificial, scripted. Nothing replaces time spent in the presence of another, seeing them when they aren’t performing for an audience — we all do it, it’s part of our brokenness. If you don’t like reading, you’ll need to arrange a face to face meeting with us.

It’s not simply the lack of technology which prevented the early Christians using any other means of communication. They knew instinctively it required time and personal presence. Had you given them a printing press, they would still have insisted on going in person to the places they felt led to take their message. That business of laying hands directly on another person was not entirely symbolic. There’s no magic, as we tend to think of things today, but it’s the necessity of hearing, feeling, even smelling another person which cannot be duplicated any other way.

Truth is communicated only through the living presence of someone who is wired to that truth. That’s because Truth itself is a Person, and He cannot be known objectively.

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Apocalyptic Deception

Posted on May 7, 2011 by ehurst

If your image of reality is flavored by movies in any way, you will never understand what’s going on.

Our minds have been conditioned to expect a dramatic shift overnight, that there will be massive destruction everywhere at once. Apocalypse won’t be like that. The conditioning is intentional, though not everyone involved was in on the game. The intent was to build an unrealistic expectation, so that when the real thing comes, no one will recognize it.

The US will not end up looking like Somalia, particularly the Somalia of the military adventure movies in recent memory. We will have blood in the streets; we do already. But it will continue to come in incidents our minds have been taught to consider rare. The reports will be few, unless you get your news from alternative sources.

But there’s a problem with those alternative sources, too. Most of those folks are trying to make a living, or at least have their website paid for by advertising. Precious few are honest brokers. Worse, most of them are also infected with the same movie-minded madness.

Let’s pick this apart. The first thing we need to accept is there is no way to stop this thing. The moment of departure was long ago, and we missed it, for much the same reason most will miss the really important shifts over the next few months and years. If everyone today rose up in arms against the regime, you’d have too many of the wrong people killed and not enough of the right ones, because no one really knows who They are. I don’t. Nothing runs in a straight line, and no single human, nor any group of humans, can grasp what tomorrow will bring if we change just this one thing, or that one. The fundamental flaw is not the mechanism, but the underlying assumptions and the very language of our brains about what to expect. We don’t even see the meaning of minor events we face every day; how can we grasp the big things? Apocalypse is already here.

This is not a zero-sum game. Any fool knows if food stops coming into your community, there will be armed revolts. If the flow of food simply slows a little at a time, until certain agencies are in total control, and most of what everyone eats is still available, simply at a higher price, there will be no riots. There aren’t enough folks devoted to growing their own organic food to prevent Monsanto’s lackeys in the FDA from making home gardens pointless. They won’t simply outlaw the home gardens; expect them to make the whole business more difficult, a death by a thousand paper cuts, as it were.

There is no single crazy project which holds all the answers to our sorrows. Agenda 21, the Carbon Tax scheme, Codex Alimentarius, mandatory vaccines, etc. — some of these overlap, but some of them are actually contradictory, and it doesn’t matter. The zeal of the promoters is the scam, and the zeal of the resistors is the predictable result which makes the scam work. Each of these is a real threat, but neither any single one, nor all of them together, is the real threat. They are simply the means to an end. Keeping us riled up on them will ensure we don’t pay attention to what really matters. Every crazy announcement which “leaks” out, like the federal highway tax-per-mile scheme, is just a test. It’s not a matter of whether it will be done, but how and when — and more importantly, how it will keep us tied up in knots while something else slips by unnoticed.

What’s really going on is the cultural conditioning in the background. Does it not occur to anyone the very use of videos as a means of communication is a fundamental element of this whole thing? When I see a thousand idiots and their earnest pleas for attention to some dire problem posting on YouTube or Vimeo, I wonder whatever happened to the intellectual depth it takes to write the same message in just a few paragraphs. I wonder whatever happened to the intellectual depth it takes to read and understand those paragraphs. Folks, the medium is the message; it is the means to control. Just my saying that guarantees a large number of folks will turn away from any message I might offer.

This is part and parcel to my contention we have surrendered the entire battlefield when we insist on Aristotelian logic. The entire ground of Western Civilization is the victory of evil. Freedom is not simply getting some government hack off our backs, nor keeping the international bankers from mortgaging every square inch of American soil, nor even the ability to grow your own organic food and homeschool your kids. If your homeschooling curriculum consists of Classical Western themes and topics, you are a slave before you start.

It’s bad enough American Christians have so deeply absorbed a pitiful nationalism to the point they are willing to promote Satanic methods to win whatever it is they think matters in human politics. Even as they mouth the words, “You can’t defeat Satan by using his weapons,” they are arming themselves with the tools of Darkness. But if you allow Satan to redefine the very nature of warfare and meet him on his battlefield of choice, any battle which follows is his game, his staged drama. You must attack his stronghold, not contest the yard in front of it. His stronghold is Western Civilization itself, the fundamental assumptions about the world. Any decent academic who doesn’t love Jesus can point out where we have departed from the intellectual assumptions of the New Testament, but we refuse to listen. We have so enslaved ourselves to this world, we don’t recognize the exit standing wide open.

That exit is the Ancient Near Eastern Mysticism by which Jesus Himself organized His own human thoughts. If you don’t know Jesus that way, you don’t know Him at all. But in a much wider sense, those of you who want to ignore the whole Jesus thing, let me warn you, too: Don’t lock your brain into a failed and falling civilization. When you acknowledge there are some things which can’t be explained in mere human intellectual terms, you are in a position to step out of the prison of your own limitations. You don’t have to embrace Jesus to take full advantage of understanding reality. Learn about intuition, and how the subconscious tosses things out for your conscious mind to notice. Realize when you buy into the grand visions of human unity, you are already chained to a lie. You have to find your own answers, and you won’t even get started as long as you swallow so much of the mass of lies, cutting yourself off from things you should explore for yourself.

Let me say it again, and invite you to explore a better way: Every truth becomes a lie when it has to pass through a video camera lens.

When something so important as truth is all prepackaged neatly, a sterile and fully digested slurry of sweet nonsense which prevents you exploring the thing itself, then you are simply buying into someone else’s private truth. There is no objective body of cosmic truth, that stands out there ready to be discovered if we just keep poking at the details of this or that observable fact. If truth does not live of itself inside you, it’s not truth. If I try to do more than simply point out where you can find it, then it won’t be truth for you. You have to do it yourself, and that means using all the means at your disposal. If you deny those means exist, you’ll never get there.

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Just Passing Through

Posted on May 6, 2011 by ehurst

The original title to my blog (not just this post) was “Just Passing Through.” It was meant to be a religious statement, taken from a song commonly attributed to Albert Brumley:

This world is not my home, I’m just a-passin’ through.
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue.
The angels beckon me from Heaven’s open door,
and I can’t feel at home in this world any more.

It hearkens to a previous era in American Protestant religion. While I know those in academia had changed their minds much earlier, and big churches with big programs had already moved with them, I can recall when the big shift in thinking began showing up in the little churches where I spent most of my time back in the mid-1970s. Up until that time, the adult leadership of those churches were pretty other-worldly. That is, they really didn’t expect much from this world, and knew things wouldn’t be good until they were in Heaven.

Songs like the one above were very popular, and these folks could recall when there weren’t even many American flags visible in those little country church houses. When politics got any mention, folks were typically old-line rural Democrats. Those days are gone. It’s not as if things were all sweet and dreamy all the time; you can corrupt anything involving humans. Nor do I find fewer genuine caring souls in the modern here-n-now generation. The problem is not the power of God to work in human hearts, but the overall thrust of thinking which contributes to the vast foolishness of Dispensationalism.

During my college years at Oklahoma Baptist University (I graduated in 1978), it was trendy and popular to say something like this: “If all this Bible stuff were simply a fantasy, I still believe living by Christian ethics is the best life one can have.” What a stinking bucket of manure! If all this is false, we have no power to live; we are just fooling ourselves. The underlying lie, the greatest threat to Christian faith since it all began, is that we can accomplish anything useful by human talent and intelligence. This is the basic idiocy behind the likes of Rick Warren and most of what passes for emerging church.

It is merely the latest manifestation of all that was wrong with the Crusades, the Inquisition and every other horror blasphemously attributed to Christ’s teaching. Today we have millions of feverish Christian Zionists demanding the slaughter of Muslims. They deny the words, but it’s what they hope to see. Draping the US flag over the Cross denies the very reason for the Cross, and Jesus died in vain. Most certainly it denies the power which took away the stone from the door of His tomb. If politics were a good way of doing things, Jesus would have embraced the Devil’s offer to proclaim Himself the political messiah everyone wanted.

So here’s another prophetic message from God for you American Christians: You blew it. You had a chance to keep America back from presumptuous sin, but you dove in head first yourself. When you decided God was running for office in US politics, and bought into the blasphemous arrogance that America was somehow God’s own nation, you nailed Jesus the Cross again. The reason our nation is such a horrible place to live is because you started meddling in the politics, and decided to support one party over another. You people are the reason American morals are filthy hedonism, the reason our taxes are soaring and our economy dying; you are the reason God allows so many natural disasters, and more you won’t believe until you see them. It’s all because of you and your fake religion of politics. Guess what? Everything you hate about the political situation today is God’s wrath on you. It’s all going in the toilet, and God is sponsoring it.

The One World government you fear and hate will come. The worst oppressions you can imagine will descend upon the land, along with starvation, natural disasters, diseases both natural and manmade, and more evil than you ever dreamed possible. You asked for it, and if you now decide to resist, you will be fighting God Himself. When they come demanding your children for use as soldiers to enforce martial law on behalf of the Antichrist, God will not hear your cries, because it is you who have thrown them into the arms of Molech.

The one last hope for a precious few of you is to embrace the otherworldly viewpoint. When you realize all this stuff you fight for does not matter, that it’s all futile and senseless, and only feeds the Kingdom of Darkness you claim to despise, then you’ll be free. Perhaps then, if you learn enough fast enough, you can claim the last few shreds of God’s promises for this realm of existence. No, not my particular brand of Christian Mysticism, but an end to your clinging to Western Civilization, to Aristotelian epistemology, and the intellectual lies that this world matters at all.

Can’t do it? Enjoy your sorrow, because tribulation is already here, and you won’t be raptured out of it.

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Make Sane Choices Against the Lies of the World

Posted on May 5, 2011 by ehurst

Having a vision of truth, of clarity and honesty, isn’t very useful to others if I can’t show an application.

First, an honest accounting of where I stand, of how I arrived at my applications. I take the Bible seriously. We might debate what it says, but I find that’s mostly a matter of whose glasses you wear when you read it. Again, there is no objective truth out there we can bring to the question, because humans are not capable of it; I choose my biases openly and wisely. A very fundamental issue in my reading of the Bible is my choice to wear the glasses of the Hebrew intellectual culture which brings us the Bible. In so doing, I reject the lenses offered by Aristotle and all of Western Civilization. Not so much that I have succeeded, but this is my commitment. You can read more about that here if you need an academic accounting of my approach. The point is, I have a bone to pick with almost the entirety of Western Christianity; someone paid big money for my Western Christian education, and I have a BA in Religion, and have not since then ceased to study, so I understand all too well what’s involved. If you are oriented toward the mainstream Western Protestant expressions of faith, we will have much to debate, but we can agree the Book is the basis for proceeding.

From there, it’s a short step to declaring I utterly reject the modern nation-state called “Israel.” I’m asking you to make the sane choice of rejecting it, too. That is, let us regard that nation is the single greatest threat to human life on this planet. Yes, this awful world offers plenty of dangers, and we have no end of things we should call “sin” and demand they stop. However, the problem with Israel is so unspeakably huge because it steers most of what’s wrong elsewhere.

Getting back to that Bible business, my claim to be true to the ancient Hebrew understanding is the primary basis for rejecting any claims modern Israel represents any promises God made in the Bible. I’ll save you a lot of time: So long as Israel does not adhere to the Covenant of Moses, they cannot claim God’s favor as a nation. They do not, so they cannot; that’s in the Bible. As long as they reject Moses, they cannot claim the support of any Christian, either. Let’s pretend for a moment the political machinery of Israel is seized by the Orthodox Jews. Would that fix things? No. They adhere to the Talmud, and Jesus bluntly said that was contrary to Moses. Modern Judaism is Talmudism, a departure from the Old Testament religion. That’s also covered in my link above. Sorry, but unless there is a radical transformation and repentance in Israel and all Jews, they can make no claim to fulfill anything God put in His Bible.

So any Christians who agitate for political support for Israel are agitating against the Bible. I could go much farther, pointing out how Christ on the Cross completely ended the Covenant of Moses in the first place, but we don’t have room for that here. I could also take you to a thousand pages of facts which point out how Dispensationalism is a heresy, tracing the entire detailed history of where those ideas come from, but that’s more than adequately covered by others. If you want to know, you can easily find out how the whole thing came from some lying Catholic priests, ambitious and greedy English Protestant preachers, some wacko teenage girls, and all of it passed along through a series of politically ambitious preachers in the US. Sorry, but Jesus said in no uncertain terms no good thing comes from political activism.

So much is simply a long standing debate with ample record. Should you really want to know the truth, you’ll find it. If you don’t want the clarity and honesty, then nothing I say here will help you. The Bible itself destroys the claims of modern Israel. Any other position is blasphemy. It’s all stolen land, and the folks there are unspeakably evil oppressors of the previous occupants. Our political alliance with them is poking God in the eye. Thus far is theology. And for anyone who really wants to know the truth, almost all our adventures in the Middle East are at the behest of Israel’s political agenda. Any secular searcher of truth could figure that out.

Hussein was our hired thug; whatever he was doing was at the behest of the US political establishment, until at some point we suckered him into something we would not tolerate. Our rulers needed an excuse for a big show of warfare, and he took the bait as our faithful foolish servant. We were already in Afghanistan, in part because of demands from Big Oil. The Taliban, whom we created during the Soviet Occupation, were not showing themselves sufficiently grateful. None of this is secret, either. That there was a bigger agenda, with a plan to attack Iran all along, is also not hard to see. Look at a map. Afghanistan is east of Iran. Iraq is west of Iran. It doesn’t take a genius. And since Pakistan is south of Afghanistan, shifting from Afghanistan to Pakistan, or simply adding it on, hardly changes the underlying narrative of our activities there. Israel fears Iran’s nuclear ambitions because Israel intends to be the only nuclear power in the region.

And so on. The only reason most American Christians don’t see these things is because they are blinded by the Dispensationalist lies. Shed that insult to God and everything else makes sense. You really don’t need me for this part.

Now, let me shift over to another level. As part of my peculiar approach to the Bible, I believe God still uses folks to speak as prophets. I believed it before He gave me a prophetic word. I understood the prophetic background of His nation, ancient Israel, and where the boundaries were. I believe I understand how things were shifted to the New Covenant, and His church. Those things I realize require His Spirit to understand, and I have a strong theological basis for discussing the necessity of spiritual birth to understand how these things work. In theory, at least, anyone whose spirit the Lord has raised up to life inside their soul is in a position to hear a prophetic word on any question in their personal life. Sometimes what He has to say applies to more than the individual who hears it.

My warning about invading Iran could find a logical basis, but I’m not relying on that. While I don’t claim to have a word from God regarding Israel, it is my speculation from that prophetic word any attack they make on Iran is equally doomed. They got away with the last one; I personally believe they won’t get away with it again. I suspect they will act very soon, and that their failure will be what draws us into it. Never mind how I consider the government of Iran foolish and wrong; that’s not the point. This is a word from God, and some reasoning connected to it.

I further speculate this stuff will happen this summer, or perhaps as late as the fall. No, that’s not part of the prophecy; it’s just my personal guess. I hope stay out of it, but I have no doubt it’s part of our government plans, and I suspect this disaster will have something to do with massive political changes in the world, particularly the US. I’m hardly the only sane man who thinks our national debt places us in precarious position, and any day now our currency will collapse in terms of how the rest of the world treats it. And while I don’t quite believe these images are the real thing (seen all over the alternate news and underground blogs in the last few days), the background story of something like a North American Union swallowing the US is entirely plausible. It’s entirely plausible some hidden agency has been trying to entice our government into reckless and endless spending and borrowing as the means to destroying what little is left of our national sovereignty. We have been ruled by some outside power for quite some time now, but getting the mass of citizens to go along with it is cheaper than simply sending the troops into the streets. All the more so since our troops are busy elsewhere right now. So I am utterly certain this whole thing has been set up in advance, and we have been nudged in this direction by conflicting stories which serve to herd us in a controlled panic when it becomes necessary.

I hope I’m wrong on most of this, because it will be very uncomfortable for me when it all happens. My beloved Internet will probably become difficult to access, if not impossible. The fun of fixing people’s computers will disappear for me, right along with the fun I have using my own. Most likely my veterans’ pension will disappear, along with a lot of other government funded support systems. I have little confidence there will be any useful replacement for that, and lots of people will be hurting. It doesn’t matter what I think of them in terms of proper libertarian economic policy; such a drastic change coming so quickly will be painful beyond imagining. I’m not looking forward to these things, but I am quite certain most of it will happen as I describe. The timing is merely my personal guess.

So I am trying to do a few things now which might help me stay focused and sane while the rest of the world goes mad. Part of that is simply keeping track of events and seeing how they confirm or deny my story line. You need to write your own story line. Don’t trust mine; I could be stupid and insane at the same time. That Israel is a big problem is hard to dispute, but you don’t have to swallow my approach to the the Bible to arrive at that conclusion. Realizing that messing with Iran will hurt the West does not require a prophecy from God. That our economy is about the crash is hardly a secret. But if you swallow the lies of our government, as told through the mainstream media, you deserve everything that’s coming.

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Transparency and Vision

Posted on May 5, 2011 by ehurst

You cannot easily see the truth if you aren’t willing to be the truth.

Whoever you are, I am no better than you. At most, I am simply somewhere out ahead of you. More likely, this blog simply offers some hope it’s worth the trouble to keep poking at the barriers in your own world. The ability to string words together in a way some find engaging is simply the act of holding up the torch for you to see where I’ve gone. Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking such a talent puts me on some level you can’t reach.

Over the past few years I’ve been put through the wringer on some things. At points I nearly committed suicide, and that should be sufficient proof I’m not that special. What is special, and what I want to draw your attention to is the call to clarity itself. It’s like a sword you cannot use until you have turned it on yourself, and it’s the only weapon which actually makes any difference. It’s a death defying act to grab the handle, and I’m still here somehow. The past few years I have been chasing the ghosts of forgotten sins, and some of them are fearsome threats to sanity.

This is not a question of achieving, but believing — believing it’s worth the price. So fully do I believe it I’m willing to expose myself unilaterally. I expose myself to one and all. Ask me anything. While civilization demands we keep some things to ourselves, it’s not about hiding truth, but leaving others unburdened with things unworthy of their attention. There are dumb questions, unworthy questions, but truth itself includes pointing out what matters and what doesn’t. So if some government agency really needs to see know what I do with my computer, they need only ask and I’ll provide a full accounting. I don’t run Linux to hide things, but to maintain a responsible control over things which matter to me in my burning search for clarity. Linux itself is not truth, not by any measure, but is simply a tool I use. In demanding the truth about the world in which I live, this is the right question for me to ask. Don’t emulate my choices unless they work for you; emulate the search itself.

That’s just one tool among many as I chase the lies out of my world. Right now, the Internet looms large on my horizon. I find moments of clarity from others. OBL? Don’t believe everything you hear. Especially don’t believe our government, which has proven beyond all doubt a willingness to lie about anything and everything. But I’m willing to be transparent to them because the way to fight lies is not to produce your own. Having nailed all that to the Cross, I’m not going to defeat the Darkness by hiding things. We don’t become sane by trading one madness for another.

There is enough madness simply living in this broken world. I can’t promise I’ve found the absolute sanity, as if it’s something so universal you need to buy my personal vision. Don’t follow me unless your feet can’t take any other path. I’m not building a cult and I don’t want your money, just a little of your attention until you no longer need what I offer. The most important thing you can do for me is claw at your own eyes, pulling away the mask, until you can trust the truth about yourself, until you can test your own vision against the light of honesty. I assert there is no objective truth we must all share on this plane of existence. Truth is not an achievement, a place you can go, but a path, a commitment. It’s the search which becomes so obviously necessary when you realize you can’t swallow any more lies.

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Other-Worldly Terrorist

Posted on May 4, 2011 by ehurst

I am the greatest threat to every government in the world, simply because I am totally disinterested in them.

This is the one thing in which I most sure of my understanding, and find the most difficult to write. Most of what I read every day is aimed in some way or another at getting folks riled up about all the evil men do when they get into power. If you really believe there is some hope of fixing the system, you don’t want to talk to me. I don’t support the system, by any means. I also don’t support the myth it can be fixed by human minds and hands, because it’s that very involvement of humanity which guarantees it will remain broken.

With the utmost confidence, I am certain I can write a prescription which will guarantee change, at least. One of my favorite myths, one which amuses me most, is “Rule of Law.” It’s a peculiarly Anglo Saxon notion, foreign to anyone whose cultural background is from any other part of the world. But it’s more honored in the breaking than in the implementation. We talk about it in revered tones, and then promptly make all manner of excuses why we can’t live it, why there must be a long list of exceptions. The only real debate is whose list of exceptions will be followed. But I feel certain I can tell you how we could come close to it, and have it work as well as it might, for as long as it might.

First, make absolutely certain there is no money in it. For example, to rein in Congress, simply destroy the profitability of being elected. Not by changing the laws; nobody will obey them anyway. Destroy the sources of profit in being a legislator. Start by executing a bunch of large corporate CEOs and senior management staffs. When there’s no profit in conglomeration, no profit in concentrating wealth and power, there’s no reason to tweak the laws. Of course, on the way to that, you’ll have to nuke — literally drop a nuclear device on — the offices of the NSA, CIA and the Pentagon. Make sure it’s a good work day. Those have become the single greatest concentrations of unaccountable power in the US. For example, not only does the CIA not serve the interests of the citizens of the US, but they hardly serve the US government, either. They constitute an independent government of themselves, with a separate foreign and domestic policy, a large degree of independent funding, and there is simply no leverage whatsoever to make them account for their actions, because they can lie and no one will ever know. It’s only be sheer human incompetence have independent observers ever caught them in the act, but you won’t read about it in any mainstream reporting. There’s too much money in covering it all up.

Of course, all that killing will of necessity scoop up a lot of folks who are innocent tools and fools. But of course, if we let them live, they will never accept the truth, because their whole world is within the system. They would be like the generation of Israel who had to die in the Wilderness, because physical freedom could not make them any less slaves than they were under Egyptian taskmasters. You see, you’d have to kill a whole bunch of Americans who honestly and earnestly believe in the mixed mass of lies about the utter necessity of material prosperity and comfort. If not kill them physically, you’d have to kill their illusions, which is much harder.

Okay, so maybe we could just secede by getting all the smart liberty-minded folks in one place. But then you’d have to push out the ones there now who don’t think like you. How about that Free State Project? Honestly, you can’t imagine how racist this will look when you start actually putting it into practice. That’s just one minor problem on the way to the dream of honest human government. Indeed, it’s the minimum for one which is merely tolerable. No matter how good it starts, you end up having to fight the whole world to keep what you gain. Every plan ever tried in history began with some pure vision, something frankly plausible, but always impossible because people are still people.

Or you could get a clue and realize none of it matters. When the angels sang to the shepherds about “peace on earth” they were addressing the social outcasts of a nation which had been given the single best opportunity God could grant any nation in the whole of human history before or since. The one batch of guys fit for God’s message that night were the ones least likely to be heard when they shared it. The song of angels played before a tiny audience, because it simply doesn’t get any better. You have to be a fringe element to even understand God’s notion of peace among humans. That’s because peace is not offered, not possible, for those fully involved in much of anything which requires heavy human interaction. It’s for individuals who happen to share the most tenuous bonds in the flesh, and care a great deal about something else.

The choice of the shepherds, of course, was symbolic. The greatest image of manhood, of the greatest king in human history, was a shepherd. It requires the instincts honed from years of protecting one of the stupidest creatures in all the world, and realizing that is much more doable than leading people. What I promote here on this blog is just about as solitary as sheep herding.

How am I a threat? Sure, I could get my hands on a firearm, but I don’t personally own any. I traded my last pistol for this laptop. Yes, I know tactics and martial arts, for what it’s worth. Try as I might to stay somewhat physically fit, my body is too badly broken — permanently — and too old for me to be a fighter of any account. I can’t imagine wanting to hurt another person in the first place. I can’t imagine wanting to be involved in something which contributes to hurting other people. I realize there is a lot of human misery which can’t be avoided, and that my continued living comes at the cost of someone somewhere not getting a square deal. I feel utterly powerless in that sense, and I can’t wait for God to tell me it’s time to come Home.

That’s the real threat. I care enough about people to sacrifice anything in this life, anything on this plane of existence, for the few good actions I understand. I have no interest in human greatness, and am actively hostile to all human government which isn’t at least harmless — which means all human government in existence today. Since I know my own government best, it is to that one I am most hostile. But it’s not a hostility they can track, quantify and prepare to defeat.

While I use the normal human channels of communication, my ultimate source for everything I know is really built into my soul. I am utterly certain it won’t matter what influences have worked in your life up to this point; if you received from God the same living spirit I have, it’s entirely likely you’ll agree with me, sooner or later, on most things we discuss. When I say God has revealed to me America is doomed for her sins, I know beyond all doubt your agreement or disagreement is not a matter of my ability to convince you by talented communications. It depends entirely upon God Himself living in you, same as me. If I share with you a prophetic message God won’t allow the US to successfully make war on Iran, it’s not up to me to make the case logically, nor even based on pure emotion. It rests on God to convince you. If that doesn’t work, I’d hate for you to pay any attention to me at all.

So on the same basis, I make no effort to organize any resistance movement. I don’t organize anything at all. If you agree with my message, there is no need to organize. You’ll automatically do what’s right, or wrong, or whatever it is you do, and God will make it all work out His way regardless. My measure of success, my sense of having done what I set out to do, is entirely a matter of something inside me. Sure, I like to see rising numbers of hits on this blog, but who’s to say anyone is actually reading this stuff? Yes, if you post a comment, I’ll have something more substantial to go on, but all I can know is what you tell me, never mind whether it represents your true feelings. What really matters is the results I can’t measure or quantify.

What matters is the peace I sense, which I see somehow connected to the unspeakable peace of those shepherds on that night long ago and far away, hearing music few hear and live. And yet, I believe I’m hearing that same song. Do you hear it? Then you are as much a terror to human government as I am. It’s not likely they are paying attention to either one of us right now, but that time will come. It always does. At some point, our commitment to something beyond this world becomes the greatest threat to those who see nothing beyond this world, simply because they can’t threaten us.

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Your Facebook Spyware Is from the Government

Posted on May 3, 2011 by ehurst

Forgotten in all the hubbub about OBL is something the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported a few days ago.

When fixing computers for people, most of what I do is remove spyware, followed numerically by a handful of viruses. The biggest single source of spyware is game downloads followed by social media. Facebook is a primary source of trouble, with several spyware infestations already famously coming from there.

But some of that Facebook spyware could have been planted by the US government. That makes it actual spy-ware.

I seriously doubt my work has interfered with any ongoing investigations. In the past, the anti-malware and anti-virus companies have tended toward not playing well with governments on this issue, but given what I know about my clients, I doubt any of them are much of a threat to anyone, except perhaps themselves. However, given the whole thing turns on the willingness of their investigative targets to do silly things like wasting time on Facebook, I’m confident they have no trouble re-infecting target machines someone accidentally sanitized. I’ve not convinced a single client to get rid of their Facebook account.

There are a couple of interesting things we can take from this, aside from the very plain thrust of the EFF article — that the FBI and others were willing to plant this spyware without proper accountability.

With this and the revelations from the HB Gary fiasco, it shows us there are still numerous security flaws in Windows and off-the-shelf commonly used software. There is a big industry in unreported vulnerabilities, and keeping them unpatched is critical to both government and crime (which is which?). We can’t be sure Microsoft isn’t playing along with this industry by pretending they don’t know about some of the vulnerabilities, and we have no reason to believe them when they deny they granted the NSA a backdoor in Windows 2000, at least, if not every version of Windows before or since then. Do you trust them? I don’t.

But even what is advertised as the most secure popular OS — OpenBSD — is alleged to have had for some time now a back door sponsored by the government. We may never get to the bottom of that one. And should we trust the NSA to be honest about their work in helping secure Linux via SELinux? Can we believe them when they say there is nothing hidden in anything the US government, or others government spook outfits, have not touched, even in the land of Open Source?

When it comes down to it, I don’t trust anything I didn’t create with my own hands, and I don’t trust my own hands that much. It doesn’t matter if you have nothing to hide. At the very least, the first time I raised my right hand and took the oath of enlistment in 1979, whatever privacy I may have once had was long gone. I am fully compromised, lacking only the next new invasion of privacy in the form of mandatory chipping of my body for easy tracking. I keep wondering when the VA medical system will announce they can no longer treat anyone without such a chip, so get it now.

I don’t pretend by running Linux on my laptop I have frustrated any snooping, except by the relatively minor threat from questionable marketing trackers. Even on Windows we can defeat most of that. As far as I am concerned, my privacy was compromised long ago. Whatever it is I hope to do in the future had better not depend on privacy and secrecy of that sort. We find Orwell’s nightmare visions credible because we know people will do some of the awfullest things to each other for the stupidest of reasons. The only limits on government immorality is a lack of creativity. Psychopaths are forced to rely on the pool of talent which gravitates to the suffocating inhumanity of government service. Government is riddled with incredible incompetence, but the real problem is simply how large it is, and how wide the net is cast for relatively silly things it tries to control.

What I was hoping to put before you today, dear reader, is the silliness of the whole thing. The government’s Keystone Cops level of incompetence works because too many people are silly enough to put their lives on Facebook. The two sides of this equation deserve each other. Never mind my mad chatter about Christian Mysticism and being a prophet of God; any secular intelligence can see this is silly on a purely human level. Are we reduced to the point the government efforts at law enforcement are going after the kind of people who suffer such a common grade of vanity? Think about that for a moment. Why do we still call this “civilization”?

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The Prophet’s Trilemma

Posted on May 2, 2011 by ehurst

The call it the Lord, Liar or Lunatic Trilemma.

It was made popular by Josh McDowell, but I understand it first came from C.S. Lewis. In summary, Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, among other things. You cannot simply say He was a good teacher. Either he was lying about being the Son of God, or He was a madman who really believed it, or He was the Son of God as He claimed.

Yes, one could pick it apart logically, but the impact is still sharp. The point here is, the same thing can be applied to anyone who claims to be a prophet of God.

I have made such a claim. Further, I put myself in a bind by claiming to have a predictive message from God: If America sends troops and/or vehicles against Iran, we will fail and fail miserably in battle. I can’t pretend to speak for other nations involved, or if they act alone. I know only my firm conviction what will happen to the US. I say without hesitation this is a word from God.

If we do go to war against Iran, and after a reasonable time frame, what I say does not happen, then I am wrong and it’s not a Word from God. The Bible says some pretty harsh things about people who claim to speak for God and it turns out false. For the time being, I rather doubt anyone will attempt to carry out the provisions of the Law of Moses, but it would be justified, in one sense.

You see, my pronouncement of this message as being from God arises from a certain set of beliefs. This is what I honestly believe, so the liar option is gone. If my message is wrong, so are all of my beliefs. But this is not something I can simply correct by changing my mind. These beliefs, so far as I can tell, arose from outside my intellectual control. These beliefs aren’t going away. That is, if I’m wrong, I’m going to question my grip on reality altogether.

It seems to me in my rational mind we are dangerously close to attacking Iran. I’m so deeply committed to honesty, I need to set this in stone, as it were, before we get there. If we attack Iran and subdue the government, and if after some reasonable interval, nothing happens to our troops and equipment, then I will find myself unable to continue writing. I won’t be able to trust my own mind, and I would hate for any of my readers to keep on trusting me, and be led astray by my madness.

It’s possible we won’t do it, in which case we’ll never know either way. The point is, I want to make clear I know what’s at stake. If this fails to come true, I’m pulling all my stuff from the Net. Not out of embarrassment, but out of a concern for everyone else, because if I can’t trust my own heart on this, you and I would be crazy to think anything else I say is worth the trouble.

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Manipulation Detector Working? (Updated)

Posted on May 2, 2011 by ehurst

It doesn’t require a weird conspiracy theory to see the lies and manipulation.

How is your manipulation detector working? Can you measure the high level of garbage coming out the mainstream media today? The current ruling regime of the US is setting us up for a fresh sucker punch. Here’s the obvious steps:

1. You and I know Osama bin Laden was dead a decade ago. The man had been in fragile health for some years, and the CIA spent quite a bit of money on his medical care, even sending agents to visit him in the hospital. It doesn’t matter what bin Laden knew; the CIA was using him.

2. Since that time, we have had piles of videos with fake bin Ladens. It didn’t take any serious expertise to see it was not him. So it should come as no surprise if you view photos of the guy they shot yesterday, it’s also not him (I saw the photo, but it fell victim to government censorship just a short time later). The facial features and hair color alone are different enough to give it away.

(Edit: The photo in question was a fake of a different sort. It was not censored, but removed because the original post I saw used an old hoax photo dredged up yet again, trying to fool us one more time. So now what we have is a body not seen by any third party, dumped into the ocean, taken from a compound burned to the ground. Net result is no change to my original thesis. BTW, how long does a DNA test take? Hint: Labs say their fastest turn-around is not possible in less than 48 hours.)

3. So every time they waved the dead guy at us, it was about the same time there was some outcry over a fresh attack on rights and liberties.

4. Today we see the news about expecting al Qaeda and other CIA black ops promising new forms of terrorist retribution for the death of some guy they know is not bin Laden. These threats will justify, at the very least, making sure no one pays any attention to the popular backlash against the likes of TSA. More likely, this heralds some fresh assault on our perceived rights and liberties.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking all this runs along any single thread of planning. This coup is bigger and smarter than that. There are an awful lot of brilliant folks involved in both major parties working every angle of this thing. They’ll estimate the popular response and take that as a cue what they can get away with. The public announcement of bin Laden’s death has been in the can for some years, and it was pulled out of a much wider collection of propaganda stunts all lined up and ready.

Even then, it’s all a distraction within a distraction. They already know some of us have this figured out in advance, and they have something for us, too. As long as there are folks selling information, there will always be information to be sold. The Controlled Opposition has many faces, too — there’s something for everyone.

That is, except for Christian Mystics like myself and a few others. Having opted out a long time ago, most of what we see now is just so much entertainment, and mighty poor entertainment, at that. The real story is Western Civilization is crumbling, hollow and rotten to the core. It’s just another case of “Babylon is fallen, is fallen…” Everything has a price and that’s all that matters, according to Babylon. Don’t be bought; don’t make your heart for sale. Opt out and let it all pass you by, while you give yourself to the really important stuff of showing the truth in how you live.

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