Morals in a Sick Society

Posted on March 8, 2011 by ehurst

We need to understand morality in this world is always contextual, always complex.

In my theology, there will always be that sharp distinction between the Two Realms, the Spirit Realm and the Fallen Realm (AKA, the world). If you prefer the Science Fiction mode, there are two dimensions of existence. The warp tunnel between them was closed at the Fall, in the sense humans could no longer pass alive between the two dimensions. Now you have to die to leave this one. Never mind the temporal associations; the Cross reopened the way by shifting the boundaries of death, giving “death” a new meaning. You can embrace death before you actually face it. So people before the days of Jesus could find that path, because it had always been there, in a certain sense. However, the path was much more difficult to discern in the temporal stretch of time before the Cross.

That path was through the ancient Law Covenants. All of them are connected to the Covenant of Noah. If it suits you, call it all mythology or fiction or parable, so long as you understand that mythology still points to eternal truths which bind you nonetheless. The point is not so much what happened back then, as what it indicates about our reality.

Grace from Heaven is determined in Heaven. Nothing of human choice has any bearing on such things. However, the entire gamut of morality in this world, the whole matter of God’s Laws, is fully within human reach. In short, grace is predestined and inscrutable, but morality is entirely a matter of free will. Insofar as any mind can do anything at all about grace, it requires embracing the morality of the Laws of God for this fallen realm. Law is the path to grace, gives meaning and context to grace. We who have experience in evangelical churches can recognize the failure to distinguish between the two realms, with all this verbiage about making sure folks are “born-again” before they become members. It simply is not possible to know; no human can know, not even reasonably sure, another is spiritually alive. The only thing you can know is whether that other is tolerably close to compliance with the Laws as you understand them. A commitment to such morality is all you can surmise based on evidence you see, and is the only proper grounds for embracing fellowship and membership. There is no such thing as “a saved church,” because all human organizations are still human, and having an eternal purpose for organizing, and making it belong to Christ, cannot change the fact. It is a human organization which must fall entirely under the requirements of God’s Laws, because it remains a human activity.

And it remains utterly contextual. We can know the absolute truth of some things, know the whole social structure is broken beyond repair, know that God’s wrath rests upon it, but find moral approval for certain choices within that context. That I reject the whole of Western Civilization does not mean Western evangelical churches are entirely worthless. I remain outside such churches because they don’t tolerate me. That’s their choice, and they are required by God’s Laws to make it. They are required to state certain boundaries and adhere to them, or they must as a whole embrace a new structure in defiance of their culture, and inevitably in defiance of national laws. By no means should we mistake national laws for moral Laws of God. The latter is binding; the former is a matter of strategy, because no nation in history has long held to any Law Covenant. The prophetic word makes clear this situation will get worse as time drifts toward the final close. So we who understand these things are still stuck in a less than optimal situation.

That I may be totally committed to raising a consciousness of God’s optimal moral society does not mean I am committed to making it become a reality. My duty to God is not the accomplishment, but the struggle to reveal. I am accountable to my commitment, not the results. This is the fundamental nature of the His Laws, something we find foreign in our Western world. I have no trouble realizing my commitment may have me engaging in activities I otherwise despise. The context in which I live is not under my control; only my response to it is mine to direct. The fundamental morality is to uncover the jarring, earth shattering disconnect between “reality” here below versus what it ought to be. The moral code itself does not permit a full rebellion, so my actions must range between various levels of resistance within the context. By whatever small and incremental amount, my conduct must constitute a gentle tug back to God’s ideal.

So while I despise war as we do it here, the context of a warfare empire is where I live. I have no trouble finding good morals within this evil regime’s crushing Orwellian lies. I can find a place and mission within that disgusting context. What is evil and immoral is attempting to discern what is moral and good by using the fallen reasoning of mankind, when the standard was revealed long before. In case you don’t know it, despite all the modern schools of philosophy and their trendy departures from the Enlightenment, it all still stands on the fundamental epistemology of Aristotle. It all assumes human reason can grasp all that matters, and rejects revelation. The Laws of God came well before Aristotle, and we can be sure he knew of them, and rejected them outright. They are still binding. But I live in Aristotle’s legacy, and must choose actions and words which speak to that context.

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Garden Is Ready for Spring Planting

Posted on March 7, 2011 by ehurst

Last summer, after the rather disastrous growing season in our little garden, I took over from Dad. Instead of leaving our red clay soil as is, I broke it up using an all-steel shovel and very many hours of slicing and dicing the brick-like slabs into small crumbles. Even more hours went into schlepping mulch from the other end of the trailer park. Each time, I would spread a thick layer, let it rain, then turn it all under. I did this for three layers. Finally, I tilled it all two more times with the shovel.

Then I covered it all in pine needles and left it for the winter. It stayed above freezing just below the surface, and was damp throughout the recent drought. I know this because there is only one weed in this area which likes pine needles — we call it chickweed. Edible, but not very tasty and not especially nutritious. It grew immediately after the first snow thawed, and stayed green through unusually low temperatures and more snow.

That meant in order for me to make it ready for spring planting, I had to pull off the pine needles, pull those weeds, and turn it all under a couple more times. It looks more like potting soil than hard red clay. That’s done today, and the pine needles are back down just in time for our first spring rain tonight and tomorrow.

We plant later this week, starting with blue potatoes. We also have some strawberries, tomatoes, beets and a few other goodies. The choosing and planting really isn’t my department. I’m just the rototiller.

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ANE Culture and the Place of Violence

Posted on March 6, 2011 by ehurst

We should not assume we understand violence the way it was understood in Scripture simply because we know how to use the word in modern English.

The world today as we know it is not what God had in mind. I have no doubt He knew it was coming, but it was not what He desired for us. The world is broken; we are fallen. The ideals of Edenic Innocence no longer apply. Step by step, at pivotal points in human history, God revealed what was necessary to get the most out of this bad situation. Those portions of revelation apply to all human life, as what I refer to as Laws. Grace is another matter entirely. Though it overlaps, what we who have experienced grace and spiritual birth offer to the world is Laws as the path to entry into grace. If we don’t understand Laws, we cannot understand grace, and we cannot participate in God’s revelation.

A few people understand this. What most do not understand is the vast gulf between where we are today in our understanding of the world, and where folks were back when they were still rather close to Eden. God revealed Himself within a specific context, a cultural background which holds to a particular intellectual heritage now utterly foreign to us today — Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) Mysticism. Without embracing that context insofar as we are able, we cannot hope to understand Laws. My blather here warning people to divorce themselves from their Western roots is based on this very thing. Western intellectual roots are actively hostile to a proper grasp of God’s Laws.

So if I suggest a word study of the term “violence” in Scripture, and you approach it with Aristotelian categories of logic and epistemology, you won’t get it. You’ll find yourself trapped in one of several fractured threads of thought, all mutually exclusive, and all wrong. Violence in Scripture is understood in terms of context, not as a concept which stands alone. If you chased all the references in something like Strong’s Concordance, you might quickly realize the words commonly translated into English as “violence” are more accurately terms describing motives or the results, not the thing itself. In other words, they didn’t use the term(s) as we do. That’s because the biblical concept of violence is more about injustice.

That is, a vigorous action which brings physical harm to another is not intrinsically wrong of itself. We are smug in our modern Western world, considering it barbaric to spank children. We may put forward numerous studies showing how spanking leads to children becoming violent. You can gin up a study to prove just about anything you want when it comes to human behavioral science. The only reason kids grow up to become violent due to spanking is because their world was really screwed up in the first place, and their human development was never finished. Children who actually finish most of the tasks of human development are grateful they were forcibly restrained from the habit doing things which would harm themselves or others. In other words, as Scripture suggests, it is the failure of proper spanking which makes kids grow up to become violent.

You’ll most likely hear campaigns against spanking from people who don’t have kids. Most parents do it improperly if they do it at all. That’s because they adhere to another false notion about violence, that somehow society and the state have an unlimited grant to do violence, and call it “patriotism,” or even more asinine, “keeping the peace.” They place spanking into the same basket.

Both false views are threads of a whole tapestry of lies. If I say violence has its place in this world while calling myself a pacifist, you would call me an idiot. That’s because you don’t yet understand the proper ANE viewpoint on things. I use the term “pacifist” because folks understand what that means; I’m speaking the language of these times. If I then write several articles refining that position (as I’ve done here), that I am not a peace activist because organized political action as we know it today is always a failure, then they realize their standard definition of “pacifist” does not fit. But my actual position is closer to that than other terms I might use. It’s a way of opening the door to discussion about such things. It’s a way of unraveling the tapestry of lies.

I prefer to make peace. But peace can only come on certain terms in this fallen world. Those terms are inscrutable from the Western viewpoint. The first thing absolutely necessary is destroying the notion of the modern nation-state, the evil legacy of the so-called Peace of Westphalia. Such a construct is intrinsically evil, and the only peace involved is the silence which comes after killing everyone who wants something different from what the government has decided will be offered. It’s what we call an Orwellian abuse of the term “peace,” because the whole idea is the state has the monopoly on the use of force, and uses it generously.

The ANE culture would demand there be no state. Period. Government was required by God to be people, not impersonal structures. It must be people who are directly accountable to those they govern. Not simply held accountable out of fear of revolt, though that helps, but accountable out of fear of God. It demands accountability on that deep moral level of a good moral parent accountable for the well-being of a child. It requires severe cultural and personal character breakage to make parents willing to harm their own children. In other words, God says no one on this earth has any business directing your daily affairs unless they are bound to you by blood or covenant. The only enforcement God endorses is that of your own kin keeping you from making trouble for them or for any one else.

Who in this world is ready for such an idea? Not anybody tied to Western Civilization. Rejecting this idea is why we have so much filth in government. Step back; let it crash and burn.

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Why Western Civilization Has Failed

Posted on March 4, 2011 by ehurst

Western Civilization has sided with God’s enemies.

You might think this deserves a book, but most who read this will already understand. All I’m doing is giving some words and mental shape to what we all know. Some of you could surely write this better than I, but this thing sits on my chest like a loaded tractor-trailer rig. I have to get it off.

Let’s start small, where everyone can understand. It’s familiar territory to me, since I’m a disabled military veteran. Civilized suburbanites want nothing to do with most disabled veterans. That’s why our government gets away with ignoring them, too. Drop a bill in the hat and keep on walking, if that. I’m one of the lucky ones, can blend in when I feel like it, and no one knows unless I tell them. The scar on my leg is not highly visible. Arthritis in the other damaged joints doesn’t change the color or shape of your exposed flesh until later in the game.

It’s the scars on my soul that matter most. I can’t do much for some of my fellow disabled veterans. I’m better at tolerating their presence than most, but there’s only so much of that you can offer before you start hurting other people you care about. I know better than to think any agitation will change things. Money is hardly the answer, and we can’t even get that. What we really need is to stop creating these rusting hulks of humanity.

It’s not enough to say our ruling class is all psychopaths. It doesn’t put a proper perspective on what little you can and should do. It’s better by far to see it from another angle, the angle you can’t get without a touch of mysticism. I’m not sure precisely what it’s like in the other countries composing Western Civilization as we know it when it comes to military veterans, but I do know some of our evil is the same as theirs.

For example, we have The Franklin Scandal. Europe as The Dutroux Scandal. If reading stuff like that makes you hug your children just a little closer, you are normal. But chances are you really don’t understand the worst part of this. The vast majority of the child victims were not simply nabbed off the street by strangers. They were placed in this awful situation by their families. If it makes you feel guilty about letting your kids off the leash too much, you are wrong. That means the other side has won. It means you are listening to the voice of demons.

It’s part and parcel of the reason we can dare to allow our government to hire, train and protect from exposure those who torture for reasons other than sexual pleasure. Okay, so maybe there’s some of that, too, but it’s not the point. If you fearfully clutch at what you think you have, you will lose it. If you have to be that protective of your children, you will have already made them perfect for such abuse. If all you worry about is you and yours, then you have already lost it.

Yes, it is a horrific tragedy, all this abuse and torture, the heart rending tale of each child, each life destroyed with such vigor. If you understand the greater tragedy is how this changes our entire social fabric, then there is hope. These nasty things are part of a much wider evil, a mere symptom of something far deeper going wrong. We surrendered to demons. They run our civilization, running each government.

It won’t matter at this point to discuss in detail how the very foundation of Western Civilization was an open invitation to demons, except as a reminder to help you shake loose any fondness for it. Western Civilization was wrong from the start, and what we see now is of the essence, the natural fruit from the seeds planted. If you continue clinging to Western Civilization, you will go down with it. God is not pleased with the West. If you step away from it, denounce it and renounce it, you just might save your children and yourself from at least part of the sorrow from its collapse.

Then you won’t be surprised our governments are doing everything they can to drain away the last vestiges of private wealth and productivity and hand it over to the banks. And if that’s not enough, they borrow against alleged future productivity and hand that over, too. Yes, somewhere in all this mess is batch of dreams of one-world government, a global tyranny still twinkling in the eyes of many globalists. And some of them engage in horrific molestations of children along the way, because the impulse to torment the innocent in every way possible is part of their natural instinct. It comes from what makes Western Civilization different from what preceded it.

These are the same kind of people who gave birth to Western Civilization. This kind of people have been in charge every step of the way. It’s the reason we have news outlets giving so much time to the likes of Charley Sheen, and Lady Gaga, and spending staggering amounts on the bread and circuses called “professional sports.” It keeps us from noticing what really matters.

I’m sure you get it. Take it from there and fill in the blanks. Most importantly, step away from it. Let it go. Embrace something else. Stop listening to the demons.

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Scientific Linux 6.0 Released Today

Posted on March 3, 2011 by ehurst

In case you weren’t watching for this anywhere else, you can now download the full release ISOs for SL 6.0:

Go here for 32-bit ISO

and here for 64-bit

If, like me, you installed any of the betas and RCs, by now you should already be updated to the full release.

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On the Madness in Libya

Posted on March 3, 2011 by ehurst

It’s hard to process all the junk in the media about what’s going on in Libya if you don’t know the history of the country.

What the MSM want you to remember is bombings, and they want you to think Qaddafi is a dictator. None of that matches reality. The current uprising is not a peaceful cry for democracy, either. It’s another CIA operation of regime change.

I find this covers the relevant history nicely. It’s best to see Qaddafi in proper murky Eastern fashion as a leader, a very big tribal elder figure, but lacking the precise control of a dictator. Like an eastern potentate, he had lots of layers between himself and reality on the ground. We should be utterly unsurprised if his take on things is completely different from that of the MSM, and that neither bears much resemblance to reality. I doubt any of us knows the reality, nor even the people on the ground involved.

His leadership was marked by some silly vision of making his nation like a true Arabic empire, but with far too many modern Western features and assumptions. For the most part, his influence is that of a revered theorist, and his theories have missed the point, though the results are not so bad as we’ve been told. Good things did happen, and the broader welfare of the people did rise significantly since Qaddafi rose to his position. The problem is you cannot make several nations of people into one big tribe. It hasn’t worked here and it didn’t work there. Local autonomy is the life and breath of tribal economics, but Qaddafi tried to make his whole country like a single big happy family with highly centralized control. He bluntly broke all the old tribal boundaries in his administrative districts, and that cannot possibly work. Ever. It violates fundamental principles of human nature, not to mention God’s Laws.

The disco bombing was a Mossad operation with planted fake evidence. The airline bombing was a CIA operation designed to prevent some DEA agents presenting evidence of the CIA’s heroine operations in the Middle East, again with planted false evidence. The so-called chemical weapons plant we bombed was basically an aspirin factory; yet again, Mossad planted fake evidence around the facility to produce a false report from our spies on the ground. If you wanted to know these things, it would be easy to read the compelling evidence all over the Net.

The current revolt is easily traced to long-time CIA operations in the Mediterranean. The current rebel leadership went to various training courses run by the CIA. The courses were designed to look like some honest promotion of democracy, but included a healthy dose of activist trouble-making bullshaloney. It takes advantage of the ever-present opposition elements in every country in the world. We can’t rule out the same influence in most of what’s sweeping the Middle East right now, but it always includes a good bit of slop, a high margin of error, so that things cannot be precisely controlled by our black ops people. There are other, competing interests working out there. The CIA plans to keep an eye on everything and steer it as they see fit, but we and they should expect some surprises. However, the business in Libya is almost 100% CIA meddling and arrogant “nation building” which stems from the same violent rejection of human nature which backs every evil regime in history.

Libya’s current troubles are nothing more than exchanging one bad government for another. Qaddafi’s service as our whipping boy has run its course, just as with Saddam in Iraq, Mubarak in Egypt, etc. Time for a new one.

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Xiphos on SL 6

Posted on March 2, 2011 by ehurst

Just a few quick notes here. There is as yet no repository offering Xiphos and Sword for SL. You can easily Yum the Clucene and development package from SL repositories. I decided to grab Sword and Xiphos SRPMs from the Fedora 13 Updates repository.

Sword builds after you satisfy the other dependencies using Yum. SL has them all, except Waf. You’ll need to pull that from FC13 SRPMs, too.

Xiphos is a bit more ticklish. The SPEC file calls for xulrunner-devel-unstable, but that has been obsoleted by the latest xulrunner-devel package. So I simply edited the SPEC file and changed that to match the reality. It built fine from the xulrunner-devel and works as it should.

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The Problem with Video Games

Posted on March 2, 2011 by ehurst

The real problem with video games is they tend to cripple human intelligence in players.

It’s nothing new to taste the brouhaha over tenuous links between video games and violence. Someone with an ax to grind notes video games are addictive (which is demonstrably true) and goes on to assert some link between this virtual world escapism and anti-social behavior (not proven, perhaps unprovable).

It sounds reasonable, since we know addictive strands in human personality do create significant flaws in how people address their world. Who hasn’t faced the unreasonable, painful and destructive behavior of someone addicted to a chemical substance? The brain is a spooky place at the best of times, but crippling our interaction with reality by cutting ourselves off from the tools of perception, and replacing that with any number of fantasies, guarantees a measure of failure. Bad enough becomes inevitably worse than it has to be.

Yet we know most of humanity enjoys the escapes into fantasy precisely because they know it’s not real. If all we had to deal with were expansions on our awareness of just how badly broken the world really is, we would not call it “entertainment.” At the very most primitive level, entertainment compares the world we experience with the one we would like to see. It helps us to imagine what might be, to explore the possibilities. Those of us with a creativity quotient take the cue to decide what has been done before isn’t necessarily the result of thorough examination, and there may well be a better way on some level. Invariably, such creativity will extract just a few more improvements from reality. We need a slice of humanity to always chase dreams or we have no hope of salvaging anything at all from the past.

Something inside us knows when an element of a particular encounter is false in some way. If all we get from such moments is a vague discomfort, then the only result is more tension, more pressure to escape heedlessly. If we structure our escape by giving place to human weakness along with more noble elements of human nature, and mix these things differently, we learn more about both. A fantasy which is too chaotic is not entertaining. It has to connect tangentially to reality in some way, so that it mimics reality with different rules. What would you do if the context of your world changed? How would your character manifest? You can learn a great deal about yourself and your very real world by indulging in good and artful fantasy. It makes you better able to discern the falseness in the real world.

There are some badly broken people in this world, and withholding from them fantasy won’t improve their condition. Engaging them in fantasy won’t make them measurably worse. Such people are everywhere, and it’s simply not possible to identify them all and keep them away from the entertainment the rest of us need, and should be permitted.

The problem is not with fantasy, per se, but the means of delivery. It’s not so much a problem with mindlessly violent fantasy via video games, but video games themselves. As the experience approaches total immersion in an alternate reality, it is not the barriers of mere judgment which are broken, but the level of improvement those experiences offer. A major element in the social good from entertainment is suspense of the ego, the losing of a measure of the self so that those inner resources are set loose. If you loose too much of yourself, those inner resources get lost, too. Full sensory engagement consumes the subconscious as well, and disorients the recalibration process.

Literature, recitations, music and live drama all have proven beneficial in the process of raising the level of human intelligence. They provoke a level of ego suspension which strikes a fair balance between ugly reality and complete disconnection. The problem with even ordinary video is the very well established effect of hypnosis, in that it suspends too much of the ego, and goes too far by grabbing all the resources of human attention, weakening or even killing the subconscious processes. Just yesterday I experienced this afresh, being caught by a running video display in some business. It was mindless and stupid, and offered only the shallowest of moral elements, but I was nonetheless transfixed by the spectacle. At some point I tore myself away and felt guilty, because I wasted some part of myself to no good purpose. It wasn’t even that entertaining, but it was absorbing by virtue of how much of my ego it consumed. Video games go one step farther, by engaging your direct interaction under conditions when your subconscious is mostly inactive. Not to the point of making you mindless and utterly shaped by the experience, as the nanny-state proponents allege, but bad enough to fail the mission.

I don’t see a tipping point, but more of a sliding scale. Every day we see advances in virtual reality, in the absorption of the ego into an alternative world. I suppose at some point we may see people utterly crippled by the experience. I doubt it will make them any more violent than is already the case with the mass of humanity, but it will certainly make them less intelligent on some level. For example, in the linked article, we note Carole Lieberman plays a silly game by asserting a fantasy as reality, and the gamers respond in kind by asserting a fantasy regarding her books in Amazon reviews. Both are a matter of spewing words. That our society already suffers from a vast layer of fantasy from carefully controlled inputs is not the question; it’s really easy to discount both Lieberman and the gamers. When the business of writing and selling books is more like games, when a visit to Amazon becomes the sort of consuming and absorbing experience as that stupid movie I saw, I think humanity will be a lost cause. I’m pretty sure those predisposed to gaming are approaching that now, but the rest of us will surely face the same absorption at every turn as soon as the psychopaths can arrange it.

But neither gaming nor advertising is a major moral threat in the sense Lieberman alleges. Morals are too complex to be gained or lost that easily. Rather, there is a different kind of moral threat from a world which cannot communicate at all without taking the easy path of making a vapid video to post on YouTube. The greater danger is not in causing us to do bad things, but to do nothing at all. That business of sucking up the whole of our minds renders us inert and passive. Only on a very superficial level will it cause people to use poor judgment in doing things; at the very core the issue is they’ll just go along for the ride because that’s all they know.

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Scientific Linux 6-RC2 on Inspiron 1525

Posted on March 1, 2011 by ehurst

It’s not that I didn’t like running Debian Squeeze on my laptop, it’s that there was no reason to ever use the laptop since my desktop was identical. I noticed Scientific Linux (SL) was close to releasing their 6.0 and decided to try the latest release candidate. Unlike CentOS, SL runs a beta test program and it is now quite usable.

You can review the series on RHEL 6 for the Clueless (now in a static archive linked here) for most of the details. I’m sure most of that will also apply when CentOS 6.0 comes out later.

There are several other differences between CentOS and SL. It appears CentOS has a much larger user base, and the mailing list archives indicate a rather different kind of user. SL draws the Fermilab-CERN crowd, naturally, as that’s where it’s produced. The users of CentOS include a much larger group of rowdies, so to speak. I sensed the developers were being hounded by impatient folks, whereas the SL lists are much more calm about these things. On the other hand, CentOS developers keep more of their discussions in private, and don’t take time to post detailed descriptions of their progress toward each release. SL has their very public whiteboard, which is a copy of the project leader’s literal whiteboard kept in his office. There is also a nice listing of problem RPMs and how they went about getting past the build failures. Thus, perhaps it’s simply sane for the CentOS devs to avoid wasting time responding to every passing anxious user, whereas the SL folks don’t seem the face much of that.

You’ll be happy to know the ATrpm repository covers SL, as well. However, you’ll have to edit your YUM repo file once you install the ATrpm repo. Here is what I had to make mine look like:

baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/sl6-i386/atrpms/stable

This will get you all those nice tweaked codecs and packages for multimedia playback. Please note, Adobe now has it’s own YUM repo for the Flashplayer plugin. When you go to Adobe’s download page, you’ll get the option to select the YUM package. This allows updating the Flashplayer directly and automatically.

On the issue of fixing the bytecode hinting in the Freetype library, I noticed the SL repo is out of date compared to what is installed from the DVD. I had to get my SRPM directly from the RHEL respository. It still works out fine.

Overall I’m very pleased with how well it works like RHEL, but free and tweaked just a bit to make it easier to use. I heartily recommend Scientific Linux as a good clone of RHEL. The DVD required I select the minimal video driver, but it all worked nicely and I didn’t have to do anything to make suspend and hibernate work. SL has added a few more options for the touchpad to the standard GNOME mouse config dialog. This is typical of the enhancements you’ll find.

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The Death of Convention and Orthodoxy

Posted on February 28, 2011 by ehurst

Adults are not herd creatures; children are. To the degree you embrace conformity, to that degree you have unfinished business in your process of maturation. A godly, spiritual society of mature humans would be nearly shapeless in its diversity and flexibility. Genuine diversity needs no promotion or recognition.

When the political authorities promote diversity, you will note it is always a substitute for the real thing. It is diversity which divides, because it simply chops up any given population into groups which, if they do not antagonize each other naturally, then it must be provoked. Control is always divide and conquer, but not in the way God divides, where everyone is utterly unique, but a division into strictly defined categories which are manageable by the bureaucratic machinery.

The spiritual path is challenging orthodoxy. Even if it happens the orthodox position is factually correct, no one should be permitted to assert it for its own sake. The proper parental response to adolescent challenges to orthodoxy is to encourage the exploration, to guide them through the difficult period of human development when each of us must find our own unique path to peace with a broken world. Don’t lie to them about everything being all fine and it’s they who are messed up for daring to challenge it. Reality sucks! Let them see it painfully and clearly, and steer them away from the other falsehoods, which includes the assumption things ought to be nice. If they don’t come to a clear realization how bad it is, they won’t have any reason to grow up and try to improve things by shining the light of truth.

It requires a hard-headed realization of how nasty this world is before you can expect a sensible negotiation of balance between what you can and cannot change, and on what level you should challenge the false assumptions of your world. Yes, there are moments of sheer joy mixed with sheer terror, but most of it is downright dreary. The conventional world around you attempts to subvert this natural impulse to find yourself by offering all sorts of lies, trying to steer you into one of several manageable tracks of false individuality. This is the one thing we most need to challenge.

Let me cite a concrete example with the person I know best: myself. I suffer this persistent vision, a dream or premonition if you will, that I will be somehow swept back into government service, perhaps even some sort of military conscription. Given the wasteful expenditure of human life and productivity in our various undeclared and illegitimate wars around the globe, even someone with 50% disability rating and 55 years old could be swept back into the gaping maw of government.

In an ideal world of genuine need, such a process would naturally take into account my talents, such as they are, and deploy me where those talents were most needed. That will not happen. Should such a process be initiated which would attempt to use me again, it would surely be on the basis of the shallowest bureaucratic number crunching. They’ll want me as some kind of security guard. That’s because my last military service was in the Military Police, and I was on the fast track for promotion when I got hurt. Using me for a static security post would free up the more able-bodied as cannon fodder.

On one level, I am certainly competent for such work. On another level, it would be insulting and degrading, just about the last thing on this earth I would want to do, not to mention morally repugnant. And would I do it? Probably.

That’s because I have found my own path, my own level of negotiation between the various forces pushing and pulling me in this evil and broken world. I would submit to this awful thing because it would put me in a very good place to do what really matters most to me, that business of shining the light in the darkness of human misery. An awful lot of other folks out there will be miserable, sucked into something they don’t understand. Despite all the conventionality, each of them will be unique in their own mixture of blindness, bewilderment, certitude, sadness and resignation. A few will at least appear quite happy with things. But I would take each of them as utterly unique, even when they fall into easily recognizable psychological profile types. I would assume each of them has some divinely appointed moment with me, and me with them, and His inscrutable plans will work out as He alone can measure.

No two of us should expect to respond the same in the same situation. In spite of my commitment to pacifism and my hatred for such government service, particularly the ultimately bureaucratic and dehumanizing work of physical security, I already know God has warned me to be ready for such. Granted, if it was TSA, I’d rather be put in jail or even executed, but military style access control — gate or perimeter guard — is more tolerable. Would you call that compromise? For you, it might well be. For me, it’s a matter of context. The context includes my peculiar outlook on the difference between things which I control versus the things I do not control.

The most important thing you’ll ever do is challenge the orthodoxy of everything until you find your own answers. The title of this post is a double entendre. It’s you versus convention; kill or be killed. You can allow it to snuff out your spiritual awareness, or you can engage in the endless battle against it in your own soul.

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