Model Policy Manual: Sexual Harassment

Posted on August 11, 2009 by ehurst

A page from an imaginary organization, as a commentary on modern idiocy.

In a modern civilization, prickly interactions between employees are inherently unprofitable. Both visitors and staff here are expected to conduct themselves with a modicum of warmth and humor. Within the standard construct of civility, we begin each encounter with the assumption the other person means you no harm.

At the same time, we are painfully aware of unwanted attention, and certainly recognize there are limits to what is acceptable in showing affection. We contend there are plenty of ways to discourage those whom you deem to have crossed the line without resorting to the complaint process. Give them a chance to understand and correct their mistakes. If you find a co-worker or visitor persists in ignoring your polite warnings, we will certainly entertain your complaint.

However, we take the position you must make your case. We do not adhere to the notion your every personal discomfort is worthy of administrative notice. Before you enter the complaint process, you should have already discussed the matter with trusted peers to ascertain a sanity check on the matter. Management does not accept the notion of a one-sided adjustment process.

Given the history of our experience with this, we find it necessary to explain certain cultural assumptions. In a civil society, humor serves as a social lubricant. Sarcasm, back-handed compliments, and innocent flirtation are all a part of that. Literate societies make room for human interaction as a form of art, not simply mechanical communication. If you prefer to keep things mechanical, the burden for establishing proper notice to others falls upon you. You are further expected to do so with a minimum of fuss, with a certain expectation the results will be uneven. You must accept a certain lack of control over some things in this world.

By no means are you expected to maintain a false egalitarian reaction to everyone. However, the choice to interact with one person or another is established by policy, not your personal preferences.

Management takes the position popular notions regarding this issue are, for the most part, silly. Having observed court rulings in the matter, in consultation with legal counsel, we take the position we would prefer to close down business rather than yield to frivolous trouble makers on either side of such problems.

This entire issue is subject to frequent review, and this section is subject to revision as warranted. As always, no one can force you to read any part of this manual, yet it always applies, regardless of your personal awareness. However, we will make reasonable efforts to notify all of significant changes.

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Church Shopping Is a Necessary Burden

Posted on August 10, 2009 by ehurst

Our house church is no longer a free-standing operation, in theory. We need pastoral coverage; it’s a spiritual principle. If the Lord calls us to remain as we are for several years coming, we would go forward without complaint. Time is not the factor, but the nature of the thing is what stands before us. We are keeping our eyes open for opportunities.

I truly hate church-shopping. Long ago I came to understand the justification of numerous denominations, and it bothers me little. Pure visions of a unified organization under Christ is a Western myth, not a biblical standard. It is easy for fellow believers to unite in spiritual worship, no doubt. It’s when we sit down to teach things go ragged. You will surely have experienced Christ in a different way than I. Those experiences color our understanding of God, and at some point the differences cannot be ignored. That’s why we have labels; it prevents us wasting time in a church where we cannot avoid feeling alienated. When humans organize, regardless of the divine purpose, we must of necessity divide from each other. I’m stuck with the task of seeking a level of compromise which doesn’t leave me feeling dirty. That’s a tall order, in our case.

For example, any church with an American flag inside the auditorium is unacceptable. Whether you like it or not, that flag is not “the people of the United States,” but a martial symbol. It’s a battle flag, which should not be displayed outside military formations. Nothing can symbolize the people, so any such talk is missing the point. Churches which host that battle flag are compromising with a pagan god. Jehovah has already made clear He won’t send His protective and supportive hand among troops who sin flagrantly against Him, and torture is a flagrant violation of Noah’s Covenant. It’s a doorway for demonic presence. That sin taints anything organized under the battle flag. That’s the logic of Scripture, so if you have a US battle flag in your auditorium, don’t pretend I’m invited to join you there.

As you might expect, that closes a lot of doors for us. Indeed, it’s most of the church doors, as it were, in the entire US. And there are many other considerations on top of that. Our insistence regarding the necessity of embracing the ANE (Ancient Near Eastern) intellectual culture is another huge barrier. We are more flexible on this, as long as any church hoping to gain our trust must at least accepts our adherence to it, regardless of what brand of Western rationalism they own. Still, you have to know it will cause some friction. We would find constant reminders in taking positions somewhat aside from strict orthodoxy in just about every theological tradition I’ve examined so far in American Church History. Also, those differences result in many pragmatic differences, arising from applications of that theology. But in this case, it’s more a matter of them tolerating us.

For example, a very significant difference is our lack of sympathy for modern Israel, which is coupled with our rejection of Dispensationalism. Never mind we realize intellectually every generation of Western Christians seems to think theirs is the last, and that such is the result of unconscious arrogance. We find zero support in Scripture for the notion. Israel of the Old Testament died on the Cross; the Veil was torn in two. Their purpose was fulfilled in Christ, so the Covenant of Moses is now closed. The New Testament meaning of “Israel” now is the True Israel of Christ, a nation whose identity is in Heaven, not in any earthly meaning — not in DNA, nor culture, nor religious organization. Judaism is a dead religion; being Hebrew people means nothing in God’s eyes, any more than being Arab, Persian, European, Asian, etc. You are either in Christ or going to Hell. Israel needs Jesus, not billions of dollars and shiploads of munitions — if they had more of the former, they wouldn’t need any of the latter.

To some degree, we might be comfortable with operating as a peculiar satellite off some churches. That raises a whole new bunch of questions, but I note the possibility simply on pragmatic grounds. I have no trouble believing a true pastoral soul can find room to care for peculiar adjuncts. It really depends on the conscience of the man and those to whom he is accountable. Any number of unique and creative arrangements are acceptable.

What remains is the question of finding a place, whatever we mean by “place,” where the association is not painful. The last church my wife and I attended worshiped too much the god of war and politics. The difference was painful. The pastor’s friendship and favorable disposition for us could not bridge the difference. The church before that was simply a political organization in disguise, pretending to be a church. We now realize we have cast adrift forever from the Baptist traditions, and have no great sorrow from the loss. So far, none of the other denominational groups we experienced are likely to be any more welcoming of us, since they all have this assumption theirs will be the only folks in Heaven. Yes, that’s hyperbole, but it gets at the truth of the matter. We have found no home for our souls in the Vale of Sorrow.

Still, I’m keeping my eyes and ears open for a reasonable offer.

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October Surprise for US

Posted on August 9, 2009 by ehurst

I’ve been reviewing all the various oppressive threats noised about in recent months. Some are more plausible than others, so I left out a few I’d read as just too unlikely. Still, it would seem our federal government is hell-bent on stirring up a revolt. Some of these are leaked by government officials just to get a rise out of us, and I’ve already mentioned anything which smacks of booga-booga is bogus, by itself. On the other hand, it’s unlikely any of those will be tried alone.

Yet, surely I’m not the only one who sees this. I’m sure The Powers That Be (TPTB) also know how we react to this crap. They surely know some in the US are armed to the teeth and willing to see bloodshed to resist some of this. They’ve already gone out of their way to demonize anyone who feels government may be overstepping the bounds a bit. The did this by calling returning combat vets a source of trouble, along with gun owners, constitutionalists, etc. In other words, if you don’t bow and kiss the ground before the bureaucrats and their socialist-communist police state, you are evil. They have already faced harsh and wide criticism for these things, but don’t bother to apologize for much. So with all this mouthing and making threats and planning to oppress harshly, you realize some of this has to be aimed at sparking some kind of armed resistance.

They even have astro-turf militia types suggesting folks go to the health care town hall meetings armed and prepare to shoot the Purple Shirts (union thugs). We saw this before when masked idiots tried to get peaceful protesters to become violent, even caught it on video a few times. Turns out the masked idiots were cops. They want armed resistance as part of the propaganda battle, but they have to know it won’t end there. If I can figure out mandatory vaccination with roadblocks and RFID bracelets will mean a lot of dead cops and health care contractors, surely they know this, too.

Does it not seem logical there is something coming which might tip things overwhelmingly in their favor? There aren’t enough armed law enforcement officers in this country to survive a serious crack-down. There aren’t enough troops, either. Something really dirty is coming, something which will make most sheeple unsympathetic to resistance. Something to cause mass fear and panic. Something they are planning, and I’m not the only one suggesting this. That part is not booga-booga, but inviting you to caution, and to keep a wide open mind to things you would never imagine. Not paranoia, but cynicism about the evil men can do.

Be ready, because we ain’t seen nothing, yet.

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Note to the Regulars: Emergency Contact

Posted on August 7, 2009 by ehurst

You’ll find the necessary details here.

WordPress has been known to censor folks. Usually it’s due to complaints from Zionist activists who gang up on some blog with complaints of something like “anti-Semitism.” Simply writing such a sentence as that should indicate I might some day be a target for their wrath. What’s in my favor so far is the low traffic here.

Nobody much cares what I think or write. Since I don’t take myself that seriously, it’s not a major issue with me. Frankly, it’s my Linux articles which get the most attention, even now. And most of the traffic is from folks who won’t be back until I post something of similar interest. But I do have at least a handful of regulars whom I don’t see face to face.

Should it happen this blog is shut down, you might want to know how to get hold of me. That link should be enough, so get hold of me and we’ll go from there. Should this blog go down for any reason, I’ll switch to the host for my static webpage at SoulKiln.org. It won’t be anywhere near as fancy as this, but I’ll try to make sure it’s readable for as long as the server is up and running.

Thanks.

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Population Control: Coming Soon

Posted on August 7, 2009 by ehurst

Have you ever noticed the most ardent advocates of reducing the world’s human population never seem interested in volunteering for it? It’s the same MO for everyone who promotes war; we call them “chicken-hawks.” The proper response to them is always, “Put up or shut up.”

When we discuss Them and their agenda for enslaving the world, a major recurring theme is population reduction. What are some ways to get this done?

War is an old favorite, in part because it supplies an endless stream of tax money for the military industries. The narrow slice of Them living here in the US have carefully invested in both sides of most wars. So today we have CIA fronts arming the Afghan Taliban to insure our boys in uniform don’t get bored. Go ahead, google for it; you’ll find the links. If it’s not the CIA, it’s MI6, Mossad, or some other clandestine agency. Guess who provides most of the missiles in southern Lebanon? Mossad. Who funds development and firing of those pitiful useless rockets coming out of Gaza? Mossad. Who trains the suicide bombers detonating themselves among Israelis? Mossad. Who is “al-Qaeda”? A CIA operation. You get the picture.

But that’s not quite enough. How about starvation? I’m not so sure about claims of weather control experiments, but I am quite certain Monsanto has poisoned almost every food crop in common use around the world. Their upper executives would be so very happy if no seeds would grow for which they couldn’t charge outrageous prices. It’s not just herbicides casually over-sprayed onto neighboring fields, nor just GMO with “accidental” cross pollination for which they then sue farmers into oblivion. They buy out or crush anyone who doesn’t need them. They are particularly adept at buying government regulations which favor them. And while we’re at it, let’s not forget major chemical industries of other types who insist on slurping up all available water so the water table drops below the wells the poor can afford. Failing that, they simply poison it. Or the air, with those “accidental releases” like Dow Chemical in Bopal.

Now comes the latest hope for such plans: engineered plagues. Of course, right now, it’s not working all that well. The triple-source H1N1 produced in the Big Pharma labs isn’t so vigorous as they had hoped. While it has killed a few hundred, it pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands killed annually by the natural flu strains. But they still hype it all over the airwaves, trying to scare us into taking their filthy untested vaccine. And because they just can’t crank up enough vaccine production to pump it into every living human, they have to ration it out, thin it down with adjuvants. But of course, those adjuvants do all sorts of nice things, such as compromise the body’s natural immune system, destroy fertility, and in general make life both shorter and more miserable. They propose to put this in the youngest bodies, of course.

By now, you surely understand the last thing you want to do is whatever it is They are promoting. Flu vaccine? No way. War in Pakistan and Iran, or increasing troop levels in Afghanistan? Forget it. Medical reform? Big stinking lie. But that’s not the only lie. They have their Hal Turners, too. Noise about foreign troops on US soil? There aren’t enough soldiers among allies. Gun confiscations? They’d love to see a civil war bloodbath again, but there aren’t enough cops in the US, and the troops likely would refuse. The dollar dropping to zero value? It’s almost there already. Learn to barter or use something else as “money.” In other words, it’s all about fear. Fear from any angle — MSM or alternative — is probably noise They sponsored.

Don’t buy it. Sure, some of Them want to kill off about 75% of the world’s population, and soon. They will try some things to bring it about. Don’t put anything past Them. But don’t buy the fear. If you see if for what it is, you can’t be herded in the direction they hope you’ll go. Stop letting them sucker you into buying useless merchandise, whether it be tech toys, junk food, crappy cars, brain-dead entertainment, etc. And don’t buy the lies. It won’t take you 15 minutes of quiet meditation to realize what it takes in this life to make it worth living. Let everything else go. Because if you buy any part of it, you will surely be a part of that population reduced for their pleasure.

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Don’t Be A Slave

Posted on August 6, 2009 by ehurst

In the next twelve months, the US will be reduced to third world economic status. The objective is amassing all available wealth in the US in the hands of an elite group. It has to do with creating conditions which sucker the masses into dreaming of grand material wealth, then make them believe it can be achieved. Create conditions which actually delivers to a small group, while making it appear that small group is just a collection of ordinary Joes and Janes who figured it out. Get them to follow the lies, inflate the economy, scrape off the wealth, which will crash it all. Then, while everyone is in a dependency panic, crush them under tight controls, and start the cycle all over again.

The only way out of the cycle, of course, is to stop chasing grand wealth, and accept the reasonable prosperity God intended under the Covenant of Noah. The only way to get that is cling to the Covenant. Aside from long term philosophical considerations, that means committing yourself to forming your tribe. While ANE feudalism is a matter of academic interest, you have to find an entry point to begin moving that way.

The first and most obvious step is your irrevocable commitment. If you are determined to form a covenant tribe, your success will become the gift God supplies. You need not succeed in all particulars for this to work. You must simply seize the desire itself. It can begin with a single household, just a couple. Determine in your heart (the seat of the will) you are going to obey the Covenant.

This need not involve researching what it means to be an “alpha male” — that requires competition within the community, which is hardly a good thing. Competition requires rules which will not fit well under Noah. The tribal leader is always the one who seems to sense what God requires, and can persuade the group with love and influence while keeping the peace. In other words, it’s the father figure. It’s not about mere charisma. It is never of necessity the eldest, but an elder.

It’s really simple until your community reaches about a dozen. Suddenly, everything changes, though it might be hard to put that in words. At about 20 members, you have some hope of being very effective in the objective itself: self-sufficiency. At 50, you must break it off into separate households at a minimum, with elders closer to the people they lead. At 75, no one man can possibly do it without the worst brand of favoritism. These are thresholds you can learn from other sources.

The point was to note the objective is pulling back from outside government. You probably can’t fully accomplish that with less than 20, but you can aim for it, work toward it. God’s government is by close relative, patriarchal and based on common necessity. That shared necessity fades above 50, simply by the factors of human nature. Nor is it a question of high competence. It’s a question of whom God chose. We in the West approach that very, very poorly. It’s a good idea to start with the oldest man still in full control of his faculties.

Once a tribe starts in that direction, God will intervene to make it obvious who is best for what, but more importantly, will see to it your best is actually good enough to please Him. He takes a personal interest in folks who want to please Him, even if only at the worldly level.

Here’s what you need to know right now: Just decide you will start today. You can’t possibly control all the factors which affect your execution, only what’s inside you. If you aren’t the leader, give your loyalty to God by giving it through your leader, those things which God says are the leader’s concerns. Keep civility in negotiations, because most of your time will be spent in renegotiating every day. That’s the nature of the beast, as it were, until some things become settled. The leader does not control, but negotiates consensus. Again, and again, and again, until certain elements of life can be made routine, but all things remain flexible because humans are flexible by nature. Patience, never arrogance. You should already know all that. Just do it.

By all means, the one thing non-negotiable is the need to minimize dependence on outside sources. That is never absolute, and some flexibility appears here, too. The underlying principle is not flexible. The more you surrender to the outside, the more exposure you have to harm. Make peace with the peaceable; seek ways to disengage every one else. This does not mean a last stand like Masada, but so much as the leaders in clear conscience before God are willing to do.

The very foundation, of course, is the commitment to be free under God’s terms. Everyone serves someone, but by choosing the Covenant of Noah, you cannot possibly be more free.

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Cheaper Life

Posted on August 5, 2009 by ehurst

We are sliding down the slope of brutality here in the US. It was always bad, but now it’s worse.

After making such a mess of my first enlistment, I decided to go back and heal the wounds on my soul by doing it right. When I went for the counseling interview, the only Army school willing to accept “re-treads” was Military Police. So I became a military cop and learned to understand it. At some point, I caught a glimpse of the latest training doctrine proposals. At the time, I didn’t understand all I read, but I knew I didn’t like it. So when I got hurt, and the military nearly begged me to stay, even with a high physical exemption rating, I went home.

Shortly thereafter, I observed the Waco Massacre on TV. At the time, I was inclined to support the government because I had been on the happy side of law enforcement. I drank the koolaid. A few years later I moved to Texas for a time. I was immediately introduced to the wrong end of federal law enforcement (see Part 2). The experience made me an ally of the victims of illegitimate police activity. The Feds have always been questionable at best, and more than once I have heard local police warn folks never, ever trust the Feds.

Lately, it seems more and more local police are becoming worse than the Feds. This rapid decline into casual brutality is making more and more of the US population into scarred victims. Those scars tend to mark both body and soul, and whatever sympathies the victims might have held before, as with me, their answer to the Tom Jode Test changes.

So here, stated briefly, is the question that serves as the shibboleth/sibbolet dividing line in the “Tom Joad Test”:

When you see a cop — or, more likely, several of them — beating up on a prone individual, do you instinctively sympathize with the assailant(s) or the victim?

If it’s the former, you’re an authoritarian, irrespective of your partisan attachments or professed political philosophy.

If it’s the latter, you’re an instinctive libertarian, whether or not you are consistently guided by that impulse in your political decisions.

It may later be demonstrated that the figure on the receiving end of the beating had committed some horrible crime. However, such a disclosure wouldn’t invalidate the results of the Tom Joad Test, because that test reveals a subject’s default assumptions about the relationship between the individual and the state.

Do you assume that the state is entitled to the benefit of the doubt whenever its agents inflict violence on somebody, or do you believe that the individual — any individual — is innocent of wrongdoing until his guilt has been proven?

Having been subjected to state-sponsored abuse, albeit not directly physical, I now assume the cops are wrong. I can’t forget how it was drummed into my head: The suspect is a human being. I can’t forget the overpowering sense I was responsible for making my handling of suspects the very picture of kindness and respect. God would not let me be so much as rude. I would smile, joke, and make them relax as much as possible. It would have been reason enough this was, on sheer mechanics, the easiest way to get things done, but my conscience demanded it. When people hurt, I weep. I made enough serious mistakes in other ways, but I don’t recall ever being too rough. I won awards, promotions, a high reputation in the community, and the Army begged me to reenlist.

Part of me now regrets ever having been involved in Law Enforcement, because it now has a dirty name. It’s getting dirtier by the day. When cops beef about the need for more roughness, the justification is always how rough suspects are getting. It never occurs to them they have set the tone for the decline in civility, or could fix it if they tried to make it better. Instead, it is they who lead the way in making every citizen understand you cannot ever be friends with a policeman, because there is no such thing as a policeman who is your friend.

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Turn It Off

Posted on August 4, 2009 by ehurst

The mainstream medium was never meant to actually inform anyone, only to provide a means for advertisers to reach the consumer. When you consume the mainstream output, you are not the customer. The advertiser is the customer, and you are the product. The media are just that: the means of transaction. We know they hook you by billing themselves as the source of information and entertainment. That’s just the sucker call. The pretense of objectivity is the biggest lie of all, and they tell it to themselves. What actually goes across that media and into your mind is heavy duty manipulation.

We also know it’s not just commercial advertisers, but the government as well, which consumes the product of the media. Government typically does not pay in cash, but by enabling the whole thing to work. Naturally, the media will present the government message to you, though it will be cloaked in a thousand ways. A favorite method is pretending to be a little argumentative with government, but in the end, always avoiding the hard questions which matter most. Thus, the world is seen through the lens created by government of, by and for big commerce. So much we have covered in the past.

You could, in theory, attack the government which promises to serve you and promptly proceeds to serve big moneyed interests upon arriving in the office. We attack it verbally every day. It does no good, though. We all know it. The pitiful response from the sheeple will never provide the groundswell of reform. We have come to the point where destruction and death is inevitable, on all sides, before change is possible. So you could take it to the government people who keep the system alive. In the realm of human probability, you could put your hand to violence and start killing government officials, or at least ruining their lives in various ways. Sure, terrorize them the way they terrorize you.

But it would tend to leave the culprits who created this mess free to do it again. Yes, when government is destroyed, it does tend to expose big commerce to some losses, but not really enough to get their attention. The people behind big commerce have already planned for that. Their companies might die, but that golden parachute has already been deployed, and they have their tidy nests somewhere difficult for us to reach. They’ll escape, leaving us to clean up the mess, only to return once we try to rebuild.

And we would likely not remember who they are or what they caused, but will be hungry for their wares, and welcome them back. So the lying will start once again. Pretty soon, whatever government we can construct to serve our real needs will be perverted again. In other words, we always get the government we deserve, because we can’t understand what is in our own best interests. Instead, we are suckers for shiny, tasty, and snow jobs.

You want to be really free? Just be free. Choose today to break the cycle. You can get yourself killed trying to kill the people who make your life miserable, but that’s like killing dope dealers — as long as there are buyers, a new dope dealer will be in his place in an hour or so. Stop taking the dope. Stop giving in to the desire for things which destroy you.

Want a new start? Turn off that TV. Better yet, get rid of it and the cable, satellite, etc. And if you can’t keep yourself from going to the media dope dealers on the Internet, maybe you need to reconsider how you surf. For example, you might not be aware Windows is simply another media, a means to sell your eyes to the liars. Mac is an elitist version of the same thing. And while Linux and friends are hardly pure as the driven snow, the point is it works pretty much the way the Internet was meant to work. You can do a lot of nasty stuff on the Net, but you don’t have to — you can choose (for now). With TV, you can’t choose. Every channel is the same in that respect, or they wouldn’t be there. The system itself is designed to control you.

That’s the whole point. To the degree you can keep from harming others, there is no reason you can’t do whatever enters your silly head. But if no one is making money by selling you their silly ideas and manipulations, they’ll have to get an honest job. Or at least, they’ll be forced to work on a smaller scale, with far smaller piles of wealth, and far less likely to buy off your government. Really, it’s up to you and I. We don’t have to kill a bunch of bureaucrats and self-important bigshots, nor even the filth which buys their favors. Just pull the plug and watch it all come apart. You can kill the whole thing by just deciding you have more important things to do with your brain than waste your life letting liars construct your world for you.

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Silly Debates on Creation

Posted on August 3, 2009 by ehurst

Recently my surfing has taken me across a collection of discussions about Creationism and Evolution, along with the variations attached to them. A primary flaw in all of this is making it man-centered.

By “man-centered” we are dipping once again into the sin of Hellenism. Go ahead and look up that term. A fundamental element of the entire field of thought is the arrogant assumption man is the measure of all things. Those of us who claim to rely on the Bible can’t allow ourselves to yield that ground in such a debate. From the biblical point of view, God is the center of all things.

So it works like this. Was the earth created some 6000 years ago? Or for the generous, would it be more like 12,000? The biblical answer is “wrong question.” First and foremost: God created the world. His purpose is something at which we might guess (I rather like CS Lewis’s suppositions), but that is not actually revealed in any obvious way. Rather, the point is to note He is the center of any questions we might ask about the whole thing. So instead of looking at all the data you can gather, or the data you might believe you can find in the Bible, how about we look at the question using the Bible’s own philosophical bias? Yeah, it works a lot better that way.

Whatever the various reasons God might have had, at least part of it is hinted at broadly in Scripture: A place for mankind to act out a reaction to God’s revelation. From there, it’s not too hard to imagine if you find evidence of human activity in the dust of the earth, it wasn’t created that way. Just about every other sign of activity and change is “natural” by definition.

The next mistake is assuming we are capable of dating those human events for which no dates are provided in the Bible. For example, honest historians will tell you the entire dating system for events in ancient Egypt is a house of cards. Most of what we think we know about Bible History and other ANE chronologies rests largely on associating them with “known” dates of Egyptian contemporary history. Objectively, it’s very iffy. The Bible text itself pays little attention to dates, frequently using round numbers, symbolic numbers, and generally treating time measure as a silly obsession of other people, not folks in the Bible. We don’t know how to handle that, for the most part.

But even if we could pin down dates of most human activity, it wouldn’t help us much. If any part of the major catastrophes described in Genesis can be taken literally, then any system of dating based on extrapolations of steady progress are utterly silly. Most secular dating systems do this, blindly assuming digging in the dirt to find layers associated with prehistoric eras and putting dates with them is possible by simply extrapolating, as if all natural events took place at some steady pace.

The biggest kicker is this: Why does anyone assume the world was created in some pristine state? Would that even make sense? Can you not imagine God knows a thing or two about efficiency? I have to wonder: If this were my project, would I need an earth in pristine, “new” condition? There’s not much point in that, since it would not be usable in that shape. If I knew millions and billions of years of radical changes needed to take place before man could make any sense of this created world, why not just create it in an aged condition?

Lest you consider that some sort of “fraud” on God’s part, you are back in that Hellenized territory, where man is the measure of all things. God, by definition, is always Truth and Righteousness. If He did it, it’s right. Just because humans — who deny Him — are confused by the apparent aged condition of the universe is no sign He is guilty of anything. They are. I am not logically required to assume some long string of world-shaping catastrophes compressed in some short time span to suggest the earth isn’t much more than 12,000 years old. I’m assuming my God is smart enough to put stuff where it was needed, rather like the science fictional act of cloning an adult with a full adult copy.

Until it can be proved conclusively God didn’t do that, I’d say the whole question is goofy.

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Tribal by Nature

Posted on August 2, 2009 by ehurst

It is a common error to mistake “perverted” for “civilized.” When Satan has a measure of control over your cultural foundations, it’s easy to accept some of his suggestions as advancements to a higher plane. Humans have struggled for years to break away from instinct, even to the point of denying we have any. Even the most damaged and schizophrenic among us still exhibit instincts, however twisted. A very powerful instinct built into human nature is clinging to the tribe.

The best way to see what’s at the bottom of human nature is to scape away everything on top. We see this during catastrophes, with people clinging most to those they have come to trust for whatever reason. While this would most often be one’s blood kin, there are degrees by which that net spreads wider when the closest affinities aren’t available. Even in places where you couldn’t and shouldn’t be trusting anyone breathing (in prison, for example), you will seek passing alliances for the advantage they offer. It’s hard wired.

Denying such wiring does not make us superior. No one is such a virtuoso at everything, such that they can always win. There is always someone out there with an advantage over you, and always will be. You will need to analyze possible alliances to see which offers you the best chance of gaining what you really believe you must have, at a price you are willing to pay. When you can start with an alliance in which you have already made heavy investment, where trust is already there, you are far more sure of the results of testing.

The pretense of standing “on your own two feet” is dangerous. Not that you will always fail, but that you will tend to build a life outside God’s will. God’s own Word assumes you will act tribally. His very own Kingdom assumes fellowship, and He has no Lone Rangers. We stand alone before Him in repentance only so we may join, as the rite of passage which strips away everything He calls evil. So it is in this lower realm, as well. We are tribal. It would make a lot more sense to cultivate it wisely and intentionally than fight our one hope of gaining the blessings God offers all humanity. We must consciously break down the myth of the individual, and replace it with the God’s viewpoint.

Most of what we fear and complain about in bad government is a direct result of trying to set aside the tribal lifestyle. When you build up the tribe, you don’t need government as we know it.

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