Maybe It’s Just Me

Posted on July 27, 2021 by ehurst

There’s a battle going on in my soul. From where my conscious awareness stands, it’s impossible to identify all the elements in the battle, particularly in terms of which is the good guys and the bad guys. Maybe it’s neither, but a matter of choosing from two or more equally difficult paths.

I know where my convictions are steering me. Sometimes I’d like to know more of the why, and that’s what makes it slow going. Not some impetuous child demanding a reason for something unpleasant, but in order to make my flesh obedient, I need to know a little more about the context.

Here’s what I have so far: God is pushing me to get off the Net. Not today, but somewhere out there in the future. I’ve been moving that direction for quite some time. Yes, my flesh has a heavy investment of 30 years messing with computers and networking, and it’s not really happy about all the wasted investment. But my heart knows that I got involved in obedience to the Lord, and now I’m getting out of it in obedience to the Lord. It doesn’t have to make sense to my human mind.

I’m certainly going to miss the communications. Both passive and active engagement in the wider world seems like a good thing to do. There’s something beneficial about it. Still, I have to wonder how it was for the ancient Hebrew peasant who knew only what he experienced first-hand, and maybe had some inkling of things in the wider world that he heard about. Yet, he was able to focus on what God required of him, if he was so inclined, and nothing else really mattered.

So, if you have had time enough to waste reading my blogging, you can surely see I’m tapering off the active engagement first. I honestly do not understand why God wants me to abandon the audience I built up through blogging, but I do understand that the Lord gives and takes away what suits His purpose. There’s a conflict here: I have a mission and message, and the Net has been the best way to express it. Apparently, that’s no longer true.

I have no idea why. I could speculate that it’s because the Lord is going to make it hard for everyone else to be on the Net, but that’s not certain in my mind. There are gaps between the things my convictions declare about this whole story, and my brain is eager to fill in those gaps for it’s own use. It’s not a sinful thing; it’s just human nature. It’s what we live with in this fallen world as we pursue the path out of it.

I’ve done some more research on CMEs and electronics. I’m not an engineer, but I’ve tried to find out what engineers know about such things. So far, I don’t think anybody really knows. What they do know has wide gaps, and so far all they have is speculation to fill in the blanks. Most of them seem to think that a major solar flare/CME would not fry electronic devices, but would do more damage to the electric power grid than anything else. They suggest that the most vulnerable thing is what I’ve already identified: the transformers. The wiring might survive okay, but the transformers appear to be vulnerable to what a CME does to the grid.

And everyone who claims to know says we don’t have very many transformers in stock. So if the CME heats up the wires and overloads the transformers, it will be a loooong time replacing them. Maybe some are shielded, but those little gray cans mounted on utility poles all over the US are what’s almost guaranteed to explode in vast numbers. And everyone is pretty sure if that happens, there won’t be much power to keep the cellphone towers and Internet switching centers working. So it won’t matter if you still have a working device, there won’t be any service to which it can connect.

But then, a few other folks claiming to be engineers and astrophysicists say a CME like that is not what everyone thinks it would be. They say it would include a lot of stuff not often accounted for — not just plasma and particles, but various energy fields. We haven’t had any big CMEs in a long time, and when we did, nobody knew what to look for back then. And they suggest that everything that can conduct electricity will be overloaded, frying the lightweight stuff first. That would mean electronic devices.

I don’t know what to make of it all.

What I do know is that I’m supposed to get off the Net as much as possible. For now, it looks like there is some transition time left. That could disappear without notice, but my heart says we have time. I have no idea if it’s something that applies to you, but it certainly applies to me. I need to get comfortable doing things the way I did back in the 1970s and earlier, in terms of getting the message out.

Whom the new audience will be is still shrouded in mist for me. For those of you who read this blog, if you want to hear from me past that final cut-off, you’ll have to send me a snail-mail address. I may still have use of phones, but I wouldn’t count on that. For now, this blog will keep running. For some of you, I know that you are concerned about the ongoing series of Bible studies, and rest assured, that’s the core element of my ministry. I’ll do what I can to share that stuff until circumstances force my hand.

But it’s the same thing I’ve been saying for at least a couple of years: You need to be ready to proceed in your religion and faith without me. It’s about time to graduate. Whatever God is doing with the Radix Fidem virtual community is about to enter the next phase. I have no way to estimate at this point how much I’ll be involved in the Internet and the cellphone net at any point in the future, but I am convinced that I will have no presence on the Net. In terms of the virtual realm, I’ll be dead.

I have no idea why, beyond vague visions of a fellowship here in the real world. Whether that means a cataclysm that kills it for everyone else is more than I know right now, but I believe it includes something like that. So I can tell you what God is doing with me, and some of what I am doing to prepare for the changes, but you’ll have to follow your own convictions.

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How Do We Live?

Posted on July 26, 2021 by ehurst

Note: It’s okay if you think that I’m nuts preparing for a major solar flare. Just ignore that part and keep reading the stuff you can use. But there are at least a few of us who take this seriously and those are the folks I’m writing for in this post. I’m not going to be embarrassed if nothing ever happens. The notion that a big CME is coming is just how I organize and make sense of what my convictions demand of me.

The foundation is that you will live by your own convictions first and foremost. What works for me may not work for you. It’s not a question of being right or wrong, but of being obedient regardless how it turns out.

I stand firmly in the conviction that Iain is correct, that a big CME is coming our way in the near future. The Lord is granting us some advanced notice, some time to prepare. Here are some things that cross my mind, arising from my convictions.

Generalities: I expect the electrical grid here will survive. Most older cars will, too. However, a lot of electronic stuff, especially the more recent ultra-thin chip products, will fry. I’m counting on not having a cellphone or any computer devices. So I’m trying to unwind myself from dependence on them. Aside from trying to take advantage of the time I have left to print things that I have currently saved on computers and devices, there are other practical considerations.

I never gave much thought to how much work it would be to put all my books on paper. For me, the most important stuff is the Bible commentaries. I’m rereading all of that as I reformat for printing. It’s not just typos and grammar glitches, but there are places where I’ve changed my mind about things that matter. So, I’m investing a lot of hours in revising the Ancient Truth series of books. The rest I’ll hold off until later.

I need to get a mechanical wristwatch, maybe one with a date window, because I get lost regarding date and time a lot. I need lots of writing materials, and I need to see if I can recover a decent penmanship. I plan to start putting more stuff on paper tomorrow. It means rearranging a lot of my habits and assumptions about daily activities. I am quite serious about getting a typewriter, but the Lord says I have some time; good ones cost roughly $200 used. Oh, and I was surprised to find that the best quality typewriters are all portable.

I’m not sure if our cars will make it. I know that my bike will suddenly become very valuable, and I’ll be using it like most people use a car. I managed to get the front rack back on and I think I solved the problems I had with it before. I can’t estimate if the bicycle lights I have will survive (and whether batteries react to a CME), but I’ll try to shield things like that as a matter of storage habit.

I need to keep a rotating stock of canned goods. The issue here is that banking will suddenly come to a screeching halt for a while as the panic hits and everyone has to shift back to technology from the 1970s or earlier. I don’t think the Internet will be completely gone, but there will be a sudden paucity of machines able to connect. I’m just guessing, but I suspect some older hardware in protected places could survive. Most radios and TVs will be toast. Printed media will make a sudden comeback.

I’m going to hunt for Bible reference books locally, and download/print everything I decide I can’t afford to lose. I have a smattering of DIY stuff, and I’ll try to get more, but only what I know how to use. I’m unsure if any of my power tools will survive, but I do have a manual backup for most of them. Oddly, the hardest thing to replace is electric drills.

I gotta remember to create something like my own Rollodex, and put important dates on a paper planner. I’m expecting to have very little phone access for a long time to come. I need to develop mental habits that account for all of this.

What seems really amusing to me is that my convictions led me to move in this direction before I was aware this kind of disaster was in our future. I’ve long felt the need to prepare to do without computers and the Internet, I just couldn’t picture it happening until now. Suddenly, it all makes sense. The CME is the thing that holds it all together. My convictions were already pushing me there from other angles.

Suddenly all my computer technology experience is approaching irrelevance. Think about how significant that is for me. I’ve been drifting that way for a while, but now it’s a clear mandate. The way I see it, we have only a few years at most, and it’s now almost humorous how my reading habits have changed.

Feel free to share in the comments how you see it.

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Admin: List of Published Articles

Posted on July 25, 2021 by ehurst

This is a list of the articles in PDF format currently stored within this blog’s archives. If you click on a link, your browser should attempt to display or download the file. Right-click on a link and download should be one of the options:

East versus West: a Review of Epistemology

Rehabilitation of Peter

Biblical Human Development

The Heresy of Dispensationalism

Logic Games: Doctrine of the Fall

A Quantum Spirit

Sex, Pornography and Children

The Nature of Sin and Temptation

Christian Mysticism HOWTO

The Cult

Repent

Radix Fidem (trifold)

Gifts of the Spirit

Omnisexual

Ancient Truth: John’s Revelation (2nd ed)

A Redemption Story

Radix Fidem Booklet

Commentary on Matthew 24-25

Theology and Practice

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Admin: Making Printed Copies

Posted on July 25, 2021 by ehurst

If you invest enough time in reading my stuff, it’s not long before you can guess that I might say about various things. If you read my stuff with your heart, you might do a good job of estimating what you should be able to say about almost anything you encounter. As always, I don’t take myself that seriously, so the most I ever hoped to do was to prime the pump so that Living Water would flow out of your own soul.

Because I’ve honestly expected things to go badly for our access to each other on the Internet, I’ve tried to warn you all from time to time that you really should aim at standing on your own in serving the Lord. I really don’t want you dependent on my faith and religion. Still, I suppose for the sake of fellowship, and perhaps an easier way to share what I’ve taught up to now, you might want to try capturing some of this on hard copies.

It appears at least one person (Jay) wants printed copies of my books badly enough to collate them into anthologies and submit them to a POD (print-on-demand) service. They should be available at cost, since none of us are trying to make any money at this. We’ll let you know how that turns out.

This may take awhile, but if you want any of my current ebooks in a printable format, let me know via email. While Smashwords does offer them in multiple formats, I’m quite willing to email you a copy in whatever format I have. The idea is that if you feel like you are in a hurry to use your own printer, I’ll be glad to make it easier. If you give me a little time, I plan to burn the library to CDs, because it really isn’t such a large collection.

Which brings up the next issue: I’m collecting snail-mail addresses. You can share yours with me via email or whatever, but I’m posting mine here for all to see:

Ed Hurst
2600 N. Glenhaven Dr., APT D
Midwest City, OK 73110

Be aware of a minor problem: If you use any kind of electronic service to send something to that address, you may get a complaint that they can’t find that street. This is what my local post office uses, but Google is a butthead operation that insists it is W. Glenhaven. That will still arrive here, but it’s not technically correct.

As part of this larger project, I’ve purchased a collection of ring binders so I can get my own books and papers in hard copy. In the process, I’ll run through them one last time looking for errors, so the very last edition will be what I churn out that way.

I’m also planning on formatting the popular series Law of Moses and New Testament Doctrine into a book, but I’m not going to mess with Smashwords on those for now. The other thing I’m doing is printing copies of very instructive graphics from Bible research that I find on the Net. If I can remember, I’ll share some of those here on the blog from time to time. It would mostly be maps, drawings of structures, or graphical representations of information that save lots of time.

I’m taking this seriously folks. Maybe I’m deluded, but I believe having a good paper library of things that matter to me will bless others. We have no way of estimating how much time the Lord will allow us, and I can’t even begin to estimate what it would cost to put stuff on paper, but I’m committed to the task.

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New Testament Doctrine: John 3:22-36

Posted on July 24, 2021 by ehurst

Keep in mind that John the Baptist remains an Old Testament figure. His cousin Jesus is the bridge over from the Old to New Covenant, but John remained under Moses. His message and ministry was to prepare for the Messiah. After Jesus’ baptism, John’s doubts about Jesus went away, at least for awhile.

The wording is a bit clumsy in English translations, but Jesus left Jerusalem a few days after the interview with Nicodemus, and went out into the Judean countryside down near the Jordan River. Aside from His preaching and miracles, He supervised His disciples in baptizing those who repented in preparation for His reign.

Our text notes that John the Baptist had moved his ministry upstream a ways, as far as we can discern now. There’s an engaging video here about some folks searching for the site. It turns out Enon (Grk. Aenon) is not a proper place name, but a word to describe an area where there were multiple springs of water. This is after the Passover, during the harvest season when it’s dry, so the Jordan ran a bit low, but these springs were in those days quite full of water.

It’s also outside the jurisdiction of Herod Antipas. Take a look at this map. Notice the two purple areas? That’s the tetrarchy of Herod Antipas. If you look close, you’ll see a city in Decapolis named Scythopolis roughly half-way between the two districts of Antipas. The hill today called Tel Shalim is almost certainly the Salim mentioned in our text, deep in the pocket between Judea and northern Perea. Roughly a kilometer south of there, as the video indicates, is the most dense collection of ancient springs, and highly probable as the site where John was ministering at this time.

The reason John wasn’t yet in prison was because he was legally out of Antipas’ reach. At some point he slips back into Perea and is arrested. He was imprisoned at Machaerus, an old fortress built by one of the Hasmoneans — the Maccabean priestly rulers. This place stood on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, far down at the southern end of Perea.

There arose a debate between some Jewish rabbis and the disciples of John the Baptist. It’s almost certainly something to do with the difference between John’s ministry and that of Jesus. The disciples came to their teacher and asked about that difference. Why was Jesus eclipsing John?

John’s answer was self-effacing. Everything he had gained was from God, and surely God can give it to someone else. Besides, John was not the Messiah, just the forerunner. John uses a parable to explain that Jesus was the Messiah, and the people of the Covenant were His bride, His inheritance. John was blessed to bring them together. Being able to attend the wedding was quite a privilege for John, and it signaled the end of his mission.

Then we get some comments that sound a lot like John the writer editorializing again. Jesus came down from Heaven, while John was just a rather ordinary man. The teaching of the Messiah reflects His direct experience as the Son of God in the Heavenly Courts. John could share only what he experienced with the Covenant of Moses. When people who lived under the Covenant embrace the Messiah, they affirm that God has been faithful to His promises, because they experience the fulfilment of those promises.

John received a measure of the Holy Spirit; the Son is the Holy Spirit in human flesh. As you might expect, the royal Heir inherits everything the Father has saved up for Him. So it is that the Son is the sole, final ruler of Heaven. Those who bow the knee to Him will enter that eternal realm. Those who reject the Son as their sovereign Lord shall stand eternally in the wrath of God.

As God’s own final OT prophet, John the Baptist assures us that Jesus is the Messiah according to the Covenant promises. He is the personification of what the Covenant tried to tell humanity.

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The CME Threat

Posted on July 24, 2021 by ehurst

Brother Iain shared a prophetic word on our forum:

I told Ed about my long held weird attraction to the possibility of a catastrophic CME hitting Earth. I did enough research to understand that it would be a cataclysm. Well, I have it on the Highest Authority … it’s gonna happen.

He goes on to mention how his experience with prophecy is appropriately challenging. It’s not fun and games. That has been my experience, as well.

CME is the abbreviation of Coronal Mass Ejection: a sunspot the spits a lot of energy and particles into space, particularly when that wave of stuff hits the earth. It’s also referred to as a Carrington Event. It’s a type of catastrophe, not specifically a matter of how bad it is. In the context he indicated that the strength would be enough to damage a lot of electronic devices, if not all of them. However, he offered no timeline. I have no reason to doubt this is a valid warning from the Lord, all the more so since it echoes in my convictions.

So what’s left is first to query your own convictions as to what God wants you to do about it. Finally, you can query the human knowledge of such things. Science is uniform in stating that we are headed into another solar activity period, which means that we are coming up out of a low period, and the cycle is well established on this. The peak will come in 2025. On top of that, science uniformly notes that our planet’s magnetic field of protection is weakening dramatically. It wouldn’t take much of a CME to do some damage in the current setting.

It is significant to note that, for the time being, every time the sun spins around to point sunspots at us, they keep going relatively quiet. I haven’t heard a convincing explanation from scientists on why this is so. The best explanation for this is our Lord keeping things quiet until He decides otherwise. Given the context of His wrath on the world right now, that means only that it will be a surprise when He drops His protection. We won’t get much warning.

For now, all I can do is share my own convictions. Of course, the previous post is where I asked for help finding a typewriter. I’ll very much miss having a screen and decent software with spellcheck and all that. I confess I’ve gotten lazy about spelling because of it. Right next to my typewriter I’ll keep a dictionary.

But I’m also investing in writing materials. I always carry a notebook and pen on my rides so I can write stuff down and not forget those fine inspirations coming into my consciousness. Even if I don’t look at the notebook later, writing stuff down makes it easier to remember. I’ve got some good Zebra pens and some lined pads, too, along with an old-fashioned leather folder for those lined pads.

For your amusement: I seem to recall reading somewhere about computer hardware when it encounters electrical/magnetic energy fields. It was some time ago, so it noted that floppy disks and tape drives fail first. As the field intensifies, Bluetooth and Wifi chips come next, followed then by miscellaneous micro-processing chips. CPU, GPU and memory (like SSDs) fail next. Proper spinning hard drives fail last (unless you count cooling fans).

But more broadly, in terms of a CME severity, smaller devices and newer devices die first. Electronics die before plain electrical systems. The fatter, and better shielded wiring lasts longer. So, older cars will ride it out better than newer ones. At some point, the energy field overwhelms anything that conducts electricity at any level, and they can burn or melt. Longer wires catch it quicker, because they create a field of their own that invites interference. Exposed electrical grids (up on utility poles) will fail before buried lines, but the transformers tend go before either of them.

Think about this: How dependent are you on this stuff? What part of your mission and calling will change when cellphones, tablets and computers are all fried? What if the broader Internet goes down, or various types of utilities? Iain suggested that you should make a paper copy of anything important to you. Even if memory/storage devices survive, the means to read them may not.

Even more so, think about how it will effect government activities. Surveillance will take a huge hit, as the cameras will fry early. On the other hand, the propensity of government agencies to lag behind civilian technology trends might save them some trouble. Still, if the CME is big enough, life as we know it will change dramatically.

Keep in mind that there will likely be clusters of CMEs. They tend to come in batches. Also, we’ve already just missed some pretty big ones recently. This is how we know that sunspots tend to weaken right now when facing the earth, because huge CMEs burst out the far side and were detected by satellites.

Again, query your own convictions. Be aware how this kind of thing will affect your mission.

Posted in prophecy | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Admin: Hunting a Typewriter

Posted on July 23, 2021 by ehurst

I feel the need to obtain a manual typewriter. Nothing electric; I’m looking for an old style finger-powered machine. I’ve seen hundreds of portables on eBay, but I really would prefer the desktop kind. At one time, the federal government had a few million of them, including the military services. That’s the kind of machine I’m looking for, so if any of you come across one, let me know what it would cost to buy and ship. Of course, a donated machine would be dandy, if you are so blessed.

Posted in administration | 2 Comments

The Divine Tolerance of Church

Posted on July 23, 2021 by ehurst

This is so simple, and yet millions of professing Christians don’t see it. Ask any of them what church is really all about and you’ll get a lot of answers. One of the most common answers will be some mixture of getting more bodies, budgets and buildings. That’s fine for a business, but it’s not what the New Testament says churches do.

The single greatest mission objective for churches is learning to live with each other.

Go ahead; read that again. The whole point of a church family is to love and care for people for whom you might have no human reason to even notice in the first place. This is the core of what a church is in the New Testament. It’s people learning to accept each other as God’s gift.

Yes, we must have boundaries, but the boundaries point to the pragmatic issue of working together. It’s not the matter of what you accomplish, but the a matter of communion and fellowship. It’s whether you can learn to put up with each other in day to day living. So right away, we realize that coming to a common meeting place for an hour or two each week does not promote this goal. This isn’t a social club, but a family household. You should be in each other’s armpits every day, just like a real family living in one household.

So, all that building effort to construct facilities specifically designed for short hours of purposeful occupation and long periods empty is very much not a New Testament plan. The building plan should be housing and care facilities, so that you can all be together. It’s not communism and it’s not encouraging lazy bums to sponge off the system. It’s a family whose primary business is making a life together as family. It’s the ongoing mission of putting out fires and solving conflicts. That’s the primary function of a church — just being together.

Thus, the miniature culture that grows within a church fellowship should be based on the idea of being able to tolerate each other. Your membership should reflect an invitation for folks you can stand to be around. This is where that business of predestination comes into play. Way too many churches are seeking to reach a particular target demographic, a specific audience for corporate planning. They build programs for psychological conversion, and pretend it’s what “spiritual birth” means. In the Bible, it says flatly that God chooses whom they will be; your mission is to make a life for them and with them. All the underlying, unspoken planning behind church growth strategies has been based on the flesh, not on the Spirit.

Get what I’m suggesting here: There’s a difference between building a corporate entertainment franchise, and building a tribe that can live together. There will be some superficial similarities at times between those two conflicting visions, but the fundamental choices are different. The kind of rules you build for the two will be entirely different. You aren’t inviting only folks with a nice middle-class income, and trying to teach some artificial accommodating regimen for the sake of keeping a paying audience. You are inviting people as the true treasure of faith on this earth.

So you’re doing two things at once. First, you are fully aware that a significant portion of folks coming into the church won’t stay that long. They’ll become aware of moral and spiritual patterns, and at some point based on that, become aware that they are called to another work somewhere else. Second, you’ll develop a core of permanent family members who will fully embrace the shared identity of faith. They won’t leave until God drags them away.

But the work itself is building a tribe with an otherworldly orientation. The primary interest is in making the faith of each member stronger. A primary manifestation of faith is loving and caring for someone who needs your help, and learning to accept the gifts and talents they supply. The fundamental assumption is that what faith demands in this life is not something any one person can do alone. It always requires the supporting network of weirdos you would likely never choose to be with for any human reason. You build your activities based on what your members can do, not artificially construct a military unit with pre-determined specialties, for which you then recruit folks to match your design. You take what God brings in the door and figure out what He intends you to do based on what you have in the people.

This is why I keep saying that, as elder of a virtual parish, a primary requirement for membership is not that you buy everything I say, but that you can understand where it comes from and can tolerate it provisionally, so that we can continue being a community. Maybe some day it will be your turn to tell it like you believe it, and then you’ll ask folks to tolerate you.

We don’t have to think alike, but we do seek common ground. We draw the boundaries of what we can tolerate based on a vision of unity that is not what humans can do, but what God Himself can do in us. We don’t have to get much done, in human terms, but we do have to stick together and defend each other from demonic interference. God says we need each other, so get rid of the idea of doing it alone. Recognize when a brother or sister does something good for the body better than you do it, and encourage them to find their own blessings that way. Make room for each other. Don’t plan what kind of people you need; plan to accommodate whatever God brings through the door.

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Stop the Brother against Brother Stuff

Posted on July 22, 2021 by ehurst

Home should be the one place where you can be yourself. It’s the place where you are protected from anyone else’s impertinent judgments about you. It’s the one place where following your convictions is always right. It’s supposed to be the domain God as feudal Sovereign has granted you, so that you can carry out His will unhindered by outside forces.

And church should be the place where your domain merges with others of like faith who will reinforce your mission and calling. The phrase “of like faith” needs to be reinterpreted here: It means you stand with others who hold the same total commitment to Christ as Lord. It’s the place where Jesus rules unhindered as the Ancient Near Eastern feudal Master, and we His adopted family. That’s where all covenants in the Bible point.

If there is a distinctly Christian Red Pill lore, then it’s really not so much a matter of having ideal marriages, but of being more perfect men. We should view marriages as a result, something God grants for His own purposes. We should strive, as part of the gospel mission, to have better relations with everyone who wants them, and romance is just a special category within the matrix of how we live the Word with others.

Building a godly community is not restricted to breeding one from scratch. The Covenant of Christ is not one of human birth, but of spiritual adoption. We are all imported, and the issue is spiritual birth, spiritual DNA. Our children still have to have this, and it’s not automatic. We should raise them as best we can, but the primary mission is finding hearts open to the gospel, whether inside or outside the home.

Nor is it merely a matter of claiming spiritual birth. The biggest single element is holding a sense of calling together. We haven’t done good work establishing a proper understanding of boundaries. Church History is a very ugly tale of including and excluding people on all the wrong grounds. On Judgment Day, we should all stand ashamed that we failed to understand how one person’s logical analysis of what it means to obey the Lord is for them alone, not a rule of faith by which to judge others. That was never part of any biblical covenant.

The whole thing is rather soft, and should arise from mere practical matters. Can you tolerate each other? How hard, and how soft, can the individual boundaries of divine calling be, and at what points do we harden or soften them for the sake of the gospel? We don’t have a Church History of seeking the truth without making it a cerebral task, and the very nature of the Fall itself is trusting human capabilities to establish right and wrong. We mistake our human boundaries as coming from God. We very much need to work on that.

But that’s a huge task, and I mention it only to make it obvious just how much work we have ahead of us. One of the first and most obvious ways we can tell the world about our Savior is how we defend each other. One particular place where this has failed is how Christian Red Pill men don’t pull together in a tribal manner, as the Bible teaches.

Jack notes how most church guys attack each other in support of feminist idolatry. If we do not band together to uphold a biblical standard of manhood, then we cannot expect anyone else to respect our boundaries, either. The strength of the Body of Christ is our moral unity, not our theological unity. It’s not merely a matter of how we do or don’t impress the church ladies, or anyone else. It’s a matter of how we uphold each other as men, because God said in His Word that we are the foundation of His reign on this earth.

Jack particularly points out how the primary problem of the Christian Red Pill online community is a kind of elitism. Those who are blessed with the social and physical charisma and have their pick of women seem wholly incapable of understanding or caring what it’s like to have no such advantages. Further, they see no purpose in fostering fellowship with these “lesser” men. There is virtually no redemptive effort at all, and certainly no clear plan for building a community that includes such men, men as God made them. Without an army of common men, there is no one for the leaders to lead into battle against sin. And as long as the elites keep bashing common men for being common, there can be no true church on the earth. We have failed to define what is good Red Pill living for men without those elite advantages.

The goal is not great marriages, but great men. Yes, there are clear tendencies in how God works among us. There are precious few men who are supposed to endure a Gomer as Hosea did. There aren’t that many men who are supposed to remain celibate in the church body, and it has nothing to do with leadership, per se. But if the majority are supposed to be married and building strong moral families for a strong covenant community, then we need the proper foundation. And that foundation is the biblical definition of manhood. It’s a definition that is partly informed by the Red Pill lore, but does not rest on what what seems to be the common over-emphasis on romantic relationships.

If we cannot change the meaning of the term “Christian Red Pill,” then we need to call this something else. Either way, we can’t keep doing what has already been done, which has been mostly failure. That is, it’s mostly failure in the sense that, so far, few men have those good relationships with the world. And that’s not the biblical standard. It should not rest on whether those men are born with the talents and charisma of the romantic upper class. It should rest on a communion of saints who build each other up to serve the Lord.

One of the most disappointing things has been just how the Red Pill movement has failed to lift up the men who are fallen. Let’s stop eating our own. We cannot redeem our women from the idolatry of feminism if we don’t first climb out of our own idolatries. It won’t matter what you consider the apex of Red Pill manhood if it doesn’t include actual leadership that guides lesser men to a higher standard. Not everyone needs to be like the apex, but we sure could use a lot more thoughtful guidance for those we need in abundance who walk the wider paths of common manhood. We need to change the definition of “common manhood” for the covenant community.

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Black Kettle Grasslands and Antelope Hills

Posted on July 22, 2021 by ehurst

We continue with the photos taken from yesterday’s trip to Western Oklahoma.

From what I understand, a major element in the declaration of the national grasslands is that it prevents people from changing the natural flora. Most of the land outside the National Grasslands is growing other kinds of grass, or even crops. This first image is roughly the middle of the grasslands, showing both the flora and the unique hilliness that makes driving through it so wonderful.

Where there isn’t a landscape deeply carved by water run-off, there are these hills everywhere. This one is typical of what you would see driving in this area. Keep in mind that most of the roads through the National Grasslands are oil roads; they are maintained by the county, but exist primarily to access the dozens of oil wells out here. There are a few houses and ranching is allowed, so most of the land is fenced, and the roads are littered with cattle-guards.

Despite the fish-eye effect, I think this image does justice to how some of the hills look. It’s a panorama stitched together from five shots, where the road ran right up against the foot of one hill. There were cattle just visible on the far side as the road took us around this. It’s all gravel roads with few exceptions.

As we began moving toward the next natural wonder in the area, we spotted this very old house. From what I could tell, this is easily one of the first structures in this part of the country. It’s covered in a kind of stucco, and appears to have been added onto at some point. There aren’t many of these in the area.

A few miles north of the Black Kettle National Grasslands is a state-owned natural monument called Antelope Hills. It’s a rather small collection of mesas clustered up against the southern bank of the Canadian River, where the river makes a wide sweeping bend to the north. What makes the Antelope Hills so unique is that it is mostly white sandstone, which is exceedingly rare in a state noted for its bright red soil.

The oil road runs through a gap between two of the hills. In times past, schools would actually bring kids out here by the busload and let them wander at will. It’s just possible to climb some of these, but it’s no longer encouraged. A couple of them feature a layer of stone on top that looks almost like a fortress.

This panorama was stitched together from two images inside the gap in the previous image. It shows the view from the bottom. There aren’t very many of these hills, and a pair of them are orphaned from the main cluster, standing off a mile or two east of the rest.

Sadly, several photos just didn’t turn out well. I’m hoping I can take a few more trips this year, maybe even going camping some.

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