Fixing Demonology

Wiping away the false demonology of Western Christianity, we can start fresh with a clear understanding rooted in God’s ancient revelation.

Satan and his fallen angels are outnumbered two-to-one. The Apostle John took pains to declare this in the symbolic language of the Apocalypse, describing the Great Dragon (Satan) as sweeping a third of the stars from the sky with his tail as he fell. That was an ancient symbolism going all the way back to Genesis. The symbolism of stars as angelic beings is easily obvious from the Tower of Babel narrative. That ancient ziggurat was simply an early astrological observatory, and Nimrod’s plan is a euphemism for communing with these heavenly beings to regain the power lost when mankind was expelled from Eden. Indeed, it was this sort of chasing after demons, who typically portray themselves as angels of light, which caused the pre-Flood society to be so despicable. People were messing with what we would call Black Magic, trying to regain those powers, often by seeking demonic assistance in the guise of worshiping spirits of the sky, etc.

The Laws of Noah were imposed by God on the fallen earth. That is, the code was already implemented in the existing cosmos, but fully declared in the business with the rainbow, and removal of our previously permanent cloud bank around the earth. The fundamental moral code of the universe was thus revealed, but the Hebrew symbolic literary style makes it hard to discern while wearing our Western rationalist lenses. So after the mess caused by a vast corruption where the unrepentant had managed to wholly seduce those who were trying to live right, the Lord cleaned up the mess and gave everyone a fresh start, using Noah to prophetically announce the requirements for the balance of history until the coming of Christ. Christ did not do away with Noah, but with Moses. Christ continued Noah as noted by the first council in Jerusalem. Paul notes in Romans 13 how the Law of Christ’s sacrificial love — His own Covenant of the Cross — would fulfill God’s Laws, but it needed some clarification to make sure his pagan contemporaries embraced the ancient ways as the path to understanding into what it is grace saves us. Meanwhile, those Laws of Noah continue applying to all fallen creation because they declare the very nature of things.

So if obeying Noah keeps demons out, then rejecting Noah is how they gain entrance. Their presence and power varies with the context and the level of human authority at which they are welcomed by this betrayal of God’s Laws. Individual households can obey Noah and escape some of the wrath due their entire nation because the national government is loaded with demonic presence. This is manifestly the case in the US. Our government was founded on Enlightenment notions, something Satan himself sponsored along with the likes of the Treaty of Westphalia and so forth. In the broadest sense, democracy assumes man is not fallen, that mankind is inherently good. This blatantly pokes God in the eye, Who said mankind was incorrigible repeatedly.

The US Constitution was a rejection of God’s Word, despite all the sanctified language about God as our witness, and so forth. The whole structure presumes a concept of the universe in direct contradiction of revealed truth. Part of Daniel’s condemnation of Rome as iron, then iron mixed with clay, depicts Rome beginning as a very poorly implemented Western tribal nation, which degraded into some pretense of a republic built on objective truth. In reality, it was all simply an excuse to destroy the ancient tribal ties of nationhood which God had ordained, then once broken and dehumanized, it was easy for some dictator to ignore every restraint and wallow in filth at the price of vast oceans of human misery. We learned nothing from this; our founding fathers did their best to emulate this failure in the Classical Studies.

Daniel said Babylon, evil as it was, could be represented as the golden head of the symbolic statue. This is largely because the Babylonian imperial rule respected the tribal system of government, and didn’t even dare to interfere with any subject nation’s religions. They assumed all of them were valid. While otherwise a very good government, in this the Babylonian rulers were mistaken. The New Testament says in no uncertain terms pagan deities were all demons, that there was ever only one true God. How could this God allow Daniel to serve on the imperial court in such a pagan atmosphere? How could He prosper Daniel and his friends in their study of the vast pagan literature of Babylonian libraries?

Indeed, how could God prosper Joseph, making him viceroy of Egypt when it necessarily meant Joseph engaged in pagan rituals of the court there? Wasn’t it evil of Joseph to enslave the whole nation in feudalism, using the extended famine to break the relative independence of the noble houses? Why didn’t Joseph campaign to reverse such an evil trend? Could it be we fail to understand what God considers good government? Either way, we have no record either of these great men of the Bible evangelized anyone to their personal faith, in the sense we today think of evangelism.

Again, the servant of God who embraces the Laws of Noah will in some measure be immune to the demonic powers in human governments. That alone would have been testimony enough. Each of these men were called by God to serve in these high places, rubbing elbows with vast armies of demonic powers. Daniel ran into a couple of delays inherent in his position when praying for an answer to certain perplexing questions. It was explained matter-of-factly, just part of the context, and Daniel would have to deal with it.

But the Exile itself was God’s penalty for constant surrender to the lies of demons. Every idolatrous compromise was a compromise with demons. God was not going to allow His Son to be born in that setting. Jesus had enough work on His hands with all the healing and deliverance from the vast horde of demons in His nation without that sort of direct call to demonic powers. Yes, the Pharisees, Sadducees and other minority religio-political parties in power were demonic enough, having left their nation in the grip of all sorts of demonic powers, but the original problem of direct challenge to God’s primacy was finally killed once and for all. Of all their horrific sins, the rulers of Judah did not ever again worship demons.

Instead, they simply rejected the ancient Hebraic intellectual legacy in favor of Hellenism, an Aristotelian approach to the Law. Examine every debate Jesus had with His opponents, and you’ll see He kept calling them back to the ancient Hebrew mystical understanding of things, versus their literalistic Western approach. That all of modern evangelical Christianity now embraces the same approach as the Pharisees is an unspeakable horror, because it cedes the very ground of understanding to Satan.

Western Civilization is not Christian in the purest sense of the term; it does not represent in any way the teachings of Christ. It is for the most part a corrupted Pharisaical caricature of Christ, a literalist rendering of a mystical Eastern religion. It’s no surprise evangelicals are so deeply mistaken about demons and why miracles and the Second Coming are the subject of such a carnival atmosphere. We don’t understand the basis for miracles, and we flatly reject the symbolic teachings on the Return of Christ. Somehow they are deluded by Satan to believe a bunch of self-proclaimed “Jews” who utterly rejected the God of Scripture and can’t even adhere to their beloved Covenant of Moses, which Christ ended and is no longer in force, can then claim to be God’s Nation returning to the lands from which God Himself drove them. This is because the Western churches bluntly reject the intellectual culture of Jesus Himself.

Western Christians will be utterly shocked when it becomes apparent in the near future God does not like Western Civilization, is not very pleased with modern evangelical religion, and is not behind that demonic state called Israel.

(Note: This and the previous two posts have been collected into a single article and updated. You can find it here.)

Broken Demonology

The inherent failures of Western Systematic Theology are most evident in Demonology.

In the first place, Systematic Theology is scarcely induced to recognize the divine, so it should be no surprise it handles demons poorly. They do appear in Scripture from beginning to end, though not always by that label. For example, the chief of demons, Satan, is labeled “the Serpent” in Genesis. If you have a poor grasp of Hebrew symbolic logic, you might conclude this is a literal reference to some primordial snake with legs. So Western evangelical teachings are shot through just such a silly notion. It carries them down endless wild goose chases.

Nor should we be surprised at the often comical notions taken by the less orthodox Charismatic notions regarding demons. When your epistemological assumptions undercut a proper grasp of the Hebrew Scriptures, and the Hebraic substrate of the New Testament, you leave people dangling, wide open to deception when they can’t quite buy your own obvious mistakes.

Popular forms of demonology arose against the utter failure of old line orthodoxy to take seriously the problem with demonic influences. With the dominance of Enlightenment rationalism, demons were viewed merely as a quaint notion from some primitive past which had to be discarded, or at least downplayed, in order to be serious scholars. The entire field of Neo-Pentecostal or Charismatic theologies is the result of closing off any access to the Hebrew epistemology, but refusing to deal with very real non-rational manifestations of the Spirit Realm. Lacking the clear understanding of the Hebraic logic, and seeing the failure of the orthodox rationalism, the Charismatics were left with little choice but to try using broken logic to process a very experiential religion and come up with something which seems to work.

I say these things because I have been directly involved in both traditional evangelical, and even fundamentalist, orthodoxy as well as the Charismatic movement. Both failed me and my own encounters with spiritual realities. That spiritual reality forced me to engage Hebrew intellectual assumptions with a will.

The truth need not make sense to Post-Enlightenment rationalism. It is ineffable, which is why Jesus taught in parables. The ultimate truth of things cannot be stated plainly in rational discourse and match Aristotle’s categories. They cannot be clinically described, only symbolically indicated. Hebrew logic is symbolic and indicative, not analytical and descriptive. Hebrew texts must be read from the Hebrew viewpoint. Aristotle’s categories only work for as far as they go, which stops dead at the boundaries of observable reality. Reaching beyond into the Spiritual Realm requires a departure, a recognition of things beyond the intellect. You simply must absorb revelation as it is.

Demons are fallen angels. So much is commonly understood, but with such a poverty of grasp of all things spiritual, entirely because of the assumption it can be understood on the human level, we end up ignoring the reality of human nature. That reality includes a spirit which can be brought to life, and put in charge over the intellect. The living spirit “reasons” as it were on a spiritual level, completely outside the boundaries of Aristotle’s assumptions, and far above human intellect. Failure to develop a consciousness of this higher faculty is the primary failure of Western theology. We aren’t supposed to understand angels and demons; we are supposed to implement in our minds a mode of life which assumes their presence and powers by recognizing the limits of what we can know.

The world is fallen. Aside from the Creator Himself, any entity which enters within the fallen realm must of necessity respect the limits placed on that realm by the Creator. Angels and demons don’t lose their power, but are confined by the limitations of the realm itself. Both recognize those inherent limits, but demons will lie about them. Our primary understanding of those constraints comes from the Covenant of Noah. In a sense, demons are bound by the Law of Noah. The entirety of their efforts in our lives and in our world is to seduce us off the path of observing the Law of Noah.

When you embrace that covenant willfully, you gain a measure of immunity from demonic activity. The boundaries are not precise as we tend to think of such things in the West, but they are inescapable for both humans and spirit beings. If you are under grace, you are in a position to gain the authority which comes with compliance with that Law of Noah, but without having to worry overmuch about the provisions of that Law. However, if you lack the Hebraic approach to understanding grace, you are horribly crippled in claiming that authority. You won’t get there, except by accident. Your immunity from demonic activity will have huge holes in it unless you approach things from the spiritual reasoning of the Spirit Realm.

Verbally announcing your authority under the Blood of Jesus and other such incantations are ludicrous is you don’t actually operate in the name of Jesus. The concept of “in His Name” is not native to our Western culture. Spoken words have no authority on their own; it’s not magic. Ritual acts and words mean nothing if they don’t arise from a spiritual reality. It requires diving into the Ancient Near Eastern cultural background to realize what is required to properly use such phrasing with any meaning. If you are under the Blood of Jesus, you cannot claim much if you don’t know what it requires of you. You can’t attack the strongholds of Satan in Jesus’ Name if you aren’t actually walking in His authority as a faithful servant of His Divine Court. Simply because you believe you recognize those terms does not qualify; you have to know them from the biblical perspective, the Hebraic perspective.

It boils down to this: Walking obediently to the Covenant of Noah grants you that authority. You have to understand it all from the Hebrew intellectual culture, so that you will read the Scriptures as they were written, not through some perverted goggles of Western rationalist assumptions. You have to think in Hebrew terms, and process the meaning of the Law of Noah from a spiritual frame of reference. It requires recognizing how your spirit communicates down to your mind, and how you discern what is required of you in any given context. Grace means you will surely fail, and still come out clean, not that you can simply run along whatever path appeals to your Western sensibilities. Charismatics are notorious for mistaking emotional stirring for the move of the Spirit. Even those without a living spirit can choose to embrace Noah and Hebrew logical assumptions and find sufficient forgiveness to obtain a level of faithfulness which restricts demonic power in this realm.

You defeat the demons because you fulfill the Laws of God. If you understand the Law of Moses as a contextual expression of the Covenant of Noah, you’ll be miles ahead of the game. You need not bind yourself to Moses, of course, but use Moses as a particular example of Noah. You can gain the authority of obeying Noah by walking in the Spirit, but you can’t claim that without spiritual thinking. Having a spiritual birth does not itself immunize you from demonic activity in your life. It does remove the final penalty of the Fall in Eternity, but it does not give you a free pass in this realm. Regardless of their lies about it, demons are forced to respect the limits of the Laws of God for this fallen realm. If you don’t understand those Laws as revealed, they have the upper hand, and your witness will fail in many and magnificent ways.

Theology Is a Human Effort

A hallmark of Western Christianity is Systematic Theology. The whole idea was stolen from the Pharisees, who were Westernized when they embraced Hellenistic rationalism, and departed utterly from their ancient Hebrew intellectual roots. Anyone with a bit of classical education can tell the difference between the epistemology of the two, and modern Judaism is by no means Hebrew religion. Hebrew religion was Near Eastern Mysticism by definition. In other words, Systematic Theology is essentially foreign to the Bible.

Most Western Christian scholars recognize the difference between Biblical Theology versus Systematic Theology. They consider the latter more essential, if anything. They can’t imagine a Christian faith without it. What they refuse to recognize is how Paul, the other Apostles, even Jesus Himself, did not support Systematic Theology. That’s because in their day, only Pharisees used it.

The theology which derives directly from the Scripture narrative is all there was when John published his last message, Revelation, at the end of the First Century. Only much later did any Christians fall victim to the rationalist approach, the sense of utter necessity for things to be organized and structured according to the epistemology of Aristotle and Plato.

That fancy word “epistemology” is simply an intellectual assumption, an approach to deciding how we can say something is real, can be known and understood. If you can’t prove it by Aristotle’s rules of analysis — which is utterly materialistic — then it can’t be called knowledge or truth. Aristotle devised a logical structure of organizing ideas, and it’s founded entirely on man as the measure of all things. If something does not yield to human intellect, it’s not real. Thus, knowledge by revelation simply does not exist. Aristotle rejected it out of hand. Why the whole of Western Christendom now defends his epistemology as necessary to understanding that ancient religion from the Hebrews is beyond me.

Thinking they can somehow use Aristotle and yet embrace revelation is simply the excuse for demanding a formal analysis of revelation, in essence dumbing it down. It’s merely a simplistic organization under the categories of Aristotle, who himself rejected revelation. It doesn’t work too well. So we have all these mutually exclusive theological systems, each so logically certain the rest are nonsense. What none of them will ever accept is that their own system is nonsense. When a man can fully grasp it with his mind, it’s not revelation. Does that fancy theological term “ineffable” mean anything? It means real truth can’t be told, can’t be understood on the level of human intellect.

So Systematic Theology is pretty much a human construct, not divine. It’s not truth; it’s a human reduction of truth down into soundbites. It’s really not that important in the grand scheme of faith and redemption in history. An awful lot of people are going to stand before God on that Final Judgment Day, and be embarrassed at their silly house of cards they were so sure was absolutely necessary, that men were evaluated on a fallible human construct.

Mixed Signals: Boredom

Most people have no idea how to interpret boredom as a symptom.

I’m quite sure the audience most in need of reading this will not read it. For most people, boredom is a constant complaint. That’s because they are so empty of intellect, and their ability to accept artistic and intellectual stimulation is atrophied to the point of uselessness. The solution to that is based on a very fundamental principle.

Boredom is not a problem in itself; it is a symptom. It is your subconscious mind’s way of telling you to change the type of activity which engages you at the time. Not just those short few moments, but the larger scope of your activity patterns.

Most people do have some instinctive idea of this, but tend to change the wrong things. For example, too many people will disrupt the most important things in their lives, the things which contribute what little sanity they may have in the context, such as stable family relations. This is a primary example of misreading the signal coming from the subconscious. If you are capable of being bored with relationships, you have surely built them wrong in the first place, typically choosing the wrong people for all the wrong reasons. You don’t have to change such things by direct intent. Simply change the right things and the relationships will change themselves.

The problem, as hinted at earlier, is the utter lack of intellectual depth. People who are easily bored are themselves boring, lacking anything which they could offer the rest of the world. They don’t participate in reality in any meaningful way. For the rest of us, boredom is simply a signal to do something constructive. It’s a warning we have backed off the things which matter most, and need to reassess how our pattern of behavior matches our true commitments. The nature of such a commitment prohibits stasis; it demands you keep stretching the boundaries of discovery.

It’s not hard to write a simple story of some kids bored by their suburban existence, then being inspired by someone quirky and interesting outsider to go perform some act of kindness or simply picking up trash from the local park. That’s because this sort of thing happens just often enough to become a part of our social consciousness. It’s the way things actually work. It’s what church youth leaders discover if they are the least bit conscious as they build their ministry. Teens in our world are bored because that’s they way our society is structured, but by intentionally breaking the structure in a positive way, the excitement of being alive is restored.

The alternative is encouraging destructive attempts to relieve boredom. This doesn’t really fix anything, because it leaves them emptier than before. This is what the oligarchs ruling our world hope for, because it means those kids will demand and spend more money on things which simply create an even bigger appetite for the empty, flashy crap those oligarchs love to sell.

Boredom means you aren’t answering the call from your own inner soul to explore.

Trail Is Clear

I scarcely believe it myself.

We’ve had two days of unseasonably cool temperatures, so I took advantage of them and worked like a madman. I cleared the new section to within a few meters of the old and still usable trail yesterday. I was too tired to go any farther.

Today I went around the other direction and thought I might chop a few downed trees from off the old path. I was able to work more quickly than I expected. There were four places where I had to chop through something large, where I had to first lop off a lot of smaller stuff. Somehow, I got through them all and found myself just a few meters from the end of the new trail I was cutting.

I thought, “Why not?” So I dug into the grass, shrubs and saplings. Now it’s done. There are a few places where the bulldozers and firetrucks either cut out chunks of my old trail or piled excess sand onto it, but I don’t think the shovel work will be all that extensive. So basically it’s already clear now, and usable.

And I am very tired and sore.

Job Hunting: Relief Work

I’ve been wishing over the past few years I could find some job meaningful to me. Sure, I have this computer ministry going, but it’s just something to keep me busy for awhile. Much as I like computers and helping people with them, it is hardly fulfilling work.

What I’d really like to do is work in humanitarian or disaster relief. I don’t mind if it’s secular, but I’d rather it be with a religious organization. I really don’t care where it takes me in the world. Nor am I all that interested in making a big paycheck, or working in comfortable conditions. I admit I’d probably need access to some basic medical care, but otherwise I’m quite comfortable in austere conditions. The military taught me a lot about that. On the other hand, I would absolutely refuse to do any fund-raising. If an organization can’t pay my way, they don’t need me.

I’m really interested in organizing and leading such work, and I enjoy having lots of challenges. I’m not easily frustrated. I like to organize on the fly, and I don’t balk at adapting to sudden or frequent changes. The one thing I hate is doing some crazy project which no one really wants or needs, but is the brainchild of someone who has no clue about the place and people they pretend to serve. It’s one thing to help people change really bad cultural habits, but it’s another to act like they have no clue. I don’t believe in forcing people to accept help they don’t need, but I’m willing to try to convince them of something I can believe in myself.

With all the junk websites on the Net claiming to hook you up with such work, then offering nothing really useful, I am pretty cagey about using a search engine for this. Most of the mainstream organizations (I’m glaring at you, Red Cross) have already proven to me they are fake, just a way to play on human emotions and collect tons of money for internal consumption on fat salaries, big pronouncements and nothing to show for it. Nor would I tolerate some government funded boondoggle designed to fatten some contributor’s bank accounts using imaginary crises with even more fanciful solutions. I’m tired of such games.

I’ve done work in primitive civil engineering for things like sanitation and flood control. I can teach anything I know; I really do like people, especially children, and am not annoyed by things foreign to me. I’ve had a great deal of experience building teamwork and reducing conflict. I’m not much good at theoretical scientific research, but I’m pretty good at implementing things designed by others, particularly using whatever is at hand. I’ve used a wide range of tools for building and repairing facilities and equipment, though I’m not a master of any construction trades. I suppose my archive of computer articles indicates I have some skill with IT, but I’ve also done lots of fine arts work — music, drama, drawing and painting, sculpture. Obviously I write English well when needed, but I’ve done course work in German, Dutch and Spanish, used them some in the real world. I can learn other languages, of course.

If you know of something worth pouring my heart into it, I’d like to know.

On the Virtue of Decentralized Power Structures

No one has any business poking about in your personal life who isn’t related by blood or covenant. Thus saith the Lord. This was His part of His intention in promulgating the Covenant of Noah, because the primary burden of settling disputes falls on those closest to you. Depersonalizing social and legal processes is an abomination before the Lord, and is a fundamental element in God’s wrath on Western Civilization.

Yet, even in this filthy cultural heritage, we find islands of sanity. When a judge in Florida recently ruled in favor of preexisting binding arbitration by a Sharia Law process, it was no different from a similar process binding in many Christian organizations. This decision is just before God; it’s consistent with the fundamental moral nature of the universe.

All the more so because it reasserts the ancient requirement to keep power decentralized and personal. Everything we seek to build in a moral and sane society must begin right there. That it defies the plans and purposes of the evil oligarchs is just an added bonus.

Rampant Deception

The officials and news outlets have been steadily lying to us about the danger from the nuclear reactors in Japan. The idea was to protect GE’s stock, since they designed and built these failing reactors. The US government has been lying to us about their plans for Libya. They’ve lied about the so-called recovery. Okay, for the ultra-wealthy, things have been looking up, but for the rest of us it’s still a depression.

Recently one of those oligarchs admitted there was class a war. That is, he admitted there was a war of the wealthy against the rest, and the upper classes are winning.

Most folks don’t know about this thing called Certificates of Authority (“certs”) used on the Internet. It has to do with using your web browser to seek and accept an encrypted connection to the server on the other end. It’s a way of double checking whether that server belongs to whomever it claims it belongs to, and we can trust them to do for us whatever the owner advertises.

The authority for these certs is delegated and pretty carefully controlled. Except, someone managed to sneak into one of the certs issuing outfits and grab the numerical code keys for some very popular websites used for communications of various kinds.

I first read a rather technical report of it, and just barely understood it. Then I read a more popularized geeky report and understood it a lot better. Now the story is being reported in a very dumbed-down version. Basically, the reports now say they believe some government-sponsored Net spooks from Iran got those keys so they could intercept their own people’s attempts to use things like Skype and Facebook to communicate about plans to resist the government.

But the dumbed-down report doesn’t reveal just how serious this breech was in terms of how it threatens the very nature of the Net itself. Granted, this has all been fixed, and apparently before the keys could be used. Those keys were revoked and most web browsers have been updated to reflect that. Still, that the keys leaked at all is a really big deal. You see, if a so-called rogue nation like Iran can do it, what prevents someone in the US government doing it? What prevents them from having already done it and not telling anyone?

Don’t trust anyone with more power or money than you. Then, just to be safe, don’t even trust yourself.

GNU for Win32

Did you know a large number of GNU Open Source command line utilities are available for Windows? See this list for what’s available. Under Unix/Linux, there are certain command line goodies I use quite often. Nothing in Windows Land comes close.

CoreUtils — The primary item here is ls. Not simply because I can’t get used to using the old DOS dir command, but the way the results are displayed is different, and I prefer the format from ls. There are other normal shell commands there, too, mostly useful in the Unix style scripting.

File — Without fail, this thing can always tell me exactly what type or contents are in any given file. So, if I want to save a copy of that Flash video in my browser cache, it’s easy from the command line to check the largest of those files and it will tell me which one can be renamed with the proper extension .swf. It’s also one of the best ways of checking a file’s contents and format when somehow the names get borked: file somefile comes back with a report of the file type.

Grep — This allows me to hunt through a batch of files for a particular reference, provided I can recall a key word or exact phrase. It parses them far more quickly than the Windows indexing service: grep "some phrase" ./ means find all the occurrences of “some phrase” in the current directory.

Units — Simply one of the best command line tools ever, this allows me to convert between various measuring systems, including length, mass, volume and a ton of things I’ll never use. It’s interactive; just call it up and the prompt will ask what you have. Using standard abbreviations, it will usually recognize what you mean (for example, “10 inches”) and ask what unit of measure you want instead (for example, “cm”) and it spits out the answer in several ways. You’ll have to remember to kill the utility manually when you are done, using CTRL+C.

You can pick some others, but I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what each of them does and how to use them.

Each of these packages installs in the same directory (I recall one of them hangs and you have to use Task Manger to kill it, but it works). So you have to add that directory to your PATH statement. In most versions of Windows, that’s under “My Computer.” Right-click and select “Properties” then look for something indicating Advanced System Settings. In Win7, you get a window with tabs; select “Advanced.” Then click the button for Environment Variables. In the list box at the bottom, find “PATH” and click the “Edit” button. It will open a box with a huge long string. You are going to add to the end of that, so hit your END key.

Make sure you don’t add any spaces. Type a semi-colon (;) and add this:

C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin\

or whatever is equivalent on your system after you install the packages. For 64-bit systems, you probably know it’s more like “Program Files (x86)”. At any rate, for those of you who are jonesing for a command line fix, now you know where to find your supply.

Step Outside to See In

Our intervention in Libya makes more sense when you understand who is in charge of what we are doing there.

For the Christian Mystic, to be truly objective about the world requires a position external to it. The third pillar of disentanglement provides for standing outside the madness to see it clearly. On the one hand, we understand the injustices from God’s viewpoint of the Laws, but on the other hand, we understand this world is hell bent on defying His Laws. Thus, we can know what is right, but don’t expect anyone else to care, and only get involved because we are compelled by His Spirit. That is, we get involved in whatever way, and on whatever level, our sense of calling demands. It matters not whether there is any human measure of success in our actions, only that we fulfill our individual commitment.

So by embracing the other-worldly view of Christian Mysticism, we can find the wisdom of, say the Prophet Daniel. We may well lack his gifts, but his level of grasp on this world’s affairs is available.

Today I would like to draw your attention to this explanation of our intrusion in Libya’s affairs. If you want to know who and what steers the madness of US government, you really have to understand the PNAC vision of the future. I’ll be one of the first to warn this is not the game plan for all the world’s ruling elite, but the one we Americans have to worry about right now.

Nor does it matter that our government borrowing is unsustainable. As long as the ruling elite are happy with how it is working, it will be sustained. The necessary borrowing authority will always pass through Congress, and the available credit will be there. It’s mostly symbolic of committing the nation to slavery, a commitment of our future productivity or usefulness at whatever level of activity there may be, so that’s certainly in their interests. As to how all this warfare works out is of no consequence in their plans. Making cannon fodder of a whole generation is just a way of increasing the level of ownership over what’s left of our population.

There are similar plans for the rest of humanity.

It’s really very easy to get wrapped up in things like the Truth Movement for 9/11, not to mention all the other political activism causes. Those are the sideshow, the distractions for you and I. When you remind yourself all this nasty tyranny and the rising police state has been decreed as the moral justice heaped on the West in general, and the US in particular, a punishment for our generations of devotion to mere material progress, and a willingness to flout all moral limits in pursuit of that progress, you are unsurprised at any of the increasingly horrifying things government officials decide for us. In Christian terms: The descent of America into crushing tyranny is itself God’s wrath, and we are not to resist it in the sense of open rebellion. It’s what the nation deserves. There’s nothing wrong with symbolic gestures, as long as you don’t take yourself too seriously. Don’t hope for turning things around, and don’t give yourself to any other political causes; don’t be entangled.

I fully expect to see troops committed to Libyan soil. Rather than distract ourselves fighting the inevitable, let us rather decide whether it will engage our individual callings, or sense of compelling necessity on the higher level. Within the given context, what part do we each play in our pursuit of ultimate truth and human compassion? How do we find and help those select few with a capacity to see and understand?

Step outside the stream and you can see things flowing by meant for you. You can make peace while the world descends into the madness of constant war.