Morality Is Power

Re: ACCM

Embracing God’s moral imperatives changes reality.

Not just anything or everything, but moral obedience does change how things in this world go for you. There are no nifty formulas and direct exchanges; it’s not that simple. There are no lists you can check off. The whole thing assumes a mystical viewpoint foreign to Western Civilization. It’s not easy to get there. However, it does work on something which might seem to be a sliding scale. Your level of commitment and investment of effort does make a difference. The farther you dive into this ocean of truth, the wetter you get. Instead of pretending you are some rock on the shore, which seems to weather the storm but is actually slowly dissolved, you are part of what Creation does naturally. Find your place and float with it. Let it carry you and you’ll be far better off than ignoring it or fighting it.

First, an example of moral justice on a national level. Defying God’s moral code guarantees a nation will be destroyed eventually. It’s not simplistic. For example, there’s nothing wrong with spying so long as your spying on other governments is simply a matter of getting information. Should there be even the slightest effort to steer anything that government is doing, you are already evil. There is no sin in using tactical elements of surprise in warfare, but that’s not the same thing is secrecy. There is simply no need for end-to-end secrecy, because God’s moral justice says it won’t matter if the enemies knows about your troops, equipment, capabilities, etc. God has more than once defeated an enemy despite such openness. If the war itself is justified, open honesty is not a weakness. It is the moral strength to win regardless, because nature itself, even their own human nature, will oppose your enemy.

You’ll notice almost no one has tried it in a couple of millennia at least. Instead, the US is destroying itself by casting off everything God has offered for protection. Now the US is His enemy.

On a personal level: Try out the power of forgiveness. Yes, it has a known psychological power. You’ll feel better and act better if you can get over things you can’t fix. But it’s more than that. The power to forgive according to God’s moral justice changes how nature acts with you. It’s not some silly sentimental absolutist proposition of letting everyone get away with anything. That reflects the evils of Western rationalism. Rather, you gain insight into when it just doesn’t matter; there’s nothing wrong with fighting when it does matter. The point is to understand how to evaluate what matters. Whatever you lost will be replaced and then some. That’s how the moral laws of the universe work.

This is what Christian Mysticism is about, claiming the very real power of God that changes reality itself.

None Righteous

“There is no one righteous, not even one.” (Romans 3:10 NET, quoting Psalm 14)

The human race is fallen. The most basic demand from God after the Flood was for Noah to institute social constraints on human behavior. Men were to get off their lazy butts, as in the sin of Adam in dealing with Eve, and take charge of thinking about moral implications to prevent the demise of the entire human race. The human psyche typically includes a measure of restraint, a superego telling us certain things might be fun, pleasant, entertaining or offer some advantage, but isn’t worth the other consequences. It seldom rests in our minds as pragmatic, but as a foreboding “ought” accompanied with feelings of guilt, etc.

No, morally mature people don’t need guilt and so forth to participate in preserving our humanity, but most people never quite reach moral maturity. Human moral development tends to slow down around age 6, and many never reach teenage skepticism. Precious few ever get past that to a sense of peace and purpose about things. Thus, we have a social structure which tends to create psychic barriers not easily crossed. Without them, there might not be a human race.

So most of us run around with a taste for things we’d never actually do or obtain. Within a given social context, those things tend to be illegal. Law is a moral statement of sorts. It’s a commonly recognized cycle that a society will be vigorous with simple and strict laws at first, reflecting the sort of vigor of something which is vital and growing. At some point there is a consciousness of prosperity and the barriers become more complex and fungible. At some point the ones that actually serve a purpose kind of collapse or simply stretch too far to be useful. Meanwhile, the laws that simply cannot serve any good purpose become so common that the society eventually breaks down, consuming itself.

That final stage is coupled with insane laws that attempt to reach inside the very mind. It’s no longer what we do that is illegal, but what we think. The final mark of social collapse is a complicated and utterly senseless orthodoxy of social morality that demands you confess your sins, including a whole raft of things about which you have zero interest in the first place. Your very humanity itself becomes illegal.

The Law God gave Noah presupposes you can only act on things people do wrong. The only person with any business counseling you on underlying immoral desires is someone who knows you well enough to recognize your tendencies. The Law of Noah also presupposes it is totally evil to farm out that responsibility — that fatherly shepherd duty — to anyone who isn’t direct family kin. No one else has any business getting to know you that well. You cannot trust anyone else with your real self. Anyone who isn’t bound up in your life in the first place, who doesn’t share your suffering, is damned for wanting to know.

That is inherent in the concept of “civility,” the term we use to describe any social milieu for restraining common human immorality. You could correctly say the fundamental Law of God for the human race equates to civility — Covenant of Noah = civility. Civility was thus defined ages before Western Civilization arose. This business of a godlike intrusion into your stream of awareness is a quintessential expression of Satan. Privacy is not a right; invasion of privacy is so fundamentally evil it transcends talk of rights. It goes all the way back to why God might destroy humanity. That we have a Western social habit of intruding into privacy, a childlike demand to know everything about which we might be the least bit curious — “What are thinking about me?” — is a symptom of how far we have fallen back toward the society God destroyed in the Flood. That we have so many willing to spill the entire contents of their stream of consciousness without any regard for privacy and civility shows another round of destruction is wholly justified.

Yeah, Western Civilization in general, and America in particular, is doomed. God’s wrath is upon us and we so richly deserve it.

Good Bets

It’s not as if I have any secret revelations, but sometimes it helps to restate the obvious.

All governments lie, some more than others. The US government is incapable of telling the truth, especially if the message comes through the MSM. If Holder says that Snowden’s leaks hurt the government, what it really means is Holder is cackling at how successful this PsyOp was. You don’t have to know the real story to recognize the basic fact the only thing keeping the US government from slaughtering even more people is bureaucratic inertia. On top of that, it’s much more fun to murder people when they are panic-stricken. I mean this quite literally: The people running the US government are controlled by demons. They don’t need to be personally evil, though a great many are. Rather, the whole system is now under Satan’s control. Again, I mean this quite literally.

I’m not particularly brilliant, but for reasons I’ll never understand in this lifetime, God has chosen to show me some things He’s tried to show others. Quite some years ago I knew the US was doomed for her sins. Once I understood the time scale of God’s operations on this earth, I realized a fifty-year delay in His wrath was awfully quick. I saw His wrath coming and my spirit recognized there was no exit path for this nation. The options were gone, discarded too long ago for any hope during my lifetime. I was born after the decision was already set in stone. But God’s wrath is on the people who could have known better if they had chosen to seek His face. They didn’t. Instead, they played the same game as Judah’s leadership up to the Exile. They shook their finger in God’s face and demanded He play by rules He never said were His. They allowed their human intellect to define God’s revelation, a fallen intellect wholly incapable of grasping the most basic elements of truth.

Yes, feel free to dismiss me as an insane crank. It won’t hurt my feelings.

Let me say it again: Our evil government is the means of God’s wrath on America. This government will grow more insanely stupid and hateful until there is a some incomprehensible bloodbath. The lies will pile up to the sky long past the time the carnage begins. You simply cannot imagine what is coming. This is God’s wrath on the American people for flouting His Word. Worst of all: American Christians are responsible for this mess, and they will suffer for it. Because these Christians have absorbed the message and methods of the Pharisees, their end shall follow the same pattern. Just when they think their power and success is at hand, it will blow up in their faces. It’s not the simple issue of theology, but a theology built on entirely false assumptions and human presumption. Worst of all, they have defiled the mission of the Church.

The message of Christ was how to leave this world. Nothing in His teaching was about fixing this broken world, only to show that this world is not what His Father intended. We live by God’s moral laws as the means to pointing people to a higher realm. American Christians are hung up on this world, so their actions are consistently unlawful and immoral. The actions of American Christians in support of lies is what causes all the trouble. Their false beliefs make them act with incredible stupidity and blindness. They have compromised with the Beast, thinking they can bind its future actions. Satan cannot be bound by a covenant. At the moment they least expect, the Beast will turn on them; persecution will catch them completely off guard. The Lord may grant a few of them escape, but a great many will end up enslaved, if they survive. How fortunate will be those who die! The loudest and most prominent Christian organizational leaders will suffer the most. This is the warning of God.

I could discuss repentance avenues, but that’s not the purpose of today’s post. I’ve covered that in previous posts at length. The people most likely to survive and even prosper are those who are not wrapped up in this world.

Meanwhile, it’s a good bet the US will get mired in Syria on the way to Iran. The plans are deeply misguided, because deceiving demons are their advisers. Even if our government gains any measure of success in what they plan for Syria, it will have already lost just by getting involved. By the time they get ready to strike at Iran, it will be too late for any hope of victory by any definition. Thus, my prophetic warning that any attack on Iran will end in battlefield disaster.

We have made that last fatal turn in the path to destruction. The ax is not laid at the root, but has already begun cutting. There may be some surprises along the way, but the end is in sight. I don’t have words to describe it. Human language cannot bear up under the load of such madness. The American churches together are the Great Harlot; America is the drug-addled bitch of the Beast. Babylon is fallen, and the smoke rises up to Heaven.

Again, God’s time scale is not like ours. It will take some months to play out on our level, but the game is over in God’s eyes.

More Cynicism, Please

Most people have no idea how government works, much less clandestine government agencies.

Moral excellence includes not being easily fooled — wise as serpents and harmless as doves. You know you are being taken for a ride, but you go along because there is little to gain by fighting some things. You might know the drunk is going to blow your contribution on more booze, but giving him your loose change may still be the right thing to do. It’s less what you do and more how you do it, in the sense of what you value. Saving the world is the stupidest hope anyone can have. You should know striving to make life better for folks won’t really change anything if you are gripped by the divine moral imperative to focus on the higher plane of existence. Don’t believe the lies; they are aimed at consuming your soul. You can’t fix this world.

You can only show this isn’t the whole story. We live in the Shadowlands. This is a prison of falsehood, billowing curtains of deception and smoke intended to keep you from seeing any truth. A thousand half truths and lesser truths are routinely offered to prevent you thinking about what really matters.

The government of the US is not a monolith. The plutocrats are not all friends, keeping to one sheet of music and following a single script. They are more ambitious than the general run of the population, more likely to cut each other’s throats than you can imagine. It’s highly competitive, and they accept the risks because it’s how they get more of what they want. They have no sense of unity and trust is always conditional. They use each other all the time. The competing agendas are seldom a matter of genuine belief in some greater good or even a genuine evil dream. The agendas are virtually always a collective aspiration of personal benefit. People join a team for what it offers them personally, and switch to another team if the offer seems better. The partisan squabbles are almost entirely fake; what you see in the news is seldom the real point of contention.

The best of us are fake in one way or another. It’s part of being human, and you need to get used to it. That way it’s not so hard to imagine someone like Ron Paul has his own moral blind spots, as would any other of the legendary sterling statesmen of our time. Ron Paul is better than just about the entire range of other politicians, but he’s still willing to play by the rules of a fixed and tightly controlled game in which the rules are for suckers and losers. He should know that, but acts like he doesn’t. The system cannot be fixed; belief in the system guarantees you’ll be fodder for the grinding. That includes Ron Paul. I don’t support him because he isn’t radical enough; he doesn’t begin to understand the biblical message and morality. He’s just another Westerner supporting a dying Western Civilization, a wholly and utterly lost cause.

The things we can and should do under God’s moral laws are not what the majority of humanity would expect. That’s because the vast majority of humanity thinks in the wrong terms completely. See the world, not on its own level, but from a much higher level. Live with your commitments outside this world and you’ll begin to understand what you should do.

The clandestine services of the US government are loaded with the same competitive, conniving lost souls as the rest of government. Bradley Manning? He knew to keep back from disclosure the material that would genuinely threaten security. He might not have known what his superiors knew about that, but we can see in his selective disclosure an educated and trained eye on what was actually too much. That was part of his training. The IRS persecution of certain political groups was not news; it’s been going on for decades. It was known for decades, if people bothered to pay attention. It’s been in plain sight the whole time. Snowden and the NSA Powerpoint slides? Controlled release to distract, because we were told as much a long time ago.

Snowden and his ilk are professional liars; deception is the whole job. Maybe Obama is being thrown under the bus. He was always an empty suit, a man for sale to the highest bidder and slimy enough he wouldn’t even stay bought. His predecessor was too stupid to run a business even with a masters degree. And so on back down the line. All of them had handlers, often from competing teams, and the only thing they all have in common is some invisible wavy line marking what they won’t reveal about government inner workings. You don’t betray your meal ticket, but you might betray some of the food handlers. Somebody in the system is still sponsoring Snowden and helped select just what, or what version, of information he would leak.

Never believe any leak was unplanned. Things like that make a good bargaining chip for infiltration. Credibility with your espionage target is critical. Somebody in the system, with whatever agenda they might have, sponsored this whole charade and we still don’t know the worst of it, nor will we ever.

What difference does it make to a committed Christian Mystic? Recognize a distraction for what it is. Don’t be suckered into lending moral support to a false cause. Chances are Manning is the real deal, but being used as yet another propaganda tool. The system was waiting for someone like him to come along for just this purpose. Those revelations of IRS persecution? The IRS itself is a fraud, never legally ratified in the first place, but a fact of life under which all Americans live. It’s a private agency with government powers. DHS and tons of bullets ordered? That’s more complicated, serving multiple agendas. It really boosts the profits for the big arms dealers and their investors, and exposes the erstwhile patriots willing to resist. Upper level bureaucrats know they don’t have the manpower to do anything the screamers fear they might do.

One of the biggest lies of all — Modern Israel — is really little more than a huge distraction to keep genuine faith and morality off track.

Most Americans aren’t cynical enough. They care too much about what doesn’t matter and are careless about things to do matter.

Untangling Activist Logic

Activist logic does not even qualify as decent Aristotelian logic.

In order to reject the primacy of Aristotelian epistemology, I first had to understand it to some degree. This didn’t come as some dreamy longing for swords and sorcery. It came from genuine scholarship, though I’ll be the first to admit it’s not my scholarship, but that of others who have been ignored and marginalized. Somehow I managed to get what they were saying and the truth of it consumed me.

Activism assumes a certain power of the people which cannot be proved. Yes, there are apparent victories, but no lasting change. Instead, it’s the oppression that endures and finds another way, while liberty dies from a thousand cuts. What most people foolishly ignore is the hollow core of human decency. It’s there, but it always highly limited to certain contexts.

Glaring and dramatic illustration: Okies are generally nice people. Most folks out here in the semi-rural Eastern Oklahoma County will be decent when things are okay. Some are wild and crazy all the time, but generally decent. Put them under the least bit of pressure and decency fades quickly. Because our area was subject to tornado threats, our household decided to head south out of its path. That meant two-lane rural roads, laid out mostly in a square grid pattern here in Oklahoma. There are enough people and enough cars to pack these quiet rural roads if they all decide to do the obvious at the same time. So we found ourselves in slow moving traffic as we rolled over hill and dale toward some landmark we all knew. While the majority did stay within the common rules of courtesy, you would scarcely believe the huge minority that didn’t. So while we sat in an open parking area that was generally safe for awhile, we were treated to the spectacle of heavy traffic taking both lanes in the same direction and the most incredible panicky impatience that was willing to risk the lives of others to escape.

Prolong the panic past a single night and there would have soon been massive loss of life from crazies, compounded by those who were intent on teaching them a lesson. This is an anecdote to illustrate, not prove, my point. Our Western Civilization is exceedingly fragile. So long as we can expend our emotional energy on virtual threats in games and movies, or in wars in other places, things will be okay here at home. But the underlying brutality is not tamed, only diverted. This reflects the vast layer of Germanic social mythology lying over our Greco-Roman heritage — this is the fundamental nature of the Enlightenment, and the West will never progress any farther than that. We are not exactly Aristotelian. We still have this massive element of brutality and call it something else as justification for not examining it. The willingness to harm others as the means to changing things we don’t like is the core of activism. That we somehow convince ourselves our activist goals reflect the will of some god or another changes nothing. It’s still doing bad things in pursuit of what we imagine is good. It’s the same instinct for oppression but from the opposition parties.

Meanwhile, the pacifist veneer peels off quickly when it comes to things people really want. Doctrinaire pacifists are rare because they are killed off when things get genuinely hairy. Wise pacifists aren’t involved in the first place. They realize peace cannot be gained by activism, because humanity cannot ever be at peace. Only in the wildest frothy imaginations of idiots could we find the notion mankind is inherently peaceful. Violence is fundamental to the nature of the Fall. Humans evolve physically, and our intellectual wiring changes with both short and long term environmental influences, but intellect cannot possibly rise above a certain point. It cannot discern ultimate reality. And without a very solid background in mysticism, it cannot even discern the facts, never mind fundamental reality.

Activism is a manifestation a particular cultural mythology. You cannot sustain the energy level necessary to keep evil in a box. Static constraints are a waste of time; you cannot outsmart the genius of evil by designing barriers. There is no foolproof plan. The potential is there for containing evil, but it requires an opposing watchful force at least equal to the threat. The moral passion is not strong enough to keep it up. Logic and human longing are not sufficient. Oppression is fundamental to our human nature; it requires no particular effort. Activism against oppression is contrary to our nature. All the changes you think you can gain are illusory. We are still left with that damned meanness that pervades the human race and guarantees the same flood of sewage will go somewhere regardless of your levies to contain it. Talk the Army Corps of Engineers about the futility of flood mitigation; we’ve seen it right here in my county. No matter how far out you plan your cycle (“100 year flood levels”), that time eventually comes around and the levies are topped or breached. Activism is limited to tactical measures and temporary shifts.

Do you worry what your children will live with? Too bad; you can’t do much more than help them learn what you learned. Constrain them too tightly and your social edifice will crumble for being too ambitious. Constrain them not at all and they will turn on you for lack of interest. As for some vague notion of building a society in which they can prosper: You cannot possibly make that much difference. Peace, love and understanding cannot be imposed or it ceases being peace, love and understanding. It requires a voluntary embrace, a conscious choice which cannot be sold to more than a tiny minority at any given time. You can have it in yourself and demonstrate it. It’s a weak contagion against a strong immunization.

The logic of Paul’s admonition to be submissive to human government does not demand loving the evil that governments inevitably do, nor does it require imbuing those governments with a false holiness. Nothing in Scripture makes human government sacred; you have to misread it on purpose to get that idea. Ordained by God is one thing; sacred is another. Government is a part of the punishment of the Fall. Besides which, not a single government in the world today obeys God’s ordinance about structure and conduct. Thus, He works with them as they are, as slaves who never understand and require constant force just to stay in place. It requires a peculiarly damned foolishness to leap from “God requires we obey” to “God says it’s a good and holy thing.”

Paul’s logic is based on the assumption you can’t accomplish much by resisting, because the rest of the Bible makes it painfully obvious God is in control of human politics. His plans are indicated in parabolic language, but never actually explained because they are above human intellect. We are told to trust Him and play along, giving our time and attention to the things He has placed in our hands. Human politics is not in our hands. Such affairs run according to His dictates and He is not accountable to us; we are accountable to Him. We should expect no lasting or significant influence on human affairs. Rather, we focus on glorifying God, even at the cost of seeing our children taken from us and enslaved to unconscionable evil. Trust God for their lives and obey the mandate to stay focused on His glory. In other words, flee when you can, resist when you know His Spirit demands it of you, but don’t actually expect anything to change. Trust Him for the outcome.

It is a peculiarly damned Western myth that fires our hyper-protective instinct regarding our progeny; we go way too far in demanding control and prescribing outcomes. His Word admonishes us to raise them with a grip much more limited than the evil mythology of our times implies. We pull parenting epigrams out of context, completely missing the cultural and intellectual atmosphere behind them. We bring to the Bible a broad collection of false dichotomies and completely miss the point. We end up striving against God by not trusting Him to take care of our kids for us, particularly in those things He says are His concerns, not ours.

Teach your kids the moral laws of God first by living them. Those moral laws include a requirement we be otherworldly, not activist. Then, having demonstrated them, we teach them orally. Against the vast ocean of falsehood we face today, that’s a pretty big job. Still, at some point your spirit recognizes you can’t steer the outcome, neither for your children nor the rest of society. Just because you built your homes in Tornado Alley during the quiet part of the cycle is no reason to blame God when the storms come around and rip your house and children to shreds. It’s your fault.

Do you blame God for slaughtering the Egyptian children during the Passover, the final grand affliction of the Ten Plagues? No, we blame the Egyptian parents for rejecting God’s message. That mess was not necessary. It was human intransigence against the patient and merciful hand of God. Don’t be like them, demanding God conform to your expectations when He has offered plenty of warning it will not be that way. Nor should you be like the Pharisees, clinging to a false God of your intellectual reasoning. God is hardly constrained by Aristotle’s delusions.

Activism is the ultimate expression of human folly.

From a Sincere and Honest Kook

I am blessed. Think about it: With all this pervasive surveillance and electronic snooping, I am guaranteed all my prophetic warnings against the US government are surely noticed, archived and waiting for the time when God proves His Word lives in me.

Not that it will do them any good, and I seriously doubt it will make my human existence any better. That was never the objective. The objective is to cling to the truth of God and let it take my human life where it will. I’ll be glad when it’s all over and I get to go Home to Heaven, but until then, this is my mission.

I’m not like the lawyers’ Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas (Westboro). I reject their Western epistemology. Some few things they say are accurate, but not true, and their actions represent nothing in Scripture. They don’t understand the Hebrew point of view, so they don’t understand the Bible. My message is totally different.

Indeed, the sin of the Westboro Phelps crew is the quintessential sin of the West in general, and America in particular. They are an expression of what’s wrong with America, the same fundamental error with a different flavoring, all growing from the same root. America has rejected God’s Word as He gave it, and when they bother referring to it all, they get it desperately wrong because they reject the intellectual foundation God used to build His revelation. The West is burning with hatred for God’s truth.

So today we have sent our hatred abroad in the form of our troops in every sector of planet. Where we do not have them already, we are determined to destroy whatever keeps them out. We are currently sending money and weapons into Syria, stirring up fake Muslims to insane hatred that they would just as gladly bring to our shores. Give them time. Right now, they are ripping up Assad’s government. On my human side, I suspect Assad will fall, but only as a symbol. I seriously doubt the rebels will actually win much, and will eventually lose.

We did not win in Iraq; we simply destroyed what we built and gave the plutocrats another masked opportunity to raid the US economy in the process. We’ve pretty much left it to the residents to fight it out with terribly destroyed infrastructure. This does have something to do with the natural disasters striking the US; God is returning our destruction on our own heads and He’s just getting started.

We didn’t win in Afghanistan. Without our constant presence and occupation, we cannot even pretend to hold any ground there. As soon as we back out the least bit, our presumed enemy will simply recover with a vengeance. We have the money and the training, but they have everything else we lack, which is an awful lot. They have God on their side by default, because we are surely more evil in His sight. Yes, they are far closer to obeying His Laws.

So we won’t be able to accomplish much in Syria beyond an attempt to destroy what little good they have. They’ll reorganize and rebuild despite us, and we won’t be able to prevent it. But when we attack Iran, God will use the occasion to finish us off. This is from God, a prophetic warning: We will lose in battle against Iran. God Himself will fight for their side. He won’t even bother to explain why, because it will be too late.

Our propaganda excuses for all this hate are pretty thin; everyone knows it has to do with a huge move by plutocrats, the shadow government that actually runs things here and in a lot of other countries. That would include Israel. No, Israel does not write US policy, despite how it appears. Our policy is written by the same demons who write theirs, working through the same select group of human agents. These are the folks whom we have all elected to obey simply by refusing to understand things well enough to recognize the evil they have planned. We have closed our eyes and bought the lesser lies because it came wrapped in a promise of material and creature comfort.

We trade holiness and divine guidance for material prosperity, so we shall have neither. We have purchased the spilling of vast oceans of innocent blood and even the destruction of tornadoes are our own fault. But in righteousness we will attempt to reach out in kindness to recover what is left for our own. That’s one of our few virtues. Too bad we can’t treat the rest of the world that way; instead, we send our hatred wrapped up in ever-changing uniforms and weapons systems.

The really cool part is I know for a certainty the US government bureaucrats will read this and analyze it and at least a few folks guilty of keeping this wall of propaganda in place to obscure the truth will have no excuse when God puts His hands of wrath on their lives.

Disturbing Christian Links

I make no secret of rejecting much of what comes packaged under the label of “Western Christianity.”

Most of the time I confine my blather to fundamentals. I talk about the intellectual frame of reference and historical events that steered the narrative of Church History. For example, most of you are likely aware of how desperately Constantine tried to hijack the Christian religion for his political purposes. For the most part, he succeeded. I’m hardly the only Christian who believes the true gospel message was nearly buried more than once in the past by political exigencies.

It has happened again here in the US. I can’t pinpoint where it started, and there is no one central figure who can carry the blame just yet. We know Constantine hardly labored alone in his demented vision, but it seems he was the pivotal person in his era. We don’t seem to have one right now. Instead, we have a long list of names all entangled in a long list of political agencies and religious denominations. I don’t have room to list them all, but just chasing down the list of folks who took money from Reverend Moon, often through his CIA lieutenants, would be shocking enough. You would be shocked by the people who fawned over him. It’s the same people who are considered the standard bearers in modern evangelical Christianity.

Look folks, even the highly revered Billy Graham was highly compromised, so I am not interested in your defense of those people. Don’t tell me how the millions of people “he brought to Christ” somehow covers his awful sins in the background. The Bible bluntly says those millions of converts, if genuine, would have come to Christ one way or another. God doesn’t need any human agent for His divine work. It’s that old heresy of Synergism, the blasphemous reduction of the divine to something less. God uses whom He likes, but He stoutly asserted He often used the worst. And until you realize Satan still serves His purposes, you’ll never comprehend even what little He has revealed to us.

No, I make no pretense of being better than any of them, but I don’t do what they do. I don’t confuse my God with any political agenda. I’m not going to lay the blame at all one source, because it’s never that simple. Yes, it does involve the heresy that Modern Israel somehow reflects God’s prophetic plans for humanity, but it’s much, much more. I look back with revulsion on that time in my life when I was held captive by that lie. But this issue is not so focused, except when you realize the whole purpose is to destroy the power of the gospel message. The people most loudly claiming His power are those most guilty of perverting it.

And no one has to tell me how this puts me out on the fringe. Yes, I belong to the Lunatic Fringe of Christian faith. I make no effort to temper and spin my message to appeal to any particular audience. Nor do I scream and accuse everyone of knowingly engaging falsehood and serving the Devil. The majority of those in Western Christianity are dupes. I have no idea what to make of folks like Pat Robertson, whether he’s just an idiot they prop up to defame the gospel or whether he actively cooperates, but I do know his Operation Blessing was a CIA front, as was World Vision and a slew of other Christian relief agencies. If you want footnotes, you can find them with any search engine.

It’s hard to gather any kind of resources without some infiltration from evil powers these days. If it’s big enough to be noticed, the spies will own it or destroy it. So I stay small and virtually unknown. God is my publicist and He’s the one who makes my message plausible to whomever pays attention. Don’t put any trust in anything that gets air-time. Don’t trust me just because I’m small. I can offer criteria for rejection only as a counter to their lying promotion. Bigger is not better, nor is smaller. Don’t listen to me; listen to your own soul. I don’t trust myself that much, always failing my own promises.

You have to look inside your own soul and find your own way.

Of Truth and Angels 8

“I think it’s time to remove this hair coloring,” Preston suggested as they started filling the tub.

He looked at the small on-demand water heater common in most of Europe. “This has to be the smallest one they could find.” They had to turn down the flow a bit or it passed through too quickly to be warmed much. Preston decided it was also time for another hair cropping. Angie was glad to help, having already declared a preference for the shorter look on Preston.

They rolled into the hammock that night looking very much like their passport photos again.

The work of processing the images and videos had never been so hard, and with only one computer at that. They reviewed their results again the next morning. Aside from Gordy, they picked out about three dozen people they felt were most likely candidates for attention from the association. Preston loaded a selection of images on his cellphone for quick reference, using humorous pseudonyms for those they couldn’t actually place with a name.

On a hunch, Preston suggested that they pre-pack their stuff. Then they put on hats and left their hideaway north bound. A narrow track eventually brought them onto a slender paved road leading into a village. They passed through along the main route eastward. On the eastern end of the village stood a very old monument that served as the bus stop where they caught a ride down into the northern end of Dinant. Only as they left did they find a sign pointing back into the village with a name: Sommière.

They had donned for the day their hiking gear and broad-brimmed hats against the summer sun. With sunglasses, they both appeared completely different from the previous day, aside from their relative sizes. The bus turned right onto the main route and chugged up a slight incline, stopping to let them off next to a large parking area. At one end was a low, narrow arched passage under the railroad tracks, letting them onto a paved walking path along the river bank. At the water gate they took the walking bridge across and found themselves almost in front of the grocery shop. They wandered over to where the tourists clustered on the north end of a large parking area just off the river bank.

A large tree offered shade at the entrance to a tiny round building. Through the windows, it looked like a library or information booth. Angie and Preston rested a few minutes, discussing their plans for the day.

“What would you bet they moved the limo parking for today?” Preston offered.

“You would win,” Angie countered.

There were far more boats than usual, including several with police markings.

“Maybe we can squeeze into the crowds on the bridge again,” she suggested.

They eventually wandered over to a sandwich deli and got some ham and egg sandwiches with coffee to go. They strolled slowly back toward the walking bridge over the canal lock, eating as they went. Both times across, the lock was pretty busy, as was the pedestrian traffic, so catching the narrow walkway over one gate or another took some patience. They strode slowly along the quayside toward the main bridge in Dinant. They engaged in plenty of lallygagging and acting like tourists.

Space on the main bridge was at a premium. Eventually, Preston handed Angie the better camera and hoisted her up on his shoulders. This worked well enough, giving her a better line of sight over the crowd. The pleasure boats had already tied up just south of the bridge. One was obviously the center of all the attention, very fancy with multiple decks. The other was slightly less opulent, but receiving no less attention. It was this second one Angie focused on the most, while Preston scanned for interesting photographers.

This time the limos were closer together, in three convoys with the usual police motorcycle escorts. With all the boats crowding the water, there wasn’t all that much water visible to the casual observer. Preston had no trouble recognizing Gordy. When he realized Gordy had not boarded with the rest of everyone’s entourage, it made him a little nervous. It was the final excuse he needed to bring Angie down and head west off the bridge. Preston glanced back a few times but lost sight of Gordy, despite the man’s height.

They went back the way they had come and sat on the west bank itself for awhile, feet hanging down on a grassy slope that dropped quickly to the water. They reviewed the footage and still shots for quite some time, matching faces to their previous list. Preston made note of a few new faces. He decided to upload everything via his cellphone broadband connection.

When it appeared things had settled back to a less intense pitch on the other side of the river, they wandered back over the bridge. There were a couple of cafes featuring live music, so they tried to pass the time. They ate some lunch and wandered around a bit, never getting too far from the open plaza near the bridge. As it got warmer, they shed the outer shirts, exposing matching gray tank tops underneath. They rolled up the t-shirts and stuffed them in their fanny packs.

Eventually some of the smaller boats began to return. Cameramen were disembarking and vying for good shots to catch the barges approaching from upriver. The police boats cleared some space against the quay, while the officers on the shore started blocking traffic. It seemed the conferees were going to disembark and walk up the street to the Hall of Justice again.

Meanwhile, the entourage boat edged against the quay first and tied up. The well-dressed occupants got off quickly and swarmed the quay where the fancier boat approached. Preston decided to tether his camera this time and stream the footage live to their upload link. It was downright hot, so the crowd wasn’t quite as thick this time. Preston was hoping he and Angie could get some footage with both cameras without bringing attention to themselves by her riding his shoulders again. They managed to get some very good line of sight on the entourage.

Once the VIPs disappeared down the gauntlet toward the Hall of Justice, and the supporting staff thinned out, Preston walked over to the last of the huge stone flowerpots sitting on the walkway at the east end of the bridge, on the northern side. He was holding the camera down where they both could see it. They were discussing quietly who was visible.

Suddenly Angie was shoved roughly aside, off the walkway and into the street, where she fell on one knee, the other leg splayed out to catch her from going face down.

Christian Political Propaganda

I really do wish I could remember all the details.

At the time I was one of them, and it never occurred to me to wonder if I was being manipulated. They considered me talented enough to have potential in their agenda. I was just a young preacher boy, fresh out of college. It started with my college days, when I was involved in the fundamentalist resurgence in the 1970s. I didn’t know the facts of what had happened before I came along, but this whole thing goes back before my parents were born. Still, during my own lifetime came the changes that the broader audience of sheeple never noticed.

It’s not exactly the same people, but it’s a broad overlap. The names involved in the church and denominational politics of the fight over Bible inerrancy are largely the same people with a very ugly political agenda. Most of them are frankly true believers to this day. That does not absolve them from the lies they promoted, but it does make them fools instead of simply evil. I was captivated by the rhetoric at the time. One of my best friends was an acolyte and drew me into it. Somewhere along the way, I woke up, but I don’t think he did. He stopped responding to my letters, so I’m not sure. Nothing is as simple as it appears, especially when the demons run all through the churches. Those Bible inerrancy people are part of the Necon agenda.

The conspiracy part is the manipulation by Neocons, taking advantage of true believers without telling them the whole cynical story. Leo Strauss openly taught that using people’s religious fervor was a good and valid way to herd them into agendas against their own interests. The inerrancy debates were bundled with the Neocon agenda; it’s all the same people.

It would take several books to address the whole thing, and some have already tried. The thread I’m teasing out today is one representative issue: Muslim terrorism. With all seriousness, I assure you that there would be no such thing were it not for the work of the Necons and Christian fundamentalists. Your American tax dollars and church donations went to fund all the work that created a large Muslim fundamentalist population that didn’t exist beforehand. In other words, these people created the enemy they vilify most. It’s not as the BBC alleges in their brief series exposing how torture turned a true Muslim believer into an activist. No, the CIA and similar agencies were working both sides, trying to stir up the Muslims from inside the religion while oppressing them without mercy from the outside to make them even more reactionary.

Surely you know that nothing unifies true believers like oppression? Even the Bible notices how that works. The difference is the Bible bluntly says activism is not a godly response. Try getting any modern day Fundie to admit that. Their inerrant Bible isn’t allowed to tell them to stay out of politics.

To my everlasting shame, I was an active part of all this up through the early 1990s. At some point, though, the seeds of truth planted by just a select handful of people from my preacherboy days bore fruit. No, it wasn’t the Neo-orthodox or Christian Liberal folks. They are simply the controlled opposition, keeping the battle away from the real objective. The people whose words came back to haunt me time and time again were not in either the Fundie or Liberal camps. Imperfect they were, no doubt, sharing their struggle to find the solid rock of truth on which to stand.

Contrast that to the utter false humility of the demigods of Neocon Christianity. They had poor fools like me believing they were God’s men, like Moses and Joshua. Behind their cloaks of probity, they were more like Balaam, Jannes and Jambres. I was so enthralled by their apparent greatness, so utterly thrilled by their small notes of attention directed my way, I never noticed the utter corruption they hid. As I said, there were plenty of humble true believers near the top. But a few of them betrayed a dark side you couldn’t simply write off as ordinary human frailty. They were hideously corrupt, all about the money and power. When I was permitted to read some of the background documents that revealed the utter cynicism of abusing the trust of the sheeple, I never noticed at the time how abusive it really was.

I don’t have those papers any more, those books and so forth. All I have is the damning memories of having been directly involved in something so dirty. I don’t keep track of them any more, because they don’t really matter. But I assure you some people involved in the leadership of the likes of CUFI know they are lying. Maybe they’ve convinced themselves it’s all necessary in service to God, but they serve the wrong god. So while I don’t name names, it’s not hard for anyone who really intends to walk in truth to figure out what matters most is not the people, but the message.

I’m just a messenger.

Mythical Military

As you may know, the heroic image is baloney.

I went through Army Basic Training twice. On top of that, I spent several years working in a whole division of drill sergeants. It was an Army Reserve unit. The entire division was devoted to the mission of setting up and running a Basic Training base should the nation mobilize for war honestly. I am very well acquainted with everything that goes into the very fundamental design of Army training specifically, and am acquainted with the training of the other branches.

Everyone knows it arises from our adoption of the Prussian military structure and culture.

So why is it the very best of the best are trained to differently? You can find plenty of published information, and it will be confirmed by people who have been through it. Even when they tell you stuff they shouldn’t, the basic story doesn’t change: Elite military training is totally different from the general run of military experience. If you attend an elite school for Special Forces, you are pretty much on your own, in the sense they don’t yell and scream. If you don’t want it, you go home. If your head isn’t on straight, you can’t take it.

That should be a magnificent hint as to what the military leadership thinks of the rest of the folks in uniform.

From the moment you first walk onto the assembly area of your basic training unit, it’s non-stop head games. The drill sergeants are carefully schooled in sadism and humiliation. They somehow imagine this will force some measure of conformity on the whiny brats what show up from God-knows-what social situation. Anyone with an ounce of intelligence recognizes this is not optimal. Yes, most people from the general run of the US population are totally useless for even the honest mission of the military, never mind the foul hateful stuff we actually have our troops doing in the world.

People who leave basic training already know that atmosphere does not reflect what they’ll face in any subsequent military assignment. So they pass through something they know instinctively is pointlessly brutal and dehumanizing and carry that spiteful cynicism with them. The only ones who don’t were decent to begin with, and didn’t need that sort of breaking down of dignity to become useful. Plenty of drill sergeants know it’s all wrong, but if they balk at being cruel and hateful, they get into trouble. A significant number of them didn’t want that assignment in the first place, but were pretty much drafted for it.

No, it’s not fun and not funny unless you are the scum of the earth.

Is it any surprise we have such a big problem with things like rape? I’m surprise how little there is of it, given the vast effort to turn people into abusive sons-of-bitches in the first place. Gleeful abuse is a fundamental necessity to what we have, in the sense that if you take it away, the whole thing would come apart. We’d have to start over from scratch. It’s made worse because genuine heroism in leadership is a ticket out the door, as the entire system prefers the most useless, gutless bean counters and soulless management types it can find. If you wear brass above the rank of captain in the US Army, it is highly probable I will despise you once I get to know you.

A significant number don’t stay for subsequent contracts with the military. That’s the good news. The bad news is our current evil adventures have demanded the command staff implement policies of not letting people go when the contract expires. So the worst are kept in and all sorts of insane measures are put into place to keep them under some semblance of control. It’s not working, as anyone can see.

For all that, I assure you I never felt I accomplished more than I did when wearing that fool’s uniform. That is, the people who did stick around, for whatever misguided reasons and under high manipulation, were responsive to the faith I have borne for many years. It called to them and they wanted all I could give them. It wasn’t the ego-stroking fact the took me seriously; I never took myself seriously. I wasn’t proud of my official accolades, especially when some of the foulest creatures got exactly the same rewards with exactly the same high-sounding words. Pretty bits of color I wore on my dress jacket meant precious little to me. What mattered was the trail of changed hearts I see behind me. Civilians haven’t been half as interested, but when I walked among the folks in uniform, they loved my faith and wanted their own share of it.

That is the part I miss, and I’d love to be among them again, because I already know they would be hungry for what I have.