Lies

If I know that someone lies or deceives, that instantly puts them on the "do not associate" list. Even white lies are wrong and dishonorable.

Now, there may be cases where a person is so bad with language and with limited skill and maybe intelligence, that they lie because they cannot figure out the appropriate response. Kids do this all the time, through no particularly malign spirit, just because they are bad at language or want to avoid making you mad at them or others. They have not yet developed the character to be principled truth-tellers, and that's not really their fault. Other adult people, because of not being good with words or being of limited intelligence, might be in the same boat. Just as violence may be more common with people with low verbal skills who cannot voice their feelings well, lying may also be more common because they literally can't figure out what the right thing to say would be. So they lie.

More commonly, people lie because they are bad at processing interpersonal conflict or have a problem accepting blame or responsibility.

"Where's your homework Billy?" "The dog ate it."

This can indeed be a moral failing, but at least Billy didn't start his day intending to lie to his teacher. He was confronted with a shortcoming of his, and he lied in reaction to that. It was a reactive lie, not a proactive lie.

But if you lie when you truly don't have to, because lying has become just another tool in the toolkit, or you lie for personal advantage, then you have started walking down a dark road that leads to spiritual destruction. Just as bad is deception, even when it is not a technical lie but intended to mislead. We see both lies and deception constantly in advertising, business brochures, news, other media, and sales pitches of all kinds. Intentional lying and deception has become normalized, deception even more so because if you lie in a business deal, you could get sued. If you deceive cleverly, you can be safe even though you twisted reality all around. The functional problem with lying is that you can be caught in a lie. If you just deceive, you cover your ass better.

Our society just in general has zero cultural commitment to not lying or deceiving. "Everyone does it." If people were taught how to respond morally to difficult situations in childhood, even people who are not that bright with language could respond correctly to the temptation to lie. In addition, lying is a sign of bad character. It means you aren't adult enough and your coping skills are too poor to handle truth-telling. You are socially and morally retarded, a child not a man or woman.

Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you. We hardly ever lie for the benefit of others, almost always for the benefit of ourselves at the expense of others. A lie is an assault, against the person lied to, and also against G-d.

G-d hates lies.

Saffron

A Saffron Field

This may not seem in keeping with this blog for me to talk about a spice (this ain't a cooking blog, or Dune for that matter) but bear with me.

Saffron is the world's most expensive spice. Great fields of it are grown, and for every acre 1-2 kilograms of the precious spice are collected. Laboriously, by hand. The whole plant grows just to yield three flower stigmas, three threads. 70,000 crocus flowers are required to collect just one pound of saffron.

What is the purpose of the saffron field? For the owner of it, the answer is obvious: to collect saffron. For the passerby, it is a scene of beauty: fleeting beauty, but beauty nonetheless. If there are such things as saffron pirates (which I bet there are,) the purpose is a quick buck from someone else's labor. For birds, perhaps a place to rest. For the government, a place to collect property taxes from. But none of these other purposes would exist without the farmer's purpose.

It seems to me that Life is rather like that saffron field in a couple senses.  One, if Life has a Purpose with a capital P, that doesn't exclude you from doing other things with life if you want. You are able to do those things, that doesn't mean you escape consequences any more than the saffron pirate might escape consequences, but nothing prevents you from reassigning its purpose to suit yourself. You may look at the saffron field and say it is beautiful and that is its only purpose for you. Not its purpose with a capital P, but it's purpose to you. But its beauty like all things will fade. G-d might be the farmer, but many purposes may arise and fade within that field of existence. None last except G-d's purpose.

And it is perhaps like it in another sense. Once this world, this universe, is done and gone, what will last? After the harvest in the saffron field, the saffron itself remains in the farmer's storehouse. The flowers die, the leaves wither. Snow may cover the ground. What are the threads of saffron in this context? What is left?

Many Jewish scholars say that the Kingdom of the Righteous, The World to Come, will be quite like this world, but without evil. In other words, you'll sleep in a bed, you'll eat apples (or perhaps manna,) there will be skies and clouds and trees. As maybe pleasant as that thought is, I am very skeptical of it.

The Kingdom of the Righteous might be entirely humanly inconceivable. Our sensory apparatus and our human brains may be entirely inadequate for it. What "threads" of us continue then in that realm? Much indeed that is human may not, just as the farmer does not store the petals of the flower or the leaves of the plant in his barn, but only the saffron threads. In this context, many of the saffron plants perhaps had no saffron, so nothing of them continues. As Jesus suggests in multiple passages, there is the wheat and there are the tares, and the wheat is stored and the tares (a kind of weed I guess) are burned. There is the narrow road and the broad road, and few are on the narrow road that leads to the next world. And for those that do continue, some part of them pertaining to the previous world is left behind and only the wheat kernels, or the saffron threads in my parable, continue to the Kingdom. Metamorphosis. Only the part of us that is most valuable to the Farmer continues. The part for which the world exists to begin with.

According to most Christian doctrine, in this case deriving from Greek philosophy, the soul exists from conception. Human life does indeed begin then, but I tend to think the soul does not. Rather, the soul is grown, planted, watered, it is not there to begin with. It is like the saffron plant that must grow its flower and open it and then the valuable part exists. The part for which we exist, for which the world exists.

New Children for G-d.

And what those Children will be like in the after-time, I cannot say, except that I doubt any human mind can conceive of it.

Despair and Faith

Faith is not a thing you believe. It's a thing you do.

I feel it all too often, especially at night when my energy is at low ebb, but sometimes from the start of the day too. The sour black taste of despair.

There is no shortage of things to despair about. There wasn't any shortage before, before the deaths and the looming economic conflagration that will no doubt cause death or great suffering to so many. So many. Personally I am relatively unaffected by the virus, except for knowing that I am precisely the kind of person it is most likely to kill. Over sixty, damaged lungs. When the despair is particularly black, I think it would kind of be a relief.

It is not just lately that I have felt that, though. There were a number of times in my life when I went to bed praying I would not wake up. I am not saying this so you will pity me, I am saying it so you will understand the realness of what I am saying.

It is not even necessarily adverse circumstances in my own life that is the cause, though as I grow older it can be harder and harder to feel good, to feel strong. Granted, if I always felt strong and able, the other things would be easier to bear up under. But usually if I bear up first, then I will feel strong.

But the feeling that is with me most consistently is the feeling that the world itself is a dark, malign place. I mean, fuck that, I KNOW that it is. We live in a world where people take their pleasure and sometimes their survival at the expense of the suffering of other people or other creatures or even that person their own selves. How many eat to bury their pain or take drugs to bury it, or engage in cruelty or sexual immorality or dark sickness to bury it? And when they do that it is their own selves they prey upon. In addition to others.

We are living in a world we are destroying. We bunch up together in city cockroach towers like some sort of lab rat experiment and damage each other and prey on each other's weakness. Lies and liars are like the sand of the shore, beyond number.

Love your neighbor as you do yourself. How alien that is, to this world.

When people send me mail trying to get me to buy some come-on bullshit I neither need nor want, they want to make me the food and themselves the eater. It may be money not flesh they want, but the principle is the same. Is it not my flesh and blood if I worked for it? Expended some of my few years of life to earn it? It is my blood they want, in fact. Economic vampires.

It's not just humans, we are the mutant offspring of the natural world, and nature is extremely vicious. In a sense, we just did nature better than any of the other monsters on this planet, we progressed without balance, and so now we can dominate all life. Congratulations, Homo Sapiens, you won the three billion year long asshole contest on the planet Earth. You get the prize.

I want to set this stage of despair for you, because if you don't understand this part fully, you are in danger of practicing pollyannaism, not faith. Blind unreasoning optimism, not faith. I see this all too often.

Faith can only become what it truly is when you  UNDERSTAND  the darkness. Faith does not live where you are standing on the deck of the Titanic and believe yourself to be standing in a sunny green meadow. Faith only lives where you see the icy water coming up, claiming the lives of the poor struggling souls slipping into the sea. Faith is only faith in the face of darkness.

Do not succumb to the darkness, but know it.

What does this darkness have to do with faith? We often think of faith as being synonymous with belief, but it's not. Faith at core is an action, not a thought, not a belief. Thoughts and actions may go into it, may prepare the ground for it, but where the rubber actually meets the road is in courageous action in the face of darkness, in the face of limitation, in the face of despair or even death.

In this sense Yoda was right. Do, or do not. There is no try.

Or in this case: Do, or do not. There is no belief.

If I were to try to proceed logically in the face of this overwhelming darkness, how could I even proceed to do that? Like Luke trying to lift the X-wing from the swamp mud: there is no way from here to there. Logically what I should do is try to score a whole lot of heroin so I can try to erase myself chemically from this existence.

Or like Peter stepping out of the boat onto the sea: you do know you will fall straight through that shit, right? You can't walk on water. He could try all day long, he is never going to believe that he can walk on liquid water. That's crazy.

What he can do is say, "that IS water, it IS liquid, and I am going to step on it anyway."

What I find is this: the only way I can extricate myself from the blackness is not to think or believe that G-d will deliver me from it. The only way I can extricate myself from it is to act faith. I throw myself out there and pray that G-d will catch me as I fall.

I do, not believe. You cannot truly believe your way to faith. You can only act your way to faith. I don't mean act like in a play. I mean, He tells you to step out on the water, you step. You may wind up neck deep, or you may be dancing on the wavelets, but you step regardless. And you can never think your way into that step. You cannot believe your way into it. Because if you trust the evidence of your eyes and mind, there is nothing out there but the cold depths.

It is a matter of pure raw trust in Him expressed in action, and nothing else.

And there has never been a time in my memory when I did this (and was following His will) and He was not faithful. He is always faithful, I am the one who has the problem.

I woke up this morning pretty miserable and a bit pissed off that I cannot regulate my sleep very well. I woke up at 11 after a restless night and I have a lot to do just in general these days, so after coffee that's half the day gone. And I have been feeling kind of grungy lately. Nothing specific, just overall bleh.

But I was like, "whatever, lets just go. I can't control how I sleep, apparently, but I am going to give the rest of the day my best shot." And you know, before long I was feeling pretty good and even blessed. I could have turned around and gone back to bed, in which case I would have missed the blessing.

Don't wait to feel good before you act. Do not wait to defeat despair before you act. Act, as long as you are acting according to G-d's will, and you will draw the strength you need in acting. Faith is not what you believe, it is what you do. 

Father

For the first time today, while I was praying, the name Father seemed too small. You are more than any father could be to me. You are everything to me.

***

Usually when I do these blog posts, I have a theme or something specific on my mind. This one might be a bit more rambling.

My mind seems to be coalescing on an image of the folly of human nature. I am using the word folly as sort of a shorthand for common but diseased frames of reference. Religious people tend to talk about X or Y sin, but sins devolve from a worldview, an attitude of soul. If your spirit was not deviated, corrupted, your behavior would not be.

Folly is that worldview, and everything, from adultery to greed to murder to lying is merely the fruit that falls from that tree. I have gotten to the point where I can almost smell the folly, and it makes me physically nauseous. Yet am I always that different? Perhaps I am only allergic to forms of folly that I have personally overcome, not by a long shot the whole thing. What does transcending that folly really mean? Can humans on this earth ever really transcend folly?

I read a story about a woman who compromised her morals for cash. In the end she quit that job, but I feel like she didn't really change. The worldview that made her take that shady job hasn't ended, only that particular job has. If someone really plops down a large enough wad of cash, would we all be whores? Would I be a whore? Does everyone have a price?

I think I know the answer for most people: if someone drops a huge wad of cash in front of you for a job that is morally unpleasant but with limited personal ramifications (you won't wind up with a 20 year jail sentence,) then it is simply a matter of how much money is involved. Not whether.

But money is not the only possible currency of folly, and it may be that I am more vulnerable to other lures. I do truly believe that even if someone offered me $10,000 a day to work an easy job at an abortion clinic, I would not do it. I know I would never be able to live with myself after. What benefit is it to gain the whole world and lose your soul?

But I might be more easily led to compromise if the payoff is other things. Particularly if the compromise to my principles involved is small. In fact I know that if the deviation from the better way is small enough, I will compromise. Perhaps I am not a whore to evil, but under certain circumstances I am willing to give it a lap dance. Or at least a wink.

What does a life on this Earth without folly even look like? Is it possible? If it is possible or even asymptotically approachable, I want it.

I don't want it to save my soul, I know that the Lord is forgiving. I also know that all fall short. I want it because it is good, because the Lord is the opposite of this folly.

I crave the goodness of the Lord my G-d like a heroin addict craves the junk. I see folly everywhere and it makes me want to puke, but I am not completely immune. What does completely immune look like?

I think from the point of view of someone who only understands folly, it is humanly inconceivable. "You turned down that money? That was a great job offer. You're not spiritual, you're stupid." In fact I know it is inconceivable, because it operates on the basis of what is invisible. You look at a person, and you think they are operating in the same world you are, but they're not. They are operating in the Kingdom of G-d and you are operating in the human world. The world of folly. From the viewpoint of a worldly human, the one freed from folly might look like a borderline bum, a person of no importance. Low status. Because status operates in the human world of folly, and people functioning on the basis of folly want it. They might seem simple-minded.

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.

~Isaiah 53:2-3

But the truth is that I am not that person yet. I keep dipping my toe into the filth, even while hating it and hating myself for doing it. Media is my downfall, I look at the news pretty much every day even though I understand that it is trash. I watch Youtube and movies. I am deathly adverse to boredom. I crave intellectual stimulation, even if what I am consuming is trash. I engage in political debates even though I know it is futile, that politics are futile. Politics is like spectator sports except with slightly more intellectual furniture than NFL football. I have no more ability to affect political outcomes than I do to change the outcome of an NFL playoff. It is folly. But I still do it.

But I do see that it is folly. And seeing it, perhaps I will do better.

Shut Down

Worshipers were arrested for worshiping in a synagogue (practicing social distancing.) People have been arrested at churches. On the one hand, I don't believe that under the Constitution the government has any right to do that. The people fined or arrested should take it to the Supreme Court.

On the other hand though, perhaps this crisis will lead people to question what their particular beliefs are about. Devout Catholics for example approach Communion with extreme reverence and being denied it is a serious issue to them. How does that make one lick of sense? Is G-d limited in space and time? Is G-d incapable of rendering the same blessing to you without little white wafers and fermented grape juice? Is the Priest your sole connection to the divine, and you are cut off unless he pushes white wafers and grape juice into you?

And how is it that we NEED to be in some sort of community to legitimize our relationship to G-d? Sure, in Christianity the special nature of meeting G-d in groups is explicitly mentioned. "Wherever two or more are gathered." And building the bonds of community is a good thing, if they are built right.

So let me ask you: who was with Elijah when he was running from Jezebel's minions and despaired of life? No one but G-d. Who was with the prisoner of faith when he sat and stank and cried in a prison, whether in the old Soviet Union or North Korea or any of the other places? No one but G-d. Who was with Moses when he walked onto the mountain that was said to be death to any other but the one He had chosen? No one but G-d. He walked alone with G-d.

So whatever it is that you feel you must do in churches and synagogues and mosques, clearly that's not actually necessary, is it? It may be desirable, lots of things are desirable. But I am talking about what you need.

Cultural Christianity has a big obsession with "formation" and leaders, and I suppose the apple doesn't fall that far from the tree so probably that was a feature of early Christianity too. In many cases though, this cult of leaders and this squelching of independent thought about G-d in favor of doctrine has been poison. Sure, you have to crawl before you can walk, you can't go around saying that the prophet Ezekiel wore bell bottoms and drank Boone's Farm and have any credibility. Problem is, there is no walking, and sometimes not much good crawling either. Church leaders, like any other kind of leader, have been prone to corruption and deceit. They have very often become wolves not shepherds. No man is my Shepherd.

You don't need church (or synagogue or mosque) to have a relationship with G-d.

What you actually need, is to seek Him truly. Honestly. Completely bare.

I don't have a church. I cannot have a church. As far as Christianity goes, I can't agree to the Nicene Creed so that counts me out. Believing that a man was ever G-d is idolatry. As far as synagogue goes, I cannot take the word of a rabbi as being equivalent to the word of G-d, and they have their own problems with abuse of authority (though honestly not as bad as the Christians.)

I embrace my identity as a non-Jewish lover of YHWH. That is no slight on that people, who I believe were indeed set apart to G-d's service. I'm just not one of them. Mosque, I don't believe Muhammad was a prophet. So I doubt I would be welcome there.

I don't have the luxury of a community; not that I don't want one, just that I don't have one. My walk with G-d is a walk with G-d alone.

This I believe:

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• G-d is ONE. He needed no partners to speak Being into being. He has no parts. He was never a man.
  
• He is not defined by any human limitations, images or even text. His name: I AM. There is relationship, but relationship is not definition. For example, I can love and be friends with a person and even in some sense know them, but I will never define their true existence. It would be deeply wrong for me to try.
  
• The Ten Commandments is the word of G-d for humans. It and the Torah defines US (or our proper condition,) not G-d.
  
• No rabbi, no priest, no pastor, no Imam, can say that his opinions on the Tanakh have equivalent weight to the Tanakh itself. Everyone must pore into the Tanakh for themselves with sincerity and understand it for themselves. If you fail to understand, it is your failing and you are responsible for it. No one can take that responsibility away from you. Why should G-d send more prophets when we haven't done what He has already told us to do! I know that not everyone has the same intellectual capacity, but the Law at heart is simple. If people spent as much time trying to understand it as they do other things in their lives, it would present no problem.
  
• The persistent temptation in human religion is the temptation towards idolatry. Idolatry is fundamentally placing G-d beneath humans by defining Him in a human context. The goal, or A main goal, of a proper relationship with G-d is a mystical communion with Him which is not definable, not limited by a human framework. Human imagery connected to G-d is not divine but idolatry. Jesus on a cross is idolatry, fancy churches and synagogues and mosques are idolatry. You understand nothing about the Tanakh (for Christians the Old Testament) if you do not understand THAT.
  
• G-d has given us Laws which are akin to laws of nature, or more accurately laws of living beings. Just as a good gardener controls the conditions in his garden to make his plants healthier and more productive, G-d has given us his laws so as to make the people of G-d prosper. He has very definite ideas on the subject, it's not a potluck where you can pick whatever you like and leave the rest. It is not accepted on human terms, we accept it as G-d's terms.
  
• Even the Tanakh is only an instrument. It must be read with sincerity towards G-d and with the inner guidance of G-d's spirit or what it says will be interpreted corruptly.

************************************

You find me a group that believes THAT, and maybe I have a fellowship. Until then, I walk with G-d alone.

Plain

There have been certain groups of Christians through history, the Amish, Mennonites, some Quakers and to an extent the Puritans, who have believed in plainness of appearance. That colorful or fine clothing is a sign of unbecoming vanity. Perhaps more importantly they have believed that churches should not have ornamentation, to the extent that they have churches at all. Many such groups met in homes, not churches.

And they have a point. What is the objective, after all, of fine clothes but to promote yourself (potentially promote yourself as a sex object even) and elevate yourself above other men? What is the point of women's makeup, but that? Their objection to such things is not so much biblically based as based on common sense. Presumably the first Israelites didn't have the option of swanky threads and they never got around to having any sort of guidance about it.

The Jewish preachers of Jesus' day often took pride in quality apparel and you could actually make the argument that Jesus did too, based on his shirt that was valuable enough for them to especially note it and valuable enough for Roman soldiers to draw lots for it. You think they wanted scruffy rags off some shepherd's back? I would doubt it, but maybe they weren't paid well. Yes, sometimes evil people were depicted as being in fine clothes in the Bible, as one of the many luxuries of their wealth and power, but overall it was apparently not worthy of note. Jacob's son Joseph was noted as having his "coat of many colors" but this was more of a device to show how Joseph was the "special boy" of the family. A real Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Fine apparel is one of the many things to which the Bible kind of goes, "Meh, who cares? Knock yourself out, fancy boy." As long as there wasn't wool and linen mixed, which apparently was reserved for priestly clothing, nobody much cared. G-d had bigger fish to fry.

Despite this, I'm gonna side with the Plain People. Fine clothes are a vanity. "Look at me, I'm special." While I don't wear a black hat and longcoat without buttons, I have my own uniform that I wear every day. Black or neutral-toned shirt, drab olive or khaki pants, work boots. I dressed up once in recent history, to go to court, because I had to. Otherwise, every day, this is it. I really have better things to do than worry about how I look.

Now to weightier matters: ornamentation in churches.

Before I start in on that, I'd like to comment that there appears to be two completely different schools of thought present in the Torah relative to ritual paraphernalia. One is what you might call the "Egyptian School," represented by the Tabernacle and the golden altar and other golden religious knick-knacks. Despite being a tent, the Tabernacle was a very fancy thing indeed and also decorated with lots of images that might be interpreted as idolatrous. They needed dolphin skins to make it, how the hell did they find and skin dolphins in the desert? It was multilayered and intricately decorated and dyed. It was indeed a forerunner of the Temple in terms of its expense and beauty, and a direct descendant of Egyptian ritual arts.

And then there was the hardcore aniconic school, where you could not even use a tool on the altar or you would defile it. This is represented in Deuteronomy 27:5 and Exodus 20:25. The altar had to be made of earth or unhewn stone, any touch of human artistry or even squaring up the stone would render it unfit, because man's art has touched it.

Well, clearly the altar covered in gold in front of the Tabernacle and the altar of unhewn stone are not the same altar!

There were TWO Judaisms here, as indeed archaeological evidence and the evidence of the Tanakh itself suggests. One version was idolatry- and polytheism-friendly. YHWH was worshiped along with Asherah as consort and probably Baal and others. Descended from the rituals and religion of Egypt and Canaan. Much of the ritual furniture and indeed structure of the Tabernacle itself was taken more or less whole from Egyptian movable battle shrines that would be taken along with Egyptian armies on campaigns. There were images of deity-like beings embroidered in gold on the curtain of the Tabernacle itself! Violating the Second Commandment!

Lets face it, the World's people like a show when they go to church, then as now. So we can surmise that the religion of the masses was this Egyptian-inspired nonsense. Just as the religion of the masses today is full of rock bands and overhead projections and stained glass and finery.

But alongside that was a much more sere faith, represented in the Second Commandment and indeed in Moses' encounter at the Burning Bush. It is that one that I am interested in.

"You shall not make for yourself any graven image,
or any manner of likeness
of what is in the heavens above, or

on the Earth below, or in the waters

under the Earth. You shall not bow

down to them or serve them."

~Exodus 20:4-5


And if you make for Me an altar of stones,
do not build it of hewn stones;
for by wielding your tool upon them
you have profaned them.

~Exodus 20:22

So you see the two Judaisms, or should I say one Judaism and one mixed Egyptian-Canaanite temple culture. In one, you have all these fancy objects and an altar covered in gold and a multi-layered tent with all kinds of images sewn in inside and out.

In the other, if you even square a stone block you have profaned it.

No artistry or craft of Man is acceptable in connection to this religion period. G-d is not an item of furniture in the human sphere. Not a concept for us to pigeonhole. G-d transcends humanity. This is a fundamentally mystical conception, G-d is saying "You will not label, box, draw, categorize or name Me." What name did G-d tell Moses at the Burning Bush?

Just "I Am"

And of course throughout the Tanakh you can see ample evidence of the more pagan-friendly or even outright polytheistic version of pseudo-Judaism. In the midst of this, the believers of the purer harder faith were probably a small minority. That minority might have had their viewpoints more dominantly expressed in the Tanakh, but the Tanakh itself clearly shows that they were constantly brushing up against a polytheism-friendly majority. King Josiah might have been a great champion of this minority, but his own dad sacrificed to pagan deities. Solomon, son of David, sacrificed to pagan deities. In the Judges period, there was all kinds of idolatry. This aniconic, radically antipagan Judaism was a tiny zealous minority among Jews.

Is it not exactly the same today? In the big churches you have your stadium seating and the displays and the rock bands and the preacher dressed like a really rich and tasteful pimp and all kinds of bells and whistles. You have candles and stained glass and brass and fine furniture and, G-d help us, images of Jesus and of saints. It's exactly the same. People say it is for the glory of G-d, but it's not for the glory of G-d. G-d does not need our reflected glory, we need His glory. The fancy cathedrals and the ornate mosques, they may be beautiful works of Man's contrivance, but they have nothing to do with G-d.

Anyone who has read this far probably knows what side I come down on. All this finery, all this ritual, it's just modern paganism. The modern Christian church is pagan down to the bone. Modern Judaism in many respects is not that far behind them. These things, these churches, this stained glass, these golden cups, these fancy buildings - they have nothing to do with G-d. They were built for the glory of MEN.


Be Plain.

Vine And Fig Tree

Everyone will sit under their own vine
and under their own fig tree,
and no one will make them afraid,
for the Lord Almighty has spoken.

~Micah 4:4

This used to be an ideal in America. The whole idea of the New World, the frontier, was that everyone could have their plot and live free from slave-masters and bosses and tyrants and kings, and whether they succeeded or not was dependent on their own hard work and the blessings of G-d.

What has happened to us since then? Do you have your own vine and fig tree? Do you even want one?

Some small business owners may raise their hand and say "I've got one! I've got my own vine and fig tree! Or at least I own my own business, and no one is my boss!"

Well, no you don't have one. As the poor unfortunate restaurant owners and owners of many small businesses have discovered in the current coronavirus crisis, your lives are just as much at the mercy of this disturbed and chaotic human system as the wage slave. Indeed, some wage slaves are doing very well right now, as wage slaves go. Grocery stockers and cashiers and many health care workers have more work than they have time to do. Many small business owners are looking for convenient ledges to jump off of.

The human economic, social and political system is disturbed and wicked. DO NOT rely upon it. How many times do you need to be told to put Babylon and Egypt behind your backs, you double-minded? Make Haste From Babylon. But people love the idols of Babylon and Egypt. They love the fleshpots of the city.

When the Bible refers to vines and fig trees, it means literally food-bearing plants. My favorite modern parable is from the Great Depression. In the Great Depression there was the Dust Bowl, which was a legit environmental catastrophe. On the whole though, in the rest of the country and world, did apples cease to grow on apple trees? Did wheat cease to ripen in the fields? No, there was still plenty of food, for those growing it. The Great Depression was a human catastrophe of human systems.

For those small farmers who managed to avoid that plague of humanity, debt, and owned their own land and house, their children barely knew there WAS a Depression. They still ate. They still had a roof over their heads. Maybe they had to darn their socks not replace them, but they were probably doing that anyway. They had their own vine and fig tree.

Those farmers who were interested in making a killing not a living and who were deep in debt, they lost their farms. They gambled on a productive year and profitable markets, and they lost.

Indeed there was probably some poor unfortunate living in the Great Depression who starved to death literally surrounded by food, because they did not know what it looked like outside of a grocery store. How much more would that be the case today!

You may think that owning your own business, you are no slave and you take orders from no one, but you are wrong. You are not the masters of your destinies. You cannot even live, unless the chaotic corrupt human system makes it possible for you to do so.

Suppose even that you are fabulously wealthy, in cold hard cash sitting in bank deposits. No debt. How much are you the master of your own fate then? Well, more so than the vast majority of people, sure, but what is that money? It's just numbers on a computer. Nothing physical backs it up, there is no land or gold behind it. It's just numbers to which people have ascribed value. Suppose, as happened in Weimar Germany, suddenly it takes a million dollars to buy an egg? What is your money good for then? It was just a castle of smoke that vanished with the wind. Money has no value unless people agree that it does. It is the ultimate pyramid scheme. I get you to give me your real labor or products, and I give you a piece of paper that has numbers on it. It is worth nothing, except what the vast majority of people say it is worth. That is what the value of the U.S. Dollar really is: no more or less than what the world says it is worth. And fortunately people love them some U.S. Dollars right now, but there is no guarantee that they always will.

And of course, when things go to hell as indeed they must, what will the starving crowd be clamoring for? "Save me, FatherMotherGovernment. Save me, synthetic god that men have made. Save me, golden calf." Communism, or statism of some other stripe. Some new slavery, some new serfdom. The end of freedom, even if it comes with full bellies.

No thanks, I already have a FATHER. I already have a G-d, the real One G-d. From His hand I receive all things.

Land, Knowledge, Health, Strength and Faith are the signs of true wealth, but the providence of a merciful G-d is your only true wealth, for how will you get the others without that?

FROM HIS HAND I gain use of all these things: health, strength, knowledge. From His mercy alone.

Sadly, you cannot fully own land because of the satanic property tax. In which you never truly own what you own. Still, you are better off owning land and figuring out how to make your tax payment, than you are paying rent and groceries and utilities without a job or a business if the human system collapses again. Which inevitably it must.

Your own vine and fig tree is the biblical ideal, that you can gain your food and everything you need from your own land, yourself. You are serf to no man, no corporation. You are living on G-d's bounty, not Man's dole or the vagaries of the human system. Thomas Jefferson, not a particularly godly man, said that the backbone of the Republic was the yeoman farmer, the man who was master of his own fate because he owned his own land and grew his own food and thus was beholden to none. He was right.

But who wants their vine and fig tree now? Who would even know what to do with them if they had them? How many truly want their freedom, and how many will gamble with the human system or bend the knee to the synthetic god? Most will do the latter, and thus the false god they made will become stronger and stronger, and freedom fade from the world.

But for me and my house, we serve the Lord.