Surviving Off Off-Grid: Chapter 3 - Something Must Be Done

***Welcome to the Book Project. I am writing the book Surviving Off-Off-Grid. Please read the participation rules HERE. Remember that the work is unedited when posted and is subject to change until final publication***

FIRST GO READ THE INTRODUCTION
THEN GO READ THE FIRST CHAPTER
THEN GO READ CHAPTER 2

Something Must Be Done

These early chapters of the book where I am defining words, explaining concepts, laying the foundations, and removing objections are important to our overall understanding. We’re going to get to the nuts-and-bolts of Off Off-Grid Living pretty soon, but we do want to make sure our foundation is sound.

Contra Mundum

Our lives are rarely defined by the measure of our character taken during the long lulls of quiet and sameness that make up most of our time here on earth, when we do the things we think we ought, and when we keep the patterns we’ve always kept; it might be better if they were. But our character is usually defined, and we are usually remembered by how we act under stress and pressure, during times of crisis, emergency or drastic or dramatic change, or by the detours we choose to make in our lives that take us off the well-worn path of least resistance. It is an interesting truth that extraordinary people are deemed extraordinary by the things that they do which are contrary to what is expected by the world.

Whether it is fair or not, the biggest impact we will ever have on ourselves, our families, our friends, our loved ones, and our culture is when we are put under stress, pressure, or strain, or when we depart from the way everyone else has chosen to act, to be, or to live. Going along with the throng never changed or affected anyone, much less ourselves. Acts of survival or acts that cause us to operate contra mundum (which means against the world), are the acts that are most likely to cause the greatest impact in our lives; and are the acts that are the most likely to impact others.

It is interesting to me that many of the words in our language that have the most powerful imagery associated with them, or that move us to awe, respect, honor, and appreciation, are those words that define how people act when they are acting contrarily to how the world would act. In fact, it is the exclusivity of these words, or their nature of defining some unique quality, that gives them their power. Some of these words that I am talking about here have been abused and overused in our modern world, so I refer you to their original and their most pure meanings. Words like integrity, heroism, bravery, fearlessness, audacity, courage, boldness, are words that historically have been used to define actions or behaviors by people who have operated contrarily to what was expected from them at the time. Think about that for a moment. The words that mark a person or an act as exceptional are words that also identify people or actions as an exception. As an aside, this is why it is so offensive to hear these words (like “hero”) used to describe just about anyone today who does their duty and gets rewarded for it. Today, all soldiers are heroes, all teachers are heroes, all mothers are heroes, all police officers are heroes, etc. The word has lost all meaning because it has been so horribly misused. All of these words once had the foundational inference that some act or deed was exceptional, which means “far beyond or different than what is normal”, “exceeding or surpassing what is common”, or “deviating widely from the norm”.

All of this is designed to make you consider your condition and your path, and to make you think about how you ought to live. It is an interesting irony that a world that forces assimilation, that rewards amalgamation and syncretism, and that preaches a doctrine of mediocrity and consumption, would still use such interesting words to idealize those who refuse to be assimilated, or who act contrarily to the world’s expectations.

Nowhere is our character more on display, and nowhere are we more likely to impact others, than when we are in the Valley of Decision, that place where we are forced to decide on a course of action that will have dramatic effect on ourselves and others. In the crucible of change, or when we are faced with choices that will define our lives to the outside world, that is when true character is made known.

When a person comes to the conclusion that they are in an untenable situation, or that they are living an unsustainable lifestyle, or that their practices and ways are not conducive to the ends that they say they desire for themselves and for their progeny, they enter into the valley of decision where a crucible is presented. A crucible is a vessel used to melt metals and other materials. It is a vessel that will not melt when put under the high temperatures necessary to melt the metals. A crucible is where steel, iron, gold, and silver are refined. As people, we are refined in the crucibles of our lives, those times when heat, pressure, and stress are applied. It is at these times when we feel the most uncomfortable, and it is when we are facing huge challenges, obstacles, or decisions, that we are most susceptible to being refined by the heat of decision. Exceptional people become exceptional in the valley of decision.

It is during these times of stress, crisis, or challenge, when hopefully it becomes obvious that something must be done. Options often only become apparent when our first and easiest option is blocked or goes away. This is true on any scale, from the smallest details of life to the biggest decisions of living. If we have determined that we intend to travel to a certain location (say Dallas) and we head off on our journey, and somewhere along the way we come to the certain conclusion based on irrefutable facts that we have made a great error and that we are traveling away from Dallas, it would only be wise and prudent then to re-chart our course, to make fundamental changes in our direction. Likewise, if we were to start our journey with the correct direction and heading, but through further investigation and information gathering we discover that our chosen route is blocked, impassible, unmanageably dangerous, or impossible to maintain, it would only be wise and prudent to come up with another plan. This is what I mean when I say that something must be done. The crucible often doesn’t appear until our first plan is proven to be a failure. When our current trajectory means absolute and unquestionable failure, we determine that something must be done.

Something – Not just any thing, or nothing, but some particular thing. Some new course of action must be adopted, engaged, and followed. You hear a lot of talk about “change” today, especially in politics. People shout “change” as a mantra, as if change in-and-of itself is valuable and intelligent. When most of the people who shout “change” as a political platform are questioned as to the specifics and the target of the change, they are usually unable to provide any details. When radicals or rebels demand change, they usually get it, and history proves that they are rarely happy with what they receive. They say, “We need change”, but are not willing to say what that change is or what it will be. Change is only good and intelligent if it is specific, objective, achievable, and moral. When we say “Something Must Be Done”, we advocate change, but it is necessary that we also identify our destination, and that we understand the means and methods used to bring about that change, and that we intelligently pursue the specific change we advocate. Something is a particular thing, some correction or right action that will bring about positive change.

Must – The word “must” means “to be obliged or bound to by an imperative requirement.” Must means “to live or to be under a requirement”, “to be compelled” to some particular action. When we find ourselves in an untenable situation, if we are intelligent, engaged, and responsible we come under a compulsion to positive change. We are bound by our responsibilities to our duty, to our selves, to our families, to others to whom we owe service or protection, and most particularly to God, to engage in some change of course that we pray will bring about substantive and positive change.

Be Done – Be attempted and hopefully accomplished. Our methods must have an end. Our endeavors need to have a goal or destination in mind. Understand that when we are obedient and dutiful, results are not completely under our power. Obedience is ours, results belong to God. We are responsible to act properly, to move and act deliberately and according to moral and intelligent means, but this does not mean that ends or purposes become an idol. Obedience is our intent, but it is an intention that works towards a specified end. When we say we plan and hope for substantive change, we ought to be declaring that we have a specific change in mind, and that that change is our focus.

Something Must Be Done

Now let us put this understanding into a real world context. Going back to our example, if we have set off on a course for Dallas, with the intention of arriving at that destination, and if we learn that our course was erroneous, or that situations have caused that course to be no longer maintainable as a means to achieving our destination, then we must intelligently and deliberately re-chart our course. Course changes are often necessary, good, and right. Sometimes we do not learn about our mistakes and errors in planning until after a disaster or calamity has occurred. Other times we may not see things rightly for months or years, and God may let us continue in error for long periods of time. Oftentimes we only see our failures through the window of regret and sorrow. This is the purpose and the cause of repentance when it is given to us. Sometimes we do not know how we have failed until it is brought to our attention through other means. Even then, so long as we are alive and so long as we have survived our ignorance and failure, we are invited to repentance and ought to be exhorted to use our failures as effective tools for change. Just because we have been wrong all along does not mean that we should give up or quit. That we still live means that we still have duties and obligations, and that we still are responsible creatures.

A True Story

As I have mentioned here a few times, it has been a relatively short time since Western society embarked on the great industrial experiment - shorter than you probably imagine. I would like to tell you a story of how our philosophy and how the things that we think and believe, ultimately affect us and our destinations.

When my grandmother was a young girl, her life was not much different than that of little girls 300 years before her. She was born in 1909, 100 years before this book was started. Motorized air flight had become a reality 6 years before her birth, but the thought of flying was still science fiction for most people. Most of you have heard or read about space flight, but it is almost certain that you have never been on a rocket ship. In 1909 there were motorcars, but most people, except those in large eastern cities, had never even seen one, and that was the year Alice Ramsey, a 22-year-old woman from New Jersey drove a motorcar across the whole United States. It took her two months. Only a handful of people had ever made such a journey in a car. By contrast, almost all travel in 1909 in rural Texas where my grandmother lived was by way of horse power, just as it had been around the world for most of the preceding millennia. Alice Ramsey, the intrepid motor car record holder, was the anomaly and the exception in 1909, my grandmother was the rule. Most of my grandmother’s food was grown by her family, and it was cooked in woodstoves and later in gas stoves (after 1922, when they became more common) using fire for heat. She did not have running water, or indoor plumbing. In fact, historically speaking it would not be improper to say that, compared to the lives of many little girls in Rome in the 4^th Century, my grandmother lived a pretty basic, uncomplicated, and simple life. She would have been considered backwards and unsophisticated by the Romans. Life in the early 20^th Century was not remarkably different than life in the 15^th century or even in the 12^th Century, although things were about to change, and very, very rapidly! Rural folks lived lives of relative freedom in America in the first couple of decades of the 20^th Century. They didn’t know much of debt and mortgages and financial instruments. Most people owned their own land, or they worked as tenant farmers on the land of someone who did. Whatever a family needed that they didn’t provide for themselves, they purchased, traded, or bartered for from folks who had what was required. The people were not generally enslaved to the tyranny of markets and of the whims of the consumer economy. Sadly, back then my grandmother and her family did not even know how free they really were, because they had not yet had a glimpse of the slavery that modernism would bring, nor were they aware of all that the new industrialism (new at the time) would cost them. The Industrial Revolution had been going on for more than 100 years in 1909, but in real terms, without electrification or motor vehicles, the Industrial Revolution (it was more of a rebellion than a revolution) really just meant that there were some handier and cheaper gadgets available at the store for the back woods people of the early 1900’s. The change was on its way, but it hadn’t yet really arrived. The most important elements of life and living had not changed for hundreds and hundreds of years.

In order for industrialism to take root and for it to have its intended impact on the lives of rural Americans, an intensive period of colonization and brainwashing was necessary. My grandmother’s generation was even then being taught that they were poor and “backwards” and bereft of all of the "good things in life", and that the only solution to their newly understood condition was to fully embrace the onrushing new Great Society. A couple of generations before her, they lived much the same way that she did, but none of her ancestors would likely have considered themselves to be poor. In the Bible the “poor” were widows, orphans and those who, because of some infirmity or affliction, were forced to beg for food. In other words, if you were not begging bread, you would not have been considered poor by any but the wealthiest and most affluent people in society. No one working the land and with food and raiment considered themselves to be poor. The concept of someone being considered poor just because they did not have the most modern conveniences would have been strange. The word “poor” didn’t come into its modern usage until the Industrial Revolution by way of marketing, merchandising, and consumerism. It was a marketing ploy, a rhetorical button, and it was all about engendering rampant covetousness and the burgeoning consumerist mentality. After the colonization and intense mind training of the Industrial Revolution, everyone who lived without electricity and without the newest modern time-saving conveniences (which is to say everyone who lived exactly like their parents and ancestors had lived) was to be convinced by the advertisers and the marketers of the new order and by the public educators and prophets of the Industrial religion that they were the pitiful poor. According to the new thinking, everyone was poor except the very rich, and everyone was inundated with mass advertising and with cultural and social pressure that they should want more than anything else not to be considered poor. Financial condition was measured solely by how assimilated a person or family had become with the new consumer world, and there was no other more objective way to measure ones spiritual or physical condition. Either you had electricity or you did not. Either you had running water, or you did not. Either you had an automobile and a refrigerator, or you did not. It was unthinkable that someone would not embrace and rush out to purchase these things… unless they were (gasp) poor. The poor were to be pitied and not admired. No one would choose to deny their flesh such “necessary” toys, that is, nobody except someone who is crazy. It was understandable if you did not have the latest gadgets. It meant you were poor. The only possible excuse for simple living was poverty. When the new thinking, however weak and anemic, becomes the common thinking, the mind becomes quick to lock out the old thinking as “impossible” or “not practical or desirable”. An equivalent comparison today is made by looking at modern air-conditioning. Today, air-conditioning is not even considered an option. The new thinking has prevailed, and thousands of years of experience have been thrown into the dustbin. The single comment I receive the most by people who first come upon my philosophy is this, “I don’t think I can live without air-conditioning. I just wouldn’t make it”, which is to say, “I’m more unviable and weaker than 99.9% of the 100 billion souls who lived on this planet before modern air-conditioning was invented! Once the mind is colonized and trained, decolonizing it is a monumental task.

My grandmother’s generation was told that all the new things and ideas that were coming would be good for them, and would free them from hard labor to a comfortable life devoid of stress and turmoil. Now, to flash forward and to risk giving away a bit of the ending, it must be considered here that if these young people at the turn of the 20^th century had been told that they were all going to die virtually penniless and alone in a sterile and cold nursing home (a weigh station for those waiting to pass on), crying out for a modicum of familial care and the simple warmth and care of home, I believe many of these people might have rejected the new way of thinking. Salesmen, however, and the prophets of modernism are not likely to mention the unhappy reality of death when they are trying to sell consumption and corruption. It is bad salesmanship. No, the salesmen of modernism focused on the middle future, and on the happy corporate dreams created by well educated advertising executives. The push-button society was going to free man to pursue intellectual and spiritual endeavors, and would eradicate poverty, inequality, and need. If you have become convinced you are poor, why would you not sign on to a philosophy that had as one of its main tenets the abolition of poverty? Why not grasp and hold a worldview that enthrones the idols of leisure time and endless entertainment? I’m not saying we blame them. They didn’t know any better, although a thorough study of the Bible might have taught them differently.

But by the time of the middle of that same century, modern society, high on the cliffs of the new industrial/consumerism, and flushed with paper money, was the envy of the entire world. This was the precipice (a high and lofty place) from which a people would be thrown into an abyss of mental and physical slavery. By the 1950’s, it seemed as if they promise was within reach. Everyone was rich, and only the willfully ignorant or lazy were poor. The massive carnage and destruction that would come of that society had not yet peeked its head around the door. Families were still relatively intact, and although the culture and morality was headed into serious decline, things still looked pretty good.

The elements of the Industrial Revolution that had the most dramatic impact on lives (electrification, cheap energy, and automobiles) happened during my grandmother’s life, and were as contemporary to her time as the home computer revolution is to my own time. On the day she was born, her father would have never imagined the changes that would happen in the span of her lifetime. He had seen the advent of the motorcar and of the aeroplane. Together they saw the arrival of readily available cheap grid electricity, and the arrival of the tractor and the subsequent death of the horse-powered farm. International manipulations, cultural imperialism, and the continuous reality of foreign wars and entanglements had created legions of colonized foreigners eager for American goods. But the harsh results in real terms would not be evident for decades. In four generations our family (like most families in America) went from a family with the skills to provide almost all of the staples and necessities of life, to one that relied on the world and its corrupt and failing system to provide all of the necessities for them. In four generations, our family went from a family of producers and freemen, to a family of consumers and slaves. In four generations, we went from being a nation of large, strong, patriarchal, nuclear families, to a nation of fractured, broken, and unnatural families and disconnected individuals with no historical understanding or memory. And the change has happened so quickly; it is stunning. I am reminded of the words of a Robert Earl Keen song:

"I wanna know…

Did your father own an automobile or a two horse carriage with wood spoke wheels?

I hear you used to walk to school seven miles a day

Did you ever ride a railroad train?

And the very first time you saw a plane did you think the world had gone insane?

Tell me what you've got to say

I want to know.

(Robert Earl Keen, "I wanna know")

The failure of the industrial experiment is one of the most evident but unspoken and unrecognized truths in the culture. It seems to be a contradiction that some fact can be “evident” but “unrecognized. That is the reality of colonization. It causes us to be blind to ultimate realities, and to deny facts in favor of conditioning. The truth is right in front of anyone who cares to look, but the brain that controls the eyes and the thoughts that process the information from the eyes is a tool that has been programmed by the colonizers. When I think about a once vibrant, stable and strong culture now trapped on the industrial treadmill, drowning in the consumer mentality, enslaved by the insatiable needs of "time-saving" devices, mobilized only in the desire for any new entertainment, any employment, or any mental excitement or wonderment that will anesthetize the mind just long enough to keep it from recognizing its miserable existence - and its eventual end - I cringe and I am saddened.

Back to our story. My grandmother died blind and lonely in a nursing home. I’m sure you didn’t see that coming.

Her last year was a sad exit from a world that had sold her all these lies. This is a story that no one would like to talk about, and that people would love to deny, but it is one that is repeated millions of times a year. It is likely a story that is true even in your own family. It is the third rail of family history; you just don’t touch it or talk about it, because it is the most prevalent truth in the story of growing old in western society today, and of death and dying in the Industrial world.

One of my clearest memories of my grandmother’s final year was of random and frightened phone calls from her in the middle of the night, or throughout the day. My parents had purchased her a phone for her bedside in the nursing home. The phone had extra large buttons so that hopefully, despite her blindness, she could count through and figure out what buttons to push if she needed to talk to us. However, whenever she became frightened, or lonely, or panicked, she would grab the phone and vainly, frantically, and randomly press buttons until somebody would answer. Since most of our numbers had been programmed into the speed dial, you never knew when she would call. And she wasn’t calling me, she was calling anybody. Actually she was calling a concept of family and of comfort and love that she had once known, but that the Industrial society had killed, but she couldn’t have known that that was what she was doing. Usually she was frightened and mumbling to herself, praying that someone, anyone, would come get her and talk to her and maybe take her out of that place. Her mind was mostly gone, sure, but somehow I know she knew what was happening to her.

Her children loved her and wanted the best for her, at least the best of what they knew. They only acted according to the training they had received from the society that had colonized them. Her children were trapped in the modern system and were exhausting themselves on the treadmill of achievement, debt, comfort and status. They didn’t have the time or the energy to care for an old, blind, helpless woman. The desire for stability, advancement, comfort, and purpose-driven progress made it all but impossible for them to be able to care for her at the very end. You could see it on their faces. They wanted to do more, but they couldn’t. They just couldn’t. Their worldview, philosophy, and the reality of the modern world did not allow for it. When the entire concept of survival is based on “going to work” and earning more money, and when the lusts for stuff and for comfort have caused you to live a life that requires every adult to “go to work”, then… every person must go to work. It seems like the only way, and since no one will ever question the premise, then, in reality, it is the only way. Happily for them, the industrial world had conceived of a solution. The nursing home. Or the “adult care facility”. Or the “senior care home”. Whatever you want to call it. Specialization is king! Let us take care of your parents so you don’t have to.

Now, to be fair, my family did make the effort. My grandmother lived with my aunt for most of her final years, and I am grateful for that. And most of her living children pitched in for her care, until the point where her body grew too weak and her mind started to go and she just could no longer care for herself while my aunt was away at work at the hospital. A few of my cousins and I tried to keep her out of the nursing home by rotating and staying with her on the nights that my aunt worked, but we were all in college and trying to get a toe-hold in the Great Society for ourselves. We had been trained by the Industrial society as well, and we had the hope that one day we could claim all of its promises for ourselves (and the cycle repeats; one generation is shuffled off, while the next pursues the dream). All of my grandmother’s living children worked jobs in the modern system. The “system” made it easy to hand her off to the nursing home. The marketing arm of the new world system kicked in and offered all the right solutions to the problem of “transitioning” old people out of this world. The family told themselves it was nice, and that it was clean, and that she would be cared for. Everything she owned of value, including her home, would need to be sold off to pay the nursing home fees. I guess it is wrong to call such a place a “nursing home”. Some nursing goes on, but it is not a “home”. It is a weigh station and a waiting room for the unwanted and unneeded as they await their time to drop off of the planet. It is where you take old and worn out human units so you can get them out of the way while you continue your own journey there. It is the island of unwanted toys, only for people who have outlived their usefulness.

We all visited her, and then we all went home. She cried, and her mind went. Sometimes she was lucid and talkative, other times she was lost in her own mind, having no idea to whom she was even talking. Sometimes she cried and begged to be saved from that place, and all along I still had the feeling that she knew what was going on.

She had given birth to 7 children, and had provided for the 6 of them that lived into adulthood. Her husband died several decades before she did, so she spent a good portion of her life without a spouse. She had been married as a teenager, because that was the common practice in the rural area where she grew up. She did what she was told; she raised her family, worshipped her God, and ultimately she believed the lies of a culture that didn’t care one whit about her except for what service she perform for the benefit of the Great Society.

At one time my grandmother could have been called an Agrarian. She raised a lot of her own food, cooked on a woodburning stove, shelled peas and snapped beans in the summertime and knitted and sewed in the winter. She was a country girl who had been dragged into the Great Society by the overwhelming flood and bonds of modernism and necessity. She was a product of her time. The world believed that people should leave the farms and the land (actually, they should be turned over to the industrial farmers who would raise all of the food by the miracles of modern chemistry and machinery) and go to the city or, at the very least, that rural Agrarian people should adopt all of the new industrial methods and gadgets that the city would be producing. You must be a customer or a consumer – there is no third way. Trying to live in both worlds was a hope that soon became an implausible dream. The Great Society was littered with hidden traps and costs, and, soon enough, country people found out that “making it” in the country was very nearly impossible, especially when there were all these new bills to pay, and when it took two working parents to make ends meet. Most farm folk embraced this new reality. They stopped growing food and started buying it at the store where it was cheaper, easier, and more abundant. The more the people embraced the Great Society, the more reality conspired to make a fuller embrace inevitable. So her husband left the farm and got a job at an industrial dairy in West Texas. There seemed to be no other choice, and the world taught them that this was the right thing to do. She eventually went to nursing school and helped bring thousands of babies into the new industrial world.

They have a plaque honoring her on the wall of the “birthing center” in the hospital where she gave her time and her heart for a couple of dozen years. She was a fixture there for several decades, but no one there now remembers her. She’s just a name on a plaque.

They Taught Her That She Was Poor

They taught her that she used to be poor, so she bought a car, even though she went to church and to the grocery store right down the street from her urban house. She had no more real need for a car than a poodle has need of a parachute, but she went and got herself a car because she wasn’t poor. I bought that car from her almost 20 years later and she had only put 25,000 original miles on it.

They taught her she used to be poor, so she got electricity even though she had lived most of her life up until that time happily without it.

They taught her that she used to be poor, so the candles and oil lamps on her shelves and tables became antique ornamentation, while electric light (all sold cheaply by the watt) flooded her rooms.

They taught her that she used to be poor, so she moved on up in the world. She got air-conditioning and an electric iron, and a refrigerator, and all the other gadgets the world told her she should have just to prove she isn’t poor.

She raised her children, saw them educated and married off, and played with her grandchildren.

My grandmother’s children are all nice folks, and those that are living are the salt of the earth. They are not criminals, they try to do right, and they work hard. They played by the rules and they reaped the temporal rewards. Now they all feed the same machine, and they can’t see their way out of it and nor would they want to because, after all, their momma used to be poor, who would want to go back to that? All of their lives they have been taught that the worse thing in the world is to be poor, so they each sell their lives as cheap fuel for the industrial machine; because “momma used to be poor”. Some of them will get plaques on the wall where they used to work, but most won’t, and as their families continue to fragment and scatter, most of their stories will be forgotten as well. It’s the nature of a fragmented society. People aren’t stories, they are cogs in a machine. They are Dixie Cups. When their usefulness is done, they get thrown away. Some of them have played the game well enough and they have made enough money to die at home with a home health care nurse to care for them. It is a strange marker for success, but you’d hate to inconvenience the next generation of consumers, and besides, who wants to watch their parents die?

Some of my grandmother’s children got educated, and all of them said that they wanted their children to “have more than we had” (one of the greatest and most effective of the industrial mantras). Such a phrase is a powerful anesthetic. It makes one feel better when he says he did all of this for the next generation, especially if he doesn’t actually have to study and see what is happening to each subsequent generation. Each generation is taught that the earlier generation was poor and miserable, and each generation watches the next generation grow more selfish, more miserable, and more arrogant, with ever increasing moral weakness. Each generation seeks its own success and comfort, and each claims to be doing it for the children and the grandchildren. The grandchildren have more stuff all right… and more debt, more stress, more diseases, more pharmaceuticals, more divorces (it becomes impossible to even count them all), more step-relatives, more modernism, and, well… just more. They have less of God and true religion, less freedom, less practical intelligence, less survivability, less integrity, less moral uprightness, and less of a probability of surviving even the slightest of disasters, but they think they have more.

And they told her she used to be poor…

Today, our most ancient and successful ways of living have become by-words and pithy catchwords for poverty and backwardness (remember Rome). If someone wants to exalt their now lofty position they contrast it with humble and sorrowful beginnings. They say, “When I was a boy, we didn’t have running water or electricity.” Or if they want to emphasize how far they have come, they say, “When I was young, we didn’t have a television and we had to walk to school”. None of this is new. Rome is being revisited and we are too stupid and historically ignorant to know it.

If there were no wind we might, we think, hear the earth grind on its axis, or history drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar. (Robert Penn Warren – “Evening Hawk”)

One of the sad truths about moral and cultural blindness is that the morally and culturally blind do not have the eyes, or the ability, to see their blindness. As each generation slips farther and farther away from the ideal (whether we are considering true religion, morality, or the ability to provide the basics of survival), they move farther away from the old historical landmarks. They are more prone to lose their way and less likely to even accidentally end up where they ought to be. Each generation becomes the default leaders and teachers of the next generation, and the blind lead the blind ever deeper into the ditch.

A Parable

When an aircraft suffers a mechanical failure, there remains hope so long as the structure survives intact and so long as the instruments remain trustworthy. If, however, the structure and the instruments are destroyed, it ought to be assumed that a crash is imminent. Miracles can always happen, but by definition they usually do not. When we say “Something Must Be Done”, it is in this context. Catastrophes and disasters do not usually strike without any warning whatsoever. There is generally some period of time between the moment when we are made aware that something is terribly wrong, and the moment when the catastrophe finally hits, or when the full impact is registered. This period of time, however short or long, is when decisions are made. Now, it is during this interim when our true character and the things that we have truly believed become known. It ought to be a time of action, because it is the time when something must be done.

Survival (like true revival) requires an unbending and inflexible demand for the truth. We must require facts, and we must see those facts as they are, and not as we might want them to be. Deception is the enemy to true survival. Self-deception is the most heinous enemy, because it is the equivalent of smashing our own instruments when they are needed the most. When our internal compass is inoperative, survival becomes a wish and a dream, but not a real likelihood.

The modern world, with its society and culture, is an aircraft that (at a very high altitude) has proven to have inoperative instruments while it has simultaneously suffered massive systemic and structural failure. Things do not look good. But, there are a couple of options:

One option is to do nothing. We are perfectly free to continue to live on in delusion and denial. One thing about most modern aircraft is that they have comfy blankets and a nice pillow for your head. Humans are perfectly equipped to deny all of the available intelligence, and to remain blind and deaf to reality, but we must say here that the end will not change merely because someone wishes it to. Now, if you become determined to do nothing and to remain in denial, you are going to be extremely irritated with anyone around you who doesn’t choose to share in your deceptions. Those who will deny reality and who will deny facts cannot suffer someone who has decided to receive and act on the truth. It is extremely uncomfortable to have your conscience seared with a hot iron as your plane is crashing. So if someone is determined to deceive themselves, then they have to do something about the guy who is trying to ruin their perfectly good delusion. Towards this end, they usually have a handy trick left in their bag. If they can dismiss you as a pessimist, then they can alleviate the stress and the pressure; they can salve their own conscience, and they can feel better about themselves and their lives so they can remain in relative comfort as they rocket towards the ground.

Here is something for you to write down and remember: Facing reality and embracing true facts is never pessimistic. Believing the truth, no matter how difficult that may be, is the ultimate act of optimism because it opens up the panorama of options that will free us from further deception. Taking off a blind-fold is never an act of pessimism. However, getting angry at the truth (or at the messenger who delivers the truth) is merely a self-deceptive act of narcissistic theater, and it is a colossal waste of time.

All of the data is out there for anyone who cares to spend the time to study it and analyze it. Modern society is peopled with folks who are suffering from group dementia and a paralyzing allergy to the truth and to facts. The Industrial system has succeeded in providing cooked books, powerful and deceptive narcotics, smoke and mirrors and sleight of hand by way of billions of dollars in marketing and advertising in order to sustain the illusion of safety and security. Those who wish to stay on the plane, believing it will arrive safely at its destination despite all the available facts to the contrary are free to do so. I was asked if it would be possible to just write this book without mentioning the condition of the world, or “scaring people” with tales of doom and gloom. Yes, it would be possible. It just wouldn’t be honest. I am not predicting some worldwide calamity, although many calamities are very, very likely. The devastation I warn you of is cultural, and social, and spiritual. It is already here. Our society, like Rome and like Sodom before us, is already wicked and evil to the core. The actual and physical destruction is inevitable, but it is not the point of this book. The destruction of Rome by the Alaric and the Gothic Barbarians was just the period at the end of a very long sentence. Western Society is crumbling, but it is being destroyed on the inside first.

I don’t think that anyone ought to be motivated primarily by fear. Some fear is good, and it is given to us by God for our preservation and for our safety. If you are standing in the middle of a highway with cars coming at you, the fear that you feel is a good thing, and it ought to motivate you to right action. I think, however, that people ought to be primarily motivated by intelligence, duty, obedience, and courage. Maybe you shouldn’t have been on that highway to begin with? One of the ingredients that will eradicate fear is faith, and another is a love of the truth.

Before anyone gets too angry at me, let me say that no one is going to rob you of your freedom to destroy yourself. You are free to choose to do nothing. You are free to dismiss me as a kook and an alarmist. That is your right. If you are honestly convinced that nothing is wrong with our society, and that there are no real dangers, and that the realities I mention to you are not systemic or not that important, then by all means go in peace. You may still gain something from the things taught in this book, so I will encourage you to read on, but if you do believe that even some of the problems I mention are serious. If you do see danger signs, or if you question the stability or morality of the system, then it would be wrong to submit to the inevitability of it without considering that there might be another option. It would be wrong to squander the gift of sight by doing nothing. Most people, when they are confronted with the true facts, will not have the eyes to see their condition. They will deny the truth at all costs. Most are already blinded by their own lusts and their own corruption and they are not able to see. If, however, it is given unto you to see your peril, I believe it would be wrong to yield to some pessimistic view of “fate” without intelligently and carefully considering your duty to survive. Remember, true survivalists are the real optimists.

The second option is to admit that “something must be done”. If there is to be any true survival, let us start by admitting that we have to do something. We cannot just wish our errors and troubles away.

Let’s quickly list a couple of options under the category of proactive action (remember our plane is going down):

We can attempt to fix the plane in flight, to repair the instruments, and to cobble together some repairs to the structure in order to attempt to maintain airworthiness.

Or maybe it would be wiser to make use of parachutes if some are available – which means to agree in ourselves to abandon the doomed aircraft altogether. This, to me, is the ultimate act of optimism, because it is a declaration that I am not a part of this broken craft, and that there is still hope. Once we have accepted the true facts as they are, and once we have determined based on those facts that the plane is going to crash, we can choose to jump out of it. The thought might seem frightening, but it also ought to seem exhilarating. Now, there is no guarantee that our plans are going to succeed. Maybe the chute will not open. Maybe we land on a power line (oh, how ironic would that be?). But there is an absolute guarantee that if we do not do something, we are going to go down with the plane – and we can know that that option is positively not survivable.

We have options, and this book is about making those options known. It is about hope and optimism. It is a parachute. Something must be done, and that is a fact in my life. I have accepted it. I hope you will too.

Donate To Michael's Ministry

Scattershooting: Book talk and July Update

Greetings y'all and welcome to July. If you are looking for the Introduction or the first couple of chapters of the online book, here are the links:

FIRST GO READ THE INTRODUCTION
THEN GO READ THE FIRST CHAPTER
THEN GO READ THE SECOND CHAPTER

I haven't yet decided if I am going to continue to post chapters here on the blog. I announced to my private email friendslist that I was probably not going to continue with the book project on the blog because of lack of interest, but recent events may conspire to change my mind. We'll see. Basically the facts are these: For 12 months the blog had seen a steady (and sometimes) remarkable growth in readership, but subsequent to me starting the online book project on the first of June, we lost well over 100 unique visitors a day. I expected some dropoff because we knew it would not be necessary for our regular visitors to stop by each day if I was only posting a chapter a week, but I was not prepared to see our hits and visits drop like a rock, and, combined with the anemic participation (even by longtime participants and regular commenters) in the chapter comments, I could only conclude that my core readership was not interested in the book project. I had already accepted that most new readers, drive-bys, etc. would probably find the book to be "too much" or overwhelming, but I was not really prepared to see it fall so flat with my regular readership. Sooooo.... I had to figure out what to do. My regular readers know that I am not a guy who goes by what is popular or what will drive the most traffic. I was purely prepared for a big hit in traffic with the book being posted. But, again, if my core readership isn't even interested in the project, then it seems to me to be a waste of time and bandwidth to keep posting chapters.

I had basically decided to quit posting chapters (I am still working hard on the book, I just wouldn't be posting the chapters as I finish them) on the blog. Until we had the massive influx of hits and visits on Monday after my Palm Pre review was featured as a story on some pretty big gadget sites. We've had short flashes of such things before, but I was curious if any of the new readers were getting anything out of the book. Well, I received a few "tweets" on my Twitter page, and several private emails and communications from new folks who were actually reading and learning from the book. So now I am torn, and I haven't decided whether to continue with the book online or not. I have been busily working on Chapter 3 and hope to have it ready later today (or at the latest tomorrow morning). I guess you'll find out what I decided if you check back in late this afternoon. Comments or suggestions are always valuable.

Anyway, for this morning, a regular "Scattershooting" edition. For you new folks, Scattershooting is a stream of consciousness rant as I go through the morning's news and events, and sometimes I include updates on what is going on here. So here we go...

An ad for an Italian ice cream maker caused some distress and anger because it illustrated its slogan of "forbidden Italian temptations" by showing a priest and a nun in a very seductive pose inside the confessional. Apparently, this ad bothered some people. Perhaps they were offended by the ridiculous imagery of a Roman Catholic priest being portrayed as a heterosexual.

Not that I would ever drink one, but here is one way to open a Bud Light (make sure you scroll down to see the picture.)

Remember back in the old days when "summer" meant the sound of cicadas and crickets, or maybe the sounds of the ice cream truck and the crack of a bat? Not today, and not in Detroit. "Bria Wilson, 15, said she never saw a green minivan, or even the gunmen who fired the shots. But the sound of gunshots meant it was time to run." I am torn between two reactions: 1. Is it news that people got shot in Detroit? 2. Are there still people in Detroit?

Hypocrisy alert. Apparently, according to Geraldo Rivera, a child rapist should be killed in the street by vigilantes... unless he is your friend Michael Jackson. It is "brutal child rape" if it is done by an unknown white guy. If it is done by your Hollywood friend, theoretically a black guy, it is "unnatural affection for children".

This is too funny and ridiculous for words. Apparently some British cop got beat up by a gang of cows... "I really want to put out the message that cows can't be trusted." Even though the cop was on private property, he sued the landowner and won. It seems the cop thought the property owner should have erected signs on his cattle farm to protect innocent pedestrians from untrustworthy cows. "I'm not one to believe in unnecessary over-regulation, but I think a lot of people don't realise how dangerous cows can be." Well, as a cattle owner, I'd like to correct one glaring error in this cop's logic. Cows don't read signs.

Another "pastor" convicted of child pornography. This time in Texas. And they say cows are untrustworthy.

This pastor may be a heretic, but he has it right about guns. It's good to finally find a story about a pastor or priest who isn't a pedophile.

My good friend and Agrarian hero Herrick Kimball has posted his June update and it includes a lengthy plug for my online book. Thanks Herrick. We miss your regular posts, but I wait anxiously for your monthly updates.

Some updates... well, Danielle's garage sale was successful, and she was able to raise $300 more towards little Sarah's (age 5) emergency dental work. For those who are not on my private friendslist, our daughter Sarah, it seems, was born without enamel on her back teeth, and she has had major dental problems as a result and has problems eating. The emergency work is going to cost $2000 and Danielle is with Sarah at the specialist right now getting the work done. Anyone else who wants to help with this emergency may do so:

If the link doesn't work you'll find it in the right hand column of this page. I have in the past, as a policy, only discussed donations on my private friendslist and not on this blog or on the other sites. As you can tell from the response to the online book, that policy is no longer practicable (or is it practical?). Readers and bloggers like Northern Farmer who insist that I never, ever, ever mention or raise money, while they continue to tithe to their own salaried apostate preachers, can take a flying leap. Thank you.

Hey, y'all have a great day and check back later to see if I decide to post Chapter 3. Remember, I am often swayed by insistent comments and/or threats. Fire away.

Your servant in Christ Jesus,

Michael Bunker

Surviving Off Off-Grid: Chapter 2 - Revolution

***Welcome to the Book Project. I am writing the book Surviving Off-Off-Grid. Please read the participation rules HERE. Remember that the work is unedited when posted and is subject to change until final publication***

FIRST GO READ THE INTRODUCTION
THEN GO READ THE FIRST CHAPTER

Chapter 2: Revolution

What is Power?

For most of the last six thousand years the world has lived without electrical power. Cheap electrical power has only been readily available for less than 100 years, and only appeared in most of rural America about 30 years before I was born. This means that likely over 100 billion people were born, lived their whole lives, and died on this earth having never made use of electrical power. Yet, as we have said, if the electrical power grid was to collapse today, and if it was to remain unavailable for some great amount of time, it is likely that a majority of the people alive would die within a year. Readily available and cheap grid electricity has regrettably resulted in a world filled with unviable slaves, and it has made man dangerously dependent on a system that has proven itself to be unreliable and contrary to man’s eternal best interests.

It is very interesting that we call both the electricity that supports and enables life today, and the force that keeps people under the sway and thumb of the world, by the same name!

“Power”

I can think of no more deliciously appropriate irony. Let us take a look at a few relevant definitions of the word “power” from Dictionary.com :

Power: Great or marked ability to do or act; strength; might; force

Power: The possession of control or command over others; authority; ascendancy: power over men’s minds.

Power: Work done or energy transferred.

Power: Energy as distinguished from hand labor.

Power: A person or thing that exercises authority or influence.

Isn’t it ironic that we have come to believe that electrical power frees us and gives us comfort and leisure, when in fact it is the primary means by which we have been colonized and enslaved by the world “powers”?

All Carnal Power is Coercion!

Write that down. You’ll need to remember it. Some coercion is good and legitimate, such as when we teach and train our children up in the way they should go (according to the Bible this way would be “the old ways”, “the old paths”). Coercion can be brutal and tyrannical, or in other forms it can be benevolent, or subtle, or political. When we use means to bring about good and Biblical ends, we are exercising coercion. When the world uses marketing, advertising, and trickery, and when it plies the lusts, the carnal desires, or fears in order to bring about cultural or social change, it is using coercion. Never deny, even for a moment, that carnal power utilizes coercion. To deny it is just to stick ones head in the sand.

As we mentioned, man has chosen to use a word (power) to describe the force and energy that travels through cables and machines, a force that supposedly makes life easier and more comfortable and more fulfilling; and he has chosen to use the same word to define and represent the authority that coercive energy holds over his mind and life. It is fascinating to note the Bible teaches that Jesus came to His people, “to open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God” (Acts 26:18). Satan has coercive power over the people and that power is used to keep them in darkness. Likewise, mankind has become totally dependent upon earthly electrical power to supply and maintain his desires. Grid electricity is only a part of the overall coercive grid “system” in the world today, but it is inarguable that grid electricity has made man dependent on it for his survival, and it has, in the past 100 years, become the basis for earthly political and social power. I guess it could be said today that POWER is POWER.

When grid power is used to coerce and enable the lusts and desires of man, political and social power results. One hundred years ago, much of America, indeed much of the world, lived independently from any system of grid power. Under that system, most rural people lived lives of relative freedom. It is true that forced slavery has existed throughout history, and it is true that rural people, like urbanites, have been enslaved and colonized by others throughout history. However, it is notable that historically (before the advent of grid power) the people could only be subjugated by military power, or by the persuasive power of ideology, philosophy or religion. Historically, coercion had to come from outside the individual person, group, or society. It was readily identifiable. If the people were slaves, they were slaves to superior might and strength. They could see their masters, and they could see their chains. They were slaves to superior might and not slaves of themselves and of their own material and carnal lusts. Contrarily, under the system of cheap and ubiquitous grid electrical power, the people became enslaved to the philosophy and religion of this world, and they submitted willfully to it, because by it they were enabled to fulfill their carnal desire for temporal comfort and security. The slave is held most securely when he is held by the chains of his own will and of his own fears, and when he is locked down by his own slavish desires for a comfortable life. For a slave mind to turn against his master and seek to return to a life of freedom a revolution is in order.

In the last chapter I said that when illegitimate power is overthrown by those with legitimate power you have a revolution. A quick word about Revolution:

I don’t want people to be confused. Many conflicts are called revolutions that are not revolutions at all. When one tyrant is overthrown and replaced with another one, one that has the same ends or the same goals and the same basic philosophy, you have had a coup d'état or a rebellion, but not a revolution.

The overthrow of the Russian Czar system that began in 1917 is called The Russian Revolution, but the results show that it was really a coup d'état and not a proper revolution. The Russian people, poor and powerless after centuries of life under the thumb of the Russian Czars, threw off the shackles of the czar only to find themselves under the thumb of the Communists. While it is true that many Russians did have hope that things would get better and that they would be afforded basic freedoms and that their conditions would improve, in reality, after the revolution, they wanted the same things they had always wanted. There was no real change. There was no revolutionary change in the overall philosophy of living. If the Czar had offered the peasants some fundamental freedoms they would have been more than happy to continue under the Czar. The people had not experienced a wholesale change of heart and mind, they had just had enough. Most Russian peasants wanted one simple thing, and that is the thing most Americans and westerners want; the Russian people just wanted the government to get off their backs. The average Russian countryman didn’t have an overwhelming love and admiration for the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks or for any other new political voice or party. The people just figured that any government that promised them freedom had to be better than what they had been experiencing. Freedom sounded better than the serfdom they had experienced under the Czar. This is, unhappily, the truth behind most so-called “revolutions” and it ought to be a cautionary tale for all history students. When the people find their current state intolerable, they are likely to go along with whoever might overthrow the latest tyrant. We will examine these motivations and their results more later on in this chapter.

If the people of Russia had been truly converted to a whole worldview of freedom; if they had individually and corporately experienced a conversion to a compelling and complete philosophy of freedom; if the average Russian (and the people as a whole) had been committed and irrevocably bound to a truly revolutionary idea of freedom, then the Communists would have quickly gone the way of the Czar. Once a man is wholly and truly converted to a right philosophy of freedom and life, he is never going to be satisfied with less than that. A true revolution, then, is founded on conversion in the mind and heart. When the mind is converted, the man naturally follows. Tyrants know this. Colonizers know this. Why do you think that the prophets of industrialism and consumerism spend billions and billions of dollars on converting minds? What do you think advertising is? The industrial consumer society is built wholly on consumption, and the minds of consumers must be completely and utterly colonized in order to make the people true believers in the consumptive gospel. Jesus Christ knew the power of the marketing forces of the world and He rejected them. This is why His apostles warned “we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and raiment let us be therewith content” (1Ti 6:7-8). Jesus brought a revolution, and He did it by converting the minds of men. He and His messengers taught men that worldliness (the world’s way of doing things) was folly, and could lead only to eternal disaster. His philosophy was revolutionary in that those who were converted to it valued nothing (even their lives, families, etc.) more than they valued obedience to Him and His Word.

The First Revolution: Revolution in the Mind and Heart

When I teach that the mind has to be decolonized, I am teaching and advocating nothing less than true revolution. This revolution must take two forms. The first revolution is internal. It is a conversion of the mind; an overthrowing of the old way of thinking, of the old lusts and desires, and of the old worldview. The second revolution is external. It shows forth the product of different wants and desires; different principles and a different worldview. Decolonization is revolution. Decolonization is the process of coming to a different conclusion based on the facts in evidence. It is the process of having our minds rewired so that we think differently, so that we want different things, and it is the process of shedding the lifetime of false conclusions we have reached based on false and misleading evidence. Every element of the industrial system (which is the prevailing system of the world today), its foundations, its systems of survival, its methods and maxims, must be examined. From our youth, when our carnal minds were first encouraged to abandon the old paths and constantly seek whatever new and modern wisdom was being preached by the prophets of “success” and “comfort”, we have been undergoing training and indoctrination into the global industrial system. The world calls us “consumers” because that is what we are. The world system needs eaters and buyers, so it creates and trains them. Colonizing and training minds is the ultimate purpose behind public education. In an industrial/consumer society, the mind must be colonized, and that colonization must begin at an early age, so that real production forever remains in the hands of the elite, and so that no one ever dares examine or question if the emperor is actually wearing any clothes. Only if you have followed the world’s system of colonization, and only if you have succeeded in showing yourself an apt and able proselyte of the consumer religion, will you ever be accepted (or even tolerated) by the world system.

As I mentioned in the last chapter, words have been redefined, reality has been obscured, and old truths have been convoluted and twisted until people actually believe that they are the philosophical offspring of their forefathers. Every American child is told, “If you work hard and excel and do what the world expects from you, why, you could grow up to be the President!” Hereby the child is trained to believe that freedom exists in the possibility that right behavior (meaning behavior consistent with the desires of the colonizer) can ultimately lead to political power and the authority to coerce others. These children are not told that most of their ancestors came to North America because they had had enough of government coercion (and the coercion of government churches, by the way), and that they wanted nothing more than to be left alone so that they could farm and be free. We have been taught what to want, and we have been taught that wanting the right things is what makes us good and valuable to the system. Our first revolution, then, must be in the mind and heart. We must be converted. Our wants must change and we must be convinced – not just in our minds and in our hearts – but we must be spiritually convinced of the dangers and death that accompanies the old way of doing things. Only when it is given to us to see the world as it is, will we be made willing to engage in revolution.

A Second Revolution: Overthrowing the System

The second revolution is external. When the colonizer finds out that revolution is afoot, he becomes very, very angry. When the slave-holder comes to learn that his slaves have been turned against him, he will become distressed and fearful. When the proselytes of the industrial/consumer religion see that you have become a renegade to their cause, they become avowed enemies.

The first step in the Second Revolution (and that is what this book is ultimately about) is the recognition that something must be done. Decolonization starts as an internal process, but at some point it must break outwards into the world in which we live. If the mind and heart are converted, the body will inevitably begin to obey its new operating system. Ultimately, if there is no obedience, then there has been no conversion. Once we learn and believe that our system has produced death, destruction, cultural and social decay, slavish dependence, and an unviable life, it is natural that we will want to begin to exit that system and free ourselves from its influence.

In order to extricate ourselves from our dependence on the world and its consumer system we have to recognize that we are slaves to it. That is the purpose of the first few chapters of this book. If we do not recognize our slavery, we will never move towards freedom.

A Pair of Tests

Here are a couple simple tests that you can use to judge your dependency level, and whether or not you are a slave to the current system. In order for these tests to provide useful information for you, you must be totally and brutally honest with yourself. The tests are shockingly simple, but it is also remarkably easy to cheat on them. Remember, the carnal mind is capable of rationalizing any behavior and any lie. So if you cheat or lie to yourself, you will only be harming yourself.

Ok, here is the first test. We’ll call this first test the Dependency Test. Answer each question honestly. I recommend that you get a pen and paper and that you write down each answer fully and thoughtfully:

**Would you call the world we live in today morally and culturally good? Or morally and culturally corrupt? Are you and your generation more wholesome, holy, and righteous – or do you believe that society and the culture has degraded through time?

**If you know anything about your own history or your own ancestry, would you say that you are more or less dependent on the world “system” than your ancestors were?

**Can you feed and clothe yourself? Can you provide heat, light, shelter, etc. for yourself and your family? If the world grid system (electricity, “just in time” food, water, etc.) was to collapse, and no outside help was forthcoming, would you be likely to perish? Be honest here, because here is where the mind is able to fantasize and create unrealistic “solutions”. If today or tomorrow, starting at noon, your electrical power was cut off, you had no access to the “just in time” food and water delivery system, would you survive? If so, for how long?

**If you were able to survive for awhile (maybe you are a survivalist, or a “prepper”, or maybe you have access to survival material sources, or stored food, and maybe you live next to clean water source) is your survival temporary or is it sustainable? Is it based on “pulling through” or bare survival, for example – making it until the grid system comes back or until help arrives from outside?

Now, depending on how honestly you have answered each of these questions, you ought to have some kind of indication of how viable you are in your current situation and how dependent you are on the world system for your well-being and survival. Many, many people are as deceived about their physical condition as they are about their spiritual condition. I hear it all the time, people will say “I have 3 months (or 1 year or 7 years) supply of dehydrated food”, or “I live where there are a lot of deer and other game animals”, or “I took some survival courses”, or my all time favorite, “I will just go into the woods or the wilderness and survive off the land”. Right. Anyway, as we mentioned in the last section, the concept that “survival” is just a way to temporarily bridge the gap during a crisis situation until things return to “normal” is a failed survival philosophy. It insists that the anomaly of grid living experienced during the last century is “normal”; it presupposes that the industrial/consumer grid system is morally “good”; and it absolutely rests on the ridiculous notion that the industrial/consumer Ponzi scheme can continue indefinitely without collapsing.

The first test was the Dependency Test and it was designed to make you consider how dependent you are on the system. This next test can be a little more painful. I call it the Slavery Test, and I am hopeful that it will cause you to think very carefully on how enslaved you are to the current system. This test necessarily rests upon the previous test.

Ok, here we go:

**If you were to determine through prayerful consideration that the current industrial grid system is dangerous for you and your family and harmful to your physical and spiritual condition, could you walk away? Immediately?

**Write down what conditions hinder you from walking away. Are you broke? Are you deep in debt? Are you locked into a long-term mortgage or some “obligation” from which you feel you cannot walk away?

**If you became convinced that moving to an off-grid or off off-grid lifestyle was the thing to do, would you be hindered from doing so by your family? By your friends? Would you be threatened with the loss of the ties of family and friends if you rejected their lifestyle and moved away from it? Would the persecution you would suffer from renouncing the world’s way of doing things keep you from obeying your conscience?

**Are you hindered by your ignorance? Do you feel like you don’t have the skills, the strength, the know-how, or the courage to leave the grid system?

**Are you hindered by your condition or circumstances? Are you physically or mentally unable to make a change in your lifestyle? Are you suffering from the circumstances brought about by your poor or unbiblical decision making? Are you hindered by an unbelieving spouse, or some other circumstance that is regrettable, but of your own making?

**Are you paralyzed by fear? Does the thought of leaving your comfort zone keep you from ever challenging the things you have believed all of your life?

Now we have arrived where the rubber meets the road. I hope you have been honest in taking these two tests, and I hope you have written down your answers. Now it is time for us to identify our chains. Slavery is often identified by the use of chains. Chains represent the restriction of movement, and their use represents the submission of the slave to the one who has the power to put him in chains. Chains can be physical, mental, or spiritual. There are multiple types and kinds of chains used by the world to keep folks under the impression that they are helpless or powerless to change their condition, and it would serve us well to do a quick study on these methods (or chains).

Blind Mice Get The Carving Knife

Secular government intelligence agencies learned decades ago that there are basically four factors that motivate individuals to join or support certain causes or movements. Agents can be recruited or manipulated by using these four principle motivations. These motivating factors (or chains) are used by intelligence agencies, politicians, individuals, corporations, cults, religions, families, and nations to motivate individuals and groups towards certain actions or behaviors. In the espionage business, these four motivations are known by the acronym M.I.C.E. Knowing what M.I.C.E. means, and being able to recognize what motivates people (and ourselves) will go a long way in helping us to identify and quantify the chains that bind us:

M – Money (includes Debt, Comfort, Leisure, “Stuff”, etc.)
I – Ideology (Patriotism, False Religion, Philosophy)
C – Coercion (Compromise, Fear, Force, Hostility, Grudges, Disaffection)
E – Ego (Excitement, Position, Status, Importance)

Understanding M.I.C.E. helps us get a grasp on what motivates people, and a thorough study of it can help us identify what chains are being used to attempt to hold us or manipulate us. Go back through your answers on the Slavery Test and next to your answers try to identify and write down which motivational chain is being used to keep you enslaved. Every spy in history was recruited according to a motivational propensity or predilection. One or more of these motivational categories was used in the recruiting. Likewise, Satan uses all of the tools in these categories to motivate worldlings to operate according to his power. Every world religion and cult (except True Christianity) uses one or more of these categories (and the elements within those categories) to motivate to action to bring about loyalty.

True Christianity is the only religion that concedes in its doctrines that these motivations are inadequate for the production of true, spiritual loyalty and love. True Christianity teaches that a love of money is the root of all evil, and that the desire to operate according to the principles of mammon is a sign of the damned and not of the elect. Jesus Christ taught that feigned or human loyalty would crumble under pressure and stress. True Christianity teaches that there is a new and spiritual Kingdom, not of this world, and that the desire for the things of this world (money, position, power, status, etc.) will be one of the first things slain in the heart of the regenerate. Jesus Christ and His Apostles taught that we could not obey or love Him without His gifts of Grace and Mercy, and that we must receive a new heart and a new mind from Him in order to see and hear clearly and to obey Him. The Bible teaches that coercion or servile fear (like that used by modernist “christianity” to motivate or “save” people) is insufficient to move people to Godliness and obedience, and that we must have the gift of new operative principles divinely imputed and imparted to us in order for us to operate truly as Christians. Jesus Christ taught that the low and humble would be made high, and that the meek would inherit the earth. He taught that those who would be rich will be made eternally poor, and that the poor in spirit would be the rich in His Kingdom. Jesus taught us that if we follow and obey Him we will receive persecution and tribulation in this world. He taught that we are of a different country, and that we are ambassadors of a different and spiritual nation. In light of this wisdom, it can be a very valuable for us to re-examine our motivations and see how we are shackled by our own sinful principles.

Let’s do some exercises. Here are some other things I hear or read almost every day when I am contacted by people who read the things I write. Pay attention to what people are saying, and see if you can identify the motivation(s). Then, maybe write down some things you yourself have said or thought, or some things that others have said to you that expose and uncover true motivations. Here are a few examples:

“I was raised on a farm, and I would never want to go back to that life I love the conveniences of modern society and don’t want to change anything”

From this we can determine that this person is motivated by category “M”, specifically leisure, comfort, and money. Let’s do a quick rundown of many of the excuses. The motivational chains will be listed in parenthesis:

“I have a family to support and debt to pay off” – (Money, Fear, Philosophy, Coercion)

“I have a job and things are tough out there. How would I survive?” - (Money, Fear, Philosophy, Position)

“My family (friends/church) would disown me. My children will think I’m crazy. My wife will leave me.” – (Fear, Position, Status, Philosophy, False Religion, Ideology, Ego, Compromise)

“I don’t have any skills. I would be lost. I’m old/young/single and unable to do what I would like” – (Fear, Compromise)

“I was always taught that this (the way of the world) is the way to live. If it was good enough for my parents then it is good enough for me” – (Ideology, Philosophy, Status)

There are no lies as dangerous as those we tell ourselves about ourselves. Most slaves and most colonized people are not willing to rise up and overthrow their oppressors for a few basic reasons:

First, they do not believe that they are slaves, or they think that their condition of bondage is acceptable, or that slavery is better than freedom. In some cases, the mind is so thoroughly colonized or the slave has been so thoroughly brainwashed that he actually comes to have the same mind as the slave-holder or the colonizer. There is a term in psychology called The Stockholm Syndrome. The term “Stockholm Syndrome” was coined to identify a psychological reaction often seen in abducted hostages. Quite often, when a person is captured, enslaved, or abducted against his or her will, after a time they will come to identify and show loyalty to their captor or hostage-taker. Although the psychological response has been around forever, the term was first used after a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden in 1973. In that case bank robbers held the employees of the bank hostage for six days, and during that time many of the hostages became loyal and emotionally attached to their captors. Some of the hostages even fought to defend their captors after they were freed. I believe that most of the people who defend this current world, who love it and become emotional or defensive when it is disparaged, or who advertise for it and who are loyal to it – suffer from a mental condition that is identical to Stockholm Syndrome.

Second, they have been taught from a very young age that conformity and syncretism are good and right and that they will lose everything and be poor, hungry, and miserable if they do not conform to the world’s way of doing things.

Third, their consciences are seared. To admit that they are slaves, or that they are helpless to improve their condition, or that the philosophy and ideology on which they have based their worldview and lived their lives is wicked, would be a final burden on a conscience already seared by a lifetime of compromise.

Revolutions are bloody things, and they can never be done half-way. A revolution will (and ought to) cost us everything. Jesus said, “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it” (Matt. 10:34-39).

I said towards the beginning of this chapter that the Second Revolution begins when we admit that something must be done. That is the topic and title of our next chapter.

Surviving Off Off-Grid: Chapter 1 - Defining Terms

***Welcome to the Book Project. I am writing the book Surviving Off-Off-Grid. Please read the participation rules HERE. Remember that the work is unedited when posted and is subject to change until final publication***

FIRST GO READ THE INTRODUCTION

Defining Terms

Words Mean Things

Advanced communication, primarily the use of words, is one of the most important things that separate man from the lower animals. Man is able to use a multitude of creative and descriptive words. This wonderful ability of communicative speech is a gift of God to aid us in our understanding and our living. Words, and the proper use of them, allow us to come to agreement, or to understand where we differ, and words allow us to perceive how very important our agreements or differences may be. It is said that the only hope we have of ever coming to agreement with one another is if we share the same information and if we understand that information in similar ways. Words allow us to identify concepts, thoughts, and ideas, and words allow us to communicate our understanding of those things to one another. Even the word “communication” has “commune” as its root, because we use words to commune with one another and with our God. Discussion is the primary form of communion between man and man, and Prayer is the primary form of communion between man and his God. Communion requires communication, and communication requires that we have some agreement and understanding as to the meaning of the words we choose to use.

Unhappily, words today, like most things, have lost their real value. “Talking” or conversation today seems to have its value in the sheer number of words, rather than in their quality and in our mutual understanding of those words. Most conversation today is light and meaningless, and most modernists are able to have long and drawn-out “talks” where almost nothing is learned, decided, or actually communicated. Talk is everywhere – on the TV, on the radio, at the workplace, and as the total number of words have increased, true understanding and communication has decreased. It is quite common today for two people to have an entire conversation where both parties leave the conversation believing that they are like-minded and that they agree, when in reality they have in no way come to any real agreement at all. They have agreed using words, not realizing that they have each held different interpretations and definitions of the words being used. Nowhere is this tragedy more prevalent than in religious circles. Religious words have become stripped down and systematized until most of the world’s religions and denominations, some with patently opposite beliefs and understandings, have chosen to use the same lexicon, and have come to believe that they actually agree on the fundamental or principle elements of faith because of the similarity or likeness of the words being used. Some of the most important words that frame and define who we are as a people have completely changed meaning in the last 100 years. In the American system, the words of the framers of the United States Constitution have been twisted to the point that in many places they now are understood to mean the exact opposite of what they were intended to mean by the original writers. Different political and cultural parties choose to adopt meanings for identical words that often are in diametrical opposition. As I was writing this chapter I came upon a news report where a journalist was arguing for European style restrictions on the freedom of speech in America. Here is what this “journalist” said:

“I love and respect the freedom of speech. As a journalist I am absolutely dependent and reliant on the First Amendment. But we have to understand that freedoms can be abused, and some nations have wisely chosen to restrict certain kinds of dangerous and hateful speech in order to maintain a society where freedoms can exist and flourish. We have to decide whether we want to be the kind of society that uses the police to protect hateful and abusive speech that can lead to crimes and death, or whether we want to use the police to protect our freedoms and our society from people who would destroy the society using the freedom of speech.”

I would hope that any reasonably intelligent, historically knowledgeable, and fair reader would know that this understanding of the freedom of speech is completely at odds with (it is, in fact, opposite of) what the framers of the U.S. Constitution had in mind. This is Orwellian doublespeak at its pinnacle. Every tyrant in history has used necessity as a primary argument for the abridgment of freedoms, and it was clearly expected and understood by the founders that freedom of speech was critical in restricting the ability for tyrants to use necessity to crush freedom. The attempt by this journalist is to give political and social “cover” for reactionary elements who hate and want to control and limit true freedoms. I use this as an example because this is certainly a case of words being used to mean the opposite of what they actually were intended to mean. And in this case, the words of reactionary tyrants will lead to actions, and those actions will lead to very real infringements and the eradication of true freedom. Words do mean things.

Do we understand one another?

I was doing a radio show about ten years ago and I was trying to illustrate the importance of words, and why words must be properly and clearly defined. I used the example of someone trying to communicate to another person how to find a location in a particular town. Now, the first person has a traditional and accepted understanding of the critical words to be used in the exercise. He understands the words in a way that ought to be clear and apparent to an intelligent and aware typical listener. The second person, however, comes from a completely different background. He has been brought up in a very subjective and verbally confused and confusing society. His understandings of many words are strange and subject to irrational change. In an attempt to arrange a meeting, person number one tells person number two: “I live in the only blue house on Main Street near the Post Office”. Person number two hears these words correctly and writes them down. However, his subjective and changeable understanding of the words causes confusion. To person number two, “blue” need not be the color we all associate with the sky as seen from earth, or of a beautiful mountain lake. To him, “blue” can mean “not red” or “any color that is dark and not quite black”. The word “only” can be very subjective to person number two because he refuses to be subject to the tyranny of such a restrictive word. “Only”, then, can mean that there are very few of them, or that houses of that color are in the minority. Likewise, “Main” can mean “central” or “primary”, or even “large”. The words “street” is not descriptive enough, and can mean “alley” or “passageway”. “Near”? Well, the word “near” to person number two can have any of a dozen meanings and adds nothing to his discovery of truth. “Post Office” is made up of two words, each which can have multiple meanings based on context.

So…

What is the probability that person number two and person number one are going to be able to meet at the right place at the right time? Person number two shows up several hours late in the alley behind one of several brown houses on Central Avenue several miles from the Post Office. I hope the meeting was not important.

This all goes to illustrate the importance of defining words, and it explains why much of my teaching and ministry time is spent in that important endeavor.

Ok, so why all the emphasis on defining words? Because the first word in the title of this book is SURVIVAL – a word that can have drastically different meanings to different people. During times of stress and trouble, when survivalism grows and thrives, the importance of communicating what we mean by such an important word is multiplied. In attempting to communicate, it is not so critical that our use of a word follows accepted or cultural norms, as it is that we share the same definitions. So long as we agree on the terms, we can communicate. If we share the same definitions, then we are able to commune in the arena of ideas and we are able to discourse more honestly about the how and the why of living.

Now, I must say here as an aside that this book and the ideas in it are very challenging to read, and they are very challenging to write. First, they are challenging to read because they run so contrary to the accepted thinking and the presuppositions of the day. Second, they are difficult to write for a few reasons. I want to address those reasons here so that the reader will have fair warning and an understanding as the challenges I have faced in writing this book.

I am a committed Christian (and YES, I understand that the word “Christian” is one of those words that no longer has any real descriptive meaning or definitive power, and it is one which must be properly defined. I have done so elsewhere at great length, but do not have the space to do so here), and I understand many of those who need the practical information found later in this book, and who want to learn more about Off Off-Grid living, who are not Christians. I have been challenged by the impossibility of trying to present my philosophy if I were to do so while also removing the foundation behind 100% of that philosophy. It cannot be done, at least not by me. I have been asked “Who is your intended audience?”, and I can honestly answer “Everyone”. I have not made the assumption that anyone who reads this is already a true Christian, but I have absolutely properly situated my whole philosophy and worldview on my understanding of what Christianity is and what it requires. It is, of course, not my intention to exclude anyone. Facts and truth are, in and of themselves, exclusive enough. In fact, I have determined that in order to be fair, I must be willing to insult everyone equally, and I include modern “christians” and modern “christianity” (which I reject wholly and not in part) in my condemnation of the world and the current world system. I know that this book could be written from several different angles. It could be written as a secular book, and the advice and counsel would be just as valuable (though temporal). It could be written from a Christian perspective with all separatist convictions tempered or removed, and I believe it would still have value. In fact, if I were willing to do these things, it would probably sell more copies and make more money. But I have rejected that counsel. The facts in the book are true whether you reject or accept my overt and sometimes offensive Christian Agrarian Separatism. I would have been a traitor to my conscience and a rebel to my convictions if I had tempered the book at all. I ask, therefore, that the reader simply read this book as a dissertation (and dispensation) of a new (actually old) philosophy and worldview, and that the reader glean what he or she can. In my life I have read dozens of books (as Jimmy Buffet would say “about heroes and crooks”) which describe and even proselytize for other religions and philosophies. I believe my God wants me to fairly examine and judge His claims, and I felt it necessary to do so by reading many philosophies and religious opinions with which I do not agree. I merely ask that you read the material fairly and openly, and judge it for what it is.

Ok, let us get to these definitions, shall we?

SURVIVAL

The dictionary defines the word survive as “to remain alive after the death of someone, the cessation of something, or the occurrence of some event”. Further, it is to “continue in existence or use”, to “get along or remain healthy, happy, and unaffected in spite of some occurrence; to live through affliction, adversity, or misery”.

At its very root, to survive is to live through or beyond some thing or occurrence. This definition, though technically proper, is entirely too bare and empty for our purposes. It is stripped of any spiritual truth, or any philosophy or context of living. To merely survive in a life that is remarkably short and fleeting, is hardly a philosophy worth embracing. Sadly, the modern concept of “survival” is wholly based on this empty philosophy. When you read of survivalism or survival today, it generally has this overall meaning – to live no matter what the cost.

Now, if we say that our philosophy is to live no - matter what the cost - then we must conclude that that cost may include our immortal soul and our eternal happiness. Would it ever be a good deal to trade our immortal soul and our eternal happiness for temporal and fleeting survival? Does anyone truly survive this carnal world? No, they do not. To anyone who values law and morality, and particularly to the Christian, this definition of survival is inadequate and even dangerous. So you see, if I were to begin to write or teach without properly defining what I mean by survival, I would do you a disservice, and I would feed into some scary and dangerous concepts that really have no place in the life and philosophy of right thinking people.

So I have chosen here to give you a working definition of what I mean when I speak and write of survival and survivalism. So long as we both are clear that this is what I mean when I use these words, then we are able to proceed in our discourse with understanding.

Survive - To persevere. To do all that is within my power to persist in my Christian duty, to maintain my Christian witness, to protect and defend all of my human and Christian obligations, and to continue to live obediently as long as God chooses to sustain my life and ministry. To stand.

My goal is not merely to continue to live at all costs despite the situation or danger that exists around me. Life is transient and passes so very quickly. My goal is to persist in my duties, to continue in obedience, and to live my life in such a way that, by the grace, mercy, and sustenance of God, I am able to stand and resist the dangers and follies of the world, the temptations of the flesh, and the wiles of the devil. My goal is to continue dutifully at my station, to stand against the tyranny of absorption and syncretism with the world, and to hold fast to the old and narrow paths wherein is found the good and righteous way. My way is not the way of the world, and I do not value cohesion and intercourse with any system which is contrary to the direct statements of my God. Were I to live for a thousand years in the way the world has defined as acceptable, I will have failed to truly survive. Were I to perfectly avoid all danger, peril, and consequence, and in doing so glorify the Prince of this World and his temporal and earthly reign, I will have failed to truly survive. I cannot say that I want to survive at all costs. I cannot say that “pulling through” is worth betraying my Master. I cannot believe that looking, dressing, and acting like the world is worth the evil that accompanies that mentality. I wish to survive to the Glory of God, regardless of what men say. The Bible says, that “whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it” (Luke 9:24). This saying is a perfect paradox for the worldling or the modern survivalist, but for those who understand how to properly define Survival, this saying makes perfect sense and is not paradoxical at all.

If we will survive, we must lose our lives. What can this mean?

There is a way of living life that is in perfect harmony with a world that is at war with the God of Creation, and there is a carnal life which loves the world, embraces its culture, pursues its goals, and does its bidding. The carnal life of fulfilling temporal lusts and embracing all creature comforts must be lost if we are to truly survive. The carnal man must die if we are to survive as spiritual beings. “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Pro 14:12). Now let us stay here for awhile and consider this. If it is true that the carnal man embraces a way that seemeth right unto him, and if it is true that the bulk of carnal men are at enmity with God and are pursuing a way that seemeth right unto them, then it must be true that the general and accepted way of the world is a way that seemeth right unto the world… BUT… it is the way of death. There is no true survival in that way. True survival, then, must presuppose that Godly men must go a different way then the way of the world. Honest men and women without guile must operate on different principles, and their way must actually look and be different from the way that leads to death. This is a maxim, and all of our understanding of survival must rest on this maxim.

The way or philosophy of living that you find defined in this book may seem ancient or anachronistic, but it is a way that has been proven through the centuries. In every era or region where men and women lived simply according to the principles of God, righteousness and holiness have thrived, and evil has had no foothold. As the Bible says, in order to return to true Godliness and a truly Biblical way of living, we must return to the old paths and the old ways. You will find this principle verse repeated in all my writings wherever you find them:

“Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein.” (Jer. 6:16).

This understanding is critical in our understanding of right living and of survival. Repentance is the God-given ability to understand that our current path and trajectory is wrong and perilous and will lead to disaster if we continue in it. Repentance is turning from that wicked way and returning to a way trod only by a few brave and hardy souls. The prophets of worldliness, urbanism, and industrialism have every interest in keeping consumers (lemmings) on the path that at its end must leadeth to destruction. The prophets of industrialism and consumption have every interest in defaming and rejecting any call to repentance of spirit and of life. The prophets of today have a vested interest in teaching people that separation is of the heart only, and that holy and Godly living is only an internal precept and not an actual calling. I understand this, and so should you. I understand that our call to true survival will not ever be popular, and few will ever heed it. But it is a holy calling nonetheless, and it is our duty to proclaim it.

In summation, when God took His people from Egypt (a type of slavery to worldliness and wordly wisdom), to the Promised Land, He promised that if they obeyed and followed His prophet, they would prosper and survive. No one believes that this promise meant that they would live carnally on this world forever. Whether they stayed in Egypt or left for Canaan, they were eventually going to die. Survival, then, was the God-given protection and inclination to leave the world and the dominion of the Pharaoh of Egypt, in order to live simply and in a holy way under the authority of God alone. It should be said here that almost all of the Israelites loved the world too much, feared freedom too much, and never entered into the Promised Land. This is our model and “type” for separation from the world system. Survival is the process of trying to live obediently no matter what giants seem to be in the land.

OFF-GRID and OFF OFF-GRID

I hope that by now you have noticed that the title of this book is a call to OFF OFF-GRID Living. This was not an error in typesetting. You have all heard of living Off-Grid, but most of you will have never heard of living OFF Off-Grid. It is necessary now that I define the two phrases, and differentiate between the two.

Off-Grid Living

If you went up to the average person and you said, “I live off-grid”, the reply would likely be something like this… “Oh, that’s interesting, how do you get your power, from a generator?From solar power? From wind power?” You see, off-grid living today implies being separated from the industrial power grid unto a separate or independent power grid that supplies all the same perceived benefits and “necessities”, only (it is assumed) cheaper and more sustainably. Most people, then, do not even begin to consider that the so-called “necessities” of modern living are not actually necessary at all. I talk to hundreds of people who are considering separating from the modern world and moving off-grid. Their first impulse is always to ask themselves “how do I do all or most of the things I do now without being attached to the power grid?” But our philosophy requires that we look at every single assumption and question it. Every technology must be examined to see if, in the long run and with all things considered, this technology actually benefits us in the process of daily obedient living. Does this technology help or hurt our overall plan of being independent and separate from the world? Does this technology lock us into some necessary and continued adherence to the industrial system? Is it sustainable? These things are not usually ever addressed or questioned, even by people who see the grid system for what it is and who desire to separate from it. For this reason, I have called the “off-grid” system just a step-child or an offspring of the grid system.

Some people today do indeed live “off-grid”, but they do not recognize that they are just one step removed from the grid. They have, in effect, created a separate grid system which, admittedly, makes them a single step more sustainable than the world, but in the long run is just a faint copy (a copy of a copy) of the grid system from which they have endeavored to separate. Much of the meat of this argument will be fleshed out during the remainder of the book, but it is important for our purpose here that we identify a difference between “off-grid” and “off off-grid”.

Off Off-Grid Living

By contrast, the Off Off-Grid system is the system that is the most sustainable, the most separate, and is closest to the ideal way of living as portrayed for us in the scripture. By “Off Off-Grid” we mean that we have not just taken a single symbolic step away from the industrial/urban system by creating our own grid system with which to replace it. Off Off-Grid means that we are moving towards a purely God-reliant, separated, survival life. In the Off Off-Grid system, we have eschewed and rejected the accepted maxims of industrialism and urbanism, and we actually dare to question whether the perpetual 72 degree myth and the lies of “time saving” is beneficial to our long-term survival and happiness. We actually dare to question whether some very modern conveniences are really necessary. We actually dare to ask if we, as a people, are better off and more holy and spiritual since we have determined that carnal comfort is critical to our well being and happiness.

I know it is common, as I mentioned in the introduction, for ignorant worldlings to have an “all or nothing” mentality, which means that if we use any technology at all (such as a screwdriver, or a pie plate) then we are hypocrites. I know that I cursorily handled the “hypocrisy” charge in the introduction, but since it is such a prevalent charge, I want to take the time here to publicly respond to it and to expand on my comments.

Agrarianism and Technology

I have written about this before in many venues and at great length, but we must emphasize that we are not "anti-technology". There is a really sick kind of institutional (colonized) blindness that assumes (whether purposely or not is always the interesting question) that any limits put on the use of technology is automatically hypocritical. Let me explain this in the same illogical steps used and followed by most people:

Step 1: "Oh, you are an 'Agrarian'... like the Amish. That's interesting."

Step 2: "Well why are you on the Internet, and why do you have a truck?" (Note: if you are not on the Internet, or you do not have a truck they will say, “Why do you use store bought tools or frying pans –which are all technology”? The assumption is that anyone who dares question or reject ANY technology, is automatically a hypocrite and should be rejected).

Step 3: "If you are going to preach that all technology is evil, then you should get rid of all these things"

So, according to the modernist, if you reject a home phone and grid electricity because you do not want to allow some ungodly company to wreck your land and destroy the view by running poles and lines on your property, then you are a hypocrite and you must also reject frying pans and matches. Since any simple machine or tool can be considered technology, and since the worldling wrongly assumes that you reject all technology, then you are automatically a hypocrite even if the only technology you use is a stone wheel to crush walnuts. To most modern world-lovers ALL technology must be embraced without question. To the modern world, Industrialism, technology, and advancements are a complete and inviolable package, and with every toothbrush you must also warmly receive bluetooth technology. Regardless of the criteria you use, or the philosophy behind your thoughts in rejecting some so-called "advanced" time-saving gadgets (a lie if ever there was one), and accepting some others, you must realize that to the modernist industrial colonized mind you are a hypocrite if you do anything more than stand naked and starving in a cave, defecating on yourself until you die. There is no middle ground and no gray area. You must accept technology as morally neutral and embrace every bit of it, or you must reject every single bit of it without prejudice. Of course if anyone really believed this false dialectic it would prove every human ever born to be a hypocrite.

This is a really stupid idea, I know, but that is what the modern worldling thinks of any attempt at rejecting modernism. Even those who admire the simple life or who think it quaint and interesting will conclude (whether openly or privately, whether consciously or unconsciously) that the plain and simple separatist is really a quaint and simple little hypocrite. When they accuse us of hypocrisy, it is because they do not know what we believe (nor do most of them really care). The worldling accuses the separatist of hypocrisy, because if they do not, then they are faced with examining all the lies they have believed, and all the truths they must avoid at all costs. The principle truth that their worldview requires that they never, ever consider about themselves is this:

1 John 2:15 "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him."

The colonized mind must defend this world and its ways because it loves the world. That is a fact. It is a sad and scary fact, but it is a fact. The world will not listen to your reasoning as to why you have rationally and reasonably come to reject their worldview. They must not listen, because if they do - they will come face to face with their primary love... their love of the world. They must embrace this world and never for a minute weaken their grasp on it, because it is all they have. Never mind that:

a.) their culture is evidently crumbling around them.

b.) with all their time and labor-saving devices, they must work harder with less (in real terms) to show for it. Where a man used to be able to work to support his whole family, now, most two-earner families must utilize mountains of debt in order to maintain a worse standard of living. Families suffer, marriages are temporary, children reject God (or embrace a fake 'god' of their own mind and creation), and the worldling can't stop for a moment on the treadmill of this worldly life or they will be crushed under the weight of the cost of their lusts.

c.) their religion is designed to fit neatly into their worldview. It is rubber and flexible and doesn't for a minute challenge or confront the world that it upholds so wonderfully. In fact, modern "christianity" is the merely the religious arm of the industrial world; it is a fully owned subsidiary of the world system that hates Jesus Christ (Luke 19:14, John 7:7). This is why I call modern “christianity” Jesus Christ, Inc.

Religion (at least modern plastic religion) is indeed the opiate of the masses, and for those who are fully and completely brainwashed and colonized by the industrial religious cult, any defection from complete and idolatrous worship of technology and the industrial Leviathan is treason of the highest order.

Hypocrisy... So just who is the hypocrite? Let’s see…

Do our accusers embrace ALL technology without question? Of course not. Go to your accuser and ask them if there is any technology that they have rejected. Does your secular humanist have every gadget out there and does he accept all new technology without question? If not, why not? Has your modernist “christian” already received a Digital Angel personal tracking microchip? Then ask them if they will allow such a chip to be put into their right hand to be used for monetary transactions, and if they do not already have one of these, ask them “why not?” These tracking chips are already available and they have been for many years!

HYPOCRISY!

I saw a chef on a television show one time that used a hand whisk to beat eggs. Why would he use a hand whisk when beautiful and expensive electric egg-beaters are available to enable him to save time? The chef said that he used the hand whisk because it made the eggs lighter and fluffier and allowed him to have better control of the texture of the final product. Hmmmm... what can we determine from such thinking? Is it hypocrisy for someone to actually examine each technology and decide on a case by case basis if that technology is wise and good for the situation or the job? Would any reasonable person accept every technology just because it is technology and not examine the claims made by that technology? Would anyone really dare accuse a television chef of hypocrisy for refusing to use an electric egg-beater?

So, let’s get this straight... virtually every intelligent and sentient being makes value decisions about their use of different technologies and how they fit into their particular worldview, and how those things are used in the process of work. This is a fact. If other men are free to make value decisions (according to their worldview) in the technologies they embrace and accept, why then are we attacked for the doing the same thing?

I will tell you the answer…

We are NOT attacked because of the technologies we choose to reject or accept. We are attacked because the philosophy behind our choices condemns and exposes the lies of industrialism and exposes the modernist’s love of the world. When some folks hear that we do not have grid electricity, in their consciences they hear:

YOU ARE BAD AND WICKED AND EVIL AND YOU LOVE THE WORLD

Now, if this were not true, they would not care and would not suffer much over it; but they know that it usually IS true, and that is what they are really defensive about. People are defensive because they feel they are being attacked, but since we have attacked no one, it must be the conscience of the modernist that is attacking him.

There is a second issue at play here, and I want to address it here while we are defining terms. The second reason that modernists reject the concept of Off-Grid (and especially Off Off-Grid Living) is that they have allowed their minds to be bifurcated and fragmented (more on that in the next chapter). In addition to the assumption that all technology must be good (or at the least morally neutral), the worldling is taught from a very young age that technology saves time and effort and creates wealth and leisure time, which must be good.

During a speaking trip up north several years ago I was asked some questions about Agrarianism, and these questions are actually pretty common today. The natural response by the colonized mind when confronted with Agrarianism as a philosophy is to question why anyone wouldn't accept technology as good, beneficial and acceptable. People will ask, "So, am I supposed to get rid of my cell phone and my computer?” Others will say, "God gave us a mind. If we use our minds to create time-saving technologies aren't we just doing what we're supposed to be doing?”

There are some automatic pre-suppositions that create and support these questions or positions. The pre-suppositions are these:

1. As we have mentioned, the Agrarians are anti-technology, or reject all technology.

2. Therefore, as I have mentioned, if an Agrarian uses any technology, then he is a hypocrite.

3. Because technology is good or at the least morally neutral, then any use of technology must also be morally neutral; therefore if technology can be used for things that are automatically considered good, then… Technology is good.

4. "Saving time" is automatically good, regardless of the results or the reality of whether or not real time was “saved” or not.

5. Therefore if the human mind is capable of devising it, and it can be marketed as time-saving, efficient, or necessary, then it should be accepted without question.

There is a corollary to these false assumptions – another maxim of modern society. The corollary is this: If the corporate human mind can rationalize something as good, then it is good for all individual humans without question.

Here is an answer to these presuppositions:

1. As we have previously shown, Agrarians are not anti-technology, nor do we reject all technology. A frying pan is technology; a plow is technology; a shovel is technology. We all use technology and Agrarians do not at all universally reject technology. What we reject is the presupposition that all technology is good or at the least "morally neutral". Because we reject (or are moving away from) some technologies as harmful to ourselves, our families, our way of life and our worldview, does not make us anti-technology.

2. The use of technology by a separatist Agrarian does not constitute hypocrisy. I’ve examined this issue at length in the previous section.

3. Technology is not universally or inexorably good, nor is it naturally morally neutral. It cannot be considered outside of its purpose and use, and purpose and use cannot be morally neutral. Some of these presuppositions intertwine. There is an assumption made by most colonized minds that technology is fundamentally good. Some people believe that in the very worst case, technology is morally neutral. In reality, every technology exists for a purpose, or is used toward an end. Every technology must be considered and judged as to whether:

a.) It's intended use is positive towards our lives and worldview, and is conducive to our Christian survival, success, and happiness.

b.) The reasons and logic used to determine that a thing is "good" or not is true and Biblical. We do not want to produce "false positives", by assuming that a thing is good just because it enables some result or action that is presupposed to be good.

c.) The results promised are actually the results received.

4. Saving "time" is not always “good”. In fact, in very real terms, there is no such thing as saving time. Time may be reallocated, but never “saved”. Some technologies promise to be "time-saving" when in reality none of us using that technology have any more time available for spiritual pursuits than we had before the use of the technology. Time passes the same for all of us whether we use technology or not. In fact in real terms, “time saving" devices do not save time at all. A device or technology may shorten the amount of time necessitated by a certain job, but they do not “save time” at all. We all just go do something else. As we traveled faster, the world expanded and there was more places to travel. We used to walk to the garden for tomatoes and to the chicken-yard for eggs, now we drive to the store at 70 mph. Have we really saved time? Time-saving devices usually just reallocate time to some other industrial or unbiblical use. In fact, most time-saving devices actually cumulatively require more money (which takes time to earn or produce), more other devices or services (such as electricity, which requires money, which requires work), or simply shift the time requirement elsewhere. If it were true that all the “time-saving” devices invented since the advent of the industrial age actually saved time, then the average citizen in the industrial society, because of the conglomeration of all the time-saving devices and methods used throughout the last century or so, would have nothing at all but free time on his hands! It is an accepted truism that the time-saving society has less true relaxation and leisure time than the generations before the advent of the industrial society.

The presupposition exists that saving "time" is good for its own sake, as if just because a task took half the time then somehow we are better off (presumably doubly so) for the time saved. This is rarely the case. The cult of "time-saving" has never saved anyone any time; it has instead produced mentally and spiritually crippled people who are unable to do the most basic and necessary tasks. People today are ignorant of the means of basic survival and unable to hunt, grow, build, fix or create. Yet they believe they have some mystical bank filled with “saved time” deposits.

The argument for saving "time" has become an end in itself. No one is willing to ask the scary question "save time for what?", or “what is the cost?” Are our lives really more spiritually full and complete now that we are surrounded by "time-saving" devices that must be served by us, no matter the cost? At the root of this deception is the question, "What are we here for?" If God put me here to be perfected as I am digging post holes and planting a garden and building fences, am I really well served to be able to do all of that in ¼ of the time with machines that do the job for me, separating me from the lessons God intends for me to learn, and leaving me to serve the machines and to spend more time on spiritually and mentally debilitating pursuits?

5. Just because the human mind is capable of devising it, and it can be marketed as time-saving, efficient, or necessary, does not mean it should be automatically accepted.

By rejecting the concept of "time-saving" as being intrinsically or unquestionably good, we can also come to the conclusion that many of the devices created by men for that purpose are also not good. Just because an invention promises me that it will save me time and be easy to use, does not mean that it is good for me to use it. Buying industrialized butter from a commercial chain store may be easy and nominally time-saving - but is it good? Would I have been eternally (and physically) better served to go through the process of making my own butter? Would it be better for me to know how to make butter? Am I more likely to survive if I already know how to make, and practice making, butter? Those are the real questions, and these types of questions we are begged not to ask by the prophets of the industrial age.

Because of the high regard humans have for their own thoughts and ideas, people generally are not willing to question the character and the state of the mind that thinks the thoughts and that comes up with the ideas. By that I mean that man naturally believes his own heart to be good, and since his mind tells him something is good, it must naturally be good. Speaking of the mind of man, the Bible says that the heart (which is the mind) of man is desperately wicked, and naturally at enmity with God:

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jer. 17:9)

“For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be” (Rom. 8:6-7).

It seems to me it would be wise to automatically question whatever the world tells us is the way to do things. It seems to me that questioning worldly wisdom ought to be a default for those who seek to live life by a higher wisdom. It seems to me that I ought to automatically question something when my carnal flesh is naturally inclined to it.

ADDICTION

Addiction (Noun): the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma.

It is interesting to note that in virtually every addiction, the addict must eventually become a salesman for the addiction (or of the addictive product) so that he can afford to feed the addiction. The dope smoker or the crack addict must eventually sell dope or sell crack in order to make enough money to feed his addiction. Likewise those who become addicted to the world and its time-saving and leisure devices must eventually become spokesmen and defenders of the ideas that support the sale and perpetuation of the addiction. There is a scary fact here that everyone is too frightened to examine too closely:

If enough people pull out of the system and begin questioning all technology and rejecting most of it, then the industrial system that supports the massive sale of these addictive drugs at low cost will collapse.

Most of the people who defend worldly living are completely and utterly supported by that system. As I said before, they are un-sustainable as people, and they cannot live outside of that system. Therefore the thought of the destruction of that system necessarily means that they would have to separate from it or perish. Herein lies the conflict, and here is why this will be a very emotional and confrontational area of your life if you pursue separating from worldliness at any level. Revolution is warfare. This is the revolution, and welcome to it.

This leads me to the final term I want to define in this chapter, because you will need it for the next one.

REVOLUTION

A “rebellion” is an attempt by unauthorized and unlawful means to overthrow and replace a lawful system of authority or governance.

The word “revolution” has as its root the term “revolve” or to turn over or around. A revolution is the overthrow or removal of an unauthorized or unlawful form of authority or governance, or a usurper government, with an authorized and lawful one. When an illegitimate power is overthrown by those with legitimate power you have a revolution. When a people who have been brainwashed since birth, forcefully colonized, and illegitimately ruled by a colonial power, throw off the shackles of that colonial power, it is properly called a revolution.

I have told you that the majority of all people alive in the world today have “colonized minds”. The decolonization process is painful and difficult, but it takes nothing short of a revolution to overthrow the illegitimate system that currently rules over the colonized mind and heart. The next chapter is about this wonderful and needful revolution.

Surviving Off-Off-Grid: Introduction

***Welcome to the Book Project. I am writing the book Surviving Off-Off-Grid. Please read the participation rules HERE. Remember that the work is unedited when posted and is subject to change until final publication***

INTRODUCTION

If you pay attention to the news there seems to be much trepidation and worry in the world today. Western Civilization seems to be coming apart at the seams; economies around the world are crashing; there are massive job layoffs and bank failures; governments are printing and spending trillions of pretend dollars to try to stem the tide of collapse. There is a palpable nervousness in the air, and it seems that most people are just trying to pretend as if nothing permanently serious is really going on.

For over a century the Western Democracies have seen unprecedented growth and apparent success, and have been the envy of the whole world when it comes to standard of living. Now, if one looks closely, it appears that there is a change coming – and that change is making a lot of people really nervous.

But… have we been here before? Is there a time in history that we can look to in order to learn what is likely to befall Western society in the coming years?

Urbanism and Suburbanism, the Modern Rome

Towards the end of the 4^th century, Rome, the capital city of the Western Roman Empire was a metropolis of more than a million inhabitants. Most of the citizens of Rome were purely urbanites, people who had never known any other life and whose families and households had lived in the city for generations. The agrarian skills and trades that had allowed people to survive and thrive for thousands of years around the world had been almost completely lost by the city-folk in Rome, and, much like today, city dwellers looked down on and sneered at people who actually had (or chose) to work in the soil and with their hands to provide the necessities of survival. People who arrived in Rome from the “country” or from the provinces were considered to be backward bumpkins when compared with the cosmopolitan and progressive people of the city.

Do you think of Rome as an ancient and unrefined city? The city of Rome had running water, a sewage system, baths, mausoleums, temples, clubs, restaurants, pubs, and shops. Many of the homes had air-conditioning, milk delivery, and indoor plumbing. Students attended the city’s many schools and universities. Writers and artists worked by commission for religious leaders, politicians, and rich citizens. Specialization thrived. Most of the residents lived in apartments, walked to their jobs on cobblestone and brick streets lined with flowers and topiary, and spent the majority of their lives within the boundaries of the city. Many Romans had never even seen a farm nor did they possess any practical agrarian survival skills.

JIT – Just In Time

The city was provisioned in much the same way large cities are provisioned today. Away from the city there were clay and stone excavations, gold mines, tin and lead mines, metal forges and factories. Large granaries and warehouses in the harbor city of Portus, south of the city on the Tiber River, stored grains for daily transport for the JIT (Just In Time) supply of Rome. An advanced system of transport and supply kept the city well stocked from every direction. Highways and roads, advanced even by modern standards, allowed for goods to be transported to Rome from all over the known world. With ease a middle-class shopper in Rome could, in a relatively affordable way, buy spices and fabrics from Asia, clothing and tools from local artisans or from the Middle East, and food from Western Europe.

Most of the citizens of Rome were employed in jobs that were necessitated and supported by the massive amount of consumption by the citizens of the city. It was not uncommon for a wealthy Roman citizen to employ as many as 50 full-time paid workers, some whose day might consist solely of polishing candle sticks or sweeping floors, or carrying things from one place to another. Others worked in shops, thermal bath houses, restaurants, accounting offices, business trades, or in the city’s many venues of entertainment. Constant wars and conquests provided the means for a constant inflow of money and material for expansion and for the maintenance of jobs and a stable economy. It is true that Rome had massive slums and areas of poverty and degradation inhabited mainly by slaves and the poorer classes, but it also had very wealthy districts with upscale shops and boutiques.

The Romans, after centuries of living the urban life, had little or no concept of how their food was grown or produced. If you asked a Roman how sustainable his existence was, he might reply “Rome is the eternal city. It has always been here, and it will always be here”. You would have to admit it was something to behold! If you asked that same Roman citizen from where his water came, he would have likely shrugged and pointed to the aqueducts. Like the city, it seemed that free and plentiful water had always just been there. Eleven towering aqueducts, technological marvels built over a span of 500 years, brought cool, clear, potable water into the city from dozens of miles away. Underground pipes brought running water into and provided for air conditioning for the houses of those able to afford it. Huge buildings and structures, built by both paid and slave labor loomed over the city streets. The imposing Roman Colusseum, capable of seating 50,000 spectators, was a marvel of engineering and construction. The Colusseum had stood for over 300 years and was the site of gladiatorial contests, executions, animal hunts, savage battles, and other public spectacles. The Colusseum could even be filled with water for staged mock sea battles. Construction was a way of life in Rome, and, much like in our present cites, construction meant jobs and it gave a sense that things were always going to get bigger and better.

But, at the turn of the 5^th century, even though the Romans did not know it and could not have conceived of it, the end was very, very near. The thought of disaster would have been implausible to a Roman. Rome had not fallen to an enemy army in 800 years, and even though cultural and social memories and historical awareness were much greater back then, it seemed as if Rome, the eternal city, would indeed continue on for centuries more.

The Roman juggernaut was both hated and feared by friends and neighbors alike for hundreds of years and it could be said that, much like America in the early 21^st Century, world opinion had ceased to be favorable for the lone western superpower. By the end of the 4^th century many of the barbarian tribes had begun to unite against domination from Rome. The Visigoths had moved into the Eastern Roman Empire to escape persecution and subjugation by the invading Huns. The Visigoths led by Alaric, and other barbarian tribes now found themselves subjects of Rome, and they often suffered from persecution, high taxes, government intervention and corruption, and forced conscription. Uniting together against Rome, the barbarian armies on several occasions besieged Rome, and in 410 the Eternal City – that shining city that sits on seven hills - fell to the barbarian hordes. The destruction of Rome was unthinkable. But the unthinkable happened, and hundreds of thousands of people – those who were left alive and who had not starved, died of disease, or been killed during the siege – fled into the countryside as Rome was sacked and burned.

During the sieges of Rome by Alaric (there were three in all) starvation and disease killed tens of thousands of people, and the city descended into a maelstrom of bloody violence, robbery, and even cannibalism. It is said that the Roman leaders continued to hold the spectacles and gladiator battles during the siege in order to keep people’s minds off of their miserable condition, only now, instead of merely cheering at the destruction, death, and dismemberment of criminals, slaves, and political and religious prisoners, the people demanded that the bodies of the dead be given to them for meat. In a scene that has been repeated many times in history, city and suburb dwellers, angry, hungry and without any practical skills or means of support, devolved into pitiless beasts when the JIT (Just In Time) means of provisioning dried up, and when the means of production and distribution of mass-produced foods were destroyed.

Europe descended into a period that is now called the Dark Ages. It was dark, not because Rome had been some kind of beacon or a shining light - Rome had always been dark, brutal and nasty, blood thirsty and murderous – it was called “dark” because the elements that fallen man has come to regard as “progress” were all destroyed at the same time and in magnificent fashion. The vacuum created by the fall of Rome was filled by power hungry priests, monks, and Popes, and, because of the ignorance of the people, un-Biblical superstition would reign for nearly a thousand years.

A hundred years after the sacking of Rome farm animals grazed in the now crumbling Colusseum. Adults and children looked at the towering aqueducts and the fabled city streets and marveled at the technologically advanced society that must have created them. Another hundred years after that people were chiseling rocks and stones out of the walls of the Colusseum in order to build rudimentary stone buildings for housing. Many history students look at Roman ruins and believe that the destruction they see is solely the result of time and the elements, but in reality many of those structures were disassembled or torn down piece by piece for the base materials in them that could be had and used for the bare maintenance of life. Students today are taught that the destruction of Rome caused a great leap backwards in technology and knowledge, but wiser and more spiritual minds know that the advancement and success of Rome was actually a work of God designed to show forth his manifold wisdom in its eventual destruction. The technological feat that was Rome was actually a huge deception, a monstrous hologram of success and achievement. Rome was a city powered by blood, coercion, and foreign domination (as any huge city or state must be). The success of Roman life came on the backs of slaves and conquered peoples, and was upheld by the use of crushing tyranny and the usurpation of God-given freedoms. Like in any major metropolis, the maintenance of the city of Rome required massive amounts of taxes and human investment. True wealth, created by the hard work and creativity of productive people who tilled, planted, harvested, milled, mined, built, etc. was expropriated at the point of a sword and by threats. Taxes, as they are in any nation, were acquired in myriad ways, but all of those ways rested on the threat of imprisonment, death, or worse… the Colusseum.

The “advancements” of Rome (those accomplishments that allowed hundreds of thousands of people to live in an artificially built society, separated from the means of production) actually served to cripple and mentally enslave the people who became addicted to city and suburban life. People moved out of the countryside and into the cities and suburbs for many reasons, but most went to Rome because:

1. Agrarian life had become difficult due to the continuous hardships imposed by the constant warfare required for the maintenance of the big city-states. Oppressive taxes were bad enough, but the knowledge that your entire crop (along with your sons and sometimes your daughters) might be “requisitioned” by the next passing army was too much for many to bear. If everything was being stolen or destroyed in order to maintain Rome… why not move to Rome?

2. Rome had assumed an almost mythic status. Country-folk were considered backward and ignorant. Knowledge was in Rome. Advancement was in Rome. Enlightenment was in Rome. Rome, as a woman dressed in red, had become the beautiful and seductive harlot of the world, and fallen man was easily enticed to go in unto her.

3. Greed. It was said that Rome was the richest city in the world. God had commanded man to live simply, and to be satisfied with food and raiment and not to seek riches; but the carnal mind is able to rationalize any behavior. To be frank, GREED is the primary reason most people end up moving to the city. The carnal mind knows that country life is hard, and that there is no safety net. In the country you work and you pray, you plant and you water, and you look to God alone for the increase. City life provides a buffer zone between man and God. Unified work and specialization mitigates the immediate risk of failure, and provides an insurance-like effect when God’s judgment causes failures or disasters. In the country, if your crop failed, you alone were responsible and you were exposed and open before a sovereign God to whom you owed obeisance and service. But if you lived in a city and disaster struck, you could always just get a job polishing furniture or sweeping out kitchens. Risk could be spread out and shared in a Babylonian fashion.

The city-dweller is almost never survival minded. Why should he be? His job is to perform his individual task and let others worry about the details of survival. The advent of specialization fractured the mind and caused man to focus on pieces of the puzzle instead of the whole picture. The urbanite doesn’t concern himself with whether or not the grocer has food or the peddler has supplies because during good times those things are not his concern. His mind is to be focused on his daily specialized tasks and the rest of the brain is allowed to atrophy. Governments and the prophets of urbanization provide entertainments to keep the mind numbed and fractured, and always new trinkets and wonderments to keep the soul anaesthetized. New products must always appear on the shelves in order to stave off boredom – and the manufacture of eternally useless baubles serves to maintain an ever increasing need for jobs, employment, and growth. Survival and preparedness, once an unconscious way of life and a God-given instinct for the continuance of the race and for motivation to productive work, became nothing more than a hobby for enthusiasts and a pacifier for worry-worts.

Modern Society and the Myth of Mitigation of Threats

Today, the idea of corporate mitigation of the threat of disaster or judgment is the foundational idea behind industrial and urban society. Our world now functions on the premise that if people become more specialized and come together to create a global corporate economy (a prosperity machine), that nothing bad can happen to the new global Rome. Modern society is unconsciously designed to take the mind off of the truth of the absolute sovereignty of God, and off of man’s responsibility before God. It is a sublime spiritual irony that, had man remained within God’s declared will as to the manner and means of life and living, he would have not been so susceptible to the massive and destructive threats that face him today… and at the same time, having remained within God’s will, he would be less likely to be facing wrath as a result of his rebellion.

It is an unhappy reality that it often takes massive and devastating economic interruptions in order to get people to think about doing things they ought to have been doing all along. It is a sad commentary on humanity that it often takes the fear of a second great depression to motivate people to learn the lessons of the first great depression. It is a sign of the human condition that most people, most of the time, will not do that which seems uncomfortable for them at the outset, even if it means that doing so will spare them the unbearable in the long run. This book is for the few who are willing to look at facts the way they are, and not just the way that people want them to be.

The 80/20 rule - and why I believe that it is overly optimistic

In every field of endeavor in which I have ever engaged, especially while I was back in the world, there existed what was called an 80/20 rule. Many of you may have heard of it. The 80/20 rule is flexible and it changes based on different situations or genres, but in general it goes like this...

20% of the people do 80% of the work, while 80% of the people do 20% of the work.

20% of the people are producers, while 80% of the people are consumers.

20% of the people provide 80% of the benefits that sustain society, while 80% of the people provide 20% of the benefits.

Many years ago I was in a survival related course, and the instructor said that 80% of the people are “victims, just waiting to happen”, while 20% of the people are rarely victims because they are intelligent, engaged, aware, and responsive. Well, I am going to go on the record as disagreeing with the 80/20 rule in this case. I do not believe that anywhere near 20% of the people are producers, workers, or survivors. I believe 20% is overly optimistic in virtually any situation, and it most certainly is overly optimistic when it comes to survival today. In reality, most of the people you know (likely including you), if examined in a historical context, are now not viable or sustainable, meaning that they would not survive even a short amount of time after a systemic failure of the JIT industrial/consumer life support grid that is our world today. I call this industrial-consumer life support system “the perpetual 72 degree consumer womb”. If a situation were to arise where people were forced, even for a very short amount of time (say weeks or months) to live exactly as their great-grandparents or ancestors lived, they would die off in massive numbers in very short order.

For example, when rural electrification was underway during the depression of the 1930’s, had a huge systemic disaster wiped out the entire electrical system in America for a year, there likely would have been zero deaths that could be directly attributed to the power outage. By contrast, a similar unexpected and systemic loss of electrical power across the whole of America today would likely lead to deaths in the millions (more likely the hundreds of millions) if the outage were to last for a single year.

Industrialism coupled with modern consumer capitalism has created generations of non-viable people, each generation more non-viable than the one before it, each peopled with individuals who cannot and would not survive even the mildest interruption in goods or services without massive government outlays and government rescue programs. We need look no further than Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, or more recently, Hurricane Ike here in Texas, to see how absolutely necessary massive government interventions (with funds and material) are to the short-term survival of modern man. In every case during the last several decades where massive disasters have been recorded, there has always been (however weak and/or slow it may appear) an outside source of stability that was ready and able to jump in and provide aid and comfort to support those who are otherwise unable to survive and support themselves. When hurricane after hurricane punished Florida and the American eastern coast in 2004, aid poured in almost immediately from the rest of the country and around the world. When Hurricane Katrina (historically not the biggest or most devastating storm) destroyed most of New Orleans, we saw the almost immediate complete devolution of that society and the monstrous result of carnal people being stripped of the support structure that has become necessary to sustain them. Even those who did survive well enough, who did not riot, who did not loot, who did not kill or rape – these were bolstered and supported by the knowledge that help was coming, and with the understanding that if they could hunker down and wait it out, they would soon be returned to their former state of dependency on the system which sustains them.

I am going to make a statement that might shock some people, and you would do well to ruminate on it for some time...

I believe that if tomorrow there were some sort of massive and comprehensive systemic disaster, resulting in a loss of JIT goods and services and a loss in available grid electrical power and water, and if that disaster (whether man-made or natural) caused a scenario where omnipresent paternal government could not or would not be able or willing to send any appreciable aid for a long period of time, that fully ½ or more of the population of the United States (or of just about any country for that matter) would die in less than a year. 150+ million deaths in less than a year, just in the United States; and I believe that my prediction is probably on the conservative side.

Think about that. Most people who read that might scoff or deny that such a thing could be possible. Like the Romans in 410 they cannot conceive of such a thing coming to pass, nor can they even begin to quantify the difficulties and realities of what will occur when such a thing comes to pass. If Americans today were forced, without warning, to live for just 1 year exactly like their ancestors lived 150 years ago, the greater part of them would die in a very short amount of time. This is exactly what I mean by “the perpetual 72-degree consumer womb”. This is the very definition of a system that is not-viable, that is unsustainable. Most fat, ignorant, and lazy modernists are likely to disagree with me, because most fat, ignorant, and lazy modernists do not have any idea what life would be like (even on a very short term level) without the government sponsored artificial womb that has been created for them and in which they now live. In every case, for the entire life span of virtually everyone who reads this, there has been a system in place to support and provide for all those who are unable or unwilling to take care of and provide for themselves and their families – and by that I do not mean to say that they are unwilling to “go to work”. I am saying that they are unable or unwilling to provide and support for their families OUTSIDE of the unsustainable JIT system that has put everyone within it at risk. We are several generations removed from the last generation that had to “make it” off the land without a safety net, or an artificial system which piped in food, water, electricity, and whatever else is necessary for “survival”. Even the term Survival, as it is most commonly used today, implies “lasting” or “making it through” to a time or place where the artificial womb of government or industry supplied material comfort and safety is in place. Most survivalist instruction and materials are predicated on the idea that survival means “to persevere until help comes or until ‘normalcy’ returns”, which means that this type of survivalism assumes a return to the crippling and atrophying way of life that put people at risk in the first place. Now, in and of itself and in the short run there is nothing wrong with this type of survival, if it is necessary and if it works. The problem is that so long as we deny that our current system of life and living is unsustainable, then we refuse to move towards a more realistic and honest system of life and living. In the current situation, every person is in daily peril of that very likely and impending reality where the system itself collapses and is either irreparable, or it cannot be restored to its former condition.

So Why This Book?

This book is not really a “how to” book. There will be some how to and plenty of “why to”, but this book was not designed to be a manual on Survival. This book is about decolonizing the corrupted and atrophied mind and teaching people another way to think.

What do we mean by “decolonize”? Well, every colonial power admits that there are certain things it must accomplish when it colonizes a formerly independent and free people. The colonial power must first convince its new subjects (by warfare or education or whatever means necessary) that they must change their former way of life and living. It is not enough that the people be forced to act differently, but, in the long term the newly colonized people must be taught to think differently. They must be reprogrammed. Their minds must be colonized. Colonialism, whether good or bad, is designed to make a people change the way they think and operate so that they can become valuable and beneficial to the colonial power. Well, in order to make a successful and thriving Agrarian people (the American colonies prior to the War Between The States) accept that industrialism would bring prosperity and unity, the minds of the people had to be subjugated and colonized. There is a long story of how this colonization of the mind came to be, and it is a subject that could fill a whole book in itself, but it is inarguable that this colonization of the Western mind took place. Thousands of years of history and successful living were thrown out, the baby with the bathwater. Over a period of 100 years, the Agrarian mind was overthrown and the Industrial and Urban mind was developed. Independency was replaced with dependency. Individuality was replaced with a horrible fake of the same name. The whole mind was fragmented and compartmentalized so that the man or woman can be forced into specialization – like an ant or a bee in a colony. People were robbed of their concept of “wholes” and instead were sold on the virtue of “parts”. Marketers and salesmen applied to the baser desires of greed and covetousness to convince people that their old lives were hard and unprofitable, but in the Brave New World they would have gadgets and fun and free-time, and leisure. The family was fractured, and each member became replaceable. Even the definition of “family” was altered.

Sin is Codified and Man attempts to Reign in God’s Stead

It is our opinion that urban-industrialism (and the inter-connected/inter-dependent world required to support it) is responsible for most of what is wrong with the world. Ok, sin is what is wrong with the world, but industrialism is the coalescence of all that sin does and can do in the world. It is distilled sin, in that it perpetuates and allows all that man imagines, and therefore, in industrialism nothing is restrained from man that he might imagine doing:

And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. (Gen 11:6)

Now this makes industrialism the modern tower of Babel. It is the one language of the world, and it is the result of the carnal man saying "Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven". Of course the city is urbanism and the tower is industrialism.

Ok, so if you disagree with that, then you have no reason to read further or to investigate the solutions provided for you in this book. Your system (urban industrialism) already reigns and is already out there on the plain of Shinar and you may go get your fill of it. If, however, you agree with what I have said, then Agrarianism is God's survival alternative. We believe that disconnecting from the current system is necessary for our spiritual safety, our physical well-being, and for our eternal good.

The Grid

The connection that ties people into this modern Babylonian system is the system we call "the grid". That grid consists of physical and spiritual connections and services that intertwine us with the world, and cause us to rely on the world system instead of on God. There is a huge difference between utilizing some aspect of the world system, as necessary, for the purpose of further separating from it (much as you would, if you were in a small boat, push off from a dock in order to gain speed to separate from it), and loving the world by being tied to it - so do not let naysayers and illogical barkers convince you that if you believe in separation, that this separation must be complete, total, and immediate - else you are a hypocrite. Let dogs bark. You just go on about the business of being obedient. Dogs defend what they love - never forget that. A barking dog is just defending his first love.

It is ridiculous and stupid for anyone to assert that because, at any particular time, we are still connected in one way or another to the grid, that we are hypocrites or that we are in the precise same position as someone who is completely and utterly dependent on the grid. It is such an illogical assertion that it barely merits a response. Unhappily though, it is the argument that world and grid lovers use the most when trying to defend worldliness. They will look at the Amish and they will say “Ha! Some of the Amish use cell phones or diesel generators! Ha! They are just as worldly as me, and they are hypocrites!” No. They are 99% less dependent on the system than you are. They are almost certainly not dependent on that cell phone or that diesel generator, and they almost certainly will not die if they have to go without it – since they have spent centuries learning how to live and survive off of the grid. So, like I said, the “hypocrisy” charge is as inevitable as it is stupid and illogical. Never mind barkers because they are just defending what they love.

Ok, as I was saying… this world "grid" system is most perfectly represented by the electrical grid. In the electrical grid, everyone is tied together and reliant on some mega-corporate (or fascist state/corporate conglomerate) system to provide them with power. (This is not the section where we discuss electrical power, we are just using electrical power as a parable) Now, the trick for the industrialist is to provide sooooo much power, and at such a seemingly low cost, that people will go out into the corporate industrial stores and buy tons of once needless stuff that can be plugged eternally into wall sockets. Each one of these things in and of itself uses only a nominal amount of power, but each is designed to accomplish several things:

1. To cumulatively provide huge amounts of money to the power company.

2. To make us daily MORE dependent on the power company for the maintenance of a certain "standard of living".

3. To make us daily LESS viable as creatures dependent on God alone for our provision, safety, happiness, and well-being. In other words, each generation is less and less able to survive without the comforts and conveniences provided by grid power.

4. To enslave us to our baser lusts. The system itself is designed to provide proxies for all that God would have for His children. The grid-system provides a perpetual 72 degree womb where every carnal need is met instantly by the world system.

So, after fallen man discovered the ability to create electrical power and to channel it down long power lines to each individual dwelling, the marketing arm of Satan clicked into business. Daily, more and more power gulping systems and gadgets are provided which take mankind farther and farther away from the way that God has ordained that His people live.

The Bible tells us what was the job of man before the fall:

And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. (Gen 2:15)

And this was the job of man after the fall:

Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. (Gen 3:23)

We are to work with our hands (1 Thess. 4:11), in the ground/soil (Gen. 3:23), and to be content with food and raiment (1 Tim. 6:8). The lie of the industrial grid system is that if you will enslave yourself to your baser lusts (for comfort, leisure, entertainment, sin) then you will not have to labor in the soil. That is basically the gist of it. That is why your parents always told you to go to a worldly college to get a degree... so you won't have to dig ditches. The world hates the idea of working in the soil, because that is what God has decreed for man. The world hates the idea of working in the soil because it reminds us that one day our mortal man must return to dust. Anyway, I digress...

So this grid system is a tool of the world for the enslavement of the minds and hearts of the people. Once again, if you do not agree, you may go your way... your system is out there and you may go have your fill of it. If, however, you still agree or you are considering what I am saying - we can move on to the next step.

GETTING OUT

Getting "off-grid" looks like a monstrous and overwhelming task. It is the giant in the land that keeps us from going in and taking the good land that God has promised us. The grid system is easy and relatively cheap (when you consider that you are already in it, and enslaved to it) in that it will cost you more to get out than to stay in. To be honest with you, our flesh loves air conditioning and microwaves and hair dryers and such things. All the junk we plug in to outlets is designed to please and anaesthetize our flesh. That is why they are so hard to get rid of. The first task in getting off-grid is to fall out of love with these things - to realize that they enslave us and they are poisonous to our souls and to our hope of eternal life. Not that going off-grid could ever save us - but be assured of this one thing, living for our flesh will certainly damn us. Think of going off-grid as going into a lifeboat from a sinking ship. You may not be saved if you go off the ship, but you will surely die if you don’t. Anyway, we have to fall out of love with these things that pamper and cater to the flesh. We have to look at them with a true and pure eye and we must evaluate the true purpose and need of things. We must convince ourselves that most of these things are poisonous to our well-being. Then we can more easily toss them. Those things that are conducive to off-grid living, or that can be used to our benefit, or that can be used to help us on our pilgrimage OUT of the system - we can retain for a time. The next step is to train ourselves to go without these things, and train ourselves on older and better ways of doing things:

Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein (Jer. 6:16).

Don't be one of those people who say "we will not walk therein. God has said that the old paths are better than the new ones. That is a fact declared from heaven. Learn it and love it.

The next step is to practice and begin to live the things we say we believe. This is the first real step on the Pilgrim's Progress. Step out and start to practice and live a different life. Sell all of the junk you don't need and begin to procure those things that will help you to live off-grid... which means you need to sell almost everything you own. Best to get used to it, since you won't take any of that stuff to wherever you go after you die anyway. Get rid of stuff and start to make do without.

This book is about a whole new way of thinking and a whole new philosophy of life (new for you, but old when examined historically). It is a paradigm changer, and it is also a spiritual road map to simpler and Godlier living. It is designed to challenge every thing you think about the world around you, and to offer alternatives to modern maxims and accepted shibboleths. In fact, there is nothing new here at all. This is, of all things, a history book – a time machine through which you may become acquainted with your own ancestors and their more successful and holy ways of life.

I pray it succeeds in whatever way the Lord would choose to use it.

Book Rules Posting

6/04/08 - 5th Day - Midday. Ok, this is the re-post of the rules for the book we are going to be writing here on the blog. The first chapter (actually the introduction) is scheduled to be posted later this afternoon, so please check back before 5pm for the first installment. This post is so I will have a link to post at the top of each installment so people can check out the rules... so here are the rules...

We are going to write a book, you and I.

I have decided to turn the Off-Grid Living series I did last year on this blog into a book tentatively entitled...

Real Survival: Living Off-Off-Grid

I hope to capitalize on the current "survival" interest and give people a completely different philosophy than they've ever read about real survival.

I am going to almost completely re-write the series and put it into book form. Re-writing means that I am going to add a lot of things I have learned in the last year or two, and add more information that really wasn't conducive to the blog series.

I intend to post each Chapter (maybe 1 every week) on A Process Driven Life, then I will ask you guys to comment, edit, and help out with improving the chapter. What I would like is comments (such as.. "you might say something about X"), edits ("Bunker, you idiot, you misspelled X"), and even suggested improvements. In fact, you can write or re-write whole paragraphs that you think would be a help for the reader, and if I like it I will plagiarize it and put it into the book.

Here are the rules:

1. You can't get mad if I do not use, or if I ignore or reject, your idea or suggestion. Some of you are very good writers, but I do have an overall impression and idea of what I am trying to accomplish and what the philosophy is. A very, very great idea, may still not make it into the book if I feel it won't be right. In fact, some ideas may be included already in unpublished parts I have already written but have never put online.

2. I really want some participation. I want your help and you are able to make any and all suggestions for changes, additions, subtractions, etc. Don't think I will be mad because you say "this part stinks" or "just delete this part". Again, I may not follow your suggestion, but I sincerely do want to read them.

3. You aren't going to get any credit, except a general "thanks to the blog folks" in the beginning. You also aren't going to get any money, since there will never be much, and what little there is will go to support my family.

4. Your suggestion may be included in the book in its entirety, and then again, it may not get posted on the blog at all much less be in the book. It depends, and I claim sole authority and discretion over how the project progresses.

5. I won't be posting all the articles online for participation. Some are going to be top secret, after all - there still has to be a reason for you to go buy 10 copies of the book to give to your friends and family.

Please participate and comment, even if it is just to say "I really like this" or "I really hate this", because if there is not an appropriate amount of participation, I will quit spending the massive amount of time this takes to do this online.

***Each chapter will be posted, then throughout the next week until the next chapter appears, changes will be made to the actual post text, so if you are participating, you must go back and read the chapter to see the changes as they are posted.***

So, let's get started, shall we?

Michael Bunker

Flashback Alert

6/03/09 - 4th Day - After Breakfast. Hey, things are looking bleak out there, so welcome back to A Process Driven Life - your daily jolt of alternative hope. Well, June is here and today was supposed to be our "First Wednesday" community work day, but the rains came last night and we had to cancel the work day. I would guess we probably received about 2 inches, which is very, very nice. Our best rain this year I would say. We are doubly blessed because the Lord saw fit to protect us from some pretty severe weather in the area last night, including tornadic vortices and heavy hail. Praise God for his mercy. Anyway, I should get some time today to work on the first submission of the June Book Project, so I pray, if the Lord wills, that I will have that ready to post tomorrow morning some time.

Hey, the dollar continued to decline as other nations begin to wake-up to the fact that Amerika's economy is on life support. Russia and other countries are beginning serious talks on getting out of the dollar as their reserve currency. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the hypnotist with the soothing voice in charge of telling other countries that we are not falling as our elevator screams towards final impact, was laughed at by an audience of Chinese when he waved his hand in a Star Wars mind control manner and said, "Our dollar is strong and your investments are safe". All the while, The Amazing Timothy has been unable to sell his house in a rich New York Suburb, even after he dropped the price to less than what he paid for it. He finally had to rent out it so he didn't bleed to death from the house payments on an empty castle. But things are fine and we are already seeing the signs of a strong recovery... right.

Oh, and someone shot a missile at a passenger jet here in Texas, but you'd never know it because the mainstream national news isn't touching the story. In fact, even though the pilot who reported the incident is an ex-military man and even though he did an awesome job documenting the incident, the investigation is being kept hush-hush and at a low level with the local County Sheriff's office heading it! Yes, you see Homeland Security and the FBI are too busy following old men with ties to anti-tax groups, spying on people with conservative bumper stickers, and giving armed security to late-term abortion doctors to investigate a missile attack on a US passenger aircraft.

Enough of that.

FLASHBACK ALERT: So I was reading back through my early June blog posts of previous years, and I found some snippets I thought I'd share with you. This first is from June 2008 I believe...

"The thing that scares folks is that I am proposing an actual Biblical philosophy of Christian Agrarian Separatism, rather than just offering agrarianism as a pretty good lifestyle choice. Our approach condemns the world that hates Christ, and the industrial system that it has produced. It doesn't mollycoddle syncretists and worldlings, but challenges them to examine their foundations, and to read the Bible as it is written, and not through the rose-colored and skewed filter of industrial and commercial colonialism. The fact is, if folks listen to me (and they are listening in ever larger numbers) AND do what I am proposing, the world system that has corrupted and destroyed so many billions of souls would collapse around us. I have always preached that people have a fear of freedom, and nowhere is that more evident than in the nascent agrarianism movement. People want to live in a picture postcard, or imagine living in one, but they want to bring Egypt with them. They want renovation without revolution. They want a life with barnyard animals and chicken tractors, but they want them and air-conditioning and Wal-Marts and toaster pastries too. Every movement is killed by syncretism, and every attempt at change is destroyed by compromise. I understand that not everyone is going to agree with me. In fact, I expect almost nobody is going to agree with me. But I don't need a million man march to change the world. One man and one family at a time will be enough. Each family that unplugs from the modern apostate industrial and religious world, is a leg being kicked out from under the hologram of freedom and security most people have accepted as reality. That is a fact. Which makes me dangerous. You may write me off as a kook and an extremist, but don't ever think that I'm not dangerous. There is no more dangerous man than one who believes and who attempts to live what he preaches.

Think about that."

And this one, if I remember right, is from June 2007:

"Agrarianism naturally puts us into closer contact with God's creation. We hear (or see) His still small voice in the minute changes of the weather, in its extremes, in the animal and plant life. The example of the righteous in Israel in the Bible is interesting - the elect few were able to see the hand of God in conditions and events, and gave Him alone the glory for all His mighty works; when chastised they repented, and when blessed they praised God. The Puritans, also Agrarians, exemplified this understanding, instituting days of thanksgiving and days of humiliation based on their in-depth understanding of what God was doing in the creation. By contrast, Industrialism makes man blind and dumb to the hand of God and ignorant to His speaking and threatenings in His book of nature. Now, a thousand-million blind, deaf, and dumb industrial prophets – surrounded by air-conditioning, wall-to-wall carpeting, and sheet rock – preach peace to a people who have insulated themselves from anything God has to say in the creation. When the children of Israel refused to hear God, He spoke to them through Moses. Today's Moses is a pampered seminary graduate with well lotioned hands and tempered glass with a high R-value who considers Agrarianism to be an ill-informed lifestyle choice, an ignorant movement of simple-minded throwbacks, a folly-bound quest for dreamers who reject the “Great Commission” and eschew explosive evangelism.

It is interesting to me that our friends and family members still don't get it. Well, the fact is they don't want to get it. It's easy enough to explain if they cared to hear, which they do not. They still think their lives and choices are better than ours, and they cannot believe that anyone seriously would choose to live this life. In their minds even if we adults do choose this life, surely our children are only doing it out of obedience to their parents. They cannot comprehend that our children might follow after us. Who (they think) would possibly reject 4 years of the drunken debauchery in college, followed by the “better life” - 401k's, highway traffic, hypertension, drug stores, abortions, fag-preachers, apostate Sunday school, HDTV, and a ¼ acre bit of paradise in a subdivision, peacefuly jammed between two other homeowner/consumers and their pets? Oh, and let us not forget a lingering death in a nursing home with visits maybe once a week from family members treading the same path.

For generations, Christian Agrarianism was the foundation and ruling philosophy for our ancestors. Remember, the modern industrial lifestyle is still fairly new in the grand scheme of things. All of these things have become ubiquitous only in the last 100 years:

urban living, latch-key kids, public schooling and social indoctrination from 5 to 22 years of age, air-conditioning, cars, planes, the 'suburbs', punching a clock, retirement plans, convenience stores, superstores, microwaves, cell-phones, free condoms, radio, television... Oh, and we best not forget the computer and the Internet – only widely used for less than 20 years. So all of this is the gift and promise of the Industrial victory over Agrarianism... How's that workin' out for ya?

Stupid people (and I do not mean to be un-charitable) who become prophets and recruiters for the One-World Cult can not understand why a reasonable person can examine all the evidence and reject that thinking and way of life. In fact, some even consider it child abuse to raise our children like our grandparents were raised! Worst of all, these people act hurt and offended if you dare defend your way of life – even though their lifestyle has been on display these past decades and the disaster it has visited on lives and families is self-evident.

Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein (Jer. 6:16).

They said, “we will not walk therein – and neither will you if we can help it. If we can't convince YOU to abandon the old successful paths of your ancestors, then we will do our best to steal your children”.

You know what? My children do not want to go to college – and it is not because they are abused, mistreated, or brain-washed. In fact, they have more information on the subject than you do, thank you very much. My guarantee to you is that they will be better educated, wiser, more able to persevere and survive, and more willing to walk in obedience to God than the flaccid, mind-numbed slaves that your university can produce. We teach our children about the dangers and seductions of the secular cult of industrialism and its plans to subvert them:

Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand (Eph. 6:10-13).

2 Corinthians says that we are not ignorant of the devices of the devil, and that is true – but some of you are. The best tool we have is to educate our children about the wiles and devices of the devil. To let them see the product of the worldview and lifestyle of this wicked world. The Bible says about any man who loves this world, that the love of the Father is not in him. The prophets and recruiters for this world system better heed what they do, even those of you who go around with the name of Christ on your lips."

So enough light reading for today. Y'all go out and have a great day, and be sure to tune in tomorrow (Lord willing) for the first installment of the new book.

Your servant in Christ Jesus,

Michael Bunker

Scattershooting Because You Love It So

6/02/09 - 3rd Day - After Breakfast. Howdy y'all, hope all is well out there where you are. The prognosticators keep giving us some probabilities of rain, though the percentages remain somewhat low. Yesterday morning a two county-wide storm was bearing down on us in the morning, and then, after entering Coleman County, the storm decided that there wasn't much to do in this county and promptly disappeared. The humidity, however, has remained high - which makes for good, steamy afternoons. It's great here when you can get a breeze though. We're supposed to be up near 90 today and closer to 100 by Friday. Hopefully some of this possible rain will get to us and cool things off. For those of you tuning in to find out how we did in our June 1 office fundraiser, I will be giving an update later today on my friendslist.

Let's get straight to it, shall we?

I do so like to read James Kunstler, even though he is a pompous, arrogant, citified ass. Unhappily, although I do like to post quotes from Kunstler, I am unable to link directly to his blogs because he, like some teenage Biff Tanner, is unable to control himself from using foul language in front of women and children. I really like much of what he has to say, but, were he a southerner, he would get a few good raps across the mouth to keep him in line.

***Please do not email me to tell me that I just said "ass" in the same paragraph and that "ass" is a bad word. It is a Bible word, so as a preacher I feel permitted to use it... besides, Kunstler is a pompous aristocratic ass, no matter how good some of his musings are***

Anyway, here is a good snippet of Kunstler for this week:

"All this was occurring against the background of General Motors looming bankruptcy, an epochal moment in US history, like losing a limb or a loved one. The US Government has decided to drive a Chevrolet off the cliff Thelma and Louise style. We were heading there anyway, so why not make the trip in air-conditioned comfort, with plenty of room for all the family members, and on-board video entertainment for the little ones. In fact, it may not be the bankruptcy of GM itself that will amaze and appall the other nations of the world, so much as the US government's pretense that the company can return to health in just a little while and pay back all the money that the citizenry has allowed to be sucked into its black hole of losses."

I guess as an observer to this farce, I cannot help but note how truly bizarre it is. Obama's government is still doing the proverbial shell game, only now they are doing it openly, and in slow motion. Only idiots could be deceived by it, which goes to prove the point. It is like when the government said something akin to this:

"We ordered some 'stress tests' to be run on the nation's biggest banks in order to find out how bad things really are. Well, before the results were announced we determined that the results were so bad, that if they were just released to the public, they would cause a massive panic and the world would burst into flame, dogs and cats would be living together, it would be mayhem... so... instead we just announced that the results were *likely* to be really bad - so bad that we couldn't announce them - then we worked daily with the press to slowly announce over time that we were not ready to announce them for fear of panic. Then we got the press to announce that the results would soon be announced in a gentle, non-panicky way, and then we announced that the perfectly un-shocking announcement was forthcoming. Then, after a few vanilla mochas, we finally announced the results on a Friday evening on page 15 of the Village Voice underneath an article on "Will the AntiChrist be Homosexual?", but by then the public was not in a panic mode (and we don't think most Americans read the Village Voice anyway, it being gay and all), because they know that we are firmly in charge, and that we are willing to go to great lengths to make sure that they don't panic. Thus, trust and confidence were re-instilled in our banking system, whose stress test results were so bad that planes were nearly falling from the sky"

Relax Amerika...


No one means you any harm...

...except the aliens, and I'm not sure exactly what they are threatening to do to the earth but it involves invading members of the phylum cnidaria (jellyfish).

The Difference between Christian Agrarianism and Mercantile Agrarianism

Youth Pastor "denied abusing at least one of the boys and said he did not recall taking pornographic photos of boys found on hard drives in his possession". The question, do the 4 life sentences each end in judgment and eternal damnation, or is it just the first one?

You should visit Cleveland, because at least it's not Detroit...



Ok y'all, that's it for today.

Michael Bunker

June Project starting line, and some Scatterspeak

6/01/09 - 2nd Day - After Breakfast. My plan right now is to post the first section (the introduction) to the book on Thursday. It actually could happen tomorrow (Tues.) but I don't think it will, then Wednesday is our "first Wednesday word day" here in the community, so I won't be able to do any writing on that day. So, we'll look towards Thursday as the launch day for the June Blog book project.

GM filed for bankruptcy this morning in a plan hatched by Obama and his administration that will give the Government majority ownership of the failed automaker. It should be a nifty and successful partnership, because - as we all know - the government manages things so well. Maybe GM now will run as smoothly and efficiently as the IRS and the DMV? Anyway, for some of my more astute readers, this situation might bring to mind a quote from the classic 1954 Hitchcock film "Rear Window", where Stella, James Stewart's nurse, tells him that she predicted the 1929 stock market crash after she was nursing a GM exec who was having to urinate a lot because of the stress:

Stella: You heard of that market crash in '29? I predicted that.
Jeff: Oh, just how did you do that, Stella?
Stella: Oh, simple. I was nursing a director of General Motors. Kidney ailment, they said. Nerves, I said. And I asked myself, "What's General Motors got to be nervous about?" Overproduction, I says; collapse. When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country's ready to let go.

Well, GM doesn't just have to go to the bathroom ten times a day this time. GM has a catheter and is on life-support. The good news is that the newer, smaller, more efficient General Motors is determined to continue to build better cars that no one wants and for which there will be no affordable oil or parts.

Ironical quote of the day. Apparently, some guy shot an abortion doctor in his "church", and while we detest violence, we generally are not shocked, surprised, or even saddened when chickens come home to roost. Anyway, the wife of the slain baby-murderer offered this quote which I have awarded the Ironical Quote of the Day award:

"The slaying of the 67-year-old doctor is "an unspeakable tragedy," his widow, four children and 10 grandchildren said in statement. "This is particularly heart-wrenching because George was shot down in his house of worship, a place of peace."

His "place of peace" kind of like his "womb of serenity" where he had a reasonable expectation not to be harmed or killed?

Oliver North said in his 1987 trial that if the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were not stopped, there would eventually have to be a "Berlin-like" wall on our borders where people would be harrassed for their papers when trying to enter or leave the country - and nobody, especially not Oliver North, would have accepted that in 1987. Well, the Sandinistas were voted out of office in 1990, and Oliver North and his neo-fascist buddies are now applauding the erection of border fences... and as of now you can't go into or out of Mexico or Canada without being harrassed for your papers at the border. Why am I cursed with such a good memory? and does anyone else remember this stuff?

File this one under DUH! World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned policy makers that fiscal-stimulus plans are insufficient to turn around the “real economy” and rising joblessness threatens to set off political unrest across the globe. The good news is that as the country slips into economic collapse, political unrest, and massive hyper-inflation, at least you won't be able to leave the country without a microchip in your drivers license. When the cities begin to burn and the suburbs turn into lawless ghost towns with grass growing in the streets, you can rest easy in the knowledge that armed Mexican bandits won't want to scale a wall to get into this hell hole of freakish deception.

I was accosted at the grocery store again, but this time it wasn't anywhere near as jerkish and belligerent as the last time it happened to me when I was assaulted at the Wal-Mart. This time it was by a 85 year old man named "Tut" who was walking around the Kroger asking people where they went to "church" and if they were saved. At first I overheard him talking to a Kroger clerk. The conversation went something like this:

Tut: Hello young man, what is your name?
Clerk: Mark
Tut: Where do you go to "church" Mark?
Clerk: Plastic Jesus UPC (I didn't catch the real first name, just that it was a UPC "church")
Tut: UPC? What's that?
Clerk: United Pentacostal Church
Tut: Oh (worried look comes over his face). Does that mean you guys are those "oneness" people?
Clerk: What?
Tut: You people don't believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost?
Clerk: No
Tut: No Father, Son, and Holy Ghost?
Clerk: No
Tut: Really?
Clerk: Really
Tut: (Very concerned now, scratching his chin) Well, I suppose if you are saved, it doesn't matter. Are you saved?
Clerk: Yes sir
Tut: Good, ok, you have a good day.

Ok, so Tut walked off and I saw him approach a few more people but could not hear the exchange. Later, he walked up to Danielle and me:

Tut: Hey feller, what is your name?
Me: Michael
Tut: Michael, my name is TUT... T... U... T...
Me: Well, that ought to be easy to remember.
Tut: How long you been growing that beard?
Me: I don't know, 4 or 5 years.
Tut: Well, I guess you save on razors, but your wife could grab it and drag you around by it.
Me: That's why I married a short one.
Tut: (laughs). So where do you go to "church".
Me: Well, we fellowship with our community of brethren up north of Santa Anna (you say Santy Anna, or else they know you aren't really from there).
Tut: Fellowship? So.... (scratches his chin) what do you.... do there?
Me: When we are gathered together? Oh, the normal things. We sing psalms and have sermons, etc.
Tut: Oh (big smile), I suppose it don't matter if your affiliated with denomination so long as your saved, right?
Me: I suppose.
Tut: Well, IF you are saved, I'll see you in glory.
Me: Alright.

My conclusion is that religious people are far less arrogant and abusive at Kroger than at Wal-Mart.

I hope you all have a very nice day.

Your servant in Christ Jesus,

Michael Bunker

Scattershooting in the end of May

5/29/09 - 6th Day - Preparation of the Sabbath. After Breakfast. Thank you all for your participation in the May Project. Thanks go out to all of you who wrote articles and all of you who read and/or commented on the submissions. I really am thankful for you all, and I appreciate all of your opinions, comments, and stories. Based on the response and on my emails, it seems that many people were positively affected by the things you all wrote and shared, and I am very grateful for your endeavors. So now we move on to June and The June Project, which I will talk more about towards the end of this post.

Things are going well here at the ranch. Pretty much everyone has been working on fencing since we had set a deadline here in the community for everyone to have their homestead areas fenced so we can free-range our pure Longhorns starting June 1. We've also received a fair share of rain, which is always nice, and I believe we have received just about our monthly expected rainfall in May. After the big 2" rain we received last weekend, we got another 1/2" a few days later, then probably close to another 1/2" last night when we really weren't expecting any. Things are beautiful and green here, and we haven't had to water the gardens in a few weeks. The gardens are doing well, especially the tomatoes, and, if the Lord wills, I will be harvesting my garlic crop starting on the 2nd Day. I still have two heifers who are getting close to dropping calves - one is our full-blood Holstein who is going to be our milk cow (lots and lots of milk) and the other is Bonita, one of our pure Longhorn heifers who is due to drop her first calf. That should be it, then, for me in 2009 (at least I think it should be it) on new cattle. I do try not to count my cattle, though, before they are hatched.

Hey, do you have some money in your wallet? Go get some and take a look at it for a moment. Think about what that much money will buy right now. Do you have a $20? Think about how many groceries you can get for $20. Then think... "How much will this $20 be worth with inflation running at 231 MILLION PERCENT?". Just for a gauge, inflation is less than 2% right now. Well, one of the most well known Amerikan investors and prognosticators, a man named Marc Faber, says that he is "100% sure" Amerika is moving into a period of hyper-inflation and that inflation rates will be "close to" Zimbabwe's inflation rate, which reached 231 MILLION PERCENT before they just stopped counting. Now, look back at your $20. If hyper-inflation even half as bad as Zimbabwe's were to hit Amerika, and you woke up to find out a dozen eggs cost $20 at the store, by the time you got to the store, you couldn't buy 1 egg (or even the carton) for $20.

Now let's look at the same scenario under a Christian Agrarian situation. The Agrarian wakes up in the morning during a situation of hyper-inflation and he decides he needs a dozen eggs. Later that day, he walks up to the chicken coop and finds 24 eggs, which is basically the same amount he received yesterday. Oh, but you say "Yes, but the FEED he is buying will be subject to hyper-inflation!". Only if it is absolutely necessary that he buy feed. Me, I would just open up the chicken pen and let the chickens feed themselves all they want. I don't need to buy feed. Now, let's say that the people who are suffering from hyper-inflation want eggs, but they cannot afford to buy them from the store. How much are my eggs worth now? What will they be worth in barter and trade? You see, now I am on the other end of the hyper-inflation situation. Unhappily, most people, even most of you (not all of you, I know, so don't email me Beth!), do not really think that such a thing is possible. You say, "tomorrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant!" (Isa. 56:12). The Christian Agrarian has his faith in God and in God's favor and abundance. He does not have his faith in man. You live in the world and you say you do not have your faith in man? Really? Listen to what the pollyanna-things-are-gonna-work-out-alright monkeys have to say:

"There are some concerns of a risk from inflation from all the liquidity injected into the banking system but it’s not an immediate threat right now given all the excess capacity in the U.S. economy, I have a little more confidence that the Fed has an exit strategy for draining all the liquidity at the appropriate time." (David Cohen, head of Asian economic forcasting at Action Economics in Singapore).

If you live in the world and you are subject to it's whims, and if you are dependent on this current economy, then you absolutely must trust David Cohen, who is telling you that he has put his confidence in the Federal Reserve. He agrees that there is a huge ax hanging over your head, but he has confidence that the Federal Reserve will spare you at the last moment. "It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man" (Psalm 118:8).

If you don't think that the powers that be are trying to soothe you into complacency, here's your brilliant Internet deceptive economic quote of the week from Yahoo finance:

"The government says the economy sank at a 5.7 percent pace as the brute force of the recession carried over into the start of the year. However, many analysts believe activity isn't shrinking nearly as much now as the downturn flashes signs of letting up"

In other words, as you plummet off a cliff, you hear the comforting words "You have slowed your rate of descent". But, upon reading the actual article from Yahoo finance, you learn that the paragraph is misleading in many ways. First, the rate of descent hasn't slowed at all. In fact, the 5.7 percent drop just turned out to be a bit less than the 6.1 percent which was "estimated last month", so the drop wasn't a decline from the previous drop, it was a decline from the estimated decline! None of that means anything anyway, since rates of decline during a precipitous descent change regularly as consumers react to situations going on in their lives. A lower drop may just mean that people began spending large amounts of remaining cash on cheap products as businesses dump inventories, and as consumers try to make use of dollars which they expect will decline in value as inflation increases. You can expect that phenomena to increase as things go on, which gives the economy the appearance that it might be improving, when in fact it is all a dead cat bounce.

I remember way back when it was announced that the U.S. Gov't was 1 Trillion dollars in debt and we all were shocked. Well, as of today, Uncle Sam owes 63.8 Trillion and the meter is running. You better just hope the Chi-coms and their 200 million man collection army don't decide to repossess what they actually own.

At least oil is on the way back up... can you say "back over $3 by mid summer?" I wonder what a horse will cost when inflation hits 231 MILLION PERCENT.

A White House official who was in France to prepare for Obama's visit next week caught the Swine Flu. Despite the early victory, France, when it learned Obama still planned to visit, promptly surrendered. A government spokesperson from the wine-guzzling cheese eating surrender-monkeys said, "A U.S. citizen, who is in France as part of an official delegation preparing the D-Day ceremonies, has tested positive for H1N1 flu and has been hospitalized in Caen". When asked why the French did not invite England's Queen Elizabeth to the D-Day Celebration, the French spokesperson said, "I give up".

Ok, so the June Blog project...

We are going to write a book, you and I.

I have decided to turn the Off-Grid Living series I did last year on this blog into a book tentatively entitled...

Real Survival: Living Off-Off-Grid

I hope to capitalize on the current "survival" interest and give people a completely different philosophy than they've ever read about real survival.

I am going to almost completely re-write the series and put it into book form. Re-writing means that I am going to add a lot of things I have learned in the last year or two, and add more information that really wasn't conducive to the blog series.

I intend to post each Chapter (maybe 1 every week) on A Process Driven Life, then I will ask you guys to comment, edit, and help out with improving the chapter. What I would like is comments (such as.. "you might say something about X"), edits ("Bunker, you idiot, you misspelled X"), and even suggested improvements. In fact, you can write or re-write whole paragraphs that you think would be a help for the reader, and if I like it I will plagiarize it and put it into the book.

Here are the rules:

1. You can't get mad if I do not use, or if I ignore or reject, your idea or suggestion. Some of you are very good writers, but I do have an overall impression and idea of what I am trying to accomplish and what the philosophy is. A very, very great idea, may still not make it into the book if I feel it won't be right. In fact, some ideas may be included already in unpublished parts I have already written but have never put online.

2. I really want some participation. I want your help and you are able to make any and all suggestions for changes, additions, subtractions, etc. Don't think I will be mad because you say "this part stinks" or "just delete this part". Again, I may not follow your suggestion, but I sincerely do want to read them.

3. You aren't going to get any credit, except a general "thanks to the blog folks" in the beginning. You also aren't going to get any money, since there will never be much, and what little there is will go to support my family.

4. Your suggestion may be included in the book in its entirety, and then again, it may not get posted on the blog at all much less be in the book. It depends, and I claim sole authority and discretion over how the project progresses.

5. I won't be posting all the articles online for participation. Some are going to be top secret, after all - there still has to be a reason for you to go buy 10 copies of the book to give to your friends and family.

Ok, so let's start today. What do you think? Do you have any ideas already?

I am your servant in Christ Jesus,

Michael Bunker

Praying This Site Stays Online

***Welcome to the Process Driven Life - May Blog Project. During the month of May, this blog is being turned over to my readers and friends. During May and probably June, my regular updates, scattershooting, etc. will only be available on the Friendslist.

Make sure to read the issues you missed. Check back regularly this month to find out what my readers have to say!***

Guest Issue #21 - About five years ago I was working in a factory, when I met Brian, This guy exalted himself above everyone else. With his smooth talking he had gotten me interested in real estate. So, he set up an appointment for me to meet his partner. That is how I met Jim Hartman. It wasn’t long after Jim and I met that Brian was kicked to the curb for trying to play us against each other. Jim and I spent a lot of time working together. Some days we didn’t get much work done. He would start teaching scripture and we would forget about work. I was so thankful to have met Jim. For years I had prayed for truth. The whole free will doctrine just didn’t feel right. I said the prayer, accepted Christ into my heart as my personal savior, but it just didn’t feel right. We went to church and adult bible study on Sundays. Everyone gets all dressed up for a couple of hours and then it’s all over. Once they left the church, no one ever talked about what was preached that day or even mentioned God. They just all blended back into the world, doing whatever they wanted. It didn’t matter because they were saved. Well, the more Jim and I and my wife would study scripture, the worse the free will doctrine sounded. I showed Jim how they had us highlight scripture in our bibles, to create their own doctrine. He got a good laugh out of that.

Jim had just gotten back from Texas when we met. Not long after we met, Jim told us about the LazarusUnbound.com website and Michael Bunker, and he gave us many CD’s from Michael. My wife and I started using this site on a regular basis. In our Bible study with Jim we would discuss what we read on this site. It would amaze us how Michael and Jim thought so much alike. It was great having Jim here to minister to me and my family. Since Jim has passed, we rely on Michael’s knowledge more now than ever. When I heard that the site may be shutting down because of what’s been going on at the ranch the last few months or so, I figured it was my duty to defend Michael and try to persuade Michael to keep your site going. Sorry it took so long to respond. I am not real good at writing and I am even worse at using my computer. The little bit I do on my computer my wife types in for me. I think I could type about two words a minute.

Anyway Michael, these five you separated from are cowards. They attack you while you're gone and then deny it when you return. Then in less than a week they have a forty-page book of offenses against you. They invite you to their homes and visit with you and your family and yet they are very quick to turn on you. Sounds like they were just looking for a reason to separate from the group. And what do they have against Calvin? I had a friend I grew up with who moved to Las Vegas. He called me after many years and said, God called him to do his work for him. You should have heard Jim laugh at that one. Now he preaches at the prisons in Las Vegas and tries to save as many souls as he can. He recently told me that he actually healed people with cancer and other diseases. He says God gave him the gift of speaking in tongues. He says God is speaking through him. We talked for about an hour or so and he says to me, you’re a Calvinist! I said, yeah I guess, I agree with his teachings. That was the last I heard from him. I took that as kind of a compliment.

I think for your children this is a good lesson on the ways of the world, and the persecution they will most likely be subject to in the future. As for your accusers, it sounds like they don’t agree with Calvin, or maybe it’s the truth that’s eating away at their consciences. Maybe they need to go start their own religion. It’s like Jim told me the last couple of days that he was with us. He said, Bob, people are just no damn good.

Lord willing one day my family and I can live in a community like you have in Texas. I pray that this site stays online for many years to come. There are a lot of people who depend on this site and your knowledge. I just hope that a lot more people rise up in your defense.

Thank you Michael for all your time.

Bob Etzler
Pennsylvania

Is Separation of the Heart?

***Welcome to the Process Driven Life - May Blog Project. During the month of May, this blog is being turned over to my readers and friends. During May and probably June, my regular updates, scattershooting, etc. will only be available on the Friendslist.

Make sure to read the issues you missed. Check back regularly this month to find out what my readers have to say!***

Guest Issue #20 - While reading one of the posts on this blog, I clicked on the link to another site that claimed that separation is of the heart and of the heart only. It concluded that one who is separate in their heart and is a “true” Christian can be identified by their keeping the sermon on the mount beatitudes. This means that if one acts humble, mourns, is meek, hungers for righteousness, is merciful, is pure in heart, is a peacemakers, is persecuted, etc; then they are a Christian and separate in their heart. Never mind that all of these characteristics can and are faked. Most of us are really good actors, until the Truth judges and convicts us.

The reality is that there is no way by examining another person actions using the beatitudes alone to determine if another person is a Christian or not; let alone using them to judge one's self. The only way to tell if we’re walking in the faith is by what our conscience tells us judged against our doctrine and our fruit as it lines up with scripture. Even then we must be cautious for we most certainly can and do lie to ourselves. Over time our conscience, that sense or consciousness of the moral goodness or blameworthiness embedded in our heart, (if it is not seared) will nag and tell us the truth, if we listen.

But let’s assume for the moment that it is possible to be separate in your heart. The heart in the Bible is the source or root of our thoughts and feelings; it is equated to the functions of our minds. OK, so you tell yourself that in your heart or mind you are separate. Therefore being separate in your heart, you must of separated from something. So, what have you separated from? Have you separated from your bad living? Your bad ideas? Your sin and/or your iniquity? So I ask again, what have you separated from?... Those who believe this drivel will have no answer, if they’re honest; for they know they have not separated from anything. It’s nothing more than a cop-out.

Ah, you say you don’t need to separate from anything? Then God saying “Wherefore come out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord...” (2 Cor 6:17) has no physical meaning, it only has spiritual meaning, because if you can’t identify what you’ve separated from, you are NOT separate. Gee I wonder why God had Paul put this in the Bible under the words “saith the Lord” if it was just spiritual? God is clearly saying “come out from among them!” and He means physically as well as spiritually. What it looks like is if you claim that it only has a spiritual meaning, then you can walk around and say to other Xtians that you are super spiritual because you are “separate in your heart”. What a crock! You show me your separation in your heart without physical separation and I’ll so you my separation in reality. See James 2:18.

I do not mean in any way to make light of the effort, commitment, and trial it takes to become separate physically from the world. I parceled, delayed, and deferred my own move from the corporate world and life on the Yellow Brick Road over a period of about three+ years. Even after the big part of move was done I found that the struggle was not over, just changed. It is no easy thing. My heart (mind and feelings) was daily for most of those years nagging me to make the break from the world. If your heart is telling you to be separate and you cannot lie by telling yourself that you are already separate, then sooner or later you will separate from the world. How can anyone be “separate in the heart” when one’s heart is telling them to be separate? It’s just not possible.

While driving to work I knew I was going against the Lord’s will. While working I knew I was going against the Lord’s will. While reading (especially the Bible) I knew I was going against the Lord’s will. I even asked God to make me like those other “Christians” who believe that we are to be separate from what they call “the world”, and still live in harmony, peace and agreement with the world. That didn’t work either. Eventually I followed my heart and my process driven life continues to this day.

On this journey I found the following from Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible for 2 Corinthians 6:17 very encouraging. This man clearly knew that the separation this verse calls for is primarily physical and that it applies to all Christians, everywhere who desire to be obedient to Christ Jesus’ call “If you love me follow my commandments”.

“Wherefore - Since you are a special people. Since God, the holy and blessed God, dwells with you and among you.

Come out from among them - That is, from among idolaters and unbelievers; from a frivolous and vicious world. These words are taken, by a slight change, from Isaiah 3:11. They are there applied to the Jews in Babylon, and are a solemn call which God makes on them to leave the place of their exile, to come out from among the idolaters of that city and return to their own land... Babylon, in the Scriptures, is the emblem of whatever is proud, arrogant, wicked, and opposed to God; and Paul, therefore, applies the words here with great beauty and force to illustrate the duty of Christians in separating themselves from a vain, idolatrous, and wicked world.

And be ye separate - Separate from the world, and all its corrupting influences.

Saith the Lord - see Isaiah 3:11.

And touch not the unclean thing - In Isaiah, “touch no unclean thing;” that is, they were to be pure, and to have no connection with idolatry in any of its forms. So Christians were to avoid all unholy contact with a vain and polluted world. The sense is, “Have no close connection with an idolater, or an unholy person. Be pure; and feel that you belong to a community that is under its own laws, and that is to be distinguished in moral purity from all the rest of the world.”

And I will receive you - That is, I will receive and recognize you as my friends and my adopted children. This could not be done until they were separated from an idolatrous and wicked world. The fact of their being received by God, and recognized as his children, depended on their coming out from the world...”

William Braley
Santa Anna, Tx