Ephesians 6 – Poetry, Short Prose and Walking

Sunday Walk 48 – Independence Day

Happy Fourth of July! I am in the process of moving away from big tech. Here’s what I’ve done so far.

For browser and search engine, I switched from Google Chrome to Brave with DuckDuckGo.

For email, I purchased a subscription to ProtonMail. My Gmail account is nearly inactive.

For cloud services, I canceled my subscription to Google One’s storage plan using instead my own solid state drives.

For office tools, I switched from Google Docs and Sheets to Apache Open Office.

For those interested in doing something similar, Sven Taylor provides a list of alternatives for Google products at the Restore Privacy site. There are more alternatives than I initially realized.

For social media, although I am currently inactive on Facebook and Twitter, my accounts remain open. I think it is worthwhile to interact with others in such environments. The same goes for places like Stack Exchange and Quora where I also have open, but inactive accounts. At the moment my social media focus is on MeWe and this WordPress blog.

Part of alt tech is to learn how to wear the whole armor of God (Ephesians 6). It is not just using open source software to protect one’s privacy or new platforms to avoid censorship. The user needs to get his act together. Without that armor I could still become corrupted and unwittingly corrupt others in turn.

By the next Fourth of July, God willing, I hope to be on Linux and know better how to wear that armor.

Weekly Bible Reading: Numbers (Audio) Deuteronomy (Audio)
Commentary: David Pawson, Numbers, Part 2 of 2, Deuteronomy, Part 1 of 2, Unlocking the Bible

Sunday Walk 45 – Satan

Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.
Ephesians 6:11, King James Bible 1769

In the past when I wanted to see the hidden world of devils or Satan I would read M. Scott Peck’s 1998 book People of the Lie. Peck attempted to develop a psychology of evil which led him into exorcisms with the help of Malachi Martin. See Martin’s 1976 book Hostage to the Devil. There were also C.S. Lewis’s accounts of Screwtape and Wormwood in The Screwtape Letters and the possessed shadows of hell in The Great Divorce who thought everyone else was the problem. However, much of this seemed remote from my normal reality.

Today, given the social context of fake news, fake science, fake elections, psyops and bioweapons, someone seems to have let Satan out of his cage if he ever was caged at all. Here are a few recent items I’ve come across.

Mario Murillo notes that just dabbling in the occult, even as a game, can leave one open to demonic influence unlike the conscious surrender required to receive the Holy Spirit. While I’ve heard this before, the urgency today seems new.
Geri Ungurean takes a look at Greek mythology as real and possibly satanic in a recent post.
John Gideon Hartnett provides a link to Altiyan Childs’ experiences with freemasonry. Childs’ video is over five hours long, but you’ll find there many examples of the covered eye, the hidden hand, the 666 finger sign and other symbolic communications I didn’t know existed before.
I found on Dianne Marshall’s blog Trey Smith’s video (linked below) which provides an overview of ancient history as it relates to Satan.

Although I’ve always thought Satan and his devils were real and needed to be avoided, at least as an intellectual exercise, today I wish I knew better how to put on the armor of God in Ephesians 6. Today I see why Jesus told us (Matthew 6:5-13) to pray to be delivered from the evil one.

Weekly Bible Reading: Genesis (Audio: King James Version read by Alexander Scourby) and Exodus (Audio: King James Version read by Alexander Scourby)
Commentary: David Pawson, Genesis Part 7 of 7 and Exodus Part 1 of 2, Unlocking the Bible

Noise – Décima

There’s nonsense in the stuff I hear.
What once had order, now there’s noise.
The blatant dare of fake destroys
the shield we fashioned stopping fear.

Apocalyptic times are here.
We need full armor for this fight:
the truth, the doing what is right,
the peace and faith, salvation, too,
and God’s own Word. Let hearts renew
and face the darkness with this light.

This week Ronovan Hester offers the rhyme word “noise” to be used in the B line of a décima having rhyme pattern ABBAACCDDC.

I am thinking of Ephesians 6.