That’s the name of the game in customer support: never admit to being at fault or that the problem your customer has called about is one any other customer shares!

Thursday morning last, I send a message off to work to the effect that I would not be in. In fact, this was planned, but to boot, I had been suffering from laryngitis for a couple of days along with a annoying sinus condition which makes people justifiably nervous and they had sent me home.

In fact, we had long been scheduled to marry off Anya, our Russian, sort-of daughter for many years. She’s stayed several summers with us.

The upshot of this is to explain that I was too busy (and miserable) Thursday to do anything about my Internet connection which was gone by the time I came home in the evening. Friday evening, I decided to complain after running through the standard ritual of bouncing every device from my router and hubs to my computers. Nothing worked.

And then a bizarre thing happened. I noticed that Skype was in working order. Yes, Skype was working and I began complaining to my nephew, who was off-line, about the symptoms. Sometimes it’s very useful to complain to someone else about a problem because in writing it up and ensuring an accurate diagnosis, one often solves it.

Broadweave’s customer support guy was courteous, but clueless. He punted to "second-level" support and told me that they might fix it during the night (Friday-to-Saturday), but would not call me until a decent hour the next day.

For me, the decent hour was shortly after 8 when I decided that clearly they had not fixed the problem. I called again, got a different person who said that their contract promised they’d get to it within something like 48 hours. I was bummed to have to spend the whole weekend without a useful Internet connection.

Meanwhile, as it was a "decent" hour, I gave Richard a call because while Skype appeared to work (I had even looked up and added a new contact in this state of things), I wasn’t totally sure and I wanted to find out if he had got my messages.

Of course, ever the helpful gentleman, he quickly abandoned whatever useful, productive undertaking he’d planned and began to help me diagnose the problem. In particular, he helped me tunnel through SSH/SOCKS in an attempt to get some DNS resolution after we decided that it was really DNS. In the end, our playing around lasted just short of an hour (during which I did my first protocol-tunneling exercise).

I elected to make use of a couple of different DNS servers in place of Broadweave’s which pretty much ended the bleak nightmare of no connectivity.

Which brings me to my third support call.

I carefully goaded the young lady into admitting that Broadweave only makes two IP addresses available through first-line support for customers’ DNS use. She thanked me for tracking down the problem, but quickly got brighter and more deceptive once it became clear that I could not have been the only Broadweave customer out of the tens of thousands whose ability to surf the web, use Windows Messenger, do e-mail, etc. had been inoperative for at least 36 hours.

When I asked her how this could possibly be, she clammed up and repeated her expressions of gratitude that I had tracked the problem down and, given the bad DNS addresses I had discovered, opined that the second-tier support folks would have all the more advantage in tracking down my problem.

Sheesh. Thousands of Broadweave customers have been without DNS for the last couple of days and these jokers are that clueless? If this was what I did for a living, it surely would not have taken me the scant hour Richard and I spent going over the problem to conclude that the DNS servers were toast. We were already at that conclusion early on, but the tunneling exercise was too much for two geeks to resist. So, that’s right: Broadweave knew it too.

So why didn’t Broadweave support reply to my calls with, "Yes, we know our DNS servers are down and we’re working on the problem," instead of carefully wording our support conversation to uphold the possiblity that it might be a difficult problem to solve (and my own problem to boot)?

Obfuscation, baby!

openSuSE 10 is dead. This is an old friend I’ve used in excess of four years now. Novell, ever impatient, tight on server space, and more miserly still on charity for down-streamers, terminated it at the end of October. What this means is that not only aren’t they actively supporting it (which is totally okay by me), they have decisively destroyed it (shame, shame!) by removing the remote software installation points essential to Yast. There is no “back-burner” software repository. They require you to flee to openSuSE 11.x.

How did I figure this out? It is publicly known, but I wasn’t paying attention until this morning when, faced with needing to get some software out of cvs on an open source site, I realized I’d never installed a cvs client on my development host (because we only use svn at GWAVA). So I popped open Yast only to find the repositories are gooooooooooonnnnnnnnneeeeee!

This is very annoying because it’s so risky to upgrade dot releases, but moving to a new major version is just asking for massive trouble.

My development host has been running 10.3 for the last eighteen months. As I’m ending my employment at GWAVA very soon, I am loathe to go to the trouble to cycle my host development platform.

So, long fascinated with Ubuntu and convinced at this early point that they do not pull the carpet out from under their subscribers’ feet, I’m moving to that Linux on another piece of (personally owned) hardware. I may move my main development host over eventually assuming my contract with GWAVA is renewed.

Meanwhile, I’ve got my brand new flaming hot Windows 7 host, which I’ve discussed in recent blogs, plus Ubuntu Karmic running on an old piece of junk that formerly ran openSuSE 10.2. I probably won’t be able to run any development tools on this new Ubuntu box, but I will be better able to administrate my web server (sheesh, it’s running on openSuSE 10.2) from it than from any Windows box.

I think it’s time to rebuild my web server to place it on Ubuntu as well. Sayonara, Novell.

I made a comment last week about how Linux won’t run my development tools. In fact, I’ve been running Eclipse, my primary integrated development environment, for over a year on openSuSE 10.2. I mostly run Europa, but have tried Ganymede (very short temper for that version) and Galileo (no wonder it came out so quickly to replace Ganymede).

However, I have always found it hangs and/or crashes frequently: about once per day if I’m careful only to edit and compile Java source code; at least once per hour if I get to editing JSPs or invoking ant scripts.

I put up with this state of affairs because, compared to my Windows host, Linux launched Eclipse lightning fast. And my product test environment in which I develop is already set up on my Linux host. And I promised my colleagues that I’d be the Linux guy. And etc.

What clenched the deal for me, however, was getting into Spring. I attended Spring Core Framework training, but couldn’t get SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) on to Linux until I got my instructor involved who sent me the course materials, which had been distributed for Windows and Macintosh, for Linux.

Remember, we’re talking about my own personal development host here and not the one belonging to my employer. So, other than pride, I have no reason to flinch at any reasonable choice I make.

STS launches on Linux, but there’s nothing you can do there except hang and crash—not its behavior on Windows.

Now, I know, I could be an idiot. In fact, I am an idiot and I freely admit it. But, I have been active on Eclipse forums for nearly two years and I’ve heard and seen it all over and over again. I know about not using any but Sun JVMs. I know about mixing and matching JDKs. I know about the black art of maintaining eclipse.ini. Yeah.

Eclipse is made by mostly Windows guys for mostly Windows use. Because it’s Java-based, it tends to run on Linux and Macintosh, but those are foreign countries to Eclipse. And my colleagues at work are all Windows guys and never suffer from the crap I put up with.

Then my interest in Flex became the last straw. There’s a rumoured FlexBuilder coming for Linux, but as it’s Eclipse-based too, what’s the point?

When I was bringing up my new hardware, I first installed Ubuntu Karmic, 64-bit because my Windows 7 update didn’t come down as an ISO, and I secretely wished I could be in denial over the conclusions I drew (and have explained in earlier paragraphs here).

Karmic was zippy and a pleasure to play around with. I’ve only played a bit with Ubuntu, a few years ago, and have always just used openSuSE owing to my status as a Novell alumnus.

I loaded on Eclipse Galileo and tried it out. Very fast, but basically, there was little I could do with it. For example, I couldn’t create a Java project at all. I could create a Dynamic Web Project and add my first package, but when adding a new class, the Finish button wouldn’t materialize so I could move on. Stuff like that proves that Linux and Eclipse just isn’t worth the pain.

I’ve seen others on the forums with Linux problems and they do get help, but not as fast as just plain Eclipse problems and advice from Windows users whose problems are rarely OS-related.

I’m very sad because I love Linux with all my heart. But, I love technological progress more. I hate to concede this one (temporarily, I hope) to Microsoft, but there it is: game, set and match.

Update: Later I found this blog entry explaining that Eclipse is using GTK+ wrong in certain ways and has got caught doing it beginning in Karmic only. See Fixing Eclipse in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala.

So, after months of fighting my main development host running openSuSE Linux, which I’ll soon lose, and an old Windows XP Professional computer (Pentium 4, 2.8GHz with 3+Gb RAM), I am resigned that I will never be able to run the SpringSource toolkit or FlexBuilder unless I update my home hardware.

I’m fairly loyal to Dell Computers, but I saw that they charge a premium for computers once you get beyond the range of mere consumer toys these days, so I decided to build my own from parts. "Bwahahah," laughs Dr. Frankestein.

I got some good advice from a couple of people whose opinions I respect and who have experience building machines themselves, my nephew, Richard, and a fellow who builds many of the machines at work, Ernie Riedelbach.

I bought a kit from TigerDirect with chassis, mobo, CPU, power supply, hard drive and DVD burner, extra memory and a video card. Fortunately, they didn’t have the hard drive that came with the kit, which I didn’t want in the first place, in stock. So I called and modified the order to include two chocolate shakes instead of the big Coke.

I got a card reader and some SATA cables from Directron, plus a 120mm fan from BestBuy.

My build-out looks thus:

What I got out of this was a pretty screaming machine running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. Very nice even if it is Windows. I would have preferred a Linux, but Linux won’t run my development tools very well if at all.

The build was child’s play. Since the last time I built a box, about 6 years ago, I find everything is better documented and color-coded. I had no trouble at all matching all the myriad little wires from the case lights, switches, USB ports, and peripherals to their respective pins on the mobo.

I installed Ubuntu on it first, just for grins and sighs, but as I noted, it won’t run Eclipse, my principal development environment let alone with all the Spring stuff on top. However, Ubuntu does have very nice tools to do useful things like check the hard disks and scan memory for flaws.

Finding God is probably the most important thing we can spend three-quarters of a century doing here on this planet. Many, perhaps most of my colleagues, friends and acquaintences have given up. I don’t know if they’re disappointed, cynical, angry or just insincere, but my observation is that failing to find Him leads to mockery of those who do believe.

And that situation can only get worse as our society sinks deeper into the moral oblivion it’s so fervently embraced.

But, that’s not what I’m on about today.

Garbage-in, garbage-out

There’s a old saying in my industry about why computer software sometimes gives unsatisfactory when not catastrophic results. It’s “garbage-in, garbage-out.”

The analogy is meant to point out that if you have been looking for the God many may tell you about and haven’t found him, it may be because you’ve been misinformed about God.

Now, telling another he’s benighted is an exercise in intellectual arrogance that I don’t like to conduct. My days of youthful pride are, I hope, far behind me. I’m often wrong about a lot of things and I’m not the brightest crayon in the box.

But I do know this: God exists.

The 2-ton elephant in the room

If you’ve been told all your life that the elephant is a tiny grey creature with a trunk that lives in the bush of certain African and Asian countries, you could spend your whole life looking for it. You’d never find it because while it may be grey, it isn’t a tiny creature. What’s more, the mice and rats you did find fitting the other half of the description don’t have trunks. Well, okay, tiny is pretty relative. The elephant is tiny compared to a great whale. Maybe you were talking to the wrong observer?

I don’t know God exists in the way an atheist accepts. I would protest that I know empirically, but today’s non-believer has a rather narrow view about what constitutes valid observation. Non-believers seem somehow to accept that there are facts outside the realm of quadruple sensuality (eyes, ears, touch and smell) like love—and many don’t even believe that. There are still other manifestations of truth besides love that cannot be subjected to physical observation or that defy any accurate or satisfying description (like the divine taste of good chocolate). However, an atheist’s imagination isn’t much broader than that.

Ironically, an atheist’s imagination is just about good enough to get us to the Moon or to Mars which he sees as a tremendous achievement. But, it doesn’t come close to getting men to stop waging war or feeding hungry people. It takes men with real imagination to solve those problems. Look who responded in the Southeast Asian tsunami. Who sent aid to the victims of hurricane Katrina? Government showed up late to those, but atheists were pretty much missing altogether. I guess they think that government is good enough.

God is here

But God Himself is in the room. In a sense, He is so big he can’t be seen. He plays by rules man ill-understands. He has created this whole universe for our betterment and is teaching us things that we could never learn without the hard experiences we face. I mean war and hatred, family love and joy, disease and intolerance, friendship and sacrifice.

It’s not that God isn’t to be found in the room. It’s that we’re really and very literally His children. His love for us is why He created this mysterious schoolyard in which we flounder, committing the most egregious mistakes, hurting each other (especially) and paining Him by our faithless actions, but true to that love, He will not step into the mix in any way that would suspend or thwart this free agency we enjoy. That’s part and parcel of the story.

Pull the rabbit out of the hat and school’s out. That’s why.

God exists (among myriad other observations that convince me He does) because this existence, when led by those with faith and love, ultimately triumphs over the negative. It works because the hand doesn’t reveal the rabbit. Some believe there is no rabbit; others are confident that there is. It’s faith. Despite the adversity, faith finds a way to turn the negative conditions and experiences into at least learning, always growing and, for the sincere, a sense of gratitude.

Where God isn’t is in the moral depravity of our society. He isn’t in the tawdry attempts of humans redefining what tolerance and suffering are, our willingness to surround ourselves with the worst criminals while we deny life to unborn humans we irresponsibly procreate then discard, or in the entitlement attitudes of the masses who want nothing better than to suck at some comfortable teat be it government or charity.

Let’s grab our lives by the horns

As Lewis put it, “God wants us to grow up.”

He wants us to take ownership of ourselves, our families, the problems in our neighbhorhoods, cities and countries. He doesn’t want us getting free stuff by gambling or playing the stock market, but He does want us to give liberally of all that He gives us in the first place: capital to help companies grow, product products, give breadwinners a wage; our hand and excess out to misfortunates who cannot negociate the adversities of life without the help of others. God is not in getting rich and He isn’t in being poor.

If you were looking for God in wealth or in the transfer of it, you’ve been mistaken about Him. If you were looking for Him in forcing everyone to be nice to everybody else, you missed the point.

God also wants us to respect each other’s free agency just as He respects ours. But, that’s a thesis to develop another time.

Find out who God must be and what He gives you. Find out what He expects of you. Rabbi Harold Kushner remarked that there [were] five billion people on the planet and God cares what [he] has for lunch. God does care. He cares about everything. He especially cares about whether you are being totaly honest and taking responsibility. He cares about whether you are kind and loving because you’re here to grow up to become like Him, to get a doctorate in love. Though His children, a lot of us look like we’re not going to make it out of high school with a diploma let alone that advanced degree.

God isn’t so big that a bird’s feather dropping to the ground escapes Him on any of the countless planets on which He presently maintains life. He isn’t so small as to favor one people over another or to cave in and grant victory to one group over another. Why would you ask God to grant you victory in the end zone when the other team is populated by an equal number of players who are His beloved children? He is into helping both sides play their best.

God helps everyone by sustaining life during this 80-year long education we’re getting and God helps especially those whose effort and desires accord with His plan for peace and unity.

It’s not summer—yet

Now, if you thought peace and unity were coming in this world, you’re again mistaken. You missed God’s point.

Men are weak, foolish and arrogant. Men will not tolerate peace and unity. This is why peace and unity come after the educational experience. It’s not to opiate the masses, this idea, it’s just the plain truth. It’s not because God doesn’t care, that He doesn’t ache to put an end to the charade, that He’s mean and loathsome because He chooses not to end the misery.

God is waiting until the bell rings. His bell: He’s not going to spoil anything for us. As stupid and intolerable as man is, God will wait patiently until all the lessons and experiences have been lived by all the men and women. Then comes the end. And a sorry lot most of us will make by complaining that it wasn’t fair, that He didn’t love us or that He didn’t give us a sign. We just refused to listen and believe.

Today I was surprised by my daughter who came by for a brake change for her car.

Now, if you’re normal, you’re thinking I did it. You’d be wrong. All she wanted was my floor jack and a few tools. I figured she’d save about $100.

It’s true that, in the end, a couple of bolt heads were a bit worn and it required the purchase of a 12-point Craftsman socket (14mm) to ensure both that we could get them off and be able to reuse them. And it’s true that I helped in that process, but it was mostly out of concern that the bolt come off undamaged. I was just plain fussing. Otherwise, she had it under control, pneumatic impact driver, air rachet, rubber mallet, the works.

I also fussed a bit over the rear lift points for her Camry—she was using my floor jack instead of whatever junk jack Toyota includes.

She even did the standard joke about spreading the lubricant package on the abrasion surface of the brake pads to quiet them down. She was just one of the guys today.

Out of it I ended up getting all my sockets and end wrenches sorted between metric and English. I don’t know where my old 14mm socket got off to over the years, but I’ve got a crisp and shiny replacement now. My daughter’s car is good for a bunch more miles now (these were rear disc brakes) and I have the satisfaction of knowing that my little girl is a pretty dang competent mechanic. She already knew the names of all the tools and which ones were for what job.

Hehehe, some days are witness to great events!

My main development host is a big piece of 64-bit iron on which I run openSuSE Linux 10.3. And I run GNOME which is alright with me, though I admit I only did it because I had used KDE once and thought it clunky. Some swear by KDE. Whatever.

Anyway, my Linux host works well enough. However, today I tried to use Skype on it and I couldn’t get the sound to work.

I have always run Skype on my Windows host; Skype for Linux is very stinky, but it would be rather more convenient for work reasons to run Skype on Linux.

Googling, I saw echos or suspicions that installing Skype on Linux and running it mutes the speaker (headphone) jack. I could not verify that this was true, but I did succeed in getting mine working (and it did not at first—just as if it had been muted).

I first went to the Control Center and ran the Sound utility. Testing the speaker produced nothing.

I googled around and whether this was the optimal or even the right solution, I was led to install (via Yast) aumix.

Run aumix from /usr/bin/aumix. I found my Line setting at 0, so I used the down-arrow to get to it, then the right-arrow to increase it to 100%. I don’t remember which other settings were 0, but in the end, except for IGain left at 50%, I left all others at 100%. I pressed S to save the settings.

(Note: aumix is entirely scriptable since it accepts command-line arugments. So, you could create settings profiles as bash scripts and just run them as needed.)

Then I returned to Control Center->Sound and tested again. I found only the left ear of my headphones working then, but jiggling the connector the right ear came on. I adjust the volume using a control on the headphones themselves. I don’t yet know if my microphone works, but I may later today after audibly Skyping someone.

Oh, yeah. A real stinky thing about Skype on Linux is that if you close the main view, it’s the same thing as quitting—except that the process remains live. If you do

	# ps -ef | grep [s]kype
		

you’ll see that it’s still there and if you attempt to launch Skype and log in, you’ll only get a nastygram to the effect that "Sign-in failed: Another Skype instance may exist."

The only solution seems to be to kill the process (kill -9 process), then launch again. Minimize Skype instead of closing it next time (very unlike its Windows behavior).

Skype developers: it should be better on Linux than on Windows because Linux is better. Get a clue.

The Adversary has sent a new rallying cry throughout the land these last decades. If he cannot turn us away from our God and His Christ, he will at least encourage us to keep them at arm’s length and refrain from frequenting those places and occasions to hear bonafide truth concerning Them.

Sure, attending religious services with a bunch of other people brings no guarantee of truth. Men are weak and corrupt. There is nothing fundamentally safe about gathering together in worship. A congregation may worship the very Devil himself if it chooses. This essay, however, is about God choosing organized religion by which to convey His word to the world. It examines recorded history and practice rather than a novel, convenient invention with no basis in truth.

The case for organized religion

Speaking to His apostles, Jesus said,

You see, it’s always about multiple people—never about one. Obviously, Jesus does not approve the Adversary’s whispered advice to shun organized religion.

Do you believe Christ? If not, this is not the essay for you. The "essays" you should read first are found in the New Testament and the Book of Mormon. This essay uses those, and the Old Testament, in support of organized religion.

If you consider yourself a Christian, but don’t "believe" in organized religion, ask yourself why Jesus went to the trouble of establishing His church when He was here? Ask yourself how you can follow His teachings including being baptized and taking communion without gathering together with others?

It takes at least one other person in order to be baptized (actually three others because of the need for witnesses), an act essential to salvation according to this statement by Jesus. The person performing this ordinance should also be a legitimate representative of the Lord. Such a calling can only come through the Church which provides an organized structure of legitimacy (by definition).

The example the Lord set in breaking bread with His disciples on the eve of His death strongly suggests "community" and "organization" of believers. Can one break bread and pass it to oneself in memory of the Crucified? Where does one obtain the sacerdotal authority to do so? Why only these twelve men and not all His other followers too? This suggests hierarchy and an organization.

Organized religion in history

All through the history of God and His dealings with the earth, we observe God generally speaking to one man, His representative—a prophet of ancient or modern Israel, but it is always on behalf of all His other children.

Moses was sent as an emissary to Pharoah demanding the release of Israel. These were led as a body through the wilderness and then established as a nation in Palestine. Moses organized Israel with "captains over thousands, over hundreds, over fifties, over tens, and officers among [the] tribes." (Deuteronomy i.15)

Service to others has consistantly been demonstrated and praised throughout holy scripture. Service to oneself was never listed by the Lord in His sermon on the mount as a good thing. Instead, service to others in the community was instructed. Thus, did Rebekah at the well refresh the servant of Abraham and his son Isaac sent back to a branch of the family to obtain a wife of the covenant people. God’s covenant people are His church. In Isaac’s day, a different branch was to be had at Haran. (Genesis xxiv)

Samuel annointed Saul, then David kings of Israel. Samuel had been taken as a little boy to Israel’s chief priest, Eli, because he was chosen to become God’s next mouthpiece. Again, organization. (Samuel ix and xvi)

God chose descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as the covenant people to be a sort of leaven in the world to safeguard and carry His gospel to all the world in ways that are suggested by the metaphor of the vineyard in the Book of Jacob, chapter 5. This was people in an organization. Today, God chooses "Gentiles" to build His kingdom and eventually to return the favor to Israel. This is organization. If none gathered together in worship, how would God "gather" His chosen people? God ever speaks of individual salvation, but in the context of the salvation of His saints who are gathered together, linked to one another in community and sealed to one another in families stretching back across millennia. Nothing of this can be done without organization and God chooses His church for this.

It always involves multiple people. It always involves revealed gospel—from the Lord to His prophet to the people.

(Hebrew: counsel)

It always involves authority. It always involves gathering. Therefore, it always involves organization, sometimes multiple ones in far-flung geography and low-technological conditions (Alma 29:8), sometimes one single organzation when conditions permit (Doctrine and Covenants, preface).

Yes, the Spirit will guide a person in his life, giving him peace and aid in the journey through mortality on an individual basis. However, this Comforter spoken of by Jesus was given to His disciples who were organized into a church, whose baptisms were incidental to that church, whose Pentecost and the bestowal of that Spirit came as a result of and demonstrated spectacularly in congregational worship:

Reason stares

You do not read in scripture or hear from the mouth of the Lord’s prophets,

One smears mud on her face in a grotto, another suffocates himself in a smoke-filled tent, still others dance with snakes or sacrifice black cats. This is not worship of God; this is chaos and disorder.

No, the Lord makes of the people of the earth His sheep. Who utters the word sheep implies gathering, for flock is necessarily more than one individual. Such are the Lord’s metaphors, such is His intention. The number of recorded instances of the Lord’s voice or inspiration are staggering small in which it can be asserted that instruction was given to His interlocutor for His interlocutor and not for the benefit of others than His interlocutor. (In fact, no example comes to mind as I write this.)

So my reasoning leads me away from seeing the shunning of organized religion as anything but just another lie of the Adversary. It’s a lie calculated to turn a person away from his God and Heavenly Father. If the Devil cannot get us to hate God, at least he insists that we carefully avoid the greatest opportunities to hear what God has to say because then, Satan can begin to substitute his own words in our heart for the Lord’s.

In defence of his new, false faith, full of belief in things the Lord has not said and ignorant of the things He has said, a person will begin to say, "You know, I believe in God and Jesus, but I have a real problem with organized religion."

This ruse of the Adversary’s has long been known, so it isn’t as recent as we think. That it would prevail in the last days just before Lord Jesus’ triumphant return was known by prophets thousands of years ago:

At times, God has been explicit about organized religion: He desires us to gather together as a church to hear his word.

Why would our Saviour, as Jehovah dealing with Israel, then as Jesus Christ dealing with the church He sent His apostles to establish among the Gentile nations, not have been serious about the very church He organized?

Satan benefits from human missteps in his bid to dissuade men from organized religion. He works very hard to corrupt men from the truth, from light and good practice. And he is very successful at it in spectacular ways.

He will remind men of the Inquisition and encourage men to gasp at this abomination perpetrated by organized religion upon the consciences and bodies of men. The very horror of it shocks the unthinking who is quick to claim the epiphany of associating it with organized religion.

But it was not organized religion that effectuated the Inquisition upon the earth; it was evil men hiding behind the cloak of organized religion. At worst men might begin to suspect that the Roman church was corrupt and abusive, that it did not hold the truth and was not God’s true church upon the earth. But, men cannot hold that church responsible even though the corruption and abuse that were the Inquisition went high up in its heirarchy.

Think instead upon the countless sincere believers and their acts of piety that led to outward signs such as sacrifice to build the glorious churches and cathedrals of Europe, the composition and performance of glorious music dedicated to celebrating the Lord’s birth, life, death and resurrection, or the quiet charity many believers visited upon each other in serving as God intended them to. That these people did this comes from the grace of missionary organization: people fanning out over the earth to educate their fellows in Jesus, bring their souls to Jesus.

True, the pot is scorched. Men are ignorant, greedy and in all other ways imperfect. This is a given. This is understood by God even as He allows men their agency and tolerates their mistakes. He sees the end from the beginning; men will not, cannot, destroy His work, even though His church is made up of these imperfect men.

A parenthesis: moral agency and stupidity

Lucifer is no idiot in capitalizing on the rather ho-hum and obvious fact that men are imperfect. He leads them from injustice to war as many times as he can accomplish it. One of man’s greatest follies is that collectively he is utterly unable to learn from history. So he is led to throw off one tyrant only to subjugate himself to another. So he is led to murder millions of God’s children through war. And he will frequently do these things in the name of whatever deity the Devil can induce him to invoke—be it Allah, Jehovah or Jesus—it’s all the same to him.

Through these horrifying acts, the Devil reaps the souls of men unprepared to die, men made vicious by war on the one hand and their victims in a state of carefree non preparation on the other, and he sets up resentment against the true God whom ignorant men will then hold responsible for "if God exists and is all powerful, why wouldn’t He step in and put an end to suffering and cruelty?" At most, a scant couple of generations later, man is back at it warring in the name of some god be it greed or even God Himself.

Ever the moron, man refuses to see through the Adversary’s ruse, to accept that God in His omniscience has given man use of free agency and expects him to use it just as a father teaches his child to pay attention, learn and make the choices of a grown up ere long he mature into one.

God is our Father and we learn the lessons of this creation less well than our children learn not to cross the street without looking. And yet it is we who grow impatient with what we see as our children’s lack of attention!

Saints worship in community

But the community of saints marches on receiving greater and greater light in preparation for the Lord’s return. Outside that community, truth is bestowed at best as so many crumbs falling from the Lord’s table—the table at which are seated His saints, by definition, the members of His church. And, in the last days, the Saviour has carefully organized His church and placed the fullness of the gospel within it. Yes, in the hands of men as imperfect as those He chose two millennia ago to lead the primitive Christian saints.

The theme is simple.

If God sent His word to prophets over the course of this earth’s history, what did He mean by it if it mattered not to Him that His word be followed? Why preach to us when nothing that we do in this life matters and we’ll all be preserved in the next?

Our Lord descended to the earth to live as a peasant in relative squalor, to endure poor food, degrading bathroom and sanitary conditions along with uncomfortable, searing heat. He wandered far and wide under these conditions. That’s right: the Master of the Universe, Creator of Heaven and Earth, the Lord God Omnipotent permitted Himself to be abused by ignorant and vain men, ultimately to suffer death at their hands. How then can we conclude that He wasn’t serious about what He said in His teachings? How can we preach to ourselves that it makes no difference if we

Does this sound like something the very Creator of an immense universe with countless galaxies, stars and planets, whose imagination is unlimited, would do "just to see what it would be like to live a degraded life and die at the hands of His creatures?" A life with no real purpose led in jest?

Or could the Great Jehovah be serious when He speaks to His people and teaches them? Could He actually care what His people do? Did He really care what His ancient covenant people ate for breakfast? Could He in fact know something about the outcome of this mortal existence that will be dramatically different for those who follow Him through His organized religion as compared to those who live in a natural, "eat, drink and be merry" state?

God reveals Himself to the whole world

When God reveals Himself to a prophet, it it always for the benefit of the whole world more than for the individual He has chosen. For this reason, we must be careful when we hear of revelation to individuals. God does not sow disorder and confusion. If He revealed Himself independently to every person in the world, nothing of the chaos and destruction of this world would be solved. And so He does not nor has He ever done so.

Our spirits are literally the sons and daughters of the One True God. And so He does not raise us, no more than we raise our own families—these children of God for whom we provide physical bodies, in isolation, teaching each of us something different.

Organized religion is the usual means by which God reveals His full intent to His people.

Computers can be used to disseminate pornography or cheat someone out of his or her savings. A computer is not inherently evil just because it so effectively plunges the masses into pornography; it can also be used to educate, teach and convert to Christ.

Gas turbines can be used to propel aircraft that drop death and destruction upon nations. Or they can be used to transport a critically injured person to a hospital where help can be obtained or to reunite family members across vast continents. Gas turbines and internal combustion engines can be used to ferry the Lord’s servants across the globe to teach others God’s word.

Like anything else, organized religion can be used as a tool of the devil, but this does not mean it’s wrong or bad, it just means that care must be exercised to avoid deception.

Christ has given men the light by which to commence the journey to truth and understanding. Once the baptism by fire is obtained, His Spirit is given as a permanent gift to enable those who’ve entered by the gate of baptism to remain upon the path that leads to slavation and eternal life and avoid the side paths that lead to destruction. It helps to walk any path in the company of others.