Year 9-17
For me life is interesting, even though Bell Tel. sometimes makes matters miserable for me. I am in this technologically advanced country on dial internet service. Can’t get wireless, and too many trees make it impossible to sight a relay tower. So I am stuck with grandma Bell. The connection between our house and the highway goes dead when snow melts or rain falls, while the line to the village – 5 km away- suffers from nobody knows what- perhaps squirrels or black flies or raccoons eating the wires, giving me p.p. internet service. The p.p. you can either read as pretty poor or as a shorter version where the first ‘p’ is exactly that, and also another 4 letter word, conveying the same meaning.
But life is good and even afterlife gets good publicity nowadays.
Afterlife? Yes, life after death, is very much in the news nowadays. Perhaps not surprisingly the typical American believes not in evolution or global warming but does in Doomsday and an afterlife, in heaven, of course, wearing white robes and clutching golden harps, I presume. The average American – not Canadian – adult sees the earth as a 10,000 year old evil matter whose substance may be abused – hence the denial of global warming – and sees Doomsday coming and regards afterlife a heaven-bound certainty. Yes, in these dark days they expect Doomsday to come knocking at the door anytime now, abetted by the combined crush of economic collapse, peak oil and global warming, the latter not human-induced, of course, but an act of God. This trinity of evil will, they believe, be so severe that society as we know it will never recover, our lifestyles be seriously compromised and survival become a life-or-death issue.
I can back this up with statistics. The surveys vary a bit, but for the longest time, something in the order of 90% of Americans say they believe in God and an afterlife in heaven.
It’s now been 200 years since Charles Darwin came up with his evolution theory. I think that he was partly right. Of course I believe that God exists – as did Darwin – and created the cosmos. I also believe that this took place millions if not billions of years ago – with God one day is as a thousand or million years and a billion years as one day – so that, since that original concepts took shape, humans and animals have gone through development stages (don’t we all): what we see around us is too convincing to assume otherwise. Yet two-thirds of all Americans believe that the earth was created 10,000 years ago.
The church-going crowd over there is mostly Republicans. Among them only 21% think that we are at fault causing climate change. That too fits in with the heaven-thing. To them “earth is a foreign strand, wilderness waste” quoting a hymn. In other words, most Americans don’t think their use of fossil fuels causes this Greenhouse Effect. They blame nature.
Fortunately there are still a lot of religious people who think otherwise. On February 21 Globe and Mail had an interesting exchange between Ian Brown and Jean Vanier. I love Jean Vanier, and I have many of his books.
In that article both mention life after death. Neither mentioned ‘heaven’, which, seen as a human destination, is a very unbiblical concept. Let me give one example: The last verse in the book of Daniel says, “As for you, go your way till the end. You will rest, and then at the end of days you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance.” Jesus too sees death as ‘a restful sleep’. That inheritance, by the way, is a cleaned up earth.
The church is wrong when it portrays heaven as the after-life abode, a lie the Devil has successfully sold to organized religion, weakening the resolve of church people to whole-heartedly care for the earth.
Vanier writes that, in thinking of life-after-death, he visualizes “it will be a wonderful moment of peace, of joy, of ecstasy of love, a fulfillment of love. It will be more wonderful than anything we could have imagined.” He repeatedly mentions the beauty of the earth, which reminds me that “God made no junk and will not junk what he has made.” That’s why we must now live so that when the renewal comes we will have no trouble making that transition.
So how will it all end? I don’t refer to Doomsday – the Bible calls it “The Day of the Lord” – but I do mean the current economic and environmental crisis. If the majority of Americans deny any direct responsibility for Climate Change, then our planet will certainly keep on deteriorating at a rapid rate, with China and India, taking their cue from America, continuing to pollute.
So, indeed, the American collective psyche definitely has a Doomsday mentality, enhanced by their heaven-heresy.
Oh, yes, we live in interesting times.
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