NOVEMBER 24 2018
WILL CLIMATE CHANGE ALSO BE A MIND CHANGER?
Most of us humans are an optimistic bunch. Not I. Perhaps it is my age. Perhaps it is my upbringing. Perhaps it is my inclination, my religious outlook, which prompts me to pray every day, “Maranatha, Lord come quickly.”
It’s not that my life is hard, or that I am destitute. It’s not that I am in poor health, even though my spouse of 65 years has some health issues which keeps her home-bound and has made me a care-giver, also needing the constant assistance of our children and friends plus extra help. Perhaps for some the news may be depressing, but actually I am among the few who is totally optimistic about the long-term outlook for the world, because the Bible, my constant source of wisdom, tells me that all is well that ends well.
So, what is the bad-news/good-news scenario out there?
The bad news.
The bad news today centers on the accelerating effect of Climate Change, the rise of fascist and “alt-right” politics, violent world-wide conflicts, millions of stateless refugees, a looming Brexit crisis, and a financial system teetering on collapse. Trump.
There’s more. A few weeks ago WHO (World Health Organization) published a 180 page report, centering on the particular vulnerability of children due to the dire consequences of air pollution.
Every year air pollution kills 7 million people world-wide, more than the total death toll of AIDS (1,1 million), TB (1,4 million), Diabetes (1,6 million) and traffic accidents (1,3 million). That makes air pollution the greatest health danger.
Blame Climate Change and the increasing peril of forest fires. Air pollution cuts the average lifespan of people around the globe by almost two years, analysis shows, making it the single greatest threat to human health. The research looked at the particulate pollution produced by the burning of fossil fuels by vehicles and industry. It found that in many parts of the worst-affected nations – India and China – lifespans were being shortened by six years.
Children are especially vulnerable here. Every year some 600,000 children die from infected air passages because they live in an atmosphere saturated with tiny particles caused by automobile traffic, industrial activities, agriculture and other hazards as well as indoor pollution. Ban all cars from urban areas: yes, we know the remedies, we won’t implement them.
The world is a unity: everything is connected to everything else.
Are wild-life species less important than humans? True, most of us live in cities where we hardly ever see wild-life. A new study has shown that “loss of one species can make more species disappear (a process known as ‘co-extinction’), and possibly bring entire systems to an unexpected, sudden regime shift, or even total collapse.”
Well, it so happens that 60 percent of all wild life, all birds, all fish has already disappeared. Are we next?
Physical fatigue fosters failure.
City people today must work longer hours, need more overtime, more wage earners per family, just to make ends meet. This means that they come home tired, have less time for their children, less time for reflection, hardly the energy to watch TV, never time for God and his world, for religion and serious reading, let alone time to get in touch with their inner selves.
Is there any good news?
I believe we live in an age of great spiritual hunger, which calls for open discussion, as part of the healing consists of striving for greater harmony with the natural world in which we live and which is, itself, so gravely threatened.
Needed: Days of Atonement.
What we need is Days of Atonement, that so beautiful concept initiated in Leviticus 23: 28, “Do not do any work on that day, because it is the Day of Atonement, when atonement is made for you before the LORD your God.”
Atonement today means saying sorry for the sins against Creation, and promising a new start, initiating reform and sticking to it.
Churches are the natural initiative takers there, but don’t expect them to start that biblical concept: we are in an age that thought it knew better than the collective wisdom of ancient religious traditions. It thought that the progress of scientific knowledge would turn aside the darkness and that the need for religion would recede, but the opposite has been the case.
Sad to say, Western Religion, both Christianity and Judaism, just as in Jesus’ days, have stagnated and resorted to empty formalism and vacuous traditions, afraid to see the reality of the state of creation, where mounting evidence points to collapse. All signs shows that a 5°C rise in temperature could occur very rapidly, as soon as September 2019.
The signs are clear to the discerning eye.
I don’t want to rehash all the ominous indications of Climate Change: to the discerning citizen, these are all too clear. What is happening is not a linear, gradual heating, but exponential increases that will take months, rather than decades, to take effect.
WILL CLIMATE CHANGE ALSO BE A MIND CHANGER?
No. The largest Christian denomination, the Roman Catholic Church, is in total disarray. A top Vatican official last week issued a scathing open letter accusing an archbishop who launched an unprecedented attack on Pope Francis of mounting a “political frame job devoid of real foundation”.
The fiasco was not surprising — the tone-deafness and self-protectiveness of the Roman intervention, the bafflement and internal divisions of the American bishops, and the liberal-versus-conservative arguments that followed were all characteristic of Catholicism’s crisis under Pope Francis.
A church in disarray has no interest or inclination in being prophetic: too busy to retain the status quo, as sex abuse scandals and consequent lawsuits multiply. In everything else connected to the scandals there is little progress because Catholicism’s leaders cannot agree on what progress means.
What’s needed is a VATICAN III, an open debate questioning where the church is going, and let variety appear, allow priests to marry, let the differences take form in separate denominations, the way Protestantism has developed. The Roman Church which prides itself to be united in faith and doctrine, in reality is split in many different ways, a sign of the times. What is needed is the ending of Popery, is doing away with the office of The Holy Father altogether. And let the chips fall. Yes, Francis could well be the Last Pope.
And the Protestant wing?
There most believers are winging all the way to heaven, delighted in leaving the earth in total disarray, clinging to the satanic belief of Pre-Tribulation-Rapture: well, they got a surprise coming.
All this is true to form, as Revelation 22: 11 indicates: everything will in the end show its true colors. The church is no exception there.
The same is true for all created matter.
We are – nature-wide – in such a vulnerable position that only ONE of the many support systems on which we depend – soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity – need fail for everything to slide.
Here the most immediate danger is ICE, melting ICE.
When Arctic sea ice melts beyond a certain point, the positive feedbacks this triggers (such as darker water absorbing more heat, melting permafrost releasing methane, shifts in the polar vortex) could render runaway climate breakdown unstoppable. When the Younger Dryas period ended 11,600 years ago, temperatures rose 10C within a decade. That can happen again!
Given human nature and the 40% support Trump has in the USA, Climate Change only will accelerate making collapse inevitable.
Of course were the world totally united, were all politicians on the same page, were all believers to see the world as God’s world and thus holy, then, yes, disaster could be avoided.
When the US joined the Second World War in 1941, it replaced a civilian economy with a military economy within months. In one year, General Motors developed, tooled and completely built from scratch 1,000 Avenger and 1,000 Wildcat aircraft … Barely a year after Pontiac received a navy contract to build anti-shipping missiles, the company began delivering the completed product to carrier squadrons around the world.” And this was before advanced information technology made everything faster. So, yes, a total switch to renewable energy is possible, if….
The problem is human.
It already started in the Garden of Eden. The voice of The Evil One was more seductive than the voice of God.
So let me go back to that beginning, to Cain killing his brother Abel in a fit of jealousy. He fled, and God went after him and promised him a free hand to develop God’s world according to Cain’s conception.
Why did God do that?
I believe that God wanted to see creation developed faster, wanted a quicker pace of progress in the world so that his coming again might happen sooner.
Cain, driven from his fields, uprooted from a slow-moving agricultural society, received carte-blanche to mold creation into the image of murderous humanity. Cain shattered that great stability, the affinity between the human race and God’s creation, obliterating the lingering legacy of Paradise. He introduced insecurity, the taste for blood, the desire for revenge.
With Cain, Satan took effective control over the earth, yet Cain, who defied God and denied him, is promised protection by God.
So where did Cain go? He turned his eye and his desire to Eden, toward the lost Paradise, which also happens to be the perpetual quest of humanity.
The search for a home, the search for Paradise Lost, is nothing else than the human desire for God’s presence, the God Cain, and humanity in general, rejects.
Cain, haunted by fear, in order to feel secure, built a City.
It is now nigh impossible to imagine life without the City. People even in the smallest communities depend on the city. Our pension cheques, our TV programs, our tax notices, they all come from the city. Human development and the City are intimately intertwined. The City, the place of progress, is the direct consequence of Cain’s murderous act and his refusal to accept God’s protection.
Cain calls the City Enoch, which means “A New Beginning.” Cain is going to make the world all over again, but now in his image. God’s creation is seen as nothing. Cain, with everything he does, digs a little deeper the abyss between himself and God. But each solution becomes also a new problem, each invention a new offence. Cain molds creation according to his plan. It is no longer God’s world: it is Cain’s creation and now almost totally Satan’s.
Today we all have become extensions of the City. Yet the City, Cain’s answer to Eden, to Paradise really, is God’s way of preparing God’s people for the New Jerusalem, the City of God.
The City is now the place through which Christians must pass. It is the World Today. The world is the City. Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, China, Russia, even the Sahara deserts, the satellite-filled expanse above, every square inch of the universe has been annexed by the City. Yet God uses the momentum of human progress and the advance of our knowledge not only to bring about the downfall of those who willfully pollute creation, but miraculously God also blesses human progress for the benefit of the building of God’s City.
The City today is our Virtual World, dominated by technology, flick of the switch heat and cool, where reality is not allowed.
But reality is cruel: it does creep up on us, while we sit in our spiritually dark room, staring at a stupid screen.
It now looks that we will have an ice-free Arctic two years from now, which means total Climate Change, resulting in COLLAPSE.
WILL CLIMATE CHANGE ALSO BE A MIND CHANGER?
Don’t bank on it: as always I end with a biblical given: Revelation, of course.
Here is what it says: (Revelation 16: 21), “And they cursed God on account of the plague of hail, because the plague of Climate Change was so terrible.”
Climate Change will happen. Will personal change also take place, or will it lead to curses?
WILL CLIMATE CHANGE ALSO BE A MIND CHANGER?
Yes, the GOOD News is that ALL IS WELL THAT ENDS WELL, in this case: a new humanity in a new creation.