SEPTEMBER 15 2018
ENDS AND ODDS
The End of Oil, Paul Robert;
The End of Science, John Horgan;
The End of Nature, Bill McKibben;
The End of History, Francis Fukuyama;
The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin;
The End of the World, A history, by Otto Friedrich;
The Beginning and the End: the Bible
Except for Fukuyama’s, all the other books I have.
THE ENDS.
THE END OF OIL I bought in 2004 in Kingston,Ont. Then Peak Oil was much in the news. I even attended a Peak Oil conference in Boston where at Boston University many learned people predicted that very event. Today, thanks to fracking, oil flows liberally, even though the environmental effects are disastrous, especially the abundant release of methane, that ultra-dangerous gas.
Still, for the time being, No End of Oil, but rapid increases in carbon-based Climate Change.
THE END OF SCIENCE I bought in 1996 in Raleigh, NC, when our youngest daughter lived there. John Horgan, then staff writer for the Scientific American gave his book the subtitle of `Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age.”
I think he was unto something. Today we see some refinement here and there, such as the Apple gadgets, but not really anything new. Sticking my neck out, I believe that we have reached the limit of scientific knowledge, while stupidity has no bounds as we see a drastic decline in wisdom, due to the disappearing ‘fear of the Lord’, which is the beginning of wisdom.
Bill McKibben wrote THE END OF NATURE, not fully realizing then, 30 years ago, how accurate he was: a real plus for this man. His book appeared years before the onset of rapid Climate Change.
THE END OF HISTORY: Francis Fukuyama, an American political philosopher, entered the global imagination at the end of the Cold War when he prophesied the “end of history” — a belief that, after the fall of communism, free-market liberal democracy had won out and would become the world’s “final form of human government.
How wrong he was. Today we see the opposite happening: right-wing movements, dictatorships are popping up everywhere: more like the end of democracy, of which Trump in the USA and Doug Ford, in my home province of Ontario, are the symptoms.
THE END OF WORK: Jeremy Rifkin in 1995 wrote that the decline of the Global Labor Force will be caused by the increasing influence of computers, robots and telecommunication devices. Indeed, he was quite prophetic in his prediction.
THE END OF THE WORLD, a History, was written by Otto Friedrich. I bought it in 1986, more than 30 years ago.
He divides it in three books:
Book I: Barbarians at the Gates:
The Sack of Rome, A.D. 410; the Birth of the Inquisition: 1209-44.
Book II: The Eye of God:
The Black Death 1347-50; the New Jerusalem 1525-33; the Lisbon Earthquake, 1755.
Book III: In Our Time:
The Coming Revolution, 1905; The Kingdom of Auschwitz, 1940-45; Epilogue, The Great War.
Of course, the End of the World did not come but many people centuries ago were deeply religious and saw these events as The Hand of God. Today, when the real End of the World is at hand, this religious notion is strikingly absent.
THE BIBLE: The Beginning and the End.
Well, the world still turns, and The End has not yet come, but multiple endings occur continuously, such as species vanishing, forever, democracies disappearing, dictatorships emerging, rampant anger and civility ceasing, the End of stable weather, the End of Capitalism, and, at the very end, THE END, when the Lord returns, pretty soon, I think.
We should not forget that the Bible is completely written with THE END in mind. Jesus came to prepare us for THE END. In the Sermon on the Mount, that very Christian Manifesto, he sums it all up with the words, “Be Tele-ios, as I am Tele-ios”, (Matthew 5: 48), which is translated as “Be perfect”. However, it really means “Always keep The End is mind”, the End as in Tele-phone, Tele-gram, Tele-pathy, Tele-vision, Tele-scope, all referring to the TELOS, the word for END or FAR AWAY in Greek.
THE ODDS
The ODDS refers to something unusual, something out of the ordinary, such as the unusual hurricane striking at North Carolina.
August had no significant storms in the Atlantic and people on the East coast felt better, North Carolina especially because the government there, when a scientific report came in that North Carolina with many low lying areas, was a sitting duck for rising seas, the government passed a law banning policies on such forecasts. So it allowed further expansion, also in pig farms, which now have 9 million hogs. The odds are that this poses more than a mere threat. There also are a dozen or so nuclear reactors there. The odds there are frightening in the extreme, as the plants generally reside near a body of water—a river, lake, estuary or ocean—because they require a constant source of water for cooling purposes. Without cooling water, a nuclear reactor will overheat, leading to core damage, containment failure, and release of harmful radiation into the environment.
Global Warming and Hurricane frequency go hand in hand: this past week I counted 9 of them churning their ways across the earth’s major waterbodies, four in the Atlantic and five in the Pacific.
Odds are that this is just the beginning: the dangers from the seas are just the start. And they are not the only threats that face us. New technology and climate change might make the world more different than we can possibly imagine.
The odds are that the job market will change the way we work. It could quite well mean the End of Work, as AI, Artificial Intelligence, outwits the ever shrinking brain capacity of the average human.
Neil Postman wrote “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”. That Death refers mostly to the death of thinking and the ability to reason critically. All our gadgets are making us less human and more like robots. Fight it tooth and nail: your spiritual wellbeing depends on it!
Some people believe that machine learning and robotics will make humans economically redundant. I believe that more rapidly than we can imagine, the way we work will change, but, somehow we will not, and that will cause untold misery. In many ways we are what we do: our work defines us.
There are certain dangers lurking out there, dangers totally new to our generation: computer! We are as much products of what we feel as what we think. And computers now know that. Already algorithms control much of our daily lives. Odds are that Google and Facebook will exercise undue influence.
The Bible is right: un-equality is becoming the norm. In Matthew 25 Jesus is quoted, “For everyone who has will be given more and he will have an abundance.” (Verse 29). In the past few decades, people all over the world have been told that humanity is on the path to equality. Yet the world has never felt more unequal with vast wealth and power concentrated in the hands of the few while others have nothing. This is very bad and may well get worse unless we do something about it.
Beware of online communities such as Facebook. Odds are that they are being spied upon. But the greatest dangers lurk in ecological disasters.
The ODDS on Climate Change.
Arctic sea ice isn’t just threatened by the melting of ice around its edges, a new study has found: Warmer water that originated hundreds of miles away has penetrated deep into the interior of the Arctic.
That “archived” heat, currently trapped below the surface, has the potential to melt the region’s entire sea-ice pack if it reaches the surface, researchers say.
The study appears online Aug. 29 in the journal Science Advances.
“We document a striking ocean warming in one of the main basins of the interior Arctic Ocean, the Canadian Basin,” said lead author Mary-Louise Timmermans, a professor of geology and geophysics at Yale University. She is Canadian-born, and has a perfect Dutch name.
She writes, “The upper ocean in the Canadian Basin has seen a two-fold increase in heat content over the past 30 years, the researchers said. They traced the source to waters hundreds of miles to the south, where reduced sea ice has left the surface ocean more exposed to summer solar warming. In turn, Arctic winds are driving the warmer water north, but below the surface waters.
“This means the effects of sea-ice loss are not limited to the ice-free regions themselves, but also lead to increased heat accumulation in the interior of the Arctic Ocean that can have climate effects well beyond the summer season,” Timmermans said. “Presently this heat is trapped below the surface layer. Should it be mixed up to the surface, there is enough heat to entirely melt the sea-ice pack that covers this region for most of the year.”
All this perfectly confirms what Dr. Guy McPherson has preached for the last decade. See his ARCTIC NEWS blog.
We live in an Age of Transition, from the normal, steady state, to the abnormal, unsteady state. Nothing is certain anymore. The past no longer holds lessons for us. Does that mean THE END OF HISTORY?
The ODDS on religion.
The odds are that faith in the return to earth of Jesus to restore creation, as he promised when he ascended to heaven, will wane, while false faiths will proliferate. Religion once provided meaning and identity, which it still does in my life, but, by and large churches have lost their bearings, and movements have taken on sectarian and bigoted views.
As natural disasters multiply, despair and hopelessness will abound.
Odds are there will be a backlash against immigrants at a time when the economy is faltering and traditional jobs are under threat. But immigration can be a force for good, both economically and socially in helping different cultures to understand one another better. The key is to find the balance between bad immigration and good immigration before everyone is either controlled by Google or wiped out by a natural disaster.
Terrorism
Billions are spent to prevent bad people to harm good people. I am writing this on September 11 that notorious date when the twin towers in the World Trade Center in New York City were attacked and some 3000 people died. Yet world-wide more than One Million people die in automobile accidents each year, 3000 every day! It’s about time we abolish cars and make the world Bike-Friendly, but the odds are that this will never happen.
True, if terrorists get their hands on nuclear weapons that would be scary.
Love.
With us being on the brink of a climate change catastrophe combined with economic collapse, will I really continue to love my neighbor as myself? What are the odds there?
I really do not dare to speculate on such a situation. The Bible – Matthew 24: 12 – tells us that, “Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold”. Already there’s something like donor fatigue: the problems everywhere are giving rise to far-right movements, truly scary.
So what is the answer?
Try Meditation: I meditate for two hours or longer every day while preparing for my blog. Turn off television, listen to good music, walk, run, bike, do physical exercises to clear your mind. Read good books. Discuss matters of importance with others.
We need to worry, because modern life does present plenty of reasons for concern: terrorism, climate change, the rise of A.I., encroachments on our privacy, even the apparent decline of international cooperation.
No, I am not a pessimist. I am a cheerful guy, always upbeat, take pleasure in life, love my wife and extended family, but when I run, (3 times per week) my running mantra is MARANATHA, LORD COME QUICKLY, because time is short.
Fortunately the Lord will cut short the age of trial for the sake of the saints, but, for the time being it will get a lot worse: the tribulations are about to start, and there won’t be a pre-tribulation Rapture.