AUGUST 31 2019
GREED IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL
Radix malorum cupiditas est.
Nowadays we experience the culmination of history: everything is becoming what it is. We are rushing to the END, and that means that the true nature of humanity and the true nature of human enterprises are being bared in all its vulgarity and vileness, exposing GREED as the root of all evil, but also revealing the good deeds that will accompany us into eternity.
The Latin word ‘cupiditas’ is derived from the verb, ‘cupido’ which signifies erroneous desire of all sorts, money, power, sex.
The saying “The lust for money is the root of all evil” originates with Paul, the apostle, who wrote it to his protégé, Timothy (1 Tim.6: 10). Paul was a passionate person: whatever he did, he did with gusto and, when young, with fanatic overtones. He reminds me of myself in my younger and even not so younger days. No half-way measures for him. I love the man, not only for his wise writings, truly inspired, but also for his forthrightness. He shows the power of his upbringing as an aspiring Pharisee, steeped in the Scriptures, and a great artist and poet as well – just read 1 Corinthians 13, that great song of love: “Faith, Hope and Love, and the greatest of these is LOVE” – even though he apparently never married.
He mentioned that he was afflicted with ‘a thorn in the flesh’. He fervently prayed to have it removed, but the Lord had other ideas, something like, “That sting will keep you humble”. In my DAY WITHOUT END you will meet him, and there he reveals what I think, is his Thorn, not an unusual affliction, I believe.
For many ‘greed’ is the thorn in the flesh, and when we give in to it, it poisons our personality. For politicians “economic growth” at all costs, is the scourge of society. Many who faithfully attend church justify their greedy exploitation of creation by basing it on the ancient misinterpretation of Genesis of ‘dominating’ the earth, abetted by the ‘heaven’ syndrome. By and large the church people see the earth as disposable, even though the Bible repeatedly claims that, “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it” (Psalm 24), making it holy. There too greed is the driving motive.
So what do we observe in our world today?
Satan, God’s enemy of old, kicked out of heaven for subordination, has landed feet first on earth, where he and his army of angels turned evil, now rule all rulers everywhere. There’s not a just government left: all exploit the earth.
That’s why OIL is still king. We have become helpless. You may think, “I will drive less, and so cut back on my energy consumption.” Unfortunately, in the entire scheme of things, whether or not we cut back on the use of gasoline doesn’t get the world economy very far. Gasoline accounts for about 26% of world oil consumption, or about 8.7% of total energy use. A cut of gasoline consumption by 10% would curtail world energy consumption by less than 1%.
Still I bike wherever I can, even though pedaling my iron horse makes no difference on the global scale, but that is not the point: I am totally responsible for how I conduct my daily life. Since the earth’s eclipse is looming far faster beyond anyone thought possible, I know that I have to give account of how I have conducted myself in God’s earth, because, once the earth is consumed by human induced FIRE, Judgment Day is the immediate next immense event.
Yes, we will never get away with murder – and that is what God will charge us with: murder of species, murder of air, soil, water, trees, and everything that depends on these basic elements. All based on GREED.
The main charge against us, humans, will be that we have fashioned a society totally relying on greed, of which carbon energy is now all-pervasive, because Carbon energy is needed for every activity that is considered part of our GDP, Gross Domestic Product.
God gave us the energy from the sun without which food can’t grow. That’s why initially human beings were vegetarians: no supplementary heat sources were needed: the sun did it all.
Once we started agriculture and used animals, one thing led to another. Without supplemental energy of some kind (such as using electricity to heat an electric stove or burning animal dung or sticks), it becomes impossible to cook food or smelt metals.
Slowly at first, and now at breakneck speed, we have painted ourselves in a corner. Now everything, everything depends on energy consumption. The tasks that governments do, such as building roads and schools, require energy consumption. Both transporting and cooking food require the use of energy products. Refrigerating food requires energy products. These energy uses, as well as many other everyday hidden uses of energy, aren’t things that we can easily cut back on.
Fools in charge.
“The fools have said in their hearts, there is no God above.” (Psalm 13). Those are the people who have their values all wrong. For them creation is there to exploit. We see it in Brazil. We see it in the USA. We see it in the UK and Australia and Italy and Russia and India and China: everywhere populists, men – all men!! – catering to the lowest tendencies in human beings, are in charge today even as matters fall apart at an ever faster rate.
As circumstances environmentally deteriorate, and climate change really starts to bite, causing inflation of basic food stuff, the dream of climate friendly energy sources, solar and wind power, will come crashing down, while the use of carbon energy will soar, even when it is the source of our ills.
Just as taxes on tobacco have risen exponentially in an effort to curtail its lethal use, so governments, desperate to raise funds to pay for our earlier extravagance when oil was cheap, and cheap to obtain, now the opposite is becoming true. Soon rulers everywhere, even in the USA, will see carbon as the fountain of folly, and will tax it as a sure source of badly needed tax revenue. Why? Because due to Global Heating, the damage done to infrastructure, to dwellings and public buildings, plus the extra cost of protecting them from increasing climate change, will stretch public resources beyond their limits, screaming for extra revenues to mend the damage.
Greed is at the root of it all.
It already started in Paradise, in the Garden of Eden. In the early Bible chapters God pointed the TREE out to the human pair, and they saw that it was “Beautiful to look at and good for fruit”. Later the sly ENEMY drew their attention to that same tree, and the order of priority was reversed, “Good for fruit and nice to behold”. Suddenly GREED raised its ugly head and Capitalism was born.
Today Capitalism thrives on OIL. Oil oils all. Oil and its related products, coal, natural gas, make modern life possible, but also kill it.
That’s the dilemma we all face. To cut down its use, Governments must tax it, but higher oil prices will increase the chances for recession. Also the easy oil is gone. The next batch is further away, is deeper in the earth, costs more to extract.
That means that oil companies have to charge more. But if oil prices rise, the prices of many different types of goods and services, food, goods transported by truck or airplane, and vacation travel, rise at the same time. Wages don’t rise as quickly, in part because it is the true energy content that the economy requires.
So, looking into my cracked crystal ball, the economy will be forced to spend a larger share of its resources to producing energy products, which means that more energy will be used to obtain energy resulting in more pollution and greater expenses.
With fewer resources to use, the economy reacts by shrinking back. An adequate supply of energy products is what makes the economy operate as it does; if buying an adequate amount of energy products becomes too expensive for consumers, they cut back and cause an even greater economic downturn. With rising inflation, interest rates too have to go up, so no wonder that the Fed, the US federal Bank, is loath to decrease rates.
Middle Eastern oil exporting countries want higher prices as well, because they have large populations and inadequate employment opportunities unless the government provides them with handouts or with programs that provide jobs. If these governments need to cut back too much, there is a real danger that the governments will be overthrown.
If prices cannot rise high enough, the vast majority of the oil that seems to be available based on published reserve amounts and geological surveys cannot really be extracted.
Whether there are ways to raise oil and other energy prices higher than they are now remains to be seen.
You see: today we eat oil – 10 carbon parts for each food part; today we move our bodies, not by the two legs God gave us, but by four rubberized wheels attached to 2,000 pounds of steel and plastic; today we travel not by wind-power and clever sails, but by jet engines, whose contrails poison the skies; today we don’t get the news from neighbors and friends but on the boob-tube and the internet.
Carbon energy is deeply buried in all goods and services that are made. If there isn’t enough supply, the world stops or at best stagnates.
Today Collapse is in the cards, because no matter what we do, no matter where we turn, dangers dawns, either in the form of depression or wars or epidemics or defaulting debts or failing governments and intergovernmental organizations or Brexit or devastating earthquakes or super typhoons or a sudden spike in temperatures: the list is endless.
If the oil prices go too high – and they should to ascertain new supply – the economy crashes. If they go too low, the supply will stop, and the economy crashes. If we continue to use oil the climate crashes and we with it.
Needless to say, stock markets are likely to be adversely affected. So-called renewables will quickly fail because they are currently dependent on fossil fuels for repairs and the electric grid. In fact, it is hard to see any aspect of the world economy that can continue unaffected.
Under today’s circumstances, damned when we do, damned when we don’t, it is hard to believe that the overall system can stay together for many years, but perhaps, in parts of the world, it can.
Given how interconnected the economy is and how widespread the problems are at this point, the scene in Paradise, in the Garden of Eden, is now playing out. There we succumbed to GREED: it’s as simple as that: radix malorum cupiditas est.
Yes, it started in Paradise, it continued with Cain who built the first city as the world’s answer to the Garden of Eden. The Satan, the Great Enemy offered Jesus the entire world (Matthew 4: 8-10). Yes, not God, not Jesus, but the Devil calls the tune today, and his goal is to destroy creation. Sorry to say that, thanks to our lifestyle, thanks to our living habits, totally entrenched in energy, we have been led astray, seduced by greed.
Today the ruling maxim, our real manifesto, should be to return to the original rule for life: to serve creation, to love it with all our heart, soul, mind, being as it is God’s direct revelation.
Jesus was, is and always must be our example as found in John 3: 16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
The word for ‘world’ here is ‘COSMOS’. The word ‘cosmos’ means everything created, and that includes our tiny earth as well.
Cosmos is the
opposite of chaos. God called forth cosmos from chaos. We have turned this same
cosmos into chaos, but Jesus in turn reversed it again, turning our chaos into his
cosmos. That’s why he died: he died not only for our sins: he died to make
paradise, the Garden of Eden, REAL again.