October 7 2023.

Do we need another ‘religious’ revolution?

Some 3200 years ago, a mere 120 generations, the first God/Creator-monotheistic revolutionary religion was born, when God appeared to Moses in the burning bush. 600 years later, Zarathustra, on whom Nietzsche later based his hero, became the founder of Zoroastrianism. In that same period Confucius (551-479) appeared in China, and Buddha (563-483) in India.

Then, in the first century, Jesus was born, and I presume you know the rest of that revolution, still playing out, somehow. In the Seventh Century came the revolutionary Mohammed (570-632), founder of Islam, who died almost exactly six hundred years after Jesus.

Guess work.

So far, so good. What about the lack of new religious development in the 13^th and 14^thCentury? Blame it on the disastrous Black Plague, which set back development in Europe for centuries – half the population died! – so, I skip aheaf to the Reformation, which started with Luther in 1517. Luther’s revolutionary act, released a plethora of innovations and artistic expressions, as well as religious strife of immense cruelty.  

Also, during that period, America was discovered, at a time when Europe became too crowded, and wood fuel was running out.

Now another 600 years have elapsed: does this signal another major change?

Is a new religious revolution at hand? Are the current systems really in line with God’s intent? Would Jesus approve of an organizational clerical system that resembles the Old Testament setup? Wasn’t Jesus’ most vehement critique directed toward the church leaders of his day? Isn’t it plain that Christianity in its present form, is a failing enterprise?

Yes, all denominations are in trouble. 

In the Catholic Church Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, has accused the pope of undermining the Catholic Faith, has suggested that other Vatican officials have veered so far from church teaching that they are no longer Catholic, and has warned that a landmark global gathering that opens this week at the Vatican could threaten “basic truths” of Catholic doctrine. 

The Protestant wing is no better off. It is also deeply divided over sexual orientation, while, in religion-soaked USA, a large segment of the church has become Nationalistic rather than Christian, seeing Trump as a Christ-like figure, unjustly suffering. The famous Dr. Harold Bloom in his The American Religion wrote that The American Religion masks itself as Protestant Christianity yet has ceased to be Christian.

Yes, the church in general has become purely Gnostic, separating body from soul. Dr. C. A. van Peursen, professor at the Netherlands’ most prestigious University, Leiden, in his Body, Soul, Spirit, writes that “the soul is a presence which makes the body what it is.”  However, religion has seen the body as being on an inferior plane, influenced by Descartes separating soul from body, even regarding body as evil, while Plato’s priority of soul over body, proclaiming death as a happy escape from the body, has also deeply influenced the Christian religion. 

The church resembles Greek pagan thinking, I need of a final revolution.

In my opinion, the Christian Church has inadvertently adopted the pagan Greek philosophy of Plato and Socrates, evident in the ‘heaven heresy’, separating soul from body. This teaching has given ‘the world’ the go-ahead to see creation as evil, exploiting her natural resources to the point where now all of life is imperiled, the very LIFE Jesus lived (John 10:10), by  becoming himself fully human.

J.H. Bavinck and Bonhoeffer, both highly respected Biblical scholars, have, indeed, revolutionary views. Dr. Bavinck, in his, Between the Beginning and the End, a radical Kingdom vision, makes the astonishing statement: “There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal”, which means that salvation of the person and salvation of creation go hand in hand: you can’t have one without the other. 

That puts a stop to most church preaching, and calls for a life fully integrated with God’s Holy Creation. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his essay, Your Kingdom Come, writes: We have fallen into secularism, and by secularism, I mean pious Christian, secularism. Not the godliness of atheism or cultural bolshevism, but the Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the earth. The function of the church is to witness to the resurrection of Christ from the dead… and to the power of God in the new creation.

Do we need another ‘religious’ revolution?

Yes, a revolution that is no longer religious: a revolution that implements LIFE, and that to the full, that prepares for eternal life here, where we now love and move and have our being: All our actions, thoughts and desires must be geared toward that purpose.

However, beware, and be ready, for “the day of the Lord will come like a thief”. (2 Peter 3: 10)

September 30 2023

WHERE IS GOD?  Some theological musings.

“The highest heavens belong to the LORD, but the earth he has given to mankind”, says Psalm 115:16, yet, as Psalm 24 attests: The earth is the Lord and all that it contains. A contradiction? No. Compare it to that famous Rembrandt painting, The Night Watch, forever prescribed to him, but owned by the Dutch Government. There also is a saying that possession constitutes 90 percent of ownership. Yes, as owners of the earth – not stewards – we are on our own: God help us.

Another misconception: Jesus did not die to bear the load of our sins – that too – but, as John 3: 16 unequivocally tells us: Jesus died to buy back the ‘cosmos’ (all created matter) which we had acquired in a deal with the Devil. To connect Christ’s sacrifice solely with human ‘sin’, is, I believe, the ultimate cause of Climate Change. Which needs a further explanation! 

Had the church seen creation as ‘holy’, as ultimately divine – because Christ’ death restored divine ownership – and acted accordingly, the current cosmic crisis, only to get worse, would not have happened. 

So, where is God in all this? 

Deuteronomy 32: 20 provides the answer: “I will hide my face from them,” he said, “and see what their end will be; for they are a perverse generation, children who are unfaithful.” That’s us, you, me, everybody.

Have a close look at the older Testament. In it, God slowly disengages himself from us. Look at the sequence: In the Eden Garden, God walks and talks with Adam and Eve. With the Ark, God personally instructs Noah. Abraham argues with God about the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. Moses is called God’s friend, and after that, except for some ‘voice-mails’, God basically disappears from the earthly scene: God separates himself from us and our actions, though not on a personal level.

Yes, God appears to Elijah: first causing a hurricane, but no God there; then via an earthquake, but no God there; then in an enormous fire, but no God there either; then, surprisingly, in the sound of silence: yes, complete quiet, there’s where God appears. 

These three natural phenomena remind me of today: earthquakes: caused by fracking and other human actions; hurricanes increasing in strength and frequency, all human actions; forest-fires everywhere, all caused by human actions: God is absent there, but we are! Our evil actions have consequences! God is so different: He is in ‘the sound of silence’, in quiet contemplation, in personal piety, in prayer and peace.

Where is God basically?

God dwells, “in unapproachable light, whom nobody has seen or can see”. (1 Timothy 6: 16). The still influential Billy Graham, that Bible pounding-evangelist, quoted the book, little knowing what it contained. In a final interview with Larry King on CNN in 1991, Larry asked Billy, “What will happen when you die?”. The celebrated preacher answered, “Jesus will take me by the hand and bring me to God”, in direct conflict with the above text, as well as John 3: 13, Nobody has ever gone to heaven, except the one who came from there, the Son of Man. 

We are earthbound, forever. 

Jesus, explicitly told us: The humble will inherit the earth. J. B. Phillips translates this as: ‘those who claim little for themselves will be the earth-dwellers’. 

It seems to me that, in the Hebrew part of the Scriptures, God, somehow, is different than in the Newer Testament. In the Old Testament, dominated by ‘the 10 commandments’, God is the stern judge, chastising his children. In the New Testament Jesus’ law of ‘love’, dominates: God becomes accessible only through the Son. Basically, God disappears, cedes authority. And we? We quietly mature in faith and grow in understanding, shedding our infancy because we cannot remain children forever: we simply have to grow up. Bonhoeffer, 80 years ago, mentioned “coming of age”. Curiously, this clashes with Jesus’ words, naming ‘the most important in the kingdom are those who become like children’ (Matthew 18:1-5). 

“Coming of Age”, could well mean being worthy to meet Christ, who wants us to grow up, and see how we will end up. The word ‘end’ here points to being a “Teleios” person, one who keeps ‘the New Creation’ in mind, the concept Jesus mentions in Matthew 5:48, “Be perfect -teleios – as my heavenly Father is perfect”.

Where is God?

Where is God? Where is Bach? Where is Shakespeare? We know them, we love them, we see them through their legacy!

That’s also why we find God in the universe, the place God called ‘good’ seven times. Jesus did not bring religion: the church does. Jesus brought LIFE: John 10: 10: I have come that we may have life, and have it to the full.

September 23 2023

COLLAPSE COMING

We’ve just had the hottest summer on recorded history, with runaway wildfires in Canada and Hawaii, ruinous floods from Slovenia, Sudan and Hong Kong to Vermont and South Americaand Libya. We’ve seen nearly half of the world’s ocean waters in a heat wave, having absorbed almost all of the heat produced by our greenhouse gas emissions. Even the Arctic has become almost tropical in temperature. The number of Hurricanes so far in the Atlantic is unprecedented for an El Nino year. And it will also affect you, and you, and me too, sooner than later: prepare for it.

The UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, said that “humanity has opened the gates of hell” by unleashing worsening heatwaves, floods and wildfires seen around the world. He echoes Matthew 24.

Collapse is in the cards

Collapse first come gradually, and then, all at once. People say that I am an alarmist because I expect collapse. I admit: I am a Collapsetarian. I see emission of greenhouse gases increase; I see how new fossil fuel projects are subsidized; I see how global warming accelerates, how bushfires and floods engulf the planet; I see climate science ignored, climate change projections kept away from the public eye; I see nations invest in killer submarines rather than water spraying aircraft and other fire-fighting equipment. Yes, I am a Collapsetarian. 

ARCTIC NEWS.

Almost every day I have a look at the ARCTIC NEWS website. I sincerely believe that our future lies buried there, or, better, the lack of our future. Especially its September 15 issue is frightening. It states, based on NASA observations, that the Arctic is heating up beyond any other region in the world. The ice that used to reflect the sunlight is now absorbing the solar heat and temperatures there are heating up with the Gulf Stream pushing hot water toward the Arctic Ocean. As the temperature of the Arctic Ocean keeps rising, more heat can reach sediments located at the seafloor, since much of the Arctic Ocean is very shallow and sediments at the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean contain vast amounts of methane. The danger is that additional heat will destabilize hydrates in these sediments, leading to explosive eruptions of methane, as the compressed volume of methane increases 160 to 180-fold when leaving the hydrates. 

This will result in huge eruptions of methane both from the destabilizing hydrates and from methane that is present in the form of free gas underneath the hydrates. The scientists studying this phenomenon fear that a tipping point may be reached within months, causing a sudden spike in the world’s temperature beyond the limits of human endurances.

COLLAPSE

I have this book, 575 pages, COLLAPSE, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, written by (Dr.) Jared Diamond. He discusses the tragedy of Easter Island, discovered by Jacob Roggeveen, and his Dutch crew, in 1722 on Easter Sunday, hence the name. Not a living soul remained, only gigantic statues. All trees gone. Dr. Diamond wonders, “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?” Like modern loggers, did he shout “Jobs, not trees!”? Or: Technology will serve our problems”?…. The parallels to today are chillingly obvious.

Looking around in the world, thanks to ‘The Internet’, everybody should be a “Collapsetarian”. Faith in the rulers of this world is fading. Look at the USA and the politics there: the Republicans seeking the presidency, don’t believe in Climate Change, ridicule science and scientists. For them Collapse will come as a total surprise.

Before COLLAPSE happens, all sorts of little collapses will take place, just as what happened in ungovernable Libya where civic strife prevented regular maintenance of the dams that collapsed and took away thousands of lives in a matter of minutes. I think it is a metaphor depicting our sudden demise, also due to human indulgence. 

Just imagine: a sudden spike in the overall world temperature beyond the THREE DEGREES Celsius wherever you are in the world, will make life impossible for all that has a being. Do have a second look at the ARCTIC NEWS website. If its observations are correct – for their information they rely on NASA’s satellites regarding ice formation and water and air temperatures – then it is very possible that life on earth may cease as rapidly as the sudden deluge that occurred in strife-torn Libya.

Jesus had a unique insight into the future. Matthew 24 offers a glimpse of what is to come: for you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.

We do well to take stock and consider what it means when sudden Collapse, ultimate death and destruction, overwhelms all and everything. Be aware.

September 16 2023

Dreams 

Your old men will dream dreams. Joel 2: 28.

Count me among the old men. Count me among those who dream. Count me among those who see dreams as wrestling with oneself. Count me among those who see dreams as cleansing the mind so that I can enter eternity a bit closer to my true me. Count me among those who see dreams as often inexplicable because they deal with the unconscious. Count me among those who believe there is no one dominant explanation for dreams. 

Carl Jung stated that dreams are a way for the unconscious mind to communicate with the conscious mind. He also be asserted that dreams are symbolic and can have multiple meanings. 

My unconscious mind caused me trouble at night.

Looking back, as far back as the day of my birth, has been a liberating experience. I’ll tell you why. For many decades I’ve had nightmares, fighting off an attacker, thrashing my sheets and blankets but never able to catch the bugger. 

Then something dawned on me. When I have born, I weighed 5 kg, or 11 lbs. I also was circumcised right at birth. As a youngster I was called ‘dikkop’, ’fathead’, indicating that my head was larger than normal. Combining all these factors, I concluded, that my delivery was a difficult one, struggling to get out, while, once safe in my mother’s arms, I experienced the pain of penis plight. Once this had become plain to me, my nightmares ceased.

Several Dreams.

In the last year or so I have had different dreams. In one of them, I became quite agitated and worried: “how, in the world, I, as an unskilled, impractical, green immigrant, 23 years old, brought up in a better than average middleclass home, never having worked a day in my life, suddenly landing in Canada, engaged already to the love of my life, how would I ever be able to earn a decent income to support a family?”

Well?

Somehow, by the grace of God, I managed, reinventing myself three times: from starting an insurance business, then adding by becoming a real estate broker, and finally, relocating from the Niagara Peninsula to Eastern Ontario, where I reschooled to become a commercial Real Estate Appraiser. All good enough to earn a decent living, saw five children become professionals and managed to save enough for retirement.

Alone in an unending desert.

Last week I had a dream in which I stood in a stark, unending desert: a Sahara-like situation with sand dunes everywhere, and I the solitary person there. That was my dream. 

I immediately connected my dream to my life prior to 1972, when, raised in an orthodox Christian family, committed to everything Christian, activist, promoting Christian education zealously, but having a faith more historic and traditional than progressive and vibrant. 

That all changed when, in 1972 two books came my way, thanks to two friends: one a Dutch one, “Sterven… en dan” (After death… what) and another by Dr. Donella Meadows, the lead author of Limits to Growth. 

After death, what?

The first book changed everything in my life that I had automatically assumed to be the true faith: “we live, go to church, have a decent life, die and go to heaven”. My dream of standing in a barren desert portrayed to me that sort of existence: sterile, unquestioning, stagnant. Through that book, I suddenly saw Christianity in a new light: not heaven as goal, but the earth, God’s precious gift to humanity; God’s infinite work of art; God’s marvelous, majestic, wonderful miracle, where all creatures, great and small testify to God’s greatness. 

Then in 1972, now more than 50 years ago, faith became real for me, expressed in John 3: 16: “God so loved the ‘world’, that he offered his Son as a sacrifice to buy the cosmos back from the Devil”. I then saw for the first time in my life that Christ died not merely for our sins, but primarily to ‘redeem = buy back’ God’s precious creation. The church, exclusively focusing on ‘sin’, has turned Christianity into the desert, where it still is languishing and dying.

The Finite Earth.

The second book, Limits to Growth, suddenly saw me living in the world, a different world, a world dying by a thousand cuts. I then saw that I lived in a World that God called ‘good’ seven times, a world created to support us fully and gloriously when we practise symbiosis. I finally, by the grace of God, saw how we must truly see the world as ‘holy’ as God’s expression of what is good and wise and infinite, a true symbol of his majestic creativity. 

Yes, old men do dream dreams. 

September 9 2023

Veggies for humans; rights for animals.

Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. Genesis 1:29.

In paradise, God prescribed a special diet for Adam and Eve: strictly vegetarian. Jumping from the first chapter of the Bible Genesis 1, to the very last one, Revelation 22, describing the New Creation, or, the restored Garden of Eden, I read something similar: “the Tree of life bearing twelve crops of fruit every month”. Again vegetarian! 

What does this mean for us?

It has long been my thesis that our present existence is a proving ground for the REAL life in the new creation, a theme that dominates the Scriptures. I sincerely believe that a vegetarian life is the Biblical option: It has been mine for many decades.

But…

In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were vegetarians, eating only from the plants and trees. Later, with Noah, this changed. It seems to me that meat was then used on special occasions: Abraham provided (Genesis 18:7) the Lord with meat from a calf, tender and good. The same happened when the Prodigal Son re-appeared. Jesus ate fish. So, what do I conclude? 

For me, the likely benefits of being vegetarian, both for my health, the environment and reducing animal suffering, outweigh the minor inconveniences. So, perhaps optional: no black and white situation. 

There also is that Job text.

But ask the animals, and they will teach you; or the birds of the air and they will tell you; or ask the plants of the earth, and they will instruct you.  Job 12: 7-9.

The above text points to integration, points to intimate relations with ‘the natural world’. Yes, we are a unity: soil, animals, humans: they belong together. That’s why many people are convinced that animals are sophisticated mental creatures who have beliefs and desires, memories and expectations, who feel pleasure and pain and experience emotions, and like us, animals have a basic moral right to be treated in ways that show respect for their independent value. 

As an aware Christian I believe that we should welcome the days when chickens revert back to their natural pecking order and contended cattle roam the vast expanse of the prairies where they belong.

But back to my question: Do animals have rights? Yes, they do. Do chickens and other incarcerated animals deserve rights? Yes, they do. Just as the people in Bangladesh and elsewhere have the right to be housed decently, and live comfortably, so, if my Bible is true, animals too have the right to exercise their freedom of movement. Job’s words thousands of years ago are still relevant today. What we have lost is the wisdom animals can teach us. We no longer have the ability to understand what the birds are trying to tell us. We no longer know how plants can enlighten us. We are paying lip service to the knowledge that in God’s hands are the life of every living being – animal, birds, plants – and the breath of every human being. 

Does that include trees? Do they have rights?

Some time ago I read Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I was struck by one sentence, “I entreat you, brothers (and sisters), remain true to the earth”. Another sentence stayed with me: “To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence”. I wonder, “Is that the sin against the Holy Spirit?”

So how about trees? 

I have long maintained that our original sin included taking fruit from a tree without asking permission. I too, when I accidently brush against a tree, I ask the tree for forgiveness. I see trees as my neighbors, and love them as such. Trees really matter: no trees, no LIFE. Dying trees mean death for humans. Forest fires indicate the approach of hell. Nietzsche was right: “By killing creation we are killing God.”

 

It always strikes me that, when in Genesis 2 trees are described, the beauty aspect is mentioned first (Genesis 2:9). That also points to our original mandate of beautifying creation. It is my considerate opinion that the early humans mentioned in the Bible lived so long because the main cover of the planet was trees, breathing out super-rich oxygen.  

Luther once said, “even if I knew that the Lord would come back tomorrow, I still plant a tree today.

We need ever closer contact with creation. Dying trees, forest fires, earth quakes, violent storms indicate a broken relationship with creation. 

The Bible tells us that God, creation and the human race form an organic whole. That wholeness includes animals and trees.

Yes, animals and trees do have rights. 

September Second 2023

Inflation, more Inflation, then Explosion.

Inflation is much more than an increase in the cost of food and other consumption items. Take Putin, the Russian dictator: he represents inflation because war always leads to higher prices, armed conflict always destroys dwellings, always burns trees, always wounds and kills people and animals, and always causes fires: Climate Change does the same!. Putin, personally, suffers from super self-esteem, Hubris, the word for overweening pride, a form of inflated ego, something the entire Western world also suffers from. We behave as if earth’s finite resources are infinite, now disappearing in fire and smoke or smothered by too much water or not enough, causing foodstuffs and other essentials, such as potable water, to disappear, the source of extreme inflation: welcome to the Age of Extremes.

Global Boiling.

Of course, Global Boiling brings inflation, because Climate Change boils down to being a war on Creation. Just as war is waged to cause regime change – at a colossal cost, and often not achieving the initial goal – so the battle to ameliorate the effects of Climate Change may actually do more harm than good. The Electric Vehicle phenomenon is a case in point: some 400kg of scarce natural resources, often ripping up precious forests in Africa and elsewhere, cause irreparable damage to fragile ecosystems. Also, much of the raw material needed to build the batteries at the heart of these new motors, is controlled by China, now the world’s leading EV manufacturer.

Face it: the major factor of increasing inflation is the changing climate. Suddenly the whole world is up in arms. God is hiding his face and withdraws his presence; God sits back, and watches what’s happening on the earth with its eight billion human beings, now all of them fully aware that the earth and the fulness thereof is no longer able to sustain all that lives and moves and has a being. Everything and everybody is under stress and unable to maintain itself, while the resources, water, air, soil, are shrinking and the available basics are disappearing, causing inflation and unavailability at any price. 

Wartime conditions.

I am old enough to have lived, as a teenager, through the years of war – 1940-45 – in German-occupied the Netherlands. Then suddenly all imports ceased, oranges, bananas, coffee, tea, simply disappeared, including TOBACCO, yes, that poisonous item, became more precious than gold! All foodstuff was rationed, all new clothes disappeared and fuel was basically non-existent, while electricity was only sporadically available: barter was the key to staying alive, as money could no longer buy the essentials. 

Of course, these conditions did not appear overnight: it took months and even a few years to bite with a vengeance. Today the situation is the same, but world-wide. The poor in tropical countries already feel the effects: that’s why they risk their lives to come to the paradisical West to find out that there too Paradise is Lost. For us, the reckoning too, will come, will come sudden and abrupt for most. 

Will humans change? No way: Each day I do my 6,000 steps on the Canada Trail bisecting Tweed. I often am the only walker, but not the only user: for every walker there are 4 ATVs, dusty, noisy, polluting: for these operators the tipping point will come as a total surprise: sudden, unexpected, out of the blue. 

The near future: Change

The coming years will have no equal. They will be drastically different. They will not replicate the experience of the 1920s or the 1940s. The idea that we can recover from the fiscal and monetary excesses of the past decades without economic pain — at a time of political polarization and geopolitical conflict — seems historically implausible. The only thing constant is change. It’s not just that hard things happen without adequate notice and in a short period of time; it’s that a lot of things happen without adequate notice in a short period of time. 

Given all this, prepare mentally and spiritually for a steadfast change. The new situation we face – shortages, even collapse – forces us to focus on what we can control and let go of what we cannot.

Not surprisingly Revelation reveals inflation too as a hallmark of the last days, indicated by the rider of the black horse (Rev. 6:5) who carries a scale, and says: “A quart of wheat for a day’s wages and three quarts of barley for a day’s wages.” Both that scale and these words signify poverty, hunger and inflation. The prices mentioned here are about eight times the prices normal in those days, explains the footnote.

Our economic system is based on stability. Our war against creation wrings its neck, tightens its noose, kills the goose, leads to explosion and clears the deck for Christ’s return.