Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

October 26 2019

DEATH.

If you don’t like reading about DEATH (and most people don’t), you can skip this, but you can’t skip death.

But first, some money-news.

Last week all the financial brains in the world were in DC: Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, Christine Lagarde, still head of the International Monetary Fund, but soon taking over from Mario Draghi, head of the ECB, the European Central Bank. Of course he was there too – as well as Jerome Powell, ruling the Federal Reserve in Washington, just to name the head ponchos in our financial world. They were there to listen to Mervyn King, he ruled the Bank of England for many years, which earned him the LORD title. Canadian Mark Carney succeeded him six years ago.

When I read the comments on his speech, I was astounded: he warned that unless we adopt policies that enhance growth, we are heading for collapse.

Lord King’s speech reminded me of a Latin saying: Pariuntur montes, nascetur ridiculus mus: The mountains copulated – the big shots of the world gathered – and a tiny mouse was born – and the result was a total flop.

In his speech Mervyn King did not mention the consequences of Climate Change but later Mark Carney did. He said that business as usual will lead to a temperature increase of FOUR DEGREES CELSIUS, in other words: COLLAPSE, DEATH.

We are caught in an impossible situation: the world economy will collapse if there is no growth. It also will collapse when there IS growth. Take your pick. Business wants growth. No economic school of thought, except Herman Daly, former economist with the World Bank, taught in the Universities, deals with a No-Growth Society.

Just imagine having TV commercials (paid by the government, of course) pleading not to buy automobiles, not to buy Jet Skis, or not to travel to exotic destinations. Impossible, of course, but having no TV commercials signals the death of TV. That’s alright with me, but it’s the life-line for most people – or should I say death-trap?

But I digress.

The economy will remain a competitive battlefield with one company vying to best the other, with GM vying for prominence over the Japanese manufacturers, while they will try to outdo the Koreans. And then there are the many billions who, exposed to the clamorous lifestyles shown on TV want to enjoy the benefits of the wealthy Westerners.

So brace for sudden collapse, something nobody is prepared for, just as very few realistically face the collapse of one’s vital organs, more commonly known as death.

You know what set me off to write an article on DEATH?

Well, it was an Israeli academic. He discovered that we mortals can visualize the death of others, but not our own going to the grave.

That’s because, researchers say, our brains do their best to keep us from dwelling on our inevitable demise. A study found that the brain shields us from existential fear by categorizing death as an unfortunate event that only befalls other people.

“The brain does not accept that death is related to us,” said Yair Dor-Ziderman, at Bar Ilan University in Israel. “We have this primal mechanism that means when the brain gets information that links self to death, something tells us it’s not reliable, so we shouldn’t believe it.”

We have that saying: ”Only death and taxes are sure.” We give credence to the taxes, but the reference to death we ignore.

I am not a psychologist so I have no professional qualifications to comment on this, but, with more than 91 years of living experience, it seems to me that the phenomenon not to dwell on death stems from what I could call the Paradise Syndrome, where people were initially created to live forever.

Sin and Death.

Sin and Death are intimately connected. The Bible says somewhere that “The wages of sin is death,” or in plain English, The wages, the true reward or compensation for going against God`s commandments is death: Sinning against Creation leads to death.

Why do I call it “sin against creation?”

It is curious that the Bible relates how sin involved two items: Trees and Food. The human pair mentioned in Genesis had been given specific instructions about fruit trees, described as ‘beautiful to look at and good for food.’ Their specific assignment was to maintain these standards, with enhancing the garden, making it more beautiful, having priority.

There were plenty of other sources for food in the garden, so abundant, in fact, that obtaining nourishment became a secondary matter, while creational enhancement was the divine priority.

BUT……..

But by preferring food over artful decoration this has become the original sin, now manifest in ‘the lust for money as the root of all evil’, and thus the true cause of death.

Sin and death are synonymous. We don’t like the word ‘sin’, that’s also the reason why we don’t like the word ‘death’ and avoid thinking about it, preferring to live in the present. That’s also why we don’t want to hear about the ‘death of nature’.

About 30 years ago Bill McKibben wrote “The End of Nature.” I bought the book in February 1990. All the writings, all the warnings, the ever more dire predictions, have made no difference: we refuse to think about death, we refuse to think about “The End, the DEATH of Nature, the agony and final gasp of Creation.”

That is also the reason why church has become so unpopular: if it is true to its calling, the church deals with death, the death of Christ, the death of humanity, the death of creation, the death on the cross, but also the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.

Today we live in a culture of death. THE SIXTH EXTINCTION, written by Elizabeth Kolbert, has been listed as one of the most important book of the 21^st Century. It tells us that over the last half billion years there have been five major mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. We, you and I, we have induced the Sixth Extinction: we have altered life on earth to the point of death for everything that lives: we have created a death culture: death of insects, of birds, of mammals, of trees, the list goes on.

Where in Paradise, the Garden of Eden, food was for the taking, we have made it into an industry, but……… it now takes 10 carbon – death dealing – calories to bring one ONE food calorie to the table, unless you grow your own. The only way to stop Global Heating is to stop eating, which means that there is no solution, no matter what the politicians and experts say: we have created a culture of death, and it started with agriculture.

Today animal agriculture is one of the highest sources of greenhouse emissions. Starting a vegetarian diet is now our God-given duty. Sorry farmers. It’s also our future in the New Creation: cutting out meat is a simple, but necessary small first step toward eternity. And it ensures LIFE. We, my wife and I have avoided meat for more than 40 years and our physical health is excellent.

Yet we will die, but we live in the hope of eternal life.

I have tried to describe that phase in the book I wrote, DAY WITHOUT END. There I visualized the End of the World, an event coming totally unexpected, yet predicted in the Bible time and again: “like a thief in the night”, with “merchandize piling up – Revelation 18: 11 – and the Amazon warehouses and Walmart stores – the two main employers in the USA – chockful with stuff”. The drones still active, delivering stuff people don’t need, bought with money they don’t have, a typical description of the American economy.

Here’s how in DAY WITHOUT END – available at LULU.com for less than $10.00, – I describe this last day:

“Suddenly there was a blinding light, like lightning, but not one streak, thousands of them, surrounding us with streams of fire flashing to the earth. Trees were struck, but instead of bursting into flames they simply dissolved. Like a rapidly rewinding film, they shrank from full-grown to seedlings, dwindling to seeds buried in the earth. Uncreated. The highway along which we walked melted, not into a puddle of hot tar, but right to dust; concrete and asphalt reduced to their basic elements. Cars dissolved, even as they moved. And the people in them? Gone. Evaporated. A little wisp of smoke was all that was left. Or was it a trail of dust?

“We didn’t say a word. We didn’t even have time to wonder why all this was happening before the intense heat engulfed us, too. There was no pain, no discomfort, just purifying fire. I remember smiling as I faded away. My last glance was toward the sky, where I could see the sun, blackened as if all its fire had descended to earth, and the moon, too, was different: a dark, bloody red. I felt my body glow, and then I fell asleep, warm and cozy.

“All this was accompanied by glorious sound: the all-pervasive resonance of a trumpet. At least it sounded like the music of a single instrument. Some virtuoso player repeated the same theme in innumerable variations: wake up; reveille; rise from your sleep; the hour has come. It was as if the very energy of God was conveyed in these notes, penetrating to the very bottom of the seas and the very top of the mountain peaks: the universe was simply saturated with this utterly compelling rhythm.”

That’s how I envisioned what the Bible calls, The Day of the Lord.

THE DAY OF THE LORD!

Until now, on this very day while I am writing this, the day does not belong to the Lord, even as we used to call Sundays “The Day of the Lord”. 1John 5:19 unequivocally states that “The Evil One is in charge.” That’s why the Day of the Lord is needed to reclaim creation!” The Bible pulls no punches there:

“See, the day of the LORD is coming –a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger– to make the land desolate and destroy the sinners within it”, says Isaiah 13:9.

On Climate Change we are staring death in the face.

We all are somewhat acquainted with Handel’s Messiah, especially the Hallelujah Chorus. There also is another line in that oratorio: “But who can endure the day of his (Christ) coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire. (Malachi 3: 2).

Prepare the Way of the Lord.

Another musical comes to mind, God-Spell, in which John the Baptist sings: “Prepare ye the way of the Lord”, repeating that line Twelve times, increasing the tempo and the music volume. “Prepare the way of the Lord”, the opening words of that enchanting and up-to-date melodious play, is s timely reminder to us, more urgent than ever.

How do we prepare ourselves for the most epoch-changing event ever? There’s nothing that even remotely compares to this literary world-shaking event.

Oh, yes, there already are many indications! Right now Climate Change is one of them. Another is the disappearance of organized religion, and the increasing godlessness. Also the deaths of wild mammals, as well as ….. you fill it in.

How do we prepare? Pray for the Lord’s coming: pray without ceasing, and believe that your prayer will be heard: THAT’s the only WAY to overcome DEATH AND LIVE!

Be faithful to his creation. The first human pair as described in early Genesis took God’s world for granted, preferring possessions over beauty. Nietzsche, that misunderstood genius, cried out in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:  “I entreat you, brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of super terrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not…..To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence”.

We have not honored God in his creation, ensuring DEATH for all that lives: the wages of sin is death.

Loving Christ, who loved creation so much that he died to restore it, and for us loving Christ and his creation, is the only way to LIFE. 

OCTOBER 19 2019

RELIGION-LESS CHRISTIANITY.

There’s a very telling text in the Bible, a wise reminder from the apostle Paul written to the sophisticated believers in the then world’s capital city, ROME, today still the headquarters of the Roman Catholic branch of Christianity. Here it is:

“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”

When in our church the Bible is read, the reader often adds, “This is the word of God”. This is true, but the text quoted above points to another word of God: Creation. Never reading the Bible is not seen as a sin, but looking at creation and not attributing it to God: That is seen as inexcusable.

INEXCUSABLE!

Looking at creation and ignoring the creator, is like listening to THE ST.MATTHEW PASSION and refusing to attribute it to J. S. Bach, or admiring Rembrandt’s NIGHTWATCH, stubbornly maintaining that he did not paint it, instead suggesting that these master pieces evolved by themselves.

I realize these examples pale in comparison to the unfathomable intricacy of creation, where everything is connected to everything else.

There is one issue of overriding importance today, and it is: “If God created the cosmos, does that mean that creation is Holy? If that is the case, then mistreating it, is sin.”

I believe that the Belgic Confession is correct: “We know God by two means:

First, by the creation, preservation, and government
of the universe,
since that universe is before our eyes
like a beautiful book
in which all creatures,
great and small,
are as letters
to make us ponder
the invisible things of God:
God’s eternal power and divinity,
as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20.

All these things are enough to convict humans
and to leave them without excuse.

Leave them without excuse!

The “THEM” are us. Yet, our entire society floats, moves, flies, focuses on abusing creation.

What can be concluded here is that creation exists to affirm the reality of the Scriptures and that the Scriptures exist to affirm the reality of Creation.

All signs signify that we are in the END TIMES. The differences between denominations are disappearing, as the matters that once divided these various churches are fading into irrelevance. Bonhoeffer predicted this when he coined the phrase,

“Religion-less Christianity”.

We all stand in history. The animal does not know history: it is aware, shows love and compassion and has many admirable attributes, but it stands outside what’s happening in its surroundings.  Only we –men and women – have a place in history, and that place determines our life.

That place is now exclusively determined by the way in which we treat God’s creation, and how we care for it, especially now when the End is approaching.

Let’s face it: of course we have to enact our love for our neighbor, but if, in the process we poison the air, what good does our love do when we bring disease and death?

Just as the Bible, in a few sober words, depicts the beginning of it all, so it outlines for us the end-times as well, the confluence of everything, where cosmos turns to chaos.

We are getting a taste of this nowadays: wherever we look, wherever our eye turns, whether to China and Hong Kong, whether to the Arctic and ever higher temperatures there, whether to Indonesia and its fires, whether to the Middle East and its explosive situation, whether to Europe and Brexit, whether to the USA and a simmering civil war, it becomes increasingly clear that the history of the world ends in God’s judgment, a judgment that originates with humanity.

It is also becoming clearer by the day that not God, but The Evil One, is in charge of this world, and now that the coming of the Lord is fast approaching, the Devil and his legion of angels are redoubling their destructive efforts, using us as the executors.

Just as our life-story starts with TREES, so today, in the end-times, all things turn to the beginning. Just as the book of Genesis paints paradise for us, the place where human life started, so the Revelation of John brings us back to the same place.

To be human means to have a place between the beginning and the end, between the two trees in the beginning, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and the Evil, and the END, with self-imposed, self-inflicted punishment and Judgment.

That’s in short how the Bible depicts, in living color, the life of us men and women, each with their own life to live, each directly related to eternity, and each simultaneously caught up in history.

And at the center of it all is CHRIST, who did not bring religion, but who taught us how to LIVE! CHRISTIANITY means LIFE and that to the fullest!

Crunch time.

Everything becomes what it is. It’s becoming increasingly clear that by treating creation as disposable we are cutting our own throat. By denying Creation as holy, we deny God. But when we love creation, then we do God’s will, then no other doctrine, no other religious rule is required: then we practice Religion-less Christianity, then, as Bonhoeffer has stated, we can live Etsi Deus Non Daretur, live “As if God does not exist.”

Looking back

For centuries now we have treated God’s Creation, God’s Primary Word, God’s Direct Revelation, as an item to be abused. We have scratched out God’s signature on every created entity, and written in our own name, even though the Ten Commandments explicitly state that “You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.”

That’s why Romans 1:20 bears repeating:

“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”

But we must treat creation as God’s precious GIFT to us, remembering Psalm 115: 16 “The highest Heavens belong to God, but the Earth he has given to us:” all our actions must be geared to better the earth, because it’s our eternal HOME: Christ gave his life for it. We now can throw out all church teachings. We now have only ONE goal to live for: loving creation.

Confessions are useless when we deny them in reality, which we do constantly in our daily life: it’s easy to say “God is Love”, when we our actions scream that this does not apply to his creation, which we can and do abuse without ceasing. We are asked “to pray without ceasing” and that is true. My constant prayer is “Maranatha, Lord come quickly”, because my life, everybody’s life has become denial of God’s majesty in creation, God’s Primary and Direct Word, as Romans 1: 20 asserts.

It’s easy to intellectually love God. But he demands more than tokenism. Both in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament, the basic commandment is: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ (Mark 12: 30).

The Hebrew Bible says exactly the same in Deuteronomy 6: 4, 5. Jesus calls that the greatest of all laws.

In other words we have to love the Lord with all our facilities, just as the Lord loves us with his totality, including Creation. There is no more beautiful Psalm than Psalm 19: “The heaven proclaim the glory of the Lord…… The Law of the Lord is perfect, it revives the soul. The fear of the Lord is pure…. In keeping them is great reward”.

Those lines refer to CREATION.

Dr. Barry Commoner, a man who taught biology for decades, by studying creation coined the LAWS OF ECOLOGY.

1. Nature – Creation – knows best;
2. Everything is connected to everything else;
3. There is no free lunch;
4. Nothing disappears.

At our own peril we are disregarding these rules for life. While there is great reward in keeping them, there is immense danger in ignoring them, and that’s what we have been doing: hence Climate Change; hence Global Heating.

With that in mind we must read – with new eyes – John 3: 16. It too bears repeating.  

“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 Greek word for ‘world’ is “cosmos”, which embraces everything that exists: you, me, the earth out of which we were formed, the trees, the air and oceans, the elephants and whales: nothing excluded.

That’s why “Our own deliverance and the deliverance of creation go hand in hand.”

James 2: 14 points to this: “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them?”

Today the overriding issue involves the disintegrating of creation. Since everything is connected to everything else, we, the citizens of the earth too are affected, bringing protests, dissatisfaction, chaotic minds, confusion.

Organized religion has lost its relevance: only creation matters.

I know: I have mentioned this before, but I am fighting the generally accepted belief that Jesus died ONLY for our sins. He Did Not. Yet almost every hymn sung in church mentions that line. Also every other hymn wants to make us believe that we go to heaven. We Can’t Go to Heaven because Earth we are and to Earth we shall return: there’s where our destiny and future lies. I am fighting givens that the church has adopted for centuries, if not millennia, and they are LIES. Jesus – as John 3: 16 unambiguously states – died because he loved the earth, because He made it. He cringes in agony every time we abuse it.

That’s why the only way to ensure our future is to treasure the earth, to love it as Jesus loved it and gave his life for it.

Sorry to rehash this but new ideas have to be repeated to us constantly…What we read at nine in the morning will be forgotten by lunchtime and will need to be reread by dusk”.

John Calvin was wrong when he wrote that, “For anyone to arrive at God, the Creator, he needs only Scripture as his Guide and Teacher”. That may have been true 500 years ago when the earth was still pure. Protestants then agitated against Roman Catholicism, where all churches were replete with the replicas of saints and depictions of heaven.

Now often the Roman Catholic Church members are keener in their treatment of the earth than Protestant Christianity.

What counts today is Revelation 21: 22. There John was allowed to have a peak into the future and discovers that on the re-created earth he sees no temple there: “I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.”

No temple means the absence of church denominations. No temple means the disappearance of the Bible. No temple means the disappearance of all doctrines and church teachings that has caused so much confusion on earth. No temple means that God – his creation – is all and in all. God’s law will be in our hearts. No temple in the new creation means Religion-less Christianity.

That’s why we now, in these last days, seconds before Christ returns, must give priority to the welfare of creation, show our love, our utmost devotion, to the Created Word, which before our eyes is

like a beautiful book
in which all creatures,
great and small,
are as letters
to make us ponder
the invisible things of God.

Any other way is a denial of God. That’s why today John 3: 16 must dominate our life: since God so loved the cosmos, we too, to ensure eternal life, must follow Christ’s example by loving creation as the primary goal in life.

Here’s an exercice:

Repeat every day four times, before breakfast, before lunch, before dinner, before bed time:

“Christ did not die for our sins, he died to restore Creation.”

Repeat every day four times:

“We don’t go to heaven: we will inherit God’s Earth.”  

October 12 2019

“666” OR “777”?

Oh, that mysterious number 666! How many have broken their brains to decipher it. Johan Herman Bavinck in his 85,000 word book on Revelation wisely avoids dealing with the number. Eugene H. Peterson, in his excellent exposition REVERSED THUNDER, The Revelation of John & the Praying Imagination does mention it. He writes, “666 is a human number….It’s a religion that makes a show, that vaunts itself, that takes its eye of the poor and suffering and holy Christ. In the language of numbers, 666 is a triple failure to be 777, the three-times perfect, whole, divine number.”

That confounding number – 666 – is found in Revelation, the last book of the Bible, Chapter 13: 17-18. There is says,

“No one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name.  Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for the number is that of a man; and his number is six hundred and sixty-six.”

To me it looks more complicated than Peterson asserts. Bavinck wrote his book some 70 years ago. Then the most advanced technology was radio and a land-line telephone. Peterson’s book dates from 1988, also well before the advent of I.T., Information Technology, which has changed everything, including us humans and, I think, has made us ready to embrace THE BEAST.

Of course, that needs some explanation. The BEAST is a creature that devours everything. I believe that the time has come to identify that creature: it’s us: HUMAN GREED, causing societal collapse.

I also believe that, in line with the main motif of that last Bible book, eventually everything will resort to its true nature. Assuming this given, the meaning of 666 will be revealed.

How?

Let me repeat the words of caution, “Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for the number is that of a man; and his number is six hundred and sixty-six.”

That man – humanity at large – operates without God, as Cain did who built the city, an open challenge to Eden. It’s also a number-game on which the computer is based: 010101010, now dominating and absorbing everything.

So, what is ’Wisdom’?

T. S. Eliot, some 100 years ago, coined the familiar saying, “”Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

Eliot really was a prophetic questioner. I too have a question: “Did we lose wisdom when we abandoned ‘the fear of the Lord’”?

The Bible repeatedly reminds us that “The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. What does ‘The Fear of the Lord’ really mean?”

The word ‘fear’ has nothing to do with anxiety or fright or scare. It has everything to do with reverence and humility. But reverence for what or for whom?

Psalm 8 comes to mind:

“When I behold Your heavens,

the work of Your fingers,

the moon and the stars,

which You have set in place—

what is man that You are mindful of him,

or the son of man that You care for him.

It is that kind of awe I am hinting at.

Years ago our family visited Banff. When I stood in front of Lake Louise and saw the glaciers on the horizon, I spontaneously burst into tears, overcome with emotion, overawed by the majestic panorama.

“The fear of the Lord” starts with that frame of mind. There’s where wisdom has its origin, its start, humbled by the marvel of God’s creation. I emphasize the verb ‘start’. From there on in, it is hard work, and I confess: I am very much a novice in knowing creation, having barely made the first step in attaining the creational wisdom needed for knowing God.

The trouble is that today everything conspires to deprive us of wisdom. Churches are no help there. On the contrary: their heaven talk, and the widespread acceptance of Rapture, with its pre-tribulation nonsense, is just another hindrance to deal with the lack of wisdom.

The basic question today is: “Are we becoming an extension of the machine?”

Here’s where a Jewish historian, a professor by the name of Yuval Noah Harari, comes in. He is Worried about Our Souls. He thinks that “The big-data makeover of humanity could be a recipe for disaster.”

Just a few years ago Yuval Noah Harari was an obscure Israeli academic with a knack for playing with big ideas. Sapiens, a sweeping, cross-disciplinary account of human history landed on the bestseller list and remains there four years later.

Now he’s got a new book, “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”.

Harari is openly critical of how Facebook and other tech companies exploit our personal data, and he worries that online interactions are replacing actual face-to-face encounters. Much of the book speculates on the revolutionary impact of artificial intelligence (A.I.) He wonders if computer algorithms can know us better than we know ourselves, is there any room left for free will?

He thinks that we are on the precipice of a revolution that will change humanity for either our everlasting benefit or destruction. “For the first time in history,” Harari said, “we have absolutely no idea how the world will look in 30 years.”

Well, I disagree there, and so do a lot of young people: world-wide they are demonstrating against Governments’ failure to combat Climate Change. Given human nature to ignore obvious signs, the world is in a death spiral, and the youth know this.

Climate Change will be worse than war-time conditions. Then there was HOPE. The war on nature is final.

I am old enough to remember the conditions in German-occupied Europe 1939-45 when the purchase of food and clothing involved coupons and identification. This time there won’t be paper coupons, or documented ID, but a chip in the shoulder or an eye-scan. Conform, or no food. That’s the future. And that’s what worries Harari.

HOMO MACHINA

Harari fears that “We have become HOMO MACHINA, no longer afraid of the machine, because we have become it. We no longer search for information. We Google. We trust the Google algorithm and we lose the ability to search for information independently.”

Harari thinks that we have entered a new phase in human history, where the twin revolutions of artificial intelligence and bioengineering can hack human beings and other organisms, and then re-engineer us and create new life forms.

“This can change our imagination, too. If our imagination is too limited to think of new possibilities, we can just improve it.”

666.

Here’s where “666” comes in. We can manipulate the human mind to see Climate Change as normal, can be bent to accept a man such as Donald Trump as a divine ruler, can be conned to see heat and drought and storms and tornadoes as perfectly normal, and poor Africans and Asians as purely disposable, as long as we have a tankful of gas and a bellyful of fabricated food and, of course, the proper number, the right combination of identification and personality.

Says Harari, “We’re about to start combining the organic with inorganic bots to create cyborgs……………..One of the most important forces in history is human stupidity. We should never underestimate human stupidity.”

That last statement, about human stupidity, is already all too evident, witness Climate Change, Brexit, Trump, Rapture, and the list goes on.

He writes, “Experiments are already under way to augment the human immune system with an inorganic, bionic system. Millions of nano-robots and sensors monitor what’s happening inside the human body. They could discover the beginning of cancer, or some infectious disease, and fight against these dangers for your health. The system can monitor not just what goes wrong. It can also regulate our moods, our emotions, our thoughts. That means an external system can get to know us much better than we know ourselves. We go to therapy for years to get in touch with our emotions, but this system, whether it belongs to Google or Amazon or the government, can monitor our emotions in ways that neither we nor our therapist can approach in any way…….. Fear and anger and love, or any human emotion, are in the end just a biochemical process. In the same way we can diagnose flu, we also can diagnose anger. You might ask somebody, “Why are you angry? What are you angry about?” And they will say, “I’m not angry about anything, what do you want?” But this external system doesn’t need to ask this. It can monitor our heart, our brain, our blood pressure. It can have a scale of anger and it can know we are now a 6.8 on a scale of 1-to-10. Combining this with enormous amounts of data collected 24 hours a day can provide the best healthcare in history. It can also be the foundation of the worst dictatorial regimes in history.”

No longer God the creator: only MAN the manipulator.

Harari fears that an external system can know us better than we know ourselves. It can predict our choices and decisions. It can manipulate our emotions, and it can sell us anything, whether a product or a politician.

The fear Harari has is that we will shift authority to THE MACHINE, indicating the frightening scenario that the robots will make better decisions than we.

And then Harari asks the most important question: “What is human life all about?”

He says, “For thousands of years we have constructed this idea of human life as a drama of decision-making. Life is a road with many intersections, and every couple of days or months or years, we need to make decisions. If we make good decisions, we go to heaven; if we make bad decisions, we go to hell.”

Earlier this week I watched the leaders of 6 (Canadian) political parties debate. Climate change being one topic. They all projected a future as an extension of the past, while all around us the world is boiling. Literally.

Today two things are happening at the same time.

First: we’ve gained the ability to hack human beings. If you believe in free will, you will say this is impossible. Nobody can know me better than I know myself. Nobody can predict my choices or manipulate my desires, because they are a reflection of my free will, of my free spirit.

Secondly: thanks to loss of religion, mentally and spiritually wounded by TV and media, we have become the easiest persons to hack and to manipulate.

This brings me to the question: “What does it mean to be human?”

We are made in the image of God. We perfectly fitted in the Garden of Eden, where we were charged to develop creation, make it more beautiful, explore its potential, live in full unity with nature, always learning, always caring, always serving. Especially the latter: servants in chief, honoring God as Creator in everything, singing his praises.

God gave us full authority, trusting that we would do it right and knowing that we could.

Well, it did not pan out that way. So Jesus, God’s son, also the perfect human, out of pure love for his COSMOS, sacrificed his life and straightened out the mess we created. That’s why John 3: 16 is perhaps the most important text in the Bible. His death of the cross ensured our eternal life on earth, to be made perfect again when Christ returns. I am eagerly awaiting his coming, while trying to live as our original mandate requires.

That effort is now threatened by today’s technical development, robbing us of our initial calling: our very humanity is at stake. We were created to serve. Instead the real danger is that we become slaves to the technological society, a system that will abuse creation till it succumbs into chaos, implementing the aim of God’s adversary who wants to see it destroyed.

We are at a crossroad: which way? 666 or777?

There’s a song: “I want to follow Jesus.” Jesus once said: “Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” (Matthew 7: 14.) Be among the few.

OCTOBER 5 2019

THE GATES OF HELL…..

Virgil said, “The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way.”

C. S. Lewis echoed this, “The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without sign posts.”

How did I come to that topic? The October 21 election in Canada is the indirect reason. The Globe and Mail, Canada’s answer to The New York Times featured an in-depth analysis of Andrew Scheer, the banner carrier for the Conservative Party, and a devout Roman Catholic. According to this article Scheer is an admirer of its most conservative wing, Opus Dei, which yearns for the re-introduction of the Latin Mass, and condemns any approach to same-sex unions or a role for females in the R.C. church, and a firm believer in HEAVEN.  

I have long agitated against the teaching of HEAVEN. Yet I was shocked to read the Official Opus Dei doctrine on this topic. Here it is:

“Since Christ came into the world to redeem us from sin and lead us to perfect communion with God, his Ascension inaugurates humanity’s entrance into heaven. Jesus is the supernatural Head of mankind, as Adam was in the order of nature. Since our Head is in heaven, we who are his members have the real possibility of reaching heaven too. Moreover, he has gone to prepare a place for us in the Father’s house.” (cf. John 14:3).

Oh, there is so much in that statement that I disagree with, that I can only highlight a few objections.

First there is the split between Supernatural and Natural: that cursed dichotomy separating nature from grace, and praising heaven at the expense of the earth. That’s why Scheer did not participate in the Climate Change walk, and is against a Carbon Tax. Should I mention his denial of any Same-Sex connection? 

This statement totally ignores Acts 1:11, where the angels say that Jesus will return to earth in the same way he left. John 3: 16 (God so loved the WORLD) also gives a different picture. Jesus did not die for our sins: he died for the restoration of creation, which God, upon completion, called ‘good’ seven times: going to heaven means abandoning his precious creation and so making God imperfect: leaving the earth amounts to failure.

Can we blame ‘Religion’ for Climate Change?

The late Dr. Lynn White, professor at Duke University thinks so. In 1965 he wrote an essay in which he explains this position. Here are some excerpts, “The victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture. It has become fashionable today to say that, for better or worse, we live in the “post-Christian age.” Certainly the forms of our thinking and language have largely ceased to be Christian, but to my eye the substance often remains amazingly akin to that of the past. Our daily habits of action, for example, are dominated by an implicit faith in perpetual progress which was unknown either to Greco- Roman antiquity or to the Orient. It is rooted in, and is indefensible apart from, Judeo- Christian theology. The fact that Communists share it merely helps to show what can be demonstrated on many other grounds: that Marxism, like Islam, is a Judeo-Christian heresy.

“We continue today to live, as we have lived for about 1700 years, very largely in a context of Christian axioms. What did Christianity tell people about their relations with the environment? While many of the world’s mythologies provide stories of creation, Greco-Roman mythology was singularly incoherent in this respect. Like Aristotle, the intellectuals of the ancient West denied that the visible world had a beginning. Indeed, the idea of a beginning was impossible in the framework of their cyclical notion of time. In sharp contrast, Christianity inherited from Judaism not only a concept of time as non-repetitive and linear but also a striking story of creation. By gradual stages a loving and all- powerful God had created light and darkness, the heavenly bodies, the earth and all its plants, animals, birds, and fishes. Finally, God had created Adam and, as an afterthought, Eve to keep man from being lonely. Man named all the animals, thus establishing his dominance over them. God planned all of this explicitly for man’s benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes. And, although man’s body is made of clay, he is not simply part of nature: he is made in God’s image. Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.”

Later he continued, “Man shares, in great measure, God’s transcendence of nature. Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia’s religions (except, perhaps, Zorastrianism), not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends. At the level of the common people this worked out in an interesting way. In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects. It is often said that for animism the Church substituted the cult of saints. True; but the cult of saints is functionally quite different from animism. The saint is not in natural objects; he may have special shrines, but his citizenship is in heaven. Moreover, a saint is entirely a man; he can be approached in human terms………….. But since God had made nature, nature also must reveal the divine mentality. The religious study of nature for the better understanding of God was known as natural theology.

“In the early Church, and always in the Greek East, nature was conceived primarily as a symbolic system through which God speaks to men: the ant is a sermon to sluggards; rising flames are the symbol of the soul’s aspiration. The view of nature was essentially artistic rather than scientific. While Byzantium preserved and copied great numbers of ancient Greek scientific texts, science as we conceive it could scarcely flourish in such an ambience.

“However, in the Latin West by the early 13th century natural theology was following a very different bent. It was ceasing to be the decoding of the physical symbols of God’s communication with man and was becoming the effort to understand God’s mind by discovering how his creation operates.”

Let me stop there. If you want to read his entire essay, go for it: it is well reasoned. Even though the church has vehemently denied that it is responsible for our environmental problems, just look at the US “Evangelical” wing, fiercely supporting Trump and fully endorsing his anti-Creation policies.

What Dr. White writes about ‘nature’ is an angle I have so often pursued that I am loath to mention it again. God is so holy that whatever he created is holy as well. That makes creation HOLY, and by harming creation, we offend God.

It seems to me that “The Gates of Hell” differs little from “The Gates of Heaven”. Just as “the way to hell is smooth and easy” thanks to carbon fuels, our entire life and supposed ascent to heaven is smooth and easy as well. That it now starts to cause hell on earth is conveniently ignored: is there where “pre-tribulation Rapture” comes in?

On more quote from Dr. White: ”For nearly 2 millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves, which are idolatrous because they assume spirit in nature. What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of the man-nature relationship. More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one.”

I emphasize: “Until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one.”

Prof. White is right. “Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and re-feel our nature and destiny.”

WE MUST RETHINK OUR RELIGION.

Throw out the Heaven Heresy. It’s a cop-out. Belief in Heaven prevents us from loving the earth. We must adopt the Bonhoeffer-Bavinck line: “God, We and the Earth belong together”. The current “Christian” approach is Un-Christian. Christ died to regain the earth, now in the clutches of The Evil One. If you have a Bible, just look up 1John 5: 19.

Virgil said, “The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way;” C. S. Lewis echoed that, “The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

The Lord’s Prayer has a line that Pope Francis wants to change, and I agree. The line is, “Lead us not into temptation”. He correctly has stated that God does not lead us into temptation. In the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving in the Presbyterian Book of Praise (Canada) it is translated as “Save us from the time of trial”.

In these last days God, in his wisdom, has decided to confront us with the ultimate trial to make us ready for eternity. Remember, not God, but The EVIL ONE today rules the world. It is The EVIL ONE, Christ’s perennial opponent, who now is calling the shots, and we, all of us, have chosen his smooth, easy, creation-destroying road, which is leading us to HELL.

Sorry to be so blunt. We need a new approach to life and to worship, in a way where the unity of God with us and the earth is lived and expressed. We must admit that the way we live today leads to the demise of God’s earth: that is SIN with three Capital Letters.

TOTAL CONVERSION

The bible uses two different words for CONVERSION: metanoia and epistroph?. The first, metanoia, means a change in our mindset, the second, epistroph?, means a complete change in life style. Metanoia implies a radical change in devotional behavior. Church services now consist of a monologue, prayer, reading the bible, some songs, a collection to support a minister, all within an hour, leaving LIFE unchanged. Bonhoeffer calls this ‘pious secularism’. Epistroph? is a 24/7affair. We need a combination of the two, a total approach to life, a creation-loving life and relationships and new comprehensive, prayerful piety.

Jesus is the controversial and radical version of God, who drove the moneymen from the temple, who called the clerics poisonous snakes, who said, “I have not come to bring peace but the sword.” (Matthew 10: 34).

No wonder the clergy avoids preaching about him. Why? Because this same Jesus does not bring us religion but teaches us how to live.

His opponents hated him, calling him a glutton and a winebibber, whose first miracle was making top-grade vino, because he wanted us to be truly human, joyful when the occasion merits it, moved to tears when bad things happen – which is the case today.

If we believe we go to heaven, then we allow creation to be smothered in its carbon-filth. If we believe that “the meek shall inherit the earth”, because it is HOLY, then this should be evident in how we live. “Meek” in this instance means living in obedience to the divine laws of creation.  

Remember: personal salvation and the salvation of the WORLD go hand in hand: you can’t have one without the other.

SEPTEMBER 28 2019

THE TREMENDOUS IMPORTANCE OF “THE TREE”.

I am a very blessed man. I am very blessed with our children who often come and help, even though they live far away. I am thankful that our tax dollars are liberally spent on frequent home-care for my wife who suffers from dementia. To cope with the stress I experience, I make sure that I eat well, sleep well, and exercise well, outdoors when possible, and indoors thanks to a treadmill, a stationary bike and a rowing machine, all set up in my library.

I am a very blessed man: I live among trees. When I feel down- and being my wife’s principal care-giver this occasionally happens – I walk in the forests surrounding our property west, north and east. Yes, I do Forest Bathing. Our arborist grandson has cut paths there so that the forest-bathing is easy.

Forest Bathing? Ever heard of it?

Our oldest son gave us the book with that title: “The Japanese Art and Science of SHINRIN-YOKU: FOREST BATHING. How trees can help you find Health and Happiness.” It is written by Dr. Qing Li, chairman of the Japanese Society for Forest Medicine.

The book is beautifully illustrated and meticulously researched. Here are the opening words, “We all know how good being in nature can make us feel. We have known it for millennia. The sounds of the forests, the scent of the trees, the sunlight playing through the leaves, the fresh, clean air- these things give us a sense of comfort. They ease our stress and worry, help us relax and think more clearly. Being in nature can restore our mood, give us back our energy and vitality, refresh and rejuvenate us.”

I am very blessed. A 25 minutes stroll through our forest brings me to an immense Beaver Dam, where a carpenter friend found a large dead pine tree, and from its trunk sculptured a series of benches, facing a small beaver-built lake, where we often sit, and where our church has gathered on a few occasions.

Back to the book. 

Dr. Li writes, “The good news is that my studies, and those of my fellow researchers, have proved that forest bathing:

. Lowers the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline.

. Suppresses the sympathetic or ‘fight or flight’ system.

. Enhances the parasympathetic of ‘rest and recover’ system.

. Lowers blood pressures and increases heart-rate variability.

The book gives tips “How to be still and listen to the sounds of nature, which is difficult to do when we are used to noise.

        Start by slowing down

        Focus on your breath

        Listen in all directions.

        Close your eyes to help you hear more intensely.

FOREST UNDER THREAT EVERYWHERE.

I don’t have to tell you that our planet is suffering, suffering beyond its capacity to endure. We seem to be blind to its pain, even though even Romans 8 – dating from the year 70 A.D. or so – already sounded the alarm bells: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until the present time.  Not only that, but we ourselves who have the first-fruits of the Spirit groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons and daughters, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved; but hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he can already see?  But if we hope for what we do not yet see, we wait for it patiently.”

Such a beautiful text: a beacon of hope in our disheartening times. I especially treasure that phrase, “The redemption of our bodies”. That means a lot to me. It means that our bodies, our heart and lungs, our brains and limbs, will be re-created into perfection, not only physically but spiritually as well, totally in tune with the natural–unspoiled-surroundings!

And part of this renewal involves trees. When Abraham settled in what is now Palestine and Israel, he chose a forest location: the oak woods of Mamre. Genesis 18: 1 tells us that “The LORD appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day”: a most fitting place to meet the Creator.

But today that’s not the case. Summer 2019 – More than 38,000 fires raged across the Amazon. Fires that were man-made. Over the past 50 years almost 17% of the world’s largest rainforest has been cleared. And globally deforestation has almost doubled in just five years.

Since the start of human civilization it’s estimated that the number of trees around the world has fallen by almost half. Clearing forests increases carbon-dioxide levels but planting them could store away some of the carbon already in the atmosphere.

There are people who try to reverse the trend. In the very first year we settled in Tweed, in 1975, I planted 4500 trees, all pine. I also planted soft maple, but they did not thrive, except two to the west of our dwelling, where they provide super-shade in the summer time.

About pine trees the Forest Bathing book tells me that “evergreens like pine, spruce, cedars and conifers are the largest producers of phytoncides.” Phytoncides protect trees from bacteria, insects and fungi and aid trees in communicating with its neighbors. The pine needles are good sources of vitamins A and C: pine needles can have as much as five times the amount of vitamin C as a lemon and eight times as much as an orange. There are other benefits as well.

Planting trees.

Almost 20 years ago Isabella Tree—yes that is her real name – handed 1,400 hectares of Sussex farmland back to nature, by doing, well nothing. She thinks this is the best way to use the land to help tackle climate change.

And there’s never been more global ambition to plant trees. In 2014, 51 countries pledged to plant over 3.5m square kilometers of forest by 2030 – an area slightly larger than India. The 2030 target looks likely to be met. But there’s a catch…

Monoculture tree plantations like eucalyptus grow quickly but the trees are harvested every ten or so years releasing much of the carbon stored in the tree back into the atmosphere – which means that, according to some studies they’ll store only around one-fortieth of the carbon natural forests do over the long term.

In fact, those pledges to plant millions of trees actually promise to store 26bn tons less carbon than they could. Sometimes the motives for planting forests are less green than they might appear. By 2020 Ireland ought to have cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 20% below 2005 levels. But at current rates it will have reduced them by only 5%. Planting forests might help Ireland avoid massive penalties for missing EU targets because the potential carbon these forests could store in the future can be counted as a carbon credit today. In the 1920s Ireland had the lowest forest cover in Europe at around 1%. That’s now risen to 11% and the government has set a target to cover 18% of the land with forest by 2046.

And now local community groups are protesting against these monoculture tree plantations. They say they’re doing more harm than good.

Tree-planting programs invariably have an impact on the people living nearby. In east Africa one project is demonstrating what can be achieved when there’s genuine buy-in from the local communities. Green Ethiopia is a mixed-tree planting charity.

The land is communally owned and co-operatives of local women receive benefits for planting trees which are protected from being harvested. Here conserving is just as important as planting. Green Ethiopia assesses whether the condition of the land is good enough to regenerate by itself. When it is—on about a third of the area the charity runs they leave it alone. Just like Isabella Tree, back in England.

THE TREE OF LIFE.

The Bible starts and ends with trees, singling out one specific tree that is a symbol of all others: The Tree of Life.

To me this suggests that this is not one singular tree, but stands for trees as a species: in a sense all trees are The TREE of LIFE. In Genesis 2: 9 it says that, “LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground–trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”. Quite mysterious: does it mean that trees hold the key to life and death, to knowledge and ignorance?

The very last chapter of the Bible ends with reference to trees. The TREE of LIFE is mentioned again which has a poetic line that brings tears to my eyes, (Rev. 22:1), “The leaves of the Tree are for the healing of the nations.” Oh, blessed tree!

However, the most significant TREE stands on Golgotha’s hill, at the very center of history. There Jesus died to restore all of creation, including us humans. That tree, representing all trees, was the first to receive Christ’s blood, and was first to be impregnated with Christ’s flesh, signifying the importance of TREES.

Trees make life livable. They are the ones that regulate the BIOTIC PUMP that causes the interaction between land and sea, the key to death and fertility. Without the FORESTS –North and South – we cannot function. Without these massive arboreous bodies covering the earth, we are doomed. Without them all of nature revolts and goes to extremes, too much heat here, too much rain there: the balance is gone.  

A clear choice.

We live in end-times, which means that the world’s evil will become manifest to all, and we see it daily in crooked business and crooked politics, but also our good deeds will rise up, placing all people for a clear choice. That choice involves eternity. We, under the influence of Greek dualistic thinking, have separated nature from grace, God from creation. One of my favorite books is Tom Hayden’s THE LOST GOSPEL OF THE EARTH. There Tom Hayden – a former California legislator – passionately argues that we must reclaim our spiritual bond with the earth, a regular theme of my musings. He writes, “We divide grace and spirit from nature at our own peril. When we worship a God above, the earth withers from neglect below. We develop a society where everything from human habits to politics and economics exploits the environment with callous indifference. Unless the nature of State is harmonized with the state of Nature our greed and ignorance will eventually take us beyond the capacity of the very ecosystems that support human existence.” 

The Good News is that it is possible to find GOD again: we cannot find ourselves and cannot become what we are unless we find God. Bonhoeffer repeatedly has stated: God, we ourselves and the earth belong together.

The Belgic Confession has beautifully formulated this:

Article 2: The Means by Which We Know God

We know God by two means:

First, by the creation, preservation, and government
of the universe,
since that universe is before our eyes
like a beautiful book
in which all creatures,
great and small,
are as letters
to make us ponder
the invisible things of God:
God’s eternal power and divinity,
as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20.

All these things are enough to convict humans
and to leave them without excuse.

Second, God makes himself known to us more clearly
by his holy and divine Word,
as much as we need in this life,
for God’s glory
and for our salvation.

That’s the truth the world is rediscovering, and that’s the truth the church has abandoned, and so has sealed her own doom.

The clear choice is that God, we ourselves and the earth belong together: our salvation and the salvation of the earth go hand in hand: we can’t have one without the other. Trees are at the very center of life, of which Christ dying on the TREE and his subsequent resurrection are for our salvation, ensuring VITA ETERNA, Life forever.

SEPTEMBER 21 2019

EXACTLY NINETY YEARS AFTER THE GREAT CRASH 1929.

The way I arrive at my weekly writing choice is a mystery. Somehow my hand and eye are directed to a certain book which becomes my assignment for the week: I don’t choose them: they choose me.

This week it so happened that I had promised a friend a book which dealt with an island she was going to visit in a few weeks, and, while looking for this paperback, my hand touched upon THE GREAT CRASH 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith, economics professor at Harvard. I had been looking for it a few weeks ago, and remembered that this financial disaster happened exactly 90 years ago, and wondered whether the world is due for something similar.

So what did that great economist, J. K. Galbraith – Canadian-born, a graduate of Guelph – write about 1929?

The first half of the book deals with the stock speculation and manipulation that drove the market to ever higher records. Most of the shares were bought on margin, that is 10% down and the rest on credit. That works beautifully when the stock rises, and is disastrous when these shares fall. Here’s a line out of the book, “Never before or since have so many become so wondrously, so effortlessly, so quickly rich.”

Perhaps people were more gullible in those days: they believed the experts: investment funds were all the rage: they had increased eleven-fold between 1927 and late 1929. The great villains then were the Ivory Tower professors of economics, who claimed to have prophetic insight.

Professor Galbraith makes clear that we should never believe the predictions of both politicians and arm-chair economists. Here are some examples.         

Dr. Joseph Stegg Lawrence, of the prestigious Princeton University, wrote, “The stage whereon is focused the world’s most intelligent and best informed judgement (lies in the universities)……..how much safer and wiser to let it be accomplished by the men of peculiar knowledge and wisdom.”

Indeed, it was the golden age of professors. Just before the great crash, Professor Irving Fisher of Yale – another bulwark of learning – made his immortal estimate, “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” On Tuesday, October 22, just a week before the real crash, Charles E. Mitchell, a well-known banker predicted that the decline has gone too far. On that most infamous day, October 29 1929, John D. Rockefeller came out of hibernation to publicly state that, “Believing that fundamental conditions of the country are sound, my son and I have for some days been purchasing sound common stocks.” Politicians were equally bullish.   

Well……………In all, in about two weeks from October 29 1929 till November 13, the stock index closed down from 452 to 224, more than a 50 percent drop.

AND THEN CAME THE GREAT DEPRESSION, 1929-39.

To this day there is no reasonable explanation why this happened. What did happen is that unemployment reached 25 percent of the working force, at a time when there were no unemployment benefits and all municipalities and all government levels were cash strapped, so no welfare either. Just imagine the hardship!

Galbraith mentions that some people thought that after a period of 7 fat years, inevitably 7 lean years were to follow, but he dismisses that possibility. So, yes, we are really in the dark why suddenly everything came tumbling down: not only stocks, but also real estate prices, while dust storms played havoc with agricultural yields. In the end it was the 1939-45 WAR that cured the depression: millions were mobilized to fight and billions were spent to equip them with lethal weapons.

The depression was felt more severely in North America than in Europe. True, on the continent money was tight. My father-in-law, a minister in a large church, suggested a pay-cut, as contributions to his church were down. I remember to my shame how I piously helped a woman who had dropped her wallet full of change. While I gathered the coins, I had my foot on a penny: Oh, my sinful youth! In those days there were even half-pennies in circulation.

So what’s in store for us spoiled rotten Westerners?

Well, yes, it will be war again, but this time it will not cure hardship as it did 80 years ago in 1939. Already a real Climate War has been going on for decades, intensifying in the last few years: Our WAR against CREATION is now approaching its final and most lethal stage. This war – which also will involve conflicts between nations – really is the war to end all wars, because, in essence, it is war against GOD, in which we, sad to say, are often willing participants.

Warnings Galore.

I just read a review of Naomi Klein’s new book, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal.

Robert Jensen, a retired professor of journalism, comments on this book: “The problem of climate change is bigger than the Great Depression. It’s bigger than war. The problem of climate change is the problem of how and whether human beings can live together sustainably on this planet.”

My comment: “If history is any guide, universal sustainability will never happen: it would mean a mass conversion, something impossible, because we, the latter day sinners, are the least religious of all people ever lived.”

Dr. Jensen again, “I can offer a real-life example, my late friend Jim Koplin. He once told me, in a conversation about those multiple, cascading ecological crises (a term I stole from him, with his blessing), “I wake up every morning in a state of profound grief.” He was neither depressed nor irrational but simply honest. Jim, a Depression-era farm boy who had been permanently radicalized in the 1960s, felt that grief more deeply than anyone I have known, yet every day he got up to work in his garden and then offer his time and energy to a variety of political, community, and arts groups that were fighting for a better world.”

Grief: how often have I mentioned ATONEMENT, public lament for the state of the World? Why are churches so afraid to start this? No better way to tell the world that they see the earth as holy!

Naomi Klein too mentions grief. She writes, “There is no question that the strongest emotions I have about the climate crisis have to do with [Toma, her son] and his generation—the tremendous intergenerational theft under way. I have flashes of sheer panic about the extreme weather we have already locked in for these kids. Even more intense than this fear is the sadness about what they won’t ever know. They are growing up in a mass extinction, robbed of the cacophonous company of so many fast-disappearing life forms. It feels so desperately lonely.”

WAR.

Talking about war again: The entire nature of warfare is changing: nature’s degradation is the result of human degradation, which is the result of folly, which has as its base SIN. The folly is especially visible in the USA, a country obsessed with MONEY and RELIGION.

Example: USA recently commissioned a new aircraft carrier, costing some 13 Billion Dollars, and still not functioning, because the elevators that are supposed to bring the bombs to the airplanes, don’t work. What’s a warship that lacks ammunition? A dodo.

Already that big machine, (costing more than the entire Canadian Defense budget), home to thousands of sailors and pilots and whatever, is already obsolete: simple drones, with a price tag of a couple of hundred dollars, can fly undetected, carrying lethal loads, as became clear in Saudi Arabia last week. Also new Russian anti-aircraft missiles are so advanced that the most advanced US aircrafts are sitting ducks for these guns: the Pentagon, with a budget close to One Trillion Dollar, has become One Trillion Dollar Waste. The real reason for this humiliation is the fact that Russian arms are far superior to American ones: the US arms industry develops weapons for profit while Russia produces them to defend itself.

Here is a prediction, which like all predictions, is about the future, and this non-predictable. Nevertheless one thing is beyond doubt: “Times are gonna to get worse.” Politicians shy away from painting the proper picture, but I am not: mentally and religiously and physically we have to face the consequences of our actions. Only prayer, only confession is the only option. 

A unique view.

Here is an interesting take on the future, a reasonable guess what is in store. Gail Tverberg, who writes OUR FINITE WORLD, is an actuary, a person who works for pension funds and life insurance companies, in charge of making intelligent guesses about the future.

She, in her latest blog, looks back and ahead, back hundreds of years when falling interests happened, and then singles out the three latest in the last 200 years: from

• 1817-1854
• 1873-1909
• 1985-2019

In the gap between the first two takedowns in interest rates (1854 to 1873), the US Civil War took place. This was a period of very poor return on investments. Somehow it ended in war.

Immediately after the second takedown in interest rates (after 1909), the world entered a very unstable period. First there was World War I, then the Spanish Flu, then the Great Depression, then World War II with 100 million lives lost.

Now we are facing the possibility of yet another end-point for the take-down in interest rates.

She writes, “The total return of the economy seems to be too low now. This seems to be why we have problems of many types, ranging from (a) low interest rates to (b) low profitability for energy producers to (c) too much wage disparity.” 

All of the problems listed above are manifestations of an economy that is not producing sufficient total return. The laws of physics distribute the problem to many areas of the economy, simultaneously.

Tverberg again, “A person wonders what could be ahead. We seem to be reaching the end of the line regarding the takedown of interest rates. If a takedown in interest rates is possible, it acts as a relief valve for some of the other problems the economy is facing, including too much wage disparity and energy prices that are too low for producers. Earlier in Section [10], we saw that when the relief valve of lower interest rates had disappeared, wars and depressions have taken place. We can’t know the precise outcome this time, but our current situation doesn’t look good. Will we encounter wars, or a serious depression, or financial problems worse than 2008? We can’t know for certain. Or will we somehow find a way around serious problems?

So far Gail Tverberg.

What she implies is that indeed hard, very hard times are ahead, based on historical data. We know that the US civil war still ranks as the most destructive for the USA. The period 1914-1945 is too well known, when 10% of the people living in 1900 died violently, some 100million lives lost.

Today the world faces problems beyond the wildest imagination. Already in July several tipping points were crossed in the Arctic. Have a look at ARCTIC NEWS where is says that, “In July 2019, a critical tipping point was crossed. July sea surface temperatures on the Northern Hemisphere were 1.07°C above what they were during the 20th century, as illustrated by above image which has a trend added that points at 5°C above the 20th century by 2033.”

Of course 5°C is far beyond the possibility of LIFE: that will be reached within a few years.

NINETY YEARS AFTER 1929.

That’s how I started. The Finnish Prime Minister visited the White House a few months ago. He told the present occupant there that “When the ice in the Arctic is gone, we are gone too.”

He told the truth to the ultimate CLIMATE CHANGE denier, now working hand in hand with the Ultimate Evil One who, says 1 John 5: 19, “We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.”

Ninety years after 1929 we face the ULTIMATE DEPRESSION, when all planetary forces, economic, military, environmentally, spiritually, physically, band together to destroy God’s creation. That also means that THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IS COMING HERE!

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