June 29 2019

THE END OF RELIGION?

When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” Luke 18: 8.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his introduction to his book on CREATION, basically an explanation of Genesis 1-3, the first Bible book, writes, “The church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.”

Isn’t that curious?

And he is not alone in this.  Stanley Hauerwas, Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University, in his APPROACHING THE END, makes an identical statement, when he starts his book with, “When I begin to think about what I should say about creation, the title “The End is in the Beginning” immediately comes to mind.

And then there is another voice that utters similar sounds, albeit from a different angle, but equally with the End is mind. Dr. J.H. Bavinck in his book on REVELATION, the last book of the Bible, wrote, and I translate, “Under the force of constant hammer blows, still raining upon this pseudo world, humanity finally becomes the humanity it was meant to be in the most detestable sense of the word. It becomes the real human, that is the rebel, the prisoner, the doubting, the unconverted.

“World history, stripped bare from all pretenses, is not simply a record of events: it is nothing else than that through all these happenings, through prosperity and adversity, through wars and peace, through increase in knowledge and culture, through all this and more, in the end everything becomes what it always has been. (My emphasis). That’s why the Kingdom of the Son of man, the reign of Christ who is Humanity Personified, can only come when the Kingdom of the Beast has had the entire world in his grasping hands.”

So Bavinck too states that the end is in the beginning.

In essence Bavinck says that before Christ returns the TRUE image of humanity will be revealed in all its depravity, in all its god-forsaken state of mind, in all its sinful condition, plainly evident today in our dealing with creation, God’s precious masterpiece. This indicates that we travel from Chaos to Cosmos, from Cosmos to Chaos, from Beginning to the End.

Yes, the End is in the Beginning.

The Bible starts with the three words, “In the Beginning”. Then continues, “The earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” Chaos, in other words, no sense of order, no structure whatsoever, yet, somehow, in the back ground, God’s Spirit is there.

Now that we are approaching the End, we are starting to see the same initial conditions: Climate Calamity, widespread destruction, water shortages, droughts and floods, rumors of war, looming epidemics, 95% of the arable soil contaminated… and the list goes on. Our End is like the Beginning, when through prosperity and adversity, through wars and peace, through increase in knowledge and culture, through all this and more, in the end everything will become what it always has been: chaos.

Also “In the beginning” humanity was so godless that God was compelled to make a new start with Noah and his family. He also vouched not to destroy the world again, fully well knowing that perverse humanity would cause its own destruction in the end, allowing for a New Beginning.

We are at that stage now.

Today chaos is universal. Even the vast oceans, covering 70 percent of the earth, are saturated with plastic particles. All the earth and air …….No, I don’t have to start listing all the ills in the world. I take great comfort from my daily Bible reading, and am especially intrigued by Matthew 24 where Jesus warns to be vigilant: The American Religion regards Trump as a demi-god, seen as appointed by God to deliver America from the godless Democrats. Matthew 24: 10-11 points to this, “At that time many will fall away and will betray one another and hate one another. Many false prophets will arise and will mislead many.” Yes, Trump is a false prophet.

Stephen L. Carter, law professor at Yale, in his book, THE CULTURE OF DISBELIEF, writes, “America’s civil religion portrays its people, often in comparison with people in other countries, as God-fearing souls, as champions of religious liberty, and in many instances as a nation God has consciously chosen to carry out a special mission in the world. (But) America’s civil religion consists of platitudes. They have no religion except a theology of “America First”.

That “America First” theology is sharply accentuated in Trump’s Campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.” That speaks to the American “Christian” mind”, an altogether pagan notion, which has nothing to do with Christ and his core message, “Seek First the Kingdom of God”, which essentially means “to seek the welfare of Creation, God’s work of art and his precious masterpiece”. Exactly the opposite is the aim of Trump’s America.

Dr. Harold Bloom, America’s foremost literary critic and Hebrew Scholar, in his THE AMERICAN RELIGION, subtitled The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation, writes that “We think we are a Christian nation, but we are not…..The American stands outside creation, Gnostics, believers in individual divinity.”

Now that we see THE END OF NATURE, we also see THE END OF CHRISTIANITY. The love for creation has disappeared as we have shaped a society totally dependent on its destruction. Whatever we do leads to greater annihilation. This simply means that with every action we destroy God and with it the Christian Religion, the two go hand in hand.

That’s why Dietrich Bonhoeffer is important today. In his essay, “Thy Kingdom Come”, he writes, “Christianity is neither an archaic replica of the heavenly world nor a cluster of sacred shrines and hallowed sanctuaries, magic escape routes from earthly turmoil. Rather the Christian is to live faith as much in the marketplace and factory as at church altars. Faith is thus to be embedded in the way each Christian becomes strong in his or her service of EARTH and its PEOPLE……………..(But) We are Christian at the expense of the earth….We cannot bear having the earth so near……However Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from this world to other world beyond: rather he gives us back to the earth as its loyal children….We have fallen into SECULARISM, and by secularism I mean pious Christian secularism, the Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the EARTH”

Here’s what Bonhoeffer says about the church, “The function of the church is to witness to the resurrection of Christ from the dead, to the end of the law of death of this world that stands under the curse, and to the power of God in the new creation.”

The church has totally failed on that score and has aided the Evil One.

Bonhoeffer sees John 3: 16 as today’s most important Bible text: “God so loved the cosmos that he gave his most precious Son to buy it back from the Satan”. 1John 5: 19 explicitly states that today, now, this very moment, while you read this, the Prince of this world, THE EVIL ONE, is in charge. And he holds sway, also over the church which, by and large, sees HEAVEN as the destination of its people.

Last week, as a caregiver, I had a meeting with other caregivers in a new nearby Baptist church. Of course I inspected the facilities, and in its news stand found a pamphlet on heaven. No surprise. The last words my oldest brother in the Netherlands who attended a conservative church, said to me, “See you in heaven.”

John 3:13 explicitly states that, “No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven–the Son of Man.” “The Son of Man” is Jesus, the Son of God. He alone, nobody else, not you nor your pious parents nor the saints of old, will go to heaven or have gone to heaven: only Jesus did, from where he will return to announce and accomplish and establish The New Earth, the re-configured Garden of Eden.

THE END OF RELIGION.

What is meant by religion?

Religion involves the human psyche which makes it a complex phenomenon. The simple explanation is that all humans are religious beings, in the same way that we are sexual beings. Just as sexuality is going through a final phase, religion too is under constant debate. There really is no scientific consensus about the question, “What is the definite definition of ‘religion’”? Some point to the three Abrahamic ones, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, while others include Hinduism, Buddhism, Humanism, Shintoism, actually any “ism”.    

Andrew Sullivan tells me that, “Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized husk of a society.”

He writes, “By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods).”

He continues, “Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion. Their denial of any God is as absolute as others’ faith in God, and entails just as much a set of values to live by — including, for some, daily rituals like meditation, a form of prayer.”

Bavinck also believed that the religious impulse of humanity would not disappear, not even with increasing secularity in the West.

He wrote this about 70 years ago. Since then a lot has changed, witness the advent of Television and the Computer, with all its technical gadgets.

Bavinck essentially took a psychological view. He could not foresee the immense changes in today’s society, where Trump is seen as appointed by God to lead America, where the mainline churches are aging rapidly, which basically means that the official Christian view is disappearing.  

Observing society in the Western world today, I must conclude that God has become a stranger in his world, even among the church which basically has become gnostic: God-consciousness has disappeared.

So, yes, religion is still out there, in the sense of “The Search for Meaning”, the name of a book by Viktor Frankl. Many still search, trying to come to grips with what’s happening in the world. Many more purposely ignore the signs, and close their minds to the dire state of affairs, especially climate-wise. But, as Freud has observed, “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive, and will come forth later, in uglier ways”.

These unexpressed emotions also apply to religious feelings, which suppressed, result in pronounced religious antagonism.

And Jesus?

Jesus did not advocate religion: he brought us LIFE and that to the full. Religion? He was thrown out of the Nazareth synagogue – his hometown. In the Jerusalem temple he chased out all the money changers. There he also argued with the religious leaders, calling them blind guides, who lead the people astray, and adders, who poison their minds. And finally, the church of his day killed him. No, Jesus was no friend of religion.

When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” Yes, there’ll be lots of faith, but not in Christ’s Kingdom to come.

The late Dr. Evan Runner, professor of Philosophy at Calvin College taught me that “All of Life is Religion”

I believe that to be true. Its consequence is that Religion disappears and becomes anonymous with life, with oxygen, with air, with everything that exists. That’s why Revelation 21: 22 points to The New Jerusalem, and tells us that there is no temple there.

In the New Creation there is no need for Religion, because then LIFE is religion. Every action, all our thinking, will be geared toward the glorification of God and the beautification of his created word. That’s why the Bible will disappear. Then the Word will be in our hearts.

That’s how we have to live TODAY, even though it means the end of religion but not of worship!

June 22 2019

IS TIME UP?

I always have a book or two on the go. This past week I read THE VALUE OF NOTHING, by Raj Patel, a graduate of Oxford, the London School of Economics. I bought it a decade ago. 

Every day I browse the Guardian, where I got some tips how to grow old gracefully. Here are some of the suggestions: drink coffee; read a book each week; walk fast or run; meditate; take a nap; have your main meal at noon – little else until breakfast; become vegetarian; walk a dog; do bush-walking; use olive oil and turmeric; avoid TV at night; keep learning; work longer.

All easy steps, most of which I have followed for decades.

I also read, in the Atlantic, a piece by James Carroll, a former RC priest who recommends abolishing the clergy and so save the church.

And then there is ARCTIC NEWS. Oh, oh. Its heading:

 But first back to Patel who analyzed the real cost of a hamburger.

He estimates the energy cost (in 2009) of the 550 million Big Macs sold in the USA at $300 million per year, producing a carbon foot print equivalent of 2.66 billion pounds of CO2. He stated that, “In addition to the carbon in the footprint, we might want to add the broader environmental impact in terms of both water use and soil degradation, together with the hidden health cost of treating diet-related illness such as diabetes and heart disease.” None of that is paid by the McDonald Corporation but by society as a whole.

So what is the REAL cost of the hamburger?

“According to a report by the Centre of Science and the Environment in India, a burger grown from beef raised on a clear-cut forest should really cost about Two Hundred Dollars.”

I singled out the hamburger, but the same is true for many food items. Take breakfast cereal: by the time it reaches the table, it has been processed from corn or wheat to a corn flake or wheat square, has traveled from farm to factory, where it is milled, dried, filled with preservers, then trucked from factory to wholesaler, from wholesaler to store, from store to customer, neatly packaged at a total cost of at least 20 energy calories for each food calorie, with hardly any nutritional value, I might add.

That process applies to much of the food stuff we eat.

The ARCTIC.

Oh: the Arctic!! We know, energy calories cause Climate Change, and Climate Change causes Climate Calamities. Brace yourself: This past week temperatures over the Arctic were high, very high, up in the 20 Celsius range. Smoke and soot from fires in the North, including Siberia, darken the ice, accelerating the melting process. Changes to the jet stream due to the rapid heating of the Arctic are causing hot air to move deep into the Arctic, including over the Laptev Sea all the way to the North Pole, while high temperatures in Siberia are warming up the water of rivers, causing warm water to flow into the Arctic Ocean. Melting ice in Greenland increases water levels threatening coastal regions.

Permafrost is no longer perma-nent.

Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.

ARCTIC NEWS reports that, “As the world keeps increasing its carbon emissions and exports, rising in 2018 to a record 33.1 billion ton per year, the atmospheric greenhouse gas level has now exceeded 560 ppm CO?-equivalent when methane and nitrous oxide are included, intersecting the stability threshold of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The term “climate change“ is no longer appropriate since, what is happening in the atmosphere-ocean system, accelerating over the last 70 years or so, is an abrupt calamity on a geological dimension, threatening nature and human civilization. Ignoring what the science says, the powers to be are presiding over the sixth mass extinction of species, including humans.

“As conveyed by leading scientists: “Climate change is now reaching the end-game, where very soon humanity must choose between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too late and bear the consequences”, writes Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. “We’ve reached a point where we have a crisis, an emergency, but people don’t know that”

It seems that TIME IS UP!!

So, these hamburgers and that box of cereal and all the items we eat have disastrous consequences for all of us. We either stop eating or we must pay sky high prices for alternative food products that don’t pollute or cause Climate Disasters.

Since we can’t stop eating, the only alternative is INFLATION because in the near future we are forced to pay the true price of the items we eat and the products we manufacture. Not only that, but also pay for the cost of repaying what we have borrowed from the future. Impossible. It is too late to change.

These repayments involve more than just consumer items: we have built our cities in North America on the assumption of unlimited and cheap fuel: our subdivisions and exurban settlements bear testimony to this phenomenon. Driving to work for 30-40 km one way on congested roads, has become the norm as inner core residences are too much in demand and too unaffordable. These single family dwellings on spacious lots make public transportation impossible. These neighborhoods will see drastically lower prices, thus food inflation on the one hand and property deflation on the other. The same will be true for the value of shopping centers, and of commercial real estate in general.

Return to the land? There too: too late to change.

Jobs? They should go to rural areas where small-scale farming should be the future, farming with horse and hoe, farming with sweat and backaches, farming with families and friends.

The old could be new again …………….if we are smart, which is questionable. 

The wise will take measures, because this society is built on energy, the use of which has to go down to zero. If we don’t do it voluntary, the system will collapse and we have a much greater problem on our hands. Let’s face it: we have lived in a make-believe world for the last 70+ years. We have created a society built on a faulty foundation, and that includes the banking system. We also have – thanks to the almighty computer – a society so complex that the least hiccup will cause it to collapse. And collapse it will, sooner than later.

This means that we should create a fallback system.

How do you create such an animal?

I just came back from an hour of hoeing, braving the flies, which reminded me of Ogden Nash: God in his wisdom made the fly.
And then forgot to tell us why.

 You know what growing food entails? I started my garden when I was 40 years younger and had the physical stamina to travel with a wheelbarrow to the decades old manure pile some 150 meters away where, available for free: beautiful black earth. I carted scores of loads of this precious stuff, mixing it with my sandy soil. Each year I add our own compost.

I now have a vegetable garden of 45’ x 55’ (14m x 17m) divided in 8 segments of 45’x5’ each (14m x 1.5m), covering some 2,600 square feet (240m2) with pathways in between. Each year I rotate a different kind of edible: this year bed 1 has cabbages- red-white-kale-Brussels-sprouts; bed 2 red beets; beds 3, 5 and 8 potatoes; bed 4 green beans; bed 6 onions-leek, carrots with some mint in between, some rhubarb plants as well as some raspberries; bed 7 tomatoes, lettuce, basil, and other herbs.

That’s our fallback position. Yes, it takes a bit of sweat, and multiple mosquito bites, and oodles of satisfaction. Each year I learn something new. A gardener friend sprinkles bone meal in the planting groove, so I have done the same. Later I will water the plants with a blood meal solution. Yes, it calls for work, but, frankly, I love doing it.

The new truth is that nothing beats eating your own home-grown food: no carbon footprint, no chemicals, no pesticides: the real product of God’s Whole Earth.

On to the RC church and James Carrol.

He wrote in the Atlantic: “My five years in the priesthood, even in its most liberal wing, gave me a fetid taste of this caste system. Clericalism, with its cult of secrecy, its theological misogyny, its sexual repressiveness, and its hierarchical power based on threats of a doom-laden afterlife, is at the root of Roman Catholic dysfunction. The clerical system’s obsession with status thwarts even the merits of otherwise good priests and distorts the Gospels’ message of selfless love, which the Church was established to proclaim. Clericalism is both the underlying cause and the ongoing enabler of the present Catholic catastrophe.

He wrote something I have often stated, “Clericalism’s origins lie not in the Gospels but in the attitudes and organizational charts of the late Roman Empire. Christianity was very different at the beginning. The first reference to the Jesus movement in a nonbiblical source comes from the Jewish Roman historian Flavius Josephus, writing around the same time that the Gospels were taking form. Josephus described the followers of Jesus simply as “those that loved him at the first and did not let go of their affection for him.” There was no priesthood yet, and the movement was egalitarian. Christians worshipped and broke bread in one another’s homes. But under Emperor Constantine, in the fourth century, Christianity effectively became the imperial religion and took on the trappings of the empire itself. A diocese was originally a Roman administrative unit. A basilica, a monumental hall where the emperor sat in majesty, became a place of worship. A diverse and decentralized group of churches was transformed into a quasi-imperial institution—centralized and hierarchical, with the bishop of Rome reigning as a monarch.  Church councils defined a single set of beliefs as orthodox, and everything else as heresy.”

Let me stop there and comment on this as a person who has attended church for close to 90 year, often twice on Sundays.

“Home churches, no clergy”. That’s what we need in these last days. The clergy are the organization’s retardants, are the ones who stick with the traditional, are the status-quo maintainers, afraid to rock the boat, cling to yesterday’s failing strategies, drive the young people away and keep the laity dumb.

Home churches can do the opposite, although fewer will participate, yet, that’s how the church grew, that’s how the people became informed, learned the Scriptures; taught themselves to articulate the message of salvation, trying new approaches, incorporating the created Word with the written word, making ‘loving one’s neighbor’ a reality.

There too: it may be too late to change.

The current model has failed; the monologues are outdated. It is time for the people in the pew to take over and become prepared for eternity as mature Christians because all denominations suffer from the same lethargy.

Enough; something else altogether: African Swine Fever.   

African swine fever– the largest animal epidemic in history – is currently rampaging throughout China and other parts of Asia.

Pork prices have shot up 40% globally. This epidemic is just one more pressure on food prices; others include India’s drought and the US Midwest floods.

The disease has a similar effect on pigs as Ebola has on humans, causing massive internal hemorrhaging and very high death rate.

So far, over one million pigs in China have been culled–slaughtered, that is – to stop the spread of the disease. However, China has over 440 million pigs, half of the world’s total pig population, and experts estimate that up to 200 million pigs will have to be killed this year alone to slow down the spread of the disease.

African Swine Fever does not affect humans, but it is bound to have a devastating effect on food security in Asia, which depends on pork for much of its meat consumption. In Vietnam, for example, 75 percent of meat consumption is pork. Already, pork prices have risen by as much as forty percent globally.

To recap all this:

Vast changes are afoot, inflating the items we need to stay alive, and deflating the goods we possess. We all will be severely affected, to the point where our very survival is at stake.

June 15 2019

THE ULTIMATE TEST

We, you, I, every member of the human race, is on the earth for a purpose. That purpose is to try us out for the new earth to come. That trial involves an exam of sorts, even though the Lord’s Prayer has a line, “Save us from the time of trial”, but this is not going to happen. Sorry to say, but the ultimate test is coming, unique to our generation for a reason. As the last generation we must face the consequences of being the most destructive of all who came before us. That makes following the Lord’s command nearly impossible: “Be perfect, as God is perfect”. That’s what Jesus told us in Matthew 5: 48.

The Greek word for ‘perfect’ is teleios, better translated as ‘holistic’. We must live a holistic life, not only refrain from harming creation but even enhance it.

In “Tending the Garden”, Paulos Mar Gregorios, Metropolitan of Delhi in the Indian Orthodox Church, echoed Bonhoeffer and Bavinck, when he wrote, “Human redemption can be understood only as an integral part of the redemption of the whole creation. Romans 1: 20 confirms this:

“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.

This text points to God as the Creator. Creation is God’s primary message to the world. 

Why has the entire theological enterprise, from Pope in the Roman Catholic Church to the Archbishop in the Anglican Church, to the Billy Grahams in the Baptist and Pentecostal movement, to the Allah adherents, solely centered on the Bible or Koran as the only source of salvation?

Harold Bloom in THE AMERICAN RELIGION, both translator and interpreter of the Hebrew Bible, writes fundamentalist America  (which Bloom calls the Know-Nothing Believers) uses the Book as a Talisman in the same way a person carries a charm or a magic ring to ward off evil. But ask them to define their beliefs and the stammering begins, probably alluding to ‘Rapture’.

“In the beginning was the Word,” that how Jesus’ disciple, John, begins the Bible book named after him. Psalm 33: 9 tells us that, “God spoke and it came to be.” That “came to be” is not the Bible: that came to be is “creation”. Creation is God’s Primary Word. If we want to LIVE forever, have eternal life in perfection, then we have to understand this, then we have to mentally, spiritually, and physically treat Creation as our most precious possession, for the simple reason that it is a direct product of God’s unfathomable ingenuity. The Bible is there to explain how creation came to be: call it a handbook, a directive, a guide for understanding creation. No wonder there are so many different interpretations because they all use the wrong approach. We have turned the entire God culture on its head by using the directions as the real thing, while demoting the real thing to a matter of abuse and scorn.

How did this come to be?

C. S. Lewis hit the nail on the head when he wrote in the Screwtape Letters, “Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts”.

Well, that’s where we have been travelling: the road to hell. Instead to work “by the sweat of your brow”, as God told Adam and Eve, our generation has avoided the sweat by employing energy slaves, lambasting the land, wasting the weeds with cancer-causing chemicals, effortlessly speeding everywhere by plane, by car, by motorboat, until….

That until… is now knocking at the door.

The voices that spell ‘doom’ are getting louder by the day, yet the institution that’s supposed to advance the Coming of the Kingdom, the church, is absent here. History is repeating itself. In Jesus’ time the church brought death to the Redeemer. This time we are killing God. How? Dr. Bloom has shown that the American Religion, basically all religious expression, has become totally gnostic, and sees creation, God’s work of Art, as evil or as irrelevant.

The End is approaching.

It’s hard to believe that our miraculous human enterprise, with its megacities and spectacular technology, with its flying machines and satellites, with its television and smart phones, is ending.

That’s what the scientists – the true scientists, not the lackeys of business and politics – keep telling us. We’ve done ourselves in, are destroying ourselves with our own, fatal success. Oh, yes, more and more people are telling us this, but the question is: will the people with power, the heads of state in, say the USA or Brazil, even listen?

And will the others, the world leaders who understand the situation, do enough? Their mantra too is Economic Growth, while business as usual continues, because profits must keep rolling in.

There’s some good news. The good news is that, for the sake of the believers, the true believers, matters of universal disintegration are speeding up. That’s the good news.

David Wallace-Wells in his recently published The Uninhabitable Earth, writes, “Half of the Great Barrier Reef has already died, methane is leaking from Arctic permafrost and may never freeze again, and the high-end estimates for what warming will mean for cereal crops suggest that just four degrees of warming could reduce yields by fifty percent.”

Permafrost covers 25% of the Northern Hemisphere. It is the world’s largest icebox, and its landmass is 4.5xs larger than Antarctica, 6.5xs larger than the United States. It is stuffed full of carbon locked in frozen ground accumulated over eons, which, by way of contrast, makes coal power plant emissions look bush-league. Global warming has changed the equation. Nowadays, permafrost disintegration is officially hot news.

The melting of the permafrost in a very short time, will quadruple the global temperature. When the Giga-tons of Arctic Methane explode – and it is exactly there where the rate of warming is the highest – then a sudden spike in temperature is the result, which would spell the end of all that lives. That is not science-fiction: that is a distinct possibility. The odds that this is occurring are much higher than our house catching fire, for which we all carry fire insurance.

What sort of insurance is there for Methane mayhem?

The altered climate will cause multiple catastrophes, listed in Wallace-Wells’ table of contents: heat death, hunger, drowning, wildfires, out-of-control weather – typhoons, tornadoes, floods and droughts – a fresh water drain, dying oceans, unbreathable air, the spread of plagues not seen in millennia and of tropical diseases throughout the world, climate wars and more.

Yes, matters are acceleration exponentially! In the last 25 years we have altered “twenty-two percent of the earth’s landmass”. Ninety-six percent of the world’s animals, by weight, are now humans and their livestock,” writes Wallace-Wells. He describes “the forces that  unleashed climate change – namely ‘the unchecked wisdom of the market’” to conclude that “neoliberalism is the God that failed on climate change.” Indeed those who hope that salvation from the human-induced climate catastrophe will come from our neoliberal leaders are deluding themselves and wasting time.

“More than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in the past three decades,” Wallace-Wells writes. The climate catastrophe is predominately the creation of the World War II generation, the boomers and their children. And if we don’t wean ourselves quickly from oil and gas, from our meat-intensive diet, and if we don’t stop pouring concrete, large parts of the earth will become uninhabitable.

Wallace-Wells quotes, “a billion or more vulnerable people have little choice but to fight or flee.” You think the Syrian war produced a refugee crisis for Europe (a war, by the way climate-change induced drought)? Or that Central American drought has propelled unsustainable numbers of migrants to the U. S.? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

“Since 1980,” Wallace-Wells writes, “the planet has experienced a fiftyfold increase in the number of dangerous heatwaves…The five warmest summers in Europe since 1500 have all occurred since 2002.” Humanity has been playing with fire. “In 2010, 55,000 died in a Russian heatwave…In 2016…temperatures in Iraq broke…120 in July, with temperatures dipping below 100, most days, only at night.” The Chicago heatwave of 1995 killed 739 people, “of the many thousands more who visited hospitals during the heatwave, almost half died within the year. Others merely suffered permanent brain damage.”

Meanwhile “nearly two thirds of the world’s cities are on the coast – not to mention its power plants, ports, navy bases, farmlands, fisheries, river deltas, marshlands and rice paddies…Already flooding has quadrupled since 1980…and doubled since 2004.” NOAA has predicted a possible eight feet of sea level rise just in this century, Wallace-Wells reports.

A human holocaust looms.

This week I also read a book by a Holocaust survivor, Dr. Viktor Frankl.

Just a word on how I select my topic of the week. Actually, I don’t choose it: it chooses me. Somehow each week my eye is directed toward a certain topic, either a bible passage or a book. This week the book was MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING. Dr. Frankl was professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Vienna. During three years of incredible suffering at Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps, he developed his theory of LOGOTHERAPY, which treats the human being as a whole in the effort of groping for a higher meaning of life. Dr. Frankl, in his book, explains that LOGO means ‘meaning’.

So I started to write about ‘the purpose in life and what is the meaning of it all in the light of religion.

David Brooks, the New York Time columnist, last week wrote, “We’re living in the middle of a religious revival; it’s just that the movements that are rising are not what we normally call “religion.” The first rising movement is astrology. According to a 2018 Pew poll, 29 percent of Americans say they believe in astrology. That’s more than are members of mainline Protestant churches.

“Another surging spiritual movement is witchcraft. In 1990, only 8,000 Americans self-identified as Wiccans. Ten years later there were 134,000, and today, along with other neo-pagans, there are over a million. As Tara Isabella Burton put it in an excellent, deeply researched essay in The American Interest, “Wicca, by that estimation, is technically the fastest-growing religion in America.”

It reminds me of Amos 8: 12, People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the LORD, but they will not find it.

People are screaming for “meaning”, and don’t find it because the churches have failed to pursue THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM.

The church has fallen for the Gnostic-Hellenic notion that the body is evil, and that matter is without quality. The Biblical TRUTH, however, is that human redemption and the redemption of the entire creation go hand in hand. Of course: this is God’s earth!!    

Jesus told us in Matthew 5: 33, “Seek first the Kingdom of God”. Once we do that, our entire life will acquire meaning. Seeking “The Kingdom of God”, means promoting, living, minding, focusing on the welfare of creation.

Let me repeat that: Our sole goal in life is to enhance creation, is to beautify it, it is promote its wellbeing, is to rise up in the morning with the sole purpose to pursue the beautification of the natural environment. That gives meaning to life, a meaning that extends into eternity. Christ came to wrest creation from the power of the evil one. That’s why John 3: 16 is so important. There it says not that God so loved the human being that he offered his life to set it straight, but that God so loved THE COSMOS. That word encompasses everything created, including us poor creatures, now devoid of meaning, now embracing all sorts of false religions, now slated to become obliterated by the coming Holocaust.

God so loved the world. The only way to gain meaning at this late hour is the do likewise.

The entire world history can be summed up in these words, “God is trying to determine who are worthy to inhabit the New Earth to come”.

That’s why today our constant prayer should be,

“Forgive us our now inevitable intrusions into your holy creation, and make us worthy to inhabit the New Earth”.   

June 8 2019

IS ‘666’, THAT OMINOUS SATANIC SITUATION, IMMINENT?

I had a dream. Some prominent psychologists see dreams as important: Carl Jung comes to mind and today the author of the 12 steps, Jordan B. Peterson.

I had that dream last Sunday morning

Here’s what I saw in full color. Our entire school body, the University Prep school I attended for 8 years, was walking to the school building. There was a wide waterway in its path with a long bridge. The bulk of the students and staff were across when the bridge started to move to allow ships to pass, and preventing the laggards to cross. I was among those stuck before the bridge, seeing a vast array of fast moving ships, all cargo, sailing through the open channel at top speed.

Among the first group I had spotted my Latin teacher, who had scheduled a test that day that would determine my final mark: failing it would mean that I would not get my diploma. Let me add that I was not an outstanding student. I was highly nervous in my dream, emotionally upset.

Yes, I did pass the exam thanks to my Greek teacher whose better mark rescued me (the average was counted). This month, it is exactly 70 years that the last phase of my formal schooling ended. I now realize that the final exam, involving 6 languages and 7 science subjects, must have been the most traumatic event in my life.

So what sort of explanation is there for this strange dream? Here’s what I think.

I believe that we, as a society, face a similar traumatic situation, also a real test. The greater part of humanity will pass the bridge, and a small segment will be “Left Behind”. The reckless speed of the ships indicates to me that world events will highly accelerate. Matthew 24 relates how Noah and his family were “Left Behind”, another ‘ship’ image, while the sinners were taken away. Jesus added, (verse 39), “That’s how it will be when Jesus returns”: the Jesus’ followers will be left behind.

Is that the meaning of my dream?

So how do I tie this in with today’s circumstances?

David Brooks had an interesting article in the New York Times last week. He highlighted, “How technology reshapes consciousness.”

Here are some snippets.

“Over the past several years, teenage suicide rates have spiked horrifically. Depression rates are surging and America’s mental health over all is deteriorating. What’s going on?

David Brooks wrote that the answer starts with technology, and the sort of consciousness “online life” induces. He writes that when communication styles change, so do people.

Centuries ago, around 1500 AD a shift from an oral to a printed culture also transformed human consciousness. Once, storytelling was a shared experience, with emphasis on proverb, parable and myth and I may add, religious experiences, as everything was seen in a religious light. I remember reading a Martin Luther biography how he was caught up in a terrible thunder-lightning storm and deadly scared, vowed then and there to devote his life to serving God: so he became a monk.

At that time, Brooks writes, the printing press made life more a private experience, still enjoyed ‘en famille’, in the privacy of one’s home.

Today the shift from printed to electronic communication has similar consequences. Here people switch their attention and affection from bonds, such as from family and friends, basically to strangers and persons met ‘online’.

Yes, until recently most of the contacts a person had were with family and friends, a pretty stable situation. But now most of the attention a person receives comes from far and wide and is tremendously volatile.

David Brooks writes, “Sometimes these online posts go viral and get massively admired or ridiculed, while other times they can leave you alone and be completely ignored. Communication itself, once mostly collaborative, is now often competitive, with bids for affection and attention. It is also more manipulative — gestures designed to generate a response. People ensconced in social media are more likely to be on perpetual alert: How are my ratings this moment? They are also more likely to feel that the amount of attention they are receiving is inadequate.”

He quotes David Foster Wallace in that famous Kenyon commencement address, “If you orient your life around money, you will never feel you have enough. Similarly, if you orient your life around attention, you will always feel slighted. You will always feel emotionally unsafe.”

The internet has become a place where people communicate out of their competitive ego: I’m more fabulous than you (a lot of Instagram). You’re dumber than me (much of Twitter). It’s not a place where people share from their hearts and souls.

Of course, people enmeshed in such a climate are more likely to feel depressed, to suffer from mental health problems. Of course, they are more likely to see human relationship through the abuser/victim frame, and to be acutely sensitive to any power imbalance. Imagine you’re 17 years old and people you barely know are saying nice or nasty things about your unformed self. It creates existential anxiety and hence fanaticism and trauma caused by aftershocks of not being recognized: a victim of today’s Technological Society, the name of Jacques Ellul’s masterpiece.

Bit by bit; bite by bite; byte by byte.

It reminds me of James Comey and his opinion piece in the New York Times a few weeks ago.

Here’s an excerpt. “Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them. Sometimes what they reveal is inspiring. For example, James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, resigned over principle, a concept so alien to Mr. Trump that it took days for the president to realize what had happened, before he could start lying about the man.

“But more often, proximity to an amoral leader reveals something depressing. I think that’s at least part of what we’ve seen with Bill Barr and Rod Rosenstein. Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from. It takes character like Mr. Mattis’s to avoid the damage, because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.

“It starts with your sitting silent while he lies, both in public and private, making you complicit by your silence. In meetings with him, his assertions about what “everyone thinks” and what is “obviously true” wash over you, unchallenged, as they did at our private dinner on Jan. 27, 2017, because he’s the president and he rarely stops talking. As a result, Mr. Trump pulls all of those present into a silent circle of assent.”

I see an analogy here. Bit by bit, bite by bite, byte by byte we are bitten and smitten by technology: can’t live without it: first thing in the morning, last thing at night, 24/7, at work or what used to be called, at leisure. I believe we all have fallen victim to this phenomenon.

It all started so simple: a landline telephone, then a mobile, then a smartphone, then internet, then twitter, then Facebook.

I believe we have now come to the point, “Does technology serve us, or are we serving technology?

Fact is that our world today is replete with manicured nature, with designer-babies and scientifically shaped chickens, quick maturing, lots, lots of meat.

How natural is nature anymore? Today we have little or no control over the Internet or the logarithm-controlled financial markets. It all seems that the forces of nature control them as well: everything is now a number-game, all controlled by digits, not unlike that infamous number: 666. 

It looks more and more that we have arrived at an historic junction in human history: we are well on the way to leave that recently entered Anthropocene stage, the era dominated by the human race, to rush into the Technocene stage, the new period dominated by technology.

It seems to me that human nature, softened up by carbonized living, conditioned by television and electronic toys, is ripe for the machine-age, and has been perfectly prepared to surrender to the number game, with its very humanity at stake.

THE CLIMATE CATASTROPHE.

This also means that in no way are we ready to voluntary engage in measures to combat the Climate Emergency, which requires a world-wide effort involving sacrifices reminiscent of war-like conditions, depriving ourselves of all the luxuries, all the conveniences that has made us the most pampered people in history with 100 energy slaves at our fingertips.

The cruel reality is that we face an abrupt end to this unnatural universe we have fashioned. I believe it is too late to change. Humans are by nature inclined to avoid difficulties, and act only when the danger is so acute that immediate response is needed. Today it is questionable whether we are still capable to respond to the current challenge. As long as personal climate responsibility has not become ingrained in everyone’s daily living habit, politicians, always testing public opinions, will do nothing.

Add to this the now so prevalent techno-mentality that is robbing us of our human essence, and pronto, disaster knocks. More and more we have become psychologically cyborgs, extensions of the machine, where we integrate these devices into our mental functioning, into our social and emotional lives.

What is 666?

Many believe that the number signifies the inability of the Evil One – yes he exists! – to bring perfection, portrayed as 777. 1John 5: 19 should not be forgotten where it says that the Evil One calls the tune today. Jesus repeatedly calls him, “The Prince of this world.” (John 12: 31; John 14:30).

In these last days, whether this is next year or 20 years from now, given human mentality not to prepare for tomorrow, the end of humanity will come. This is not pessimism at work: that is the cruel reality. The number 666, says the Bible, will identify the person: not just 666, but any number, Social Security, Social Insurance, Pin, any word, as we drift toward a cashless society where universal control is in the cards.

Technically this is quite feasible; mentally this is already on its way, while psychologically we are being readied. Once the climate emergency is baring its ugly claws and only desperate measures dictate a possible solution, with famine festering, unimaginable unnatural disasters evident, ultra-strict rationing needed, the number rules.

What to do?

Jesus advised us to flee the city where control is most easily implemented. Re-read Matthew 24: it gives a true picture of the days to come.

Is that all the advice I can give?

Should we chuck all mechanical devices? Should we sell our urban properties and settle in the country? Should we give up our jobs which mostly are promoting the current destructive lifestyle?

I might as well say that we should quit eating, as our current diet requires 10-20 energy calories to provide us with one food calorie, which perfectly illustrates our current predicament.

During the war 1939-45 we had paper coupons for food and textile. Ubiquitous copiers today have put a stop to that: now eye-recognition and a secret number will serve as identification for rationing, which is sure to come: no number, no food. Not compliant with the Satanic Code? No food.

Sounds ominous? It is.

We are in this situation, which bit by bit, bite by bite, byte by byte, has become our death trap. There’s no escape. The only remedy is found in the Bible, in 2Peter 3: 11-14,

Since all these things are to be destroyed in this way, what sort of people ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness,  looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be destroyed by burning, and the elements will melt with intense heat!  But according to His promise we are looking for new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells. Therefore, beloved, since you look for these things, be diligent to be found by Him in peace, spotless and blameless, 

JUNE 1 2019

ETERNAL LIFE.

In a book with the simple title of HEAVEN, I found a quote by the philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, “Can you imagine anything more idiotic than the Christian idea of heaven? What kind of deity is it that would be capable of creating angels and men to sing praises day and night into all eternity?”

It reminds me of a hymn with a beautiful melody, but questionable words, “By the sea of Crystal saints in glory stand…. Robed in white apparel washed in Jesus’ blood, They now reign in heaven…”

I once attended a conference in Hamilton, where Dr. Lewis Smedes of Fuller Seminary spoke. He commented, “suppose you hate singing, and dislike white attire, would that mean that you don’t fit in heaven?”

The HEAVEN book is actually quite interesting. In it the authors, Colleen McDannell, an American, and Bernard Lang a German professor, depicted the changing views on HEAVEN during the last 1,000 years, from early remote monasteries, where the monks pictured heaven as paradise, to modern-day fundamentalists, more in tune with Billy Graham.

So, what brought this Heaven Talk on?

I am trying to get rid of stuff, books, magazines that I deemed important at one time, and saved, and saved, and never re-read. I came across an old TIME magazine, dated March 31 1997, more than 22 years old, asking DOES HEAVEN EXIST? Its cover page had a man standing on a cloud, peering upward, the right hand above the eyes. It contained some interesting statistics, such as, “Do you believe in the existence of heaven, where people live forever with God after they die?” 81 % said yes, and only 13% disagreed.

It reminded me of Billy Graham, interviewed by Larry King on CNN years ago. Larry asked him, “What happens when you die?” Billy: “Jesus will take me by the hand, and bring me to God”.

Billy apparently does not know his Bible. Paul writes to Timothy, “God, who alone is immortal, lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see”. (1 Tim. 6:16).

Frankly the common ‘heaven’ view is so outdated and also so misleading that a totally new take on heaven and eternity is needed. Will it happen?

A long time ago the Presbyterian Record published an article I had written, questioning the entire HEAVEN concept, which evoked a letter writer to call me a heretic. When I answered this charge, the editor declined to publish it and, in turn, sent me a book by Boston College Philosophy Professor Peter J. Kreeft, with the telling title, Heaven the Heart’s Deepest Longing. Last week I re-read the book, and found much that I liked, but, you guessed it, I had basic disagreement with its main thesis which spiritualizes heaven, and has no place for eternity on earth.

The book has one illustration which clearly shows its main thesis. On page 7 of the introduction the author depicts 3 different situations. He had drawn three tubes representing humanity. One tube is open-ended on both sides, the bottom arrow pointing to the world, the tube itself featuring humanity, while the top points to God, with the subscript, Traditional Western Religion.

The second tube, also depicting humanity, is closed on the bottom and open-ended on the top, pointing to God, describing Eastern Mysticism.

The third tube again representing humanity is closed to the top, thus God is eliminated, while the bottom is open to the world, and the description there is Modern Western Secularism.

Dr. Kreeft describes this as follows: “Think of humanity as a tube with two openings. The openings can be either open or closed. Think of God, as superhuman reality, as above the tube, and nature, or subhuman reality, as below it. Traditional religious wisdom tells us to be open at both ends so God can flow in one end and out the other: in the receptive ends first by faith and then out of the active end by works. But if the top opening is closed, our business becomes exclusively human action in the world, without a plugin to divine power.”

No tube but a triangle

I see it differently. Picture a triangle, with God on top, the earth and us, humans, on the other corners. Arrows to and from each of the three parties, indicating both dependence and interactions: God depends on us – without humans there is no Christ and no world – and we and the earth depend on God. We and the earth are also interdependent. That’s a truer depiction.

Manipulations.

So why has the church, have all churches, promoted heaven at the expense of the earth? I detect several reasons.

1. Greek Philosophy. When Socrates died, he welcomed death. In The Trials of Socrates, Plato depicts Socrates’ last moments before his death. Plato quotes Socrates: “I’ll no longer stay put, but will take my leave of you and depart for certain happy conditions of the blessed”.
   Socrates is certain that he’s on the way to heaven, and even says a prayer to the gods after drinking the poison: “‘One is, I suppose, permitted to utter a prayer to the gods – and one should do so – that one’s journey from this world to the next will prove fortunate”. Socrates died to celebrate death.
2. The church has taken the easy way out. It is much easier to sell heaven than to treat God’s earth as holy. That involves a radical shift in how we have to live.
3. Preaching heaven is a sort of manipulation. It gives power to the clergy. A recent New York Times article state that, “You can unite millions of people by making them believe in completely fictional stories about God, about race or about economics….and most important, the truth is often painful and disturbing. Hence if you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you.”

Yes, it is much easier to believe in heaven. Believing in earth as God’s precious possession, and thus as holy and to be treated with the same love we reserved for ourselves and our neighbors, would mean a totally different life. When Jesus tells us ‘TO LOVE GOD ABOVE ANYTHING ELSE’ then this simply means that we have to love all that God has created.

OUR CALLING AND TASK IN LIFE

Now that we are approaching the end of human society, it is high time that we reflect on what we are supposed to do or should have done as the human race.

It goes beyond dispute that we are on earth for a certain purpose: we were called to do something specific. When we were created and so entered into history, God charged us with a specific mandate. That mandate was to cultivate creation, to look after the earth and the air around us. God specifically outlined this cultural task to us, to become one with the earth, to serve it in all its manifestations, not only what lived and moved and had its being around us, but also, and even more as our primary task, to discover who we are and what we are and why we are. After all, we grow emotionally in line with our task, and by accomplishing one step we mentally and spiritually prepare ourselves to tackle the next phase and the next, because it is a never-ending assignment the Lord entrusted to us.

However, the task is two-fold. Not only are we assigned to bring to fruition what in its essence, its kernel so to say was and is dormant in creation, both its human and non-human potential that is waiting to become into being, the other side of the coin is to preserve what is there, and to treasure and cherish what God already had entrusted to us as guardians and safe-keepers.  

This dual goal, this two-sided assignment, holds for eternity as well. As a matter of fact only when we today are busy with both the discovery what is latent in creation, and with the preservation of what is already there, that we are allowed to continue that into eternity, when both aspects will continue unabated and without the impediments we now experience in our sinful state.

Brother, Sister, are you saved?

We are called to fulfill that cultural duty while simultaneously striving for salvation. Salvation not only means eternal redemption but also the fulfillment of the creational mandate.

Enter Dr. Okke Jager.

The name means nothing to most of you. He was well known in the Netherlands for the many lighthearted books he wrote and his connection to Christian Radio. His doctoral thesis – a near 600 page tome – was on “Het Eeuwige Leven”, LIFE ETERNAL, Vita Aeterna.

I acquired a copy of his book on November 29 1986. It was published in 1962. I did not read the entire volume, but carefully studied the last chapter, entitled Het Eeuwige Leven, Life Eternal, some 30 pages.

He writes, “Life Eternal is true life. It is endless, free from death and decomposition and disintegration, a perpetual communion with the living God…….Death starts the moment we are born, and eternal life starts when we are ‘born again’…. We are able to be a new creation already now…..Those who have eternal life are a new people…. We are both 100% the old Adam and 100% the new person, if we belong to Christ”

He quotes his own professor, Dr. G.C. Berkouwer, “The reality of the Second Coming (of Christ) will not be unfamiliar in comparison with life on earth. In a great measure it will compare to this life in all its complexity and immense variety… Only then ordinary, daily life will be revealed and recognized, with its real character.”

Okke Jager again: “That’s why the Second Coming (the Parousia) does not mean a suspension of time, but rather a return to the original notion of time”.

Both Okke Jager and J.H. Bavinck reaffirm that the real meaning of history is the realization of the Kingdom of God where “life eternal is an earthy life, a bodily experience”. The Greek notion negating the body is totally contrary to the biblical view. The Socrates-Plato view severs eternal life from the new earth, a heresy largely adopted by much of Christianity.

No marriage in The New Earth, but……..

“In the approaching New Age there will not be marriage, in the form of a sex- and procreation union, but there will be special ties, that are the extension of the kind of existence in which we find ourselves today.”

Okke Jager seems to imply that sexual intercourse will not be excluded. “Even though the difference between Creator and creature will be maintained, the relationship between persons and sexes will not be different but will return to its original divine status, where the human will resort to its particular place, crowned with glory and splendor.”

Okke Jager continues, “God created the humans as men and women and not as neutral, sex-less beings. In the New Age Genesis 1 remains in force, as evident from Jesus’ pronouncement, “Haven’t you read that in the beginning the Creator made both male and female, for this reason a man will leave to get married”, (Matthew 19:4).

Enough. Time to recapitulate.

We are approaching the end of history. Jesus has told us that in the END everything will be revealed. That’s why the Bible ends with the book of REVELATION, which basically proclaims this message.

There is an enormous misconception of what is in store for humanity. Rapture and heaven are just two of the most glaring lies.

Once the END comes, God’s people will not go to heaven. As Bonhoeffer, Bavinck and now Jager have stated, we are from the earth, exist from the earth – now thoroughly poisoned – and will wake up in the earth, when it is totally purged of all evil, including pollution. Jesus came to restore creation to its original pristine state.

We will then be pure women and men, totally cleansed from the state of impurity where we have existed, to enter LIFE TO THE FULL. Women will glorify in their femininity, man in their masculinity, as the French say, “Vive La Difference”.

That’s what Jesus taught us. He also taught us, in John 3: 16, that we too must love the earth as Jesus loved it, for which he gave his life.

THE BLACK SWAN

May 25 2019

Unexpressed emotions will never die.
They are buried alive, and will come forth later,
in uglier ways.
                              – Sigmund Freud

So, what’s the connection between Sigmund Freud and THE BLACK SWAN? Let me first go to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of the Black Swan, who describes it as follows:

“The Black Swan is first of all an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its concurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.”

It’s my contention that the next BLACK SWAN will be the result of plain stupid stubbornness, stemming from repressed feelings.

Human folly is all around us. Stop watching TV, the height of contaminating foolishness, and exercise extreme caution reading newspapers as well. This past week I read an article in the Guardian, where the author wrote that in 1900 life expectance was 45 years. Over the 9 decades she saw almost a doubling of lifespan, and predicted that her grandchildren, given medical progress, would live forever.

That’s the sort of nonsense we constantly read, just as economists talk about perpetual growth in a finite world, equally impossible. Yet we all eat that claptrap, forgetting that nothing is predictable, because we generally are oblivious to the randomness in history, especially now, when the world is beset with immense problems.

Of course, in its well over 400 pages, the BLACK SWAN author never mentions the Bible, which has a number of Black Swan events, such as Adam and Eve, the couple selected to start a new humanity, quite quickly encountering a Black Swan that forever changed the fate of humanity: the simple act of picking a fruit. The flood was another example. The coming of Jesus, the arrival of God in perfect human form, most certainly qualifies as a Black Swan, as will his return, which also will come totally unexpected. The rise of Christianity, the Black Plague, both qualify as Black Swans.

Unexpressed emotions will never die.
They are buried alive, and will come forth later
in uglier ways.

Unexpressed emotions mostly happen on the personal level, with disastrous results, but there also is a collective consciousness, mostly unexpressed as well, affecting us all, differing from continent to continent, from language to language. It takes its form in shared beliefs, ideas, attitudes and knowledge. They are mostly faith-based, faith in permanent progress, blindness to reality and denial of human frailty and sin.

We, the human race persistently cling to false hopes, convinced that in the end all will be well, believing that science will provide an answer, that human intelligence will find a solution, that human ingenuity will get us out of the hole.

These unexpressed emotions have a life of their own, hidden deep in the human psyche, where they are buried alive, but in the end will emerge in ugly ways. When Euripides, 2500 years ago, observed that, “Stronger than lover’s love is lover’s hate, incurable, in each, the wounds they make,” this also applies to thwarted desires in the wider context. Now that these unexpressed emotions are starting to surface as false and beginning to have detrimental effects on the human race at large, we see the “yellow jackets in France”, the “Trump tragedy” in the USA, and the “ultra-right movement” everywhere. Soon civic obedience may turn to mass disobedience, to hatred and violence, and in the collective may cause wars and revolutions as the future turns ugly.

Frequent Grey Swans.

In terms of Black Swans: today there are multiple predictable perils out there, which could be called “Grey Swans”.

Here are a few examples. A report from the U. N. states that air pollution may be damaging every organ and virtually every cell in the body. These pollutants cause inflammation that then floods through the body, with ultrafine particles being carried into the bloodstream, and result in all sorts of ailments, also affecting the brain cells, reducing intelligence. Air pollution now plays havoc with 90 percent of the world’s population. I call that a Grey Swan.

Then there is famine looming, as there’s a distinct possibility that the world`s food situation will worsen. Excessive rain and floods in the lower Mid-West in the USA, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, spell trouble for the farmers there, unable to work the land. In China there are invasive pests feeding mainly on corn devouring many millions of acres, mostly in the south and southwest and moving northward at an alarming pace.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reports that the fall armyworm native to tropical and subtropical areas of the Americas, was observed in central and western Africa in early 2016. In addition to corn, the worms feed on over 80 other crops, including rice and millet. “In the absence of natural controls or good management, it can cause significant damage to crops,” said the organization.

And then there is the African swine fever.

The spread of African swine fever (ASF) in Asia is taking a worrisome turn. First reported in northeastern China in August 2018, the highly contagious, often fatal pig disease quickly swept through the country, causing the death or culling of more than 1 million pigs. In recent weeks, it has jumped borders to Vietnam, Cambodia, Mongolia, Hong Kong, and possibly North Korea. Animal health experts agree that the disease will inevitably spread farther. And many of the newly hit countries are even less prepared to deal with ASF than China, they say, which has so far failed to end its outbreaks.

Vietnam and Cambodia “probably do not have the technical abilities to be able to control ASF,” says François Roger, an animal epidemiologist at the French Agricultural Research Center for International Development in Montpellier. He believes the virus will soon surface in Myanmar and Laos which both have an ever weaker infrastructure. 

Back to THE BLACK SWAN. Its subtitle is “The impact of the HIGHLY IMPROBABLE”.

Thanks to CLIMATE CHANGE there’s no more such a matter as the highly improbable. Ugi Bardi, an Italian Professor, in his blog, Cassandra`s Legacy, writes: “Human Extinction, an idea whose time had to come”. Hugh McPherson, and many others, all scientists closely following the developments in the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland, predict Short-term Human Extinction, see the greatest danger in the melting of the Permafrost and the consequent release of huge amounts of methane and other gases, causing a sudden spike in Global Heating, and the onset of sudden death of all that lives.

Mainstream news sources and its clients, the automakers and utilities, the politicians and the bureaucrats deny this, and people, more interested in sport scores and lottery outcomes, and struggling daily to keep their heads above water, do not give this the attention it deserves.

Yes, the collective consciousness is in denial, which means that The Black Swan on the horizon will come as a total surprise. Blame this on the media, the frivolity of entertainment, and the reassuring sounds of those in power, whose faith commitment is reaffirmed by the clergy of all faiths in that human cleverness will triumph.

Watching too much TV and reading too many newspapers, and not reading enough Bible passages, lead to mental blindness.

I know, I am a Vox clamantis in deserto, a voice crying in the wilderness, like John the Baptizer 2000 years ago. 85 years ago Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany. This country, the birthplace of Luther, Bach, Goethe, Bismarck, overnight became a nation of barbarians, of the SS, the SD, the Holocaust. I am afraid that a second term of Trump will see a similar development.

The Dirty Thirties are upon us again. The untold trillions of personal, corporate and national debt, so easily created on the computer screen, called into being out of nothing, has become real money in the form of mortgages, junk bonds, shares and stocks, and needs to be repaid. When that is not possible, and it is not possible, the BLACK SWAN of world-wide depression, worse than the 1930’s will be upon us. Taleb in his book writes, “History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Yet we (and historians) believe in the predictable, small incremental progression.”

The universal access to computers has made us strong believers in information, with Google at our fingertips, and that combined with television has dimmed our minds to knowledge and made us wisdom deficient, so evident in how we treat creation. We set ourselves up like sheep for the slaughter, comparable to turkeys at Thanksgiving. Here’s a quote from THE BLACK SWAN.

“Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race ‘looking out for its best interest’, as a politician would say. On the afternoon before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief”.

That’s the only time Taleb in his book, the BLACK SWAN uses the word belief. It reminds me of Matthew 24 where Jesus, as recorded in verses 38 – 39 tells his followers (and us today), “For in the days before the flood people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them (the sinners) away. That’s how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.”    

Peter, in 2 Peter 3, reaffirms this. Verse 10, “For the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear like a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.”

So, yes, the Black Swan, the ultimate Black Swan, is approaching. All the signs are out there, becoming more pronounced by the day.

Years ago, just before Hitler came to power, in 1932-33 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, then, at the age of 26-27, and already connected to the university as a theologian with a double doctorate, gave a series of lectures on CREATION AND FALL.

Here’s how he introduced them, “The Church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end. “Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing” (Isaiah 43: 18-19). The new is the real end of the old; the new, however, is Christ. Christ is the end of the old.”

Taleb in his book, the BLACK SWAN, writes that we need a different mentality. So true. “As we cannot push the problem under the rug, we will have to dig deeper into it. We behave as if the Black swan does not exist: human nature is not programmed for Black swans.”

That is also true for the church. Bonhoeffer is not popular there: he is too blunt.

I believe that there is a collective consciousness, mostly unexpressed, affecting us all, differing from continent to continent, from language to language.

With the back to the wall, all of us inwardly know that what we are engaged in cannot last. We repress these feelings, and these unexpressed emotions will come forth later, in uglier ways.

Again Revelation.

In Chapter 16 the bowls of God’s wrath – all human induced – are described. “Next, the fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun, and it was given power to scorch the people with fire. And the people were scorched by intense HEAT and they cursed the name of God who had authority over these plagues; yet they did NOT REPENT and give him glory.”

Unexpressed emotions will never die.
They are buried alive, and will come forth later,
in uglier ways: THE ULTIMATE BLACK SWAN.

But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when He appears? (Malachi 3:2)