Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

June 17 2017

WILL THE ORGANIZED CHURCH EVER REFORM ITSELF AGAIN?

Two thousand years ago the Christian Community took a daring step: they changed the day of worship from Saturday to Sunday, from the Sabbath – today still celebrated by the Jewish faith – to the first day of the week.
Genesis 1 relates how God created light on the first day, while Jesus called himself “the Light of the world” (John 8: 12.) To combine God creating LIGHT on the first day, and to celebrate God’s son as the LIGHT on the first day of the week, was totally fitting. Is it still?

I will attempt to challenge this custom, believing that we live in different times, which calls for a different approach to worship. Also the church needs a jolt akin to what early Christianity did in its infant days.

Some ancient history.

When the Roman Empire collapsed around 450 A.D. the church was in its ascendency and organized itself along Roman Imperial lines, with the Pope taking the place of the Emperor, the cardinals the equivalent of generals, the bishops heading the regional regiments, all the way down to priests becoming the local company commanders, imitating the Centurions.

Around the year 1500, having had a religious monopoly for about a thousand years, the church saw her doctrinal standards decline while experiencing an increase in the construction of ever more glorious religious structures, requiring ever more money. So it exploited dubious sources to finance these ventures, such as the sale of indulgences.

Enter Martin Luther.

Martin Luther himself a church official protested the sale of these indulgences which were sold with the promise that they would exempt the sinner from the consequences of sin, as in those days the fear of PURGATORY played a major role in the church.

On October 31 1517 Luther affixed 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg outlining his well-reasoned objections to the all-powerful church, ultimately resulting in a totally different denomination, aptly called THE LUTHERAN CHURCH.

Since then we have seen a proliferation of Protestant churches, one of which was guided by Jean Calvin in Geneva, Switzerland, and another by John Knox in Scotland.

I believe that today the entire denominational future is slowly fading away, because all of Western Christianity is suffering from hardening of its arteries. Already most of those disenchanted with religion have left the church and couldn’t care less what’s happening on the ecclesiastical scene, but there are still a few who want to engender REFORMATION from within. Count me among these intrepid individuals.

A brief look back to the recent past.

Frankly I have no clear idea why, some 60 years ago, Europe and Canada almost completely turned off on RELIGION. I suspect that growing indifference affected many of the regular church-going crowd, so they, the former faithful, on cue, stopped to darken the doors of the places where they were baptized as infants and had their marriage sealed by the clergy.

Take the Canadian Province of Quebec.

There the Catholic heritage is everywhere, in street names, in monuments and in church buildings galore, but Catholic practice has plummeted. The province’s main metropolis, Montreal, is as non-religious a place as any in secular Europe. Marriage (even in the civil sort, let alone church weddings) has become an unusual choice among Quebecois youngsters. A church spokesman estimates Mass attendance in Montreal at 2-4% of the population. In the province as a whole, just 11% say they are regular worshippers. But 75% of the province’s people still identify as Catholic.

The same is true for Canada’s mainline churches. In my small village the Anglican Church closed years ago. The United Church with a building dating from the 1920’s and sporting a grand church organ, had some 200 people attending in the 1950’s, but today no more than 30 show up, the old faithful, with emphasis on ‘old’. The same with my church, Presbyterian, which seats more than 250 people – built in 1890 – and now has sometimes no more than 25 attending, spread out over the entire sanctuary.

Frankly I love our small church, with its devoted and talented people, and its enthusiastic choir consisting of 3 sopranos, 2 altos, 2 basses and me, the lone tenor, and a director, of course and an audio person, both women.
A few weeks ago our choir was invited to be part of a larger one to perform at the opening of the General Assembly in Kingston, Ontario. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada is equivalent to the General Synod for churches such as the Christian Reformed Church of North America, where my roots are.

Participating in this choral affair, gave me the opportunity to listen to the sermon of the departing moderator, always a prominent person in the denomination. He had chosen as his sermon topic “The People’s Book” and the Bible readings dealt with this topic. The Old Testament section related to Josiah, the then King in Jerusalem, who had rediscovered the LOST Torah, the five books of Moses, and had an inspired urge to reacquaint his nation with the rules and commandments the Lord wanted his people to observe.
The New Testament reading was “But these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name.”

As suggested before, with the Protestant Church celebrating 500 years of rising, shining and declining influence and the Western Roman Catholic Church in the same position, it is my contention that both wings of Christianity need a thorough overhaul, as radical as when the first Christians left the Old Testament Hebrew Church.

Why?

When, in the choir loft, having an elevated view on the audience of some 400 people in St Andrew’s Kingston, on that 4th Day of June in the year of the Lord 2017, from 7-9 P.M., I saw all these dignified pastors in their elegant robes and rounded collars, and it went through my mind that 500 years after Luther’s valiant attempt to reform the church, REFORMATION had basically run stuck.

My thoughts went to Karl Barth, the great German-Swiss theologian, who said that preachers must prepare their sermons with the Bible in the one hand and the newspaper in the other. In today’s terminology that means, of course, news from whatever source.

On the General Assembly’s agenda was the ticklish topic of same-sex marriage. The preacher voiced his carefully phrased misgivings, and that came as no surprise to me because in the main the Bible is seen as the sole source of all wisdom. When that is the case, dogmatism and conservatism rule. In the Roman Catholic Church tradition too plays a large role, reason why there is a POPE and why women have no real role in worship, and the male hierarchy dominates.

So where is my beef? Here it is!

THE BIBLE IS NOT GOD’S ONLY WORD!!!

Basically the Christian Church has run stuck because it sees the Bible as THE ONLY WORD OF GOD and heaven as its goal. That is to be lamented, because we cannot really understand Creation in its wider sense without knowing the Bible, and we cannot really understand the Bible without a thorough knowledge of Creation.

Frankly, we cannot love God if we don’t love creation and see studying creation as an integral part of attaining wisdom. That’s why Romans 1: 20 is in the Bible.

THE BELGIC CONFESSION cites that text.

Here’s what this important confession says about us knowing God: “We know God FIRST by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book…. As the Apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20: “(the creation of) all these things are enough to convict men and to leave them without excuse.”
Hence my radical statement: CREATION IS GOD’S PRIMARY OR DIRECT WORD!!

What does CREATION tell us?

Observing CREATION – my biologist friend George tells me – teaches us that homosexuality is also found in the animal world, so it is no surprise that humans too are afflicted with this, as some people are genetically conditioned that way.

That is what the GOD’S CREATION WORD teaches us. Nietzsche was right when he wrote that “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.”

In the Old Testament God is often identified as THE CREATOR OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. Psalm 8 starts with the exclamation, “How great is your name, O Lord our God, through all the earth.”
God’s name and God’s Word are one and the same, because any facet of God portrays his totality. Thus we can also read this as, “How great is your Word, O Lord our God, through all the earth.”

The preacher in Kingston mentioned Psalm 119:105, “Your word is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path”, but failed to point out how this text combines the written word – the Scriptures, God’s Secondary or Indirect Word – with the Created Word, and so makes the two complete.

A NEW REFORMATION NEEDED.

My discovery trip to Kingston, my elevated view on the elect or as one Presbyterian minister labeled them to me some time ago as “The Frozen Chosen”, granted me the opportunity to gauge the real feeling in the church, and it filled me with compassion, because believing that the Bible is God’s only Word, leads to distortion of the truth. Seeing Creation as God’s Primary Word solves a lot of controversies because the Bible is not a book for science (it teaches us of Creation, Fall and Redemption), where Creation tells us that e.g. EVOLUTION is a fundamental aspect of Creation.

When Christianity was in its infancy it took a daring step. It looked at the Sabbath – the Seventh Day in which God rested to contemplate what he had wrought– and replaced it with the Sunday, signifying a radical break with the Jewish religion.

That was TRUE REFORMATION, and necessary. Now this has run its course. The church’s clergy-dominated Modus Operandi has failed. 500 years after Luther for the Protestants and 2000 years for the Roman Catholic Church we need a new, unified, model where also the Jewish faith finds a place.

Relying on Genesis One we read that God started creation on the First Day and ended it on the Sixth Day with the creation of Humanity. God rested on the Sabbath Day, the SEVENTH DAY. Resting means contemplating and enjoying creation.

We have to recapture that sort of REST. I believe that the church needs to make a Radical change, resting, honoring, celebrating the completion of Creation on the Seventh Day, openly recognizing that Creation is complete and openly recognizing that our personal salvation and the salvation of the earth are intricately and intimately connected: you can’t have one without the other!!

We must break the Sunday preaching monologue and the church-building fixation, because it echoes Descartes’ COGITO ERGO SUM, meaning “I think (listen to preaching) therefore I am”, threatening Christianity to become a dualistic, splitting grace from nature, experience and running the danger of making it more an intellectual exercise rather than a full-orbed experience.

WILL THE ORGANIZED CHURCH EVER REFORM ITSELF AGAIN?

NO. All branches of the church – Catholic, Jewish and Protestant – have become captives of their edifices, offices, customs, doctrines and traditions. They are beyond reforming.

So what maybe the answer?

Our local church has made a modest beginning, originating from its ENVIRONMENTAL COMMITTEE, a body every congregation should have.

In the past year it has organized two Sunday services with a direct Creation Emphasis and three short services on Saturday mornings in nearby “natural” settings, not supplanting the Sunday service, but supplementing it, away from the church building. After all we cannot store new wine in old bottles, emphasizing that God’s Word is two-fold: Creation and Scriptures.

In the out-door services we can fully embrace those of all faiths – and perhaps none – including the Jewish one, the original COVENANT people.

The church always must remind its people that our eternal future is not heaven – the church’s major heresy – but a RENEWED EARTH.

JUNE 10 2017

WILL A MELTING ARCTIC CAUSE A PANDEMIC?

Margaret MacMillan, in her book THE WAR THAT ENDED PEACE, suggests that the Influenza in 1918-19, which killed some 40 million people, was caused by churning up the micro-laden soil in Northern France and Belgium. That churning up was the result of the exploding of tens of millions of shells fired by thousands of heavy guns in the four years of trench-warfare in 1914-18.

War always has consequences beyond the immediate battlefield. The World-wide Influenza was either directly or indirectly one of them. The terrible pandemic especially affected young adults. I have known several orphans in Tweed, whose parents died while they were in their infancy and were adopted by relatives.

World War I reminds me of bringing Meals on Wheels to Albert McTaggart, who in 1990 was 90 years old. He told me how he had volunteered at the age of 16 to fight in World War I, lying about his age. In 1917 he was wounded, and, using his rifle as a crutch, wandered away from the frontline in search of a First Aid station but stumbled and fell into a water-filled crater, unable to go on. An English officer spotted him, and brought him safely to a field hospital.
In the hospital train to England, up 4 high, he heard from a fellow across from him that his entire platoon had been killed just after his departure. He told me that, before he crawled away from his post, he prayed aloud for his comrades in arms, none of whom survived.

All this pales compared to today’s battle grounds, this time not confined to Northern France and Southern Belgium, but truly UNIVERSAL.

Today’s war is waged every hour, every minute, and every second all over the world. The battle fields are not limited to the traffic arteries in the major cities of the world, Beijing, Tokyo, New Delhi, L.A. New York, Toronto, where untold millions of automobiles – mostly with one person steering 2,500 lbs of steel and plastic – do their polluting work.

No, the most dangerous battlegrounds are far, far away from human habitations, in inhospitable places circling the North Pole, stretching far inland, where no longer the reindeer and the buffalo roam, but where the frozen tundra, covering millions of square miles, is in the process of melting.

The unnatural warming there – a full SIX PLUS CELSIUS above normal – is causing the same conditions as on the battle fields now 100 years ago in Europe when the millions of shells churned up the soil so thoroughly that dangerous microbes were released.

There is the real danger now that the Arctic soil, finding itself completely transformed after many millennia of a frozen state will now release the megatons of methane and trillions times trillion of microbes that normally are solidly encased. I fear that these immense areas in Siberia and Canada, in Alaska and Greenland, will cause the world to be exposed to the two-fold dangers of unbelievable rises in temperature and hordes of unknown bacteria for which the human race has no antidotes.

The world has seen disasters before.

The book RATS, LICE, AND HISTORY by Hans Zinsser, leaves no doubt that pandemics are part of the human make-up. Zinsser writes: “The sixth century was a period of calamity rarely equaled in history…..A succession of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions – Vesuvius in 513 was one – and famines preceded and accompanied the series of pestilences which wrought terror and destruction throughout all of Europe, the Near East, and Asia for over sixty years. Of the natural convulsions, the most destructive was an earthquake, followed by conflagration, which destroyed Antioch in 526, killed between 200,000 and 300,000 inhabitants, and frightened away most of the remainder…… A succession of floods and famines added to the general misery. ….All this was accompanied by the great plague of Justinian. After the plague had ceased, there was so much depravity and general licentiousness that it seemed as though the disease had left only the most wicked.”

Some 700 year later, Otto Friedrich, in THE END OF THE WORLD, devotes a long chapter to THE BLACK DEATH 1347-50. In a European population of less than 100 million, 30 million, at least 1 in 3, died. These were confusing times, both religiously and nature-wise. Again there were droughts, famines, swarms of locusts, deluges of frogs, lizards and scorpions, forcing rats and other rodents in search of food. Heavy rains in 1314 severely limited the grain harvests, so that the general physical well-being was greatly impaired, not unlike today. The rain persisted into the next year as well, causing the price of food to skyrocket.

Barbara W. Tuchman in her A DISTANT MIRROR, subtitled “The Calamitous 14th Century”, makes special mention of THE BLACK DEATH. She also points out that the epidemic occurred after the world population had experienced a series of poor harvests, enfeebling the humans there to such an extent that the disease found ready victims.
Today is not different, yes we live longer, but no, we are not very healthy.

Global Health

According to the influential medical magazine The Lancet, 90 percent of the world population already suffers from some sort of disease, telling us that the general overall health is poor. Also there is not a person in the world free of chemical contaminants, due to the universal presence of airborne particles originating from automobile exhausts, electricity generating stations, pesticides and fertilizers. This comes from the tens of thousands of compounds from our oil-based industrialization which is changing the very essence of humanity. Obesity too has become a world-wide curse, another symptom of poor health and the wrong food sources.

We now are again some 700 years. Our civilization totally dependent on fossil fuels, has done more harm than simply filling the air with CO2 and threatening our very physical existence. It also has given us a false sense of spiritual security, as if we no longer need God. It reminds me of Psalm 2, depicting the very situation we have today:
Why this tumult among nations, Among peoples this useless murmurings?
They arise, the kings of the earth (Trump?)
Princes plot against the Lord and his anointed.
He who sits in the heavens laughs;
The Lord is laughing them to scorn.
Then he will speak in his anger,
His rage will strike them with terror.

We would expect that, in times of immense distress people would turn to organized religion for solace and encouragement, but Barbara Tuchman in her “A DISTANT MIRROR” disputes that. She writes, “The plague accelerated discontent with the Church at the very moment when people felt a greater need of spiritual reassurance. There had to be some meaning in the terrorizing experience God had inflicted. If the purpose had been to shake man from his sinful ways, it had failed. Human conduct was found to be “wickeder than before,” more avaricious and grasping, more litigious, more bellicose, and this was nowhere more apparent than in the Church itself…..When those who have the title of shepherd play the part of wolves,” said Lothar of Saxony, “heresy grows in the garden of the Church.” While the majority of people doubtlessly plodded on as before, dissatisfaction with the Church gave impetus to heresy and dissent, to all those seeking God through the mystical sects, to all the movements for reform which were ultimately to break apart the empire of Catholic unity.”
So far A DISTANT MIRROR.

J.H. Bavinck confirms this. In his commentary on REVELATION he writes about the last days, the current era, and I translate:
“The culmination of the natural disasters and the pinnacle of pain are caused by an earthquake (Revelation 16: 18) “No earthquake like it has ever occurred since man has been on earth.” The seismographs in the capitals shake wildly and record numbers beyond any ever registered. And the houses tumble, the palaces are ruined. No human technological expertise is any help. Nothing can withstand this force of nature: no nuclear bomb has this devastating power. Now an endless series of ever more frightening events roll over the world.
The catastrophes mentioned here extend to the entire cosmos. They affect people everywhere. Earlier we have seen how in the disastrous happenings preceding the last things, two types of distress can be detected. There are calamities that originate from above, that find their source in nature and there are those that are the result of human action. Here only the first type is mentioned. It is as if the tamed earth, given by God as a gift to humanity as his own domain, is now rebelling, is now rising up against her tormentor. It is as if nature that, for so long, for so many centuries, has faithfully furnished humanity with all its needs, has now become recalcitrant, and full of revenge has thrown itself upon humanity. And this humanity, this so superior human race, with her atomic energy, her mighty medical system, her military prowess, and her entertainment establishment all of which made her feel so immense mighty and strong, these same men and women are now in a total humiliating fashion confronted with the fact that in the final analysis they amount to nothing, that they are a mere rag that is thrown out as useless.”
He continues, “But not now. There’s not a trace of confusion to be noticed. Of course people are unsure. Of course there also is a good amount of despair. But conversion? No, they cursed God the God of the heavens! Strange, these modern men and women, who had become convinced that the concept ‘god’ did not exist anymore, all these people started to curse. They always had told themselves that they no longer believed in God, that this fairytale was something they had ridiculed all their lives. They had left the church in droves already long ago and had assured their neighbors that God was dead and that they, in line with the spirit of the age, had nothing to do with him anymore. On the census they had written “no church affiliation”, so how was it now possible that suddenly God was back, risen from the dead? How come that these educated people, so up-to-date with everything, with the latest gadgets, who never did need God, now suddenly seem to remember that he exists after all? Was there in the deepest crevices of their mind a secret notion that the meaning of life is that we always are in a conversation with him who made our lives and even guides us? Have they understood this more profoundly than they would admit to themselves and to others? In any case, at this so critical juncture, now that the flames of defeat leap up high and start to scorch their fragile body frames, now irrepressibly the certainty arises that God is there after all. And these nervous, these out of balance persons clench their small fists threatening the Lord of the heavens. They wished they could aim a guided missile and so shoot God from his throne. They would crucify him again if they could, would cast him into the deepest black hole, dead, forever defeated. But all they can do is belch out their powerless rage against him who now so mightily intervenes in this minor league game of human creation and construction.
So far a small section of Bavinck’s Dutch book on REVELATION.

WILL A MELTING ARCTIC CAUSE A PANDEMIC?

Few people in the West have ever heard of the Yamal Peninsula in western Siberia, and fewer still have heard of an anthrax outbreak there, now about a year ago, among its nomadic reindeer herders. But the Russian government launched a major effort to evacuate the whole group while shipping in medical experts plus its Chemical, Radioactive and Biological Protection Corps to sterilize the region. As of Aug. 2 2016, over 2,500 reindeer had died and 20 herders had confirmed anthrax.

We don’t know the future. We do know that, as a generation, we sucked out and dug up carbon fuels buried for millions of years. They have given us luxurious conveniences even Solomon in all his glory could not have imagined.

We now are like the Prodigal Son who wasted his inheritance, and, totally destitute, returned to his Father. (We find the entire story in Luke 15: 11-32.)

He wasted his future. We wasted our future.
Our Father too will welcome us back when we repent.

June 3 2017

OUR NEAR FUTURE.

Of course I am sticking my neck out. Well, it’s pretty short so I can’t venture too far. I am told that if you want to fathom the future, look to the past, so this week I am (re)reading Barbara Tuchman’s THE GUNS OF AUGUST, the so well written prelude to World War I and its first month of fighting in 1914. I have also started for the first time Margaret MacMillan’s THE WAR THAT ENDED PEACE, dealing with the same subject from an earlier perspective.
Tuchman tells me that, on the day the war started, von Moltke, the then German top general, wrote: “this struggle will decide the course of history for the next hundred years.” He was so right. She also affirms that, while politicians dither the generals act, perhaps not always wisely: that’s dangerous for today with so many generals in the Trump cabinet.

I believe that the year 1914 ended that 19th Century of 100 years of peace and heralded the start of that fateful 20th Century, the age I lived through for all but 14 years, born in 1928.

The Age of my life

My life started tranquilly enough, as our family – 9 kids – was quite well off in the depression years. I enjoyed the usual middle class prerogatives: youth choir, music lessons, swimming instruction, regular family vacations.
With supposedly better than average intelligence, I was, after primary education, sent to an exclusive – fee charging – university training school, which, upon completion, would allow me automatically to enter the faculty of law, medicine or theology. My parents hoped that I would choose the cloth. It was not to be.

The Age of my life has been war: World War II in occupied Holland 1940-45, trained for war from 1949-51 as a conscript, the Korean War, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, the entire Middle East.
Today all of us earth inhabitants are willing participants in the Universal War on Creation which is approaching its final stages, leading to the destruction of all we hold dear.

It is my contention that the 20th Century stopped in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell, making it a mere 75 years, followed by an interlude that ended with the onset of Brexit and the TRUMP TRAGEDY.
We now have entered the FINAL period of World History. I know that is quite a statement.

Here’s how I see it.

The TRUMP TRAGEDY has the potential to cause a second American Civil War. Trump will never resign because he cannot admit failure, but he may be forced out once the Democrats gain the upper hand in Congress in 2018. His followers, armed and dangerous and having nothing to lose, will rebel. Result: the end of the USA as a vital nation.

Trump’s divisive stance will greatly reduce America’s status. Of course, nothing happens in isolation. The TRUMP TRAGEDY is a symptom of a decaying world, unleashing the worst in humanity, and as such it will simply accelerate the world’s unwinding process because wars, both environmental and civil, are extremely destructive.

The impossible is still impossible.

There are already plenty of insoluble problems today. Due to the graying of the nations, more and more old people are becoming more and more dependent on healthcare. This places governments and institutions for the impossible problem of funding pensions – both state and private – for longer living elders, and also financing the ever expanding need for healthcare, while the tax base is decreasing and growth is stalling.

Slow or no economic growth is due to mechanization, evident in robotics. This will cause many, perhaps most jobs to disappear. Robots don’t pay taxes, yet unemployed people need income also, so there is another conflict that is impossible to solve. A guaranteed income will simply cause huge deficits.

Technology comes with a disastrous price tag.

The entire ‘computer’ age may prove to be a disastrous development. That millions of jobs have already vanished is a big problem. The greater problem is that people have lost touch with the earth, have calcified their brains due to mind-killing TV watching. There also is diminished community sense and a loss of ‘god’ awareness. All this spells trouble, big trouble, as forced idleness breeds violence. Add to this the real danger that ‘hacking’ may paralyze society as we totally depends on computer power to function, and the stage is set for a complete shut-down of all activities.

With an exhausted environment our dangers multiply.

I have extensively written on this before. Let me repeat that we cannot expect infinite growth in a FINITE world. Expect Climate Change to bite with a vengeance, causing destructive hurricanes, ever more devastating earthquakes, speeding up economic collapse.

The future and us.

The future belongs to those who prepare for it. That today is more valid than ever. Martin Seligman, a well-known professor of psychiatry, writes that,
“We are misnamed. We call ourselves Homo sapiens, the “wise man,” but that’s more of a boast than a description. What makes us wise? What sets us apart from other animals? Various answers have been proposed — language, tools, cooperation, culture, tasting bad to predators — but none is unique to humans.
What best distinguishes our species is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: we contemplate the future. Our singular foresight created civilization and sustains society. It usually lifts our spirits, but it’s also the source of most depression and anxiety, whether we’re evaluating our own lives or worrying about the nation. Other animals have springtime rituals for educating the young, but only we subject them to “commencement” speeches grandly informing them that today is the first day of the rest of their lives.”
He continues, “A more apt name for our species would be Homo Prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise. Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain, as psychologists and neuroscientists have shown”

Our true future.

Dr. Needleman is right that we must live for the future. Yes, we should be Homo Prospectus, looking forward to the future.
I don’t know how Needleman sees that future. I know how I see it. Today the only future that is really viable has as basis, “The fear of the Lord as the beginning of wisdom”. This simply means that for us humans the only way to live is “loving creation”.
That love must dominate our lives; only that selfless act has validity and is the total opposite of the TRUMP DOCTRINE. I believe that John 3: 16: “God so loved the world”, is the most important text in the entire Bible. The Greek word used is COSMOS, encompassing all of creation, including humans.

There simply is no future for a depleted earth. There also is no future for a world increasingly dominated by the machine, but that is what I see.
What do I see? People having an arm glued to the ear holding a device; people with their fingers constantly typing a message; people at home looking at TV for hours; people in cars driving everywhere, including the nearby corner store; people sitting on a lawn-mower cutting 20 square yards of green; people travelling on ‘walking trails’ on their noisy and polluting ATVs.
We have become an extension of the machine. We have become HOMO MECHANICUS: Man the Machine.

Of course, I exaggerate. There are many, many exceptions, but they are too few to make a difference.

Still: admit it. It’s over.

The entire model our society is based on has become a fallacy! That’s why there’s Trump. That’s why there is Brexit. That’s why there are terror attacks. That’s why suicide is the leading cause of death among employable men. Trump bases his fictitious budget on THREE percent growth. Sorry, there is no growth. His projection will only make one item great and greater: DEBT. There hasn’t been any real growth for years. The only growth there has been is in healthcare costs and in those who are over the age of 65 year. And in DEBT.
There is debt, untold trillions of it. Debt can only be paid when there is growth, because debt, even in the current low interest situation, needs growth to repay it with the accrued interest. That’s no longer possible. During the past decade or so we have lived on borrowed money, and in an exhausted world the money supply too will end.
We are at the end of the line. It had to come, and it is here. Sorry to be so blunt.

Based on the above there is only one explanation: we are smack in the middle of the most important global development ever. Never before, not when Rome ceased to exist as a viable empire in about 460, some 1500 years ago, declining as a city from millions to a mere 20,000; not when the Black Plague reduced the European population by some 30 percent in the 14th Century; not since the 20th Century, when wars cost the lives of Hundreds of Millions of people; now in the 21st Century we see the potential of the entire world population being in danger of life and limb.

The most puzzling aspect is that nobody talks about it.

We have built an entire economy on the phantom of economic growth. Our entire financial system, the lives of all the people in the Western World, those of pension age, those suffering from disabilities, those in institutions, in the educational and the medical fields, comprising the major part of the population: they all depend on economic growth.

The political turmoil, in France, in Great Britain, in the USA, is an example of what is to come. Traditional political parties, which have ruled their countries for decades, are today at or near record low support levels.

I guess the very reason why this ultimate danger is not mentioned is that there is no antidote. There’s nothing we can do about it. It all is a matter of ‘forces’ moving beyond our control, forces that have their own momentum, forces that are bigger and more far-reaching than our intentions, however noble and well-meaning they are.

Basically I am convinced that this is what is coming. It’s solely a matter of straightforward reasoning. But nobody seems to really know or understand it which is odd, because it’s not that difficult to grasp. This all happens because growth is over. And if growth is over, so are expansion and centralization in whatever shape or form they come in.

Some Biblical advice.

Curiously the Bible has some advice here, because it is quite explicit in outlining how the end will come. For one thing: it will come suddenly, without warning. The last Bible book, Revelation, is named “Revelation”, because all things will revert to its true nature: the true character of humanity will be ‘laid bare’, her accomplishments, her failures and successes. It also warns us that we must expect immense disasters, of which the outlines are clearly visible today.

The book also offers some advice: Revelation 18: 5 suggests that we disassociate ourselves from the kind of society that has caused this disastrous situation. There it says, “Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues; for her sins are piled up to heaven and God has remembered her crimes.”

Abandoning a sinking economy has, I think, a double significance: if we are able, we must distance ourselves from the mentality that has brought this disaster to happen, but only very few can do what our family has done now more than 40 years ago: leave the city and build some sort of an ARK where, perhaps, the worst of the worst may be avoided. In any case we must learn, wherever we are, to live within rhythm of creation, because that is our future.

I have outlined THE NEAR FUTURE as I see it, sticking my neck out. Of course, I don’t know the Lord’s timetable, but he did warn us to look for the signs around us: these signs do tell me that THE TIME is near.

May 27 2017

I’VE SAID IT BEFORE AND I WILL SAY IT AGAIN.

We are heading for disaster. Of course you know this already. Chances are you will not admit this to yourself or to others. By disaster I mean the end of carbon-driven abundance, an abnormality we have taken for granted.
Why do I say that the end of ‘normality’ is near?
Look around. Have a critical peek at your own daily routine. Is there anything you do that will somewhat slow global deterioration? I am trying it, fully well knowing that it really is impossible to make even a minute difference. True, I bike; true. I grow much of our food; true, we prepare meals from scratch, heat with recycled wood; have solar panels to save on electricity. But whatever we do, there are billions of others who want to engage the energy kick, can’t wait to get a car, have electricity. So in the end, my tiny effort comes to nothing, and really, I still live a more wasteful life than billions of others, because I no longer am able to live ‘responsibly’, fully in tune with God’s creation.
I too am like the idol so well described in Psalm 115:
But their idols are silver and gold,
made by human hands.
5They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see.
6They have ears, but cannot hear,
noses, but cannot smell.
7They have hands, but cannot feel,
feet, but cannot walk,
nor can they utter a sound with their throats.
8Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.

THOSE WHO MAKE THEM WILL BE LIKE THEM.

I too have eyes but refuse to see.
I too have ears but refuse to hear.
I too have a nose but refuse to smell.
I too have ceased to be truly human and have become unfit for the kingdom to come where only full human beings are allowed, people who have eyes that acknowledge and perceive the earth’s degradation around us. I too have ceased to be truly human because I no longer hear the cries of creation, the wailing of the whales, the buzzing of the bees, the eerie silence around the refugees. I too have ceased to be truly human because, as Jesus observed, as recorded in Matthew 11: 17, ‘We played the pipe for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.’

We all are part of creation, but the church favors the HEAVEN HERESY over CREATION CARE by an immense margin. That’s the reason why we no longer know how to mourn, no longer know how to rejoice. Something vital has been lost because the commandment to love God – and thus his creative powers – is no longer believed.

Our future is decided in the ARCTIC.

We have become immune to the message of ARCTIC NEWS which warns us of mass extinction of species, including humans, within one DECADE, before 2027!! It records that, globally, it is 1.65°C warmer today, compared to 1890-1910. Anomalies in the Arctic are even higher. It’s around 6°C warmer at latitudes north of 70°N. This applies in particular to feedbacks associated with loss of snow and ice cover in the Arctic and to methane releases from clathrates contained in sediments at the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean.

The Arctic is melting. The vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, containing almost a million packets of seeds, each a variety of an important food crop, thought to be safe forever, has been flooded by the ‘permafrost’ melt. When it was opened in 2008, the deep permafrost through which the vault was sunk was expected to provide “failsafe” protection against “the challenge of natural or man-made disasters”.

This proves that nothing is PERMANENT anymore. We can take nothing for granted. Everything is at odds with everything else.

Fact is that we face a totally different future. Fact is that we cannot continue in the way we do. The data (data is the plural of datum) are obvious and the logic is clear. We cannot continue as we have been. The situation is simply unsustainable.

“Make America great again” simply means going back to the good old days of the past, the ideal 1950-60’s when fuel was abundant and dirt cheap, when jobs were plenty, when men received a decent, living wage and women knew their place.

The trouble is that we can’t go back because ‘the times they are a’changing’, or rather, they have changed, irrevocably.

Species are disappearing, oceans are acidifying, glaciers are melting and sliding away, with those in Greenland and Antarctica contributing to sea level rise, a phenomenon that is not somewhere out in the future, but right here, right now.

Sell your waterfront property.

The past weeks have shown that waterfront means danger. If you own water front property worth a bundle that’s at risk, sell now and avoid the rush. Get out of Florida and New York City and Amsterdam. Soon the insurers and underwriters might pull your insurance coverage. How much is an uninsurable property on the coast of a rising sea or along a river or lake, worth? As a former real estate appraiser my answer is obvious: not much, if any.

A (very) little bit of study reveals that exponential growth on a finite planet is a bad idea, which means that perpetual exponential growth is an even worse idea. Unfortunately, and quite obviously, perpetual exponential growth lies at the very heart of every so-called ‘modern’ economic model. It’s what we seek as a culture, and is lauded and rewarded in every possible way.
However, exponential growth has taken us in a surprisingly short time from a relatively empty world to a world with plenty of people and their plastic playthings, full of their furniture and empty of what has been there before. The signs of stress can be seen in shrinking forests, falling water tables, eroding soils, disappearing wetlands, rivers either running dry or inundating residential area, and the lists go on, all too familiar to the discerning minds.

The basic problem is oil consumption. The Paris-based International Energy Agency argues that demand will grow, albeit slowly, past 2040. And the two biggest U.S. oil companies, Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. , say peak demand isn’t in sight. In spite of the unbelievable bad consequences of oil use, we are hooked. There’s no way that we will curtail Carbon consumption. We are CARBOHOLICS. Electric cars? Not for many decades.
Our greedy desire for ever more, spells our doom, both for us as the human race and for the planet as a whole. These last 150 years of rampant human feasting on fossil fuels and wallowing in wanton waste is bringing us to the verge of collapse.

Our diet causes die-out.

Look at what we consume: just one example: breakfast cereal travels from land to mouth via many energy-rich processes, and ends up on our palate depleted of oil-rich or fatty substances, which ensures years of ‘durability’ but fails to be ‘real nutrition’. Result: sugar-rich non-food at a cost of 40+ energy calories for one unhealthy food calorie.

Our diet depends on cheap fossil fuel energy and corporate profits, causing cancers to mushroom. On our current course, 8 or 9 billion people will soon be trying to produce more food from degraded soils even as the production of fossil fuels from far away sources, from deeper and deeper wells, requires more and more energy to bring it to market.

Our ability and inclination to enrich the present at the expense of the future and of other species, is as real and as sinful as our tendency to further enrich the wealthy at the expense of the poor as the present TRUMP regime is setting out to implement. To hand back to God the gift of creation (Psalm 115: 16 comes to mind: “The highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to mankind”) in a degraded state capable of supporting less life, less abundantly, and for a shorter future, is surely a sin. If it is a sin to kill and to steal, then certainly it is a sin to destroy carrying capacity, the capacity of the earth to support life now and in the future. To sacrifice future life to protect present luxury and extravagance goes directly against the work of Jesus who came to save the cosmos. We must face the failures of the GROWTH idolatry, the god of our present age.

Our Giant Canoe

Here’s what I read last week: “Think of our situation as if humanity were all together in a giant canoe and nearly everybody is paddling as hard as they can. After all, we’re trying to get somewhere: to improve ourselves, to grow our economy and increase our prosperity. There are goals to be met!
“Along the way we’ve convinced ourselves that this canoe is the best one ever built and it cannot fail us. It is the very pinnacle of achievement. It looks great, and there are creature comforts and pleasant distractions galore. Food has never been more abundant or easier to obtain, new gadgets keep showing up, and (in theory, at least) you can determine for yourself where you want to sit in the canoe.
The people in the front love being there, as they feel powerful and in control. Ironically, though, it’s the few people in the stern who are actually secretly and rather effortlessly steering, but nobody in the rest of the canoe seems to notice or care.
There’s only one thing wrong with this canoe. It’s headed for a gigantic waterfall, and if it tips over the lip, very few will survive. It will be like going over Niagara Falls without a barrel.
A few in the canoe have woken up and noticed this. But their protests are limited to either pulling their paddles out of the water and refusing to propel the canoe any faster, or even trying to futilely paddle backwards against the rest of humanity’s combined efforts.
Neither approach is a solution, mind you. But at least for these ‘awake’ souls, it feels better than paddling mindlessly towards the roaring falls. As it stand today, humanity’s canoe is destined to speed right over the edge. “

Today the greatest tragedy is the absence of a sense of the tragedy, our inhuman lack of creational compassion.

So I am called a pessimist, a doomsayer. I call myself a realist, a person who looks at the present condition and calls a spade a spade. I am too old “to beat around the bush”, as the saying goes.
As far as the church is concerned, its task is over. Just as the ‘world’ cannot change anymore, too set in the groove that inevitably leads to total collapse, the church as an institute has had its day. It too can no longer change course. As Jeremiah laments (51: 9), “We would have healed Babylon, but she cannot be healed; let us leave her and each go to his own land, for her judgement reaches to the skies, it rises as high as the clouds.”

I think that this means that missions is over, because church reform has become impossible 500 years after Luther’s attempt to do so.

“Let people retreat to their own community” and prepare for the return of the Lord, and start learning to live The Gospel of the Earth, in light of the Scriptures. We cannot understand the Holy Writ if we neglect the Holy Earth. We cannot understand the Holy Earth if we neglect the Holy Writ: the two go together.

In these last days, of which the signs are all too clear for the discerning spirits, it is high time that we leave the gods of the age, money, infinite growth, pleasure, whatever, and concentrate, as much as possible, on imagining The Kingdom, the New Creation, to come. Now it is time to implement the plea Jesus left with us: Seek first the Kingdom of God, the welfare of His Creation, and trust that everything else will fall into place.
That is our only hope. Trust and obey. There’s no other Way.

MAY 20 2017

AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH.

For years I had a book by Neil Postman with the above title. The book was written in 1985, thus 32 years ago. I usually put my name on the inside cover and the date and place where I bought it. Not this time, so I am at a loss where and when I got it. I know that it has been in my library for years, if not decades, and, to my shame perhaps, I never read it until this past week. But then I have a lot of unread books.

The reason why I grabbed this paperback with some 180 pages was the TRUMP presidency. I am searching for the reason why so many Americans voted for him, suspecting that it had something to do with TELEVISION, the medium that has gained prominence in the last 6 decades.

I grew up in a very conservative household where even radio was barely tolerated. This changed during the war when the BBC was the only reliable source of information, but by that time even having a radio was punished by deportation to Germany and an almost sure death. It’s then, devoted patriots we were, when we did get a radio complete with short band the only option for listening to London.

The first time I saw TV was in the mid 1940’s when our physics class visited a technical center in downtown Groningen, not far from our school, where PHILIPS, the large Dutch firm then mainly engaged in the manufacture of electrical light bulbs, had installed a prototype. The screen was small and showed a blurry picture of something I don’t recall.

Little did I realize that its successors would immensely influence the entire world, and become the major election tool for politicians everywhere.

I saw TV again in 1953 when we, just married, had a basement apartment – $25 per month rent, including all utilities – and our land lady invited us to watch the LEAFS, then in their glory time.

We finally got a set – second hand – in 1966, but, when the volume switch failed, our family now grown to 7, my wife and I plus 5 kids ranging from 1-12, voted not to repair it.
So our young family grew up without the Boob Tube. Instead our family became addicted to reading. I now think that their later success can be traced to that crucial vote.

Now everybody has TV, and viewing it has become hazardous to our physical and spiritual health.

Here follow some ideas I gathered while reading an article called CARPE DIEM REGAINED: “The Vanishing Art Of Seizing The Day”, by Roman Krznaric.

Television takes up a full 50 per cent of our leisure time, more time than we spend doing any other single activity apart from work or sleep. Persons who live to 75 will have spent around nine years of their lives watching television.
Not me, because basically I dislike TV. I especially loath the commercials, the smiling faces, the phony gaiety, so, if nothing else, that alone makes me squirm when I watch TV.

I am pretty sure that this artificiality has made TV watching folk immune to Trump’s fake counterfeit promises. His campaign boasts remind me of the Devil promising Jesus the world if he only would honor Satan. Not Jesus, but yes, American Christianity did fall for him.

I know, computers and the Internet are TV’s greatest competitors. I admit I spend a lot of time each morning looking at newspapers on line, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Toronto-based Globe and Mail and other sources. My excuse is that I have a blog to write and without these news outlets I simply cannot function. Also I am a news freak: at breakfast at 8 a.m. I never fail to listen to CBC’s World Report on radio.

Yes, I admit, these days I follow the TRUMP tragedy on TV, actually quite fascinating: a classical example of what Solomon once stated, recorded in Proverbs 16: 18: “Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

‘Newscasts’ now are called ‘shows’ and have to be entertaining. Robert MacNeil, a Canadian who, together with Jim Lehrer ran the PBS MacNeill/Lehrer NEWS HOUR, wrote. “The idea is to keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action, and movement. You are required to pay attention to no concept, no character, and no problem for more than a few seconds at the time.”

That sort of news-casting has mangled the minds of the masses, no longer able to think for themselves. Oceans of commercial soundbites have dulled our brains, have disabled us to think coherently and have paved the way for such brainless people as Trump who speaks the TV language and so can communicate to the brainless on their own level of understanding or lack of it.

Trump: I utterly disliked him even before he did politics. Watch Trump speak: he breathes TV with its short sentences, exaggerated claims, switching swiftly to another topic because his attention span is short: the perfect TV personality, shallow, inarticulate, untrue.

Yet even in our digital world TV remains by far the dominant force. According to one of the most detailed studies of how much time US adults spend using different electronic devices, 12 per cent of the daily total is using a smartphone, 9 per cent on a PC, 4 per cent with a tablet and 18 per cent listening to the radio. And the figure that dwarfs them all? Television, at 51 per cent, which we watch at scheduled times and for which we increasingly use “on demand” or “catch-up” services.

TV is to reality what watching a garden show is to getting your hands dirty planting potatoes and petunias, and braving black flies and mosquitoes, as I do daily this spring.

We in Canada and the USA have become the first culture to have substituted secondary, mediated versions of experience for direct experience of the world. It had become normal to sit in front of a screen and spend a substantial portion of each day watching other people live their lives – or actors pretending to be other people – instead of living our own.

In general watching TV is a passive way of engaging with life, because most of the time we are just gazing at the screen. It might be a great way to relax, it might make you laugh or cry, and it can certainly be more informative or enlightening than scrolling through Facebook updates. But it is a poor surrogate for the pulsating sense of aliveness and active engagement that is the essence of seizing the day.

Just imagine, appearing before the Lord on Judgement Day and telling him that a good portion of our waking hours we spent on mind-murdering, body-bulging, soul-starving shows, rather than furthering our knowledge, meditating on matters eternal or visiting or praying or reading or writing a blog, which I find highly rewarding for my own spiritual development.

Take running.

There’s nothing I dread more than to get up three times a week and force myself to run. The first 500 meters is sheer murder, but then my tortured body adjusts and it’s clear sailing from there. It’s so much easier to turn on the TV which tends to switch us off from so much else. For a start, it’s bad news for our sex life: people with a television set in their bedroom have half as much sex as those who don’t. It also makes us less active: heavy TV viewers tend to do less sport or physical exercise.

High television consumption is associated with low levels of civic and political engagement, for example in volunteering, voting and protesting. And it isn’t great for kids: pre-schoolers who spend lots of time looking at screens spend less time in creative play and constructive problem-solving.

We really amuse ourselves to DEATH.

Television will kill you: it kills the mind and it kills the body: total death.
I came across a startling article in the British Journal Of Sports Medicine that concluded: “On average, every single hour of TV viewed after the age of 25 reduces the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 minutes.” That’s bad news for Trump, who sleeps only 3-4 hours per day, never reads, and watches TV a lot. No wonder he is what he is: basically a child in charge of a grown-up job and bad news for the USA. Ecclesiastes 10:16 warns us: Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child.
He’s a striking example how TV dumbs a person down.

Compare that to running. Each hour of running, even at a slow pace, extends life by seven hours. Thus my 2 hours of running each week, one hundred hours each year, over more than 50 years – I started running in 1961 – have added 7 x 5000 = 35,000 hours to my life span, or 35,000 divided by 8760 (annual hours) = more than 3 years.

Oh, my disciplined Calvinistic temperament!

Yet my running also infuses my mind with new ideas, new word-plays, and stops my aging process to some extent, while inactive television viewing retards everything that a person possesses: killing minds and bodies and stifles the spirit.

No wonder, based on the study of tens of thousands of people, TV viewing, and other forms of sedentary behavior such as sitting at a computer all day, go hand in hand with increased risk of death, particularly from cardiovascular disease. Experts in preventative medicine are starting to recognize that human beings simply aren’t designed for long periods of sitting still. Doing so may, for instance, have a detrimental effect on how our bodies process fats and other substances, leading to greater risk of serious heart problems.

TV is an addiction.

The curious thing about the above arguments is that they are unlikely to convince you to watch less television. The reason is that TV has powerful addictive qualities. People can have a strong sense that they should be watching less but find themselves unable to reduce their viewing time: surveys reveal that 40 per cent of adults and 70 per cent of teenagers say they watch too much TV, and 10 per cent of adults describe themselves as addicts.

Researchers in Germany found that people who try to resist the urge to watch television fail around half the time, and are much better at resisting the desire to nap or snack. Other studies show that the longer people watch, the less enjoyment they get from it – yet they don’t have the willpower to switch it off even if the program is boring. Think how many times you’ve come to the end of a program or film and thought: “Why did I just waste my time watching that junk?” It happens to me more often than I’d like to admit.

Simultaneously stimulating and relaxing, watching television develops into an almost physiological craving: we become desperate for an injection on a daily basis. The addictive nature of television makes it disconcertingly similar to the happy drug soma used to dope up the inhabitants of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Ultimately, is it really worth granting nine years of our precious existence to the second-hand pleasures of television when we might be having more direct experience of the world?

Oh yes, there are good things on TV. Most of them are BBC or PBS originated. But even then, I prefer reading. I always have 2-3 books on the go. Nowadays books can be bought for a buck or two at two places in our village, hardcover in immaculate condition. I also buy books because I know that the time will come when through some mishap TV and Internet will disappear. Then what? That’s when our spiritual death will really become apparent. I believe that TV and Internet will disappear for extended periods, maybe forever, because our entire mode of life has FINITE written on it, and there is no PLAN B.

This is becoming more and more evident by the day with Global Heating and an economy now almost totally floating on DEBT, a true PONZI scheme, that must fail sooner than later.

Swear off TV. Read more. Start running. Extend life so that you may face your Maker with a degree of confidence.

May 13 2017

THE AMERICAN RELIGION AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.

Gnosticism.

My NIV Study Bible, in the introduction to the three letters of John, warns us for GNOSTICISM, calling it ”One of the most dangerous heresies.”

Its central teaching is that spirit is entirely good and matter is entirely evil. From this unbiblical dualism flow five important errors:
1. the human body, being matter, is evil. God who is spirit is wholly good.
2. Salvation is an escape from the body, achieved not by faith in Christ, but by special knowledge – gnosis in Greek, hence GNOSTICISM.
3. Christ’s true humanity is denied.
4. The body is evil and thus can be treated harshly.
5. Since matter is considered evil, creation is there to exploit and breaking of the law has no moral consequence.

These 5 rules explain a lot. Jesus is not seen as ‘the door’ to God. John 14: 6 says of Jesus, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Salvation is seen as escape, hence the RAPTURE error, and THE LEFT BEHIND lies.

The rejection of Obama Care, ensuring the health of the poor millions to be paid by taxing the rich, is contrary to Gnosticism, thus to be rejected. After all the body is evil and can be treated harshly. This really can be seen in the people in the South of the USA where this heresy is being played out in obesity and diabetes. Also breaking the law is no big deal and thus killing doctors who do abortions is condoned.

Enter Prof. Dr. Harold Bloom, America’s foremost literary critic. Here’s what he writes in his unique book with the telling title of THE AMERICAN RELIGION.

Last week I wrote on EVANGELISM, a word derived from Eu-good- and Angelos- message. Bloom in his The AMERICAN RELIGION calls it not Good News but KAKANGELISM, from the Greek Kakas = bad. On page 32 Bloom writes that, “I argue in this book that the American Religion, which is so prevalent among us, masks itself as Protestant Christianity, yet has ceased to be Christian.” He calls the USA “a dangerously religion-soaked, even religious-mad, society.”

Bloom’s central point –page 38 – is “that we all are affected by the consequence of our national – gnostic – faith.”

Gnosticism has as its root the Greek word “gnosis’, which means ‘knowledge’. Knowing it all means that we don’t have to learn anything, which is at the root of (page 43) “Anti-intellectualism (which) pervades American political, social and moral life.”

The ‘HEAVEN HERESY’ is purely Gnostic. It pervades the totality of North American church life, even of what is commonly known as THE REFORMED FAITH, as expressed in Presbyterian and Reformed churches.

The American Religion, now so agitating against Islam, says Bloom, actually resembles the Muslim religion. “Inerrancy for both Islam in the Koran, and for the American Religion in the Bible, is an unconscious metaphor for the repression of all individuality: it is a conversion of the Bible ‘into a statue or an icon’.”

Enough of Harold Bloom, and back to the reality of CHRISTIAN politics in the USA.

Yes, there is something like THE AMERICAN RELIGION, a strange mixture of GNOSTICISM and GODDINESS, a word not to be confused with godliness. GODDINESS is a word I coined to portray the emphasis in THE AMERICAN RELIGION on God rather than on Christ. It also implies that it prefers the Old Testament over the New Testament out of which CHRISTIANITY was born.

Its leaders, Franklin Graham, son of Billy, and Jerry Falwell Jr, son of Jerry Falwell Sr. the founder of Liberty University in Lynchburgh, Virginia, proclaim a gospel that is far removed from the teachings of Jesus. For them, it seems, Jesus does not exist. The God they worship so fanatically reflects more accurately the Old Testament mentality evident in such lines as “Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.” (Psalm 137: 9). Such cruelty is not found in the New Testament, but this sort of attitude is quite plain in the Republican stance on healthcare. The health plan the (Christian) Republicans want to enact, condemns the poor to premature death, makes pregnancy for them impossible to pay and, in essence, has the same outcome as dashing babies to death against the rocks.

A religion of anger.

These people, full of ‘goddiness’, obsessed with furious Old Testament wrath, are a far cry from Jesus who – Luke 18: 16 – said: “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” American Religion has no clue about the Kingdom and there’s no ‘Jesus sentiment’ in their make-up. On the contrary, the National Rifle Association finds a welcome there, in total contrast with the words of Jesus: (Matthew 26: 52) “For all who draw the sword (carry a gun) will die by the sword (be killed by a bullet.)

Two weeks ago, in the Rose Garden, after being introduced by “Christian” Vice President Mike Pence, Trump addressed a crowd of prominent church leaders, flanked by his “spiritual adviser,” the televangelist Paula White, who sells “resurrection seeds” for the low, low price of $1,144.
This longtime televangelist and senior Pastor of New Destiny Christian Center in Apopka, Florida, Paula White offered her followers an Easter Sunday deliverance from a spiritual death sentence for a $1,144 “resurrection seed”, a fee, she says, was set by God.
The amount of $1,144 is based on John 11 verse 44, and refers to Jesus resurrecting Lazarus.

It reminds me of Martin Luther, the Reformer who, in 1517, protested the sale of indulgences giving people an entry to heaven for a fee. It gave Martin Luther the incentive to challenge the Roman Catholic Church which culminated in his affixing 95 theses on the door of the Wittenberg church, starting the REFORMATION on October 31 1517, soon 500 years ago.

On the eve of the first National Day of Prayer of his presidency, Donald Trump invited his closest evangelical advisors to join him for a private, long-awaited dinner celebration at the White House.

For the first time since they formed last June, the members of Trump’s campaign advisory board were meeting together not in weekly phone calls but in person, having already accomplished what a year ago many thought was a long shot.

Less than four months into Trump’s presidency, their biggest hope of getting a conservative Supreme Court justice on the bench had been reached, and their supporters’ other objectives were in sight.

As they gathered in the Blue Room, news was spreading through Washington that Trump was preparing an executive order to relax prohibitions on religious organizations’ political activities, and the House of Representatives was preparing to vote on a repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

Most of Trump’s evangelical advisory board flew in for the event. In addition to Trump’s longtime spiritual advisor Paula White, there were Southern Baptist pastor Robert Jeffress, evangelist Franklin Graham, Focus on the Family Founder James Dobson, former Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, South Carolina televangelist Mark Burns, Faith and Freedom Coalition chairman Ralph Reed, and others.
They were joined by top White House officials, including Vice President Pence, Second Lady Karen Pence, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon.

These guests at Trump’s table asked him questions about the health care bill, and Trump indicated that he was very positive about the passage. As we now know the health matter is still in limbo.

The evening, guests say, was more a celebration of their victories so far than a discussion on future policy. Trump took photos with the guests in the Red Room, Graham kick off festivities with a prayer, and a dinner of shrimp scampi with parsley butter, red wine braised short ribs, and wild ramp gnocchi was served. White presented Trump with a gift on behalf of the group from the Museum of the Bible, a framed page of an original King James Bible from 1611 A.D., “a Bible which as you know was commissioned by a political leader in service to the church,” she said.

Evangelical musician Steven Curtis Chapman performed his songs “Be Still and Know that I am God” and “The Lord’s Prayer.” Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, gave a benediction, and Trump then invited everyone up to the residence for a brief after party, complete with a tour of the Lincoln bedroom and the Truman balcony, before shaking hands again.

“It was a reunion more than anything,” Bachmann says. “For people of faith, there was so much trepidation about what would happen in this election. They really felt that if Mrs. Clinton had prevailed it would have spelled a diminution of the nation, the nation would have morally suffered.”

The evening reaffirmed the bond Trump has forged with evangelical and social conservative leaders who propelled him victory in November, one based on shared policy ambitions and often couched in prayer events. Jeffress, who preached a private sermon for Trump the morning of his inauguration, addressed the group briefly, reminding Trump, “Mr. President, we are going to be your most loyal friends,” and “We thank God every day that you are the president of the United States.” Trump at one point took the podium to a standing ovation, and spoke of the large numbers of evangelical voters who elected him in November. Exit polls showed 80% of white evangelicals backed Trump.

The next morning, the leaders gathered again, this time in the Rose Garden for the signing of Trump’s latest executive order. “This won’t be a token and this won’t be a bone that is thrown,” Bachmann says. “We will see the goal of preserving religious liberty fulfilled.”

The Judas comparison.

The gathering of the ‘CHRISTIAN’ leaders at the White House reminded me of Judas, one of the twelve disciples of Jesus, who, driven by lust for money, and the wrong concept of Jesus’ mission on earth, betrayed him.

The leaders of THE AMERICAN RELIGION are doing exactly the same thing. They totally misunderstand the meaning of the gospel, captioned in John 3: 16, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son as an offering to buy back the COSMOS from the great adversary.” 1 John 5: 19 clearly outlines ‘that the whole world (cosmos) is under the control of the evil one.’

The very leaders who are charged with preaching the renewal of the earth are betraying this mission by endorsing the most powerful politician in the world who has vouched –and now is implementing – the destruction of God’s Holy Creation-Word, perfectly in line with THE AMERICAN RELIGION which has severed all ties with the Son of God, whose humanity they deny.

Jesus always calls himself THE SON OF MAN, which means that he personifies the HUMAN RACE. Colossians 1 portrays him as ‘the first-born of creation’. Only as perfect God and perfect Man could he act as The Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.

THE AMERICAN RELIGION denies that, and with its leaders associating themselves with the most nihilistic president ever, is certain proof that what generally is believed to be Christian, no longer deserves that label.

Bonhoeffer was correct when he wrote that God has granted American Christianity no Reformation of the church of Jesus Christ by the Word of God.”

THE AMERICAN RELIGION sees the human body, being matter, as evil, and God who is spirit as wholly good.
It also denies Christ’s true humanity, and sees salvation as an escape from the body, because the body is evil. It also regards creation as an object of exploitation, all pure symptoms of GNOSTICISM.

This dangerous heresy explains the political climate of the USA and prepares the ground for welcoming the coming of the ANTICHRIST with open arms.

Just as the church in Jesus’ days condemned him to death, so the church of our days condemns his beloved COSMOS to death, hastening the coming of the New Earth where finally God’s laws will rule forever.