Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

OCTOBER 11 2015
Does violence against creation and the killing by humans have a common root?

There are 33,000 people in America who lose their lives to gun violence each year and more than twice as many are injured by bullets. There also were 994 mass shootings in 1,004 days. These mass shootings caused 1,260 deaths and 3606 injured, the latest just last week in Oregon.
Welcome to “The City of the Hill, the envy of all nations”. Or is it? The Oregon school shooting is evidence that the US response to gun violence “has become routine”, Barack Obama says: “The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it is routine. We have become numb to this.”
Obama continued: “What’s also routine is that somebody, somewhere, will comment and say ‘Obama politicized this issue.’ Well this is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic.”
Of course anything Obama says is contested by the slate of Republican contenders for the presidency who always object to more gun restrictions. One of them, Jeb Bush, said: “We’re in a difficult time in our country and I don’t think more government is necessarily the answer to this. I think we need to reconnect ourselves with everybody else. It’s just very sad to see.”

Bush continued: “But I resist the notion — and I had this challenge as governor — because we had — look, stuff happens, there’s always a crisis. And the impulse is always to do something and it’s not necessarily the right thing to do.”
“Stuff happens.” What is true of indifference to gun-killing by the Republican candidates for the presidency- and Canada’s Harper regime – also applies to our natural world. “Stuff happens.” That we’re sitting on planetary boundaries right now, and that these systems may flip from one stable state to another unstable point, is not mentioned. That the Amazon rainforests may tip into a savannah, that the Arctic loses its ice cover and instead of reflecting the sun’s rays starts to absorb them in water, and that the glaciers all melt and cannot feed the rivers — is not a campaign issue, because the majority of people don’t believe that.

Nevertheless there are more and more signs that we may have reached a saturation point. Forests show the first signs of absorbing less carbon. The oceans are rapidly acidifying as they absorb more CO2, harming fish and coral. Global average temperatures keep rising.
Both in Canada and in the USA the next governments there will face a world that suddenly may tip into a state where the planet no longer can absorb the daily doses of pollutants we pour into its air, its waters and its soils. When nature goes against you, watch out.

“Stuff happens.” 33,000 are killed each year in the USA by guns alone. That works out to almost 100 deadly shootings each day. “Stuff happens.” Have gun, will kill. The Harper party in Canada killed the gun control law. Let’s pray that he will be soundly defeated on October 19. No Christian in his or her right mind – those loving God and his entire creation – can in good conscience vote for this politician who had gutted environmental laws, has muzzled scientists who spoke out on environmental issues and fired a scientist who composed a song called “The Harperman” faintly ridiculing the Prime Minister.

“Thou shalt not kill” is one of the Ten Commandments. It also applies to nature. Killing nature means killing people who depend on it. That’s why degradation of the one leads to degradation of the other. That degradation also applies to disdain for other religions. During the current Canadian election, that same Harper man is using the niqab issue – the all-face covering by Muslim women – to black-ball all Islam followers, making fear for certain people an election issue. Beware of Christians – like Harper – who believe in heaven as their ultimate destination: they defile creation and they think they have a special line to God knowing who will be saved and who will burn in hell. Beware of Christians who hate sinners but condone sin.
Possession of guns kills. We have to start the process of curtailing our gun culture, and I don’t say that as an anti-gun absolutist, but as a person who while serving in the military from 1949-51 was trained to instruct young recruits how to use guns to kill others. In my instructor days, when bayonets were still fitted to rifles I even had to make these young conscripts simulate killing people with that sharp tool by sticking it into bales of straw and yelling their heads off.

I remember once going hunting for the first and last time in my life. When I had a rabbit in the scope, I simply could not pull the trigger. That’s how fainthearted a person I have become. I have a grandson who hunts deer with a bow and arrow somewhere in Wisconsin where there are too many deer. I can see the use there.
But to kill people?

Well, wait a minute. We kill creation every day. We already have killed half of the large wild animals in the world. We already have killed almost all the large fish in the seas. We already have appropriated half of the entire earth-mass for the exclusive use for us humans. We kill thousands of people in the Middle East by our inhuman policies. We kill a cruel million people every year in automobile accidents and maim or injure many millions more. In addition, untold billions are breathing in lethal gases from our auto tail pipes. Thanks to Climate Change we soon will kill millions in Africa and Asia by inducing either too much rain or not enough.
In a word: we all are a thoroughly murderous bunch.
No wonder there is a lot of fear out there. Fear kills. Mass shootings that take place in the USA almost every day come forth from fear. Instead of creating awareness that guns kill, and that only abstinence, total absence of guns in one’s possession can guarantee safety, the opposite is happening: people engage in what can only be described as panic buying and ammunition hoarding. People are buying guns out of fear. Television feeds on this fear, featuring shows that feed on fear, pitching the message that there is no one and nothing we can trust, not family, not neighbors, and certainly not the authorities.

Yes, there is reason for fear because we have created a world that now can, at any moment, tip into disaster. But the real ‘fear’ is missing: there is no longer the fear of the Lord. The angels in Bethlehem’s fields, who appeared at the shepherds there to announce the birth of Jesus, started with the words: “Fear not.” When Jesus was confronted by heavily armed soldiers to arrest him and Peter pulled a gun injuring one of the guards, Jesus healed the man and said the memorable words: (Matt. 26: 22) “they who draw a gun will be killed by a gun”. Remember also Jesus words of turning the other cheek?

People are afraid.

These people are afraid. Ignorance breeds fear. People no longer know what Jesus has said about violence. Thanks to TV and the conservative media and, especially, the gun industry they are convinced that the time is coming when sales of weapons, particularly some types of weapons will be restricted or forbidden. They are afraid of growing populations of people they don’t trust. Some are even afraid that a time will come when they will have to defend themselves against the government itself.
Harper and other right-wing politicians use fear to control them. Fear of the unknown, fear of what’s different, fear of change. But also fear of communists, fear of muslims and fear of people who have different skin colors, customs, rituals and cultures. We possess a myriad of -often dormant- fears, and it is very easy to play into them, and get people to support those who promise to protect them. “Trust me, I’ll keep you comfy, I’ll make sure things stay just the same.”

Fortunately gun laws are different in Canada. If I were to buy a gun I would have to write an exam, undergo a thorough character test, and face all sorts of obstacles before I can lay my hands on this lethal weapon. Thanks God. Gun-related deaths here are a fraction of those to our Southern neighbor.
There fear is winning, even though crime is down. There fear is winning and so are massacres because these don’t lead to fewer gun sales, but more. There fear is winning, induced by anti-government militias and hate groups. There fear is winning with the result that there are now close to as many guns in the USA as people — with the gun industry producing millions more each year. There they have reached a supersaturation point as a culture. And with that many guns in circulation, too many will invariably make their way into the hands of people with ill intent.

If you have read my writings for a while then you know that the future does not look bright: on the contrary, We are approaching the end of an era: a time when economic growth, that goal that politicians always promise but are now unable to achieve, will cause increasing hardship. The debt we have created, not only to the environment but also on all levels of society, and I refer to monetary debt here, must be repaid in one form or another. Chances that we will have a severe recession, even a depression, are increasing exponentially. Already we see an immense increase in natural disasters, either too much or too little rain, resulting in extra costs and extra taxes. People will become more afraid, and have real reason to be so. They will not turn to the Lord and accept what is to come as signs that the return of the Lord is near, and greet these signs with delight and anticipation. No, with an increasing lack of biblical insight, their fear will turn to more violence and with the massive amount of lethal weapons everywhere mass murders will become commonplace.

What to do?

With physical violence we can turn other cheek, as Jesus did, but with bullets flying around, once one cheek is hit, that’s it. That’s the reason the bible advises us to avoid the conflict altogether: “Come out of it” the Bible advises repeatedly, both in the New Testament, Revelation 18: 4, and in the Old Testament, both in Isaiah and Jeremiah. We don’t have to court danger. It is prudent to run from it. Jesus himself, apparently referring to destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, advises his people to get out of the city while there is yet time. The mentioning of ‘the great desolation of which Daniel speaks’ in that ominous chapter of Matthew 24 – I advise you to look it up and read it aloud – refers to world-wide pollution, not only the senseless killing by guns, but also Climate Change that creates havoc everywhere. There too Jesus reminds us to seek refuge somewhere else.

“Come out of it?”

That is easier said than done. In Jesus’ time people mostly lived in small villages. Then only Jerusalem was a large city.
Today almost everywhere people are city dwellers. The Chinese government has relocated hundreds of millions to the cities, even constructing some 70 million apartments where nobody lives. Coming out of the cities and flee the violence and safeguard one’s existence has become almost impossible. Cities have the jobs. Farming has become big-city enterprises. Although I have some ideas, it calls for imaginative and communal thinking to find an answer there. Perhaps there is no longer an answer. Perhaps the existence of cities is an unnatural phenomenon: Cain was the builder of cities! He killed Abel, the first murder victim, who was a country fellow. The city kills the country. Violence against the first human being was the start of the death of nature.

More about that next week.

OCTOBER 4 2015

Is Capitalism a religion?

Let me take a look back, a really long look back. I think the root of Capitalism appeared in the Garden of Eden. In Genesis 2:9 it is recorded that God made trees to come out of the ground, ‘trees pleasing to the eye and good for food’. Then in the next chapter Genesis 3: 6, when the human race had a closer look at the trees, prodded by God’s archenemy, trees were suddenly seen in a different light: ‘trees good for food and pleasing to the eye’. There you have it: the order reversed, the beginning of capitalism: good for food, good to feast upon, good for profit, never mind the beauty of creation, never mind creational collapse.
In last week’s blog I defined religion as a belief or condition that is pervasive in all our actions, that motivates all of our life.
We know that in the Western world the condition what is generally defined as ‘religion’ is very much on the wane. In my neck of the woods, a municipality with 6500 people inhabiting an area the size of the city of Hamilton with over 500,000 people no more than 200 people attend church on a given Sunday, or 3 percent, mostly old people. Yet we call our nation a Christian country. The children and grandchildren of these people, by and large, never darken the doors of the church except for funerals. So what is their religion because nobody is not ‘not-religious’?
‘Not religious’ means that God and Jesus do not play a role in their lives. They never pray even though the exclamation “Oh my God” is heard quite frequently. Still the monotheistic faith-traditions have not just disappeared into the thin air of modernity. Islam is the most pious of them, perhaps because it requires work: it involves the keeping of the five all important religious duties: confession of faith, prayer, the giving of alms, fasting and the pilgrim trek to Mecca. Islamic cultures also contain strong currents of resistance to Western consumer individualism because they are perceived as decadent and nihilistic, and they are. But in the West, Christianity has lost much of its power to resist the new god that has (and is) conquering the old ones (just like Christianity did in its displacement of Roman deities). And that power is Capitalism, which has become our first truly world religion, binding all corners of the globe into a worldview and set of values whose religious role we overlook only because we insist on seeing them as secular.

Capitalism comes with its own theology.

Economics is the new theology of this global religion of the market. It has different expressions, but the overall aim is the same: consumerism is its highest good; its language of hedge funds and derivatives as incomprehensibly involved as the Christian teachings about the Trinity or Predestination. Its mantra is “Accumulate, accumulate”. Where in Islam the slogan is “God is great”, meaning Allah, in Capitalism it is “Greed is great,” something that, I think, started in Paradise, the Garden of Eden, when economics- good for food- had priority over the aesthetic – pleasing to the eye.

We are all religious.

Human beings are innately religious. Nobody is not ‘not-religious’. Watching Stephen Harper, Canada’s Prime Minister fighting for his political future, outline his re-election platform, is watching religion at work: lower taxes, economic growth, balanced budgets: the trinity of Capitalistic faith. Of course the other contestants believe the same. That we live in a finite world, that perpetual growth only takes place in un-treated cancer cells, is never mentioned. That perpetual growth has given us the cancer of Climate Change is never mentioned. To say that, to openly admit that, is to question the god of our age, and that is sacrilege.
Any intervention in the “world of business” is perceived as a threat to the “natural order of things,” a direct challenge to the “wisdom of the market.” That the “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”, that awe for the greatness of creation and its holiness, must be observed, goes directly against the grain of capitalism. No, capitalism demands that its dogma must be applied universally, must be observed as the dominant religion of our time. The TPP – the Trans Pacific Partnership- is just the latest example.
Yes, Capitalism is a religion. We sacrifice our time, our families, our children, our forests, our seas and our land on the altar of the market, the god to whom we owe our deepest allegiance, all the hallmarks of a (false) religion. The Bible may say that blessed are the poor, that blessed are those who put their trust in the New Creation to come, but that is seen as undemocratic. When Jesus says that “my kingdom is not of this world’, then he simply means that, as 1 John 5 : 19 says,” the whole world is under the control of the evil one,” and Jesus wants no part of the world ruled by Satan, a world dominated by Capitalism, our present world.
Shunning the consumer paradise for a life of self-sufficiency, taking in refugees, of whatever color or creed, devoting one’s life to alleviating the plight of others, pursuing a “the earth is holy” policy, all that is not an optional matter for most faith-community members: it is their holy duty.

Are the old religions are no longer viable?

How did this transition come about? The Lord’s Prayer, still somewhat in vogue today, has two striking lines right at the beginning: “Hallowed be thy name” and “Thy Kingdom come.” Most of us who utter these words have no clue what they mean. The church by and large avoids explaining these phrases because they are so totally controversial. That they mean that the earth is holy and that the kingdom is the new earth to come, and that thus our entire focus is not on “our daily bread” (which is mistranslated in that same prayer) but that we must live for “the new creation” is never preached, because it goes against the capitalistic creed.

Must we fight Capitalism?

Capitalism stares at us the minute we turn on TV or radio or open a newspaper. It is everywhere, while the old religions have given up the fight by preaching ‘heaven’ or ‘rapture’, delegating the earth to a place of non-relevance. It is sad but true that the old-time religion is only good for a very few, mostly the elderly, and they often are exposed to a distorted gospel.
Beginning in the late middle ages and reaching its first plateau in the late eighteenth century, the capitalist market began to assume an autonomous, god-like existence. Protestant believers began to measure God’s favor by their economic success. Economic success was the means to achieve the end of God’s favor and eternal salvation. Eventually, the means, economic blessings, displaced God himself. God was now The Market–the Source of all Hopes. Who disputes the gospel of sustained economic development? Even Jesus would drive an S.U.V, as the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, the once formidable American leader of the Christian Right, wanted us to believe.

Have we been warned?

Eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith warned us over two centuries ago that the market was a “dangerous system because it corrodes the shared common values it needs to restrain its excesses”. Two hundred years later, Polyani – a Nobel Prize winner – argued against a system that annihilated “the human and natural substance of society.”
Today the demands made on the physical world are all penetrating. German philosopher Habermas in his “colonization of the lifeworld,” wrote: “Doesn’t everyone know that the god we serve requires clear cut forests, depleted oceans, empty oil wells, toxics dumped into the biosphere? “ Genesis 3: 6 all over again.
Everyone also knows, deep down, in their heart of hearts, that the god we serve actually has no life of its own. In Capital, volume 1, Marx imagined that the god of the market was like a vampire who “lives only by sucking living labor and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” This monster feeds on the life force of the natural and human worlds. It needs men and women as slaves who have energy and the motivation to work endlessly with others to produce the goods. Even prolonging the working day, says Marx, “only slightly quenches the vampire thirst for the living blood of labor.”

And then there is Jesus.

When Jesus came to earth, forever to retain the status of both God and Human, he could have been a human being of any description, stature, degree and condition; and yet he chose to be poor. The English poet Christopher Harvey said of him in the seventeenth century:
It was Thy Choice, whilst Thou on Earth didst stay, And hadst not whereupon Thy Head to lay.
No wonder that throughout the Middle Ages Jesus is appearing not just as God, but as a pauper. I am convinced that Jesus had some basic misgivings about money – just like we do at times- because we all know that wealth and its acquisition makes people do crazy and often dishonest things. Look what Volkswagen did. “The love of money is the root of all evils,” is Paul’s warning to Timothy and this probably was one reason why Jesus did not like money. If I understand Jesus correctly, I think that with Jesus there also was a deeper reason, something very personal. I get the impression that Jesus went out of his way to avoid contact with money and was even loath to touch the stuff. Why do I make that assumption? Well, Jesus has a perfect recall of everything, past, present and future and so had perfect insight, hindsight and foresight into everything. We will we recall that his betrayal, his suffering and death was directly associated with money. How would we feel if we know that money would eventually kill me? Well, I think that this view governed Jesus’ attitude towards money and perhaps even towards economic theory.
Take the feeding of those thousands: Jesus knows that if these people had gone off to buy bread and fish in the neighboring stores, the merchants, being good businessmen, would have suddenly increased the prices of these basic food items because of greater demand. The law of supply and demand is certainly not a latter-day invention: it has existed as long as people have traded. That’s what economics is all about: charge high when everybody needs it. So what did Jesus do to forestall this price-gouging? He simply by-passed the economic law of supply and demand and created bread and fish ex nihilo- out of nothing- well, almost out of nothing.
Then there is that so uncharacteristic incident where Jesus almost went berserk when he chased the money changers out of the temple, upsetting much more than the tables. After all having these business people do their work in the temple was an age-old tradition and necessary to keep the Jewish house of worship functioning properly because only certain kinds of money were accepted in the temple. And how else to get the proper animals for sacrifice? I think it was money and its abuses that made Jesus so angry. Another, more indirect, indication: I find it curious that Judas, the unredeemed among the saints, carried the purse and handled the finances: Judas, who loved money more than Jesus. In the end he ended up with thirty pieces of silver and then discovered that money as an idol wants our very lives. In that sense we are much closer to Judas than to Jesus. With ‘we’ I include all people in the over rich West. Also to me a tip-off was Jesus’ great disdain for the nominal value of currency, evident when Mary spent perhaps a year’s income on that precious oil. “So what,” Jesus remarked, “so what if such a large sum was spent. It is only money.” Or consider the occasion when Peter was asked if Jesus would pay the temple tax. “Of course,” is Peter’s immediate reaction, “of course Jesus pays.” But for Jesus this was not such a straightforward matter. Why this reluctance to pay the temple tax? Well, I have my theory about this. I think Jesus knew that perhaps this very money given to the temple was going to buy his life and ensure his death.
Where Jesus lived without money, our lives are centered around it. Jesus once made a radical statement: “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” In our Western world everything is about money: the stock market, the strength of the dollar, the price of gold: three items mentioned in almost every newscast. Let’s not kid ourselves: Mammon is God, the Dollar is King in the world and its possession a holy grail. We now put a price tag on everything. First on Jesus – 30 pieces of silver – and now also on the rest of creation: the woods are paved, the mountains mined, the seas eaten, species eliminated: all because of money. We all participate in that criminal act. Jesus was sold for the price of a slave: we are selling creation to serve us as a slave.

An idol always wants sacrifice. In our case we sacrifice the whole earth and with it our very selves.

ISLAM VERSUS CHRISTIANITY

Before I try to outline what Christianity and Islam have in common and where they differ, I first have to talk about `religion`. If you have followed me at all, you know where I come from. I am an adherent of what is commonly called The Christian Religion, even though I have some difficulty with the way Christianity is expressed. I must say that this past week Pope Francis did go a long way in expressing the essence of the Christian Religion, which includes concern for animals and seeing all of creation as holy. However he completely fails to give women the 50 percent place they deserve in all functions, including being priests and eventually becoming a pope – which means papa or father – thus giving the world a mamma.

What is religion?

If I am to talk about religion, then a description is needed. I was brought up in a family which saw life as religion and was exposed to sermons in a staunch Calvinistic setting. For my first 45 years of life this meant going to church twice on Sunday. One sermon was always on the Heidelberg Catechism (dated from the 17th century), a series based on 52 Sundays and 129 questions and answers. The very first question of Lord’s Day 1 is: What is your only comfort in life and in death” The answer: That I am not my own but belong – body and soul, in life and death – to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.
I still see the Reformed tradition as having the greatest potential for developing an all-encompassing creational life-style in preparation for the re-appearing of the Lord.

Karen Armstrong has written a lot on Religion. She is a former nun (Roman Catholic) who has become a well-regarded author. Here is a quote from one of her articles.
“But perhaps we should ask, instead, how it came about that we in the west developed our view of religion as a purely private pursuit, essentially separate from all other human activities, and especially distinct from politics…. Secularism has become so natural to us that we assume it emerged organically, as a necessary condition of any society’s progress into modernity. Yet it was in fact a distinct creation, which arose as a result of a peculiar concatenation of historical circumstances; we may be mistaken to assume that it would evolve in the same fashion in every culture in every part of the world.

“We now take the secular state so much for granted that it is hard for us to appreciate its novelty, since before the modern period, there were no “secular” institutions and no “secular” states in our sense of the word. Their creation required the development of an entirely different understanding of religion, one that was unique to the modern west. No other culture has had anything remotely like it, and before the 18th century, it would have been incomprehensible even to European Catholics. The words in other languages that we translate as “religion” invariably refer to something vaguer, larger and more inclusive. The Arabic word din signifies an entire way of life, and the Sanskrit dharma covers law, politics, and social institutions as well as piety. The Hebrew Bible has no abstract concept of “religion”; and the Talmudic rabbis would have found it impossible to define faith in a single word or formula, because the Talmud was expressly designed to bring the whole of human life into the ambit of the sacred (I underlined that). The Oxford Classical Dictionary firmly states: “No word in either Greek or Latin corresponds to the English ‘religion’ or ‘religious’.” In fact, the only tradition that satisfies the modern western criterion of religion as a purely private pursuit is Protestant Christianity, which, like our western view of “religion”, was also a creation of the early modern period.

“The prophets of Israel had harsh words for those who assiduously observed the temple rituals but neglected the plight of the poor and oppressed. Jesus’s famous maxim to “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” was not a plea for the separation of religion and politics. Nearly all the uprisings against Rome in first-century Palestine were inspired by the conviction that the Land of Israel and its produce belonged to God, so that there was, therefore, precious little to “give back” to Caesar. When Jesus overturned the money-changers’ tables in the temple, he was not demanding a more spiritualised religion. For 500 years, the temple had been an instrument of imperial control and the tribute for Rome was stored there. Hence for Jesus it was a “den of thieves”. The bedrock message of the Qur’an is that it is wrong to build a private fortune but good to share your wealth in order to create a just, egalitarian and decent society. Gandhi would have agreed that these were matters of sacred import: “Those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.”

So far my quote of Ms. Armstrong.

So what is religion?

Religion, as I have underlined in the Armstrong article, really means that the whole of human life lies into the ambit of the sacred. There is no sacred and secular. So when I quote the Heidelberg Catechism and the answer to question 1 “That I am not my own but belong – body and soul, in life and death – to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ, then I have to see that in the context of the totality of my life. Belonging to Jesus Christ means abiding by his teaching. There is no more compact statement concerning this than in John 3: 16, those so well-known words: “God so loved the world that he gave his only son who by his death bought all of creation back from the great usurper, the current Prince of this world, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.” (My free translation).

That the Evil one and not God rules the world at this moment became again eminently plain this past week when VW – Volkswagen – was caught cheating on exhausts, poisoning the air for greater market share. Jesus came to set the world right. That is the basic message of Christianity which will only happen when he returns. If I want to belong to Jesus Christ body and soul, then my total life has to be devoted to love the world, not as it is today, but as it ought to be. Pope Francis, visiting the highest polluting nation in the world on a per capita basis, personifies that message more than most other church leaders today.
The USA is the most Christian of nations, yet those vying for the post to represent the Republican Party in the next presidential election say that the Pope is wrong when he mentions the economy. He should stick to ‘religion’, a clear indication that religion has no place in business or politics.

Harold Bloom, distinguished professor at Yale and America’s foremost literary critic, in his The American Religion writes that “We (Americans) think we are a Christian nation, but we are not. We are American Gnostics, believers in a pre-Christian tradition of individual divinity. The American self stands outside creation.” No wonder what presents itself as Christian has nothing to do with Christ. In that sense America is a pagan country.
By and large Christianity is no longer a religion but it has become a cult, grossly distorting the Bible and seeing nature as something to be exploited. The Pope cannot change the hearts and minds of the people. Luther said, quoting Romans 5: “It is by grace that we are saved.” Good works alone cannot save us.

So what about Islam?

Islam was born around the year 500-600 A.D. This religion sprouted in a totally different climate, mostly desert, and among different people, the Arabs, supposedly the descendants of Ishmael, the son of Abraham by his concubine, Hagar. There where the merciless sun burns, there, in the endless deserts of Arabia, new religious ideas were developed which became the nucleus of this world religion. Islam adopted several elements from other religions, ranging from Judaism to Paganism, from Christianity to Eastern philosophy. For Islam the existence of the one and only god forms the cornerstone of its entire belief system. Allah alone is the all-powerful Authority. Who can challenge Allah? Who can question why Allah has created the world the way it is? We cannot but fear and worship him as the One and Only God.
And what about redemption in Islam? When we surrender ourselves wholeheartedly to Allah, then we can be assured that our road to eternal bliss is assured. This surrender involves the keeping of the five all important religious duties: confession of faith, prayer, the giving of alms, fasting and the pilgrim trek to Mecca where just last week more than 700 people were crushed to death among the 2 million attending this religious routine. Mohammed himself is no more than the bringer of the message, the prophet who has proclaimed the truth. He is not the only prophet, not the first one, but he is the last and the most important one, the prophet par eminence.

It is typical that this religious approach to deliverance is by means of knowledge. Only the truth, the system of thought, sets free. Because once humans possess the truth and make it their own, they can fit it into their lives, suit it their way and even choose another path, a better one. Islam teaches that the prophet alone preaches the truth and offers the possibility of salvation. Muslims must apply this truth in their daily lives. By following the outlines they must deliver themselves and find the way toward salvation. In other words, they are justified in saying that they can redeem themselves if they only apply that truth, follow the way to truth and then they are on the way to salvation.

Where do Christians and Muslims differ?

In short Muslims can redeem themselves by following the rules. Christianity experiences the misery, the bankruptcy of life at a far deeper level, reason why it sees redemption completely different from any other religion. Is it sufficient for us when we know the truth, when the road to salvation has been prescribed for us? No, because Christianity doesn’t work that way. I may be able to know exactly where to go but inside me there is a force that always pushes me to do evil. “The good I know I do not do” says the Bible. The evil we do is not a mere matter of understanding, not an instance of ignorance, or some sort of deviation. There is much more that need to change in us, because the bankruptcy of our lives comes in three forms. We lack the knowledge, the insight into the truth. We also lack the peace, the true justice, the harmonious attitude to God. Finally we also lack the holiness, the will to do good. To be truly free we must surrender the entire structure of our existence: our redemption must be threefold, just as our misery is threefold.
That is the Reformed vision, now mainly absent in the world. With Islam all of life is religion. In contemporary Christianity, with some exceptions, there is a definite split between nature and grace, so typical of the Lutheran and Roman Catholic systems. Bonhoeffer has seen that heresy and has by and large corrected it. Pope Francis also is on the way to remedy that situation, even though he still sees women as unfit for official ecclesiastical office bearers and still has no vision of the Kingdom to come and sees the church as the kingdom. I imagine, given time, he will allow male priests to marry.

I am sorry to conclude that, if religion can be defined as a total way of life, then Islam is a religion, and I must respect that, even though I disagree with it. At the same time much of what goes under the label of Christianity is not a religion but a cult, a distortion of the truth because it lacks total comprehension. Why? It uses the Bible as a talisman, sees the written word only as holy, while often abusing God’s primary word, creation.

I also must say that in today’s society it has become impossible to live the total Christian life. We only can humbly confess this and pray for forgiveness while trying the best we can. To my shame I must confess that I drive a diesel car.

Next week: Is Capitalism a religion?

SEPTEMBER 20 2015

HOLLOWED BE THY NAME

What keeps my mind busy this week? After 10 weeks of intensive translating, consulting dictionaries, trying some different literary devices, going back and re-reading what I have written, it is ‘weeds’ that now occupy my tired mind, weeds, in the plural, the unwanted greens that always creep in between my vegetable, tomato and potato plants, weeds that stubbornly stick out on my sidewalks and between the bricks near my back door. I know Monsanto sells some sort of poison to kill them, but that is not my cup of tea. Now that I’ve sent in the book on the Revelation of John to the publisher, more than 85,000 words in 8 chapters, I have time to come back to earth, the substance we have been made of, and to which we all will return in some form of another.
A Canadian author who wrote The Two Solitudes, once said that “I don’t know what I think until I have read what I have written”. While I write this, sort of probing what at this point I will write about, my thoughts go to my Journal, a book with 365 blank pages featuring just a bible text. The idea is that I then fill the page with my musing, which I do. I sometimes skip a day and make it up the next. Last week a text was from Romans 11: 16: “If the root is holy, so are the branches.”
My quirky mind always jumps all over the place, so somehow this line reminded me of the Lord’s Prayer, and the archaic words: “Hallowed be thy name.” It made me think about an old joke. A young kid was asked the name of God and he said “Harold” is his name of course. “Hallowed” is a word we seldom use. In other languages the phrase “Hallowed be thy name” is much more in line with the spoken language. In French it is plain: “Que ton nom soit santifié”, the same in Dutch “Uw naam worde geheiligd”. Both clearly express that God’s name is holy, which applies to everything God does, including all of creation. Today, however, the line much more resembles “Hollowed be thy name”.

Yes: ”Hollowed be thy name” is much more fitting. That`s what we have done. We have taken the heart out of the earth. We have gutted God, who is total. He is what he thinks, is what he does. Everything that God has done and still is doing is holy, that makes you, that makes me, that makes the trees and the animals, the air and the soil, all holy: everything created is holy. We have gutted all that, made it hollow, have taking the heart out of it, including the soul of us, human beings.

Take Pollution.

If the air that fills my lungs becomes polluted, if the nutrients in the soil that produce my food become depleted, or if the spring water which make up 60% of my body becomes poisoned, my own health suffers accordingly. This seems like common sense, but you wouldn’t think so by observing the way we treat the natural world today. Over time, even the boundaries of what I considered to be “I” became less and less clear. We are a mere shadow of what we supposed to be: hollowed out.
When Roman legions marched on their way from Italy, through France to Germania, they travelled weeks on end through dense forests, as recorded in De Bello Gallico, a book written by Julius Caesar – which I had to read in school in Latin. The BBC reported last week that a Yale professor, using aerial maps estimated that the world once had 6 trillion trees, now reduced by 46 Percent. We know that trees are life. They absorb GHG – Green House Gases – while converting it to O2, the oxygen we need every minute to fill our lungs. With 7.2 billion of us inhaling oxygen every minute, the world now only has 400 trees per person.
How many trees do we need to have sufficient oxygen?

The USA department of Energy asked the Institute for Energy Analysis in Oak Ridge, Tenn., to calculate how many trees we need to provide us with that life-sustaining oxygen. The average American or Canadian, through our daily use of combustion engines for transportation and the prodigious amount of electricity, each one of us needs the oxygen of 4500 trees. The average family with 2.5 children needs more than 20,000 trees. Simple living Africans or Asians can survive on the oxygen of 500 trees.
This is another example where we, through our extravagant life style, deprive even the poorest of their needed breathing elements. The recent forest fires carry a double whammy: they destroy millions of trees while the fires add trillions of tons of carbon to the atmosphere, greatly enhancing the Climate Change situation.

Then there is the matter of the hollowing out of the soil. With rapid population growth, especially in Africa and Asia, we need ever more farmland with greater fertility. But here too the trends are entirely the opposite. Land degradation is costing the world as much as $10.6 trillion every year, equivalent to 17% of global GDP. This report, published last week by the Economics of Land Degradation, also warns us that more than half of the world’s arable land is moderately or severely degraded.

So far this year every heat record has been broken. The rate of increase both in loss of trees and decreased fertility goes far beyond any projected. Both will only speed up the process as decreased vegetation cover and increased soil erosion means that land is less able to store carbon, contributing to climate change. News sources now regularly report that 50 percent of fish and large animals are gone: crowded out by human greed. Hollow seas, hollow earth, hollow people too.

No wonder: millions are on the move.

These pictures we see now every day of mostly enterprising young men trying to reach Western Europe are on the move because of ‘soil degradation’ causing desertification, the result of climate change and overgrazing. This is the root cause of the migration of millions. A study by the UN’s Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), found that the process may drive an estimated 50 million people from their homes in the next 10 years. And that is probably a very low number. Others sources go as high as 200 million.

All this reminds me of a section in the book I just translated. In Revelation John describes how there was a pause in heaven, a silence lasting a “half hour”. You may know that Revelation deals with the Last Things, and the real significance of that silence has to do with the church, how the church on earth experiences her spiritual life.

Here is that quote:

“Her prayer-life, her surrender to God, her faithfulness all are part of the process of the grand finale. And John, really upset, observes that in this important moment, when everything is ready to go and the New World is about to appear, the church herself is lagging behind. She has not kept up with God, she has clung to her old customs and modes of life, has failed to grasp God’s unfathomable majesty and refused to undergo a true conversion. While being fully exposed to the grand revelation of the last things, she remained stuck in the small, everyday events of her earthly existence. Above her the loud thunderclaps of God’s threats are cascading through the skies, while she, with eyes wide open in horror, has become mesmerized, as around her all human riches and powers are visibly collapsing. Amidst all these cries of anguish escalating exponentially she has not learned to think differently. She has remained mired in the immorally routine rest of her everyday existence. Now that the very last happenings are knocking at the door, she is not ready. She no longer knows how to pray. She can’t keep up with what God is doing. The bible time and again tells us to wait on the Lord. But now the rolls are reversed. It used to be that God’s clock ran slower than ours and we had to pause for a while for God to catch up. God always had a much slower pace than we. But now it appears to be the other way around. Now God has to wait for us. Now he is way ahead of us, now our clock is slow, now we no longer can catch up to him. Is all this happening because of what we with growing intensity see happening all around us today? Is it true that, looking back to the 20th Century with its devastating wars and its aftermath of displaced persons, famine, chaos, and today with the mayhem in the Middle East, and environmental deterioration everywhere, God wants to remind us that the seventh seal is being broken now? Could it be that the breathtaking speed in which events overwhelm us today with tsunami force is a sign that the seven angels with their trumpets are poised to blow their instruments? And would all this be a sign to remind us that ours is the next move?”

So far that quote.

My recent experience in translating a book dealing with Revelation, of which the Greek name is Apocalypse made me think of the rise of Hitler in Germany in 1933. In six short years he vaulted from a relative unknown to the greatest threat to civilization ever. By some clever manipulation of half-truths and devious money maneuvering he convinced a cultivated electorate that he had the answers to the world’s problems.
Today these problems are world-wide, witnessing the experience of unprecedented storms, relentless droughts and the associated wars and south-to-north migrations. These events will jar expectations about the security of resources and make Hitlerian politics more resonant. As Hitler demonstrated, humans are able to portray a looming crisis in such a way as to justify drastic measures in the present. Under enough stress, or with enough skill, politicians can put into effect the measures Hitler pioneered. If a nation such as Germany which gave the world such giants as J. S. Bach, a Mozart, a Bonhoeffer, and many more great people, could so easily be seduced to support a Satanic regime, it seems very likely that a less distinguished population will fall for a world figure that makes the right promises.
The world is ready for a dictator, yes, even an Antichrist, because the Real Christ only promises eternal life in a renewed world, and bases this only on faith. Hebrew 11: 1 says “Faith is sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” That no longer appeals to the masses: they want it now, never mind what is to come.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. That’s what the Bible tells us. It also is an archaic expression, just as “Hallowed be Thy name”. The word ‘fear’ here has nothing to do with being afraid. It means “being in awe of”. When we look at creation with unbiased eyes and uncluttered mind, then we can only be totally floored by the wisdom of it all, how everything fits, how every animal, in the right place, how every plant in its original setting, forms a beautiful organic whole. Once we see that then we have the beginning of wisdom. That’s why the phrase “Hallowed be Thy name” must dominate our lives. We, in our utter stupidity have done the opposite. Now our life’s motto is “Hollowed be Thy name.” We have gutted God and in the process we have lost all wisdom. Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that “The sin against creation in the greatest of sin” because it deprives us of wisdom.

We must make a choice: either Hallow the name of the Creator or Hollow it.

THE ANTICHRIST

September 13 2015

The Republican Party in the USA, or perhaps more correctly, its mostly Christian component, believes that President Obama is the forerunner of the Antichrist, just as John the Baptizer was the forerunner of Jesus Christ.
Why do I so suddenly choose to write about this mysterious figure?

Two reasons.

(1). I just finished translating a book dealing with the last book of the Bible, the Revelation of John. In the last chapters the matter of the Antichrist is mentioned, an unavoidable subject because the Bible is quite clear on that score. He is portrayed there as the beast, an apt description. Bavinck writes that the end of the world- and we are fast approaching this point – will culminate in the appearing of the Antichrist who will rule the entire world. He sees this is the last frantic effort of the Satan to assert his power over the earth. John, on several occasions, both in the Gospel with his name and in his first letter calls the Satan “The Ruler of this world” (See John 12: 31; 14: 30; 16: 11) and in his letter in 1John 5: 19 John unambiguously states that “the whole world is under the control of the evil one.” So forget that Christ is in control at this point. The Satan offers Jesus the entire world if he would only worship him. Jesus does not dispute that claim, but also refuses to bow before the Evil one. We usually in the church sing and preach that Christ is the King of this world, and that is ultimately true, but in the meantime not he but the Satan calls the shots here in our world.
That we now live in a world dominated by the evil one is becoming more and more evident by the day, certainly quite visible in the march of the millions, escaping from chaotic countries to more orderly ones. Part of this global confusion is due to climate change – itself a sign of the last days. Both Daniel and Jesus in Matthew 24 mention that the last days bring the “great desolation” of which Climate Change is a sure sign. Another part of the new condition in which we live is the post-imperial, post-colonial and, soon, I believe, post-authoritarian world, in which no one will be able to control the disorderly regions. The Middle East regions with their arbitrary boundaries – all relics of World War I- used to be ruled with an iron fist by characters such as Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, but the USA thought it best to intervene, confirming again that “the law of unintended consequences” is still in effect. That is one reason for the emerging of the Antichrist: utter chaos that needs a harsh tyrant.

(2) The second is the rise of the Anti-Party symptom. For this I have to thank David Brooks of the New York Times.
He calls the rise of the Anti-Party men, such as Trump, Carson and Sanders in the USA and Corbyn in the UK signs of disorientation.
Here’s what David Brooks wrote in the New York Times:
“Political parties are civic institutions. They are broad coalitions built for the purpose of creating a governing majority that can be used to win elections and pass agendas. This summer three American politicians have risen to the fore, and they all sit outside or at the margin of the party they are trying to lead.

Donald Trump didn’t even swear allegiance to his party’s eventual nominee until last week. He is a lone individual whose main cause and argument is Himself.

Ben Carson has no history in politics and a short history in the Republican Party. He is a politically unattached figure whose primary lifetime loyalty has been to the field of medicine.

Bernie Sanders is a socialist independent, who in the Senate caucuses with the Democrats.
And yet, these anti-party figures are surging in the party races for the presidential nominations.

This phenomenon is even more extreme in Britain. The British Labour Party suffered a crushing election defeat in May because people did not think its leader was strong enough, and because they thought its policy agenda was too far left.
And yet at the moment the next leader of the British Labour Party is Jeremy Corbyn. Mr. Corbyn has existed for decades on the leftward fringe of the Labour Party, tolerated as sort of a nice but dotty uncle.

He spent much of his career at the edge of the parliamentary party, writing columns for The Morning Star, a communist-founded newspaper. He’s a pacifist who called for British withdrawal from NATO. He’s spent his career consorting with the usual litany of anti-Western figures, including his friends in Hamas and Hezbollah. Until about three months ago he was considered the most outside of the outsiders — until a cult of personality developed around him, rocketing him to the top of the polls.

These four anti-party men have little experience in the profession of governing. They have no plausible path toward winning 50.1 percent of the vote in any national election. They have no prospect of forming a majority coalition that can enact their policies.
These sudden stars are not really about governing. They are tools for their supporters’ self-expression. They allow supporters to make a statement, demand respect or express anger or resentment. Sarah Palin was a pioneer in seeing politics not as a path to governance but as an expression of her followers’ id.

Why has this type risen so suddenly?

First, political parties, like institutions across society, are accorded less respect than in decades past. But we’re also seeing the political effects of a broader culture shift, the rise of what sociologists call expressive individualism.”
So far David Brooks

I connect these Anti-Party men to the Anti-Christ. If these people appeal to the masses, can an Antichrist not do the same? Let’s face it: the church is rapidly disappearing. There is little respect for the church even though a man such as Pope Francis is generally admired, basically because he challenges the capitalistic system, and in that “the God of this Age.” America is supposedly a Christian nature but its religion has ceased to be Christian. Christians there, by and large, are gun-toting, bent on revenge, climate change denying people, having no notion that Jesus once proclaimed that those he use the sword will die by the sword.

Let me point out one thing that struck me while translating this book on Revelation. In Revelation, that last Bible book, nature is given priority over the church. Here’s a quote: “The four living creatures, as we have seen, represent nature in its fullest sense of the word. Nature itself is the background against which history is depicted, the history of all her high and low points, her bloody wars and glorious discoveries. In the song John hears, it is the existence of the four living creatures, the beings of nature that glorify God as the God who was, who is and who is to come.”

Later on Bavinck points to the silence in heaven that lasted for half an hour. He explains that this is due to the church neglecting its duty to tell the world about the coming of the New Creation, and the Eternal Future that awaits those who “first seek the Kingdom”.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer talks that same language. In his introduction to his book on “Creation and Fall”, he writes words that should be engraved above every church door: “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.”

By failing to do so the church has become by and large irrelevant because it has paid at most only lip service to the importance of this message. No wonder in the book of Revelation nature is seen as more important than the church. Think about that.

The rise of the anti-party men is to me a sign that all institutions are in danger and that a fast-talking fellow – an Antichrist figure – who appeals to the basic instinct of the people, pursuing greed, easy living, something for nothing, all which can easily seduce the masses.
Increasingly the world becomes ungovernable. Increasingly institutions are failing us. Hillary Clinton, however much I admire her, is essentially a status-quo woman, who will follow the will of the money men. If fellows like Donald Trump can generate such a following, then it seems to me that the days of the Antichrist are not far off.

Already the scene is set for global disorder. What we see today in Europe with millions on the march to a better life, is only the beginning. The world is radically splitting in two camps, the haves and the have nots.

The bible is quite explicit that we are in for disastrous times. There is that number 666. Bavinck does not mention it, because when he wrote the book – he died in 1965 – there was no logical explanation possible for this. If today you follow the financial news then you will have noticed that many important people connected to both big government and big banks are calling for the abolishing of cash. In Greece there is a lower VAT – Value Added Tax equivalent to the HST in Canada- for using a credit card to pay items, for the simple reason that they leave a record, so there is no cheating on tax there. In the next few years when governments everywhere will need the maximum tax revenue, the call for abolishing cash will become more pronounced. It will leave each citizen who buys or sells at the mercy of the big machines, which all operate via numbers. Then nobody will be able to buy or sell unless they use the government or bank sanctioned card. It will use either the hand, via finger prints, or the head, an eye scan, exactly as Revelation portrays it. With security measures increasing all the time whether there is reason for it or not, we will quickly lose all freedom. I am not paranoid, but I see that what the Bible now already mentions may soon become reality.

Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw the coming of the Antichrist. He wrote a book by that name. He foresaw the coming madness, now evident in Climate Change. He wrote that the loss of God entails madness, which has implications for a society which has lost God. A society that prefers a Trump and a Corbyn in the UK has become mad. Once they prefer to be led by such figures, the matter of choosing for the Antichrist is the next step.

The entire world has already become godless. When in the next few years the world economy falls apart due to excess of monetary and environmental debt, and severe hardship will be the result, the disasters so plainly stated in the book of Revelation of John, will not be far away.

Basically we are blind to all this. We prefer a willful blindness, generated by false optimism and a wishy-washy religion that fails to consider the implications of what it means to be a Christian. I repeat, it is the failure of the church to “seek first the Kingdom’, to strive first and foremost for the welfare of creation, and so be prepared for the New Creation to come that is at the heart of the problem. That’s why Christ died on Calvary. John 3: 16, says it all. This text is almost always abused be the church to read that “God so loved humanity etc.” No, it says “God so loved the cosmos” for which he gave his life. The cosmos includes all that lives and moves and has a being. In other words: “The Four Living Creatures” that feature so prominently in the book of the Revelation of John have to become central in our lives, because without them “The Kingdom” is not possible.

Be aware: the Antichrist in whatever form, as a person or as a spirit, will come. Soon.

SEPTEMBER 6 2015
THOUGHTLESSNESS

In one of her book Hannah Arendt describes the concept of thoughtlessness, the failure to gauge the consequences of one’s actions. She wonders whether this is the root of all evil.

Perhaps she is right. It reminds me of the Garden of Eden which the Bible sees as the beginning of history and the origin of sin with Adam and Eve eating that fateful
piece of fruit. Had this human pair really gauged its disastrous consequences, now imperiling our entire earthly existence through Climate Change, perhaps they would have acted different.

I was thinking about that this week because I had a rather unique experience these last few days. For this I have to go back 40 years.
In 1975 our family, upon my insistence, moved from urban St.Catharines, Ont., to rural Tweed, midway between Ontario’s two principal cities, Toronto and Ottawa, each approximately 200 km away. Actually my story goes back even further, also connected to my topic of “Thoughtlessness”. That year was 1944 and as a 16 year old I still can picture myself in front of a corner store – a tobacconist- shuttered, of course, because there were no tobacco products for sale anymore. During the war in occupied the Netherlands cigarettes, if you had them, were worth their weight in gold. Nevertheless there I learned how to smoke. My friend, the eldest son of our family doctor, only a week younger than I, was puffing a cigarette, stolen from his father. He was smoking rings, which intrigued me and I wanted to try it as well. I did and that launched my smoking addiction, except that in those days smoking was seen as a manly thing. My father was a confirmed smoker and because he had lots of stuff to barter, was never short of cigarettes and cigars ever during the war. It was not hard for me to filch more than the odd one.

Fast forward to 1959, 15 years later and now well settled in Canada. One of my clients was dying – I then operated an insurance agency- and when I saw how he no longer ate or drank, but till his last breath smoked, I decided to quit my a pack-a-day-addiction. It was thoughtlessness that got me into the smoking habit – my father died of lung cancer – while my friend who was my accomplice in acquiring the habit, is also long gone. I see it as providence that made me quit. Instead I took up running, a so-called positive addiction, which I still do until this day.

I was reminded of all that this week when a pole that carries the wires that bring electricity to our house, snapped right at the point where it enters the earth. At a 70 degree angle it was leaning against a tree and the heat of the transformer caused the beginning of a fire there. I saw it happen at 2.30 p.m. Tuesday afternoon. I called 911 and the Tweed voluntary fire force came out with three trucks and they called Hydro One, just 2 km down the road. The hydro people too appeared with 2 trucks and quickly disconnected me from the grid by removing the transformer. Since the pole was on my property it became my responsibility to call a contractor to remove the broken pole and insert a new one. Both my phone and my internet were affected, so I had to go to a neighbor for this. The Ontario Hydro crew gave me a number to call, which turned out to be a wrong one. So it wasn’t until the next day that I located a firm able to so this.
That all happened on Tuesday September 1. On Friday morning a crew came to replace the pole, but another complication arose. Forty years ago, in 1975, I planted some 4000 trees in that same area where the wire connection is between our house and the highway. These trees were tiny when I planted them, but I never looked up, taking that overhead wire into consideration. Basically this was a matter of Thoughtlessness. So I had to engage a firm to cut a corridor through that pine forest because no power would be provided until that was done.

So how did we manage having no electricity for four days? Actually very well. Thanks to some foresight, the opposite of Thoughtlessness, I had, years ago, installed a winterized water pump over my wellhead. Winterized means that there is some four feet of air before the water is reached, something necessary in our neck of the woods where the frost at times goes as deep as 4 feet. So we had water, an important ingredient of human life.
Another, equally important feature was that we had solar panels and fairly new batteries so we had lighting, TV and enough power to boil water, make coffee in our house, and have the slow cooker prepare our oats. That was another good thing. A few years ago I had converted my office – a separate building- into a guest house, so, when our children come – they all live far away – they have separate lodging. There we have a propane-fired stove where we could cook our own meals, which we did in great comfort.

Years ago I bought a small freezer to accommodate the extra food we needed to overwinter. That one is connected to the solar panels. There was enough space there to store all our frozen items. Thank God.

Thoughtlessness is the key to our demise as the human race, something that started in the Garden of Eden. Take the Greenhouse effect, as it was called in the initial stages. A Swedish chemist by the name of Arrhenius wrote in 1906, thus 109 years ago, that if the concentration of Greenhouse Gases would double, the average temperature of planet Earth would rise by 5-6 degrees Celsius. Then it was less than 280ppm of CO2. Now it exceeds 400, not quite double but well on the way. We were certainly forewarned, but we did not listen. When coming November the world meets in Paris to discuss Climate Change we will hear all sorts of dire predictions and governments will make solemn promises, and, if history is any guide, all these promises will be broken because immediate needs, such as the pursuit of economic growth, and the pledge to provide employment, will have priority.

A dry run

To me the episode this past week is a dry run for the time when some powerful natural event will inconvenience us in North America so much that we will be forced to
live off the grid for an extended time. Our total way of life is one borrowed from the future and there will come a time, perhaps soon, where there is nothing more to borrow. To me it is an omen, and reminds me of what Joseph Conrad wrote in his Typhoon. There it says: Omens were as nothing to him, and he was unable to discover the message of prophecy till the fulfillment had brought it home to his very door.

To me there is a lesson here. Thanks to some foresight – the opposite of thoughtlessness – we weathered this small crisis well, and it made me realize the preciousness of water. For four days I went back to the old-fashioned way where every drop of water had to be carried into the house, to flush the toilets, to make tea and coffee and prepare meals.

Also for four days we had no access to telephone and Internet. We did have TV and radio, so we were not completely cut off from the world. The absence of Internet and the news sources there – I usually spent an hour each day to read various papers and blogs – gave me more time to finish the book I am translating which deals with Revelation, the last Bible book. That has been an intense job: 70 days of 5-6 hours of thinking, writing, erasing, re-arranging, while also receiving a thorough education in what Johan Herman Bavinck, a celebrated Professor of Mission Studies at the Free University of Amsterdam, once wrote.

Transposing his words from Dutch into contemporary English gave me good insight into the matters that deal with the Last Days. The more I re-interpret his words into the language of the world, the more I am convinced that we live in the Last Days. These last days – I think today – will be preceded by some terrible happenings, and when we watch TV and see what happens in the Middle East, the cradle of civilization, then for a large part of the world these terrible happenings are already taking place. Many parts of Africa are now inhabitable, due to drought, overgrazing and overpopulation. The deserts there are expanding rapidly and so is the population. Soon there will be some 200 million excess people in Africa alone, converging into cities where there is no work and no housing. What we have seen so far at the edges of Europe is only the very beginning.

Turmoil is also happening in the USA. A few days ago the New York Times reported that the murder rates in US cities are skyrocketing for the same reason: no work, no opportunities, no decent housing and too many guns.
Let me end with a quote from the last chapter of the Revelation book that I finished translating this past week.

But what is sure beyond doubt is that humanity will be hit exactly there where it imagines itself to be the strongest: in its technical knowhow and in its mastery over nature. Nature will fall upon the human race as a provoked lion: nature will breach all constrains humanity has enforced upon it, as it will explode into extraordinary catastrophes, such as earthquakes, floods, failed harvests, and pandemics, more severe than ever.
An integral part of this will be the dissolution of human society. Wars will come of an intensity and brutality never before experienced, causing incalculable confusion. And all this will result in the kingdom of the world-tyrant, the Rule of the Antichrist, the beast with his abhorrent body, arising from within the community of nations.

Again for a short spell the human throne will be established. Humanity will not turn to God, will only become more outspoken in its resistance to the Christian religion, more spiteful in its condemnation, more determined in its powerless hate, more relentless in its rage against God’s children. Indeed, the unjust will become more so; the vile will simply pursue more vileness: the masks will fall off, and the true nature of everything will be revealed.
Yes, what will become quite clear in the last days is that the real object for this new situation is to lay bare the true nature of everything and everybody. In this very last human empire that is coming into being, all hidden forces that have dominated the world’s history from times immemorial will be there for all openly to see in its minutest detail. In other words: sin will be revealed in its full sense of the word, in its breathtaking hubris, in its self-elevation to God’s throne, in its all-out discarding of everything that stands in the way of exercising power. All our vilest intentions will rise to the surface; all veneer will vanish, and melt away in the heat of evil evident in the last days. Humanity, not as single persons but as the human race in its totality, as a collective species, will unite in its secular dream to form a totalitarian world empire, lauding its greatness and power. This state will only have one idol….the Antichrist, the culmination of the world’s history.

All the signs are there already. Our artificial world, now tottering under the mountain of monetary and environmental debt, will soon collapse through a series of disasters, all man-made.

Once this evil empire has run its course, Christ’s Kingdom will come where everything will be as it is.
That is the ultimate consequence of the ‘thoughtlessness’ that started in the Garden of Eden. Indeed it looks like the original sin.