Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

MARCH 15 2015

Man becoming the ultimate Machine

I was surprised to read that news now can be algorithmically generated without our brains being involved or our fingers doing the typing. Don’t ask me how that works. I imagine that some newsworthy item out there is fed into a computer which then will consider all possibilities, predict a likely outcome, and let the machine ‘scientifically’ determine the final result. Long live the Magic Machine: death to the human touch, no longer needed.

What this means is that we’ve gone far beyond the words of Psalm 115. There it says that: “Their idols are silver and gold…They have ears that cannot hear, eyes that cannot see…. Their makers will become like them and so will all who trust in them.”

Ah, those are so yesterday’s idols. Today our idols are machines, tools so clever that the idols can speak, can hear and can see. All of which makes them much more dangerous and lethal because machines have no conscience, no heart, no feelings. The slippery slope has just started to slant significantly more steeply. Imagine software stealthily replacing us as communicators, algorithmic content rapidly permeating the nooks and crannies of our culture, from government gobbledegook to fantasy financial phenomena, to fake information on the future. Of course some human brain writes the parameters but from there the machine assumes control following certain ‘environmentally’-friendly guidelines. Just imagine: bad news no longer condoned. It does not sell, so we simply eliminate it. Just imagine: computers programmed to delete anything to do with Climate Change, anything to do with unemployment, anything to do with accelerating cancer rates, and, please no reports on Pope Francis because he is saying some disturbing things.

Automated Insights (A.I. also the acronym for Artificial Intelligence) states that its software created one billion stories last year, many with no human intervention; its home page displays logos of customers all of us would recognize: Samsung, Comcast, The A.P., Edmunds.com and Yahoo. What are the chances that you haven’t consumed such content without realizing it?

Here is a concrete example. While I am writing this, I read that “Officials responsible for making sure Florida is prepared to respond to the earth’s changing climate are barred from using the terms “global warming” and “climate change” in official communications, emails and reports. We were told that we were not allowed to discuss anything that was not a true fact,” said Kristina Trotta, a former Florida Department of Environmental Protection employee. Another former employee added, “We were dealing with the effects and economic impact of climate change, and yet we can’t reference it.” Apparently when we don’t mention it, this human-induced catastrophe will disappear. Fat chance, as Florida is one of the most vulnerable states.

Welcome to the new world of Man as the ultimate Machine. This is happening in an era where nothing is stable, nothing is straightforward, everything is fixed, and nothing is fixed: it basically signals the End of Humanity.

I hardly ever watched Television, get my news from newspapers and alternative sources. I have been my own boss since 1952, a year after I emigrated from the Netherlands. Since then I’ve been dealing with people all the time, gaining a bit of insight into human nature, and still learning, gaining some self-knowledge too, I hope. My observations tell me that society at large and government bureaucracy in particular are trying to paint a picture that does not at all portray reality.

What is the current reality?

Fact is that deflation is exactly what the word implies: a bubble losing air or a human losing humanity. It applies to money whose value actually increases with deflation because as goods go down in price, a dollar buys more. It applies to humanity at large where the vast majority has no clue where we are, thanks to deflated understanding. It also applies to our precious planet, in a state of perilous depletion, another lethal form of deflation. Algorithmically generated news, Man the Magic Machine, simply ignores reality. Newspapers already reflect that trend so independent sources, such as hielema.ca/blog, become more valuable because it not only represents a more sober and genuine point of view, but does this from a unique Christian – Biblical – End-Time perspective. If we do not know where we are going then we wander in the dark. And that is the aim of Big Business. The harsh truth is that this world has an expiry date and it is approaching fast. It is from that perspective that we have to plan the future.

Yes, we live in a Near Term Human Extinction situation. On a clock it would signal a minute or two before Twelve. The algorithmically generated news is just one of the signs. Stock markets rely on this as well, with the result that stock values go up with bad news and go down with good news, because good news means that interest rates go up, and that in a world drowning in debt. A fraction of increase in the cost of debt can tumble the entire house of cards which is the current economy.

Last week the US Bureau of Labor Statistics issued an optimistic report in the labor market as jobs for waiters increased and the health industry saw gains, as more and more people got sick, now claiming 18 % of the Gross National Product in the US of A: good for the doctors and nurses, bad for the patients. The largest percentage of bankruptcies in the USA is money owed to hospitals and doctors. Wal-Mart increased wages for its workers, but reduced their hours, meaning that it is not responsible for health benefits.

What somehow was not reflected in the Labor Statistics was the job bloodbath in the oil industry, thanks to the surplus of oil – due to reduced economic activity. The never imagined happened: the world halved the price of oil with economic activity down, especially in Europe and China. Last week saw a veritable hemorrhagic fever of job layoff announcements: 9,000 here, 7,000, there, thousands of thousands everywhere — Halliburton, Schlumberger, Baker Hughes — all deep into the oil services sector: Calgary, Fort McMurray, Alberta in general, all in the same boat.

It reminds me of 1984, where Truth is Lies and Lies are Truth. The more our leaders lie about misbehavior in banking the worse will be the instability in currencies. In the end the truth will emerge and with it the realization that – to translate a Dutch saying – Even though the Lie is fast, in a race with Truth it comes in last. After this cruel winter – not yet over – and the high heating bills all over North America, except in California where drought has the same effect – money will be hard to come by, promising pinching of pennies, more savings, but fewer goods bought.

Externalities

Take the matter of “externalities”, the so-called free natural elements: water, air, soil. Here is a truth that burned deep into my consciousness. There was an article in Grist Magazine that stated that none of the twenty biggest industries in today’s world could break even, much less make a profit, if they had to pay for the damage they do to the environment.

That is the awful truth we are faced with. That’s why the stock market reflects only fraud. The Alberta Tar Sand oil should fetch some $200- $300 per barrel if the true price of natural restoration was taken into account. It now struggles with $50. A McDonald’s hamburger should cost as high as $100 if the rainforest clearing, the methane caused by the cattle emitting lots of Green House Gases, the poor wages and the disposal of the garbage were taken into account, never mind the after effects of eating meat and its impact on future medical costs.

Fracking is the prime example of utter folly. It needs clean water – now more scarce than oil – generating waste that will work their way up the food chain and start producing cancer clusters, but algorithmically generated news will not pick that up.

The Laws of Ecology are still in force

Yet all these costs come back to haunt us. Nothing is more certain. The laws of Ecology state that:

(1) Everything is connected to everything else;
(2) There is no waste;
(3) Nature knows best;
(4) Nothing comes free.

The free air we pollute, the water we discharge full of toxins, the soil we contaminate don’t just go away; one way or another, they’re going to be paid, and costs that don’t appear on a company’s balance sheet still affect the economy. That’s the argument of The Limits to Growth, a book that set me on the path to reality, together with the insight that the Heaven Heresy is trouncing the relevance of the church by neglecting the New Earth reality.

 Here is rude reality

Here is the Truth that is staring us in the face: on a finite planet, once an inflection point is passed, the costs of economic growth – now robbing the earth of its vital ingredients, air, water, soil – rise faster than growth does then this forces the global economy to collapse: it is costs $1.01 to produce $1.00 of goods, the systems stalls. That is the truth behind the stagnation we now experience, but which the brains of this world refuse to see because it has never happened before and we, as a society, are too stupid, too brain-washed by the aspect of Infinite Growth to be able to detect something that is plain to the smallest child.

The most important cause of the lack of growth we now experience is the increasing impact of the overall pollution we now experience.

Here is my assessment: wages will decline, costs will go up, weather related incidents will increase heating and cooling bills, droughts and floods will harm food supplies, famines will occur more frequently, wars will result because Climate Change will force people to migrate to the ever smaller greener pastures. That is the kind of future algorithmically generated news will refuse to show on your TV screen or your New York Times or your Globe and Mail.

 Opt out where possible, however insignificant.

I always bake my own bread. I buy the organic whole wheat kernels in 10 kg lots, I grind it into fine flour in my electric flour mill operating on my solar power. I sweeten my bread with my own maple syrup, and exercise my hands kneading the dough. People have done that for thousands of years.

That bread is simple and delicious: no additives, except some milk powder, a touch of salt, some yeast. No packing, no wrappings, no transportation, no use of the so-called externalities. That’s real bread. I do the same with yogurt. If I can do that, so can you.

A long time ago Ivan Illich pointed out in Energy and Equity that buying from a bakery is only faster if you don’t count the time you have to spend earning the money needed to pay for it. Also buying ready-made bread involves a long series of actions such as a 200 km trip from factory to store. Another example: every day I see scores of cars racing past our house en route to Belleville, some 45 km away to work 8 hours in a store or small shop. There they earn a little better than minimum wage, grossing perhaps $100 or netting $75 at best, while the cost of driving there is 90 km at 50 cents per km or $45.00 not counting air pollution. The net gain of 10 hours away is $30.00, or $3.00 per hour, not including expense for lunch and clothing. That time is better spent baking bread, preparing meals from scratch, visiting people, improving one’s mind.

The same is true for television, the boob tube, just another instrument to dumb us down so that we will not see the truth out there. Apple with its new watch and Facebook and all Internet related matters make us into robots, slaves to some stupid machine: society is now so vulnerable that it will cease to function when the Internet falls down.

We have become enslaved to the Industrial Machine. Only when we liberate ourselves from The Machine in whatever form, and assert again our humanity, as images of God, loving his holy creation, will we be able to fight the future that stands and falls with the Machine.

MARCH 8 2015
“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.” (Revelation 16: 4)

What does this text mean? I have often thought about this. It becomes clearer by the day that the financial system we live in is destroying the planet. The Pope said a while ago that “harming creation is a sin”. If that is the case, and I think it is, then we sin all the time. Polluting is a direct sin against the Ten Commandments, where the Fourth Commandment says: “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name”. Think about that: we misuse or perhaps better, we abuse God’s name when we pollute, which has become as universal as eating and drinking and sleeping. This means that we must abandon our way of life (get out of her as the text above tells us) which is offending God. I do harm this very moment while I typing in my laptop even though I use solar power today. The laptop itself is chockfull with harmful material and the Internet takes a lot of energy. Must I really consider abandoning all that?
Luther, the Reformer, once said that we must sin bravely. In his time people carried no or negligible carbon foot prints: we always do all the time. Yes, we have painted ourselves into a corner: we now have a way of life that is continuously and disastrously sinful. We can’t just shrug our shoulders and keep on sinning, because the fate of the planet is at stake. The Pope still flies everywhere while airplane flights are among the worst polluters. We still eat beef even though beef cattle generate more greenhouse gases than any other animal. I live 5 km from the nearest store and church. In the winter time I simply cannot do without a car. Yet 100 years ago my former neighbors did it all the time, and the village core was a hive of activity and the churches shrived. Think about it: constant sinning kills religion.
The text listed as the heading, asks us – never commands us – to come out of her, lest we share in her sins. We now know what these sins are: the sins of destroying creation.
We can easily make excuses. My excuse: I see my blog as an evangelism tool, and, yes, it is read all over the world: I have hundreds of readers every day. Has the time come where even that is no longer effective and ‘evangelism’ is no longer viable in a world where the Good News has become so distorted that it is lost in the multitude of opinions?
Does “Coming out of her” indicate an end to communication and a separation from society that implies a cessation of contact with the outside world? Has society become so sinful that contamination can no longer be avoided? It reminds me of Lot and his small family who were forcefully removed from Sodom and Gomorrah. It reminds me of the descendants of Jacob moving out of Egypt and establishing a theocracy in the conquered lands of Palestine. It reminds me of the convents and monasteries of the Middle Ages, and the current day Amish communities.
Let’s face it: by and large the church is perhaps not dead but certainly comatose . Missions miss the message because the message has become meaningless: heaven has become a heresy because it implies leaving the earth to its polluted fate, while the New Earth concept is too difficult to grasp in a world racing to its suicidal demise.
Yet the New Earth promise is the only viable gospel out there, but difficult to sell because all our lives are completely wrapped up in our creation-destroying ego trip. If evangelism, the bringing of the Good-News, – the Eu-Angelos – wants to be effective then it has to prove that it is possible to live so that we can visualize this new theology, already long ago outlined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and J. H. Bavinck, especially in his book Between the Beginning and the End – a radical Kingdom vision (Eerdmans).

In that regard is abandoning all electronic devices a first step?

In previous columns I have mentioned The Tower of Babel, an early attempt to dominate the world which God prevented by confusing their language. Thanks to Moore’s law, computing power has expanded exponentially, and has made mechanical translation possible. In other words, the effects of The Tower of Babel have been negated: language confusion has been eliminated. God has lost the communication battle. Humanity has triumphed.
But has it really?
Just as due to the language confusion the Tower of Babel was abandoned, so the new Tower of Babel, the entire Internet and World Wide Web too will collapse. In the Babel’s Era the world was largely open. Now there is not a square meter not affected by human influence. When our totally interconnected world, now completely dependent on the Internet, is ruined somehow (and it will happen) our entire world goes with it. That’s how vulnerable we are. Better not depend on the Internet at all.
There is another, slower way of disintegration
When I look around in the stores and businesses I visit, I see only women there. Where are the men? As robots replace humans – mostly jobs earlier done by men – are the only jobs left for the males to be truck drivers and the army? Each Memorial Day a company of soldiers comes to Tweed from the nearest bases – Trenton and Petawawa – and fine young men they are. Are these the only secure jobs left for men? Of course in the bigger cities the legal profession and the upper echelons of finance are still dominated by the males. When I see the pictures in the Globe and Mail of appointments to the various boards of large companies, WASP persons dominate. The acronym no longer applies to WASP but MASP – Male Anglo Saxon Protestant or now more and more MASA – Male Anglo Saxon Agnostics.
Those are jobs not easily robotized, including most brain jobs. A robot chess player can thrash the best chess player in the world, but can’t match the motor and perceptual skills of a one-year-old baby. Robots can lift three thousand pounds at a time and carry an entire stack of shelves in one go. Directed wirelessly along preprogrammed paths, they swivel and dance around each other with surprising elegance, then pick up their packages according to the instructions printed on automatically scanned barcodes. It looks that the role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to disappear in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was eliminated by the introduction of tractors.
That means no place for muscle men of average intelligence, which means most of the men in the world. So what is needed to solve that problem? Does that mean that we need a 1914-18 war where mostly men were sacrificed as cannon fodder?
Yes, that’s what Capitalism wants. Capitalism now aims for war in which the surplus men are killed while factories hum with war production, making the economy grow: a double solution. We now know that the Capitalistic system destroys the natural system through sheer pollution. It now looks that it will also make a good portion of the employable male population redundant.
If we do not change, robots are going to eat all the jobs, and only the very talented will rule the roost: the infamous One Percent will not only garner the capital, they will also have the brain-jobs. The rest will be closely monitored, constantly on a screen somewhere to detect insurrection and revolt.
Deflation
Robots have other negative effects: it will cause severe deflation. When jobs are disappearing, then there is less and less money in most people’s pockets, and when that happens, prices fall. We already are starting to see deflation in our world where oil price are falling causing economies to stagnate and consumers to lose confidence. Now these two different deflations are starting to overlap. Collapsing house prices could be another part of this equation. The prospect of millions of jobs being rendered obsolete, private-home values collapsing and the prices of everyday goods going into a deflationary spiral sounds like a recipe for disaster, and it is. However, there is a degree of inevitability there. In a capitalist system the elimination of inefficiency through technology has to be pursued to its logical conclusion, even when it kills people.
For jobs to go away with that speed however is a new thing and there are no historical precedents for this: this simply has never happened before. We don’t have a clue how this speed of job disappearance, combined with extensive deflation, will play out, but the omens are horrifying.
It’s also worth noting what isn’t being said about this robot future. There’s capital, doing better than ever; the robots, doing all the work; and the great mass of humanity, doing not much. There is a saying that idleness is an invitation for the Devil to take over. It’s the old, old story: God – creation – versus the Devil – un-creation, pollution. Now more than ever we have to take sides. If you have a Bible, read Deuteronomy 28 which warns us when we side with evil.
There is a better way.
In 1810, agriculture employed 90 per cent of the American workforce. Then millions of buffalo roamed the prairies, living off the prairie grass. Now all the prairie grass is gone, millions of beef cattle are penned in feed lots, basically eating oil, as corn and soy beans are artificially composed and seeded, harvested with million-dollar machines, on soil yearly depleting at an alarming rate. Famers now compose less than 2 per cent of the workforce. Men and horses have been replaced by computers and oil to the extent that we eat nutritional-empty food, leading to obesity, cancer and multiple different disorders. Welcome to the Devil’s world.
There is a better way, but it involves a thorough conversion. The Greek word for conversion in the New Testament is ‘metanoia’. The Greek word ‘meta’ always indicates change. We find it in metabolism or metaphor or metamorphosis. The Greek word ‘noia’ comes from ‘gnoosis’ meaning knowledge or mind. Conversion in the theological sense means much more than ‘being born again’ in the Pentecostal sense, where you suddenly speak in tongues and daily pray for being Raptured, asking to be taken away from this wicked earth. Conversion really means following a different mindset, a complete change in life and living. Conversion is the exact opposite of the conventional meaning of ‘born again’ which is a flight from this world. Conversion means becoming one with the earth which formed us, sustains us and daily upholds us.
Yes, there is a better way. We must embrace our life-giving earth. We must take distance from all elements that hinders us to do so. The earth is God’s precious possession, we misuse God’s name when we abuse it. John 3: 16 tells us that God so much loved the earth from which we sprout, which is our mother, which has all the elements to make us perfect beings, that God sacrificed his Son to buy it back from the Devil.
Here is how I see it.
When God gave the earth to Humanity as its possession, these early people sold it to the Devil who ever since then has been in charge. Regard it as a real estate transaction. Jesus bought it back from the Devil and paid for the purchase with his life. That sealed the deal. We now live in that interim period where the sale has been finalized but the deal has not yet been closed. That will happen when Christ returns, which will be soon. All signs point to that for those who have eyes to see, ears to hear and a heart that ticks for Jesus.
That is the reason we must live expecting his coming and act so that when He returns we readily fit into the Perfect Earth where Harmony, Shalom, and Love are the only features.

MARCH 1 2015

THERE’S NO WAY BACK

Just as we try to do everything possible to stay healthy so too we must do the utmost to keep the earth in the best possible shape, because the earth and we are one. We are not stewards but owners of the earth. Psalm 115: 16 is quite explicit on that score. It says that The Highest Heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to humanity. And that makes sense. There also is a saying that ‘possession is 99 percent of ownership,’ so that too indicates ownership. Of course there is some validity to the claim that it is God’s earth. He created it after all. It is like a painting: I may buy a famous piece of art, which makes me the rightful owner, but the treasure always is identified by the original creator, such as a Picasso or van Gogh or,  in music, Bach or Beethoven. That’s how it is with God: our cosmos will always be identified by God as the creator, even though he gave it to us.

We know what we have done to the earth and the lower heavens: irreparable damage, never to be reversed, on the contrary, it will get worse and worse, as is evident from the weird weather we are having. The deterioration we experience will be the topic of many discussions this year and the awful truth is that nothing will change: There is no going back.

Environmental damage is a form of debt. When I borrow money to buy something today, and when I then start using that product, its value goes down, but the debt increases because of interest. Debt, any debt, makes it more difficult for me in times to come because this future obligation hampers my life today because my debt cuts into my buying power, which means that in the months and years ahead I have less money available.

The same is true for environmental debt. We continually borrow from the atmosphere. We use the air, soil, water without regard to the eventual clean-up cost which all lands on our shoulders later in our lives or on future generations to clean up. It’s impossible to enjoy the same benefits tomorrow as we do today without paying much more because the environment debt also carries a penalty. The best way to handle this is to repair the damage now which costs money and time, but will prevent much greater hardship in the near future. Will we do it? No. Our entire life style is built on growth and thus more pollution. In the vocabulary of politics and business there is no concept of going back and cutting down, only growth matters.

What is the church going to do?

Our debt trap reminds me of the Lord’s Prayer, the most popular prayer in churches, a prayer we know by heart, but we fail to know its deeper meaning. The entire prayer is probably one of the most misunderstood sections in the Bible, at par with John 3: 16, where the line “God so loved the world” is generally read as “God so loved the human race.” The misunderstood parts center on the Kingdom and on Debt. Both Bonhoeffer and J. H. Bavinck repeatedly emphasize that the line in the Lord’s Prayer “Your Kingdom Come” is a fervent plea for the establishment of God’s New Earth where righteousness reigns, where everything that was wrong on our current earth will forever be corrected. Then there is the line in that prayer “Give us this day our daily bread”, which is completely mistranslated. There is a Greek word in that sentence – epiousios (Google it to confirm my statement) – that actually does not point to today but to the future. So “Give us this day our daily bread” is not a plea for a constant supply of bread, but really means to ask for the power to prepare for the Kingdom that is to come in the future. After all, Jesus’ entire mission was eschatological, and had everything to do with the coming Kingdom, the New Creation. His sacrificial death was solely for the purpose to ensure that the New Creation was to come in all its glory. His death served to pay for all the environmental debt we accumulated through thousands of years of abusing the planet. Thus “Forgive us our debt as we forgive our debtors” basically refers to all the ‘debts we have inflicted upon creation’, which can never be made good if they depended on us humans to do so. Actually the original text mentions ‘trespasses’. Anything that hampers God’s holiness is a trespass, an illegal entry. When we harm creation we trespass on God’s holiness. We do that all the times and so does everybody else, that’s why we must forgive others as well.

Without Christ there would not be a way back no matter how hard we try. Too bad that by and large almost without exception, the Church rather sticks to the old, and erroneous, version of the Lord’s Prayer. It prefers the engrained interpretation because it is much easier this way and does not call for a totally different approach. That does not mean that there is no place for the church anymore: there is.

There is a vital place for the church

We cannot do without the church, even though fewer and fewer people see it that way. However, in these last days where all the bills, also for the environment, are due, the church’s approach must become completely different. Bonhoeffer, in his Creation and Fall, starts his book with the remarkable words: “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 from the End.”  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, killed by the Nazi regime weeks before the end of World War II, called himself an ‘Anthropos Teleios”. Anthropos is the Greek word for ‘a human being.’ In the Sermon of the Mount Jesus uses the term ‘teleios’ to indicate how we should live. In Matthew 5: 48 Jesus tells us ‘to be teleios as my heavenly father is teleios,” the word usually translated as ‘perfect.’ I do a lot of translating I know that translating is often a guess game. Just as the Lord’s Prayer contains mistranslations so does the Sermon on the Mount. Here the word ‘teleios’ refers to the Greek ‘telos’ as we find it in ‘tele’vision, and ‘tele’phone, both referring to ‘telos’ the Greek word for ‘far’ or ‘end’. The correct translation of Matthew 5: 48 could thus quite well be Consider with everything you do the ultimate outcome and act accordingly.

Don’t expect the church at large to change and live that way. It is too entombed in its customs and superstitions to ever be able to change. There will be places where this will happen, but they will be the exceptions.

Fortunately more and more books and people start tuning into a different melody, one away from heaven and Rapture and more emphasizing the Redemption of all Creation. Where this does not happen, the church has been relegated to the margin. I admire the Pope and his vision. He just appointed scores of new cardinals, but the fact that his church gives no voice to females and its belief that good works can earn salvation indicate the irrelevance of the largest denomination in the world.

At an environmental bible study I attended a few weeks ago it was said that Christianity is really growing in Africa and China. This was seen as hope for the world, because an important environmental scientist, Dr. Schindler of the University of Alberta, himself an unbeliever, had said that the only hope to save the world is to become a Christian. The problem with this is that the fastest growth of Christianity is of the Pentecostal kind, and its main platform is “Rapture”, that erroneous teaching that in a flash Christians will suddenly be swept up to heaven, away from this sinful earth, leaving the godless to fend for themselves in an increasingly satanic environment. A book that has rivalled the Bible in popularity was The Great Late Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey. The title says it all. The New York Times called it the Bestseller of the Decade. By and large both the Catholic and the Protestant church have little use for creation, even though the current Pope has called pollution a sin against God, and I admire him for it.

Of course there are exceptions to this, mainly in the so-called neo-Calvinist tradition, but there too the idea that we are going to heaven is so engrained in all its teachings and its hymns especially, that it is almost impossible to undo the heaven heresy. When, years ago, in an article I wrote for the Presbyterian Record I expounded my misgivings about heaven, a letter to the editor called me a heretic, and the editor himself gave me a book disputing my claim.

Here’s what J. H. Bavinck wrote in his Between the Beginning and the End: A radical Kingdom Vision: “A human being, adam, belongs to adamah, the life?bearing earth. With every sinew of his exis­tence he is tied to the earth, which bears him and feeds him.”  Bonhoeffer wrote essentially the same in his Creation and Fall: “I belong completely to this world. It bears me, nurtures me and holds me…. God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together.”

These two Reformed theologians are now coming back into fashion, and that is a good sign, and also an indication that we are speeding to the End when more and more of the final Truth is being revealed.

Let me cite one example of what sooner than later will engulf the entire globe. Last week I read an article on Egypt. It stands and falls with the river Nile which is Egypt’s life line. When some 70 years ago Egypt had 23 million people, had a good supply of energy, and the Nile yielded an abundance of fish, the country was self-sufficient in food and energy. Since the annual floods from the Nile River no longer occur, thanks to the Russian built dam, the sediments and silt that were carried all throughout the region are trapped, and as one scientist explains, “Sediment is primarily retained in an extremely dense network of irrigation and drain channels, and also in wetlands in the northern delta” This lack of natural fertilizer has resulted in an increase in erosion of the river and Nile Delta, and an increase in the use of chemical fertilizers. Chemical fertilizers have to be imported and thus cost money for the farmers that grow their crops, and it also causes pollution of the surrounding environment due to runoff.  The chemical fertilizers contain high levels of Nitrogen and Phosphorous which are harmful because they flow from the cropland to the water.  Both of these elements are known to cause an increase in algae and algal blooms; algal blooms and the increasing erosion present a problem to fish because both contribute to an increase of particles in the water, which can occasionally clog the fish’s gills, suffocating them.

Now Egypt has a population of 70 million and with the energy sources depleted, with polluted land and fish stocks also down, Egypt has reached the stage of ungovernable. That is increasingly the case also in Africa and China where sand storms darken the days.

There is no way back.

There’s no way back. Seven Billion Two Hundred Million people populate the finite earth. All make claims on the soil, the water and the air, and do so with utter disregard of the ultimate consequences. Already in the Garden of Eden the economic prevailed over the aesthetic. As natural disasters multiply at an unprecedented pace, the End of Life too is approaching with increasing velocity. Nobody knows the exact time of collapse. Only God does. But that it is coming is beyond doubt.

So what must we do? That is today’s dominating question. In the first place we must be aware of the lethal forces we have unleashed. To state that we must remain optimistic because otherwise our grandchildren have no future, is baby prattle. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,” is an ancient saying. In the Fourth of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20: 4) it explicitly says that we shall not worship any other than God. By making economic growth our idol – and we all are guilty of this – the sins of the fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers will be punished to the third and fourth generation through our abuse of the world God solved so much (John 3: 16).

There’s no way back, only a way forward, and thus our prayer should be one of forgiveness and for the speedy coming of the Lord and his New Creation in all its glory.

February 22 2015

PRETEND AND EXTEND

I am always in pursuit of news. And what I see troubles me. Or perhaps what I do not see. I do not see any official warnings that we are in uncharted waters; I do not see that we are sailing into a future that is totally different.

When I was young the world was pretty stable. There was an abundance of small shop owners, small farmers, lots of skilled people. There were a few who had better than average brains and they went on to university, usually the children of professionals – brains generate brains – and in that sense I was the exception in my family, the first to chart a course into higher learning.

It all changed radically a few years after WWII – World War 2 – around the 1950’s, and the advent of the Oil Age, when, to paraphrase Geert Mak, “God Disappeared from the World,” and the god of Economic Growth became the Idol of our Age.

As all idols, they sooner than later want total submission and total devotion. We are now at that phase. In a sense it is the final battle, a battle that started in the Garden of Eden.

The history of the world is like a human life. Let me divide it into four arbitrary segments: age 0-20 formation; age 20-40 experimentation; age 40-60 consolidation; age 60-80 finalization. In the first 20 years we grow up and start to find direction in our lives. We then start to experiment, receive our education, and try to find a spouse or partner and a career. By the time we are 40 we are more or less settled, and look forward to the final years, inevitably ending in death.

In a sense the world is like that, except that the periods are not of equal length. The formation years has taken many thousands, if not millions of years; the experimentation stage started perhaps with the invention of fire which made agriculture possible. I am not sure when that happened, perhaps 100,000 years ago. The consolidation period started with the invention of the printing press, which made the Protestant Reformation – 500 years ago in 1517 – possible. The decades of 1950-2000 were a transition time. We now have entered the home stretch, and I use that term ‘home stretch’ on purpose, because the world as we now know it is in its final stage. Politicians everywhere are desperately trying to halt the decay, but matters have gone too far. Home will be ‘the new creation’ which the Lord is ready to launch. Birth can be a painful matter and we are about to experience this situation. Welcome to the ‘birth pangs’. Read Romans 8 for further enlightenment.

So why am I so convinced that we are in the ‘death-years’ of our civilization?

As I wrote last week: Peaks are everywhere. One that I did not mention concerns ‘science.’ You may remember that in Switzerland the European Union spent in excess of $1 billion to discover a so-called God particle. To trap this elusive matter the CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has built the Large Hadron Collider. Here is some truth from one of the people involved:

Quantum Physicist Dr. Amit Goswami admitted today that he, and his peers, have absolutely “no fucking idea” what they’re doing, and claims they were no nearer than prehistoric man to figuring out the Universe. “We have been just winging it, to tell you the truth,” explained the 78-year-old in an exclusive interview with WWN. “Seriously, I haven’t a clue what’s going on. Either does anyone else in my field. We keep proving stuff that never actually happened.

Over the years there have been just a handful of us pretending to know something about the universe that no one else does,” he went on. “But this is all lies to feed the charade. I’ve had some great times during the years; travelling the world, and giving talks on our pretend finds.

When asked how he got away with it for so long, he replied: “I found out a long time ago that everything can be proven with a mathematical equation. Now, I mean everything; from unicorns, fire-breathing dragons, God and even the G-spot. None of it is true. Me and the handful that know the truth have been riding the Quantum Physicist celebrity wave for quite some time now, but it must end – before someone gets hurt”.

The University of Oregon professor warned that the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, could potentially wipe out the entire planet if the project is not put to a halt.

“I’m coming near the end of my days now and I just want to get this off my chest,” he said. “I just hope the world can forgive us”.

Of course this ‘science’ program near Geneva won’t stop. Too many careers are at stake, and stopping it would be an admission of failure: science cannot fail. Pretend and extend, in other words. It reminds me of the Tower of Babel, where the people wanted to become famous “Make a name for ourselves” says the Bible in Genesis 11: 4, replacing the name, the Kingdom of God, with the human name and Kingdom. Here too the same principle is at work.

I must admit that the CERN people discovered one thing: The Big Bang Theory is no longer valid. Of course not. Just as God has no end or a beginning, so the world has no end or a beginning. For the world there is no beginning and there is no end: “in the beginning” are just words because we cannot understand that there is ‘no beginning’. These CERN scientists may yet blow up the world, but they rather Pretend and Extend than admit that they are wrong.

That same sort of brinkmanship is going on in Brussels where Greece is speaking the truth about Capitalism and the rest of Europe adheres to the Lie, the lie that Austerity can save us from financial collapse. The harsh truth is that neither the Greeks nor the Euro nations have a clue what is really going on. Just as the Collider conspirators know that they, for the sake of obtaining funds and secure prestigious positions, knew they did not know anything, the financial gurus in Brussels also know themselves to be frauds, and, as true fanatics, are redoubling their efforts, speeding up the demise of the global money system. The Greeks are wrong too, but less so. There simply is no solution to the ‘debt’ problem, so everybody pretends and extends.

When all else fails, go to war

When all else fails, go to war. That is what’s happening. The rumbling in the Ukraine, the mess in the Middle East, the tensions in the Far East, the droughts in Australia, the extreme weather everywhere, all point to us humans going to war, basically against creation. They all are omens of the Global Grand Finale.

The most disconcerting aspect of these finalizing times is that they are signaling a total destructive all-out war. Leaders mobilize all forces, refuse to compromise, define their enemies in moral terms, demand sacrifice on the battlefield and home front, build the most destructive weapons imaginable, and employ those weapons to obtain victory at any cost.

It may seem inconceivable that war on such a scale will happen within the next ten years, but it was equally inconceivable in 1936 that 65 million people would die in the next ten years during World War II. We valued all the wrong things and made all the wrong choices leading up to this Crisis and during the early stages of this Crisis. The accumulation of unmet obligations, unpaid bills, un-kept promises and unresolved issues will provide the fuel for an upheaval that will shake our society to its core and transforms the country’s direction for the next years. No longer make our choices any difference. That is not a pessimistic statement: that is the only outcome of what Pope Francis calls, referring to pollution: the sins against creation. The Bible says (Romans 6: 23) “The wages of sin are death.” In this case the death not of the planet, because in the final analysis the planet belongs to God, but of all living matter.

Today we experience all sort of wars. Let me name a few, without elaborating too much. I won’t again mention our  war against Creation.

Currency War

The world is awash in sovereign debt, as governments have over-promised welfare benefits, every country is attempting to debase their currency in order to make their debt load bearable. When Greece exits the EU, the currency wars may lead to real war in Europe.

Class War

As Warren Buffett admitted in an oligarch momentary lapse into truthiness:

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

The true class war is between the .1% and the 99.9%. There is a small clique of bankers, billionaires, corporate CEOs, media moguls, politicians, and their acolytes who represent the Deep State, or invisible government, and control the mechanisms of financial markets through their capture of the system.

Generational War

A particular dicey war is the war between the older generations and younger generations.  The tension between older and younger generations is palpable. Older generations have accumulated wealth during the good times. The Boomers who didn’t save for their retirement refuse to yield the field and allow Millennials into the workforce. Millions of delusional Boomers utilized the easy debt provided by the bankers to live for today and never save for tomorrow. Well tomorrow is here. The older generations are still going to receive all the social benefits they were promised, while younger generations will get stiffed. They know they are going to get screwed and are unlikely to take the screwing lying down.

Terrorism/Religious war

The war on terrorism, like the wars on drugs and poverty, is unwinnable. They aren’t meant to be won. They are meant to enrich the vested interests, expand their control over our lives, erode our liberties and freedoms, and provoke fear and dependency among the masses.

The war on terrorism is a cover for hijacking the oil under the ground in the Middle East. ISIS is now Satan, Hitler, and Attila the Hun rolled into one, even though they didn’t exist a year ago. They are the existential threat of the day – the excuse for U.S. troops and armaments to flow back into Iraq. The military industrial complex profits will surge.

The Middle East is a powder-keg which could be the catalyst for the start of World War III.

Cyber war

We, the technology addicted masses, are completely oblivious to their loss of privacy and freedom. We are being tracked and monitored through your electronic devices. Our TV is recording your conversations. In cyber war, the playing field is fairly even. Even North Korea can create problems for a superpower. Hackers have already caused billions in damage to retailers like Target, Home Depot, Staples, Sears, and Neiman Marcus. Over 1,000 merchants have had their computer networks breached. Hackers could potentially bring the financial system to its knees with a few keystrokes. Foreign governments have their smartest tech geeks probing U.S. computer networks for weaknesses and will act on these weaknesses when they feel it is beneficial to their interests. Technology will not save the world, but it might play a part in ending it.

Total War

It all adds up to Total War, war on all fronts, cyber, religious, generational, class, environmental, currency, war so total never before experienced, and since it is so total, it will involve every living thing on earth, the fish- already mostly gone – the trees – in a far state of decline, the animals – many species already eliminated – and we poor and sinful humans, the perpetrators of all this evil which started in that beautiful Garden of Eden

Conclusion

All this will affect me as much as anybody else. I’m living in the midst of this Crisis with all the other participants. I’m not happy about the prospect of financial collapse, societal collapse, and war. My wife and I have many children and grandchildren. It’s not fair they are left with the burdens created by decades of bad choices and cowardly acts of us, their elders.

Next week: what can we do; what must we do.

February 15 2015

PEAK EVERYTHING

I have been a columnist for some 25 years, and an occasional feature writer before that. My first column for the Christian Courier was an evaluation of the then new Ontario Premier, Bob Rae, who, to his own immense surprise replaced David Petersen in 1990. From 2000-2010 I wrote a weekly column for the Intelligencer, the Belleville (On) daily, also placing this on my web site, where I still post a new article each week. While my Intel column was limited to maximum 800 words, the blog I now write is usually around the 2000 words length: it is easier to write a longer column than a short one.

While I am contemplating what to write next, my eye falls on a book in front of me with the title The March of Folly. If there ever is an age that qualifies for that epitaph it is the contemporary scene.  Barbara Tuchman wrote the book in 1984 and I bought it in 1985. She ends the book with the Vietnam War which did not prevent the USA from repeating this folly in both Afghanistan and Iraq in quick succession. Obama knows this, reason why he is hesitant to get involved in the ISIS mess and in the Ukraine debacle.

However, the folly to PEAK ALL FOLLIES is our relentless war on creation. This profound stupidity trumps all other ones because our very existence is at stake there, as war on creation essentially means War on God, something we simply cannot win. It’s all because we worship idols, the idols of Economic Growth especially. That’s the reason why we have lost all connection with reality: we have eyes but we see not, ears but we hear not, to quote Psalm 115.

Closely connected to this is PEAK FAITH. The church I attend was built in 1890 with a seating capacity of some 250. This past Sunday our choir of 10 people equaled the size of the audience. The average attendance is perhaps 25 and the average age about 70 years. Now with four times as many people in the world since 1890, church attendance is a tenth of what it was 125 years ago, a real reduction of more than 95 percent.  Faith has become unfashionable, faith that is belief in God as the Creator and Jesus as the Redeemer. Isn’t there a saying that when people stop believing in God they start to believe anything? That makes sense to me because The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, even though that text has become a cliché. What it really means is that we garner wisdom only when we acknowledge God’s wisdom as evident in creation, and treat creation as a holy gift from God. That is confirmed in Jesus’ prompting to First seek the Kingdom of God – which is the welfare of creation – and everything else will fall into place.  By and large Christianity has failed to make this the heart of the Gospel, and this is the principal reason for the church’s decline and the global disasters we daily experience. The sad news is that, just as the corporate world can no longer alter its approach to the natural world – inevitable leading to the demise of the earth – so the church too no longer can change its approach to the spiritual world. Call it PEAK POWERLESSNESS.

In the natural world we experience all sorts of peaks, and I don’t refer to Switzerland or Nepal. Take bees, those little insects that provide us with honey and are vital for pollinating fruit trees, from almonds to apples. No bees, no fruits, so needed for our food supply. Bees have been dying off in droves, and no one has been able to pinpoint the real cause. Blame it on the all-pervasive pollutants that, in humans, cause cancers, and in animals, death and deformation. The die-off is now world-wide.

I see peaks everywhere. Peaks everywhere really mean that from here on everything is going downhill. We now have PEAK MARRIAGE. Of our 9 grandchildren of marriageable age, only two have officially tied the knot. Failure to a faith commitment is also evident in marriage. There’s little desire to commit to a partner for life. Perhaps the economy is to blame in case of marriage. Somehow I sense a connection to Jesus’ words where he said that in the New Creation there will not be marriage. I maybe all wrong there, but that’s how I would like to explain this. I also believe that young people sense the darkness of the future and their reluctance to increase the world population, already far beyond what the earth can support.

Again this week I experienced computer fraud. My credit card was again compromised. Although for me charging purchases on credit cards means acquiring air-miles, I have decided to sever that connection, because it is increasingly my experience that the Internet and all its connections suffer from PEAK INSECURITY. I therefore will drastically reduce my exposure to the Internet and have already invalidated one credit card, determined as I am to use my debit card, cash and cheques from now on, even though I forfeit the chance to accrue air-miles. Moreover flying is one of the filthiest ways to travel in terms of air pollution.

All sorts of other peaks come to mind such as PEAK MONETARY DEBT. I just Googled the word and out came $250 Trillion as the total amount of global debt. This translates into more than $30,000 for every human being on the earth, including the 2 billion or more who have an annual income of less than $1,000. That means that we, the rich, with personal income of more than $20,000 each, owe astronomical amounts, never to be repaid, just as the Environment will never become pristine again as we also have PEAK ENVIRONMENTAL DEBT. There too we are beyond the point of no return. Some time ago, a scientist went on his biannual tour of the Russian arctic ocean, checking for toxic plumes of methane gas bubbling up from the ocean. He’d previously seen hundreds of these plumes, about a meter wide each, emitting gas 50 times more damaging to our climate than carbon dioxide. This time, as he came across the first plume, he couldn’t believe it. It was a KILOMETER wide. A vast column of gas entering our atmosphere. He sailed on and found another a kilometer wide, and another, and another. Hundreds of them. The Paris meeting in the Fall to discuss Climate Change is mere window dressing: just so much more pollution-causing airflights for the thousands of  delegates.

The world is doing everything to generate more growth. Nothing works, which also means that we have PEAK GROWTH. The entire global economy is built on growth. Just as a bike stops and falls down when the forward momentum ceases, so too the world economy collapses when growth stops. In connection with this PEAK LIES are part of the parcel. No public statements can be trusted anymore. Take everything with a scoop of salt, which reminds me of PEAK FOOD and PEAK SOIL and PEAK FERTILIZER and PEAK OIL. Closely connected to Peak Food is Peak soil. It derives from the more concrete concept that we are “mining” the soil: degrading and exhausting it by growing single-crop “monocultures”, using too much fertilizer and irrigating too enthusiastically, all in the name of higher crop yields. Since it is Oil that we eat – each food calorie requires 10 oil calories – once we reach PEAK OIL the food supply too will collapse.

Here’s what I read this week. “We know far more about the amount of oil there is globally and how long those stocks will last than we know about how much soil there is,” said John Crawford, Director of the Sustainable Systems Program in Rothamsted Research in England. “Under business as usual, the current soils that are in agricultural production will yield about 30 percent less…by around 2050.”

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 25 percent of the world’s soils that are currently under cultivation are severely degraded, and another 8 percent moderately degraded. (Even “moderately degraded” soil has lost half its capacity to store water.) And the only way to access new, undamaged soil is to deforest the rest of the planet.

All of which brings me back to the issue of PEAK FOOD. This year prices for corn, soybeans and wheat are so low that next year farmers will plant less of it. The low 2013 crop and the high prices then tempted farmers to grow much more in 2014, so much more that commodity prices collapsed. In 2015 they will plant less, much less with the result that there won’t be enough come September.

During the latter part of the 20th century, food production grew at around 3.5 percent per year, comfortably ahead of population growth, but the dramatic rise in crop yields was due to new inputs of fertilizers and pesticides, much more irrigation, and new “green revolution” crop varieties. Now those one-time improvements have largely run their course, and global food production is rising at only 1.5 percent a year. In food there already have been several peaks. A report by scientists at Yale, Michigan State University and the Helmholtz Centre in Germany in the journal “Ecology and Society” stated that peak corn happened in 1985, peak rice and wild fish in 1988, peak dairy in 1989, peak eggs in 1993, and peak meat in 1996. More recent peaks were vegetables in 2000, milk and wheat in 2004, poultry in 2006, and soya bean in 2009. Indeed, sixteen of the 21 foods examined in the “Ecology and Society” report have already peaked, and production levels have actually flattened out for key regions amounting to 33 percent of global rice and 27 percent of global wheat production.

So we are already in trouble, and it will get worse even before Climate Change really kicks  in. There are still some quick fixes available, notably by cutting down on waste: more than a third of the food that is grown for human consumption never gets eaten. But unless we come up with some new “magic bullets”, things will be getting fairly grim on the food front by the 2030s.

Of all the peaks, PEAK FOOD AND WATER are the most scary. Billions will go hungry. Everything impacts the food supply.

So what must we do? What can we do?

I hope that we also have PEAK AWARENESS because there certainly is PEAK STUPIDITY. Most people give little thought to tomorrow. But tomorrow always comes. Last month the rich of the earth gathered in Davos Switzerland. There are reports that even these billionaires fear for their future. And well they should. For too long the Western Governments have protected the banks and by implication the rich from collapsing. Once the Debt mountain disintegrates the rich more than the poor will suffer. Ted Turner may hide away at his 500,000 acre ranch in Montana but drones with bombs are now a middleclass toy. Nobody and nothing will be secure in the near future.

This week frantic conferences in Europe and elsewhere are signs that we are in an endgame of sorts. Little Greece with only 11 million people, comprising a mere 2 percent of the Euro population, may yet cause the money world to implode. The lowly honey bee, one of the smallest animals, may yet cause the food supply to be reduced by 30 percent.

We live in a totally integrated world. Collapse of one segment, however small, will have disastrous domino effects.

The Chinese have a curse: may you live in interesting times. For the few who still have eyes to see and ears to hear these interesting times are not a curse but a wake-up call.

February 8 2015

HOW MANY PEOPLE CAN THE EARTH SUPPORT (3) Conclusion

God created a perfect world – still with us – and in spite of all the damage we have done to it, come time, the world will heal itself. All it needs is a few thousand years without the evil influence of us, human beings who – and here my Calvinistic streak pops up again – are born and conceived in sin and therefore children of wrath.

While I write this it occurs to me that there is no possibility that we can be present during this recuperative period, because it is impossible to totally- and I mean completely –live harmoniously, holistically, perfectly pure lives in a world suffering from human-induced ills: the world has to be cleansed of all traces of pollution before redeemed mankind can live there again, because contaminated earth breeds contaminated people. In other words we have to be ‘teleios’ – always aware what our actions will be in the short and the long run. In Matthew 5: 48 Jesus tells us not to be like the pagans but to be ‘perfect – teleios – as your heavenly Father is perfect – teleios.

For God time is no problem. With God a thousand years are like one day, which also means that God can cause the healing process to speed up.

In the first episode I mentioned that I would use a quote from a book I wrote which I gave the title of Day without End referring to the perfect state that is to come. In that book I imagined myself in that renewed world and describe what I think I will experience there and who I will meet, including Jesus. Here is an episode in which I travel with 3 other people in Africa the continent where we possibly originate. Here‘s an excerpt.

As we approach a waterway, we see a virtual paradise; trees and fields and water streams and animals in an almost chaotic abundance. A herd of antelopes is grazing and they just barely lift up their heads when we come close. Giraffes, their necks craned as usual, have their heads well in the trees. They, too, barely turn to us as they watch us with one eye. Some wildebeests are drinking and pause only briefly as we arrive. None of them show the slightest inclination to bolt from our presence as they would have in the former time. It seems as if the entire animal population has come here to meet us and greet us. This combination of water and fertile land, of low lying land and higher elevations has created a natural habitat for both a vast array of land animals and water fowl, all rich in colors and outspoken in their melodies.

“Now I see why you want to travel via water ways,” Jethro says. “It is there where eventually all animals and humans meet; the fish, the fowl, the fast-footed all need water!”

Our map shows us that we have reached one of the side arms of the Nile. Initia becomes quite excited now that we have arrived at this beautiful launching point for our African voyage.

Arctica checks out the large papyrus growing in abundance along the water’s edge. Faint memories of thousands of years ago have awakened in her, when her ancestors made ocean going vessels from these very plants and travelled from Asia to the Arctic. However, before we have an opportunity to explore the possibility of constructing a river vessel, we are startled by a sound.

It is a tom-tom, the African telegraph system, relaying messages from one tribe to another, quite close, and in the distance, a more faint reply can be heard.

We look at each other, realizing other people are here, people familiar with the ways of old. People are here, indigenous people, and they are talking to each other, perhaps already signaling the arrival of four strangers, people totally unlike themselves. How is that possible? Where do these people come from? Were they there when Jesus sat on his throne and celebrated with us the wedding, sealing the covenant that would bind us, humans, forever to his New Creation? Of course. Then they must have gone here without delay. Makes sense.

“Let’s go and find them,” says Initia, “I am sure they can help us build a boat or suggest to us where we can find suitable material.”

Jethro, the experienced outdoors man, gauges the direction and the distance of the drums, and we set out on foot.

The drums grow louder and louder, and then stop.

Not far away, at the edge of the river, we see tents, about a dozen of them, and a number of large canoes on the shore. We see sails as well, but no people. Where are the people?

While we are wondering, a face appears in the opening of the central tent, and then a hand beckons us to come and join the festivities in progress. As we approach, we see the large drum standing behind the tent.

Later I describe how these native people, so extremely knowledgeable in the ways of nature, meet Jesus. Life-long students of their own world they have concluded that there is a God, an all-wise deity, who had created it all, and they had worshiped him. Now they meet the Creator in their own setting.

How do these people live in the New Creation? They know exactly what nature provides in fruits, plants and other edibles and where to find them. They are the original hunter-gatherers. Their way of life is the only sustainable in the long run, and that’s what Day without End shows.

Today’s unsustainable situation

What is happening now? I ended the previous instalment with condemning The Green Revolution. Here is what the article The Oil we Eat says about this:

“More relevant here are the methods of the green revolution, which added orders of magnitude to the devastation. By mining the iron for tractors, drilling the new oil to fuel them and to make nitrogen fertilizers, and by taking the water that rain and rivers had meant for other lands, farming had extended its boundaries, its dominion, to lands that were not farmable. At the same time, it extended its boundaries across time, tapping fossil energy, stripping past assets.

“David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if the entire world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of being off on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it ten years.”

If the entire world would eat as the USA, obesity would be a world-wide curse. It already is becoming a global phenomenon thanks to the sugar content in corn, America’s biggest crop. Agriculture in North America is not about food; it’s about commodities that require the outlay of still more energy to become food. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.

That situation is totally unsustainable. We know what carbon- derived energy does to God’s creation: every carbon calorie adds to the destruction of whatever we hold dear. Thus, whether we like it or not, if we aim for eternal life in God’s creation, we need to do without energy derived from carbon sources, be that coal, natural gas or refined products. It appears that wood fires are allowed. Why?

Jesus, in the last chapter of the Gospel of John meets his disciples at the water edge, and when they spot him, “they saw a fire of burning coals there with fish on it, and some bread.”  No doubt the coals are from wood. Fish can be harvested on a sustainable basis. Agriculture too can be redeeming.

The new creation needs no technocrats, no automobile designers, no lawyers or preachers or insurance sales personnel. It does need experts in natural edibles, people knowledgeable of living off the land, skilled in organic gardening, in harvesting what the earth offers in perpetuity. God, in the Garden of Eden, showed Adam and Eve (Genesis 2: 16) “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden.” Thus basically a vegetarian diet, something to start now, I believe.

According to Genesis, the early people lived for hundreds of years, one, Methuselah almost 1,000 years. Whatever the length of life, in the very early days the air was so pure, the water so perfect, the soil so unspoiled that people lived almost forever. Now, when none of these natural conditions are in force, sicknesses are increasingly rampant.

How many people can the earth support?

Of course, I cannot give a number. I can with a good degree of confidence say that it will be far fewer than 500 million. That was the number of people alive before the Industrial Revolution, the onset of the Carbon Age, and even then deserts grew, as trees were used for fuel.

It took 150,000 years for the world population to reach One Billion in the early 1800’s. Thanks to oil it skyrocketed from there on. When the world had a mere 100 million 1600 years ago even Rome had trouble continuing its life style, which collapsed after the year 450 A. D. Due to the general weakening of health about the year 1300 – due to famine – almost half the European population died from the Black Plague.

We are creating similar conditions again, a prelude to the Great Collapse. We now are like cattle that spend their adult lives packed shoulder to shoulder in a space not much bigger than their bodies, up to their knees in shit, being stuffed with grain and a constant stream of antibiotics to prevent the disease this sort of confinement invariably engenders. Their manure is rich in nitrogen and once provided a farm’s fertilizer, but the feedlots are far removed from farm fields, so it is simply not “efficient” to haul it to cornfields. It is waste. It exhales methane, a global-warming gas. It pollutes streams. It takes thirty-five calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of beef this way; sixty-eight to make one calorie of pork. That’s why it all will end with a bang. The Great Bang  -supposed to have been the beginning of our world but now discredited – will end it all when Christ will return to claim his own.

Various estimates put the number of the people who have ever lived at about 100 billion. “Many are called, few are chosen” (Matthew 22:14).  That makes sense, as the one world we have, even under ideal conditions, can only support a limited number of people, because it has to last forever. If there have been 100 billion of us greedy customers, and if 100 million is the top figure the earth can support in perpetuity, then simple arithmetic tells us that 1 in a 1000 are among the chosen. Oops that hurts! Since our, the last generation, is also the most destructive, the number is probably less for us 21^st century people. It reminds me of Luke 18: 8 in which Jesus lamented “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

Yes, we are the last generation, the generation of the Internet, of universal mostly useless television, of useless space travel, of universal waste, and frivolity, of useless lives without meaning, religion-less religion. We are the last and also mostly the lost generation.

How do we prepare for The End? 2 Peter 3 gives us the answer:

“The day of the Lord will come like a thief…….Since everything will be destroyed (by fire) what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed it coming…………We are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness….. Make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him.”

In light of recent developments, especially world-wide pollution and Climate Change, living holy and godly lives entails loving creation- God’s first love – with all our hearts, all our souls, all our intellectual powers, and love our neighbors as ourselves.  We can only love God when we love his creation. It’s to the New Earth to which the redeemed of the Lord will return. They will enter Zion with singing and everlasting joy will crown their heads (Isaiah 35: 10).

How many can the earth support into perpetuity? That’s God’s business. God offers us a choice: Life or death. Deuteronomy 30: 19: “See I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. Choose Life.” Live in harmony with the world God loved so much: John 3:16.

Next week: Peak Everything!