Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

PREPARING FOR COLLAPSE (10)

Final Episode

I could continue in this series, but other topics beckon, so this is my last one dealing with Collapse. I believe that, in the main, nobody is ever ready for Collapse, because our brains are wired to ignore such events as Climate Change and Collapse. Just try to bring the subject up at a social gathering; chances are that you’re met with either silence, downright denial or confusion.

I read a new word last week: HOPIUM. Where Karl Marx is supposed to have said: “Religion is the OPIUM of the people” for many liberal thinkers HOPIUM is the poison that distorts reality. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary they hope that somehow science, or the government, or the United Nations, or nature itself, will cause the problem of Collapse to disappear.

I was at a meeting last week where an author, a woman with extensive scientific background, kept on saying that ‘we will overcome’ the problems facing us. She demonstrated her knowledge of natural sciences repeatedly and, to general applause, expressed her ‘belief’ that dangers such as Climate Change and disappearance of wild species will be solved, without saying how.

HOPIUM is the new religion.

I am of Dutch birth, born in the most Northerly part of the Netherlands, where ‘nuchterheid’ ‘down-to-earth common sense is said to originate. HOPIUM is the false religion which soothes us to sleep, induces us to inaction and leads us to the way to Hell. C. S. Lewis once wrote something like this: The way to hell is smooth, no sudden turns, slightly sloping, easy to traverse. That’s the way we like it. But that’s not what life is all about. When we look at what’s going on out there, then optimism is not warranted. Instead we purposely close our eyes to reality, which earns us the label of being a cynic which is defined as someone who knowingly acts against what he or she knows to be true.

Why doesn’t positive thinking work the way you might assume? Dreaming about a future that poses no dangers calms us down and robs us of the incentive to take action to pursue our goals. Positive thinking fools our minds into perceiving that we need not act at all, and so stops our willingness to do anything at all. It’s the easy way out and also literally the way to hell on earth.

Do I sound negative? Yes. I know I cannot convince you. Still I want to draw your attention to a host of happenings which indicate COLLAPSE. The list is by no means exhaustive.

1. Colony Collapse Disorder: bees are dying off in droves, imperiling thirty percent of our food supply.
2. Wild Animal Collapse Disorder: more than half of the wild animals out there have disappeared due to us depriving them of their habitat.
3. Ocean Fish Collapse Disorder: the oceans once full of life are increasingly depleted of fish and filled with plastic and other filth, while acidifying rapidly, spelling the end of all life.
4. Stable Weather Collapse Disorder: ask insurance companies where the major source of insurance claims comes from, and they answer: volatile and dangerous weather.
5. Middle Class Collapse Disorder: with the advance of robots and computer software inventions, society is rapidly dividing into a tiny upper class and a huge underclass, eliminating the most significant section: the Middle Class, the mainstay of society.
6. The Truth of the Matter Collapse Disorder: the media are a reflection of our own reluctance to face the truth, and so reinforce our weakness to shy away from the cruel reality that is about to overwhelm us.
7. The Stock Market Collapse Disorder: where before we bought when we had saved the money, we now live on debt, feeding the rise of stock market with borrowed funds, until debt does us in.
8. The Fighting Ebola Collapse Disorder: we have closed our eyes to the imminent danger of infectious diseases, of which Ebola is the current danger.
9. The Ecclesiastical Enterprise Collapse Disorder. In the coming columns I will elaborate on this phenomenon in detail, and will try to offer a possible remedy.

It’s not that I am obsessed by bad news. What I am fighting is that, by and large, people don’t really believe that evil is the prevailing reality in our life. In general, even the church people, the ministers and the rapidly diminishing flock of the faithful believe that evil can be overcome.

OK, I am an old fashioned believer. The Bible repeatedly states that we are born and conceived in sin and therefore are inclined to all evil, and shun the good.  Those who govern us at the present time reject this central insight of Western religion, which is found also in Greek tragic drama and the work of the Roman historians. Destructive human conflict is rooted in flaws within us, the human beings. The study of human actions reveals that humans always are inclined to destructive and self-destructive behavior. The bitter truth is that we must be constantly aware that, in whatever we do, evil always pops up.

We are bombarded with news that spells progress. No view of things could be more alien at the present time. Every politician – especially now with the USA November midterm elections just ahead – whatever their political spectrum, all of those who govern us hold to some version of beneficial liberalism – the HOPIUM, that false religion – which teaches that human civilization is advancing, albeit in fits and starts, to a point at which the worst forms of human destructiveness can be left behind. According to this view, evil, if any such thing exists, is not an inbuilt human flaw, but a product of defective social institutions, which can over time be permanently improved. “All we need is love,” however that is defined. Politicians as a block reject the insight that destructive human conflict is rooted in flaws within us humans. They also, fanatically, advocate that continuous growth is possible in a finite world.

I have a book by the American writer and journalist William Shirer who lived in Germany during the rise of the Hitler regime in the 1930s. He writes something that applies to us as well:

“Most Germans, so far as I could see, did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of their splendid culture was being destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work were being regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation … On the whole, people did not seem to feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupulous tyranny. On the contrary, they appeared to support it with genuine enthusiasm.”

Time and again we see that, if it comes to choose between a job and preserving the climate or democracy, the job always wins. Hitler created jobs. That, in a nutshell, illustrates the truth of the end of the world. Jared Diamond, in his book COLLAPSE, also gives a good example, citing the demise of the Eastern Island’s existence. He writes ”What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say? Like modern loggers, did he shout “Jobs, not trees!”? Or: “Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood”?

Jesus asks us to be (and here I use the Greek words, as the New Testament has been preserved in that language) ‘anthropoi teleioi’. This means that we have to be anthropoi ‘people’ who are ‘teleioi’ keeping the ‘telos, the end’ in mind. The translators in their idea of the meaning of the word ‘teleios’ have seen fit to render it as ‘perfect’: so the text in the Sermon in the Mount comes to us as “Be ye perfect as my Father in Heaven is perfect.” But we know only too well that we can’t be perfect. But we can fulfill the meaning of teleios by always in our actions trying to gauge what the end of our doings entail. We know that the ‘telos’ of driving an automobile is GHG – Green House Gases – which, in the end causes Climate Change and all its after effects such as warmer weather, greater storms, rising seas, disappearing glaciers, harsher drought. Even if I cannot do without a car, living far from stores, church and relatives, I do what Luther recommended, “sin bravely”, while praying for forgiveness. That this earth, as we now know it, will end, and be replaced with a renewed, cleansed, pristine world, is a biblical given. So, in a sense, all my 10 instalments of PREPARING FOR COLLAPSE are Eschatologies, stories that deal with – another Greek word – the eschaton – meaning the last stage of all things.

Collapse.

The apostle Paul elab­­o­rated on this when he wrote, “For the creation was subject to frus­tration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it” (Rom. 8:20). Once sin affected just one portion of that beau­tifully holistic order, it infected its totality, ruining the entire realm because Satanic forces threw themselves onto nature, onto us humans, onto the entire radiant creation. The result has been that our universe no longer is one of only beauty and harmony, but, especially in our days, one where  unpredictable powers are threatening us with annihilation from all directions. Now the world in which we live is dominated by demons. Every hour we experience the terrible influ­ence of this satanic situ­a­tion.

Yes, something went wrong.

Here’s how a poet who remains anonymous, phrased it.

The future broke. Collapse.

The Collapse is the future slowing, stopping, winding down. Fracturing; splitting apart; coming undone. It is the future ending, rupturing, breaking.

Once, we subscribed to a naive view of historical progress. That humanity marched forwards into a place we called the “future”.

The future stopped happening. For most of us. We got left behind by it.

The future isn’t one of unalloyed, golden progress anymore. Tomorrow is a tale of decline, degeneration, decay. Collapse.

The future isn’t flying cars and food pills and a smart-home and a stable career and comfortable prosperity for every family anymore. Collapse.

The future looks more like this. A story of a burning planet, of imploding middle classes, of lost generations, of empty decades, of mass unemployment, of the rule of law breaking, of democracy cracking, of nations splintering, of tribes warring, of broken dreams, of Greater Depressions, of unending Stagnations, of human possibility itself shattering into a million million pieces. Collapse.

The future isn’t the steady, forward march of human advancement anymore. What is “declining”? Constitutional democracy, opportunity, mobility, material prosperity, law, equity, fairness, a sense of meaning in life…hope for the future. Collapse.

The stories we used to tell ourselves can no longer be told. History is not a march to progress. Progress can shatter; crack. Collapse.

The future, too, can end up broken.

Collapse.

This is how the future ends. Not with a click, but with a Bang.

The Collapse is a story about how the world—the world as we once knew it—will end. Not end as in “be blown to bits by a meteor”. But end in the sense that it will never come to be. It is a story about the end of the future.

We are not living in the future. We are living in the Great Collapse. The space in between the future that never was, and the past that will not end. The break; the chasm; the gap.

We’re trapped here, in this ongoing Collapse. In a purgatory from which there’s no escape.

This Collapse is killing the future. Not the past, not the present, the future and filling it with a void, a null, an empty space, full of stagnation, of nothing, of nihilism. We can’t fix it by fixing it. We can only fix it by fixing us.

There is a fundament to the thinking of all civilized people. It is this. That each and every person deserves the chance to live fully. No matter how weak, poor, frail, or destitute. Why? Because to each life, that is all that there has ever been. Life. The struggle. The glimpse. The triumph. The fall.

If we are to become ourselves again, then we must fight to reclaim what we truly know. We are made to LIVE. That fighting against life is the truest misfortune of all. For it is the end of Faith, love, meaning, purpose, grace, wonder, suffering, passion.

And it is all those that we must rediscover if we are to escape the Collapse.

And the greatest of these is LOVE. Love for God’s creation. Love for all of life.

I have translated a book by Johan Herman Bavinck, of which the subtitle is A Radical Kingdom Vision. That radical Kingdom vision is the Renewed Creation where the sheep and the lion, the wolf and the little child, live together in peace, where harmony reigns forever, never to be broken again. It will restore what happened in the Garden of Eden, when Collapse began, when the human pair there wanted to be like God and so God let them be: God hid his face “to see what their end would be.” (Deut. 32:20). We are now discovering what it means when God disappears from the earth.

Fortunately it is only temporary. The true vision of the future is captured in Revelation 21: 2: I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.

The new earth is the bride. We, the new human race, with Christ as the head, is the groom. The last Holy Marriage. 

Next week I will start a long series on the possible place and task of the church in these Last Days. The possible new title CHURCH—ILL?

PREPARING FOR COLLAPSE (9)

Will you get Ebola?

I am quite sure that you’ve heard the word Ebola by now. It was named after a river in Sudan, where, on July 6 1976, a storekeeper, identified only by the initials of Yu. G. of the Zande tribe, died with blood running from all his body’s openings. The mysterious disease spread through his rural area, killing many people and then, with no more reluctant bodies available, the virus went into hiding.

We all know that Africa today is a vulnerable conglomerate of nations. Before 1800 it consisted of scores of tribes, with only at its southerly tip, Cape Town, a white settlement. The place originally was named Kaap van Goede Hoop  -Cape of Good Hope –  which the globetrotting Dutch used first as a stopover to the Netherlands East Indies, now Indonesia, and later as a good place to settle.  Africa then was pre-colonialist and largely forest, with people living within the means of creation, not unlike most of North America’s native people before 1500.

In early 1800 Europe discovered Africa and carved it up between England, France, Germany, Belgium and Portugal, robbing it of its people and natural treasures. It really never recovered from this rape. Now it often lacks basic health services, totally different from our situation. Or is it?

My question: “Can too much medical care be equally dangerous?”

William McNeil, University of Chicago historian, and a native Canadian, studied the matter of infectious diseases and discovered that each catastrophic epidemic event is the ironic result of humanity improving its overall condition, because as its health and wealth increase its vulnerability to disease also goes up. Dr. McNeill writes that “the more we win and the more we drive infections to the margin of human experience, the more we clear a path for possible catastrophic infections. We’ll never escape the limits of the ecosystem. We are caught in the food chain, whether we like it or not, eating and being eaten.”

That makes sense to me. The more hygienic we become and the more we ban dirt from our system, the fewer antibodies and natural remedies are present in our bodies and the more we become susceptible to infection. Thus anti-biotic medicine, so beneficial when having a communicable disease, may yet prove our undoing because it deprives our bodies of natural healing agents. That’s why organic food, free from pesticides and free from antibiotics so abundant in meat products, living close to the earth, and even grow your own, may be the best defense against body-killing pests.

Hans Zinsser in his classic Rats, Lice and History traces how pestilences, which reigned supreme less than 100 years ago, hastened the final demise of the Roman Empire. He states that “it can hardly be questioned that it (the great pestilence under Emperor Justinian) was one of the factors – perhaps the most potent single influence – which gave the coup de gr?ce to the ancient (Roman) empire.”

Last week I mentioned the dire die-off of wild animals. Some researchers now speculate that the substances in our waters, laced with traces of antibiotics, birth control pills and other medicinal remnants may be the root cause of their disappearance. If that is true, then the same fate may befall the human race, as we too are constantly bombarded with all sorts of unknown chemicals, an untold variety of harmful substances of which we have no clue what they do to our bodies.

Zinsser in his book also mentioned how the super healthy country boys, drafted in the army of the great Napoleon during his adventurous reign which ended in 1815 with the Battle of Waterloo, died like flies when they fraternized with the sickness –hardened city soldiers. Of course the same was true for the natives in North and Central America who were decimated when confronted with the measles and smallpox and other diseases infiltrating their bloodstreams originating from the immune Europeans.

Now the rolls are reversed thanks to us simply being too hygienic. We are like a beautiful flower, kept in a climate controlled environment that will wither and die when transplanted into a natural state, exposed to wind, sun, rain and cold; or we are like a pet wild animal, raised in the comfort of a caring home and suddenly helpless when released to vend for itself in the cruel jungle.

My point is that once the Ebola virus is on the loose, we are just as vulnerable, perhaps even more so than our brothers and sisters in West Africa.

One of the laws of Ecology is that ‘nothing ever disappears.’ Every infectious disease that ever existed is still out there, somewhere, in a rat or a louse or a bat or a monkey. And it is the lot of humanity that everything will be revealed, whether the good or the bad. That’s what the word “Apocalypse” means. Since not God, the Creator, but Satan, the Destroyer, is temporarily in charge of the world, it is no coincidence that the last book of the Bible, Revelation (Apocalypse), also has a line or two about plagues. Revelation 6: 8 mentions the Pale Horse who has been given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword (drones, bombs) famine and plague (Ebola, Marburg, Bird Flu, whatever). The same book of Revelation urges us to “Come out of her, my people,” because in 18: 8 it says, “Therefore in one day her plagues will overtake her: death, mourning and famine.”

Right now Ebola is raging in Africa with no reasonable chance it will be brought under control there: it will have to burn itself out.  This is because the countries simply do not have the administrative capacity to handle it: not enough beds, nurses, isolation suits, money.

It is my contention that we in the West are responsible for the current Ebola outbreak. It simply is another case where Capitalism, via its ruling bodies the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), conspired in the 1970s and 80s to radically alter the make-up of Africa. Why? In 1970 Ebola simply expired when it ran out of customers in the rural sections, to emerge now, 40 years later, in a totally different urban Africa. Now the crowded mega cities, their lack of infrastructure, their packed slums, and distrust in Western medicine mean that the Ebola virus is having an unlimited market.

How did this come about?  

Africa changed completely when OPEC – the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries – started to dominate the world with its oil policies, and in the process wound up with mountains of money they didn’t know what to do with.

So the Western white money men, administering the world’s cash supply, reasoned that they knew how to develop so-called backward countries, taking their own prosperity as the only example. They told African rulers: “You’ll borrow our money, invest in development and have more than enough funds to pay off the loans.”

What really happened was that even in those countries in which the leaders didn’t steal the money the loans grew faster than the tax base, leaving governments less and less able to administer their own countries.

When we go back a century or so, Japan, Korea, the United States and Britain developed real industry behind trade barriers: that’s how they were able to flourish. But the ‘experts’ of the World Bank said to the naïve Africans: “you have a competitive advantage in certain commodities such as cash crops and minerals such as gold and diamonds. You should work on that. Since most cash crops are best grown on plantations, you must change your economy to cash crops, which means that you have to move your small self-sufficient farmers off their land. They will then settle in the cities where they’ll get jobs and earn money to buy the food they no longer grow. The cash crops are then sold to Westerners, and with all those funds coming in you’ll be able to food and luxury products from us in Europe and America.”

However, with everybody growing more cash crops, the price dropped through the floor and so a thirty year commodities depression followed. With most of the people shoved off the land and with no jobs for those forced into city ghettos, instead of self-supporting peasants spread over a large area and thus not easily contaminated, they were packed in shanty towns, in unsanitary conditions, and easily affected by dangerous diseases.

Of course some got rich by selling grain and overpriced military gear from the West, but 95% of the Africans lost their identity, their tribal structure, their proud self-sufficiency, and, thanks to immense population density, became extremely vulnerable to Ebola, to name the most current affliction.

What about the rest of the World?

Poor people with inadequate health care, nutrition and sanitation are reservoirs for disease to develop. Thanks to the current West Africa danger, other nations are at risk as well.  The widespread waves of austerity and the destruction of their economies, many countries of our first world too, have left gaping holes in their medical infrastructure.  Does anyone think Greece, for example, could handle Ebola?  Spain already fumbled a case, leaving a nurse who said she probably had Ebola in a public waiting room for hours, while she was symptomatic.

Austerity, cheapness and incompetence kills.  America has about 40 million uninsured.  The initial symptoms of Ebola look a lot like the flu.  Think about what most uninsured are going to do if they get a bad flu?  Best case is a trip to the clinic to get some antibiotics.  The same is true of many insured.  Going to the hospital for a bad case of the flu is overkill, and hospital stays are expensive. It is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the USA.

Imagine you are poor, uninsured and have no paid vacation days, then come down what looks like a bad flu. I imagine you might still go wipe old people’s bums, or clean rich people’s houses, or go to work in retail.  Sure, soon enough you’ll be too sick to continue, but for a few hours…

Many other countries are in no position to do the sort of contact tracking that is required to stop something like Ebola.  Think of Mexico, America’s southern neighbor.  Entire cities, indeed provinces, are beyond the writ of the government, essentially controlled by drug gangs.

Ebola may not be a real threat unless it mutates.  It’s still fairly hard to pass it to another person; it isn’t communicable, but if it goes airborne, or if it becomes communicable during the incubation phase, it could turn into something truly horrible.  And the more people who get it, the more likely a mutation is to occur.

There are some threats where we’re all in it together.  Money and position may buy us some immunity, but they cannot buy us total immunity.  Climate change is one of those threats; another is communicable diseases.  We can be truly grateful that this isn’t the super-flu like the Spanish Flu that killed 30-50 million people in 1918. Ebola may kill in a particularly nasty fashion, but the last great Flu Epidemic killed more people than World War I.

In the meantime our poor West Africans neighbors will largely suffer this Ebola burden without meaningful help. However our real desire to help them poses a threat to us as well as we are far more vulnerable than we think. Today our lack of internal borders, the near-failed or failed (Greece comes to mind) States and austerity means that if Ebola gets a foothold it may be far harder to contain than we believe. The Ebola virus could well be the pestilence the bible book of Revelation mentions as a prelude to the Coming of the Lord.

Be prepared for Collapse.

PREPARING FOR COLLAPSE (8) (with some help from Ilargi Meijer)                                                                                  

 I have lived in Canada since 1951, thus more than 63 years. I had 16 years of formal education in the Netherlands, but am still learning every day. I also did my military duty in my motherland from September 1949 till April 1951, leaving the army with the rank of Sergeant. Crazy business, actually, being a soldier, being taught how to kill. I even had bayonet drill, sticking a sharp piece of steel, attached to my rifle, into a bail of straw, while yelling at the top of my voice. That sort of thing was a left-over from World War I when millions of young men faced each other in Flanders Field and Northern France and died for the greater good of whatever. Generals always prepare their underlings for the last war. With so many young lives eliminated in 1914-18, World War I, and from 1939-1945 in World War II, surprisingly there was a surplus of male bodies in the 1930’s when the Great Depression hit.

People feared that the aftermath of WWII would be the same: instead the Great Consumer Society emerged. When I landed in Canada in July 1951 I right away had work. When factory work proved not to my liking, I quit after one day and started work in a feed mill. After a few more different jobs I became self-employed in October 1952 and remained my own boss the rest of my life.

Suppose I would arrive in Hamilton, Ontario, today as a 23 year old foreigner, reasonably well educated, a few thousand dollars in hand to tie me over. How would I fare? Would I find a job right away? Not very likely judging by the millions of young people looking for work and burdened with debt. During the 1950’s and early 1960’s I raised a family on a modest income. Our five children all sailed through school, got married, are all professionals. Our grandchildren too are doing marvelously well, but what sort of future are they facing?

Last week I saw our Prime Minister, a so-called Christian man – I deeply dislike the word “Christian” because it has ceased to have little or no connection to what I think “Christ” stood for – gave young peoples’ parents a tax break for buying sports equipment, appealing to middle class voters to help give their kids more incentive to play sport and so become healthier adults. If he really were concerned about our future generation, if he really wanted to have children grow up to be productive people, he should have said: “I also have two young children, and I fear for their future because of Climate Change, destructive Capitalism, pervasive pollution, and disappearing resources. Therefore I now put a halt to tar sand oil, promote renewable energy, and greatly expand funding for mass transportation.” Actually he is doing exactly the opposite. He says that he loves his children, but he loves being re-elected more because his financial and moral bankruptcy shows nowhere better than in the way he treats his and our children. Ask any parent and they will swear to God and cross their hearts and hope to die that they love their kids to death, but the facts say otherwise. We only love them as far as the switch to the thermostat or the air conditioning, or as far as the trip to the garage or driveway to start the car.

While we swear on our mother’s graves that we love them so much, we leave them with a world that lost half of its wildlife species in 40 years, that can expect to make coastal areas around the globe uninhabitable during their lifetimes, and a world that is so mired in debt just so we, their ‘loving’ parents, can hang on to our dreams of oversized homes and cars and gadgets so that all there will be left for them are nightmares.

This past weekend was Canada’s Thanksgiving Day. We had 12 extra guests for a couple of days, including 2 children and their spouses, a brother and his wife and 6 grandchildren, ranging from 6 to 30. Let’s be honest: we all depend on economic growth to make a living or enjoy our state pensions. Solid Middle Class as we all are, our grandchildren too will receive an excellent education, but for what?

What I see in my own family is that we are totally unprepared for Collapse. The harsh truth is that we can continue our lifestyles only because we have shoved all our problems on the unprepared shoulders of our children and grandchildren. In the meantime we continue to kill more species, at home but mostly abroad, because we never get in touch with any of those species anyway. We can drive our 3 cars per family because we only see the ice melt in the Arctic on TV.

Yes, we also allow ourselves, and our governments, to get deeper into debt every single day because we’ve been told that without more debt – not our own of course, but corporate and public – we would all die. We don’t understand what it means that our governments increase their debt levels by trillions every year, and we choose not to find out.

They – my children and their children- see me switching off the lights after them, closing the doors behind them, but the bulk of us, we, the most pampered parents and grandparents ever to raise offspring, have, by and large, by our example, failed to prepare the next generations for the Collapse to come, which brings me back to me.

Sorry to say but my generation is the last of the luxurious class. Indeed it is: Apr?s nous le déluge. We are the last one for whom that is true. It’s been a short blip in human history, let alone in the earth’s history, and now it’s over. Ours is the task, the duty, indeed the holy obligation to be an example of what we are going to do, knowing that not doing anything will make our, yours and my sons and daughters futures even bleaker than they already are.

Noah was in the same predicament. He was told by the Lord Creator to prepare a refuge for all land-based life. He built an ark, believing that, since the world had grown so wicked that reform had become impossible, he must prepare for total collapse.

I see it all around me. I talked to a former member of our church who now has a Bachelor of Arts degree and works as a clerk in the liquor store. I am not sure how much debt she has – I did not dare to ask – but the average young person with a university degree has more than $30,000 personal debt and responsible for on an average $40,000 in National Debt. Should I mention the Environmental DEBT, which is beyond calculation?

Re-election for politicians depends on the Middle Class. Politicians vie for the votes and campaign donations of the parents, not the children who don’t count because they don’t vote.

The October 10 issue of The Economist gave an overview of the three waves of technical revolution, starting with the First Industrial stage which began in the late 18^th Century, with the second influx about a century later, and comparing it to the current one. Where the previous periods of innovation were more or less helpful for the job market, with the initial power loom in Great Britain replacing a lot of textile workers, but generating much more employment elsewhere, and with the automobile taking the place of the horse and buggy, the current invention of computing and information and communication and robots leaves a few super brains on the top and the masses on the bottom, making the middle class almost disappear. Young people are squeezed, doomed to McJobs, with minimum wage and often no benefits.

Welcome to Century 21.

The only solutions in the minds of our political leaders are reforms (make it easier to get rid of the older people and let the young do their jobs at half the price) and growth. Both of which have failed for all those years. With pensions in jeopardy, the old hang on to their jobs, leaving no room for the young who fight squalid working conditions and miserable low pay.

There used to be growth in the economy. In earlier times growth gave the young a chance to fit in. But the world is exhausted: growth is no longer possible because we are trying to live life abundant on a planet that is pumped out, scraping the bottom of the barrel in many ways, fish, trees, water, soil, you name it. The planet needs a long rest- many millennia – to recuperate from the human plunderers who have everywhere harvested the easy stuff, exploited the earth everywhere, depriving her of the fertile top soil, the potable waters, and the fresh air, leaving the youth with the dregs.

Sorry young people. No luck.

So we parents, what sort of lives will our children have if growth is gone, and what are we going to do for them? How are we going to soften the blow for them? How much are we willing to sacrifice for our children lest they be sacrificed by society?

Let’s face it: it is obvious that we teach our kids the wrong skills. If we had trained them properly we would have lots of jobs for them. If J.H. Bavinck in his Between the Beginning and the End- a radical Kingdom vision, is right, then we must train them for the coming of the Kingdom, for a steady state economy where we can learn from our indigenous forefathers who lived in symbiosis with creation.

Of course our kids need history. Of course they need to know how to write and read and do math. They need to know the Bible and Shakespeare and appreciate the great works of art. But there’s more to learning that what happened in the past. They need practical skills, need to know how to grow food organically, how to work with their hands, how to live on less, how to exist within the means of creation, how to live without electricity, and the Internet, and ready-made entertainment, because that is going to be their future. It basically means that they ought to be prepared for eternity where no pollution, no waste, no senseless actions will be condoned. Much of what we do today makes no sense, has no other purpose than create waste, only fosters frivolity and folly.

No, tomorrow will not be like today and yesterday. Schooling is for the future, a future totally different from the way we lived.

Christian education means “Kingdom Training”, means getting ready for the New Creation to Come!!! That is what is meant by preparing for collapse

Next week: Is Ebola a sign of the Last Days?

PREPARING FOR COLLAPSE (7)

Margaret MacMillan, an Oxford historian who wrote “Paris 1919” and “The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914,” says the US president is right that we probably are more aware of what’s going on around the world, even with all the “rubbish” on the web, but she also believes that, from voracious Putin to vicious jihadists, “sometimes we’re right to be scared.”

How true!

She predicted that instead of World War III, “The 21st century will be a series of low grade, very nasty wars that will go on and on without clear outcomes, doing dreadful things to any civilians in their paths.”

How true! We are well on the way to see that happening. I think we have to expect terrorist attacks in Europe and the USA: there are scores of well-educated citizens of these continents now fighting with ISIS, eager to return to their homelands to carry out suicide missions. In our society there simply is no longer a place for these chaps, so they will take revenge for being declared surplus by committing acts of extreme cruelty. Be prepared. Ebola too could well become a pandemic. So be prepared to see many different matters explode in the near future, something foretold by a book published more than 40 years ago. I refer to the book Limits to Growth available for free on the WWW.

This book predicted that our civilization would probably collapse in the 21^st Century. Of course it has been criticized as doomsday fantasy since it was published in 1972. Back in 2002, self-styled environmental expert Bjorn Lomborg consigned it to the ‘dustbin of history’. Totally unwarranted. The book has influenced my thinking as few other books have. If we continue to track in line with the book’s scenario, expect the early stages of global collapse to start appearing soon.

Limits to Growth was commissioned by a think tank called the Club of Rome. Remember the Club of Rome? It consists of politicians, businessmen and academics from around the globe. This illustrious gathering commissioned researchers working out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), including husband-and-wife team Donella and Dennis Meadows to explore what would happen when we proceeded on the path we were going. The first thing the team did was to build a computer called World3 to track the world’s economy and environment, then the most cutting edge machine available.

The task was very ambitious. The team tracked industrialization, population, food, use of resources, and pollution. They modeled data up to 1970, then developed a range of scenarios out to 2100, depending on whether humanity took serious action on environmental and resource issues. If that didn’t happen, the model predicted “overshoot and collapse” – in the economy, environment and population – before 2070. This was called the “business-as-usual” scenario.

The book’s central point, much criticized since, is that “the earth is finite” and that the quest for unlimited growth in population, material goods etc. would eventually lead to a crash.

So were they right? Dr. Graham Turner decided to check in with those scenarios after 40 years. He gathered data from the UN, from UNESCO, its department of Economic and Social affairs, from the FAO, its Food and Agriculture Organization, and the UN statistics yearbook. He also checked in with the US national oceanic and atmospheric administration, the BP Statistical Review, and elsewhere. These data were plotted alongside the Limits to Growth scenarios.

The results show that the world is tracking pretty closely to the Limits to Growth “business-as-usual” scenario. In other words, we are well on the way to COLLAPSE.

As the MIT researchers explained in 1972, under the scenario, growing population and demands for material wealth would lead to more industrial output and pollution.

We all know that resources everywhere are being used up at a rapid rate, that pollution is rising and that industrial output and food per capita is still growing as is the population, completely in line with the projections made in the Limits to Growth.

So what happens next?

According to the book, to feed continued growth in industrial output, industry must exploit ever-increasing use of resources. As always happens “the low-hanging fruit is picked first”. After that resources become more expensive to obtain as the readily available oil, iron ore, water are first used up. As more and more capital goes towards resource extraction, industrial output per capita starts to fall, for which the book estimate to be the case in about 2015: dead on in this case.

The book predicted that as pollution mounts and industrial input into agriculture falls, food production per capita falls. Health and education services are cut back, and that combines to bring about a rise in the death rate from about 2020, a mere 6 years away. It estimates that global population will begin to fall from about 2030, by about half a billion people per decade. If Ebola becomes a pandemic, all bets are off, of course. Even without such an event living conditions will fall to levels similar to the early 1900s.

The book projected that resource constraints will bring about global collapse, factoring in the fallout from increasing pollution, including climate change thanks to Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emissions.

In spite of the recent Fracking Boom, making the USA the world’s largest oil producer, the issue of Peak Oil does not go away. Many independent researchers have concluded that “easy” conventional oil production has already peaked. That issue alone could be the catalyst for global collapse because fuel sources such as shale oil, tar sands and coal seam gas basically are temporary saviors. If the price for oil becomes too low – and it is dropping fast as the current economic depression has stymied consumption – the oil products obtained via these high-cost methods of oil production may prove to be uneconomical.

Yet politicians like Stephen Harper of Canada only talk about Economic Growth, as if we live in an Infinite World. I believe it is too late to convince the world’s politicians and wealthy elites to chart a different course. Let’s not be fooled by political claptrap. It time to think about how we protect ourselves as we head into a diminishing future.

Limits to Growth concluded in 1972: “If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next decades. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”

Need more evidence?

Here is a scary news item. The number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years, according to a new analysis. Creatures across land, rivers and the seas are being decimated as humans kill them for food in unsustainable numbers, while polluting or destroying their habitats, according to the research by scientists at WWF and the Zoological Society of London.

I found this particularly disturbing because in an essay that I wrote with the title When will Christ Return? – available right here on my website – I made the suggestion that Collapse and the arrival of The New Creation will occur when we humans have laid claim to 50 percent of Primary Productivity.

Let me explain. Primary Productivity represents Humanity’s impact on the biological component of earth systems. In other words it points to our negative influence on everything that lives, the way we affect animals, plants, as well as fungi, bacteria, and any carbon-based life forms on earth.

It is exceedingly difficult to measure the impact of Primary Productivity. Sanderson and others have classified up to 83% of the global terrestrial biosphere as being under direct human influence, based on geographic givens such as human population density, settlements, roads, agriculture, horticulture, the state  of the oceans – now filled with plastic and empty of fish. Another study, by Hannah et al., estimates that about 36% of the Earth’s bio-productive surface is “entirely dominated by man”. I imagine that the two differing findings are due to the methods used in measuring. Basically Primary Productivity is the rate by which the Human Race – you and I in other words – have deprived the non-human world to function. That’s why the discovery that 50 percent of wild animals have disappeared, scares the wits out of me. Fact is that with human numbers growing, the impact of us men and women accelerating, we may well be approaching the tipping point. The Bible states that nobody knows exactly when COLLAPSE occurs, except God Creator. It seems to me that God, in his plan for creation, inserted a tipping point of which only he knows the exact hour and minute: “not even the Son of Man.”

Collapse will come in multiple forms

One of the laws of ecology is that ‘everything is connected to everything else’. Of course this applies to money also. We live in a world of electronic money, which means that money is created out of nothing. But its source is prone to “Hacking”, which is the new and often painless way to counterfeiting and bank robbery. This poses a colossal danger to the integrity of the money supply and to the economy as a whole. A word of advice: always have a considerable amount of cash handy: we never know when ‘hackers’ shut down the banking system. There’s a much greater threat to the Western world from hackers targeting financial institutions than from ISIS, barbaric though they may be. Writes one computer expert: “The bottom line is that anything on the Internet – or any system that has connected to the Internet at some point or can be accessed telephonically – is potentially vulnerable.

I like Gail Tverberg’s website: The Finite Earth. In her latest blog she writes that ”There have been many studies of collapses of past economies. These collapses tended to occur when the economies hit diminishing returns after a long period of growth. The problems were often similar to ones we are seeing today: stagnating wages of common workers and growing debt. There were more and more demands on governments to fix the problems of workers, but governments found it increasingly difficult to collect enough taxes for all the needed programs. Eventually, the economic systems have tended to collapse, over a period of years.”

Our world situation in short is: today more than 7 billion people are trying to copy the Western way of life, meaning using more energy, buying more cars, covering the planet with more roads, causing more pollution, destroying more forests, wiping out more animals, creating more Climate Change. A perfect recipe for Collapse.

PREPARING FOR COLLAPSE (6)

 Nothing is more conducive to cause COLLAPSE than war, especially the war in which you and I willy-nilly participate: our collective crusade against creation. Our hostile engagement against the very source of our existence is mostly one of passive failure to recognize our complicity and so turning a blind eye to our active involvement in the undoing of our natural environment. We blithely ignore that we are engaged in a war in which everybody loses because the first and foremost casualty is our aging mother Earth, now more frail than ever. Romans 8: 22 tells us that Creation has been groaning for a long time, and groans now more than ever. I have a dear friend who physically suffers when he sees wild life disappearing and species vanish because of our actions.

 And then there are shooting wars.    

Shooting wars speed up creational chaos. This past week US airplanes bombed and destroyed refineries and oil storage facilities in territory held by ISIS, an acronym now generally recognized by most people, standing for Iraq-Syria-Islamic-State.

ISIS’ fundamentalism reminds me of both the last book in the New Testament, Revelation, and the last book in the Hebrew Bible, Malachi. Revelation 22 says that “Let him that does wrong continue to do wrong – because the time is near – let him who does right continue to do right.” To me it suggests that this means that the opportunity for conversion maybe over as well, as it becomes more and more difficult for people to change their minds. Malachi, the last book in the Old Testament, has a similar passage – just before describing The Day of the Lord, Malachi 3: 18 says “And you will again see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between those who serve God and those who do not.” Both point to the deeply digressing differences between those who serve God – and treasure creation – and those who live apart from God.

Today we see IRAQ I and II wars merge into IRAQ III. Most of us have forgotten that IRAQ WAR I in 1991 caused the largest oil spills in history: on the land, in the sea, and in the air. Massive clouds of oily pollution carried as far away as India. Was stability the outcome? Not at all: rather than a peaceful state, resentment worsened over the US behavior. Osama bin Laden cited the actions of the United States and transnational oil companies there as the reason for his launching the terrorist bombing on 9/11. Actually the destruction of the current oil refining systems also had an economic reason: oil is getting too cheap. The US Fracking Industry and the Canadian Tar Sand Companies need high prices to continue to operate in the black, even though both operations are among the most polluting in the world.

Back to IRAQ WAR I

At the time of IRAQ I, I wrote a song, which could be sung based on a sad melody in tune with the affliction felt by the Juda tribe exiled to Babylon as found in Psalm 137: By Babel’s streams we sat and wept. It is no coincidence that the Judean Exile 2500 years ago also played out in that same neighborhood: history is coming full circle, again a sign of the End of Times.  You may remember that Saddam Hussein upon his retreat from Kuwait set fire to the 500 oil wells there. Below follows my song of lament, a dirge actually. If you know the tune – Olive’s Brow L.M.-, sing it aloud:

Five hundred fires cover Kuwait

Five hundred fires contaminate

The sane, the sick, the cities, the sea,

Well, what’s this got to do with me?

Five hundred fires in the Middle East,

The Devil’s delight, his hellish feast

He looks on them with pronounced glee

Because they’re set also by me.

Five Hundred fires continue to rage

Their smoke, their soot they know no cage.

The battle is over, Kuwait is free

Free to furnish more fuel for me.

The war, the West at its secular worst

Was waged to quench my insatiable thirst

My feasting on fuel set the wells ablaze

On fire through my carboholic craze

Now dominoes fall both left and right:

The oil slicks, dying Kurds, Shiites,

Forgive me Lord for being to blame,

I pray that, yet, I may honor your name.

All of us who drive cars are complicit in this crime. Oil, crude, refined, in all forms causes fatal pollution by poisoning areas forever, spreading deadly fumes over large sections of land, killing humans, cattle, and plants for generations.

War is a waste of resource and money, which can be used for a solar revolution and now are fundamentally undermining the movement for renewables. To fight the Ebola outbreak requires a billion dollars, which is less than the Pentagon spends each day to pursue its warlike actions, but the Western world is hard-put to gather these funds. What is more important? Fighting ISIS which is no immediate threat to the USA or combatting a horrible disease such as Ebola, which, indeed, may become a world-wide curse?

Why all this bombing? So far neither the USA nor Britain has had casualties in their homeland. War is never a solution. Jesus prophetically proclaimed that those who use the sword perish by the sword.

The men in charge of the ISIS movement are not stupid. Their make-up is composed of professionals of the former Saddam Hussein army who were stupidly shunted by the American occupation forces when George W. Bush set out to destroy that regime. Bush-Cheney’s sole purpose then was to have unlimited access to the mostly unexplored Iraqi oil fields.

That war has had an entirely opposite result. The current initiative will also end up being disastrous, perhaps even more so. Now that Saudi Arabia is involved ISIS might target the Saudi oilfields, depriving the World of the last major oil reserves.

In terms of war and national security, a much more serious long-term threat is that of climate wars and infectious diseases. Money being spent on oil wars ought to be shifted to strategies to prevent climate wars by getting at the root causes of climate disruption, but that would intervene with our cozy life style, so we choose to be active participants in the Climate Wars: our way of life versus God’s creation, the cosmos God loved so much. (John 3: 16).

In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond examines the environmental factors contributing to the collapse of advanced societies around the world, such as the Mayans in Central America and the Polynesians on Easter Island. The Mayans had a calendar dating back to 3114 B.C., built magnificent temples, and did sophisticated astronomy. But their population grew to an estimated 5 million, well beyond what the land could sustain, while huge amounts of resources were spent by chiefs trying to surpass other chiefs in building even bigger monuments. The leadership continued to misjudge the land stewardship and the food resource needs, and as a result several smaller collapses occurred before a large collapse around 900 AD, due in part to a severe drought. When Spaniards reached Mayan territory after 1500 AD, the temples had been abandoned and the Mayans scattered.

1. The peoples settling the isolated Easter Island around 900 AD met a similar fate after several hundred years of expanding their population and quarrying gigantic stone statues (weighing up to 270 tons) which they then moved to the perimeter of the island. They deforested the island and the surrounding waters filled with silt, while at the same time vast energies were occupied on rivalries over which clan could build the biggest stone head. The first-recorded European contact with the island was on 5 April (Easter Sunday), 1722, when Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen visited it for a week and estimated a population of 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants.

When Captain Cook arrived at the island in 1774, he found a tiny population (down perhaps from a peak of 20,000) that he described as “small, lean, timid, and miserable.” The civilization had collapsed in a cannibalistic endgame.

Collapse there was caused by population growth beyond the capacity of the land to support it, by destruction of good farmland, and the use of resources in tribal conflict and monument building. Leadership in both societies failed to respond to the handwriting on the wall.

As we fail to adequately address climate change and its root cause, will our society face a similar collapse? All signs point to this.

We are looking at a “perfect storm” of conditions around the world that will lead to major conflicts and wars: growing populations, reduced food resource base, destruction of fisheries with dead zones and acidification, enormous deforestation, and the like. We are courting COLLAPSE, which will be sudden once a tipping point is reached, a moment nobody knows.

Already we see serious problems with ecological refugees trying to escape unlivable conditions in their homelands and get to Europe or North America. In Asia, India is building a huge fence along its border with Bangladesh, fearing massive fluxes of refugees as Bangladesh gets swamped by sea level rise and major storms.

Our fragmented knowledge keeps us from seeing the entire picture.  Everything looks normal. Newspapers, TV shows, radio reports, all major in minors, none want to sound the alarm bells, because optimism sells, and that’s what our world wants. Store shelves are stocked; traffic stagnation is still a headache in major cities. There’s simply nothing that would suggest COLLAPSE. Matthew 24 describes similar conditions: “For in the days before the Flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the Ark…. That’s how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.” (Matthew 24: 38-39).

Good News: The new book by Johan Herman Bavinck is available

Between the Beginning and the End – a Radical Kingdom Vision is out: I received my first 10 copies which have gone to my extended family and close friends. Go to EERDMANS.COM to obtain your copy or order from your favorite book store or on line. This book will revolutionize your understanding of your place and role in creation: no other book provides such a reliable and inspiring guide to make you navigate these last days.

PREPARING FOR COLLAPSE (5)

High Time for Change. Can we?

here’s a peculiar passage in Revelation 18, referring to the church, I believe, urging her to quit what she is doing and make an abrupt departure from ‘the world’. The text, verse 4, says Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you not will receive any of her plagues; for her sins are piled up to heaven. Is it a coincidence that Climate Change is a matter that is occurring in the heavens? Climate Change is a direct result of our sins against creation.

It seems to me that, prior to collapse we must recognize the situation and leave ‘the world’, something that is physically impossible, of course, but which must happen nonetheless. “You are in the world, but not of the world”, the Bible tells us. Adhering to the ‘world’ is a spiritual matter, because it pertains to the ‘religion of progress and unlimited growth’ Thus our ‘leaving’ is a foreswearing of worshiping the ‘idols of our age’ and returning to a way of life that is in accordance with the Spirit of God, the creator of heaven and earth.

The majority of the world’s population now lives in cities, also called “Babel”. Yet the New Creation is also called a city, “The New Jerusalem, so matters are not cut and dried, black and white. Actually, in the Western World the boundaries between country living and city dwelling no longer exist. I live in the ‘country’, but I am just as dependent on motorized transportation and the use of fossil fuels for electricity and heating as urbanites.

Was the past better?

I am old enough to have experienced a totally different world. My parents were born at the very end of the 19^th Century. I have known my four grandparents who started their lives about 150 years ago, an age before the advent of our carbon-driven world, an age before the rise of the consumer economy.

Raised into a large family – I was my mother’s fourth child in 5 years of marriage with another five children to follow – I was repeatedly farmed out when another sibling was about to be born. The only place always available was the farm of my maternal grandparents of which I have lasting memories.

How simple was their life. Just imagine: no electricity, no running water, a foul- smelling outhouse at the back of the cow barn over the cesspool where also the cattle manure ended up, periodically scooped empty by hand for use in the fields as fertilizer. It reminds of a somewhat crude story, supposedly taking place in a one-room rural school, where the only teacher cultivated a large vegetable garden. The school inspector came and marveled at the luscious plants and wondered how. One young boy signaled that he had to go. The teacher consulted his chart and said: third row, fourth plant.

Back to the almost medieval conditions in which my grandparents lived. All cooking and eating was done in a special small building separate from the main dwelling, with the woodstove space split from the eating area. The walkway between the main dwelling and the ‘stookhut’ – the cook house – was paved with red brick where, in a corner, a hand pump was placed over the cistern which gathered all rain water. My grandmother, each Saturday, would broom fresh sand in the seams between the bricks.

There was, of course, a formal dining room, used on Sundays and when visitors came. There a beautifully colored oil lamp was suspended from the high ceiling, easily lowered or raised when more or less light was needed.

All worked long hours. Up early to milk a dozen cows, yielding perhaps 3 milk cans full, containers now only seen as antiques and used for flowers or to hold a mailbox. Each morning these cans would be carted to the platform on the edge of the canal, to be fetched by a horse-drawn punter and transported to the milk processing plant a few kilometers away, to be returned that same day with whey for the pigs and a small can of buttermilk porridge, a daily menu item.

Once a week my paternal grandfather would come calling, a grocer, in his two-wheeled horse-drawn buggy bartering eggs for coffee, tea, sugar. Very little money would be involved. A large vegetable garden and lots of canning would guarantee food for the winter, potatoes being the main staple. A pig would be slaughtered in the fall, the bacon hanging in the chimney for curing.

Simple living. Compared to today the lack of affluence and technology is striking. No carbon footprint. Deeply religious.

A century ago, economic activity took place primarily in the physical world of production. People made things: they farmed, crafted, cobbled, nailed, baked, brewed, repaired, knitted, mended. They created tangible goods and services whose value could be determined because they directly were related to their daily needs. They made their own entertainment: brass bands, lots of church meetings, home visiting. Nobody was rich. Everybody had enough.

We now exist in a-typical times.

How immensely different is life today. I was struck this past week again when the new Apple I-Phone came out. Long line-ups and 10 million sets ordered or sold. People live for the moment, crave immediate satisfaction. Buy now, pay later. Food comes from the store, milled, molded, made to look good, to last long, and leading to obesity and diabetes. Fake food fosters fake folks. We live as if there’s no tomorrow, which perhaps is the case anyway. We push problems forward to the future. Our political institutions, once capable of mobilizing resources and people to win wars – witness the 1940-45 conflict and the Marshall Plan that helped to rebuild Europe ruins – now avoid complex and recurring challenges, of which there are aplenty. We do nothing about education reform, ignore climate change, and pretend that ever expanding debt is healthy. The church, even though it loses members left and right, continues in the same stale format. The worst recession in three quarters of a century should have led us to rethink the current economic model based on automatic upgrades and short-term gains. Instead, we’ve continued to focus our economic energies, our entrepreneurial talents, and all innovation on getting the biggest returns in the shortest time possible. Worse, we’ve done so even though fewer and fewer of us can afford to keep up with the futile pursuit of ever-faster gratification—a frustration expressed in the angry populism now paralyzing the politics in the USA. From top to bottom, we are becoming a society ruled by impulse, by the reflexive reach for rapid rewards.

There is no doubt that our lives have become luxurious, affluent and extraordinary self-satisfying. During my life-time, and especially the past four decades, we have created a sophisticated, self-feeding socioeconomic system that is marvelously efficient at catering to our fondest desires. Even the poorest in the Western economies – provided they don’t smoke or drink – thanks to the miracles of cost-reducing business strategies and powerful personal technologies have achieved a high level of economic well-being.

As I suggested in my previous blog – citing Psalm 115 – our preferences, attitudes, and identities have become so intertwined with the offerings of the marketplace that we have internalized many of the market’s values and reflexes: we are becoming the machines that serve us. We no longer can function without them. True, it also spreads the gospel to the very ends of the earth, overshadowed by such things as the I-Phone craze which typifies our religious urge to possess the latest, the fastest and most up-to-date gadget immediately when it is available. In other words, the marketplace and the self, our economy and our psychology, are fusing in ways we’ve never before experienced. We have become an extension of the industrial system. It’s not that we need these mechanical means. We want them. They define us. Psalm 115 again: Those who make the idols and use them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them. (verse 8).

We no longer are a ‘producer’ society. We truly have become a ‘consumer’ nation, which is rapidly also consuming us and our natural habitat, as our consumption is no longer driven by what we need – food, shelter, clothing – but by desire, by the ‘spiritual’ criteria of our inner worlds. Our aspirations, our hopes, our identity, are being cannibalized by the multi-media companies who are exploiting our cravings for the latest gadgets, and so succeeding in possessing our very souls.

Is that what the number 666 means in the book of Revelation? Does this development signify the final stage in human development?

Danger ahead

Jacques Ellul in his (1964) The Technological Society has foreseen this development. He writes that by not fully understanding the role of technique in the life of us today we modern human beings are beset with anxiety and feeling of insecurity. He prophesied that technology which we say is our servant, will overthrow everything that stands in the way in its quest to dominate the human race. Now 50 years later his words have come true. Technology is the victor and we are the willing victims.

For most of the 20th century, this merger between man and the machine proceeded at a gradual pace. But starting in the 1970s, the marriage moved into overdrive by two powerful shocks. The first was the collapse of America’s postwar economic boom in the face of high oil prices, inflation, and rising foreign competition. As corporate profits fell, it was clear that many multi-nationals had grown too complacent and inefficient to prosper in a faster, more global economy. With company shares trading at historic lows, activist investors launched an economic coup. They bought struggling companies, broke them up, and sold the pieces, often for substantial profit. As takeover fever spread even healthy companies embraced defensive strategies to boost profits and share prices and keep investors happy. Companies fired workers and began moving operations overseas. It was thought that the only way American companies could help society was to get rid of any separate, social obligations and pursue making maximum profit. The only way for government to make this happen was to cut taxes and regulations and allow the marketplace to find the most direct route back to wealth. Add new technology, the microprocessor, which made computing vastly more powerful and much cheaper, and here we are: the rich richer, the poor poorer, and no work for the middle class and no future for the young, by the grace of God forcing us to seek alternatives.

Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you not will receive any of her plagues; for her sins are piled up to heaven. Is it really a coincidence that Climate Change is a matter that is occurring in the heavens?

The most precious quality we have is our humanity. With every sinew of   our existence, we are tied to the earth, which bears us, feeds us, and is our abode forever. By destroying the earth, we destroy ourselves; by separating our lives from the earth, we become estranged from our very source. My grandparents sensed this. It is to the life-giving earth that we must return that precious work of art our God created and gave us for safe-keeping.