Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

PREPARING FOR COLLAPSE (4)

Is my Theology all wrong?
My Bible tells me that Collapse will come suddenly: bang, there it is! That’s the reason why Jesus keeps on telling us to be on guard all the time. Actually his return to earth- where he belongs as the Son of Man, Humanity Personified – is something he looks forward to. Why? I base this on theologians Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Johan Herman Bavinck whose book Between the Beginning and the End – a Radical Kingdom Vision- will be released on October 31. Both categorically state that Jesus, Humanity and the Earth belong together. To explain that concept is the main reason why we have the Bible, confirmed in Psalm 119: 105 which says that God’s word is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path. Where do we plant our feet when we walk? Here, on our very earth, sometimes muddy, sometimes rocky, but by and large a very agreeable place. The Scriptures are there to help us in exploring this world. Let me remind you that when the Psalms speak about God’s Word it refers to the 5 books of Moses with a few prophets thrown in. Yet even these few books give enough illumination for us to navigate God’s creation unhindered, enabling us to treasure the trees and the bees and appreciate the plants and the ants.

In order to prepare for Collapse – and the coming of a renewed world – we need both biblical knowledge and intimate insight into nature both sorely lacking, witness the heaven myth, Climate Change and world-wide pollution.

Here is human history in a nutshell.

In the beginning God gave the earth to us as our special possession, but we sold it to the Enemy. Fortunately Christ bought it back with his blood (that’s where the Cross comes in) and will restore it to its former glory when Beginning and End again coincide, because the Beginning is in the End and the End in the Beginning.

It is my deep-felt belief that God wants to unite all fractured parts of his creation into his kingdom to come. Forget about individual salvation. Sal­vation is universal: it’s all about the restoration of Paradise Lost. Forget about us personally enjoying God and be saved in him. The sole goal of our life is that we again become part of the wider context of the King­dom of God, where all things are again unified under the one and only all?wise will of him who lives and rules for ever. Jesus, in the Sermon of the Mount, said that our foremost priority is to “Seek the Kingdom and everything else will fall in place.” For us this means to seek the welfare of creation and build our life on that premise. That’s also why in the Lord’s Prayer the first plea is “Thy Kingdom Come!” By praying that line we must actively implement it otherwise it is just a throwaway phrase.

If I am right, does that mean the end of the institutional church?

Look at the church today: it’s usually old people. Seventy percent of church services take place without children or young people. This past week I read in our daily newspaper that three United Churches in Belleville, Ontario – the larger town 45 km from us- will combine into one, citing falling attendance. This simply means more drop-outs, as the average age attending church is 76 and old people hate to change worship locations. That’s happening all over the Western world.

I am increasingly convinced that the decline of the church can be traced to its failure to integrate the Written Word with the Created Word, which is a direct result of refusing to see our very earth as our eternal habitat and seeing creation as God’s Kingdom.

The demise of the church is also something that must happen. In the one but last chapter of the Bible (Rev. 21:22) it simply says that in the New Creation there will be no temple, no synagogue, no mosque, no cathedrals, thus no places of worship at all. The church, denominations, sermons, preaching, popes, priests, the entire religious rigmarole will have disappeared. We are well on the way to see that: a clear sign of Collapse.

Even though Christ’s return will be without warning, there will be lots of hints.  “Will I find faith on earth when I return?” laments Jesus, who gave a decisive indication of the Last Days in Matthew 24, where he warns of ‘The abomination that causes desolation’ (Matthew 24: 15). In that context Jesus uses the phrase ‘let the reader understand’. From this I conclude that

(1) This desolation refers to Capitalism, Climate Change, world-wide pollution, wars, human indifference, all the great destroyers, all man-made abominations. The outbreak of Ebola is also part of this eschatological phenomenon.

(2) We can only understand this when it actually happens: Let the reader beware. My parents and grandparents would not have had a clue what Jesus was referring to.

Do I really have to rehash this again?

That we have new climatic conditions is beyond dispute. NASA’s Earth Observatory recently commented on the extreme temperatures we were experiencing in North America this summer. The months June to August were the world’s hottest ever. NASA also states “In places where it should be seasonably hot – the eastern and southern United States and western Europe – it’s just been warm. In places where weather is usually mild in the summer – northern Europe, the Pacific coast of North America – it has been ridiculously hot.”

A study recently published in Nature warns that the two-headed dragon of air pollution and Climate Change will likely result in severe damaged crop growth, indicating that our world is rapidly moving toward a state where nobody can survive. One bright spot: (I am kidding of course) tourism is coming to the Arctic, where people can take a cruise now for a trip through the ice-free water of the Northwest Passage.

Speaking about water: we know water is essential for the survival of all life – but it’s not just about drinking water. Seventy percent of world’s freshwater use is for irrigation. While each person drinks an average of one liter of water daily, it takes 2,000 liters per person to produce the food we eat.

In the United States, examples of “peak water” abound. Nowhere is peak water more evident than in California, where more and more farmers lack enough water to maintain their livelihoods. The record-breaking drought across the Golden State is hammering the lake and river tourism industry there, where marinas and boat ramps are becoming high and dry, and is causing fires as never before. Entire cities in California are now under threat of running completely out of water, and country groundwater levels are falling at higher rates than is normal as a result of the severe drought.

Scary scenes abound

July saw new all-time heat records in the Siberian town of Norilsk, which is just above the Arctic Circle and known as one of the world’s coldest cities. Yet this past summer temperatures there were on par with those in the Mediterranean. What’s worse: several massive methane blowholes left craters in Siberia. They have caused much of the scientific community to fear the worst because the escape of methane is the ultimate danger. One of the craters is 60 meters – 200 feet –across, and appears bottomless. Russian scientists found extremely high concentrations of methane at the bottom of the first crater found.

Why is methane so menacing? In the atmosphere, methane is a greenhouse gas that, on a relatively short-term time scale, is far more destructive than carbon dioxide. It is 23 times as powerful as carbon dioxide per molecule on a 100-year timescale, 105 times more potent when it comes to heating the planet on a 20-year timescale – and the Arctic permafrost, onshore and off, is packed with the stuff.

NASA has already reported about the threat posed by the distinct possibility of a massive amount of methane being released from the Arctic – which holds five to six times the carbon equivalent of that humans have burned in our entire existence on Earth – along with the fact that most of this carbon is located in thaw-vulnerable top soils within 10 feet of the surface.

Moving beneath the Arctic Ocean where methane hydrates – often described as methane gas surrounded by ice – exist, a March 2010 report in Science indicated that these cumulatively contain the equivalent of 1,000 to 10,000 gigatons of carbon. Compare this total to the 240 gigatons of carbon humanity has emitted into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution began. In other words: we are in the process of unleashing hell on earth, thanks to our devotion to the gods of our age.

Psalm 115 comes to mind. It mentions idols and suggests that the danger is that we become like them. This is now becoming the case: we have mouths but we cannot speak, eyes but we cannot see, ears but we cannot hear, noses but we cannot smell, hands but we cannot feel, feet but we cannot walk, nor can we utter a sound with our throats. In other words: we have ceased to be human.

That same psalm says (verse 16): The highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to man. Where we failed, Jesus, the Son of Man, was able to do the perfect thing.

Is my theology at odds with the church?

PREPARING FOR COLLAPSE (3)

September 15 2014

Addiction

I had a close friend who was an alcoholic. For a time he relied on me to help him with his weakness. I couldn’t possibly protect him from his addiction and, tragically, he died instantly in a collision, swerving in the path of a fully loaded log-hauling truck. His alcohol count was double the legal limit; he wore no seat belts.

He once told me that the murderer on the cross next to Jesus on Calvary was his model: he thought he could live it up and in the end, with a quick deathbed conversion, make everything right with the Lord. Well, it did not turn out that way. Frankly I doubt that the conversion of the criminal who hung next to Jesus was all that sudden anyway. I imagine that, while in jail, or even before that, this man had heard of Jesus, witness his rebuke to the  criminal hanging on Jesus’ other side. He defended Jesus and asked the Christ on the cross to remember him once he is in his kingdom. Yes, that conversion on the cross, was a miracle- any conversion is – but it was also one of those ‘eureka’ events, when suddenly the truth was recognized, when out of the blue disjointed facts came together.

We all have had those moments of sudden discovery. It happens when all the factors are present, but not quite assembled. Jesus’ attitude on the cross, his active passivity toward suffering, his concerns for others, even in utmost agony, his majestic bearing while dying, suddenly clarified the man’s picture of what was happening to him and who Jesus was.

What has all this to do with Preparing for Collapse? Quite a bit. The murderer on the cross finally connected the dots. It’s about time that we, as a society and as individuals, do the same, realistically look at the conditions we have created, acknowledge the consequences, and have a conversion.

The word Collapse indicates something like a lightning out of the blue sky event, totally unexpected. Our society too suffers from several addictions such as total dependence on carbon-based fuel and an incurable infatuation with economic growth, both fatal. Collapse, like a heart attack, can occur without warning.

I am reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Its subtitle is The Impact of the HIGHLY IMPROBABLE. Taleb’s main thesis is that Collapse cannot be predicted, and I agree with him. But when it does happen, it is analogous to the death of society because our life, yours, mine, everybody’s, depends on a guaranteed supply of liquid fuel and electricity. Eliminate the one or the other of these energy sources, both Black Swan events, and within a day total chaos ensues, followed by deaths in the billions. These are not the only dangers: our entire financial system too is built on trust. Once this is gone, so goes our economy which cannot function without money.

Why we cannot change

Can we change our risky behavior? My friend found it impossible. Can society? The short answer is “NO”.

There are several reasons for this. One is plain lethargy. Another is a line Upton Sinclair wrote: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’ Take our beloved motor vehicle. At least 20 percent of all jobs are related to our highly polluting automobile, from traffic cops to insurance agents, from highway construction to TV ads, from its manufacturing to money lenders and salesmen of new and used cars. I should add funeral homes and our medical system to this list as well. One million people die in car accidents while 20 million are injured. Yet we love our cars, and refuse to own up to our dependency. No wonder that Green House Gases are higher than ever.

That Heaven Thing Again

There’s another reason why we refuse to face reality: Religion. Most, I’d say, almost all church goers believe in going to heaven, even though there is not a shred of evidence in the Bible that says that this is the case. On the contrary John 3: 13 explicitly says that No one has ever gone to heaven except the One who came from heaven, the Son of Man. Billy Graham, our Protestant High Priest, has drilled heaven into the minds of his followers, and nothing will convince them that this earth, the very soil on which we move, is our final resting place and our eternal habitat. As a kid in the Christian Elementary School in the Netherlands, I was taught a song: “Sluit U aan, sluit U aan, wie mee will naar de Hemel gaan”; “Get in line, get in line, then follow the ‘to heaven’ sign.” Consult any hymn book: multiple songs glorify heaven. The church is seen as the Gateway to Heaven. That’s how our religion works. When I once wrote in an article for a mainstream Protestant church paper that going to heaven is a heresy, a reader replied that I was the heretic. This very heaven heresy is also the reason why almost all church goers have no real compassion for the earth. Nothing can convince them that there is something wrong with our energy-gorging habits. Canada’s P.M. Stephen Harper, a born-again Christian, is also a confirmed creation destroyer.

Reason does not work

On the whole nobody will change their belief systems, no matter the evidence.  When people are misinformed, giving them all the facts in the world to correct the errors of their ways only makes them cling to their beliefs even more tenaciously. People who thought WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction) were found in Iraq believed that misinformation even more strongly when they were shown a news story correcting it.

Take the most serious issues today: Climate Change and Limits to Growth. Another friend of mine somewhat sneeringly told me that “Fracking” has forever solved the Peak Oil issue. Denial can only be described as business-as-usual for our brains; more and better facts don’t convert badly informed church members or voters into better thinking people.  It just makes them more committed to their faith and beliefs. When there’s a conflict between faith and beliefs, and plain evidence, it’s the beliefs that win.

My friend died: no death-bed conversion for him. The church still clings to heaven: too set in her ways to change. Society will collapse still convinced that Climate Change is a political ploy and Infinite Growth still possible.

PREPARING   FOR COLLAPSE (2)

September 8 2014

I had long suspected it, but now a Dutch scientist, Dr. Jan te Nijenhuis of the University of Amsterdam has found proof that we have much smaller brains than our ancestors. That doesn’t mean that you or I are dumber than our forefathers, but it does mean that, on the average, we, the human race in general, have gotten more stupid. His study indicates that we have lost 14 I.Q. points on average since the Victorian era, which roughly covers the 19^th Century.

How did he do it? Dr. te Nijenhuis and colleagues analyzed the results of 14 intelligence studies conducted between 1884 to 2004. Each study gauged participants’ so-called visual reaction times reflecting a person’s mental processing speed, considered an indication of general intelligence. In the late 19th Century, visual reaction times averaged around 194 milliseconds, while in 2004 that time had grown to 275 milliseconds.

Why are we getting dumber?

Here are some indications:

(1)        Toxic chemicals in the environment can reduce intelligence. Examples include flame retardant everywhere in furniture, lead(found in many lipsticks), certain pesticides,  fluoride – used in many city water systems – and radiation, which can reduce brain size. When a tsunami overpowered the Fukushima nuclear plant, radiation spread covering the Pacific, now reaching the shores of California. Expect even dumber TV shows and movies to emanate from Hollywood.

(2)         Humans used to eat a lot of Omega 3s when wild game animals were part of their diet. They have much higher levels of these essential fatty acids than domesticated animals. If we only eat the modern, mostly processed food stuff without getting enough omega 3s, expect even more health and intelligence problems.

(3)        The Science Daily notes: Exposure to specific bacteria in the environment increases learning behavior. We ingest these bacteria when we spend time in nature. Since most of us are city dwellers, we don’t inhale any of these good bacteria. Also most native culture used a lot of fermented foods containing healthy bacteria. Eating lots of yogurt and sauerkraut is good for the brain.

(4)        Exercise boosts intelligence. Run, bike, walk. I get my best ideas when I run. Our forefathers and –mothers – were always physically active. Television has mostly been a curse for society. Shut the boob-tube down and start reading.

(5)        Stress reduces sound thinking. With many people working several part time jobs high levels of cortisol – the chemical released when one is under continuous, unrelenting stress – and poverty can physically impair the brain and people’s ability to learn.

(6)        Relaxing activities, such as meditation, keeping a journal and prayer have shown to enhance growth in certain areas of the brain.

(7)        Lack of sleep reduces our thinking capacity. Many of us suffer from a chronic sleep deficiency.

We must prepare for collapse

Why do I list these items? They are all prerequisites for preparing for collapse, where we’ll need all our wits. Not surprisingly they also are necessary for entering the Kingdom to come. It seems to me that the Lord wants people there who are alert and open to new ideas.

You will notice that many of these 7 conditions have one feature in common: live close to the earth, grow as much as possible our own food, don’t be afraid to get dirt in your system, all of which promote intelligence. Listening to the earth is our holy duty.

Here is a new-old- idea. The Bible on several occasions state that The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom. (Proverbs 1:7; Prov. 9: 10), which, in essence, says that intelligence starts with ‘fear of the Lord.” This is another reason (#8), perhaps the most important one, why we are losing our marbles: we got rid of biblical religion.

A word of warning. Today, in a totally different society than when these words were written 3000 years ago, we have little idea what ‘the fear of the Lord’ means anymore, so we give these words a pious twist and leave it at that. What do they really signify? First the word ‘fear’. It has nothing to do with anxiety, being afraid, trying to avoid an encounter with God. The opposite is true. The world’s greatest composers and painters are a good example. The ‘fear’ of Bach, Rembrandt, van Gogh  – fill in your favorite artist – is the beginning of getting to know them better by listening to their music and admiring their works of art. “Fear” here means ‘awe, admiration, deep respect.’ The same is true of “The Fear of the Lord”. By closely studying God’s work of art, his creation, we can only state: “How great Thou art.” Proverbs states that “In wisdom He made everything.” The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, because getting to fully know his creation takes more than eternity.

Our Western civilization, which is often called Christian, has a faulty view of reality. We correctly believe that God and humanity have a relationship. However for most church goers ‘nature’ is subject to human exploitation and has little or nothing to do with God, so we can destroy it freely, which we do and continue to do in spite of creation suffering severely. Again the “heaven” notion plays dominant role, something which I will touch upon in the next blog. Here is how we usually see reality.

GOD

 |

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HUMAN

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|
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EARTH

We have a connection to God, but, based on an erroneous interpretation of  Genesis 2: 15 where the old translation used the word ‘dominate’, we eagerly implement this faulty view, forgetting that, just like Jesus who came to serve (Matthew 20: 28) we too must ‘serve’ creation. This is shown in the triangle below.

GOD

HUMAN  ————–                 EARTH

This basically illustrates that God is supreme. We depend on him. So does the earth. But the earth also depends on us and we on the earth. We all are mutually dependent, a truth that is valid for eternity. Bonhoeffer has said: God, Humanity and Earth belong together. The Earth- not heaven – is our eternal habitat. Therefore we must treat it as such.

More about this next week.

PREPARING   FOR COLLAPSE

September 1 – Labour Day 2014

Start of a new weekly column

Nothing makes sense anymore

The hand formed to feed us has become the fist that fights us. 

Now that the summer is over – well for students of all ages and teachers on all levels at any rate – and with about half of my veggie harvest stored away (it’s been a great growing year) it’s time to return to a weekly routine of writing a column after having posted 3 long monthly articles in June, July and August. I was glad to see that the number of visits on my blog has remained quite high during these three months: well over 12,000 with more than 26,000 hits, some days numbering more than 350 visits and 500 hits. Only the Lord knows whether I have influenced anybody.

It seems to me from my rural perch in Eastern Ontario that the world is stuck in a destructive pattern where any fundamental change has become almost impossible even though different thinking and action is sorely needed. The reason is that any attempt to fix dysfunctional systems steps on the toes of deeply entrenched vested interests that profit from the broken down Status Quo because people in charge of institutions devote every resource in their command to water down, co-opt, divert or defeat any reforms that reduce their share of the national income or curtail their political power or affect their powerful position or outdated doctrines.
As a result, true reform has become impossible, also because (1) politicians are elected to give everyone more of what they want so nothing changes while economic conditions deteriorate, and (2) corporations’ profits suffer when environmental controls are enacted. Alberta’s Tar sands and North Dakota’s Oil Fracturing boom are prime examples. The result is that sooner than later societal institutions will break down and no amount of make-believe or bogus statistics or happy talk can mask the rot.

Nothing makes sense anymore

Take the stock market.

In spite of slumping retail sales, static or declining income, rapidly shrinking workforce and dreaded deflation, the stock market is again close to an all-time high.

Makes no sense.

Take money.

When I studied Economics at Queen’s University, the money rate was then seen as the current inflation rate plus 1 percent for administration, plus 2 percent real return, for a minimum of 3 percent above the Cost of Living Index. My first and only mortgage in 1962 was $15,000 at 6.25% and that was seen as normal. My payment was $100.67 per month. Now the rate is 3% so my $100 now buys $30,000. No wonder house prices are up, but it means a negative return on my savings, and foreclosures when rates go up, which they will.

Makes no sense.

Take Climate Change.

More than half of US citizens don’t believe that this is taking place with politicians and church leaders out in front denying this man-made curse. Consequently America does nothing to combat it while the rest of the world pays lip service.

Makes no sense.

Take food.

It now is saturated with sugar and salt while most meats contain contaminants harmful for humans and, filled with antibiotics, have made this medicine ineffective. No wonder cancer and obesity are rampant. With a rapidly aging, unhealthy population health problems will skyrocket.

Makes no sense.

Take politics.

In name we are a democracy. In reality the lobbyists for financial institution, the arms industry and the big corporations call the shots. No wonder people have become cynical especially about politicians.

Makes no sense.

Take our soil, air, water.

We now use each year in natural resources the equivalent of close to 2 earths. How long can this last? We are increasingly using more than the earth can deliver.

Makes no sense.

Take economic growth.

Politicians and economists want, demand, do everything possible to foster economic growth, forgetting that in a finite world infinite growth is impossible.

Makes no sense.

Take war.

We know from history that nobody gains from waging war, yet today, while environmental conditions are deteriorating globally, war is everywhere, including in the USA where racial strife is still rampant. Fifty days of fighting between Israel and Palestine solved nothing. Two thousand people dead, destruction galore. Should I mention Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine?

Makes no sense.

Take wars on cancer and drugs. There billions have been spent ever since Pres. Nixon 40 years ago, declared it, yet cancer and drugs are still proliferating.

Makes no sense.

Take the fracking business or the Tar Sands.

Optimists now call North America Saudi America, but extracting its oil is very costly, very polluting, and very fast depleting. It has created the impression that we can burn oil ad infinitum, ignoring decades of warnings that by burning through the Earth’s finite reserves of fossil fuels just as fast as they could be extracted, the industrial world has backed itself into a corner from which the only way out leads straight down. White’s Law, one of the core concepts of human ecology, points out that economic development is directly correlated with energy per capita; as depletion overtakes production and energy per capita begins to decline, the inevitable result is a long era of economic contraction, leading to the collapse of most economic and cultural institutions.

Infinite growth in a finite world makes no sense.

Take the church.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer starts his book Creation and Fall with these remarkable words “The Church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end. The church should be there to prepare ourselves for the Coming of the Kingdom, God’s Perfect Cosmos. Instead its main message is heaven oriented, in essence calling God’s world evil. Believing that Heaven is our final destination is the greatest heresy. Exploiting the earth is the greatest sin.

Makes no sense.

The Teacher wrote in Ecclesiastes some 3000 years ago “There is a time for everything… a time to be born and a time to die”. That also applies to our era where we witness the last gasps of humanity as it speeds towards extinction, foolishly accelerating the inevitable, ever faster running toward self-annihilation. Einstein’s observation is now more relevant than ever: “The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”
Our stupidity – bewitched as we are by having 200+ energy slaves at our disposal night and day, provided by coal, oil and gas – has caused the earth itself to become our enemy, the very source on which our life depends: the hand formed to feed us has become the fist that fights us. The struggle for the remaining energy slaves has placed us and the planet in mortal peril, thanks to oil, which is a finite product, and also highly polluting.

Now our entire world is in suspense, anxiously suspecting that the next phase for us is the arrival of the unexpected, the improbable, the final stage of humanity. All sorts of hints are out there, but few take them seriously.

No wonder nothing makes sense anymore.

August 2014

HEADING FOR DISASTER?

The simple answer to this question is: Yes, we are on the path of unparalleled, unprecedented perils, worse than anything ever experienced, even in the entire second millennium, the previous 1,000 year period, which saw such enormous events as the Black Death, when as much as a third of the European population died, and world-wide wars that killed as many as 100 million people in the last century alone.

Two hundred years ago – 1815 – the Napoleonic Age ending with the battle of Waterloo, signaled the conclusion of the first European World War. This was followed by a century of peace briefly broken by skirmishes such as the Crimean War and some colonial conflicts – the Boer War comes to mind around 1900.

This all changed in 1914 when, for reasons still debated, Europe erupted not unlike a volatile volcano dispatching sudden death and destruction. Perhaps, who knows, the economy played a role, because just prior to the onset of the first cataclysmic event of the 20^th Century, the so-called World War I, financial turmoil was just as bad as it is now. This war was welcomed because, in 1914, with high unemployment and no government aid, the unemployed flocked to the recruiting centres to enlist, as joining the armies meant payment of a dollar a day – when one single dollar still had substantial buying power – three square meals a day and free clothing. Historians do agree that commercial competition between England and Germany played a role, while France still smarted from Germany decisively defeating La Belle France in 1871. Whatever the reason, fact is that this war was the most tragic conflict in modern history, that it was totally unnecessary madness, and that its unintended consequences wrecked Europe’s illustrious and indeed idyllic civilization, spawned a Stalin, a Hitler and its continuation in 1939. The victorious politicians, after Germany’s defeat in 1918, cut up the Middle East without regard to tribal and religious factions, creating numerous problems which only now, 100 years later, are screaming for solution.

The Final Reckoning: the Four Horsemen

The entire world is preparing for a final reckoning as all simmering strives and unsolved issues are coming out in the open. Apocalypse the Greek name of the Bible Book Revelation, its last chapter, means ‘coming out in the open.’ The bad decisions and political resolutions of this long 41 year War, from 1914 till 1945, are being exposed and are screaming for rectification, including long suppressed colonial injustices. To aggravate matters even more, cosmic conditions are being bared, of which Climate Change, energy shortages, clean water availability, soil erosion, and overpopulation are the most prominent, all affecting the entire human race. Fighting in the Middle East, Israel, Iraq, Yemen, Eastern Europe, and an Ebola pestilence in Africa, are eerie examples of the four horsemen of pestilence, famine, war, and death, now evident everywhere. We are caught in an impossible bind. On the one hand energy availability is waning and the global economic system is beginning to turn down, on the other hand our political structure and Capitalism can only function with expanding growth.

This all looks like the Beginning of the End.

Our slaves have enslaved us

Am I unduly pessimistic? No. For me, an older man, it pays to have such a frame of mind. A study published last year in the journal Psychology and Aging found that older people with pessimistic views of the future were more likely to live longer and healthier lives than those with a rosier outlook. The researchers used data from a nationally representative survey in Germany of about 11,000 people. When looking at respondents older than 65, a total of about 1,300 people, the researchers found that the likelihood of surviving or remaining healthy increased by about 10% for those who were more pessimistic. Pessimists prepare themselves for the worst and so are better equipped to face the future.

And there is a lot to be pessimistic about. Everywhere we look pressures of all sorts are pushing against us, threatening our well-being. The main reason is our comfortable condition, with each of us in the West, having 200+ energy slaves at our disposal night and day, provided by coal, oil and gas. That very situation is now under attack, because, in human history, this is an enormous anomaly. It has caused the earth itself to become our enemy, the very source on which our life depends: the hand that was created to feed us has become the fist that fights us. The struggle for the remaining energy slaves has placed the planet in mortal peril, thanks to oil, which is a finite product, and also highly polluting.

The Arctic Region and Shale are about the only ‘new’ sources of oil and gas we have, but Shale is a rapidly depleting source and the Arctic is too expensive to exploit, reason why immensely powerful and rich oil companies, such as Shell and Exxon, have sold their shale holdings and abandoned their leases in the forbidden Beaufort Sea. But don’t the Saudis have lots of oil? No. They won’t be able to make up for the difference. Not even close. The only possible way to go from here is to lower our energy demand, and our reliance on the energy demand of our society, by as much as 90 percent. If we don’t – and we won’t, for the simple reason that we no longer can’t – the West will face a sudden and merciless demise, probably preceded by the collapse of the financial system. The single reason why world population has tripled in my life time is the use of carbon fuels. Once this supply stream slows, so will life expectancy. A sudden stop will cause the death of billions within a very short time.

Wars and rumors of War.

I am writing this in August 2014, the exact month when 100 years ago the 20^th Century First World War started, the very reason why this war is so much in the news now. Historians have been busy trying to trace who were primarily responsible for starting this conflict. On one side of the debate is historian Margaret MacMillan, whose new book “The War That Ended Peace,” lays primary blame on Germany’s military and commercial ambitions. On the other is “The Sleepwalkers – How Europe Went to War in 1914” by Cambridge professor Christopher Clark who disagrees with MacMillan and shows that Germany’s role in the conflict was no greater than the other belligerents, and perhaps less than commonly believed.  He writes that starved into submission by Britain’s naval blockade, Germany was unfairly and foolishly saddled with total war guilt, and saw 10% of its territory and 7 million of its people torn away at Versailles by the victors, primarily France and England.

Both authors agree that the cruel conditions imposed on Germany led to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power on his vow to return Germany’s lost lands and peoples who had been given to Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Most of today’s Mideast’s problems flowed directly from the diplomatic lynching of Germany at Versailles led by France and Britain.

In one report I read Prof. Clark shows that both of these imperial powers feared Germany’s growing commercial and military power (just as the US today fears China’s rise). Germany’s vibrant social democracy with its worker’s rights and concern for the poor posed a threat to the capitalists of Britain and France.  Britain’s imperialists were deeply worried by the creation of a feeble little German Empire based in Africa.   At the time they controlled a quarter of the globe and all of its oceans.

Whoever is correct, we now know only too well that almost 40 years of petty European rivalries, intrigues and power games finally ran disastrously together in 1914.

We see the same dangers today in the growing conflict over Ukraine between the US and its European allies and Russia.  Every week seems to bring the US and Russia closer to a collision as the Washington seeks to dominate Ukraine and use it as a weapon against Russia. At this point no one in the West is ready to die for Luhansk or Donetsk, but then, in 1914, few in Europe were ready to die for Verdun or Ypres – but millions did. Will history repeat itself? Often when politicians are powerless to prevent recessions or depressions, war seems to be the best alternative. History tells us that, if all else fails, making war diverts the attention of the electorate. However, the last thing our fragile environment needs is more destruction and violent deaths.

We are sleep-walking into oblivion

The title of Christopher Clark’s book The Sleepwalkers is eminently fitting for our time as well. Just as Europe, as in a trance, got closer and closer to the fatal step from which there was no retreat – optimistically proclaiming that any conflict would be short-lived – our war against nature is very similar , also a war with no winners.

The average person in the Western World is blind to what’s really happening and consequently our ‘carbon footprint’ is still increasing – and mine as well. In July my share of the world’s pollution was bigger than usual: I flew to Europe to visit a sick sister and brother, and later my wife and I flew, also from Toronto, to Minneapolis for a grandson’s wedding. I observed that both in Europe and in the USA there is little or no awareness that Time with a capital T is running out. It reminds me of Revelation 22:11, the last chapter in the Bible. There is says that “Let they who do wrong keep on doing so… let they who do right continue to act that way.” In other words, the time for conversion is past. People are too set in their ways to change direction. We no longer can change our life style, and so the dome of bubbles just keeps blowing bigger and bigger into an unstable explosive critical mass. Limited resources are rapidly vanishing under our global canopy; extreme drought in China, in West USA, in South America means that food scarcity is increasing worldwide; political, religious, business leaders all are silent about the taboo topic of controlling the world’s out-of-control population growth and unable to stop Climate Change, and so the real clock keeps ticking.

Yes, silence on long-term big-bubble issues is deafening, stifled by our relentless quest for more, by the endless drive for earnings by big banks, big oil, big lobbying, big government and blinded, crowd-pleasing, small-minded politicians who tried to be re-elected by promising a better future, with nothing to back up their empty slogans.

The military men, the real power in Washington, are planning for more wars, austerity, massive population losses, as pandemics lurk in the shadows, emerging without warning.

What’s ahead? What is the West’s future? What sort of world is emerging where a hundred billionaires own more than half of the world’s resources and want more? Where are we headed when billions go to bed hungry every night? Can we really say that matters will improve when soil erosion, Global Warming, polluted waters, a looming pandemic, increasing unemployment and a still rapidly expanding world population are the only growth industries?

So what’s ahead? Wars, wars and more wars fought by desperate people for vanishing resources, because failure to deal with the big issues will fulfill the Pentagon’s 2020 prediction: “As the planet’s carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies would emerge … warfare is defining human life.”

That’s also the clear message of Michael Klare’s “The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources,” preceded by Klare’s earlier book, “Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict.”

Klare’s prophecy is unambiguous: “No matter how much corporate or government officials wish to deny it, there are not nearly enough nonrenewable resources on this planet to perpetually satisfy the growing needs of a ballooning world population.”

In today’s world run by Big Oil and climate-denying billionaires like the Koch Bros, Klare warns “existing modes of production are causing unacceptable damage to the global environment……continuing with current industrial practices will simply prove impossible.”

The truth is our planet is at a historic turning point. A critical mass is near its flash point, bringing with it a perfect storm of regional wars, mass starvation, pandemics and global-warming catastrophes, the perfect Apocalypse situation. And yet most conservative politicians, Wall Street CEOs and billionaires minimize the warnings of men like environmentalist Bill McKibben, money manager Jeremy Grantham, anthropologist Jared Diamond, and global security expert Michael Klare, all warning us to wake-up before it’s too late to save our planet.

The Four Horses of the Apocalypse are out in the open. The world is facing an unprecedented crisis of resource depletion, a crisis that goes beyond ‘peak oil’ to encompass shortages of coal and uranium, copper and lithium, water and arable land. With all of the planet’s easily assessable resource deposits rapidly approaching exhaustion, the desperate hunt for supplies has become a frenzy of extreme exploration, as governments and corporations rush to stake their claims in areas previously considered too dangerous or remote, such as the melting polar regions, where now exploding methane gases – 23 times more deadly than our exhaust-spewing Green-House-Gases – cause mysterious craters in the Arctic ice, accelerating Climate Change beyond the most pessimistic projections.

All this will “Prepare the Way of the Lord,” when he returns to ‘judge the living and the dead.’

In September I will start a weekly series on

PREPARING   FOR COLLAPSE

July 2014.

GENESIS 1: 26-27: “Let us make the human race in our image, according to our likeness.

Isaiah 61: 1 “Proclaim freedom for the captives.”

God created; we uncreated.

God created everything we observe around us, all in different stages. It seems to me that, when creation was fully operational, when the butterflies where fluttering by, when the birds flew their erratic courses, when insects were strictly there for pollination, when everything was in full bloom, God took a break. He paused for a while, surveyed the scene, surmising that something was lacking.

Where until now everything else had sort of evolved, perhaps from seed, perhaps from different life-forms over the millennia taking on the shapes and sizes and figures we now know as created matter, when it came to calling the human race into being, God used a different method.

We were not created ex nihilo, out of nothing, as all other matter. They took their shapes and essence from the way God had visualized them. No, unlike everything before, God created us, women and men, using already existing stuff, the soil with its trillions of microbes and other substances. From the very earth he fashioned a human figure, a mirror image to his own appearance: perfection in other words.

I know this is a deep mystery. What does it mean to be created in God’s image? Jesus said of his father that “God is a Spirit,” Paul writes that God lives in inapproachable light: “Nobody has seen him and nobody can see him.” (1 Tim. 6:16). Paul also tells us that “Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation by whom all things were created.” (Col. 1: 15- 16).

What could I conclude from this? If Jesus was the first-born of all creation, was he the first human who, as a human being created everything, including the human race made in his image? Psalm 82: 6 says that “We are gods, all sons of the Most High.” When Jesus was accused by the Pharisees of calling himself “the Son of God” he pointed out to these bible experts that this is exactly what this Psalm tells us.

Bonhoeffer, in his Creation and Fall, referring to Genesis 1: 26-27 which deals with The Image of God on Earth, writes that “being created in God’s own image on earth means that humankind is like the Creator in that it is free.”

So, based on this I could say that being made in God’s image means two things: (1)  we look like God- or Jesus, the image of the Father – and (2) we were created not as captives, but mentally, physically and spiritually free.

We are no longer free.

It is exactly this freedom that is now imperiled. We have become captives. The Bible speaks of this captivity both in Psalm 68: 18 and Isaiah 61: 1. Jesus quotes Isaiah 61: 1, when he speaks in his home town. There he says that Jesus has come to proclaim liberty to the captives, implying that his former playmates  – and by implication we too – are prisoners of systems that enslave. These words so infuriate his former neighbours that they want to kill him.

Why were these small town people so upset, ready to do away with Jesus? Let me take a stab at this. Here was this bachelor Jesus, 30 years old, who had never once joined in to condemn the Roman occupiers, who, when others went out to chase girls, left to meditate in the countryside, who, where others participated in the parental business, had long discussions with the regional rabbis and sought out the shamans and the naturalists, those who like himself found solace in nature. He just was not a joiner. He was a maverick, traveling to pagan strongholds, doing all sorts of things a respectable Israelite would never do.

So this oddball was going to tell them what to do and what to believe? No way. When they heard Jesus say that they were captives of a civic spirit that was contrary to the freedom Jesus proclaimed, it was precisely this that so infuriated them: they were convinced that he was wrong, so wrong that they were certain that he was a traitor, a public disgrace.

Is the same true today? Do we too get upset when the true implications of these words become clear to us?

Let me explore how situations we take for granted and even love, have, in reality, become prisons for us. The people in Nazareth, in Jesus’ days, were totally sold on ‘them versus us’, the Roman occupiers and the Jewish traitors against those who refused to recognize that the Roman occupation had a shred of legality. This prevented them to see beyond the narrow confines of Jewishness and kept them from embracing a larger global perspective, something Jesus often emphasized. The Jews thought themselves better that all other people: they were the real seed of Abraham, the chosen people, while all others were inferior, lost forever. His fellow citizens hated Jesus’ tolerance.

I believe that what applied then to the Jews, also applies to the church of today. We too are prisoners. Before we can come to Jesus, we must be aware of our status as captives just as the pious Jews in Jesus’ home town. We too have to free ourselves from what enslaves us. We, more than any other generation, have become blind followers of sinful systems.

What am I really talking about? 

We must look into the mirror and confess that we are prisoners of conditions that constantly debase God’s creation. We must recognize that we are subject to situations that undermine our health, enrich the rich and penalize the poor. We must confront ourselves with the truth that the way we live is deeply flawed, is not the Way of Life, but the Way of Death. We must confess with Milton in Paradise Lost that we rather “reign in hell than serve in heaven.”

We must acknowledge that we have become addicted to creation-debasing habits. We have become carboholics, slaves, captives, not free anymore to live and do what we like, or better what Christ demands of us. We still confess that Christ has set us free, that Christ is all and in all, according to Colossians 1: 15-20. We still maintain that we are free to use everything created, while respecting the holiness of each created entity. But these words belie our actions because we fail to see our true state of dependence on life-altering fossil fuels. The fact that everything created by God is holy means that we sin when we harm any facet of creation. I believe that it was exactly that to which Jesus referred to in the Lord’s Prayer. There he asked us to “Hallow his name,” regard everything created in his name as holy. We so flippantly recite these lines Sunday after Sunday without really fathoming what they mean. The grammatical construction of the phrases “Hallowed be thy name” and the next line “Thy Kingdom come”, suggest that we must constantly work to accomplish that. Both imply that we must keep on trying all our lives to realize that. Actually the line in the Lord’s Prayer asking us to “give us this day our daily bread” is wrongly translated. The word ‘epiousios’ translated as ‘daily’ really means something like ‘tomorrow’ referring to a later time. A better translation is “give us the wherewithal to always be focused on the kingdom that comes tomorrow”. “Forgive us our trespasses” is included in that same prayer because we cannot live without sin.  We may live perfectly moral lives, but in regards to creation we constantly sin. I sincerely believe that when we appear before God’s throne of judgement, one of Jesus’ questions will centre on our ‘carbon foot print,’ asking us what we have done to reduce the harm caused by us to our own bodies, our fellow citizens and creation in general.

That’s why forgiveness is needed all the time.

Because we are addicted to a carboholic life-style, we need forgiveness every minute of the day. It is my contention that our entire society, the whole-wide-world in which we live, is conspiring to rob us off the freedom that Christ has given us and forcing us to live not according to the laws of creation but according to the laws of Capitalism, which thrives on Creational Destruction. The very first commandment Jesus gives us is to love God above anything else. This simply means that our priority in life is to love everything God has made. We don’t love Bach as a person. We don’t love Rembrandt for his charm: we love these men for their masterpieces. The same is true for God, who can only be known for his unequalled creation: the world we inhabit.

Rather than honoring his marvelous piece of art, the world and they who dwell therein, we daily molest it. The sort of society we have created leads to universal death, and we are, by and large, eager participants in this destructive act. Christ has promised to set us free from this bondage, but as is the case in all we do: God won’t do anything without us and we can’t do anything without him. Christian living has always been a total affair.

What are some of the other factors that entrap us? 

Let me name a few, not in order of priority. (1) Transportation and Energy; (2) Food; (3) Religion; (4) Money and debt.

(1)        Transportation and Energy.

Fact is that we live in a finite world. Fact is that our financial world looks like a bankrupt remnant of our past. Fact is that our energy resources are dwindling, that we hit peak conventional oil in the last decade. Shale is a pipedream, wind and solar can’t keep the grid running; these things, like the debt situation, look so obviously threatening to our way of life you’d think we’d be looking hard at seriously adapting that way of life. But we don’t, we just want to substitute one energy source with another, even though they’re hugely different and to a large extent incompatible.

We’re so addicted to the comfortable feeling of having all rooms in our homes heated or cooled, and to taking our own little transport units the same half hour drive to work and back every single day that we’d rather not think about why we do it than change our ways, even as it’s glaringly obvious that our ways must and will stop at some point. We’re not going to find some new magical mystery energy source, and besides, both our own legacy of profligate energy use and the 2nd law of thermodynamics tell us it wouldn’t be all that magical anyway.

The consumption of energy is a potentially very destructive force, as physics clearly states, which should really teach us that we need to be very careful about using it, burning it, and building our societies in ways that necessitate for us to use more of it all the time.

We have become captives of a transportation system that is now seen as destroying everything we hold dear. Yes, only prayer for forgiveness is all that we have left. “Forgive us our trespasses.”

(2)Food.

We have bought into a food culture in which eaters — that’s everyone — exploit animals, people and the environment, and which make ourselves sick. To change that, we have to change not only the way we behave as individuals but the way we behave as a society. Food, saturated with sugar, salt and other ingredients that cause cancers, heart attacks, diabetes and obesity, are for most the only available sources of nutrition. It has become impossible for many to free themselves from this trap, as pesticides and contaminated soil and water lead not to life but premature sickness and death. But try we must, even though it has become nearly impossible for those with little income and often no notion of a different approach.

Obesity, diabetes, cancer and other environmental diseases can be traced to the way we eat. Making meals from scratch, especially from home-grown ingredients has become a lost art. Just as General Motors bought up bus companies and then liquidated them to prevent people from using mass transportation and encouraging the use of autos and the building of subdivisions, multinational companies have done the same for food production. For them not nutrition, not basic health, but shelf life and deceptive appearance that promote profits is their goal, at the expense of general well-being. Never trust a product that is produced in a factory.

(3)Religion

Beware of religion that promotes heaven, wealth, nationalism and ignores or even condemns Climate Change. Beware of religions that know exactly what God wants us to do or what God doesn’t want us to do. We see through a glass darkly and today that glass is more obscured than ever. Churches, almost without exception, see the Bible as God’s only Word, while in reality Creation is God’s Primary Revelation. I see the Sin against the Holy Spirit, of which Jesus suggested that it would be the greatest of sins, having a connection to creation through wantonly and purposely harming God’s precious creation. (See John 3:16). We are already being punished by ignoring the impact of methane, CO2 and other substances. The Climate Change principle is dead simple: increase the amount of these substances in the atmosphere – in the soil and in the oceans – and temperatures will rise. It is basic physics. What awaits us is a world of violent storms and heatwaves, of crop losses and flooded nations, a world which at the same time will have far less energy available to deal with these issues, and no money/credit to speak of to buy that energy with. That looks like a pretty accurate picture of the world that we – or is that our children? – will live in.

The bright side is there’ll be far fewer of us, which will reduce per capita energy consumption drastically. The dark side is we will be fully unprepared, because we will have chosen to live in our past until our future caught up with it. Come to think of it: a nation and a world that no longer cares for the future is already dead.

(4) Finances and debt

What is true for transportation and food, also applies to finances. The global financial system owns our societies, banks, politicians, everybody, including you and me.  It can do what it wants and what it pleases with impunity. Today all money matters are controlled to the advantage of the moneyed segment of society and to benefit the financial structure of the ruling class. As long as interest is kept at a very low level, our immense debt will be manageable. Where before savings and decent wages fueled the economy, now debt makes the world function. As soon as interest rates increase, making debt service impossible, our financial world too will collapse.

Is there a solution?

Bonhoeffer in his book The Cost of Discipleship wrote that there is not such a thing as “cheap grace,” something we wealthy Westerners are counting on for eternity.” Replying to the rich young man Jesus said that it is almost impossible for a rich person to enter the kingdom. We are much richer than even the Emperor of Rome in all his glory. No wonder Jesus wondered whether: “He will I find faith on earth when he returns” He also stated “Many are called but few are chosen.”

Fact is that we are saved by grace, because we cannot live perfectly, that’s why we must pray for forgiveness all the time, and, with the words of the church reformer Martin Luther, ‘sin bravely.’

When Christ returns he will not ask us how well we have observed religious customs but how carefully we have lived in God’s Holy Creation, the Kingdom to Come, and how well prepared we are for entering it. Johan Herman Bavinck in his Between the Beginning and the End: A Radical Kingdom Vision the Kingdom has pointed out that the New Creation is The Kingdom to come. That’s why Jesus has urged us to Seek First the Kingdom of God and the laws that govern it. That simply means that our primary task in life now is to seek the welfare of the creation from which we get our food, in which we live and move and have our being, and which will be perfected when Christ returns.

We now have to prepare ourselves for that situation. We must free ourselves from the slavery which has chained us to the secular forces that have imprisoned us and which threaten to separate us forever from the love of Christ. This love will become evident to every living creature when he returns as King of Kings and Lord of Lords.