DECEMBER 8 2018
WE ARE KILLING GOD!
When last week I read about the sad situation with our insects, I was overcome with emotion: tears filled my eyes. It’s not that I have a special love for bugs – I know they love me – still lately I have tried to catch them and release them in the open rather than swatting them. Of course: a bit of self-interest: I have 4 apple trees in my yard and getting a good crop depends on these little critters.
My sad state of mind was caused by the awareness that insects are a crucial part of creation, and that their disappearance signals our demise as well. It also seems that only the odd person is ready to lament this, with the emphasis on odd.
It reminded me of an ancient proverb,
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of message the battle was lost.
For want of the battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
For want of those pestering and pesky insects, THE KINGDOM that God gave us to cultivate and improve is being lost. In the process we are killing God as well.
Back to insects.
Here’s a lengthy quote from the New York Times Magazine:
By far the (insect) expert there is E.O. Wilson, who began his career as a taxonomic entomologist, studying ants. Insects are not what we’re usually imagining when we talk about biodiversity. Yet they are, in Wilson’s words, “the little things that run the natural world.” He means it literally.
Scientists have tried to calculate the benefits that insects provide simply by going about their business in large numbers. Trillions of bugs flitting from flower to flower pollinate some three-quarters of our food crops, a service worth as much as $500 billion every year. (This doesn’t count the 80 percent of wild flowering plants, the foundation blocks of life everywhere, that rely on insects for pollination.) If monetary calculations like that sound strange, consider the Maoxian Valley in China, where shortages of insect pollinators have led farmers to hire human workers, at a cost of up to $19 per worker per day, to replace bees. Each person covers five to 10 trees a day, pollinating apple blossoms by hand.
By eating and being eaten, insects turn plants into protein and power the growth of all the uncountable species — including freshwater fish and a majority of birds — that rely on them for food, not to mention all the creatures that eat those creatures.
Bugs are vital to the decomposition that keeps nutrients cycling, soil healthy, plants growing and ecosystems running. This role is mostly invisible, until suddenly it’s not. After introducing cattle to Australia at the turn of the 19th century, settlers soon found themselves overwhelmed by the problem of their feces: For some reason, cow pies there were taking months or even years to decompose. Cows refused to eat near the stink, requiring more and more land for grazing, and so many flies bred in the piles that the country became famous for the funny hats that stockmen wore to keep them at bay. It wasn’t until 1951 that a visiting entomologist realized what was wrong: The local insects, evolved to eat the more fibrous waste of marsupials, couldn’t handle cow excrement. For the next 25 years, the importation, quarantine and release of dozens of species of dung beetles became a national priority. And that was just one unfilled niche. (In the United States, dung beetles save ranchers an estimated $380 million a year.) We simply don’t know everything that insects do. Only about 2 percent of invertebrate species have been studied enough for us to estimate whether they are in danger of extinction, never mind what dangers that extinction might pose.
When asked to imagine what would happen if insects were to disappear completely, scientists find words like chaos, collapse, Armageddon. Wagner, the University of Connecticut entomologist, describes a flowerless world with silent forests, a world of dung and old leaves and rotting carcasses accumulating in cities and roadsides, a world of “collapse or decay and erosion and loss that would spread through ecosystems” — spiraling from predators to plants. E.O. Wilson has written of an insect-free world, a place where most plants and land animals become extinct; where fungi explodes, for a while, thriving on death and rot; and where “the human species survives, able to fall back on wind-pollinated grains and marine fishing” despite mass starvation and resource wars. “Clinging to survival in a devastated world, and trapped in an ecological dark age,” he adds, “the survivors would offer prayers for the return of weeds and bugs.”
So far the article.
WE ARE KILLING GOD!
Suppose we were to destroy all of Bach’s music, then, after one generation, he would be forgotten, historically dead. Suppose we were to destroy all of van Gogh paintings, would have erased all traces of this great painter, we effectively would have killed him.
By killing off creation piece by piece, insects today, bees tomorrow, birds another day, slowly but surely that would be it. That’s what we are doing to God.
COP24
This past week and next, the UN sponsored COP24 – dealing with Climate Change – is in session in Poland, a country where almost all electricity is generated by Climate Enemy Number One: COAL, Poland’s home-grown product.
Doom is in the air there in Poland. David Attenborough, celebrated TV personality and Britain’s foremost Climate Critic addressed the delegates from over 200 countries with the opening words, “Right now we are facing a manmade disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years: climate change. If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”
Well, action is in the works but not the kind that will prevent doom: on the contrary.
France is in uproar: President Macron, a fervent environmentalist, imposed a tax on fuel, gasoline and diesel, in order to initiate more climate change measures, which initially would cost money, hence the extra tax. Rather than accepting this global warming – reducing incentive, the masses revolted, throwing France into chaos.
Macron capitulated, confirming once more that Climate Change is an unstoppable Climate Cancer. The common man – de gewone man (in Dutch) – will not cooperate, will not accept the higher taxes, will not fall into line and be compliant, because they don’t believe that those in power will do the right thing. This is good news for Trump and seals the demise of us all.
There’s another 16th Century saying: “you cannot have the cake and eat it,” which in this case could read, “You cannot have a reliable climate and yet abuse it left and right, in the air above and down the earth below. But that’s exactly what we are doing, and the trouble is we are too far down this road to change, at least I can’t see a solution to this situation. Do you?
Fact is, we are a spoiled generation, ruled by short-sighted politicians, who cannot look beyond their next election campaign. Personally I think we’ll get a little help from ON HIGH: not the solution that we can continue our wasteful ways, no, a little help to speed up the end.
Will the BIG ONE come?
For quite some time now I have been of a mind that soon there will be a convergence of disastrous events. So far in the past 100 years we have weathered two World Wars, one enormous pandemic, the so-called Spanish Flu, which killed especially young adults, perhaps the class of people in 1918-19 most affected by the ravages – physical and emotional – of World-War I.
Today the entire world population is compromised physically by foul air, foul water and foul food thanks to our Global War on our natural environment. In other words, the world is ripe for a pandemic.
Last week Alaska experienced a large earth quake. They are coming closer, these upsetting events. As you know, Alaska is near the Arctic, where trillions of tons of methane are buried. There is the imminent danger that earthquakes will trigger large amounts of ultra-dangerous methane to be released from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean.
Warming caused by us, using carbon-based fuels, makes snow and ice melt, which is taking weight off the land and dumping it into the nearby sea. This change in weight can trigger earthquakes and seismic shocks that can travel over long distances and trigger further earthquakes elsewhere.
Earthquakes in the Arctic Ocean can destabilize methane hydrates and such earthquakes as well as the eruption of methane itself can in turn destabilize methane hydrates in nearby locations.
Especially vulnerable are areas near fault lines, because that same shifting of weight happens in California where disastrous fires have incinerated massive trees and reduced human habitat to ashes, also affecting the precarious balance in that vulnerable area. It so happens that the San Andreas Fault is the sliding boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate. It slices California in two from Cape Mendocino to the Mexican border. San Diego, Los Angeles and Big Sur are on the Pacific Plate. There’s where THE BIG ONE will happen.
There have been many small ones lately in the entire Ring of Fire and, as yet, The North American Pacific Coast has been spared. The Big One will come there some time in the near future and be the onset of a domino of disasters, setting in motion a series of calamities from which the earth will never recover.
Revelation, that fateful last Bible book does not give a time table, does not provide us with date and place of the events to happen: on the contrary, the Bible repeatedly tells us that there won’t be a warning, but there will be clear indications: they are happening now.
The Death of Insects.
That article in the New York Times Magazine set me off on a new train of thought.
In our world for all practical purposes God is dead. We don’t openly say that, because it sounds blasphemous, but we certainly live that way. We wantonly kill nature, wild animals, fish, fowl, and feel offended when we say that these actions kill God also.
In a sense we do the same with our bodies: rather than have the body heal the body by employing the body’s defense mechanism, we swallow drugs, all sort of chemicals, that may give a cure of sorts, but every drug has side effects, and we really don’t know or want to know what they are.
I am inclined to call a spade a spade, that’s why we too must give events names that portray their essence. Instead of global warming or climate change, the affliction should be called what it is: climate crisis or climate cancer. Or, instead of the cozy-sounding global warming, planetary destruction would be more appropriate.
We live in interesting times. Those who most loudly trumpet Fake News are the worst offenders themselves. No longer do they trust reliable science, and persecute the bringers of bad news.
My blog, mainly based on what the American Religion calls THE HOLY SCRIPTURES, would, in their eyes, be totally fake news, because in their Brave New World language True is False and False is True. No wonder people are confused.
Economic anxiety is now everywhere. The stock market is a good barometer, up one day, down the next, while suicides are at an all-time high, signaling sociological, psychological and spiritual decay.
For want of the battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
For want of insects our world is lost because it is dominated by The Evil One. The GOOD NEWS is that these events prepare us for THE NEW WORLD to come, for which Christ paid the ultimate price, as John 3: 16 tells us:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”