MARCH 8 2015
“Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues.” (Revelation 16: 4)
What does this text mean? I have often thought about this. It becomes clearer by the day that the financial system we live in is destroying the planet. The Pope said a while ago that “harming creation is a sin”. If that is the case, and I think it is, then we sin all the time. Polluting is a direct sin against the Ten Commandments, where the Fourth Commandment says: “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name”. Think about that: we misuse or perhaps better, we abuse God’s name when we pollute, which has become as universal as eating and drinking and sleeping. This means that we must abandon our way of life (get out of her as the text above tells us) which is offending God. I do harm this very moment while I typing in my laptop even though I use solar power today. The laptop itself is chockfull with harmful material and the Internet takes a lot of energy. Must I really consider abandoning all that?
Luther, the Reformer, once said that we must sin bravely. In his time people carried no or negligible carbon foot prints: we always do all the time. Yes, we have painted ourselves into a corner: we now have a way of life that is continuously and disastrously sinful. We can’t just shrug our shoulders and keep on sinning, because the fate of the planet is at stake. The Pope still flies everywhere while airplane flights are among the worst polluters. We still eat beef even though beef cattle generate more greenhouse gases than any other animal. I live 5 km from the nearest store and church. In the winter time I simply cannot do without a car. Yet 100 years ago my former neighbors did it all the time, and the village core was a hive of activity and the churches shrived. Think about it: constant sinning kills religion.
The text listed as the heading, asks us – never commands us – to come out of her, lest we share in her sins. We now know what these sins are: the sins of destroying creation.
We can easily make excuses. My excuse: I see my blog as an evangelism tool, and, yes, it is read all over the world: I have hundreds of readers every day. Has the time come where even that is no longer effective and ‘evangelism’ is no longer viable in a world where the Good News has become so distorted that it is lost in the multitude of opinions?
Does “Coming out of her” indicate an end to communication and a separation from society that implies a cessation of contact with the outside world? Has society become so sinful that contamination can no longer be avoided? It reminds me of Lot and his small family who were forcefully removed from Sodom and Gomorrah. It reminds me of the descendants of Jacob moving out of Egypt and establishing a theocracy in the conquered lands of Palestine. It reminds me of the convents and monasteries of the Middle Ages, and the current day Amish communities.
Let’s face it: by and large the church is perhaps not dead but certainly comatose . Missions miss the message because the message has become meaningless: heaven has become a heresy because it implies leaving the earth to its polluted fate, while the New Earth concept is too difficult to grasp in a world racing to its suicidal demise.
Yet the New Earth promise is the only viable gospel out there, but difficult to sell because all our lives are completely wrapped up in our creation-destroying ego trip. If evangelism, the bringing of the Good-News, – the Eu-Angelos – wants to be effective then it has to prove that it is possible to live so that we can visualize this new theology, already long ago outlined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and J. H. Bavinck, especially in his book Between the Beginning and the End – a radical Kingdom vision (Eerdmans).
In that regard is abandoning all electronic devices a first step?
In previous columns I have mentioned The Tower of Babel, an early attempt to dominate the world which God prevented by confusing their language. Thanks to Moore’s law, computing power has expanded exponentially, and has made mechanical translation possible. In other words, the effects of The Tower of Babel have been negated: language confusion has been eliminated. God has lost the communication battle. Humanity has triumphed.
But has it really?
Just as due to the language confusion the Tower of Babel was abandoned, so the new Tower of Babel, the entire Internet and World Wide Web too will collapse. In the Babel’s Era the world was largely open. Now there is not a square meter not affected by human influence. When our totally interconnected world, now completely dependent on the Internet, is ruined somehow (and it will happen) our entire world goes with it. That’s how vulnerable we are. Better not depend on the Internet at all.
There is another, slower way of disintegration
When I look around in the stores and businesses I visit, I see only women there. Where are the men? As robots replace humans – mostly jobs earlier done by men – are the only jobs left for the males to be truck drivers and the army? Each Memorial Day a company of soldiers comes to Tweed from the nearest bases – Trenton and Petawawa – and fine young men they are. Are these the only secure jobs left for men? Of course in the bigger cities the legal profession and the upper echelons of finance are still dominated by the males. When I see the pictures in the Globe and Mail of appointments to the various boards of large companies, WASP persons dominate. The acronym no longer applies to WASP but MASP – Male Anglo Saxon Protestant or now more and more MASA – Male Anglo Saxon Agnostics.
Those are jobs not easily robotized, including most brain jobs. A robot chess player can thrash the best chess player in the world, but can’t match the motor and perceptual skills of a one-year-old baby. Robots can lift three thousand pounds at a time and carry an entire stack of shelves in one go. Directed wirelessly along preprogrammed paths, they swivel and dance around each other with surprising elegance, then pick up their packages according to the instructions printed on automatically scanned barcodes. It looks that the role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to disappear in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was eliminated by the introduction of tractors.
That means no place for muscle men of average intelligence, which means most of the men in the world. So what is needed to solve that problem? Does that mean that we need a 1914-18 war where mostly men were sacrificed as cannon fodder?
Yes, that’s what Capitalism wants. Capitalism now aims for war in which the surplus men are killed while factories hum with war production, making the economy grow: a double solution. We now know that the Capitalistic system destroys the natural system through sheer pollution. It now looks that it will also make a good portion of the employable male population redundant.
If we do not change, robots are going to eat all the jobs, and only the very talented will rule the roost: the infamous One Percent will not only garner the capital, they will also have the brain-jobs. The rest will be closely monitored, constantly on a screen somewhere to detect insurrection and revolt.
Deflation
Robots have other negative effects: it will cause severe deflation. When jobs are disappearing, then there is less and less money in most people’s pockets, and when that happens, prices fall. We already are starting to see deflation in our world where oil price are falling causing economies to stagnate and consumers to lose confidence. Now these two different deflations are starting to overlap. Collapsing house prices could be another part of this equation. The prospect of millions of jobs being rendered obsolete, private-home values collapsing and the prices of everyday goods going into a deflationary spiral sounds like a recipe for disaster, and it is. However, there is a degree of inevitability there. In a capitalist system the elimination of inefficiency through technology has to be pursued to its logical conclusion, even when it kills people.
For jobs to go away with that speed however is a new thing and there are no historical precedents for this: this simply has never happened before. We don’t have a clue how this speed of job disappearance, combined with extensive deflation, will play out, but the omens are horrifying.
It’s also worth noting what isn’t being said about this robot future. There’s capital, doing better than ever; the robots, doing all the work; and the great mass of humanity, doing not much. There is a saying that idleness is an invitation for the Devil to take over. It’s the old, old story: God – creation – versus the Devil – un-creation, pollution. Now more than ever we have to take sides. If you have a Bible, read Deuteronomy 28 which warns us when we side with evil.
There is a better way.
In 1810, agriculture employed 90 per cent of the American workforce. Then millions of buffalo roamed the prairies, living off the prairie grass. Now all the prairie grass is gone, millions of beef cattle are penned in feed lots, basically eating oil, as corn and soy beans are artificially composed and seeded, harvested with million-dollar machines, on soil yearly depleting at an alarming rate. Famers now compose less than 2 per cent of the workforce. Men and horses have been replaced by computers and oil to the extent that we eat nutritional-empty food, leading to obesity, cancer and multiple different disorders. Welcome to the Devil’s world.
There is a better way, but it involves a thorough conversion. The Greek word for conversion in the New Testament is ‘metanoia’. The Greek word ‘meta’ always indicates change. We find it in metabolism or metaphor or metamorphosis. The Greek word ‘noia’ comes from ‘gnoosis’ meaning knowledge or mind. Conversion in the theological sense means much more than ‘being born again’ in the Pentecostal sense, where you suddenly speak in tongues and daily pray for being Raptured, asking to be taken away from this wicked earth. Conversion really means following a different mindset, a complete change in life and living. Conversion is the exact opposite of the conventional meaning of ‘born again’ which is a flight from this world. Conversion means becoming one with the earth which formed us, sustains us and daily upholds us.
Yes, there is a better way. We must embrace our life-giving earth. We must take distance from all elements that hinders us to do so. The earth is God’s precious possession, we misuse God’s name when we abuse it. John 3: 16 tells us that God so much loved the earth from which we sprout, which is our mother, which has all the elements to make us perfect beings, that God sacrificed his Son to buy it back from the Devil.
Here is how I see it.
When God gave the earth to Humanity as its possession, these early people sold it to the Devil who ever since then has been in charge. Regard it as a real estate transaction. Jesus bought it back from the Devil and paid for the purchase with his life. That sealed the deal. We now live in that interim period where the sale has been finalized but the deal has not yet been closed. That will happen when Christ returns, which will be soon. All signs point to that for those who have eyes to see, ears to hear and a heart that ticks for Jesus.
That is the reason we must live expecting his coming and act so that when He returns we readily fit into the Perfect Earth where Harmony, Shalom, and Love are the only features.