TIPPING POINTS.
What are tipping points?
They are thresholds where just a small push can propel a system, a person, a society, a church even, into a totally different state, sometimes with no possibility of return.
Take a simple example of a chair: just as you rock too far, you commit yourself to toppling over.
I have experienced a tipping point in my life, a spiritual one. In 1972 a good friend gave me a Dutch book, dealing with death: “What happens when we die?” The author, a gospel minister, questioned the ‘heaven destination’, instead favoring a new earth. I was immediately convinced, and became a confirmed earth-lover, seeing it as my eternal destination. In that same year another friend gave me “Limits to Growth”, questioning our wasteful way of life, and predicting a ‘resource crisis’ in 50 years, based on computer projections, now becoming reality. It made me an ‘environmentalist’. I experienced a ‘rebirth’.
I believe that the church, almost universally, has tipped into the ‘heaven heresy’ – with disastrous consequences for ‘the cosmos’, which God called ‘good’ upon completion and loves immensely, as John 3: 16 attests. Is a ‘rebirth’ still possible there?
An environmental paradox.
The paradox today is that, as resources dwindle, rather than husband the remaining treasures, we waste it by accelerating war-preparations, which only aggravate the problems and speed up the ascent of tipping points, of which Climate is the most impacted.
No wonder atomic scientists set their “Doomsday Clock” earlier this week closer than ever to midnight, citing aggressive behaviour by nuclear powers Russia, China and the United States, as fraying nuclear arms control, conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East and AI worries among factors, are driving risks for tipping the world into global disaster. Also, AI, Artificial Intelligence, requires enormous amounts of natural gas, and will hasten the onset of a universal Tipping Point.
A courageous stance.
When Canada’s Prime Minister, in last week’s concluded World Economic Forum mentioned of likelihood of ‘Rupture’, Tipping Points were foremost in his mind. The recent monster winter storm embracing most of the US or the crazy hurricane battering Sicily destroying its coastlines are just two very recent examples of the new reality of intensifying winter extremes across the Northern Hemisphere.
Carney’s mention of Rupture was a direct rebuttal of Trump’s ahistorical actions rescinding measures to generate wind and solar energy, replacing them with carbon-based polluters, accelerating the most frightening of Tipping Points: Climate Collapse. Carney demonstrated Brain over Brawn, the Divine over the Devil, Ethics over Evil, Reality over Rapacity. He bravely chose China over the USA through its emphasis on renewals, making this communist state more ‘Christian’ than ‘religion-soaked’ USA. Harold Bloom, in his ”The American Religion”, writes “The American Religion masks itself as Protestant Christianity yet has ceased to be Christian.”
Tipping points galore.
What comes next?
What happened in Davos last week, at the World Economic Forum, will have lasting significance. For once, a politician spoke the Truth. In a certain sense, Carney’s speech was about a rupture, but it also clearly was a very visible effort to try to create public recognition around that rupture, from which other stuff can, perhaps, begin to happen.
Rupture is quite radical. It rips apart some important entities. After rupture, healing must set in, a new direction is required. On a world-wide scale. Prime Minister Carney, leading a middle-sized country, in the perilous position next to the foremost World Power, must be lauded for his daring, and his calculated initiative to force a tipping point in finance and commerce. I wonder whether Carney, sincere Christian that he is, foresees the USA to collapse, including its AI industry, that has so fueled the stock market there, bound to fail in its aim to replace God.
I also believe that the earth now is in “In extremis”, and stands at the point
death.
Yes, this, our planet too, has an expiry date, has a built-in closing mechanism, has a stated intolerance level that will automatically set off an all-consuming fire when earth’s atmosphere reaches a certain degree of heat beyond which nothing can exist.
Does that make sense?
Let me reread that sentence. Yes, it makes sense to me. Our planet is alive and can suffer from abuse just as our bodies do. Too much of physical torture, too many pollutants, and there is a tipping point where earth’s capacity is exceeded, and it all goes up in flames, total destruction. Even Jesus, when on earth, did not know the day or the hour when this is to happen.
Yes, there also is a Global tipping point. And Trump, in his Satan-inspired edict to spurn renewables and to bet American Prosperity and the World’s Fate on AI and the rapidly disappearing and heavily polluting oil sources, will hasten the Day of all Days, the Day of Christ’s Return.
Rejoice! God is in charge. He loves creation!