Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

OCTOBER 5 2019

THE GATES OF HELL…..

Virgil said, “The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way.”

C. S. Lewis echoed this, “The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without sign posts.”

How did I come to that topic? The October 21 election in Canada is the indirect reason. The Globe and Mail, Canada’s answer to The New York Times featured an in-depth analysis of Andrew Scheer, the banner carrier for the Conservative Party, and a devout Roman Catholic. According to this article Scheer is an admirer of its most conservative wing, Opus Dei, which yearns for the re-introduction of the Latin Mass, and condemns any approach to same-sex unions or a role for females in the R.C. church, and a firm believer in HEAVEN.  

I have long agitated against the teaching of HEAVEN. Yet I was shocked to read the Official Opus Dei doctrine on this topic. Here it is:

“Since Christ came into the world to redeem us from sin and lead us to perfect communion with God, his Ascension inaugurates humanity’s entrance into heaven. Jesus is the supernatural Head of mankind, as Adam was in the order of nature. Since our Head is in heaven, we who are his members have the real possibility of reaching heaven too. Moreover, he has gone to prepare a place for us in the Father’s house.” (cf. John 14:3).

Oh, there is so much in that statement that I disagree with, that I can only highlight a few objections.

First there is the split between Supernatural and Natural: that cursed dichotomy separating nature from grace, and praising heaven at the expense of the earth. That’s why Scheer did not participate in the Climate Change walk, and is against a Carbon Tax. Should I mention his denial of any Same-Sex connection? 

This statement totally ignores Acts 1:11, where the angels say that Jesus will return to earth in the same way he left. John 3: 16 (God so loved the WORLD) also gives a different picture. Jesus did not die for our sins: he died for the restoration of creation, which God, upon completion, called ‘good’ seven times: going to heaven means abandoning his precious creation and so making God imperfect: leaving the earth amounts to failure.

Can we blame ‘Religion’ for Climate Change?

The late Dr. Lynn White, professor at Duke University thinks so. In 1965 he wrote an essay in which he explains this position. Here are some excerpts, “The victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture. It has become fashionable today to say that, for better or worse, we live in the “post-Christian age.” Certainly the forms of our thinking and language have largely ceased to be Christian, but to my eye the substance often remains amazingly akin to that of the past. Our daily habits of action, for example, are dominated by an implicit faith in perpetual progress which was unknown either to Greco- Roman antiquity or to the Orient. It is rooted in, and is indefensible apart from, Judeo- Christian theology. The fact that Communists share it merely helps to show what can be demonstrated on many other grounds: that Marxism, like Islam, is a Judeo-Christian heresy.

“We continue today to live, as we have lived for about 1700 years, very largely in a context of Christian axioms. What did Christianity tell people about their relations with the environment? While many of the world’s mythologies provide stories of creation, Greco-Roman mythology was singularly incoherent in this respect. Like Aristotle, the intellectuals of the ancient West denied that the visible world had a beginning. Indeed, the idea of a beginning was impossible in the framework of their cyclical notion of time. In sharp contrast, Christianity inherited from Judaism not only a concept of time as non-repetitive and linear but also a striking story of creation. By gradual stages a loving and all- powerful God had created light and darkness, the heavenly bodies, the earth and all its plants, animals, birds, and fishes. Finally, God had created Adam and, as an afterthought, Eve to keep man from being lonely. Man named all the animals, thus establishing his dominance over them. God planned all of this explicitly for man’s benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes. And, although man’s body is made of clay, he is not simply part of nature: he is made in God’s image. Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.”

Later he continued, “Man shares, in great measure, God’s transcendence of nature. Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia’s religions (except, perhaps, Zorastrianism), not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends. At the level of the common people this worked out in an interesting way. In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects. It is often said that for animism the Church substituted the cult of saints. True; but the cult of saints is functionally quite different from animism. The saint is not in natural objects; he may have special shrines, but his citizenship is in heaven. Moreover, a saint is entirely a man; he can be approached in human terms………….. But since God had made nature, nature also must reveal the divine mentality. The religious study of nature for the better understanding of God was known as natural theology.

“In the early Church, and always in the Greek East, nature was conceived primarily as a symbolic system through which God speaks to men: the ant is a sermon to sluggards; rising flames are the symbol of the soul’s aspiration. The view of nature was essentially artistic rather than scientific. While Byzantium preserved and copied great numbers of ancient Greek scientific texts, science as we conceive it could scarcely flourish in such an ambience.

“However, in the Latin West by the early 13th century natural theology was following a very different bent. It was ceasing to be the decoding of the physical symbols of God’s communication with man and was becoming the effort to understand God’s mind by discovering how his creation operates.”

Let me stop there. If you want to read his entire essay, go for it: it is well reasoned. Even though the church has vehemently denied that it is responsible for our environmental problems, just look at the US “Evangelical” wing, fiercely supporting Trump and fully endorsing his anti-Creation policies.

What Dr. White writes about ‘nature’ is an angle I have so often pursued that I am loath to mention it again. God is so holy that whatever he created is holy as well. That makes creation HOLY, and by harming creation, we offend God.

It seems to me that “The Gates of Hell” differs little from “The Gates of Heaven”. Just as “the way to hell is smooth and easy” thanks to carbon fuels, our entire life and supposed ascent to heaven is smooth and easy as well. That it now starts to cause hell on earth is conveniently ignored: is there where “pre-tribulation Rapture” comes in?

On more quote from Dr. White: ”For nearly 2 millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves, which are idolatrous because they assume spirit in nature. What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of the man-nature relationship. More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one.”

I emphasize: “Until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one.”

Prof. White is right. “Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and re-feel our nature and destiny.”

WE MUST RETHINK OUR RELIGION.

Throw out the Heaven Heresy. It’s a cop-out. Belief in Heaven prevents us from loving the earth. We must adopt the Bonhoeffer-Bavinck line: “God, We and the Earth belong together”. The current “Christian” approach is Un-Christian. Christ died to regain the earth, now in the clutches of The Evil One. If you have a Bible, just look up 1John 5: 19.

Virgil said, “The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way;” C. S. Lewis echoed that, “The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

The Lord’s Prayer has a line that Pope Francis wants to change, and I agree. The line is, “Lead us not into temptation”. He correctly has stated that God does not lead us into temptation. In the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving in the Presbyterian Book of Praise (Canada) it is translated as “Save us from the time of trial”.

In these last days God, in his wisdom, has decided to confront us with the ultimate trial to make us ready for eternity. Remember, not God, but The EVIL ONE today rules the world. It is The EVIL ONE, Christ’s perennial opponent, who now is calling the shots, and we, all of us, have chosen his smooth, easy, creation-destroying road, which is leading us to HELL.

Sorry to be so blunt. We need a new approach to life and to worship, in a way where the unity of God with us and the earth is lived and expressed. We must admit that the way we live today leads to the demise of God’s earth: that is SIN with three Capital Letters.

TOTAL CONVERSION

The bible uses two different words for CONVERSION: metanoia and epistroph?. The first, metanoia, means a change in our mindset, the second, epistroph?, means a complete change in life style. Metanoia implies a radical change in devotional behavior. Church services now consist of a monologue, prayer, reading the bible, some songs, a collection to support a minister, all within an hour, leaving LIFE unchanged. Bonhoeffer calls this ‘pious secularism’. Epistroph? is a 24/7affair. We need a combination of the two, a total approach to life, a creation-loving life and relationships and new comprehensive, prayerful piety.

Jesus is the controversial and radical version of God, who drove the moneymen from the temple, who called the clerics poisonous snakes, who said, “I have not come to bring peace but the sword.” (Matthew 10: 34).

No wonder the clergy avoids preaching about him. Why? Because this same Jesus does not bring us religion but teaches us how to live.

His opponents hated him, calling him a glutton and a winebibber, whose first miracle was making top-grade vino, because he wanted us to be truly human, joyful when the occasion merits it, moved to tears when bad things happen – which is the case today.

If we believe we go to heaven, then we allow creation to be smothered in its carbon-filth. If we believe that “the meek shall inherit the earth”, because it is HOLY, then this should be evident in how we live. “Meek” in this instance means living in obedience to the divine laws of creation.  

Remember: personal salvation and the salvation of the WORLD go hand in hand: you can’t have one without the other.

SEPTEMBER 28 2019

THE TREMENDOUS IMPORTANCE OF “THE TREE”.

I am a very blessed man. I am very blessed with our children who often come and help, even though they live far away. I am thankful that our tax dollars are liberally spent on frequent home-care for my wife who suffers from dementia. To cope with the stress I experience, I make sure that I eat well, sleep well, and exercise well, outdoors when possible, and indoors thanks to a treadmill, a stationary bike and a rowing machine, all set up in my library.

I am a very blessed man: I live among trees. When I feel down- and being my wife’s principal care-giver this occasionally happens – I walk in the forests surrounding our property west, north and east. Yes, I do Forest Bathing. Our arborist grandson has cut paths there so that the forest-bathing is easy.

Forest Bathing? Ever heard of it?

Our oldest son gave us the book with that title: “The Japanese Art and Science of SHINRIN-YOKU: FOREST BATHING. How trees can help you find Health and Happiness.” It is written by Dr. Qing Li, chairman of the Japanese Society for Forest Medicine.

The book is beautifully illustrated and meticulously researched. Here are the opening words, “We all know how good being in nature can make us feel. We have known it for millennia. The sounds of the forests, the scent of the trees, the sunlight playing through the leaves, the fresh, clean air- these things give us a sense of comfort. They ease our stress and worry, help us relax and think more clearly. Being in nature can restore our mood, give us back our energy and vitality, refresh and rejuvenate us.”

I am very blessed. A 25 minutes stroll through our forest brings me to an immense Beaver Dam, where a carpenter friend found a large dead pine tree, and from its trunk sculptured a series of benches, facing a small beaver-built lake, where we often sit, and where our church has gathered on a few occasions.

Back to the book. 

Dr. Li writes, “The good news is that my studies, and those of my fellow researchers, have proved that forest bathing:

. Lowers the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline.

. Suppresses the sympathetic or ‘fight or flight’ system.

. Enhances the parasympathetic of ‘rest and recover’ system.

. Lowers blood pressures and increases heart-rate variability.

The book gives tips “How to be still and listen to the sounds of nature, which is difficult to do when we are used to noise.

        Start by slowing down

        Focus on your breath

        Listen in all directions.

        Close your eyes to help you hear more intensely.

FOREST UNDER THREAT EVERYWHERE.

I don’t have to tell you that our planet is suffering, suffering beyond its capacity to endure. We seem to be blind to its pain, even though even Romans 8 – dating from the year 70 A.D. or so – already sounded the alarm bells: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until the present time.  Not only that, but we ourselves who have the first-fruits of the Spirit groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons and daughters, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved; but hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he can already see?  But if we hope for what we do not yet see, we wait for it patiently.”

Such a beautiful text: a beacon of hope in our disheartening times. I especially treasure that phrase, “The redemption of our bodies”. That means a lot to me. It means that our bodies, our heart and lungs, our brains and limbs, will be re-created into perfection, not only physically but spiritually as well, totally in tune with the natural–unspoiled-surroundings!

And part of this renewal involves trees. When Abraham settled in what is now Palestine and Israel, he chose a forest location: the oak woods of Mamre. Genesis 18: 1 tells us that “The LORD appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day”: a most fitting place to meet the Creator.

But today that’s not the case. Summer 2019 – More than 38,000 fires raged across the Amazon. Fires that were man-made. Over the past 50 years almost 17% of the world’s largest rainforest has been cleared. And globally deforestation has almost doubled in just five years.

Since the start of human civilization it’s estimated that the number of trees around the world has fallen by almost half. Clearing forests increases carbon-dioxide levels but planting them could store away some of the carbon already in the atmosphere.

There are people who try to reverse the trend. In the very first year we settled in Tweed, in 1975, I planted 4500 trees, all pine. I also planted soft maple, but they did not thrive, except two to the west of our dwelling, where they provide super-shade in the summer time.

About pine trees the Forest Bathing book tells me that “evergreens like pine, spruce, cedars and conifers are the largest producers of phytoncides.” Phytoncides protect trees from bacteria, insects and fungi and aid trees in communicating with its neighbors. The pine needles are good sources of vitamins A and C: pine needles can have as much as five times the amount of vitamin C as a lemon and eight times as much as an orange. There are other benefits as well.

Planting trees.

Almost 20 years ago Isabella Tree—yes that is her real name – handed 1,400 hectares of Sussex farmland back to nature, by doing, well nothing. She thinks this is the best way to use the land to help tackle climate change.

And there’s never been more global ambition to plant trees. In 2014, 51 countries pledged to plant over 3.5m square kilometers of forest by 2030 – an area slightly larger than India. The 2030 target looks likely to be met. But there’s a catch…

Monoculture tree plantations like eucalyptus grow quickly but the trees are harvested every ten or so years releasing much of the carbon stored in the tree back into the atmosphere – which means that, according to some studies they’ll store only around one-fortieth of the carbon natural forests do over the long term.

In fact, those pledges to plant millions of trees actually promise to store 26bn tons less carbon than they could. Sometimes the motives for planting forests are less green than they might appear. By 2020 Ireland ought to have cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 20% below 2005 levels. But at current rates it will have reduced them by only 5%. Planting forests might help Ireland avoid massive penalties for missing EU targets because the potential carbon these forests could store in the future can be counted as a carbon credit today. In the 1920s Ireland had the lowest forest cover in Europe at around 1%. That’s now risen to 11% and the government has set a target to cover 18% of the land with forest by 2046.

And now local community groups are protesting against these monoculture tree plantations. They say they’re doing more harm than good.

Tree-planting programs invariably have an impact on the people living nearby. In east Africa one project is demonstrating what can be achieved when there’s genuine buy-in from the local communities. Green Ethiopia is a mixed-tree planting charity.

The land is communally owned and co-operatives of local women receive benefits for planting trees which are protected from being harvested. Here conserving is just as important as planting. Green Ethiopia assesses whether the condition of the land is good enough to regenerate by itself. When it is—on about a third of the area the charity runs they leave it alone. Just like Isabella Tree, back in England.

THE TREE OF LIFE.

The Bible starts and ends with trees, singling out one specific tree that is a symbol of all others: The Tree of Life.

To me this suggests that this is not one singular tree, but stands for trees as a species: in a sense all trees are The TREE of LIFE. In Genesis 2: 9 it says that, “LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground–trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”. Quite mysterious: does it mean that trees hold the key to life and death, to knowledge and ignorance?

The very last chapter of the Bible ends with reference to trees. The TREE of LIFE is mentioned again which has a poetic line that brings tears to my eyes, (Rev. 22:1), “The leaves of the Tree are for the healing of the nations.” Oh, blessed tree!

However, the most significant TREE stands on Golgotha’s hill, at the very center of history. There Jesus died to restore all of creation, including us humans. That tree, representing all trees, was the first to receive Christ’s blood, and was first to be impregnated with Christ’s flesh, signifying the importance of TREES.

Trees make life livable. They are the ones that regulate the BIOTIC PUMP that causes the interaction between land and sea, the key to death and fertility. Without the FORESTS –North and South – we cannot function. Without these massive arboreous bodies covering the earth, we are doomed. Without them all of nature revolts and goes to extremes, too much heat here, too much rain there: the balance is gone.  

A clear choice.

We live in end-times, which means that the world’s evil will become manifest to all, and we see it daily in crooked business and crooked politics, but also our good deeds will rise up, placing all people for a clear choice. That choice involves eternity. We, under the influence of Greek dualistic thinking, have separated nature from grace, God from creation. One of my favorite books is Tom Hayden’s THE LOST GOSPEL OF THE EARTH. There Tom Hayden – a former California legislator – passionately argues that we must reclaim our spiritual bond with the earth, a regular theme of my musings. He writes, “We divide grace and spirit from nature at our own peril. When we worship a God above, the earth withers from neglect below. We develop a society where everything from human habits to politics and economics exploits the environment with callous indifference. Unless the nature of State is harmonized with the state of Nature our greed and ignorance will eventually take us beyond the capacity of the very ecosystems that support human existence.” 

The Good News is that it is possible to find GOD again: we cannot find ourselves and cannot become what we are unless we find God. Bonhoeffer repeatedly has stated: God, we ourselves and the earth belong together.

The Belgic Confession has beautifully formulated this:

Article 2: The Means by Which We Know God

We know God by two means:

First, by the creation, preservation, and government
of the universe,
since that universe is before our eyes
like a beautiful book
in which all creatures,
great and small,
are as letters
to make us ponder
the invisible things of God:
God’s eternal power and divinity,
as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20.

All these things are enough to convict humans
and to leave them without excuse.

Second, God makes himself known to us more clearly
by his holy and divine Word,
as much as we need in this life,
for God’s glory
and for our salvation.

That’s the truth the world is rediscovering, and that’s the truth the church has abandoned, and so has sealed her own doom.

The clear choice is that God, we ourselves and the earth belong together: our salvation and the salvation of the earth go hand in hand: we can’t have one without the other. Trees are at the very center of life, of which Christ dying on the TREE and his subsequent resurrection are for our salvation, ensuring VITA ETERNA, Life forever.

SEPTEMBER 21 2019

EXACTLY NINETY YEARS AFTER THE GREAT CRASH 1929.

The way I arrive at my weekly writing choice is a mystery. Somehow my hand and eye are directed to a certain book which becomes my assignment for the week: I don’t choose them: they choose me.

This week it so happened that I had promised a friend a book which dealt with an island she was going to visit in a few weeks, and, while looking for this paperback, my hand touched upon THE GREAT CRASH 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith, economics professor at Harvard. I had been looking for it a few weeks ago, and remembered that this financial disaster happened exactly 90 years ago, and wondered whether the world is due for something similar.

So what did that great economist, J. K. Galbraith – Canadian-born, a graduate of Guelph – write about 1929?

The first half of the book deals with the stock speculation and manipulation that drove the market to ever higher records. Most of the shares were bought on margin, that is 10% down and the rest on credit. That works beautifully when the stock rises, and is disastrous when these shares fall. Here’s a line out of the book, “Never before or since have so many become so wondrously, so effortlessly, so quickly rich.”

Perhaps people were more gullible in those days: they believed the experts: investment funds were all the rage: they had increased eleven-fold between 1927 and late 1929. The great villains then were the Ivory Tower professors of economics, who claimed to have prophetic insight.

Professor Galbraith makes clear that we should never believe the predictions of both politicians and arm-chair economists. Here are some examples.         

Dr. Joseph Stegg Lawrence, of the prestigious Princeton University, wrote, “The stage whereon is focused the world’s most intelligent and best informed judgement (lies in the universities)……..how much safer and wiser to let it be accomplished by the men of peculiar knowledge and wisdom.”

Indeed, it was the golden age of professors. Just before the great crash, Professor Irving Fisher of Yale – another bulwark of learning – made his immortal estimate, “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” On Tuesday, October 22, just a week before the real crash, Charles E. Mitchell, a well-known banker predicted that the decline has gone too far. On that most infamous day, October 29 1929, John D. Rockefeller came out of hibernation to publicly state that, “Believing that fundamental conditions of the country are sound, my son and I have for some days been purchasing sound common stocks.” Politicians were equally bullish.   

Well……………In all, in about two weeks from October 29 1929 till November 13, the stock index closed down from 452 to 224, more than a 50 percent drop.

AND THEN CAME THE GREAT DEPRESSION, 1929-39.

To this day there is no reasonable explanation why this happened. What did happen is that unemployment reached 25 percent of the working force, at a time when there were no unemployment benefits and all municipalities and all government levels were cash strapped, so no welfare either. Just imagine the hardship!

Galbraith mentions that some people thought that after a period of 7 fat years, inevitably 7 lean years were to follow, but he dismisses that possibility. So, yes, we are really in the dark why suddenly everything came tumbling down: not only stocks, but also real estate prices, while dust storms played havoc with agricultural yields. In the end it was the 1939-45 WAR that cured the depression: millions were mobilized to fight and billions were spent to equip them with lethal weapons.

The depression was felt more severely in North America than in Europe. True, on the continent money was tight. My father-in-law, a minister in a large church, suggested a pay-cut, as contributions to his church were down. I remember to my shame how I piously helped a woman who had dropped her wallet full of change. While I gathered the coins, I had my foot on a penny: Oh, my sinful youth! In those days there were even half-pennies in circulation.

So what’s in store for us spoiled rotten Westerners?

Well, yes, it will be war again, but this time it will not cure hardship as it did 80 years ago in 1939. Already a real Climate War has been going on for decades, intensifying in the last few years: Our WAR against CREATION is now approaching its final and most lethal stage. This war – which also will involve conflicts between nations – really is the war to end all wars, because, in essence, it is war against GOD, in which we, sad to say, are often willing participants.

Warnings Galore.

I just read a review of Naomi Klein’s new book, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal.

Robert Jensen, a retired professor of journalism, comments on this book: “The problem of climate change is bigger than the Great Depression. It’s bigger than war. The problem of climate change is the problem of how and whether human beings can live together sustainably on this planet.”

My comment: “If history is any guide, universal sustainability will never happen: it would mean a mass conversion, something impossible, because we, the latter day sinners, are the least religious of all people ever lived.”

Dr. Jensen again, “I can offer a real-life example, my late friend Jim Koplin. He once told me, in a conversation about those multiple, cascading ecological crises (a term I stole from him, with his blessing), “I wake up every morning in a state of profound grief.” He was neither depressed nor irrational but simply honest. Jim, a Depression-era farm boy who had been permanently radicalized in the 1960s, felt that grief more deeply than anyone I have known, yet every day he got up to work in his garden and then offer his time and energy to a variety of political, community, and arts groups that were fighting for a better world.”

Grief: how often have I mentioned ATONEMENT, public lament for the state of the World? Why are churches so afraid to start this? No better way to tell the world that they see the earth as holy!

Naomi Klein too mentions grief. She writes, “There is no question that the strongest emotions I have about the climate crisis have to do with [Toma, her son] and his generation—the tremendous intergenerational theft under way. I have flashes of sheer panic about the extreme weather we have already locked in for these kids. Even more intense than this fear is the sadness about what they won’t ever know. They are growing up in a mass extinction, robbed of the cacophonous company of so many fast-disappearing life forms. It feels so desperately lonely.”

WAR.

Talking about war again: The entire nature of warfare is changing: nature’s degradation is the result of human degradation, which is the result of folly, which has as its base SIN. The folly is especially visible in the USA, a country obsessed with MONEY and RELIGION.

Example: USA recently commissioned a new aircraft carrier, costing some 13 Billion Dollars, and still not functioning, because the elevators that are supposed to bring the bombs to the airplanes, don’t work. What’s a warship that lacks ammunition? A dodo.

Already that big machine, (costing more than the entire Canadian Defense budget), home to thousands of sailors and pilots and whatever, is already obsolete: simple drones, with a price tag of a couple of hundred dollars, can fly undetected, carrying lethal loads, as became clear in Saudi Arabia last week. Also new Russian anti-aircraft missiles are so advanced that the most advanced US aircrafts are sitting ducks for these guns: the Pentagon, with a budget close to One Trillion Dollar, has become One Trillion Dollar Waste. The real reason for this humiliation is the fact that Russian arms are far superior to American ones: the US arms industry develops weapons for profit while Russia produces them to defend itself.

Here is a prediction, which like all predictions, is about the future, and this non-predictable. Nevertheless one thing is beyond doubt: “Times are gonna to get worse.” Politicians shy away from painting the proper picture, but I am not: mentally and religiously and physically we have to face the consequences of our actions. Only prayer, only confession is the only option. 

A unique view.

Here is an interesting take on the future, a reasonable guess what is in store. Gail Tverberg, who writes OUR FINITE WORLD, is an actuary, a person who works for pension funds and life insurance companies, in charge of making intelligent guesses about the future.

She, in her latest blog, looks back and ahead, back hundreds of years when falling interests happened, and then singles out the three latest in the last 200 years: from

• 1817-1854
• 1873-1909
• 1985-2019

In the gap between the first two takedowns in interest rates (1854 to 1873), the US Civil War took place. This was a period of very poor return on investments. Somehow it ended in war.

Immediately after the second takedown in interest rates (after 1909), the world entered a very unstable period. First there was World War I, then the Spanish Flu, then the Great Depression, then World War II with 100 million lives lost.

Now we are facing the possibility of yet another end-point for the take-down in interest rates.

She writes, “The total return of the economy seems to be too low now. This seems to be why we have problems of many types, ranging from (a) low interest rates to (b) low profitability for energy producers to (c) too much wage disparity.” 

All of the problems listed above are manifestations of an economy that is not producing sufficient total return. The laws of physics distribute the problem to many areas of the economy, simultaneously.

Tverberg again, “A person wonders what could be ahead. We seem to be reaching the end of the line regarding the takedown of interest rates. If a takedown in interest rates is possible, it acts as a relief valve for some of the other problems the economy is facing, including too much wage disparity and energy prices that are too low for producers. Earlier in Section [10], we saw that when the relief valve of lower interest rates had disappeared, wars and depressions have taken place. We can’t know the precise outcome this time, but our current situation doesn’t look good. Will we encounter wars, or a serious depression, or financial problems worse than 2008? We can’t know for certain. Or will we somehow find a way around serious problems?

So far Gail Tverberg.

What she implies is that indeed hard, very hard times are ahead, based on historical data. We know that the US civil war still ranks as the most destructive for the USA. The period 1914-1945 is too well known, when 10% of the people living in 1900 died violently, some 100million lives lost.

Today the world faces problems beyond the wildest imagination. Already in July several tipping points were crossed in the Arctic. Have a look at ARCTIC NEWS where is says that, “In July 2019, a critical tipping point was crossed. July sea surface temperatures on the Northern Hemisphere were 1.07°C above what they were during the 20th century, as illustrated by above image which has a trend added that points at 5°C above the 20th century by 2033.”

Of course 5°C is far beyond the possibility of LIFE: that will be reached within a few years.

NINETY YEARS AFTER 1929.

That’s how I started. The Finnish Prime Minister visited the White House a few months ago. He told the present occupant there that “When the ice in the Arctic is gone, we are gone too.”

He told the truth to the ultimate CLIMATE CHANGE denier, now working hand in hand with the Ultimate Evil One who, says 1 John 5: 19, “We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.”

Ninety years after 1929 we face the ULTIMATE DEPRESSION, when all planetary forces, economic, military, environmentally, spiritually, physically, band together to destroy God’s creation. That also means that THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IS COMING HERE!

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SEPTEMBER 14 2019

ABOLISH THE CLERGY?

James Carroll certainly thinks so. A former priest he knows the Roman Catholic Church inside out, and wrote an article on THE CHURCH AND THE CLERGY in the Atlantic Magazine, in which he boldly stated that to save the Roman Catholic Church it would have to get rid of the clergy.

Here is an excerpt of his essay.

“The virtues of the Catholic faith have been obvious to me my whole life. The world is better for those virtues, and I cherish the countless men and women who bring the faith alive. The Catholic Church is a worldwide community of well over 1 billion people. North and South, rich and poor, intellectual and illiterate—it is the only institution that crosses all such borders on anything like this scale. As James Joyce wrote in Finnegans Wake, Catholic means “Here Comes Everybody.” Around the world there are more than 200,000 Catholic schools and nearly 40,000 Catholic hospitals and health-care facilities, mostly in developing countries. The Church is the largest nongovernmental organization on the planet, through which selfless women and men care for the poor, teach the unlettered, heal the sick, and work to preserve minimal standards of the common good. The world needs the Church of these legions to be rational, historically minded, pluralistic, committed to peace, a champion of the equality of women, and a tribune of justice.

“That is the Church many of us hoped might emerge from the Second Vatican Council, which convened in the nave of Saint Peter’s Basilica from 1962 to 1965. After the death, in 1958, of Pope Pius XII—and after 11 deadlocked ballots—a presumptive nonentity from Venice named Angelo Roncalli was elected pope, in effect to keep the Chair of Peter warm for the few years it might take one or another of the proper papal candidates to consolidate support. Roncalli—Pope John XXIII—instead launched a vast theological recasting of the Catholic imagination. Vatican II advanced numerous reforms of liturgy and theology, ranging from the jettisoning of the Latin Mass to the post-Holocaust affirmation of the integrity of Judaism. Decisively, the council defined the Church as the “People of God,” and located the clerical hierarchy within the community as servants, not above it as rulers. The declaration, though it would turn out to have little practical consequence for the clergy, was symbolized by liturgical reform that brought the altar down from on high, into the midst of the congregation.

“Clericalism, with its cult of secrecy, its theological misogyny, and its hierarchical power, is at the root of Roman Catholic dysfunction.”

My question: “Does the same apply to the Protestant wing?”

That’s what I am exploring. For this I am intrigued by Walter Brueggemann’s book, THE PROPHETIC IMAGINATION. This well-known theology professor, already on the first page of his 1978 book – of the five books I have by him, I think this is his best – writes, “The contemporary American Church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has very little power to believe or to act.”

He sets out – and succeeds – to explore that, “The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.”

There’s no doubt that today circumstances have changed for the worse: Climate Change is starting to rip, drench and destroy: we all know, or should know that we cannot continue to live as we do. This means that the church too must change.

Brueggemann again, “It is the task of the prophet to bring to expression the new realities against the more visible ones of the old order.”

Today it is becoming generally accepted that Business as Usual will lead to annihilation, which means that ‘nihil=nothing’ will remain the same. Basically the world is at it wit’s end. How can we stop the current track of commerce, of consumerisms, of industrial growth? Our business world is built on them. No growth means stagnation, means layoffs, means less tax income, means deathly deficits.

Already in prosperous times we experience enormous revenue shortfalls. When inflation comes – and in a world where soil, air and water are under ever growing stress – a rise in the cost of basic food items is bound to happen, we will see the worst of all possibilities: shrinking incomes and rising costs.

Churches are middleclass institutions. Especially the middle classes will face the brunt of financial cutbacks.

Back to Brueggemann. 

Jesus was a threat then and is now. Writes Brueggemann: “Very early Jesus is correctly perceived as a clear and present danger (by the church of his day)”.

It reminds me of an episode that ties in with this. I noticed it in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, Dostoevsky’s last book. It’s called “The Grand Inquisitor”. It’s a story that Ivan, the atheist Karamazov brother, has composed and recounts to his younger brother Alyosha, the aspiring priest. In it Jesus returns to the earth during the Spanish Inquisition. Ivan says: “It is fifteen centuries since signs from heaven were seen. And now the deity appears once more among the people.” Everyone recognizes him, because a blind man sees and a dead child rises. But the old cardinal, in charge of the Inquisition, takes Jesus to prison and tells him that: “You have no right to add anything to what you have said…. Why have you come to hinder us?” Ivan explains that this is a fundamental feature of the Church that God cannot ‘meddle’ now because “all has been given by you to the Pope. The Church is the authority now.”
The Grand Inquisitor then tells Jesus that he erred when he resisted the devil’s three temptations in the wilderness, where the devil offered him miracle, mystery and might, which the Church has accepted. Jesus, however, wanted them to have freedom of choice. But, says the clergyman, freedom is too difficult and frightful for the masses and so the Church has taken the three awesome gifts for them. The Inquisitor concludes: “We are not working with you, but with the devil– that is our mystery.” Jesus, still not speaking, kisses him on the lips. “That was all his answer.” The Grand Inquisitor opens the cell door and says, “Go, and come no more, never, never.” And the divine visitor leaves.
“Freedom is too difficult for the masses” says the cardinal, but that is an important part of Jesus’ teaching: “The Truth shall set you free”.

That perfectly illustrates that the church then and now rather not give the people a free hand. Yet, before Jesus returns, more imminent by the day, we have to break free from the ecclesiastical enterprise. Yes, James Carroll is correct.

The Bible again.

Already in the letter to the Hebrews the immaturity of the pew-sitters is evident. The author writes, (Hebrew 5: 11-14):

“Concerning him we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God, and you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he is an infant. But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil.”

That was 2,000 years ago when the church was in its infancy. Now the problem is worse, and the structure of the church is to blame. Our crutches have to be taken away and we either walk by ourselves, or tumble and fall. 

Brueggemann hints at that when he writes: “Jesus’ ability to heal and his readiness to do it on a Sabbath (Mark 3: 1-6) evoked a conspiracy to kill him. The violation is concerned not with the healing but with the Sabbath.”

This is a clear indication that Jesus directly aims at the institution, and the maintainers of the establishment, the clergy. Then and now they have become a hindrance to the coming of the kingdom.

I have mentioned ATONEMENT before. Atonement is an expression of compassion. Brueggemann again: “Jesus in his solidarity with the marginal ones is moved to compassion. Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.”

Do you know of any church that has initiated a Day of Atonement?

The Bahamas has been ravaged by our actions. Climate Change has been put on our debit account. Jesus loves the ‘cosmos’ and today he is in tears and agony because of us, because we have totally despoiled HIS creation.

Brueggemann again, “Jesus brings newness in the situation, but only in his grief: grief, embodied anguish, is the route to newness.”

The refusal to confess ATONEMENT represents denial of The New Creation. Brueggemann writes, “Prophetic criticism knows that only those who mourn can be comforted and so it first asks about how to mourn seriously and faithfully for the world passing away”.

There is no doubt that this world is passing away: all the signs are there.

Back to James Carroll’s article:

“My five years in the priesthood, even in its most liberal wing, gave me a fetid taste of this caste system. Clericalism, with its cult of secrecy, its theological misogyny, its sexual repressiveness, and its hierarchical power based on threats of a doom-laden afterlife, is at the root of Roman Catholic dysfunction. The clerical system’s obsession with status thwarts even the merits of otherwise good priests and distorts the Gospels’ message of selfless love, which the Church was established to proclaim. Clericalism is both the underlying cause and the ongoing enabler of the present Catholic catastrophe. I left the priesthood 45 years ago, before knowing fully what had soured me, but clericalism was the reason.

“Clericalism’s origins lie not in the Gospels but in the attitudes and organizational charts of the late Roman empire. Christianity was very different at the beginning. The first reference to the Jesus movement in a nonbiblical source comes from the Jewish Roman historian Flavius Josephus, writing around the same time that the Gospels were taking form. Josephus described the followers of Jesus simply as “those that loved him at the first and did not let go of their affection for him.” There was no priesthood yet, and the movement was egalitarian. Christians worshipped and broke bread in one another’s homes. But under Emperor Constantine, in the fourth century, Christianity effectively became the imperial religion and took on the trappings of the empire itself. A diocese was originally a Roman administrative unit. A basilica, a monumental hall where the emperor sat in majesty, became a place of worship. A diverse and decentralized group of churches was transformed into a quasi-imperial institution—centralized and hierarchical, with the bishop of Rome reigning as a monarch. Church councils defined a single set of beliefs as orthodox, and everything else as heresy.”

Back to our roots.

The Beginning is in the End and the End is in the Beginning. We live in End Times, that’s why everywhere churches are dying, including the church I attend. All institutions, all human endeavors, will fail, including the church. The End is in the Beginning.  

In the beginning believers met at each other’s homes. Church buildings are energy hogs, and getting there means driving polluting cars, while sitting to listen to a monologue is the most ineffective way to communicate ideas.

What is needed is personal exploration and reflection, discussion, praying together, hosting events, and inviting neighbors. In a world, desperate for answers, Christ is the only answer: The Coming of The New Creation.

That means going back to the church in its infancy, when the “Christians” met in pious anticipation of the coming of the Lord.

All the old will be new again.

Brueggemann ends his book with these words, “Those who have not cared enough to grieve, will not know joy.”

Just as in Jesus’ days, the church structure has become an impediment to The Coming of the Kingdom, the New Creation.

James Carroll is right: “Clericalism is at the root of the church’s dysfunction.”

SEPTEMBER 7 2019

BRAIN-DEAD?

Solomon, the not always wise king, wrote that “Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body” (Ecclesiastes 12:12).

I guess Solomon was right. But reading is my life. Always has been. Where speaking is silver, and silence is gold, so writing is silver and reading is gold. How else can I gather knowledge? TV does not provide it: on the contrary. Newspapers or periodicals have their peculiar biases, so selective reading is the only avenue left. Of course my daily Bible reading always inspires, and so does utilizing my library, where I continue to find nuggets of wisdom.

I am still brooding on Jung. Brooding may be too strong a word, but his words that “We are very far from having finished completely with the middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity,” still lingers in my mind.

Somehow my eye fell on a book I bought in 1991 and never read, “The Medieval Vision”. Here is how it ended, “Understanding the past means…..trying to re-create a holistic view of existence that has not been generally held for four centuries. To live in medieval Europe was to appreciate that the events of human experience were linked irremediably to the past and the future, and that beliefs and judgements were inseparable from a vast network of complementary ideas.”    

Then people knew where they came from and knew where they were going. We may take issue with their Hell and Heaven notion then prevalent, but it gave them clear objectives. Then, as the book states, “The vision of Christ’s divinity and the Paradise of God were crucial not only to piety but to all earthly affairs.”

My brother Drewes each month sends me the digital version of Civis Mundi (Citizen of the world), written in Dutch, a high-brow digital magazine with some Roman Catholic flavor. Dr. Jan de Boer, a professor in Amsterdam, commenting why we are what we are, wrote the following in the August edition, and I translate,

BRAINS

Now even these beliefs are hardly ever mentioned in the church let alone by business and politicians. We are the last generation, because we are devoid of vision, devoid of perspective, devoid of knowledge of past and future. We have become gods in our own right, so we no longer need God, the creator. We are the first generation to have the power to destroy everything, both by our way of carbon-induced death, or through our nuclear arsenal. These powers are the direct result of us abandoning religion: we have become our own religion, no longer rooted in the Medieval way when magnificent cathedrals were living testimonies to their commitment, something we still long for, witness the outpouring of compassion when Notre Dame de Paris went up in flames.

Our faith is vested in ever higher skyscrapers, strikingly silhouetted against the horizon where the moneymen plot their ever more dangerous schemes, and the legal minds are twisting to make the rich richer.

That brings me to our brains.

The question remains: how come that our brains urge us to destroy the planet and wonders whether there is a way to prevent that.

That is precisely the subtitle of a book, Le bug Humain written by Sébastien Bohler (February 2019).

He describes how our cortex, the outer contours of our brain, continues to pursue goals which are incompatible with efforts to save human society on our planet. He quotes the author, “For a long time our brains were our best ally, but they now are a real risk factor in our demise. Why? Because our brains have a programming problem in its design, a veritable deviation right at the center of this unbelievably complex organ: the nerve cells, the neurons, which supposed to guarantee our survival, are now never satisfied, and require ever more sustenance, sex and energy.”

The British ecologist, George Marshall, gives a more complicated explanation. In his book, with the fitting title The Ostrich Syndrome (2014) he maintains that our denial to effectively deal with the threat of Climate Change can be traced to our evolution, which urges us to opt for the short-term advantage. According to Marshall our rational brain by not recognizing the seriousness of climate change, acts contrary to our emotional brain which determines our decisions and so is not capable to effectively deal with the reality of the anxiety and uncertainty caused by this weather anomaly.”

Dr, Jan de Boer continues, “Reading these two and other sources have pretty well convinced me to have little faith in a future that promises little and threatens a lot. I am sorry to say but I am convinced that we do not really face up to the deadly seriousness of climatic changes and their disastrous consequences.”

So writes Dr. De Boer.

Yet, Africa is still different.

Years ago my wife and I spent three weeks in Central South Africa, visiting our youngest son who had a two year assignment there. What struck me about the African people was their innate sense of art and beauty. With the simplest of tools and the most ordinary of material they are able to create something beautiful.

Again reflecting on the first chapters of Genesis, the first bible book, confirms the African mentality: when God pointed out the TREE to the first couple living in Paradise, he described it as ‘beautiful to look at and good for consumption’: beauty before anything else. Africa has understood that priority, we have not.

I believe that, unless we escape the brain-dead trap, and free ourselves from human tendency to ignore the evil in society, we are goners.

Jung maintained that we are the product of past generations, so it behooves me to look back to my ancestors to enable me to reflect on who and what I am. So here it goes.

My parents named me Egbert Drewes, both after my maternal grandfather, Egbert de Haan, my mother’s father, and Drewes Bouwsma de Haan, my great-grandfather. A double surname, in those days, signified country gentry, and that was the case with him, as his grandfather an Egbert Drewes de Haan was the honored member of the Groningen Provincial Parliament, an appointed, not an elected position, a fervent supporter of the Dutch Royal Family during the French annexation of the Netherlands in around the year 1800. In my ancestor’s church, dating from the year 1300, my great-great-grandfather was honored with a plaque cemented in above the church’s entrance, forever proclaiming him a true royalist. Both were organic farmers, loved the land. My parents were the first to settle in the city. I am the first to return to the soil that shaped me, surrounded by forests which have had a calming influence on me and prevented me from becoming brain-dead.

I relate this because Jung has told me that my psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find a proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being.

My school Greek already taught me to “gnoothe seauton”, to ‘know thyself’, the eternal struggle to reflect on what I am and why I do what I do.

Jung tells us “Not to do so, has made us plunge down a cataract of progress, which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our up-rootedness, which has given rise to the “discontents” of civilization and to such a flurry and haste.”

This past week is a perfect example of what Jung refers to: turmoil everywhere, including the oceans, including the not so Great Britain, including the trading frenzies involving the USA and China.

Don’t get emotionally mixed up in the frenzy that is modern life. Get used to the eternal pace, our glorious future that awaits us, because, as Jung also asserts, “we refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse”. He also said that, “The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.”

So, what am I implying?

For one thing, God has to enter again in our lives, in the person of Jesus Christ through whom and by whom everything exists, including us. Jesus is the image of the invisible God.

Right now we are on a brain-dead trajectory witness our unwillingness to tackle Climate Change. We need to imagine a cultural shift away from the way of death we now are on, and dream again, dream about our roots, which lie in the earth, not in concrete, not in steel and cement, not in high rise and technology, but in down to earth humility: ‘earth we are and to earth we must return.’

We have to start all over again, wised up, chastened, humbled: listening to the cries of creation, recognizing our complicity in the unfolding climate crisis, praying, PRAYING for forgiveness, learning the true meaning of METANOIA, because a mind-change is needed: we have to become trustworthy to Creation once again.

Psalm 51 comes to mind, “My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.” We have to be delivered from the cult of objects that leaves little room for emotion, little room for reverence or wonder. False images and gods have hypnotized us so completely that they’re killing us – and yet we remain in their thrall.

We have to again admire the greatness of creation, where every snowflake is different. If that is true – and it is – then we too should refuse to become homogenized, molded into Homo Economicus, oblivious to the pain of creation.

Admit that we have lost our indigeneity, our Earth stories and our Earth-memories; admit that we do not make the time to cultivate these things, or to reinvent them. Re-discover again how synchronized we actually are to Earth’s living rhythms, her inhale and exhale; like the water in the soil, the liquids in our bodies rise and fall twice daily with the moon, like internal tides, no matter how far we might be from the shore.

At one time, we too walked the Earth with feet perfectly suited to all her varied terrains. In recent times, though, we have lost our baseline gait, a term borrowed from the science of wildlife tracking that refers to the prints left by a healthy animal moving in a relaxed manner through her environment. With our shoes and our pavements, our high-rises and cars, we have eliminated the in-built, visceral knowing received directly from the Earth. And because we are being bombarded by information, toxins, and electronic signals coming at us faster than our bodies can process, our brains assemble fragments of information into a distorted composite from which we react rather than respond.

I have read that some 500 years ago the earth in North America was so vibrant that disease was virtually unknown: now suicide and cancer are the leading causes of death there. 

I have come to believe that only in surrendering to the grief that takes us apart and strips everything away, can we hope to salvage the essential alliances that keep life going: the partnership between God – Christ, humans and Earth and the reverence engendered by deep knowing that God is all and in all, which signifies PANENTHEISM.

In the Native American and Indigenous prophesies of what we now call the Americas, doom was foreseen.

The Bible, written thousands of years ago, echoes this sentiment. The great enemy, whose initial aim was to prevent the coming of the Christ, now that the Evil One rules our world (1 John 5: 19), has only one goal: to destroy God`s creation. Over the decades our brains have changed, no longer receptive to the cries of creation. Salvation is an all-inclusive affair: our redemption and the redemption of creation go hand in hand.

AUGUST 31 2019

GREED IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL

Radix malorum cupiditas est. 

Nowadays we experience the culmination of history: everything is becoming what it is. We are rushing to the END, and that means that the true nature of humanity and the true nature of human enterprises are being bared in all its vulgarity and vileness, exposing GREED as the root of all evil, but also revealing the good deeds that will accompany us into eternity.

The Latin word ‘cupiditas’ is derived from the verb, ‘cupido’ which signifies erroneous desire of all sorts, money, power, sex.

The saying “The lust for money is the root of all evil” originates with Paul, the apostle, who wrote it to his protégé, Timothy (1 Tim.6: 10). Paul was a passionate person: whatever he did, he did with gusto and, when young, with fanatic overtones. He reminds me of myself in my younger and even not so younger days. No half-way measures for him. I love the man, not only for his wise writings, truly inspired, but also for his forthrightness. He shows the power of his upbringing as an aspiring Pharisee, steeped in the Scriptures, and a great artist and poet as well – just read 1 Corinthians 13, that great song of love: “Faith, Hope and Love, and the greatest of these is LOVE” – even though he apparently never married.

He mentioned that he was afflicted with ‘a thorn in the flesh’. He fervently prayed to have it removed, but the Lord had other ideas, something like, “That sting will keep you humble”. In my DAY WITHOUT END you will meet him, and there he reveals what I think, is his Thorn, not an unusual affliction, I believe.

For many ‘greed’ is the thorn in the flesh, and when we give in to it, it poisons our personality. For politicians “economic growth” at all costs, is the scourge of society. Many who faithfully attend church justify their greedy exploitation of creation by basing it on the ancient misinterpretation of Genesis of ‘dominating’ the earth, abetted by the ‘heaven’ syndrome. By and large the church people see the earth as disposable, even though the Bible repeatedly claims that, “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it” (Psalm 24), making it holy. There too greed is the driving motive.

So what do we observe in our world today?

Satan, God’s enemy of old, kicked out of heaven for subordination, has landed feet first on earth, where he and his army of angels turned evil, now rule all rulers everywhere. There’s not a just government left: all exploit the earth.

That’s why OIL is still king. We have become helpless. You may think, “I will drive less, and so cut back on my energy consumption.” Unfortunately, in the entire scheme of things, whether or not we cut back on the use of gasoline doesn’t get the world economy very far. Gasoline accounts for about 26% of world oil consumption, or about 8.7% of total energy use. A cut of gasoline consumption by 10% would curtail world energy consumption by less than 1%.

Still I bike wherever I can, even though pedaling my iron horse makes no difference on the global scale, but that is not the point: I am totally responsible for how I conduct my daily life. Since the earth’s eclipse is looming far faster beyond anyone thought possible, I know that I have to give account of how I have conducted myself in God’s earth, because, once the earth is consumed by human induced FIRE, Judgment Day is the immediate next immense event.

Yes, we will never get away with murder – and that is what God will charge us with: murder of species, murder of air, soil, water, trees, and everything that depends on these basic elements. All based on GREED.

The main charge against us, humans, will be that we have fashioned a society totally relying on greed, of which carbon energy is now all-pervasive, because Carbon energy is needed for every activity that is considered part of our GDP, Gross Domestic Product. 

God gave us the energy from the sun without which food can’t grow. That’s why initially human beings were vegetarians: no supplementary heat sources were needed: the sun did it all.

Once we started agriculture and used animals, one thing led to another. Without supplemental energy of some kind (such as using electricity to heat an electric stove or burning animal dung or sticks), it becomes impossible to cook food or smelt metals.

Slowly at first, and now at breakneck speed, we have painted ourselves in a corner. Now everything, everything depends on energy consumption. The tasks that governments do, such as building roads and schools, require energy consumption. Both transporting and cooking food require the use of energy products. Refrigerating food requires energy products. These energy uses, as well as many other everyday hidden uses of energy, aren’t things that we can easily cut back on.

Fools in charge.

“The fools have said in their hearts, there is no God above.” (Psalm 13). Those are the people who have their values all wrong. For them creation is there to exploit. We see it in Brazil. We see it in the USA. We see it in the UK and Australia and Italy and Russia and India and China: everywhere populists, men – all men!! – catering to the lowest tendencies in human beings, are in charge today even as matters fall apart at an ever faster rate.

As circumstances environmentally deteriorate, and climate change really starts to bite, causing inflation of basic food stuff, the dream of climate friendly energy sources, solar and wind power, will come crashing down, while the use of carbon energy will soar, even when it is the source of our ills.

Just as taxes on tobacco have risen exponentially in an effort to curtail its lethal use, so governments, desperate to raise funds to pay for our earlier extravagance when oil was cheap, and cheap to obtain, now the opposite is becoming true. Soon rulers everywhere, even in the USA, will see carbon as the fountain of folly, and will tax it as a sure source of badly needed tax revenue. Why? Because due to Global Heating, the damage done to infrastructure, to dwellings and public buildings, plus the extra cost of protecting them from increasing climate change, will stretch public resources beyond their limits, screaming for extra revenues to mend the damage. 

Greed is at the root of it all.

It already started in Paradise, in the Garden of Eden. In the early Bible chapters God pointed the TREE out to the human pair, and they saw that it was “Beautiful to look at and good for fruit”. Later the sly ENEMY drew their attention to that same tree, and the order of priority was reversed, “Good for fruit and nice to behold”. Suddenly GREED raised its ugly head and Capitalism was born.

Today Capitalism thrives on OIL. Oil oils all. Oil and its related products, coal, natural gas, make modern life possible, but also kill it.

That’s the dilemma we all face. To cut down its use, Governments must tax it, but higher oil prices will increase the chances for recession. Also the easy oil is gone. The next batch is further away, is deeper in the earth, costs more to extract.

That means that oil companies have to charge more. But if oil prices rise, the prices of many different types of goods and services, food, goods transported by truck or airplane, and vacation travel, rise at the same time. Wages don’t rise as quickly, in part because it is the true energy content that the economy requires.

So, looking into my cracked crystal ball, the economy will be forced to spend a larger share of its resources to producing energy products, which means that more energy will be used to obtain energy resulting in more pollution and greater expenses.

With fewer resources to use, the economy reacts by shrinking back. An adequate supply of energy products is what makes the economy operate as it does; if buying an adequate amount of energy products becomes too expensive for consumers, they cut back and cause an even greater economic downturn. With rising inflation, interest rates too have to go up, so no wonder that the Fed, the US federal Bank, is loath to decrease rates.

Middle Eastern oil exporting countries want higher prices as well, because they have large populations and inadequate employment opportunities unless the government provides them with handouts or with programs that provide jobs. If these governments need to cut back too much, there is a real danger that the governments will be overthrown.

If prices cannot rise high enough, the vast majority of the oil that seems to be available based on published reserve amounts and geological surveys cannot really be extracted.

Whether there are ways to raise oil and other energy prices higher than they are now remains to be seen.

You see: today we eat oil – 10 carbon parts for each food part; today we move our bodies, not by the two legs God gave us, but by four rubberized wheels attached to 2,000 pounds of steel and plastic; today we travel not by wind-power and clever sails, but by jet engines, whose contrails poison the skies; today we don’t get the news from neighbors and friends but on the boob-tube and the internet.

Carbon energy is deeply buried in all goods and services that are made. If there isn’t enough supply, the world stops or at best stagnates.

Today Collapse is in the cards, because no matter what we do, no matter where we turn, dangers dawns, either in the form of depression or wars or epidemics or defaulting debts or failing governments and intergovernmental organizations or Brexit or devastating earthquakes or super typhoons or a sudden spike in temperatures: the list is endless.

If the oil prices go too high – and they should to ascertain new supply – the economy crashes. If they go too low, the supply will stop, and the economy crashes. If we continue to use oil the climate crashes and we with it.

Needless to say, stock markets are likely to be adversely affected. So-called renewables will quickly fail because they are currently dependent on fossil fuels for repairs and the electric grid. In fact, it is hard to see any aspect of the world economy that can continue unaffected.

Under today’s circumstances, damned when we do, damned when we don’t, it is hard to believe that the overall system can stay together for many years, but perhaps, in parts of the world, it can.

Given how interconnected the economy is and how widespread the problems are at this point, the scene in Paradise, in the Garden of Eden, is now playing out. There we succumbed to GREED: it’s as simple as that: radix malorum cupiditas est.

Yes, it started in Paradise, it continued with Cain who built the first city as the world’s answer to the Garden of Eden. The Satan, the Great Enemy offered Jesus the entire world (Matthew 4: 8-10). Yes, not God, not Jesus, but the Devil calls the tune today, and his goal is to destroy creation. Sorry to say that, thanks to our lifestyle, thanks to our living habits, totally entrenched in energy, we have been led astray, seduced by greed.

Today the ruling maxim, our real manifesto, should be to return to the original rule for life: to serve creation, to love it with all our heart, soul, mind, being as it is God’s direct revelation.

Jesus was, is and always must be our example as found in John 3: 16, “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.”

The word for ‘world’ here is ‘COSMOS’. The word ‘cosmos’ means everything created, and that includes our tiny earth as well.

Cosmos is the opposite of chaos. God called forth cosmos from chaos. We have turned this same cosmos into chaos, but Jesus in turn reversed it again, turning our chaos into his cosmos. That’s why he died: he died not only for our sins: he died to make paradise, the Garden of Eden, REAL again.