Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

FEBRUARY 25 2017

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

I am sure that sooner than later we will experience an economic COLLAPSE. It seems to me that we live in a world that now resembles a house of cards. Everything is racing to its ultimate demise at neck-breaking speed.

Our population increase is well known.

The world population slowly increased until there were about 1 billion of mainly self-sufficient human beings around the year 1800. Then, thanks to coal-fired mechanization the next billion only took about 120 years, and accelerated from 2 billion in 1920 to the present 7.5 billion of ever more greedy customers today. A graph would show an almost vertical line up.
The same is true, of course, in energy consumption: it too climbed steeply and with it the pollution in the air we breathe, coupled with rising global temperature. ARCTIC NEWS on February 15 2017, less than two weeks ago, signaled that the global annual land surface temperature for 2016 was 1.43°C (2.57°F) above the 20th century average, surpassing the previous record of 2015 by 0.11°C (0.19°F). When we compare this to the year 1800, thus prior to the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, it is closer to 2°C higher, a goal that the UN hoped we might never reach!

While I am writing this the outside temperature is about 10 degrees warmer than the average for late February. Last week I hung out my maple syrup buckets before I left for a weekend family reunion in Canada’s Big City. When we returned late Sunday February 19, I checked the buckets and they were full: the earliest I have seen it ever.

Does this early heat spell doom for the harvest year?

This year so far has seen a constant rise in natural disasters and the year has barely begun. We have entered a period where the risks we face are becoming potentially far more extreme in their impacts, more probable in their likelihood, and potentially irreversible in their duration.

That we live on an edge of new times is becoming clearer by the day and will increasingly be part of our experience whether we admit to them or not. It so happens that the longer this state of freakish weather persists, the greater also the dangers of total collapse.

Next month the TRUMP administration will come up with a new budget which always contains economic growth projections. Since 2008 we have seen only tiny annual increases there. To make all the projection for expected revenues fit, the new government will need 3-4% annual growth, something not experienced since early 1970. The arrests up of illegal immigrants there remind me of my war years in Holland when the Nazis rounded up Jews and all males over 18 in a similar way. This cruel act will have very negative effects on the US economy.

That’s why, rather than growth, COLLAPSE is much more likely. All government expenditure is based on continuous increase in GDP, now needed more than ever to be able to pay for an aging population, their pensions and the inevitable increase in medical costs. Yet the opposite looms, negative growth, and vastly decreased tax receipts which spell doom.

A number of factors make COLLAPSE more likely to happen of which the environmental element is the most prominent. Sad to say but we, the inhabitants of North America, have the dubious honor of being the largest per capita polluters in the world, and also are in denial of this condition. Because of our lack of ecological awareness we deserve to be more inflicted by the forces of nature than any other part of the earth because we are like the cancer patient who ignores all symptoms until it is too late.

Some 200 years ago around the year 1800 when our planet supported some 1 billion people, the world was somewhat in balance. Food was grown and consumed locally, which had its risks as local inclement weather could then temporary jeopardize the harvest outcome.
How have circumstances changed! Today our food is a global affair: just imagine: we airfreight watery lettuce across the entire American Continent so that it takes 100 calories of fuel energy to bring just ONE food calorie of these green leaves from California to Ontario where I live!! Today everything is international, meaning that the average food calorie requires a minimum of 10 energy calories. A quick look at a typical dinner table will show that the green lettuce comes from California, the avocado from Mexico, the potatoes from Prince Edward Island, the meat perhaps from Alberta, the wine from may be as far away as Australia: and the list goes on.

In 1800 there was plenty of work, because all energy, except for wind to sail the ships and make the arms of the windmills move, came from muscle power, either human or animal.

Gail Tverberg in her latest blog of OUR FINITE WORLD makes the point that non-elite workers–that is, workers without advanced education or supervisory responsibilities–play a special role in our economy, because there are millions of them, many of them unemployed. TRUMP referred to them when he promised 25,000,000 (Twenty Five Million) new jobs.

Fat chance.

The overwhelming majority of the prime-age men in this un-working army generally don’t “do civil society” (charitable work, religious activities, volunteering), or for that matter much in the way of child care or help for others in the home either, despite the abundance of time on their hands. Their routine, instead, typically centers on watching—watching TV, DVDs, Internet, hand-held devices, etc.—and indeed watching for an average of 2,000 hours a year, as if it were a full-time job, a mind-dulling occupation.

It so happens that the US economy can only grow if these disappeared workers earn a living wage and so can afford to buy the goods, the cars, the houses, that are being produced or built. If these workers find fewer jobs available, or if these jobs don’t pay sufficiently well, the economy collapses. It’s as simple as that.

Today the TRUMP revolution was fueled by these same people who trusted Trump. I call it THE GREAT BETRAYAL because jobs are disappearing thanks to automation, a process that will simply accelerate.

President Trump also promised to replace the Affordable Care Act with something that is better, is cheaper and covers more people.
Scratch that too.

Republican leaders in the House and Mr. Trump’s secretary of health and human services released a plan last week that would provide insurance that is far inferior to OBAMA care, shifts more medical costs onto families and covers far fewer people. One of my daughters, living in New Mexico, told me last week that they pay $900 per month for healthcare for a family of 4, with large deductibles.

The Middle East is a good example of what will happen here as well.

The countries there, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran were food independent back in the 1950s, but now they are importing ¾ of their food. Yes, blame CLIMATE CHANGE.

This means these countries have to export a lot to pay for it. Fortunately these Middle East countries had oil and this provided the money to feed the landless millions. But now, thanks to more efficient machinery, and stagnating wages in the Western world, there is a peaking in the word oil production, while the price is too low to exploit new resources. Yes, we have ECONOMIC PEAK OIL.

DEBT

Another exponential graph is evident in DEBT.
While income growth has been lagging, since the year 2000 DEBT has increased exponentially. Debt is a product of Credit which in turn is based on FAITH. Credit comes from the Latin word CREDO, which means I BELIEVE. Belief in God has almost disappeared, so now we believe in anything and anybody – witness the TRUMP tragedy. Once we fail to believe in CREDIT, the entire world collapses. The trigger may be set off when the Trump regime backfires, because the current regime in Washington does not inspire confidence. We haven’t had a recession since 2008, so one is overdue. Also inflation is on the rise, which means that interest rates will have to go up. The current ‘boom’ is simply due to historically low interests. Once the price of money goes up, a lot of loans will bite the dust.

Freakish weather will play havoc with food prices, and cause more natural disasters. There is a definite link between food prices and social unrest: when food prices rise, first you cut on some leisure expanses (meals out, movies, etc.); but as they keep rising you cut on core goods, such as medicine. And in a poor country, a food crisis can rapidly have terrible results.

Yes, there is an increasing probability of system breakdown. This past weekend I spent in the big city of Toronto. I cruised through its central part below the 401, that 6-8 lane Highway that bisects the more or less downtown part of the city from its suburban section.
While I was driving throughout this immense metropolitan expanse I wondered what would happen when the economy, our total system, breaks down as happened in the Middle East. There’s no doubt in my mind that the longer the system is going, the greater the impact and the more severe the outcome.

Trump and Brexit are signs of desperation.

I believe that a pervasive fear is gripping the world: a sense of insecurity, feeling of dread, an undefined anxiety that works paralyzing and causes all sorts of mental and also physical illnesses. There are no real solutions to the problems we have created, which are made worse because we are failing to acknowledge them. To open up to them means to admit that we have chosen the wrong path: in that sense we all are like TRUMP who also never admits that he has ever been wrong. Yes, there is the growing feeling that we have a permanent crisis on our hands.

We now see the craziest of conditions. We now know that the ice in the Arctic is vanishing fast: all gone by 2030. To combat this scientists propose to install enormous fans there to regenerate the ice at a cost of $500 billion. Of course that will never happen. In retrospect, the USA wasted untold trillions on useless wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, while neglecting its own infrastructure and proper training for its citizens. Because events now are moving faster than ever, while society also is much more integrated, COLLAPSE, when it comes will also be fast and furious.

The Great Betrayal will hit the underclass the most, those who live from paycheck to paycheck, and have no reserves whatsoever.

And then there is the threat of a major epidemic disease. In the 14th Century Black Plague took months and years to travel through Europe, originating in the Far East, probably China. Today it would come very quickly because of air transportation. Right now there is Bird Flu in China – more lethal than the Spanish Flu that killed between 50-75 million people in 1918 when there were less than 2 billion on the planet. Now with 7.5 billion the toll could run into the hundreds of millions. I also believe that the general health, world-wide, is poorer than a century ago.
By all indications the 21st Century is off to a poor start.

The real lack today is WISDOM. As long as my wife and I have been married – almost 64 years – every morning we have read a Psalm or a portion thereof. Last week – February 21 – we read Psalm 111 of which the last line is: ”To fear the Lord is the first stage of wisdom; all who do so prove themselves wise.”

To fear the Lord means also, perhaps primarily, to cherish his creation, to do anything to enhance it, to be in awe of its beauty and coherence and to always keep its fragility and holiness in mind.

That basic wisdom is lost and this entails that from now on we will experience what that beautiful hymn prays:
Abide with us, fast falls the eventide.
The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide.
Change and decay in all around I see
But Thou who changes not, abide with me.

FEBRUARY 18 2017

THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE.

“What is TRUTH?” Pilate wondered when Jesus stood in front of him to be sentenced to death. Jesus remained silent.

Today the matter of ‘truth’ and ‘fake’ is very much an open question.

Here’s a quote:

“The things in this world are really not what they are in the final analysis. Everything in our world is fake, carries a mask, is disguised; everything is different than it is.”

That sounds pretty post-modern. Who said this?

Actually these words are from Johan Herman Bavinck in the book he wrote on REVELATION (translation is mine). In the book the apostle John, the author, saw what was going to happen in the last days, and in bold strokes outlined what will happen before the world we live in will come to an end.

One of the signs of the approaching end is when the actions of humans will reveal their true nature: when all masks will be torn off, all hidden motives come out in the open. That is now increasingly becoming the case. Modern technology is a definite factor there with cameras everywhere.
There’s a striking text in the very last chapter of Revelation: “Those who do wrong will keep on doing wrong, and those who do right continue to do so, and those who are holy will remain holy”.

That’s the situation today: peoples’ minds are made up. All the preaching in the world will have little effect, including my writings here, which is more like preaching anyway. That also applies to the world’s economic situation which no longer can be reversed. High levels of unemployment or under-employment; falling incomes; housing crises and obscene levels of inequality have led to the rise of counter-movements in all the leading economies. These anarchist agitations – Trump and Brexit – threaten to further undermine an already enfeebled Western democracy. At the same time, the inability of democracy and our financial system to respond to the threat of climate change, imperils the very future of the ecosystem and therefore of humanity. Our world is dangerously disordered, and so-called remedies make it worse. Welcome to a post-modern or perhaps better a pre-collapse planet.

Is there HOPE?

Yes. What is happening in these Last Days is that out of all the chaos and disintegration at long last the Truth will emerge, all fakeness will vanish, all camouflage will be torn away and everything will finally show the true character that corresponds with its ultimate essence. That is the melody of the Last Bible book, the Revelation of John. This anthem vibrates through the entire book which makes it such an engaging and encouraging prophesy.

Today we see glimpses of that truth emerging. Curiously the LIAR in CHIEF, the current president of the USA, occupies an important position here: I have no doubt that he will be dethroned, that the political powers in Washington will pull the plug on him and send him home, wherever that is. But he will not go peaceably. He is so insecure that he can never admit being wrong. In his own eyes he is perfect, is always right: he simply does not commit sin.

So far his followers have stuck with him: see him as their last hope. Well, they have nothing to lose. When he is stripped of his office – the politicians there will finally see his true character – he will incite the ‘disillusioned’ to take up arms and physically battle the establishment. The failure of his campaign promises to create 25 million new jobs and give everybody full medical coverage ‘at a fraction of the cost’ he will blame on the Supreme Court, Congress and the Media, all conspiring to prevent him from implementing his political goals.

Thus will Trump, the pretender, speed up the coming of that glorious future by first bringing in the Age of Lawlessness, and the reign of the Devil.

THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE.

Jesus said that “the truth will set you free’, as recorded in John 8: 32. To be free does not mean free of all rules, free of all regulations. That is anarchy. Jesus tells us that the TRUTH is present when we follow Jesus in all our actions, unencumbered by convention, by tradition, by family custom, by life-long habits. Today it also and perhaps especially means to be free of addiction!!

Addiction?

Let me focus on that aspect. Let’s face it: we all are, without exception, addicted to carbon fuels: we all are carboholics.

Last Sunday, February, 12 part of our church’s readings were from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ famous rules for life. I was struck by one line: “if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out because it is better to lose one part than your whole body”.

That line made me think of our addiction to creation-destroying, God-cursing carbon fuel that now is causing unbelievable changes in “our Father’s World”. It focused my attention on our carbon-culture which is ruining our world. Jesus, with his typical no nonsense approach to sin would have said today: “If your carbon use causes you to sin against my creation, cut out driving, stop heating your house with natural gas and electricity, don’t eat food trucked in from California.”

Hmmm. Gouge out an eye? Deprive ourselves of automotive wheels? Freeze in the dark? Go hungry? For Jesus’ sake?

Let’s be honest. Our industrial world will remain shackled to fossil fuels for most of its energy and all of its transportation fuel, for the simple reason that no other energy source can provide the abundant, concentrated, and power source that’s needed to keep our current lifestyles going.

The Christian alternative today ought to be a deliberate downshifting out of the excruciating extravagance of normal lifestyles in the industrial world. We must be willing to accept more restricted ways of living in order to prepare for the better world to come.

“Many are called, few are chosen” said Jesus, because by all indications very few people will be willing to accept that alternative. Can anybody in the Western world live ‘clean’?

Let’s face it: the only way to stop human induced climate change in its tracks is to stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Doing that would require the world to ground its airlines, turn its highways over to bicycles and horse-and-buggies and to shut down every other technology that won’t be economically viable if it has to depend on the unreliable energy available from renewable sources.

Of course no administration will enact this. Trump most certainly not. Yet for the TRUTH to set us free we must face the harsh truth about ourselves.

Today there’s much talk about the great divide in the world, the growing disparity between the rich and the poor. However the real difference is not a monetary one or an educational one: it’s between those who persist in their creation-destroying conduct and those who try to do God’s will, and even for these few this is almost an impossible task, because today the Devil is in full charge of the world.

THE DEVIL: is he still out there?

Yes, now more than ever. He deserves a closer look.

It is safe to say that the devil or Satan appears in the Bible under two personas. He is in the first place the great seducer who tempted humanity right from its very start in Paradise. In chapter 12 of the Revelation of John he is still called the Satan “who seduces the entire world, (verse 9) and was hurled out of heaven”. Just imagine: Satan! Hurled! Kicked out! Expelled!

And where did he land? Feet first, right here on Planet Earth!

Jesus depicts him as the ultimate deceiver, the “father of lies” (John 8: 44). He twists human thought in the web of delusion; he conjures before the human eye the mirage of salvation and grandeur and drags the people, caught in the grip of falsehoods as an easy prey to their perdition. He is the king of conceit, the royal champion in mind bewilderment. Trump is a perfect example of this description.
But before he was sent packing, the Bible depicts this same Satan as the terrible informer, who accuses the helpless, disoriented humans before God’s throne. That’s how he, as a prosecutor, appears in the first chapter of the book of Job in the meeting of ‘the children of God’. There, scoffing cynically, he hisses his poisonous accusation: “Does Job fear God for nothing?”
He dissects the disintegrating human life, he picks it apart, he grinds it to pieces, until there’s nothing left but ruin and garbage, and then he triumphantly brings all this to God’s throne to show God that everything in this world has gone to pieces.
Imagine! He confronts God. Satan again: “This world, God, your own world, over which you at one time have pronounced that it was ‘very good’, now this world, this same world, is, in my possession, distorted into dire destruction, everything in her is in pieces, is poisoned, is on the verge of collapse.”

That’s why the Satan is the tireless accuser of all God’s servants. He is the one that carries the title of “the great accuser of all our brothers and sisters”. So, in that capacity, as the accuser of the human being, he has access to the heavenly realms. That’s the case because there is so much truth in his accusations, because, as a matter of fact, he has us in his grip, witness our Carbon Addiction. Satan has, to tell the bitter truth, truth on his side. The facts show that, indeed, we humans are completely corrupt. God is in no position to deny him that truth; God simply cannot ignore this as pure fiction.

But Jesus made the difference.

Thanks to Jesus the situation has totally changed: he has deprived the Satan of his status in heaven. Since the shout of triumph has sounded on Golgotha, the place of God’s children has become different as well. They are justified in Jesus Christ, they have become new creatures.
Now that Christ has emerged as the victor, no longer can the Satan lodge any accusations against the woman and against the people of God, because every charge comes to nothing thanks to the great redeeming work of Jesus Christ.

No longer may Satan appear in the meeting of the angels with his sneering face, his sarcastic mockery, his taunts aimed at the believers. For “in all this we are more than conquerors through Him who has loved us”. Because we know that Jesus Christ is there, who died – more than that, who was raised to life, is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. “Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen?” (Rom. 8: 33).

So, what is the role of the Devil in all this?

Today the Law of the Lord has been discarded, abandoned, forgotten. But once law is abandoned for raw power, everyone is exposed. That’s what we see now!

All around the world, authoritarian regimes are questioning, even dismantling the rule of law. We see it in the Philippines, justified as a war against drug dealers and users. We see it in Turkey, justified by a coup attempt. We see it in Hungary and Poland, justified as a rebuilding of national pride and the elimination of threats attributed to refugees and minorities. We see it in Russia, justified by a desire to return to national glory and influence.

And now we see it in the USA.

And the people? Have they still got the gumption to defend the law, to fight for what is right?

THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE.

The truth is spoken by Jesus. “”Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. That is the first and greatest commandment” (Matthew 22: 37-38).

That simply means – and is confirmed in John 3: 16 – that we must love everything God in his wisdom has created. We love great artists through carefully examining their works of art. The greatest work of art is God’s creation – there’s nothing that even remotely equals it.
We must unconditionally love God’s creation in all its manifestations, even when this leaves us at odds with everybody else. Only that TRUTH will set us free in a world now dominated by EVIL.

FEBRUARY 11 2017

THE ARCTIC’S ACUTE AGONY

The late Dr. Barry Commoner coined the four laws of ECOLOGY.
They are:
1. Everything is connected to everything else.
2. Nothing disappears: there is no such thing as waste.
3. Nature knows best.
4. Nothing comes free: the bill always comes sooner or later.

When we see that the Arctic experiences a 30 Degree Celsius spike in temperature, then this has universal implications because “EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED TO EVERYTHING ELSE”.

Way up there in the far North, we are distorting the nature of nature because for many millennia the Arctic has been a place where the seal and the polar bear had their play grounds which included a lot of ice. God created it that way.

Scientists now discover that the ice there and on Greenland is melting at a rate 600 percent faster than earlier estimates. The ice on Greenland rests on solid land, which means that its melting directly influences the world’s sea levels, endangering such low lands as The Netherlands and Florida, while in the Arctic the ice is free floating. There the danger is different. There, in the shallow waters, only 50 – 100 meters deep, are Giga (Giga is billion x billion) Tons of methane buried under the ice cover. This suggests that millions, perhaps billions of years ago, the region had a tremendous amount of vegetation – how else to explain the presence of this lethal gas? – but God, in his wisdom had decreed that the North- and the South Poles should leave that dangerous gas forever buried, because NATURE KNOWS BEST, which actually means that we must follow God’s plan for creation.

What then is God’s plan for creation?

God’s plan for creation is called ”The Kingdom of Heaven.”
This kingdom has a cosmic character, which means that it comprises the entire world as we have come to know it. Not only are we humans part of that Kingdom, but it also includes the worlds of animals and plants. Yes, even the angels are part of this wider context: they too have a place in the harmonious totality of God’s Kingdom.

“In the beginning” in that Kingdom – which we might call NATURE – all parts of the world were attuned to each other: EVERYTHING WAS PERFECTLY CONNECTED TO EVERYTHING ELSE. Nowhere was there a false note, a dissonant that disturbed the unity, as everything fitted harmoniously into the greater scheme of the totality.

We have undone that sacred plan. We went our own way, and now reap what we have sown. Just recently the Arctic, when there was not a single ray of sunshine, saw temperatures 30 Degrees Celsius above normal. Since EVERYTHING IS STILL CONNECTED TO EVERYTHING ELSE, this has dire consequences for all of us. We have upset the normal. We have transgressed the very laws of nature and must face the after effects. The unexpected rise in temperature there will harm the entire globe, will influence everything and everybody everywhere. How and to what extent the very near future will tell.

That sudden spike signals that something vital has died. Not only the polar bears and the seals; not only the myriads of other living matter that only thrive in very cold temperatures, it also introduces elements in these waters that always were foreign there, did not fit, were alien elements.

What are the consequences?

Death. The Bible says that ‘the wages of sin are death.’ Our distorting of God’s Holy Creation, is SIN, a sin that affects us as humans, but equally exerts a toll on the environment, influences everything that surrounds us as we breathe in the air, eat stuff grown on the soil, drink its water.

Our own body temperature normally is 37 degrees Celsius. We have a fever when it goes up to the 38-39 range and we die when it exceeds 45. Does an increase of 30 degrees above normal somewhere on earth also spell doom?

The law “NOTHING DISAPPEARS: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS WASTE” sounds at odds with a world overflowing with refuse: everywhere municipalities have to cope with mountains of garbage, while discarded electronics are becoming a hazard, and what about the trillions of plastic particles saturating the oceans? Since our world is a closed system, from which nothing can escape, our throw-away-society is distorting ‘nature’ and signals again another symptom of our mounting sins against creation, another sign of ignoring the laws of ecology which also includes that “THERE IS NO FREE LUNCH.”

Sooner or later the bill appears at our doorsteps, and, by all indications, the due date is NOW.

The greatest storage of waste is found in the air and in the oceans. Plastic there is a problem, but a much greater hazard is the warming of the world’s waters, increasingly evident in the ARCTIC.

IS THE END NIGH?

ARCTIC NEWS thinks so. It poses the question:

WILL HUMANS BE EXTINCT BY 2026?

A mere nine years?

Here is what it says:

“In the Arctic, vast amounts of carbon are stored in soils that are now still largely frozen. As temperatures continue to rise and soils thaw, much of this carbon will be converted by microbes into carbon dioxide or methane, adding further greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. In addition, vast amounts of methane are stored in sediments under the Arctic Ocean seafloor, in the form of methane hydrates and free gas. As temperatures rise, these sediments can get destabilized, resulting in eruptions of huge amounts of methane from the seafloor. Due to the abrupt character of such releases and the fact that many seas in the Arctic Ocean are shallow, much of the methane will then enter the atmosphere without getting broken down in the water.

“What makes the situation so dangerous is that huge eruptions from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean can happen at any time. We can just count ourselves lucky that it hasn’t happened as yet. As temperatures continue to rise, the risk that this will happen keeps growing.”

The article then shows a graph which somehow I am unable to reproduce in my blog, but which I can transpose into prose. This illustration shows a number of feedbacks: extreme weather such as heatwaves causes fires, which generates CO2 emissions, which melts the Arctic ice, which makes ice and snow to disappear which allows the dark waters to absorb more heat which accelerates the heating process, which warms the shallow Arctic seas to the point where the Giga tons of methane are released, a gas up to 100 times as lethal as CO2, causing the Global temperature to rise by TEN DEGREES Celsius by 2026, less than 10 years from now.

Here’s how the ARCTIC NEWS describes this:

“This dangerous situation has developed because emissions by people have made the temperature of the water in the Arctic Ocean rise, and these waters keep warming much more rapidly than the rest of the world due to a number of feedbacks.

“One such feedback is the retreat of the sea ice, which in turn makes the Arctic Ocean heat up even more, as much sunlight that was previously reflected back into space by the sea ice, instead gets absorbed by the water when the sea ice is gone.

“Without sea ice, storms can also develop more easily. Storms can mix warm surface waters all the way down to the bottom of shallow seas, reaching cracks in sediments filled with ice. This ice has until now acted as a glue, holding the sediment together. As the ice melts, sediments can become destabilized by even small differences in temperature and pressure that can be triggered by earthquakes, undersea landslides or changes in ocean currents. This past week there were hurricane storms raging in the Arctic!!.

“As a result, huge amounts of methane can erupt from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean and once this occurs, it will further raise temperatures, especially over the Arctic, thus acting as another self-reinforcing feedback loop that again makes the situation even worse in the Arctic, with higher temperatures causing even further methane releases, in a vicious cycle leading to runaway global warming.”

What next?

Such a temperature rise in the Arctic will not stay within the borders of the Arctic. It will trigger huge firestorms in forests and peatlands in North America and Russia, adding further emissions including soot that can settle on mountains, speeding up the melting of glaciers and threatening to stop the flow of rivers that people depend on for their livelihood.

These developments can take place at such a speed that adaptation will be futile. More extreme weather events can hit the same area with a succession of droughts, cold snaps, floods, heat waves and wildfires that follow each other up rapidly. Within just one decade, the combined impact of extreme weather, falls in soil quality and air quality, habitat loss and shortages of food, water, shelter and just about all the basic things needed to sustain life can threaten most, if not all life on Earth with extinction.

How much have temperatures risen and how much additional warming could take place over the next decade?

I repeat:

The article signals that, because of the different feedbacks and reinforcing elements the potential global temperature rise by 2026 from pre-industrial levels could be as high as 10 degrees Celsius.

So far scientists intimately involved with the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has been extremely cautious and this has given the world a false sense of security. The ice melting on Greenland is one example, where it now appears that this process has seen a 600 percent increase. None of the reports even mention methane as a danger, because the rapid acceleration there is seen as too alarming, and TRUMP, no doubt, will label such a news item as FAKE.

There is nothing FAKE about the Bible which repeatedly states that the DAY OF THE LORD will come as a thief in the night. Just look up 1 Thessalonians 5: 2 or 2 Peter 3: 10 or Matthew 24: 43.

Revelation 18 too hints at that, where the merchants, AMAZON, WALMART, COSTCO, all with their warehouses full with merchandize, are “terrified that this is happening” (verse 15-17). Suddenly they all are stuck with billions of dollars of unsold stuff. The owners and operators of these retailers are completely caught off guard: there were no news reports that this would happen. Everything seemed totally normal.
A TEN DEGREE Celsius increase makes true the words of 2 Peter 3: 10-13, where Peter saw this happening, without really knowing what he was talking about. He wrote (verse 12) “That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire and the elements will melt in the heat.”

That’s what a TEN DEGREE jump in the world-wide temperature will do to everything. The Arctic’s Agony is our agony. When one part of the body that is our earth suffers, the entire body suffers. The agony is so acute that it will spell the end.

That’s why the earth needs total purification. We have so thoroughly distorted God’s GOOD creation, HIS KINGDOM that only an intense world-wide holocaust will cleanse the earth, and all it contains, from the damage we have caused and increasingly inflict.
Still the laws of ECOLOGY hold true. In spite of total conflagration NOTHING WILL DISAPPEAR except sin. The essence of whatever is or was will remain. From the ashes will arise – see Revelation 21 – “A NEW HEAVEN” to replace the one that was saturated with undue amounts of CO2 and Methane, and “A NEW EARTH” replacing the one that was filled with garbage, Monsanto seeds and all the human detritus that has made living a God-honoring existence nearly impossible.

Peter, this same apostle who had denied Jesus three times when the chips were down, was nevertheless chosen by Jesus to play an important part in the coming of the Kingdom: he had learned his lesson, as is evident from his concluding remarks: (verse 14) “make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him.”

That ‘peace’ includes shedding tears for the Arctic’s Acute Agony.

FEBRUARY 4 2017

A CLUELESS LEADER AND HIS SOON TO BE DISILLUSIONED FOLLOWERS.

The fellow must have writer’s cramp by now from signing all these executive orders. Not too long ago the spineless Republicans condemned Obama for doing a miniature version of this in his last months in power: this fellow enjoys every minute of displaying his ill-gotten authority, well, let him. In my humble and unworthy opinion it seems that he is speeding up the coming of the Kingdom: also the most powerful man in the world occupies an important place in God’s service, even though he sees himself as God. In rambling speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Trump jabbed at immigrants and religious freedom and reassured Americans that he will save the world, “THE WORLD IS IN TROUBLE…..I WILL FIX IT!!”

As the self-proclaimed God he is yet constantly afraid: one handshake will cause dangerous bacteria to sicken him. He is afraid of the media, afraid of the intelligence community, afraid of Mexico and China and now Iran, afraid of Muslims, afraid of terrorists. I think before he goes to bed, he looks under it: who knows some danger might be lurking there.

However he not afraid of a big Mac or Kentucky Fried Chicken. If I were him –God forbid – I’d afraid for my health. He already is overweight and is under constant pressure to prove himself, not very good for his heart, but he regards himself beyond the powers of nature by a most unhealthy and heart-rending eating regime that simply invites a direct assault on his blood circulation. Mens sana in corpore sano means a healthy mind in a healthy body. Mens insana in corpore insano means the opposite. That’s what we see in what is called the most powerful person in the world, a sure example of the insanity of our entire system, both financial and environmental.

And he is not alone.

I read last week in the Globe and Mail that nearly half of U.S. men have genital infections caused by a sexually transmitted virus and that 1 in 4 has strains linked with several cancers. No wonder almost 20 percent of the US GDP – the Gross Domestic Product – consists of medical expense, the highest in the world, but the outcome is poor: on a world-wide scale the health gauge is not even among the ten top. Blame vested interests as well as a fanatical faith in private enterprise stemming from a fearsome loathing of government intrusion. All this, combined with a TV-saturated sedentary life fed by a fast-food diet is a recipe for bodily disaster. If there is any country that needs universal health care, it is the USA.

The real reason why tens of millions of men, between the ages of 25-54 have dropped out of the job market is partly their poor health, which, in turn has led to suicide and drug dependence. Idleness breeds devilish conduct. Also, due to automation and jobs migrating overseas, these men have lost the opportunity to do meaningful work. Now they no longer are able to function as meaningful members of society, no longer can prosper, and lack the satisfaction of succeeding at something. It is precisely these legions of men – soon to be disillusioned – that secured Trump’s victory in the battleground industrial states of Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In today’s state of automation it will be impossible to create 25,000,000 new jobs and health coverage for all at a fraction of the cost of Obamacare. Both promises will backfire badly.

We live in a new world dominated by the machine.

According to some reliable reports, the American economy is already at full employment. True, there are these millions of idle hands, mostly men, who want to work, but, unfortunately, people to dig ditches, milk cows, and cut down trees with a two-man saw are no longer needed. A long time ago those were the jobs for the unskilled. I remember how, during the Dirty Thirties in the Netherlands a new company was formed with the (Dutch) name DE HEIDE MAATCHAPPIJ, The Heather Company. This government agency was charged to overturn these stubborn tracts of heath, converting them with pick and spade into tillable soil. This had a dual purpose: to provide work for thousands of empty hands and serve the larger good by making the soil ready for cultivation.

Most men in our Western world today would be incapable of doing hard physical labor. The USA army already has a recruitment problem, because only 1 in 4 qualifies because of the strict regulations, such as no criminal record, no tattoos, no health problems and at least a high school education.

Many of these unemployables, in their innocence, and ignorance, voted for Trump. True, change was needed, just as a lifestyle of no-smoking, no soft drinks, plus lots of exercise and meaningful work is also needed. However in the existent economic situation, with good pay going to fewer people and the increasing loss of the middle class employment, the drift toward service jobs in bars and fast food outlets, cannot be reversed.

I am reading AVERAGE IS OVER, a book by Tyler Cowen, an economics professor.

The title says it all: only if you have above average intelligence, come from a functional family, have a good work ethic, or are a math whiz, familiar with current technology will you be a financial success. The rest will become an underclass, doing minimum wage stuff.
The book ends with the prediction that society will split in two classes, the high brainy earners, and the rest. The rest means, by and large, the products of the USA educational system, which has been sabotaged by the Republicans who wanted to reduce taxes and consistently voted against increases for education.

How to fit into the new way of life.

The crucial problems today concern the way technology and globalization are decimating jobs and tearing the social fabric. All the big things that were once taken for granted are now under assault: globalization, capitalism, an American-led global order, on the one hand, and mechanization, computer-driven work and robotic explosion on the other hand. All thanks to AI – Artificial Intelligence – which is changing everything in every workplace.

That will simply make it impossible for President Trump to generate 25,000,000 (Twenty Five Million) new jobs during his 4 year term as he promised. Also how he will revamp the Medical system, having promised coverage for all at drastically lower cost, is another big question. Here too his re-election will depend on this.

In my reading I often turn to PROJECT SYNDICATE.

Simon Johnson of MIT Sloan and the Peterson Institute for International Economics writes that “Trump’s economic-policy priorities are reflected in his proposed cabinet, which represents a dramatic shift to outright “oligarchy: direct control of the state by people with substantial private economic power”. Trump seems determined to lower income taxes for high-income Americans, as well as to reduce capital-gains tax (mostly paid by the well-off) and nearly eliminate corporate taxes (again, disproportionately benefiting the richest).”

Joseph E Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, believes that the political consequences for Trump’s off the cuff promises will be disastrous. He writes that “Experience shows that this trickle-down “story does not end well for Trump’s angry, displaced Rust Belt voters,” who will be tempted to seek even more aggressively for scapegoats once they realize how profoundly Trump has betrayed their interests.

America in the lead – down.

Frankly I believe that Trump is the last gasp: America is quickly becoming a failed state. A country is the sum of its citizens. Already American innovation first began declining or narrowing as far back as the late 1960s, owing to “a corporatist ideology that permeated all levels of government. True, Silicon Valley created new industries and improved the pace of innovation for a short time”; but now it, too, has run up against diminishing returns.

No amount of Trumpian rants will restore America’s greatness, and his erratic behavior will make people all over the world think twice to settle there and invest money. Trump is the last desperate attempt to revive a dying nation.

America has always been ahead of the pack, first in leading the world in development, now in being in the forefront of decline.
This has everything to do with ENERGY and its use. Where the USA has some 5 percent of the world’s population, it uses 25 percent of the world’s carbon products, thus causes a quarter of all Green House Gases, and can expect natural disasters at an equal ratio. Better move away from the most hurricane and earthquake prone coast lines, exactly there where most people live.

Yes, urban North America- and, sorry to say, I have to include Canada here as well – is built on an infinite supply of liquid fuels, the stuff we get when we say “Fill’er up”. In the next decade subdivisions, a single family house on a large lot with lots of green lawn will become the white elephant of the cities: too spread out to economically accommodate mass transit, it will remain dependent on that 2,500 pound monster that conveys a 120-170 pound individual from home to far away work or shopping.
Europe, at least, had the sense – mostly because fuel was so terribly expensive – to build cities up some stories rather than each in its own little domain. Too late to change this now, because, believe it or not, the gasoline age is rapidly coming to a disastrous close.

Some reliable reports now calculate that we may soon be spending more energy on getting the energy that is required to keep the cogs and wheels of modernity turning.

This is due to dreaded Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI). That ratio is increasingly becoming out of whack. Before we fill up our beloved automobile, let me recite some of the steps fuel has to take before we can burn it.

Take the Alberta tar sands. We all have seen the gigantic shovels that load these dwelling-size dump trucks with oil-laden sand. There already a lot of energy is expended to manufacture this equipment and these trucks with tires that dwarf a mere human and cost more than an individual earns in a life time. Also these monstrous machines burn many a gallon of fuel a minute.
That sand – and that’s what it is – is then saturated with water, an ever-more precious commodity. The viscose mixture is boiled – just imagine the energy this takes – and the sand is separated from the tiny bit of oil that is attached to the sand, which is discarded because it remains too contaminated for commercial use.

The tar-sand-oil is then pumped into pipeline, mixed with water because it is too stiff to flow, on the way to a refinery. Every step takes lots of energy. The refinery makes it into a usable product from where both pipelines and tanker trucks bring it thousands of miles to service station where it is pumped into our fuel tanks, causing GREEN HOUSE GASES all the way.

That process is now coming close to a point of no return: already 85% according to some calculations. Once that process is equalized, when Energy Return EQUALS Energy Invested, we cease to be a functioning society. There is not much that even Mr. Trump can do about it, other than seize the entire Persian Gulf which Cheney and W. Bush tried to do with disastrous results.
True, the new regime in the USA, put in place by a minority of voters, is a clear sign that people want change. True, the old order was found wanting. It also is true that the future looks grim, because THE AVERAGE IS OVER, which means that the majority of people, because they don’t have the right genes, are becoming surplus, are strictly needed as consumers, but no longer needed as producers.

It also is true that a society which requires 10 carbon calories to deliver one food calorie doomed and is totally out of touch with the essence of Christianity whose aim is “YOUR KINGDOM COME”.

John 3: 16 “God so loved the cosmos,” requires us to live and move and think and sleep the welfare of the world we live in. That must be our thought when we get up, when we eat when we work when we play: it must dominate our life 24/7.

January 28 2017

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE NEW TOWER OF BABEL

You may remember the OLD tower of Babel, as related in Genesis 11. Here’s what the Bible says: ”Now the whole world had one language”, not unlike today I might add.

These people felt on top of their world, so they boasted: “Let is build ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens so that we make a name for ourselves.”

The Lord never likes boastful language (not even from presidents), musing (verse 6) if this Babel crowd pulls this off “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.”

So the Lord simply confused their language, which now has resulted in world-wide geographic and scientific progress so that there is not a place on earth not touched by human enterprise.

Today we know too well that this development has not all been favorable. All human actions have had destructive side effects such as Climate Change, acidifying oceans and decimated wild-life. And now its scientific section is starting to modify what it means to be human.

This brings me to the NEW TOWER OF BABEL, not just a gigantic physical structure but, far worse, threatening the essence of our psychical, spiritual and mental makeup, reminding us of God’s earlier thought: “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.”

The Last Frontier?

HOMO DEUS is the title of a new book, being published in North America this week, but which has been a best-seller in Great Britain since the fall of last year. The title, HOMO DEUS, says it all, if you know some basic Latin. A few weeks ago I saw the imported book for sale at CHAPTERS, for $40.00, but then I found the entire book on line for free.

Yuval Noah Harari, an Israel based philosopher, is also the author of an earlier book SAPIENS. Sapiens is also a Latin word, stemming from the verb SAPIO which means “be sensible, be wise”. Thus SAPIENS can be translated as MAN COME OF AGE, to speak in Bonhoeffer terms.

In HOMO DEUS he turns his focus toward humanity’s future, and the quest to upgrade humans into gods. Yes, you read this correctly UPGRADE US TO GODS, as the title HOMO DEUS means HUMAN as GOD. It comes with the subtitle: A BRIEF HISTORY OF TOMORROW. Actually Psalm 82: 6 sort of confirms this: “You are gods, you are all children of the Most High, but you will die”. Homo Deus, however, aims for eternity.

An ambitious claim

Harari first traces human development, lauding its achievements. Thanks to penicillin we have managed to limit deadly infections. Also, thanks to fertilizer and irrigation, more people are dying from eating too much than from starvation. Unfortunately, thanks to depression, more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined.

This new book explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the 21st century, in which – so says the author – we will overcome death and create artificial life.

In what he calls The DATA RELIGION the author claims that our upgrading into gods may follow any of three paths: biological engineering, cyborg engineering and the engineering of non-organic beings.

He writes that “Though the details are obscure, we can nevertheless be sure about the general direction of history. Now, in the twenty- first century, the new big project of humankind will be to acquire for us divine powers of creation and destruction, and upgrade Homo Sapiens – man come of age – into Homo Deus – man become god. We want the ability to re- engineer our bodies and minds in order, above all, to escape old age, death and misery, but once we have it, who knows what else we might do with such ability?”

In other words: science has a new agenda: attaining divinity and eternal life.

When one phase stops, everything stops.

As an aside Yuval Noah Harari, a professor in Jerusalem, claims that science has become so complicated that no one understands the entire system, so no one can stop the progress that is being made. If it is stopped somehow, he says, our economy will collapse, along with our society.
He, in a later chapter, asserts that the modern economy needs constant and indefinite growth in order to survive. If growth ever stops, the economy won’t settle down to some cozy equilibrium; it will fall to pieces.

My comments: everything is connected to everything else: one of the laws of ecology.

That’s why today politicians everywhere want GROWTH AT ALL COSTS (in a FINITE WORLD!) That is why capitalism encourages us to seek immortality, happiness and divinity: only when we are truly GODS can we overcome finiteness. An economy built on everlasting growth needs endless projects – just like the quests for immortality, bliss and divinity. Computers powerful enough to understand and overcome the mechanisms of ageing and death will probably also be powerful enough to replace humans in any and all tasks.” Welcome to a Brave New World!

He continues: “Whereas believing in multiple gods (theism) justified traditional agriculture in the name of God, humanism has justified modern industrial farming in the name of Man. Industrial farming sanctifies human needs, whims and wishes, while disregarding everything else. Industrial farming has no real interest in animals, which don’t share the sanctity of human nature. And it has no use for gods, because modern science and technology give humans powers that far exceed those of the ancient gods. Science enables modern firms to subjugate cows, pigs and chickens to more extreme conditions than those prevailing in traditional agricultural societies.

Cogito Ergo Sum: I think therefore I am.

This theory was upheld by the father of modern philosophy, Rene Descartes, who coined “I think therefore I am”.
In the seventeenth Century Descartes maintained that only humans feel and crave, whereas all other animals are mindless automata, akin to a robot or a vending machine. When a man kicks a dog, the dog experiences nothing. The dog flinches and howls automatically, just like a humming vending machine that makes a cup of coffee without feeling or wanting anything. This theory was widely accepted in Descartes’ day. Seventeenth-century doctors and scholars dissected live dogs and observed the working of their internal organs, without either anesthetics or scruples. They didn’t see anything wrong with that, just as we don’t see anything wrong in opening the lid of a vending machine and observing its gears and conveyors.”

I may add that today, in the early twenty-first century there are still plenty of people who argue that animals have no consciousness, or at most, that they have a very different and inferior type of consciousness.

Yuval Noah Harari, the author, argues that “if we think in term of months, we had probably focus on immediate problems such as the turmoil in the Middle East, the refugee crisis in Europe and the slowing of the Chinese economy. If we think in terms of decades, then global warming, growing inequality and the disruption of the job market loom large.

“Yet if we take the really grand view of life, all other problems and developments are overshadowed by three interlinked processes:
1. Science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms, and life is data processing.
2. Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.
3. Non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves.

“These three processes raise three key questions, which I hope will stick in your mind long after you have finished this book:
1. Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing?
2. What’s more valuable – intelligence or consciousness?
3. What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves? “

He continues:

“Religion and technology always dance a delicate tango. They push one another, depend on one another and cannot stray too far away from one another. Technology depends on religion, because every invention has many potential applications, and the engineers need some prophet to make the crucial choice and point towards the required destination. Thus in the nineteenth century engineers invented locomotives, radios and internal combustion engines. But as the twentieth century proved, you can use these very same tools to create fascist societies, communist dictatorships and liberal democracies.

Indeed: LIFE IS RELIGION

“Without some religious convictions, the locomotives cannot decide where to go. On the other hand, technology often defines the scope and limits
of our religious visions, like a waiter that demarcates our appetites by handing us a menu. New technologies kill old gods and give birth to new gods. That’s why agricultural deities were different from hunter- gatherer spirits, why factory hands fantasize about different paradises than peasants and why the revolutionary technologies of the twenty-first century are far more likely to spawn unprecedented religious movements than to revive medieval creeds.

Islamic fundamentalists may repeat the mantra that ‘Islam is the answer’, but religions that lose touch with the technological realities of the day lose their ability even to understand the questions being asked. What will happen to the job market once artificial intelligence outperforms humans in most cognitive tasks?

“What will be the political impact of a massive new class of economically useless people?
What will happen to relationships, families and pension funds when nanotechnology and regenerative medicine turn eighty into the new fifty?
What will happen to human society when biotechnology enables us to have designer babies, and to open unprecedented gaps between rich and poor?

“You will not find the answers to any of these questions in the Qur’an or sharia law, nor in the Bible or in the Confucian Analects, because nobody in the medieval Middle East or in ancient China knew much about computers, genetics or nanotechnology. Radical Islam may promise an anchor of certainty in a world of technological and economic storms – but in order to navigate a storm, you need a map and a rudder rather than just an anchor.

Hence radical Islam may appeal to people born and raised in its fold, but it has precious little to offer unemployed Spanish youths or anxious Chinese billionaires. True, hundreds of millions may nevertheless go on believing in Islam, Christianity or Hinduism. But numbers alone don’t count for much in history. History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses.

“Ten thousand years ago most people were hunter- gatherers and only a few pioneers in the Middle East were farmers. Yet the future belonged to the farmers. In 1850 more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants, and in the small villages along the Ganges, the Nile and the Yangtze nobody knew anything about steam engines, railroads or telegraph lines. Yet the fate of these peasants had already been sealed in Manchester and Birmingham by the handful of engineers, politicians and financiers who spearheaded the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines, railroads and telegraphs transformed the production of food, textiles, vehicles and weapons, giving industrial powers a decisive edge over traditional agricultural societies.“

End of quotes.

Again the words of Genesis 11 come to mind: “Nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.”

Also Satan’s work has a place in God’s design and is made to serve the Coming of God’s Kingdom.

Paul in 1 Corinthians 15: 26 tells us that “The last enemy to be destroyed is death”. Satan has the same goal, but enslaves all in his service. Christ by dying on the cross has guaranteed eternal life for his followers, but grants them full freedom.
HOMO DEUS means HUMAN as GOD. It comes with a subtitle: A BRIEF HISTORY OF TOMORROW.

Here’s how the real history will unfold. The Lord will put a virus, codename ISAAC, which means LAUGHTER (Read Psalm 2: 4) into ALL computers world-wide, destroying them completely. This will cause our world, the world of THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS, to totally collapse, ensuring the fall of the SECOND tower.

In the new world to come the saints will pick up creational development from there, because the Spirit of God will continue to cause new things to appear within the framework of his world order wherein they are potentially enclosed.

Says Revelation 14: 13: “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord, they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.”

January 21 2017

EXODUS: come out of her.

Abram left his ancestral home not knowing where he would end up. The people of Israel, by leaving Egypt, made the word EXODUS a by-word. So it is no surprise that we too are called to do the same, judging by: “I heard another voice from heaven say: ‘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 18: 4.

Last week I wrote that “We must create ‘neo-monastic church communities’ as places of formation for modern Christians.” And my comments were: “I know that this is difficult in our subdivided world, where each is on his/her own in their separate dwellings. Monastic means communal living, as in a convent or monastery, but then for families. It is something that need to be explored and, who knows, the future may impose this sort of living on us. Curiously in the October 9 2003 issue of the New York Review of Books, discussing Father and Son McNeil’s book, The Human Web, the authors recommend the formation of primary communities: ”Religious sects and congregations are the principal candidates for this role.”

I believe it is time to seriously think about this. It also is advice given to us in both Isaiah and Jeremiah. Jeremiah 51: 9 is quite explicit: “We would have healed Babylon but she cannot be healed; let us leave her and each go to his own land, for her judgement reaches to the skies, and rises as high as the clouds.”

That Babylon – the present world – is a failure beyond healing is evident from the Trump victory: it signals the definite end of the present political and economic systems. America and our entire Western world have been built on creational domination and exploitation of the most vulnerable. These crimes are now backfiring on us. Trump’s assertion to “make America great again” is nothing else but an empty and evil boast. Yes, our present situation, our total economic system is beyond repair. The rise of Trump, the eager ally of the Antichrist, makes this abundantly clear.

The employment situation is a case in point.

In THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY Jacques Ellul, the eminent French philosopher and astute Christian, accurately describes the present state of affairs. He writes that “technique has become indifferent to all the traditional human ends and values by becoming an end-in-itself…..which has nothing human in it to which we must accommodate ourselves as best we may…… In the technological society we humans are but a single tightly integrated and articulate component.”

Now in 2017 we are, indeed tightly integrated into The Technological Society. I blame this on another product of the Technological Society: Television.

Neil Postman in his classic AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH has phrased it correctly. In our Brave New World Postman writes “we are moving toward some preordained paradise, and technology is the force behind that movement.”

Technology’s march is indeed relentless, but the “paradise” paradigm is no longer possible because there is no leisure without work: television has robbed people of the ability to live. There simply is no across the board solution to the unemployment situation: their brains had become dulled by the BOOB TUBE and now even more by the incessant silly chatter on the many media tools.

This is not the first time.

It happened before in the early 19th century. That’s when the first generation of workers had the experience of being suddenly thrown out of their jobs by automation. But rather than accept it, they fought back—calling themselves the “Luddites” – and staging an audacious attack against the machines.
In the first decade of the 1800s, the textile economy in Great Britain went into a tailspin. A decade of war with Napoleon had halted trade and driven up the cost of food and everyday goods. Fashions changed, too: Men began wearing “trousers,” so the demand for stockings plummeted. The merchant class—the overlords who paid hosiers and croppers and weavers for the work—began looking for ways to shrink their costs.
That meant reducing wages—and bringing in more technology to improve efficiency. Huge factories were built where coal-burning engines would propel dozens of automated cotton-weaving machines. And the owners grew rich. The Luddites were not so much against progress: they revolted because the owners made millions while the workers starved.
Today is no different: the rich have grown richer while the poor now have TRUMP, the ultimate conman. Today the redundancy of labor, supplanted by efficient machines, will create an enormous “useless class”, without economic or military purpose. So what will happen to this human surplus? Cannon fodder as was the case in the 1930’s?
Trump boasts that he will create “Twenty Five million new jobs”. How about the loss of jobs of the same number!

TRUMP and his illiterate legions hotly blame foreigners and immigrants for taking their jobs, and that is true to some extent, but the real culprits are Robots and computers which are taking over the work place where once humans toiled. So will TRUMP outlaw robots and computers?
We simply cannot set back the clock to the 17th Century when wind and water fueled economic life. Yet eliminating fossil fuels has become necessary: increasing its use – as the now TRUMP regime wants to do – will hasten the Day of Reckoning.
The new man in Washington wants to implement across the board tariffs and fines, cajoling companies with threats and empty bombast, which may actually have the opposite effect, upsetting the delicately balanced economic system and the carefully calibrated international agreements. It may suddenly bring on the day of reckoning, paying the price for unprecedented pollution, and negation of the human spirit caused by as Postman so aptly phrased it AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH.
We live in a world gone mad.

Let’s not fool ourselves: we are in for the most terrible of times. The rumblings are all too evident, in the weather, in the economy, in the deteriorating state of the global health, in the TRUMP tragedy, in the irreparable Middle East drama: it’s time for the people of God to extract ourselves from political, economic, self-destructing circumstances that inevitably will lead to total disaster.

Yes, let me be honest: my Calvinistic tentacles, my Bible-based opinions tell me that we will self-destruct. I now suspect that Climate Change is the deciding factor with the Arctic holding the key, the place where untold trillions of tons of methane are about to emerge. Before the final denouement, before our entire world will go up in flames, we will experience wars, famines, mass migration and state failure. These are the Horsemen of the coming Collapse of Industrial Civilization.

The Titanic to come.

Just as in the case of RMS Titanic, when this ship called industrial civilization sinks there will not be enough life boats, and those that there are will not be fully utilized. That is the reason why we must leave before everybody tries to do it at the same time.

Leave? If not, what?

We are back to the ABEL-CAIN situation.

That needs some clarification. So let me take an example from the Bible.
You may recall how the two first sons of Adam and Eve were quite religious and made an offering to Yahweh. God accepted Abel’s gesture of devotion, but rejected Cain’s, because he was not sincere in his approach to God. This infuriated Cain so much that he killed his brother. Religious strife is still with us and is often among the most ferocious.

Cain fled and we read that he built a city, signifying that the human desire to exclude God from creation is the prime motive behind the founding of the city.
Cain, who murdered his brother Abel, is the first city builder. He called it Enoch, which means a New Beginning.
Jacques Ellul in his book THE MEANING OF THE CITY mentioned that it was Cain’s intention to re-make the world over again, with not the Garden of Eden but the City as the new paradise.

Ellul wrote: “Cain has built a city. For God’s Eden he substitutes his own, for the goal given to his life by God, he substitutes a goal chosen by himself. The city is the direct consequence of Cain’s murderous act and of his own refusal to accept God’s protection. ….The city is opposed to Eden….God’s creation is seen as nothing. Cain made a new start, a start no longer seen as God’s beginning, but of human making.
“And thus Cain, with everything he does digs a little deeper the abyss between himself and God….. With Cain’s beginning with Enoch, we have a sure starting place for all of civilization. Paradise becomes a legend and creation a myth……..Cain takes possession of the world and uses it as he wishes…….It is man’s highhanded piracy of creation that makes creation incapable of giving glory to God. Cain bends all of creation to his will.”
Today we see this clearly in the aims of Trump: no consideration of nature whatsoever.
In his book Ellul does not glorify the country over the city, because, today, by and large, the countryside simply has become an extension of the city. Geert Mak in his Dutch book “How God disappeared from Jorwerd”, eloquently described how a small Frisian village lost its tradesmen, its specialty stores, its very soul, when commuters bought its houses, and relied for their purchases on city-based big block merchandize, so effectively killing the village’s economy. The same is true everywhere in the Western world.

Ellul mentions that too when he writes that, “Babylon is not A city, it is THE city……..When the wrath of God is loosed, she is struck first…. She is the very home of civilization and when the great city vanishes, there is no more civilization, a world disappears…..The very fact of living in the city directs a person down an inhuman road. They are taken into the service and worship of a somber goddess.”
Is that the end? Does Ellul in his THE MEANING OF THE CITY offer no hope?
He does. He points to the NEW CITY to come, a city the exact opposite of the city Cain founded, and in which we now live, which has to be destroyed, as she was and still is the representation of human security and human thinking and human intentions.

In the new city, the City of God, the Lord’s presence will be constant, his spirit all pervasive. And promises Revelation 14: 13: Our good deeds will follow us there. Writes Ellul: “The new city is founded in humility, constructed in the acceptance of God’s decisions. ……….Just as the new city is the accomplishment of what we humans were never able to realize, she is also the exact opposite of the earthly city….and the exact counterpart of what we humans had wanted to do.”
Properly speaking the new world to come will totally reflect God’s will, will be a world where communion with God is perfect and for all who live there.

I believe that it is later than we think. The Bible also says that the collapse will be sudden and unexpected. ARCTIC NEWS keeps on raising the alarm. Here is what this blog says, dated January 16: “The outlook is terrifying. As I calculated last year, surface temperatures of the atmosphere could rise by some 10°C or 18°F within a decade, i.e. by 2026,” making true 2 Peter 3: 10-13, I might add.

Last year, 2016, the global temperature was well above 1.5°C. At the North Pole in December 2016, it was 6.58°C (11.84°F) warmer, already releasing mega amounts of methane!

“‘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 18: 4.”
We have to reorient our goals, away from the City of Man to the City of God where SHALOM reigns, where full harmony within all spheres of life and within all humans, animals and plants will be universal.

Can we still form communities where we are at peace with God, his creation and each other? Can we still create ‘neo-monastic church communities’ as places of formation for modern Christians? Or is it too late? Is the seductive power of the CITY too great?

Pray without ceasing and may our works follow us into eternity.