Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

OCTOBER 25 2015

HE’S COMING AND WE MADE HIM.

Have you cut down on your driving, lowered the heat in your house, downsized to 1950 housing standards, walked or biked where it was possible, gone vegetarian, ripped out that lawn and started to grow your own produce? Of course not. Nobody else you know has done that, so why should you.
Let me go back a few years. When I started selling real estate in 1963 the first house I sold was a new 3 bedroom brick bungalow, full basement, measuring 40 feet by 25 feet or 1,000 square feet for $12,000. Then the family size was 4.5 persons, giving each person about 220 square feet. Now the average new house is 2400 square feet, occupied by a small family of 2.6 persons, or close to 1,000 sq.ft per person. Cheap and abundant energy made this possible, and, of course, cheap money, thus lots of debt. Downsizing to 1960 standards would mean 600 sq.ft. dwellings and a huge saving in carbon!
Appealing to people to restrain themselves by self-enforced abstinence alone is a waste of time. By and large, we consume as much as our incomes allow: the more we earn, the bigger the car, the larger the living space, the more we fly, the further away the vacations. In other words: we love to tell the world that we are well-off.

My opinion

We will not, we will never, change our living habits voluntarily. That bodes ill for climate change and will cause HIM to come. Nobody in the Western world – of course there are a few exceptions – will go against the grain, will be a climate change leader, yet we will have to if the world will stop the process of Climate Change.
Next month the world will meet in Paris to discuss this matter. With Stephen Harper out of the picture in Canada and the Australian Abbott also booted out, two vocal Climate Change deniers will not be heard. However the USA is still the wild card. Obama is convinced that the world is in danger, but less than 35 percent of its population shares that view.

The only way to stop Global Warming is to enforce it by law. Only when enforceable and enforced constraints are in place for everyone, can manmade global warming be curtailed. That simply means that we need a world-wide body to legally enforce the way we live. Does that point to the HIM, the Anti-Christ?
Justin Trudeau in Canada and whoever will be president in the USA have their work cut out for them. In Europe it is a little easier. They have the Euro area, comprising most of that part of the world. There is a governing body in place to start a process of carbon use curtailment. Also, generally, Europeans are much more climate conscious than we in North America. I can see Canada come around somewhat, but there is no doubt that it is almost impossible to curtail energy use there. We simply cannot abandon the McMansion we have built everywhere. The only way to force people to alter their wasteful living habits is to tax them on the carbon fuels they use. In other words: a carbon tax.

Of course a carbon tax solves nothing. The rich can afford to pay it. And the poor? Well they’ll sell their ration to the rich, so it is a sort of wealth transfer. More about that next week when I take a stab at the number 666.
Let’s face it: we have painted ourselves in a corner. We have built a society based on cheap and abundant and – presumably – friendly fuel. We now know that this was totally wrong, but once on that road it is impossible to turn back: it is a one way street to universal suicide.
When the substance used in refrigeration was seen to cause the Ozone layer to disappear, the so-called Montreal Accord was universally accepted because there was a non-polluting alternative readily available. Now we must replace fossil fuel with solar and wind power, which is possible to some degree as long as energy to make thee panels and towetrs is cheap and widely available because it still takes electricity to fuel hybrid cars; it still takes all sorts of steel and other material to fabricate them, using perhaps as much energy to manufacture and transport them than they save in fossil fuels. And then there is long distance trucking and airplanes.
Elections

I closely followed the Canadian elections and still do so for the USA where politics has become a total farce, which bodes ill for the world. Were the government there to legislate a carbon tax there, the country would see a revolt.
For Canada too it does not look promising. Take Canada`s recent election. The mantra all party leaders forcefully proclaimed was that Economic growth would be their prime goal. The Liberal Trudeau went the furthest by promising deficit financing to build or repair the infra structure so that heavily polluting cars and trucks would have a smoother ride. Expanding the infrastructure means new jobs, more carbon costs and also more taxes: Infinite Economic growth in a Finite World is impossibility. None of the politicians even hinted at this.

We all love our television. We love watching sports. We love the situation comedies, all financed by advertising which have as sole purpose to sell us more things we don`t need with money we don`t have.
I repeat: it just can’t be done, assuring that HE will come.

A steady state economy, which means a no growth society, will only be achieved when a new human consciousness emerges. That means a totally new mindset. This means a complete reversal of the way we now live. Even if this were to happen, even if everybody would suddenly be a convinced environmentalist, nothing would change because of the sort of suburban society we have created, including the massive Wal-Mart stores, the Big Box business model: change has become structurally impossible. We simply cannot go back to small dwellings, small local communities and local enterprise, no matter how willing we are. Only demonic repression, a ruthless dictatorship, a regime with a wide-spread secret police and death penalties for energy abusers is able to only somewhat make this possible. Prepare for HIM to come.

Voluntary curtailment just can’t be done.

Like so many others we too have kids spread out over North America which mean airplane trips either for us to see them or for them to visit us. Our grandchildren want jobs, need economic growth to make a career. In short: a no growth society is a pipe dream. We can’t change anymore. Nobody wants a stagnated society, not a soon-to-graduate student looking for the first job; not immigrants who arrive with almost nothing; not newlyweds considering starting a family; not academics building research programs or pursuing tenure; not development officers of green non-profit organizations; not the newly elected Prime Minister of Canada. Perhaps a few old fogeys like me, a somewhat well-off retiree. That’s about it.
Granted, we in North America certainly could do with less. Europe, with an equal if not higher standard of living, manages to do so at half the carbon use. But how about China or India, where a good portion of the population lives on a dollar or two per day. No way will ROW, the Rest of the World condone a no-growth policy.
What will eventually happen?

We eventually will see the implementation of some sort of wartime energy rationing, perhaps by means of electronic coupons that must be surrendered with each fill-up, electricity payment and heating fuel. Each person receiving an equal share. That how it was done during the war in Europe with food and clothing. Extra coupons too be bought from those who use less. It means, of course, a world-wide police state. More about that next week. Failure to implement this mean unrestrained weather catastrophes. We are well on the way for this: every month this year has been the warmest ever, with September exceeding all.
Yes, we live in interesting times.

It is fascinating to follow the USA political scene. What is going on there is a snapshot of what is happening elsewhere. Gone are all illusions. The United States is abandoning its self-imposed overseer of international order. What Paul Kennedy in his classic book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers predicted, is happening: money problems and budget constraints will force once Great nations to stop policing the world- as the US has been doing – or face monetary collapse.
The real problem is that we have abandoned God.

Jesus once wondered whether he, upon his return, would still find faith on earth. Indeed our deeper problem is spiritual. Capitalism has brought the world to the edge of environmental collapse. Now all sorts of pseudo religions are appearing, one of them evident in the USA in the Tea Party vision of individual priority where Government action of any kind is seen as evil. And that in an age where only concerted action to combat Climate Change can give us a bit of hope.
Common sense is no longer an option there. In the USA are emerging fanatic movements, devoid of reason. In case after case, “reasonableness” has been trampled by behavior and creed that is stronger, darker and less temperate. As David Brooks wrote in the New York Times: “Fanatics flock to the Middle East to behead strangers and apostates. China’s growing affluence hasn’t led to sweetening, but in many areas to nationalistic belligerence. Iran is still committed to its radical eschatology. Russia is led by a cold-eyed thug with a semi-theological vision of his nation’s destiny. He seeks every chance to undermine the world order.”

All politicians are at a loss how to counter this. Canada may have elected a charming new leader, but smiles and hugs are no remedy for Climate Change, budget deficits, falling oil prices, universal deflation, or a Super El Nino. Persons such as Trump in the USA and Carson, both leading the polls in the Republican contest for the Presidency, are purely false prophets. Can Hillary Clinton rescue us? No person can because the problems are larger than life.
I once wrote long ago that civilization started in the Middle East and it looks like it will end there too as Russia and its arrogant leader has now increased the odds of this happening.

No longer can diplomacy and appeal to common sense be used to rectify the world situation.
Last week NASA, the USA National Aeronautics and Space Administration, predicted that California will experience a major earthquake in the next 30 months. The Revelation of John, the last Bible book, predicts that one of the signs of the last days is a giant earthquake.
A super El Nino is on the way. There was also one in 1918, the year of the Spanish Flu, which killed anywhere from 40-100 million people when the entire world population was less than 2 billion. People now think that the 1918 El Nino contributed to the onset of that pandemic as an El Nino affects weather patterns throughout the entire world, causing extreme droughts in some places and floods in others. A similar pandemic today with 7 billion plus people in the world could well kill hundreds of millions, especially since, according to the influential medical magazine The Lancet, 90 percent of the world population already suffers from some sort of disease.

Where is this all heading?

Writing in The American Interest, Joshua Mitchell of Georgetown argues that we are heading toward an “Age of Exhaustion.” That sounds true to me. Most certainly we are at the end of Capitalism whose mantra is ‘creative destruction’. We have used up 50 percent of all life on earth to satisfy our growing population and its inexhaustible appetite for all things natural. I repeat that Infinite Growth in a Finite World is impossible, yet our politicians utter this phrase all the time and win elections on this platform.

The Bible tells us time and again that “we must love God above all and our neighbors as ourselves”. To love God means to love his creation. That is the core of our failing. The world is full of false prophets: the Donald Trumps in the USA, the Le Pens in France, the ISIS caliph in the Arab world, and Vladimir Putin in Russia. They will make matters worse and speed up the coming of a world ruler, the Anti-Christ, who will try to enslave us all.

Next week: What could the number 666 mean?

OCTOBER 18 2015

IS THE CITY BEYOND REDEMPTION?

Last week I wrote that, when disaster strikes, people in the city will not be able to find refuge. I did not elaborate then, promising to do this now. Here are a few obvious facts. When collapse looms there will be no electricity and thus all transportation will soon cease. Today people in cities such as Toronto and New York increasingly rely on public transportation which is good for mobility inside the city but traveling away from the core requires a car. Both in Toronto, the third largest city in North America, and New York tens of thousands have bought condos in the core, forsaking the use of the automobile, so all these people are stuck when disaster strikes: there simply is no escape. Stores only have a three day supply. After that: famine.
It all started with Cain. Cain? Who is he?
There once were two brothers, Cain and Abel. Their parents were Adam and Eve, which the Bible tells us were the first human pair. These two fellows were born when their parents were banned from the Garden of Eden. They were as different as two siblings could be. Cain was the man of action who worked the land and tamed animals to take the hard work out of farming. Abel was a shepherd. While Cain was impatient, Abel was slow in pace, contemplative, not lazy, but certainly no go-getter. Somehow Abel understood God’s plan for creation, he relied on God’s law, studied the way of nature, and marvelled at God’s goodness.
Cain was different. Because his parents had insisted on his doing so, he went through the routine of worship but really thought offering a lamb or other animal pretty silly stuff. He noticed Abel’s contentment, his happiness, his lack of uptightness and realized his own anxiety and his own restlessness.
All this did not escape God’s attention. He spoke to Cain: “what the matter with you? How come you are so unhappy? Cain replied: “I do all the work around the place. I toil from dawn to dusk and beyond. Abel, the pious fool, what does he do to contribute to the economic well-being of the family enterprise?” So, at one time when Abel had forgotten to close the gate and his sheep accidently strayed into a field ready for harvest, his anger boiled over and he knocked him cold. Abel’s head hit a sharp stone and he bled to death.
Then God got into the act again: “Cain, where is your brother Abel?” But Cain ignored the question and kept on walking. God repeated the question and Cain screamed back: “Leave me alone. Am I my brother’s keeper?” God: “Cain you killed him. His blood cries out to me from the ground. Now the ground is cursed forever and you will be a restless wanderer forever.”
Cain, scared, lamented: “You drive me from the land. Whoever finds me will kill me.”
The start of the city.

God makes a promise and allows him to develop creation in the way he sees fit. Why does God give Cain such freedom? God wants to speed up the development of creation. Cain, driven from the fields, uprooted from a slow-moving agricultural life, God gave Cain carte-blanche to bend God’s creation to mold it into the image of humanity. Until Abel’s blood flowed, there still was a great deal of stability and affinity between the human race and God’s creation. Cain shattered that closeness. He introduced insecurity, the taste for blood, the desire for revenge.
Cain, the insecure wanderer, who yet craved security, Cain was promised protection by God, a God whose existence he denied. The tragedy of Cain, the tragedy of the human condition, is that the human Cain will always be in search of a home.
So where does Cain search? He turns his eye and his desire to Eden, toward the lost paradise, and this too is the perpetual quest for humanity. The search for a home, the search for “Paradise Lost” is nothing else but the human desire for God’s presence.
Cain, in search for a home, in search for security, builds a fortified city.
It is now almost impossible to imagine life without the city. People even in the smallest communities, isolated on remote islands, depend on the city. The old age pension cheques, the TV programs, our tax notices, they all come from the city. Human progress and the city are most intimately intertwined. Harsh as it may sound, the city, the place of human progress, is the direct consequence, is the direct consequence of Cain’s murderous act and his refusal to accept God’s protection.
So Cain builds his city. For God’s open paradise, Eden, he substitutes his closed fort. He calls the city Enoch, which means “a new Beginning.” Cain is going to make the world over again in his image. God’s creation is seen as nothing. A new start is made, a new beginning. Cain, with everything he does, digs a little deeper the abyss between himself and God. Each solution to a problem becomes a new disobedience, each invention, each remedy, a new offence to God. With Cain paradise becomes a legend, creation a myth. Cain, in his city called “A new beginning” takes possession of the world, and molds creation according to his plan. It is no longer God’s world: it is Cain’s creation.

The city, what is it?

It is the place of people, rich and poor, old and young. It is the place of cathedrals and concerts, of head offices and sweatshops, of courts and crime. Many people of God live there, yet basically a city is the place where the human desire to exclude God from creation is the prime motive, is the place where people display a remarkable unity in being separated from God, where constant efforts are made to exclude any divine intervention.
Perhaps 60 years ago there still was a country-side separated from the city, but now there is little difference. Food production with monstrous tractors and so much other energy-intensive machinery has become just as heavily dependent on the total energy package as the city. The modern farmer has become little more than an extension of the city system. Now with the opening of India and China many more billions want to adopt the Western City and will become enslaved to the environmental waste cause by human progress.
Yet the city, Cain’s answer to Eden, to paradise, is God’s way of preparing God’s people for the New Jerusalem, the City of God. The city is now the place through which Christians, wherever in the world, must pass. The city is the world today, the world is the city, the global village where, says 1 John 5: 19, Satan rules. The Arabian desert, the valleys of Nepal, the African jungle, the forests in Brazil, the space above the earth where the satellites roam, every square inch of the universe has been annexed by the city. We need to be in the city but not of the city. We must work for the betterment of the city without adopting the mentality of the city.
For Cain, the founder of the city, it was first of all a monument to his own pride, his defiance to the God whose existence he even denied. God now uses Cain’s pride and is using our pride to produce human progress. Cain saw the city as the expression of his power to thwart God’s efforts to bring creation to its fullness. God uses the momentum of progress and the advance of human knowledge not only to bring about the downfall of those who willfully pollute creation, but miraculously God also blesses human progress for the benefit of the building of God’s city. The contemporary designers and builders of the city now have no God-Creator factor in their blueprints, yet they cannot manage to exclude God from the city. When the full truth is revealed it will become plain that God has used the sinful efforts of humanity to bring about God’s plan, the New Jerusalem.
The city has become the place of non-communication. Through all branches of electronic and written media, through advertising and promoting a consumer lifestyle, the economic aims everywhere are clearly identical. With a universal economic language, with ‘market forces’ in control world-wide and instantaneous satellite communication everywhere, never has there been a greater choice in communication networks and simultaneously a greater lack of personal communication. It is the Tower of Babel confusion all over again but now the confusion is not caused by God but is self-generated. Confrontation is now world-wide. As the population pressures multiply, as the conflict zones expand, as the soil becomes more degraded and the air more dangerous, so too wars and rumors of war multiply. The tragedy of human progress, of a life lived without God is becoming more focused, and so are the voices of despair and the acts of desperation evident in the millions of migrants now moving to where food and safe shelter beckons. No longer is heard a message of optimism, of a better tomorrow.

The entire world is now city.

We are now in the midst of the great cosmic drama of conflict that defines the earth as it yearns for the perfection of heaven. As Johan Herman Bavinck in his exposition of John’s book of Revelation indicates: “everything on earth is tiring” while the church lives in conformity and contamination. Therefore the world remains ignorant of what is to come and will be utterly surprised when the mighty choral, the jubilation song of the victory, will resound through the universe.
Last week I wrote that, when disaster strikes, people in the city will not be able to find refuge. I did not elaborate then, promising to do this now. In my previous column “Does violence against creation and the killing by humans have a common root?” I mentioned that the Bible urges us “To come out of it”, meaning the destructive lifestyle we are engaged in, and I pointed to Cain as the ultimate cause of this situation.
It is true that the city, the bastion built by Cain and his offspring, provides no refuge because it has become totally dependent on creation-destroying energy resources, totally depending in its electricity distribution network. It is equally true that moving to the country is basically no solution as it too has become an integral part of the urban scene. That basically means that there is no possibility that we can pull through when global disaster strikes. That is the cruel truth.
So what does it mean when the Bible urges us “To come out of it?”
“God is a Spirit and we must worship him in spirit and in truth”, Jesus tells the Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob (John 4: 24). The truth of the matter is that we must first understand the real state of affairs in our world, which means the sinfulness of our creation-destroying way of life. This means that there is no real escape from disaster when this present world falls apart which it simply inevitable. Therefore we must rely on prayer and God’s goodness to face the horrors of disintegration as escape to a safe haven is impossible.
The time to mentally and spiritually prepare for that is now. We must detach ourselves from ‘the spirit of this age’, the false god of capitalism, the false notion that compromise is possible, the false optimism that somehow we can muddle through. Don’t expect the church at large to provide the answers, even though some of its members will.

The Bible in its last book, the Revelation of John, tells us that we live “At the threshold of Eternity”. Today we are exactly there. The stage is being set for Jesus to return, but not yet. More about that next week.

Next week: Why a world ruler – The Anti-Christ? – is a logical next step.

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OCTOBER 11 2015
Does violence against creation and the killing by humans have a common root?

There are 33,000 people in America who lose their lives to gun violence each year and more than twice as many are injured by bullets. There also were 994 mass shootings in 1,004 days. These mass shootings caused 1,260 deaths and 3606 injured, the latest just last week in Oregon.
Welcome to “The City of the Hill, the envy of all nations”. Or is it? The Oregon school shooting is evidence that the US response to gun violence “has become routine”, Barack Obama says: “The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it is routine. We have become numb to this.”
Obama continued: “What’s also routine is that somebody, somewhere, will comment and say ‘Obama politicized this issue.’ Well this is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic.”
Of course anything Obama says is contested by the slate of Republican contenders for the presidency who always object to more gun restrictions. One of them, Jeb Bush, said: “We’re in a difficult time in our country and I don’t think more government is necessarily the answer to this. I think we need to reconnect ourselves with everybody else. It’s just very sad to see.”

Bush continued: “But I resist the notion — and I had this challenge as governor — because we had — look, stuff happens, there’s always a crisis. And the impulse is always to do something and it’s not necessarily the right thing to do.”
“Stuff happens.” What is true of indifference to gun-killing by the Republican candidates for the presidency- and Canada’s Harper regime – also applies to our natural world. “Stuff happens.” That we’re sitting on planetary boundaries right now, and that these systems may flip from one stable state to another unstable point, is not mentioned. That the Amazon rainforests may tip into a savannah, that the Arctic loses its ice cover and instead of reflecting the sun’s rays starts to absorb them in water, and that the glaciers all melt and cannot feed the rivers — is not a campaign issue, because the majority of people don’t believe that.

Nevertheless there are more and more signs that we may have reached a saturation point. Forests show the first signs of absorbing less carbon. The oceans are rapidly acidifying as they absorb more CO2, harming fish and coral. Global average temperatures keep rising.
Both in Canada and in the USA the next governments there will face a world that suddenly may tip into a state where the planet no longer can absorb the daily doses of pollutants we pour into its air, its waters and its soils. When nature goes against you, watch out.

“Stuff happens.” 33,000 are killed each year in the USA by guns alone. That works out to almost 100 deadly shootings each day. “Stuff happens.” Have gun, will kill. The Harper party in Canada killed the gun control law. Let’s pray that he will be soundly defeated on October 19. No Christian in his or her right mind – those loving God and his entire creation – can in good conscience vote for this politician who had gutted environmental laws, has muzzled scientists who spoke out on environmental issues and fired a scientist who composed a song called “The Harperman” faintly ridiculing the Prime Minister.

“Thou shalt not kill” is one of the Ten Commandments. It also applies to nature. Killing nature means killing people who depend on it. That’s why degradation of the one leads to degradation of the other. That degradation also applies to disdain for other religions. During the current Canadian election, that same Harper man is using the niqab issue – the all-face covering by Muslim women – to black-ball all Islam followers, making fear for certain people an election issue. Beware of Christians – like Harper – who believe in heaven as their ultimate destination: they defile creation and they think they have a special line to God knowing who will be saved and who will burn in hell. Beware of Christians who hate sinners but condone sin.
Possession of guns kills. We have to start the process of curtailing our gun culture, and I don’t say that as an anti-gun absolutist, but as a person who while serving in the military from 1949-51 was trained to instruct young recruits how to use guns to kill others. In my instructor days, when bayonets were still fitted to rifles I even had to make these young conscripts simulate killing people with that sharp tool by sticking it into bales of straw and yelling their heads off.

I remember once going hunting for the first and last time in my life. When I had a rabbit in the scope, I simply could not pull the trigger. That’s how fainthearted a person I have become. I have a grandson who hunts deer with a bow and arrow somewhere in Wisconsin where there are too many deer. I can see the use there.
But to kill people?

Well, wait a minute. We kill creation every day. We already have killed half of the large wild animals in the world. We already have killed almost all the large fish in the seas. We already have appropriated half of the entire earth-mass for the exclusive use for us humans. We kill thousands of people in the Middle East by our inhuman policies. We kill a cruel million people every year in automobile accidents and maim or injure many millions more. In addition, untold billions are breathing in lethal gases from our auto tail pipes. Thanks to Climate Change we soon will kill millions in Africa and Asia by inducing either too much rain or not enough.
In a word: we all are a thoroughly murderous bunch.
No wonder there is a lot of fear out there. Fear kills. Mass shootings that take place in the USA almost every day come forth from fear. Instead of creating awareness that guns kill, and that only abstinence, total absence of guns in one’s possession can guarantee safety, the opposite is happening: people engage in what can only be described as panic buying and ammunition hoarding. People are buying guns out of fear. Television feeds on this fear, featuring shows that feed on fear, pitching the message that there is no one and nothing we can trust, not family, not neighbors, and certainly not the authorities.

Yes, there is reason for fear because we have created a world that now can, at any moment, tip into disaster. But the real ‘fear’ is missing: there is no longer the fear of the Lord. The angels in Bethlehem’s fields, who appeared at the shepherds there to announce the birth of Jesus, started with the words: “Fear not.” When Jesus was confronted by heavily armed soldiers to arrest him and Peter pulled a gun injuring one of the guards, Jesus healed the man and said the memorable words: (Matt. 26: 22) “they who draw a gun will be killed by a gun”. Remember also Jesus words of turning the other cheek?

People are afraid.

These people are afraid. Ignorance breeds fear. People no longer know what Jesus has said about violence. Thanks to TV and the conservative media and, especially, the gun industry they are convinced that the time is coming when sales of weapons, particularly some types of weapons will be restricted or forbidden. They are afraid of growing populations of people they don’t trust. Some are even afraid that a time will come when they will have to defend themselves against the government itself.
Harper and other right-wing politicians use fear to control them. Fear of the unknown, fear of what’s different, fear of change. But also fear of communists, fear of muslims and fear of people who have different skin colors, customs, rituals and cultures. We possess a myriad of -often dormant- fears, and it is very easy to play into them, and get people to support those who promise to protect them. “Trust me, I’ll keep you comfy, I’ll make sure things stay just the same.”

Fortunately gun laws are different in Canada. If I were to buy a gun I would have to write an exam, undergo a thorough character test, and face all sorts of obstacles before I can lay my hands on this lethal weapon. Thanks God. Gun-related deaths here are a fraction of those to our Southern neighbor.
There fear is winning, even though crime is down. There fear is winning and so are massacres because these don’t lead to fewer gun sales, but more. There fear is winning, induced by anti-government militias and hate groups. There fear is winning with the result that there are now close to as many guns in the USA as people — with the gun industry producing millions more each year. There they have reached a supersaturation point as a culture. And with that many guns in circulation, too many will invariably make their way into the hands of people with ill intent.

If you have read my writings for a while then you know that the future does not look bright: on the contrary, We are approaching the end of an era: a time when economic growth, that goal that politicians always promise but are now unable to achieve, will cause increasing hardship. The debt we have created, not only to the environment but also on all levels of society, and I refer to monetary debt here, must be repaid in one form or another. Chances that we will have a severe recession, even a depression, are increasing exponentially. Already we see an immense increase in natural disasters, either too much or too little rain, resulting in extra costs and extra taxes. People will become more afraid, and have real reason to be so. They will not turn to the Lord and accept what is to come as signs that the return of the Lord is near, and greet these signs with delight and anticipation. No, with an increasing lack of biblical insight, their fear will turn to more violence and with the massive amount of lethal weapons everywhere mass murders will become commonplace.

What to do?

With physical violence we can turn other cheek, as Jesus did, but with bullets flying around, once one cheek is hit, that’s it. That’s the reason the bible advises us to avoid the conflict altogether: “Come out of it” the Bible advises repeatedly, both in the New Testament, Revelation 18: 4, and in the Old Testament, both in Isaiah and Jeremiah. We don’t have to court danger. It is prudent to run from it. Jesus himself, apparently referring to destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, advises his people to get out of the city while there is yet time. The mentioning of ‘the great desolation of which Daniel speaks’ in that ominous chapter of Matthew 24 – I advise you to look it up and read it aloud – refers to world-wide pollution, not only the senseless killing by guns, but also Climate Change that creates havoc everywhere. There too Jesus reminds us to seek refuge somewhere else.

“Come out of it?”

That is easier said than done. In Jesus’ time people mostly lived in small villages. Then only Jerusalem was a large city.
Today almost everywhere people are city dwellers. The Chinese government has relocated hundreds of millions to the cities, even constructing some 70 million apartments where nobody lives. Coming out of the cities and flee the violence and safeguard one’s existence has become almost impossible. Cities have the jobs. Farming has become big-city enterprises. Although I have some ideas, it calls for imaginative and communal thinking to find an answer there. Perhaps there is no longer an answer. Perhaps the existence of cities is an unnatural phenomenon: Cain was the builder of cities! He killed Abel, the first murder victim, who was a country fellow. The city kills the country. Violence against the first human being was the start of the death of nature.

More about that next week.

OCTOBER 4 2015

Is Capitalism a religion?

Let me take a look back, a really long look back. I think the root of Capitalism appeared in the Garden of Eden. In Genesis 2:9 it is recorded that God made trees to come out of the ground, ‘trees pleasing to the eye and good for food’. Then in the next chapter Genesis 3: 6, when the human race had a closer look at the trees, prodded by God’s archenemy, trees were suddenly seen in a different light: ‘trees good for food and pleasing to the eye’. There you have it: the order reversed, the beginning of capitalism: good for food, good to feast upon, good for profit, never mind the beauty of creation, never mind creational collapse.
In last week’s blog I defined religion as a belief or condition that is pervasive in all our actions, that motivates all of our life.
We know that in the Western world the condition what is generally defined as ‘religion’ is very much on the wane. In my neck of the woods, a municipality with 6500 people inhabiting an area the size of the city of Hamilton with over 500,000 people no more than 200 people attend church on a given Sunday, or 3 percent, mostly old people. Yet we call our nation a Christian country. The children and grandchildren of these people, by and large, never darken the doors of the church except for funerals. So what is their religion because nobody is not ‘not-religious’?
‘Not religious’ means that God and Jesus do not play a role in their lives. They never pray even though the exclamation “Oh my God” is heard quite frequently. Still the monotheistic faith-traditions have not just disappeared into the thin air of modernity. Islam is the most pious of them, perhaps because it requires work: it involves the keeping of the five all important religious duties: confession of faith, prayer, the giving of alms, fasting and the pilgrim trek to Mecca. Islamic cultures also contain strong currents of resistance to Western consumer individualism because they are perceived as decadent and nihilistic, and they are. But in the West, Christianity has lost much of its power to resist the new god that has (and is) conquering the old ones (just like Christianity did in its displacement of Roman deities). And that power is Capitalism, which has become our first truly world religion, binding all corners of the globe into a worldview and set of values whose religious role we overlook only because we insist on seeing them as secular.

Capitalism comes with its own theology.

Economics is the new theology of this global religion of the market. It has different expressions, but the overall aim is the same: consumerism is its highest good; its language of hedge funds and derivatives as incomprehensibly involved as the Christian teachings about the Trinity or Predestination. Its mantra is “Accumulate, accumulate”. Where in Islam the slogan is “God is great”, meaning Allah, in Capitalism it is “Greed is great,” something that, I think, started in Paradise, the Garden of Eden, when economics- good for food- had priority over the aesthetic – pleasing to the eye.

We are all religious.

Human beings are innately religious. Nobody is not ‘not-religious’. Watching Stephen Harper, Canada’s Prime Minister fighting for his political future, outline his re-election platform, is watching religion at work: lower taxes, economic growth, balanced budgets: the trinity of Capitalistic faith. Of course the other contestants believe the same. That we live in a finite world, that perpetual growth only takes place in un-treated cancer cells, is never mentioned. That perpetual growth has given us the cancer of Climate Change is never mentioned. To say that, to openly admit that, is to question the god of our age, and that is sacrilege.
Any intervention in the “world of business” is perceived as a threat to the “natural order of things,” a direct challenge to the “wisdom of the market.” That the “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”, that awe for the greatness of creation and its holiness, must be observed, goes directly against the grain of capitalism. No, capitalism demands that its dogma must be applied universally, must be observed as the dominant religion of our time. The TPP – the Trans Pacific Partnership- is just the latest example.
Yes, Capitalism is a religion. We sacrifice our time, our families, our children, our forests, our seas and our land on the altar of the market, the god to whom we owe our deepest allegiance, all the hallmarks of a (false) religion. The Bible may say that blessed are the poor, that blessed are those who put their trust in the New Creation to come, but that is seen as undemocratic. When Jesus says that “my kingdom is not of this world’, then he simply means that, as 1 John 5 : 19 says,” the whole world is under the control of the evil one,” and Jesus wants no part of the world ruled by Satan, a world dominated by Capitalism, our present world.
Shunning the consumer paradise for a life of self-sufficiency, taking in refugees, of whatever color or creed, devoting one’s life to alleviating the plight of others, pursuing a “the earth is holy” policy, all that is not an optional matter for most faith-community members: it is their holy duty.

Are the old religions are no longer viable?

How did this transition come about? The Lord’s Prayer, still somewhat in vogue today, has two striking lines right at the beginning: “Hallowed be thy name” and “Thy Kingdom come.” Most of us who utter these words have no clue what they mean. The church by and large avoids explaining these phrases because they are so totally controversial. That they mean that the earth is holy and that the kingdom is the new earth to come, and that thus our entire focus is not on “our daily bread” (which is mistranslated in that same prayer) but that we must live for “the new creation” is never preached, because it goes against the capitalistic creed.

Must we fight Capitalism?

Capitalism stares at us the minute we turn on TV or radio or open a newspaper. It is everywhere, while the old religions have given up the fight by preaching ‘heaven’ or ‘rapture’, delegating the earth to a place of non-relevance. It is sad but true that the old-time religion is only good for a very few, mostly the elderly, and they often are exposed to a distorted gospel.
Beginning in the late middle ages and reaching its first plateau in the late eighteenth century, the capitalist market began to assume an autonomous, god-like existence. Protestant believers began to measure God’s favor by their economic success. Economic success was the means to achieve the end of God’s favor and eternal salvation. Eventually, the means, economic blessings, displaced God himself. God was now The Market–the Source of all Hopes. Who disputes the gospel of sustained economic development? Even Jesus would drive an S.U.V, as the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, the once formidable American leader of the Christian Right, wanted us to believe.

Have we been warned?

Eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith warned us over two centuries ago that the market was a “dangerous system because it corrodes the shared common values it needs to restrain its excesses”. Two hundred years later, Polyani – a Nobel Prize winner – argued against a system that annihilated “the human and natural substance of society.”
Today the demands made on the physical world are all penetrating. German philosopher Habermas in his “colonization of the lifeworld,” wrote: “Doesn’t everyone know that the god we serve requires clear cut forests, depleted oceans, empty oil wells, toxics dumped into the biosphere? “ Genesis 3: 6 all over again.
Everyone also knows, deep down, in their heart of hearts, that the god we serve actually has no life of its own. In Capital, volume 1, Marx imagined that the god of the market was like a vampire who “lives only by sucking living labor and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” This monster feeds on the life force of the natural and human worlds. It needs men and women as slaves who have energy and the motivation to work endlessly with others to produce the goods. Even prolonging the working day, says Marx, “only slightly quenches the vampire thirst for the living blood of labor.”

And then there is Jesus.

When Jesus came to earth, forever to retain the status of both God and Human, he could have been a human being of any description, stature, degree and condition; and yet he chose to be poor. The English poet Christopher Harvey said of him in the seventeenth century:
It was Thy Choice, whilst Thou on Earth didst stay, And hadst not whereupon Thy Head to lay.
No wonder that throughout the Middle Ages Jesus is appearing not just as God, but as a pauper. I am convinced that Jesus had some basic misgivings about money – just like we do at times- because we all know that wealth and its acquisition makes people do crazy and often dishonest things. Look what Volkswagen did. “The love of money is the root of all evils,” is Paul’s warning to Timothy and this probably was one reason why Jesus did not like money. If I understand Jesus correctly, I think that with Jesus there also was a deeper reason, something very personal. I get the impression that Jesus went out of his way to avoid contact with money and was even loath to touch the stuff. Why do I make that assumption? Well, Jesus has a perfect recall of everything, past, present and future and so had perfect insight, hindsight and foresight into everything. We will we recall that his betrayal, his suffering and death was directly associated with money. How would we feel if we know that money would eventually kill me? Well, I think that this view governed Jesus’ attitude towards money and perhaps even towards economic theory.
Take the feeding of those thousands: Jesus knows that if these people had gone off to buy bread and fish in the neighboring stores, the merchants, being good businessmen, would have suddenly increased the prices of these basic food items because of greater demand. The law of supply and demand is certainly not a latter-day invention: it has existed as long as people have traded. That’s what economics is all about: charge high when everybody needs it. So what did Jesus do to forestall this price-gouging? He simply by-passed the economic law of supply and demand and created bread and fish ex nihilo- out of nothing- well, almost out of nothing.
Then there is that so uncharacteristic incident where Jesus almost went berserk when he chased the money changers out of the temple, upsetting much more than the tables. After all having these business people do their work in the temple was an age-old tradition and necessary to keep the Jewish house of worship functioning properly because only certain kinds of money were accepted in the temple. And how else to get the proper animals for sacrifice? I think it was money and its abuses that made Jesus so angry. Another, more indirect, indication: I find it curious that Judas, the unredeemed among the saints, carried the purse and handled the finances: Judas, who loved money more than Jesus. In the end he ended up with thirty pieces of silver and then discovered that money as an idol wants our very lives. In that sense we are much closer to Judas than to Jesus. With ‘we’ I include all people in the over rich West. Also to me a tip-off was Jesus’ great disdain for the nominal value of currency, evident when Mary spent perhaps a year’s income on that precious oil. “So what,” Jesus remarked, “so what if such a large sum was spent. It is only money.” Or consider the occasion when Peter was asked if Jesus would pay the temple tax. “Of course,” is Peter’s immediate reaction, “of course Jesus pays.” But for Jesus this was not such a straightforward matter. Why this reluctance to pay the temple tax? Well, I have my theory about this. I think Jesus knew that perhaps this very money given to the temple was going to buy his life and ensure his death.
Where Jesus lived without money, our lives are centered around it. Jesus once made a radical statement: “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” In our Western world everything is about money: the stock market, the strength of the dollar, the price of gold: three items mentioned in almost every newscast. Let’s not kid ourselves: Mammon is God, the Dollar is King in the world and its possession a holy grail. We now put a price tag on everything. First on Jesus – 30 pieces of silver – and now also on the rest of creation: the woods are paved, the mountains mined, the seas eaten, species eliminated: all because of money. We all participate in that criminal act. Jesus was sold for the price of a slave: we are selling creation to serve us as a slave.

An idol always wants sacrifice. In our case we sacrifice the whole earth and with it our very selves.

ISLAM VERSUS CHRISTIANITY

Before I try to outline what Christianity and Islam have in common and where they differ, I first have to talk about `religion`. If you have followed me at all, you know where I come from. I am an adherent of what is commonly called The Christian Religion, even though I have some difficulty with the way Christianity is expressed. I must say that this past week Pope Francis did go a long way in expressing the essence of the Christian Religion, which includes concern for animals and seeing all of creation as holy. However he completely fails to give women the 50 percent place they deserve in all functions, including being priests and eventually becoming a pope – which means papa or father – thus giving the world a mamma.

What is religion?

If I am to talk about religion, then a description is needed. I was brought up in a family which saw life as religion and was exposed to sermons in a staunch Calvinistic setting. For my first 45 years of life this meant going to church twice on Sunday. One sermon was always on the Heidelberg Catechism (dated from the 17th century), a series based on 52 Sundays and 129 questions and answers. The very first question of Lord’s Day 1 is: What is your only comfort in life and in death” The answer: That I am not my own but belong – body and soul, in life and death – to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.
I still see the Reformed tradition as having the greatest potential for developing an all-encompassing creational life-style in preparation for the re-appearing of the Lord.

Karen Armstrong has written a lot on Religion. She is a former nun (Roman Catholic) who has become a well-regarded author. Here is a quote from one of her articles.
“But perhaps we should ask, instead, how it came about that we in the west developed our view of religion as a purely private pursuit, essentially separate from all other human activities, and especially distinct from politics…. Secularism has become so natural to us that we assume it emerged organically, as a necessary condition of any society’s progress into modernity. Yet it was in fact a distinct creation, which arose as a result of a peculiar concatenation of historical circumstances; we may be mistaken to assume that it would evolve in the same fashion in every culture in every part of the world.

“We now take the secular state so much for granted that it is hard for us to appreciate its novelty, since before the modern period, there were no “secular” institutions and no “secular” states in our sense of the word. Their creation required the development of an entirely different understanding of religion, one that was unique to the modern west. No other culture has had anything remotely like it, and before the 18th century, it would have been incomprehensible even to European Catholics. The words in other languages that we translate as “religion” invariably refer to something vaguer, larger and more inclusive. The Arabic word din signifies an entire way of life, and the Sanskrit dharma covers law, politics, and social institutions as well as piety. The Hebrew Bible has no abstract concept of “religion”; and the Talmudic rabbis would have found it impossible to define faith in a single word or formula, because the Talmud was expressly designed to bring the whole of human life into the ambit of the sacred (I underlined that). The Oxford Classical Dictionary firmly states: “No word in either Greek or Latin corresponds to the English ‘religion’ or ‘religious’.” In fact, the only tradition that satisfies the modern western criterion of religion as a purely private pursuit is Protestant Christianity, which, like our western view of “religion”, was also a creation of the early modern period.

“The prophets of Israel had harsh words for those who assiduously observed the temple rituals but neglected the plight of the poor and oppressed. Jesus’s famous maxim to “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” was not a plea for the separation of religion and politics. Nearly all the uprisings against Rome in first-century Palestine were inspired by the conviction that the Land of Israel and its produce belonged to God, so that there was, therefore, precious little to “give back” to Caesar. When Jesus overturned the money-changers’ tables in the temple, he was not demanding a more spiritualised religion. For 500 years, the temple had been an instrument of imperial control and the tribute for Rome was stored there. Hence for Jesus it was a “den of thieves”. The bedrock message of the Qur’an is that it is wrong to build a private fortune but good to share your wealth in order to create a just, egalitarian and decent society. Gandhi would have agreed that these were matters of sacred import: “Those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.”

So far my quote of Ms. Armstrong.

So what is religion?

Religion, as I have underlined in the Armstrong article, really means that the whole of human life lies into the ambit of the sacred. There is no sacred and secular. So when I quote the Heidelberg Catechism and the answer to question 1 “That I am not my own but belong – body and soul, in life and death – to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ, then I have to see that in the context of the totality of my life. Belonging to Jesus Christ means abiding by his teaching. There is no more compact statement concerning this than in John 3: 16, those so well-known words: “God so loved the world that he gave his only son who by his death bought all of creation back from the great usurper, the current Prince of this world, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.” (My free translation).

That the Evil one and not God rules the world at this moment became again eminently plain this past week when VW – Volkswagen – was caught cheating on exhausts, poisoning the air for greater market share. Jesus came to set the world right. That is the basic message of Christianity which will only happen when he returns. If I want to belong to Jesus Christ body and soul, then my total life has to be devoted to love the world, not as it is today, but as it ought to be. Pope Francis, visiting the highest polluting nation in the world on a per capita basis, personifies that message more than most other church leaders today.
The USA is the most Christian of nations, yet those vying for the post to represent the Republican Party in the next presidential election say that the Pope is wrong when he mentions the economy. He should stick to ‘religion’, a clear indication that religion has no place in business or politics.

Harold Bloom, distinguished professor at Yale and America’s foremost literary critic, in his The American Religion writes that “We (Americans) think we are a Christian nation, but we are not. We are American Gnostics, believers in a pre-Christian tradition of individual divinity. The American self stands outside creation.” No wonder what presents itself as Christian has nothing to do with Christ. In that sense America is a pagan country.
By and large Christianity is no longer a religion but it has become a cult, grossly distorting the Bible and seeing nature as something to be exploited. The Pope cannot change the hearts and minds of the people. Luther said, quoting Romans 5: “It is by grace that we are saved.” Good works alone cannot save us.

So what about Islam?

Islam was born around the year 500-600 A.D. This religion sprouted in a totally different climate, mostly desert, and among different people, the Arabs, supposedly the descendants of Ishmael, the son of Abraham by his concubine, Hagar. There where the merciless sun burns, there, in the endless deserts of Arabia, new religious ideas were developed which became the nucleus of this world religion. Islam adopted several elements from other religions, ranging from Judaism to Paganism, from Christianity to Eastern philosophy. For Islam the existence of the one and only god forms the cornerstone of its entire belief system. Allah alone is the all-powerful Authority. Who can challenge Allah? Who can question why Allah has created the world the way it is? We cannot but fear and worship him as the One and Only God.
And what about redemption in Islam? When we surrender ourselves wholeheartedly to Allah, then we can be assured that our road to eternal bliss is assured. This surrender involves the keeping of the five all important religious duties: confession of faith, prayer, the giving of alms, fasting and the pilgrim trek to Mecca where just last week more than 700 people were crushed to death among the 2 million attending this religious routine. Mohammed himself is no more than the bringer of the message, the prophet who has proclaimed the truth. He is not the only prophet, not the first one, but he is the last and the most important one, the prophet par eminence.

It is typical that this religious approach to deliverance is by means of knowledge. Only the truth, the system of thought, sets free. Because once humans possess the truth and make it their own, they can fit it into their lives, suit it their way and even choose another path, a better one. Islam teaches that the prophet alone preaches the truth and offers the possibility of salvation. Muslims must apply this truth in their daily lives. By following the outlines they must deliver themselves and find the way toward salvation. In other words, they are justified in saying that they can redeem themselves if they only apply that truth, follow the way to truth and then they are on the way to salvation.

Where do Christians and Muslims differ?

In short Muslims can redeem themselves by following the rules. Christianity experiences the misery, the bankruptcy of life at a far deeper level, reason why it sees redemption completely different from any other religion. Is it sufficient for us when we know the truth, when the road to salvation has been prescribed for us? No, because Christianity doesn’t work that way. I may be able to know exactly where to go but inside me there is a force that always pushes me to do evil. “The good I know I do not do” says the Bible. The evil we do is not a mere matter of understanding, not an instance of ignorance, or some sort of deviation. There is much more that need to change in us, because the bankruptcy of our lives comes in three forms. We lack the knowledge, the insight into the truth. We also lack the peace, the true justice, the harmonious attitude to God. Finally we also lack the holiness, the will to do good. To be truly free we must surrender the entire structure of our existence: our redemption must be threefold, just as our misery is threefold.
That is the Reformed vision, now mainly absent in the world. With Islam all of life is religion. In contemporary Christianity, with some exceptions, there is a definite split between nature and grace, so typical of the Lutheran and Roman Catholic systems. Bonhoeffer has seen that heresy and has by and large corrected it. Pope Francis also is on the way to remedy that situation, even though he still sees women as unfit for official ecclesiastical office bearers and still has no vision of the Kingdom to come and sees the church as the kingdom. I imagine, given time, he will allow male priests to marry.

I am sorry to conclude that, if religion can be defined as a total way of life, then Islam is a religion, and I must respect that, even though I disagree with it. At the same time much of what goes under the label of Christianity is not a religion but a cult, a distortion of the truth because it lacks total comprehension. Why? It uses the Bible as a talisman, sees the written word only as holy, while often abusing God’s primary word, creation.

I also must say that in today’s society it has become impossible to live the total Christian life. We only can humbly confess this and pray for forgiveness while trying the best we can. To my shame I must confess that I drive a diesel car.

Next week: Is Capitalism a religion?

SEPTEMBER 20 2015

HOLLOWED BE THY NAME

What keeps my mind busy this week? After 10 weeks of intensive translating, consulting dictionaries, trying some different literary devices, going back and re-reading what I have written, it is ‘weeds’ that now occupy my tired mind, weeds, in the plural, the unwanted greens that always creep in between my vegetable, tomato and potato plants, weeds that stubbornly stick out on my sidewalks and between the bricks near my back door. I know Monsanto sells some sort of poison to kill them, but that is not my cup of tea. Now that I’ve sent in the book on the Revelation of John to the publisher, more than 85,000 words in 8 chapters, I have time to come back to earth, the substance we have been made of, and to which we all will return in some form of another.
A Canadian author who wrote The Two Solitudes, once said that “I don’t know what I think until I have read what I have written”. While I write this, sort of probing what at this point I will write about, my thoughts go to my Journal, a book with 365 blank pages featuring just a bible text. The idea is that I then fill the page with my musing, which I do. I sometimes skip a day and make it up the next. Last week a text was from Romans 11: 16: “If the root is holy, so are the branches.”
My quirky mind always jumps all over the place, so somehow this line reminded me of the Lord’s Prayer, and the archaic words: “Hallowed be thy name.” It made me think about an old joke. A young kid was asked the name of God and he said “Harold” is his name of course. “Hallowed” is a word we seldom use. In other languages the phrase “Hallowed be thy name” is much more in line with the spoken language. In French it is plain: “Que ton nom soit santifié”, the same in Dutch “Uw naam worde geheiligd”. Both clearly express that God’s name is holy, which applies to everything God does, including all of creation. Today, however, the line much more resembles “Hollowed be thy name”.

Yes: ”Hollowed be thy name” is much more fitting. That`s what we have done. We have taken the heart out of the earth. We have gutted God, who is total. He is what he thinks, is what he does. Everything that God has done and still is doing is holy, that makes you, that makes me, that makes the trees and the animals, the air and the soil, all holy: everything created is holy. We have gutted all that, made it hollow, have taking the heart out of it, including the soul of us, human beings.

Take Pollution.

If the air that fills my lungs becomes polluted, if the nutrients in the soil that produce my food become depleted, or if the spring water which make up 60% of my body becomes poisoned, my own health suffers accordingly. This seems like common sense, but you wouldn’t think so by observing the way we treat the natural world today. Over time, even the boundaries of what I considered to be “I” became less and less clear. We are a mere shadow of what we supposed to be: hollowed out.
When Roman legions marched on their way from Italy, through France to Germania, they travelled weeks on end through dense forests, as recorded in De Bello Gallico, a book written by Julius Caesar – which I had to read in school in Latin. The BBC reported last week that a Yale professor, using aerial maps estimated that the world once had 6 trillion trees, now reduced by 46 Percent. We know that trees are life. They absorb GHG – Green House Gases – while converting it to O2, the oxygen we need every minute to fill our lungs. With 7.2 billion of us inhaling oxygen every minute, the world now only has 400 trees per person.
How many trees do we need to have sufficient oxygen?

The USA department of Energy asked the Institute for Energy Analysis in Oak Ridge, Tenn., to calculate how many trees we need to provide us with that life-sustaining oxygen. The average American or Canadian, through our daily use of combustion engines for transportation and the prodigious amount of electricity, each one of us needs the oxygen of 4500 trees. The average family with 2.5 children needs more than 20,000 trees. Simple living Africans or Asians can survive on the oxygen of 500 trees.
This is another example where we, through our extravagant life style, deprive even the poorest of their needed breathing elements. The recent forest fires carry a double whammy: they destroy millions of trees while the fires add trillions of tons of carbon to the atmosphere, greatly enhancing the Climate Change situation.

Then there is the matter of the hollowing out of the soil. With rapid population growth, especially in Africa and Asia, we need ever more farmland with greater fertility. But here too the trends are entirely the opposite. Land degradation is costing the world as much as $10.6 trillion every year, equivalent to 17% of global GDP. This report, published last week by the Economics of Land Degradation, also warns us that more than half of the world’s arable land is moderately or severely degraded.

So far this year every heat record has been broken. The rate of increase both in loss of trees and decreased fertility goes far beyond any projected. Both will only speed up the process as decreased vegetation cover and increased soil erosion means that land is less able to store carbon, contributing to climate change. News sources now regularly report that 50 percent of fish and large animals are gone: crowded out by human greed. Hollow seas, hollow earth, hollow people too.

No wonder: millions are on the move.

These pictures we see now every day of mostly enterprising young men trying to reach Western Europe are on the move because of ‘soil degradation’ causing desertification, the result of climate change and overgrazing. This is the root cause of the migration of millions. A study by the UN’s Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), found that the process may drive an estimated 50 million people from their homes in the next 10 years. And that is probably a very low number. Others sources go as high as 200 million.

All this reminds me of a section in the book I just translated. In Revelation John describes how there was a pause in heaven, a silence lasting a “half hour”. You may know that Revelation deals with the Last Things, and the real significance of that silence has to do with the church, how the church on earth experiences her spiritual life.

Here is that quote:

“Her prayer-life, her surrender to God, her faithfulness all are part of the process of the grand finale. And John, really upset, observes that in this important moment, when everything is ready to go and the New World is about to appear, the church herself is lagging behind. She has not kept up with God, she has clung to her old customs and modes of life, has failed to grasp God’s unfathomable majesty and refused to undergo a true conversion. While being fully exposed to the grand revelation of the last things, she remained stuck in the small, everyday events of her earthly existence. Above her the loud thunderclaps of God’s threats are cascading through the skies, while she, with eyes wide open in horror, has become mesmerized, as around her all human riches and powers are visibly collapsing. Amidst all these cries of anguish escalating exponentially she has not learned to think differently. She has remained mired in the immorally routine rest of her everyday existence. Now that the very last happenings are knocking at the door, she is not ready. She no longer knows how to pray. She can’t keep up with what God is doing. The bible time and again tells us to wait on the Lord. But now the rolls are reversed. It used to be that God’s clock ran slower than ours and we had to pause for a while for God to catch up. God always had a much slower pace than we. But now it appears to be the other way around. Now God has to wait for us. Now he is way ahead of us, now our clock is slow, now we no longer can catch up to him. Is all this happening because of what we with growing intensity see happening all around us today? Is it true that, looking back to the 20th Century with its devastating wars and its aftermath of displaced persons, famine, chaos, and today with the mayhem in the Middle East, and environmental deterioration everywhere, God wants to remind us that the seventh seal is being broken now? Could it be that the breathtaking speed in which events overwhelm us today with tsunami force is a sign that the seven angels with their trumpets are poised to blow their instruments? And would all this be a sign to remind us that ours is the next move?”

So far that quote.

My recent experience in translating a book dealing with Revelation, of which the Greek name is Apocalypse made me think of the rise of Hitler in Germany in 1933. In six short years he vaulted from a relative unknown to the greatest threat to civilization ever. By some clever manipulation of half-truths and devious money maneuvering he convinced a cultivated electorate that he had the answers to the world’s problems.
Today these problems are world-wide, witnessing the experience of unprecedented storms, relentless droughts and the associated wars and south-to-north migrations. These events will jar expectations about the security of resources and make Hitlerian politics more resonant. As Hitler demonstrated, humans are able to portray a looming crisis in such a way as to justify drastic measures in the present. Under enough stress, or with enough skill, politicians can put into effect the measures Hitler pioneered. If a nation such as Germany which gave the world such giants as J. S. Bach, a Mozart, a Bonhoeffer, and many more great people, could so easily be seduced to support a Satanic regime, it seems very likely that a less distinguished population will fall for a world figure that makes the right promises.
The world is ready for a dictator, yes, even an Antichrist, because the Real Christ only promises eternal life in a renewed world, and bases this only on faith. Hebrew 11: 1 says “Faith is sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” That no longer appeals to the masses: they want it now, never mind what is to come.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. That’s what the Bible tells us. It also is an archaic expression, just as “Hallowed be Thy name”. The word ‘fear’ here has nothing to do with being afraid. It means “being in awe of”. When we look at creation with unbiased eyes and uncluttered mind, then we can only be totally floored by the wisdom of it all, how everything fits, how every animal, in the right place, how every plant in its original setting, forms a beautiful organic whole. Once we see that then we have the beginning of wisdom. That’s why the phrase “Hallowed be Thy name” must dominate our lives. We, in our utter stupidity have done the opposite. Now our life’s motto is “Hollowed be Thy name.” We have gutted God and in the process we have lost all wisdom. Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that “The sin against creation in the greatest of sin” because it deprives us of wisdom.

We must make a choice: either Hallow the name of the Creator or Hollow it.