Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

AUGUST 2 2015

OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, REALISM

Some people don’t like my columns because they find them pessimistic. Especially mothers with children fall into that category because the future I paint is one of threatening scenarios, so they close their eyes and minds to the inevitable bad times the entire world population is facing, especially children and young adults.
Also many others who shares my views on Climate Change, just cannot bring themselves to admit that there really is no cure for Global Warming, and disagree with me that planetary conditions will only deteriorate because of my conviction that human nature will never change, (We are born and conceived in sin, and therefore children of wrath!). I sincerely believe that even if we try (and we must) the capitalistic society has made it impossible to significantly moderate our energy-saturated society.
Preachers like Joel Osteen preach optimism. His motto is “You can be rich too”, just like Mr. and Mrs. Osteen. They bought a disused football stadium in Texas somewhere and preach the gospel of Prosperity, a heresy if there ever was one. With a regular attendance of some 15,000 people, their weekly take, assuming each drop $20 on the plate, is $300,000. The Osteens probably get a good percentage of that. Politicians exactly do the same: always promising growth. Ever heard a politician mention a future of bad times? Yet last year a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll revealed that 76 percent of Americans did not feel confident that ‘life for our children’s generation will be better than it has been for us.’ This is 10 percentage points worse than the poll had ever recorded. Yes, 3 out of 4 Americans are in a down mood. Almost all of them, if they miss one paycheck, have trouble paying their bills.
Last week the New York Times had an Op Ed article entitled We Need Optimists. That is the last thing we need. We Don’t Need More Optimists: unchecked positive thinking simply is dangerous: unbridled optimism is just another way to ignore real issues, which are Climate Change, uncertain future for many, debts till they die and beyond.

I headed this column with three words: pessimism, optimism, realism.

Which one do I prefer? As a society we don’t have a whole lot of patience for realists because our politics, our newspapers, our visual and audio outlets are dominated by people who tell us what we want to hear.
So what do we want to hear?
People are very insecure. Many of the jobs are subject to outsourcing, either going abroad or to mechanical slaves, such as robots. Driving trucks has become a major source of employment, yet driver-less cars and trucks are now a distinct possibility. We now see entire factories without human bodies. No wonder people feel insecure. A.I. Artificial Intelligence poses a danger to brain jobs too. So we crave security, even though religion, the only real source of security, is scorned.
When I landed in Canada with $200 in my pocket, there were lots of job opportunities. Strangely last week I had a dream. I had finished my schooling and did not know what to do next. In my dream I was totally at a loss what my next step would be, yet in my 64 years in Canada – I landed in New York on July 4 1951 and entered Canada in Fort Erie on the way, by train, to Strathroy – I never have been a day out of work. Yet I still had that scary dream. Somewhere in the past I must have suppressed these feelings of insecurity.

Today is different.

I think society has totally lost its way. Nothing is what it seems. Now that we in Canada officially have an election in October, it will rain promises. Already where I live our own tax dollars are liberally disbursed to buy votes. For a few months optimism will be in the air. No politician will mention that trade pacts will eliminate jobs at home and create polluting jobs in India and Vietnam and China. No politician will mention that China is going down, fast. There they overbuilt, over-borrowed, over-polluted, went overboard on the stock market, used the savings of their extended families in the hope of an easy buck. Chinese are notorious gamblers, and this time the gamble will not pay off. Canada, New Zealand, Australia, all mineral exporting countries, will also be the victims of these high-stake gambles, involving some 64 million unoccupied dwellings, unused bridges to nowhere, airports, harbors, all vacant. That sort of optimism is back-firing in spades. We also will be its victims.

Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of an excellent book on the perils of optimism, Bright-Sided, looks at its dangers. She mentions the Iraq fiasco, how that war was sold on optimistic premises, one of them being that invading Iraq would be a cakewalk, that it would be over in a few weeks, would cost a few million, and within a year would start paying a dividend. Now a few trillion dollars later, the mess there has become unsolvable: American optimism at work! She mentions the book claiming that the Dow would reach 36,000! Where is it now, 20 years later? Not even half- way and declining. Housing prices could never go down! Optimism was not only patriotic but was also a Christian virtue, or so we learned from the proliferating preachers of the “prosperity gospel,” whose God wants to “prosper” you. In 2006, the runaway bestseller “The Secret” promised that you could have anything you wanted, anything at all, simply by using your mental powers to “attract” it. The poor listened to upbeat preachers and took out subprime mortgages.
One of the interesting things Ehrenreich describes in “Bright-Sided,” which is subtitled “How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America,” is the origins of American optimism. While we typically assume that optimism and the U.S.A. have walked hand in hand from the beginning, the country was founded by Puritans, and it remained Calvinist — with its emphasis on depravity and sin — well into the 19th century. American optimism – Reagan comes to mind – was necessary to pull away from all of that, but the happy talk became a commodity, and was co-opted by the corporate culture and adopted by the election machine to brainwash an increasingly suspicious electorate.

Another look at China

Today China is an excellent example of optimism gone haywire. The Chinese economy is bloated with monumental mal investments and stupendous excesses—–the likes of which have never previously been visited upon a modern industrial economy. Someday soon reality will rush in causing a crash that will resound even in my back yard.
Chinese companies have expanded their debts from $2 trillion to $28 trillion in just 14 years. This will lead to a thundering deflationary collapse.
Stated differently, profits there have already nearly vanished in upstream sectors like coal, steel, aluminum and cement. They are now eroding in shipbuilding, construction equipment, solar equipment, and other capital goods; and will soon be falling in overbuilt consumer industries, especially, automobiles, as well. Like Japan in the mid-1990s, China is heading for an era of profitless deflation as its credit binge comes to an end. The meme of the day—–that China doesn’t have so many gamblers—-is hilarious. From stem to stern, China’s version of red capitalism has evolved into the greatest gambling den in history. The whole thing is a giant farce. It is worth repeating: more than 60 million empty high rise apartments, ghost cities and malls, endless strings of bridges, highways and airports to nowhere. China used more cement in three years than the US did during the entire 20th century.
What does the Bible say about this?

What is needed is a balanced and moderate approach, neither dwelling on the downsides nor a forced jumping for joy: we need a sober, hard-headed realism about our accomplishments and failings, not empty cheer-leading, guided by the Bible.
The Bible is a pretty realistic book. We sing “This is my Father’s World” and that was true and will be true again, but that is not true today. Ownership has, for the time being, been transferred to God`s great enemy. In Revelation 12 it related that there was a war in heaven, (verse 7) and Satan was thrown out of there, and he landed feet first right here on earth. 1 John 5: 19 spells this out quite clearly: We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the Evil one. You can’t pick and choose in the Bible. You either accept it all, or none. That`s why Jesus said that We are not of this world. By that he means that we do not belong to the world where Satan dominates. Jesus repeatedly says that The Prince of this world will be driven out, (John 12: 31) clearly indicating that Satan, not Christ is in charge at this moment.

That is realistic talk. That is not beating around the bush. We better get used to it that at this precise moment not Jesus, not God, not the Christian community, but the Evil one calls the shots. That`s why there is at this point of history no ground whatsoever for claiming that all is well. It is not. All is not well. Satan rules this world. Not believing this is denying the biblical truth, is denying that Christ`s sacrifice was an necessary act: it was necessary precisely because Satan rules the roost here. But also the Bible is quite clear that his ruling the world will come to an end, his rule will have an expiry date. However before that happens, before he is also thrown out of the earth, just as he was thrown out of heaven after a fierce fight, and landed right here in your and my backyard, from here too he will not be go without a cruel struggle, which will affect us all, through tremendous terrors. We may sing Jesus Reigns with hands and arms up in the air but the evidence is entirely to the contrary: Satan still reigns here and now, and is all around us.
Fact is that we are on the way to the ultimate disasters, and, as the Bible tells us without a blush in Matthew 24 `many false prophets will appear and deceive many people`, there will be great distress, but God in his grace will cut short the end times, will return before we all perish.
That is the realistic picture. The pessimists see no hope at all. They have lost the biblical promises and see only a future of increasing hardship, higher pollution, more fraud and abuse, more natural disasters, more heat and drought, more floods and famine. The optimists, most of the church people included, deny that Satan calls the tune, deny that he rules the world for the time being, and believe that somehow all will turn out well. Today even the best church, if there is such a thing as the best church, usually misses the crucial emphasis on `the coming of the Kingdom` the approach of the New Creation when Christ will be All and in All.
Until that time the church – almost all of them – will continue to conform to the world. When I was a small child, more than a few decades ago, there was something like a separate culture for the church people, legalistic as it was, such as strict Sunday observance and abstaining from worldly amusements. That separateness was also evident in schooling, dress code and other facets of life. Today there is none of that. By and large the only way Christians are different from the `world` is that they attend a church service for an hour on Sunday. At least the Amish are consistent. At least some ultra-orthodox Jews are different. At least the Muslim people are recognizable. By and large, not the church people, including me, I am sorry to say.

I am a realist. Not an optimist in the worldly sense, but an optimist in the Biblical sense because I live in the hope, the constant hope of Christ`s return to set everything straight and forever ban Satan, the Evil one from the earth.

JULY 26 2015

MY CROCK POT, GREECE AND EUROPE

I am a man of regular habits, and that makes life easier. Every evening, when I do the dishes – we don’t have a mechanical dishwasher, just a human one (me) – I also clean the crock pot of our slow cooker, always being careful not to bang it or, worse, drop it, because replacement are impossible to find.
Each evening I fill it with a cup of organic rolled oats, and when I go to bed, promptly at 10 p.m. I scoop in 3 ½ cup of water, plug it in and in the morning 2 smooth meals of oatmeal porridge are ready. Nothing is simpler.
The slow cooker itself is more than 30 years old. Our youngest daughter used it in university and somehow I inherited it. It only has one speed, actually no speeds at all: no knobs, nothing to set, so also nothing that can go wrong. Oh, the old time simplicity!
When the old insert broke, I had to buy a complete new cooker, but that new thing did not work very well, so I inserted the removable pot in the 30 year old machine and now, despite my ever so careful handling, there is a large vertical crack, now also joined by a smaller horizontal one, about three-quarters of the way down.
These cracks somehow remind me of Greece, the vertical split, and Europe the horizontal one. It won’t be long or Greece will split from Europe, and go back to its former national currency: the drachma. And after that it won’t be long before the Euro goes as well, to be split again into marks and guilders and francs. The two cracks point that out, even though my reasoning may sound cracked as well. What is sure is that before too long my cracked crock pot too has an irreparable break, and will become garbage.

When Greece or Finland or Portugal or Spain – all countries with unsustainable debts – go alone, they can regulate their own financial affairs and not be subjected to draconian austerity, imposed by Germany, the only country who has benefited from the Euro, the common currency for 18 countries in Europe. “Das Herren Volk has certainly thrown its weight around in this affair, where nobody came out a winner.

So, why the Euro?

The introduction of the Euro was based on the vision of “sustainable growth” and “social inclusion”. Both these concepts have been written into every European treaty from Rome to Maastricht. Nice-sounding words, and both totally meaningless today. “Sustainable growth’ is an oxymoron, is a contradiction in terms, because any growth is unsustainable for the simple reason that the earth is finite. “Social inclusion’ is totally negated by Germany’s cruel treatment of Greece.
In 1998 or thereabouts the new currency was introduced, aptly called the Euro. Basically it was a political decision. The 20th Century had seen two devastating wars and, so it was thought, more political cooperation, especially in the financial world, would prevent another disastrous war. And, yes, 70 years later no military conflict has taken place. The new currency has benefitted especially Germany which is the leading economy in Europe. Thanks to the Euro all participating countries had access to cheap money. Greece really wanted some of that and, thanks to some clever book keeping, it was admitted to the club, where one of the rules was that national budget deficits could not exceed 3 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. But rules are there to be broken, and they did, with the consequence that deficits soared. Deficit is a nice word for debt. Today debt is the great enemy of stability.
Debt is only manageable when economies grow. If the debt carries 2 percent in interest, and the growth is 2.5 percent, then debt can be carried. If the debt carries 2.5 percent in interest and the growth is 2 percent or less, then we have troubles. Today we have troubles, big troubles, because the growth is much lower than the cost of money. Actually in many ways we have deflation in raw materials, in oil prices, in minerals, but inflation in food products, thanks to weather related events, mostly. People may pay a little less for gasoline, but all food products are shooting up. Soon Janet Yellen, the woman at the top of the money-mountain in Washington wants to increase the cost of money, and that will really screw up matters.

Back to Greece.

Greece is really being screwed. Basically Greece is no longer an independent state. Europe has imposed such cruel economic measures there that comparisons have been drawn to the Treaty of Versailles, which set Europe on the path to Nazism after the end of World War I. But the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which ended a small country’s brave experiment in policy independence, is almost as good an analogy. In crushing Czechoslovakia, the invasion also destroyed the Soviet Union’s reputation, shattering the illusions that many sympathetic observers still harbored. It thus set the stage for the final collapse of Communism, first among the parties of Western Europe and then in the USSR itself. Today Europe’s reputation is in shatters.
To many Greeks, the debt the country has amassed is the evil fruit of austerity policies, imposed from the outside that asphyxiated its economy and trampled on its sovereignty. Today that debt is more than 310 billion euros, or almost $(US)339 billion, make that more than $400 billion (Can). Basically there is no way that Greece can pay its debts. It needs to have a substantial amount of it forgiven, but Germany, Greece’s largest single creditor, says that Greece’s debts are a sacrosanct commitment that must be paid as a matter of law and of principle, forgetting that in 1948 Germany was forgiven many more billions.
The current stalemate
So for the time being, we have a stalemate which sooner or later will be broken. Greece cannot pay its debts. Germany does not want to lose the $200 billion lent to Greece. A big reason for the stalemate is the nature of Greek debt. In many previous international negotiations — including those over money owed by Latin American countries during the region’s debt crisis in the 1980s and the €107 billion in debt that Greece got written off in 2012 — the creditors were mostly foreign banks and other investors. In this case, though, the Greek government’s debt is held mostly by other governments. So tampering with this debt is impossible without approval from lawmakers in Germany and other countries, and any losses would be borne by taxpayers in those nations. Nearly 60 percent of Greece’s debt is held by fellow euro-zone countries, which gave Greece a second bailout in 2012 and are now preparing to throw it a third lifeline worth a further €86 billion. Germany’s contribution to the two initial bailouts was more than €50 billion, making Berlin the biggest contributor.
But some experts believe that once German contributions to the European Central Bank and to other lenders are taken into account, Berlin is on the hook in Greece for upward of €100 billion.

Small is beautiful

Oh, I wish that politicians were wise and let go of their megalomania. “Megalos’ is the Greek word for ‘big’ and ‘mania I don’t have to explain: we all have a touch of it. Politicians want power: the bigger the stakes, the better they like it. That’s how the Euro-zone came into being. The saying goes, Think locally, act globally, or is it the under way around. Never mind. My thinking is ‘think locally, act locally’.
“Small is beautiful.” That’s the title of a book written by German-born, English educated economist by the name of E. F. Schumacher. It was written in 1973 and immediately become a best-seller. The sub-title is Economics as if People mattered.
The title says a lot about the book and the subtitle even more. The European Union has imposed measures upon the Greek people with total disregard of the population there. The Euro goes directly against the notion that “Small is Beautiful.” To the politicians, abolishing the German Mark, the French franc, the Dutch guilder, all good currencies in their own right, now all superseded by the one Euro, signify that Big, not small, is Beautiful.
The book advocates that human beings remain close to the nurturing land in both fact and spirit. Of course today we see rapid world-wide depletion of the world’s resources and the corresponding destruction of the environment: even the sharks in the seas are angry at people.
Much of what Schumacher predicted has come to pass: we now see every day how traditional economics is bringing the world to the edge of ruin. My wife recalls how in the late 1930’s her father, a minister, was extremely afraid that Hitler would start a war and overrun Europe. People in the know sensed the approaching danger, which proved justified when war broke out in 1939. Johan Huizinga, a well-known Dutch Historian in the Dirty Thirties wrote a book with the telling title: In the Shadows of Tomorrow (In de schaduwen van morgen) where he too expressed fearfulness.

Today we again live “In the Shadows of Tomorrow” the unavoidable cataclysm that is to come, and will ruin everything we hold dear.
By failing to heed Schumacher’s advice that “Small is beautiful” we have built a society entirely on debt. That immense debt, thanks to ultra-cheap money, those untold trillions, created out of nothing, sheer computer generated, with nothing to back it up, has caused China to use in one decade more cement than the entire world used in the 20th Century. Now China stopped growing leaving overcapacity in oil, in coal, in iron ore, in manufacturing capacity, all of which will have such a backlash in the years to come that, rather than inflation – which wipes out debt – we will experience deflation which enhance debt and make it much more difficult to come to terms with the trillions of dollars governments, corporations, and people owe to banks. Deflation means lower prices but also lower profits and less tax income and more unemployment. It means depression, means banks going belly up and hunger and hardship. All this means that within a few years, perhaps sooner, the entire world economy will crack up, just as my crock pot, just as Greece and just as the Euro.
What should we do?

Schumacher is correct: small is beautiful. In the book by that name he writes: “Next to the family, it is work and the relationships established by work that are the true foundations of society. If these foundations are unsound, how could society be sound? And if society is sick, how could it fail to be a danger to peace?” Today meaningful work is quickly going the same way as viable families. Also we are in a global war against creation, a war where everybody is a loser.
There is indeed a satanic element in our contest with creation. All of us, Christians, non-Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, we all, without exceptions, are allies with the Evil one, the Satan who hates God and who, from the very beginning, has as his sole aim to destroy creation. Take China: the Chinese central government is building a city which will have 150 million inhabitants, with no provisions for schools or for parks because those are the responsibility of the local councils.
Schumacher writes that the upper limit for a city is about 500,000, the size of Hamilton, Ontario. Go bigger and problems multiply, so much evident in traffic congestion, and human degradation, in unaffordable rent, in factory food. Give me a place in the country any time.
What was the norm during the depression and the 1940-45 War will become necessary again. I mean the growing of food, where a “Small (garden) is Beautiful”. Most of the year we are privileged to eat from our small, 2,000 square feet – about 200 m2 – garden where much of our food is grown. With rolled oats porridge in the morning prepared in my crockpot, the main meal at noon –usually totally home grown – and little or nothing in the evening, a slice of bread perhaps, a few nuts, we stay healthy. In the summer I spent only a few hours in the week to look after the garden. Just as everything else, it takes a bit of discipline. Nowadays with raised gardens, even on a small city plot much can be grown. Try it.

And buy a crock pot, even though they crack sometimes.

JULY 19 2015

THE NARROW DOOR

For the last number of years, while visiting St Paul where our youngest daughter lives, I have bought a Journal in the bookstore of the Luther Seminary close to where they live. This past year it was a simpler book with 365 pages, blank except for one Bible text. Based on that text I write my daily meditation. I have done this for more than 25 years.
Last week the line came from Luke 13, and the designated section was Jesus saying “Make every effort to enter through the narrow door because many will try to enter and will not be able to.”

It puzzled me and made me think of illustration that hung in my parental home, depicting John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. The illustration showed a long winding road where the Pilgrim encountered all sorts of obstacles starting from the City of Destruction – Earth apparently – on the way to the ‘Celestial City’ or Heaven. Christian – the Pilgrim- finds himself weighed down by a great burden which he gets from reading the Bible. The Evangelist appears several times during the story, pointing him in the right direction. In the book the first person he meets is called Mr. Worldly Wiseman, who says he can be saved by looking at the law, and that Mr. Legality can help him. Evangelist stops him from going that way.
Later he goes to the Shadow of Death. He is not afraid because his friend Faithful reminds him of the words of Psalm 23: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Just outside the Valley of the Shadow of Death he meets Faithful, who also used to live in the City of Destruction. They go together to Vanity Fair, where they are both arrested because they do not like the kind of business which is being done at the fair, all based on greed. Faithful is put on trial, and executed. Hopeful, who lives in Vanity, takes Faithful’s place as Christian’s companion for the rest of the way.
Christian and Hopeful eventually reach the Celestial City. End of story.

Help from others

I was also reminded of the Narrow Door when my younger brother, Drewes, living in The Hague, sent me some comments on Pope Francis’ encyclical. I have other people who feed me with comments, such as Fred in BC. Without these people my self-imposed task to write a weekly blog would be much more difficult. Here’s what Drewes sent me: “A senior figure in the Church of England has described the recent papal encyclical as unlikely to produce the desired reduction in global poverty. In a commentary on Pope Francis’s recent encyclical on the environment, Peter Forster, the Bishop of Chester, and the Labour peer Bernard Donoughue, say while they share the Pope’s deep desire to reduce poverty, they are concerned the very policies advocated by the papal encyclical are more likely to hinder than advance this great cause. The authors argue that “the encyclical is coloured too much by a hankering for a past world, prior to the Industrial Revolution, which is assumed to have been generally simpler, cleaner and happier. There is little historical evidence for such a vision, and for most people then life was brief, painful, poor, and even brutal.”
Bishop Peter Forster said: “Pope Francis should certainly be commended for his desire to deal with poverty in the developing world, but it is hard to see how he hopes to do so without economic growth and fossil fuels, both of which he thinks are unnecessary evils.”

The authors are also critical of the failure of Pope Francis to address some of the most pressing moral dilemmas in the environment debate.
Lord Donoughue said: “Wood and dung fires may be renewable energy sources but their disastrous impact on human health is undeniable. We would have liked to have seen the encyclical address moral dilemmas like this head on. We would also have liked to have known Pope Francis’s view on the bans on development aid for fossil fuel plants that so many western governments have put in place.”

Is there a connection to the Narrow Door?

How can I connect all this to Luke 13, to the Narrow Door?
I see Pope Francis as a Reforming Catholic. In the original sense of the word “Catholic” pertains to the entire body of believers, regardless of denomination. The Apostle’s Creed points to this when it refers to the church as the One Holy Catholic Church. Even though the Pope in his encyclical refers to Mary, there is in Revelation 12 a direct referral to the church as “The Woman who gave birth to the Child”, and how this woman, actually the church, was persecuted by the Dragon, who stood before the woman, trying to devour her. That’s what’s going on nowadays: Satan – always busy – is trying to destroy the church.
We usually see heaven as the most tranquil of places, but in that same chapter, Revelation 12, it unambiguously says that: “There was war in heaven.” Satan had a big fight with Michael, a prince among the angels, and mighty Michael prevailed and sorry Satan was kicked out of heaven. You know where he went? Here, on planet earth, there’s where he made his temporary habitat. Not really a welcome guest in my book. But he’s here, and wherever he is, there is trouble. In Brussels they placed Greece in a Satanic bind, because of money. Believe me, money is a very hard taskmaster, and by and large Satan personifies money. When in Genesis 2 the Lord Creator made trees, the Bible says “Trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food.” The aesthetic comes first: pleasing to the eye; the economic comes last: good for food. In the next chapter, Genesis 3: 6, when Satan points out the tree to Eve, the order is reversed. There the Satan refers to the tree as “Good for food and pleasing to the eye.” With Satan Economics, the pursuit of money, the lust for that filthy lucre, always has priority, even when it kills people, even when it kills creation, even when now most of the fish are gone, and most of the large animals are extinct. Money overrides it all.
With that in mind I come back to Pope Francis, return to the objections raised by an Anglican Bishop and that Labour leader.

Pope Francis knows darn well that nothing what he says can change people. Actually his warning has come too late. What is going on today with poverty and Climate Change had its start in Paradise, in the Garden of Eden with that tree. That same John who penned the book of Revelation while exiled to a lonely island, also wrote a few letters. In 1 John 5: 19 John clearly says that, ”We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the Evil One”. Jesus admits to the same when he is tempted by the Evil One and Satan (Matthew 4: 9) offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world. Of course Jesus refuses, knowing that he will be the ultimate winner here, but he does not deny that today and yesterday and tomorrow until Jesus returns Satan rules this world.
The Pope does not say that in so many words, but the Anglican bishop and that Labour leader are siding with Satan by pursuing economic growth at all costs, even creation. The Pope is right when he points out that the pre-industrial time was more God-pleasing, as it was easy on creation, God’s work of art. Pope Francis is right, even when many of his own church, especially politicians, disagree with him. Pope Francis is right for the simple reason that he is being persecuted by others. The church today, unless it is persecuted for its stance, is on the wrong track. Pope Francis is doing the right thing.

That Narrow Door again

To pursue the ‘narrow door’ matter: Jesus points out that it is not easy to aspire to enter through the narrow door. Talk is easy, but it does not earn us bonus points with Jesus. Talk – sermons – is the church’s usual stock in trade.
C. S. Lewis, a well-known Christian and world renowned author, who wrote an excellent book Mere Christianity said somewhere that ‘the way to hell is smooth, slightly sloping, no sudden turns, no real obstacles.”

That’s the way of the Evil one. He was thrown out of heaven and landed feet first on the earth, where he now rules the world, and where he each day dreams up new ways to entice people to fall in line with his thinking.
It seems to me that the “narrow door” section in the Bible – Jesus’ very words- calls for a radical Christianity. There’s nothing easy about radical Christianity. Jesus explicitly says: “Many will try and few will be successful”. I recall that Jesus also said: “Many are called, and few are chosen.” He also wondered whether he would find faith (in him) when he returns.
So this Anglican bishop is the pragmatic kind. Listen, he suggests, growth is imperative for the church because without it we face economic stagnation and the few who still come to church will be reduced even further when jobs disappear and money becomes scarce.
Pope Francis personifies Radical Christianity here, a movement that engenders persecution. He knows that economic growth is the perfect Devil tool to subvert what little wholesome is still around in this world. The trouble is that he can say only so much or he will be accused of being a heretic as Martin Luther was, the whistle blower who almost 500 years ago in 1517 turned the table on the church. Pope Francis already has to cope with a lot of members of his own church, including cardinals, who disagree with him. You see he is aiming for the narrow door and that is an unpopular stance.
Even though Jesus said that ‘my yoke is easy and my burden is light’ that is only true because when we aim for the narrow door, he is with us.

So what is that narrow door business all about?

Psalm 119: 105 says that “Your word is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path.” The church has, by and large distorted that by concentrating on the lamp, God’s written word, his secondary, indirect word. By doing so it has stared into that light so much that it has become blinded, unable to navigate the earth, stumbling around, splitting up in all sorts of different paths – or denominations – and forgetting that the earth is God’s primary word, where we securely can make our way when we are guided by God’s written word. Why do we need the Bible? It tells us that God is the Creator; it relates how we fell into sin and ceded the earth God had given us to the Evil one. Its crowning truth is that Jesus has bought creation back at the cost of his life. That same creation, once restored, will be the new Kingdom. The door to that kingdom is narrow, because the earth can support only a limited number of people in perpetuity without damaging it again.
That’s what the Written Word tells us, unpopular perhaps. We now must use the Scriptures to guide us in making our way in creation, in the direction of the Narrow Door. For that we have to take the road less traveled. We have to make our way, in this Satanic world unfortunately on a road that is full of obstacles, full of temptations, full of Satanic pleasures, full of evil matters, exactly the opposite of what C. S, Lewis describes as the road to hell.
How your travel to the “Narrow Door” must proceed is not something I can tell you. There is not a single way. Your way is different than mine. I do think, however, that there is a definite and necessary link to creation. For the rest it is something between you and Jesus. Once you have him on your side, the going is easy. Alone it cannot be done.

Next week my crockpot, and how it relates to Greece and Europe.

JULY 12 2015

GREASE

I waited till the last minute to complete this week’s column: it seems that every day brings a new crisis and changed circumstances, at least that’s what I perceive happening. It now looks that Greek will exit. Turmoil is in the cards.
All week both Greece and China have constantly been in the news. Where since 2014 in Greece the stock market, or any market, has virtually disappeared, China’s stock market had a meteoric ride, doubling in return from June 2014 till June 2015. Some 230 million people there bought shares, borrowing from the piggybanks of father, mother, sister, brother, uncle, aunts, grandparents to benefit from that phenomenal money maker: the stock market. Many also took out loans from banks and other lending institutions. Then, in about a month’s time it lost 30 percent of the value. Panic. Savings wiped out. More about China later.

And then there is Greece.

If you were to read the title out loud it would sound like Greece, a country where Grease – unlawful money- took on a brand-new meaning. I have never been in Greece, but my wife and I spent a pleasant few weeks in Barcelona, when our youngest daughter lived there, enjoying her husband’s sabbatical there. It is in the same mild region as Greece.
Where Greece resembles Spain is that both have a relatively warm climate and a history of doing well with relatively little carbon energy. During my 16 years of schooling I was for 6 years subjected to classical Greek, Homer, Plato, Xenophon, his Anabasis and Katabasis. Then, while trying to make sense of all these mythical figures, I learned about its philosophy, literature and theatre, music and dance, science and technology, and art and architecture. Great History Greece has. Northern Europe, because of its cold climate, was not able to do very much in the fine arts until it added peat moss and coal as supplemental energy. Once these cheap supplemental energies were added, Northern Europe was able to industrialize, while Southern Europe lagged behind. If we are running into obstacles now with respect to fossil fuels, perhaps the advantage will again go back to people who live in warm enough climates that they can mostly live without supplemental energy. So perhaps the countries of antiquity may have the ultimate advantages when energy can no longer come from burning fossil fuel. I guess that’s why the Lord chose Israel and the Middle East for the birth place of his people.

The Greeks and the Spanish are different from their Northern neighbors, the German and the Dutch. It is not for nothing that the Spanish invented the word ‘siesta, that mid-day break in working because of the heat. The climate in these Southern Europe countries allows for growing a great variety of fruits and vegetables, the main diet for these people. Perhaps, and now I speculate, that’s the reason why they have been more prone to ‘grease’, to bribe and to be bribed. Also their money habits are different from its frugal Northern neighbors, who insist on absolute discipline there. Impossible.

Greece desperately wanted to become a member of the European Union and partake of its monetary system, but its financial history, their recurrent budget deficits did not qualify them. So they turned to the American money wizards, Goldman-Sachs, the top Grease suppliers in the world, where a smart English educated, Greek woman, devised a scheme that, at least on paper, made these deficits disappear. She earned hundreds of millions in the process. The Greeks paid this money juggler a lot of Grease, but it paid off: they were admitted to the exclusive club of the Euro countries, which enabled them to borrow cheaply, and all went well for a while until it went wrong. Now they are negotiating again, with France leading the Greek wing because a Grexit, Greece leaving the Euro, will expose France’s equally weak position. Will the Greeks agree to more, far more austerity and pension cutting measures? I doubt it. This week will tell. Prepare for more trouble.

Our own disappearing prosperity

Our entire life style in the whole- wide – Western- world is based on two fallacies: (1) cheap oil, somewhere between $20-$40 per barrel, and (2) Infinite growth. Both are now proven to be impossible.
True, oil is somewhat cheaper now, because demand has tanked, but don’t be fooled by the lower price: all the real cheap oil we used up, is gone forever, and the same applies to all minerals, as naturally, we always use up the easy-to-get stuff first. That is now long gone. Now the average barrel costs in excess of $70 to bring to the market. Tar-sand oil, fracking oil, and deep-sea oil really need $100 per barrel oil to earn the Big Oil Guys a decent return. So the danger now is that, since the oil price is too low to be profitable, we may yet see a shortage of oil.
Just as cheap oil, Infinite growth too is a pipe dream, even though politicians still mention it all the time. Watch any TV program where election is mentioned, and they all promise more growth. That’s why politics has become irrelevant. Basically all politicians are in the pockets of the money men, the now infamous 1 percent which include those who are at the top in the banking world.
These financial bodies have done well because they are too big to fail and the governments of Europe and America have helped them out when they were far too far extended by creating debt that now has become a tax-payers liability. If there are ever institutions saved by GREASE they are the banks.

Back to China.

Chinese troubles are likely to prove more important to markets in the near term than Greece. Chinese troubles are unfolding now, they are immediate, and they are vast. The Greek tragedy will continue to unravel but do so more slowly with fits and starts, via false hopes, humanitarian aid, misinformation, and political posturing. What China has in common with Greece is that both have immense debts. In economies that are stagnating and even shrinking, the one item that always is growing, because of added interest, is debt. All debt accumulates interest, some as low as 2 percent, most much higher, while growth today is often flat or negative. Greece borrowed and then some more, because the lenders were eager to give money to them. But there’s always a ‘but’. Debts must always be paid: either the borrower pays back, or the lender takes a cut. The entire Greek drama was about money, the desire for which is the root of all evil.
China is 120 times bigger than Greece, and its debt problems are of that same magnitude. The country’s corporate and local government debt totals an extraordinary 289% of its GDP, which is the second largest in the world at about $16 Trillion, which makes its debt: $46 Trillions!!. The debt was taken on with the expectation that its economy would grow at a rapid 8-10 percent which had been the case in the past. Now the property market is depressed and overstocked, and confidence is fragile, making China as vulnerable as a china set. Once it drops it shatters. Also China’s regulations of the past – the one child policy, plus preference for male children – gives it the world’s most rapidly ageing population in the world. Add the unpaid bills for environmental damage and its health effects and the debts are staggering. Throw in Climate Change and the acute water shortage and failing crop yields, and the outlook for China is ominous. It is all too true that ‘How China goes, goes the world.’

Climate Change and World Hunger

Last week I heard on the news that Western North America, the USA and Canada, is suffering from drought, witness the scores of forest fires. It so happens that it is “out West” where the cereal crops are grown, signaling a shortage of wheat this year. Throw in the historic lack of water in California, the greens- basket of North America, coupled with trouble in the bread basket, and food inflation will enter the statistics.
When I survey the world scene, China, the Middle East, Southern Europe, the volatile weather with not enough water in the crop-growing areas and too much elsewhere, then there is a lot to worry about. Couple that with the unbelievably high debts everywhere, and global collapse cannot be ruled out.

How does collapse come about?

In his book The Five Stages of Collapse, Dmitri Orlov explains that finance will collapse first because it is a house of cards predicated on the assumption of perpetual growth. He also demonstrates, mathematically, that the cost of debt service will always outgrow the economy – something that we can all observe by looking at the ratios of debt to GDP across the world over the last three decades.
What happens next, Orlov explains, is that the collapse of finance is followed by the collapse of commerce. What Greece is showing us, however, is that these collapses are virtually simultaneous. If the banking system ceases to function, so do all commercial transactions, because the supply chain is severed in real time. How, without cash, can Greek businesses pay their staff, pay their suppliers or receive payment from customers? How, without tax income, can the state pay salaries or pensions? Would you, as a supplier, provide goods to a customer who you know has no access to money? Would you supply drugs to a hospital which cannot pay you for them? And, as a foreign supplier, would you export food or energy to a bankrupt customer? That’s why Greece agreed to a new deal this weekend, even though it Plebiscite -61 percent – voted the opposite.

Are we any different?

To be sure, Greeks and their governments have behaved fecklessly, but are we really much different? The Greeks may have been like poor men living like rich ones, but walk down any seemingly-prosperous street in the West, especially Britain, Canada or America and ask yourself quite how much debt is represented by the smart houses and expensive cars that you see there. The days when possessions indicated affluence are long gone, and the far greater likelihood today is that possessions indicate indebtedness. Look, next, at how much debt these governments have, how much they are still adding to their debt piles, and how much they have taken on in off-balance-sheet obligations such as public sector pension promises.
It’s all a house of cards. Our prosperity is a total sham. And it will come tumbling down. Are we prepared? Just consider the following.
During the Great Depression, the vast majority of American citizens were rural, farm-oriented people with survival skills far beyond the modern American, just as Greece still is today. It pays to be backwards. That’s how Russia survived after the 1989 change of regimes. “Prepping” – be ready for the worst – in those days was ingrained in our society. Today Canada’s population is 82 percent urban, with a dwindling number of farm-experienced North Americans and a vast wasteland occupied by urban and suburban citizens — many with few, if any, legitimate skill sets. During the Great Depression, millions of people died of starvation and general poverty, despite the incredible number of people with rural survival knowledge. What do you think would happen to our effeminate; overweight to obese; iPhone-addicted; lisping; limp-wristed; self-obsessed; Twitter-, texting-, video game-addled; La-Z-Boy-riding; overgrown-child culture in the event that another economic crisis even remotely similar were to occur? Yes, most of them would die, probably in a horrible fashion.
Think about it for a moment. An incredible subsection of us North Americans do not know how to feed ourselves, do not know how to kill an animal for meat, do not know how to grow crops, do not know how to repair any necessary items used for subsistence, do not know how to build anything useful, don’t even know how to prepare a meal from scratch. For most od us our only skills involve using the remote, play games on our electronic devices, and talk incessantly in our phones, our only manual skills involving fingering nonsensical text messages.
Once the debt crisis is at our doorsteps – and it cannot be postponed indefinitely – then all commerce will cease, all banks will close, all stores shut down and paralysis sets in.

The Bible teaches us that “The lust for money – grease – is the root of all evil”. Think about that.

July 5 2015

COMPARING TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO TO TODAY

Two Thousand Years Ago

Two Thousand Years ago there was a drastic change in the world. Oh, it started pretty small, (all drastic changes start small) when a certain fellow, by the name of Jesus, son of Joseph and Mary, challenged the people in charge of the Jewish religion in Jerusalem, because he said that the laws given to the Jewish people by the then temple administration were no longer valid.
Why did he do that? When Jesus appeared on the scene the Jewish religion had become encumbered with all sorts of new restrictions and those in charge laid heavy religious burdens on the people. Jesus, that simple fellow from Nazareth, lambasted these leaders, defied the Sabbath laws, told the crowd that the temple would be destroyed, and would no longer be the center of their religion. What especially enrages the elite was him saying that the old laws of do’s and don’ts were no longer valid but that love would be the norm, love even for the enemy, these hated Romans who had occupied the country. He summarized his new law as “Love God- that is creation – above else and your neighbors as yourself”. This caused the then church leaders to kill that man.

His 12 disciples took up the challenge, endowed with special wisdom. After some debates Paul (who himself had been a zealous persecutor of the New Way) convinced his fellow apostles that circumcision was no longer needed and so the band of Galileans – people mostly from the North of Israel, uneducated fishermen – set out to convert the world, preaching a radical new religion, making the Sunday instead of the Saturday the day to be set aside for worshiping the only God to whom also the Roman Emperor was subject.
The missionaries were aided by the Pax Romana, the Roman regime that made the entire world one unit with one language and one law, facilitating travel and communication, completely easing the way for new ideas to spread world-wide. And that’s what happened.

We now have a similar situation.

Now that same 2000 year old Christian Church is in deep trouble. In spite of Pope Francis being some sort of an icon in the world, his popularity has not translated into greater church attendance. In my neck of the woods, a bit of a rural outpost, only about 2 percent attend church regularly, and that mostly old(er) people who often hear uninspired sermons, but bear with them because the traditional coffee hour is a good time for socializing while the real church business goes on in the mid-week gatherings of study groups, choir and prayer meetings.
In many ways the social situation today resembles the universal status 2000 years ago. Then the common languages were Latin and Greek. Now the most used tongues are English and Mandarin, with English gaining ground every day. Then for Israel adherence to the law was the paramount requirement, the prescribed rituals, such as observing circumcision, temple tributes, keeping the Sabbath, all of which guaranteed salvation. Now most churches too have a set of what are called principles. Most of these rules center on opposition to homosexuality, premarital sex, contraception, out-of-wedlock childbearing, divorce and a range of other social issues. The Roman Catholic Church and many other Protestant denominations also have a female problem: women cannot serve in any capacity, even though they often compose the major part of the pew sitters. Then ideas spread through the world, without hinder, thanks to the Roman Empire. Now we have the INTERNET, the special tool able to spread a message, including the GOOD NEWS, world-wide.

It spite of failure the same format persists

When we joined the local church some 35 years ago we had regular attendance of some 50-60 people. Now, with people dying off or leaving to live with their children, the weekly attendance is seldom more than 25.
We used to have Sunday school. Now couples with children stay home, as especially teenagers don’t want to be associated with church.
Personally I feel that the current church format has become obsolete, just as it was 2000 years ago in the Temple worship. To have one person who has had a smattering of theological training speak some sort of essay – called sermon in church parlance – is no longer viable: it simply prevents a church from maturing. To enliven the worship scene with loud bands and hand-raising and overhead pictures will, perhaps, draw some pious young people, but that too misses the point. People keep on leaving the church, because the format is wrong, but nothing changes.

Last week David Brooks of the New York Times wrote a column on Christianity and its slow demise. He wrote: “More and more Christians feel estranged from mainstream culture. They fear they will soon be treated as social pariahs, the moral equivalent of segregationists because of their adherence to scriptural teaching on gay marriage. They fear their colleges will be decertified, their religious institutions will lose their tax-exempt status, their religious liberty will come under greater assault.”

I agree with him that we live in a ‘post-Christian’ era, but that’s exactly how Christianity started about 2000 years ago in the ‘pre-Christian’ era: a world hostile to the Gospel. Hostility is the seed of the church. Indifference kills the church, makes it impossible to reach people. Even though all signs point to a world situation that can no longer be sustained, both economically and environmentally, with many predicting the end of the world as we know it, the church goes its own irrelevant way. By and large the church seems oblivious to these events, just as the main press, all drunk on the deadening doses of carbon pollution which also have transfixed our brains in believing that infinite growth and infinite use of poisonous substances can be prolonged forever. The utter craziness is especially evident as most Christians deny Climate Change.

My own Reformed roots are rotting.

All this has affected also my roots, which are in the Protestant Reformation. The Dutch wing in Canada has been quite active in establishing all sorts of Christian Institutions: Christian Schools on all levels as well as Christian Social Action in labor, politics and world relief. Many years ago I was at the forefront of all this. Now I am starting to see that all this action completely depends on the continuation of the Capitalistic Society which is at the root of the current environmental plight. All these Christian institutions depend on people making plenty of money in order to be able to afford the high tuition in the different levels of schooling.

I see many parallels between 2000 years ago and today.

In the first place we have, just like in Jesus’ time, a universal language and a universal culture, both of which are a blessing – the language – and a curse – a culture that is totally godless. For most of the world God is dead and, as Nietzsche has remarked, “When God is dead everything is permitted.”
I think the church is in a rut, just as it was 2000 years ago when Jesus intervened. Today nothing is as dangerous as ordinary, seemingly harmless matters, such as our carefree cup of coffee, perhaps a prayer at breakfast, our regular trek to church, enrolling kids in Christian Schools. For many that is the extent of Christian service. All this can be fine and even pious, but it also can slowly deteriorate into some sort of disastrous routine. If I read my bible correctly holy living has always something to do with perspective, with vision, with élan, with, dare I say it, with forming new ways and adapting to new ideas, and constantly struggling against the spirits of the age.
Forty years ago, when living in St. Catharines, Ontario I had a dispute with my minister so, rather than bringing it to a head, I left his church. Fortunately this conflict was the beginning of me changing from being Reformed and starting Reforming. Our moving to 50 acres in Eastern Ontario and building an energy efficient house was the beginning of a new journey into faith. Living among the trees, amidst the full force of nature brought us closer to creation.
The Pope in his excellent encyclical made the amazing statement that if we want to love God we do so by loving his creation.
If that is true, and I think it is, then our entire way of worshiping has to change: more creation-centered. Christianity believes that God created the world. I too do firmly believe that. Because God created it all, it is his Primary Word, his direct revelation. The Pope quoted Romans 1: 20 which contain these amazing words: “God’s creation in itself is sufficient to rob people of all excuses that God does not exist.” It might not bring them to salvation, but it certainly is ground for condemnation.
We generally refer to the Bible as God’s Holy Word, even though it is God’s Secondary Word, his indirect revelation. For some reason – which I will suspect is the easy way out – the Church has promoted the Bible to be the All and in all, the first and last word and everything in between, making faith basically a Sunday matter, in essence denying that creation is God’s HOLY Word as well.
Now more than ever we must follow the no-nonsense directive of the Bible which time and again speaks of fighting to the death and waging a determined battle with the evil in society, which becomes more evident by the day, especially in our polluting ways of life from which there is no escape.
I admire what Pope Francis said, even though there was nothing radical in his encyclical. What I missed in his words – and in the church in general – is a vision of the Kingdom. The Roman church equates the Kingdom with their church and Reformed people maintain that the Kingdom consists of Church, School, Home, an erroneous idea originating with Kuyper and Calvin. That the Kingdom is God’s creation and will come in perfection when Jesus returns is not commonly preached or practiced in Reformed circles.
That’s why I am no longer Reformed but try to be constantly Reforming, constantly seeking new ways to honor God in his creation. I try to live in tune with the sort of vision that goes beyond the church and includes the aims of Greenpeace and other environmental organizations, and entails a radical new view and basis of life.
It is my sincere conviction that, were the church to regard God’s creation as the Primary Word, of which John 3:16 is its very foundation, rather than stare oneself blind into the Scriptures, God’s Secondary Word, then, perhaps, the slowly decaying institutional church could see a distinct revival. Very perhaps. I believe Amos was right when he predicted that we are (Amos 8: 12) “searching for the word of God but they will not find it.”
As I have written in one of my blogs, this might entail changing our way of living from a suburban- single family-auto-imprisoned existence, to perhaps a more monastic family-oriented community.

Jesus, time and again, hammered on the theme: “Seek first the Kingdom” – work for the welfare of Creation – so that, indeed, the first request in the Lord’s Prayer “Thy Kingdom Come” is realized for us.
We should remember that in the New Creation – this very earth where we are now- there will be no church, no bible. So, in a sense it is not surprising that the church is disappearing. The same can be said of marriage, I presume.
To me John 3: 16 is the most important text in the Bible today: God loved his cosmos so much that he sacrificed his Son to redeem it – buy it back, in other words. It’s now in the power of the Evil One.
A few weeks ago – March 29- one of my blog’s heading was: You can’t love Jesus if you don’t love creation.

So what should the church do?

So what should the church do? The church should forget about Sunday services in its current form, the customary monologues that have proven to be totally ineffective in this age of so many competing attractions. Instead Sunday gatherings should consist of singing and prayer – lots of both, and some appropriate Bible passages – after which the congregation splits into sessions of yes, bible discussions, yes, workshops on environmental matters, yes, learn how to live responsibly in an age of depletion, pollution and food-poisoning. Most bought foods have far too many unwanted ingredients. Perhaps the local church should also have training sessions on how to grow foods, how to live healthy. The opportunities are endless: all this in anticipation for the New Earth to come.

Two thousand years ago new hope was born. Now 20 centuries later that only hope is for Christ coming again to set his people free.

June 28 2015

WHY I AM A VEGETARIAN

It all started more than 40 years ago: 1972 I believe. I had bought a book by Lappé, I forget her first name, but remember the title: Diet for a small Planet. I still have it somewhere in my forgotten books corner. 1972 was sort of a landmark year, with oil shooting up in price, OPEC making its presence felt, and general concern that food would soon be in short supply. Lappé pointed out that a vegetarian diet would be more earth-friendly and so we almost overnight implemented it in our household.
People sort of raise their eyebrows when I tell them that I don’t eat meat, especially in rural Eastern Ontario, with lots of beef farms and still a few private slaughter houses. No meat? How do you survive?
We do consume eggs, bought just down the road on which we live, and milk, mostly converted into yogurt. So strictly speaking we are lacto-ovo-vegetarians. Now 43 years later, I am sure that this was the right decision, confirmed by many recent findings, including our generally excellent health.
Eating out is a bit of a problem, at times. We never go to a fast food outlet, but seek out buffet places and when in Toronto or Ottawa go to the Commençal or the Green Door.
Our decision to be vegetarian was initially made strictly for environmental concerns. In 1972 we figured that at least 8 pounds of grain was needed to bring one pound of meat to the table. Now there are many more reasons to go vegetarian.

Take water

In a world increasingly running out of potable water recent calculations indicate that producing 1 kg of animal protein requires about 100 times more water than producing 1 kg of grain protein. Although livestock directly uses only 1.3% of the total water used in agriculture, when the water required for forage and grain production is included, the water needs for livestock production dramatically increase. The extra hay and grain requires about 100 000 liters of water to produce the 100 kg of hay, and 5400 liters for the 4 kg of grain. On rangeland for forage production, more than 200 000 liters of water are needed to produce 1 kg of beef.

Or take grain and energy

To bring 1 kg of fresh beef to the dining room table requires about 13 kg of grain and 30 kg of hay. In contrast to beef, 1 kg of broiler can be produced with about 2.3 kg of grain. But then eating chicken has become a real health hazard.
At present, the US livestock population consumes more than 7 times as much grain as is used by the entire American population. The amount of grains fed to US livestock is enough to feed about 840 million people who follow a plant-based diet.
We all know that fossil fuel fuels Climate Change, recently affirmed by Pope Francis. Lots of fossil energy is expended in livestock production systems. For example, broiler chicken production is the most efficient, with an input of 4 calories of fossil energy for each 1 calorie of broiler protein produced. The broiler system is primarily dependent on grain. Turkey, also a grain-fed system, is next in efficiency, with a ratio of 10:1. Milk production, based on a mixture of two-thirds grain and one-third forage, is relatively efficient, with a ratio of 14:1. Both pork and egg production also depend on grain. Pork production has a ratio of 14:1, whereas egg production has a 39:1 ratio.
The 2 livestock systems – beef and lamb – depending most heavily on forage but also using significant amounts of grain, are very fossil fuel dependent. The beef system has a ratio of 40 energy fossil:1 food calorie, while the lamb has the highest, with a ratio of 57:1. If these animals were fed on only good-quality pasture, the energy inputs could be reduced by about half.
The average fossil energy input for all the animal protein production systems studied is 25 calories fossil energy input per 1 calorie of protein produced. This energy input is more than 11 times greater than that for grain protein production. In a sense we are eating mostly oil.

Soil erosion

More than 99.2% of US food is produced on land, while less than 0.8% comes from oceans and other aquatic ecosystems. The continued use and productivity of the land is a growing concern because of the rapid rate of soil erosion and degradation throughout the United States and the world. Each year about 90% of US cropland loses soil at a rate 13 times above the sustainable rate. About 60% of United States pastureland is being overgrazed and is subject to accelerated erosion.
The concern about high rates of soil erosion in the United States and the world is evident when it is understood that it takes approximately 500 years to replace 25 mm (1 in) of lost soil. Clearly, a farmer cannot wait for the replacement of 25 mm of soil. Commercial fertilizers can replace some nutrient loss resulting from soil erosion, but this requires large inputs of fossil energy.

Eating meat means killing a lot of animals, often in cruel and inhumane ways. That begs the question:

Do animals have rights? How ethical is using animals for human consumption?

Of course no post of mine comes without some biblical references. This is what I found in Job, which I think is the most up-to-date book in the Bible.
But ask the animals, and they will teach you; or the birds of the air and they will tell you; or ask the plants of the earth, and they will instruct you. … In his hands is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being. Job 12: 7-10.

A while ago one of my dear friends loaned me two books on Animal Rights: “Do Animals have Rights,” by Alison Hills, an easy read which gave a measured approach, and “The Case for Animal Rights,” by Tom Regan, a hard slog and much more radical. In it he refutes the still current view that the animals we eat, hunt, and experiment on are, in the words of René Descartes, “thoughtless brutes.” But the author’s opinion is that animals are sophisticated mental creatures which have beliefs and desires, memories and expectations, and feel pleasure and pain and experience emotions, and like us, animals have a basic moral right to be treated in ways that show respect for their independent value.
Is he right?
Years ago, while on my way to Bancroft for business, I noticed a freshly killed bird on the side on the road and its partner standing next to it as in mourning.
We all know that chickens are kept in cages and cows in confined conditions, not unlike people in faraway countries, packed in favelas, in shantytowns, and other make-shift slums. A few years ago a fire in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, killed hundreds of people because they could not escape their packed places. We condemn it where it concerns people. Should we also agitate against the same situations for animals?

There is a curious passage in Genesis 2, where God named the first couple Adam and Eve. Later that same human pair were given the right to name animals. It seems to me that this signifies that we have a certain power over animals, which is plain in later biblical episodes.
At first, in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve apparently were vegetarians, eating only from the plants and trees. Later, with Noah, this changed. Abraham provided (Genesis 18:7) the Lord with meat from a calf, tender and good. The same happened when the Prodigal Son re-appeared. Jesus ate fish. Also the Bible is full of animals being slaughtered for ceremonial purposes.

More reasons to quit eating meat of any kind
Simply for health reasons we should quit eating chicken and meat. Statistics show that more than half of all chickens are contaminated while meat has also become a health hazard. Both types of animals are raised in crowded quarters where antibiotics are needed in large quantities to contain diseases. This over-use of drugs are causing human resistance to infections, creating the distinct possibility that soon a simple infection may lead to death as was the case prior to penicillin.
Those who work in chicken barns have hideous jobs: picking up and binning the birds that drop dead every day, catching chickens for slaughter in a flurry of shit and feathers, then scraping out the warehouses before the next batch arrives. The dust such operations raise from a mixture of chicken dander, mites, bacteria, fungal spores, mycotoxins, endotoxins, veterinary medicines, pesticides, ammonia and hydrogen-sulphide is hazardous to health, and helps explain why 15% of poultry workers suffer from chronic bronchitis.
Awhile ago we were in an Iowa farming community where an animal lot was a mile or so from the built-up area. When the wind came from that direction a terrible smell hang over the town, due to hundreds of cattle crowded in a small space.
As an aware Christian I believe that we should welcome the days when chickens revert back to their natural pecking order and contended cows roam the vast expanse of prairies where they belong.

Yes, animals have rights

But back to my original question: Do animals have rights? Yes, they do. Do chickens and other incarcerated animals have rights? Yes, they do. Just as the people in Bangladesh and elsewhere have the right to be housed decently, and live comfortably, so, if my Bible is true, animals too have the right to exercise their freedom of movement. Job’s words thousands of years ago are still relevant today. What we have lost is the wisdom animals can teach us. We no longer have the ability to understand what the birds are trying to tell us. We no longer know how plants can enlighten us. We are paying lip service to the knowledge that in God’s hands are the life of every living being – animal, birds, plants – and the breath of every human being. It is exactly our ignorance of “the wider world out there” that has led to the mechanization of animal production.
However, our first duty is to see that people everywhere in the world live in humane conditions, as God has named them and they are made in His image. As long as this is not the case, we cannot demand that animals have priority over humans.

That’s why we are vegetarian

My wife and I try to minimize our carbon footprint. I was fortunate to be able to build an energy-efficient house with passive solar heating, due to large Southern exposed windows, and very well insulated. We also grow as much of our own food as possible, so that means that basically we always eat our own potatoes, our own beets, beans, onions, cabbages, leeks, kale, rhubarb. Want some rhubarb?
Eating from our own soil is good for the body because “soil we are and to soil we shall return.” The closer we are to what we eat the healthier we will be. Home-grown food means clean intestines; it also promotes good minds and spirits. Home-grown food means being close to the Creator. Good health comes from avoiding commercial foods: “eat plants” as much as possible and we do so in abundance. Mike Pollan, a California professor in food sciences says: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” He contends that most of what Americans now buy in supermarkets, fast food stores, and restaurants is not in fact food, and that a practical tip is to eat only those things that people of his grandmother’s generation would have recognized as food. We adhere to that, perhaps not as many potatoes as my grandparents ate, and less fatty stuff, but then they worked physically a lot harder than we.
Statistics indicate that by and large vegetarians live longer, live better and significantly reduce their carbon foot print.

Isn’t that something we all should strive for?