Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

MARCH 29 2015

WE CAN’T LOVE JESUS IF WE DON’T LOVE CREATION

That’s quite the controversial statement. It hit me when I was doing one of my 3 times-a-week runs. In the winter I run indoors on my treadmill and I have a series of CDs I play when I do so. One song is based on John 3: 16: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that who believes in him has everlasting life”. The choir kept on repeating the phrase, “God so loves the world”, and then my grey cells woke up thinking about people like Bach and Mozart, van Gogh and Rembrandt, and their exquisite works of art. We love these creators of master pieces not because of their personalities – we really don’t know them – we love them for their paintings or their musical talents. Thanks to the Bible we know a lot about Jesus, of course, but is that enough reason to love him?

So you say you love Jesus or God?

Let me take another example. While I am writing this I am listening to Bach’s majestic Mass in B Minor. I love Bach, that is to say I love his music. I don’t have a personal crush on Johann Sebastian, I really don’t know him all that well as a person. I know a few particulars about his life: his wives – 3 in all – died on him; he had 20 children, about half lived to be adults; he was a workaholic writer of music, the greatest in the world.

So what about Jesus? I love him too. Pray to him every day. When he lived on earth he did what no other person ever did: died to restore creation. He loved creation so much that he gave his life to restore it. Why did he love it so much? Simple. He created it, just as Bach created his oratorios and organ pieces.

Actually the Christian life boils down to the summary of the law Jesus gave us: Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and your neighbor as yourself. Loving God is not so simple. He is invisible, the Bible tells me. So how do we love God? We love him just as we love Bach, by loving his creation. Romans 1: 20 affirms that in a negative way. There it says that people are condemned because they have not connected creation to the Creator.  Colossians 1: 15-20 is more positive. It contains one of the greatest truths ever written. Here is what it says:

“For by Jesus the Christ all things were created: Things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible….all things were created by him and for him… and in him all things hold together….For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Jesus Christ and through him reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shred on the cross.”

There is the gospel in a nutshell. We love Bach because of his music. We love Jesus because of creation. This leads me to conclude that: Human redemption can be understood only as an integral part of the redemption of the whole creation. If we don’t love creation, we cannot love Jesus. It is as simple as that! Or as complicated! To be ‘born again’ means to treat the earth as holy, means trying always to stop polluting.

This week I am re-reading a book I bought on September 12 1998, almost 17 years ago. Since then I have read The Hidden Face of God at least 3 times before. Psalm 22 mentions it. Jesus quotes this Psalm when he hung on the cross to die: My God, my God why have you left me, one of the most moving exclamations ever recorded. Actually the Bible refers to God hiding his face 30 times. It means that God has left us to our devices because we have chosen to forget about God. That’s because as a society we have been increasingly abusing God’s creation, plundering it, polluting it, soiling and savaging it for the benefit of the few. These acts have caused God to leave us.

The author of The Hidden Face of God , Richard Elliott Friedman, a professor of the Hebrew language, writes that “the disappearance of God is a more terrifying condition than divine punishment, in a way that children would be less afraid of their parents’ punishing them than of their parents’ leaving them…….. It is one thing to cry out to one’s God and hear the divine voice saying, “You’ve been bad.” It is another to cry out and hear nothing but the sound of a thin hush………But either way, come to terms with this: in the Bible God creates humans, becomes known to them, interacts with them, and then leaves.”

There’s where we are.

We are left on our own: solely responsible for our world. That, my dear people, is the deplorable state we are in. We are in the most scary, frightening, mindboggling situation we can imagine. God has left us. We are on our own even though God still looks after his own people. His absence we can notice everywhere. The whole world is adrift like a rudderless ship on an ocean that is increasingly beset by dangerous currents, by immense hurricanes or typhoons, by unnatural ingredients, millions of tons of non-degradable plastic, choking fish and poisoning sea life in general, jellyfish crowding out every living thing, the waters now the planet’s garbage dump, also saturated with CO2. The whole human world too is adrift, fighting for the remaining green spaces, and ruining them in turn, plastering the economies with phantom money in a desperate attempt to engender economic growth, akin to trying to get blood from a stone.

The world’s unwise wizards are in lockstep to repeat the mistakes of the past because as ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ so the opposite is true as well as the wise words of Solomon attest (Proverbs 19: 3): “Peoples’ own folly ruins their lives, yet their hearts rage against the Lord.” When things go bad, people blame the Lord, when life is good it’s our doing, of course.

I was in occupied the Netherlands from 1940-45 where the Nazi Germans were the possessors of the land and robbed it blind, depriving us of our own food. That state of terror ended when the Canadian soldiers liberated our city on April 10 1945, now 70 years ago. That same sort of occupation is now happening to the Globe. Jesus, in Matthew 4, tempted by the Devil, readily admits that Satan can indeed give the world to Jesus if he only were to bow down and worship the Devil. Jesus knew that Satan’s reign would be temporary, ending when He returns.

The Covenant.

Here’s what happened. Many a thousand of years ago God made a covenant with humanity, a document that today would start as follows:

“Hereafter God will be known as the party of the first part, and humans will be known as the party of the second part.”

God, in essence, treated us as equals. In that covenant the relations between God and the human race were defined. God would always bless us. The things that Yahweh required of his human covenant partners where listed as given to us in Micah 6: 8 “To act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God.” Failure to do so would result in alienation and exile and would ultimately end in God leaving his people to their own devices.

This is the situation we humans encounter today, ending in total disaster, just as was the case when the Ten Tribes of the original twelve tribes of Israel vanished when they broke the covenant.

Where are we now?

We already have gutted half of the earth’s treasures. A new study in Sweden claims that we now have used up 50 percent of the earth resources. It scares the wits out of me because I once predicted in an essay When will Christ Return – see side bar – that the Lord will come back when we have used up half of creation for our benefit. A Swedish scientist claims in a new theory that humanity has exceeded four of the nine limits for keeping the planet hospitable to modern life. Environmental science professor Johan Rockstrom, the executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden, argues that there are nine “planetary boundaries” in a new paper published in Science – and human beings have already crossed four of them.

Those nine include carbon dioxide concentrations, maintaining biodiversity at 90 percent, the use of nitrogen and phosphorous, maintaining 75 percent of original forests, aerosol emissions, stratospheric ozone depletion, ocean acidification, fresh water use and the dumping of pollutants.

“The planet has been our best friend by buffering our actions and showing its resilience,” said Rockstrom. “But for the first time ever, we might shift the planet from friend to foe.” (My comments: God withdrew his protection).

Rockstrom’s planetary boundary theory was first conceived in 2007. His new paper reveals that because of climate stability, which began when the Ice Age ended 11,000 years ago, a planetary calm helped our ancestors to cultivate wheat, domesticate animals, and launch industrial and communications revolutions. But those advances have strained the stability of the planet, and Rockstrom says we have broken four boundaries: too much nitrogen has been added to ecosystems, too many forests have been cut down, the climate is changing too quickly and species are going extinct at too great a rate.

Ben Swann, Professor of Ethics from the University of Florida said that we have accelerated the extinction crisis through deforestation and ocean acidification, a development which is driving species to extinction.

“[Human] beings have increased, even from 1925, from 2 billion – which is considered to be a sustainable population for human beings, according to northern European consumption standards – to 7.2 billion at this point,” he said.

We are at a crucial point in human history. There are too many of us and we simply consume too much of the earth’s resources. It’s almost impossible to both love creation and Christ. Yet we can’t love Jesus of we don’t love creation. That is the ultimate dilemma we face. Only loving Jesus and having no regard for creation resorts, says Bonhoeffer, to “Pious Secularism”, so evident in the USA. Much of the ecclesiastical enterprise is based on loving God without ever defining this, except interpreting this in anthropological terms: love your neighbor. It is true that Paul writes that by loving our neighbor we have fulfilled the law (Romans 13: 8). However we forget that these are empty slogans when we don’t draw the lines all the way to life’s essentials: we undercut our love for our fellow beings when we pollute the very ingredients life depends on: soil, water, air.

Friedrich Nietzsche has written the remarkable words: “Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God dies. And these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful sin.” Nietzsche lost his mind when he saw a horse whipped to death. He was a sort of prophet, and I believe that in the cruel death of an animal he foresaw the death of creation, mindlessly murdered by a mad humanity.

We indeed have lost all sense of sanity. Basically, for those who reject the holiness of creation, God is dead. Living without God means the loss of the source of wisdom, with insanity as the ultimate result. Society at large abandoned God a long time ago. We still have some religious trappings, but they are basically empty of meaning.

How then shall we live?

That’s the perennial question. Visualize a world of total permanence and try to live by that vision, perpetually praying for wisdom and constantly asking for forgiveness, because it is an impossible assignment, yet one we must adhere too however falteringly. Only then can we really love Jesus and see him as the ultimate source of all happiness.

Remember:

Human redemption can be understood only as an integral part of the redemption of the whole creation. If we now don’t love creation, we cannot love Jesus. It is as simple as that! Or as complicated!

MARCH 22 2015

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

Why do I tackle the problem of evil? My youngest brother – living in the Netherlands – sent me an article by a Jewish writer dealing with evil. He also sent it to my only other brother, a retired minister of the gospel with a doctorate in theology, living in Canada: we emigrated together in 1951. That youngest brother, an engineer by profession and a philosopher by inclination, keeps me on my toes by challenging me to take a stand, this time on “The Problem of Evil”.

The article he sent me was written by a Jewish philosopher, originally written in Hebrew I believe, (written while the author was in Jerusalem) and translated into Dutch. The man connects the problem of evil to Job, a person, almost as well-known as Jesus, and also often misunderstood, mainly because both Job and Jesus deal with the Problem of Evil. The author, being Jewish, only deals with Job, but I will also deal with Jesus, of course.

First Job

We all know something about Job. We know that he was famous for his afflictions and his supposed patience, a man fabulously rich who suddenly lost all his wealth, his children and in a violent argument with his wife was told to curse God and die.

We also may vaguely remember how three men, come from afar, visited him in his misery, joined later by a younger visitor and how these fellows made long speeches, to which Job replied. How finally God spoke up, vindicated Job, rebuked the four friends, after which Job received twice as much wealth back as well as his family.

The book is famous for that strange encounter with a mysterious figure called the Satan. Imagine: God and Satan, the two sworn enemies, make a bet, and here is where the Problem of Evil enters. God allows the Satan to introduce evil into the idyllic situation where Job and his family live.

Here’s how I see it. It seems to me that Job then represented the human world in ‘the beginning’, living a ‘paradise-like’ life, where everything was just perfect. The Satan is used by God to teach us all a lesson, because life is nothing else than one endless learning process: we never arrive, never quit learning, not even in eternity. Part of our ‘lesson’ is that Job was abandoned by God and left to the wiles of Satan. Actually the same happens to us. Yes, I mean that God has left us to cope for ourselves. In these last days God has declared us mature, old enough to live without his guidance. Deuteronomy 32: 20 says it all: “I will hide my face from them. I will see what their end will be.” That is the situation we face today: life without God and God testing us how we will manage without him.

The Jesus angle

So “How are we making out without God?” Oh, you don’t believe that we are on our own? Let me refer you to a noted theologian.

J. H. Bavinck, in his Between the Beginning and End: a Radical Vision of the Kingdom makes this quite clear. Here is a quote:

We are now faced with a development in creation that we cannot understand and control, but of which we daily exper­i­ence the terrifying consequences. We now see God’s work of art embroiled in the power of demons. Satanic forces have thrown themselves onto nature, onto us humans, onto the entire radiant creation. Nowhere does the Bible elab­o­rate on these matters, but once in a while it allows us a peek into the abyss of sorrow and hardship now evident everywhere. This is espe­cially evident in the Gospels. When Peter’s mother-in-law suf­fers from a fever, Jesus “rebuked” the illness and “it left her” (Luke 4:39). When Jesus and his disci­ples were at sea and a severe storm endangered the ship, Jesus “rebuked” the wind and said to the sea: “Be still!” (Mark 4:39). The forces behind that storm and behind that fever are satanic; the world of hid­eous demons plays a blasphemous role in these phenomena. Jesus shows us here a scenario regarding life in general—awesome storms—and what will affect us in particular—mysterious diseases—both with omi­nous con­se­quences. No longer is our universe one of only beauty and harmony, but, especially in our days, one of unpredictable powers which threaten us with annihilation from all directions. The world in which we live is dominated by demons. Every hour we experience the terrible influ­ence of this satanic situ­a­tion.

It is impossible to visualize the immense difference between the majes­tic, harmonious unity of creation as it emer­ged from God’s hand, and the frantic, demon?dominated planet in which we, the cursed human­ity, dwell after the fall into sin. The Kingdom is in shatters. That is the profound tragedy con­fronting the life of the world. This goes far beyond the fact that we have torn up its cohesion: it actually means that God has surrendered his own creation to Satan and his followers, whose only purpose is to abuse it and destroy it. The Kingdom, after all, com­prises all things, all plants, all animals, all people, all angels. The King­dom includes the sea and the land, the moun­tains and the valleys, all that was and is and is to come; and all of it is incorporated in a great and mighty whole. The Kingdom is the place where all things are in their rightful place and where everything can fulfill its function and deploy its potential in complete harmony with all that surrounds it. The Kingdom is synonymous with light, peace, joy, service to God, in harmonious vene­ra­tion. Where the Kingdom is being destroyed, where this structure comes apart at the seams, there is decomposition, brokenness, frag­men­tation, enmity, contra­diction, meaninglessness, darkness, death.

Jesus is the fighter against evil and has won the battle. Still today not God but Satan is in charge, just like he was allowed to intervene in Job’s life. There you have it: The Problem of Evil still with us. God allows this to see how we’d fare without him. The Satan now ruling the world accounts for the wars, the cancer pandemics, the Holocaust, Capitalism, Global Warming, and the total world-wide destruction we are busy completing. Remember: today not God but Satan still calls the tune.

In the article my Dutch brother sent me the author Moshe Halbertal writes about the Problem of Evil, quoting Hannah Arendt who attended the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Eichmann was the German official in charge of killing 6 million Jews in Europe. Ms. Arendt, being Jewish was forced to flee Germany in 1933, moving first to Paris then to the USA. Here’s part of the article, which I translate.

Hannah Arendt in her book “The origin of Totalitarianism” has elaborated the concept of ‘radical evil.’ She wrote that radical evil is not a crime against humanity but a crime against being human. Radical evil tries to do away with the characteristics of the essential components of the human existence: spontaneity, openness and pluralism. Radical evil is accomplished in the totalitarian fantasy by changing humanity, not affecting their physical state but by instilling in them completely predictable reactions, such as never doing anything unusual, always a total sameness, never altering their behavior. The Nazi concentration camps, being a monstrous experiment in absolute domination, turned out to be nothing else but death factories by turning human beings into living dead, people not even sufficiently alive to wish to be dead: they even lost the will to die, a symptom Arendt typifies as “the banality of evil”.

The perpetrators of these evils – the ordinary German people – were without remorse and didn’t see their actions as evil. This sort of evil – the banality of evil – has a deadening effect because what is lost is the ability to be ‘outraged’, the will to fight. These people simply give up. They are survivors interested only in self- protection. They have lost the capacity and desire to fight against evil.

Arendt at the time – after the Eichmann trial – talked about the German people who ignored what happened to Jews among them, favoring Hitler who provided them with jobs. They later backed him ‘for the greater glory of Germany’. Then their national anthem started with the words: Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles, which means Germany, Germany above everything else. Their desire for jobs and glory overshadowed their feelings for justice and human dignity.

Moshe Halbertal is referring to us today, the Century 21 people. We too have lost the ability and the desire to fight against evil. We are like the Israel people wandering in the desert, rather being slaves in Egypt and having meat than being guided by God. They then had Moses to plead for them. We, almost all others, have no Moses: we are on our own!

We have lost the will to fight to preserve creation. The powers of advertising, the ease of daily living, the modern conveniences we, you and I, experience every minute of our lives, have killed us, have sapped us from the will to fight Climate Change and global injustice. The very church people who rule the USA and Canada – the Republicans in the States and Stephen Harper in Canada – are the leaders promoting death to us all. And we too are the willing victims, victims of evil.

We do have warnings, even though we ignore them. All crucial measures of the health of the ecosphere in which we live—groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of “dead zones” in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of biodiversity—suggest that our high-energy/high-technology society is unsustainable. Because we live in an oil-based society and are rapidly depleting the cheapest and most easily accessible oil reserves, we face a huge adjustment in the way of life on which our existence is based. We now have entered an era of “extreme energy” evident in such dangerous and destructive technologies as hydro-fracturing, deep-water drilling, mountaintop removal, tar sands extraction, all of which will hasten the coming calamities of climate change. Welcome to our affluent captivity where we ignore ‘the problem of evil’.

Back to Job. He is a fighter. Back to Jesus. His fight cost him his life. Job fights against his three so-called friends who accuse him of hiding his sin. His friends see wealth as the reward for living a good life. Job knows better, that’s why he fights back, even against God. He screams at God: “Why have you made me your target? How come that I am in this miserable condition?”

Scientists these days are talking about tipping points and planetary boundaries, about human activity pushing the planet beyond its limits. In a recent study, 22 leading scientists warned that “humans likely are forcing a planetary-scale transition with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience.”

In plain language it says that our biological resources – water, trees, soil, air – which we now take for granted, will be subject to sudden and unpredictable transformations probably sooner than later.

That means we are in deep trouble, something the church can no longer ignore, because that trouble plays out in a world chockfull with the inequalities that flow from deeply entrenched power structures, both within individual countries and between the so-called developed and developing worlds. Stir in the ecological crises which will greatly exacerbate existing problems rooted in the unjust distribution of wealth and power, and our troubles are likely to magnify exponentially. I see it as the role of preachers and self-appointed bloggers like me to warn our society that we are in deep denial, denial that is especially anchored in the relatively privileged sectors, such as organized religion where our affluence insulates us from the immediate consequences. Bonhoeffer’s advice to the Church of Christ, in his introduction to Creation and Fall, is: “To witness to the end of all things, to live from the end, to think from the end, to act from the end, to proclaim its message for the end.” In this the church fails miserably.

Therefore I see it as my duty to sound the unpleasantly loud alarm that we must drastically change the way we think, move, worship, especially the latter, because only as a community can we prepare ourselves for the future. In other words: like Job and Jesus we must fight insidious evil.

Fact is that we need a radical conversion. Many of us are shuttled by way of cheap gasoline from climate-controlled house, to an artificially lighted work-place, to a prepackaged supermarket, to a night in front of electronic amusement, and there is little, in all this, to shock one’s level of energy and material use out of the unconscious realm. Just as Job ‘in paradise’, we need a totally new way of life, not just ‘brother are you born again?’ but consciously trying to live a God- that means Cosmos- pleasing existence.

The sin of Job before his affliction, our sin today, is Anthropocentrism, the arrogant and deluded belief that the earth and the universe were designed for human (Anthropos) benefit and control, something the entire World, including all religions, believes with a passion. John 3: 16 is almost always wrongly interpreted as if it reads: “God so loved the human race….”

The Problem of Evil is now all-pervasive. In 1933-45 Hitler and his willing countrymen ignored what happened to the Jewish people. They paid a steep price. Today the entire world is complicit in perpetrating the evil of Climate Change. We will pay an even steeper price.

The Bible is quite clear on one cardinal point: We can’t love Jesus if we don’t love creation, the topic of the next article. This makes me wonder whether a deliberate Sin against Creation is equivalent to the Sin against the Holy Spirit. Look up Matthew 12: 31.

Next week: We can only love Jesus when we first love creation

MARCH 15 2015

Man becoming the ultimate Machine

I was surprised to read that news now can be algorithmically generated without our brains being involved or our fingers doing the typing. Don’t ask me how that works. I imagine that some newsworthy item out there is fed into a computer which then will consider all possibilities, predict a likely outcome, and let the machine ‘scientifically’ determine the final result. Long live the Magic Machine: death to the human touch, no longer needed.

What this means is that we’ve gone far beyond the words of Psalm 115. There it says that: “Their idols are silver and gold…They have ears that cannot hear, eyes that cannot see…. Their makers will become like them and so will all who trust in them.”

Ah, those are so yesterday’s idols. Today our idols are machines, tools so clever that the idols can speak, can hear and can see. All of which makes them much more dangerous and lethal because machines have no conscience, no heart, no feelings. The slippery slope has just started to slant significantly more steeply. Imagine software stealthily replacing us as communicators, algorithmic content rapidly permeating the nooks and crannies of our culture, from government gobbledegook to fantasy financial phenomena, to fake information on the future. Of course some human brain writes the parameters but from there the machine assumes control following certain ‘environmentally’-friendly guidelines. Just imagine: bad news no longer condoned. It does not sell, so we simply eliminate it. Just imagine: computers programmed to delete anything to do with Climate Change, anything to do with unemployment, anything to do with accelerating cancer rates, and, please no reports on Pope Francis because he is saying some disturbing things.

Automated Insights (A.I. also the acronym for Artificial Intelligence) states that its software created one billion stories last year, many with no human intervention; its home page displays logos of customers all of us would recognize: Samsung, Comcast, The A.P., Edmunds.com and Yahoo. What are the chances that you haven’t consumed such content without realizing it?

Here is a concrete example. While I am writing this, I read that “Officials responsible for making sure Florida is prepared to respond to the earth’s changing climate are barred from using the terms “global warming” and “climate change” in official communications, emails and reports. We were told that we were not allowed to discuss anything that was not a true fact,” said Kristina Trotta, a former Florida Department of Environmental Protection employee. Another former employee added, “We were dealing with the effects and economic impact of climate change, and yet we can’t reference it.” Apparently when we don’t mention it, this human-induced catastrophe will disappear. Fat chance, as Florida is one of the most vulnerable states.

Welcome to the new world of Man as the ultimate Machine. This is happening in an era where nothing is stable, nothing is straightforward, everything is fixed, and nothing is fixed: it basically signals the End of Humanity.

I hardly ever watched Television, get my news from newspapers and alternative sources. I have been my own boss since 1952, a year after I emigrated from the Netherlands. Since then I’ve been dealing with people all the time, gaining a bit of insight into human nature, and still learning, gaining some self-knowledge too, I hope. My observations tell me that society at large and government bureaucracy in particular are trying to paint a picture that does not at all portray reality.

What is the current reality?

Fact is that deflation is exactly what the word implies: a bubble losing air or a human losing humanity. It applies to money whose value actually increases with deflation because as goods go down in price, a dollar buys more. It applies to humanity at large where the vast majority has no clue where we are, thanks to deflated understanding. It also applies to our precious planet, in a state of perilous depletion, another lethal form of deflation. Algorithmically generated news, Man the Magic Machine, simply ignores reality. Newspapers already reflect that trend so independent sources, such as hielema.ca/blog, become more valuable because it not only represents a more sober and genuine point of view, but does this from a unique Christian – Biblical – End-Time perspective. If we do not know where we are going then we wander in the dark. And that is the aim of Big Business. The harsh truth is that this world has an expiry date and it is approaching fast. It is from that perspective that we have to plan the future.

Yes, we live in a Near Term Human Extinction situation. On a clock it would signal a minute or two before Twelve. The algorithmically generated news is just one of the signs. Stock markets rely on this as well, with the result that stock values go up with bad news and go down with good news, because good news means that interest rates go up, and that in a world drowning in debt. A fraction of increase in the cost of debt can tumble the entire house of cards which is the current economy.

Last week the US Bureau of Labor Statistics issued an optimistic report in the labor market as jobs for waiters increased and the health industry saw gains, as more and more people got sick, now claiming 18 % of the Gross National Product in the US of A: good for the doctors and nurses, bad for the patients. The largest percentage of bankruptcies in the USA is money owed to hospitals and doctors. Wal-Mart increased wages for its workers, but reduced their hours, meaning that it is not responsible for health benefits.

What somehow was not reflected in the Labor Statistics was the job bloodbath in the oil industry, thanks to the surplus of oil – due to reduced economic activity. The never imagined happened: the world halved the price of oil with economic activity down, especially in Europe and China. Last week saw a veritable hemorrhagic fever of job layoff announcements: 9,000 here, 7,000, there, thousands of thousands everywhere — Halliburton, Schlumberger, Baker Hughes — all deep into the oil services sector: Calgary, Fort McMurray, Alberta in general, all in the same boat.

It reminds me of 1984, where Truth is Lies and Lies are Truth. The more our leaders lie about misbehavior in banking the worse will be the instability in currencies. In the end the truth will emerge and with it the realization that – to translate a Dutch saying – Even though the Lie is fast, in a race with Truth it comes in last. After this cruel winter – not yet over – and the high heating bills all over North America, except in California where drought has the same effect – money will be hard to come by, promising pinching of pennies, more savings, but fewer goods bought.

Externalities

Take the matter of “externalities”, the so-called free natural elements: water, air, soil. Here is a truth that burned deep into my consciousness. There was an article in Grist Magazine that stated that none of the twenty biggest industries in today’s world could break even, much less make a profit, if they had to pay for the damage they do to the environment.

That is the awful truth we are faced with. That’s why the stock market reflects only fraud. The Alberta Tar Sand oil should fetch some $200- $300 per barrel if the true price of natural restoration was taken into account. It now struggles with $50. A McDonald’s hamburger should cost as high as $100 if the rainforest clearing, the methane caused by the cattle emitting lots of Green House Gases, the poor wages and the disposal of the garbage were taken into account, never mind the after effects of eating meat and its impact on future medical costs.

Fracking is the prime example of utter folly. It needs clean water – now more scarce than oil – generating waste that will work their way up the food chain and start producing cancer clusters, but algorithmically generated news will not pick that up.

The Laws of Ecology are still in force

Yet all these costs come back to haunt us. Nothing is more certain. The laws of Ecology state that:

(1) Everything is connected to everything else;
(2) There is no waste;
(3) Nature knows best;
(4) Nothing comes free.

The free air we pollute, the water we discharge full of toxins, the soil we contaminate don’t just go away; one way or another, they’re going to be paid, and costs that don’t appear on a company’s balance sheet still affect the economy. That’s the argument of The Limits to Growth, a book that set me on the path to reality, together with the insight that the Heaven Heresy is trouncing the relevance of the church by neglecting the New Earth reality.

 Here is rude reality

Here is the Truth that is staring us in the face: on a finite planet, once an inflection point is passed, the costs of economic growth – now robbing the earth of its vital ingredients, air, water, soil – rise faster than growth does then this forces the global economy to collapse: it is costs $1.01 to produce $1.00 of goods, the systems stalls. That is the truth behind the stagnation we now experience, but which the brains of this world refuse to see because it has never happened before and we, as a society, are too stupid, too brain-washed by the aspect of Infinite Growth to be able to detect something that is plain to the smallest child.

The most important cause of the lack of growth we now experience is the increasing impact of the overall pollution we now experience.

Here is my assessment: wages will decline, costs will go up, weather related incidents will increase heating and cooling bills, droughts and floods will harm food supplies, famines will occur more frequently, wars will result because Climate Change will force people to migrate to the ever smaller greener pastures. That is the kind of future algorithmically generated news will refuse to show on your TV screen or your New York Times or your Globe and Mail.

 Opt out where possible, however insignificant.

I always bake my own bread. I buy the organic whole wheat kernels in 10 kg lots, I grind it into fine flour in my electric flour mill operating on my solar power. I sweeten my bread with my own maple syrup, and exercise my hands kneading the dough. People have done that for thousands of years.

That bread is simple and delicious: no additives, except some milk powder, a touch of salt, some yeast. No packing, no wrappings, no transportation, no use of the so-called externalities. That’s real bread. I do the same with yogurt. If I can do that, so can you.

A long time ago Ivan Illich pointed out in Energy and Equity that buying from a bakery is only faster if you don’t count the time you have to spend earning the money needed to pay for it. Also buying ready-made bread involves a long series of actions such as a 200 km trip from factory to store. Another example: every day I see scores of cars racing past our house en route to Belleville, some 45 km away to work 8 hours in a store or small shop. There they earn a little better than minimum wage, grossing perhaps $100 or netting $75 at best, while the cost of driving there is 90 km at 50 cents per km or $45.00 not counting air pollution. The net gain of 10 hours away is $30.00, or $3.00 per hour, not including expense for lunch and clothing. That time is better spent baking bread, preparing meals from scratch, visiting people, improving one’s mind.

The same is true for television, the boob tube, just another instrument to dumb us down so that we will not see the truth out there. Apple with its new watch and Facebook and all Internet related matters make us into robots, slaves to some stupid machine: society is now so vulnerable that it will cease to function when the Internet falls down.

We have become enslaved to the Industrial Machine. Only when we liberate ourselves from The Machine in whatever form, and assert again our humanity, as images of God, loving his holy creation, will we be able to fight the future that stands and falls with the Machine.

MARCH 8 2015
“Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues.” (Revelation 16: 4)

What does this text mean? I have often thought about this. It becomes clearer by the day that the financial system we live in is destroying the planet. The Pope said a while ago that “harming creation is a sin”. If that is the case, and I think it is, then we sin all the time. Polluting is a direct sin against the Ten Commandments, where the Fourth Commandment says: “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name”. Think about that: we misuse or perhaps better, we abuse God’s name when we pollute, which has become as universal as eating and drinking and sleeping. This means that we must abandon our way of life (get out of her as the text above tells us) which is offending God. I do harm this very moment while I typing in my laptop even though I use solar power today. The laptop itself is chockfull with harmful material and the Internet takes a lot of energy. Must I really consider abandoning all that?
Luther, the Reformer, once said that we must sin bravely. In his time people carried no or negligible carbon foot prints: we always do all the time. Yes, we have painted ourselves into a corner: we now have a way of life that is continuously and disastrously sinful. We can’t just shrug our shoulders and keep on sinning, because the fate of the planet is at stake. The Pope still flies everywhere while airplane flights are among the worst polluters. We still eat beef even though beef cattle generate more greenhouse gases than any other animal. I live 5 km from the nearest store and church. In the winter time I simply cannot do without a car. Yet 100 years ago my former neighbors did it all the time, and the village core was a hive of activity and the churches shrived. Think about it: constant sinning kills religion.
The text listed as the heading, asks us – never commands us – to come out of her, lest we share in her sins. We now know what these sins are: the sins of destroying creation.
We can easily make excuses. My excuse: I see my blog as an evangelism tool, and, yes, it is read all over the world: I have hundreds of readers every day. Has the time come where even that is no longer effective and ‘evangelism’ is no longer viable in a world where the Good News has become so distorted that it is lost in the multitude of opinions?
Does “Coming out of her” indicate an end to communication and a separation from society that implies a cessation of contact with the outside world? Has society become so sinful that contamination can no longer be avoided? It reminds me of Lot and his small family who were forcefully removed from Sodom and Gomorrah. It reminds me of the descendants of Jacob moving out of Egypt and establishing a theocracy in the conquered lands of Palestine. It reminds me of the convents and monasteries of the Middle Ages, and the current day Amish communities.
Let’s face it: by and large the church is perhaps not dead but certainly comatose . Missions miss the message because the message has become meaningless: heaven has become a heresy because it implies leaving the earth to its polluted fate, while the New Earth concept is too difficult to grasp in a world racing to its suicidal demise.
Yet the New Earth promise is the only viable gospel out there, but difficult to sell because all our lives are completely wrapped up in our creation-destroying ego trip. If evangelism, the bringing of the Good-News, – the Eu-Angelos – wants to be effective then it has to prove that it is possible to live so that we can visualize this new theology, already long ago outlined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and J. H. Bavinck, especially in his book Between the Beginning and the End – a radical Kingdom vision (Eerdmans).

In that regard is abandoning all electronic devices a first step?

In previous columns I have mentioned The Tower of Babel, an early attempt to dominate the world which God prevented by confusing their language. Thanks to Moore’s law, computing power has expanded exponentially, and has made mechanical translation possible. In other words, the effects of The Tower of Babel have been negated: language confusion has been eliminated. God has lost the communication battle. Humanity has triumphed.
But has it really?
Just as due to the language confusion the Tower of Babel was abandoned, so the new Tower of Babel, the entire Internet and World Wide Web too will collapse. In the Babel’s Era the world was largely open. Now there is not a square meter not affected by human influence. When our totally interconnected world, now completely dependent on the Internet, is ruined somehow (and it will happen) our entire world goes with it. That’s how vulnerable we are. Better not depend on the Internet at all.
There is another, slower way of disintegration
When I look around in the stores and businesses I visit, I see only women there. Where are the men? As robots replace humans – mostly jobs earlier done by men – are the only jobs left for the males to be truck drivers and the army? Each Memorial Day a company of soldiers comes to Tweed from the nearest bases – Trenton and Petawawa – and fine young men they are. Are these the only secure jobs left for men? Of course in the bigger cities the legal profession and the upper echelons of finance are still dominated by the males. When I see the pictures in the Globe and Mail of appointments to the various boards of large companies, WASP persons dominate. The acronym no longer applies to WASP but MASP – Male Anglo Saxon Protestant or now more and more MASA – Male Anglo Saxon Agnostics.
Those are jobs not easily robotized, including most brain jobs. A robot chess player can thrash the best chess player in the world, but can’t match the motor and perceptual skills of a one-year-old baby. Robots can lift three thousand pounds at a time and carry an entire stack of shelves in one go. Directed wirelessly along preprogrammed paths, they swivel and dance around each other with surprising elegance, then pick up their packages according to the instructions printed on automatically scanned barcodes. It looks that the role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to disappear in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was eliminated by the introduction of tractors.
That means no place for muscle men of average intelligence, which means most of the men in the world. So what is needed to solve that problem? Does that mean that we need a 1914-18 war where mostly men were sacrificed as cannon fodder?
Yes, that’s what Capitalism wants. Capitalism now aims for war in which the surplus men are killed while factories hum with war production, making the economy grow: a double solution. We now know that the Capitalistic system destroys the natural system through sheer pollution. It now looks that it will also make a good portion of the employable male population redundant.
If we do not change, robots are going to eat all the jobs, and only the very talented will rule the roost: the infamous One Percent will not only garner the capital, they will also have the brain-jobs. The rest will be closely monitored, constantly on a screen somewhere to detect insurrection and revolt.
Deflation
Robots have other negative effects: it will cause severe deflation. When jobs are disappearing, then there is less and less money in most people’s pockets, and when that happens, prices fall. We already are starting to see deflation in our world where oil price are falling causing economies to stagnate and consumers to lose confidence. Now these two different deflations are starting to overlap. Collapsing house prices could be another part of this equation. The prospect of millions of jobs being rendered obsolete, private-home values collapsing and the prices of everyday goods going into a deflationary spiral sounds like a recipe for disaster, and it is. However, there is a degree of inevitability there. In a capitalist system the elimination of inefficiency through technology has to be pursued to its logical conclusion, even when it kills people.
For jobs to go away with that speed however is a new thing and there are no historical precedents for this: this simply has never happened before. We don’t have a clue how this speed of job disappearance, combined with extensive deflation, will play out, but the omens are horrifying.
It’s also worth noting what isn’t being said about this robot future. There’s capital, doing better than ever; the robots, doing all the work; and the great mass of humanity, doing not much. There is a saying that idleness is an invitation for the Devil to take over. It’s the old, old story: God – creation – versus the Devil – un-creation, pollution. Now more than ever we have to take sides. If you have a Bible, read Deuteronomy 28 which warns us when we side with evil.
There is a better way.
In 1810, agriculture employed 90 per cent of the American workforce. Then millions of buffalo roamed the prairies, living off the prairie grass. Now all the prairie grass is gone, millions of beef cattle are penned in feed lots, basically eating oil, as corn and soy beans are artificially composed and seeded, harvested with million-dollar machines, on soil yearly depleting at an alarming rate. Famers now compose less than 2 per cent of the workforce. Men and horses have been replaced by computers and oil to the extent that we eat nutritional-empty food, leading to obesity, cancer and multiple different disorders. Welcome to the Devil’s world.
There is a better way, but it involves a thorough conversion. The Greek word for conversion in the New Testament is ‘metanoia’. The Greek word ‘meta’ always indicates change. We find it in metabolism or metaphor or metamorphosis. The Greek word ‘noia’ comes from ‘gnoosis’ meaning knowledge or mind. Conversion in the theological sense means much more than ‘being born again’ in the Pentecostal sense, where you suddenly speak in tongues and daily pray for being Raptured, asking to be taken away from this wicked earth. Conversion really means following a different mindset, a complete change in life and living. Conversion is the exact opposite of the conventional meaning of ‘born again’ which is a flight from this world. Conversion means becoming one with the earth which formed us, sustains us and daily upholds us.
Yes, there is a better way. We must embrace our life-giving earth. We must take distance from all elements that hinders us to do so. The earth is God’s precious possession, we misuse God’s name when we abuse it. John 3: 16 tells us that God so much loved the earth from which we sprout, which is our mother, which has all the elements to make us perfect beings, that God sacrificed his Son to buy it back from the Devil.
Here is how I see it.
When God gave the earth to Humanity as its possession, these early people sold it to the Devil who ever since then has been in charge. Regard it as a real estate transaction. Jesus bought it back from the Devil and paid for the purchase with his life. That sealed the deal. We now live in that interim period where the sale has been finalized but the deal has not yet been closed. That will happen when Christ returns, which will be soon. All signs point to that for those who have eyes to see, ears to hear and a heart that ticks for Jesus.
That is the reason we must live expecting his coming and act so that when He returns we readily fit into the Perfect Earth where Harmony, Shalom, and Love are the only features.

MARCH 1 2015

THERE’S NO WAY BACK

Just as we try to do everything possible to stay healthy so too we must do the utmost to keep the earth in the best possible shape, because the earth and we are one. We are not stewards but owners of the earth. Psalm 115: 16 is quite explicit on that score. It says that The Highest Heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to humanity. And that makes sense. There also is a saying that ‘possession is 99 percent of ownership,’ so that too indicates ownership. Of course there is some validity to the claim that it is God’s earth. He created it after all. It is like a painting: I may buy a famous piece of art, which makes me the rightful owner, but the treasure always is identified by the original creator, such as a Picasso or van Gogh or,  in music, Bach or Beethoven. That’s how it is with God: our cosmos will always be identified by God as the creator, even though he gave it to us.

We know what we have done to the earth and the lower heavens: irreparable damage, never to be reversed, on the contrary, it will get worse and worse, as is evident from the weird weather we are having. The deterioration we experience will be the topic of many discussions this year and the awful truth is that nothing will change: There is no going back.

Environmental damage is a form of debt. When I borrow money to buy something today, and when I then start using that product, its value goes down, but the debt increases because of interest. Debt, any debt, makes it more difficult for me in times to come because this future obligation hampers my life today because my debt cuts into my buying power, which means that in the months and years ahead I have less money available.

The same is true for environmental debt. We continually borrow from the atmosphere. We use the air, soil, water without regard to the eventual clean-up cost which all lands on our shoulders later in our lives or on future generations to clean up. It’s impossible to enjoy the same benefits tomorrow as we do today without paying much more because the environment debt also carries a penalty. The best way to handle this is to repair the damage now which costs money and time, but will prevent much greater hardship in the near future. Will we do it? No. Our entire life style is built on growth and thus more pollution. In the vocabulary of politics and business there is no concept of going back and cutting down, only growth matters.

What is the church going to do?

Our debt trap reminds me of the Lord’s Prayer, the most popular prayer in churches, a prayer we know by heart, but we fail to know its deeper meaning. The entire prayer is probably one of the most misunderstood sections in the Bible, at par with John 3: 16, where the line “God so loved the world” is generally read as “God so loved the human race.” The misunderstood parts center on the Kingdom and on Debt. Both Bonhoeffer and J. H. Bavinck repeatedly emphasize that the line in the Lord’s Prayer “Your Kingdom Come” is a fervent plea for the establishment of God’s New Earth where righteousness reigns, where everything that was wrong on our current earth will forever be corrected. Then there is the line in that prayer “Give us this day our daily bread”, which is completely mistranslated. There is a Greek word in that sentence – epiousios (Google it to confirm my statement) – that actually does not point to today but to the future. So “Give us this day our daily bread” is not a plea for a constant supply of bread, but really means to ask for the power to prepare for the Kingdom that is to come in the future. After all, Jesus’ entire mission was eschatological, and had everything to do with the coming Kingdom, the New Creation. His sacrificial death was solely for the purpose to ensure that the New Creation was to come in all its glory. His death served to pay for all the environmental debt we accumulated through thousands of years of abusing the planet. Thus “Forgive us our debt as we forgive our debtors” basically refers to all the ‘debts we have inflicted upon creation’, which can never be made good if they depended on us humans to do so. Actually the original text mentions ‘trespasses’. Anything that hampers God’s holiness is a trespass, an illegal entry. When we harm creation we trespass on God’s holiness. We do that all the times and so does everybody else, that’s why we must forgive others as well.

Without Christ there would not be a way back no matter how hard we try. Too bad that by and large almost without exception, the Church rather sticks to the old, and erroneous, version of the Lord’s Prayer. It prefers the engrained interpretation because it is much easier this way and does not call for a totally different approach. That does not mean that there is no place for the church anymore: there is.

There is a vital place for the church

We cannot do without the church, even though fewer and fewer people see it that way. However, in these last days where all the bills, also for the environment, are due, the church’s approach must become completely different. Bonhoeffer, in his Creation and Fall, starts his book with the remarkable words: “The Church of Christ witnesses to the End of all things. It lives from the End, it thinks from the End, it acts from the End, it proclaims from the End.”  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, killed by the Nazi regime weeks before the end of World War II, called himself an ‘Anthropos Teleios”. Anthropos is the Greek word for ‘a human being.’ In the Sermon of the Mount Jesus uses the term ‘teleios’ to indicate how we should live. In Matthew 5: 48 Jesus tells us ‘to be teleios as my heavenly father is teleios,” the word usually translated as ‘perfect.’ I do a lot of translating I know that translating is often a guess game. Just as the Lord’s Prayer contains mistranslations so does the Sermon on the Mount. Here the word ‘teleios’ refers to the Greek ‘telos’ as we find it in ‘tele’vision, and ‘tele’phone, both referring to ‘telos’ the Greek word for ‘far’ or ‘end’. The correct translation of Matthew 5: 48 could thus quite well be Consider with everything you do the ultimate outcome and act accordingly.

Don’t expect the church at large to change and live that way. It is too entombed in its customs and superstitions to ever be able to change. There will be places where this will happen, but they will be the exceptions.

Fortunately more and more books and people start tuning into a different melody, one away from heaven and Rapture and more emphasizing the Redemption of all Creation. Where this does not happen, the church has been relegated to the margin. I admire the Pope and his vision. He just appointed scores of new cardinals, but the fact that his church gives no voice to females and its belief that good works can earn salvation indicate the irrelevance of the largest denomination in the world.

At an environmental bible study I attended a few weeks ago it was said that Christianity is really growing in Africa and China. This was seen as hope for the world, because an important environmental scientist, Dr. Schindler of the University of Alberta, himself an unbeliever, had said that the only hope to save the world is to become a Christian. The problem with this is that the fastest growth of Christianity is of the Pentecostal kind, and its main platform is “Rapture”, that erroneous teaching that in a flash Christians will suddenly be swept up to heaven, away from this sinful earth, leaving the godless to fend for themselves in an increasingly satanic environment. A book that has rivalled the Bible in popularity was The Great Late Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey. The title says it all. The New York Times called it the Bestseller of the Decade. By and large both the Catholic and the Protestant church have little use for creation, even though the current Pope has called pollution a sin against God, and I admire him for it.

Of course there are exceptions to this, mainly in the so-called neo-Calvinist tradition, but there too the idea that we are going to heaven is so engrained in all its teachings and its hymns especially, that it is almost impossible to undo the heaven heresy. When, years ago, in an article I wrote for the Presbyterian Record I expounded my misgivings about heaven, a letter to the editor called me a heretic, and the editor himself gave me a book disputing my claim.

Here’s what J. H. Bavinck wrote in his Between the Beginning and the End: A radical Kingdom Vision: “A human being, adam, belongs to adamah, the life?bearing earth. With every sinew of his exis­tence he is tied to the earth, which bears him and feeds him.”  Bonhoeffer wrote essentially the same in his Creation and Fall: “I belong completely to this world. It bears me, nurtures me and holds me…. God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together.”

These two Reformed theologians are now coming back into fashion, and that is a good sign, and also an indication that we are speeding to the End when more and more of the final Truth is being revealed.

Let me cite one example of what sooner than later will engulf the entire globe. Last week I read an article on Egypt. It stands and falls with the river Nile which is Egypt’s life line. When some 70 years ago Egypt had 23 million people, had a good supply of energy, and the Nile yielded an abundance of fish, the country was self-sufficient in food and energy. Since the annual floods from the Nile River no longer occur, thanks to the Russian built dam, the sediments and silt that were carried all throughout the region are trapped, and as one scientist explains, “Sediment is primarily retained in an extremely dense network of irrigation and drain channels, and also in wetlands in the northern delta” This lack of natural fertilizer has resulted in an increase in erosion of the river and Nile Delta, and an increase in the use of chemical fertilizers. Chemical fertilizers have to be imported and thus cost money for the farmers that grow their crops, and it also causes pollution of the surrounding environment due to runoff.  The chemical fertilizers contain high levels of Nitrogen and Phosphorous which are harmful because they flow from the cropland to the water.  Both of these elements are known to cause an increase in algae and algal blooms; algal blooms and the increasing erosion present a problem to fish because both contribute to an increase of particles in the water, which can occasionally clog the fish’s gills, suffocating them.

Now Egypt has a population of 70 million and with the energy sources depleted, with polluted land and fish stocks also down, Egypt has reached the stage of ungovernable. That is increasingly the case also in Africa and China where sand storms darken the days.

There is no way back.

There’s no way back. Seven Billion Two Hundred Million people populate the finite earth. All make claims on the soil, the water and the air, and do so with utter disregard of the ultimate consequences. Already in the Garden of Eden the economic prevailed over the aesthetic. As natural disasters multiply at an unprecedented pace, the End of Life too is approaching with increasing velocity. Nobody knows the exact time of collapse. Only God does. But that it is coming is beyond doubt.

So what must we do? That is today’s dominating question. In the first place we must be aware of the lethal forces we have unleashed. To state that we must remain optimistic because otherwise our grandchildren have no future, is baby prattle. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,” is an ancient saying. In the Fourth of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20: 4) it explicitly says that we shall not worship any other than God. By making economic growth our idol – and we all are guilty of this – the sins of the fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers will be punished to the third and fourth generation through our abuse of the world God solved so much (John 3: 16).

There’s no way back, only a way forward, and thus our prayer should be one of forgiveness and for the speedy coming of the Lord and his New Creation in all its glory.

February 22 2015

PRETEND AND EXTEND

I am always in pursuit of news. And what I see troubles me. Or perhaps what I do not see. I do not see any official warnings that we are in uncharted waters; I do not see that we are sailing into a future that is totally different.

When I was young the world was pretty stable. There was an abundance of small shop owners, small farmers, lots of skilled people. There were a few who had better than average brains and they went on to university, usually the children of professionals – brains generate brains – and in that sense I was the exception in my family, the first to chart a course into higher learning.

It all changed radically a few years after WWII – World War 2 – around the 1950’s, and the advent of the Oil Age, when, to paraphrase Geert Mak, “God Disappeared from the World,” and the god of Economic Growth became the Idol of our Age.

As all idols, they sooner than later want total submission and total devotion. We are now at that phase. In a sense it is the final battle, a battle that started in the Garden of Eden.

The history of the world is like a human life. Let me divide it into four arbitrary segments: age 0-20 formation; age 20-40 experimentation; age 40-60 consolidation; age 60-80 finalization. In the first 20 years we grow up and start to find direction in our lives. We then start to experiment, receive our education, and try to find a spouse or partner and a career. By the time we are 40 we are more or less settled, and look forward to the final years, inevitably ending in death.

In a sense the world is like that, except that the periods are not of equal length. The formation years has taken many thousands, if not millions of years; the experimentation stage started perhaps with the invention of fire which made agriculture possible. I am not sure when that happened, perhaps 100,000 years ago. The consolidation period started with the invention of the printing press, which made the Protestant Reformation – 500 years ago in 1517 – possible. The decades of 1950-2000 were a transition time. We now have entered the home stretch, and I use that term ‘home stretch’ on purpose, because the world as we now know it is in its final stage. Politicians everywhere are desperately trying to halt the decay, but matters have gone too far. Home will be ‘the new creation’ which the Lord is ready to launch. Birth can be a painful matter and we are about to experience this situation. Welcome to the ‘birth pangs’. Read Romans 8 for further enlightenment.

So why am I so convinced that we are in the ‘death-years’ of our civilization?

As I wrote last week: Peaks are everywhere. One that I did not mention concerns ‘science.’ You may remember that in Switzerland the European Union spent in excess of $1 billion to discover a so-called God particle. To trap this elusive matter the CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has built the Large Hadron Collider. Here is some truth from one of the people involved:

Quantum Physicist Dr. Amit Goswami admitted today that he, and his peers, have absolutely “no fucking idea” what they’re doing, and claims they were no nearer than prehistoric man to figuring out the Universe. “We have been just winging it, to tell you the truth,” explained the 78-year-old in an exclusive interview with WWN. “Seriously, I haven’t a clue what’s going on. Either does anyone else in my field. We keep proving stuff that never actually happened.

Over the years there have been just a handful of us pretending to know something about the universe that no one else does,” he went on. “But this is all lies to feed the charade. I’ve had some great times during the years; travelling the world, and giving talks on our pretend finds.

When asked how he got away with it for so long, he replied: “I found out a long time ago that everything can be proven with a mathematical equation. Now, I mean everything; from unicorns, fire-breathing dragons, God and even the G-spot. None of it is true. Me and the handful that know the truth have been riding the Quantum Physicist celebrity wave for quite some time now, but it must end – before someone gets hurt”.

The University of Oregon professor warned that the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, could potentially wipe out the entire planet if the project is not put to a halt.

“I’m coming near the end of my days now and I just want to get this off my chest,” he said. “I just hope the world can forgive us”.

Of course this ‘science’ program near Geneva won’t stop. Too many careers are at stake, and stopping it would be an admission of failure: science cannot fail. Pretend and extend, in other words. It reminds me of the Tower of Babel, where the people wanted to become famous “Make a name for ourselves” says the Bible in Genesis 11: 4, replacing the name, the Kingdom of God, with the human name and Kingdom. Here too the same principle is at work.

I must admit that the CERN people discovered one thing: The Big Bang Theory is no longer valid. Of course not. Just as God has no end or a beginning, so the world has no end or a beginning. For the world there is no beginning and there is no end: “in the beginning” are just words because we cannot understand that there is ‘no beginning’. These CERN scientists may yet blow up the world, but they rather Pretend and Extend than admit that they are wrong.

That same sort of brinkmanship is going on in Brussels where Greece is speaking the truth about Capitalism and the rest of Europe adheres to the Lie, the lie that Austerity can save us from financial collapse. The harsh truth is that neither the Greeks nor the Euro nations have a clue what is really going on. Just as the Collider conspirators know that they, for the sake of obtaining funds and secure prestigious positions, knew they did not know anything, the financial gurus in Brussels also know themselves to be frauds, and, as true fanatics, are redoubling their efforts, speeding up the demise of the global money system. The Greeks are wrong too, but less so. There simply is no solution to the ‘debt’ problem, so everybody pretends and extends.

When all else fails, go to war

When all else fails, go to war. That is what’s happening. The rumbling in the Ukraine, the mess in the Middle East, the tensions in the Far East, the droughts in Australia, the extreme weather everywhere, all point to us humans going to war, basically against creation. They all are omens of the Global Grand Finale.

The most disconcerting aspect of these finalizing times is that they are signaling a total destructive all-out war. Leaders mobilize all forces, refuse to compromise, define their enemies in moral terms, demand sacrifice on the battlefield and home front, build the most destructive weapons imaginable, and employ those weapons to obtain victory at any cost.

It may seem inconceivable that war on such a scale will happen within the next ten years, but it was equally inconceivable in 1936 that 65 million people would die in the next ten years during World War II. We valued all the wrong things and made all the wrong choices leading up to this Crisis and during the early stages of this Crisis. The accumulation of unmet obligations, unpaid bills, un-kept promises and unresolved issues will provide the fuel for an upheaval that will shake our society to its core and transforms the country’s direction for the next years. No longer make our choices any difference. That is not a pessimistic statement: that is the only outcome of what Pope Francis calls, referring to pollution: the sins against creation. The Bible says (Romans 6: 23) “The wages of sin are death.” In this case the death not of the planet, because in the final analysis the planet belongs to God, but of all living matter.

Today we experience all sort of wars. Let me name a few, without elaborating too much. I won’t again mention our  war against Creation.

Currency War

The world is awash in sovereign debt, as governments have over-promised welfare benefits, every country is attempting to debase their currency in order to make their debt load bearable. When Greece exits the EU, the currency wars may lead to real war in Europe.

Class War

As Warren Buffett admitted in an oligarch momentary lapse into truthiness:

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

The true class war is between the .1% and the 99.9%. There is a small clique of bankers, billionaires, corporate CEOs, media moguls, politicians, and their acolytes who represent the Deep State, or invisible government, and control the mechanisms of financial markets through their capture of the system.

Generational War

A particular dicey war is the war between the older generations and younger generations.  The tension between older and younger generations is palpable. Older generations have accumulated wealth during the good times. The Boomers who didn’t save for their retirement refuse to yield the field and allow Millennials into the workforce. Millions of delusional Boomers utilized the easy debt provided by the bankers to live for today and never save for tomorrow. Well tomorrow is here. The older generations are still going to receive all the social benefits they were promised, while younger generations will get stiffed. They know they are going to get screwed and are unlikely to take the screwing lying down.

Terrorism/Religious war

The war on terrorism, like the wars on drugs and poverty, is unwinnable. They aren’t meant to be won. They are meant to enrich the vested interests, expand their control over our lives, erode our liberties and freedoms, and provoke fear and dependency among the masses.

The war on terrorism is a cover for hijacking the oil under the ground in the Middle East. ISIS is now Satan, Hitler, and Attila the Hun rolled into one, even though they didn’t exist a year ago. They are the existential threat of the day – the excuse for U.S. troops and armaments to flow back into Iraq. The military industrial complex profits will surge.

The Middle East is a powder-keg which could be the catalyst for the start of World War III.

Cyber war

We, the technology addicted masses, are completely oblivious to their loss of privacy and freedom. We are being tracked and monitored through your electronic devices. Our TV is recording your conversations. In cyber war, the playing field is fairly even. Even North Korea can create problems for a superpower. Hackers have already caused billions in damage to retailers like Target, Home Depot, Staples, Sears, and Neiman Marcus. Over 1,000 merchants have had their computer networks breached. Hackers could potentially bring the financial system to its knees with a few keystrokes. Foreign governments have their smartest tech geeks probing U.S. computer networks for weaknesses and will act on these weaknesses when they feel it is beneficial to their interests. Technology will not save the world, but it might play a part in ending it.

Total War

It all adds up to Total War, war on all fronts, cyber, religious, generational, class, environmental, currency, war so total never before experienced, and since it is so total, it will involve every living thing on earth, the fish- already mostly gone – the trees – in a far state of decline, the animals – many species already eliminated – and we poor and sinful humans, the perpetrators of all this evil which started in that beautiful Garden of Eden

Conclusion

All this will affect me as much as anybody else. I’m living in the midst of this Crisis with all the other participants. I’m not happy about the prospect of financial collapse, societal collapse, and war. My wife and I have many children and grandchildren. It’s not fair they are left with the burdens created by decades of bad choices and cowardly acts of us, their elders.

Next week: what can we do; what must we do.