Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

THIS WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS: ending Nov. 23 2014

I occasionally watch T.V., mainly the newscasts. The picture that fascinated me last week was taken at the G20 meeting in Brisbane, with Putin sitting at a round table with 10 chairs, and he was there all by himself. Had I been there – God forbid that I would ever dwell in such company – I would have joined him, asking him about his relationship to the Russian Orthodox Church, to which, so the tale goes, he is committed. But then that church is no different from any other, I imagine. Last week I was at our regular Thursday night Bible study, where one of the topic was Jesus’ agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. You may remember that twice he found the disciples – reduced to 11 by now – the then church, fast asleep. Jesus scolded them for this. It struck me that today, with God’s creation also in total agony, the church too is asleep. The excuse: creation is none of its business.

Talking about sleep: is there anything more boring than a G20 meeting? For some reason the heads of states from important countries meet once of year to dine and wine, at great expense to the taxpayer and even greater expense to the environment. They all fly in, of course, adding to our precious air megatons of GHG- by now you may know that this means Green House Gases – mostly CO2 which causes Climate Change.

The Australian chairman of the G20, Tony Abbott, wanted to keep Climate Change off the agenda, enthusiastically supported by Stephen Harper, the Canadian P.M, who has found a soul mate in Tony Abbott, whose name has religious connotations, an abbot being the head of a religious order. How fitting!

Both P.M.s are deeply religious: Infinite Growth being their idol, and in that they were at the right church service: the meeting of the G20. The Christian God is a G3, God in Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Devil favors G666, while the secular church goes by G20, representing multiple gods, with the overarching expression of faith in the sacred duty to deliver exponential economic growth in a finite earth.

At this meeting, as usual, a company of priests prepared the Holy Script which always contains their faith commitment. It never varies: “The G20 is going to boost living standards and create better jobs.” It’s the age-old political clap-trap that is as meaningless as their idols, which are eloquently described in Psalm 115:

Their idols are silver and gold, made by the human hands. They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes but they cannot see, ears but they cannot hear….Those who make them will become like them, and so will all who trust in them.

Indeed those who believe in the god of silver and gold and in infinite growth have lost all notion of the essence of creation. To see creation as something that cannot feel or hear, or suffer pain, something dead, implies that God is dead. The Bible sees creation as a living entity, now (Romans 8: 22) groaning as in agony. The Psalms see it as alive: hills dancing with joy, the heavens proclaiming God’s glory. To trust in the Lord means trusting in the goodness of creation, seeing it as the symbol of God’s greatness, and treating it God’s gift to us. That same Psalm, 115, tells us that “the highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to us.” That is a holy trust.

The G20 in Brisbane, Australia, where the outside temperatures had again reached a record, the matter of Climate Change was on the agenda in spite of the protests from Abbott and Harper. The final official communique said that:

“Our 800-point action plan will increase the size of the global economy by more than 2% over the next four years. It is going to step up the fight against climate change, make banks safer, modernize infrastructure, crack down on tax evasion and win the battle against Ebola.”

Stephen Harper certainly did not help to cure Climate Change the week of November 9-16. He must have generated tons of Green House Gases, by first flying to Beijing, for an APEC conference – APEC standing for Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation – then back to Ottawa, for the November 11 commemoration, trying to score political points, and then right away hopping in the plane flying 14 hours to Brisbane, Australia. Of course Harper is one of those Christians – the majority actually – who does not believe in Climate Change. He does believe in Infinity that is in Infinite Economic Growth a faith he shares with his soul-buddy Tony Abbott who scrapped the carbon tax when he came to power. Everything is sacrificed on the altar of Economic Growth. I wonder have these fellows ever read Isaiah 24, where the consequences of molesting the earth are outlined:

See the Lord is going to lay waste the earth and devastate it;

He will ruin its face and scatter its inhabitants –

It will be the same for priest (abbot) as for people…………

The earth will be completely laid waste and totally plundered.

Last week I read in E. F. Schumacher’s Small is beautiful that Jesus’ admonition to First Seek the Kingdom has not only a promise – all things we need will come to us – but also a threat: unless we first seek the Kingdom, that is the welfare of creation, these other things which we also need, will cease to be available to us. That’s what happens when we pursue Economic Growth and neglect the welfare of creation. The Bible says that the ‘wages of sin –polluting is sin – is death.”

I am quite sure that behind closed doors the leaders of the world weren’t so optimistic. The entire world is in deep human excrement, to use a diplomatic word. Frankly its politicians are in panic. They are running out of options. The Financial Times reports today that China now resembles the US in 2007. Domestic bank loans have risen 40% since 2008, while “the ability to repay that debt has deteriorated dramatically”. Property prices are falling and the companies that run China’s shadow banking system provide “virtually no disclosure” of their liabilities. Last week the G20 leaders announced that growth in China “is robust and is becoming more sustainable”. That is pure hogwash.

Take debt

A long time ago Shakespeare cautioned: Neither a lender nor a borrower be. Well, today there are plenty of both, and the great bard’s warning is not being heeded.

A report in September revealed that total world debt (public and private) has reached 212% of GDP, $100 Trillion +. In 2008, when it helped to cause the last crash, it stood at 174%. The Telegraph noted that this threatens to cause “renewed financial crisis … and eventual mass default.” Shadow banking has gone berserk, stocks appear to be wildly overvalued, the Eurozone is bust again. Which will blow first? The system the world’s governments have sought to stabilize is inherently unstable, built on debt, fuelled by speculation.

David Cameron, Britain’s PM, came back from the G20 meeting with warnings that we are in for hard times, revealing a bit what his political colleagues also fear. The world has run stuck: there is no alternative policy to the so-called Keynesian policies – pump in more money – with the result that they are making the same mistakes while expecting a different outcome. There is talk in Canada that Harper will call an early election. He has to face the voters in October 2015. When we do go earlier to the polls that is a certain sign that he fears collapse will come before next October.

Back to Oil.

By now everybody knows that fuel prices are down. Speculation abounds that this is a political ploy to play hardball with the “fracking” oil in the USA, which needs at least $70/barrel oil, and to humiliate Putin whose Russian economy depends on high fuel prices, well north of $100 per barrel to make ends meet. The Middle East oil sheiks can get by on less than $40 per barrel. Of course we, in North America, are glad because the cheap oil frees money to spend, especially with Christmas a few weeks away.

Actually low oil prices are a symptom of the opposite the G20 need for growth: they signal stagnation everywhere, in China, in Japan, in Europe, and also at home in North America.

The world at large needs high oil prices to pay for the ever-more expensive exploration costs, such as penetrating the almost inaccessible last frontiers. So the low prices are bad news, because they spell deflation, the exact symbol of the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Deflation is the Great Economic Plague. In a world oversaturated with debt, deflation is makes debt harder to repay. Lower prices mean that people wait to buy, because tomorrow the prices may have gone down even more. Thus lower prices signal economic stagnation. Fact is that the global economy has caught the equivalent of financial Ebola: deflation, which is the recognition that debts can’t be repaid, obligations can’t be met, and contracts won’t be honored. Credit evaporates and actual business declines steeply as a result of all those things.

I dare say that, for the foreseeable future, we will not see higher growth for the simple reason that growth can never go on forever. The earth is tired. It is literally exhausted. It’s been a fabulous 200 years, and now we see the end of growth. Our natural environment cannot continue to support further exploitation. The evidence clearly shows that atmospheric temperatures are rising, nature is failing to sustain many of the services that are critical to human life, and our global theft of everything natural is sharply reducing the biodiversity that safeguards our existence. There is no longer any doubt that ‘growth’ which really means the massive use of carbon energy, the increase of material output per person, and the rapid growth of the overall human population, is the cause of this environmental degradation. And yet, economists across the political spectrum call for ‘restoring growth’ as quickly as possible: the blind leading the blind.

Politicians are plainly petrified

I repeat: at this point politicians and bankers are simply terrified: the global system is overly indebted and so vulnerable to complete collapse of stock markets that very few of our leaders sleep peacefully. That the entire financial world is desperate can be seen by the violent rise and fall of currency values. The Japanese yen and the euro go down, the dollar goes up. It happens in a few months, which is quickly in the world of money.

Yet the stock markets go up, no longer a portrayal of the real state of affairs. Nobody wants to be the first to pull the plug: perhaps there are yet a few paper dollars to be made. Both Greed and Fear rule the roost.

My advice? No, I won’t hazard a guess. There is no rule that applies to all. Become aware of the utter frailty of the system we have devised. Support and strengthen the community you live in. There is real wisdom in community. Now more than ever we will need friends and family and strong churches, just as the time when all these bodies are often in deep disarray.

Pray without ceasing is perhaps the best and only option.

THIS WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS

The hoily mess in the Middle East

November 16 2014

Idleness is the source of all evil.

History started in the Middle East, and it did so with a bang. The bang was the killing blow to Abel’s head. The killer was his older brother, Cain, the first child of Adam and Eve. Ever since that time war and bloodshed has been the maker of history. Lamech, Cain’s offspring, was typical. He boasted: “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for injuring me; if Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times. (Genesis 4: 23-24). Apparently this ratio still applies there today: in the recent conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, 30 Israelis were killed and 70 time as many Palestinians. Quite a contrast with Jesus who uses that same number: we have to forgive wrongs not seven times, but seventy-seven times.

Thanks to Lamech’s bragging we now face feuds forever and ever with the result that the Middle East has been floating in a flood of blood until this day. In ancient history matters there got so bad that Yahweh drowned its entire population, save for Noah and his family. Can this happen today? Yes. If the Massive Solar Flare of 1859 (the “Carrington Flare”) that melted electrical transformers everywhere, would hit now, it would have the same fatal effect as Noah’s Flood. It would effectively stop all electrical transmission, paralyze daily life and starve the Western World in a few days.

After the Flood came the Tower of Babel drama. There God thwarted human communication to prevent the first – not the last – human overreach. The confusion of tongues then led to widespread emigration, as the world was largely unexplored and uninhabited, and deserts basically non-existent.

Overgrazing and overpopulation were to become the prime cause of desertification, now the norm in the Middle East and rapidly gaining elsewhere. Violence against creation and violence between people go hand in hand. The Middle East was the first densely settled part in the world and also the first area to suffer environmental degradation. It seems to me that, in order to provide ‘lebensraum’ for its people, the spread of Islam – basically a black/white religion (follow the rules and you go to heaven, easily replacing Christianity) – can be traced to escaping its polluted lands for greener pastures, which in the early Middle Ages were found in Eastern and Southern Europe,

The Crusades – 1096 to 1291 – were the first of a series of religious wars.  The Popes then, supposedly possessing the keys to the kingdom of heaven, promised the Crusaders, upon joining up, carte-blanche forgiveness for their past and future sins, resembling the exact Koranic assurance of heaven for any Moslem warrior. The Crusades were followed by the Black Plague which killed some 30 percent of the then European population of an estimated 60 million.

Religious Wars

Where the first religious war was between Islam and Christianity, the second one occurred in Europe between two branches of the Holy Catholic Church, its Roman Catholic wing and the Protestant part. It lasted from 1618-1648, and affected half of Europe’s people. That prospect now looms for the Middle East, adding to the chaos there and preparing the ground for another pandemic.

Wars always lead to abuse, especially of nature. The current conflicts in the Middle East are also a direct result of lack of water, overpopulation and no meaningful employment. There’s a Dutch saying that “ledigheid is de Duivel’s oorkussen”, which resembles our saying “Idleness is the root of all evil”, including the waging of wars. I wonder what will happen in California where there is a looming lack of water, and in Brazil, where in its largest city, San Paolo with 20 million inhabitants the pumps are also running dry. Both California and Brazil are slated to become deserts due to the persistent drought in the Sunshine State, while in Brazil the landscape has been stripped of 80 percent of its natural forests. Natural forests act like giant sponges soaking up rain and gradually releasing it. They also protect watercourses and maintain water quality by reducing sediment and filtering pollutants. Can Phoenix be far behind or Las Vegas? Both desert cities rely on far away, ever scarcer water.

The oily mess in the Middle East.

Two of the Middle East’s three biggest oil?producing countries, Iran and Iraq, have a Shi’a majority, while  Saudi Arabia is overwhelmingly Sunni, with a restless Shi’a minority concentrated in the country’s oil?producing east, a dangerous situation, a deep religious divide.

What separates Sunni from Shi’a is a succession dispute that erupted after the death of Mohammed in 632 A.D. now almost 1400 years ago. Those who accepted Abu Bakr, Mohammed’s father?in?law, as the rightful successor became known as Sunnis. Those who believed that Ali, Mohammed’s son?in-law, was properly the successor became known as Shi’ites. They’ve been fighting ever since, now coming to a head.

The seeds for war were sown in 1911 with Winston Churchill who was First Lord of the Admiralty, responsible for the Royal Navy. He set out to bring the Royal Navy’s aging fleet into the 20th century, switching its engines from coal to oil. Hence his interest in the Middle East, the trustee of the largest pool of oil in the world, with Saudi Arabia leading the count controlling a quarter of the world’s oil reserves.

Now, in 2014, the world is totally addicted to oil. No wonder that the world’s attention is concentrated on the Middle East, and particularly on Saudi Arabia, where young adults, those between 15 and 30 years old, make up half of the grown-up population and, despite the country’s oil wealth, close to 30 percent are unemployed. Corruption there is endemic, 50,000 princes and their relatives are on the state’s payroll, leading wasteful lifestyles, while the bulk of the population live in servitude. While siding with the USA in fighting the notorious IS- Islamic State – its ultra conservative Wahhabi clerics propagate the spread of hatred of the West. Of the nineteen 9/11 attackers, fifteen were Saudis.

The Danger of Religious zeal

Nothing inflames minds more than disputes involving religion. Actually Religious fervor is a world-wide phenomenon. Hardliners, those who know exactly what God or Allah wants, battle the modernizers. Rome, with Pope Francis, is not the only example. Conflicts like these rage between believers in Baghdad, in Tehran, in Riyadh, in Jerusalem and in Washington. Religious passion has been portrayed by W. B. Yeats in his poem “The Second Coming,” where he wrote When “the centre cannot hold, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” We, in the West lack all conviction, largely having abandoned religion in favor of material welfare, now rapidly disappearing. The ‘worst’ is all too evident in the atrocities committed by the ISIS followers.

The present trouble started in 1918, at the conclusion of World War I, when the Ottoman Empire, controlling much of the Middle East, fell apart. With England and France being the so-called winners of this war, they demanded compensation for the enormous human and material losses they suffered, so between them they carved up the Middle East without any regard for tribal and other ethnic considerations, including the approval to have the Jews return to the Holy Land, without making provisions for the people already living there.

Now, after 100 years the countries created out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire cry for tribal, religious, and ethnic recognition. With no democratic legacy, there’s no chance at all that this process will result in peaceful coexistence. Expect explosions. Expect more chaos. Expect a dangerous mix of oil and religion, the most lethal combination possible. The battle lines are set. Already the Shiites, centered in Iran, boast that they control four Arab capitals: Beirut, through the Shiite militia Hezbollah; Damascus, through the Shiite/Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad; Baghdad, through the Shiite-led government there; and Sana, where the pro-Iranian-Yemeni-Shiite offshoot sect, the Houthi, recently swept into the capital of Yemen. In all these places the Shiites dominate the Sunnis.
Over against them is Turkey, with the largest army in the Middle East, a Sunni nation, and Saudi Arabia, also on the Sunni side, with the largest oil deposits, and the richest nation by far. At present the situation is still fluid, with Syria engaged in a civil war with no definite outcome in sight, and the Kurds wanting an independent nation, fighting both Turkey and Iraq for self-control. In the midst of it all is Israel, where the unrest among its Arabian population is growing, completely surrounded by simmering fires. In the meantime the stage is set for a massive Sunni-Shiite all-out war.

So how about us in the Western world?

We still need the oil there, even though today there’s a surplus of the stuff, thanks to ‘fracking’, the new word that is derived from the word fracturing, a process involving in crushing rock to free the tight oil in there. It is a very expensive procedure and highly polluting, because it takes a lot of energy, sand, water and chemicals to free the fuel that delivers our daily bread to the local store. A low oil price kills this bonus which has propelled the USA to become the largest oil producer in the world, for a short time anyway. Once this rapidly depleting source is gone, it is back to the Middle East, still the major source for the lowest cost oil.

The story becomes complicated

Right now the USA and some other countries, including Canada, are bombing supposedly only ISIS targets. ISIS is the fanatical movement that wants to return the Middle East to pre-modern religious conditions, a male-dominated society where no emancipation is tolerated, operating under the banner of the Sunni religion. “No boots on the ground” has been the Western slogan, knowing too well that the wars waged by the USA and others in Iraq and Afghanistan have been total failures. Will a bomb here or there do the trick? The perilous part is that the two most populous nations in that region, Iran and Turkey, are on opposite sides. Turkey is a member of NATO, another complication, but it favors ISIS which both the USA and Iran opposes. But the USA and Israel are against Iran for its effort to become a nuclear power. So the matter involves the choice between two evils: either Iran is punished for developing nuclear capability, or Tehran is asked to side with the USA in its fight to topple the ISIS radicals. Israel is dead-set against Iran proclaiming that its very intention is to wipe Israel from the map. Will that pit Israel against the USA?

Apart from oil, the Western world is not threatened by all this Middle East turmoil. Also we in the West have enough troubles of our own. Basically the West sees ISIS as nothing more than small groups of highly motivated and trained fighters, who, by passionate and brutal means fueled by Islamic radicalism, have managed to do immense damage to advanced societies, thanks also to clever user of technology.

Because ISIS is motivated by ‘religion’ it is impossible to eradicate this danger. Ideology and religion always trump rationality. That was the case in Europe during the Thirty Year War, and that is the case now. The millions of refugees, displaced in Syria, in Iraq and elsewhere, are the victims, and soon the UN will be powerless to feed these people as their numbers multiply and the conflicts in the Middle East accelerates. Don’t for a minute expect for token bombing to have any effect: just as the blood of martyrs has always fueled the advance of Christianity, so Western involvement in this solely Arab civil war, will only aggravate the anger and draw the battle lines even more clearly.

There is the explicit danger that what is taking place in the cradle of civilization will become the start of a War involving the entire world. Once the battle lines are more clearly defined, when Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran openly enter into the fray, the fate of the entire world is in the balance as OIL becomes the ultimate treasure. The world cannot function without the fuel that originates in the Middle East. At the same time the Western world has sucked itself into a spiral of debt that threatens its social cohesion. It is simply impossible to continue the Welfare State in an era of deflation and economic collapse, witness its powerlessness as Russia takes over Eastern Ukraine, as the economies of Spain, Greece and Italy experience downright depression, as the economies of Japan and China succumb to excessive debt, and as Climate Change worsens and threatens our way of life.

History started with a bang to Abel’s head. History will end with a bang to the very source of energy on which the world depends.

NOVEMBER 9 2014

CHURCH—ILL?

I had planned to start a series about the church, but, on second thought, I abandoned this idea, even though I had lots of sources. I even wrote a book on the church, which I never finished. What’s the use, I reasoned: the church is in decline and very few people are really interested in its fate. My writing about it will only add to the confusion. Instead I will devote future weekly columns to THE CREATED WORD, the world we all live in, the world which is our home today and in the future. I believe that future to be The New Creation, the Coming Kingdom, which the Lord Creator upon his return – he is absent now – will establish.

Another reason why I will not write about the church is the Republican victory in the USA. A good percentage of this block of people are church goers, who deny the relevance of Climate Change, see the earth as its enemy, and consider exploiting it as its rightful privilege.

Perhaps some unbiblical thinking

Just a line on where I am coming from. In the Hebrew Bible there is a mysterious passage concerning Cain who flees from his family after having killed his brother Abel. When God talks to him he replied that he was afraid being killed by roaming vagabonds (Genesis 4: 14), implying that other people were already out there. This to me conveys the distinct possibility that Adam and Eve were selected by God out of the existing human race to make a new beginning, this time filled with the Holy Spirit, thus infused with God’s wisdom. To me this could suggest that God has sensed that the humanity then present was on the verge of harming the world he loved so much (John 3: 16), so he chose a certain human pair to make a new beginning to show the rest of humanity how to live within the limits of creation. Such a choice is not unusual. Later Noah, Abraham and David too were chosen to do the same.

Ii seems to me that the two humans whom we know as Adam and Eve took fruit from a tree without asking the tree for permission, thus breaking cosmic harmony and unlocking cascading creational chaos, culminating in the current climate change. Nietzsche has written that ‘the sin against creation is the greatest of sin.’ I believe that to be the case as well, because creation is God’s direct revelation.

The Bible tells us that the entire human history is one of fall and redemption, of briefly doing God’s will and again and again going against God’s commandments. The real miracle is that, straight through all these strivings, these ups and downs, God is establishing his kingdom. Revelation 14: 13 tells us that our good deeds will accompany us in the New Creation. History has meaning, after all.

There is evolution, also in human development. That Adam and Eve were rather naïve is related by Richard Elliot Friedman in his book, The Hidden Face of God. This great Hebrew Scholar concludes that throughout history two crucial developments have taken place: (1) God’s role in the world slowly disappears – see also Deut. 32:20 were God contemplates to let humanity have its way – which resulted in (2) a shift in the balance of control toward more human power, as humans assume an ever greater responsibility for the fate of their world. Adam and Eve could not do anything about the weather. We now have done that, so much so, that the climate has gone wild.

Consider the following. Adam and Eve were so helpless that God had to make the clothes for the fallen human pair. With Noah we see a lot of progress. Where God caused the Flood to happen, Noah is the project manager for building the Ark. Abraham is even much more independent, evident in discussing with God the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, where he even argues with God (Gen. 18). In the next chapter, Genesis 19: 22, there is a real curious sentence: “I cannot do a thing until you get there,” referring God not able to act until Lot’s family has escaped from that hellish place. Writes Friedman, “Humans are not independent of God here, to be sure, but let us say, the human voice in the story is certainly growing louder.” The progression continues in Jacob who has a physical fight with God. In other words, human are confronting their creator, and that results in increasing their participation in the arena of divine prerogatives, quite in contrast with the pietistic hymn Mold me and make me after thy will, while I am waiting yielded and still.

And then there is Moses. Friedman here quotes Exodus: “See, I have made you a god to Pharaoh.” He writes: “These words are remarkable by any reckoning, but that are particularly impressive in the context of the shift in the divine- human balance.” Psalm 82: 6 comes to mind where God tells us that “you are gods; you all are sons of the Most High.” All of which makes me wonder whether we underestimate ourselves.

Later when Moses had destroyed the first tablets of the law, furious that the folk of Israel had turned to worshiping the golden calf, the second set of tablets is not inscribed by God but by Moses, who later more than once successfully persuades God to relent and change a divine decree. To top it off: Moses speaks with God “the way a man speaks to another man” (Exodus 33: 11).

In short the entire Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, is a repetitious series of falling away from God, briefly returning to his laws, and repeatedly forsaking his commands. Even though God’s prophets were extremely outspoken in their condemnation of the false religious practices of their days, their words did not seem to make much of a difference, which suggested to me also that, if I were to write a series on the church, my musings would have the same result. My change in focus is also inspired by Amos whom I see as a role model, also a lay-prophet, a farmer called by God to speak to the nation.

Years ago I made a six verses song about Amos. Yes, they can be sung on any melody with 10 10 11 11 meters. Here are 3 of them:

2.      You think God will not observe what you do;                                                                                   that He will not see the sins you pursue:                                                                                        the widows you trample, the poor you despise,                                                                             while rich become richer through fraud and through vice.

3.      “The noise of your music and songs God detests.                                                                              He hates and abhors your religious fests.                                                                                        Your pious assemblies they cause only dread:                                                                                let Justice roll on like a river instead.

5.      “Hear this you who cheat the poor of the land                                                                                 false dealings your holdings greatly expand.                                                                                   I’ll send a new famine to all people here:                                                                                        My blessings will cease and my Word disappear.”

I believe that basically today God’s blessings have ceased and God’s word has disappeared. The church, by and large, unless it preaches the Kingdom to Come, and prepares the church for the New Creation, has lost its focus.

Israel’s exile, which lasted 70 years, is another example. It mainly involved the cream of Israel’s intelligentsia, among them many people very knowledgeable of Israel’s past history, harboring historical data preserved through the generations by means of oral transmissions. They also managed to take along all possible written sources. Somehow these people were allowed time and had the opportunity to record much of what we now know as the Hebrew Bible.

There are lessons we can learn from this. During Israel’s 70 year exile, a genuine community had developed in Babylon. I found this also being the case during the German occupation in the Netherlands 1940-45. Oppression is a good thing for the church. The exile period resulted in deep religious questioning. However, immediately upon return to the Promised Land religious strife erupted (something also the case after the war in the Netherlands). Where the prophet Isaiah had pointed out that Yahweh’s aim was to restore the whole creation to a divinely ordered shalom, this vision was ignored by the returning parties who focused primarily on their own partisan interests. The Old Testament tells us that soon disputes arose between its two leaders, both intent on establishing their authority over all opposition, and not hesitating to call the judgment of God on the heads of their rival. Instead of establishing ‘SHALOM” as Isaiah and his followers had advocated, in other words “making Peace with the Planet”, religious strife persisted. This condition has prevailed till the present day.

What really changed my mind.

I was re-reading J. H. Bavinck’s recent book Between the Beginning and the End: a radical Kingdom Vision. I was struck by something he wrote, something the church as institute will never buy, bent as it is on individual salvation. He writes: “There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal….. The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the Kingdom of God.”

That’s revolutionary. We, as Christian Community, must struggle to live in expectation of the Kingdom –that is the New Creation – to come. That is the task the church is supposed to prepare us for. Frankly I can’t see that happening. My thinking not to pursue a series on the church was also influenced by the following observation:

“If the people of Israel, directly in touch with God through priests and the prophets refused to live according to God’s laws, it is extremely unlikely that the 2000 year old institution which is the church today has preserved the Truth with a Capital T.”

My conclusion is that, if the decline of the influence of the Christian Religion in the sophisticated Western World is any indication, a process that is continuing unabated, no human effort to stem that tide will be successful.

What is needed is a totally different approach. Where the Old Testament Church failed to believe what the Hebrew Bible prophesied about the coming Messiah, the New Testament Church failed to believe that “this is our Father’s World, and thus his Word as well.”  The new approach must not focus on the church, because, according to Revelation 21: 22, the church has no place in the New Creation, the Kingdom to Come. This text, one of the last ones in the New Testament says: “I did not see a temple or synagogue or mosque or church building there, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple”.

From this I conclude that our focus, aided by Scripture, should be on Creation, God’s Primary Word, because also God’s Secondary Word, the Bible will no longer be relevant, as God’s law will be written on our hearts.

It is well to recall what happened to the Old Testament religion, where Jerusalem was the seat of the Jewish worship, centering on the temple, which  was destroyed in the year 70 A. D. This officially ended the Old Testament way of worship, which already had ceased to be relevant with the death of Jesus who will make everything new.

There’s a revealing passage in J. H. Bavinck’s book: Between the Beginning and the End: A radical Kingdom Vision. It describes the legal process between Jesus and the High Priest. Here is a citation:

“The Messiah was the ultimate meaning of Israel’s nationhood. ….From generation to generation Israel had longed for and pined after the eventual coming of Him who would, at one time, bring salvation. The prophets had testified that this great Redeemer would be none other than God himself, the son of God who was to come into the world. And now that finally this great son of David, this Messiah, has arrived in the world, now he, by that same Israel, is labeled as a blasphemer, a person who has made himself equal to God. Has there ever been anything as tragic as this denial?”

I believe that we are making the same tragic mistake again by ignoring Scripture passages about the New World to come and effectively denying that Creation is God’s Primary Word.

The main reason I decided not to write a series on the Church, was my re-reading of J. H. Bavinck’s Between the Beginning and the End: a Radical Kingdom Vision. It contains everything and every thought I want to say. Go and buy it today. Search for EERDMANS.COM to order the book. Amazon too carries it, of course.

For 10 years I wrote a weekly column for a regional daily. Starting next week I will again do this on my blog – which had 11,000 visitors in October and 9,000 in September.

In This Was The Week That Was, I will single out events that caught my attention during the past 7 days.

PREPARING FOR COLLAPSE (10)

Final Episode

I could continue in this series, but other topics beckon, so this is my last one dealing with Collapse. I believe that, in the main, nobody is ever ready for Collapse, because our brains are wired to ignore such events as Climate Change and Collapse. Just try to bring the subject up at a social gathering; chances are that you’re met with either silence, downright denial or confusion.

I read a new word last week: HOPIUM. Where Karl Marx is supposed to have said: “Religion is the OPIUM of the people” for many liberal thinkers HOPIUM is the poison that distorts reality. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary they hope that somehow science, or the government, or the United Nations, or nature itself, will cause the problem of Collapse to disappear.

I was at a meeting last week where an author, a woman with extensive scientific background, kept on saying that ‘we will overcome’ the problems facing us. She demonstrated her knowledge of natural sciences repeatedly and, to general applause, expressed her ‘belief’ that dangers such as Climate Change and disappearance of wild species will be solved, without saying how.

HOPIUM is the new religion.

I am of Dutch birth, born in the most Northerly part of the Netherlands, where ‘nuchterheid’ ‘down-to-earth common sense is said to originate. HOPIUM is the false religion which soothes us to sleep, induces us to inaction and leads us to the way to Hell. C. S. Lewis once wrote something like this: The way to hell is smooth, no sudden turns, slightly sloping, easy to traverse. That’s the way we like it. But that’s not what life is all about. When we look at what’s going on out there, then optimism is not warranted. Instead we purposely close our eyes to reality, which earns us the label of being a cynic which is defined as someone who knowingly acts against what he or she knows to be true.

Why doesn’t positive thinking work the way you might assume? Dreaming about a future that poses no dangers calms us down and robs us of the incentive to take action to pursue our goals. Positive thinking fools our minds into perceiving that we need not act at all, and so stops our willingness to do anything at all. It’s the easy way out and also literally the way to hell on earth.

Do I sound negative? Yes. I know I cannot convince you. Still I want to draw your attention to a host of happenings which indicate COLLAPSE. The list is by no means exhaustive.

1. Colony Collapse Disorder: bees are dying off in droves, imperiling thirty percent of our food supply.
2. Wild Animal Collapse Disorder: more than half of the wild animals out there have disappeared due to us depriving them of their habitat.
3. Ocean Fish Collapse Disorder: the oceans once full of life are increasingly depleted of fish and filled with plastic and other filth, while acidifying rapidly, spelling the end of all life.
4. Stable Weather Collapse Disorder: ask insurance companies where the major source of insurance claims comes from, and they answer: volatile and dangerous weather.
5. Middle Class Collapse Disorder: with the advance of robots and computer software inventions, society is rapidly dividing into a tiny upper class and a huge underclass, eliminating the most significant section: the Middle Class, the mainstay of society.
6. The Truth of the Matter Collapse Disorder: the media are a reflection of our own reluctance to face the truth, and so reinforce our weakness to shy away from the cruel reality that is about to overwhelm us.
7. The Stock Market Collapse Disorder: where before we bought when we had saved the money, we now live on debt, feeding the rise of stock market with borrowed funds, until debt does us in.
8. The Fighting Ebola Collapse Disorder: we have closed our eyes to the imminent danger of infectious diseases, of which Ebola is the current danger.
9. The Ecclesiastical Enterprise Collapse Disorder. In the coming columns I will elaborate on this phenomenon in detail, and will try to offer a possible remedy.

It’s not that I am obsessed by bad news. What I am fighting is that, by and large, people don’t really believe that evil is the prevailing reality in our life. In general, even the church people, the ministers and the rapidly diminishing flock of the faithful believe that evil can be overcome.

OK, I am an old fashioned believer. The Bible repeatedly states that we are born and conceived in sin and therefore are inclined to all evil, and shun the good.  Those who govern us at the present time reject this central insight of Western religion, which is found also in Greek tragic drama and the work of the Roman historians. Destructive human conflict is rooted in flaws within us, the human beings. The study of human actions reveals that humans always are inclined to destructive and self-destructive behavior. The bitter truth is that we must be constantly aware that, in whatever we do, evil always pops up.

We are bombarded with news that spells progress. No view of things could be more alien at the present time. Every politician – especially now with the USA November midterm elections just ahead – whatever their political spectrum, all of those who govern us hold to some version of beneficial liberalism – the HOPIUM, that false religion – which teaches that human civilization is advancing, albeit in fits and starts, to a point at which the worst forms of human destructiveness can be left behind. According to this view, evil, if any such thing exists, is not an inbuilt human flaw, but a product of defective social institutions, which can over time be permanently improved. “All we need is love,” however that is defined. Politicians as a block reject the insight that destructive human conflict is rooted in flaws within us humans. They also, fanatically, advocate that continuous growth is possible in a finite world.

I have a book by the American writer and journalist William Shirer who lived in Germany during the rise of the Hitler regime in the 1930s. He writes something that applies to us as well:

“Most Germans, so far as I could see, did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of their splendid culture was being destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work were being regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation … On the whole, people did not seem to feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupulous tyranny. On the contrary, they appeared to support it with genuine enthusiasm.”

Time and again we see that, if it comes to choose between a job and preserving the climate or democracy, the job always wins. Hitler created jobs. That, in a nutshell, illustrates the truth of the end of the world. Jared Diamond, in his book COLLAPSE, also gives a good example, citing the demise of the Eastern Island’s existence. He writes ”What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say? Like modern loggers, did he shout “Jobs, not trees!”? Or: “Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood”?

Jesus asks us to be (and here I use the Greek words, as the New Testament has been preserved in that language) ‘anthropoi teleioi’. This means that we have to be anthropoi ‘people’ who are ‘teleioi’ keeping the ‘telos, the end’ in mind. The translators in their idea of the meaning of the word ‘teleios’ have seen fit to render it as ‘perfect’: so the text in the Sermon in the Mount comes to us as “Be ye perfect as my Father in Heaven is perfect.” But we know only too well that we can’t be perfect. But we can fulfill the meaning of teleios by always in our actions trying to gauge what the end of our doings entail. We know that the ‘telos’ of driving an automobile is GHG – Green House Gases – which, in the end causes Climate Change and all its after effects such as warmer weather, greater storms, rising seas, disappearing glaciers, harsher drought. Even if I cannot do without a car, living far from stores, church and relatives, I do what Luther recommended, “sin bravely”, while praying for forgiveness. That this earth, as we now know it, will end, and be replaced with a renewed, cleansed, pristine world, is a biblical given. So, in a sense, all my 10 instalments of PREPARING FOR COLLAPSE are Eschatologies, stories that deal with – another Greek word – the eschaton – meaning the last stage of all things.

Collapse.

The apostle Paul elab­­o­rated on this when he wrote, “For the creation was subject to frus­tration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it” (Rom. 8:20). Once sin affected just one portion of that beau­tifully holistic order, it infected its totality, ruining the entire realm because Satanic forces threw themselves onto nature, onto us humans, onto the entire radiant creation. The result has been that our universe no longer is one of only beauty and harmony, but, especially in our days, one where  unpredictable powers are threatening us with annihilation from all directions. Now the world in which we live is dominated by demons. Every hour we experience the terrible influ­ence of this satanic situ­a­tion.

Yes, something went wrong.

Here’s how a poet who remains anonymous, phrased it.

The future broke. Collapse.

The Collapse is the future slowing, stopping, winding down. Fracturing; splitting apart; coming undone. It is the future ending, rupturing, breaking.

Once, we subscribed to a naive view of historical progress. That humanity marched forwards into a place we called the “future”.

The future stopped happening. For most of us. We got left behind by it.

The future isn’t one of unalloyed, golden progress anymore. Tomorrow is a tale of decline, degeneration, decay. Collapse.

The future isn’t flying cars and food pills and a smart-home and a stable career and comfortable prosperity for every family anymore. Collapse.

The future looks more like this. A story of a burning planet, of imploding middle classes, of lost generations, of empty decades, of mass unemployment, of the rule of law breaking, of democracy cracking, of nations splintering, of tribes warring, of broken dreams, of Greater Depressions, of unending Stagnations, of human possibility itself shattering into a million million pieces. Collapse.

The future isn’t the steady, forward march of human advancement anymore. What is “declining”? Constitutional democracy, opportunity, mobility, material prosperity, law, equity, fairness, a sense of meaning in life…hope for the future. Collapse.

The stories we used to tell ourselves can no longer be told. History is not a march to progress. Progress can shatter; crack. Collapse.

The future, too, can end up broken.

Collapse.

This is how the future ends. Not with a click, but with a Bang.

The Collapse is a story about how the world—the world as we once knew it—will end. Not end as in “be blown to bits by a meteor”. But end in the sense that it will never come to be. It is a story about the end of the future.

We are not living in the future. We are living in the Great Collapse. The space in between the future that never was, and the past that will not end. The break; the chasm; the gap.

We’re trapped here, in this ongoing Collapse. In a purgatory from which there’s no escape.

This Collapse is killing the future. Not the past, not the present, the future and filling it with a void, a null, an empty space, full of stagnation, of nothing, of nihilism. We can’t fix it by fixing it. We can only fix it by fixing us.

There is a fundament to the thinking of all civilized people. It is this. That each and every person deserves the chance to live fully. No matter how weak, poor, frail, or destitute. Why? Because to each life, that is all that there has ever been. Life. The struggle. The glimpse. The triumph. The fall.

If we are to become ourselves again, then we must fight to reclaim what we truly know. We are made to LIVE. That fighting against life is the truest misfortune of all. For it is the end of Faith, love, meaning, purpose, grace, wonder, suffering, passion.

And it is all those that we must rediscover if we are to escape the Collapse.

And the greatest of these is LOVE. Love for God’s creation. Love for all of life.

I have translated a book by Johan Herman Bavinck, of which the subtitle is A Radical Kingdom Vision. That radical Kingdom vision is the Renewed Creation where the sheep and the lion, the wolf and the little child, live together in peace, where harmony reigns forever, never to be broken again. It will restore what happened in the Garden of Eden, when Collapse began, when the human pair there wanted to be like God and so God let them be: God hid his face “to see what their end would be.” (Deut. 32:20). We are now discovering what it means when God disappears from the earth.

Fortunately it is only temporary. The true vision of the future is captured in Revelation 21: 2: I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.

The new earth is the bride. We, the new human race, with Christ as the head, is the groom. The last Holy Marriage. 

Next week I will start a long series on the possible place and task of the church in these Last Days. The possible new title CHURCH—ILL?

PREPARING FOR COLLAPSE (9)

Will you get Ebola?

I am quite sure that you’ve heard the word Ebola by now. It was named after a river in Sudan, where, on July 6 1976, a storekeeper, identified only by the initials of Yu. G. of the Zande tribe, died with blood running from all his body’s openings. The mysterious disease spread through his rural area, killing many people and then, with no more reluctant bodies available, the virus went into hiding.

We all know that Africa today is a vulnerable conglomerate of nations. Before 1800 it consisted of scores of tribes, with only at its southerly tip, Cape Town, a white settlement. The place originally was named Kaap van Goede Hoop  -Cape of Good Hope –  which the globetrotting Dutch used first as a stopover to the Netherlands East Indies, now Indonesia, and later as a good place to settle.  Africa then was pre-colonialist and largely forest, with people living within the means of creation, not unlike most of North America’s native people before 1500.

In early 1800 Europe discovered Africa and carved it up between England, France, Germany, Belgium and Portugal, robbing it of its people and natural treasures. It really never recovered from this rape. Now it often lacks basic health services, totally different from our situation. Or is it?

My question: “Can too much medical care be equally dangerous?”

William McNeil, University of Chicago historian, and a native Canadian, studied the matter of infectious diseases and discovered that each catastrophic epidemic event is the ironic result of humanity improving its overall condition, because as its health and wealth increase its vulnerability to disease also goes up. Dr. McNeill writes that “the more we win and the more we drive infections to the margin of human experience, the more we clear a path for possible catastrophic infections. We’ll never escape the limits of the ecosystem. We are caught in the food chain, whether we like it or not, eating and being eaten.”

That makes sense to me. The more hygienic we become and the more we ban dirt from our system, the fewer antibodies and natural remedies are present in our bodies and the more we become susceptible to infection. Thus anti-biotic medicine, so beneficial when having a communicable disease, may yet prove our undoing because it deprives our bodies of natural healing agents. That’s why organic food, free from pesticides and free from antibiotics so abundant in meat products, living close to the earth, and even grow your own, may be the best defense against body-killing pests.

Hans Zinsser in his classic Rats, Lice and History traces how pestilences, which reigned supreme less than 100 years ago, hastened the final demise of the Roman Empire. He states that “it can hardly be questioned that it (the great pestilence under Emperor Justinian) was one of the factors – perhaps the most potent single influence – which gave the coup de gr?ce to the ancient (Roman) empire.”

Last week I mentioned the dire die-off of wild animals. Some researchers now speculate that the substances in our waters, laced with traces of antibiotics, birth control pills and other medicinal remnants may be the root cause of their disappearance. If that is true, then the same fate may befall the human race, as we too are constantly bombarded with all sorts of unknown chemicals, an untold variety of harmful substances of which we have no clue what they do to our bodies.

Zinsser in his book also mentioned how the super healthy country boys, drafted in the army of the great Napoleon during his adventurous reign which ended in 1815 with the Battle of Waterloo, died like flies when they fraternized with the sickness –hardened city soldiers. Of course the same was true for the natives in North and Central America who were decimated when confronted with the measles and smallpox and other diseases infiltrating their bloodstreams originating from the immune Europeans.

Now the rolls are reversed thanks to us simply being too hygienic. We are like a beautiful flower, kept in a climate controlled environment that will wither and die when transplanted into a natural state, exposed to wind, sun, rain and cold; or we are like a pet wild animal, raised in the comfort of a caring home and suddenly helpless when released to vend for itself in the cruel jungle.

My point is that once the Ebola virus is on the loose, we are just as vulnerable, perhaps even more so than our brothers and sisters in West Africa.

One of the laws of Ecology is that ‘nothing ever disappears.’ Every infectious disease that ever existed is still out there, somewhere, in a rat or a louse or a bat or a monkey. And it is the lot of humanity that everything will be revealed, whether the good or the bad. That’s what the word “Apocalypse” means. Since not God, the Creator, but Satan, the Destroyer, is temporarily in charge of the world, it is no coincidence that the last book of the Bible, Revelation (Apocalypse), also has a line or two about plagues. Revelation 6: 8 mentions the Pale Horse who has been given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword (drones, bombs) famine and plague (Ebola, Marburg, Bird Flu, whatever). The same book of Revelation urges us to “Come out of her, my people,” because in 18: 8 it says, “Therefore in one day her plagues will overtake her: death, mourning and famine.”

Right now Ebola is raging in Africa with no reasonable chance it will be brought under control there: it will have to burn itself out.  This is because the countries simply do not have the administrative capacity to handle it: not enough beds, nurses, isolation suits, money.

It is my contention that we in the West are responsible for the current Ebola outbreak. It simply is another case where Capitalism, via its ruling bodies the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), conspired in the 1970s and 80s to radically alter the make-up of Africa. Why? In 1970 Ebola simply expired when it ran out of customers in the rural sections, to emerge now, 40 years later, in a totally different urban Africa. Now the crowded mega cities, their lack of infrastructure, their packed slums, and distrust in Western medicine mean that the Ebola virus is having an unlimited market.

How did this come about?  

Africa changed completely when OPEC – the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries – started to dominate the world with its oil policies, and in the process wound up with mountains of money they didn’t know what to do with.

So the Western white money men, administering the world’s cash supply, reasoned that they knew how to develop so-called backward countries, taking their own prosperity as the only example. They told African rulers: “You’ll borrow our money, invest in development and have more than enough funds to pay off the loans.”

What really happened was that even in those countries in which the leaders didn’t steal the money the loans grew faster than the tax base, leaving governments less and less able to administer their own countries.

When we go back a century or so, Japan, Korea, the United States and Britain developed real industry behind trade barriers: that’s how they were able to flourish. But the ‘experts’ of the World Bank said to the naïve Africans: “you have a competitive advantage in certain commodities such as cash crops and minerals such as gold and diamonds. You should work on that. Since most cash crops are best grown on plantations, you must change your economy to cash crops, which means that you have to move your small self-sufficient farmers off their land. They will then settle in the cities where they’ll get jobs and earn money to buy the food they no longer grow. The cash crops are then sold to Westerners, and with all those funds coming in you’ll be able to food and luxury products from us in Europe and America.”

However, with everybody growing more cash crops, the price dropped through the floor and so a thirty year commodities depression followed. With most of the people shoved off the land and with no jobs for those forced into city ghettos, instead of self-supporting peasants spread over a large area and thus not easily contaminated, they were packed in shanty towns, in unsanitary conditions, and easily affected by dangerous diseases.

Of course some got rich by selling grain and overpriced military gear from the West, but 95% of the Africans lost their identity, their tribal structure, their proud self-sufficiency, and, thanks to immense population density, became extremely vulnerable to Ebola, to name the most current affliction.

What about the rest of the World?

Poor people with inadequate health care, nutrition and sanitation are reservoirs for disease to develop. Thanks to the current West Africa danger, other nations are at risk as well.  The widespread waves of austerity and the destruction of their economies, many countries of our first world too, have left gaping holes in their medical infrastructure.  Does anyone think Greece, for example, could handle Ebola?  Spain already fumbled a case, leaving a nurse who said she probably had Ebola in a public waiting room for hours, while she was symptomatic.

Austerity, cheapness and incompetence kills.  America has about 40 million uninsured.  The initial symptoms of Ebola look a lot like the flu.  Think about what most uninsured are going to do if they get a bad flu?  Best case is a trip to the clinic to get some antibiotics.  The same is true of many insured.  Going to the hospital for a bad case of the flu is overkill, and hospital stays are expensive. It is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the USA.

Imagine you are poor, uninsured and have no paid vacation days, then come down what looks like a bad flu. I imagine you might still go wipe old people’s bums, or clean rich people’s houses, or go to work in retail.  Sure, soon enough you’ll be too sick to continue, but for a few hours…

Many other countries are in no position to do the sort of contact tracking that is required to stop something like Ebola.  Think of Mexico, America’s southern neighbor.  Entire cities, indeed provinces, are beyond the writ of the government, essentially controlled by drug gangs.

Ebola may not be a real threat unless it mutates.  It’s still fairly hard to pass it to another person; it isn’t communicable, but if it goes airborne, or if it becomes communicable during the incubation phase, it could turn into something truly horrible.  And the more people who get it, the more likely a mutation is to occur.

There are some threats where we’re all in it together.  Money and position may buy us some immunity, but they cannot buy us total immunity.  Climate change is one of those threats; another is communicable diseases.  We can be truly grateful that this isn’t the super-flu like the Spanish Flu that killed 30-50 million people in 1918. Ebola may kill in a particularly nasty fashion, but the last great Flu Epidemic killed more people than World War I.

In the meantime our poor West Africans neighbors will largely suffer this Ebola burden without meaningful help. However our real desire to help them poses a threat to us as well as we are far more vulnerable than we think. Today our lack of internal borders, the near-failed or failed (Greece comes to mind) States and austerity means that if Ebola gets a foothold it may be far harder to contain than we believe. The Ebola virus could well be the pestilence the bible book of Revelation mentions as a prelude to the Coming of the Lord.

Be prepared for Collapse.

PREPARING FOR COLLAPSE (8) (with some help from Ilargi Meijer)                                                                                  

 I have lived in Canada since 1951, thus more than 63 years. I had 16 years of formal education in the Netherlands, but am still learning every day. I also did my military duty in my motherland from September 1949 till April 1951, leaving the army with the rank of Sergeant. Crazy business, actually, being a soldier, being taught how to kill. I even had bayonet drill, sticking a sharp piece of steel, attached to my rifle, into a bail of straw, while yelling at the top of my voice. That sort of thing was a left-over from World War I when millions of young men faced each other in Flanders Field and Northern France and died for the greater good of whatever. Generals always prepare their underlings for the last war. With so many young lives eliminated in 1914-18, World War I, and from 1939-1945 in World War II, surprisingly there was a surplus of male bodies in the 1930’s when the Great Depression hit.

People feared that the aftermath of WWII would be the same: instead the Great Consumer Society emerged. When I landed in Canada in July 1951 I right away had work. When factory work proved not to my liking, I quit after one day and started work in a feed mill. After a few more different jobs I became self-employed in October 1952 and remained my own boss the rest of my life.

Suppose I would arrive in Hamilton, Ontario, today as a 23 year old foreigner, reasonably well educated, a few thousand dollars in hand to tie me over. How would I fare? Would I find a job right away? Not very likely judging by the millions of young people looking for work and burdened with debt. During the 1950’s and early 1960’s I raised a family on a modest income. Our five children all sailed through school, got married, are all professionals. Our grandchildren too are doing marvelously well, but what sort of future are they facing?

Last week I saw our Prime Minister, a so-called Christian man – I deeply dislike the word “Christian” because it has ceased to have little or no connection to what I think “Christ” stood for – gave young peoples’ parents a tax break for buying sports equipment, appealing to middle class voters to help give their kids more incentive to play sport and so become healthier adults. If he really were concerned about our future generation, if he really wanted to have children grow up to be productive people, he should have said: “I also have two young children, and I fear for their future because of Climate Change, destructive Capitalism, pervasive pollution, and disappearing resources. Therefore I now put a halt to tar sand oil, promote renewable energy, and greatly expand funding for mass transportation.” Actually he is doing exactly the opposite. He says that he loves his children, but he loves being re-elected more because his financial and moral bankruptcy shows nowhere better than in the way he treats his and our children. Ask any parent and they will swear to God and cross their hearts and hope to die that they love their kids to death, but the facts say otherwise. We only love them as far as the switch to the thermostat or the air conditioning, or as far as the trip to the garage or driveway to start the car.

While we swear on our mother’s graves that we love them so much, we leave them with a world that lost half of its wildlife species in 40 years, that can expect to make coastal areas around the globe uninhabitable during their lifetimes, and a world that is so mired in debt just so we, their ‘loving’ parents, can hang on to our dreams of oversized homes and cars and gadgets so that all there will be left for them are nightmares.

This past weekend was Canada’s Thanksgiving Day. We had 12 extra guests for a couple of days, including 2 children and their spouses, a brother and his wife and 6 grandchildren, ranging from 6 to 30. Let’s be honest: we all depend on economic growth to make a living or enjoy our state pensions. Solid Middle Class as we all are, our grandchildren too will receive an excellent education, but for what?

What I see in my own family is that we are totally unprepared for Collapse. The harsh truth is that we can continue our lifestyles only because we have shoved all our problems on the unprepared shoulders of our children and grandchildren. In the meantime we continue to kill more species, at home but mostly abroad, because we never get in touch with any of those species anyway. We can drive our 3 cars per family because we only see the ice melt in the Arctic on TV.

Yes, we also allow ourselves, and our governments, to get deeper into debt every single day because we’ve been told that without more debt – not our own of course, but corporate and public – we would all die. We don’t understand what it means that our governments increase their debt levels by trillions every year, and we choose not to find out.

They – my children and their children- see me switching off the lights after them, closing the doors behind them, but the bulk of us, we, the most pampered parents and grandparents ever to raise offspring, have, by and large, by our example, failed to prepare the next generations for the Collapse to come, which brings me back to me.

Sorry to say but my generation is the last of the luxurious class. Indeed it is: Apr?s nous le déluge. We are the last one for whom that is true. It’s been a short blip in human history, let alone in the earth’s history, and now it’s over. Ours is the task, the duty, indeed the holy obligation to be an example of what we are going to do, knowing that not doing anything will make our, yours and my sons and daughters futures even bleaker than they already are.

Noah was in the same predicament. He was told by the Lord Creator to prepare a refuge for all land-based life. He built an ark, believing that, since the world had grown so wicked that reform had become impossible, he must prepare for total collapse.

I see it all around me. I talked to a former member of our church who now has a Bachelor of Arts degree and works as a clerk in the liquor store. I am not sure how much debt she has – I did not dare to ask – but the average young person with a university degree has more than $30,000 personal debt and responsible for on an average $40,000 in National Debt. Should I mention the Environmental DEBT, which is beyond calculation?

Re-election for politicians depends on the Middle Class. Politicians vie for the votes and campaign donations of the parents, not the children who don’t count because they don’t vote.

The October 10 issue of The Economist gave an overview of the three waves of technical revolution, starting with the First Industrial stage which began in the late 18^th Century, with the second influx about a century later, and comparing it to the current one. Where the previous periods of innovation were more or less helpful for the job market, with the initial power loom in Great Britain replacing a lot of textile workers, but generating much more employment elsewhere, and with the automobile taking the place of the horse and buggy, the current invention of computing and information and communication and robots leaves a few super brains on the top and the masses on the bottom, making the middle class almost disappear. Young people are squeezed, doomed to McJobs, with minimum wage and often no benefits.

Welcome to Century 21.

The only solutions in the minds of our political leaders are reforms (make it easier to get rid of the older people and let the young do their jobs at half the price) and growth. Both of which have failed for all those years. With pensions in jeopardy, the old hang on to their jobs, leaving no room for the young who fight squalid working conditions and miserable low pay.

There used to be growth in the economy. In earlier times growth gave the young a chance to fit in. But the world is exhausted: growth is no longer possible because we are trying to live life abundant on a planet that is pumped out, scraping the bottom of the barrel in many ways, fish, trees, water, soil, you name it. The planet needs a long rest- many millennia – to recuperate from the human plunderers who have everywhere harvested the easy stuff, exploited the earth everywhere, depriving her of the fertile top soil, the potable waters, and the fresh air, leaving the youth with the dregs.

Sorry young people. No luck.

So we parents, what sort of lives will our children have if growth is gone, and what are we going to do for them? How are we going to soften the blow for them? How much are we willing to sacrifice for our children lest they be sacrificed by society?

Let’s face it: it is obvious that we teach our kids the wrong skills. If we had trained them properly we would have lots of jobs for them. If J.H. Bavinck in his Between the Beginning and the End- a radical Kingdom vision, is right, then we must train them for the coming of the Kingdom, for a steady state economy where we can learn from our indigenous forefathers who lived in symbiosis with creation.

Of course our kids need history. Of course they need to know how to write and read and do math. They need to know the Bible and Shakespeare and appreciate the great works of art. But there’s more to learning that what happened in the past. They need practical skills, need to know how to grow food organically, how to work with their hands, how to live on less, how to exist within the means of creation, how to live without electricity, and the Internet, and ready-made entertainment, because that is going to be their future. It basically means that they ought to be prepared for eternity where no pollution, no waste, no senseless actions will be condoned. Much of what we do today makes no sense, has no other purpose than create waste, only fosters frivolity and folly.

No, tomorrow will not be like today and yesterday. Schooling is for the future, a future totally different from the way we lived.

Christian education means “Kingdom Training”, means getting ready for the New Creation to Come!!! That is what is meant by preparing for collapse

Next week: Is Ebola a sign of the Last Days?