July 13 2022
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.” — C.S Lewis
TRUTH VERSUS COMFORT
Looking for ‘truth’, you will be rewarded. Looking for ‘comfort”?
Well: read on.
“Everything becomes what it is”: the basic message of Revelation, the last book in the Bible. The Greek word for Revelation is Apocalypse, now a term that has become synonymous with disaster and the collapse of ‘civilization’.
Babylon.
The Bible book, ‘Revelation’ devotes a few chapters. to “The Fall of Babylon”. Babylon was the city of ancient times, to which the elite of Israel was exiled some 2,600 years ago. In an effort to assimilate these leaders of God’s people to its culture, the victors started to change their diet and progressed from there to civic rule and religion, recognizing that life is a unity.
In Revelation, the author of the Bible’s final chapter, 2,000 years ago, used Babylon as a template of what is at stake in the final episode of humanity. He used that ancient metropolis as an example of luxurious living. Also, the immorality of that once prominent empire had made a tremendous impression on Israel, while its opulent lifestyle had been carved into its historical consciousness. After all, Babylon, in the year 570 or so before Christ, was the World’s cultural Capital, enjoying the summum of luxury and ease, the dominant global economic center, with enormous riches, fabulous structures, grandiose gardens and the world’s finest cuisine. Comfort was the goal: the end?
Sudden fall.
Babylon’s end came totally unexpected. Belshazzar, the emperor, was presiding over a sumptuous banquet, when suddenly a mysterious finger wrote an even more mysterious message on the wall, eternalized today as: ”the writing is on the wall”, indicating imminent demise. It spelled doom, sudden doom. (You find the interesting details in the Book of Daniel).
A similar episode is found in Revelation 18, also describing the Fall of Babylon, also totally unexpected, also abruptly ending in chaos and mass ruination: pure economic collapse. Revelation 18, in verses 16-19 relates, how “Babylon is ruined within a single hour.”
A warning for today.
Both the Old Testament and the New Testament relate these events as a warning that we too will experience an unexpected tipping point, indicating total collapse of the world economy, suddenly, in a single hour.
Pure fiction?
Oh, you may dismiss this as pure fiction; after all the Bible basically is a book that tells us how creation came to be, perfect in all aspects, how we shattered its harmony and how Christ healed the breach.
Curiously, both Daniel in chapter 9: 27, and Matthew in 24: 16 mention “the abomination that causes desolation”, with the unusual annotation of ‘let the reader understand’ – which indicates that this can only be correctly interpreted when it actually happens, which is now: pointing to world-wide pollution and Climate Change – so, yes, the Bible does mention future happenings.
C.S. Lewis writes: If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”
He also wrote:
The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
We are on that road to hell, to utter human misery. The road of temporary comfort, the road of wishful thinking, is now signaling famine and despair for billions, because we have made the wrong bet.
We have gambled on one energy source: OIL. We now fail to understand that the world economy is powered by energy, highly polluting and finite. The easy stuff is gone, the ‘hard to find’ oil causes inflation. If the energy is suddenly much less available, there will be a huge problem. For over 200 years we gradually created a service industry, giving each of us 100 personal servants: light, heat, cool, at the flip of a finger, and speed at a pressure of the foot. No longer feasible.
Back to the more creative and sustainable 16-17th Centuries? When there were less than ONE billion people?
Fossil fuel powers the economic engine of civilization. With a minor disruption in the supply of fossil fuel, crops wither and supply chains crash. With a major disruption, a humanitarian apocalypse engulfs the world. Events of the past few months have made this clear. Without energy, civilization dies.
In choice of truth versus comfort, we opted for comfort and ease: we now face despair and death.