WILL THE WEATHER CAUSE THE WORLD TO WITHER?
I was thinking – I am, therefore I think – about that book, that sold 40 million copies: The Great Late Planet Earth, and its author, Hal Lindsey. In it he writes how Rapture will take place before the Great Tribulation begins. Well, it seems to me that its birth pangs are there for all to feel: can Rapture be far behind?
Rapture, of course, is the result of a deceptive interpretation of an obscure bible passage in 1 Thessalonians 4: 17, and its explanation a product of a puerile brain, which found a fertile feeding ground amidst the no-nothing church folk, who lack a basic understanding of the Scriptures. As always, not a single text is decisive: context only is conclusive. The same holds true for the weather: a single storm means little: a change in climate means a lot, and where the climate goes, there goes the world, and where the world goes, there go the earth dwellers as well, including us, the human race.
The whole Rapture riddle is the immediate result of Gnosticism, that pagan teaching that spirit is good and nature is bad, that heaven is heavenly and earth evil. Much, of Christianity has been distorted by that fatal heresy, which lies at the root of the Climate Crisis.
Every day I read the lectionary for that day and muse upon a passage. Last week I read in Luke 21: 25-26: “There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea.” In that week the New York Times, still America’s leading daily, had this headline: “Climate Change Batters the West Before the Summer Even Begins.” In that same issue there also was an item of similar import, how crops in Brazil have shriveled there under searing heat, how its immense water reservoirs, which generate the bulk of Brazil’s electricity, are growing alarmingly shallow and the world’s largest waterfall system, Iguaçu Falls, has been reduced from a torrent to a trickle. All this may set the stage for another intensely destructive fire season in the Amazon rainforest.
We live in a quickly changing world.
We live in a quickly changing world, where the human psyche also is at risk, because “Everything is connected to everything else”. The RAPTURE crowd, not an insignificant number in North America, basically denies Climate Change and is averse to take precautions against COVID, living under the illusion that Rapture will occur before the Great Tribulation takes hold. It so happens that exactly there where this pagan faith is the most prevalent, among the Southern Baptist crowd, there it is also where the natural disasters occur, either too much water or not enough. It is as if God is punishing the Gnostic believers, as it seems that storms and drought affect primarily the US South and Brazil, areas where Rapture reigns supreme. A bit farfetched? Perhaps.
Are there 500 year-cycles?
Every 500 years or so, we see a significant change. One thousand years before Christ, the Davidic Kingdom was established. Five Hundred years later the Israel Exile took place, and Buddhism was born. What we now regard as the beginning of the Calendar, the Birth of Christ, also coincided with the zenith of the Roman Empire, the Pax Romana, facilitating the spread of the Gospel. In the 6th Century the Empire shrunk back and basically disappeared and the world experienced the growth of Islam and from the year 1,000 on, for 500 years the Roman Catholic faith became dominant, while Europe experienced disaster upon disaster, such as the 100 years War and the Black Plague.
Then 500 years ago, the world changed. Not only through the breakthrough with the printing press, not only with the Protestant Reformation challenging the monopoly of Rome, not only due to the discovery of an entire new world, but more important the freeing of the human spirit. Then a Galileo saw the cosmos in a new way; then an Erasmus opened new vistas in thinking: then a Luther shook up a complacent church: suddenly the dullness of the Middle Ages disappeared and a new spirit emerged, a spirit which laid the foundations for a totally new world.
That world is now fading faster than we realize. In the early 20thCentury Spengler wrote Untergang des Abendlandes (The demise of the West), perhaps a bit premature yet, influenced by a World War that started in 1914 and was only concluded in 1945, he did set the tone for our final mega-machine era.
In this post-war period, started some 75 years ago, the world discovered TECHNOLOGY, energy-driven and carbon-based. Jacques Ellul saw the dangers of this machine-centered society. In 1954 this brilliant French professor wrote THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY. He, of all scientists, foresaw the information explosion and something like an Internet, as well as the biotechnology society.
Ellul, a giant thinker! I bought that book in October 1965, and since then have acquired most of the writings of this Christian philosopher, who in his Hope in Time of Abandonment – a book dealing with the church – wrote, “It is my belief that we have entered upon the age of abandonment, that God has turned away from us and is leaving us to our fate.” In his preface he stressed, “The decisive importance of the promise, the approach of the Second Coming, the eschaton which comes.”
The Technological Society is an enormously learned and, in places, densely written book and it has a clear and compelling argument. By technique, Ellul did not mean just machines. Rather, for Ellul technique applies not just to the economy or the state, but to leisure activities, bodily regimes, regulations, psychoanalysis, management and organization, human technique, information, and etc. “Nothing at all escapes technique today.”
That’s what we are at today: the future today is the machine, replacing through AI, Artificial Intelligence, all human activities. There’s no more place for factory workers, ‘robots’ are more reliable, or farmers, as ‘mega-machines’ have replaced the human body. Even actual money – bills, coins – have basically disappeared.
There’s one little hiccup: “Will the weather cause the world to wither?
“Already drought, lack of water, climbing temperatures, searing heat, fires, famines looming, the methane menace”, are daily occurrences. ARCTIC NEWS writes: “there could be a huge temperature rise by 2026 and with a 3°C rise, humans will likely go extinct.”
Think about that, for a minute: five years from now?
It’s been a long process.
This ‘dying off’ already started 6,000 years ago. Then the earth was a vast forest. Some smart people invented agriculture, and, as the population expanded, trees were in the way, so they were removed, not realizing that trees are the building blocks of life. The Tree of Life, mentioned in Paradise, simply means that trees and life are complementary: you can’t have one without the other. Not too long ago the Amazon was a complete entity: it absorbed CO2 and provided water. However, turning the forest into fields to grow soy beans to feed the pigs in China disrupted the natural rhythm, resulting in drought: Brazil, the Soy King, no longer functions. Soon the world will starve. Already the America’s West is drying out and the world’s breadbaskets go empty, and the world withers.
I love that sentence in the last Bible chapter, Revelation 22: “The leaves of the trees are for healing of the nations.” Where the weather goes, there goes the world. The end is in the beginning: “The Tree of Life” in the garden of Eden will again provide LIFE, thanks to the TREE on the hill of Calvary.