Things To Think About

Now that people all over the world are thinking about the consequences of global warming, let's consider a few more things we should be thinking about.

FISH IN THE OCEANS

The cover story in this month's edition of National Geographic magazine was horrifying. It was about the frentic pace at which the fish in the oceans are being depleted due to overfishing. I have been saying this for years but, as with global warming, each report seems to be more alarming than the last.

We cannot directly see life in the seas as we can on land, so we do not notice this depletion. Fishing involving drift nets or dredging the bottom of the sea is incredibly wasteful. The sought-after species is taken and the rest simply thrown away. With the world's population ever-increasing, we are leaning heavily on the oceans for a supply of food and it is nearing the breaking point where the fish populations will be so depleted as to make recovery virtually impossible. The bluefin tuna, for example, is a magnificent fish that may weigh 1,000 pounds but the future of the species looks very dim due to gross overfishing.

Some fishing areas have been closed to more fishing already, such as the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. Unfortunately, the only real solution to this is to say "Thats it, no more ocean fishing for at least twenty years so the fish populations can have a chance to recover."

BEES

If you are one of the few people who seem to think that global warming is not a big deal, what about bees, particularly honey bees. These are quite fragile creatures that periodically die off in significant numbers, causing alarm. Bees are very sensitive to environmental changes. The reason that they are so important is that we are very dependent on bees to pollinate our food crops. Possibly 70% of the crops that humans use for food are pollinated by bees. Fortunately, rice and wheat, the two most important food crops worldwide, are not dependent on bees. But even so, the human race would face a grave situation if enough bees died.

ANIMALS

In early 2003, I recall one of the most mind-boggling news reports ever. At that time, it was reported that there was only 20% of the lions alive in the wild that there was in 1980. What are we doing to this world?

STARVATION

Does everyone realize that between twenty and forty thousand people starve to death every day? It takes a while to weave that fact into your view of the world.

MODERN AND OLD-FASHIONED

There is a general conception nowadays that a person who lives by the Bible is "old-fashioned" while someone who is not religious is "modern". I have never seen the logic in this way of thinking. All we have to do is read the Bible as well as other documents describing life in ancient times to see that many people lived godless and sinful lives back then just as they do today. The truth is that neither religion or irreligion is modern or old-fashioned. Both ways have been around since the beginnings of civilization.

EMOTIONS AND LOGIC

There is still an impression that people who are religious think more with their emotions and people who are not think more logically. I find this to be not true at all. it is true, of course, that religious people are emotionally attached to their God, but it is also true that atheism involves thinking with the emotions too.

Many people do not want the Bible to be true because they are living a sinful life and do not want a God to answer to. Others are really mad at God for something bad that happened or something good that didn't happen and are "punishing" God by not believing in him.

Remember that the fact that bad things happen is not God's fault. He gave us all the abilities and resources that we could ever need and we are the ones who could not handle things right because of our sinfulness. There is absolutely no promise that life on earth will be a bed of roses. However, there is a promise that heaven will be far better than any bed of roses.

SPORTS AND WARFARE

I am certain that the overall, long-term purpose of all sports is physical and mental preparation for warfare. A boy who is used to having a ball coming toward him will be better prepared to handle arrows or bullets coming toward him. Handling a bat or a hockey stick will make one better prepared to handle a rifle. Throwing and hitting a ball prepares a future soldier to judge the physics of moving objects like arrows and bullets. If warfare came to an end and we knew that there would never be another war, all sports would die out in time.

LAND MINES

Why can't the world ban land mines? An anti-personnel land mine (as opposed to an anti-tank mine) is about the size and cost of a can of tuna fish. It is used in wartime to secure an area by killing or wounding any enemy soldier that steps on it when it is buried just below the surface of the ground. Mine fields are useful for a military force that must guard a long border against possible invasion. The trouble begins when the war ends but the mines are usually still there. Some mines get decomissioned but others inevitably are overlooked after the war. Innocent people, especially children exploring a field, are maimed and killed by old land mines. These mines can last a long time.

THE DEADLIEST SECRET WEAPON

Several hundred years ago, people from Europe began exploring and settling in the western hemisphere. It was already populated by the native Indians, so-called because Christopher Columbus mistakenly thought he had reached India. For them, this wave of people from across the sea ultimately proved to be a disaster.

The white people were too numerous to resist in the long-term and had more advanced weapons. Perhaps most importantly, they had built up immunity to diseases that the Indians had not. On many occasions, the two groups lived in harmony but inevitably, North America came to be dominated by white people. When there were battles between the two sides, many more Indians would be killed than white men.

However, maybe that is not the end of the story. The white men may have had more knowledge of technology. But while knowledge is one thing, wisdom is something else. The Indians had introduced the white people to tobacco and that changes the whole story around.

Ever since then, the people that had invaded Indian lands, people in the countries that they came from and people in other countries that did business with the people that invaded Indian lands have been dying at a rate that no weapon in the world can equal. If tobacco can be considered as a weapon, it ranks with guns and explosives for the carnage it has produced at the very least.

The Indians are too outnumbered to actually regain control of North America. But due to tobacco, many white people have died for each Indian that died in the clash of civilizations. The Indians had massacres such as those at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee inflicted on them but nothing like the destruction and carnage of the Tobacco Massacre.

CANCER

There is one thing that I have wondered about but can never recall reading anything about, and that is what is disturbing about it. Has anyone besides me wondered about the health effects that auto exhaust is having on us? We do not stop to think about it but most of us spend our lives breathing in auto exhaust in at least some concentration. It is difficult to separate this fact from things like junk food in causing cancers.

Suppose we compare our cancer rates to societies without cars. I recall reading about the Hmong and their immigrants to America. The Hmong are a group of people in Laos who became acquainted with Americans during the Vietnam War. The Hmong lived a very nature-based way of life and cancer was nearly unknown. The experience of the Hmong in America, however, is completely different. Among American Hmong, the cancer rate has exploded. Part of the reason is no doubt due to processed foods, but how much is due to auto exhaust?

A similar case is a community of rural Jews in Yemen years ago that I recall reading about. Cars were virtually unknown and so was cancer. But when much of the comminity moved to a western-style city and lifestyle in Tel Aviv, that all changed. Like the Hmong, their cancer rate increased drastically. If second-hand cigarette smoke has been found to be so harmful, what do you suppose it does to you to spend your life breathing auto exhaust? If we do not think about this, maybe we should start.

PSYCHOLOGY

Bookstores seem to be full of all kind of manuals and books of advice on how to have a successful marriage and how to raise a child successfully. Going by the sheer volume of books, these are areas where there are no shortage of knowledge.

But something is just not right. There is so much information available from so many experts on how to raise a successful child yet, prisons are packed to capacity. Schools have never had such discipline problems as they do now. With all the books on how to have a successful marriage, the divorce rate is higher than ever. How can this be?

The answer is the difference between the ways of the world and the Ways of God. These are areas in which the ways of the world do not have the ultimate answers. In contrast to the wisdom of the world, you can look at a chart of the decline of average church membership over the last fifty or sixty years. Then look at a chart of the average increase in crime over the same period. You will see that one is almost a mirror image of the other. The Bible has the answers.

JUNK FOOD

The medical progress that has been made over the past century is one of the great accomplishments of civilization. The story of putting men on the moon may not even compare with it. If you ever want encouragement at what human beings can do when they put their minds to it and work together, just read about the diseases and ailments that have been conquered by dedicated work and research, there are few other stories that can compare with it.

Yet, so much of it is amounting to nothing. In spite of the near-miraculous progress that has been made in medicine, the present generation will actually decline in health and life expectancy. You do not need me to tell you why. Just walk along the aisles of a supermarket and look at all the garbage on the shelves. That is what people are dining on. In fact, garbage is not even the word for it, maybe poison is a better word.

OBESITY

My lecture about junk food below may not be very popular but just think of it in terms of national security. Has anyone besides me stopped to think that America, and probably other nations, will never again be able to institute a military draft in wartime?

A counter-insurgency is usually more mundane than a conventional war. Brilliant battle tactics are not as important. The main task in an insurgency is to canvass the country and make sure the insurgents are cut off from supplies and have no operating bases. Of course, this means that the counter-insurgency force must have enough troops. Without enough soldiers to cover the country, a counter-insurgency military force is greatly hampered no matter how high quality the force may be.

These Iraq and Afghanistan wars remind me of the conquest of Spain by Napoleon two centuries ago. In fact, that is where the term "guerrilla", meaning "little war" was coined. Spain was well past it's peak as a great colonial power. Napoleon defeated Spain's army and conquered the country just as he planned. But Spanish villagers were avid hunters and Napoleon's troops, in their bright blue uniforms, made inviting targets. In addition, Napoleon had imprisoned the Pope and the conflict thus took on the dimension of a holy war for Catholic Spain. It ended up requiring Napoleon four times as many soldiers to secure the country after it had been conquered as it did to conquer it in the first place.

Now back to junk food and obesity. If we should ever require a large number of soldiers, we would find that instituting a draft (conscription) is impossible. If there were a draft, at the very least, 25% of potentional draftees would have to be given exemptions for being too overweight to complete training or even to fit into a uniform. If those exemptions were granted, the result would be a legal nightmare. Why should one teenager who keeps fit have to go to war while another doesn't because he is too fat? More kids would get fat on purpose to avoid conscription.

This is really something to think about. The present volunteer force is of high quality but strictly limited in size by the number of volunteers. The country could not possibly fight a Vietnam-scale war due to junk food and the resulting obesity. This short-term thinking of ours is really setting us up for trouble.

This is almost certainly the reason there will be a nuclear war. The lack of soldiers will force the country to depend on high-tech weapons, including nuclear, in a critical situation. Why, for God's sakes are supermarkets allowed to stack checkout aisles with candy? The next time you hear of national security, think about this.

IMPOSSIBLE SITUATIONS

Have you thought that maybe God is allowing us to get into these perilous situations with this economy and terrorism to cause us to seek him? Nearly every month, we read about a planned terrorist attack against us. If we do not have a ready solution, God does. He can make our nations more secure than any of our own efforts. He is allowing this situation and waiting for us to turn back to him.

GOD'S OTHER PLANET?

I have wondered about the description of God's throne in heaven in the Book of Revelation, chapter four. St. John is given a vision of God's throne with twenty-four elders around it praising God. Clearly, these elders are human saints from earth. But there are also four "living creatures" praising God. John tries to describe these creatures, which are obviously ones that he has never seen before.

Where did these creatures come from? They could possibly be some kind of "heaven creatures" that God created to live there. But with all the talk in recent decades of life in outer space, could it be possible that God created life on another planet, which these creatures are from? The planet may or may not be in our universe.

If so, it is possible that their history turned out completely different from ours. Maybe they never fell into sin in the first place so that Jesus was not necessary on their planet.

JUDAH

One thing I have long wondered about is why the nation of Israel is thus-called. After the death of King Solomon before 900 B.C., the nation split into two states, Israel in the north and Judah in the south. When Assyria built a large empire, it depopulated Israel, which was composed of ten of the twelve tribes, and replaced them with people taken from other parts of the empire. These people mixed with remaining Jews and by the time of the Jesus were known as the Samaritans. These ten tribes were scattered across the Assyrian Empire and have been lost to history.

The nation of Judah remained. It's population was later taken into exile in Babylon but was returned when the Persians conquered Babylon. It is Judah, composed of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, that was dispersed following uprisings against Roman rule and then returned to form the nation of Israel in 1948, just as foretold in the Bible. So, I wonder, shouldn't the modern nation be called Judah instead of Israel?