Suppose you were given a choice between two lives that you could live.
In the first choice, you could have essentially everything that you wanted all your life. You would live in a splendid palace with a staff of servants. No luxury would be denied to you. A plane would be on standby to take you anywhere in the world you wanted to go. There would be no work you were required to do unless you wanted to. You would have a life of exquisite luxury and would live in excellent health to a ripe old age. The only thing you would have to agree to is that you could not go to heaven when you died.
In the second choice, you would have a life of misery. You would have to beg to get enough money for food. You would never have a real home and would have to sleep anywhere you could. Life would never be without physical infirmities and illness. But when it was over, you would get a welcome reception in heaven.
Which life would you choose?
In another example, I have found what I believe is the simplest way to get an idea how close you are to God. Suppose that there are two trees in a meadow or park maybe thirty meters apart. One tree represents the ways of the world and the other represents the Ways of God. When you look at the two trees from a distance, they look fairly close together. That means that the standards and values of the world are not really that much different from the standards of God.
But as you move closer to God, there seems to be more and more distance between the ways of God and those of the world. The closer you get, the more alien and further away the ways of the world seem. Finally when you really get close to God, the ways of the world are so different and alien that they are not even in your field of vision.
Suppose someone asks you the simple yet complex question "What are you?" What will your answer be? If you are close to God at all, that will be your answer. If your answer is your nationality or ethnic group or any other answer, that indicates a great distance from God.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Saturday, June 16, 2007
The Real Story Of The Cold War
The usual view of the Cold War is that it was a clash between the former Soviet bloc and the west over ideology and rival economic systems. The west emerged victorious due to the superiority of democracy and free enterprise over Communism. Although it is true that the west did not win any kind of actual "war" and it is the people of the former Communist countries that got rid of Communism themselves.
After careful thought, I have come to another conclusion. There was much more to the Cold War than economic and political theory. In our secular way of thinking today, we tend to ignore the fact that it also involved religion. The western countries were too sinful and secular to really be called "Christian countries". But they did have freedom of religion and many, particularly the U.S., had a strong Christian subculture. Communism, in contrast, was officially atheist and religious expression was either supressed or forbidden altogether.
I am certain that this is what made the difference in the Cold War rather than economics and political philosophy. The west had God's partial blessings while the Communist Bloc did not.
It was not the politics and economics that doomed Communism as a major world system. The system of communes that Israel used to have was very productive. There are many people in the former East Bloc today that wish for a return to the security of Communism. Two remaining Communist countries today, China and Cuba, rate ahead of some neighboring capitalist countries in the U.N. index. The countries that inevitably rate the highest are those socialist countries that successfully blend the best elements of the two systems.
The conclusion I have arrived at is that either system, or better yet a blend of the two, could be made to work. Which system would be best would most likely be determined by the character of the people involved. Those who are more individualistic would do better to the right while those who are not would do better to the left.
Neither is Democracy the reason that the west emerged on top in the Cold War. Freedom does not automatically bring prosperity to a nation. How many nations have gone from being not free to being free and the average person became much better off? The answer is not many. Russia went from Communism to a form of Capitalism under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin with the result that about half a dozen men and those around them got very wealthy and the rest were worse off. Germany and Japan achieved great prosperity under democracy after the Second World War but the truth is that they were prosperous before being free. I have detailed the spotty track record of democracy in my book "The End of the World".
That leaves us with the religious difference between the west and the Communist Bloc during the Cold War. I have described in an earlier posting how the most highly rated nations in the world in terms of the prosperity of the average person are almost all historically Christian. I am certain that the same factor was what decided the Cold War. The west had at least God's partial blessings while the Communist domain did not. If this had been reversed and the theory of Karl Marx had embraced Christianity instead of trying to eliminate it, the Cold War would have turned out much differently.
After careful thought, I have come to another conclusion. There was much more to the Cold War than economic and political theory. In our secular way of thinking today, we tend to ignore the fact that it also involved religion. The western countries were too sinful and secular to really be called "Christian countries". But they did have freedom of religion and many, particularly the U.S., had a strong Christian subculture. Communism, in contrast, was officially atheist and religious expression was either supressed or forbidden altogether.
I am certain that this is what made the difference in the Cold War rather than economics and political philosophy. The west had God's partial blessings while the Communist Bloc did not.
It was not the politics and economics that doomed Communism as a major world system. The system of communes that Israel used to have was very productive. There are many people in the former East Bloc today that wish for a return to the security of Communism. Two remaining Communist countries today, China and Cuba, rate ahead of some neighboring capitalist countries in the U.N. index. The countries that inevitably rate the highest are those socialist countries that successfully blend the best elements of the two systems.
The conclusion I have arrived at is that either system, or better yet a blend of the two, could be made to work. Which system would be best would most likely be determined by the character of the people involved. Those who are more individualistic would do better to the right while those who are not would do better to the left.
Neither is Democracy the reason that the west emerged on top in the Cold War. Freedom does not automatically bring prosperity to a nation. How many nations have gone from being not free to being free and the average person became much better off? The answer is not many. Russia went from Communism to a form of Capitalism under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin with the result that about half a dozen men and those around them got very wealthy and the rest were worse off. Germany and Japan achieved great prosperity under democracy after the Second World War but the truth is that they were prosperous before being free. I have detailed the spotty track record of democracy in my book "The End of the World".
That leaves us with the religious difference between the west and the Communist Bloc during the Cold War. I have described in an earlier posting how the most highly rated nations in the world in terms of the prosperity of the average person are almost all historically Christian. I am certain that the same factor was what decided the Cold War. The west had at least God's partial blessings while the Communist domain did not. If this had been reversed and the theory of Karl Marx had embraced Christianity instead of trying to eliminate it, the Cold War would have turned out much differently.
The Other Christianity
Most people think of the "Christian countries" as those of the west, Europe and North America". Historically, this is correct. However, there is a phenomenon going on in the world today that relatively few people really understand. Over the past few decades there has been an explosive growth of Christianity, not so much in it's traditional domain but across the rest of the world.
Today, there is at least some kind of Christian community in every country in the world. Quite a few of China's middle class has embraced Christianity. Numerous crosses are to be seen on buildings in Seoul. Possibly the most extensive recent Christianization has been in Africa. This phenomenon is sweeping the world even as growth in the secular western countries is somewhat tepid.
These millions of new Christians are, as a rule, extremely devout. I have had quite a few as penpals and have been influenced by their spirit. The increase in Christianity seems to be mainly born-again Protestant but Catholicism is making great gains too. The days of rivalry between Catholic and Protestant are over and I, as a Protestant, am a great admirer of the present Pope Benedict and I do not see how anyone could not be an admirer of his predecessor, John Paul.
Today, there is at least some kind of Christian community in every country in the world. Quite a few of China's middle class has embraced Christianity. Numerous crosses are to be seen on buildings in Seoul. Possibly the most extensive recent Christianization has been in Africa. This phenomenon is sweeping the world even as growth in the secular western countries is somewhat tepid.
These millions of new Christians are, as a rule, extremely devout. I have had quite a few as penpals and have been influenced by their spirit. The increase in Christianity seems to be mainly born-again Protestant but Catholicism is making great gains too. The days of rivalry between Catholic and Protestant are over and I, as a Protestant, am a great admirer of the present Pope Benedict and I do not see how anyone could not be an admirer of his predecessor, John Paul.
Saturday, June 9, 2007
The Beginning Of The Modern World
The modern world as we know it, had a beginning in religion rather than in science or technology. The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century really changed our way of thinking and made the modern world possible. The Reformation was about purifying Christianity by going back to the Bible itself instead of the dictates of the pope and the extensive man-made traditions of the Catholic Church. The name most immediately associated with the Reformation is Martin Luther.
A "Protestant" was "one who protested" against the hierarchical and hide-bound institution of the church and believed that anyone could read the Bible for himself. Protestant churches were thus much more loosely organized than the Catholic Church.
It is the individualistic, continuous self-improvement, think-for-yourself Protestant mentality that led to settlement of nations like the U.S. and Canada. The biblical idea of the world as a depraved and sinful place opened the mind's door to ways to improve that world and led to the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the Reformation, people had too much respect for the way things had always been for any large-scale improvements like that.
The stripping of the pope of his authority in favor of the Bible itself provided the mindset to do the same to kings in favor of democracy. The turning to the Bible instead of the dictates of the pope opened the way for rule of law in civil society instead of the dictates of an autocracy.
A "Protestant" was "one who protested" against the hierarchical and hide-bound institution of the church and believed that anyone could read the Bible for himself. Protestant churches were thus much more loosely organized than the Catholic Church.
It is the individualistic, continuous self-improvement, think-for-yourself Protestant mentality that led to settlement of nations like the U.S. and Canada. The biblical idea of the world as a depraved and sinful place opened the mind's door to ways to improve that world and led to the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the Reformation, people had too much respect for the way things had always been for any large-scale improvements like that.
The stripping of the pope of his authority in favor of the Bible itself provided the mindset to do the same to kings in favor of democracy. The turning to the Bible instead of the dictates of the pope opened the way for rule of law in civil society instead of the dictates of an autocracy.
Saturday, June 2, 2007
Does Prayer Work?
In most religions, people can pray or otherwise make requests for blessings from God or whatever principles the religion revolves around. Most people offer prayers for the well-being and prosperity of themselves and others. There have been a number of news articles recently concerning tests that are done in an attempt to determine if prayer really works. My hypothesis is that over time the many thousands of prayers for well-being and prosperity that God answers will result in increased prosperity of the society as a whole.
The United Nations has a way of scoring the nations of the world in the average prosperity and quality of life. This is known as the HDI or Human Development Index. There is also the Human Poverty Index. Of the twenty highest-ranking countries in the world, nineteen are countries that are historically Christian and that have Christianity as their primary religion. The only country in the top twenty that is not is Japan. People in the historically Christian countries are certainly no smarter or innately talented than those in other countries, as school test scores show. This must be considered as evidence to the power of Christian prayer.
The United Nations has a way of scoring the nations of the world in the average prosperity and quality of life. This is known as the HDI or Human Development Index. There is also the Human Poverty Index. Of the twenty highest-ranking countries in the world, nineteen are countries that are historically Christian and that have Christianity as their primary religion. The only country in the top twenty that is not is Japan. People in the historically Christian countries are certainly no smarter or innately talented than those in other countries, as school test scores show. This must be considered as evidence to the power of Christian prayer.
The Babel Principle
Early in the Bible, in the Book of Genesis, people began building a great tower, supposedly to reach into heaven. God did not want them to build the tower so he smote them so that they all spoke different languages and could not understand each other. This represents a very important aspect of God's plan for the world that has been at work in human history ever since.
Human history is intended by God as a test. It is to prove that only God's ways are right and that the ways of Satan or of man without God are wrong. During this first phase of human history, God does not want any one ideology or religion to rule the world. He does not even want it to be Christian if that would mean that people would be forced to be Christians. He wants them to come to him through Jesus of their own free will.
What I will refer to as the "Babel Principle" can easily be seen in the world today in spite of what a global village we have become. The mutual incomprehension of different languages lasted for thousands of years and although this is no longer the case today, the world consists of a mosaic of different cultural groups.
The result is that whenever a large-scale ideology or belief system forms in the world, such as Communism or a religion, people in different lands will see and interpret it in different ways due to their different cultural backgrounds and ways of thinking. This will cause a splintering in the belief system and even though it may spread across the world, this splintering will prevent it from actually dominating the world.
Thus, the world will remain a "free market" of ideas until the next phase of human history, the actual rule of Jesus over the world. This phase will show beyond any doubt that God's way is the right way because the actual rule of Jesus will make the world into the paradise that it was always intended to be. Any disputes between nations or groups of people during that time will be immediately mediated and judged by Jesus himself.
Human history is intended by God as a test. It is to prove that only God's ways are right and that the ways of Satan or of man without God are wrong. During this first phase of human history, God does not want any one ideology or religion to rule the world. He does not even want it to be Christian if that would mean that people would be forced to be Christians. He wants them to come to him through Jesus of their own free will.
What I will refer to as the "Babel Principle" can easily be seen in the world today in spite of what a global village we have become. The mutual incomprehension of different languages lasted for thousands of years and although this is no longer the case today, the world consists of a mosaic of different cultural groups.
The result is that whenever a large-scale ideology or belief system forms in the world, such as Communism or a religion, people in different lands will see and interpret it in different ways due to their different cultural backgrounds and ways of thinking. This will cause a splintering in the belief system and even though it may spread across the world, this splintering will prevent it from actually dominating the world.
Thus, the world will remain a "free market" of ideas until the next phase of human history, the actual rule of Jesus over the world. This phase will show beyond any doubt that God's way is the right way because the actual rule of Jesus will make the world into the paradise that it was always intended to be. Any disputes between nations or groups of people during that time will be immediately mediated and judged by Jesus himself.
The Way To God
The way to God is a lot like using the north star to find your way across a wilderness. This is also reflected in the Bible with the journey of the Israelites out of Egypt to the promised land.
Following the north star to the promised land is not quite as simple as it sounds. Sometimes it seems as if it may not be the right way. Or another route will appear to be much easier than the one you are taking. At every kilometer of the way, someone tells you "No, that is not the right way, over here is the way we should go". At other times, someone else will tell you "That is the wrong star you are following, you should follow that star over there". Still others will always be saying "There is no reason to find our way across the wilderness, we should live right here".
But if you persevere and follow the right path no matter what, you will make it across the wilderness and will reach the promised land.
Following the north star to the promised land is not quite as simple as it sounds. Sometimes it seems as if it may not be the right way. Or another route will appear to be much easier than the one you are taking. At every kilometer of the way, someone tells you "No, that is not the right way, over here is the way we should go". At other times, someone else will tell you "That is the wrong star you are following, you should follow that star over there". Still others will always be saying "There is no reason to find our way across the wilderness, we should live right here".
But if you persevere and follow the right path no matter what, you will make it across the wilderness and will reach the promised land.
Friday, May 25, 2007
The Books Of The Bible
It is best to begin reading the Bible with the New Testament first. The Old Testament was written before Jesus came and the New Testament after. The New Testament revolves around the life of Jesus, the theology and meaning of his life and, the spread of the new church.
The first four books of the New Testament are the gospels. This is a term that means "good news". The news being that the messiah, Jesus, has come and the sacrifice of his life on the cross, as well-foretold in the Old Testament, paid the price for sin for anyone that accepts Jesus as his savior (saviour).
The first three gospels, Matthew, Mark and, Luke are known as the "synoptic gospels" for their similarity to each other. The fourth, John, is more spiritual and theological and concentrates more on what Jesus was than what he did. The Gospel written by John is different from the other three and includes some things not mentioned by the others and vice versa. Matthew is the most topical of the gospels and tends to group material by topic rather than chronology. Mark was the first written and Matthew and Luke add onto it. All four are versions of Jesus' life and the best way to get an understanding of it is to study all four.
The next book is the Acts of the Apostles. This is a continuation of the Gospel of Luke and is an adventure-packed story about the spread of the church. The first part of the book revolves around the apostle Peter and the second part around Paul. St. Paul was a great enemy of the new church until Jesus encountered him in spirit when he was heading to Damascus. He was suddenly converted and spent the rest of his life spreading the gospel.
The Epistle (letter) to the Romans by Paul is an exquisite theological treatise. Paul never met Jesus in the flesh but this could be called "The Gospel of Paul". This book explains Christianity from a spiritually legal point of view. Romans 3:28 (chapter 3, verse 28) is what really inspired Martin Luther and set off the Reformation.
The two Books of Corinthians are Paul"s advice to the believers at Corinth, a city near Athens. The Book of Galatians is one of the favorite (favourite) books of just about all Christians, certainly including me. It explains the legal foundation of Chritianity and is more concise than the Book of Romans. The next book, the Book of Ephesians, is also one of the best and is a general epistle (letter), meant to be circulated around all the churches because it does not discuss the local issues of any church. This book and the next two, Phillipians and Colossians, Paul wrote from prison.
Next are two double books, to the Thessalonians and to Timothy. All four are short and well-liked books containing various encouragements, warnings and explanations of the spiritual purpose of Jesus' life. The Book of Titus is directed to the new church on the island of Crete and the single chapter Book of Philemon is about a runaway slave named Onesimus. The Book of Hebrews is a classic and explains the life of Jesus in terms of Jewish, Old Testament religious rituals and sacrifices.
The Book of James is known as kind of a counterbalance to those of Romans and Galatians because it focuses on works rather than grace. The following Books of Peter and John are exhortations, advice and explanations for believers in the new churches. The Book of Revelation is highly supernatural and prophetic. It is similar in form to the Old Testament Book of Daniel and concerns the Last Days of the world.
The first four books of the New Testament are the gospels. This is a term that means "good news". The news being that the messiah, Jesus, has come and the sacrifice of his life on the cross, as well-foretold in the Old Testament, paid the price for sin for anyone that accepts Jesus as his savior (saviour).
The first three gospels, Matthew, Mark and, Luke are known as the "synoptic gospels" for their similarity to each other. The fourth, John, is more spiritual and theological and concentrates more on what Jesus was than what he did. The Gospel written by John is different from the other three and includes some things not mentioned by the others and vice versa. Matthew is the most topical of the gospels and tends to group material by topic rather than chronology. Mark was the first written and Matthew and Luke add onto it. All four are versions of Jesus' life and the best way to get an understanding of it is to study all four.
The next book is the Acts of the Apostles. This is a continuation of the Gospel of Luke and is an adventure-packed story about the spread of the church. The first part of the book revolves around the apostle Peter and the second part around Paul. St. Paul was a great enemy of the new church until Jesus encountered him in spirit when he was heading to Damascus. He was suddenly converted and spent the rest of his life spreading the gospel.
The Epistle (letter) to the Romans by Paul is an exquisite theological treatise. Paul never met Jesus in the flesh but this could be called "The Gospel of Paul". This book explains Christianity from a spiritually legal point of view. Romans 3:28 (chapter 3, verse 28) is what really inspired Martin Luther and set off the Reformation.
The two Books of Corinthians are Paul"s advice to the believers at Corinth, a city near Athens. The Book of Galatians is one of the favorite (favourite) books of just about all Christians, certainly including me. It explains the legal foundation of Chritianity and is more concise than the Book of Romans. The next book, the Book of Ephesians, is also one of the best and is a general epistle (letter), meant to be circulated around all the churches because it does not discuss the local issues of any church. This book and the next two, Phillipians and Colossians, Paul wrote from prison.
Next are two double books, to the Thessalonians and to Timothy. All four are short and well-liked books containing various encouragements, warnings and explanations of the spiritual purpose of Jesus' life. The Book of Titus is directed to the new church on the island of Crete and the single chapter Book of Philemon is about a runaway slave named Onesimus. The Book of Hebrews is a classic and explains the life of Jesus in terms of Jewish, Old Testament religious rituals and sacrifices.
The Book of James is known as kind of a counterbalance to those of Romans and Galatians because it focuses on works rather than grace. The following Books of Peter and John are exhortations, advice and explanations for believers in the new churches. The Book of Revelation is highly supernatural and prophetic. It is similar in form to the Old Testament Book of Daniel and concerns the Last Days of the world.
Alternatives To God
Human beings were designed by God to build their lives around him. It is easy to see that when people as a whole fall away from God, they inevitably replace him with something else. The past Hundred and thirty tears or so have been an time of secularism in western society. We have simply replaced God as the primary focus of life with nationalism and ideology, often with very destructive results.
It may not seem like it today, but intense, large-scale nationalism is a relatively recent development. In times past, people tended to think as their nation as merely a collective earthly servant of their god or gods. When nations and empires fought, warriors more often thought of themselves as fighting for their god against heretics or unbelievers than for their nation against another nation. In the Nineteenth Century, borders between nations were often poorly defined and many people in outlying areas were not even sure which nation they belonged to. Even today, if you asked a person in much of the world "what are you?", their answer would be their religion and not their nation or ethnic group.
The same is true with secular ideology. There have always been politics in the world but through most of human history, it was far less important than religion. To people in times past, the great ideological clashes of the past hundred years would be nonsensical. The ideology would be scarcely worth going to war for if no religion was involved.
All that we have done during this time is to replace God with secular ideology and nationalism. We are designed with this space for him and if we do not follow him, we replace him with something else. It is true that there have been wars and other destruction done in the name of religion. But what about the same done in the name of ideology and nationalism over the past hundred years? Nationalism or ideology is no replacement for the one true God and we can be sure that when we face God that our ideological beliefs and the nation we were a part of on earth will mean absolutely nothing to him.
It may not seem like it today, but intense, large-scale nationalism is a relatively recent development. In times past, people tended to think as their nation as merely a collective earthly servant of their god or gods. When nations and empires fought, warriors more often thought of themselves as fighting for their god against heretics or unbelievers than for their nation against another nation. In the Nineteenth Century, borders between nations were often poorly defined and many people in outlying areas were not even sure which nation they belonged to. Even today, if you asked a person in much of the world "what are you?", their answer would be their religion and not their nation or ethnic group.
The same is true with secular ideology. There have always been politics in the world but through most of human history, it was far less important than religion. To people in times past, the great ideological clashes of the past hundred years would be nonsensical. The ideology would be scarcely worth going to war for if no religion was involved.
All that we have done during this time is to replace God with secular ideology and nationalism. We are designed with this space for him and if we do not follow him, we replace him with something else. It is true that there have been wars and other destruction done in the name of religion. But what about the same done in the name of ideology and nationalism over the past hundred years? Nationalism or ideology is no replacement for the one true God and we can be sure that when we face God that our ideological beliefs and the nation we were a part of on earth will mean absolutely nothing to him.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Religion And Philosophy
Let's briefly discuss the difference between a religion and a philosophy. I have thought of a simple way to differentiate the two. I like to think that there are two different types of "realm of thought", a simple realm and a complex realm.
The simple realm is where a statement must be either true or false. Religion is a simple realm. If we say that Jesus is the Son of God, then that statement must be either true or false. There is no middle ground. Whenever you are thinking in terms of yes or no, of true or false, you are in the simple realm of thought.
The complex realm is where two opposing statements can be made and both can be true. Philosophy belongs in the complex realm because a philosophy, as opposed to a religion or a fact, cannot really be "true" or "false" in the same way that a simple fact is. Politics is also in the complex realm. One political position can be described as better than another but not as true or false.
The simple realm is where a statement must be either true or false. Religion is a simple realm. If we say that Jesus is the Son of God, then that statement must be either true or false. There is no middle ground. Whenever you are thinking in terms of yes or no, of true or false, you are in the simple realm of thought.
The complex realm is where two opposing statements can be made and both can be true. Philosophy belongs in the complex realm because a philosophy, as opposed to a religion or a fact, cannot really be "true" or "false" in the same way that a simple fact is. Politics is also in the complex realm. One political position can be described as better than another but not as true or false.
The Symbol Of The Cross
The cross is the symbol of Christianity because it is how Jesus was killed to pay the penalty for sin. I find the cross to be a profound symbol of man seeking salvation with God in a literal way.
If we reach for God in an upward direction, at least symbolically, then the vertical piece of the cross represents the way to God. The transom, or cross-piece, of the cross represents the ways of the world. This is because the transom runs parallel, in the same direction, as the ground (or the world).
No matter how far a person walks on the flat ground, he will not get one iota closer to God. This is because God is upward, in a completely different direction. The ground represents the things that the world values. But no matter how much wealth, status, looks, power or, intelligence a person has, it cannot bring him any closer to God. The only way to God is in a completely different direction, upward.
The vertical piece of the cross represents the way to God. It takes the transom, the cross-piece, upon itself and points in the right direction, which is upward in the direction of God. The transom without the vertical piece could never point to God because it is pointing in a perpendicular direction.
The perpendicular direction in which the transom points is not the opposite of the direction to God, it is just a completely different direction. The opposite to the direction to God is to follow the vertical piece downward instead of upward. That is, symbolically, the direction to hell.
If we reach for God in an upward direction, at least symbolically, then the vertical piece of the cross represents the way to God. The transom, or cross-piece, of the cross represents the ways of the world. This is because the transom runs parallel, in the same direction, as the ground (or the world).
No matter how far a person walks on the flat ground, he will not get one iota closer to God. This is because God is upward, in a completely different direction. The ground represents the things that the world values. But no matter how much wealth, status, looks, power or, intelligence a person has, it cannot bring him any closer to God. The only way to God is in a completely different direction, upward.
The vertical piece of the cross represents the way to God. It takes the transom, the cross-piece, upon itself and points in the right direction, which is upward in the direction of God. The transom without the vertical piece could never point to God because it is pointing in a perpendicular direction.
The perpendicular direction in which the transom points is not the opposite of the direction to God, it is just a completely different direction. The opposite to the direction to God is to follow the vertical piece downward instead of upward. That is, symbolically, the direction to hell.
Secular Patterns
Just by looking at the world, we can see that religion was the most important thing to human beings for a long time. The patterns in the Bible and the history of Christianity were with us for so long that they have become ingrained in our ways of thinking and show up in secular manifestations.
The movement of millions of Europeans a century and more ago from the "old world" to the "new world" in search of opportunity and freedom very much resembles the transition from the Old Testament to the New Testament in the Bible. From the old order in which a person could not hope to attain salvation by his own merits to the new order where grace had given him a new life. Today's Europe is greatly changed and is itself the destination of millions of immigrants and the same pattern is evident.
Church history also leaves it's patterns. Tony Blair's New Labour Party and it's "third way" path between capitalism and socialism followed exactly the same pattern route as the Anglican Church (called Episcopal in the U.S.), which was formed as a compromise following the Reformation between Catholicism and Protestantism. In another example, Margaret Thatcher's political reformation, beginning in 1979, followed the same pattern of the Methodist Revival in England over a century earlier.
One of the easiest similarities to notice is the pattern resemblance between the Reformation in northern Europe in the Sixteenth Century and that of the Nazis in the Twentieth Century. The first was the breaking away from the old order to a new era of religious purity. The second was the same except it was for racial purity.
The movement of millions of Europeans a century and more ago from the "old world" to the "new world" in search of opportunity and freedom very much resembles the transition from the Old Testament to the New Testament in the Bible. From the old order in which a person could not hope to attain salvation by his own merits to the new order where grace had given him a new life. Today's Europe is greatly changed and is itself the destination of millions of immigrants and the same pattern is evident.
Church history also leaves it's patterns. Tony Blair's New Labour Party and it's "third way" path between capitalism and socialism followed exactly the same pattern route as the Anglican Church (called Episcopal in the U.S.), which was formed as a compromise following the Reformation between Catholicism and Protestantism. In another example, Margaret Thatcher's political reformation, beginning in 1979, followed the same pattern of the Methodist Revival in England over a century earlier.
One of the easiest similarities to notice is the pattern resemblance between the Reformation in northern Europe in the Sixteenth Century and that of the Nazis in the Twentieth Century. The first was the breaking away from the old order to a new era of religious purity. The second was the same except it was for racial purity.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
World Peace
I know all about the prophecies of the End of the World as foretold in the Bible. But even so, since I have so much attention, I have got to try to do something to make the world more peaceful.
You probably heard this in elementary school or maybe during the Sixties but clearly, it is time to hear it again. For us to be wasting our resources on destroying or preparing to destroy each other when the world has so many troubles that we must work together on is just plain crazy. What kind of world would this have been if we had put all the effort and wealth that has been spent on all of the wars since the beginning of civilization into productive ends? There would be a world that would be so glorious that we would not even recognize it.
What can we do to bring about world peace? The answer is not to just kill everybody that we do not get along with. We have all got to find a way to live together on this planet. I am certain that a major part of the problem is over-simplification in dealing with other people. When some incident happens, such as an act of terrorism, we tend to lump people together who had nothing to do with it. In our world of global news, what could be an isolated incident instead becomes a worldwide conflict.
Our world is like a million rainbows that intersect and produce an infinity of hues. When we insist on looking at this field of color in stark black and white terms, not only will problems occur that did not need to occur but they will be of greater magnitude than need be. Seeing the world as a set of simple pigeon holes and expecting everyone and every situation to fit neatly into one or another of the holes is an invitation to a very non-peaceful world.
We are much more a world of individuals than a world of nations. When an individual or a small group does something, it should be seen in that context and not to lump an entire part of the world together. This applies whether it is an act of terrorism or the publication of an offensive cartoon. It is just so easy to generalize and to lump everybody together but we have created a world in which that is not practical.
Another part of the problem is simply people that think they are special. The rules are for other people but not for us because we are special. All of the people in this world are special. But that means that, as a whole, no one is special. Anyone who thinks themselves or their people to be innately above other people is a part of the world's troubles.
One thing we all have to realize is that the Age of Ideology is over. In this global village of instant news and communications, there is absolutely no reason for any nation or group to force it's ideology on anyone else. We can all see what life and conditions are like in other countries.
Whenever a better way of doing things emerges, it will be obvious to the entire world. In place of the Age of Ideology in the last century, we are now in the Age of Example. The way to show other to a better life or a better way of doing things is by example. The end of the days of spreading ideology by force should be a reason for the drastic curtailment of warfare.
You probably heard this in elementary school or maybe during the Sixties but clearly, it is time to hear it again. For us to be wasting our resources on destroying or preparing to destroy each other when the world has so many troubles that we must work together on is just plain crazy. What kind of world would this have been if we had put all the effort and wealth that has been spent on all of the wars since the beginning of civilization into productive ends? There would be a world that would be so glorious that we would not even recognize it.
What can we do to bring about world peace? The answer is not to just kill everybody that we do not get along with. We have all got to find a way to live together on this planet. I am certain that a major part of the problem is over-simplification in dealing with other people. When some incident happens, such as an act of terrorism, we tend to lump people together who had nothing to do with it. In our world of global news, what could be an isolated incident instead becomes a worldwide conflict.
Our world is like a million rainbows that intersect and produce an infinity of hues. When we insist on looking at this field of color in stark black and white terms, not only will problems occur that did not need to occur but they will be of greater magnitude than need be. Seeing the world as a set of simple pigeon holes and expecting everyone and every situation to fit neatly into one or another of the holes is an invitation to a very non-peaceful world.
We are much more a world of individuals than a world of nations. When an individual or a small group does something, it should be seen in that context and not to lump an entire part of the world together. This applies whether it is an act of terrorism or the publication of an offensive cartoon. It is just so easy to generalize and to lump everybody together but we have created a world in which that is not practical.
Another part of the problem is simply people that think they are special. The rules are for other people but not for us because we are special. All of the people in this world are special. But that means that, as a whole, no one is special. Anyone who thinks themselves or their people to be innately above other people is a part of the world's troubles.
One thing we all have to realize is that the Age of Ideology is over. In this global village of instant news and communications, there is absolutely no reason for any nation or group to force it's ideology on anyone else. We can all see what life and conditions are like in other countries.
Whenever a better way of doing things emerges, it will be obvious to the entire world. In place of the Age of Ideology in the last century, we are now in the Age of Example. The way to show other to a better life or a better way of doing things is by example. The end of the days of spreading ideology by force should be a reason for the drastic curtailment of warfare.
The World That We Wanted
The really incredible thing about the world today is that it is, in just about every way, the world that we wanted for so long. The global ideological conflicts of the past century are over. The major nations of the world such as Russia, India and, China do not really stand for any ideology that they are trying to push on the world.
Perhaps the most incredible development of all is Europe. The scene of the two worst wars in history not so long ago has actually formed a union that speaks with virtually one voice. To a very great extent, we have been extremely successful in bringing about the world that we wanted in the past century.
Yet, things are just not right. America is the country that has gotten the world the way it wanted only to become possibly the least popular country in that world. As technology was making the world ever more of a global village our culture, at least as presented by the media, was getting more and more crude and it seemed that there was no one anticipating the coming global culture clash.
Even as we were shaping the world the way we wanted it, we were getting ourselves into a position where we were dependent on Middle East oil and causing global warming at the same time. We were pushing this car-based way of life on the world without a thought as to where all the required gasoline was going to come from or what it was going to do to the planet.
This goes to show that no matter how carefully we craft an ideology, there will always be holes in it that were unforeseen. Some ideologies are certainly better than others but even when we get the world we want, it will not turn out like we thought it would. There will always be something that no one thought of or a long-term problem that eluded our short-term thinking.
This is inevitably true for any man-made ideology. Suppose, for example, that the Nazis had achieved their goals. What would have happened then? Would they have had the world that they wanted? I believe that the death of Adolph Hitler would have been a critical point. Hitler had carefully stoked rivalry among his underlings to prevent any possibility of getting together and overthrowing him. The top leaders were all suspicious of each other and the Waffen SS was created as a virtual parallel army that was generally despised by the regular army. I am certain that this would have resulted in a fragmentation of the empire following Hitler's death, in much the same way as the empire of Alexander the Great.
As another example, Communism was well on it's way to taking over the world. But one of the things that no one had considered is that Communism can be interpreted in so many different ways. It can be seen as meaning a wide variety of things.
As Communism spread across the world, the inevitable fragmentation occurred. The result is that different Communist countries never did get along well with each other. There was intense rivalry between Communist factions and countries. In the Cold War the two Communist giants, China and the Soviet Union, never could see eye to eye long enough to gain victory and ended up with as much rivalry between themselves as with the United States. If the Communists had gotten the world they wanted, we can be sure that it would be a world with endless rivalry over interpretation of doctrine.
In the 1920s, American capitalists seemed on their way to building the world as they wanted it. The assembly line process had revolutionized manufacturing. Factories were turning out all kinds of products from cars to radios with blinding speed. Communism had begun as a rival system in the Soviet Union but it was a backwater that few people outside that country understood. The day belonged to Capitalism.
But as always, there were holes in the plans. The pay of workers barely increased while factories turned out millions of manufactured products. Goods began to pile up in warehouses because people did not have the money to buy them. Factories began cutting back production, meaning that workers had even less money to buy the products produced by the factories. It all spiralled into the devastating 1929 crash. Rival Communism was propelled on it's way to a global ideology and a leader named Adolph Hitler emerged from the economic devastation in Germany resulting from the crash.
No matter how well human beings plan things, no matter which ideology is the dominant one at the moment, when we get the world we wanted, it just does not turn out as we wanted it to. This shows us that it is only God, and not men, that has the ultimate answers needed by the world.
In contrast to the man-made ideologies that come and go in the revolving door of history, the Bible has all of the authority that it did centuries ago. God is only allowing us this period of dominion over the world to show us that we can never have the ultimate answers without him. Someday in the not-to-distant future after the apocalypse, Jesus will actually reign over the earth from Jerusalem. Only then will the world be the paradise that God intended it to be.
Perhaps the most incredible development of all is Europe. The scene of the two worst wars in history not so long ago has actually formed a union that speaks with virtually one voice. To a very great extent, we have been extremely successful in bringing about the world that we wanted in the past century.
Yet, things are just not right. America is the country that has gotten the world the way it wanted only to become possibly the least popular country in that world. As technology was making the world ever more of a global village our culture, at least as presented by the media, was getting more and more crude and it seemed that there was no one anticipating the coming global culture clash.
Even as we were shaping the world the way we wanted it, we were getting ourselves into a position where we were dependent on Middle East oil and causing global warming at the same time. We were pushing this car-based way of life on the world without a thought as to where all the required gasoline was going to come from or what it was going to do to the planet.
This goes to show that no matter how carefully we craft an ideology, there will always be holes in it that were unforeseen. Some ideologies are certainly better than others but even when we get the world we want, it will not turn out like we thought it would. There will always be something that no one thought of or a long-term problem that eluded our short-term thinking.
This is inevitably true for any man-made ideology. Suppose, for example, that the Nazis had achieved their goals. What would have happened then? Would they have had the world that they wanted? I believe that the death of Adolph Hitler would have been a critical point. Hitler had carefully stoked rivalry among his underlings to prevent any possibility of getting together and overthrowing him. The top leaders were all suspicious of each other and the Waffen SS was created as a virtual parallel army that was generally despised by the regular army. I am certain that this would have resulted in a fragmentation of the empire following Hitler's death, in much the same way as the empire of Alexander the Great.
As another example, Communism was well on it's way to taking over the world. But one of the things that no one had considered is that Communism can be interpreted in so many different ways. It can be seen as meaning a wide variety of things.
As Communism spread across the world, the inevitable fragmentation occurred. The result is that different Communist countries never did get along well with each other. There was intense rivalry between Communist factions and countries. In the Cold War the two Communist giants, China and the Soviet Union, never could see eye to eye long enough to gain victory and ended up with as much rivalry between themselves as with the United States. If the Communists had gotten the world they wanted, we can be sure that it would be a world with endless rivalry over interpretation of doctrine.
In the 1920s, American capitalists seemed on their way to building the world as they wanted it. The assembly line process had revolutionized manufacturing. Factories were turning out all kinds of products from cars to radios with blinding speed. Communism had begun as a rival system in the Soviet Union but it was a backwater that few people outside that country understood. The day belonged to Capitalism.
But as always, there were holes in the plans. The pay of workers barely increased while factories turned out millions of manufactured products. Goods began to pile up in warehouses because people did not have the money to buy them. Factories began cutting back production, meaning that workers had even less money to buy the products produced by the factories. It all spiralled into the devastating 1929 crash. Rival Communism was propelled on it's way to a global ideology and a leader named Adolph Hitler emerged from the economic devastation in Germany resulting from the crash.
No matter how well human beings plan things, no matter which ideology is the dominant one at the moment, when we get the world we wanted, it just does not turn out as we wanted it to. This shows us that it is only God, and not men, that has the ultimate answers needed by the world.
In contrast to the man-made ideologies that come and go in the revolving door of history, the Bible has all of the authority that it did centuries ago. God is only allowing us this period of dominion over the world to show us that we can never have the ultimate answers without him. Someday in the not-to-distant future after the apocalypse, Jesus will actually reign over the earth from Jerusalem. Only then will the world be the paradise that God intended it to be.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Traces Of The Original Paradise
The Book of Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament of the Bible, gives the location of the original Garden of Eden, the paradise that God created for human beings to live in until those plans changed because of sin. The garden was vast and must have contained a luxuriant variety and number of plants. The land on which the garden is located is now mostly desert and it may seem to an unbeliever that the story could be a myth. But then a vast amount of oil was discovered under that sand. We know that oil is formed of the remains of ancient plants that became buried. It looks as if the oil in the Middle East bears witness to the existence of the Garden of Eden.
Another thing that attracted the disdain of skeptics for hundreds of years was the claim of the biblical prophecies that the final war of the world would begin over the Middle East, into which Israel would be re-established. Why would the world go to war over all of that sand? But once again, the discovery of the oil along with the development of modern technology changed the picture entirely. The past few decades have shown just how willing nations are to plunge into war over the Middle East. After Armageddon, the world will be restored to the paradise that God intended with Jesus reigning in Jerusalem and directly administering the world.
Another event that I would like to mention is the flood in the Book of Genesis. It has been established that there is a layer of clay under the ground in Mesopotamia that could have only been deposited by a vast amount of water. There are relics of human settlements both above and below the layer of clay. After the work I have done with glaciers in the Niagara and Toronto areas and in England as detailed on my other blogs, I can tell you that there is nothing at all unusual about such a flood. The relatively quick melting of glaciers could easily cause such a deluge and if we wish to get an idea of what the flood must have been like, anyone who was in New Orleans or the sorrounding area when the storm hit in 2005 can tell you.
Another thing that attracted the disdain of skeptics for hundreds of years was the claim of the biblical prophecies that the final war of the world would begin over the Middle East, into which Israel would be re-established. Why would the world go to war over all of that sand? But once again, the discovery of the oil along with the development of modern technology changed the picture entirely. The past few decades have shown just how willing nations are to plunge into war over the Middle East. After Armageddon, the world will be restored to the paradise that God intended with Jesus reigning in Jerusalem and directly administering the world.
Another event that I would like to mention is the flood in the Book of Genesis. It has been established that there is a layer of clay under the ground in Mesopotamia that could have only been deposited by a vast amount of water. There are relics of human settlements both above and below the layer of clay. After the work I have done with glaciers in the Niagara and Toronto areas and in England as detailed on my other blogs, I can tell you that there is nothing at all unusual about such a flood. The relatively quick melting of glaciers could easily cause such a deluge and if we wish to get an idea of what the flood must have been like, anyone who was in New Orleans or the sorrounding area when the storm hit in 2005 can tell you.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Secular Salvation
The stories from the Bible were so important for so long that they have permeated every part of western civilization in at least some way. Have you ever noticed, for example, that most of the fairy tales that have been read to children for centuries can be seen to be reflected in the Bible? So many of those stories are largely Bible stories with the religion taken out and new characters put in. It is fairly easy to see that the writers of those stories were raised on the Bible stories.
Likewise, the idea of salvation as presented in the Bible has been with us for so long that it will inevitably influence our patterns of thought and our way of seeing the world. It is easy to see that today, the biblical idea of salvation by the death of Jesus has been replaced by various secular forms of "salvation" following the same pattern.
The goal of people used to be to live a life pleasing to God so that they would spend eternity in heaven with him. Today, we have the same kind of feeling toward "striking it rich" in some way. All we have to do is win the lottery or emerge victorious on American Idol and we will be all set, we will have it made. Eternal salvation does not even enter the equation or does so in a very watered-down kind of way.
The truth is that we are not "all set". A person could obtain all of the money in the world, then get hit by a car or be killed by the next school or mall shooter, and spend eternity in hell. Even if that does not happen, when they face God, all of it will mean absolutely nothing. We need to pay much more attention to being "all set" for eternity instead of just for our brief lives.
Another form that secular salvation takes today is being "connected" with others, in other words, being popular. How often do we hear on the news "He was such a loner, and then one day he walked in with an assault rifle and killed everybody. If only he had been more connected this would not have happened".
First of all, this form of secular salvation is incorrect. Sir Isaac Newton was a loner who was definitely not connected and never seems to have had any real friends. Yet, he never killed anybody and spent his time establishing that there is a force called gravity that runs the universe, developing calculus, starting the modern science of physics by breaking down sunlight with a prism and explaining why and, making the science of astronomy that we have today possible by figuring out how to make a telescope with mirrors, instead of lenses, so that the instrument could me made much larger and more powerful. Altemio Sanchez, in contrast, was gregarious and popular everywhere he went and yet has been convicted of being the unknown serial killer that haunted Buffalo for over twenty years.
Maybe if the killer at Virginia Tech University had been connected with God, this would not have happened. When someone really internalizes the fact that there is an eternal judgement that everyone must face and their residence for all of eternity is at stake, they usually tend to modify their behavior accordingly.
Don't get me wrong, it is great to be connected and popular. I am absolutely stunned at how many readers I have. But as with money, this will be of no avail when facing God. It will only be the salvation offered by the sacrifice of Jesus that will be of benefit.
Likewise, the idea of salvation as presented in the Bible has been with us for so long that it will inevitably influence our patterns of thought and our way of seeing the world. It is easy to see that today, the biblical idea of salvation by the death of Jesus has been replaced by various secular forms of "salvation" following the same pattern.
The goal of people used to be to live a life pleasing to God so that they would spend eternity in heaven with him. Today, we have the same kind of feeling toward "striking it rich" in some way. All we have to do is win the lottery or emerge victorious on American Idol and we will be all set, we will have it made. Eternal salvation does not even enter the equation or does so in a very watered-down kind of way.
The truth is that we are not "all set". A person could obtain all of the money in the world, then get hit by a car or be killed by the next school or mall shooter, and spend eternity in hell. Even if that does not happen, when they face God, all of it will mean absolutely nothing. We need to pay much more attention to being "all set" for eternity instead of just for our brief lives.
Another form that secular salvation takes today is being "connected" with others, in other words, being popular. How often do we hear on the news "He was such a loner, and then one day he walked in with an assault rifle and killed everybody. If only he had been more connected this would not have happened".
First of all, this form of secular salvation is incorrect. Sir Isaac Newton was a loner who was definitely not connected and never seems to have had any real friends. Yet, he never killed anybody and spent his time establishing that there is a force called gravity that runs the universe, developing calculus, starting the modern science of physics by breaking down sunlight with a prism and explaining why and, making the science of astronomy that we have today possible by figuring out how to make a telescope with mirrors, instead of lenses, so that the instrument could me made much larger and more powerful. Altemio Sanchez, in contrast, was gregarious and popular everywhere he went and yet has been convicted of being the unknown serial killer that haunted Buffalo for over twenty years.
Maybe if the killer at Virginia Tech University had been connected with God, this would not have happened. When someone really internalizes the fact that there is an eternal judgement that everyone must face and their residence for all of eternity is at stake, they usually tend to modify their behavior accordingly.
Don't get me wrong, it is great to be connected and popular. I am absolutely stunned at how many readers I have. But as with money, this will be of no avail when facing God. It will only be the salvation offered by the sacrifice of Jesus that will be of benefit.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
The End Of The World As We Know It.
Are you aware of the real meaning of current events? The prophecies of events that were to precede the end of civilization as we know it were made long ago in the Bible. These events are coming together right now.
Chapter 21 of the Gospel of Luke warns that the End of the World must occur in the same generation as the Jews' return to and control of Jerusalem after a long absence. This return happened in 1967 following the re-establishment of Israel in 1948 after 1,836 years of exile. Since then, a multitude of other related prophecies have fallen into place.
This means that the world as we know it cannot go on that much longer. Luke 21 foretells an increase in earthquakes and "wars and rumors of wars" for the Last Days, a prophecy that speaks for itself. The devastating tsunami of December 26, 2004, was caused by an underwater earthquake and came almost exactly a year after another devastating quake levelled the ancient city of Bam, in Iran. Within a year of the tsunami, a devastating earthquake occurred in northern Pakistan on October 8, 2005. While the war in the summer of 2006 between Israel and Hizbullah was going on, there was yet another tsunami in Indonesia. The almost-continuous warnings of terrorist attacks could be considered as 'rumors of wars'.
We are also warned about false teachings and that some in this time will falsely claim to be Christ as did Jim Jones, Mehmet Ali Agca, David Koresh and, the kidnapper of Elizabeth Smart. Many people misunderstand the Bible prophecies because they think only of the War of Armageddon. A cataclysmic world war will happen, but the next step in fulfillment of the prophecies is a temporary time of peace and prosperity in a world of unity and must happen first, before the War of Armageddon. A resurgence of interest in the apocalyptic prophecies often happens when a war or terrorist attack happens but, this is somewhat misleading.
The world is coming together economically in the process known as 'globalization'. The 90s was the decade of the internet, which in effect is a global web promoting a one-world system. The 00 decade so far is the decade of a global battle against terrorism. The only real way to shut down terrorism is to create the means to keep track of anyone anywhere in the world. Which would, of course, put the system in place for the one-world system necessary to fulfill the biblical prophecies.
The unified world must some day fall under the influence of the dynamic political leader of the Last days known in the Bible as the Antichrist. This man will be from a unified western Europe. The reason for this is that the Book of Daniel (written about 700 B.C.) foretold that the Antichrist will come from the people who kill the Messiah (Jesus) and destroy the Sanctuary (The Jews' Temple). This turned out to be the Romans. The core of the European Union is the same area as the old Roman Empire.
The European Union has greatly expanded in size in 2004 and is now probably the most important economic and political entity in the world. When the Europeans introduced a common currency, the euro, it was worth only about 80 cents U.S. but is now worth about $1.50 U.S.
Aside from the one-world system, the basic structure of this future unified world already exists in the form of the United Nations. The world will move toward global unity so that the Antichrist can exercise full control. Although it sounds positive, a unified world of global cooperation is actually a deceptive stage for the Antichrist.
Many times in our television age the world has been changed by one dynamic personality. In a globalizing world, there is nothing unusual about a great leader arising, able to influence the whole world. Look at what global figures Princess Diana and Pope John Paul II became. This would have been impossible even a few decades ago.
The Antichrist will not be obviously evil, not at first. He will seem to have all the answers. Picture the Antichrist as a personality like John F. Kennedy multiplied by about a thousand. But the Antichrist is actually the Son of Satan just as Jesus is the Son of God. After the world puts it's faith in him, everything will collapse into cataclysmic wars and other tribulations.
THE WAR
The world will live in peace and prosperity for a time until it is shattered by an invasion of the Holy Land which will start the final war of the world. The Book of Ezekiel, chapter 38, forecasts this cataclysmic war. After the restoration of Israel and the reestablishment of control over Jerusalem, Israel is to be attacked by an enemy to the "uttermost north". This attack must come after the world falls under the influence of the Antichrist and will start the great war. The only nation that fits this description is Russia and Moscow is due north of Israel.
Remember also that Iraq was an ally of Russia just as Israel is an ally of America. Russia, with a long tradition of anti-Semitism, will be able to justify it's attack on Israel since if America can invade one of it's allies, it can attack one of America's allies. Since the end of the Cold War, Russians have chafed under condescending treatment, especially by Americans, and intend for Russia to regain it's place of great influence in the world.
The Bible is clear that the world's final war will begin in the Middle East. Today it is the world's center of conflict, trouble and, terrorism. The world, beginning with the United States, has shown how willing it is to plunge into conflict in the Middle East. Oil, along with religion, has made the Middle East into possibly the most important region on earth. It now appears that the days of cheap oil are finished and this only makes the Middle East more important to the world.
The old biblical prophecies of the great war at the End of the World beginning in this region can now be seen to make perfect sense. Ezekiel 38:5 prophecies that this northern invader will be allied with Persia (Iran), Libya and, Ethiopia. The U.S. has long regarded these nations as a source of trouble. Libya and Ethiopia were allies of the Soviet Union. The King James Version of the Bible gives the modern names of these nations, other versions may give the ancient names. The president of Iran that was elected in 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former mayor of Teheran, has put a lot of effort into reviving the 1979 revolution. He has called publically for the destruction of Israel.
The great war must happen, but the progress toward a unified world must happen first. The First Book of Thessalonians 5:3 states that a false sense of peace and safety will precede great destruction. Remember what an unexpected jolt the 9/11 attack was? Just when the world seems to be at peace, another war erupts. The final war of humanity will follow a similar pattern.
I believe that the 9/11 attack as well as the other terror attacks since then may have been allowed by God to jolt those people who believe that "This can't happen here" into thinking differently. The Twentieth Century, despite it's great technical and medical progress, was the century of brutal dictatorships and grotesque wars. In a globalizing world, there is nothing unusual about a worlwide dictatorship followed by a devastating war.
There have already been two world wars, three if you count the Napoleonic Wars as a world war. There is nothing unusual about another world war, which would fulfill the biblical prophecies, because the world is just about as troubled as ever.
Pay no attention to writings of psychics like Nostradamus. The prophecies of Nostradamus are so vague as to be meaningless and most of his specific prophecies were in the Bible 1,500 years before Nostradamus' time. Also, pay no attention to anyone saying that the world will end on a certain day. The Bible states that no one knows the exact day, although we can know the general time. Remember that a lot of falseness and deception must be expected.
The Second Book of Timothy, chapter 3, foretells extensive sin, lawlessness, greed and, ignorance toward God in the Last Days. Don't these things abound right now? Our society has lost it's foundation due to a straying from God's Word. The world without God cannot possibly avoid trouble.
THE BOOK OF REVELATION
The Book of Revelation contains some seemingly mystifying prophecies. Chapter 16 foretells men in the Last Days being burned by the heat of the sun. Right now the ozone layer is weakened and would go even faster following a nuclear exchange, exposing the planet to deadly ultraviolet rays. The priest and evangelist scandals also fit into the prophecies; along with a lot of false, unbiblical religion. The Second Book of Thessalonians 2:3 predicts a "falling away" by many Christians, including many churches, near the world's end.
The Book of Revelation 13:17 foretells that everyone will have a "mark" for economic purposes in the Last Days. Just about everything you do can be tracked now. There are microchips that can be inserted unobtrusively under the skin of an animal or person and read to give information about the animal or person.
In Europe and Japan, there are bar code readers on cell phones that retrieve a text message with a phone call to give detailed information about a product when a bar code is read. The world is ever more dependent on cell phones but when combined with GPS technology, the location of cell phone calls can be pinpointed relatively easily. All of this would be ideal for helping to track terrorists but would also be there for use by the Antichrist enforcing order in the coming one-world system.
The Book of Revelation also makes it clear that diseases will be a part of the Tribulation. Many people believe that we can already see the Tribulation taking place in southern Africa, which is ravaged by AIDS. Although this does not mean that destruction by AIDS is the fate of the entire planet.
Chapter 18 of the Book of Revelation should be of great interest to us. I am certain that this chapter refers to the United States, and by extension, the rest of North America. It concerns a "Mystery Babylon" in the Last Days of the world just before the Second Coming of Christ. It could not be referring to the original Babylon because it had long since passed from the scene by the time the Book of Revelation was written toward the end of the First Century A.D. by St. John.
That is why it refers to "Mystery" Babylon. It is a nation in the Last Days that spiritually resembles Babylon. The original Babylon was a nation of great wealth and power but was also idolatrous and very sinful. Down through history, Babylon has evoked images of idolatry and decadence.
The chapter foretells that this "Mystery Babylon" will be utterly destroyed by fire in one hour. It is impossible for a nation to be destroyed by conventional fire in one hour. But what if St. John is referring to nuclear explosions? When God gave him a vision of all of this happening, there was no word in the vocabulary for nuclear explosion. It also foretells that people at sea in ships will be horrified by the smoke from the burning of Mystery Babylon. Could this be referring to the sight of mushroom clouds from the nuclear explosions?
This also shows conclusively that this cannot be referring to the original Babylon because it was in the desert, far away from the sea. The U.S. has a very long coastline and is the destination of tens of thousands of cargo ships from across the world. It also reads that after the sudden destruction of Mystery Babylon, merchants across the world will mourn because no one buys their goods any more. This fits with the fact that today the U.S. is by far the world's great importer of goods from other countries, as well as services due to the outsourcing used by so many American companies. Most countries try to avoid doing a lot of importing from other countries but the U.S. is the one great exception, with a voracious appetite for foreign goods, not to mention oil. Ironically, the original Babylon was in what is now Iraq, with which the U.S. has so entwined it's history.
These are monumental days we are living in. God's prophecies will be fulfilled. The Gospels promise that Jesus, the Son of God, will remove his people from the Tribulation. You still have time to accept Christ as your Savior. Everyone has sinned but there is still a chance to repent.
The Word of God must not be ignored. God wants you to be a part of His Kingdom. Simply knowing about Jesus is not enough. You must devote your life to Him. Right now, ask God to guide you and accept Jesus as your Savior. Begin reading the Bible, it is better to read the New Testament first. The prophecies in the Bible have an amazing record of fulfillment.
The agonizing death of Jesus, a sacrifice for sin, and the events of his life are foretold all over the Old Testament. No other religion can prove itself like this. The world could have been a real paradise if the people had followed God. Think of all the people you know. What will become of them during this holocaust? Please inform them about this.
SPECULATION ABOUT THE MARK OF THE BEAST
I have been thinking about the "mark" that the Antichrist is supposed to put on people in the last days of the world according to biblical prophecies. All across the world, this has become the stuff of folklore that people will have a mark on them in order to buy and sell things. Can anyone seriously believe that hundreds of millions of people all over the world are going to line up to have such a mark put on them. I have become certain that this is not going to happen.
In discussing the Book of Revelation and similar prophecies, we have to remember that God gave a vision of future events to a person of ancient times, who described what they saw as best as they could. St. John, author of the Book of Revelation had not the slightest concept of modern technology.
Let's consider Revelation chapter 9, verses 3-9. St. John described "locusts" having a terrible sting. He also describes them as "scorpions" and as the locusts appearing like horses prepared for battle and as having crowns. To make it even more strange, these creatures are described as having hair like women and faces like men and their wings make a sound like many horses and chariots.
But the mystery ends if we consider that this is a perfect description of a military helicopter of today dispensing some kind of nerve gas or chemical weapon. Such a helicopter resembles both a locust and a scorpion. A helicopter makes a sound like many horses running. It's rotors look somewhat like a woman's long hair. The face of the pilot can be seen through the window. The "crown" is simply the rotor housing of the helicopter.
Now, let's go to verses 17-19. These verses describe what St. John sees as "horses with heads like lions" accompanying a great army of 200 million soldiers from the east in the final days of the world. From out of the "mouths" of these horses come fire, smoke and, brimstone which causes great destruction.
Consider a battle tank. When seen from the side, it's turret resembles the head of a male lion with a mane. Brimstone is the old word for sulfur (sulphur) and is one of the ingredients of gunpowder, which propels shells and bullets from guns. If the "mouth" is the cannon of the tank, this explains why fire, smoke and, destruction comes from it.
Now, considering St. John's obvious descriptions of tanks and helicopters, why should we not think that this legendary "mark" that people will have is not actually a mark at all but some other modern technology that he could not begin to comprehend? John writes that people will have such a mark on their right hands or their foreheads.
What about cell phones (mobiles)? They comes in two basic forms, handheld and headset. If there is one technology that is really taking over the world, it is not computers or cars but these phones, there is more and more that they can do virtually every year. Many countries that never had good land line networks are skipping that stage altogether and many in the west are giving up land line phones and only using cell phones.
St. John saw visions of people using hand-held phones to conduct business and described it as a "mark". He could imagine a cell phone even less than a tank or helicopter. In many countries today, such phones can scan a bar code and download information about the product or buy from a vending machine and have it put on the phone bill.
So what about the number that goes with the mark, 666? It says that this number is the "number of a man" For most of human history, people were assigned names rather than numbers. But today, virtually everyone in the world does have a number, a phone number.
Most country codes for international calling and area codes, such as those in North America, are of three digits just like 666. What is the mystery? This is simply a prefix or part of a phone number. Through cell phone (mobile) records, all that a person has dome can be kept track of. A cell phone can be pinged to determine a person's location by GPS coordinates. It will be said " What are those silly people talking about, no one is putting any "mark" on anyone, how can this be the Antichrist?"
MIRACLES IN THE LAST DAYS
One of the reasons that the Antichrist will be successful in deceiving the world in the Last Days is the idea that all miracles come from God. This is not true at all. Satan is a powerful spiritual being that has always been able to work miracles. The Bible tells us that occult and psychic phenomenon has it's source in Satan.
The work of Satan is hindered by the presence of the Holy Spirit in the believers. When those believers are removed from earth to make way for the Tribulation, Satan's power will have full reign on earth for a period of seven years until Jesus returns. Satan was once a high-ranking angel of God who became proud of himself and decided to exalt himself to be at least equal with God. Some of the other angels followed him and are now known as demons. The purpose of human history, capped by the tribulation period, is to show that it is only God's ways that work, not Satan's or man without God.
During the Tribulation, with God's Holy Spirit temporarily removed from the world, the Antichrist will amaze the world with his miracles and people will think that he must be from God. He will make fire come down to earth from the sky and will make a statue of himself come to life and praise him. The deceived world will be astounded.
Chapter 21 of the Gospel of Luke warns that the End of the World must occur in the same generation as the Jews' return to and control of Jerusalem after a long absence. This return happened in 1967 following the re-establishment of Israel in 1948 after 1,836 years of exile. Since then, a multitude of other related prophecies have fallen into place.
This means that the world as we know it cannot go on that much longer. Luke 21 foretells an increase in earthquakes and "wars and rumors of wars" for the Last Days, a prophecy that speaks for itself. The devastating tsunami of December 26, 2004, was caused by an underwater earthquake and came almost exactly a year after another devastating quake levelled the ancient city of Bam, in Iran. Within a year of the tsunami, a devastating earthquake occurred in northern Pakistan on October 8, 2005. While the war in the summer of 2006 between Israel and Hizbullah was going on, there was yet another tsunami in Indonesia. The almost-continuous warnings of terrorist attacks could be considered as 'rumors of wars'.
We are also warned about false teachings and that some in this time will falsely claim to be Christ as did Jim Jones, Mehmet Ali Agca, David Koresh and, the kidnapper of Elizabeth Smart. Many people misunderstand the Bible prophecies because they think only of the War of Armageddon. A cataclysmic world war will happen, but the next step in fulfillment of the prophecies is a temporary time of peace and prosperity in a world of unity and must happen first, before the War of Armageddon. A resurgence of interest in the apocalyptic prophecies often happens when a war or terrorist attack happens but, this is somewhat misleading.
The world is coming together economically in the process known as 'globalization'. The 90s was the decade of the internet, which in effect is a global web promoting a one-world system. The 00 decade so far is the decade of a global battle against terrorism. The only real way to shut down terrorism is to create the means to keep track of anyone anywhere in the world. Which would, of course, put the system in place for the one-world system necessary to fulfill the biblical prophecies.
The unified world must some day fall under the influence of the dynamic political leader of the Last days known in the Bible as the Antichrist. This man will be from a unified western Europe. The reason for this is that the Book of Daniel (written about 700 B.C.) foretold that the Antichrist will come from the people who kill the Messiah (Jesus) and destroy the Sanctuary (The Jews' Temple). This turned out to be the Romans. The core of the European Union is the same area as the old Roman Empire.
The European Union has greatly expanded in size in 2004 and is now probably the most important economic and political entity in the world. When the Europeans introduced a common currency, the euro, it was worth only about 80 cents U.S. but is now worth about $1.50 U.S.
Aside from the one-world system, the basic structure of this future unified world already exists in the form of the United Nations. The world will move toward global unity so that the Antichrist can exercise full control. Although it sounds positive, a unified world of global cooperation is actually a deceptive stage for the Antichrist.
Many times in our television age the world has been changed by one dynamic personality. In a globalizing world, there is nothing unusual about a great leader arising, able to influence the whole world. Look at what global figures Princess Diana and Pope John Paul II became. This would have been impossible even a few decades ago.
The Antichrist will not be obviously evil, not at first. He will seem to have all the answers. Picture the Antichrist as a personality like John F. Kennedy multiplied by about a thousand. But the Antichrist is actually the Son of Satan just as Jesus is the Son of God. After the world puts it's faith in him, everything will collapse into cataclysmic wars and other tribulations.
THE WAR
The world will live in peace and prosperity for a time until it is shattered by an invasion of the Holy Land which will start the final war of the world. The Book of Ezekiel, chapter 38, forecasts this cataclysmic war. After the restoration of Israel and the reestablishment of control over Jerusalem, Israel is to be attacked by an enemy to the "uttermost north". This attack must come after the world falls under the influence of the Antichrist and will start the great war. The only nation that fits this description is Russia and Moscow is due north of Israel.
Remember also that Iraq was an ally of Russia just as Israel is an ally of America. Russia, with a long tradition of anti-Semitism, will be able to justify it's attack on Israel since if America can invade one of it's allies, it can attack one of America's allies. Since the end of the Cold War, Russians have chafed under condescending treatment, especially by Americans, and intend for Russia to regain it's place of great influence in the world.
The Bible is clear that the world's final war will begin in the Middle East. Today it is the world's center of conflict, trouble and, terrorism. The world, beginning with the United States, has shown how willing it is to plunge into conflict in the Middle East. Oil, along with religion, has made the Middle East into possibly the most important region on earth. It now appears that the days of cheap oil are finished and this only makes the Middle East more important to the world.
The old biblical prophecies of the great war at the End of the World beginning in this region can now be seen to make perfect sense. Ezekiel 38:5 prophecies that this northern invader will be allied with Persia (Iran), Libya and, Ethiopia. The U.S. has long regarded these nations as a source of trouble. Libya and Ethiopia were allies of the Soviet Union. The King James Version of the Bible gives the modern names of these nations, other versions may give the ancient names. The president of Iran that was elected in 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former mayor of Teheran, has put a lot of effort into reviving the 1979 revolution. He has called publically for the destruction of Israel.
The great war must happen, but the progress toward a unified world must happen first. The First Book of Thessalonians 5:3 states that a false sense of peace and safety will precede great destruction. Remember what an unexpected jolt the 9/11 attack was? Just when the world seems to be at peace, another war erupts. The final war of humanity will follow a similar pattern.
I believe that the 9/11 attack as well as the other terror attacks since then may have been allowed by God to jolt those people who believe that "This can't happen here" into thinking differently. The Twentieth Century, despite it's great technical and medical progress, was the century of brutal dictatorships and grotesque wars. In a globalizing world, there is nothing unusual about a worlwide dictatorship followed by a devastating war.
There have already been two world wars, three if you count the Napoleonic Wars as a world war. There is nothing unusual about another world war, which would fulfill the biblical prophecies, because the world is just about as troubled as ever.
Pay no attention to writings of psychics like Nostradamus. The prophecies of Nostradamus are so vague as to be meaningless and most of his specific prophecies were in the Bible 1,500 years before Nostradamus' time. Also, pay no attention to anyone saying that the world will end on a certain day. The Bible states that no one knows the exact day, although we can know the general time. Remember that a lot of falseness and deception must be expected.
The Second Book of Timothy, chapter 3, foretells extensive sin, lawlessness, greed and, ignorance toward God in the Last Days. Don't these things abound right now? Our society has lost it's foundation due to a straying from God's Word. The world without God cannot possibly avoid trouble.
THE BOOK OF REVELATION
The Book of Revelation contains some seemingly mystifying prophecies. Chapter 16 foretells men in the Last Days being burned by the heat of the sun. Right now the ozone layer is weakened and would go even faster following a nuclear exchange, exposing the planet to deadly ultraviolet rays. The priest and evangelist scandals also fit into the prophecies; along with a lot of false, unbiblical religion. The Second Book of Thessalonians 2:3 predicts a "falling away" by many Christians, including many churches, near the world's end.
The Book of Revelation 13:17 foretells that everyone will have a "mark" for economic purposes in the Last Days. Just about everything you do can be tracked now. There are microchips that can be inserted unobtrusively under the skin of an animal or person and read to give information about the animal or person.
In Europe and Japan, there are bar code readers on cell phones that retrieve a text message with a phone call to give detailed information about a product when a bar code is read. The world is ever more dependent on cell phones but when combined with GPS technology, the location of cell phone calls can be pinpointed relatively easily. All of this would be ideal for helping to track terrorists but would also be there for use by the Antichrist enforcing order in the coming one-world system.
The Book of Revelation also makes it clear that diseases will be a part of the Tribulation. Many people believe that we can already see the Tribulation taking place in southern Africa, which is ravaged by AIDS. Although this does not mean that destruction by AIDS is the fate of the entire planet.
Chapter 18 of the Book of Revelation should be of great interest to us. I am certain that this chapter refers to the United States, and by extension, the rest of North America. It concerns a "Mystery Babylon" in the Last Days of the world just before the Second Coming of Christ. It could not be referring to the original Babylon because it had long since passed from the scene by the time the Book of Revelation was written toward the end of the First Century A.D. by St. John.
That is why it refers to "Mystery" Babylon. It is a nation in the Last Days that spiritually resembles Babylon. The original Babylon was a nation of great wealth and power but was also idolatrous and very sinful. Down through history, Babylon has evoked images of idolatry and decadence.
The chapter foretells that this "Mystery Babylon" will be utterly destroyed by fire in one hour. It is impossible for a nation to be destroyed by conventional fire in one hour. But what if St. John is referring to nuclear explosions? When God gave him a vision of all of this happening, there was no word in the vocabulary for nuclear explosion. It also foretells that people at sea in ships will be horrified by the smoke from the burning of Mystery Babylon. Could this be referring to the sight of mushroom clouds from the nuclear explosions?
This also shows conclusively that this cannot be referring to the original Babylon because it was in the desert, far away from the sea. The U.S. has a very long coastline and is the destination of tens of thousands of cargo ships from across the world. It also reads that after the sudden destruction of Mystery Babylon, merchants across the world will mourn because no one buys their goods any more. This fits with the fact that today the U.S. is by far the world's great importer of goods from other countries, as well as services due to the outsourcing used by so many American companies. Most countries try to avoid doing a lot of importing from other countries but the U.S. is the one great exception, with a voracious appetite for foreign goods, not to mention oil. Ironically, the original Babylon was in what is now Iraq, with which the U.S. has so entwined it's history.
These are monumental days we are living in. God's prophecies will be fulfilled. The Gospels promise that Jesus, the Son of God, will remove his people from the Tribulation. You still have time to accept Christ as your Savior. Everyone has sinned but there is still a chance to repent.
The Word of God must not be ignored. God wants you to be a part of His Kingdom. Simply knowing about Jesus is not enough. You must devote your life to Him. Right now, ask God to guide you and accept Jesus as your Savior. Begin reading the Bible, it is better to read the New Testament first. The prophecies in the Bible have an amazing record of fulfillment.
The agonizing death of Jesus, a sacrifice for sin, and the events of his life are foretold all over the Old Testament. No other religion can prove itself like this. The world could have been a real paradise if the people had followed God. Think of all the people you know. What will become of them during this holocaust? Please inform them about this.
SPECULATION ABOUT THE MARK OF THE BEAST
I have been thinking about the "mark" that the Antichrist is supposed to put on people in the last days of the world according to biblical prophecies. All across the world, this has become the stuff of folklore that people will have a mark on them in order to buy and sell things. Can anyone seriously believe that hundreds of millions of people all over the world are going to line up to have such a mark put on them. I have become certain that this is not going to happen.
In discussing the Book of Revelation and similar prophecies, we have to remember that God gave a vision of future events to a person of ancient times, who described what they saw as best as they could. St. John, author of the Book of Revelation had not the slightest concept of modern technology.
Let's consider Revelation chapter 9, verses 3-9. St. John described "locusts" having a terrible sting. He also describes them as "scorpions" and as the locusts appearing like horses prepared for battle and as having crowns. To make it even more strange, these creatures are described as having hair like women and faces like men and their wings make a sound like many horses and chariots.
But the mystery ends if we consider that this is a perfect description of a military helicopter of today dispensing some kind of nerve gas or chemical weapon. Such a helicopter resembles both a locust and a scorpion. A helicopter makes a sound like many horses running. It's rotors look somewhat like a woman's long hair. The face of the pilot can be seen through the window. The "crown" is simply the rotor housing of the helicopter.
Now, let's go to verses 17-19. These verses describe what St. John sees as "horses with heads like lions" accompanying a great army of 200 million soldiers from the east in the final days of the world. From out of the "mouths" of these horses come fire, smoke and, brimstone which causes great destruction.
Consider a battle tank. When seen from the side, it's turret resembles the head of a male lion with a mane. Brimstone is the old word for sulfur (sulphur) and is one of the ingredients of gunpowder, which propels shells and bullets from guns. If the "mouth" is the cannon of the tank, this explains why fire, smoke and, destruction comes from it.
Now, considering St. John's obvious descriptions of tanks and helicopters, why should we not think that this legendary "mark" that people will have is not actually a mark at all but some other modern technology that he could not begin to comprehend? John writes that people will have such a mark on their right hands or their foreheads.
What about cell phones (mobiles)? They comes in two basic forms, handheld and headset. If there is one technology that is really taking over the world, it is not computers or cars but these phones, there is more and more that they can do virtually every year. Many countries that never had good land line networks are skipping that stage altogether and many in the west are giving up land line phones and only using cell phones.
St. John saw visions of people using hand-held phones to conduct business and described it as a "mark". He could imagine a cell phone even less than a tank or helicopter. In many countries today, such phones can scan a bar code and download information about the product or buy from a vending machine and have it put on the phone bill.
So what about the number that goes with the mark, 666? It says that this number is the "number of a man" For most of human history, people were assigned names rather than numbers. But today, virtually everyone in the world does have a number, a phone number.
Most country codes for international calling and area codes, such as those in North America, are of three digits just like 666. What is the mystery? This is simply a prefix or part of a phone number. Through cell phone (mobile) records, all that a person has dome can be kept track of. A cell phone can be pinged to determine a person's location by GPS coordinates. It will be said " What are those silly people talking about, no one is putting any "mark" on anyone, how can this be the Antichrist?"
MIRACLES IN THE LAST DAYS
One of the reasons that the Antichrist will be successful in deceiving the world in the Last Days is the idea that all miracles come from God. This is not true at all. Satan is a powerful spiritual being that has always been able to work miracles. The Bible tells us that occult and psychic phenomenon has it's source in Satan.
The work of Satan is hindered by the presence of the Holy Spirit in the believers. When those believers are removed from earth to make way for the Tribulation, Satan's power will have full reign on earth for a period of seven years until Jesus returns. Satan was once a high-ranking angel of God who became proud of himself and decided to exalt himself to be at least equal with God. Some of the other angels followed him and are now known as demons. The purpose of human history, capped by the tribulation period, is to show that it is only God's ways that work, not Satan's or man without God.
During the Tribulation, with God's Holy Spirit temporarily removed from the world, the Antichrist will amaze the world with his miracles and people will think that he must be from God. He will make fire come down to earth from the sky and will make a statue of himself come to life and praise him. The deceived world will be astounded.
How Destructive Is Television?
Even if the content of television was fairly innocent, it would still have a damaging effect on our patterns of thought if watched more than a very moderate amount. The very nature of television and movies is that it is necessary to pack a story, eventful and complex enough to provide entertainment, into a very limited amount of time. This inevitably distorts reality and most viewers cannot prevent it from inevitably distorting their patterns of thought.
Real people are extremely diverse and complex. In order to squeeze a story into the required time frame, it becomes necessary to resort to gross over-simplification and stereotyping. A television program or movie rarely has the time to portray a character in all of their natural complexity like books do without this over-simplification. These patterns will inevitably affect viewers' thought patterns over time and they will carry this thinking out into the real world. The result will be the lumping of people together and pre-conceived notions of what a person will be like. Written stories, in contrast, not only can develop a character fully but exercise the reader's imagination in doing so.
The artificial compression of time that is unavoidable in television affects the conception of time in the entire society when we watch as much television as we do. We have a very short concept of time as a whole. How did we get ourselves into this mess of being dependent on the oil in the Middle East to continue our way of life and setting the earth's climate on a collision course with disaster at the same time? By very short-term thinking, thats how. The Y2K crisis at the turn of the millenium turned out to be pretty much a non-crisis, but it was another clear example of large scale short-term thinking.
In order to pack a story into a very brief time span, television and movies must make heavy use of non-verbal communication and cues. I believe that this greatly distorts communication between human beings, particularly between those from different countries or groups and between those who watch a lot of television and those who don't. Excessive reliance on non-verbal cues in communication definitely promotes misunderstandings. Television takes every little thing about a person; the way they walk, their expressions, gestures and demeanor and loads it all with meaning.
In reality, such things may mean nothing. But someone whose thought patterns are affected by television will read meaning into perceived non-verbal gestures anyway. This certainly invites misunderstandings of all description. On a television studio set, everything in the scene has some meaning and makes some contribution to the story. Every little thing "means" something, which in the real world may mean nothing. Television producers have, in effect, created a non-verbal supplement to the standard spoken and written language.
Misunderstandings are inevitable when some people "speak" this television non-verbal language while others don't. This is especially true with persons of different cultural background. I, for example, have not watched an ordinary television show in years and the non-verbal elements of communication mean relatively little to me. I find the loading of everything with meaning as is done on television to be ridiculous in the real world.
Romance has always been a prominent feature of entertainment in television and movies. But what does this do to distort life in the real world? Suppose a guy smiles at a girl, what does it mean? Maybe it means nothing but it the distorted non-verbal language of the screen, he must be trying to hook up with her. Suppose a guy goes to a place of business and there is a girl that works there. Obviously he must be going there because he wants to go out with her. Why, because that's the way it works in the movies, that's why.
Television fills up our lives with entertainment. That inevitably causes us to feel that we have a kind of right to be entertained. What would normally be the private lives of people are considered to be public entertainment on television. This has created a tabloid culture where many people feel that they have the right to be entertained by the lives of others. What should be nobody's business but their own is considered as legitimate entertainment.
I believe that television has distorted society even more than we have thought. A person might say or write something about some topic and there may be those who think that there is a hidden sexual innuendo to it because that is the way it works on television or in the movies.
Television bombards viewers with ads and entertainment. This gives the impression that quiet reflection or reading is somehow abnormal because it does not fit into the television studio set, when the reality is that it is the world of television that is distorted. Spending one's life being bombarded with ads gives the impression that "I am the center of the universe, everyone wants my attention, everything revolves around me".
What is the problem with our trying to be an example to the world of what a society should be? Paris Hilton is the problem, or at least one of the symptoms of the problem. The obsession with her antics is significant not for what it indicates about her but for what it indicates about us. While she was in court for traffic issues, news helicopters filled the sky overhead. Not from paparazzi, but from "real" news organizations. Before her, there was the similar national (and international) obsession with the twisted, tragic life of the late Anne Nicole Smith.
Given obsessions such as these, why on earth would anyone across the world want to use our society as an model? Unless it is a model of what they do not want to be like. It is the public in general who create lives such as these with the constant obsession with the private lives of others for entertainment.
The main reason that we are so hated across the world is what people see of us on television. If they got to know many of the average people, most people might like us. Instead, there are many thousands of people who would sacrifice their own lives to kill some of us. They do not embrace what our society has to offer, they vociferously fight against it.
TELEVISION AND GUN MASSACRES
I had no sooner completed the posting above, than the horrible shootings occurred at Virginia Tech University. I maintain that it is television that is the foundation of the wave of such shootings in recent decades. Here is my reasoning.
These horrific and seemingly senseless massacres began on a large scale in the Sixties with the Charles Whitman sniper shootings at a university in Texas. Part of the inspiration for this may have been the assassination of John F. Kennedy a few years prior, also in Texas.
What changed about the world to produce such mindless horror? Guns are a focal point of the problem but rural American boys have grown up with guns for more than two hundred years so guns alone cannot be considered as the reason. Likewise, there has been poverty, great income disparities and, crime in America since the beginning. The wild west was legendary for it's bad guys and shoot-outs, at least until the frontier was declared closed in 1890. But even then, massacres of completely innocent people because the killer was mad at the world, such as happened at Virginia Tech, were virtually unknown.
Another period that was legendary for it's crime was the 1930s. Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker and, Machine Gun Kelly have become the figures of a twisted kind of folklore. But even here, the goal of such figures was simply money, usually obtained by bank robbery. As a general rule, as long as bank employees cooperated and made no effort to resist a robbery, no one necessarily got hurt.
But in the Fifties, another factor emerged. America was building it's postwar suburban prosperity and television became a feature of most homes. Westerns and cops-and-robbers shows involving an abundance of guns were a staple on television from it's inception. The generation that reached adulthood in the Sixties was the first to have grown up with television.
This is the time that the massacres began to be a frequent news story, as well as a general increase in crime as a whole. The thing that was so different was the senselessness. This was not the bad guys of the west in a shootout over gold. It was not the bank robbers of the Thirties after cash. It was twisted individuals, many from prosperous homes, who were mad at the world and were seeking a glorious death in their own distorted minds and were striking back at society and bringing thirty or so people along with them at the same time. How can anyone say that television is not the driving force behind this?
TELEVISION DISTORTS REALITY
A major destructive effect of television is simply how it distorts viewer's perceptions of the way things work in the real world. We read stories of people doing things that they see on television, such as jumping out of one moving pickup truck into another, and getting killed or seriously injured while doing it. But examples like that are only the most obvious ones. What about warfare and the way that television shapes the public perception of it?
The majority of the public, aside from those that do a significant amount of reading, get their idea of how warfare operates mainly from what they see on television. It is true that war movies can serve as a military recruiting tool. The trouble begins with the short concept of time promoted by television and movies. Television became a staple of homes in advanced countries in the decade following the end of the Second World War. A flood of movies and programs taking place in that war was a part of television from the beginning. The first TV program that I recall watching was "The Rat Patrol".
World War Two seemed to be made for the television that would become widespread in the following decade. When two conventional military forces face off, the war tends to consist of a series of battles. The two forces will clash followed by a period of resupply and reorganization followed by another battle with the side that got the worse of the previous battle tending to retreat in order to regroup and the other side trying to press it's advantage.
The battles in the Pacific Theater of the war, with two military forces together on a small island, would naturally be intense but relatively short. The battles in Europe, where the armies had room to maneuver, would be a little less intense but the ground war had more of a continuous nature to it than the sporadic island hopping in the Pacific. Those battles, whether in the Pacific or in Europe, fit perfectly into a two or three hour movie. In addition, the large-scale amphibious landings of the Second World War could be readily reenacted with all the required drama and adrenaline.
The generation that reached adulthood in the Sixties was the first to have grown up with television. That is where the trouble began. The mid-Sixties brought the Vietnam War. It was about as different from the Second World War as night is from day. It was largely a guerilla war with the VC, meaning Vietnamese Communists or Viet Cong, supporting their allies in Communist North Vietnam against South Vietnam and it's ally, the United States.
In early 1968, the Communists launched what is known as the Tet Offensive. Targets across South Vietnam were suddenly attacked in a vast offensive operation. The American public perceived the fact that even though U.S. forces had been in the country for more than three years, the enemy was capable of striking cities and military bases all across South Vietnam at will, as well as massacring thousands of civilians in the City of Hue. So, the war effort must be unsuccessful and Americans were essentially dying there for nothing.
The facts were completely different. For the Communists, the Tet Offensive was not a success at all. They were hoping that the operation would promote a large-scale people's uprising in South Vietnam, which did not happen. Most attacks on urban areas were repulsed in a short time, fighting continued only in Saigon and Hue for longer. The attempt to overrun Khe Sanh, the large U.S. base in the northern part of the country was not successful. Most importantly, the VC suffered heavy losses that put it out of action as a major combat force.
Nevertheless America was, by this time, a nation steeped in World War Two movies. This is what defined the public conception of what warfare was and how it worked. The people wondered what had been accomplished in the previous years of involvement in Vietnam if the enemy was capable of launching massive strikes all over South Vietnam anytime they felt inclined to do so.
A drawn-out insurgency war without the classic battles and amphibious landings in the movies just did not get any sympathy. In those World War Two movies, there was no doubt who was the good guys and who was the bad guys. There was no doubt about the goals of the war, to get the front line to the enemy's capital city and have him sign the armistice on the dotted line. It was all as simple as a football game.
In contrast, everything about this war was so murky. Was the thoroughly corrupt government of our allies really the "good guys"? Why did the war drag on year after year with no way to really know if we were making progress? There had been no Pearl Harbor style attack on America, why was this war even necessary? Events were just not unfolding like they do in the movies.
Warfare is only one way that television distorts the way viewers perceive things as working in the real world. Another is crime. I don't mean the promotion of crime by the portrayal of it on television, that is already obvious. Television also has a great effect on the operation of the judicial system.
It was recently in the news that more than two hundred people in America have been freed by DNA evidence, many after spending more than twenty years in prison. Clearly, the judicial system has very serious faults. I believe that a major part of the problem is that when the average citizen reports for jury duty, most of what they "know" about crime and courtrooms is what they have seen on television.
Real people are extremely diverse and complex. In order to squeeze a story into the required time frame, it becomes necessary to resort to gross over-simplification and stereotyping. A television program or movie rarely has the time to portray a character in all of their natural complexity like books do without this over-simplification. These patterns will inevitably affect viewers' thought patterns over time and they will carry this thinking out into the real world. The result will be the lumping of people together and pre-conceived notions of what a person will be like. Written stories, in contrast, not only can develop a character fully but exercise the reader's imagination in doing so.
The artificial compression of time that is unavoidable in television affects the conception of time in the entire society when we watch as much television as we do. We have a very short concept of time as a whole. How did we get ourselves into this mess of being dependent on the oil in the Middle East to continue our way of life and setting the earth's climate on a collision course with disaster at the same time? By very short-term thinking, thats how. The Y2K crisis at the turn of the millenium turned out to be pretty much a non-crisis, but it was another clear example of large scale short-term thinking.
In order to pack a story into a very brief time span, television and movies must make heavy use of non-verbal communication and cues. I believe that this greatly distorts communication between human beings, particularly between those from different countries or groups and between those who watch a lot of television and those who don't. Excessive reliance on non-verbal cues in communication definitely promotes misunderstandings. Television takes every little thing about a person; the way they walk, their expressions, gestures and demeanor and loads it all with meaning.
In reality, such things may mean nothing. But someone whose thought patterns are affected by television will read meaning into perceived non-verbal gestures anyway. This certainly invites misunderstandings of all description. On a television studio set, everything in the scene has some meaning and makes some contribution to the story. Every little thing "means" something, which in the real world may mean nothing. Television producers have, in effect, created a non-verbal supplement to the standard spoken and written language.
Misunderstandings are inevitable when some people "speak" this television non-verbal language while others don't. This is especially true with persons of different cultural background. I, for example, have not watched an ordinary television show in years and the non-verbal elements of communication mean relatively little to me. I find the loading of everything with meaning as is done on television to be ridiculous in the real world.
Romance has always been a prominent feature of entertainment in television and movies. But what does this do to distort life in the real world? Suppose a guy smiles at a girl, what does it mean? Maybe it means nothing but it the distorted non-verbal language of the screen, he must be trying to hook up with her. Suppose a guy goes to a place of business and there is a girl that works there. Obviously he must be going there because he wants to go out with her. Why, because that's the way it works in the movies, that's why.
Television fills up our lives with entertainment. That inevitably causes us to feel that we have a kind of right to be entertained. What would normally be the private lives of people are considered to be public entertainment on television. This has created a tabloid culture where many people feel that they have the right to be entertained by the lives of others. What should be nobody's business but their own is considered as legitimate entertainment.
I believe that television has distorted society even more than we have thought. A person might say or write something about some topic and there may be those who think that there is a hidden sexual innuendo to it because that is the way it works on television or in the movies.
Television bombards viewers with ads and entertainment. This gives the impression that quiet reflection or reading is somehow abnormal because it does not fit into the television studio set, when the reality is that it is the world of television that is distorted. Spending one's life being bombarded with ads gives the impression that "I am the center of the universe, everyone wants my attention, everything revolves around me".
What is the problem with our trying to be an example to the world of what a society should be? Paris Hilton is the problem, or at least one of the symptoms of the problem. The obsession with her antics is significant not for what it indicates about her but for what it indicates about us. While she was in court for traffic issues, news helicopters filled the sky overhead. Not from paparazzi, but from "real" news organizations. Before her, there was the similar national (and international) obsession with the twisted, tragic life of the late Anne Nicole Smith.
Given obsessions such as these, why on earth would anyone across the world want to use our society as an model? Unless it is a model of what they do not want to be like. It is the public in general who create lives such as these with the constant obsession with the private lives of others for entertainment.
The main reason that we are so hated across the world is what people see of us on television. If they got to know many of the average people, most people might like us. Instead, there are many thousands of people who would sacrifice their own lives to kill some of us. They do not embrace what our society has to offer, they vociferously fight against it.
TELEVISION AND GUN MASSACRES
I had no sooner completed the posting above, than the horrible shootings occurred at Virginia Tech University. I maintain that it is television that is the foundation of the wave of such shootings in recent decades. Here is my reasoning.
These horrific and seemingly senseless massacres began on a large scale in the Sixties with the Charles Whitman sniper shootings at a university in Texas. Part of the inspiration for this may have been the assassination of John F. Kennedy a few years prior, also in Texas.
What changed about the world to produce such mindless horror? Guns are a focal point of the problem but rural American boys have grown up with guns for more than two hundred years so guns alone cannot be considered as the reason. Likewise, there has been poverty, great income disparities and, crime in America since the beginning. The wild west was legendary for it's bad guys and shoot-outs, at least until the frontier was declared closed in 1890. But even then, massacres of completely innocent people because the killer was mad at the world, such as happened at Virginia Tech, were virtually unknown.
Another period that was legendary for it's crime was the 1930s. Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker and, Machine Gun Kelly have become the figures of a twisted kind of folklore. But even here, the goal of such figures was simply money, usually obtained by bank robbery. As a general rule, as long as bank employees cooperated and made no effort to resist a robbery, no one necessarily got hurt.
But in the Fifties, another factor emerged. America was building it's postwar suburban prosperity and television became a feature of most homes. Westerns and cops-and-robbers shows involving an abundance of guns were a staple on television from it's inception. The generation that reached adulthood in the Sixties was the first to have grown up with television.
This is the time that the massacres began to be a frequent news story, as well as a general increase in crime as a whole. The thing that was so different was the senselessness. This was not the bad guys of the west in a shootout over gold. It was not the bank robbers of the Thirties after cash. It was twisted individuals, many from prosperous homes, who were mad at the world and were seeking a glorious death in their own distorted minds and were striking back at society and bringing thirty or so people along with them at the same time. How can anyone say that television is not the driving force behind this?
TELEVISION DISTORTS REALITY
A major destructive effect of television is simply how it distorts viewer's perceptions of the way things work in the real world. We read stories of people doing things that they see on television, such as jumping out of one moving pickup truck into another, and getting killed or seriously injured while doing it. But examples like that are only the most obvious ones. What about warfare and the way that television shapes the public perception of it?
The majority of the public, aside from those that do a significant amount of reading, get their idea of how warfare operates mainly from what they see on television. It is true that war movies can serve as a military recruiting tool. The trouble begins with the short concept of time promoted by television and movies. Television became a staple of homes in advanced countries in the decade following the end of the Second World War. A flood of movies and programs taking place in that war was a part of television from the beginning. The first TV program that I recall watching was "The Rat Patrol".
World War Two seemed to be made for the television that would become widespread in the following decade. When two conventional military forces face off, the war tends to consist of a series of battles. The two forces will clash followed by a period of resupply and reorganization followed by another battle with the side that got the worse of the previous battle tending to retreat in order to regroup and the other side trying to press it's advantage.
The battles in the Pacific Theater of the war, with two military forces together on a small island, would naturally be intense but relatively short. The battles in Europe, where the armies had room to maneuver, would be a little less intense but the ground war had more of a continuous nature to it than the sporadic island hopping in the Pacific. Those battles, whether in the Pacific or in Europe, fit perfectly into a two or three hour movie. In addition, the large-scale amphibious landings of the Second World War could be readily reenacted with all the required drama and adrenaline.
The generation that reached adulthood in the Sixties was the first to have grown up with television. That is where the trouble began. The mid-Sixties brought the Vietnam War. It was about as different from the Second World War as night is from day. It was largely a guerilla war with the VC, meaning Vietnamese Communists or Viet Cong, supporting their allies in Communist North Vietnam against South Vietnam and it's ally, the United States.
In early 1968, the Communists launched what is known as the Tet Offensive. Targets across South Vietnam were suddenly attacked in a vast offensive operation. The American public perceived the fact that even though U.S. forces had been in the country for more than three years, the enemy was capable of striking cities and military bases all across South Vietnam at will, as well as massacring thousands of civilians in the City of Hue. So, the war effort must be unsuccessful and Americans were essentially dying there for nothing.
The facts were completely different. For the Communists, the Tet Offensive was not a success at all. They were hoping that the operation would promote a large-scale people's uprising in South Vietnam, which did not happen. Most attacks on urban areas were repulsed in a short time, fighting continued only in Saigon and Hue for longer. The attempt to overrun Khe Sanh, the large U.S. base in the northern part of the country was not successful. Most importantly, the VC suffered heavy losses that put it out of action as a major combat force.
Nevertheless America was, by this time, a nation steeped in World War Two movies. This is what defined the public conception of what warfare was and how it worked. The people wondered what had been accomplished in the previous years of involvement in Vietnam if the enemy was capable of launching massive strikes all over South Vietnam anytime they felt inclined to do so.
A drawn-out insurgency war without the classic battles and amphibious landings in the movies just did not get any sympathy. In those World War Two movies, there was no doubt who was the good guys and who was the bad guys. There was no doubt about the goals of the war, to get the front line to the enemy's capital city and have him sign the armistice on the dotted line. It was all as simple as a football game.
In contrast, everything about this war was so murky. Was the thoroughly corrupt government of our allies really the "good guys"? Why did the war drag on year after year with no way to really know if we were making progress? There had been no Pearl Harbor style attack on America, why was this war even necessary? Events were just not unfolding like they do in the movies.
Warfare is only one way that television distorts the way viewers perceive things as working in the real world. Another is crime. I don't mean the promotion of crime by the portrayal of it on television, that is already obvious. Television also has a great effect on the operation of the judicial system.
It was recently in the news that more than two hundred people in America have been freed by DNA evidence, many after spending more than twenty years in prison. Clearly, the judicial system has very serious faults. I believe that a major part of the problem is that when the average citizen reports for jury duty, most of what they "know" about crime and courtrooms is what they have seen on television.
Friday, April 6, 2007
The Trouble With News
I would like to point out what I consider a major obstacle to world peace. It is the news. The vast majority of news is bad news of some type as opposed to good news. This is due simply to the very nature of news. Basically, good news isn't news, it's bad news that is news. Bad news is often spectacular in nature, while good news tends to be mundane. Even when good news does come suddenly, it is often the reversal of previous bad news, such as miners being rescued after a mine collapse.
Have you ever noticed that when you read news of foreign countries, you hardly ever read anything good? It is almost all bad. But we should understand that this is what I will term "news distortion". The news informs us of what is happening, but in doing so distorts our view of the world. This is not done purposely but is due to the simple fact that good news isn't news while bad news is news. If all we ever read about a certain foreign country is bad, we will naturally tend to develop a negative concept of that country because of the inevitable news distortion. I am certain that this is a significant barrier to world peace.
History has the same downward slant. Most of history is about wars. The history of human beings is basically a history of warfare. History is just the news of the past and concerns itself with changes in the status quo, which are usually accompanied by warfare. If you read the history of a particular country, a major part of what you read will be about it's wars and if you read today's news in that country, you will most likely read one bad thing after another. Countries usually only look good in the news when compared with other countries where the news is even worse. Clearly, the most fortunate countries are those which are rarely in the world news.
My solution is a monthly publication of which I have been virtually a life-long reader. I find that National Geographic Magazine is an excellent counterbalance to the news. It has plenty of news and history in it but the focus is on daily life and ordinary people and what is important in the world.
It is an American magazine but focuses on the entire world. It has a very broad range of features and gives a very realistic view of the world and beyond. It counters the inevitable news distortion. My belief is that it should be required reading for anyone who deals with the world outside their own country. And I do not work for National Geographic nor did they hire me to promote it.
Have you ever noticed that when you read news of foreign countries, you hardly ever read anything good? It is almost all bad. But we should understand that this is what I will term "news distortion". The news informs us of what is happening, but in doing so distorts our view of the world. This is not done purposely but is due to the simple fact that good news isn't news while bad news is news. If all we ever read about a certain foreign country is bad, we will naturally tend to develop a negative concept of that country because of the inevitable news distortion. I am certain that this is a significant barrier to world peace.
History has the same downward slant. Most of history is about wars. The history of human beings is basically a history of warfare. History is just the news of the past and concerns itself with changes in the status quo, which are usually accompanied by warfare. If you read the history of a particular country, a major part of what you read will be about it's wars and if you read today's news in that country, you will most likely read one bad thing after another. Countries usually only look good in the news when compared with other countries where the news is even worse. Clearly, the most fortunate countries are those which are rarely in the world news.
My solution is a monthly publication of which I have been virtually a life-long reader. I find that National Geographic Magazine is an excellent counterbalance to the news. It has plenty of news and history in it but the focus is on daily life and ordinary people and what is important in the world.
It is an American magazine but focuses on the entire world. It has a very broad range of features and gives a very realistic view of the world and beyond. It counters the inevitable news distortion. My belief is that it should be required reading for anyone who deals with the world outside their own country. And I do not work for National Geographic nor did they hire me to promote it.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
The Greatest Obstacle
I will tell you simply what is the greatest obstacle in salvation and reaching God. It is the self and the ways of the world. The way to God is to put aside your faith in other things and put your faith in him. The thing that holds people back from God is often not blatant sin. It is faith and confidence in other things such as our knowledge, skills, wealth and, strength. These things are good to have but not to put our faith in. The person who is closest to God will be the person who has no self-confidence at all but who puts faith entirely in God. Of course, this is diametrically opposite to human nature and the ways of the world and that is what the obstacle is.
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?
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?
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Atheism
Atheism is the belief that there is no god. There was an article that I read today about a writer promoting this idea. Let's consider a few implications of atheism.
Atheism forces us to find some other explanation of how we came into existence. Many atheists claim that life arose from inanimate matter by random collisions of atoms, in other words evolution (although evolution actually does not try to explain how life started, only how it developed). I have heard a number of people say that they do not believe in any religion but only in evolution, or something along those lines.
But when we consider the general definition of religion: That which brought life into existence, even though it cannot be proven. It becomes clear that evolution is as much a religion as anything. Likewise, stating that "there is no god" is every bit as much a religious statement as saying that there is a god.
The arguments of atheists often revolve around the behavior (behaviour) of Christians. Sure enough, not all Christians are perfect. In fact, none are. But if this discredits Christianity then, using exactly the same logic, democracy is invalidated when a politician is involved in a scandal as is capitalism when a businessman does some creative accounting. I think it is reasonable to agree that in any group with two thousand million members, there will be a few that fail to live up to the ideals.
It is unfortunately true that there have been bad things done in the name of religion, both Christian and otherwise. This is often pointed out by atheists. However, using the same logic and the same standards, we find that some Nazis believed that they were at a higher stage of evolution than inferior peoples. Thus, there was nothing wrong with killing or enslaving them in order to purify the genetic pool. Similar ideas were held by some in the imperial powers with regard to building empires. Communists were not driven by biological evolution, but by belief that communism was the next step in human social evolution.
So, my conclusion is that if Christians are resposible for the bad things done in the name of religion, evolutionists bear responsibility for the approximately 140 million people that were systematically exterminated during the Twentieth Century for ideologies that had some basis in evolution.
Atheism forces us to find some other explanation of how we came into existence. Many atheists claim that life arose from inanimate matter by random collisions of atoms, in other words evolution (although evolution actually does not try to explain how life started, only how it developed). I have heard a number of people say that they do not believe in any religion but only in evolution, or something along those lines.
But when we consider the general definition of religion: That which brought life into existence, even though it cannot be proven. It becomes clear that evolution is as much a religion as anything. Likewise, stating that "there is no god" is every bit as much a religious statement as saying that there is a god.
The arguments of atheists often revolve around the behavior (behaviour) of Christians. Sure enough, not all Christians are perfect. In fact, none are. But if this discredits Christianity then, using exactly the same logic, democracy is invalidated when a politician is involved in a scandal as is capitalism when a businessman does some creative accounting. I think it is reasonable to agree that in any group with two thousand million members, there will be a few that fail to live up to the ideals.
It is unfortunately true that there have been bad things done in the name of religion, both Christian and otherwise. This is often pointed out by atheists. However, using the same logic and the same standards, we find that some Nazis believed that they were at a higher stage of evolution than inferior peoples. Thus, there was nothing wrong with killing or enslaving them in order to purify the genetic pool. Similar ideas were held by some in the imperial powers with regard to building empires. Communists were not driven by biological evolution, but by belief that communism was the next step in human social evolution.
So, my conclusion is that if Christians are resposible for the bad things done in the name of religion, evolutionists bear responsibility for the approximately 140 million people that were systematically exterminated during the Twentieth Century for ideologies that had some basis in evolution.
A Simple Definition of Wisdom.
The Bible tells us that the entirety of the law can be summed up in one sentence, "Treat others as you would like to be treated". But what about wisdom? Is there a way to define wisdom in one simple sentence? Here is my conclusion.
Wisdom is not the same thing as knowledge, although there is an overlap between the two. One can have knowledge without wisdom but some knowledge is necessary to have wisdom. My definition of wisdom is simply big-picture, long-term thinking. Knowledge without wisdom will bring short-term success and long-term failure. Wisdom, as I define it, is always doing and thinking with the big picture and the long-term in mind. This is not the same thing as living in either the future or the past. The fruits of wise thinking will stand the test of time and, in fact, may require time to become apparent.
Wisdom is related to the idea of perfection but is more about making the very best of what you have, not in the short-term, but in the long-term big picture of things. In fact, wisdom can be defined as long-term efficiency. Taking every opportunity to do and think that which is most profitable and not doing or thinking that which is wasteful.
One component of big-picture thinking is insight. To see deeper than things look on the surface. Suppose someone tells you something negative about someone else. Do you automatically believe it? Maybe the person who told you just feels inferior in some way and is trying to build themselves up by trying to knock someone else down.
In fact, wisdom shows that hatred is a compliment in a very real way because it takes a great amount of energy to hate someone and so the object of the hatred must really have something to be worthy of the effort of being hated. Those countries that have persecuted Christians finally realized that hating someone for what they believe makes no sense at all because if what they believe is not true, putting in the effort of hating is utterly illogical and in fact the hatred shows that they suspect that the beliefs may be true but do not want them to be true.
Wisdom is a light that shines beyond the surface. Suppose that there is a person who dislikes you. If seen in wisdom, it may be more because of what they are than what you are. Maybe you have made them, or a group that they belong to, feel inferior. Possibly you have given them a reminder that their view of the world is inaccurate. Unless the person has a degree of big-picture thinking, this may cause them to have a dislike for you.
Every person has emotions, a mind and, a spirit. The most short-term, and unwise, plan is to have the actions dominated by the emotions. Being led by the mind is better than being led by the emotions. But the best of all is to be led by the spirit in alignment with God. The best of human wisdom can be wrong, and in any case falls short of ideal. A group or community of people are just as likely to be wrong as an individual. So, following the crowd cannot be the definition of wisdom, indeed someone who thinks as everyone else does will be no wiser than anyone else. The Wisdom of God gives people a compass with it's reference points from beyond the world. The big picture does not mean the entire world or your entire life, it means the Kingdom of God and all of eternity.
The definition of wisdom is related to the definitions of good and evil. I define good as being in harmony with the highest long-term reality and evil with being out of harmony with this reality. Good is long-term and evil, in most cases, is the product of short-term, self-centered thinking.
I have decided on a simple way to recognize a wise person. Such a person will thank you when you prove them wrong. That is my definition of wisdom.
Wisdom is not the same thing as knowledge, although there is an overlap between the two. One can have knowledge without wisdom but some knowledge is necessary to have wisdom. My definition of wisdom is simply big-picture, long-term thinking. Knowledge without wisdom will bring short-term success and long-term failure. Wisdom, as I define it, is always doing and thinking with the big picture and the long-term in mind. This is not the same thing as living in either the future or the past. The fruits of wise thinking will stand the test of time and, in fact, may require time to become apparent.
Wisdom is related to the idea of perfection but is more about making the very best of what you have, not in the short-term, but in the long-term big picture of things. In fact, wisdom can be defined as long-term efficiency. Taking every opportunity to do and think that which is most profitable and not doing or thinking that which is wasteful.
One component of big-picture thinking is insight. To see deeper than things look on the surface. Suppose someone tells you something negative about someone else. Do you automatically believe it? Maybe the person who told you just feels inferior in some way and is trying to build themselves up by trying to knock someone else down.
In fact, wisdom shows that hatred is a compliment in a very real way because it takes a great amount of energy to hate someone and so the object of the hatred must really have something to be worthy of the effort of being hated. Those countries that have persecuted Christians finally realized that hating someone for what they believe makes no sense at all because if what they believe is not true, putting in the effort of hating is utterly illogical and in fact the hatred shows that they suspect that the beliefs may be true but do not want them to be true.
Wisdom is a light that shines beyond the surface. Suppose that there is a person who dislikes you. If seen in wisdom, it may be more because of what they are than what you are. Maybe you have made them, or a group that they belong to, feel inferior. Possibly you have given them a reminder that their view of the world is inaccurate. Unless the person has a degree of big-picture thinking, this may cause them to have a dislike for you.
Every person has emotions, a mind and, a spirit. The most short-term, and unwise, plan is to have the actions dominated by the emotions. Being led by the mind is better than being led by the emotions. But the best of all is to be led by the spirit in alignment with God. The best of human wisdom can be wrong, and in any case falls short of ideal. A group or community of people are just as likely to be wrong as an individual. So, following the crowd cannot be the definition of wisdom, indeed someone who thinks as everyone else does will be no wiser than anyone else. The Wisdom of God gives people a compass with it's reference points from beyond the world. The big picture does not mean the entire world or your entire life, it means the Kingdom of God and all of eternity.
The definition of wisdom is related to the definitions of good and evil. I define good as being in harmony with the highest long-term reality and evil with being out of harmony with this reality. Good is long-term and evil, in most cases, is the product of short-term, self-centered thinking.
I have decided on a simple way to recognize a wise person. Such a person will thank you when you prove them wrong. That is my definition of wisdom.
Saturday, March 17, 2007
Christian Holidays
The two major Christian holidays are Easter and Christmas. Easter represents the rising of Jesus from the tomb and Christmas represents his birth. So, why does Easter revolve around chocolate rabbits and Christmas around Santa Claus? Doesn't everyone realize what is at stake here?
This is the whole purpose of life, to show that only God's ways are correct and to see who is to enter heaven for eternity. These holidays were supposed to be about Jesus. It seems to me that over the years, people who are uncomfortable with this, yet who wish to celebrate the holidays have introduced these distractions.
We should be celebrating our God. None of us can really grasp what Jesus has done for us, making it possible for us to spend eternity with God by dying for us on the cross to pay the price for sin. We could not possibly qualify for God's salvation through our own merits. You know that we are not living the way we should but Jesus did and he died to pay the price for us. The crucifixion of Jesus was the focal point of all human history. No matter what else you have or do, if you do not spend eternity with God, what does it really matter?
The Bible is like a brilliant and glorious light that illuminates the entire universe. Opening the cover of a Bible is opening a doorway to the highest level of reality that a human being can reach. The whole time that evil is allowed to exist is actually very brief in comparison with all of eternity and the Bible is the key to that eternity. Nothing or no one can possibly oppose the Will of God.
This is the whole purpose of life, to show that only God's ways are correct and to see who is to enter heaven for eternity. These holidays were supposed to be about Jesus. It seems to me that over the years, people who are uncomfortable with this, yet who wish to celebrate the holidays have introduced these distractions.
We should be celebrating our God. None of us can really grasp what Jesus has done for us, making it possible for us to spend eternity with God by dying for us on the cross to pay the price for sin. We could not possibly qualify for God's salvation through our own merits. You know that we are not living the way we should but Jesus did and he died to pay the price for us. The crucifixion of Jesus was the focal point of all human history. No matter what else you have or do, if you do not spend eternity with God, what does it really matter?
The Bible is like a brilliant and glorious light that illuminates the entire universe. Opening the cover of a Bible is opening a doorway to the highest level of reality that a human being can reach. The whole time that evil is allowed to exist is actually very brief in comparison with all of eternity and the Bible is the key to that eternity. Nothing or no one can possibly oppose the Will of God.
The Empire Strategy
Satan is in opposition to the Will of God but he can only work by using human beings. We can see Satan's handprints all over the past few hundred years.
The reason that Christianity spread so fast was the Roman Empire. Israel was under Roman control during the time of Jesus and the religion spread rapidly along the empire's roads and by it's postal system. Had there been a patchwork of separate countries instead of one empire, the spread would have been much slower. I believe that Satan never forgot this.
Europe became the heartland of Christianity. I believe the Reformation to have certainly been the work of God, but it also gave Satan a chance to give religion a very negative image by promoting more than a century of religious warfare between Protestants and Catholics after the Reformation.
The modern political era began with the French Revolution of 1789. There was a deep hostility to the church among the revolutionaries for this was the Age of Reason when faith was being put in the reasoning powers of human beings instead of in God. Suppose Satan could spread this hostility toward the church all across the Christian heartland?
The French Revolution did not turn out as planned. In fact, it ended up as a dictatorship under Napoleon. His forces conquered, at least for a while, almost the entirety of Europe. Was this a part of Satan's plan to destroy Christianity?
The Industrial Revolution was underway. The rural agricultural way of life was largely replaced by factories and machines. There is a very strong connection between industrialism and secularism. Farming people spend the day dealing with, and being awed by, what God has created. But while working in a factory building sorrounded by man-made machines, they can see only what man has created.
I say that it is no coincidence that secularism did not become widespread until large numbers of people were working in factories instead of on farms. Just as it is no coincidence that America's Bible Belt is in what was traditionally the most agricultural region of the country. The Theory of Evolution is a product of the industrial age and uses a mechanical factory-like process to try to explain the development of life.
Has anyone ever noticed that the Theory of Evolution was developed when the British Empire was at it's height? Could Satan, remembering the rapid spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire, have been hoping to bring evolution and secularism to the world through the British Empire?
Human beings made more and more scientific discoveries and became ever-more adept with all kinds of new technologies. What if Satan could destroy the European heartland of Christanity with a cataclysmic war like the world had never seen before? Horrible new weapons appeared and European nations had a complex tangle of alliances and pacts among themselves.
Finally, Europe was at the point where only a spark was required to set it off. In 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was visiting Serbia. A nineteen-year-old anarchist appeared with a gun and shot him. The government of Austria-Hungary was enraged. Russia had an alliance with Serbia. Germany had an alliance with Austria-hungary. France was bound to Russia by treaty, causing Germany to expect an attack on it's western border by France.
It all exploded into World War One, a war such as the world had never seen before. The war came to an end but at the Versailles Conference, where the armistice was signed, Germany was treated unfairly by the victorious allies, who insisted it had to pay the entire cost of the war. Satan must have known that this would ensure a rematch when the sons of the war veterans reached military age.
Satan knew the Bible prophecies of the Last Days of the world and he knew that it must be on the horizon. He knew that the culmination of the prophetic scenario is the end of him also. The prophecies of the End of the World revolve around the Jews returning to and reestablishing the nation of Israel and the great world leader of the future, known in the Bible as the Antichrist.
But what if Satan could take action and foil God's plans? Most of the Jews were in Europe, which was also the traditional heartland of Christianity. What if he could get a strong leader with a powerful army to quickly conquer Europe and kill all of the Jews? That would foil God's plans and give him his powerful leader over what once was Christianity's European base. Along came Adolph Hitler.
Satan's plan didn't work, although it did come close. But when the war ended, he had another powerful force against Christianity. Communism enforced atheism and looked like it could well be the future of the world, which would bring an end to widespread Christianity and achieve Satan's goal. That did not work in the long run either and by the 1990s, it was the United States, a predominantly Christian country that called itself "One nation under God" that was the strongest country in the world.
But Satan never gives up. By this time, the world was logged into the world wide web as well as being covered by television and instant news. Satan managed to see to it that when the world looked toward the U.S., they did not see a great Christian country that showed them how they should be living. Instead, they saw movies with every other word beginning with F and every other scene a shootout. They saw an unbelievable crime rate, school shootings, drugs and endless decadence in the U.S. as well as Europe.
Satan isn't finished yet. He will get a great worldly leader under his control. He will have his chance to run the world his way for a while after the Christians are taken out by Jesus. But it will turn into the greatest disaster the world has ever known or ever will know, the Bible prophecies of the End of the World. But following that, his time will be finished and Jesus will directly rule the earth, making it the paradise that it was always intended to be.
The reason that Christianity spread so fast was the Roman Empire. Israel was under Roman control during the time of Jesus and the religion spread rapidly along the empire's roads and by it's postal system. Had there been a patchwork of separate countries instead of one empire, the spread would have been much slower. I believe that Satan never forgot this.
Europe became the heartland of Christianity. I believe the Reformation to have certainly been the work of God, but it also gave Satan a chance to give religion a very negative image by promoting more than a century of religious warfare between Protestants and Catholics after the Reformation.
The modern political era began with the French Revolution of 1789. There was a deep hostility to the church among the revolutionaries for this was the Age of Reason when faith was being put in the reasoning powers of human beings instead of in God. Suppose Satan could spread this hostility toward the church all across the Christian heartland?
The French Revolution did not turn out as planned. In fact, it ended up as a dictatorship under Napoleon. His forces conquered, at least for a while, almost the entirety of Europe. Was this a part of Satan's plan to destroy Christianity?
The Industrial Revolution was underway. The rural agricultural way of life was largely replaced by factories and machines. There is a very strong connection between industrialism and secularism. Farming people spend the day dealing with, and being awed by, what God has created. But while working in a factory building sorrounded by man-made machines, they can see only what man has created.
I say that it is no coincidence that secularism did not become widespread until large numbers of people were working in factories instead of on farms. Just as it is no coincidence that America's Bible Belt is in what was traditionally the most agricultural region of the country. The Theory of Evolution is a product of the industrial age and uses a mechanical factory-like process to try to explain the development of life.
Has anyone ever noticed that the Theory of Evolution was developed when the British Empire was at it's height? Could Satan, remembering the rapid spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire, have been hoping to bring evolution and secularism to the world through the British Empire?
Human beings made more and more scientific discoveries and became ever-more adept with all kinds of new technologies. What if Satan could destroy the European heartland of Christanity with a cataclysmic war like the world had never seen before? Horrible new weapons appeared and European nations had a complex tangle of alliances and pacts among themselves.
Finally, Europe was at the point where only a spark was required to set it off. In 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was visiting Serbia. A nineteen-year-old anarchist appeared with a gun and shot him. The government of Austria-Hungary was enraged. Russia had an alliance with Serbia. Germany had an alliance with Austria-hungary. France was bound to Russia by treaty, causing Germany to expect an attack on it's western border by France.
It all exploded into World War One, a war such as the world had never seen before. The war came to an end but at the Versailles Conference, where the armistice was signed, Germany was treated unfairly by the victorious allies, who insisted it had to pay the entire cost of the war. Satan must have known that this would ensure a rematch when the sons of the war veterans reached military age.
Satan knew the Bible prophecies of the Last Days of the world and he knew that it must be on the horizon. He knew that the culmination of the prophetic scenario is the end of him also. The prophecies of the End of the World revolve around the Jews returning to and reestablishing the nation of Israel and the great world leader of the future, known in the Bible as the Antichrist.
But what if Satan could take action and foil God's plans? Most of the Jews were in Europe, which was also the traditional heartland of Christianity. What if he could get a strong leader with a powerful army to quickly conquer Europe and kill all of the Jews? That would foil God's plans and give him his powerful leader over what once was Christianity's European base. Along came Adolph Hitler.
Satan's plan didn't work, although it did come close. But when the war ended, he had another powerful force against Christianity. Communism enforced atheism and looked like it could well be the future of the world, which would bring an end to widespread Christianity and achieve Satan's goal. That did not work in the long run either and by the 1990s, it was the United States, a predominantly Christian country that called itself "One nation under God" that was the strongest country in the world.
But Satan never gives up. By this time, the world was logged into the world wide web as well as being covered by television and instant news. Satan managed to see to it that when the world looked toward the U.S., they did not see a great Christian country that showed them how they should be living. Instead, they saw movies with every other word beginning with F and every other scene a shootout. They saw an unbelievable crime rate, school shootings, drugs and endless decadence in the U.S. as well as Europe.
Satan isn't finished yet. He will get a great worldly leader under his control. He will have his chance to run the world his way for a while after the Christians are taken out by Jesus. But it will turn into the greatest disaster the world has ever known or ever will know, the Bible prophecies of the End of the World. But following that, his time will be finished and Jesus will directly rule the earth, making it the paradise that it was always intended to be.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)