The rest of our lives...

A striking realisation hit me yesterday: For the rest of my life, I will be living in a world that is dying around me.

Everyone agrees that climate change is happening (even the climate sceptics have stopped disputing that). And everyone knows that evolution takes a long time, i.e. millions of years. Life on earth takes a long time to adapt to its surroundings, and when there are sudden changes (over decades, or less), lots of things can't cope with it and die. Indeed, entire ecosystems collapse, having ripple effects all over the place, which upset other ecosystems, causing more systemic failures (i.e. more mass death).

So for the rest of my life, I will be watching life around me struggling (and failing) to adapt to the changing climate. It will be hotter, and it will rain less. There will be drought, and the grass will never again be quite so green, quite so lush. Indeed, soil will dry up and crack up, grass will wither, and green fields will turn brown. The bacteria in the soil, the bacteria that makes the soil fertile and life-giving, will be dehydrated and die. It will stop the break down of other organic matter, stop putting usable nutrition in the soil, and so everything that grows from the soil will suffer.

Trees will produce less leaves, less flowers, less seeds, less fruit. Vegetables will be smaller, the cost of irrigation will increase (as fresh water becomes scarcer), and so the cost of food will increase. My personal projects to grow my own food will become harder to succeed in, and I will see yields decrease.

And of course, I'm not simply worried about the cost of food increasing (although millions of humans will suffer and die because of it). As the world dies around us, we, being part of that dying world, will be dying slowly too. It is well-researched that when people are often around death they are not happy. When everyone is around death a lot, none of us will be happy. Oh, we'll find happiness amongst it all, but we'll be less happy than if we'd been alive in a world that was gaining in life, not losing it.

Depressing? Yes. I sometime have depressing thoughts. But at least we can try to get the message out, try to make things die slower, and try to help as many things as possible survive. In short, we need to try stop the madness that is destroying our world.

We are carpet moths!

The edges of the carpets I my house were becoming thin. I wondered why, only to discover that carpet moths were eating away the wool in the carpet, leaving the edge bear. Not knowing what too do, I resorted to google, as always! Most of the sites (except the ones selling carpet-moth pesticide) said that pesticide wasn’t necessary, and that merely disturbing them with the vacuum was good enough to get rid of them. After all, they only live at the edges of carpets, never in the middle where people walk and the floor is constantly disturbed.

Humans are also just like this. If we are not disturbed then we flourish. If the political system is stable, then we flourish. If the economy is stable, we flourish. With stability comes accurate planning, careful consideration, and long-term fruitfulness. Politicians know this, and so to win votes, they try to create a stable system, especially economically. Or at least, a system that appears and feels stable. To do this, they will (and do) do anything they can get away with, like lying about statistics (unemployment, inflation), and so use the media to try to present stability. But of course, they only try to achieve the illusion, the feeling of stability. Only good politicians try to actually create stability, and because of unrealistic expectations of the populace (fuelled by the media and ignorance) and the pressure of corporations, there is no room in the world today for good politicians, except at possibly the local level, the level where they have minimal impact (so is not worth it for corporations to work to change the situation).

But the same is also true: humans don’t flourish in times of instability. The US policy in the Middle East for the pasts few decades is to ensure there is instability. Only if there is instability can the greatest looting of resources (oil) in history continue. Only when people in their day to day lives have to worry about food and shelter, will they not have the energy to concern themselves with political injustice, to come together and organise, to throw off the oppressor and thief that the US and Britain are.

This is nothing new. This knowledge has been known by politicians for generations. It is, by now, official policy: cause chaos to steal resources and power, cause stability to get a happy population and thereby win votes.

This is the way we work. It is the way life woks. Abusing this is the speciality of politicians, corporations and economic theorists. And it is up to you, the person, to be aware of this policy and not let yourself become subject to it: to work to stop it happening to you. I hope that by publishing this I am contributing to people protecting themselves from this evil. I hope those who read it do not use this knowledge for abuse.

He who abuses this is evil. He is a rapist. He is cruel and revels in torture. And sadly, he is rich and powerful.

Life by Word, Life by Image

Just a short post to link to pictures of my travels. Click to view them!

picasaweb.google.com/thugsb

ICS Essays

These are all the essays I wrote for classes at ICS. The syllabus for most of the classes can be viewed here.
If you find any of them helpful, please leave a comment. And if you use them at all, please let me know!
They all received between a B+ and A grade, the thesis itself receiving an A.
Apologies for any formatting issues - if you would like a OpenOffice, Word or PDF version, please ask and I'll be happy to send them.

Fall 2005
John's Word - Biblical Foundations
Evil Sins - A Critique of Herman Dooyeweerd's Concept of Evil - Reformational Philosophy
Evil Relations - An Experience of the Trinity - The Divine (at) Risk
Evil Times - An Ecological Critique of the Doctrines of Individual Salvation, Dispensationalism, Creationism and Obliterationism - Christianity and the Ecological Crisis

Spring 2006
Reforming the Bible -Postmodern Canonicity - Inter-Disciplinary Seminar: Dialogue and Difference
Opening My Other Eye - Postmodernism and the Diversity of Religion - Postmodernity
CreatorCreation - Boundary and Distinction - GodSexWordFlesh & Postmodern Post-Freudian Psychoanalysis

Fall 2006
Why The Tortoise Can Fly - Knowledge as Mythology in Allen, Ansell, Moltmann and Swimme - Inter-Disciplinary Seminar: Art, Knowledge and Life
From Ground to Ocean - (Ful)filling the Abyss - The Ground of Be(com)ing / The Horizon of Hope: Creation, Time & Eschatology

Spring 2007
Jesus Divines/d (God) - Christological Godding - God Inc.: Christology/Humanity/Incarnation
The Big B's - Guided Reading

Fall 2008
From Ground to Ocean - Robinson and Keller at the Beginnings of Divinity - MA Thesis
If you wish to receive a copy of my thesis, I am more than happy to send it to you. Please leave a comment with your email address and I will send you a copy (you can immediately delete your comment if you are afraid of spammers - I receive a copy of the comment by email as soon as it is posted).

These essays are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Just a thought...

Dissolving the Ego is great. It is the direction of love, of the Divine, of connection with the world and with others. But those with power in the world seem to have over-developed egos (enabling them to separate themselves from others, the earth, even their own bodies), and since they make the laws (and bombs) it may be necessary to have an ego and not dissolve it. Necessary for our own (cultural and artistic) survival. Sad, but (maybe) true.