Thursday, February 20, 2025

Get Aboard the ARC!

"A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days."

"Socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death."

"Only morality can help the West against communism's well planned world strategy. There is no other way."

"All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the 20th century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the 19th Century."

"Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism; radicalism had to surrender to socialism; and socialism could never resist communism."

"Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free."

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn became a Christian while undergoing the beastly treatment he endured in Soviet concentration camps. Millions of people in the West who had read his books championed him as a leader of resistance to communism, and advocated and petitioned for his release, including myself. But when the Soviet regime exiled him, he came to the U.S. and began giving speeches about the decline of the West, and In reaction to this, elite American universities and mainstream media dropped him like a hot potato.

The prolific journalist and author Rod Dreher's recent column on Substack "Should We Climb Aboard The ARC?" summarizes the three-day conference of the world's thought leaders brought together by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC).

Dreher wrote – "politics are necessary to civilizational renewal, but not sufficient... ultimately, our civilizational crisis is a crisis of meaning, and that means, at bottom, a religious crisis... nearly every good thing about our civilization came down to us because our ancestors were Christians. God knows they were flawed, as all of us are, but the moral code that guided them, and by which they measured their success or failure, was that of the Bible."

Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) website contains a rich, read-worthy series of written articles and videos. A simply wonderful article, "Soul Trader: Identity in a Digital Age", explains the difference between machine-computed information and human comprehension, and between humans as mere thinking animals and souls who happen to have a human body. You do not have a soul: you are a soul who happens to have a body.

Another excellent article on their website is "Family Matters: Why Our Choices Determine Our Economic Prosperity" that tells us how family breakdown is directly linked to spiralling government budgets and population collapse. For example, "An analysis of European fertility has revealed that marital fertility rates are at least 2.6 children per woman, and up to 6 times higher than non-marital fertility rates – a stark reminder that the family is the key to population growth." In other words, fornication and the resulting abortions are a direct cause of population collapse.

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) "is an international movement with a vision for a better world where empowered citizens take responsibility and work together to bring flourishing and prosperity to their families, communities, and nations" that aims to reconstruct out crumbling western society that has sold its Christian heritage birthright for a mess of relativistic pottage. It actively posts on social media, including on LinkedIn:

"The 'twin unrelenting drive [of] individualism and secularism' has marched through our institutions. But what has it left behind? It turns out that freedom from all higher authority also means the loss of a higher purpose. Freedom from all human obligation also means the loss of meaningful relationship. With nothing greater to believe in, no place to belong to, and no community to walk with, our young people are facing a bleak future. It appears a civilisational twilight is on the horizon for the West. Yet we have hidden within our inheritance the values upon which our civilisation was once built: human dignity, truth, justice, peace."

As you can see, the above "ARC" concept ties in very well with our ARC program we've been developing over several decades for "Building the ARC" – the Agape Restoration Community concept. At this link you'll read the "why" for our ARC, and on our "Brief Overview of the ARC" page you can get a one-sheet brief overview on "how" to do it, and a second document: "Biblical Basis for the Agape Restoration Society," a 10-page paper including four full-page sketches of our plans (just updated this week!) for "Agape Restoration Communities."

We must do more than simply articulate the current malaise in western society and voice some vague generalities about recovering our Christian heritage with a few references to some Deity upstairs in the heavens. We must return to the true, original Chrisitian faith as spelled out in the Nicene Creed and preached and practiced by the Early Church. As the Apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:32-33, if God did not become incarnate in Jesus Christ, if Jesus Christ did not die for our sins and rise again, "If the dead are not raised, then" (we might as well) "eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. Don't be deceived! Evil companionships corrupt good morals." Christ is the Only Way to overcome western society's post-Christian moral malaise!

Get the full article on our ARC-News blog at blogspot.com.

You can read the rest of our newsletter at https://agape-restoration-society.org/ARC-News/a-n_2025-02-22.htm, and share it!

Thursday, February 6, 2025

'POPULATION COLLAPSE' IS ALREADY HERE

(Click the photo.) The world's population collapse isn't "going to happen"... it's already here. The article "You can’t stare down reality: population collapse has begun" explains that many people dismiss warnings about the world running out of people. They attack the messengers as sensationalist gloom-and-doomers or pronatalist fanatics who care nothing for the environment and would force procreation by religious edict.

But by 2100, populations in some major economies will fall by 20 to 50 percent, based on UN projections. This includes Europe, North America, Latin America, the Caribbean, India, the Middle East and North Africa. The global support ratio of working-age people to senior citizens was 9.7 in 1997. Today it's 6.5, projected to be 3.9 by 2050. In "Global North" countries it is 3.9, projected to be 2.0 by 2050. Seniors will account for a quarter of global consumption by 2050. While we should continue combating the birth dearth, let’s face it: our reality is a decreasing fertility and a youth deficit that will sharply reduce the working-age component of societies across the globe. This is not sustainable for modern society: it is collapsing.

What accounts for this birth dearth? Our ARC-News lead articles in the Nov. 30 and Dec. 14 issues of last year provided several reasons: The first is the "Age of Reason" in the West that exalted human rationality and its ability to analyze and control the natural, material world. Some call this the "Age of Enlightenment" but it should more aptly be named the "Age of Endarkenment" because, as St. Paul wrote – "although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools" (Romans 1:21-22).

Second is the industrial age, which ushered in the ability via steam engines, electricity, and oil products to vastly expand mankind's ability to produce material goods. This caused us to further change our focus from the world as God's creation to a world that is just waiting to be exploited for mankind's material gain and comfort. Education became completely secularized. We now have homes with central heating and cooling, kitchens full of modern appliances to make life easier, cars and smoothly paved roads to drive on, and unprecedented wealth per capita. But we've also polluted our air with petrochemical exhausts, our waters with microplastics that cause infertility, and our land with radioactive and poisonous chemical waste.

Thirdly, this ushered in the idea that we no longer needed traditional morality to have "the good life" as people accumulated more stuff and money. The pursuit of pleasure and possessions replaced the pursuit of holiness and glorifying God. By the latter half of the 20th century, the idea that the "Great Society" welfare state would provide for our every need means we don't need to bother with having children to take care of us in our old age, "the Pill" and abortion broke the link between sex and reproduction, schools began handing out condoms and the Pill to high school students without parents' knowledge or consent, and college campuses became places of rampant bed-hopping.

The first article quoted above mentioned the study “Dependency and depopulation? Confronting the consequences of a new demographic reality” from the prestigious McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), It tells that modern society has made us dependent on the secular state for education, healthcare, and retirement so that we don't need to take care of ourselves, struggle and study to learn a profession, earn our own way, raise a family, and provide for our old age: the government will provide for us.

We have become fat and lazy: most people spend the majority of their waking hours in front of a screen, either with their noses glued to their smartphones, staring at a computer, or watching TV – usually over the Internet. This has resulted in about 50% of young men not meeting the physical or intellectual standards for military service, "a population that does not want to serve, and that is too fat and dumb to serve effectively."

The "all-powerful, all-wise social welfare state" has run out of gas, money and people. It can no longer collect enough taxes to provide all of the services and benefits that it has promised and that the people have voted for. Creating "fiat money" out of thin air by simply issuing more bonds has resulted in cheapening the value of currencies in nearly all developed economies: I remember that when I was a child a first-class stamp cost two cents and a candy bar cost five cents. Now they cost about 30 times as much! This inflation is the result of financing the social welfare state by issuing "funny money" and thus devaluing our currency.

Inflation is not a law of nature, it is a man-made, government-made way of deceiving people into believing that they're earning more money so they and the future generations can pay more taxes. Even the laws of nature are not the final word: Information Science is the transformation of meaningless bits of raw data into "data structures" of meaningful information. The universe is not merely raw matter, it requires structure and information to exist; astrophysicists now know that there's something beyond human ability to comprehend, even with the best scientific instruments: they call it "Dark Matter" or "Dark Energy" that makes up over 95% of the universe and without which the universe cannot exist or hold together.

We cannot continue deceiving ourselves into thinking that life will always go on as usual, that the secular state is able to solve all social and economic problems. It is high time – even past time – for us to repent of our overweening pride, our greed and laziness, to turn away from this postmodern mentality that everything will continue getting better and better. We need to return to faith in the real, supernatural God who has revealed Himself in the Living Word, the Logos – the true Logic and Meaning of life – "Who is the icon of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him (the Logos) were all things created, in the heavens and on the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through Him, and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things are held together" (Colossians 1:15-17).

You can read the rest of our newsletter at https://agape-restoration-society.org/ARC-News/a-n_2025-02-08.htm, and share it!

Thursday, January 23, 2025

EXPERIENCE THE FULLNESS

See Colossians 2:9 below: after verse 9, click on the cross-reference to Col. 1:15 about Christ, the Annointed One: "Who is the icon [image] of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation"; then scroll down in the bottom frame to verse 19: "For all the fullness was pleased to dwell in Him". This is repeated in the cross-reference Heb. 1:3 – "His Son is the radiance of His glory, the very icon [image] of His [the Father's] person" ("image" is "eikon" in Greek).

What is this "fullness" all about? Here's the answer: read verses 9 and 10: "For in Him all the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily, and you have this fullness in Him, Who is the head of all principality and power" when you've been "buried with Him in baptism" and "raised with Him through faith in the working of God" (verse 12)....

Next, click on all of the cross-reference links after verse 10: you'll see this "fullness" is a major theme in all of the Gospels and the Apostles' letters. The Messiah – the Christ – came to make us perfect and holy like Himself: these cross-references that use terms like "holiness," "transformation," "walking in the Spirit," "partaking of the divine nature," etc., all describe what is called in Eastern Christianity "Divinization" or "Theosis" (←get the two free booklets on these topics!). Read carefully all these cross-references, especially Mt. 5:48; Rom. 1:7; 1 Cor. 1:2 & 30; 1 Cor. 10:16; 1 Cor. 15:49; Eph. 4:11-16; Heb. 12:14 and Heb. 13:4-6; 1 Pet. 1:14-16; and 2 Pet. 1:3-4, so Theosis is a very scriptural doctrine.

We are called to be saints or holy ("holy" and "saint" are one and the same word, "hagios" in Greek), to partake of Christ in communion ("koinonia" in Greek) – the Lord's Supper, thus to become partakers ("koinonoi") of the Divine nature, to participate in His glory, so we must strive for and pursue holiness (Heb. 13:4-6). Holiness and perfection are possible in Christ! Don't think so? Henry Ford once said – "There are two kinds of people: those who think they can't, and those who think they can. Both are right."

What you really believe is reflected in how you behave. A "norm" is a target or goal that is expected of us. The norm for us is holiness and perfection. When people say they want to be "normal, just like everyone else," they really mean that they want to be average, not different than most others. But holiness and perfection aren't just the average, they are higher norms. You don't need to be smart or rich or strong, though, in order to be holy and perfect. If you have experienced Christ, the visible image, the icon, of the invisible God in Whom all the fullness of the Godhead dwells, you're on your way to experience this same fullness that is in Christ. God partook of human nature so that we can become partakers of the Divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). How should we then live (behave)? Get The Benedict Option and related articles and books, many of them free.

You can read the rest of our newsletter at https://agape-restoration-society.org/ARC-News/a-n_2025-01-25.htm, and share it!

Friday, January 10, 2025

AGAINST CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION

(Click the pic!) Is Christianity really dying? The author of the article "Against Christian Civilization" paints a rather morose picture of Christianity on its last legs, but is it really Christianity that is dying? Or is it the mashup of "Judeo-Christian faith" and secular humanist democracy that is dying? The secularized, democratized version of Christianity that says you can reinterpret the faith to suit the latest liberal ideology certainly ought to die, and is. It has devolved into Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD), defined in Wikipedia as follows:

1. A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

The idea of "religious freedom" has devolved into a vague belief that you should be nice to people because it's nice to be nice: it is a logical paradox, circular reasoning, It's like when a mother tells little child to be good and the child says – "Why?" So she answers – "Because I said so!" That appeal to mom's authority might hold until the child's teenage years, but then evaporates when the kids are introduced to "freedom of thought" and begin to feel their hormones and explore alternatives. The attraction of satisfying one's desires often wins out over the fuzzy moralism of "Because I said so!"

And then the next generation – the "fuzzies" – is taught that there's no moral authority, you can do whatever you choose, it has no moral compass at all other than the pleasure principle. If there is no resurrection from the dead, no eternal reward or punishment, as St. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:32, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." They may theoretically believe that some sort of deity exists somewhere "out there in space," but deep down, their real belief system is the pleasure principle. What you really believe determins how you behave.

So now we've come to the logical conclusion of this Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD) ideology – satisfying one's urges, feel good about oneself, try to be nice to others if it's convenient and doesn't interfere with one's selfish desires, the government can and should take care of all our problems, etc. – is unravelling. People are beginning to see it doesn't work, so they are returning to the ancient Christian faith that is based on eternal beliefs and behavior: the article "Believe it or not, Christianity is making a comeback" tells us how many leading figures in modern western society have realized the bankruptcy of MTD and have returned to the fixed, eternal truths of traditional, "orthodox" (and often big-O "Orthodox") Christianity.

We must pray that this trend among leading intellectuals and social media heros will spread to the masses!

Saturday, December 28, 2024

A FIRST-CENTURY VIEW OF YESHUA, THE MESSIAH

A FIRST-CENTURY VIEW OF YESHUA, THE MESSIAH
A Historical Account of Yesous Khristos, the Anointed One

"How the Jewish mouse ate the Greco-Roman elephant"

How did we get here? Our understanding of Yeshua, the Messiah, is filtered through centuries of retelling, revising, and projecting our current worldview back twenty centuries ago, resulting in layers of anachronisms.

What went wrong? Why do we see so much animosity between Christians and Jews? Originally, the followers of Yeshua were just considered another sect of Judaism, along with Herodians, Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, and Zealots. It arose mainly in the fifth century C.E. in the writings of Jerome and Augustine, as you will see in the conclusion of this book. And where do we go from here?

INTRODUCTION

[This is a preview of my book published on Amazon earlier this year. See all the Print and Electronic Versions.]

The thesis of this book is not only to portray the Person of Yeshua, the Messiah, but also to explore in greater depth the swirling interplay of Jewish and Greco-Roman spiritual, religious, and cultural forces at work leading up to and including the first century A.D. Secondly, it is to illustrate the way in which this renewed and restored Jewish faith would be delivered from captivity and eventually expand to encompass the whole Greco-Roman Empire and beyond - see Gen. 12:1-3, Ex. 3:4-17, Dan. 2:44-45, and Rev. 19:11-16. Thirdly, it aims to point out the Messiah's three years of doing and training others to do diakonia - ministry to "the poor, the lame, the maimed, and the blind" who were the central focus of his earthly ministry, as this work will quote from this author's harmony of the Gospels, The Good News of Yeshua, the Messiah, to answer the question: What does it mean to be a diakon - a deacon?

We as humans tend to perceive what we expect or would prefer to see and hear, and filter out those data that do not conform to our stored experiences. This "confirmation bias" is what all four Evangelists and Paul referred to when quoting Is. 6:9-10 - "By hearing you will hear, And will in no way understand; Seeing you will see, And will in no way perceive: For this people's heart has grown callous, Their ears are dull of hearing, They have closed their eyes; Or else perhaps they might perceive with their eyes, Hear with their ears, Understand with their heart, And should turn again; And I would heal them." We tend to focus on the Lord's Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection because they promise us salvation, but we filter out the parts that tell us about doing hands-on ministry: they do not match up with today's worldview of state-funded social work, welfare and medical care. Let the government pay for it!

The source that has inspired the thesis for this book is "The Old Testament Basis for Christian Worship" - a section in the seminal book on the relation of the Jewish temple and synagogue worship to Orthodox Christian worship: Orthodox Worship: A Living Continuity with the Synagogue, the Temple, and the Early Church¹. That book's explanation of early Christianity and its current manifestation in Orthodox worship as being to a great extent a continuation or extension of synagogue worship spurred my interest in the topic. In addition, our home at that time was in a condo/townhouse community built for Jewish people of Pittsburgh: three of our community's residents were victims of the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre on October 27, 2018, heightening my sympathies for the Jewish people and my disgust for the unfair way in which they have been mistreated, maligned, and massacred over the centuries.

This book is also intended to help the reader overcome the anachronistic way of thinking that projects our current mindset back into the mental framework of the first century, thinking that Christians have always been antisemitic, or that Christianity is opposed to Judaism. This work uses alternatively the Hebrew "Yeshua, the Messiah" and the Greek "Yesous, the Khristos, the Anointed One" to illustrate the bilingual ability of the Gospel writers and the tension between the Jewish and Greco-Roman worldviews. "Yesous" or "Iesous" is simply placing a Greek ending on "Yeshua," and "Messiah" translates into Greek as "the Khristos" which means "the Anointed One." But today, many people tend to think of "Jesus Christ" as a man whose given name is "Jesus" and his surname is "Christ." So we must try to uncover the foundations of our present unconscious biases and restructure our distorted worldview. This work aims to point out clearly the historicity, ministry, and most importantly, the deity of Yeshua, the Messiah, not as we might think of it anachronistically today in the nice, sanitized statements of the Nicene Creed, in our services, and in our prayers, but in the rough-and-tumble of confrontations with the first-century Jewish and Roman authorities.

Other examples of anachronistic thinking are Christ and the Apostles being depicted on the iconostases of Orthodox churches with bound books in their hands, but the bound book, the codex, was not invented until the fifth century A.D.; or the way modern preachers speak - "God says in Deuteronomy 10 verse 5..." as if God gave his revelation already divided up into chapters and verses, but these artificial divisions of scripture were not added until the Middle Ages. This versification leads us to think of God's revelation as a random collection of verses, little sound-bites, rather than a vast panorama, a narrative of human history and destiny. The full canon of the books of the Bible was only ratified at the Council of Hippo (A.D. 393), so for 360 years the Church relied largely on oral teaching being handed down ("traditioned") for the most part orally from one generation to the next: see 2 Thes. 2:15.

Even up into the Middle Ages, Bibles were laboriously copied by hand, each one requiring a year or more of painstaking labor, making each Bible a rare and precious item. Only in the mid-1400s did Gutenberg invent the metal movable-type printing press and Bibles began to be widely circulated. So a century later, when Martin Luther proclaimed his doctrine of "sola scriptura" and said that every cowherd and milkmaid could read and understand the Bible, he was thinking anachronistically, assuming that everyone from the first century onward could obtain a printed, bound Bible. But the doctrine of "sola scriptura" would have been simply impossible to apply in the first 15 centuries. We all see the world through the filters of our individual and societal experiences, so in that sense nobody can be completely objective, but at the very least we should strive to be aware of our filters in order to try to see the first-century world as it was then, not as if it were our world of today.

Think of the Jewish influence on Greek culture even before the first century: the Hebrew alphabet begins with the letters aleph, beth, gimel, and daleth - the same sounds and order as in the later Greek alphabet alpha, beta, gamma, and delta. And when this author explained to a Russian Evangelical pastor that the mostly-Greek-based Cyrillic alphabet which Russian uses contains a few Hebrew letters - tsadhe, sin, and shin - for sounds that do not exist in the Greek alphabet, the Russian pastor was shocked, because, as he joked: "We Russians aren't antisemitic, we just hate Jews!" Such an antipathy toward the race and culture that gave birth to Christianity is most certainly out of place, especially for Christian ministers. In contrast, the Orthodox Church retains to this day many features of Jewish synagogue worship: the directional orientation of the building, the menorah on the altar, the chanting of the Psalms, incense, candles, no instrumental music, the bema (ambon) where the scriptures are chanted, and the conciliar form of organization with a structured priestly hierarchy...

[To read the rest of this book, see all the Print and Electronic Versions.]

Friday, December 13, 2024

BOOMERS' NEW RETIREMENT PROBLEM

The recent Newsweek e-magazine article Boomers Have a New Retirement Problem tells us that both the "Boomers" and younger generations have a big problem: the "Baby Boomers" – post-WW2 people born from 1946 through 1964 – have lived through a peak in the U.S. economy and many have bought big houses with 3 or 4 bedrooms, a 2-car garage, nice landscaping, etc. Their home equity has increased tremendously, often over half a million dollars. But now they're "empty nesters" – their children are grown up, have children of their own, and maybe even grandkids. So what's the problem?

As the above article states, "But now, thanks to ... unfavorable conditions in the U.S. housing market, boomers face a new retirement problem: affordable and accessible homes in which to age. As a result, boomers are now 'aging in place' in their current homes – a trend likely to induce a knock-on effect for younger generations." What are these "unfavorable conditions" and the "knock-on effect"?

First, property taxes: as the (inflation-induced) dollar value of their homes has increased, so have their property taxes. And these Boomers are living on fixed incomes – a retired couple's median income is around $65,000, so property taxes and likely remaining mortgage payments can take a huge chunk of that.

The second problem is that many are "aging in place" – two people rattling around using only a fraction of the living space, not able to go upstairs to the bedrooms or go down to the basement, having difficulty even climbing the front steps, not able to care for the lawn, do home maintenance, etc. – simply because there's not enough accessible housing on the market today.

Third, the younger generation is facing a "knock-on effect" because the Boomers often can't sell their houses due to that lack of accessible housing for the elderly, creating a shortage of available houses for younger families, which drives up prices along with higher interest rates and higher property taxes. Also, there are many young families who should be investing in their own homes instead of paying rent but can't afford to buy one. What must be done about this catch-22 dilemma?

It's very expensive or flat-out impossible to retrofit an existing house with a ramp to all floors or an elevator: this is something that should be incorporated into the design of homes when they're first being built. We've carefully developed plans for multi-family accessible housing both for retirees who often have mobility issues and for families with a child or adult who has a mobility issue.

It's important to include able-bodied people of all age groups in these ARCs to check in with those residents who might need help. The fast-growing number of Boomers is about to overwhelm the government-provided services such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which are strained to the limits right now and are projected to be insolvent in just a few years.

The cost for a ramp and/or an elevator can be shared among all families who live in a multiple-living-unit building, as well as sharing the cost for land, parking, outside walls, plumbing, roof, and maintenance. There should be a combination of one-bedroom, two-bedroom, and three-bedroom living units in order to accomodate singles, young married couples, larger families, and retired people. And most of all, they should have a common space for community gatherings including worship. Our 12-to-14-living-unit "ARC" (Agape Restoration Community) plans have been designed to meet all these requirements at a very reasonable cost.

You may feel when you're a young adult that it's too far in the future to begin thinking about such matters: it's hard enough getting started in adult life, so here's an idea that will give you a jumpstart: see "The Magic of Compound Interest." Don't rent! Start out small by buying a one-bedroom home in an ARC, or a "fixer-upper" or pre-fab two-bedroom home for $30,000 (yes, they're available!). Pay it off in six years and move up, do it again, and semi-retire when you're 40!

And when you're an older adult, you need to begin right away thinking about what happens as you age. The "young old" who are "empty-nesters" in their 50s and 60s can become trained in home healthcare through our one-year online "Social Ministry of the Church" program. It takes just a couple of hours per week to prepare for this oncoming "grey tsunami." And you need to get into accessible housing before your 70s: most older people will experience a few years of disability before they pass away. My wife and I moved into a second-floor condo when I was 70, but climbing 14 steps became too much for us, so when I was 80 we moved into a first-floor condo with no stairs, not even one step up into the building. I definitely do not recommend moving like this when you're 80! It took a big toll on our health. You can likely help care for others in your 50s and 60s, but later you likely won't be able to, so get prepared!

These three stages of adult life can all be combined in our ARC plans, where we can all live together in a Christian community and build each other up in the faith and physical well-being. To get our *free* series of 24 articles that explain the "why" and "how" of this whole process, please subscribe here: www.Agape-Restoration-Society.org/ARC/ – thanks in advance!

You can read this article in our newsletter at https://agape-restoration-society.org/ARC-News/a-n_2024-12-14.htm, and share it!

Wednesday, November 27, 2024

THE PITFALLS OF MODERNITY

(Click the photo.) A pitfall means falling off a cliff into a pit. As the article THE IDEOLOGY OF MODERNITY IS PULLING US OVER A DEMOGRAPHIC ABYSS explains, we're chasing after modernity's built-in goals of career success, financial security, conveniences and comforts, but we're failing to meet the 2.1 fertility rate required for any society to endure.

Birth control and abortion are the two biggest culprits. This means that the average woman needs to give birth to at least two or more babies, or else the population begins to fall. No society in human history has ever survived if its fertility rate remains below 1.6 for an extended period. And that "fatal pitfall" fertility rate now includes virtually all of the modern "industrialized" countries in the world.

The above article mentions another: Modernity's Self-Destruct Button. This button is built into modern society. We need to turn back to forms of society that have endured for thousands and thousands of years: living in harmony with nature, having large families, and preserving earth's resources instead of plundering them. This is called "permaculture" that tells us how one person can permanently live off 1/2 acre of land, or a community of 30 people can live off 15 acres of land: see How Much Land Does it Take to Feed One Person?

The recent U.S. political campaigning was full of anti-immigrant talk. But the simple fact is that we need immigrants, we need a new influx of willing workers, because we're not producing enough children. And we need to treat immigrants fairly:

"You shall not oppress a hired servant who is poor and needy, whether he be of your brothers, or of your foreigners who are in your land within your gates: that same day you shall give him his hire, neither shall the sun go down on it; for he is poor, and sets his heart on it: lest he cry against you to the Lord, and it be sin to you. The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.

You shall not withhold the justice due to the foreigner, or to the fatherless, nor take the widow's clothing to pledge; but you shall remember that you were a bondservant in Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you there: therefore I command you to do this thing. When you reap your harvest in your field, and have forgot a sheaf in the field, you shall not go again to get it: it shall be for the foreigner, for the orphan and the widow; that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands.

When you beat your olive tree, you shall not go over the boughs again: it shall be for the foreigner, for the fatherless, and for the widow. When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, you shall not glean it after you: it shall be for the foreigner, for the orphan and the widow.You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt: therefore I command you to do this thing." (Deuteronomy 24:14-22)

This and similar Bible texts are often referred to by the pro-"undocumented immigrant" Christian left folks, encouraging immigration. That phrase "every man shall be put to death for his own sin" may seem a bit puzzling: why is it included with all these commands about caring for the poor and immigrants? Perhaps it's because the anti-"illegal aliens" Christian right folks spread the blame for the sins and offenses of a minority of those immigrants onto all of them, calling them all a bunch of thieves, rapists, murderers, and drug smugglers. However, the "golden mean" – the proper response to this – is that foreigners coming to live among us are welcome but also must obey our laws, including our laws about immigration:

“And if a stranger sojourns among you and would keep the Passover to the LORD, according to the statute of the Passover and according to its rule, so shall he do. You shall have one statute, both for the sojourner and for the native.” (Numbers 9:14)

“And if a stranger is sojourning with you, or anyone is living permanently among you, and he wishes to offer a food offering, with a pleasing aroma to the LORD, he shall do as you do. For the assembly, there shall be one statute for you and for the stranger who sojourns with you, a statute forever throughout your generations. You and the sojourner shall be alike before the LORD. One law and one rule shall be for you and for the stranger who sojourns with you.” (Num. 15:14-16)

(See "How to Relate to Foreigners Among Us" for the rest of my article that I wrote in January 2017 when we in the U.S. were facing a similar situation concerning immigration.)

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