Didn't Jesus do away with all the rules? part 11

The Rev. Know-it-all’s “Young Christian’s Guide to Halakhic Law.” continued

In last week’s thrilling episode, I pointed out that the Ten Commandments are immutable because they flow from the very nature of the Almighty. Amazingly they make a point about humanity, namely that humanity is meant to reflect this same immutable nature.

The Hebrew sages speak of the Noachide laws, laws that are required of every human being.  If all people are descended from Noah, the laws of the covenant with Noah are required for all human beings, so goes the reasoning:

The seven laws of Noah are these:

Do not deny God.

Do not blaspheme God.

Do not murder.

Do not engage in illicit sexual relations.

Do not steal.

Do not eat from a live animal.

Establish courts/legal system to ensure obedience to said laws.

The sixth forbids cruelty to animals and hints at our duty as stewards of the earth. The seventh, regarding legal systems, in effect takes care of the commandments forbidding covetousness and dishonesty. One must be answerable to law and thus is held to a standard of honesty and respect for the property and relationships of others. These same laws are essentially what are meant by natural law. This very phrase “natural law” is earthshaking. It means that we have a nature, and that this nature is not totally different from God’s nature.

We Christians believe that Jesus did not come to destroy or change nature. He came to restore it. To recognize and reverence something greater than one’s own self, to treat others fairly as we would be treated ourselves and to respect the life-giving nature of human sexuality are the bedrock of human civilization and the bedrock of the Judeo-Christian law. Break these laws, or still worse, deny them and you do so at you own peril, and at the peril of the civilization. They are laws that are bound up with our nature as beings.

The world at present denies that we even have a nature, particularly in matters reproductive and intimate. The Scriptures tell us that “God said

to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.’”  (Gen 1:28) and again, “He created them male and female and blessed them.”  (Gen. 5:2)

Jesus of Nazareth, who I happen to think was God, reiterated this law when He said, “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’” (Matt. 10:4, 5) 

I think that there are now 52 or more genders that progressive people insist we recognize. Jesus, the Torah, natural law and the covenant with Noah say that nature gave us two genders. I mention this not just to be difficult, but to point out a whole spectrum of Torah laws which are designed to protect the purpose of human intimacy. These old desert laws written by ancient patriarchs are no longer adequate for life in these modern times, so we are told.

I grind the following ax constantly. All our gender and reproductive confusion is about to bring on one of the greatest crises in human history, perhaps the greatest since the flood itself that engendered the Noachide laws. I just got back from visiting the cousins in Lower Upper-Hessia. I finally understand Angela Merckl’s insane immigration policies.

After the wars, the German people rejected human life by rejecting children. I remember it. When I first visited the old country in 1973, people were having ZERO children. Now they have a few. I just got back from another visit (2017) and Germany has become a retirement home. Tourist sites are mobbed by vigorous German old folks, striding about and having a good time with lots of beer and gemütlichkeit. (Gemütlichkeit is the mood brought on by lots of beer.) They all look like those horrible commercials wherein laughing old people eat healthy cereals and drink protein and fiber drinks and use products that cause them to sit in tubs on beaches holding hands, the specifics of which I will not mention here!

Angela and her government have got to pay for all these vigorous old Germans, and there are not enough young people to do so, thus she must import other countries’ extra young people to work to support the vigorous old Germans.

It seems to me that this is a cynical reworking of the motto of previous German institutions, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work makes Free.)  Most of the world is running out of young people or soon will because we have defied our nature, and worse we have denied it. The chaos engulfing a large part of the world is a very direct result of the demographic shift that results from our failure to heed the very first law of the Torah. “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.”

“Nonsense!” I can hear the more enlightened among you say. “The world is full of people!” At present, yes, but look down the road a little, the train may be chugging along nicely right now but just around the bend, the bridge is out.

We may not be in trouble, but our grandchildren and great grandchildren are.

What's on the horizon?

Continued….

Back in the good old hippie days we used to sing, “It’s a hard rain’s agonna fall.” I think it was written by Bob Dylan.  He was right. There is a hard rain agonna fall but, it isn’t the rain we were expecting. No one expected the Soviet Union to break up. No one expected that we would all carry around little television screens in our pockets by means of which we could instantly communicate with someone on the other side of the world.  No one seriously suspected that robotic life might one day be able to surpass human life.

When I was in college, the university had a computer. It was the size of a large room. People holding punch cards stood in line for the chance to use it. Now computers are small enough to fit in our pockets and everyone has a few of them. No one thought that the world would be torn apart over looming religious wars. And above all, no one thought that the world population might one day collapse. Who could have anticipated that places like Greece, Bulgaria, Italy, Germany, China, Russia, and Japan as well as Iran and other Islamic countries would become retirement homes full of an increasing number of dependent old people? Those are some of the countries where there are simply not enough children. I will be dead and gone by the time it happens, but people under the age of twenty may well face a frightening poverty stricken old age. There is a strong probability that around 2050AD the population of spaceship earth will begin to shrink. Certainly Europe, Asia and the Americas will. Africa may continue to value children for a while yet, but who knows? 

No one expected this. You might think fewer people on earth might be a good thing.  What we are facing is not fewer people but fewer young people.  No one to do the heavy lifting. No one to buy that stuff that makes an economy happen. No one to buy the cars, the computers, the fast food, the machine made clothing or the machines for that matter.  No one to buy the houses. Things have gotten surreal in places like Italy, Spain and Japan. There are whole villages for sale, cheap! Italy is fascinating. Think about it.

After three generations of no families you have the situation in which there are four people, each of whom inherited one house. Those four people marry and each couple has one child. Now you have two people with four houses. Those two marry and produce a third generation consisting of one child. That one child inherits the four houses of his great grandparents which are now worth almost nothing.

Real estate, the most valuable possession most people have, becomes worthless; in fact, it becomes a liability. Within the next few years we clergy in the US of A will probably see what they are seeing in Europe, lots of ecclesiastical real estate for sale.  It is just beginning here. All of a sudden, there are more churches than we need. There are not enough priests to staff them and in ten years, certainly twenty years there will be no one to warm their pews because the dear little old ladies who pay the bills and come to church anytime the doors are unlocked are going to their well-deserved heavenly reward by the busload. I wonder if the people who need to experience this new situation ever really do.

When an important church dignitary comes to a parish for an important event, he sees a full church. I wonder if said dignitary ever drops in on a church on a steamy Sunday morning in July, a church that is a third full of a congregation that has no one in it under the age of forty. We count the house annually to total up the numerical strength of the church. The pastor dutifully signs the report, which is never an underestimate. If father loves his parish he is certainly not going to lowball the figures. We, the clergy, once had job security. It was assumed that father would leave his rectory feet first.  In my youth there were two kinds of pastors, irremovable pastors who could only be removed by the pope and removable pastors who could only be removed by the pope. 

In 1972, some young progressives petitioned Rome to implement term limits for pastors. Now a pastor’s term of office is six years, renewable for another six.  A pastor is allowed to love a congregation for 12 years max unless the bishop decides he can stay longer. Then the priest will have to go love another congregation. Don’t ask father what’s going on.  He doesn’t have the job security. He isn’t prone to making objective reports on the health of his parish.  Bishops see full churches. Pastors see what they need to see in order to keep going.  Ask the funeral directors. They can tell you what’s going on.  They have great job security. As they say about cemeteries, people are just dying to get in. Funeral directors see a lot of parishes and they see very representative congregations. 

My small experience indicates that a Caucasian-American funeral often has no one in attendance younger than forty. A funeral parlor full of adults may produce 2 or 3 children.  As often as not when a priest says “The Lord be with you,” at the funeral Mass, much of the congregation looks blankly at him as if to say, “Okay!” – that is when the next generation bothers with the expense of a Mass. They don’t go to church and they plan to scatter Grandma in her vegetable garden. “Father, couldn’t you just do a service in the funeral parlor?”

A friend, a devout man who has spent his life serving the needy, was recently at a funeral of a longtime friend. The deceased had left the church over some scandal or other on top of which he had been “assessed” a large sum in a parish fundraising event. In his later years he had come back to the church, but had been away from the faith during the years he was raising his family. My friend got into a discussion with the dead man’s son who, though baptized in infancy, had never participated in the church nor received the other sacraments. He asked my friend a simple question about the faith, “Why do I need it?” Good question.

Next week: Why he needs it.

Don't we need abortion and contraception? -- part 2

Continued from last week, 

Letter to N. Dignant

In many ways, the United States is in the same boat as China. We worry constantly about how long the social security system can hold out. There are more old people and fewer young people working; more of us geezers on fixed incomes, fewer up and coming tax payers. There comes a point when the math has to kick in. The crisis is already upon us.

Pensions are less and less sustainable in government, school and union jobs in the United States. Young people with good educations increasing find only part time work for which the employer needn’t provide the benefits to which my generation was accustomed. When looking at population it isn’t really helpful to look at the total population. One needs to look at the total number of three-year-olds in order to do any financial planning. Right now schools across the country are standing empty because there aren’t children to fill them. Universities are terrified. In about 14 years today’s three-year-olds will be applying for college. There aren’t enough three-year-olds to go around, and who will pay the tuitions that support tenured professors? (Tenure is a Latin word for “not having had a new thought in 30 years.”) The universities are already being sustained by foreign exchange students who come to learn math and science while we Americans are doing gender studies and getting our doctorates in Moldavian golden age literature. I imagine that soon the foreign exchange students will be doing gender studies too. 

 

Young people with their doctorates in gender studies and Moldavian golden age literature are having a hard time finding work. Most of the young people I know are underemployed and glad to get a job that is somewhere just above minimum wage. This is because the world culture has entered the DEATH SPIRAL. Isn’t that a cheery thing to call it? The death spiral is really quite simple. Old folks like me don’t need much stuff. I have all the furniture I need and the plaid polyester leisure suit that was the height of fashion in the 70’s is still good enough for me. I don’t need stuff and am on a fixed income anyway. That means there are fewer jobs making the stuff I don’t need and that means there is less money to start a family and that means people have fewer children, so there are less consumers and still, fewer jobs, and that means less employment and that means less money to start a family and that means fewer consumers and that means fewer jobs and so on.

You see: the DEATH SPIRAL: fewer kids, less demand, fewer jobs, except of course in the gender study field. (Not.) “The average cost of raising a child born in 2013 up until age 18 for a middle-income family in the U.S. is approximately $245,340 (or $304,480, adjusted for projected inflation), according to the latest annual "Cost of Raising A Child" report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Aug. 18, 2014”   Who can afford kids on a minimum wage salary? There is a saying, “There is no unemployment on a farm.” There’s plenty of unemployment in cities, where, for some unknown reason, everyone is moving in the hope of finding jobs.  

It seems that the year 2050 — just 35 years away — is pivotal for urbanization and population decline. That’s when the demographic car really goes over the cliff when we become a planet of dependent old people living in large urban slums. You think we have a struggle for resources now? Just wait.  

Population doesn’t cause the struggle for resources. Population creates resources and in itself is a resource. Wars are the lust for power and for the ability to over consume. War wastes the world’s resources. Hunger doesn’t cause war, war causes hunger. War is caused by people wanting the stuff I have. War is theft on the grand scale. If the resources devoted to war could be used for the production of food and consumer goods we could probably sustain double the world’s current population. War kills exactly the age group that makes the chairs and milks the goats and plants the corn.

Soon we will be in the death spiral that is devouring Japan, China, Germany, Poland and about 20 other countries already. We weren’t generous enough to have large families. We limit our families by means of birth control. We kill children in record numbers by means of the crime of abortion and now we can’t have children. We can’t seem to muster up the will to put up with the inconvenience. It is estimated that at the current rate, the population of the world will reach 9 billion in 2050, the magic year, and then plummet to one billion in four hundred years and there is no reason to think that the decline will stop then, unless the world at some point changes its mind about the purpose of sex and the usefulness of children. 

The sweater of humanity seems to be unraveling fast and not many are noticing it. A curious side note; the depopulation of humanity, the unraveling of the sweater started at 4901 Searle Parkway in a little town called Skokie, Illinois. It is where the Searle Company first mass produced the little golden pill that has made it possible for the great bulk of humanity to spend their old ages in loneliness. Most appropriately the factory overlooks a cemetery and a school that is closing for lack of children to fill it. It also overlooks a Catholic church.

People complain regularly about how mean God is in the Bible. God is not mean; he is just a bit of a literalist. In the Bible pharaoh said, “Kill the children of the Israelites!”  God, taking pharaoh at his word sent a plague that killed the first born. “If you want dead children, then dead children it will be.” Thus saith the Lord. 

We told God we didn’t want a lot of children and now our churches our schools; and our homes, are empty save for a few grey heads. We wanted things not families and so be it! We killed our children, the weakest, the unborn to maintain our standard of living and now we will face the rationing of health care in our old age. We geezers are now the weakest and there are not enough children to help us in our old age. 

Do you think the strong will care for us, the new weakest any more than we cared for the children, the former weakest? No, I suspect that they will let us die rather than waste expensive health care on the old and useless. Besides, it will be better for us anyway, just as it was better for all those little babies who had no one to love them. Just as we mercifully and humanely ended unwanted pregnancies, I’m sure in the near future the few young and strong who remain will mercifully and humanely end unwanted old people, just as you Ms. Dignant have asked. 

“As you measure out so it will be measure to you.” (Luke 6:38)

Yours, 

Rev. Know-it-all