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How Shall We Tell The Children?
By Edward Chamberlain

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

A gunman randomly shoots and kills a teenaged boy while the boy was walking home from school. Several people are killed when another gunman randomly begins shooting into the crowd during the noon time dining rush at a popular cafeteria. A fired employee shoots and kills several of his former work mates. These kinds of occurrences are becoming more common. Is there any wrong in them, and what gives you the right to so decide? If your answers to that second question does not involve some indication of a commitment to an absolute truth, the perpetrators of those kinds of events are actually adhering more completely to your philosophical frame of life than are you.

The reason that this must be so is: When you say, "Nobody has the right to do such and such," without reference to some authority beyond yourself, you necessarily assign the condition of wrongness to anyone who has done such and such, which is to say that you have taken it upon yourself to be the authority for "right" and "wrong" over someone else's actions, and it is exactly this condition that allowed "such and such" to occur in the first place. Also, it makes no difference that many humans such as yourself may have agreed that "No one has the right to do such and such," because in the final analysis it is still only one fallible person's opinion versus many fallible opinions. If increasing the numbers holding to an opinion within a geographical boundary increases the truth of the opinion, then Hitler was not wrong in Germany, and the Ku Klux Klan was not wrong in The South, and Napoleon was not wrong in France. If rightness and wrongness can be determined only by the majority, the majority must forever be indebted to those "brave pioneers" who are not afraid to stand alone and usher in new paradigms of truth whereby the majority may be instructed toward fresher truths, and who is to say what fresh direction the new truth must take? Acts such as were described above become not "wrong" but "fresh" when the majority holds to itself the power to judge right and wrong or good and evil.

None the less humanity in general is becoming outraged by the alarming degree to which violence and depravity are becoming commonplace behavior. A young girl recently confessed that she had murdered her infant brother when she only was three years old. Two pre teenagers in England have been tried in the murder of another infant. Children are killing each other in every city in America. Many American schools have become war zones. Every voice of "reason" is in some way concerned with the "terrible things are happening to society," and there are no solutions being suggested that everyone can agree upon. In his "Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences," Rene' Descartes taught that anything for which doubt could be raised could not represent any kind of Truth. (I do not say that he was correct in this line of reasoning, but I do avow that it has been the interpretation of his reasoning by subsequent materialists that has, more than any other cause, opened the physical sciences to inquiry apart from any metaphysical considerations, even though his "Discourse" was clearly and entirely dependent upon the metaphysical proposition, "I think, therefore, I am." I further avow that since the solutions offered by these materialists are dependent upon his parentage for their origin, they must accept his evaluation of their propositions.) Clearly all of what is being offered as solutions to the problems in civilization today fall into that category of concepts for which doubts can be raised, and, just as clearly, they can be seen to be only more expensive reruns of that which has been tried and retried in the past.

If you are beginning to have a nagging suspicion that such "solutions" are part of the problem, you are not alone. If it

has not yet become apparent to you that spending more money on education, law enforcement, and institutions of incarceration, is not going solve any of the types of problems of which we are speaking, then you are probably going to be incensed by what I am going to talk about in this book. However, I challenge you to read on anyway. It will do you good to have to clearly define to yourself those things in which you believe, and to defend the substance of those beliefs against the propositions of this book.

Every voice of "authority" has some kind of fuzzy notion about what needs to be done to fix the world in which we all must live. The Governor of Texas recently proudly announced that state would soon have the largest prison system in the Nation, and at the same time she voiced a commitment to keep those prisons full. The U.S. Senate recently passed legislation to ban the sale of so called "assault weapons." The people of America and The President of the United States recently trivialized his office in an attempt to interfere with the caning of an American teenager in Singapore. There is no common ground upon which to stand and proclaim even a starting point for solving our problems. Every proposition causes new doubts, gainsaying, polarization, fragmentation, and editorializing. The problems of humanity on the planet are becoming unmanageable not because of lack of effort to solve them, but because the rotten roots of the problem are being ignored or disclaimed, and no one is telling the children of the world what dangers they are going to face in the next 60 years, if there is no change in the fundamental character and beliefs of mankind.

How shall we tell the children? How shall we tell the children, that as many as 1 billion 752 million of them will die because of starvation and starvation related diseases by the year 2050 A.D.? How shall we tell the children, that within their generation, all of mankind could become extinct because of either a weakened DNA bond or because of pestilent attacks from "emerging viruses?" How shall we tell the children that their generation will be the first in the modern era to have to face deadly, contagious bacterial infections that have become immune to all antibiotics? How shall we tell the children, that they are going to walk through sewage, live in garbage, and die, invaded by filth, degradation, and deprivation. How shall we tell the children that Calcutta today is a mild sample of tomorrow's Sao Paulo, London, Los Angeles, or New York? How shall we tell the children that America today is within a heartbeat of being torn apart at the foundations by ethnic war precipitated out from selfish, hateful youth who "feel" that they are being victimized by the very system that has pampered and privileged them beyond any degree experienced by their predecessors. How shall we tell the children that they will live in constant fear of marauding bands of savages, and that for their own survival they will likely be a part of some similar tribe themselves? In short, how shall we tell the children of the imminent collapse of modern civilization? Who is going to point out to them that our civilization has already started to crumble in their midst, and now but awaits its defining moment in the same fashion that a car with no brakes that is driven on the Washington D.C. Beltway is a de facto collision awaiting its defining moment? Who will tell them that the defining moment will probably come in America in a violent blood bath of ethnic nationalism that is going to erupt into wars of the same type of ethnic cleansing going on in Bosnia today. What is happening in Rwanda today is mild compared to what will happen in America when the hate erupts into a war of ethnic nationalism.

But how shall we tell the children? We probably won't tell them; the knowledge would be too dangerous to the "system" we have developed to ensure our own preservation. As long as they will continue to work in order to support, and in order to die in, for, and because of our system, we will allow as many of them who can do so, to survive until we have lived out our lives in the manner to which we have become accustomed. It has always worked before, so maybe it will continue to work long enough to keep me comfortable until I die. It is a gamble in which the odds are becoming increasingly negative.

My wife and I walk around the local high school football track several times each week. Every year beginning in the summer the custodians and coaches begin setting out the ground sprinklers to water the grass to get the football field ready for football season. The field is square, and the sprinklers send out water in a circle. Every year they have the same problem; there are invariably brown places in the turf that have not gotten enough water, and soggy places that have gotten too much because of overlapping sprinkler patterns. I have the same problem in my garden. It is easy to see that we have a system for moving and placing the sprinklers, and it is just as easy to see that our system has not allowed for the prevailing winds, water pressure, and design incompatibilities. In short, there is something wrong with either the shape of our field or with our system. That is the problem with our civilization. Globally, there is something fundamentally wrong with either the system, or with the human it is supposed to serve, or both, and whatever it is that is wrong must be recognized before it can be fixed.

Children, in spite of all the war, starvation, abuse, pestilence, violence, abortion, and neglect that is going kill you by the hundreds of millions, the best computer models of population growth indicate that there will still be over 12.5 billion of you on this planet by the year 2050 A.D. In the 1960's, when scientists first began to play around with number crunching computers, they began to mathematically model earth's population growth and its capacity to support that population. Eventually those models predicted that when the planet reached a census of 4 billion people we would begin to experience problems in the areas of: waste removal and disposal, natural resource availability, food production and distribution, pollution, and energy availability.

Sure enough these problems began to manifest themselves in earnest when the population reached 4 billion. These predictions were not widely reported at that time, and I believe the reason they were not wasn't because people wanted to hide anything from us, but because most people did not want to seem to be negative about the future. Positive optimism about the future has always been thought of as an affirmation of the superiority of the American Way that stood right beside patriotism and faith in our fellow man in importance to the national survival. Positive optimism about the future of civilization is a self delusion that is now maintained to the peril of those who hold to it.

Today there are over 5.5 billion humans alive on this planet, and that figure is doubling approximately every forty years. This means that each passing reproductive generation causes the population to double. If this current trend has generally been the actual historical trend of population growth throughout all history, the net result is that the population at this time equals the total of all past populations that have lived on the earth. As a point of interest, I, at random, choose a Sunday and numbered the survivors of the deceased that were listed in the obituary page of that one newspaper. While this number of samples is totally insufficient to indicate any general trend, my inadequate sample revealed that those people who were listed on that day had an average of 26.77 direct descendants. Of course each one of those people listed was only one half of the ancestry of those descendants and so the actual average increase in population that descended from them in their lifetimes was 13.385 people, which means that their contribution to the population growth was 13.385 times greater than their contribution to its decrease. This was not a third world nation; this was America. It is not hard to understand how the population at any one time could equal the total population of all previous generations.

When stated in this fashion it is difficult to believe that this condition of population growth can have been the actual case throughout history, however, the population of earth would only have had to have averaged a net growth of 2.5% per year over the course of history in order for this to have been the case for all history. At any rate, whether it has been true for all time is not too important right now, because it is most certainly true for today. It is not hard to understand why we are having systemic problems on earth. Every father knows that the system providing for the family of two is no longer adequate to handle the demands of the family of eight. The family must effect a change if it is to delay disaster.

I want to be really clear on one point: There is nothing that can be done that will change the fact that ultimately all of the natural material universe, including the earth and the humanity thereupon, is going to die out from an ever increasing lack of usable energy. This fact is mandated by the second law of thermodynamics and that law is immutable. There are many laws that man can choose to break, but the second law of thermodynamics "ain't" one of them. There are, however, a number of things which might be done which may delay the threat of disaster in the example of the family until the inevitable fact of increasing entropy overwhelms all of humanity:

1. The family income could increase through more members of the family taking jobs, or through an increase in the earnings of the breadwinner, or through the availability of gifts from some source outside of the family.

2. The family can accustom themselves to living in a more crowded, less comfortable, more deprived condition, learning to share the shelter, food, and clothing that is available to them.

3. Some of the family can be eliminated.

Solutions, of the kind that suggest changing the shape of the field to conform to a sprinkler pattern, may seem extreme and even absurd, but when the only watering system that is both practical and available disburses water in a circle, then it is more practical to either change the field or live with the problem. In the case of the family, it is more practical to change the family than the "system," and so the family must either change or the problems must be accepted and endured. When the problems begin to present an actual danger to the system, then the system will mandate that the "family" must be changed, and the forceful molding of the family to conform to the capacities of the system will become the acceptable norm.

I am sure that with a little thought you can add more ideas to our list that will help the family in our illustration, but we must understand this: Any solution that is workable today will not be workable in some future generation, and it does not require genius level intellect to see that as resources become GLOBALLY MORE SCARCE, and as demands against those resources become GLOBALLY MORE INTENSE, all solutions, except an increasingly more common application of option #3 above, become increasingly less viable to every individual family as the problem of scarcity becomes increasingly more common to all families. It is inevitable that there will eventually come a time when the only alternative left open to mankind is the elimination of an increasingly greater and greater number of the "family members" until one of the last two humans alive kills the other remaining human before he himself eventually starves to death. That is the reality of a natural, material universe. Moreover, as repugnant as it may sound initially, option number 3 above represents the only viable long term solution that will allow the system to continue to take precedence over the "family" in general and the individual "family member" in particular. Option 3 perpetuates the system through the sacrifice of some of the individuals which the system cannot accommodate anyway. That is what actually represents the hope of all natural men. And that is why there has been no more than a perfunctory protest for the doomed souls of Bosnia and Rwanda. How shall we tell the children of the world they are about to inherit?

Children, do not look to the system to warn you of its own breakdown, for the system is self perpetuating. The reason that this is so is because the system was developed by selfish human beings to provide for selfish human beings, and it is now run by, and for, selfish human beings. Most of them will deny that this is so, even though they have probably never thought about what it means to be selfish or why we are that way.

Self preservation, self justification, self glorification, and an abiding hunger for meaning, or as some have called it, relevance or significance, all of which are fed by that which comes to the body and that which comes to the mind. We all share those things in common. They are the threads from which the fabric of our humanity is weaved. Of the four, the hunger for meaning begins as the smallest force within our personalities, while the hunger for "bodily food" such as experiencing pleasure and avoiding pain is the greatest. Many never mature beyond this stage, and they grow old and die in a condition of arrested development entirely captive to the insatiable need to experience pleasure anew because the body has no memories in which to repose. When we are young, our thirst for meaning is totally insignificant in comparison to the drive to pleasurably feed our other three motivations. But the hunger for meaning is the only motivation that normally grows in importance to us throughout our life times, and it is the only one which cannot be fed from the pleasurable experiences of the body. We will attempt to satisfy this hunger with whatever "food" comes to mind, and the problem is that most of the food supplied by our system is intended to preserve the system and not individuals.

It is impossible for me to know, and for you to learn, if my motives for writing this book are because I want to warn you of a coming catastrophe because I am truly concerned about your welfare, or if my motivation is that I want to justify, and glorify, and preserve myself, and thrust my "meaning" upon you. All who teach, preach, lead, manage, or otherwise presume to bring your beliefs into alignment with their own will have to admit to this same problem if they are honest with themselves. While we may profess the highest of motives, we will justify ourselves, and we will glorify ourselves, even as we attempt to persuade you of our meanings, and all the while our unspoken but fundamental hope is that if we succeed, we will have contributed to the preservation of ourselves. That is what selfishness means. It does not mean stingy, or unsharing, or uncaring, it means that as humans we are driven by four selfish motives: self preservation, self justification, and self glorification, and a abiding demand to be significant, or to meaningfully fit into and understand the scheme of things. We attempt to feed all of these motivations with that which delivers the maximum amount of pleasure and which involves the endurance of the minimum amount of pain.

Is there any thing wrong with this circumstance? Not if you are willing to accept the inevitable requirement that solution number three, in our family illustration above, must eventually be extended to its logical, global extreme. The practice of this solution is even now being implemented within all cultures today in the form of abortion, and it is beginning to be manifested in the practice of both voluntary and humanitarian de facto euthanasia upon the diseased and the hopeless. In the past it was manifested in tribal warfare, cultural conflict, and commercial competition, and it has been a part and parcel of all civilizations since the recording of history began. It should therefore not be too difficult to accept it in its naked extremes as the global civilization is developing at just the same time that the problems of scarcity are becoming globally intense.

Of course, our demand for self justification will, at first, bring us into conflict with ourselves until we are shown some "meaningful" criteria upon which the selection for elimination of individuals can be based. But from that time onward, our demand for self justification having been satisfied, our desire for self glorification will enable us to pursue the systematic destruction of the "undesirable" or "unmeaningful" elements with great zeal and tireless vigor, thus assuring ourselves of our own preservation and giving meaning to our existence.

Thus, if we can be given some meaningful criteria that satisfies our need for self justification, we will enthusiastically practice what ever slaughter is necessary to meet that criteria, all the while, heaping the glory of the system we are supporting to ourselves, and ensuring our own preservation. If you do not believe that this is true, you need only to look at the selfish attitudes by which we have justified and practiced the abortion of millions of helpless unborn babies. Children, this is the world to which you have been born. It is your misfortune, and none of my own, that you have been born at such a time as to have to face these stark realities unprepared and alone, but that is your circumstance. You do not have a choice in the matter. It just does not make any difference if you believe these things or not: "ready or not here they come." It does not make any difference what you want, or what you don't want, and you are going to be brutally awakened to the fact that nature is totally unconcerned about you and what you want. Your "good self esteem" is not going to help you one bit against Mother Nature and Father Time when you find out that your real Momma and Daddy sent you out into the world, or have abandoned you there, equipped with things that were not of the "truth." The world as you now know it has come to the end of its string. The world you have inherited, is even now not capable of supporting the population within it, and to ensure your own survival, you must come to grips with your demand for self righteousness, and your desire for self glorification, and find a meaningful way to eliminate your competition. It is only natural, and it is the only possible natural world. But is there an alternative to the natural world?

The answer to that question is what I want to pursue in this book. Whatever it is that you believe in right now, this book will probably take you in a direction you have not previously traveled. I do not wish to disguise the Spiritual nature of this book because it entirely concerns the existence of a Spiritual Realm that I believe to be greater than, and which permeates this smaller, material realm in which we find our awareness. I hope to show you that this Spiritual Realm has a great deal more to do with our every day life than is generally believed by even those who confess its existence. I hope to demonstrate to you in the course of this book that it is only in this Spiritual realm that you can have any hope of survival. The source of authority for this book is the Bible, which I hold to be the inspired, and revealed word of the One and Only God who is both the Creator and the Sustainer of the Cosmos.

I have written this book primarily to speak to the young, the teenager and the young adult. The things I have written in this book are matters about which I have pondered and decided for myself. I encourage each of you to likewise consider them and decide for yourself concerning them. I warn you in advance these matters concern decisions and beliefs which will never make you popular, and will even often make you unpopular. I am content to hold them even if no other human should ever agree with them. I have not decided upon them without examining and studying the opinions and beliefs of many other people, but I was ultimately captured by the God of the Bible. In reaching these beliefs, I have often struggled within myself, not wanting to believe that which so simply and plainly lay before me.

I pray that I have not written this book to popularize my own beliefs, but rather that I have written it because I want to warn you that you are in terrible danger from the natural world that you have inherited. You are in more danger than you know because of the beliefs now being accepted in unquestioned faith by the great majority of the citizens of this natural world.

There is one thing more which I want to get out of the way before we start. In referring to human beings I nearly always speak about "man or mankind" and say "his" or "him." I use this as a generic term which I hold to be an inclusive term for both male and female persons of the body of humanity. Until sometime around the end the time known as "the dark ages," the Anglo-Saxon term, "man," meant humanity of either gender, and you will presently see why I intentionally hold to that usage. In those previous ages, male persons were called "wermen" and female persons were "wombmen." If you are offended by my usage of man and mankind, and his and him , I ask your forgiveness, and assure you I intend no slur upon anyone. I do not apologize for this however, for the Bible does the same thing. Genesis 5:2 says, "Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam..." There is a word used in the Bible to speak specifically about a male person, and the word is "ishi." A female person is "ishaw," but humanity is "Adawm," which is translated as both "man" and "Adam." I will use the word "man" to the same purpose in this book. We may now begin our investigation of the coming world.

I have noticed one characteristic that is common to every one of the philosophical notions that I have read ¹ over the years: They all examined man and his existence by dialectically dissecting his manners and the civilizations he has built exercising those manners, i.e. they looked at how man "exists," or, to say it another way, they looked at man by examining where he "is at." I am now entirely convinced this is an inadequate place to begin, and that it invariably ends in a sophistry of the sort that gratifies the ego of the investigator more than shedding any real light upon our common circumstances. Rene' Descartes journey of the mind that led him to conclude that the only certainty was that thinking verified existence came the closest, to my mind, of capturing what is needful, but it is none the less, I believe, incomplete because he did not consider the possibility that the god or God, the existence of whom he had proved to his own satisfaction within his "Discourse," could actually himself be the source of those thoughts by which Descartes had proved his own personal existence. The Bible says, "in Him we live, and move, and have our being." In my journey I looked at what many such men have believed but was convinced by very little of what most of them had to say.

To the best of my limited abilities I have compared everything that I have written herein to both the Bible and to what I observe around me. I have enjoyed the freedom to "speculate" in some areas where the Bible does not speak (or quite possibly where I am ignorant of its voice, and I caution you now to be wary of all such speculations of men.) Within this book, all such speculations are of minor significance as long as they do not violate scriptural principle. They are included as things which I have found as "interesting possibilities" but not of any great consequence.

It is my intent to focus our attention upon what I believe to be the most readily observable fact of our nature, but the one which has either been ignored or rejected by nearly every one of the philosophical notions around which civilizations have been built. The most obvious thing to me is that there is a captivating quality to " man's own self," and if he does not voluntarily subject himself to some authority external to himself, which he believes to be greater than himself, he will become entirely infatuated with his "ownself." This captivation to the "self" leads different men in different directions. Some are led toward intellectual endeavors, and some toward gratification of the passions, and some in both directions, but we are each, none the less, prisoners of our own "selfs" unless we have made ourselves prisoners to some authority external to our selves.

The direction which this self infatuation leads us will be determined by the relative degrees between pleasure and pain that our demands for self preservation, self justification, and self glorification are being met and given meaning by the particular endeavors in which we engage, and by how the system in which we exist reverences those endeavors.

I have been using the word "system" herein without telling you what I mean by that word. Let me now define my meaning in this fashion: I refer to a systemic relationship between what I believe to be the three elements from which all past and present civilizations have been constructed and preserved. The nature of these three elements and their relative strengths have determined the character of all civilizations in history. When any one of these elements dies, or is missing, or becomes tyrannical within a civilization, that civilization will die, regardless of whether its existence has been as a small village or as a global empire. I believe these three elements of civilization are: Politics, Commerce, and Religion. Furthermore, I hold religion to be any proposition that is not "falsifiable," but the doctrine of which is held by faith. All such propositions are religion by definition, but when the intent of such propositions is to provide accommodation among its adherents for the politics and the commerce of the system, then that religion will engage in an inevitable power struggle among the other two elements for supremacy. In saying the religion is any proposition that is not "falsifiable," I apply the term religion to any theory or belief that is not capable of being proved false by direct, controlled, and repeatable experimentation. Such theories and beliefs are not subject to the scientific method, but must be accepted on faith.

It is the relative strength and the constant struggle among the politics, the commerce, and the religion of any civilization, and the degree to which they are individually utilized to satisfy our three motivations and our thirst for meaning that allows men to be called heroes in one system who are thought of as criminals in another. When the political, commercial, and religious elements of any nation have become segmented and polarized into separate systems within that nation, conflict will either eventually destroy the nation, or eliminate all but one of the systemic types, or; compromises between the two will render a new type from out of the older two.

For example, a nation that tries to incorporate both capitalism and communism will suffer conflict until one or the other has been eliminated, or until the nation is destroyed, or until a new type, such as socialism, is developed from out of the two. Likewise, the nation that tries to accommodate Christianity and secular humanism as its religion will suffer conflict until one or the other is eliminated, or until there is a merger of the two, or until the conflict destroys the nation. The same is true of politics. It is also almost certain that each segment of an element of a divided civilization will have different criteria for their evaluation of criminals and heroes. Robin Hood was a hero to the common populace, but he was a criminal to the aristocracy. Each human within these divided systems will choose to be evaluated by the system that most pleasurably and meaningfully fulfills his demands for self preservation, self justification, and self glorification.

Nearly all philosophical ideas entail some language specific to the concepts of the author, and many express a belief concerning such things as the "dualism" of the mind, and the captivity of the mind by the body. Indeed, many hold that the mind is nothing more than a chemical stew stirred by the environmental conditions that contain the body at any particular moment. I believe this is an inadequate notion. I believe such notions cover up our real captivity by completely denying or mystifying a simple fact of our construction: namely that we are each of us made up of a body, a mind, and a part that is something else. This "something else" part of us is a "piece" of ourselves with which we cannot directly communicate because it is that part of us by which we know about the remaining two parts, but which in itself has no capacity for self awareness. It is like the program that takes care of the basic input/output system of a computer. It receives input, and directs output, processes interrupts, and responds to stimuli, but in all of its operations, it is completely unknowledgeable about itself. I believe this part of ourselves has been inadequately called such things as the "subconscious," or the "unconscious" mind.

I believe this part of us "requires" a "connection" to some authority. This part of our being is the place where our hunger for meaningful pleasure originates. It is a part that desires connection to some "power source" from which meaning, and purpose, and intent can be drawn in a pleasurable fashion in order to fulfill our hunger for meaning. When this part of ourselves is completely unconnected, it allows the other two parts, namely our body and our mind, to meander aimlessly in a disjointed, catatonic like state much like a computer whose currently executing program has accidentally made a "far jump" into Never, Never Land.

I believe we come into being connected to ourselves at conception, and unless the intellect has made a willful determination to connect to some external authority, this part of our make up remains connected to our own intellects and eventually captures us in a spiraling squeal of nonsense which can be equated to acoustic feedback between a microphone and an amplified speaker.

Although they did not directly say such things as this, I believe both Descartes and Francis Bacon would either have had to have agreed with them, or would have had to have further sophisticated their conviction that once one's intellect agrees with another, judgment is given over to that agreement. The simple Truth is this: This "other part" in each of us is going to be connected either to the intellect of some other person, or to ourselves, or to some authority external to man, or to some combination of the three, and judgment is given over to those connections.

The combinations among our connections, and the effectiveness that those combinations have in pleasurably satisfying our four motivations, determine our personalities. For instance our motivation of self preservation might be moderated by a connection to an authority external to ourselves by which we satisfy most of our demand for self righteousness, and our much of our desire for self glorification. In satisfying the better part of two of our three motivations, we are enabled to make meaningful sacrifices over the third. Thus, we can postulate all of the various personality traits manifested by mankind by using thought experiments whereby connections to various sources are imagined which pleasurably satisfy our selfish motivations and provide us with meaning in varying degrees. We could then refine and reinforce our postulations by interviewing and examining population samples and comparing our postulations to the results from our population samples. We do not have time for that now, and that is not the purpose of this book, but you should understand that the basis of what is today called psychology and psychiatry is no more scientific or falsifiable than that of which we have just spoken, and thus they are the religious creeds and confessions of materialism.

I believe that most of us become connected to our parents or care givers as infants because it is through them that our three motivational demands are being pleasurably met and, at that time, our search for meaning is at its least demanding stage. At this time of infancy the only meaning we are interested in is satisfied by finding positive, pleasurable reinforcements to our selfish motives and by avoiding negative adversity to them. We will remain in this condition of infancy until our hunger for meaning grows stronger than our selfish motivations, or until our three motivations for some reason grow dissatisfied with the parental connection.

At some point we will become aware that our care givers also have their own motivations and that their motivations often come into conflict with our own. Unless these conflicts are resolved in a pleasurable and meaningful manner so as to satisfy the majority of the demands from our own motivations, we will ultimately rebel to parental authority. At that a crises will develop in our relationship to all authority, and we become extremely vulnerable to any perceived authority, including ourselves, that offers us the promise, however outlandish, that it will satisfy our motivational demands and slake our thirst for meaning in a pleasurable fashion. This crises will continue until we willfully decide to either submit to the "parental authority," or to connect to that other promising source of authority. More often than not that promising source of authority is ourselves, and we soon become trapped in spiral of dizzy nonsense which can only be broken through determined and voluntary reconnection to external authority. It is the intent and purpose of all education to effect a voluntary but determined reconnection to its own authority.

However, if we become connected to some other person who is mostly connected to himself, we merely slow down the spiral of nonsense that occurs when we are connected to ourselves. If we become connected to some other man who is mostly connected to an external source we need to get to know his source instead of himself. The connection to ourselves always remains connected to some degree regardless of to whom else we become connected. Likewise all previous external connections remain to some degree intact for some time afterward, even when we give ourselves over wholeheartedly over to a new source of authority. Thus we are permanently engaged in a conflict between our three different kinds of connections and our selfish motivations as long as we remain multi-connected.

I am sure that by now you have noticed that I am avowing that we are all either held predominately captive by ourselves or by another, and that while total connection to any single one of the three types of connections is theoretically possible, such totality is extremely rare. I believe that if we look at things in this light, we can see by the preponderance of the evidence concerning the circumstances of our common condition of captivity, that the situations of the Chief Executive Officer of a fortune 500 corporation and those of a death row inmate are more similar than they are different. We can see, for instance, that the distinctions between the murderer and the missionary are simply differences in the degrees to which they are connected to the three types of authority, and in the intensity with which their individual motivations of self preservation, self righteousness and self glorification are being pleasurably and meaningfully satisfied by those authorities. It is the combinations of meaningful connections to authority and the degree to which our selfish motives are being satisfied, plus the intensity of unsatisfied motivations, that weave the fabric of our "selves" into a personality. It is the meaningful connections to authority and the relative strengths among our requirements for self preservation, self justification, and self glorification that determines the warp and the woof of our being.

Can life make sense under such circumstances? If we are each products of motives and connections about which we are hardly even aware, but from which we yearn to find pleasure and meaning, should we even think about trying to make some sense out of life? No one can prove that life should make sense, but neither can they prove that it should not. If man is nothing more than an animal, he is the only animal that looks for meaning in life, but, if he truly is nothing more than an animal, life can have no meaning. We are all faced with the dilemma of choosing one of these two choices: life should make sense or it should not. But neither of these two choices will satisfy all of our motivational demands of "self" and at the same time feed our hunger for pleasure and meaning. We are in a dichotomous dilemma. Life cannot make sense unless it is intended to make sense, and the intentions for life cannot be known for certain unless they have been irrefutably declared by the source of life. But if such intent has been made known we must submit ourselves to it, and this submission simply does not satisfy our motivations of self glorification and self justification. On the other hand, if life is not intended to make sense, i.e. life is originated by that which is senseless, it cannot then make sense of itself and while we may be able to pleasurably satisfy our selfish motivations of self preservation and self justification and self glorification to some extent, we cannot do so in any permanently meaningful fashion. Since our hunger for meaning normally grows and since our search for pleasure normally wanes as we age, we normally become increasingly less satisfied by a pleasurable but senseless life.

What unhappy circumstances in which pleasure cannot normally be maintained, and in which life cannot make sense unless the source of life is capable of intent and willing to communicate that intent. But if life was originated intentionally, we cannot both simultaneously satisfy all of our selfish motivations and the intentions of our source. If life was originated by a source incapable of intent, or one that is unwilling to communicate that intent, then our selfish motivations can be satisfied, but with no meaning. Let us see if we can untie this Gordian Knot - this problem that is unsolvable from within its own definitions.

I said that I have directed this book toward teenagers and young adults. If it seems to you that it is not easy reading, I believe it is nowhere so sophisticated as to be confusing. I believe that we are being continually confronted with a series of

choices between two alternatives, each of which is equally dissatisfying to either our three motivations, or to our hunger for meaning. We, therefore, are continually engaged in compromising between our alternatives and our motivations, all the while hoping to find a pleasurable meaning. This circumstance drives us into the unending attempt to manufacture a third alternative, built from aspects of the original two alternatives. In this effort we attempt to choose those aspects that will be the most pleasurable and compatible with our multiconnected motivations and our thirst for meaning.

I believe the thing which makes this concept the most difficult to accept is not because of any complexity in that which is expressed, but rather it is our accustomed and willing captivity to a system designed, propagated, and perpetuated by, and for, selfish men. I would therefore encourage you to ponder upon this book slowly, comparing it with the Bible. Take your time to chew it over, and if, when you have finished it, you still do not understand how the above conditions have driven the historical directions of mankind, then you could form a discussion group with some friends and talk about these things. Assign some research topics to each other, and go to the public library, and do some research for yourselves, then rehash it again, always looking closely at what the Bible teaches. What I am trying to point out is that the concepts of this book are simple. The reason they may seem difficult is not because they are complex, but because they are contrary to our conditioning and our desires.

The most reasonable of propositions to me is that the things which we will most readily and dearly believe is not Truth, but rather, we will most readily believe that which most easily falls into pleasurable agreement with our selfish motivations. That by which we allow ourselves to become conditioned is that which causes us the least loss of desire, and places upon us the least demand of duty. Such a circumstance is dangerous to us even if there were no such thing as Truth that does not agree with this criteria, but if Truth does exist that is in opposition to this condition, then our condition becomes fatal. I maintain that such Truth exists, and that we can only be freed of our selfish motivations, or from those of another human likewise held captive, by having that "something else" part of us completely connected to that Truth. I further maintain that there has been but one single human who has ever been completely connected to that Truth since Adam and Eve disobeyed God. No other human since Adam and Eve has ever been born that was connected to that truth until the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of Almighty God. I further maintain that as such, Jesus is the only human ever "born" who successfully and completely denied his selfish motivations and continually maintained his connection to the source of his being. In so doing Jesus continually maintained that connection to the Creator through which the Creator had intended to feed all of our thirsts for meaning and pleasure. Unfortunately, that connection has been broken in every other human by some calamity.

I do not ask that you agree with me. I ask you to seek the Truth. I hope to show you a trail, a marked path, that runs through the Bible. It is a trail toward the Truth that has been proclaimed without alteration or modification for thousands of years. This Truth has not changed in spite of the many changes in man's beliefs and in man's technology. This Truth has declared the condition of man, and has flawlessly predicted how that condition will eventually turn a civilization loose upon earth in which the politics, commerce, and religion will be unified in order to preserve mankind, and to justify, and to glorify his condition. The exact nature of this civilization was revealed to us over 2500 years ago and has been confirmed in several later prophecies since then, and has never changed. Even as we look at ourselves today we can see the Truth unfolding before our eyes.

Keep a Bible handy while you read this book. All of the scripture quoted or referenced herein will be from the King James Version. I use this version exclusively for study because I find that I do not take it for granted that I understand the concepts being expressed just because I can understand the language that expresses them, and the Bible, like a poem, nearly always expresses a depth of meaning beyond the simple definition of words. Using the King James Version makes me study each word more deeply and thoughtfully than one of the newer translations whose idioms and constructions are more familiar to my ear and mind. I also would encourage you to obtain and routinely use a good exhaustive concordance with Hebrew/Chaldean, and Greek dictionaries, such as "Strong's Exhaustive Concordance," published by Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Two other valuable resources are: "Vine's Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words," copyright by Oliphants Ltd. and published by Barbour, and Unger's Bible Dictionary published by Moody Press, Chicago, Ill.

The Bible is not a novel, neither is it a text book in the sense of being a school book that covers some topical theme or subject. The Bible is a summary, an outline of "revealed" principles, propositions, and prophecies which must be applied in order to discover their full truth and practicality. The Bible is like a hammer where life is a nail. Philosophically and intellectually studying the hammer without ever applying it, will not drive or fix a single nail. There is, however, a portion of the Bible that can be explored for truth apart from its application, and it is that portion with which we will be predominately involved. However, it is impossible for a twice born human not rejoice in those passages that "drive his nail" and there will therefore be many such passages included as they are collaterally implicated in our search.

I have tried to direct this book toward the teenager and young adult for three reasons. I will mention two of them now and the third, which I have already introduced without statement, I will restate more explicitly again later toward the end of the book. First, I direct this book toward the young, not because I believe that older people cannot use the information it conveys, but because much of this information will be radically different to what they have always agreed upon among themselves to be the truth, and therefore many will tend to dismiss it without a complete evaluation, and secondly and most importantly, I direct it toward the young because I believe that if hundreds of millions of souls are to be snatched from the jaws of Hell, there must be a radical restoration in mankind's understanding of ancient and historical Christianity in their lifetimes. We must fundamentally change our understanding of our condition, and our expectations for civilization. I believe that unless this happens within the lifetimes of the young, they will see the end of both civilization and the world come upon them.

The prophet Joel said that there would come a time when our sons and our daughters would prophesy, if ever we have needed to see that happen it is now, because the generation of my sons and daughters and their sons and daughters now represents over two thirds of the world's population, and there would be no better way to reach these generations with the Good News than that some of their own contemporaries should begin to prophesy, and I do not mean to preach, I mean to prophesy. This, in fact, may be the only way in which to reach them.

Within less than fifty years, every spot on earth that now holds one person will have to support more than two. We simply cannot go on with the same failed understanding of the way we believe things to be, or even with how we believe things ought to be. We must somehow come to grips with the horrible prospects of the disintegration and deprivation that are even now coming upon us.

My prayer for all those who will read and evaluate this information, regardless of their age, is not that they would be open to my suggestions and beliefs, but that they would be as hard headed as a flint rock concerning any thing I say, and open to the Holy Scriptures and to the Spirit of God, comparing everything, that they read and that which they observe, against the Word of that Truth.

So with those thoughts in mind, let us begin our journey: There are two broad beliefs concerning the nature of mankind's selfishness. The first, and most popular belief, is that man is a fundamentally good product of the forces, whether natural or supernatural, that formed him. This view holds that as man now exists, regardless of how or why, he does so as a self interested being who may be relied upon to co-exist with his fellow beings in a civil manner to the extent that his own self interest is satisfied. (Of course such a view must hold to an unstated and unproved assumption that selfish interests have an upper limit of gratification beyond which they will seek no further satisfaction.)

The second, and much less popular view, agrees that man is self interested but asserts that this is a terrible thing; that because of this, man is a fundamentally corrupt, totally depraved being who, if left to himself, will destroy civilizations, societies, nations, and individuals.

The first belief assumes that man arrives on earth with innate character traits which suit him to a life of cooperation with other such innately endowed humans. Proponents of this hypothesis believe that if a person is properly educated concerning his responsibilities toward the rest of humanity, his natural warmth for his fellow man will influence his behavior toward an enduring civility.

E. M. Forster wrote in, "Two Cheers for Democracy," that he believed that most men possessed this natural warmness for each other, and that it was this "natural warmness" that made them reliable in their interchanges with each other. He admitted though, that for the purpose of living out this belief, one had to willfully ignore all of the daily evidence that was contrary to that proposition. This willful ignorance of all of the contrary evidence was how he defined Faith: not the ignorance of, but the willful ignoring of all contrary evidence. It is intended that we should willfully ignore no evidence in the course of this book, and that we should look not at how we would like for things to be, but at how things, in truth, really are, and why they are that way.

Both notions about man agree that he is a self centered, self interested being, but the one notion asserts that this is somehow, inexplicably, a good thing. This notion has been held as a point of departure within all enlightened philosophy since men, in the middle ages, rediscovered the writings of the ancient Greeks. The second view, that this self centeredness is a terrible thing, has been held by some, but not all, of those who have held a Biblical faith since the days of Adam.

There is, then, a considerable difference between how the enlightened man looks at man's selfishness and the way that it is viewed by the Bible. That difference as much as anything else is what most of this book will drape around as we examine the direction taken by civilization during much of history, and look to see if there is a cause for the direction in which it is headed and a conclusion to that direction.

Americans have been living under the assumptions of democratic republicanism since the American Revolution and most of our forefathers lived under the assumptions of democratic or constitutional monarchies before that. Prime among the assumptions of these systems is that although mankind is known to be, and can be shown to be, every whit selfish, that this is, in some inexplicable way, a good thing, and that this selfishness works not only to each person's singular benefit, but to everyone's benefit corporately. It is apparent that the traditional enlightened view and the traditional Biblical view are in direct opposition to each other concerning the benefits of man's innate selfishness.

It is manifest that in forming the American Republic, the enlightened founders, who consisted of humanists, Christians, Christianized humanists, and humanized Christians, all had to willfully ignore large bodies of contrary evidence in order to forge a consensus for government. It is my belief that holy prophets of God predicted over 2500 years ago, not just the civil and social conditions that this willful ignorance would produce in the last days, but the kind of government that would dominate the world, and the system of commerce which would finance that government, and the kind of religious philosophy which would give man his manners while living under the politics and economics of that civilization.

The Bible preceded the philosophers of the enlightenment in recognizing man's nature by over five thousand years, but differed completely in its assertion of how that nature would effect his existence and survival. It remains the belief of fundamental Christianity that the Bible speaks authoritatively on the subject of man's nature in Jeremiah 17:9 where it says, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" The historical trend of humanization within the ranks of traditional Christianity has continually been toward compromise and moderation of that position in order to accommodate the "more enlightened view" of western civilization.

In their most primitive and fundamental forms, all ancient religions acknowledged a belief in a spiritual reality separate from the material reality, and they recognized a conflict born of the duality of good and evil in man's personality. All such ancient religions, save one, prescribed a set of rules or a body of knowledge by which righteousness was earned and men could become victorious over evil within this duality. The single exception was the pure religion of the Hebrews that depended upon Almighty God to provide man with salvation. All religions in their ancient origins also prescribed some system of sacrifice as a basis of atonement for transgression of these rules. All of the world's more recent religions have become "modernized" or "liberalized" to some extent through continual moderation of that concept of duality that has been observed in both nature and in man's personality.

This is definitely not a situation where it does not matter what one believes about the condition of mankind. Our individual and corporate survival depend upon our choice between these two beliefs, for only one of them represents the Truth, and the wrong choice eventually leads to our individual and corporate destruction. The problem is that we must make our choice between the two, and then, from that time on believe in faith that we have made the right choice. I believe this to be the reason that it is harder to persuade men who are mostly connected to other men of the truth of the Gospel, than it is to convict those who are mostly connected to themselves. The connection to self is a default connection, made neither by choice nor held in faith. But the connection made to either another person, or to some other external authority, is made by intellectual choice and is held onto through faith.

I hope to demonstrate to the reader in the course of this book, that there exists a body of general evidence that indicates mankind is living out a destiny which has been prophesied for thousands of years, and that even as he fulfills that destiny, he is largely unaware of it. I believe it can be seen in these prophesies that this destiny is determined because of wrong beliefs and choices, and that, while the destiny of civilization as a whole has been ordained, any particular generation can delay that ordination, through their own individual and corporate choices.

Also in this study there will be some pointedly accusative discussions. Such cannot be avoided when demonstrating that the Bible has prophesied and condemned for thousands of years the actual social and behavioral conditions which we see in existence today. I ask you now to clearly understand that I point no finger at any man except myself, for I know better than any living man (Jesus Christ excepted) the degree to which my condition separates me from the white hot holiness of Almighty God, and the degree to which I am powerless to travel that distance. I repent of that condition a hundred times daily, and still, I live as its captive.

None the less it is necessary to state clearly those social and behavioral conditions which the Bible has condemned within all civilizations, and which it has predicted would exist in epic proportions in the last civilization. I intend no condemnation of any human being, for the time for that has not yet arrived, but in order to demonstrate both the reliability of Biblical Prophecy and the necessity for human repentance (which is a change of mind and choice), these things must be discussed.

I believe I am not so different from others, and I believe also that one of the things we need more than any other in the world today is an abiding awareness of our own degenerate nature and of the vast differences between us and Holy God. I do not deny that if any man is in Christ he is a new creation. That is a spiritual truth which at present finds realization only in faith. I do deny that we who are in Christ are in any way now perfect, and I affirm that this lack of perfection is far, far greater than our selfish motives will allow us to admit.

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