Greta Thunberg And Eco-Eugenics

Is fame random? Or, is fame the result of access to power? The recent prominence of Greta Thunberg is a case in point. Did she become famous for simply being photographed sitting alone in front of the Swedish parliament building, on strike for the environment? Or, did she inherit the mantle of an eco-prophet? Is she just an ordinary, outraged young woman, or someone with deep family links to environmentalism, and who thus has all the right connections?

For those that might not know, Greta supposedly shot to fame when the aforesaid photo of hers was put on Twitter in 2018. The Twitter account belonged to a group called, We Don’t Have Time, a Swedish organization, funded by Al Gore. Therefore, the photo was a clever piece of propaganda, designed to “capture” the hearts of people all over the world – a “lonely little girl,” speaking truth to power.

Of course, using children to further environmentalism is an old tactic. Back in 1992, there was Severn Suzuki, who at age nine started ECO (Environmental Children’s Organization), and gave a speech at the UN, which was far more coherent that Greta’s performance. But Severn’s father is David Suzuki, Canada’s foremost environmentalist.

Cory Morningstar has very meticulously, and very brilliantly, analyzed the deep connections that Greta has to the many power-structures, all of which seek to change the world. This excellent research should be widely read.

But why Greta? Why her photo? The clue lies in what she really advocates – the Fourth Industrial Revolution, aka, the New Green Deal. This is, very simply, transhumanism, which is the creation of a bio-digital world, where technology merges with humanity.

The oft-heard mantra of the environmentalists, “Change Everything,” means changing what it means to be human, what it means to work, what it means to be free, what it means to live a happy life. In short, it is Neo-Eugenics – or, the improvement of humanity by way of technology. This gives a whole new meaning to Greta’s iconic phrase, “I want you to panic.”

But why Greta? Because she belongs, as it were, to global warming “royalty,” being directly related to that very Swedish scientist who, a little over a century ago, invented, and then popularized, the concepts of both global warming and man-made climate change. His name was Svante August Arrhenius (1859–1927), and his mother was a Thunberg.

Greta’s fame therefore is not accidental. She is continuing the project started by her illustrious ancestor – of course, enabled by her astute parents. Arrhenius’s name may not be familiar now, but in his time, he was well-known throughout Europe and North America.

People commonly assume that overwhelming data (inductive reasoning) led scientists to declare man-made climate change to be “settled science.” The problem with this assumption is that global warming and climate change are in fact hypotheses first invented by Arrhenius, and for which data (evidence) is continually being sought (deductive reasoning). It is hardly settled science, as recently shown.

Why do people back this hypothesis over any other? Because the majority of college graduates have a humanities or arts degrees, which skews how they perceive things scientific, for which they have little aptitude, let alone understanding. For example, innumeracy in the general population is very high. But these arts-degree-holders are also the electorate and their consent must therefore be continually manufactured.

Also, when it comes to sociopolitical matters, those with science degrees think the same way as their humanities counterparts, given that the entire purpose of higher education now is inculcation into radicalism. In the post-truth era, this means that those who research and teach science no longer believe that science is wedded to truth, as the recent humiliating defeat of the high-priest of global warming, Michael Mann, clearly showed, along with other studies, for example, here and here and here.

Science, like all other human activities, depends upon ideas, which are structures or models with which we understand, manipulate and benefit from the reality of the natural world. In other words, inductive reasoning was once the ideal of science.

But science, serving other masters than truth, now often aligns itself with social activism and social engineering (aka, power). Such cooption of science by the power-elite means that narrative (rhetoric) becomes far more important than truth – because rhetoric is the most effective tool to manufacture consent. Humanities degree holders are used to stories and they therefore respond well to rhetoric. And so goes the entire industry of environmentalism, where the “climate crisis” is continually narrativized for consumption.

Not surprisingly, in his popular writings, Arrhenius used rhetoric to further his hypotheses of global warming and man-made climate change. Early scientists had, in fact, variously looked at how air could warm the earth, such as, Leon Teisserenc de Bort, Alexander Buchan, Josef Stefan, Samuel Langley, Claude Servais Mathias Pouillet, Arvid Gustaf Högbom, Joseph Fourier, and of course, John Tyndall.

Arrhenius took this early work and imagined that the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2), or “carbonic acid,” as he called it, in the atmosphere was directly responsible for warming the planet. He went on to suppose that if the amount of CO2 kept rising, then likewise the planet would keep getting hotter and hotter. This notion would become known as the “greenhouse effect.” And where would all this excess CO2 come from? Fossil fuels, of course.

He laid out this idea in a paper that was published in 1896 and entitled, “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.”

This paper would become the bedrock of the contemporary climate-change industry, even though it was much criticized at the time of its publications (and later also) for its faulty science, such as that the effects of water vapor are mistaken for the effects of CO2.

Many of his contemporary scientists pointed out (as many scientists still do today) that CO2 cannot have any warming effect (or climate sensitivity) – which thus means that CO2 is not a “greenhouse gas.” Also, Arrhenius’s math was severely criticized by many, such as the physicist, Anders Ångström.

But it would appear that alarmism was something Arrhenius excelled at, for he next wrote an international bestseller, entitled, Worlds in the Making, in 1908, in which he explained to the layman his “hot-house” theory, where the continuous burning of fossil fuels, by industry, would increase the earth’s temperature. Thus, he linked his dubious science to modern human life – the ideal formula for alarmism.

The logic followed in his book is obvious – control human activity and you will control the earth’s temperature. For this reason, Arrhenius is rightly called the “father” of global warming. He is also the “father” of the entire energy crisis industry, since he was the first to suggest that oil reserves were finite (aka, peak oil) and coal would run out.

Any alarmism worth its salt has an end-game (massive social change) and so must also offer solutions that will bring about this desired result. Accordingly, Arrhenius suggested that the use of oil and coal be limited, if not eliminated; that electricity replace oil as an energy source; that fuel efficiency be practiced; that bio-fuels be used; that atomic energy be developed. Arrhenius, in fact, gave modern environmentalism all of its talking points.

But how did his ideas become foundational to environmentalism today? Arrhenius was largely ignored until 1979, when the Charney Report, entitled, “Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment” was published. It relied heavily on Arrhenius and thus gave him instant legitimacy.

Then, in 1990, the IPCC used the Charney Report as the basis for its own report, which turned Arrhenius’s hypotheses of man-made climate change and global warming into “settled science.” Henceforth, climate could only and “correctly” be viewed through the lens of Arrhenius. Those who refused or objected would be labeled as “deniers” – i.e., heretics.

Another “settled science” in which Arrhenius made much contribution was eugenics. Just as animals and planets could be bred to show particular characteristics, so too, it was believed, could humans be made better by selective breeding (which was known as racial hygiene). Thus, human reproduction was to be controlled and limited by the state, all bulwarked and justified by science. The mantra of “listen to the science” that is oft-repeated by environmentalists in itself has a very sinister history, for eugenics was nothing but “settled science” for people like Arrhenius, Margaret Sanger and Hitler.

The obvious question that arises is a simple one, then – does Arrhenius’s work on global warming stem from his eugenics? For example, in 1912, he famously concocted an experiment in which public school children were electrified, in order to make them grow taller. Apparently, it was said to have worked. Thus, where does climate science stop and eugenics being for Arrhenius? It is a question not yet settled.

Further, Arrhenius was the founding member of the Swedish Society of Racial Hygiene, which was established on 1909, as well as the State Institute for Racial Biology, in 1922. Both institutes justified Sweden’s sterilization of non-Aryans, and other “undesirables,” long before the Nazis. And these institutes set the context for the forced sterilization of over 60,000 Swedish women, who were deemed unfit to breed. This practice continued until 1975. Sweden was hardly a socialist paradise for these unfortunates. As well, Arrhenius worked with Gustaf Retzius, who used phrenology (developed by his father, Anders Retzius) to further claims of Nordic racial superiority.

And, in 1900, Arrhenius was the founding member of the Nobel Institute and its Nobel Prize and headed both the Nobel Committees on physics and chemistry. Needless to say, he made sure that most of his friends received the Nobel (such as, Theodore William Richards and Wilhelm Oswald). Three years later, he himself became the first Swede to receive the prize.

Thus, Greta’s own nomination for the Nobel is part-and-parcel of being a member of the global warming “royalty.” It is interesting to note that her father, who is an actor, writer and producer, is named Svante; and her mother (Malena Ernman) is a well-known operatic singer, who has also co-authored, with her husband, the bestselling book about her family and their environmentalism, entitled, Scenes from the Heart (2018).

Like her mother, Greta recently published her own book, No One is Too Small to Make a Difference, which is a collection of her eco-activist speeches. And it does not come as a surprise that she herself has her biography on the Internet Movie Database, given her parents’ careers. But her recent stumble does give one pause as to her spontaneity.

As for Greta’s access to power? She is backed by the World Economic Forum, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Institute, the Prince of Wales’ Corporate Leaders Group, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and more than twenty NGOs – and they all want to bring about the Fourth Industrial Revolution. She is hardly a “lonely little girl” heroically fighting the powers that be. Rather, she is famous because she is an effective ambassador of these powers, and because she belongs to the right family.

Greta means serious business. Wittingly or unwittingly, she is the child-herald of a nightmare future, inhabited by a mechanized humanity, wherein that century-old experiment, conducted by her relative, of electrifying children, will be upgraded for all humanity. Saving the planet means eugenics, for it is ultimately Malthusian in its logic, in that people are the enemies of the planet and their numbers need to be controlled. Greta’s alarmist environmentalism is impossible to accomplish without eugenics. But then global warming and man-made climate change are both the invention of her ancestor who understood such eco-eugenics well.

What Is Free Will?

The act of the will is much less known to us than the act of the intellect. However, it is not impossible for the human intellect to prove the freedom of the will basing this proof on the root of freedom which is understood good.

The will is the appetitive power of the intellect, so that before any act of the will can take place, there must be an act of intellect preceding it; for the will is not a knower, it is a ‘goer’. It goes towards what the intellect presents to it as good and appetible and away from what is presented to it by the intellect as being non-appetible.

The problem about free will is this: as said above, the will is subordinated to the intellect, its acts must be about what the intellect presents to it. But the intellect is not free, it is tied to evidence. Consequently, it seems, that the will is not free either.

One could go no further and decide that the will is not free since it is under compulsion to follow the intellect. But the difficulty is this; we are quite conscious that the will is free. This is very obvious from the way we act: for we are conscious when we do something that we need not have done it, that we could have acted in another way; besides, we have laws, and laws pre-suppose that we are free; we have such things as rewards and punishments. Sometimes we praise people and at other times we blame them; all these things point to the fact that the will is free.

The solution of this problem must consist in reconciling these two truths, (a) that the will is an intellectual appetite and must follow intellect and (b) that the will is free to choose this or that or to act or not to act; for no problem is solved by denying either of the terms, for to deny either of them would be to suppress the problem.

The freedom of the will is exercised in the act of choice or election which follows and is subordinated to the act of intellect which is called the practico-practical judgment.

At this point it will be a great help to us to have a good look at these two acts. Here we are considering both these acts as they are about some particular good which of necessity is a limited or a mixed good, mixed, because it is made up of act and potency; for as we see in other places, the will is not free about a pure good or good in common or universal good.

Since the will is an appetite for understood good, and not ‘this good’, by its nature it has to appetise what seems to it to be absolutely good with no admixture of evil. Regarding a mixed good the will is together able and unable to will it. It follows then that when the intellect understands something to be somewise good and somewise not good, the will is indifferent to will it or not to will it.

Still in order to do the elective act, the will must make a choice between one particular good and another, or a choice to act or not to act. But for the will to pass from a position where it is indifferent to act or not to act, or to choose one thing rather than another, and to arrive at a determinate choice there has to be an act of intellect which makes it possible for the will to come to a decision, that is, the will cannot move from indetermination to determination by itself without the intellect intervening, for that would imply contradiction, since to be able to choose and not to be able to choose are contradictories.

In other words, the will follows the practico-practical judgment which is about a paticular good which the will may or may not go for since every particular good has in it a reason to be loved by the will and a reason for the will not to love it.

If the will is going to make a choice it must follow a judgment by the intellect presenting the thing to it as completely good and as completely befitting it. This means that for the will to will the particular good there must occur a change in the practico-practical judgment, so that this change must be caused either by the particular good itself, or by the will, for if two things are not in agreement, they can be brought to agree only by changing one or the other.

Since the particular good remains the same, the change must occur in the will so that the intellect can be presented with a new object by the practico-practical judgment and make a decision about the particular thing in question.

But, the intellect can judge that the particular thing befits the will only if new evidence arises. This evidence can only come from the will itself since, as said above, the particular thing remains unchanged, so it must be from the will acquiring a new reality within it, that is a new order of befittingness towards that particular thing, so that the will has itself towards that thing, as from its nature, it has itself towards universal good.

This order of befittingness or coaptation of the will for the thing makes it possible for the intellect to judge that the particular thing it is considering, is that which perfectly suits the will here and now, because now the intellect is looking not at the will alone but at the will together with its dispositions, (a new object). Then, this new judgment by the practico-practical intellect becomes the form according to which the will makes its choice. It is about this new judgment by the practico-practical judgment that Aristotle said “of what sort each one is, such is the end that to him seems good.” In other words we judge as we are disposed.

It follows from this that it is the will itself that causes (efficiently) and determines (objectively) the very form accordiing to which it acts and that it does this not from necessity, since from its nature the will is indifferent to appetise this or that particular good.

But, the question may be asked, how does the will effect this change in itself? The answer is that it does this by using the new judgment put before it by the intellect for this new judgment is the potential mover of the will. It uses it as a man uses a crutch; the crutch moves the man and the man moves it.

Let us recall here two principles: the principle that causes are causes to each other in diverse order of cause. This principle is the key to the problem of free will. (Causation and cause are simultaneous in duration; the priority of the cause is only an ontological priority). The principle of Denis is that every perfection loved, inclines the will towards it. St. Thomas says in Con. Gent. IV, a 19, “the loved is in the will as inclining and in a certain manner intrinsically compelling the living (subject) towards the very thing loved.” It is in this way that the loved is in the lover.

Just as in understanding, something is produced in the intellect, namely a concept, wherein the thing is known and the concept is specified by the known thing—which is the object—so in the will when it loves something, a certain inclination or love or weightedness arises in it, which inclination or coaptation inclines it towards the beloved;.

By this coaptation, which arises in the will, the will is changed and consequently it presents a new object to the intellect. This makes the intellect judge that the thing is perfectly suited to the will and makes it possible for the will to will it. But what makes the will inclined towards the thing in the first place is a certain connaturality of the will with the thing, a certain inclination towards it (there is a certain mystery here). This inclination in the will is a physical reality, specified by the loved thing which makes the beloved present to the will.

It is the will itself that is the efficient cause of its weightedness, it makes itself love by loving. It is by loving that the will produces in itself its lopsidedness towards the loved. John does not love Mary until his love has produced that lopsidedness. So John’s love for Mary is determined by his dispositions.

So it is that the weighted will presents new evidence to the practico-practical judgement which unlike the speculativo-practical judgment (which merely judges that something is good), judges the good thing in relation to the will as it is affected by its weightedness (i.e. by its dispositions.)

The will can will one thing in preference to another only if, by itself, it adjusts itself to it. In this way the will turns an indifferent form into a determinate form (i.e. a ‘can-move’ into a ‘does move’) i.e. uses the practico-practical judgment to make its choice.

In two orders of causality the practico-practical judgment goes before the act of choice, and in two orders of causality the choice goes before the practico-practical judgment. This reciprocity of causes is what is peculiar to the free act, it is found only in the free act. This interaction between the two acts has to be explained.

The two causalities exercised by the intellect on the will are: objective causality and final causality. The intellect from itself has no efficient causality. It has only extrinsic formal causality, that is, specific causality, by doing that it provides the will with final causality. By the particular object presented by the intellect to the will is specified the nature of the quality weighting the will towards this object.

The will exercises only one act by which it has two influences on the intellect; a) objective causality and b) efficient causality. This act is formally one, but virtually two (causations). As it is efficient it explains the ‘be’ of the practico-practical judgment in the intellect, as it is objective it explains the ‘be-such’ of the practico-practical judgment.

The two causalities the will exercises on the intellect are: Efficient (bends the intellect down from considering good simply to considering a particular good) and Objective causality (provides the intellect with an evident reality which it can judge.) So it is the will that provides the intellect with a new object and also moves it efficiently to make the judgment about this new object.

Therefore, it is the will that picks the form according to which it acts. But to pick the form is to pick the ‘be’ and to pick the ‘be’ is to pick the ‘do’. But to pick one’s do is to be free. Therefore the will is free.

It remains to explain that the loved is in the lover in a different fashion from which the known is in the knower. For the will is not loving the thing as it is something in it, but as it is out in the real, whereas the concept is that wherein the thing is known. “Good and bad are in things but true and false are in mind”.

Although it is true to say that the known is in the knower and the loved is in the lover, it must be realised that the intentionality of the intellect is vastly different from the intentionality of the will; for whereas knowledge is terminated at the word as it is in the intellect, in such fashion that the intellect reposes in it, the loved existing intentionally in the will is there as an impulse whereby the will is weighted and inclined towards the thing outside, although it is vitally elicited by the will for “insofar does it weight the will, insofar as it is voluntary and not from without, for the will is inclined only voluntarily” John of St. Thomas Curs. Theol. IV ed vives 927 disp. 12, a. 7, n XII.

It all comes from the will and all from the object but from the object as the specificative and from the will as the efficient cause.

All particular goods are equally unfit to move the will because all of them are infinitely deficient from being a universal good.

Therefore, if the will prefers one particular good to another, it is not necessitated by the object of the intellect (because the intellect is tied to evidence and does not move the will efficiently), but because it chooses to do so.

Therefore, the will is free since it is not under necessity to will what it wills – neither by necessity of nature not by necessity of instinct. It follows that the will can’t will a particular good unless it wills it freely, it is the cause of its own loves. So the two terms of the problem, are solved. The will is subordinated to the intellect, but nevertheless it is free, since it has dominative indifference over its acts.

This proof is reduced to the fundamental doctrine of act and potency since it is because there is potency in things that the will is free about them.

Alice Nelson is a lecturer at the Centre for Thomistic Studies, in Sydney, Australia.

The photo shows, “Echo,” by Ellen Thesleff, painted in 1891.

Clare Sheridan’s Secret Life

If Winston Churchill was a vehement opponent of Soviet Russia, his cousin Clare Sheridan, on the contrary, was one of its biggest supporters. That in Britain was unforgivable.

“I am not a Bolshevik. But I have tried to understand the spirit of Communism and it interests me overwhelmingly,” wrote Winston Churchill’s cousin Clare Sheridan in her diary, published as Russian Portraits, during a trip to Soviet Russia in 1920.

The British counterintelligence agency MI5, however, was not so sure. They believed that this relative of one of the most influential people in Britain was a Bolshevik spy.

Being the cousin of War Minister Winston Churchill was not Clare Sheridan’s only accolade. She was a famous sculptor in her own right, and it was her professional activities that took her to the capital of Soviet Russia.

Having met with representatives of a Soviet trade delegation in London in 1920, Clare admitted to having a lifelong love for Russian literature, music, dance, and art; she was promptly invited to visit Russia.

However, at the time it was very difficult for a British subject to do so. The Entente’s intervention in Russia had only just ended, and some British troops remained in Crimea, the last stronghold of the White armies. Moreover, Britain itself, despite opening trade talks, was in no hurry to officially recognize Soviet Russia.

Visiting the land of the Bolsheviks was viewed as utter madness, but Sheridan cared little for public opinion. Via Stockholm and Tallinn, “this wild cousin of mine” (as Churchill put it) set off for Moscow.

Clare was greeted in Russia as an honorary guest. For two months she lived inside the Kremlin, strolled around the streets of Moscow, visited theaters, observed the lives of ordinary people, and marveled at what she saw: “Why am I happy here, shut off from all I belong to? What is there about this country that has always made everyone fall under its spell?”

“Why are these people, who have less education, so much more cultured than we are? The galleries of London are empty. In the British Museum one meets an occasional German student. Here the galleries and museums are full of working people. London provides revues and plays of humiliating mediocrity, which the educated classes enjoy and applaud. Here the masses crowd to see Shakespeare,” she wrote in her diary.

Clare talked a lot to Muscovites, took pictures, and made notes: “Now for the first time I feel morally and mentally free… I love this place and all the people in it. I love the people I have met, and the people who pass by me in the street. I love the atmosphere laden with melancholy, with sacrifice, with tragedy. I am inspired by this Nation, purified by Fire. I admire the dignity of their suffering and the courage of their belief.”

Nevertheless, she didn’t forget why she had come to the Soviet capital in the first place. Sheridan’s sculptural portraits of Bolshevik leaders included Zinoviev, Kamenev, Dzerzhinsky, Trotsky, and, of course, Lenin.

She even got to have a private conversation with the “leader of the Russian revolution.” Vladimir Lenin jokingly reproached her for being related to “the man with all the force of the capitalists behind him.” In response, Clare remarked that her other cousin was a member of the Irish left-wing party Sinn Fein. Laughing, Lenin replied: “That must be a cheerful party when you three get together.”

At home in Britain, Clare was greeted with a coldness verging on hostility. She effectively became persona non grata in high society, and even Churchill refused to communicate with her, at least temporarily.

Despite Sheridan’s protestations that she was far removed from politics, the British were outraged by her unprecedented trip, friendship with the Bolsheviks, and support for Russia.

MI5, in particular, paid close attention to the British war minister’s cousin. The agency could not overlook Clare’s ambiguous remarks about Russia and Russians: “I should like to live among them forever, or else work for them outside, work and fight for the Peace that will heal their wounds.”

Under intense public scrutiny, Sheridan was forced to leave Britain. She set off on an incredible round-the-world trip, which included an affair with Charlie Chaplin in the US, meeting Mussolini in Switzerland, and hearing the speeches of the young Hitler in Germany. Everywhere she went, MI5 agents followed on her heels.

In 1925 field operatives discovered that Sheridan had handed over details of a conversation with Churchill (then Chancellor of the Exchequer) about foreign policy to Daily Herald editor Norman Ewer, who was believed to be a Soviet agent.

Shortly thereafter, according to MI5, Sheridan’s finances quickly improved, suspiciously so. After a decade of money trouble, she went to Algeria, having paid off all her debts. British intelligence suspected a Russian hand in it.

“In view of the facts regarding her financial position [we] are strongly of the opinion that Clare is in the pay of the Russians and that she has been sent to North Africa to get in touch with the local situation and to act either as a reporting agent or possibly as a forwarding agent,” read the MI5 report.

MI5 repeatedly shared its suspicions about Sheridan with Churchill, but he always chose to ignore them. More than that, with WW2 now in play, Clare and Winston finally reconciled their differences, letting bygones be bygones.

Clare Sheridan passed away in 1970 at the ripe old age of 84. No case was ever brought against her.

Boris Egorov writes for Russia Beyond.

The photo shows a portrait of Clare Sheridan by Emil Fuchs, painted in 1907.

Back To The Bronze Age

I am fascinated by what is to come. For someone who came of age imbibing the narrow, facile, weak, always-second-place conservative pieties of the late 1980s and the 1990s, the chaotic fluidity of today’s Right is something entirely new. There are no straight lines of sight; all is a jumble of splintered mirrors.

In this chaos, of which Trump is only one manifestation, it is a sign of something, or rather of many things, that this self-published book by an pseudonymous author, calling for adoption of a supposed ethics of the Bronze Age, is receiving a lot of attention. And as much as I hate to admit it, or think I hate to admit it, the philosophy that runs through this book is likely to drive a lot of discourse, and action, in coming years.

True, this book is, by most measures, still obscure. It has not been reviewed in the New York Times, though I suspect that it will soon enough start making appearances there, none positive. For now, its traction is only on the Right, but there is a lot of traction there, because Bronze Age Mindset, strange to say, acts to coalesce the fragmented pieces of the Right, especially the youthful, disaffected Right, around a philosophy that rejects many of the more problematic elements of the non-mainstream Right.

Bronze Age Mindset is, I think, an attempt to maneuver around a core problem for new thought on the Right—that a great many of the vocal people on the Right are clowns with stupid ideas, easily used by their enemies and of negative value to a coherent future program. Bronze Age Mindset is best viewed as a cloaked attempt to find an attractive Right philosophy that leaves such clowns, especially the racists, behind, while still capturing those who believe in seeing reality as it is, even though it is forbidden by our rulers.

This attempt to create a new thing is the genius of Bronze Age Mindset, not the actual narrative, a good deal of which is insane—though I think the insanity is mostly a joke designed to distract as the rest of the book strikes home, making it a jujitsu tactic, persuasion disguised with juvenile humor.

Others on the mainstream Right have begun to recognize this. Michael Anton, whom I greatly admire, reviewed Bronze Age Mindset last month for the Claremont Review of Books, not unfavorably, of which more later. I can assure you, if you are not familiar with the Right ecosystem, that this is wholly unprecedented.

If you had said ten years ago that a man of Anton’s prominence, in a publication of such note, would write favorably about a book that demands a military government and a return to pagan ways of thinking, praises men from history who are now viewed as entirely retrograde, and rejects any role for women in public life, among many other sins, all offered with an unapologetic, feral glint, you would have been viewed as crazy. Yet here we are.

But first, of the book. The author of Bronze Age Mindset writes under the pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert. Usually he is referred to as BAP, not so much for simplicity but because endless recitation of the word “pervert” makes most people, including me, wince because it’s tasteless.

No doubt that is the author’s intention in picking the moniker; barbed jokes of this sort characterize much of his writing. His actual name, and everything about him, is a mystery, though he affects Slavic tics in his writing, and a Russian voice narrates a podcast BAP has recently launched, called for no apparent reason “Caribbean Rhythms,” to the six episodes of which I have also listened.

Some people are very focused on who BAP is. I don’t care who BAP is, though I suspect there is some chance, say thirty percent, he is Anton himself. What most of all characterizes BAP, and suggests he is either a fierce auto-didact or someone with an academic background, is constant references to history.

The majority of his historical references are to Ancient Greece. Machiavelli also shows up several times. He refers to other interesting writings, such as Steven Runciman’s truly obscure The White Rajahs. It surprises me that he has not been doxxed; either he is very, very good at covering his tracks, or he has not gotten enough prominence. If and when he is revealed, the results may be very interesting—or completely uninteresting.

Either way, the book rewards close attention, since what BAP says is not always precisely what he means, and this is deliberate. The very first sentences of the book exemplify this. “This is not a book of philosophy. It is exhortation.” But that is a false dichotomy; such head fakes are common in this book.

Bronze Age Mindset is both, and it contains quite a bit of distilled philosophy. Or, rather, applied philosophy. It is meant to be an exposition of “the thought that motivates me and the problem faced by life in ascent and decline.” The philosopher most admired by BAP is Friedrich Nietzsche, although many other philosophers, mainly Greek, ranging from Heraclitus to Empedocles, make appearances, and Schopenhauer is also often featured.

I have no idea if any of what BAP says actually comports with Nietzsche, or Schopenhauer, for that matter, about whom I know nearly nothing, but that is not the point—broadly speaking, BAP’s philosophy is Nietzschean, if by that is meant a post-Christian view focused on hierarchy and power.

The basic points of the book can be boiled down. First, the few matter more than the many. The vast majority of humanity, today and since the dawn of civilization, has led lives of useless distress, under forms of slavery. But in all times and places, some men will not live under slavery. They are who matter. Second, all higher life inherently seeks space and dominance.

Not just territorial space, even more “space to develop inborn powers.” Offering examples from the animal kingdom, BAP says “All of this is higher organism organizing itself to master matter in surrounding space. Successful mastery of this matter leads to development of inborn powers and flourishing of organism. . . .”

What higher life wants is power and freedom, not mere survival and reproduction. This is the teleology of man. Human nature is real; very much is “in the blood,” inborn. Leftists foolishly pretend this is false. Fourth, the proper view on life is the “enchanted worldview.” This is not a reasonable, calm, hyper-rational worldview. It is more like “religious delirium,” and it is what characterizes all great men in their performance of great deeds, from warriors to artists to scientists.

The disenchanted worldview, in contrast, is “the tight-assed attitude of the science cultist and materialist.” It is worthless and no different than the outlook of slaves. And fifth, all these realities, and more, the “star of Nemesis,” have been concealed in our stupid modern world. But they will return, and soon, with fire and slaughter.

All this appears in the first of the four parts of the book. The rest of the book is an expansion and repetition. To give you a flavor, let’s take the second part, titled Parable of Iron Prison. The Iron Prison is the modern world, a place of “brokenness” and “denatured life.” Carl Schmitt is quoted, “They’ve put us out to pasture.” But, in a twist from most complaints about modernity, the modern world’s prison is “the return of a very ancient subjection and brokenness under new branding, promoted by new concepts and justifications.”

BAP does not spend time on listing the defects of modernity, though he frequently swipes at them when discussing other matters; instead, he direct us to Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra, and, interestingly, Michel Houellebecq, who has been getting a lot of play on the Right lately, though I have not read his writings myself. Then BAP offers a long series of discursive thoughts, such as pointing out that most cities, that is, most civilizations, throughout history accomplished nothing, but were rather “steaming ratpiles,” analogous to slums and shantytowns, and that small, orderly, well-run cities and city states are the exception.

Villages and other primitive life are no better; they tend to exalt the rule of women and weaklings. Then we get talk of Gnostic sects and the Demiurge. We go pretty far down the rabbit hole, with a near-endorsement of the Phantom Time Hypothesis and references to “far more advanced civilizations . . . buried beneath the ice” and to reincarnation. Wilhelm Reich and his “orgone” technology get a favorable mention, and we are told “Trump’s family knows the secrets of Tesla” (presumably not the car company).

The core point here, though, buried among apparent rambling, is that a good society must be one that “allows the ascent of life”—that is, human flourishing though mastering inborn powers. Very few societies do; that modern societies don’t is not news, but it is still a problem.

Well, sounds like a dreadful situation. What to do? In the last two parts of the book, BAP adds flesh to the way things should be. It would be hard to imagine a paradigm more unpalatable to the modern Left—but one which, crucially, avoids the bugbear-in-chief of the modern Left, racism. The chapter begins, “Life appears at its peak not in the grass hut village ruled by nutso mammies, but in the military state.

In Archaic Greece, in Renaissance Italy and in the vast expanse of the heroic Old Stone Age, at the middle of the Bronze Age of high chariotry, lived men of power and magnificence in great numbers. We are in every way their inferiors.”

Noting that the inscription Aeschylus put on his grave was that he had fought at Marathon, not that he was Athens’s most famous playwright, he notes “You know about their great art, science, and literature, or think you do. But these were men of conquest, exploration and adventure first. . . . You may not be able to emulate them in every way, because the age we live in is one of total repression, [but] you can still take some inspiration from their examples, and try to live the same in some way . . . try to live according to a Bronze Age Mindset.” In what does that consist? Vitality, and “the great aim, physical and military independence. Only the warrior is a free man.”

The ideal man is one free from the need to work who trains as a warrior. Leisure as rest is worthless. Politically, such men should rule. The men of power, that is, the free men, in ancient Greece were not racially bound, but bound to their city, culture, and language.

They “would never have submitted to abstractions like ‘human rights,’ or ‘equality,’ or ‘the people’ as some kind of amorphous entity encompassing the inhabitants of the territory or city in general. . . . [N]o real man would ever accept the legitimacy of such an entity, which for all practical purposes means you must, for entirely imaginary reasons, defer to the opinion of slaves, aliens, fat childless women, and others who have no share in the actual physical power.”

For a modern example, BAP cites Alfredo Stroessner, “dictator of Paraguay for forty years.” “The entire day he worked relentlessly for his country and to keep down the vicious and Satanic communist sect that would have massacred his people—but he also did this for his own glory!”

Then, in one of the funniest, but also most insightful, passages of the book, he imagines, or re-imagines, Mitt Romney as Alcibiades. It is unimaginable; that is BAP’s point. Instead, we have loss of vitality, spiritual exhaustion, and living in a state of fear. Therefore, any move toward the Bronze Age Mindset is magnetic. “[A] man like Trump, who seems not to care, and to find joy in this flouting and energy in this outrageous loosening—he seduces.”

The solution is not something new, a “futuristic flourishing that is not yet here.” (BAP is unlikely to be a fan of Archeofuturism and the Nouvelle Droit.) Instead, it is something old, the Bronze Age Mindset. “I want to give encouragement to some who are a certain way, in their blood, and to encourage them to become the purifying hand of nature.”

The bedrock mechanism of accomplishing this is male friendships. “[E]very great thing in the past was done through strong friendships between two men, or brotherhoods of men, and this includes all great political things, all acts of political freedom and power.” Modernity rejects this, consensus and inclusivity (not a word BAP uses, but apt) are demanded because the characteristics of male friendships, and what results, “make women and weaklings uncomfortable.”

These friendships are not homosexual; BAP rejects even that the “Sacred Band” of Thebes was homosexual and claims that the obsessive search for historical homosexuality is a “misunderstanding and exaggeration promoted by the homonerds of our time,” pointing out, for example, that there is zero suggestion in Homer that Achilles and Patroclus were homosexuals, yet they had the type of bond BAP admires. (BAP is at least partially wrong here as a historical matter; the Greeks did to some degree engage in homosexual practices as bonding, though they were not “gay” relationships in the modern sense in any way).

The goal is to become a superman, like Periander of Corinth, subject to nobody, and accomplishing great things for their own sake. Morals have nothing to do with it; such a man is above morals. BAP even admires men like Nero as described by Suetonius, and Agathocles as described by Machiavelli.

Then BAP switches gears, to more modern times, with a long profile of “the most glamorous Christian prince for me,” Conradin, grandson of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, the “Stupor Mundi.” Conradin is quite obscure; he was executed in 1268 at age sixteen after fighting, leading, and losing in the complex Italian wars of the time, but who briefly held the titles King of Sicily and King of Jerusalem.

For BAP, Conradin, shooting star, was “the renewed avatar of Apollo in Europe, recalling very old memories.” Next we get a strong endorsement of men I also endorse strongly, crusaders and conquistadors, Cortes to Drake to Magellan and more, all men with a Bronze Age Mindset. Pedro de Alvarado, lieutenant of Cortes, who slaughtered the Aztec nobles while Cortes was away from Tenochtitlan, gets the most praise.

He was who he was, and made no excuses. “Alvarado was a nemesis to civilization, and this is right and good. God sends such men to chastise mankind. I want you to be like this: to listen to these instincts in you. . . . Alvarado is the avatar of our new age, and I predict this: within fifty years a hundred Alvarados will bloom from deep in the tropical bestiary of the spirit. They will sweep away the weakness of this world.” “So far we have only had Gracchi . . . but Caesars and Napoleons are sure to follow. A man of great charisma who can seduce the people with a wild spirit and break through the rule of the pervasive bureaucracy-media complex is our best hope for the immediate problem . . . and maybe our only hope.”

The Bronze Age Mindset is explicitly not racist. “There are far more races than people want to admit.” Men of any type can adopt the Bronze Age Mindset. BAP’s focus is culture.

The Greeks looked down on the slave cultures of the Orient, but admired, to some degree, the barbarians, whether European or Scythian—BAP adroitly points out this attitude among the Greeks lasted very long, up to Anna Comnena and the Alexiad. “In spirit I would say even now the European has much more in common with the African than with the ‘Asian’ [who has a slave mentality] . . . I know many dorks who fetishize IQ above all will disagree with this.”

Anybody can have the right culture, but very, very few do have. Not just the Greeks or Europeans, though; the Comanche and the Polynesians also get a nod. Plenty of groups, races among them, come in for various abuse, offensive to modern tender sensibilities, but it’s not racism, just some combination of realism and jerkiness.

It’s all very pagan, of course, in that way common to post-liberal post-Christians. The book’s epigraph is “VICTORY TO THE GODS!” No surprise, BAP has an uncertain and tenuous relationship with Christianity. Mostly he ignores it, but he admits that many of his ideal men were very Christian. Of them, he says “The Church was embarrassed by them . . . by their cruelty and their pagan love of vitality and action, so tried to disavow them while making use of their strengths.”

That’s not really true, as a historical matter. In those days, the Church did not try to disavow them, although the most dreadful crimes against the Indians were debated, due to men such as the monk Bartolomé de las Casas. In the modern world, though, Christians aren’t BAP’s target; quite the contrary. “Offending Christians in political movements is stupid, when they’re one of the last bastions against a common enemy. If their beliefs are corrupted, they can be reformed.”

He means real Christians, of course, not leftists with a Christian veneer. The torrent of contempt he would direct at, say, the odious lesbians and feminine men who run the Presbyterian Church USA would, I am sure, be impressive to behold.

BAP doesn’t spend that much time attacking the Left; they are self-defeating bugmen, after all, even if they for now hold the levers of power. Under the right pressure, they will crumble, just as the settled peoples of the Middle East crumbled under the Sea Peoples.

He spends more time attacking today’s conservatives. “The old, exhausted conservatism; place you see like National Review, third-rate publications like that, which isn’t real conservatism. We are real conservative; we pay attention to how life is actually lived.” I couldn’t have put it better myself. In one of his podcasts, for example, BAP notes that when the Supreme Court imposed “catamite marriage,” so-called conservatives “took it like a catamite.” True enough.

Certainly, though, if you are a woman, and even more if you are a woman raised on modern so-called feminist pieties, this book will make your head explode. Even I, who think that a return to many aspects of traditional sex roles (which were not at all the fictional oppression we are told they were) is both desirable and necessary, and will be a pillar of Foundationalism, think BAP takes this too far.

But then, he takes everything too far. It is not that BAP says women are inferior, though the Bronze Age Mindset as he outlines it is surely not available to women, being male in its nature. In fact, the feminine mindset is corrosive of the Bronze Age Mindset.

The key for a good society is recognizing that women are not men; they “live in and for the genius of the species.” Or they should. Instead, “Modern women have given up this great advantage, so they can become neurotic copies of gay desk-workers. They’ve abandoned the great power endowed in their blood.” BAP attacks the idea that women should be “free” in the modern sense. “Liberation of women means freedom and power for financiers, lawyers, purveyors of comforts in and outside government, employers who whore out your wives and daughters.”

Not that women should be confined to the home, or lose the vote—in fact, women are most likely to vote for the man to come who exemplifies the Bronze Age Mindset.

If women hadn’t lost respect for men, the idea of “liberation” would have seemed pointless and laughable; feminism is therefore merely an epiphenomenon of societal decay. “This is why it’s so ridiculous to hear these ‘conservatives’ yap on about honor, or glory, or sacrifice, or any of this garbage. The respect in all institutions and all leadership classes and all traditional authority has already been lost long ago, and for good reason. Feminism then is the revolt of women against the outrage of democracy. They have been in revolt against the inability of the bugman to command authority or respect.”

In other words, women are viscerally attracted to power. Which is true, of course. But BAP sees this as a one-way street. He rejects the “game” or pickup culture attractive to many young men on the chaotic Right (though he correctly sees that is a gate to realizing that the “lords of lies,” our rulers, are lying about much more than the truth about men and women, something I had not appreciated until now).

But he does not see society as a partnership between men and women; whatever precisely he says, he views women as inferior and subordinate in the Bronze Age Mindset. He offers no chivalry (a system with mutual obligations) but does offer lots of negative talk about “viragos” “getting their hooks in you,” and so forth. I suppose he is technically complaining about women in the decayed modern system, but it’s not clear what role BAP does want women to play in a well-run society, and there are zero positive depictions of women, except in the abstract as young and hot.

Certainly, women as warriors or battle leaders is laughable, but women upon occasion in the councils of power, and constantly of great influence behind the scenes, is the historical reality, and recognizing that in the structures of a renewed society is critical.

This failure to appreciate the role of women beyond a narrow one strikes me as a huge hole, to the extent any of BAP’s writing is meant as a serious political program. True, straight men are the most oppressed group in America today, so preaching a gospel of liberation only to them makes a certain amount of sense. (Actually, it is not quite right they are the most oppressed group.

They are the group on which our ruling classes focus the majority of their hatred and attacks. But there is a strong countervailing element of the Lilliputians tying down Gulliver, so the attempted oppression is not wholly successful. It is most definitely perceived and felt by its targets, however, which is what matters for these purposes.) Nonetheless, offering a joint program to men and women is crucial.

The lords of lies tell falsehoods to both, after all. Of course, any program can and should recognize that men and women are different, but to, in essence, treat women as close to non-entities, or, worse, instrumentally, as rewards for male exercise of power and risk, is going to be fatal to any program, not because women will always be seduced by the lies of so-called feminism, but because they are not stupid or lacking self-interest.

Offering something that recognizes that men and women are partners, who are looking for joint gain and who accomplish that best in coordination, is the only path to a successful program.

That assumes what BAP offers is meant as an actual program. This is not a safe assumption. Certainly, much else of this is terrible as a political program. Most of all, a state run by Pedro de Alvarados would be awful, and collapse swiftly.

The key is to recognize the distinction between such men, “pirates” as BAP calls them admiringly, and his other avatars, mentioned only in passing, Caesar, Augustus, and Napoleon. Such men certainly had a compartment within themselves that held the Bronze Age Mindset, but it was one among many. BAP does not note that Caesar, captured by pirates in his youth, when ransomed hunted down the pirates who kidnapped him and executed them, just as he had told them he would when he was under their power.

Order and justice are as crucial to a society as is the development that comes from struggling to develop inborn powers. Perhaps this is the way to reconcile the Bronze Age Mindset and Christianity—through the vehicle of a specific man, say some combination of Augustus and Robert Gould Shaw, reborn.

So if not a program, what is this? It is a call to action, a call to shake off lethargy, packaged in a way to attract modern youth. As a charge laid against the foundations of modern society, it is well designed. As a political program, not so much. But that doesn’t matter to its author’s goals, I suspect.

Whatever the outlines of the future, BAP says, it needs to be, and will be, a lot different from the present. Hastening toward it is a good idea, though, and to get the right type of culture when the moment arrives, those who grasp the truth must prepare. BAP explicitly wants his disciples, or his exhortees, to prepare for the advent of the Man of Destiny.

He advocates allying, in essence under cover, with normal people on the Right. Don’t do “dork” things, he says, like be a white supremacist. Changes are likely to move fast, when they move, due to modern technology, and they will move to military government, most likely. True, the modern American military is filled with weaklings, homosexuals and women, which may delay change.

Therefore, BAP encourages his devotees to join the military, to learn, and to participate when the time comes. They should form brotherhoods, of a non-political nature, welcoming men of any race or creed (women must be excluded, and have their own groups). And one day, soon, their time will come.

Self-improvement is absolutely critical for BAP. He is in some ways like Jordan Peterson, if Peterson wolfed methamphetamine and mescaline. Maximizing personal beauty is very important. “Only physical beauty is the foundation for a true higher culture of the mind and spirit.” He wants everyone to get “sun and steel,” that is, to get actual sunlight and lift weights. (Although BAP does not mention it, his catchphrase “Sun and Steel” is taken from the title of a writing by Japanese ultra-nationalist Yukio Mishima, who recommended a similar program and whom BAP does mention in passing) .

This focus, combined with BAP’s frequent posting of pictures of male bodybuilders on Twitter, has led to many suggestions that BAP is homoerotic and over-focused on homosexuality. I think that’s exaggerated, but it is a little jarring.

There is, in fact, a group that, from what I know of them, attempts to live out the Bronze Age Mindset, though they arose before this book: the Proud Boys. Started a few years back by professional provocateur Gavin McInnes, they seem to embody much of what BAP recommends: close male friendships; open to all races (in theory, at least); in favor of strength and discipline; lots of inside jokes and pranks.

Of course, they were instantly crushed by the combined might of the Lords of Tech and what BAP calls the “bugmen” who rule us today. The opposite of the Proud Boys is either weak, feminine men (the masculine pseudo-ideal now exalted by the media and woke capital), or shiftless men, stupefied by video games and drugs, and often addicted to pornography (BAP’s theory is that modern hyper-sexualization, presumably including pornography, is a sign of weakness, a sign of life in “owned space”).

The lesson of the Proud Boys, whom BAP does not discuss, is that any organized group that embraces any Right principle that shows any signs of becoming a threat (as opposed to existing conservatives, who pose no threat at all) will be viciously attacked. One possible response is the turtle strategy, which BAP seems to partially endorse—not to stick your head out too far, while worming your way into the structures of power.

That seems unlikely to add recruits, though. Probably the only way such a group can be formed and grow rapidly is in times that are already actively chaotic, when confusion reigns and a focused attack response cannot be generated by the powers that rule.

Now let’s turn to the reaction of the Right to BAP. As I say, it is truly radical that Anton wrote a review of Bronze Age Mindset. Adrian Vermeule, who is not a National Review conservative and pushes the radical program of integralism, was equally incensed, so broad swathes of the Right see BAP as a threat, not just the National Review betas.

But I predicted five months ago that Anton had, without admitting it, moved on from being a Straussian, advocating a return to the principles of the Founding Fathers, to being an Augustan, a man who wants to break the system and reform it, someone focused on the uses and ends of power. His review, though not formal endorsement, of BAP suggests I was right. Also suggestive is that Anton begins his article by noting that Curtis Yarvin, at “a small dinner at my home,” introduced Anton to Bronze Age Mindset, gifting him a copy.

Within the article, he says he stuck with reading, despite initial disinterest, because Darren Beattie told him to. Yarvin is radioactive to the polite, catamite Right; Beattie, though less well-known, is too (whether justifiably or not, I can’t say). One likely possibility, it seems to me, is that Anton seems himself as the potential leader of a new thing, and is floating trial balloons to see what might work.

So, for example, don’t be surprised if another fraternal organization crops up, at a more opportune, fragile time, with Anton in a prominent role. Or perhaps the Proud Boys will resurge, and Anton will join. Stranger things have happened. In any case, what Anton is obviously doing is pushing the envelope, creating a more capacious space for growth of new things on the Right.

Despite the attention on the Right, however, this is all a very niche movement, so far. For example, the first episode on YouTube of BAP’s podcast, published two months ago, has accumulated less than 10,000 views. Joe Rogan, by contrast, regularly accrues millions of views for each of much more frequent podcasts. Anton concludes his review by claiming that “In the spiritual war for the hearts and minds of the disaffected youth on the right, conservatism is losing. BAPism is winning.”

Well, maybe, but if so, it’s a very small group we’re talking about. That could change, but Donald Trump has sixty million followers on Twitter; BAP, twenty-five thousand. As it is said, though, from little acorns giant oaks come. They just need the right soil and nourishment, and if BAP is right, those are coming, and soon.

Finally, what is most attractive of all about BAP and his Bronze Age Mindset, aside from his frequent laugh-out-loud humor, is that he’s very, and surprisingly, optimistic. He’s always dropping phrases like “But I think there must be someone as colorful as Alcibiades among you.”

The Bronze Age Mindset is not a dour one, focused on tax rates and grasping at modest government viewpoint neutrality. This flows from BAP’s recognition that the strongest weapon the Right has against the Left is the simple fact that reality cannot be denied forever, and that we are therefore destined to win—or, at least, they are destined to lose.

I’m not sure that’s reason for optimism, but only from positive energy can great new things be built, and positive energy is, no doubt, something that BAP offers by the bushel.

Charles is a business owner and operator, in manufacturing, and a recovering big firm M&A lawyer. He runs the blog, The Worthy House.

The photo shows a Scythian gold comb with the image of a battle scene, from the Solokha kurgan, 430-390 BC.

Climate Change And Truth

The following is a brief non-scientific response to a climate change article that appeared recently in a Christian topical magazine in Northern Ireland. This article remains unpublished by the editor of the magazine. Sadly, different views on climate change other than the media’s secular left are rarely represented.

In the book of Genesis after God created man and woman in his own image, he gave them certain instructions namely; ‘be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it’. ‘The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.’

There are numerous other passages in scripture concerning the environment, including flora and fauna and man’s relationship with them. Interestingly there are no specific passages relating to what we would understand now as ‘climate change’. You might say, then it’s ok to pollute and destroy the world God has made? No, it’s not. We are still to take ‘care’ of His creation. It is a specific instruction from God, for us to carry out.

Sir David Attenborough recently presented a programme on BBC 1 about the looming disaster of ‘climate change’. He begins, ‘right now we are facing the greatest threat in thousands of years. Scientists across the globe are in no doubt that at the current rate of warming we risk a devasting future.’

Throughout the programme Sir David and other like-minded scientists portrayed a doomsday scenario repeatedly stating that this was a ‘man made’ disaster of global proportions due to mankind’s involvement in the increase of carbon emissions. He further says; ‘the scientific evidence is, that if we do not take action, we face the collapse of our societies’.

His case is built on scientific research and his words designed to provoke mass hysteria.But are we to believe everything that Sir David and many climate scientists say is true? And more importantly where does God fit into all this?

Sir David over many decades has brought into our living rooms the beauty and wonder of nature, and more recently the horrendous pollution of the oceans and its devastating effects on marine life. We thank him for his commitment and enlightening our minds to the beautiful yet fragile world of nature.

However, there are gaping holes in his analysis. . Sir David as a passionate evolutionist has no time whatsoever for theism. He and many of the IPCC scientists who back up his analysis have the same outlook. In other words, they have ‘exchanged the truth of God for a lie.’ Humans contribute to, but do not cause climate change.

It is God himself who controls the climate. A cursory read from Job chapter 36 will confirm this. ‘He draws up the drops of water’ v 27. God is responsible for water vapour, and clouds, not mankind. Psalm 24 states, ‘the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.’ The climate is his. He is responsible for it. ‘Seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.’ Do Christians really believe this?

Radical environmentalism promotes its own world view and its own version of the origin and meaning of life. It goes without saying that these man-made doctrines are in total conflict to what the bible says and teaches.
The bible begins with God as creator and sustainer; not man. . The IPCC are a large body of like-minded scientists. . But who pays their salaries? And who pays for their research?

Billions of pounds, dollars, and euros, are poured into this field of ‘climate change’ to ensure the correct political answers. Wind farms and solar panels are morally a good idea but extremely limited. But what’s in it for these companies who are financed by government subsidies? I assume they get richer. Do we see evidence for the re distribution of their wealth? That’s another debate.

The key word for much of the ‘evidence’ that is presented is; predicted. Predictions as we all know are seldom accurate. Predictions and facts are two very different things. There is climate change because there has always been and always will be climate change.

The overall climate has increased by roughly .8 degrees c which when globally measured is relatively insignificant. The climate change facts and graphs we are presented with are ‘predicted’ by feeding readings and assessments into computing systems for the desired analysis. Which in turn become ‘facts’. But are they the truth? Over stating possible outcomes has become the norm.

What is the chemical makeup of the earth’s atmosphere? Wikipedia states; 78.09 nitrogen, 20.75 oxygen, 0.93 argon, 0.04 carbon dioxide. Are we to believe that 0.19 of carbon dioxide will reach epidemic proportions threatening the existence of human life? On NASA website we can see clearly that the earth is getting greener because of the slight increase of carbon, which has increased food production. Plant life and the biosphere need carbon to grow and develop as well as the human body.

Environmentalism used to be a non-political, unbiased campaign to help guide humanity to look after the environment and take care of it. Today it is anything but. It has become the new religion of the age. It and other aligned groupings policed by the media are not allowed to voice a contrary opinion. Concerning climate change the BBC inform us, ‘the matter is now closed, scientific evidence is conclusive.’

I note that Creationist theology is rarely if ever mentioned in any climate change debate. One can only assume that’s because it is not relevant. It has no kudos. It is cool and trendy to worship creation rather than the creator. Current secular thinking believes scientific enlightenment will sort the earth’s climatic problems out with God incapable of such a task.

Climate change is not an exact science and if man believes that he has it sourced through his elite so called superior knowledge; humanity is in deep trouble.

Another error climate scientists make is to compare like with like. In the world of climate change no two areas of land mass are the same. No two oceans or seas are the same. No two forests are the same. No two mountain ranges are the same. Yet the Arctic and the Antarctic are somehow equally compared. They are not the same. How they remain cold and freezing differ dramatically mainly due to deep sea currents. Sea ice in the Artic has decreased but in the Antarctic it has increased. More enlightened minds than mine can explain this.

NASA observes the recent warming on Mars, Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto. The warming of these planets is proportional to warming on Earth. Yet these planets have no jumbo jets or SUV’s.

Might it have something to do with the Sun getting warmer rather than increased man-made carbon dioxide? The sun and the moon according to the bible control the seasons and the climate. They were placed there for that reason.

Climate change is a mystery and will remain so. The El Nino and La Nina ocean changes are only recently discovered phenomenon which we know little or nothing about, yet are essential. . It is not for us to ‘give orders to the morning or shown the dawn its place’. When we do this, it highlights the sheer arrogance and foolishness of the over privileged who seek to tell the rest of us what we must do, and not do. And how we are to live our lives according to a vociferous political agenda. Paul writing to the Corinthian Church encountered similar elitism; ‘But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.’ 1 Cor 1: 27ff.

We should all strive to be environmentalists in our own way. We are not to sit on our hands bemoaning the many problems the world faces. Let’s help creation in a biblical way remembering that God still sustains the heavens and the earth. One wonders what ever happened to the campaign to stop the destruction of the rain forests back in the eighties? Or the gigantic hole in the ozone layer.

The tropical rain forests can absorb roughly a third of global carbon emissions. More projects should be encouraged and financed by the UN and the World Bank like the Great Green Wall that is transforming much of Sub-Sahara Africa and countering the effects of climate change, migration and desertification. God placed the tropical rain forests there for a reason, to act as a giant atmospheric filter. Sadly, we have all contributed in some way to its destruction.

As for me in my limited capacity I hope to plant a native woodland, to try and restore the imbalance. The scientific elite and academia can get on with manufacturing their own political agenda.

In closing I read that in the recent Science journal after much soul-searching a leading scientist in the editorial simply concludes; ‘plant more trees’. A very good idea. In short, the Climate Change hysteria is totally unfounded, and without any biblical foundation.

Rev Alan Wilson is a recently retired Presbyterian Minister in Northern Ireland. He was a former Police Officer during the ‘troubles’ before going into the ministry. He is married to Ann and they are now proud grandparents of Jacob and Cora. He enjoys keeping Alpaccas, gardening, watching football and learning how theology relates to the environment and the world at large. He and his wife spent a summer Exchange in 2018 with a Presbyterian Church in Toronto.

The photo shows, “View from Mount Holyoke,” by Thomas Nash, painted in 1836.

Having And Wanting More

Addictions are strange things. I have a friend who says that the problem with alcohol is that there “simply isn’t enough.” Non-addicts frequently misunderstand. I once heard someone say to an addict, “When you decided to go down that road…” There is very little decision within an addiction. The disease of addiction itself does the choosing. The person involved often watches helplessly as they go through the motions of yet another round, watching everything head in a direction over which they feel powerless.

First the man takes a drink.
Then the drink takes a drink.
Then the drink takes the man.

This is easily described in terms of alcohol and drugs. However, I believe we are a culture of addicts. Those on drugs and alcohol are simply lucky enough to be able to see their addiction more clearly.

Within the list of sins that come up in the Scriptures, “drunkenness” has its honorable mentions. However, there is a deeper addiction, far more pervasive, that plays a greater role, both in Scripture and in our own lives: greed. This little English word seems rather quaint. It sounds like something that belongs in a Dickens novel. Indeed, it is so removed from our working moral vocabulary that it can be proclaimed (without blushing), “Greed is good.” Greek has a much richer term: pleonexia. It means “the desire to have more.” And that definition suggests a much larger and pervasive problem indeed.

“To have more” lies at the heart of modern civilization. Wealth and prosperity at ever-increasing levels are held as promises to be desired. We often measure our economies by growth rather than any measure of well-being. Greed for us means nothing more than wanting too much. We fail, however, to challenge the wanting itself.

I am not concerned with economic theory here, except in the relations that can be called the “spirituality” of the culture. If there is a spirituality of consumerism, it is best described as pleonexia, greed. It is what drives consumers. It is sadly true that if greed were to cease tomorrow, the world as we know it would collapse. We have no inherent control on greed other than the limits of our credit cards.

If our desire to have more is to be maintained at its required level, we ourselves are required to believe in it and to agree to participate in it. And here our addiction comes to the fore. We not only desire to have more, we often find ourselves powerless to desire less. “Buyer’s remorse” is not a fiction – it is the consumer’s version of a hangover.

If the desire to have more were limited to material goods, it would, perhaps, be but a bothersome thing. However, the disease of pleonexia is spiritual and infects the whole of our lives. Pleonexia is not a disease that can be isolated to a single area of our lives. We want more of everything: more things, more sex, more food, more entertainment, ad infinitum.

In the Kingdom of God, self-emptying is the principle of true existence (cf. Phil 2:5-11). And so we find ourselves enthralled by a spiritual principle of the deepest irony: we crave more which draws us further and further away from our very being. The more we gain, the less we exist.

“What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?” This saying of Christ is daily being fulfilled in the course of our lives. It is worth noting that the great writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn rediscovered his faith when he was in the Gulag prison system of the Soviet Union. Strangely, the emptiness of that bleak existence became a treasure for him. When he was first released into external exile, he managed to find a small shack in which to live. He had no money to furnish it. He found a couple of boxes to serve for a bed. When his circumstances later improved and he gained an apartment, he took the boxes with him for his bed. He feared the road of pleonexia and treasured the spiritual freedom he had found in poverty.

The Orthodox way of life purposefully asks us to renounce the spirit of Mammon. We fast, we practice generosity – and we do so as a way of life. We were not created for acquisition. Our life is found in the Cross. The Cross is both the place Christ accomplished our salvation, as well as the way of salvation itself. It is the wisdom as well as the power of God. The wisdom of the Cross is the self-emptying of Christ. This self-emptying is not anti-life, but the actual mode of true-existence. “Whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.” (Mat 16:25)

There are many who concern themselves greatly about how a nation’s economy works (just post an economic thought on Facebook and watch the traffic). Most of our thoughts are generated by the same consumer/political/information conglomerates who press us towards consumption in the first place. For the time being, Christians should satisfy themselves that their own renunciation of consumerism will not bring the entire economy to a halt. But if we refuse to turn away from the manifold forms of pleonexia, then the whole of our soul will be in danger.

Thinking about the spirituality of pleonexia, we do well to examine the whole of our lives. Our desire to have more drives others away from us, or places them in the position of begrudging competitors. They interfere with my time, my plans, my interests, my pleasure, etc.

For Christ’s sake, lose your life. Why should you keep trying to gain the world?

Father Stephen Freeman is a priest of the Orthodox Church in America, serving as Rector of St. Anne Orthodox Church in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He is also author of Everywhere Present and the Glory to God podcast series.

The photo shows, “Girl With a Basket in a Garden” by Daniel Ridgway Knight.

On Images And Culture

Begging my readers’ patience, I will take a small anthropology tour through our culture. What I want to draw our attention to is the place of the image. We are not only fascinated with looking at images, we place them on our bodies as well: t-shirts, tattoos, hats, shoes, pants – in short, everywhere.

There is nothing unusual in this. Were we to examine primitive tribes, we would notice a vast assemblage of image-markings. People cover themselves with colorful muds, distort certain parts of their bodies, do amazing things with hair, dress themselves in utterly impractical costumes. Something is at work in the human soul that is demonstrated in all of these behaviors. My suggestion is that it is an effort to live “according to the image.”

Clothing is mentioned with an essential role in the Genesis account of human beginnings. Our sin plunges us into shame. We are “naked” and seek to “hide.” The theological unpacking of this reality is deeply important in Scripture, particularly in the New Testament. But it also reflects a simple human experience. The naked truth of ourselves is generally experienced in a shameful manner. That is to say that we feel exposed, vulnerable and in danger when various aspects of that truth are seen by others. And so, we cover up.

God provided Adam and Eve “garments of skin” in Genesis 3. Those garments have been deeply elaborated on ever since. Perhaps the deepest commentary on this is found in St. Paul: “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” (Gal. 3:27)

This would probably be more accurately rendered, “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ as a garment.” The word “put on” (ἐνεδύσασθε) specifically refers to “putting on” a garment. This “putting on” is the true and spiritual fulfillment of which all efforts to clothe ourselves are a mere reflection, and often one of deep distortion.

I take us back to my first observation: we universally seek to cover or mark ourselves with something. Our appearance is a canvas which we cannot help but disguise. And, following Genesis, we can observe that we desperately want to cover or mark ourselves in order to disguise our shame – in one form or another.

It can be argued that we wear clothes because it is too sunny or cold. But our clothing long ago transcended the practical need of hairless animals. Our clothing, like most of our lives, reflects psychological and spiritual issues more than anything. The state of our soul is often on display for anyone who understands the nature of the great human cover-up.

A frequent element of our covering is the projection of power. We use various symbols and clues as signals. Identifying ourselves with a team proclaims the power of a tribe: we are not alone. Much of our political signals are aggressive in nature, not surprising in a culture in which almost all citizens feel largely powerless. Our coverings can signal beauty, strength, anger, sexual desire, any number of things in the cultural dance surrounding inner shame.

The modern fashion of tattooing (more prominent in America than Europe) is a deeper form of covering, at least in its permanence. It strikes me as interesting that such a permanent form of covering should become popular in a culture permeated by impermanence. In my part of the world, it seems less and less common to encounter people who have no tattoos.

Please understand that I am not saying that our clothing and markings are themselves shameful. They are quite the opposite. They represent protective coverings that protect us from the shame we feel and the shaming we encounter in social settings. Our inner shame surrounds our sense of identity. Shame is about “who I am.” Our coverings represent an effort to publicly proclaim, “This is who I am,” regardless of what might be the case inwardly. As such, our coverings are an attempt to say, “This is who I want you to think I am.” Many times these same created coverings are used to hide our inner shame from ourselves. The modern selfie is a fascination with the image, an effort to proclaim an existence and identity in a world where social media has become a substitute ontology: “I’m online, therefore I exist…. And they like me!”

All of this feels intensely personal as I think about it. As an Orthodox priest, I am costumed in almost every setting. In public, I wear a cassock. In Church, I am covered in vestments. But there, the covering is extremely intentional. As he vests, the priest prays: ” My soul shall rejoice in the Lord, for He has clothed me with the garment of salvation; He has covered me with the robe of gladness; as a bridegroom He has set a crown on me; and as a bride adorns herself with jewels, so has He adorned me…. Your Priests, O Lord, shall clothe themselves with righteousness, and Your saints shall shout with joy always, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.”

According to Eusebius, St. James, the Brother of the Lord, wore a linen garment like the High Priest when he served in the Church’s assembly. That ancient reality, still enacted in the Liturgy, is a visible “putting on of Christ.” It is Christ who is present and leads us in our offering to the Father. The robing of the priest covers the person of the priest himself (and his shame), in order to present the Lord of glory.

To wear a uniform or costume (I don’t know what else to call it) in public is always to disappear to a certain extent. My own parishioners, when they occasionally see me without the cassock (when I’m out for a walk, etc.), do not always recognize me – at least not at first glance. It reminds me that I am not “me” to them, but “their priest.” My late Archbishop used to forbid priests to wear things like bathing suits in front of their parishioners. If we wanted to swim, we needed to go somewhere else.

It is possible to lose yourself in such a covering. A priest can begin to mistake himself for the robe he wears. Indeed, I think some are drawn to the priesthood precisely because they want to lose themselves – and for the wrong reasons. We can clothe ourselves outwardly, but if the clothing only hides our shame and does not transform it, then it becomes part of the sickness in our lives that binds us to our shame.

Just as our first experience of shame was our “nakedness” (the emptiness of our existence in the presence of God), so our salvation is expressed in terms of being clothed: ” Put off your old nature which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new nature, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. Therefore, putting away falsehood, let every one speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another.” (Eph. 4:22-25)

The “new nature,” created “after the likeness of God,” is nothing other than the very righteousness of Christ, described as a garment. But this is more than a garment – it is a “nature,” meaning that it no longer represents a garment that hides us, but something that changes us, so that the inside (“nature”) matches the outside (“righteousness of Christ”). We can be seen exactly as we are – without shame.

It is noteworthy that St. Paul completes the admonition with the commandment to “speak the truth.” This is the opposite of what takes place in almost all of our various cultural versions of clothing. What you see of others is never “who they are,” but what they want you to see, an effort that is rarely successful.

However, our holy transformation (conformity to the image of Christ) begins in Baptism, and continues as we “speak the truth,” meaning as we “bear a little shame” in the truth of our confession and repentance and in our dealings with others. It is, admittedly, a most difficult thing. The greater our inward fear and the depth of our wounds, the harder it is to trust this work of salvation. By grace, it is possible.

Nearly six years ago I had a very graphic dream that involved my late Archbishop Dmitri. It was some few months after his death. The last words he spoke in the dream have stayed with me: “I believe that soon, we shall all have to stand naked before the judgment seat of Christ.” I did not know then how important those words would become for me. May God clothe us with the righteousness of Christ and conform us inwardly to His image.

Father Stephen Freeman is a priest of the Orthodox Church in America, serving as Rector of St. Anne Orthodox Church in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He is also author of Everywhere Present and the Glory to God podcast series.

The photo shows, “The Brioche,” by Edouard Manet, painted in 1870.

Debunking Some Science Myths

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I had never heard of Geraint Hughes before but upon opening this book for the first time, I know he understands the lies we are being fed and seeks to debunk them one by one.

The first myth Hughes debunks is the nonsense about how a greenhouse actually works. For most young people, like myself, we were taught in school that back radiation heats the greenhouse, that the glass of the greenhouse returns the sun’s heat to the ground thus increasing the temperature however. But this is an unscientific falsehood.

A greenhouse actually works due to convection.

A strong convection current within the greenhouse creates a cycle of warming and cooling. The sun heats the earth which causes the air close to the ground to heat up and rise, it is trapped by the glass where it cools and falls back to the earth where the cycle repeats. Knowing this is the lynchpin of the Greenhouse Gas Theory.

The ‘greenhouse’ analogy completely falls apart already just knowing this, but Hughes continues to pick apart every lie the Alarmists use. The mission of the book is achieved step by step exposing the shocking truth that mainstream science claims about the Greenhouse Gas Theory are pure junk science garbage.

Most books I’ve encountered that focus on climate science are daunting to read. They require an understanding of physics and thermodynamics in order to carefully follow what we are being told.

Within the first 25 pages of Black Dragon I gleaned more insight into these issues than I found in my five years of senior school studying GCSE Physics.

Hughes makes the task easier by completely breaking down the science and equations he is using so that anyone can understand them. He then explains the physical application of this science and how it in no way relates to the Greenhouse gas Theory – which he repeatedly disproves.

Since I am a college undergraduate currently studying Bioscience – Chemistry, Biology and Psychology, one thing Hughes debunks really fascinated me; Hughes beautifully exposes the ubiquitous Climate Change in a Bottle experiment. The ridiculous Bill Nye ‘the non-science guy’ video of this is found here.

My old science teacher actually used this experiment to ‘educate’ us about Climate Change, but it completely misses out some glaringly obvious things that would affect the results.

For example, the experiment completely neglects the fact that the density of both Air and Carbon Dioxide are different and the specific heat capacity of both these gases is different, which would affect the rate at which these gases absorb IR.

Now, is this deliberate deception or simply the product of incompetence and misunderstanding among ‘experts’?

For me, the whole Climate Change narrative seems to be a case of the more you look, the less you see. What I mean by this is the more you focus on what you are being told, it reveals itself as completely wrong. Cautious (skeptic) minds need to take a step back and view it objectively – then everything becomes a lot clearer.

The whole section on Venus was interesting to read. Those spouting alarmist nonsense would have us believe Venus’ high temperatures are caused by a runaway greenhouse effect. But Venus’ temperature is due to its natural structure and formation, however, the interesting thing about this section isn’t the debunking myth about Venus but what we learn about Venus itself.

Throughout the book Hughes makes insightful and interesting points with strong evidence to prove why the various (sometimes competing) theories on Greenhouse Gas are incorrect.

One of the key things that will stick with me is that difference between Oxy and CO2 gas planets, Oxy or oxygen gas planets and Carbon Dioxide gas planets have very different temperatures for one simple reason – how emissive the abundant gas is.

Oxygen is far less emissive than CO2, therefore Oxy planets have higher temperatures, because of this it is impossible for CO2 to be the cause of global warming and Climate Change. While this isn’t the most comprehensive book I have read on the subject (it is quite short, just 152 pages), it is one of the most informative.

I highly recommend reading Black Dragon: Breaking the Frizzle Frazzle of the Big Lie of Climate Change Science if you have an interest in the subject, or even if you are just curious about the climate ‘hype’ – it is aimed at non-experts, so anyone should ‘get it.’

Courtesy Principia Scientific International.

The photo shows, Tiger in a Tropical Storm, by Henri Rousseau, painted in 1891.

Count Friedrich von Schulenburg

In September 1939, Count Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg, a 63-year-old German diplomat serving as ambassador to the Soviet Union, couldn’t have been happier. Germany and the USSR had just signed a non-aggression treaty known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Schulenburg strongly believed that peace with Russia was crucial for Germany’s well-being.

“This is a diplomatic miracle… I hope that no circumstances will ruin the situation, which is just fine now. At least, we [the diplomats] fulfilled our task… I hope something good will come out of this!” he wrote emotionally to a friend after the pact was signed.

Unfortunately, nothing good was to come out of it in the end. On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany would violate the treaty, attacking the USSR with all its might, and all of Schulenburg’s efforts to prevent such an outcome were in vain. But why did such a man serve under Hitler in the first place

Schulenburg would likely have agreed with something Joseph Stalin’s said during World War II: “’Hitlers,’ they come and they go and the German nation will remain.” Schulenburg’s diplomatic service began in 1901, long before the Nazis came to power. A descendant of an old noble family, he worked as a diplomat his entire adult life with just one break to fight in World War I, for which he received an Iron Cross for bravery. Governments changed, but Schulenburg worked professionally with all of them.

He served as ambassador to Iran from 1922-1931 and then to Romania from 1931-1934, but the real challenge for him came when he was appointed to Moscow in 1934. While Schulenburg was no Russophile, he did share Otto von Bismark’s belief that in order to preserve its strength and abundance Germany must stay at peace with Russia.

“He attached a lot of importance to German-Soviet and German-Russian ties… For him, there was no alternative to the fruitful co-existence of those two great countries at peace,” Rüdiger von Fritsch, the German ambassador to Moscow, wrote in an article for Novaya Gazeta in 2014. However, since the Nazis were in charge of German foreign policy from 1933, maintaining good relations between Moscow and Berlin proved extremely difficult.

“No one else could represent Germany in the USSR in those hard times so sophisticatedly, with such caution and dignity, as Schulenburg,” noted Gustav Hilger, a German diplomat who worked in the Soviet embassy during the 1930s. Schulenburg did his best to reduce tension between the two countries in 1938-1939, as they were teetering on the brink of war.

In 1938, he reached an agreement with Maxim Litvinov (the Soviet foreign minister from 1930 – 1939) that the two countries would refrain from lambasting one other in the press. He also helped to prolong the trade treaty of 1938. But, as with any diplomat, Schulenburg couldn’t go beyond fulfilling orders from his government, and this is why he was so supportive of Germany and the USSR signing a non-aggression pact.

The thaw between the USSR and Nazi Germany was to be short-lived. In 1941, as new tensions emerged when Moscow rhetorically supported Yugoslavia following its invasion by Germany, new rumors of war filled the air. Schulenburg tried to address Hitler directly, writing him a note on how dangerous a Soviet-German war would be.

Hilger wrote the following in his memoirs: “On April 28, 1941, while on a work trip to Berlin, Schulenburg met Hitler in person. The ambassador saw his note lying on Hitler’s table, but he couldn’t tell if Hitler had read it. However, while saying goodbye, Hitler, pointed, unrelatedly to the previous conversation: ‘One more thing, Schulenburg. I am not going to go to war with Russia!’”

He lied. Schulenburg, though a de jure member of the Nazi Party, wasn’t a true Nazi and so Hitler didn’t trust him. As Joseph Goebbels, the German propaganda minister and Hitler’s close associate, would later write in his diary: “Our ambassador to Moscow had no idea Germany was going to attack… He insisted that the best policy would be making a friend and an ally out of Stalin… There is no doubt that not informing diplomats about our real intentions is the best policy possible.”

On June 22, 1941, Schulenburg came to the Kremlin to inform Vyacheslav Molotov, Litvinov’s successor as foreign minister, that war had begun – by this time, German troops had already stepped on Soviet soil without any declaration of war. The ambassador himself had just received the order from Berlin and felt absolutely crushed. While talking to Molotov, he “raised his hands towards the sky with an expression of powerlessness on his face,” Hilger remembered.

Schulenburg had to leave Moscow once the war broke out. He served in the foreign ministry in Berlin from 1941-1944, leading the Russia Committee, a formal post without any political influence. Not surprisingly, he was dissatisfied with Hitler and his policies.

This dissatisfaction led the old diplomat to join the ranks of the German anti-Nazi resistance. In 1944, by which time it was clear Germany was losing the war, several high-ranking officers and officials hatched a plot to assassinate Hitler. Schulenburg’s participation in the plot was minor, but he could have played an important role had it succeeded – several sources named him as possible foreign minister. The assassination attempt was not successful, however, and Schulenburg, like many other conspirators, was executed.

Although Schulenburg’s career was abruptly terminated, his wisdom and principles were praised in post-Nazi Germany. As Ambassador Fritsch writes, “If you visit Germany’s embassy in Moscow, you will meet Ambassador Schulenburg: His monument stands in the chancellery and his portrait hangs in the ambassador’s residence, next to the portrait of his great predecessor Otto von Bismark… Schulenburg’s personality and his principles serve witness: He deserves such a memory.”

Oleg Yegorov, writes for Russia Beyond.

First Fruits And Harvest

There are seven main Feasts God outlined for the Jewish people to commemorate in the Old Testament as listed in the book of Leviticus. They are; the feast of Passover, of Unleavened Bread, First fruits, Feast of Trumpets, Day of Atonement, Feast of Tabernacles, Feast of Pentecost.

These Jewish feasts are clearly related to Israel’s spring and Autumn harvests and the agricultural seasons. Why were they given to the Israelites in the first place you may ask? They were given to remind the Israelites each year of God’s protection and provision. And What we do for our Thanksgiving/Harvest time has been drawn from these ancient feasts. They are connected.

One of these Feasts is the Feast of Pentecost which simply means the Festival of Harvest. The books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy all make reference to it which was held 50 days after Passover. Passover being the event where God’s angel Past Over the homes of the Israelites in Egypt as they prepared themselves to journey to the promised land. 

Almost everything we eat today has been at least partially prepared by someone else. But in ancient Israel the cycle of sowing and reaping was absolutely central to the very existence of the Jewish people. The agricultural cycle was part of everyday life.

The Feast of Pentecost was an important marker in that cycle of harvest. It commemorated the ending of the barley harvest and the beginning of the wheat harvest in the land.  And as the ancient Israelites and ourselves celebrate Thanksgiving/Harvest with gratitude we do so with joy.

Deuteronomy tells us in ch 26; ‘bring the first fruits of the soil that you O lord, have given.  Place the basket before the Lord your God and bow down before him. You shall rejoice in all the good things the Lord your God has given to you and your household.’ It takes place irrespective of whether we have a bumper harvest or a poor harvest.

It may seem strange that God would have to command his people to be joyful. But which one of us does not get weighed down by the cares and troubles of this world. Or having a poor harvest. We often forget the things for which we ought to be grateful to God for. Gratitude and joy go hand in hand. So what God does is this; he comes to us in his word and through festivals like this and says, Stop.

Stop your preoccupation with the cares of this life.

Stop with all the worries that weigh you down. Stop thinking about problems that may never happen. Stop thinking about yourself and your family.

Instead Be happy about what you have AND FOR THE SAKE OF God have a good time. That’s what a festival is about.

A lot of people think of religion in general and Christianity in particular as being a sour, dull, unhappy way to live. People have said; I don’t want to follow Jesus because I’ll have to stop having fun. Really.

If only they could understand God’s heart for his people. He commanded us to Rejoice. What is more, this rejoicing is a community event. It is not something that we’re supposed to experience alone, but with all of God’s people such as today. And Secondly, we are to remember where we came from. Where did we come from?

Remember that you were once slaves in Egypt. Remember your bondage as slaves, your mistreatment, the way Pharaoh mistreated you. Remember that once you were strangers and aliens. But now things have changed; you have been set free from slavery; this is what it means to Rejoice.

This event that took place where God led the Israelites out of Egypt from slavery, to freedom and a new life is a picture of what God can do to an individual today, because We were all at one-time slaves to sin. Sin had control over us, living lives that were ungodly, and selfish, being held captive by the things that God detests.

But God in his grace and mercy gives us the faith to believe in him. It is only God who is able to break the chains of bondage to sin and releases us from our slavery to it. He redeems us, through Jesus dying on the cross while at the same time granting us new life; a new way to live, think and behave. An exchange takes place where Jesus takes our sin and we receive his righteousness.

Because our sin impacts greatly on God’s holiness a penalty must be paid as God cannot let sin go unpunished. The penalty for sin was paid by Christ and was received and accepted by God the father.

When a person accepts and believes what Christ has done for them, they no longer stand condemned. Instead They receive forgiveness, a future, and eternal life. Heaven is assured because of what Jesus has done for all of humanity. This is the message Christ came to tell us.

Tragically Satan has great influence over the whole world as we see and hear continually. But God the Father has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son. God through his love and mercy is able to save anyone, anywhere, at any time. Scripture tells us ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’

 Are you ready to take that step of faith by believing that Jesus died on the cross thereby releasing you from the power of sin and making your future secure? He is more than able to save us. We are to rejoice in the Lord for his provision, and rejoice in our deliverance, remembering where we came from.

Thirdly we don’t come empty handed to the Lord.

Presenting first fruits to God is something that the OT speaks about regularly. It’s not a one-off thing as most people think. The idea of first fruits from the harvest is connected to the principle of presenting the first born in scripture. In the same way Mary and Joseph presented their child Jesus by bringing him to the temple in Jerusalem. In the same way as God claims the first born, he tells his people that the first fruits of the ground also belong to him.

Pentecost, this Festival of the Harvest speaks to us of the importance of dedicating our first and our best to the glory of God. Scripture promises a direct connection between our dedication and God’s provision. Proverbs tells us; ‘Honour the Lord with your possessions, and with the first fruits of all your increase; so your barns will be filled with plenty’.

However, this passage and principle should not be used to raise false hopes that prosperity is attainable in proportion to what you give. It would be foolish to calculate one’s giving based on what one expects to receive in return.

Giving that is motivated by what one will receive back, is not giving at all. The key to this verse is not what will I get back based on what I give; it is Honouring the Lord. This is our motivation. What does it mean to honour God? It’s not so much the giving it’s the honouring.

When we acknowledge that all we have including the clothes we wear, the food in our cupboards, the car we drove to church, our homes, the money in our pockets & purses/ ALL belongs to God, then we honour him.

When we dedicate ourselves to serving God and serving others; we honour him.

When we choose to repent from our sin and turn to God, we honour him.

When we seek to carry out justice, feed the poor, fend for the widow and orphan, we honour him.

When we trust that giving our first fruits for his special use will not leave us destitute, we honour the Lord.

In the summer Israelites harvested figs, dates, pomegranates, honey, nuts. In Autumn they gathered in olives and grapes. The first fruits brought before the Lord were the choicest, the best without blemish. Not the left overs.

What do our first fruits include? Apples, wine, plums, turnips, potatoes, cabbages, wheat, barley. But you say well I don’t have any of those things so how can I give them. And You would be right.

But what about other, monetary first fruits like; a pay rise, an increment, an inheritance, a rebate. Are they out of bounds? Are they out of God’s reach? Remember who gave you them in the first place?  

God blesses us because we are to acknowledge that we and all we have are rightfully his and he blesses us because in giving back first fruits, we show our trust that he intends to continue to provide for us. Honouring the Lord with our first fruits not just at Thanksgiving/Harvest time, is part of the dedication and trust he expects and deserves.

Most of us have seen the film Lord of the Rings written by JRR Tolken who was a Christian and close friend of CS Lewis. Frodo Baggins along with his companions sets out on a journey to destroy the ring forged by the evil Sauron. They meet with all kinds of dangers as well as interesting friends.

But the impact of the book hinges on the fact that at each step of the way, the reader can see that the hobbits are part of a larger story of cosmic redemption.

So, it was with Israel and with us. We are part of a bigger picture, on the road to greater events than we can possibly imagine. To thank God for a good crop is one thing. To thank him because we recall how he delivered us, and because each year’s crop is a link in a story leading up to a promise of final deliverance; well that’s something else.

What we read in Deuteronomy is not something we ignore because it happened so long ago. The past is still our story today; the story of thanksgiving, of redemption, and freedom.

For example, the worshippers at Pentecost in the New Testament include themselves in the events of the what happened although they were not physically present at the Exodus and crossing the Red Sea 1500 years earlier.

By looking and applying what we read in the bible to ourselves, we see that God’s salvation story is not only the story of people who lived long ago, it is our story as well. Every lesson that Israel learnt, is for OUR benefit. It is a lesson that we need to remember for ourselves. The God whom Israel came to experience is our God as well. He hasn’t changed.

Likewise, when we read in the New Testament that Jesus died and rose again to take upon himself the sins of the world, we are to realise that it is our sin that brought him to the cross.

First fruits and Pentecost connected us, not only to our history that is our redemption, but also to our future destiny, which means claiming and living out the promises of Almighty God as written in the bible.   

In closing. It is natural for human beings to trust something or someone, but we find it difficult to trust what we cannot see. The Israelites whilst in Canaan the land of milk and honey, were surrounded by pagan nature gods like Baal. As a result, it was easy for them to succumb to these visible graven images.

But through linking harvest celebrations like Pentecost they were to remember that the God to trust now, with our crops, land, wind, and rain, is the same God who rescued them from slavery.

The Canaanite approach is the forerunner of how modern life is lived Today. There was no history with it, and no destiny either; only the yearly cycle; then another, followed by another. Their pagan rites did not look back to a past redemption or forward to a future with God, but only to the annual cycle of rain and growth. This is the way of the unbeliever.

We see this in our time where people live only for today with little regard for history and little sense of destiny. Living only for today is all-consuming. Sadly, this generation distrusts the past and despairs of the future.

However, this is a very different viewpoint for the Christian, because he or she knows where they came from, and where they are going. Their future is assured.

Rev Alan Wilson is a recently retired Presbyterian Minister in Northern Ireland. He was a former Police Officer during the ‘troubles’ before going into the ministry. He is married to Ann and they are now proud grandparents of Jacob and Cora. He enjoys keeping Alpaccas, gardening, Watching football and how theology relates to the environment and the world at large. He and his wife spent a summer Exchange in 2018 with a Presbyterian Church in Toronto.

The photo shows, “Harvest Time in Cache Valley,” by Lorus Bishop Pratt, painted in 1913.