by Berry Friesen (July 31,
2015)
I have several answers to
this question; each is true up to a point.
The most complete answer is
that John and I are convinced our world is rapidly approaching an era of climate-driven
crisis. A few with great wealth may continue lives of relative comfort
and security, but much of humanity will experience severe deprivation and
insecurity.
This is the future some of our
children and all of our grandchildren will experience. In the words of Ian Welsh:
We’re going to hit the wall. We’re going to have to fight a
dystopic, panopticon police state in which ordinary people are not allowed to
own anything of real value, let alone keep any of the real value they
create. We’re going to do this while the environment comes apart, while
we get battered by “extreme weather events”, droughts, water shortages and
hunger.
Welsh goes on to say that
we might run into the wall “at a hundred miles an hour and go splat or hit it
at ten miles an hour and get bruised and pick ourselves up.” That is still to be determined. But the collision
itself has already been “baked into the cake.”
We’ve already passed key decision points related to climate change and
it can no longer be stopped.
For the harsh and extremely
violent world to come, our children and those who come after them will need a
faith/ideology that makes life worth living.
The faith/ideology commonly on offer today won’t be up to the challenge.
Welsh puts it this way:
If you’re middle-aged or older, you’ll miss a lot of the worst of
this. Your kids won’t. Your job, if you’re old, is ideological: to
help create the ideas that are lying on the floor, the ideas that are used when
people are desperate. When things change in crisis, they change fast, and the
ideas that are used are the ones lying around. If all that’s lying around is
neo-liberalism, that’s what will be used. Of course ideology isn’t
enough, people can still choose the wrong ideology, the wrong ideas (and often
have, don’t tell me otherwise), but if it isn’t there, all they can do is pick
up what is there.
With our book, John and I
are trying to make sure biblical ideas are there, lying on the floor when
people shift into crisis mode.
The empire will still be in
charge; it will be using its media control, 24/7 surveillance and robotic
weaponry to maintain the system that has produced unrelenting disaster.
But in contrast to now, many will recognize it as the agent of
death. And so they will ask, “If not the
empire, what? What is our alternative?”
We expect those who read
the Bible carefully will find one.
