If God was an Englishman..

Welcome to the start of 2016. I hope you all had a merry Christmas, and that all of you will have a prosperous New Year ahead. The year 2015 was a remarkable year in itself. Back in January, I was still in full time employment, although knowing full well that things were about to change. That was because during early Summer of 2014, I was diagnosed with heart failure. Symptoms preceding the assessments, and leading to the necessity for submitting to these tests, were signals that my heart had swollen at the left ventricle caused by a regurgitation of the aortic valve, most likely a lifelong phenomenon, and my heart was telling me that it has had enough. Hence the need for open-heart surgery on February 5th, which took place in one of the country's top cardiac hospitals - Harefield.

Three months of convalescence followed, which I won't hesitate to say that I thoroughly enjoyed. So when I returned to work at the start of June, I went with a heavy heart (pun intended). It was during the Summer, while sitting in a pub with some friends, that I was informed of a benefit known as Pension Credit, with the qualifying age of 63 years. Within a week, I was enjoying a drink (non-alcoholic) at another pub with one of our church elders when he endorsed my proposal for retirement from full time work, as my 63rd birthday was not that far away. So 2015 started, like all previous years, as a self-employed domestic window cleaner, by then already looking forward to settling into a three-month convalescence following a major procedure. I then attempted to resume my business for a further three months, then finally retired on my 63rd birthday. A wonderful turn of events, after working as a non-skilled labourer for 47 years, with the last 35 years running my own business, which afterwards was sold to a good friend of mine I met at the sauna, with fifteen years of window cleaning experience on both commercial and domestic clientele under his belt.

And so, in this opening blog of 2016, I would like to share my overall thoughts. For someone who left Secondary Modern school (as it was then, the forerunner of the Comprehensive) in 1968, at the tender age of fifteen years without any qualifications to show - what looked to the world to have been four wasted years of life - self-employment was indeed proved to be the major character-shaper. From posting advert cards through domestic letterboxes to knocking on doors touting for business, success came from perseverance, having faith in God, and perhaps a sympathetic outlook from potential clientele. Further growth came by observation of neighbours who approached me with a request to call at their homes as well. It took up to thirteen years of hard work before I began to reap the rewards, which was doing what I love best - Travel - as a lone backpacker.

Beginning what was believed to be a divine call to visit Israel in 1993 (not my first visit, that was in 1976), long-haul also included Singapore, Australia, and the United States. Just this week we watched David Attenborough's magnificent documentary on the Great Barrier Reef, and how privileged I felt when I snorkeled at three different locations in 1997, a threefold experience which converted me into a fan of this tropical marine environment. This, coupled with the hike into the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, to the river itself, approximately 1,600 metres below the Colorado Plateau through which the river flows. But it was in Israel that I had the greater experience of spiritual reality, and one attraction which springs to mind is the Yad Vashem Memorial, located on the western outskirts of the city of Jerusalem. Here, I spent the whole day reverently respecting the six million Jews slaughtered needlessly in the Holocaust. Next to the main memorial stands the Children's Memorial, a separate building filled with countless reflections of a single candle as a result of meticulous placing of mirrors. Then nearby stands the Holocaust Museum, from where most of my knowledge of this mid twentieth century atrocity came to light.

Interior of Yad Vashem Memorial - visited August 1993.

All this came back to mind while doing some online research of one BBC News reporter, Mark Lowen, a public-school educated Englishman with a Jewish decent from his maternal side (the factor which drew my attention). Although the source of information from where I have looked into is very patchy, there was enough to learn that this fellow has fond memories of his Jewish grandmother, Natalia Karp, whose musical talent on the piano had literally spared her from certain death at the concentration camp to survive the Holocaust, and managed to live into her nineties.

Educated at King's College Public School for Boys in Wimbledon, then reading history at Balliol College in Oxford, I would say that Lowen is an archetypal Englishman with a very middle class background and closely connected to the Christian faith. According to Wikipedia, King's College is tied to the Church of England, while Balliol College is next to the site on Broad Street, where Bishops Ridley and Latimer were burnt alive at the stake in October 1555. As a student, Lowen must have been reminded daily of his country's Christian heritage. This together with my assumption that along with his academic achievements, Lowen was also good at sports, both as a team player and as an individual. Rugby was the main Winter sports curriculum at King's College, along with cricket in the Summer. The school has its own swimming pool as well as a rowing club. Also, one cannot get any further into traditional Englishness than the school's emphasis on the tie, a prominent item of the school uniform. Different colours are worn for every academic target successfully met. Nowadays, Lowen even has his own Facebook profile, available for anyone to visit, with 1,073 friends about the time of writing.

King's College, Wimbledon.

But I know for a fact that he would never include me as a friend on his social website. First of all, he does not know me personally. Secondly, I could be perceived as a stalker, even if we are both of the same gender and we live more than a thousand miles apart (the BBC has assigned him a residence at Istanbul). And thirdly, and probably the most important reason, is the fact that he is way, way above me on the social scale. Here in England, social class mix is definitely a No-No! It's thanks to his background and high education that he has achieved media fame - what on Earth would he have in common with a retired unskilled labourer, even old enough to be his father?

Imagine if Jesus Christ had exactly the same attitude! No doubt about it, the Bible's most famous verse, John 3:16 would read something like this:
For God so loved the Englishman, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, achieve well at school, and vote Tory, he should not perish but have everlasting life.

If you feel very uneasy about how I have tampered with God's Word, truthfully, this is not far from reality. During my younger days, in my subconscious, I did perceive the Lord Jesus as aloof, unreachable, dissatisfied with the way I lived, and unloving. Certainly Heaven, if it exists, would be unattainable. And even to this day, after more than forty years as a believer, there are times that I feel a little that way about him. It is rather like the adage that the Englishman's home is his castle. I am simply not welcome unless I have scored a hit in performance, especially in the threefold area of nationality, noble birth, and high academic level.

It was during Spring of 2015 that I made a decision to take a three-month sabbatical from attending my own church, to explore other churches within a twenty mile radius of my home. It was quite an eye-opening experience. Twelve different churches were visited, including one further away than the twenty-mile radius, the Westminster Chapel in London. I have discovered that the formal dress of bygone days were virtually non-existent, remaining among a few elderly folk. Casual dress was the norm, along with all the services attended freed from the traditional Anglican liturgy, in favour of freewill praise and worship, together with a preach to face up to modern day living. For me this was a time of refreshment, to worship God without reserve and from anyone peering from the corner of their eye.

But with them all, especially among the Anglicans, the underlying culture of the Englishman's home being his castle remain intact, fully instilled in every one of them. Among all of them, very few greeted me or were interested in who I was, or where I came from, or of my spiritual state, let alone inviting me to their homes, unlike in America where my one visit to a church in Portland Oregon, ended up dining in someone's home, and at another church, in Albuquerque New Mexico, a student bought me a full lunch at the post-service church dinner, and sat with them at table. Or the time I boarded a train at Foggia Italy, and not only had I made a good friend at the very next seat, but he ensured that I was settled in a hotel after arrival at Naples (he himself was staying at a relative's home while on holiday from Turin) - and took me out to a beauty spot two days later. By contrast, even if any of the middle-class English were truly excited about God and his salvation, such were concealed under a heavy cloak of self reservation, leaving me pondering on what the heck am I doing here.

And there is also a culture of "remaining in my place" on the social ladder, the standard way of English thinking going back to the Victorian era and beyond. Over recent years, if I don't live up to the model - well educated, formal dress, a plum Southern English accent, holding a degree, and excelling in a profession - then I would never be held high in regard by anyone whether inside or outside the church. It is a humiliating experience to be ignored, or even talked over while trying to speak, or to have someone bust in while talking to a friend, but would consider me rude if I had done the same. The same in disregarding any knowledge or experience I might have to share, as had happened several times before, while recently our Elders allowed a graduate to deliver the morning preach despite his lacking of proper Bible research and knowledge - just because he happens to hold a degree.

A typical Anglican Church, Berkshire.

Which leads to one more matter. I have sensed a strong dislike of me from other church-goers because of my want of Bible knowledge, along with general knowledge with the ability to write well. It looks to me that by acquiring some learning poses a threat to their egos. Why a window cleaner should remain in a state of ignorance is because, for someone holding such a humble occupation to better himself is simply not of English ethics. Happily, those who dislike me are few, not many. Furthermore, they are more likely the ones who have trouble with the idea of a God of pure grace, instead, they insist that performance by the believer is necessary to secure his salvation, or else he will be eternally lost. Little wonder such a devastating viewpoint of God inevitably involves disdain towards the likes of me who holds that once saved always saved is through the perfect work of Christ alone on the Cross, without the need for any of us to help him.

The Snake Is Still Talking...

Here I wish to conclude this series of Creation versus Evolution, which incidentally was the result of a comment posted for the first of the series of blogs, Our Eternal Home, published February 5th, 2012. In that article, I made a suggestion that the age of the Dinosaurs shared the same time frame as Adam's early descendants. This opinion brought a comment from a scientist who firmly believed in Evolution, making total nonsense of my ideas.

What have been the overall result in believing this theory? Here I wish to highlight the consequences in believing Darwin's survival of the fittest, and to show, if I can, that Darwinism had not brought in the Utopian society wished for by the likes of Richard Dawkins, who believe that religion had always been detrimental to society.

And sure enough. Dawkins does have a point. Religion has been the cause of the rivers of blood which had flowed throughout history, and it is still flowing now, particularly in the Middle East. And the Bible itself records a history of religious oppression. The stoning of Stephen recorded in Acts chapter 7 is one good example.

But Darwinism is not just about Natural Selection. The theory embraces the idea that we, mankind, are constantly working upward in achieving a higher status, with the end means of becoming gods. Therefore we can conclude that the true teaching of Evolution is that of a very slow progress from a single, amoeba-like cell floating in the primeval ocean right up to what we are today, then into the future as divine beings. Maybe one day, as in the motion picture, 2001 A Space Odyssey, we might evolve out of our bodies to exist as pure energy, with an omnipresent feel and with technology impossible to fathom at present!

However, there are some very serious problems with the evolutionary theory. First of all, there is not enough time in the entire age of the Universe for the cell to have evolved, as we have seen in the last two blogs. A single cell is a vastly complex unit. The sheer impossibility for it to evolve has even led to a fascinating idea of panspermia. This simply mean that living cells from space had hitched a ride on a meteorite and splashed into our primeval oceans from where Darwinian Evolution began to get underway. Of course many evolutionists have dismissed all this as pseudoscience, yet such a theory has not been written off as nonsense.

Most academics, like the one who commented earlier, ridicule the idea of a talking snake. Nobody had ever seen a snake talk, for that matter, any animal. Sure enough, parrots may talk, but only repeating what they had been taught without understanding what those sounds mean. But there is absolutely no record within zoology of any beast talking and knowing what these sounds mean. Little wonder the Bible is looked upon as a book of fantasy stories. After all, Grimm's Fairy Tales are full of talking animals, but every reader knows what they are - fiction. But if we, as Christians, take the Bible as the inerrant Word of God and therefore all the events written therein as historical, then the narrative of a talking snake must be also historical. Hence, Christians who accept the Bible as historical are now held as ridicule by not only the academics but by society in general.

The truth is that the snake is still talking to this day - and we are listening! Let us go the the narration and read what it says:

Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God has made. And he said to the woman, Yea, hath God said, you shall not eat of every tree in the garden?
And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden:
But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God had said, Ye shall not eat of it, nor touch it, lest ye die.
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
For God doeth know that in the day that ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
Genesis 3:1-5 (AV).

After being warned by God not to eat of the fruit of a certain tree, the snake then asks Eve if it was true that God warned her about the fruit of this particular tree. Eve's answer is quite interesting. She admitted that this was true, but she also added the words, "neither shall ye touch it" in her response. God did not say that, it was added by Eve herself with the belief that there was something in the fruit itself. Then the serpent, or snake, denied the truth of what God has originally told them and accused the Almighty of being a jealous sycophant who wasn't keen to see the couple rise in status. This accusation is often known as the Edenic Lie.

Ye shall be as gods! And this has been the fierce battle between God and the snake within every human heart ever since. The lust for power, fame, prestige, riches and mastery over others, are all what are offered by the snake to this day. And on towards godhood. And we are listening. And furthermore, we by nature have put out our hands to grab what he offers.

Darwinism is one of the snake's lies on how we got here. It is a slow progress from a cell to becoming gods ourselves, and we are supposed to be getting there. There is a strong similarity between western thinking on organic evolution and eastern religions. In the Far East, Karma is taught, both in Hindu and in Buddhism. The two differ only in that in Buddhism, bad Karma is restricted to a human reincarnation of a person to a lower status in life. In Hinduism, bad Karma means being reincarnated as an animal. In both cases, good Karma is coming back as someone with a greater social status, in a long chain of reincarnations when someone eventually becomes a god. The sheer impossibility is that any sins committed in this life would lead to bad Karma in the next. Reaching godhood is impossible.

Darwinism involve Natural Selection, with weaker species becoming extinct to allow for the stronger to survive. Let us give an example. Let's imagine two groups of mice, intermingling with each other. One group consist of mice with dark fur, the other with white fur. They are prey to carnivorous birds such as the eagle or the owl. If the environment is dark and shady, it will most likely result in the birds spotting the light coloured mice more easily, with the result of the lighter group becoming extinct, while the darker group continuing to survive and multiply. It's the other way round if the two groups are in a bright environment, where the darker mice would then be easily spotted by the predators, allowing the white mice a greater chance to survive and multiply. This, as Darwin himself called this analogy Natural Selection, and this does not necessarily mean that the two groups of mice fought against each other in vying for space at the given environment. But a 19th Century philosopher, Herbert Spencer, who studied Darwin's work, in 1864 coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest which indicated that the two groups of mice fought each other for the space, pushing out the weaker group to full exposure to the predators.

It was Spencer's "Survival of the Fittest" which made evolution enter a new dimension: Social Darwinism. This was a development, using organic evolution to justify social behavior, mainly racism, slavery, social class and imperialism. Imperialism had always been a feature in ancient history. Empires such as the Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman - all mentioned in the Bible and all six having had dominance over Israel. But it was Social Darwinism which provided justification for more recent imperialism.

While this blog is written, Jeremy Paxman is presenting a documentary series about the British Empire on the BBC. Unlike former presenters on this subject, Paxman gives a more realistic view of British imperialists invading other countries, particularly India, and subjugated the indigenous population to servitude, lower social class and racism, along with the expectation to be looked on as god-like by the indigenous and treated as lords. All of these were based on the notion that the British were a superior race due to the result of a greater advance in Organic Evolution which inevitably led to the imperial philosophy of Social Darwinism.

Racism at football grounds was most certainly the result of Social Darwinism, the insult of racist fans, for example, throwing a banana on to the pitch in the direction of a black player with a reminder that such a person, despite his excellent footballing skills, was still closer to the Primate than the white offender at the stands - was of Darwinian origin, although I have wondered whether the offender was bright enough to realise this. Nowadays, such racism is a criminal offence here in the UK, and quite rightly so.

But the worst case of racism and national superiority were the German Nazis over the Jews. During the Second World War, up to six million Jews were needlessly slaughtered under the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler. The sole reason is definitely Darwinian in nature. When I visited the Yad Vashem and Holocaust Museum in Israel back in 1993, I came across this introductory poster at the start of the visit:

The singular tragedy of the Holocaust, in which some six million Jews were ruthlessly annihilated by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, is a pivotal chapter in human history....Guided by racial principles, Nazi ideology ordained that the Germans belonged to a superior race that was destined to rule the world. The Nazi vision of a new racial order called for the overthrow of democracy and humanism. Rooted in traditional and political Jew hatred, Nazi racial antisemitism defined the Jew as Germany's foremost enemy....In the Holocaust, man's most cherished beliefs about himself and the nature of civilisation were violently defiled. The events of the Holocaust are compelling and confronting them, every thinking person feels the weight of their imprint.

A candle burns inside the Yad Vashem Memorial, Israel

Here we have the result of Darwinism - the slaughter of millions of Jews due to national and racial superiority. This is not done so much out of Darwin's Natural Selection as Spencer's "Survival of the Fittest" and its immediate consequence - Social Darwinism.

The next image I have posted to give the real, shocking truths of Darwinism. It shows indeed that the snake is still talking and on this occasion has found a very keen ear in the head of the Nazis.

The fruit of Darwinism - Victims of the Holocaust

But what about today? Recently I have come across an article in the Daily Mail newspaper, the timing of such writing could not have been better. It was written by columnist Sonia Poulton, and was published 6th March, 2012. On the subject of the Welfare Reform Bill, she wrote that our present Government is into "Brutal Acts of Savagery". The article features on how the most vulnerable in society - the disabled or sick person will, under the reform, be made to work unpaid in factories and private businesses if they want to keep on receiving State benefit. These include patients with Alzheimer's Disease and Multiple Sclerosis. Meanwhile, company bosses and business executives can save by employing such people and make a greater profit, while the bureaucrats of the Department of Work and Pensions - who decides on who receive benefits - can carry on with their travels, hotel expenses and stationery paid for by the State. The result of all this for the disabled is cold, naked fear - of being rejected and excluded from society and the feeling of being unwanted. The knock-on result will include being beaten up on the streets, the perpetrators goaded with the idea that their taxes are being used for benefit fraud - despite the percentage of frauds given by the DWP is only 0.5%. In the past year, according to Poulton, street attacks on the disabled had risen by 42%.

Suicide among the disabled is rising due to the Reform Bill, the last count being 103, and evidence seem to indicate that it is nearing 150. Again, Poulton suggest that these suicides brings relief to the cost of the National Health Service. There seem to be a shocking similarity here, with the fate of the disabled as with the holocaust, where many Jews were put into unpaid labour, except without the gas chambers.

Then there is Dr. Francesca Minerva, a philosopher from Oxford University, also mentioned in Poulton's article. She recently suggested that babies born with disabilities such as Downs Syndrome should be killed. She then says that such children are not human and for them to live would be a burden on the national expense. Shades of Adolf Hitler! The snake is still talking and we are listening.

Here in the UK, where there is a strong social class ethic, academics are given a far wider respect than a commoner or unlearned person. Education is the catch-all in a person's worth, along with wealth. It looks to me that not only is the snake talking, but his seductively alluring many to deception under the false notion of high education, wealth and social status. I once attended a church where most, if not all of the graduates of my age believed in Darwinism. Despite their best intentions to hide their thoughts and feelings, and their attempts in forming friendships with me, I was able to detect an underlying current belief within them of my academic and therefore social inferiority.

It was 1973. The thunder rolled outside. I was alone in the house, as the rest of the family had gone out for the evening. As a devout believer in Evolution, I turned to the beginning of the Bible and began to read Genesis, starting with the very first verse: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

I was converted. There and then I turned from Evolution to Creationism in one turn of 180 degrees. God has spoken to me. I was convicted and believed.
God has saved me from my academic insanity!