A few years ago we entered a new millennium. Y2K never happened, the planets aligned and the end of the world did not come. We lived through 9/11 and the world lost a little more innocence. It was now apparent that terrorism was going to be part of our lives, not just something that we heard about in the news. With all of this, our lives became busier and a bit more complicated, but nonetheless, life finds a way and moves on.
When we reflect on the last 100 years, we can plainly see that as a people we have accomplished many amazing things. Take the history of flight: 100 years ago, we could hardly fly 100 feet, and by the end of the 1960s we put a man on the moon. Now we have developed aircraft that fly far beyond the speed of
sound and are invisible to radar, aircraft that can touch space itself and return to Earth safely. We have seen advances in technology in every corner of our lives. In fact, we would be very hard pressed to find a part of our lives that technology does not affect in some way. Science has opened vast volumes of knowledge to us in every discipline under the stars, from the start of life on Earth to the unbelievable vastness of space. Science has attained the ability to clone life and even DNA has given up its secrets to us. We have mapped the human genome. We have wiped out diseases, extended the human life expectancy and for the most part have improved the quality of life for most people on the planet. We are in fact genetically engineering the world around us, from advanced medicines right down to the food we eat. We do our best to cure the sick and feed the hungry. In fact, it is said that the United States grows enough food every year to feed the world’s population.
Computers have changed our lives in many different ways. Not a day goes by that we do not interact with a computer in some way. Computers have done something amazing for the world. Never since the fabled days of the “Tower of Babel” has the world started to speak one language again. Now, through the world of technology, we can communicate with almost anyone on our planet at any time. Communication has become a driving force in our lives. Look at cellular phone communication: this was just an infant industry in the 1980s. Cellular or mobile phones were only reserved for the rich or executives of companies. Today you can enter any city in the world and it looks like everyone, from children to grandparents, all have their own cell phone and everyone is talking to everyone else. Something that most people never had a few years ago is now a necessity of life. We communicate not just within our own circle of friends, but we communicate with people around the world, and we do so on a daily basis. Our world has become much smaller, and language is no longer the barrier it once was. Yes, there is no doubt that we push back the frontier of science a little more every day and become more knowledgeable of our world and the universe. As they study the stars and the universe around us, astronomers are finding that there are what seem to be endless galaxies in the never-ending expanse we call the universe. In fact, it is said that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on every beach and every desert on the Earth. What is more is that we are finding that many stars have planets orbiting them. It is believed that before long we will find planets, like our Earth, that are capable of supporting life. On the darker side of things, they have also found rogue asteroids and it is believed that it is only a matter of time, before an asteroid of considerable size hits our Earth and forever changes our lives, or the lives of the survivors, if there are any. Because of this possibility, governments are spending millions of dollars for scientists to come up with a solution to address this problem.
There is no doubt that science and technology have become a part of our everyday lives, and without their benefits, most people’s lives would be very difficult and very inconvenient to say the least. Still, with all the advancements that we have seen over the past 100 years, we are no closer to answering the basic questions of life, such as “Why are we here?” and “Where did we come from and where are we going?” “Does God exist?” “If he does exist, does he even care about us?” Many people have thought about questions like these many times in their lives but still have no hard answers. What is worse is that religion, which is supposed to represent God, has no answers either. It is all a mystery to religious leaders, or they invent things that sound good to their parishioners. How can they really offer any help to those who look to them for the answers to life’s questions? Still, science seems to be more reliable than religion. Science looks for the pure answer to the question and deals with facts as they are understood. Therefore, when science examines the accepted clues to our origins, the fossil record, the conclusion is that life on earth somehow started when “something” shocked some simple proteins into becoming a living, working organism and that “evolved” into life as we understand it today. As for the existence of “God,” well, we really cannot prove scientifically that he exists, but we cannot prove that he does not exist either. So we form our own ideas and opinions, we choose to have a god or not to have a god and we decide if he is a good and loving god, or a god who demands sacrifices and who burns “wrong-doers” in fire forever. Whichever we decide is what we believe and life continues.
The questions of the ages never get answered to our satisfaction. We are happy to accept the things our parents told us and we make those things our personal beliefs and accept the traditions of our family, or the community we are part of. We become
educated, polished and enter the work force as a small cog in the big machine that is our world, like the worker ant, one of
millions scurrying across the face of the Earth, coming into and slipping out of existence without really being noticed. Our goal in life is to attain “more,” to have more than our parents did, to have more than our neighbors do. We want more wealth, more honor, more happiness, more love, more everything, more than everyone else. So we bury ourselves in our life’s ambition. One day runs into the next and really, how often does anyone have the time to sit and contemplate his or her own life, or reflect about the world around us? Every day demands are made of us. At times there are so many demands made of us that we can forget who we are and what is important to us and the only question we want answered is “Why?” There are so many “whys” in our life that to start to answer them is a major undertaking. However, for us to really understand our lives today, the questions of “why” have to be answered. Without those answers, we are no better off than a worker ant, which is hardly noticed, passes into yesterday and is quickly forgotten. To get a clear and accurate answer to any question, it is best to reduce things to their simplest form and start from there. The more complicated something becomes the more difficult it is to understand. The more difficult something is to understand, the easier it is to confuse someone. When one becomes confused, it is easy to get lost. How many people live their whole lives lost and confused? Their lives are the same today as they were yesterday and they will be the same tomorrow, without meaning, happiness and satisfaction, just like the worker ant. Too many of us live our lives this way, from cradle to grave, one foot in front of the other, day after day, year after year and
then we die—and with what hope?
Where is here?
To answer any question accurately, we have to gather as many pertinent facts as possible and start from the beginning. So
where is here, anyway? We find ourselves in a three-dimensional world, on the third planet from the star we call Sun, in the galaxy we call the Milky Way. Our planet, the Earth, is just the right distance from the Sun to have produced an abundance
of life on it. We find that life exists in the harshest conditions on earth, from blistering hot deserts to thousands of feet
below sea level; we find life in boiling hot springs and the iceencrusted poles. Yes, everywhere we look, we find life on our
planet; even in places that we have polluted or destroyed with nuclear radiation, life somehow finds a way. For thousands of years man has placed himself at the center of the universe: the Sun, the planets and the stars all revolved around the Earth. Naturally we know differently now, but we still want to be at the center of at least our own universe. Nonetheless, our planet Earth is our home and a very unique one it is at that. Everything we need to live is provided to us from the
Earth. It gives us fresh water to drink, it grows our food, and supplies us with the materials we need for shelter and warmth. When we compare the Earth to other planets in our solar system, we can plainly see that we live on the “gem” of all planets; the others are totally incapable of supporting life, as we know it. They are all pock-marked by meteors. If there is any atmosphere at all on our neighboring planets, it is a deadly mixture of gases, one that would kill us quickly. So there is no doubt that the Earth is our home. It has everything we need and we are well-taken care of here. But the Earth does not just give the necessities of life; on the contrary, there is an abundance of everything.
WHY ARE WE HERE?
What is the purpose of our life? Every generation that has gone before us has pondered this question. For some reason we want
to believe that there must a “higher” purpose to our life. We are born from pain; we enter a world that at times can be very vicious. We spend most of our lives working to make the lives of our children better than ours, and then we die. The really sad thing is that this has been pretty much the way life has been throughout history. Every generation before us has faced pretty much the same thing; however, it is our generation that is exhausting the resources of our planet and leaving a wake of pollution and death in our path. For centuries, we have accepted that man was “created” by God. Religion has taught us that we have a spiritual connection with a supreme being and that he loves us, cares about us and watches over us. But that still doesn’t tell us why we are here. If there is a God who cares about us so much, where is he and why doesn’t he show us that he cares about our lives? You would think that if there were really a loving God that watches over us and cares about us and our future, he would have some kind of communication with us. Maybe this is what gave rise to the slogan of the 1960s that “God is dead!” The sixties were a very interesting decade. They started off with the election of the young and handsome president John F. Kennedy, the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the Cuban missile crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction. However, turmoil soon shook the world with the assassination of President Kennedy, and the unrest that was soon to follow would change the world forever. We lost our innocence and as the media stated it, Camelot was lost. The changes that took place in the 1960s changed the world forever. We saw the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Peace movement, the Woman’s Liberation movement — these protests changed the way we view the world. Liberalism was changing our lives at every point and we believed that our rights and personal freedom were growing and becoming stronger every day. We put a man on the moon, and life was beautiful—or was it? We saw political turmoil, the oil embargo and interest rate hikes of the 1970s and runaway military spending and the fall of Communism, with the destruction of the Iron Curtin and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Then there was the Dot Com era, Globalization and the prosperity of the 1990s. But what cost did we pay for the twentieth century?
The twentieth century started off very unassumingly, at least until 1914 and the start of what was to be World War One. It
was called the “Great War” at the time; I guess that was because we did not expect that we were going to have to number them.
Along with the First World War came the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the murders of the Czar and the royal family. The
Russian monarchy was replaced with the first Communist government, which became a major world power. Peace was not
only torn away from the world, but death was being served up in wholesale fashion, by the first mechanized war to besiege the
world. However death would not be satisfied by just war. Famine spread through Europe and several parts of the world and then
the “Spanish flu,” one of the worst epidemics to have ever struck our planet, left more than twenty million dead in its path; some estimates are twice that amount. With war, famine, plague and death ravaging the world all at the same time, one could really ask, had the four horseman of the Apocalypse been turned loose on the Earth? Never before had we seen such problems on a worldwide scale and to the extent that they were happening. The Spanish influenza we could do little about, but world
leaders thought they could do something about keeping world peace and never letting another world war take place again. To
this end the League of Nations was born. A group of nations joined together to provide an open forum to discuss world differences and problems in a peaceful way and avert war. What a noble idea! U.S. President Woodrow Wilson fully supported the idea of the formation of the League of Nations and wrote the charter for the League. However, he could not convince the U.S. Congress that joining and supporting the League of Nations was more than just a good idea and in the best interest of the people of the United States but was a necessary step to prevent war on a global scale again. As we know, the League of Nations never did get the support from the United States and in 1939 the world found itself in the grips of global conflict a second time. While it would be a few years yet before the United States would be dragged into the war on the side of the “Allies,” major investments and support were given to both Axis and Allied sides of the conflict. After Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, the “sleeping giant” had been awoken and manufacturing and production took center stage. Factories would work around the clock turning out supplies for the war effort. Not only were supplies being produced for the war, but in fact whole factories were being produced and then shipped to England and Russia, so goods could be manufactured for the “war effort” in those countries as well. The resources and the manufacturing might of the United States really won the Second World War, but that manufacturing might would not last forever.
World War Two showed us just how cruel we could be to our fellow man. Well over fifty million people died in just a few
short years. We even invented a completely new method of killing and a new terminology to go with it: “Thermonuclear Warfare.” But nothing was going to prepare us for the total shock of the Holocaust. Over six million people were murdered because they did not fit a mad man’s idea of what a “pure race” should look and be like. Imagine being rounded up like cattle, forced to work while you starved to death, and in the end led to a slaughterhouse to be put to death, your body discarded or burned like yesterday’s garbage, all because of your race, religion, or personal beliefs. Yes, the Holocaust was horrific and many have pledged their lives to see that nothing like that ever happens again. But what many people have no idea of is just how many people were put to death by the mad dictator of the Soviet Union as it was purged of “dissidents.” It is said that Joseph Stalin was responsible for as many as fifty million deaths, but the real number may be much higher because “official” records were not kept of all the murders. When it comes to mass murder, Stalin makes Hitler look like a choirboy. Out of the Second World War was born the United Nations. This organization had the same agenda as the League of Nations: to preserve world peace. At least the United States would become a member this time. In fact the United States and England have been and continue to be strong supporters of the United Nations. When you ponder the massive carnage that has piled up in the twentieth century, you must be sickened by it and have to agree that the “Horsemen of the Apocalypse” were riding. If the Horsemen of the Apocalypse are riding, then Armageddon will soon be upon us. Belief in the prediction that we are going to be facing the end of the world in the year 2012 is becoming more popular. The Mayans, Nostradamus and others have dire predictions for the year 2012, even a secret code found in the Bible says Armageddon is coming and the people of the world will see a comet strike the earth. Is God’s War of Armageddon really coming? If so will there be any life left on this blue planet we call home? What can we do to survive Armageddon?