Daily Meditation

Facing Our Fears

Ligonier Ministries

We are fragile mortals, given to fears of every sort. We have a built-in insecurity that no amount of whistling in the dark can mollify. We seek assurance concerning the things that frighten us the most.

The prohibition uttered more frequently than any other by our Lord is the command “Fear not.” He said this so often to His disciples and others He encountered that it almost came to sound like a greeting. Where most people greet others by saying “Hi” or “Hello,” the first words of Jesus very often were “Fear not.”

Why? Perhaps Jesus’ predilection for those words grew out of His acute sense of the fear that grips all who approach the living God. We fear His power; we fear His wrath; and most of all we fear His ultimate rejection.

The assurance we need the most is the assurance of salvation. Though we are loath to think much about it or contemplate it deeply, we know—if only intuitively—that the worst catastrophe that could befall us is to be visited by God’s final punitive wrath. Our insecurity is worsened by the certainty that we deserve it.

Coram Deo

Listen to God’s Word to you today: Fear not!

Passages for Further Study

Isaiah 41:10
Luke 12:32
Hebrews 13:6

Daily Meditation

Ministry and the Fear of Man

Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, declares the Lord.  (Jeremiah 1:8)

John Piper

A great obstacle to serving the Lord, especially among the young, is the fear of rejection and opposition.  All kinds of thoughts enter the mind about how some people might not like the way I do it. People might disagree or be offended. I might make a mistake and get criticized.

The fear of man is a great hindrance to ministry.

So God says, Don’t fear, because I will be with you and I will deliver you. God’s presence and approval is more valuable than all the accolades of men. And God says that in and through all your troubles, I will deliver you. You will triumph in the end. You will be more than a conqueror.

And the same thing is promised to all of us in Christ Jesus today:

“God has said, ‘I will never fail you or forsake you.’ Therefore we can confidently say, ‘The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid; what can man do to me?’” (Hebrews 13:5–6)

“If God is for us who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31)

So God said to Jeremiah, and God says to younger people today whom he is calling to serve him, “Do not say, ‘I am only a youth.’” Why?

Because your life is rooted in the unshakable, sovereign purposes of God. You have been chosen and consecrated and formed and appointed for a great purpose.

Because God’s authority, not your own, is behind your going and your speaking.

And because God himself will be with you to deliver you in all your trials.

Ceaselessly Tossed To and Fro

Seething In Vain

All Christians are utopians insofar as they believe that a day is coming when the Lord of heaven and earth will descend from heaven to dwell here and establish a perfect world, without sin--the unfolded and optimised and glorified Paradise of God's original creation.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more  And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.  And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.  He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.  He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away."  (Revelation 21: 1-4)

Most human beings--whether Christian or not--are utopians of one stripe or other.  But at the same time, there is a strong streak of dystopianism running through the race.  In the Unbelieving frame, evil threatens to destroy us all; were it to succeed, suffering and devastation would be universal.  The causes vary--global warming, asteroid strike, economic inequality, famine, destructive ideologies, disease--but the general theme remains fairly constant.  So, the human race is bedevilled by a contradictory utopian-dystopian antithesis which gives no peace--social, personal or otherwise.  Sound familiar?  Any regular reader of a daily metropolitan newspaper will confirm it so. 

Minatory Chorus

The Centre Will Not Hold

One puzzling thing about Islam is what we call the Rushdie Syndrome.  Whenever negative opinions or views are expressed about Muhammad, Islam, or the doctrine of Allah, the purveyor can end up with death threats--and in some cases, actual martyrdom.  In the West people are encouraged to hold some respect for the opinionated, even if one finds their opinions objectionable. Not so in Islam.  

We would argue that the Western tradition only abides if the centre holds.  The historical centre of the West has been the Christian faith.  We say "has been" because for over 150 years that philosophical and religious core has been gradually replaced by humanism (a doctrine of the ultimacy of man).  Humanism ends up proposing that some humans are more equal than others, and the abuse begins.  The centre no longer holds.  First to go are the most vulnerable--defenceless, silent babies in wombs which become death chambers, the aged, the infirm, then women trafficked into bondage as sex-slaves, and so forth.  In this devolutionary process  respect for one's ideological opponent dissipates.  One only has to spend a few minutes reading a mere fraction of the the vituperative rantings sizzling electronic communication devices to have the point both illustrated and demonstrated. 

But for Islam, the centre has always been wrong.

Simplistic Nostrums Don't Cut It

More Full Than a Craft Beer Bar

Consider the following testimonies.

Citation One:

Feeding the masses will be a problem if the population continues to soar.  The news on the population front sounds bad: birth rates are not dropping as fast as expected, and we are likely to end up with an even bigger world population by the end of the century. The last revision of the United Nations' World Population Prospects, two years ago, predicted just over 10 billion people by 2100. The latest revision, just out, predicts almost 11 billion.

 

That's a truly alarming number, because it's hard to see how the world can sustain another 4 billion people. The current global population is 7 billion. But the headline number is deceptive, and conceals another, grimmer reality. Three-quarters of that growth will come in just one continent: Africa.  The African continent has 1.1 billion people. By the year 2100, it will have 4.1 billion - more than a third of the world's total population. Or rather, that is what it will have if there has not already been a huge population dieback in the region. At some point, however, systems will break down under the strain of trying to feed such rapidly growing populations, and people will start to die in large numbers. 

Citation Two:

The Fear of God

Paths to Christian Belief

. . . . Very rarely, no never, does it happen that someone comes to us with the wish to become a Christian who has not be struck by some fear of God.

Augustine, On Catechizing the Uninstructed, 5.9 (400 AD)

Compulsion

Not a 'Well Turned Phrase'

. . . . I do not care whether you expect some well-turned phrases today.  It is my duty to give you due warning by citing the Scriptures.  "Do not be slow to turn to the Lord, nor delay from one day to the next, for His anger shall come when you know not." . . . I cannot be silent: I am forced to preach upon it.  Filled with fear myself, I fill you with fear.

Augustine, Sermon in Miscellanea Agostiniana, 1 (1930) 199.

Western Civilisation

The Age of Vaunting Pride and Gnawing Doubt

The title of Dickens novel "Great Expectations" aptly summarizes a dominant theme in Victorian England (and the West in general at that time, for that matter).  There was a widespread, burgeoning belief that nirvana was just ahead.  Much of the optimism was due to advances in technology and science. 

To our jaded eyes, technological advances have become the norm.  Another "breakthrough" has become decidedly deja-vu.  But in the late eighteenth century this was not the case.  Consider Sebastien Mercier's account of the first balloon flight in November 21, 1783:

The Great Bank Run of 2011

Silent Paralysis

We read recently about the "secret" bank run in Greece.  Folk have been taking their money out of bank deposits in Greece and (literally) putting the money under mattresses.  They don't trust the solvency of banks any more.  Better to get their money out before its too late.  But it appears that this is not just a Greek problem.  Europe-wide the "folks" are taking their money out of European bank deposits and putting the money . . . where?  In US banks, it would appear. 

This fear-driven phenomenon would indicate a coming recession/deflation rather than recovery.  When people store their money rather than investing it, deflation usually stalks the land.  

Here is Larry Kudlow's take:

Teaching Children to be Neurotic

Warning to All NZ Parents

Every parent worthy of the name wants his or her children to grow up in a safe and secure environment. Moreover they want their children to be able to face the future with confidence. If our children grow up fearful, neurotic, and ridden with anxieties we would rightly shoulder the blame. We would have failed in some of the basic obligations of parenting. Right?

Well, then, what would you think of parents whose children at age eight were clearly phobic and neurotic, expressing fears such as the following:

Recently I've been worrying about some of the wars that are happening on the other side of the world, why are we just killing people, why can't we just kind of stop it? I kind of just think, I hope it doesn't get any worse.

Or,

I'm worried about the environment and the global warming, the ice and how it's going. I write it down in my little notebook ... I'm thinking people should actually stop the global warming before it's too late for their children.

Or,

The future, if we have children, would there be a future for them?

These attitudes and fears were expressed to a PhD researcher studying children aged eight to ten to find out what was causing stress in their lives. The researcher suggested that these kinds of fears partially explained why so many children are neurotic.

When children have those concerns it can be very distracting and I don't think it's surprising that we have increasing behaviour problems, increasing diagnosis of childhood anxiety disorders and childhood depression.

Then there is the case of nine year old Joanna Laxon, who is growing up in a world of fears, dreads, and neuroses:

Nine-year-old Joanna Laxon stresses about finishing school projects, "stuff outside of school", the environment and "what will happen later on in life".

It's a lot for the Auckland girl to worry about but she has plenty of ways of coping with it, from talking to her parents to writing it all down.

According to research into what many 8- to 12-year-olds stress about, Joanna seems to be typical of New Zealand children these days.

When asked what things outside of school caused her stress she said "things that just don't have to do with school". Some are things she's read in the paper or heard from friends.

She had plenty of environmental concerns, including global warming and Iceland's erupting volcano.

"I don't know much about it but I know it's not very good," she said about global warming.

Joanna said these environment issues stressed her out because they "could make a problem". She also worried how they could affect her and other people in the future and the potential harm from pollution.

"Sometimes I just kind of worry about how so many people are killing animals, like in Africa a lot of people are killing lions because their territory is being ruined and then they come to the farms and kill the cows and the farmers shoot them."

Where do children get this from? Well of course they get it from the media and from their parents.

Dr Peter Coleman, a developmental and educational psychologist, said many of the world stressors indicated by children were reflective of their surroundings.

"You'd expect it from the point of view that their parents are concerned about it, talk about it. They see it on the news so they would pick it up."

But is that the whole story. We fear not. Think of the lexicon here: wars, global warming, pollution, and looming destruction of the planet. We fully and confidently expect that these kids--along with most of their age--have been fed these phobias by their teachers. We know that these issues are relatively unimportant to adults, as expressed through surveys ranking the relative importance of issues of voters. It's highly unlikely these children are daily sitting around the evening table hearing their parents express doom and gloom about Icelandic volcanoes.

But the classroom is another matter. Now, we have completed no research into the matter, but we are confident school children (particularly intermediate school age pupils) are being fed a steady diet from their teachers of alarmism, global warming sirens, and a litany terrible things that are happening and about to happen. Just at random, here is a classic of the genre from Melville Intermediate School.

Polar Bears and Global Warming

View more presentations from Myles Webb.

Our view is that it is neither parents nor the media that is to blame for NZ children growing up racked with fears and neuroses about the future. It is our state schools and the tripe they are feeding our children.

It's parents who should be alarmed--not at life in general, but over the damage government schools appear to be inflicting upon our children. Time to start asking the hard questions about a few sacred cows in the state education system.

Here We Go Again

Computer Models Have a Lot to Answer For

We have been reprised once again of the follies of relying upon computer models. Apparently it was the pesky models which led officials to shut down air traffic throughout Europe as a result of Iceland's volcanoes erupting. The disruption and the costs, of course, are prohibitive. Well worth paying, however, if the risks and dangers were genuine.

According to a recent report in the Financial Times, it was more a case of virtual reality, rather than genuine reality which has shut down air traffic.

The computer models that guided decisions to impose a no-fly zone across most of Europe in recent days are based on incomplete science and limited data, according to European officials. As a result, they may have over-stated the risks to the public, needlessly grounding flights and damaging businesses.

“It is a black box in certain areas,” Matthias Ruete, the EU’s director-general for mobility and transport, said on Monday, noting that many of the assumptions in the computer models were not backed by scientific evidence.

European authorities were not sure about scientific questions, such as what concentration of ash was hazardous for jet engines, or at what rate ash fell from the sky, Mr Ruete said. “It’s one of the elements where, as far as I know, we’re not quite clear about it,” he admitted.

Sound familiar? It's deja vu, all over again, as Yogi Berra would put it.

How can such complete faith be put in virtually nothing, or at least in the profoundly unsubstantiated? What happened to the so-called rigour of hard science? It never existed. But it's even worse when the age becomes deeply superstitious--as ours has become. In a recent article entitled This shutdown is about more than volcanic ash, sociologist Frank Furedi hits the nail on the head.

Whatever the risks posed by the eruption of a volcano in Iceland, it seems clear that the shutting down of much of Europe’s air space is not just about the threat posed by clouds of ash to flying passengers. We live in an era where problems of uncertainty and risk are continually amplified, and where our fearful imaginations can make these problems seem like existential threats. Consequently, unexpected natural events are rarely treated simply as unexpected natural events – instead they are swiftly dramatised and transformed into ‘threats to human survival’.

We have termed this phenomenon the Culture of Catastrophism. But it is important to realise that this is not just espoused by a few superstitious folk on the lunatic fringe. It is now mainstream. Furedi goes on to explain how it actually works.

I am not a natural scientist, and I claim no authority to say anything of value about the risks posed by volcanic ash clouds to flying aircraft. However, as a sociologist interested in the process of decision-making, it is evident to me that the reluctance to lift the ban on air traffic in Europe is motivated by worst-case thinking rather than rigorous risk assessment. Risk assessment is based on an attempt to calculate the probability of different outcomes. Worst-case thinking – these days known as ‘precautionary thinking’ – is based on an act of imagination. It imagines the worst-case scenario and then takes action on that basis. In the case of the Icelandic volcano, fears that particles in the ash cloud could cause aeroplane engines to shut down automatically mutated into a conclusion that this would happen. So it seems to me to be the fantasy of the worst-case scenario rather than risk assessment that underpins the current official ban on air traffic.

Risk assessment has become risk avoidance. The best way to avoid risks is to shut everything down and live in a cocoon. It is to retreat into the safety of the bunker or the cave.

Tragically, this failure of nerve in relation to the volcanic ash is the inevitable outcome of the institutionalisation of worst-case policymaking. This approach, based on the unprecedented sensitivity of contemporary Western society to uncertainty and unknown dangers, has led to a radically new way of perceiving and managing risks. As a result, the traditional association of risk with probabilities is now under fire from a growing body of opinion, which claims that humanity lacks the knowledge to calculate risks in any meaningful way. Sadly, critics of traditional probabilistic risk-assessments have more faith in speculative computer models than they do in science’s capacity to use knowledge to transform uncertainties into calculable risks. The emergence of a speculative approach towards risk is paralleled by the growing influence of ‘possibilistic thinking’ rather than probabilistic thinking, which actively invites speculation about what could possibly go wrong. In today’s culture of fear, frequently ‘what could possibly go wrong’ is confused with ‘what is likely to happen’.

When individuals turn against God they may succeed in going through life with brazen arrogance and ill-founded boldness, being protected by the lawfulness and security of the surrounding culture. When a whole culture turns away from God, fearful superstition is the inevitable outcome. Decisions have to be made about things way beyond control or knowledge. The result is fear of the unknown. Fear of the unknown and the attempt to avoid bad outcomes is the essence of a superstitious mind. Fearful superstition has now become the dominant culture of the day.

Worst-case thinking encourages society to adopt fear as of one of the key principles around which the public, the government and various institutions should organise their lives. It institutionalises insecurity and fosters a mood of confusion and powerlessness. Through popularising the belief that worst cases are normal, it also encourages people to feel defenceless and vulnerable to a wide range of future threats. In all but name, it is an invitation to social paralysis. The eruption of a volcano in Iceland poses technical problems, for which responsible decision-makers should swiftly come up with sensible solutions. But instead, Europe has decided to turn a problem into a drama. In 50 years’ time, historians will be writing about our society’s reluctance to act when practical problems arose. It is no doubt difficult to face up to a natural disaster – but in this case it is the all-too-apparent manmade disaster brought on by indecision and a reluctance to engage with uncertainty that represents the real threat to our future.

Contrast this present condition of our culture of Unbelief with the reasoned calmness of Belief when faced with minatory uncertainty:

Question 1. What is thy only comfort in life and death?

Answer: That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ; who, with his precious blood, has fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, and therefore, by his Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life, and makes me sincerely willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto him.

When Unbelief dominates a culture--as it does in the West--institutionalised fearful superstition is inevitable. It has always been the case. And so it has come to pass. This, too, will not change until we repent and return to the all wise, all governing God, Who has revealed Himself in Holy Scripture. Only then will our present fearful culture of  superstition dissipate.

The Phobic Noughties

Running When No-One Pursues

Dread and fear, when misplaced and irrational, are debilitating and paralysing. Fear can be a very sound and rational state--when the threat is real and the danger consequential. But when people fear what is harmless or no danger at all we usually regard them as disturbed, or unbalanced. But when an entire society is swept up in irrational fears we face a cultural malady that inevitably has religious roots.

The particular social hysteria which has gripped Western cultures and peoples in the past ten years has been a phobia of end-times, apocalyptic, doomsday calamity. Toby Young, writing in the Telegraph, reviews the last decade (that is, the first ten years of the new century), and characterises it as a decade of longing and yearning for chaos. He writes:

One of the most striking things about the Noughties is that when terrible things did happen – when planes really did start falling out of the sky – we greeted them with barely concealed excitement.

We watched them being replayed over and over again on CNN, drinking in the wild overestimates of casualty numbers and nodding along enthusiastically as experts confidently predicted all the cataclysmic consequences to follow. It was a form of mass hysteria – something akin to Freud’s death wish, but writ large.

If the past 10 years had one defining characteristic it was that they allowed human beings to give full expression to their yearning for chaos, one of their darkest unconscious desires. It was the decade in which people’s appetite for destruction became almost insatiable.

What is happening when a culture or generation expects, looks for, or is mesmerised with an expectation that it is all going to end? What is going on in people's minds when dark apocalyptic end-time visions incarcerate a culture? An apocalyptic doomsday scenario has to have a cause of some sort. Probably the most tortuous and "long-bow" explanation is that this current state of fear results from the deliberate manipulation of the masses by the rich and monied. Here is the intellectual left at its finest.

Among the liberal intelligentsia, the conventional wisdom is that this sense of foreboding that came to typify the decade was generated by corporate and political forces that had a vested interest in keeping the masses in a state of ignorance and fear.

Adam Curtis, the BBC documentary-maker, advanced this hypothesis in The Power of Nightmares, his three-part series in 2004 about the links between Islamism and Neo-Conservatism.

He argued that the widespread panic about the threat of Islamist terrorism had been manufactured by the British and American governments, in collusion with the media-industrial complex, to justify their erosion of civil liberties and accretion of power. The brouhaha over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the War on Terror was a case in point. . . .

But what such theories neglect is the sheer enthusiasm with which people embraced this scaremongering. If the climate of fear that characterised the decade was the result of a sinister plot, it was a conspiracy in which ‘the masses’ were eager participants.

One of the biggest phobic concerns of the decade has been the digital revolution and the internet. It opened up the technical feasibility of an Orwellian society.

Flick through any tabloid newspaper of the period and you’ll stumble across headlines like this: ‘HOW USING FACEBOOK COULD RAISE YOUR RISK OF CANCER.’ Or this: ‘HOW COMPUTERS CAN HARM YOUR CHILDREN’S FUTURE… BY DAMAGING THEIR BRAINS.’

Or this: ‘USING THIS PHOTO, OUR REPORTER POSED AS A 15-YEAR-OLD GIRL ON MYSPACE – ONE OF THE WEBSITES USED BY MILLIONS OF TEENAGERS. WITHIN HOURS SHE’D BEEN TARGETED BY A PREDATORY PAEDOPHILE. HOW SAFE IS YOUR CHILD?’

There were some genuine crises, however. In Young's book the global credit crisis deserves its sobriquet.

There is one area, however, in which it’s difficult to argue with the prophets of doom: the global financial crisis of 2007-2009. The major US and European banks came perilously close to collapse in 2008 thanks to their exposure to toxic debt and would have failed if it hadn’t been for last-minute state intervention.

The International Monetary Fund estimates that by decade’s end these banks will have lost $2.8 trillion. In Britain, the nation’s economic fortunes could be charted by the rise and fall of property prices, an obsession that came to define the decade.

As with other disasters, however, the consequences of this financial meltdown haven’t been as catastrophic as some Eeyores had hoped. By the third quarter of 2009, the economies of the US, Japan and Germany had all returned to growth, with only Britain still officially in recession.

Contrary to some predictions, the credit crunch did not lead to the Second Great Depression. Indeed, for three quarters of the Noughties, the global economy boomed, producing a sustained period of unrivalled prosperity.

Young's basic point, however, is that things are a lot better than our fears and hysteria would lead us to believe. We have spat out "Bah, humbug" at so much in the last ten years that a wonderful decade has been missed. Society has made the past decade a "glass half empty", argues Young.

As such, people were expecting huge upheaval. All kinds of strange cults sprang up, eagerly looking forward to an earth-shattering event.

Among the technocratic elite this took the form of conjuring up the spectre of the Millennium Bug, but there were thousands of other examples. The world’s population was waiting, with ill-disguised glee, for the 20th-century equivalent of the meteorite that triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs.

When nothing happened, people felt cheated. But instead of concluding that their prognostications of doom were irrational, they looked elsewhere to affirm them. They began searching for the slate-cleaning catharsis that had been denied them on December 31 1999.

In this way, all the anxiety that had been building up in the last decade of the second millennium seeped into the first decade of the third, poisoning the atmosphere.

What should have been a happy period – perhaps the happiest in history – became a fairly miserable one. For the first 10 years of the 21st century, mankind was in the grip of a fever dream in which they saw their world destroyed over and over again.

We believe that the hysteria and the phobias and the dark apocalyptic visions will not pass away any time soon. Unbelief oscillates between the extremes of unbridled optimism over the glories of autonomous man and his wondrous powers to the opposite extreme of dark pessimism that terrible calamity awaits. The vaunting of human pride brings guilt: true, deep, atavistic, profound guilt before the Living God. This guilt--far deeper and more profoundly atavistic than any superficial trivial Freudian construct--stands ready at a moment's notice to erupt, incinerating instantly the vaunted hopes and dreams of Over-man. The world becomes a dark, dangerous, minatory, and ultimately deadly place. Fears real and imaginary haunt our darkening dreams.

For the Christian, however, this is not so. The Lord has established the earth on its foundations: it will not be moved. His faithfulness and covenant oaths bind Him to the earth and its continuance.

Tremble before Him all the earth; indeed the world is firmly established, it will not be moved. Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; and let them say among the nations, "The Lord reigns." Let the sea roar, and all it contains; let the field exult, and all that is in it. Then the trees of the forest will sing for job before the Lord; for He is coming to judge the earth. O give thanks to the Lord, for He is good . . . . " I Chronicles 16: 30--34

The future is bright with promise for mankind, because He has sent forth His Son and crowned Him King over all the earth. His reign is the realm of the Gospel: good news to mankind. Whilst temporal and localised judgments will occur--they will not be the end, but a cleansing, a new beginning.

The earth is truly the Lord's and the fullness thereof. As we contemplate the coming year, we early anticipate the 2010th year of our Lord's reign.

What a Hoot

The Daleks are Coming

We knew this was coming. When a culture turns away from the Living God it ends up seeing demons everywhere. It becomes fear-riven. Superstitions and phobias begin to abound.

Now there is a deep logic in this. When a culture spurns the Lord, it is left with the dominion of demons; it is face to face with a cruel, malicious, and hostile world. Bad things happen. The world becomes a scary place. Every piece of technology, every engineering advance is feared as a threat, liable to harm and damage humans.

The latest? Wind turbines. It turns out those things are damaging and harmful to human beings--taking their place alongside cancer causing cellphones and high tension wires, fossil fuels, nuclear energy, etc. A new syndrome has been discovered, as reported in the Independent.

Living too close to wind turbines can cause heart disease, tinnitus, vertigo, panic attacks, migraines and sleep deprivation, according to groundbreaking research to be published later this year by an American doctor.

Dr Nina Pierpont, a leading New York paediatrician, has been studying the symptoms displayed by people living near wind turbines in the US, the UK, Italy, Ireland and Canada for more than five years. Her findings have led her to confirm what she has identified as a new health risk, wind turbine syndrome (WTS).

Wind turbines--hitherto promoted as the great white hope to manumit our from slavery to carbon--now (apparently) attack and damage human beings. The list of afflictions is sobering indeed:

They cause problems ranging from internal pulsation, quivering, nervousness, fear, a compulsion to flee, chest tightness and tachycardia – increased heart rate. Turbine noise can also trigger nightmares and other disorders in children as well as harm cognitive development in the young, she claims.

We would suggest that all of these afflictions are of the heart, phobias--which have actual physiological consequences. When you hate the Lord, demons can end up stalking the mind.

We just know how this is going to play out. There will be dark mutterings about all the vested interests who will be portrayed as lining their pockets from wind turbines. Governments will be seen as colluding with big business. Supporters of wind turbines will be accused of funding biased "research" to mask the dangers. So, Dr Piedmont:

There is no doubt that my clinical research shows that the infrasonic to ultrasonic noise and vibrations emitted by wind turbines cause the symptoms which I am calling wind turbine syndrome. There are about 12 different health problems associated with WTS and these range from tachycardia, sleep disturbance, headaches, tinnitus, nausea, visual blurring, panic attacks with sensations of internal quivering to more general irritability.

The wind industry will try to discredit me and disparage me, but I can cope with that. This is not unlike the tobacco industry dismissing health issues from smoking.

We look forward to seeing Greenpeace anarchists chained to wind turbines, protesting their damaging deprivations of the human race. We confidently expect that Sue Kedgley will be calling for a bans on wind turbines within twelve months (after Copenhagen, of course). The construction and commissioning of wind turbines will be cocooned rapidly in rules, regulations, and stipulations that will cause the cost of constructing and maintaining the archaic things to sky rocket, making their already marginal economic value permanently negative.

Nah. Too extreme, we hear you say. Really.

Campaigners have consistently argued that much research hitherto has been based on written complaints to environmental health officers and manufacturers, not on science-based research. But in Denmark, Germany and France, governments are moving towards building new wind farms off-shore because of concern over the potential health and environmental risks. In the UK there are no such controls, and a growing number of lobbyists, noise experts and government officials are also beginning to query the statutory noise levels being given to councils when deciding on planning applications from wind farm manufacturers. Lobbyists claim a new method of measuring is needed.

The wind turbines are coming to a place near you. They will turn out to be the Daleks of our age. They will be a perpetual reminder, memorial stones, of the demonic powers which haunt the mind of the Unbelieving world.

Fear that Stalks the Land

Athens is a City of Relentless Phobias

We have all met people who evince an overdeveloped sense of fear. Something is "out there" and it is coming to get them. There are many instances and "causes" of such paranoia. The rich, the Fates, the world, colleagues, bosses, the gods--all are variants of the overall theme that life is a minatory existence. The fear is tangible, real, and often life-dominating.

What is a distinct and clear reality for individuals can also be manifest in societies, cultures, and generations. As a whole, people can live in fear. Cultures can be riddled with apprehension. Entire generations can be dominated by phobias.

Our view is that socially dominating phobias are characteristic of all cultures of Unbelief. If a City of Unbelief denies the providential government of all things by the omnipotent God, anything is possible--and a good chunk of those possibilities are bad. Consequently, the world becomes a fearful place. There are demons of one kind or another out there.

Therefore, it is not by accident that our modern post- and anti-Christian culture has also become increasingly gripped by phobias. As time passes, the world of Unbelief is manifesting itself as a world of the paranoiac and neurotic.

Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, recently described this phenomenon.

Be afraid!
Pig flu, bird flu, global warming, crime ... Why professional panic-mongers are making us terrified.

We could have a grown-up discussion about the outbreak of flu in Mexico which has led to between 150 and 180 deaths and spread to numerous countries across the globe. And we could take comfort from the fact that in almost all cases outside Mexico those infected have been mildly ill and appear to be making a recovery.

But, unfortunately, that is not the discussion we are having. “All of humanity is under threat,” the World Health Organisation warns. “Killer flu arrives in Britain,” a newspaper informs us. We live in a world where just about any outbreak of flu is transformed into a health scare and treated as a precursor of a global pandemic. Typically, a health warning soon turns into a threat alert and once again we are reminded that we live in unusually dangerous times.

It is not hope but fear that excites and shapes the cultural imagination of the early 21st century. Indeed, fear is fast becoming a caricature of itself. It is no longer simply an emotion or a response to the perception of threat. It has become a cultural idiom through which we signal a sense of growing unease about our place in the world.

Popular culture continually encourages an expansive alarmist imagination by providing the public with a steady diet of fearful programmes about impending calamities - man-made and natural. Alarmist television programmes about old and impending disasters and films such as The Day After Tomorrow, which transmit the idea that a sudden change in climatic conditions threatens the destruction of the planet, self-consciously erode the line between fact and fiction.

Some experts and health professionals are quite happy to deploy alarmist fiction to promote their cause. Raising awareness through the promotion of fear is frequently justified by zealous crusaders. One climatologist, David Viner, acknowledged that the film The Day After Tomorrow “got a lot of details wrong”. But hey, so what! He argued that anything that “raises awareness about climate change must be a good thing”.

The open advocacy of fear indicates that it has become a cultural metaphor for interpreting and representing the world around us. Indeed, in some circles fear is used as a form of affectation to signify a sensitivity to the many hidden perils facing people. “I am really worried about my child surfing the net,” parents tell one another, as a way of displaying their parental responsibility. To acknowledge fear is to demonstrate awareness. This self-conscious affectation does not mean that people are necessarily more scared than previously. It merely signals the idea that they ought to be.

It is not necessary for our imagination of fear to correspond to our experience of life. Compared with the past, people living in Western societies have less familiarity with pain, debilitating disease and death than ever before. We are far better placed to deal with the outbreak of new disease than was the case in the past. Recent outbreaks of Ebola, Sars and West Nilus virus have been contained with relatively small loss of lives. In 2006, Thailand and Vietnam were able to report that bird flu had been contained, even though they had been at the epicentre of the epidemic a year previously. Yet despite our growing capacity to deal with the problems facing humanity, we are led to believe that we are likely to be overwhelmed by the disasters that loom ahead.

Fear can be a sensible response to the circumstances we face. As individuals, fear often helps us to concentrate the mind when we engage with unexpected and unpredictable circumstances. There are many experiences that we should rightly fear. These are threats that are based on our personal experience. It is reasonable to fear a gang of drunken louts who cross our path or the behaviour of a vindictive employer.

However, today, many of the threats that we are instructed to fear are not based on direct experience. They are often shaped by alarmist media accounts of swine flu in Mexico, paedophiles preying on our children or desperate Middle Eastern terrorists plotting our downfall. These are threats that do not emerge out of our immediate personal experience. We can neither fight them nor flee from them. They are about dangers that we can not directly confront but simply experience passively.

The growing divergence of our sensibility of fear from our daily routine indicates that we are not talking about simply an emotional response to our experience. What is at issue is a more general cultural perspective on how we make sense of our lives. One of the principal features of our culture of fear is the belief that humanity is confronted by powerful destructive forces that threaten our existence. With so much at stake, how can responsible people fail to raise the alarm? That is why it has become so easy for television producers to blur the line that used to divide reality from science fiction. That is also why officialdom appears to be in the business of transmitting scare stories to the public. Politicians and officials take the view that if they warn us to be afraid about some impending catastrophe they will protect themselves from the accusation of irresponsibility.

Recently, the White House announced that “there is no need to panic about the outbreak of swine flu”. But when is there ever a need to panic? The very attempt to reassure conveys the assumption that fear is the default state of mind. This sentiment was implicit in a recent report of the Mental Health Foundation, which claimed that more than three-quarters of the UK population believe that the world is more frightening today than 10 years ago. The aim of this well-meaning report was to warn us about the destructive consequence of the promotion of fear (It claims that 15% of us are suffering from so-called anxiety disorders). Unfortunately, its focus on the fearful consequences of fearing reinforces the very outlook the report seeks to tackle.

So why is a relatively prosperous, secure and healthy society afflicted by the myth that it is living through an unprecedented dangerous era? The principal reason for the flourishing of fear-mongering is the relative weakness of a moral code through which society can confidently give meaning to what is right and what is wrong. . . [Society] compensates for its moral disorientation through embracing health warnings, threat alerts and the rituals of risk management. We no longer tell young teenagers that pre-marital sex is immoral or bad but that it is bad for their health and their emotional wellbeing. Instead of denouncing moral transgressions, fear entrepreneurs are more likely to castigate “risky behaviour”, “unhealthy choices” or “green sins”. And the swine flu outbreak? According to one moral tale, it is a punishment for the evil of factory farming - nature biting back at industrial animal production.

Fear entrepreneurs rarely attempt to spread alarm for its own sake. As in the case of the boy who cried wolf, fear-mongering represents a call for attention. Through raising the alarm, individuals and groups draw attention to their cause and claims in order to influence the public’s behaviour. So public campaigns against obesity often justify their alarmist message on the grounds that it puts pressure on people to change their behaviour.

As a result, a public health professional such as Ian Roberts can boast that “the social stigma attached to obesity is one of the few forces slowing the epidemic”. The message is: change the way you live, get on your bike or walk, eat less, cut out meat and you will save yourself and the planet. One environmental researcher claims that “given the crushing burden of obesity on individuals and society, all potential sources of motivation need to be stressed”.

Entrepreneurs regularly harness the prevailing culture of fear to promote their businesses and sell their products. They can sell us digital devices to track the movement of our children, vitamin supplements to prevent them becoming ill, and health insurance to try and ensure that we, and even our pets, are in a position to obtain the relevant help should catastrophe strike. They continually warn that the public faces all kinds of dangers that threaten health, security or wellbeing. In some cases, hazards - such as the supposed unsafety of tap water - are fabricated, leading to a significant transformation in lifestyle and behaviour.

The health and pharmaceutical industry - one of the most profitable sectors of the economy - has been well served by the constant outbreaks of health panics. Shares in Roche, which makes anti-flu drug Tamiflu, and GlaxoSmithKline, which makes anti-flu drug Relenza, have seen significant growth over the past few days.

Meanwhile, food scares have significantly influenced our eating habits, and concern with global warming has led to the emergence of a new cadre of green entrepreneurs who argue that unless the entire economy is reorganised, we are doomed.

But it is important to note that fear-mongers are principally moral entrepreneurs. Their warnings often convey a message about how people ought to behave in order to avoid consequences that are not only dangerous but also evil. Frequently, through raising concern about problems, they turn physical threats into moral hazards. Through their crusades, physical threats also come to constitute evils. So warnings about climate change quickly metamorphose into calls for a responsible low-carbon lifestyle. Going green, ethical living, vegetarianism or carbon rationing are promoted because they alleviate the threat of a catastrophe and because they represent morally sanctioned forms of behaviour. They also constitute an alternative to “green sins”. This term, initially used tongue-in-cheek, refers to new forms of moral transgressions.

Eating and food has also become a morally charged activity. Consequently, scaremongering about the “epidemic” of child obesity continually shifts from its alarmist propaganda about health consequences to a moral condemnation of slothful behaviour.

The traditional sin of sloth has been recycled into a health warning that demands that people alter their behaviour. Obesity serves as an exemplar of 21st-century moral hazard. The main protagonist of this scare is the flabby indolent child whose parents are indifferent to his diet and feed him on a regular diet of junk food.

The massive growth of fear-mongering campaigns and crusades during the past quarter-century is unprecedented. The dramatisation of fear acquires its most extravagant form in relation to the very big catastrophic hazards that apparently threaten the survival of the planet. International terrorism, climate change, influenza type pandemic, the Aids epidemic, over-population and potential for disastrous technological accidents are only a few of the many mega-hazards confronting society.

Health scares targeting children and women have become a flourishing enterprise, and are often linked to anxieties about food or the alleged side-effects of drugs, pollution and new technologies. Personal security constitutes another important subject for fear-mongering. Anxieties about crime, immigration and anti-social behaviour are regularly promoted by law and order advocacy organisations.

Fear promotion even attaches itself to the domain of personal relationships. Parenting has turned into a minefield and children are continually depicted as “at risk”. Powerful warnings about child abuse, peer abuse, bullying, harassment, rape, domestic violence and elder abuse communicate a health warning about the perils of personal relations. Finally, many scares convey a warning about the danger of moral corruption. Possibly the most potent symbol of the threat of moral degradation is the paedophile: a threat which is further amplified through sensationalist accounts about paedophile rings, internet pornography, and other forms of immoral sexual behaviour.

Most of us are far too busy trying to tackle the challenges of day-to-day existence to live our lives, according to the dictates of fear entrepreneurs. Research indicates that what concerns people are the problems of everyday life - jobs, money, the wellbeing and future security of their children. Of the high-profile public panics, crime and perceived threats to children have the gravest impact on our imagination. Most research suggests that there is a discrepancy between how fear is represented, discussed and reported in public and the way it is experienced by individuals.

Our private fears are often about our status - not being taken seriously or respected - and about knowing our place in the world. Nevertheless the dramatisation of fear influences behaviour by encouraging anxiety about the future, along with cynicism and confusion.

Worse still, it incites us to regard ourselves as victims of circumstances beyond our control instead of authors of our destiny. That is why it is so important to rebel against the power of the fear entrepreneurs. Most of the time - as in the case of the current swine flu scare - that means getting on with life. Instead of relying on the experts, we need to cultivate the informal ties that bind us to friends and family, who are the best guarantors of our security.

Food, Glorious Food

A Cursed Fear of Food

You can tell a great deal about a culture from what it fears. The ancient Greeks feared excelling or achieving things that would attract the envious attention of the gods, who would then strike them down, in order to teach them a “lesson.” When things were going well, they would say, "Watch it, the gods may notice and then hell will break out."

Other cultures have been fearfully racked with various superstitions such as bad luck or evil charms, as when a black cat crosses one's path, or one walks under ladders. Still other cultures have such a defined ethical sense that they fear retribution for every wrong deed. Thus, Job's comforters: they reasoned that since Job had suffered retribution he must have done something wrong.

Generally, a society that lives in cultural fear is one which is far away from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. It should come as no surprise, then, that as modern culture increasingly militates against the Christ, fear would rise.

Fear of what, you ask. Of just about everything. Of course most modern Unbelievers no longer believe in superstitious idols, such as Zeus or Athena. Their unbelief is of an equally superstitious, but secular, materialistic kind: their god is man's autonomous Reason, knowing all, conquering all, determining all. So, guess what—suddenly, man's fear of man burgeons.

We have commented often on the current phobia of man-caused global warming—that is allegedly threatening the very existence of humanity. A short reading of climate blogs serves quickly to demonstrate that many people are experiencing an acute gnawing fear at the prospect of what they believe is a certain calamity to come.

But fear is not restricted to this in modern Athens. The NZ Herald's Canvas magazine recently carried an article on the growing phobia over food. People are afraid of food. Food is the staff of life: but now it is feared and hated. Surely the Scriptures speak truly when they say: “Those who hate Me, love death.” They imagine or conjure up eating disorders such as bulimia or anorexia; they are pathologically fearful about what they are eating; they live in the prison of constant dieting; healthy eating has become a monstrous tyrant.

Sarah Lang, in the Canvas article, comments: “Another dietary disturbance, coined 'orthorexia', denotes an unhealthy fixation on 'healthy' eating that can lead to social isolation, malnourishment and extreme weight loss.” A growing number of women describe being so fixated on the fear of food and of having an other-than-acceptable body shape that they confess to being unable to think about anything else except food, their bodies, and their particular eating regimes.

Another manifestation of the same phobic narcissism is food intolerance. People on every hand are now declaring themselves to be intolerant of foods, such as wheat or gluten. Intolerances are a hard thing to “get a handle on”, but internationally, best estimates are that genuine food intolerance affects about 5% of the population—but about 25% of people think they have a particular food intolerance.

Lang writes: “Among our modern-day concern with what we eat, have intolerances become a badge of honour? Nearly 40 per cent of 1500 British people polled in a survey by Yorktest thought it trendy to be (food) intolerant and many blamed celebrities. Of the 12 million who claimed to be intolerant, less than a quarter had had their condition formally diagnosed.” The proverb says, as a man thinks, so he is. Tell yourself (fearfully) that you are intolerant to foods, and you will end up finding that the thing you feared has come upon you.

Contrast this phobia over food in Athens with life under the Covenant. In the Scriptures, food and eating and drinking together repeatedly and constantly symbolised the essence of the Covenant relationship between God and His people. When the Lord established formal public worship amongst His people, it centred around rejoicing in the presence of God through eating together: the Lord rejoicing with us, and we with Him.

The activity to express this deepest of joys was feasting—eating and drinking in abundance. As Israel went up to Jerusalem three times a year during the great central feasts, they were commanded to save up so that they could spend up large at the feast. At the feast they were to “spend the money for whatever your heart desires, for oxen, or sheep, or wine, or strong drink, or whatever your heart desires; and there you shall eat in the presence of the Lord your God and rejoice, you and your household.” (Deuteronomy 14: 26)

When the Lord redeemed His people out of Egypt the deliverance was unto a land “flowing with milk and honey”—that is, a land abundant in food. The quantity and richness of the food was a proof or evidence of God's salvation, redemption, and love for His people. Not to eat richly and abundantly at the great religious feasts was to imply that God had not blessed and had not provided for His people. It would be an insult of ingratitude to Him.

Similarly, in the New Covenant, despite the fact that Jesus came bearing its curse—and therefore lived a life of deprivation and poverty, poorer than the foxes of the earth and the bird of the air—the Kingdom He established, and over which He now reigns, is one of richness, blessing and feasting. His desire and command is that He come amongst His people and eat with them. (Revelation 3: 20)

As one theologian said, with respect to redemption and the Kingdom: “It's all about food”—sitting down, eating and drinking together, rejoicing together, and enjoying the presence of one another and of our Lord.

Behind all this, of course, is the fact that when a people are in Christ, all nature, all creation, all circumstances of life are a manifestation of God's personal and abiding love to each one of us. Fear has no place in such a world. As it says, God has not given to us a Spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. (II Timothy 1:7)

Athenian culture is betrayed by what it fears. It increasingly fears the very staff of life itself. Jerusalem's culture is manifested through what it does not fear. Its banquet halls are bright with songs of triumphant joy.