This posting has been moved to the compound posting, "The Theory Of Complexity", August 2017.
We are more complex than our inanimate surroundings, but how much more complex? This is a difficult question to answer because we cannot readily quantify, or put a number on, complexity. But if it is true that, as physicists tell us, everything is really numbers, then there must somehow be a way to quantify just how complex we are with regard to our inanimate surroundings.
There are a number of possible starting points to measure this complexity that I have written about already.
We know that the more complex a system is, the more likely it is that something will go wrong. A medical textbook is basically a catalog of all that can possibly go wrong with the human body. The ailments and injuries in a medical textbook thus represent the difference in complexity between our bodies and our inanimate surroundings.
We can see how our brains must be more complex than our bodies because we can recognize each other. If our brains were no more complex than our bodies, we would be able to tell another human being but would not be able to tell one person from another.
In my complexity theory, the free will of living things only makes sense if the living thing has the capacity to be either right or wrong in it's conclusions about it's surroundings. It can only be right or wrong about it's surroundings if it is more complex than those surroundings. There is not enough information in the surroundings that are of lower complexity for everything that the being with free will can conceive of to exist. Therefore the conclusions of the being about it's surroundings can be either correct or wrong.
But that would not be the case if a living thing were not more complex than it's surroundings. Such a living thing would not be able to conceive of anything that could not exist in it's surroundings, therefore free will would be meaningless. That is why, in my complexity theory, plants do not have free will. It would make no sense because plants are no more complex than their inanimate surroundings. Plants are certainly more intricate, meaning more complexity per mass, but contain no more intrinsic information than their inanimate environment.
This greater intricacy, but not more complexity, is why plants can die but do not need to think. It also explains why plants are typically much more able to recover, and go on living, from damage than humans and other beings with free will are able to recover from injuries. The plants require more intricacy, but no more overall complexity, than the surrounding inanimate environment, while the humans and other beings require both more intricacy and more complexity. Plants thus have the advantage of lower requirements.
But this means that we, and other beings with free will, must be more complex than plants. Since we are more complex than our inanimate surroundings, that means that it is continuously trying to break us down to it's level. That means that we require food to sustain us. Free will is of no use unless we can act on it with motion, but motion further requires food for energy.
One way that we can see how we are more complex than our surrounding inanimate environment, and plants more intricate although not more complex, is in the basic patterns involved, particularly the peak. The meaningful peak pattern is generally missing in the universe of inanimate matter, but is predominant in living things. Inanimate matter tends to form a slope, the more the better. There is no peak factor in a star, for example, the more matter is available the larger and more radiant the star will be. But living things operate by having a peak, or optimum, temperature, percentage of oxygen, and so on. Humans have optimums of work, sleep and, food. It is not just the simple slope, the more the better, of inanimate matter. A peak is more complex in that it involves multiple slopes.
We use plants for food, either directly or indirectly through meat. But my complexity theory also establishes that energy and information is really the same thing. We cannot add information to anything without applying energy to it and we cannot apply energy to anything without adding information to it. Another way we can see that energy and information is really the same thing is how we can, through technology, make our lives physically easier but only at the expense of making them more complex. We can never, on a large scale, make our lives both physically easier and also less complex. This shows, again, that energy and information is really the same thing.
However, that apparently presents a problem for us. We require plants for food, to maintain our higher level of complexity over our inanimate surroundings, but yet those plants are themselves no more complex than our inanimate environment.
Yet that provides us with a possibly way to see numerically just how much more complex we are than our surrounding environment. The fact that plants are no more complex than the surrounding inanimate environment is why no one species of plant will provide us with the necessary nutrition for optimum health. We require a balanced diet that encompasses a number of different plants.
We could thus state that we are X times as complex as our surrounding environment with X being the number of different plants that are required, either directly or indirectly through meat, to maintain us in optimum health.
MATHEMATICAL SYMBOLS AND WORDS
Everything is really numbers, ultimately expressible as mathematics. We also use words to describe the world and the universe around us. The difference between words and numbers is that numbers are how everything in the universe actually operates, while words describe how we see the universe.
To describe something with mathematics we must completely understand it's operation, such as a calendar or periodic table. But we can describe something with words without completely understanding it.
If we were of the same complexity as our surrounding inanimate environment, then there should be the same number of words as there are of mathematical symbols. In fact, there should be no difference between the two. But that is not the case, there are many more words than mathematical symbols.
With words we are seeing our own complexity reflected back at us, but with numbers and mathematics we are not. Words describe how things affect us and there must thus be more words than mathematical symbols because we are more complex than our inanimate surroundings.
In fact, just as with the number of different plants that are required for us to have a balanced diet we can put a measurement on our complexity, relative to the surrounding inanimate matter, by the ratio of words to mathematical symbols that we use.
To begin with, only about ten thousand words are in common use. Furthermore, different words can mean essentially the same thing such as "red", "rouge" and, "scarlet". But if we eliminate such redundancies then the ratio of words to mathematical symbols should be approximately equal to the number of plants required to provide a balanced diet, which should be equal to our complexity relative to our inanimate environment.
But keep in mind here that I am referring to the number of mathematical symbols in use, not the percentage of data that is expressed as numbers as opposed to words. I also believe that we can take a measurement on how we are progressing from what we know now to all that we can practically know by what percentage of our data is in the form of numbers, rather than words. The percentage of numbers in our data has greatly increased since centuries past. But there are still many more words used than numbers. This is because, to describe something with numbers we must completely understand it, but that is not the case with words. We should thus theoretically arrive at a day where everything can be expressed as numbers because we will know all that we can practically know.
I am sure that we can measure complexity, which would be a great advantage. It just requires some creative ways of measurement because it is not something that can be measured with a ruler or a scale.
Thursday, February 20, 2020
The Salt Deserts Of Iran
With Iran recently in the news, I thought of something with regard to geology.
The compound posting on the geology blog, www.markmeekearth.blogspot.com , "The Story Of Planet Earth", leaves virtually no major feature of the earth's surface unexplained, either on land or on the seafloor. There is still more to be explained but I have shown how this model of the earth's development works so that readers could see for themselves how any features that are not directly described came to be.
Following is the brief abstract that I use to introduce this theory.
Basically, the theory which reveals the explanation for so much of the major features of the earth's topography and the seafloor ridges is that the continents on earth came from two Continental Asteroids. Much debris from the second, and larger, of these two continental asteroids was hurtled back into space, where it coalesced by gravity to form the moon. The idea of the moon forming in this way is not new, the asteroid is commonly referred to as "Theia", but my theory expands on it to include the continents as well. Each of the impacts of the continental asteroids unbalanced the earth's rotation, by the addition of the new mass, so that the earth's poles and equator underwent two shifts to regain rotational balance by centering one of the poles in the new additional landmass. The land mass from each continental asteroid was eventually broken up by tectonic activity, driven by the centrifugal force of the earth's rotation. The south pole is today in Antarctica because that was the core of the Second Continental Asteroid. A similar situation is seen on Mars, where the southern hemisphere is higher in elevation and thus heavier, than the northern hemisphere. But this does not upset the rotation of Mars because the south pole is in the center of the heavier hemisphere. What this means is that there have been three polar eras on earth, with the poles and equator in different places in each era. We are in the third polar era, after the Second Continental Asteroid. The First Polar Era was before the First Continental Asteroid.
The spin of the earth causes magma, hot molten rock, to emerge from below along the equator by centrifugal force. According to the laws of fluid dynamics, this equatorial emergence must then be balanced by periodic longitudinal lines of emergence in a perpendicular direction to the equator. Each time the poles and equator shifts, to regain rotational balance after the added mass of a continental asteroid, these lines of magma emergence must also shift, but magma emergence continues along old longitudinal and equatorial lines for a long time. This scenario explains just so much about the topography of the land and seafloor, and leaves few major features of the earth unexplained.
For a more in depth review of the theory, read the introduction in "The Story Of Planet Earth", on the geology blog.
Every time I think about this theory I notice something else that is difficult to explain otherwise but can easily be explained by this theory. As an example, let's considered the salt deserts of Iran.
Iran is a mountainous country but you can see that there is a wide, roughly arrow-shaped, area in the northeast central part of the country that is flat, and extends to the southeast. This is actually a plateau, the Iranian Plateau. It encompasses two deserts, the Dasht e Kavir, in the north, and the Dasht e Lut, to the southeast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Iran#/media/File:MapOfIran.png
But a desert is a matter of climate, not of geology. What I find to be so significant is that these two deserts on the plateau are salty. Salt comes from the seas. So how could we possibly get salty deserts on a high plateau far inland in a very mountainous country? This really requires some special explanation that I cannot find anywhere.
But my geology theory, as described in "The Story Of Planet Earth", makes it very simple.
The north-south axis of the Caspian Sea is a longitudinal line of magma emergence from the present polar era, after the landing of the third, and final, Continental Asteroid. The long line of otherwise very difficult to explain mountains that extends across Turkey and Iran to central Asia and beyond is actually the Original Impact Line, the remnants of this last Continental Asteroid as it struck the earth at a relatively low angle.
This extensive range of mountains across Turkey and Iran and into central Asia and beyond being the Original Impact Line of the third, and last, Continental Asteroid resolves another great mystery of the earth's geography. The Caspian Sea is salt water but yet is completely separated, and far away from, the rest of the earth's seas. How could this possibly come to be? The clear and simple answer is that is was separated by the landing of the last Continental Asteroid, and the deposition of it's debris as this Original Impact line of mountains. This also explains why the Black Sea would also be completely separated from the rest of the earth's seas, except for the Bosporus Strait which is also a line of emergence that formed a gap in this Original Impact Line.
The north-south line of longitudinal magma emergence that then formed spread the ground below the Original Impact Line of the last Continental Asteroid apart, creating a wide gap in it. That gap extended southward, in a north-south line, from what is now the north-south axis of the Caspian Sea.
But what happened is that the Arabian Plate, the tectonic plate just to the south, was moving northward as it still is. That is why Iran is vulnerable to earthquakes. This pushed against the Original Impact Line, the extensive mountains across Turkey and Iran, and pushed the western part of it northward. We can see this in how the mountains of Turkey extend east-west but then the mountains of western Iran, to the east of Turkey, are more angled from northwest to southeast.
This pushing against the Original Impact Line, as described in my theory, of the Arabian tectonic Plate forced the seafloor of the gap that had been produced by the magma emergence along the north-south longitudinal line of emergence that ran south from the Caspian Sea upward. This seafloor forced upward is what formed the Iranian Plateau as seen on the map above. Since the sea contained salt, that explains why the two deserts on the Iranian Plateau, the Dasht e Kavir in the north and the Dasht e Lut in the southeast, are salty.
The compound posting on the geology blog, www.markmeekearth.blogspot.com , "The Story Of Planet Earth", leaves virtually no major feature of the earth's surface unexplained, either on land or on the seafloor. There is still more to be explained but I have shown how this model of the earth's development works so that readers could see for themselves how any features that are not directly described came to be.
Following is the brief abstract that I use to introduce this theory.
Basically, the theory which reveals the explanation for so much of the major features of the earth's topography and the seafloor ridges is that the continents on earth came from two Continental Asteroids. Much debris from the second, and larger, of these two continental asteroids was hurtled back into space, where it coalesced by gravity to form the moon. The idea of the moon forming in this way is not new, the asteroid is commonly referred to as "Theia", but my theory expands on it to include the continents as well. Each of the impacts of the continental asteroids unbalanced the earth's rotation, by the addition of the new mass, so that the earth's poles and equator underwent two shifts to regain rotational balance by centering one of the poles in the new additional landmass. The land mass from each continental asteroid was eventually broken up by tectonic activity, driven by the centrifugal force of the earth's rotation. The south pole is today in Antarctica because that was the core of the Second Continental Asteroid. A similar situation is seen on Mars, where the southern hemisphere is higher in elevation and thus heavier, than the northern hemisphere. But this does not upset the rotation of Mars because the south pole is in the center of the heavier hemisphere. What this means is that there have been three polar eras on earth, with the poles and equator in different places in each era. We are in the third polar era, after the Second Continental Asteroid. The First Polar Era was before the First Continental Asteroid.
The spin of the earth causes magma, hot molten rock, to emerge from below along the equator by centrifugal force. According to the laws of fluid dynamics, this equatorial emergence must then be balanced by periodic longitudinal lines of emergence in a perpendicular direction to the equator. Each time the poles and equator shifts, to regain rotational balance after the added mass of a continental asteroid, these lines of magma emergence must also shift, but magma emergence continues along old longitudinal and equatorial lines for a long time. This scenario explains just so much about the topography of the land and seafloor, and leaves few major features of the earth unexplained.
For a more in depth review of the theory, read the introduction in "The Story Of Planet Earth", on the geology blog.
Every time I think about this theory I notice something else that is difficult to explain otherwise but can easily be explained by this theory. As an example, let's considered the salt deserts of Iran.
Iran is a mountainous country but you can see that there is a wide, roughly arrow-shaped, area in the northeast central part of the country that is flat, and extends to the southeast. This is actually a plateau, the Iranian Plateau. It encompasses two deserts, the Dasht e Kavir, in the north, and the Dasht e Lut, to the southeast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Iran#/media/File:MapOfIran.png
But a desert is a matter of climate, not of geology. What I find to be so significant is that these two deserts on the plateau are salty. Salt comes from the seas. So how could we possibly get salty deserts on a high plateau far inland in a very mountainous country? This really requires some special explanation that I cannot find anywhere.
But my geology theory, as described in "The Story Of Planet Earth", makes it very simple.
The north-south axis of the Caspian Sea is a longitudinal line of magma emergence from the present polar era, after the landing of the third, and final, Continental Asteroid. The long line of otherwise very difficult to explain mountains that extends across Turkey and Iran to central Asia and beyond is actually the Original Impact Line, the remnants of this last Continental Asteroid as it struck the earth at a relatively low angle.
This extensive range of mountains across Turkey and Iran and into central Asia and beyond being the Original Impact Line of the third, and last, Continental Asteroid resolves another great mystery of the earth's geography. The Caspian Sea is salt water but yet is completely separated, and far away from, the rest of the earth's seas. How could this possibly come to be? The clear and simple answer is that is was separated by the landing of the last Continental Asteroid, and the deposition of it's debris as this Original Impact line of mountains. This also explains why the Black Sea would also be completely separated from the rest of the earth's seas, except for the Bosporus Strait which is also a line of emergence that formed a gap in this Original Impact Line.
The north-south line of longitudinal magma emergence that then formed spread the ground below the Original Impact Line of the last Continental Asteroid apart, creating a wide gap in it. That gap extended southward, in a north-south line, from what is now the north-south axis of the Caspian Sea.
But what happened is that the Arabian Plate, the tectonic plate just to the south, was moving northward as it still is. That is why Iran is vulnerable to earthquakes. This pushed against the Original Impact Line, the extensive mountains across Turkey and Iran, and pushed the western part of it northward. We can see this in how the mountains of Turkey extend east-west but then the mountains of western Iran, to the east of Turkey, are more angled from northwest to southeast.
This pushing against the Original Impact Line, as described in my theory, of the Arabian tectonic Plate forced the seafloor of the gap that had been produced by the magma emergence along the north-south longitudinal line of emergence that ran south from the Caspian Sea upward. This seafloor forced upward is what formed the Iranian Plateau as seen on the map above. Since the sea contained salt, that explains why the two deserts on the Iranian Plateau, the Dasht e Kavir in the north and the Dasht e Lut in the southeast, are salty.
Thursday, February 13, 2020
The Dove In The Bible
There is something in the Bible that I think deserves more attention.
As the waters of the great flood were receding, Noah sent out a dove from the ark. The first time, the dove could find nowhere to perch and it returned to the ark. Seven days later, Noah sent it out again and it returned with an olive leaf, so Noah knew that the flood waters must be receding. Seven days after that, Noah sent out the dove again and it did not return.
Far in the future, Jesus was being baptized in the Jordan River by John the Baptist. The Holy Spirit suddenly appeared in the sky, in the form of a dove, and the voice of God proclaimed Jesus as His Son.
I see it as the same dove coming back. Both instances involved water and sin. The first instance was the wicked world of the antediluvians being destroyed by the flood. The second instance was the baptism of Jesus, who came to pay the price for sin, in water.
The first time, the flood, it was the sinners themselves that were drowned. The second time, the Baptism of Jesus, it was just the sin nature that was symbolically drowned by Jesus' baptism so that the sinners themselves could be saved.
The ark, made of wood, saved chosen people from the flood. The cross, on which Jesus was crucified, made of wood, opened the possibility of permanent salvation from sin.
Baptism was a new ceremony and the baptism of Jesus opened the door to a new and better era, when people could be permanently saved from sin, instead of sinners being drowned in the flood. I find it significant that John the Baptist was from a priestly family, representing the old era, while Jesus wasn't, which represented the new era.
Notice how the Temple Mount, on which the Temple had been built that stood at the time of Jesus, resembled a great ship in form. The Temple thus represented the long-ago Noah's Ark. The Temple was where sacrifices were made for sin. The religious establishment of the time resented Jesus, his criticism and his popularity, and got him crucified.
But that was all a part of God's plan and Jesus became the permanent sacrifice to pay the price for sin. The dove that had left the ark had returned to Him, with the ark now being the Temple Mount. The dove had returned to the ark the second time with an olive leaf. The Mount of Olives, where Jesus and the Apostles spent so much time, was just across the Kidron Valley from the Temple Mount.
We have visited the Temple Mount in the posting on this blog, "Esau And The Temple Mount", February 2016.
We have seen my conclusion that the metal band around the wooden stump of a tree, in the Book of Daniel, was a prophecy of the Temple Mount being preserved after the Temple would be destroyed, in the compound posting on this blog "New Insight Into Bible Prophecy" October 2016, section 2) THE TREE STUMP AND THE TEMPLE MOUNT. and the tree having been made out of wood is a link with the wooden ark.
As the waters of the great flood were receding, Noah sent out a dove from the ark. The first time, the dove could find nowhere to perch and it returned to the ark. Seven days later, Noah sent it out again and it returned with an olive leaf, so Noah knew that the flood waters must be receding. Seven days after that, Noah sent out the dove again and it did not return.
Far in the future, Jesus was being baptized in the Jordan River by John the Baptist. The Holy Spirit suddenly appeared in the sky, in the form of a dove, and the voice of God proclaimed Jesus as His Son.
I see it as the same dove coming back. Both instances involved water and sin. The first instance was the wicked world of the antediluvians being destroyed by the flood. The second instance was the baptism of Jesus, who came to pay the price for sin, in water.
The first time, the flood, it was the sinners themselves that were drowned. The second time, the Baptism of Jesus, it was just the sin nature that was symbolically drowned by Jesus' baptism so that the sinners themselves could be saved.
The ark, made of wood, saved chosen people from the flood. The cross, on which Jesus was crucified, made of wood, opened the possibility of permanent salvation from sin.
Baptism was a new ceremony and the baptism of Jesus opened the door to a new and better era, when people could be permanently saved from sin, instead of sinners being drowned in the flood. I find it significant that John the Baptist was from a priestly family, representing the old era, while Jesus wasn't, which represented the new era.
Notice how the Temple Mount, on which the Temple had been built that stood at the time of Jesus, resembled a great ship in form. The Temple thus represented the long-ago Noah's Ark. The Temple was where sacrifices were made for sin. The religious establishment of the time resented Jesus, his criticism and his popularity, and got him crucified.
But that was all a part of God's plan and Jesus became the permanent sacrifice to pay the price for sin. The dove that had left the ark had returned to Him, with the ark now being the Temple Mount. The dove had returned to the ark the second time with an olive leaf. The Mount of Olives, where Jesus and the Apostles spent so much time, was just across the Kidron Valley from the Temple Mount.
We have visited the Temple Mount in the posting on this blog, "Esau And The Temple Mount", February 2016.
We have seen my conclusion that the metal band around the wooden stump of a tree, in the Book of Daniel, was a prophecy of the Temple Mount being preserved after the Temple would be destroyed, in the compound posting on this blog "New Insight Into Bible Prophecy" October 2016, section 2) THE TREE STUMP AND THE TEMPLE MOUNT. and the tree having been made out of wood is a link with the wooden ark.
The Failed Millenniums
This is being reposted because a lot more has been added to it.
(Note-By the way, I know that I break rules of grammar sometimes but it sounds better. The actual correct plural term for millennium is "millennia" My old English teacher would also say that sentences should not begin with "And" or "Or", but sometimes that rule is made to be broken).
We have already seen how the glorious time known as The Sixties was actually God giving humanity a chance to see if they could build the Millennium Kingdom on earth themselves, without going through the Apocalypse foretold in the Bible.
We saw my view of the Sixties as the beginning of a would-be Millennium in the two sections of the compound posting on this blog, "New Insight Into Bible Prophecy" October 2016, sections 17) CROSSING THE RED SEA and 18) THE PENTAGON PROPHECY.
Jesus foretold that when the Jews regained control of Jerusalem from the Gentiles that would begin the countdown to the Return of Jesus to set up the Millennium, when the earth would finally be the godly paradise that it was always intended to be. But, due to our sinfulness, that meant that most of civilization had to be destroyed in the Apocalypse first.
But maybe the Baby Boom generation, that would come of age during the Sixties, might be different. This would be the generation that had heard about the recent cataclysmic world war, the genocide, the new weapons that ended the war but could destroy the world at the touch of a button. Before this there had been the terrible time of the Great Depression and before that, the First World War.
Maybe the Baby Boomers, the generation born beginning just after the end of the Second World War as returning soldiers settled down and started families, would be the generation that had learned it's lesson and would be different.
I conclude that God decided to give them a chance to build the Millennium themselves. Maybe we could call Hitler the Antichrist and the Second World War the Apocalypse, and the Baby Boomers would bring about the Millennium. That is why the nation of Israel was reestablished in 1948, after nearly two thousand years, but the original city of Jerusalem itself remained under control of the Gentiles so that the prophetic countdown, Jesus return to set up His Kingdom while people were still alive who had been alive when Jerusalem was taken back from Gentile control, had not begun.
But we just couldn't do it, we were just too sinful. There was no way that the Sixties, despite the commendable idealism, was going to bring about the Millennium without going through the Apocalypse first.
Many of the Sixties generation had their hearts in the right place, there was a seeking not only for personal fulfillment but for a better world. At the Woodstock concert, in the summer of 1969, 400,000 young people got together for three days and there was not a single act of violence. There was even an effort to "levitate" the Pentagon by people surrounding it in meditation, in order to bring peace to the world starting with ending America's Vietnam War.
Most of the Sixties idealism was not focused on Christianity but there was a Christian side to it, in the Explo 72 concert of Christian music and sermons. It was held in Dallas in 1972 and was kind of the Christian version of Woodstock.
But the Millennium was not to be. It was not mainly a time of God. A famous 1966 cover of Time Magazine asked "Is God Dead"?
The year after that, 1968, a popular movie was Rosemary's Baby, involving Satanism.
The summer of 1967 was optimistically called "The Summer of Love" but drugs and crime ran rampant. Cities across America were convulsed by urban riots. Time Magazine referred to 1967, which should have been around the beginning of the new Millennium of Jesus, as "That long, strange year".
Three of the most prominent rock stars, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and, Jim Morrison died right in a row of drug-related issues.
Clearly, humans bringing about the promised Millennium by their own power just wasn't going to work. It was in June 1967 that the Six-Day War resulted in the return of the old city of Jerusalem to Jewish control, in the state of Israel. That thus began the prophetic countdown to Jesus' promised return to earth, with people who were alive at the return of Jerusalem in 1967 still being alive at Jesus' return.
That is why there was the nineteen-year delay between the reestablishment of the nation of Israel and the actual return of the original city of Jerusalem to Israel. That delay was to see if we were able to being about the Millennium ourselves, without going through the devastating Apocalypse, but it was not to be.
What I want to add today is another unsuccessful would-be Millennium before the Sixties.
There was once a glorious time in the western countries. It lasted from about 1865 to 1914. It was called by various names in different countries. In France it is known as the Belle Epoque, "The Beautiful Era". In Britain and the U.S. it was known as the Victorian Age, coinciding with the reign of Queen Victoria. In America it was also known as the Gilded Age.
There were no major conflicts during this time. It was an extended time of relative peace like the world had rarely seen.
Many of the technical developments that shape our world today came to be. Movies, radio, cars, electricity, aircraft and large ships that made travel for many people common were developed. Mass production in factories was perfected so that the masses, instead of the few, could benefit from manufactured goods.
Some people got fantastically wealthy. Great exhibitions were held in major cities that showcased the wonderful new developments. Perhaps the best symbol of this time would be the Eiffel Tower, which was built as the entrance arch to the 1889 Paris Exhibition, the centennial of the French Revolution. It was the tallest structure ever built. The Eiffel Tower was actually intended to be only temporary, to be dismantled after the exhibition was over, but was probably saved because radio had been developed and it was the ideal place for a broadcasting antenna.
There was amazing advances in science, particularly chemistry. Treatments for disease were developed continuously and life expectance increased dramatically.
Maybe the rapid development of industry during this fortunate time of peace would even allow humans to bring about the godly paradise that was promised in the Millennium themselves.
Unfortunately, there was a decline in belief in God during this apparently glorious era. The publication, in 1859, of "On The Origin Of Species", by Charles Darwin, gave many who did not want to believe in God and intellectual foundation to explain the existence of life without the need for a creation by God. Even though the book states no such thing and does not attempt to explain how living forms could have originated.
The secularism and hostility to organized religion of the French Revolution also had it's long-term effect, particularly in Europe.
The good times were not to last. It all came crashing down into the horrors of the First World War, a war like the world had never seen before. The technical developments that had contributed to the prosperity of the Victorian Age also made it possible for humans to kill each other on an industrial scale, and that is unfortunately what happened.
The war, at least on the Western Front, bogged down into the deadly stalemate of trench warfare. Neither side could break the impasse. Before this war, guns could fire only a single bullet at a time. But the new machine guns multiplied the deadliness of the war many times over. During an offense to break the deadlock, thousands of soldiers might die over a hundred meters of ground.
Hideous new weapons were developed in an attempt to break the deadly stalemate. Tanks with treads all around the body of the tank that could pass right over a trench. One way to take out an enemy trench was to sneak up to it with a flamethrower. At sea, newly-perfected submarines sank ships unexpectedly.
The most infamous development of the war was poison gas. Lethal gases, such as phosgene, mustard and, chlorine, were heavier than air. So if a shell containing the gas could be landed near an enemy trench, the gas would seep down into the trench.
Instead of creating a man-made Heavenly Millennium, humanity had turned it's attention to creating a man-made Hell. Evolutionary theory had humans as the highest form of life but there are no animals that kill each other like this in a war that was essentially over nothing.
What I have always found to be so disturbing about the First World War was that, first, the war wasn't really over anything of great significance. It is sometimes called "The war over nothing that changed everything". Remember that we saw the beginning of the First World War in the posting on the economics blog, www.markmeekeconomics.blogspot.com , "June 28, 1914, Assassination In Sarajevo" November 2014.
The second thing that is especially disturbing is that so many people, in capitals like London and Berlin, actually gathered to cheer the declaration of war. It was as if all that time of peace was getting boring. Both sides were under the delusion that the was would only last a few weeks. But the war would turn into far and away the most devastating and deadly war that the world had yet seen.
The First World War became simply known as "The War to End All Wars" although, of course, it wouldn't be.
The war eventually ended, and the good times returned. In fact, the good times were better than ever because the now-unneeded manufacturing capacity that went to supply the war effort could be turned to making consumer goods. The result was that fabulous decade known as the "Roaring Twenties". If the Eiffel Tower could be considered as the icon of the Victorian Age ( or the Belle Epoque or the Gilded Age ), then the Empire State Building could be considered as the icon of the "Roaring Twenties".
But, once again, it wasn't to last. Factories were producing, in great quantities, all kinds of goods from cars to radios. The trouble this time would be economic. While some were becoming fantastically wealthy, the workers who were actually producing the goods were not being paid enough to be able to afford to buy them. Manufactured goods were just piling up in warehouses and factories began cutting back on production, meaning that workers had even less money, and it spiraled into a devastating economic crash in October 1929.
Following was the terrible time of the Great Depression. There were long lines at soup kitchens. Many who had gained, but then suddenly lost, great wealth during the 1920s were dead by suicide. Germany was now a democracy, the Weimar Republic, but had it's postwar economy devastated by this crash.
There is one sure way out of an economic depression. Unfortunately, it is to have a war. A party emerged in Germany that had the answers. They were the National Socialists, or Nazis. They absorbed unemployment by drastically increasing the size of the armed forces, and got factories back to full production by making war equipment for them.
It was simple and brilliantly effective, except that it was part of the reason that there would be another war, even more terrible than the First World War. The reason that the Second World War would be even worse than the First is that now civilians were considered as a legitimate target.
When this war finally ended, millions of soldiers returned home and began families. That is what brought about the Baby Boomers and the Sixties that we saw at the beginning of this article. I have concluded that God decided to give them the final chance at building the promised Millennial Kingdom on earth, without going through the horrors of the Apocalypse which will make the two world wars seem like minor conflicts by comparison.
But it was not to be. We will get to the Millennial Kingdom, where the world will finally be the godly paradise that it was always meant to be, but only by going through the Apocalypse first, as we saw in the posting on this blog, "The End Of The World As We Know It" June 2019.
Notice the chronological placements of newsworthy mass murders like the killings of Jack the Ripper, in 1888 London, and the Manson murders, in 1969 Los Angeles. Both happened right at the height of one of these two failed Millenniums.
Jack the Ripper was in the news in the autumn of 1888, right in the middle of the Victorian Age in London. Times were good, but people in general had been getting more and more secular since the publication of "On The Origin of Species", in 1859. The general movement was away from God.
Could it be possible that these shocking killings, which really jolted society, were allowed to happen to make people start thinking that something was wrong with society and that it needed God?
Likewise the Manson murders, actually an attempt to set off the Apocalypse foretold in the Bible as a race war beginning in the U.S., which would conclude with Charles Manson reigning over the world as Christ as described in the posting on this blog, "Jonestown, Charles Manson And The Gnostic Gospels", December 2019.
In July 1969 there was the epic even of America landing astronauts on the moon, and then getting them safely back home. The following month was the signature event of the idealism of the Sixties, the Woodstock concert in New York State. Woodstock was all about the better world that we could have if we would all live in peace. It does deserve a lot of credit that 400,000 young people got together for three days and there was not a single act of violence.
But what happened right in between those two events? The country was horrified by the Manson killings. The best-known of the victims was actress Sharon Tate. The members of the Manson "Family" wrote "PIG" on the wall in the blood of the victims. The intention being to get it blamed on black militants and thus begin the race war that would be the Apocalypse that would end with Manson ruling over the world as Christ.
Once again, could it be that these horrific killings were allowed to happen between these two great events to remind us that, despite the accomplishment of putting men on the moon and the commendable idealism of Woodstock, something was wrong with society and we needed to return to God?
THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION AND THE SIXTIES
We saw the importance of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 in the posting on this blog, "The Great Revolution Of Our Time", January 2017. I see it as having an impact on the world that is comparable to the French and October Revolutions that completely changed the world. The world had been secularizing until the Iranian Revolution turned the tide of history back toward religion.
The effect has been spreading ever since, and has gone well beyond the Islamic religion.
But the Iranian Revolution actually has a close relationship to the Sixties in the west. It is a reflection of the Sixties in how the Iranians demonstrating against the U.S. were a mirror image of the U.S. protests against the Vietnam War the decade before. Bell-bottomed pants were even in style in Iran at the time. The U.S. administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were simply replaced by the unpopular government of the Shah.
The demonstrations outside the U.S. Embassy compound, after the Hostage Crisis began, were the Iranian equivalent of the attempt by antiwar protesters to "levitate" the Pentagon by meditation in 1967.
So the idealism of the Sixties in America and the west was a failed attempt at creating the promised biblical Millennium ourselves, without going through the Apocalypse first. But it turned out to have been reflected in the Iranian Revolution in the following decade. The world was moving away from religion but this is what turned it back. This has affected the entire world, including the Christian nations.
We will still have to go through the Apocalypse to get to the Millennium. But the Sixties were not a complete failure as it did inadvertently end up getting the world moving back toward God.
(Note-By the way, I know that I break rules of grammar sometimes but it sounds better. The actual correct plural term for millennium is "millennia" My old English teacher would also say that sentences should not begin with "And" or "Or", but sometimes that rule is made to be broken).
We have already seen how the glorious time known as The Sixties was actually God giving humanity a chance to see if they could build the Millennium Kingdom on earth themselves, without going through the Apocalypse foretold in the Bible.
We saw my view of the Sixties as the beginning of a would-be Millennium in the two sections of the compound posting on this blog, "New Insight Into Bible Prophecy" October 2016, sections 17) CROSSING THE RED SEA and 18) THE PENTAGON PROPHECY.
Jesus foretold that when the Jews regained control of Jerusalem from the Gentiles that would begin the countdown to the Return of Jesus to set up the Millennium, when the earth would finally be the godly paradise that it was always intended to be. But, due to our sinfulness, that meant that most of civilization had to be destroyed in the Apocalypse first.
But maybe the Baby Boom generation, that would come of age during the Sixties, might be different. This would be the generation that had heard about the recent cataclysmic world war, the genocide, the new weapons that ended the war but could destroy the world at the touch of a button. Before this there had been the terrible time of the Great Depression and before that, the First World War.
Maybe the Baby Boomers, the generation born beginning just after the end of the Second World War as returning soldiers settled down and started families, would be the generation that had learned it's lesson and would be different.
I conclude that God decided to give them a chance to build the Millennium themselves. Maybe we could call Hitler the Antichrist and the Second World War the Apocalypse, and the Baby Boomers would bring about the Millennium. That is why the nation of Israel was reestablished in 1948, after nearly two thousand years, but the original city of Jerusalem itself remained under control of the Gentiles so that the prophetic countdown, Jesus return to set up His Kingdom while people were still alive who had been alive when Jerusalem was taken back from Gentile control, had not begun.
But we just couldn't do it, we were just too sinful. There was no way that the Sixties, despite the commendable idealism, was going to bring about the Millennium without going through the Apocalypse first.
Many of the Sixties generation had their hearts in the right place, there was a seeking not only for personal fulfillment but for a better world. At the Woodstock concert, in the summer of 1969, 400,000 young people got together for three days and there was not a single act of violence. There was even an effort to "levitate" the Pentagon by people surrounding it in meditation, in order to bring peace to the world starting with ending America's Vietnam War.
Most of the Sixties idealism was not focused on Christianity but there was a Christian side to it, in the Explo 72 concert of Christian music and sermons. It was held in Dallas in 1972 and was kind of the Christian version of Woodstock.
But the Millennium was not to be. It was not mainly a time of God. A famous 1966 cover of Time Magazine asked "Is God Dead"?
The year after that, 1968, a popular movie was Rosemary's Baby, involving Satanism.
The summer of 1967 was optimistically called "The Summer of Love" but drugs and crime ran rampant. Cities across America were convulsed by urban riots. Time Magazine referred to 1967, which should have been around the beginning of the new Millennium of Jesus, as "That long, strange year".
Three of the most prominent rock stars, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and, Jim Morrison died right in a row of drug-related issues.
Clearly, humans bringing about the promised Millennium by their own power just wasn't going to work. It was in June 1967 that the Six-Day War resulted in the return of the old city of Jerusalem to Jewish control, in the state of Israel. That thus began the prophetic countdown to Jesus' promised return to earth, with people who were alive at the return of Jerusalem in 1967 still being alive at Jesus' return.
That is why there was the nineteen-year delay between the reestablishment of the nation of Israel and the actual return of the original city of Jerusalem to Israel. That delay was to see if we were able to being about the Millennium ourselves, without going through the devastating Apocalypse, but it was not to be.
What I want to add today is another unsuccessful would-be Millennium before the Sixties.
There was once a glorious time in the western countries. It lasted from about 1865 to 1914. It was called by various names in different countries. In France it is known as the Belle Epoque, "The Beautiful Era". In Britain and the U.S. it was known as the Victorian Age, coinciding with the reign of Queen Victoria. In America it was also known as the Gilded Age.
There were no major conflicts during this time. It was an extended time of relative peace like the world had rarely seen.
Many of the technical developments that shape our world today came to be. Movies, radio, cars, electricity, aircraft and large ships that made travel for many people common were developed. Mass production in factories was perfected so that the masses, instead of the few, could benefit from manufactured goods.
Some people got fantastically wealthy. Great exhibitions were held in major cities that showcased the wonderful new developments. Perhaps the best symbol of this time would be the Eiffel Tower, which was built as the entrance arch to the 1889 Paris Exhibition, the centennial of the French Revolution. It was the tallest structure ever built. The Eiffel Tower was actually intended to be only temporary, to be dismantled after the exhibition was over, but was probably saved because radio had been developed and it was the ideal place for a broadcasting antenna.
There was amazing advances in science, particularly chemistry. Treatments for disease were developed continuously and life expectance increased dramatically.
Maybe the rapid development of industry during this fortunate time of peace would even allow humans to bring about the godly paradise that was promised in the Millennium themselves.
Unfortunately, there was a decline in belief in God during this apparently glorious era. The publication, in 1859, of "On The Origin Of Species", by Charles Darwin, gave many who did not want to believe in God and intellectual foundation to explain the existence of life without the need for a creation by God. Even though the book states no such thing and does not attempt to explain how living forms could have originated.
The secularism and hostility to organized religion of the French Revolution also had it's long-term effect, particularly in Europe.
The good times were not to last. It all came crashing down into the horrors of the First World War, a war like the world had never seen before. The technical developments that had contributed to the prosperity of the Victorian Age also made it possible for humans to kill each other on an industrial scale, and that is unfortunately what happened.
The war, at least on the Western Front, bogged down into the deadly stalemate of trench warfare. Neither side could break the impasse. Before this war, guns could fire only a single bullet at a time. But the new machine guns multiplied the deadliness of the war many times over. During an offense to break the deadlock, thousands of soldiers might die over a hundred meters of ground.
Hideous new weapons were developed in an attempt to break the deadly stalemate. Tanks with treads all around the body of the tank that could pass right over a trench. One way to take out an enemy trench was to sneak up to it with a flamethrower. At sea, newly-perfected submarines sank ships unexpectedly.
The most infamous development of the war was poison gas. Lethal gases, such as phosgene, mustard and, chlorine, were heavier than air. So if a shell containing the gas could be landed near an enemy trench, the gas would seep down into the trench.
Instead of creating a man-made Heavenly Millennium, humanity had turned it's attention to creating a man-made Hell. Evolutionary theory had humans as the highest form of life but there are no animals that kill each other like this in a war that was essentially over nothing.
What I have always found to be so disturbing about the First World War was that, first, the war wasn't really over anything of great significance. It is sometimes called "The war over nothing that changed everything". Remember that we saw the beginning of the First World War in the posting on the economics blog, www.markmeekeconomics.blogspot.com , "June 28, 1914, Assassination In Sarajevo" November 2014.
The second thing that is especially disturbing is that so many people, in capitals like London and Berlin, actually gathered to cheer the declaration of war. It was as if all that time of peace was getting boring. Both sides were under the delusion that the was would only last a few weeks. But the war would turn into far and away the most devastating and deadly war that the world had yet seen.
The First World War became simply known as "The War to End All Wars" although, of course, it wouldn't be.
The war eventually ended, and the good times returned. In fact, the good times were better than ever because the now-unneeded manufacturing capacity that went to supply the war effort could be turned to making consumer goods. The result was that fabulous decade known as the "Roaring Twenties". If the Eiffel Tower could be considered as the icon of the Victorian Age ( or the Belle Epoque or the Gilded Age ), then the Empire State Building could be considered as the icon of the "Roaring Twenties".
But, once again, it wasn't to last. Factories were producing, in great quantities, all kinds of goods from cars to radios. The trouble this time would be economic. While some were becoming fantastically wealthy, the workers who were actually producing the goods were not being paid enough to be able to afford to buy them. Manufactured goods were just piling up in warehouses and factories began cutting back on production, meaning that workers had even less money, and it spiraled into a devastating economic crash in October 1929.
Following was the terrible time of the Great Depression. There were long lines at soup kitchens. Many who had gained, but then suddenly lost, great wealth during the 1920s were dead by suicide. Germany was now a democracy, the Weimar Republic, but had it's postwar economy devastated by this crash.
There is one sure way out of an economic depression. Unfortunately, it is to have a war. A party emerged in Germany that had the answers. They were the National Socialists, or Nazis. They absorbed unemployment by drastically increasing the size of the armed forces, and got factories back to full production by making war equipment for them.
It was simple and brilliantly effective, except that it was part of the reason that there would be another war, even more terrible than the First World War. The reason that the Second World War would be even worse than the First is that now civilians were considered as a legitimate target.
When this war finally ended, millions of soldiers returned home and began families. That is what brought about the Baby Boomers and the Sixties that we saw at the beginning of this article. I have concluded that God decided to give them the final chance at building the promised Millennial Kingdom on earth, without going through the horrors of the Apocalypse which will make the two world wars seem like minor conflicts by comparison.
But it was not to be. We will get to the Millennial Kingdom, where the world will finally be the godly paradise that it was always meant to be, but only by going through the Apocalypse first, as we saw in the posting on this blog, "The End Of The World As We Know It" June 2019.
Notice the chronological placements of newsworthy mass murders like the killings of Jack the Ripper, in 1888 London, and the Manson murders, in 1969 Los Angeles. Both happened right at the height of one of these two failed Millenniums.
Jack the Ripper was in the news in the autumn of 1888, right in the middle of the Victorian Age in London. Times were good, but people in general had been getting more and more secular since the publication of "On The Origin of Species", in 1859. The general movement was away from God.
Could it be possible that these shocking killings, which really jolted society, were allowed to happen to make people start thinking that something was wrong with society and that it needed God?
Likewise the Manson murders, actually an attempt to set off the Apocalypse foretold in the Bible as a race war beginning in the U.S., which would conclude with Charles Manson reigning over the world as Christ as described in the posting on this blog, "Jonestown, Charles Manson And The Gnostic Gospels", December 2019.
In July 1969 there was the epic even of America landing astronauts on the moon, and then getting them safely back home. The following month was the signature event of the idealism of the Sixties, the Woodstock concert in New York State. Woodstock was all about the better world that we could have if we would all live in peace. It does deserve a lot of credit that 400,000 young people got together for three days and there was not a single act of violence.
But what happened right in between those two events? The country was horrified by the Manson killings. The best-known of the victims was actress Sharon Tate. The members of the Manson "Family" wrote "PIG" on the wall in the blood of the victims. The intention being to get it blamed on black militants and thus begin the race war that would be the Apocalypse that would end with Manson ruling over the world as Christ.
Once again, could it be that these horrific killings were allowed to happen between these two great events to remind us that, despite the accomplishment of putting men on the moon and the commendable idealism of Woodstock, something was wrong with society and we needed to return to God?
THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION AND THE SIXTIES
We saw the importance of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 in the posting on this blog, "The Great Revolution Of Our Time", January 2017. I see it as having an impact on the world that is comparable to the French and October Revolutions that completely changed the world. The world had been secularizing until the Iranian Revolution turned the tide of history back toward religion.
The effect has been spreading ever since, and has gone well beyond the Islamic religion.
But the Iranian Revolution actually has a close relationship to the Sixties in the west. It is a reflection of the Sixties in how the Iranians demonstrating against the U.S. were a mirror image of the U.S. protests against the Vietnam War the decade before. Bell-bottomed pants were even in style in Iran at the time. The U.S. administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were simply replaced by the unpopular government of the Shah.
The demonstrations outside the U.S. Embassy compound, after the Hostage Crisis began, were the Iranian equivalent of the attempt by antiwar protesters to "levitate" the Pentagon by meditation in 1967.
So the idealism of the Sixties in America and the west was a failed attempt at creating the promised biblical Millennium ourselves, without going through the Apocalypse first. But it turned out to have been reflected in the Iranian Revolution in the following decade. The world was moving away from religion but this is what turned it back. This has affected the entire world, including the Christian nations.
We will still have to go through the Apocalypse to get to the Millennium. But the Sixties were not a complete failure as it did inadvertently end up getting the world moving back toward God.
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