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Population growth

 

During the last 4,000 years or so the human population of the planet is thought to have been relatively stable at between a quarter and half a billion people.  For the preceding 70,000 years the population was considerably smaller.   Someone who believed in reincarnation could then reasonably believe the soul passed from one person to another as one died and another was born.  But in the last hundred years the population has grown exponentially.  There are now (2015) 7.3 billion people still alive and this number is likely to reach 11 billion before stabilising. 

 

 another one
In this cartoon from 1964 the US population is shown as 192,512,078. By the end of 2015 this had risen to 322,354,800.

 

In 2015 there were an estimated 57 million deaths worldwide.  This equates to around 156 thousand a day.

Anthropologists now estimate that since modern humans emerged, between 90 and 110 billion of us are already dead. 

As God was rather tardy in sending his Son to save the sinners, the great majority of these people lived and died without the benefit or knowledge of Christian salvation.

But the book of Revelations suggests that at the day of judgement there will be 144,000 souls in heaven (Rev 7:4-8 ‘And I heard the number of those who were sealed, one hundred and forty-four thousand sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel’).

This falls somewhat short of the 100 billion souls that God has reputedly handed out in the past and is exceeded every day by the present daily death rate.

While it says nothing about the possibility of an immortal soul of a Buddhist or eastern variety, it puts a fairly large hole in the orthodox Christian conception. 

Even if it was argued that only the most pure confessing Christians are filtered from this large number for salvation, it suggests extremely poor quality control by God, who casts into oblivion thousands of millions of souls that He, somewhat frivolously, created before sending his son to redeem them, to say nothing of sincere believers in other religions. 

But then, the book of Revelations is regarded as apocryphal by the Eastern Church and many theologians. 

 

 

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Travel

Burma (Myanmar)

 

This is a fascinating country in all sorts of ways and seems to be most popular with European and Japanese tourists, some Australians of course, but they are everywhere.

Since childhood Burma has been a romantic and exotic place for me.  It was impossible to grow up in the Australia of the 1950’s and not be familiar with that great Australian bass-baritone Peter Dawson’s rendition of Rudyard Kipling’s 'On the Road to Mandalay' recorded two decades or so earlier:  

Come you back to Mandalay
Where the old flotilla lay
Can't you hear their paddles chunking
From Rangoon to Mandalay

On the road to Mandalay
Where the flying fishes play
And the Dawn comes up like thunder
out of China 'cross the bay

The song went Worldwide in 1958 when Frank Sinatra covered it with a jazz orchestration, and ‘a Burma girl’ got changed to ‘a Burma broad’; ‘a man’ to ‘a cat’; and ‘temple bells’ to ‘crazy bells’.  

Read more: Burma (Myanmar)

Fiction, Recollections & News

A Digger’s Tale

- Introduction

 

 

The accompanying story is ‘warts and all’.  It is the actual memoirs (hand written and transcribed here; but with my headings added) of Corporal Ross Smith, a young Australian man, 18 years of age, from humble circumstances [read more...] who was drawn by World events into the Second World War.  He tells it as he saw it.  The action takes place near Rabaul in New Britain. 

Read more: A Digger’s Tale

Opinions and Philosophy

Climate Change - a Myth?

 

 

 

Back in 2015 a number of friends and acquaintances told me that Climate Change is a myth.

Half a decade on and some still hold that view.  So here I've republished a slightly longer version of the same article.

Obviously the doubters are talking about 'Anthropogenic Global Warming', not disclaiming actual changes to the climate.  For those of us of a 'certain age' our own experience is sufficient to be quite sure of that the climate is continuously changing. During our lifetimes the climate has been anything but constant.  Else what is drought and flood relief about?  And the ski seasons have definitely been variable. 

Read more: Climate Change - a Myth?

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