New Warhorn Media post by Tim Bayly:
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Thank you Pastor Bayly for this. I’m living in the forementioned country and it is exactly like you said it. The religion is the green ideology of “degrowth” and “living in harmony with nature”. I have heard from Christians that the meaning of life is “to leave a better world behind”. God has given us over. To ourselves. We get exactly what we want.
Slowly people are waking up. I pray that my country will return to the meaning it had found 500 years ago in the Reformation. It seems impossible, but for our Lord, nothing is impossible. And thankfully a new generation is growing up, questioning these “orthodoxies”.
And now for the curious an explanation of German waste disposal:
The gray/black container
Your run-of-the-mill waste disposal. Always has been there, you just put your trash in and it gets collected by the company that won the contract by the local government. It is paid by a fee every house has to pay. You can choose between several container sizes, smaller means a smaller fee of course.
So, in the ninties many municipalities faced problems with landfills, the got too filled up and new ones weren’t of course established. Basically we needed more money for waste disposal. The German federal government together with the industry came up with an idea: Addtionally the fee, let the companies that sell products also pay for the disposal! They can add a small symbol (“The Green Point”) to their product to tell people that they parttake in this system (Of course they will just add the cost of disposal to the product but nobody noticed). These products gave use the
Yellow container!
Initially it was a yellow half-transparent plastic bag (no, I’m not making this up!) and everybody though that you can only put stuff with the symbol on it in the yellow bag, because it can be gasp recycled! The metro area where we live has a waste incinerator. After a while I found out that the stuff from the black container and from the yellow container all just go into the incinerator. So much for recycling. It just doesn’t matter. Sometimes they have to add freaking oil to get the stuff to burn it!
Let’s come to a nicer topic, the paper/cardboard container which in my area is the
Blue container!
Our municipality was one of the last one to introduce it two years ago. Before the local non-profits had an agreement to collect it once a month and since it is a real, valuable resource which has been recycled since longer than I can think, they got real money for it. But during covid the Red Cross, the town-local voluntary fire fighters and the sport associations had trouble finding people to help collecting. So the blue container was introduced - as almost everywhere else. Nobody really wants to serve in non-profits/associations anymore. Funnily, our Christian youth group still does the collection, now independently.
And now to my favorite. When I grew up, throwing away food was a sin. Everybody had a way to compost kitchen left-overs or garden cuts. And in rural areas everybody had animals to which the leftovers or the not-so-good parts of the salad could be be fed to. This biodegradable stuff. But now, nobody - especially in the urban areas - can’t be bothered with this, but they still want to do it right! It degrades and becomes part of nature again! So there is the
Brown container!
It stinks, just yesterday I cleaned that plastic crap pile again with water. Guess how I carry it from the kitchen to the container? In a single-use plastic bag. Single-use because it’s so yucky it goes directly into the black container after emptying its contents into the brown container. Where they put it I don’t know. I also put my grass from the lawn mower in it - and then it’s full and biologially reacts with the other stuff in it.
It gets emptied every two weeks. Since the biological reactions in the containers is amplified in summer due to the higher temperatures, it gets emptied every week - great! Did I mentioned the trucks that empy the containers run on diesel? And did I mention that the people doing this work are usually men (sorry, no quota for women here) and the color of their skin is very often black?
Anyway. So 10 years ago I sit in the owners meeting of our (back then) apartment house - some 12 owners. The elected leader lectures us that NO COOKED WASTE can go in the brown container! I’m dumbfounded, isn’t it easily boidegradable? I ask where I should put it then. He says “Somewhere else”. Why? “Because of smell and it attracts rats” For me the only solution is to put it in the black container again… which is right next to it. I don’t think the rats will care about the color of the container…
Let me end by saying that my country has become an embarrassment. I’m ashamed of it. I’ve never understood it, but since around 8 years ago I know that we need mercy more than anything else.
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How did Germany, the birthplace of the Reformation, get to this point? And for those of a more Reformed bent than Lutheran Germany, the Netherlands?
Some years ago, I was on a Christian tour and one of the people on that tour, a Swiss woman, summed up her country’s Christian culture by saying that Switzerland “has in it more born-again Catholics than born-again Protestants”. Ouch.
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The snarky answer is “Slowly” of course.
I don’t know but I’m very interested in the answer too because I want my children to grow up in the faith. Here are two thoughts:
You probably know the Jenga Tower. A few tiles here and there don’t really hurt but the more the game progresses the more unstable it becomes. This is how it seems to me when it comes to a host of issues: Looking at each issue separately it doesn’t seem so bad and “look how long the French are practicing their laicism - it can’t be that bad” shouts and we roll over - another tile is gone. But first the tiles need to be unlinked from each other. Once they are independent they can be removed much easier. No-fault divorce, a pension system that allows you to live without children, doubting the inerrancy of the Bible, pietistic withdrawal from the world… you get it.
The thought of it came to me from this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbiDrzTd8fE 
The other one I noticed after reading Warhorn things: Fatherlessness and shepherdlessness. It came togehter when I read a small book from my grandfather’s bookshelf, written in the 1920s about the role of women in the church. The pressing social question back then was the women’s right to vote. The author said that after the World War people were so deeply insecure that the enemy used this situation to get this passed into the Weimar Republic, otherwise it would have never been possible. (It was very interesting to read that most women never longed to vote but now were “forced into the light of the public”. ) I couldn’t help but think of the millions of dead men of the World War, resulting in fatherlessness, childlessness, shepards of churches that died and so many women having to take over responsibilities. Made perfect sense to me: People being uprooted from their beliefs, their history, their family can be led to do everything.
That point may come again soon.
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I’m not an expert here, but my understanding is that Germany was a center for doubting the plenary inspiration of the Bible, going back to the 1800s and perhaps the 1700s.
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Yes; a lot of the problem, as I think about it, can be sourced back to the Enlightenment.
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And specific to the German case: the decadence of the Weimar Republic, Berlin in particular. That may have been killed off by certain political changes in the 1930s, but looking back at things, it opened the door to much of what came next.
A more general issue - and this would include the Netherlands and Scandinavia, which avoided involvement in World War One - was that faith turned into something to which you gave lip service, but no heart commitment. Church for appearance’s sake - certainly true for Britain.
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If you love an “influencer,” it’s b/c he agrees w/you. We all think men who write what we think are profound and wise. They’re not.
God’s Word never ever ever agrees with us. That’s how we know it’s GOD’S WORD.
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The difference between the good historian and his colleague, the hack, is the difference between writing for the future or writing for the present; between writing for unborn generations or writing for the mob.
Hacks work at lying. Scholars work at telling the truth. Honor them.
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Out of Our Minds latest podcast: “Holding onto your kids, discipline, and authority”
We often think our parenting is a failure if we have to resort to authority. Our fears and modern psychologists have trained us to believe authority is antithetical to having our children’s hearts.