Is the United Nations about to make history?

The Ukraine ambassador to the UN was addressing the Security Council when news of the invasion by Russia began coming in. In his comments (which were overruled by the president of the Security Council that month, the ambassador from Russia) he raised a simple question:

Is Russia a legitimate member of the Security Council? Could someone please show him the legal paperwork establishing them in that seat?

Some background may be in order. The United Nations consists of two main bodies. The General Assembly has a delegate from virtually every country in the world, currently comprising 193. They pass thousands of resolutions but none of their words are actually binding on anyone. They can’t send an army anywhere. Even if they all agree that one of their fellow members has done something horrible, all they can do is wag their finger at them.

The other body of the UN is the Security Council, made up of just 15 members. The Security Council can take action. Its stated mission is to establish international peace and security. It can enact sanctions, admit or remove members, and initiate military action. It has access to armies.

Over the years the Security Council has initiated peacekeeping (military) actions in Korea, Africa, Cyprus, Kosovo, the Middle East, and many other places. 

Far more actions were proposed; but one key feature of the Security Council has most frequently resulted in inactivity: Each permanent member has veto power. So actions or sanctions proposed by, for example, the United States, have usually been vetoed by the U.S.S.R., and vice versa.

10 of the seats on the Security Council are filled by members serving 2-year terms, after which they are replaced by other members. The current non-permanent members include Greece, Korea, Panama, and others. But 5 of the seats are filled by permanent members, established as such in the initial UN charter in 1945: The United States, Great Britain, France, China, and the U.S.S.R. No, I do not mean Russia – I mean the U.S.S.R. - the communist conglomerate that was an ally of the the U.S. during WWII, and that ceased to exist in 1991.

This is not just semantics. Notice that ‘China’ is also one of the permanent members, yet the China that is on the Security Council today is not the same China that was given the seat in 1945. That Republic of China, which initially held the permanent seat on the Security Council now resides on the island of Taiwan, where they fled after a communist uprising in China led to a civil war. Their seat was given, after a lot of legal maneuvering, voting, and paperwork, to the People’s Republic of China – the communist government of mainland China – in 1971. Taiwan, as a consequence, is not given legal recognition, or even a seat, in the UN.

There was even less legal maneuvering and paperwork filed when Boris Yeltsin’s new Russia government representative sat down in the Security Council seat vacated by the Soviet Union. A lot of legal wrangling might prove that Russia is not entitled to the Soviet Union's seat. Unfortunately, it would be a tough slog to try to correct that oversight now. 

But there is another avenue to getting Russia out of such a powerful position. What if Russia were not merely kicked out of the Security Council. What if it were kicked out of the UN?

Article 6 Chapter 2 of the UN Charter states, "A Member of the United Nations which has persistently violated the Principles contained in the present Charter may be expelled from the Organization by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council."

Now, you might be thinking, If the majority of the Security Council recommended such a move, Russia would veto it. But here's the thing: The Charter anticipated just such a situation. The Charter includes the rule that, "a party to a dispute shall abstain from voting." Legal papers since then have only strengthened that position. A Security Council Report from 2014 said that requiring abstention by a party to a dispute ensures that "a Council member should not be allowed to be party, judge and jury at the same time."

Other alternatives have been suggested: doing away with permanent members so that all seats on the Council rotate; making more of the seats permanent; removing veto power all together; expanding the Security Council to 24; and others. But any of these would require changing the UN Charter, which would have to be approved by the Security Council! Expelling Russia from the UN would not require changing the Charter.

So here's what we might expect to see happen shortly: The Security Council discusses and votes on a resolution to expel Russia from the UN for "Persistently violating the principles of the United Nations Charter." Russia is required to abstain from that vote. It passes. The resolution is forwarded to the General Assembly, where it almost automatically passes. There would no doubt be much discussion about what new nation might be given the now-vacant 5th permanent seat on the Security Council. Perhaps the seat would be given to India, Germany, Brazil or Japan. After the dust settles, the new Security Council begins passing resolutions that actually have 'teeth'. 

Why is all this significant to Christians? Serious Bible students see the UN as the fulfillment of the scarlet-colored beast described in Revelation chapter 17. Verse 13 of that chapter foretells that the member nations will “give their power and authority to the wild beast” for a short time right before the end of this system.

Taking away veto power from one of the belligerent countries, thus making the UN more effective, would certainly give the beast more power and authority, even if temporarily.

It could even result in people worldwide finally proclaiming “Peace and Security!” (1 Thessalonians 5:3)

Please feel free to leave a polite comment. To read one of my earlier columns about the UN click here.

Bill K. Underwood is the author of several novels and one non-fiction self-help book, all available at Amazon.com. You can help support this site by purchasing one of his books.

Would you have celebrated Saturnalia?

           Saturn driving a four-horse chariot on the reverse of a denarius issued in 104 BC. Classical Numismatic Group, Inc.
 

Imagine yourself, as a Christian, living in Rome in the first century.

In the year 56 of our calendar, the apostle Paul wrote a letter to the Christians living in Rome. He named specifically a married couple, Prisca and Aquila, as well as a couple dozen others. You can read the list in Romans 16:1-16. Check it out when you have a few minutes, and try to imagine a face for each name. They were real people, with real lives and problems. They had jobs and kids and bills. They had relatives who thought they were crazy for adopting Christianity. And of course there were many other Christians living there that Paul didn't name specifically. 

Every December, the entire city went into a celebratory frenzy. Can you imagine what Prisca, Aquila, Mary, Andronicus and the others had to deal with?

December 11 was a holiday called Sol Indiges. Sol was the sun god. The meaning of the word indiges is obscure, but it was a festival of some kind, worshiping the sun. How it was observed is unknown today.

On December 13, the birthday of the Temple of Tellus was celebrated along with a banquet for Ceres the goddess of agriculture who embodied "growing power" and the productivity of the earth. Tellus was a goddess associated with fertility, ‘Mother Earth' and harvest.

On December 15 there was a festival called Consualia. The altar of Consus lay buried all year, but it was dug up on that day. Consus was a god associated with preserving the harvest: grain storage, for example. It was a day off for all laborers and slaves, as well as work animals. 

December 19 was a festival called Opticonsivia. It celebrated Opis, goddess of wealth and, again, food supplies. The festival was presided over by a vestal virgin priestess wearing a white veil. Horses and mules were decorated with flowers, and chariot races were held. Another work holiday. Chariots and horses were a big theme in December. A coin with Saturn's name on it depicts a chariot being pulled across the sky by four horses. If you squint, it looks a lot like Santa's flying reindeer.

December 21 was a festival called Angeronalia. Honoring Angerona, the goddess of joy and pleasure, the festivities were intended to drive away all feelings of sorrow or sadness.

December 25 was the culmination: The dies natalis of Sol invictus; that is, the birthday of the sun god, Sol the unconquerable.

The entire week of December 17 to 23 was Saturnalia, a festival to the god Saturn, celebrated with a carnival atmosphere of partying, drunkenness, and gluttony. It was said that it was rare to see a sober person during Saturnalia. Pliny the Younger - famed persecutor of Christians - was said to have had a soundproof room added to his house so he could get some peace during Saturnalia. The holiday featured a loosening of morals and playing games, including gladiatorial games to the death. The dead gladiators were considered sacrifices to Saturn. All work was suspended, including courts, school and exercise. After an opening sacrifice, an image of the deity was placed reclining on a luxurious couch, as if he were present and participating. If this puts you in mind of a baby with a halo lying in a manger, you're not imagining things.

Gift-giving was a large part of the festival. The most popular gifts were candles and wax copies of fruit or idols - items purposely made to be temporary. The merchants wanted to make sure your money went to waste. Children were given toys. Employers gave their slaves and employees year-end bonuses, and merchants did the same with valued customers, to help them buy gifts. 

There was an atmosphere akin to Mardi Gras. Roles were reversed: Masters waited on their slaves; men dressed as women and vice versa. A commoner would be crowned ‘king of Saturnalia’ and give silly orders to others. While this custom is less known in America, in Europe it is still common in December to elect a “lord of misrule”. 

Homes and streets were decorated with wreaths and other greenery. Saturnalia is also referred to as a ‘festival of lights’: candles and bonfires were everywhere. By the first century, lit candles were viewed as substitutes for the heads of dead gladiators displayed in earlier years. The wax and pottery figurines given as gifts may also have been substitutes for the gladiatorial human sacrifices. 

Everyone called, “io saternalia!” as a greeting to everyone they met. Normal white togas were set aside in favor of brightly colored garments that a classy Roman would normally not be caught dead in. (Think ugly Christmas sweaters.) 

Now: with all this information as a backdrop, try to imagine that you are Aquila or Prisca, or one of the others listed in Romans 16. You have 100 or so good friends, fellow Christians, scattered throughout the city of Rome, amidst a population of well over 450,000 pagans. Perhaps the congregation meets in your home once or twice a week, and you discuss the scriptures, read the latest letter from Paul or James or Luke, sing Christian songs, and pray together. And it's December.

Going to the market or to your shop where you make and sell tents, you are bombarded by neighbors and shopkeepers calling out "io saternalia!" The streets are littered with drunks sleeping off the party of the night before. Those not falling down stagger past singing bawdy songs, slap you on the back and try to force their wine-skins into your hand. They tease you about your white toga, pointing out their own gaudy garments.  Candles burn in every window of every house but yours, and all but your house and your shop are decorated with wreaths and greenery. 

Perhaps a customer buys a tent in your shop and, after paying, stands there with his hand out, waiting for you to give him some lewd wax figurine of Tellus with exaggerated breasts while wishing him "io saternalia!" and instead, you smile and say, 'Thank you for your business.'

 Perhaps you would have tried to share the good news about God's kingdom with those who were finding the false gaiety depressing, those who were disturbed by the greediness, or were distressed by the money they were wasting on trinkets when their own families were suffering. Perhaps some of your neighbors were perplexed by the nonsensical and contradictory whims of the so-called gods and really needed to hear the truth about the Creator and his Messiah.

If you were living back then, would you have explained to them why you opted out of all the festivities?  Or would the financial losses at your shop, or the pressures from your neighbors to conform, have been too great to tolerate? 

Would you have decorated your house with wreaths and candles? Donned an ugly toga? Given gifts to neighbors, friends and employees? Called out "io saternalia!" to everyone you passed on the street? Would you possibly have reasoned, "These people put so much emphasis on birthdays. What if we just pretend that December 25th is Jesus' birthday? Then, when people yell 'io saternalia!' we can respond with 'Felix dies natalis christos!' Maybe they'll be too drunk to notice."

Of course you wouldn't have done that. You would have considered that as disgusting as idolatry. But someone in the congregation eventually gave in to the the peer pressure. And then another one did. And time went by, and their kids did, and their grandkids... 

And here we are today with all these pagan traditions, pretending they have anything to do with Christ. 

If you haven't done it yet, take a minute to read Romans chapter 16. Read the names, pick one of them and pretend it's you. Ponder how that person may have resisted the pressure from the Roman world to conform to their pagan celebrations. Then decide whether you're going to keep pleasing your family and neighbors by continuing to celebrate a thinly disguised Saturnalia, or whether pleasing God is more important. 

Please feel free to share this page with your friends. Leave a polite comment. Comments are monitored, so those with their own agendas shouldn't waste their time.  

Read more about Christmas here.

Bill K. Underwood is a columnist, Bible scholar and photographer. He is the author of several books, all available at this link.You can help support this site buy purchasing one of his books. 

Are Christmas trees really pagan?

 

I read a column this morning by a pastor promoting Christmas. “If you encounter someone telling you Christmas is pagan,” he said, “Ask them how they feel about using the calendar, since every day-name and nearly every month-name is honoring a pagan god.” 

I’m sure he felt that was a real zinger of an argument. Here’s why he’s wrong.

God’s chosen people, the nation of Israel, were not condemned for using the month-name “Tammuz”, named for a Babylonian god, for their summer month corresponding to the latter half of our June (named by the Romans for the god Junus). The Jews had been exiled to Babylon, whose calendar dominated the entire Middle East; not just at the time, but for centuries after the Babylonian empire ceased to exist. Interacting in that world required the Jews to use words with which others could identify. Calling their summer month Tammuz did not mean they were honoring or worshiping that pagan god.

However, when the Jews in the wilderness built a golden calf and began dancing around it in what they called “a festival to Jehovah”, Jehovah did not shrug it off. He ordered the slaughter of those celebrants, and 3,000 died. The apostle Paul later explained, “You cannot eat at the Lord's Table and at the table of demons, too." (1 Corinthians 10:21)

As one commentator on 1 Corinthians 10 put it, “It's not that the food, in either case, necessarily carries some supernatural power. It's that the act of eating from those tables is an act of joining oneself to that specific ‘lord’.”

So, is a Christian who uses the words ‘January’ or ‘Wednesday’ worshiping the gods Janus or Woden? Of course not.

'Aha!' some might say. 'Christians aren't "worshiping" their Christmas trees!' 

Are they, though?

A thousand years ago, a worshiper of Woden (Odin) who walked past an evergreen tree in winter wasn’t performing an act of worship. Woden's worship involved bringing evergreens into the house at the winter solstice and decorating them. 

By the same token a person living today who walks past an evergreen isn't by doing so worshiping Woden or anyone else. But a person purposely bringing a tree into the house and decorating it, with something religious or superstitious or mystical in mind - even though they don’t know the origin of it, even though they claim their actions are in memory of Jesus - they can no more claim to be Christian than those Corinthians that Paul accused of eating at a table set for demons.

Does the Bible talk about using trees in worship? Actually, it does:

• “You should completely destroy all the places where the nations you will dispossess have served their gods, whether on the high mountains or on the hills or under any luxuriant tree. You should pull down their altars, shatter their sacred pillars, burn their sacred poles (carved tree trunks) in the fire, and cut down the graven images of their gods, obliterating their very names from that place.” (Deuteronomy 12:2, 3)
• "For the practices of the peoples are worthless; they cut a tree out of the forest, and a craftsman shapes it with his chisel. They adorn it with silver and gold; they fasten it with hammer and nails so it will not totter. Like a scarecrow in a cucumber field, their idols cannot speak; they must be carried because they cannot walk."
• “You worship the fertility gods by having sex under those sacred trees of yours. You offer your children as sacrifices in the rocky caves near stream beds.” (Isaiah 57:5)

That last quote is from a rather loose translation. Most Bibles spare us many of the lurid details of how exactly the pagans used trees in their worship. But a few minutes on Google will satisfy the curious that many, many cultures around the globe have had pagan rites that involved tree worship, trees linked to various gods, sacrifices under trees, and sex amid ‘sacred trees'. 

On the other hand, the Bible is completely silent about any tree, decorated or otherwise, having anything whatsoever to do with remembering Jesus' birth.

Decorating a tree in your house with any thought that you associate with worship is inexcusable. It has nothing to do with Christianity, and everything to do with worshiping a false god. And no amount of justification makes it otherwise. 

Read more about Christmas here. 

Please feel free to share this page. Or leave a polite comment.

Bill K. Underwood is a writer, Bible scholar and photographer. He is the author of several books, all available at Amazon.com. You can help support this site by purchasing one of his books.

Should the Pope apologize?

 

An activist group is pressing for Pope Francis to come to Canada and apologize.  

As of this date, more than 1,100 bodies have been found in unmarked graves at sites of former Residential Schools – the official term for boarding schools put in place by government decree starting in 1874, and managed for the most part by the Catholic Church – a few by the Methodist and United Churches –  for over 100 years.  This on top of the decades of stories of misery and abuse from the kids who survived but, for the most part, were ignored.

An apology from the pope. Really? How does that help?

Imagine you lived and raised your kids in Hinkley, California, in the 1960s. You watched as many, many of your neighbors got sick and died, had kids born with deformities, perhaps you lost a child or two of your own. The water supply for the town was polluted by hexavalent chromium and other proven cancer-causing chemicals from a Pacific Gas & Electric plant draining right into the aquifer, but they vehemently denied that there was anything wrong.

Finally, in 2011, a spokesperson for PG&E apologized for the pollution in Hinkley and swore that the company was dedicated to ‘doing the right thing in Hinkley.’

 If you had lived there, would you have felt any better? I wouldn’t have. PG&E had spent literally decades lying and covering up the story about the pollution. They even had literature printed to tell the townsfolk that chromium was good for them! The town became famous in the movie “Erin Brockovich”, after PG&E was forced to shell out over $300,000,000, the largest medical settlement in history. “Forced” being the operative word; their actions proved they weren’t even remotely contrite. None of the corporate officers were even threatened with punishment for their crimes.

In case that example doesn’t work for you, let’s try another one: In 1976 a very young priest named Jorge Mario Bergoglio became head of the Jesuits in Argentina. That same year, there was a military coup in Argentina, leading to what has been dubbed “The Dirty War”, in which some 30,000 people were arrested, tortured, and in many cases “disappeared”, simply for objecting to or reporting on what the military government was doing.

Two of those kidnapped, priests Francisco Jalics and Orlando Yorio, were interrogated and tortured for over three months before finally being expelled from the country. Both of them placed the blame for their arrest on the head of the Jesuits, Bergoglio, who, they said, cooperated hand-in-glove with the new military dictatorship. One even claimed that Bergoglio was present during some of his interrogations.

Now: suppose someone came up with rock solid proof against Bergoglio – proof similar to the skeletal remains of native children that are now being dug up near those residential schools. Would his apology be sufficient? Or might we reasonably expect a modern Argentine court to demand that Bergoglio return to Argentina to stand trial for kidnapping?

Considering that Bergoglio is now better known as Pope Francis, that probably won’t happen.

The Residential School program began almost as soon as Europeans began settling in North America. The nominal Christians referred to the Indians as pagans and believed strongly that the best way to Christianize them was to forcibly remove their children from the pagan environment and teach them ‘Christian’ ways.

While Canada’s system is in the news now, they were not alone. Carlisle Indian Industrial School was opened in 1879 in Pennsylvania and ran until 1918 on the same principle: Take Indian children away from their parents and teach them ‘Christian’ principles. It was in fact official U.S. policy from 1819 through the 1960s. While few if any records were kept, anecdotal evidence suggests there were over 360 such boarding schools in the U.S. – more than twice as many as Canada had. 

When the former sites of those schools are discovered and searched, will the ground-penetrating radar somehow prove that U.S. boarding schools were more Christian, more caring, than their Canadian counterparts? Not likely.

But maybe the pope will show up and apologize.  That will fix everything.

Bill K. Underwood is a columnist and author of several books, all available at Amazon.com.You can help support this site by purchasing a book.