A PLANET IN TROUBLE

The other day came the news that scientists have discovered a sun which is 250 times bigger than our sun. I wonder if you heard it also – if you did, then what thoughts did that generate? If you were like me then you probably didn’t know what to think! As one of my favourite books, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, has it “The Universe is a very big place” and the book describes how it is populated with one planet being devoted to the design and construction of planets! In fact, the bible also makes it clear that the universe is very large when it shows us that of God’s Kingdom there is no end. No end physically and no end in terms of time!

People do tend to believe however that there has to be life somewhere in the universe and all we have to do is to keep looking, to keep sending messages out in the hope of finding that life. And then maybe that life will help us to resolve the problems we have here. As part of the search the Large Hadron Collider was designed and constructed. It then went out of action for over six months because, of all things, there was a short circuit through a mistake made in the installation. The collider is now busy bumping particles into one another in the hope that one very obscure particle called the Higgs Boson will be found. This particle has never been seen, measured or even proven that it exists! It was postulated by Edinburgh physicist Peter Higgs in 1964 as the solution to why matter has mass. Finding the Higgs Boson would, so it is theorised, provide the answer as to how the universe came into existence and what life is! A similar collider is operating in New York with a similar lack of results.

There seems to be an air of desperation about science these days. Even the existence of gravity is being called into question! Professor of physics, Erik Verlinde, at the University of Amsterdam contends that gravity is an illusion and that it is the result of the laws of thermodynamics. He says gravity “emerges” from something more basic. He believes that looking at it in this way could throw light upon “dark energy” which is a kind of anti-gravity, or the dark matter that is supposedly needed to hold galaxies together. What no one seems to realise that it is not outer space that is our problem. It is not the nature and structure of the universe which is going to provide the answers to the situation we have now on this planet. Even if the colliders do find the “at present” imaginary Higgs Boson we will still have major problems on earth.

We can split the atom and release the huge energy contained within it, we can land men on the moon, place robot landers on the planet Mars and others of the planets of the solar system, we worry about earth being struck by a very large asteroid and being destroyed. We don’t seem to understand that the big challenge is working out how mankind can live together in peace and co-operation. We don’t seem to understand the fundamentals of life or know enough to ask the right questions and believe the answers which become apparent as a result of those questions. Questions such as “where does life come from and what is it anyway?” What is consciousness, self awareness? These questions can be answered. Even the ones that ask why is mankind so violent? So aggressive! What we don’t realise as a whole is that life can only come from life, consciousness from the conscious, we cannot understand that there is a non-physical element to mankind which can only come from the non-physical. This non-physical cannot be established by the collision of any number of Higgs Bosons the Collider might find!

The violence, the aggression within mankind also has a non-physical source. It too will not be revealed by the Higgs Boson or any other particles which might be found. Physically it is entirely impossible for man to travel very far in space. If he did then the one certain result would be that he would take death and destruction everywhere that he went. As he is here on this planet is exactly the way man would behave in the universe. The present state of the planet one has to say has now reached the catastrophic. We have a multitude of conflicts all over the world and there is no way they can be resolved no matter what man does. There is an answer, but not one that mankind welcomes at this point.

Take for example the present situation in Afghanistan. The latest news is that America and Britain are on the way to resolving the situation, to stabilise the country so that both nations can withdraw from it in 2015, five years from now. There have been battles, struggles over Afghanistan for not just a century or two, but at least since 328 BC when Alexander the Great marched in. It was all part of the battles with the Persian Empire. After this, there were invasions by the Scythians, the Huns and the Turks, then came the Arabs in 642 AD when they brought Islam into the area. Then the Persians came in and controlled it for the next 300 years.

The Mongols led by Genghis Khan invaded in 1219. Thousands were slaughtered. And so it continued with various occupiers until the British Empire became interested as concern had grown over Russia’s advances and that of Persia. This led to Anglo-Afghan wars. The first, as the history books show, resulted in the destruction of the British army between 1839 and 1842. A second Anglo-Afghan war was fought from 1878 to 1880. Eventually the British together with the Russians officially set up the boundaries of modern Afghanistan. However, a third Anglo-Afghan war was fought in 1919 with Britain exhausted from having fought the first world war with Germany from 1914 to 1918. Britain finally gave up and signed the Treaty of Rawalpindi in August 1919.

The history of Afghanistan then took a somewhat different direction. Military coup succeeded military coup. Thousands of people who constituted the elite, the religious establishment and the intelligentsia were put in prison, tortured or murdered. Then Russia, which from experience, should have known better, endeavoured to influence and control the country through the nation’s leader at that time. Eventually they were forced to invade in1979. This led to an inner resistance which was heavily armed by the United States. Eventually the Soviet Union gave up and withdrew in 1989. They effectively lost to the Afghans. Russia lost 14,500 troops in the battles, but there were roughly one million Afghan lives lost as a result of the Russian incursion from 1979 to 1989. From then on there was constant fighting between the various factions with the country sinking into anarchy with local warlords ruling in many parts.

It was then that the Taliban arose. The name “Talib” means “pupil” Many had been educated in Pakistan and moved to control the country and to impose Islam upon Afghanistan. The group took Kabul in 1996 and then the rest of the country by late 1998. However, this wasn’t just Islam, it was an extreme interpretation of Islam. An interpretation which has resulted in extreme human rights violations mainly against women and girls.
The Taliban gave sanctuary to Osama bin Laden. He is a Saudi national who actually fought against the Russians on the side of the Afghans, who then provided him with a base for his terrorist organisation. This brought about the action by the United Nations with mainly American and British forces to remove the Taliban. Today, Afghanistan regards itself as an Islamic Republic with security provided by Britain and America mainly.

The policy at the present is to train the Afghans to run the nation themselves, to provide their own security and to resist the Taliban. The Afghan police force is being trained, the army also and a president was elected. As you will know, this is Mr Kharzai. However, the Taliban has not gone away. It is maintaining, as the language is today, a low profile but with bombings and ambushes as opportunity presents itself. To date Britain has lost roughly 324 troops, the Americans about ten times as many. Moves by both Britain and America are being made to try to develop negotiations with the Taliban. Given the extreme view of Islam the Taliban have there will be no meaningful negotiations at all. They are determined to run Afghanistan as an “pure” Islamic Republic. They are already threatening the citizens of the country. A number of districts are already governed by the Taliban.

One woman working as a teacher at a girls’ school was told to leave her job otherwise the heads of her children would be cut off and her daughter set on fire. Another woman working for a local electoral commission was told to stop working with the “enemies of religion and infidels” – she was told that if she didn’t then her head would be cut off. Violence in the nation is rising and, the Independent reports that Afghan women are terrified at the prospect of a deal between President Karzai and the Taliban. Millions of dollars, millions of pounds, have been poured into Afghanistan over the past 9 years and yet, as the paper says, hundreds if not thousands of people are living in caves.

One reference to the Taliban says that “they seek to establish a puritanical caliphate that neither recognises nor tolerates forms of Islam divergent from their own. They scorn democracy or any secular or pluralistic political process as an offence against Islam. Afghanistan has been a running sore for over a 1,000 years and has proved impossible for any of the regional big powers to control and govern for any significant length of time. The Taliban would govern, however it would be by fear, by terror. Eventually they, after doing immeasurable damage, would be superseded by someone else. The tragedy which is Afghanistan will not yet see deliverance. That it will, however, is certain.

There really is a better day tomorrow, and that’s a day which is not far off.
John Jewell