The subject of this lecture is living in the shadow of death. 600,000 people just got killed in America in the last year. They got killed because of government irresponsibility and incompetence. Now when we look at where things are going it's currently 2021 and we say look out 20 years things don't look good.
We spent years since our founding in 1995 studying global future trends. We've read or interviewed most of the so-called experts out there and find the way from the day we opened back in 1995 virtually all of them predicted a major epidemic and virtually all of them warned that a lack of national health insurance and a lack of paid sick leave would turn an epidemic in America into a disaster which is precisely what has happened. So we know that the people running things in America are not rational or not competent and are not benevolent because the failure to pay attention to the warnings about the epidemic are just part of a pattern of psychotic delusional behavior in relationship to warnings about climate change the destruction of the oceans chemical dangers so on and so on and so forth.
So these are not rational people. So literally look out 20 years or so this the likelihood on a global basis of a death toll in the billions is very high. So we get back to the concept of living in the shadow of death and possibly facing death yourself .
So how does it all have a whole lot of meaning. People write the self-help books about how there's something there for you. You pay your $19.95 and you have a happy life. Now we're not saying that some of these books might not help some people do some things.
But looking at things on a macro level what comes out as you look at all this is the importance of religion and in our view religion is going to grow in power as things become more unstable. The great weakness of communism and the probably the single biggest reason for its collapse was its dependence on atheism, which certainly isn't a very encouraging system of philosophy. By contrast religion provides security and hope ona lot of different. Well it's the ability of the believe that their various gods or a God out there that cares about you and can talk to you. But it also deals with the issue of death which has for obvious reasons been a factor in all areas of human history.
Throughout human history it's been an awareness of life as a journey between worlds the in in ancient Egypt on the walls of the Egyptian tombs you see a Cyrus the god Cyrus judging the dead who goes where the concept of the samsara in Hinduism their concepts about life after death in most forms of Buddhism and of course everyone in the West is familiar with Christianity Judaism and Islam in terms of their views of life after death. Now there's where things come together and provide some kind of realistic hope. So this is a key to think about when living in the shadow of death.
In spite of the disaster it is not at all clear that the world has learned much from what's happened. It is also very clear that the full consequences of these disasters in terms of social economic and political damage is is yet to come. We right now or in kind of the eye of the storm not the end of the storm so you see it has to be put into a a context of what's in it for you. How does your life make sense even in ancient history or throughout history there been huge death toll. 1/3 of the population of China was killed off in the Mongol invasion. 1/3 to 1/2 of the population of Germany was killed off during the 30 years war in and in reading about it was pretty shocking to see that even in a city like Berlin people were reduced to cannibalism in a so-called civilized society. So the death toll is going to be huge and people need to see something meaningful about their life. And so pay attention to what's going on in the world religion. We certainly plan to and we certainly plan to do more research and writing on the subject as we go forward.