Killing the Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs

A Question?

What is the connection between Mary Jones (the Welsh girl credited with inspiring the formation of the now world-wide Bible society) and the Water Mill? In answering that, we might also consider what is the relevance of our answer to Australian (Western) society today? As a response to that question it might be helpful to take a trip to India.

The Christian author Vishal Mangalwadi describes India, the country he grew up in, as one in which ‘history was frozen’ and where ‘no one invented agricultural or domestic appliances’ such that, at the same time as the West advanced, India ‘stagnated’.

The question is why? The answer is that Indian culture over thousands of years developed only a minimal amount of technology. In fact, India’s most famous son, Mahatma Ghandhi, described technology as ‘Evil’.

In contrast, we might also ask why did Western Europe experience the centuries-long tsunami of brilliant technological invention and advance that led to the society we have today, whereas, while responsible for a few technological inventions and discoveries, other cultures of intelligent people with equally available (sometimes more) natural resources did not? Some examples of such cultures being Indian peoples as already stated, African tribes, American Indians, Australian Aborigines, Pacific Islanders etc.

The factors that are most relevant to that reality are those of culture and world view. Some examples-

• In countries where the main religion is Buddhism, that world view didn’t encourage technological innovation. This is because for Buddhists, the world we live in is an illusion and something to be escaped from, not improved.

• Hinduism has a fatalistic view of life. There is no reason to engage in developing technology that might improve the lot of the poor, lower Caste members of society. This is because a person’s lower, even poverty stricken, status in society is the result of their Karma coming back to them from their previous life. They have the hope of better things in their next reincarnation. The Caste system, one in which most Christians are at the bottom, is held in place by this world view.

• The Chinese developed some technology, but as a culture did not go on to grasp the technological opportunities their inventions opened up. For example, they made clocks, but as a culture they were not particularly interested in time, so clockmaking did not become an industry and lead to technological innovation as it did in the West.

• In Australian Aboriginal culture life was understood as already ordained by the creative acts of the Dreaming beings, and the blueprint that was their legacy, so ‘their mission was simply to live in agreement with the terms of that legacy. There was thus no notion of progress’. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

This brings me back to the Water Mill. In many, even most, societies there has always been a need to mill grain. Several of those societies did develop the water wheel, e.g., India and Afghanistan, and the Water Mill existed in some societies before Christ. However, its use for milling grain wasn’t established in Buddhist and Hindu societies. Further it was only in the West that that Mill technology became widespread for the purposes of relieving the toil (nearly always by women) of grinding grain by hand, and then, with a great step forward, providing a power source.

So then, what is the reason for the explosion of technology that took place in the West yet didn’t occur in other cultures?

A clue to the answer to that question is demonstrated by the story of Mary Jones, a sixteen-year-old Welsh girl born in mid-Wales in 1774.

Mary attended school where she learned to read from the Welsh Bible. She found the Bible so inspirational that she resolved to work hard and save up the three shillings and sixpence (17.5 cents) to buy her very own copy. For a poverty-stricken girl in the late eighteenth century, it would have been a huge challenge.

When she was nearly sixteen years old, Mary finally had enough money to make the journey to the town of Bala where she had learned she could buy a Bible of her own. She walked the 40 Km journey barefoot, up and over rugged mountains, to get to Bala where she was able to buy her very own Bible.

On having purchased a copy, Mary describes herself setting off for home with ‘my precious burden, running a great part of the way, so glad was she for her Bible’.

As her ongoing legacy, Mary’s passion for the Bible was in part the inspiration for the foundation of the British and Foreign Bible Society, through which large numbers of people around the world have received their own Bible, and through it saving faith in Jesus.

So what is the connection between Mary and the Water Mill? The connection is between a society (as exampled by Mary) that greatly valued, was shaped by and impelled by the Bible and the beneficial technological advancement that flowed from that Biblical shaping.

The reason for the massive effect of the Bible on western society is that it brings a certain understanding of the nature and characteristics of God, and also an understanding of human nature and the relationship between the two.

1. Firstly that humans are made in the Image of God. From this God-reflecting Image flow several things.

2. God is the Creator, who made Man in his own creative image. God also created for the benefit of humanity. So it is intrinsic to God-reflecting human nature that we will be creative, and that presupposes the things to be created use the God-given resources of the earth for beneficial purposes.

3. God commissions humans to ‘have dominion/rule’ (Genesis 1:26) over the resources of the Earth (Genesis 1:28). This is not a licence given to abuse them through greed, selfish desires or Earth-damaging practices but to steward them for godly purposes.

4. The God of the Bible, unlike the gods of other religions which are unpredictable and capricious, loves us unconditionally and does not need to be appeased and kept happy by our behaviour or by the making of offerings

5. Very importantly, the God of the Bible is rational. He created the universe to run according to a set of laws which don’t vary. These laws can be studied, understood and used for the development of technologies that can be used for the benefit of the whole of humanity.

6. Lastly, but most importantly, the God in whose Image we are made, is a God of Love and Compassion. So Christian spirituality emphasises service, compassion and the setting of people free from all types of bondage. This is why western culture was the only one driven to develop technology for human welfare.

So, it is an understanding of the Bible-revealed God that drove western technological progress, not just for the sake of progress but, in obedience to the Divine mandate, for the blessing and benefit of humanity as a whole. As Ernst Benz wrote-

‘Christian beliefs provided the rationale, and faith the motive energy, for western technology’.

It was the Biblical world view (building on the acknowledged inventions of the Greeks and Romans (e.g. plumbing, urban planning, wheelbarrows, showers, lighthouses, canals, roads, sanitation, structural arches, aqueducts etc.) that turbocharged technological development in the West. The reason other cultures, some of which are mentioned above, did not show such great technological progress, to the detriment of their citizens, is primarily because they did not have a Biblically shaped culture and world view.

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So the consequences of the retreating, now denigrated Biblical world view, that has been virtually eradicated from western society, are far more than just the slow-motion moral train wreck of the ‘The Degradation’ that I have written about previously. Rather, what we see is the West deliberately deciding to kill the Biblical Goose that laid the Golden eggs of Western civilization, its progress and its technology-driven prosperity. Some examples of such blessings to third world nations brought by western Biblical culture are cited by Vishal Mangalwadi when he writes of God having truly blessed the India he grew up in through the Bible, e.g.

The University he was studying at; the municipality and democracy he lived in; the High Court and the legal system it represented; the botanical garden; the public library; the railway lines that ran through his city and the Agricultural Institute in his town.

As consequence of the rejection of the Bible in our society, we now have what Dr John Clauser, considered to be one of the world’s leading authorities on quantum mechanics and winner of the 2022 Noble Prize for physics, in a recent speech described as –

         ‘A world awash with pseudo-science’

The current trend is to dismiss western science with what Clauser describes as pseudo, i.e. fake, science e.g., making such assertions as-

1. Carbon Dioxide is a ‘pollutant’, where in fact it is the life molecule, such that when its level in the atmosphere drops below 180 parts per million all plants and animals begin to die, including us! It is in fact also plant food, and the reason why horticulturalists pump this ‘pollutant’ into their greenhouses so they get greater yield from their plants.

2. Western mathematics is ‘Racist’, whereas actually it is the score of God’s creation symphony, ranging from the composition of the stars to the beauty of the Fibonacci series that defines the shapes of flowers and leaves. Importantly, western mathematics is the basis of most technological benefits for peoples of all races, faiths and cultures.

3. Insisting that getting the ‘right’ answer, using the right method is an expression of ‘white (for which read western) supremacy’. Whereas, in obvious reality, the application of wrong answers can have disastrous effects. e.g.

In 1999, NASA lost its Mars Climate Orbiter because engineers failed to convert from the metric system to inches, feet, and pounds. Each year, 7,000 to 9,000 Americans die from (wrong answer) mathematical errors in medication dosage. Mathematical errors also kill and cause substantial property damage and losses each year.

The reality is that, it is the Biblically impelled western technology that has lifted, and continues to lift, millions out of grinding poverty; out of endemic disease around the world by the provision of safe drinking water, vaccines, antibiotics; that developed drudgery-relieving powered equipment such as pumped water supplies, rather than water needing to be carried long distances (again usually by women); and by the ongoing provision of (now demonized!) coal-fired cheap electricity!

Despite its many undeniable faults and failings, historic and present, the West is a civilization that that has brought a multitude of blessings to its people and to many other technologically limited cultures around the world. The reason? The Bible.

Yet in this now catastrophic Bible vacuum, the western Church, expressed in its networks of congregations, largely sits on its hands, its congregations are apathetic and its leaderships largely mute. Two things are consequent.

         1. The Degradation, the slow motion moral trainwreck continues unabated.

2. Western society has increasingly allowed Science, the mother of our technological advance and blessing, to be replaced by a pseudo-science that often has more to do with political agendas than true Science.

There is a question of course that it is fair to ask. That is, why is it that non-Bible cultures, for example China and India, today have advanced technologies such that they can land space craft on the Moon? This, as their histories have demonstrated, is not because invention is intrinsic to those cultures but because they have learned, copied, bought and even sometimes stolen technological expertise from the West.

So to return to the question I began with. What is the connection between Mary Jones and the Water Mill? It is the Bible highly valued and sought after by the Mary Jones western societies of the past, that impelled the development of the Water Mill and subsequently the multitude of other advanced technologies of benefit to the whole of humanity that other cultures failed to produce.

Yet now, we have apparently ‘progressed’ to the point where it is considered ‘progress’ to kill the Biblical Goose that laid the Golden Eggs of our technological blessings.

The destruction of the biblical foundation-slab of western science, upon which our modern society was constructed, along with the pulling down of the moral scaffolding that supported the western civilization project has left us with what the author Greg Sheriden describes ‘as a paralysed dystopia slowly getting worse’.

It can only be repaired by a movement to re-evangelize the nation (West) in order to resurrect the now virtually invisible Biblical world view. This task is the responsibility of every individual who claims to enjoy the present and eternal benefits won for us at great cost on the Cross by Jesus.

There is no possibility that this can be achieved while living the comfortable, Christianity-lite, convenience-church, Sunday gathering life that is standard. On the contrary, it will require that every Christian use every opportunity in their networks and spheres of influence to import a biblical world view into the discussions and activities they engage in every day. For-

         ‘A Dead Goose Doesn’t Lay Eggs, Certainly not Golden Ones’