(NB Headings are not part of original, but are added for clarity)

The World Tomorrow

Why Religious Confusion - part 3

by Herbert W Armstrong

(PLAY FROM START)

Well greetings everybody. I wonder: did you ever stop to think about the confused world that you live in?

Contribution of Science, Government and Education (PLAY FROM 0:23)

We’re in the world of modern science. Science has come along in about the past 150 years as the 'new messiah.' Science and technology have offered to put an end to all of our ills, and all of our troubles, our heartaches, and all of the evils in the world. But it seems that the principle contribution that science has made has been more and more weapons of mass destruction – until they have come now to the destructions where one man can start a nuclear war that can wipe all human beings off the face of this earth! That is what science has contributed.

Then take governments. When there’s a political election, those that are running for office...they’re going to give you what you want. They want you to know that they’re working for you, and they’re concerned about you. Yeah they say, "We - I care about you." Of course that’s a good argument to talk about if you believe it. They pose as the benefactors of the people, and they’re supposed to give us all of the good things. But the main thing that government gives us is high taxes and some more things.

I guess we forget that on welfare and all that sort of thing, that all of the money that the government pays out, they have to take from the taxpayers in the first place. They have no other place to get the money. They don’t just print more money – they can’t do that – no nation can.

So here we are in a world of trouble. And science has gone far enough to be able, and technology, to send men to the moon and back, to invent the computer, the many, many things that are just miraculous machines that we have. And also to land an unmanned space craft on the very surface of Mars – the planet Mars – and send us photographs back to earth, taken right on the surface of Mars. So we begin to know what it looks like up there. No they haven’t solved our problems.

Now we come to education – and especially higher education. Now our educators have said, "Give us sufficient knowledge and we’ll solve ALL the problems. Knowledge is all we need." And a recent president of the University of California has said that universities are merely factories manufacturing knowledge – manufacturing knowledge.

Well you know, back in the Garden of Eden, Eve took to herself the knowledge to decide what is what, and to produce the knowledge. And Adam took with her and did eat also.

Now human beings have been doing that ever since – we’ve been trying to develop our own fund of knowledge. And we have more knowledge now than we know what to do with – no one can ever read all of it. There are millions…it must be millions times millions of books. I don’t know how many there are in the Library of Congress, but it must be a staggering number of millions of books.

You know Solomon said that "...of the writing of books there is no end" (Ecclesiastes 12:12). Everyone wants to write a book. Well maybe that includes me, but if it’ll do good and reach the people with the right message, I really want to write one. I think I’d better get in line, because I haven’t seen a book yet that really came out with it, except the one book – The Holy Bible.

Now then we come to religion, but before we leave education…the scientists and the educators and our so-called thinkers have come up, in the last 150 years, also, with this doctrine, or theory, of evolution. And we’ve come to the place where the theory of evolution has won almost TOTAL acceptance in the institutions of higher learning, or higher education, in the universities of the western world, especially. And that virtually shuts religion off. Because you find anyone that is a thorough-going evolutionist, and thoroughly saturated with it, has left all interest in religion. He’s just not interested in that anymore.

I’ll tell you why: evolution is simply an atheist’s - now I don’t mean that everyone who believes evolution is an atheist - I’m not saying that. And it’s because it is not true. But evolution is the atheist’s attempt to explain the presence of a creation without a Creator! So in other words it really does away with creation, and it’s impossible to believe evolution, just as the hard-core-dyed-in-the-wool evolutionists present it, and also believe in God, and believe God, and believe what God says.

Now as I say that virtually {1} shuts evolution out. And we’re becoming more and more educated; and education is becoming more and more diffused, and reaching a wider number of people all the time. And yet the majority of all mankind are still following some religion.

Religion Failed (PLAY FROM 06:41)

Now religion has also failed to make this a better world – religion just has not done it! Religion also is that which is supposed to put us in a right relationship with God, or whatever we consider as the Supreme Being, the First Cause, the supernatural.

They say that religion, if you will look in Webster’s Dictionary, you will find that it defines religion as the service to, and the worship of God, or the supernatural.

Now isn’t it ironic that of ALL THE RELIGIONS in the world, including the Christian religion – except for one Church that Jesus Christ called the little flock and was the original Church that was founded by Him in 31 AD – NOT ONE KNOWS WHO OR WHAT GOD IS – NOT ONE! They simply do not know!

How? I’m going to prove it to you! I wouldn’t say that if I couldn’t prove it to you. But the majority are following some religion. And practically nobody knows, ever stop to inquire, in retrospect, why they believe the things they believe.

Now what about you; how did you come to believe what you believe? People have their ideas, their conceptions, and they’ll stand up and fight for it. They bristle up if anyone disagrees with them. But how did they come to believe that; how do they know that what they believe is true? Did you ever stop to think how people come to believe what they do, and how it found lodgment in their minds?

In our Western world, the largest religion, of course, is Christianity, but it’s in very great confusion. Now the largest of all religions, and the largest church in Christianity, is the Roman Catholic Church. And they’re having their troubles within right now. And many of their priests, their nuns, and other officials are hedging about. And in the election of two popes, not so long ago, there was a great deal of politicking and of controversy and maneuvering – several factions, or groups, trying to get their man in – and for a certain purpose.

But then, of course, there are, the Protestant movement is very great. And there are more than 250 denominations and sects in Protestant Christianity – and many other smaller groups beside – ALL DIVIDED, no two believing the same thing. One believes one thing – they may have certain things in common, but they all have something else they don’t have in common that they do not agree with others. They don’t agree except to a certain extent.

Then you take the other religions over the world – all is confusion. There is Buddhism; there’s Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, Shintoism, the Moslem religion which covers the whole Arab world and a great deal of Africa beside. And yet you find that the Moslems all believe the same thing, but they don’t believe the same thing that the Buddhists do. Now the Buddhists believe something else, and they won’t agree with you if you don’t believe that. Now the same thing is true of the others. It’s a hodge-podge of confusion! And the world is in trouble! And none of these organizations, the instrumentalities that are supposed to guide us out of trouble - why are we in the troubles we are?

Cause of Inflation (PLAY FROM 11:04)

Now I have an audience before me here as I’m speaking. And all of you are bothered, not only with taxes, you’re more worried about something else right now – and that’s inflation. I can tell you the reason for inflation. But the government is not going to tell you; the politicians are not going to tell you; the educators or the scientists are not going to tell you. Now that I’ve started I might as well tell you. I don’t know if anybody will believe it, but this is the truth and you can’t refute it.

Back in the year of 1914, early January 1914, now that’s before most of you were born, but I was then the correspondent of a national magazine in its editorial department. I was over traveling in eastward New York. I had reached, I believe, it was Utica, New York. I received a telegram from my publishers, of the largest magazine of its type in the United States, asking me to catch the next train – we didn’t have airplanes, you know, at that time, not yet – but to catch the next train back to Detroit, and to interview Henry Ford. He had just instituted a sensational new, five-dollar-a-day wage plan. And it was gigantic news! And they wanted a personal story. And they wanted their own correspondent to cover it and to receive it.

So I went to Detroit; I saw Henry Ford. That was in 1914. Of course he’s not here any longer, but I don’t know whether Edsel still is or not, to tell you the truth. But at that time I found Mr. Ford didn’t know much about his 'five-dollar-a-day' wage plan which was a real front page sensation in all the newspapers of the United States at the time.

You see the average union wage scale in the automobile industry was $3.75 a day. Now you can see how prices have gone up since then. What you get per day today isn’t buying very much more than their $3.75 bought then.

I can remember when my father, when I was a boy, had been taken by a man who perhaps was a little better off financially than my father was and took him to the leading hotel in our city and bought him a fifty-cent lunch. And that was quite an event. Well how much of a lunch can you get today for fifty cents? You see what’s happened to money. That’s…money is escalating like a lot of other things.

Well anyway I found that Henry Ford himself didn’t know too much about it. And that a man who was the head of his sociological department, his name was John R. Lee, was the man who had thought out and invented the idea, had presented it to Mr. Ford and others on the Board of Directors, and they had approved it, and Mr. Ford had approved it. So they told Mr. Lee to go ahead and to administer it.

So I went to John R. Lee. I said, "Mr. Lee, I’ve been sent here to get a story on this sensational thing, that you are now paying the highest wages in the automobile industry." He says, "Beg pardon, Mr. Armstrong, wrong. We’re paying the lowest." "What?" Why I said, "Isn’t the union scale $3.75 a day for a ten-hour day?" "Yes, yes indeed," he said. "Well haven’t you now raised it to $5.00 day for only a nine-hour day?" "Well that’s very true, Mr. Armstrong." "Well now isn’t that more?"

"No," he said, "It isn’t." He says, "We don’t figure in proportion to just how much money we pay. We figure what we GET for what we pay. Now we have enough volume of business and a large enough market that we are manufacturing so many more automobiles than any of the others. And we have now been able to institute the conveyor belt machine production. The car starts at one end and, as it goes along, every man has to do his part before it gets past him. We set the pace of how fast and how hard our men work! And we get twice the work out of every man for our $5.00 that they do for $3.75 – and even in the nine hours than they do at $3.75 at ten hours. You figure who is getting the most for the smallest amount? We are."

Our Industrial Economy (PLAY FROM 16:18)

Now that started the ball rolling! It wasn’t very long until others in the automobile industry had mass machine production, because the United States offered a mass market.

No other nation on earth had a mass market like that at that time. No nation in Europe – they weren’t as large or as populous as we were. Russia may have had more people than we, but they were not a market, because they, let’s say per capita income over there was insignificant compared to the United States. So it didn’t offer them any market, nor China, nor other nations. Japan is about half as large as the United States, but they didn’t have that kind of a market then,

Now pretty soon all other companies in the various industries in the United States were going to mass machine production – whether it was typewriters, adding machines, refrigerators, or whatever they manufactured.

Now a machine can produce so much more than a man by hand that, by machines, you produce, I would say, more than ten times what you can do by just the human hand. Machine production speeds it up.

Well I don’t doubt for a minute that capital and management would have taken all the profit, because it’s human, and they are human. But labor union leaders began to see a big chance for them.

Now this world, as I’ve said time after time, is based on the philosophy of get. "I love me; I’m wild about myself," you remember the song back in 1924, "Oh I love me. I put my arms around myself and give myself a squeeze. I love me." But I don’t care anything about you.

Now that’s why a common advertising slogan today is that, "We care about you." Well you'd better check up and find if that’s true. It’s a good advertising slogan.

Now listen to me just a minute. I spent 20 years in the advertising field. I know advertising. I’ve been a member of the Associated Advertising Clubs of the United States; I’ve been a member of the Association of Commerce in Chicago. And I’m very familiar with the slogan of the Associated Advertising Club’s: 'Truth in Advertising.' But don’t you believe it!

If I see something in a commercial on television I try to remember that – to be sure not to buy it – for whatever that’s worth! Now maybe I’ll be knocked off of television for saying that – I hope not.

Well anyway labor unions started a series of strikes – the labor union movement got going. Of course there was much violence. And maybe you remember things like the bombing of the Los Angeles Times, the Heron Massacre in Heron, Illinois, and some of the outrageous things that were going on. But labor got their share out of this increased profits that were coming out of the machines that were producing things for us. And we didn’t pay the machine you see. You just pay to get it and then it’s yours. It’s your slave, but you don’t have to pay it wages. And the result is it was just a matter of time until labor in the United States was on a scale that was two, three, four times that of other nations.

Now I remember when we were starting the college over in England in the year of 1960. And I spent quite a little time over there in that year – 1960. And we had to have work done; and I found that men would come to do a job for you and actually what they did - they didn’t come to work. Instead of a coffee break, they came to coffee and took a work break once in a while. They just sort of reversed the thing. Now I’m not kidding; they really did!

Economy In England (PLAY FROM 20:44)

But the average wage in England then, in 1960, I found to be one-third of the average wage in the United States. But in England, at that time, no family had more than one automobile – and a very, very large percentage didn’t even have that. And another thing: very few homes had a refrigerator.

But now Britain had already come to mass machine production, however. And the nations in Europe to the Common Market, and England finally worked her way into that, have created a mass market so that they began to have a mass market, and who get into the mass machine production, assembly-line-conveyor-belt type of manufacturing, where the machine was doing the work. But they still had low-cost labor.

Now the labor unions weren’t exactly asleep over there, but they weren’t making the progress that they had made in the United States. And consequently it was a low-cost labor market. In other words: the wage average was so much lower, about one-third of the United States.

Now it was about the same in France; it was even lower than that at that time in Germany. But it speeded up in Germany, because they began coming back fast. Remember that 1960 was not too far out of WWII, when Germany was pretty well down at the end of WWII. But they came back faster than any of the other nations.

Well Japan began to come up very, very, very rapidly. But the last time that I saw the former Prime Minister Sato of Japan, who had become a good friend of mine – I had visited him a good many times, and after he was out of office, once in a downtown office and twice out in his home, his residence, and he said to me, now it must have been about four or five years ago now – he said, "Well," he said, "Thanks to the United States, Japan has come forward with remarkable success, industrially and economically, but," he said, "Unfortunately all this prosperity that has come to Japan has not yet filtered down to our laboring element and to the masses of the people. They’re not getting so much, yet."

Now I know it has been filtering down since that time very, very rapidly. And Prime Minister Sato, by the way, just shortly before he died, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which I know he was very happy to have.

Well now what has happened? Japan came to a mass market because Japan is exporting things to the United States. And the reason Japan has been able to have such great prosperity is because they have not had to maintain a military establishment. They have no army or navy any more. They are relying on the United States to protect them. And our taxpayers are paying for the great military installation that is protecting all of Europe against Russia, and protecting Japan against China or anyone else! And we don’t realize it. Sometimes I think that instead of, "Uncle Sam," we should be called "Uncle Sap." We just don’t see those things.

American industry has mass machine production, that’s true, but with still the biggest cost is labor – even with the machine. And we have high-priced labor! Europe and Japan…their labor was only one-fourth that of the United States in 1960. I don’t know what it is now. Maybe it’s up to one-half, because I know it’s been scaling up, but I don’t know just to what extent. They still are a long ways from having our standard of income, or wage, for labor.

And so here we are trying to produce with high-cost labor and meet the competition of other nations that have mass machine production with low-cost labor. That is why we have inflation!

Effect of Inflation (PLAY FROM 25:19)

Now gradually, as I say, in England the average worker today is getting, perhaps, fifty-five, sixty percent of the wage scale of the average American. And the result is, what happens? Our prices go up so your dollar doesn’t buy as much as it did. We’ve got to get the wage scale down even with other nations one way or the other! It isn’t because anyone wants to, it’s just a matter of supply and demand. And there’s no way around it! And anyone that you elect as president or as your congressman or anything else in the government, there’s nothing he can do about it. It’s just a fact of the way of things. And we’re competing with low-cost labor. And we can’t have the kind of thing we have, and the luxuries we have in the United States and the high living standard, while other nations have a low living standard. We nations are interdependent today – one upon another!

Now this world, as I’ve said time after time, is based on the philosophy of get! You know there are the two principles. I have taught this to heads of government, kings, presidents of nations, prime ministers, and even a couple of emperors – and there were only two; and one of them is now dead – and that there are only two ways, broadly speaking, of life; two directions in which we may travel.

And the one, the way the world is traveling, I call the way of get. It’s the way of self-centeredness, the way of vanity and greed and lust, but toward other people, the way of jealousy and envy and competition and strife. That is the way of Satan.

The way of God, though, is the way of love, which is an outgoing concern, first in obedience and reverence and worship toward God, and then in helping and in an outgoing concern for the good and the welfare of human neighbors. That is the give way.

So I put it in its simplest terms: the two ways of living. One is God’s way, the way of give, or love, and love is the fulfilling of that law of God. And the other is the way of get.

Now the world has been geared to the way of get. And that has caused all of the heartaches, and all of the pain and sorrow and suffering, and the mountains of woes and of evils that have piled up higher than Mount Everest, or any other mountain in the world, by far, as a result of that get principle.

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