Herbert W Armstrong

   And greeting friends around the world, this is Garner Ted Armstrong with the good news of the World Tomorrow.

   Police Chief Parker, before his death, expressed pessimism about the future of our society. He was asked why he was really pessimistic about the survival of mankind and about the perpetuation of our society today. He said, "Very much so. It is hard for me to believe that our society can continue to violate all the fundamental rules of human conduct and expect to survive. I think I have to conclude, like that famous law enforcement official before his death, that this civilization will destroy itself as others have before it." That leaves only one question: when? No, not very good words to hear about the future. But what are the chances for the future today?

   Do you ever let yourself think about the future, about where you're going to be in the 2000s? What your children are going to be doing in 2020, 2030, 2040? You're living in an age of absolute disillusionment, of the trend on the part of our youth to disassociate themselves from the big issues because they feel they don't have the answers. And you're living in a bizarre time when people simply will not look into the future because they fear what they're going to find. They are living in the shadow of fear.

   Remember back in the forties and early fifties when you heard about all of the bomb and fallout shelters and how we saw pictures of men standing with rifles who said they would shoot down their own neighbors if they tried to break into their bomb shelter to get at some of their uncontaminated food? Some of the big articles in the weekly magazines that told in two-page spreads about the likelihood of your being burnt to a cinder if you lived within 20 miles of ground zero if all the megaton bombs should strike New York or some other large population center. Remember all the bomb scares we used to live under?

   College starts, and the war babies are halfway through college, and some of them have graduated. And today we're getting college freshmen who were born in 1947 and 1948. And they have never lived in a world without atomic and hydrogen bombs. They have never known a world without the Cold War. They have never known a world where the United Nations admitted Red China. They have never known a world without the problems that confront us today. And as U Thant said when he declined an additional five-year term as Secretary General of the United Nations, "None of the basic issues which confronted the United Nations in 1946 have been solved." Twenty years later, we still have the same problems we had then.

   But people don't worry. They sort of have the idea of, what is his name, the little kid with one eye kind of off on the front of Mad Magazine? "What, me worry?" As one woman put it, "I have faith in human nature. I think there's good in human nature is finally going to succeed." And this one very respected and leading religious figure said, and this is a little remarkable if you think in terms of total objectivity and the factual knowledge, the acquisition of facts and understand a little bit about human nature, he said, "Oh, I'm very optimistic about the future. He said, after all, we've gone down about as far as we can go, and when we hit the bottom, there's only one direction you can go, and that's up." Now, that makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? Or does it? Is that right thinking? Have we really hit the bottom yet? There isn't the bottom complete total anarchy and savagery, reverting in a sense to the jungles of one person preying on another person of complete cannibalism. Oh, there's a lot further we can go down, and the thing is we seem to be headed in that direction today. Everybody seems to be cooperating to give us a shove in that direction.

   Well, you're living in a time when the adult generation says maybe a bright young boy will come along and save us from it all. Now, from time immemorial, society has looked to its bright young men of tomorrow to extricate itself from the mess of the older generation. And today, you're living in a time where increasingly youth is disillusioned. Youth is anxious and filled with fear and worry, with repugnance and disgust at a ready-made society, not of their creating or their doing, one with which they find they cannot really cope and one from which they would like to withdraw. They would like to disassociate themselves from the insoluble problems of today.

   So, I want to tell you about some of the fodder these youngsters have been fed, the kind of world in which they grew up, the type of education they have received, and our chances of having them save us from ourselves.

   Now, take a look in Great Britain if you can, if you can do that: the mods and the rockers, the dirty, unkempt, disillusioned, high-heeled dropouts of today that are guitar pickers and strummers, and that's about all, roaring up and down M1, like as not stopping in one of the cafes for a chat, sandwich, and tea, and then who knows what else? The chances are it breaks out into a rock-throwing, bottle-throwing fist fight or maybe a chase with the police down M1, and of course, they delight in this and love nothing dearer, but you find around the Western World of so-called Christianity the seeds of moral decay, of growing resentment against law, of discontentment with the status quo, a desire to change and to throw off the yoke of any and everything that smacks of permanence or the adult or the older generation, and yet no knowledge of how to go about doing it, feeling defeated from the very start, feeling there's no need worrying, nothing's going to come out all right, there is no real good effective change you can make and expect it to stick.

   Britain today is embarked on a bizarre game of ridicule, ridicule of any and everything that stands for truth, for stability, for permanence, for integrity, for law or morality. I've been amazed at British television. I really have been. Are you people in England? Maybe you're not amazed at it. But, to an American visiting Great Britain, now the people in the United States have their own crimes, sins, and problems, and in greater proportion, often as not, than Great Britain. And that's a fact. But nevertheless, I was still a little bit surprised when I saw on British television the leading religious figure in Great Britain lampooned, ridiculed, and made fun of by a comedian who dressed up in the garb of the highest office of the Church of England and then made fun of the very voice characteristics and mannerisms of the head of the Church of England, of whom Queen Elizabeth is the titular head. Of course, the Archbishop of Canterbury. I was amazed, and I thought, well, of all things, I doubt very much that that could occur in the United States. I doubt very much that someone in the United States could get on television and dress up like the Pope or like the Archbishop of Canterbury or a leading figure in religion and absolutely try to make a fool out of that personality by lampooning and hilarity on television. Now, maybe you people in the United States didn't know that's being done, but it is. It is a constant thing in Great Britain today. You see it in the newspapers: a crass, sarcastic lampooning and ridiculing of all that is present with us, all that is present society because we realize the problems are seemingly insoluble, the worsening sociological problems, the growing racial problems, the deepening, worsening economic problems of Great Britain especially. And so, no one seems to know where to turn to solve them. And yet you talk to people on the street, they say, well, never fear. You know, we'll come along and we'll find us another Winston Churchill. Really? Thousands upon thousands of British people feel that somehow, somewhere, another bright young man or maybe an older mature man will come along and will rescue them from the problems of today.

   Now, you look at the world in which youth has grown up and you really can't blame them for being disillusioned. You really can't blame them for their antagonism against the older generation. Leading law enforcement officials say today that over 50% of all crimes in the major categories are perpetrated by youths under 18, that 72% of them are perpetrated by people under 25 years of age. So, is it any wonder when you look at everything the older generation stands for? You look at the mammoth problems. Youth is ready to inherit the dissolution of morals. This is nothing necessarily that they are antagonistic toward. They just don't realize the terrible price they're having to pay. They say, well, I think it's all right as long as it doesn't hurt anybody. No, the only people it hurts are the hundreds of thousands of illegitimate children who will never know their parents, the hundreds of thousands of others up for adoption but who never will be, the hundreds of thousands of others which are aborted or done away with before they've reached their first year of life. No, it doesn't hurt anybody. Just the church, the home, the family, every friend, every acquaintance. It just hurts the entire social structure and the economy of the entire nation and the world for that matter. But this is the way people reason. No, it is no wonder they're resentful because look what they've been fed.

   Take a look at the entertainment and the advertising of the world. The jangling, enervating, clashing noise of sound that has assailed their ears, the sensual things that have gone flooding across the silver screen and the TV set that they have seen from the time that they remember their first impressions. I didn't grow up in the age of television. I remember when television first began to sell very heavily back in the late forties after the war years and then on into the fifties when a real big television boom hit along about the mid-fifties. And for a while, people thought radio was about to go out of business. Well, thankfully, some people finally decided that radio still had a place in our modern society, and it's a good thing. But can you even begin to imagine the combination of several factors? First of all, world conditions at large. Secondly, the upswing toward rampant, free sex and the complete blatant—can you call it honesty? Is it really that in the discussion of sex and books about it, the tremendous mammoth increase in pornography. And then along with it, the new child psychology that was ushered in in the late thirties and early forties and the type of training or the lack of it that most of our youth today have received. Now, you combine all those factors together. Is it any wonder what's happening to youth today? Is it any wonder that the majority of crimes are perpetrated by young people? It's about time we took a good long look at it and found out because there are causes for every effect.

   Now J. Edgar Hoover climbed out on a limb, you might say, when he made the statement, "Any child who is taught to obey the laws of God will have little difficulty obeying the laws of society." But what did he mean, the laws of God? Now, what is true education? True education is to discover the biggest answers of all, to answer the question: What are we? What is life? And science can't tell you, not even in a test tube. Where are we going? What does the future hold? Why are we here on this earth? These are the big questions that must be answered, and these are the questions they will tell you philosophers and theologians and historians have wrestled with from time immemorial and do not have the answers yet. Furthermore, in most books on those subjects you will pick up at the college level, they will tell you, for instance, the orientation class of the very first beginning class in sociology and history or philosophy in college, the professor like as not will tell you, "Don't expect to find any answers." A fellow college professor of mine went to a class at another university, and it was entitled—the course was labeled the Origin of Life. The very first class period, the professor cleared his throat with embarrassed shyness and said, "Actually, students, the class is rather poorly named because we are going to absolutely find nothing about the origin of life. We aren't really going to uncover the origin of life in this class, but at least we shall make a stab at it." And then he went on to talk about how he hoped to make a few comparisons and at least come up with a few guesses and ideas. And so, I went to class.

   Now, college orators at commencement are told to avoid frightening the younger generation today by telling them this world is theirs. And college freshmen are warned "Don't expect to find the one book on life or you will find the magical paragraph marked with an X that will tell you the answers to why we are and where we're going and what we're doing here and what is life." And so here we find a youth in rebellion, headstrong, resenting the older generation, resenting the status quo in the world, but casting around in no particular direction, not knowing what to do about it and seldom even caring.

   You know, it's about time we got busy with the problems of today. It's about time that instead of mere rebellion and mere disgust without finding something better, which is cowardice, it's about time that instead of shrugging off responsibility and living for the moment in a fool's paradise of self-delusion, it's about time instead of resentment, rebelliousness, crime, lawlessness, and just a desire to be in the in-group, which means outside of normal society, that our teenagers today washed, got a haircut, began thinking about the things that need thinking about. It's about time we discovered the truth about the world of the future and began to have faith in it. It's about time we discovered the truth about ourselves, what we are, why we are here. And it's about time we directed our energies toward forming and shaping in our youth the pattern of life for tomorrow's world, the way to peace, to happiness, and productivity, the way to everything everybody really wants, regardless of how he describes it to themselves and to his friends.

   Now that's going to begin with true education, and true education must begin by answering the biggest questions of all. Who are we? Why are we? What are we? Are we a spirit inside of a body? Are we just a fleshly passing phenomenon that is here today and gone tomorrow? Go ahead and enjoy all the physical pleasures and sensations because there's nothing beyond. Is there a God? Do you die and go to heaven or to hell like people think? Strange how you can't find that in the Bible. But millions of teenagers think, "What? Well, I thought at least the Bible said that, but I just figured the Bible was wrong." Oh, come on, the Bible isn't wrong, but a lot of people are wrong about the Bible.

   Now, of course, people may say many crass, sardonic, and searing agnostics and skeptics will, and atheists, they say, "Oh, you don't believe that stuff in the first chapter of Genesis, do you?" And then they say, "Well, I might believe in creation but not in the way it is in Genesis. Boy, I believe in creation through evolution." Or you believe you came from worms, you believe you came from brown seaweed, from hairless sea apes, or from trees, from amoebas, or something of that nature. You know, you ought to just get back to a few basic facts and think about it for a while because you've never proved that to yourself. There are hundreds of thousands of laymen who are willing to take the word of evolutionists in all the various related fields—anything from historical and dynamic geology to ornithology, theology, zoology, biology, paleontology, comparative embryology, and the like. And they're willing to leave all of that to these specialists in these fields, not knowing that these specialists in these fields have gigantic question marks in front of them constantly, not knowing that evolutionists disagree among themselves, not knowing there are vast areas where there are no facts with which they can deal but only great shady areas of guesswork.

   Let me just make a positive statement for you in the field of geology, for example. Now, very few of you listening to my voice will have memorized the geologic succession of strata. You will not know all of the strata names from pre-Cambrian right on up through the ice ages of the recent or the terrace age. You might have heard vaguely—some of you people in West Texas know that you live in what is called the Permian basin. But exactly where that fits in the geologic order of things, you may not know. But people basically believe that science has demonstrated beyond the remotest shadow of a doubt, even though they have long since discarded the onion-skin theory—that is, that all the strata of the earth are just like the skin of an onion. That's obviously impossible if it's deposited through water. And if you're on a round sphere, you have to scrape it from someplace in order to deposit it someplace else. Therefore, it's untrue in its basic elements from the very beginning. But even though this has generally been discarded by most evolutionists who look to historical geology and paleontology as proof for their belief in evolution and their answer about who we are and what we are, they still reason to write and talk as if it were so. And it is a fact that any so-called older stratum may be found resting conformably on top of any so-called younger stratum at any place on this earth's surface at any time.

   Now, you can sort of think about that for a minute, and I'll explain the terms right quickly. You know, when I see the bed made up in the morning, I assume that my wife probably put the sheet on before she did the cover. And I think I'm correct because she's not a wizard or a magician. And when I see huge mountain ranges of sedimentary strata, and I see giant layers of rock, and sometimes, of course, they're torturously twisted and show great catastrophes—in other words, which is like a red flag in front of a bull to evolutionary geologists—but I'll come to that in a moment. You know, you take a look at the Grand Canyon, you go down and look at the bottom layers and the middle layers and then the layers up on top. I think it's fairly safe to assume, wouldn't you say, that the bottom layers were laid down first? Now, you may think that evolutionists always admit that is true. Oh no, of course not. Whole mountain ranges, whole sections—the Swiss Alps, the Atlas Mountains in North Africa, huge areas in the northwestern United States, gigantic mountain ranges—they claim were pushed from one continent to another. Now, they don't believe in catastrophes, but they try to explain away what is called non-conformity. Non-conformity to what? In the rocks, to each other? No, the rocks don't conform to the scientists' theory. They conform to each other.

   Now, maybe I can simplify it just by stating this: the rocks are laid down in much the way that you see them. Sure, there are certain areas where they've been tilted up on their sides and turned over. There are synclines and anticlines and all the rest of them, horsts and grabens, fault lines, overthrust faults, but only on a smaller degree and nowhere near as large as they would like you to assume. And this is something you can prove for yourself by a study of the subject. It's not something for you to take my word for or anybody else's. But it's about time scientists quit trying to use thrust faults to cover up the errors in their own geologic succession in strata and began to admit the strata are generally resting just the way they were deposited in the first place, just like that sheet and cover on the bed. The chances are very good the sheet was put on before the bedspread. And the chances are also very good when you see giant billions of tons of mountains of rock that they were laid down when they are conformable, when they are horizontal, and when there is no shift and there is no fault line, there is no grinding and there is no pulverizing of the crystalline rocks that are there. And when you find they are conformable, which means look at a line between one stratum and another stratum, it is smoothly uninterrupted. There is no sign of any catastrophe occurring. And yet when they tell you that bottom layer is 150 million years younger than the top layer, it sort of makes you scratch your head. And yet they tell you this by the hundreds of occasions. Why do they do this? Well, because they might have found an ammonite. And that's not an ancient man that lived near Judea, but a fossil. They might have found a fossil in the strata underneath which they say in their orderly succession of things belongs in the stratum above. Now, in order to cling to the theory, they would rather alter the rocks, apparently. So, this is done. Of course, the average person has never studied that, so he doesn't know much about it.

   Now you know, many people have insisted the Noachian deluge of the Bible could not have occurred? And they say after all, you would only need a local flood because in one-sixth of all the time of human history from then until now, man could not have migrated outside of a little valley around the Babylonian area there. So therefore, all they would need is a local flood to drown them all. Isn't that amazing? Human beings couldn't have migrated nearly 1000 years out of one little valley. That's really amazing when you read a book like Kon-Tiki and so on, you find how fast men can move around this earth. And so the idea was, let's insist on a local flood so we can do away with the idea of great catastrophism, of the sinking of continents beneath the waves, of the fulfillment of a promise, a prediction of scripture that is mentioned clear back in the sixth chapter of the book of Genesis, that had to do with vast ranges of mountain buildings, that had to do with volcanic activity, the creation of huge inland basins, the absorption of water into the lands, the gradual draining of those basins and lands, the creation of vast river valleys. The fact that all major river deltas are about 4000 years of age by actual measurement of the silt being carried to any period of so many years, whether spring floods or what. So, they say human beings could not have migrated out of that valley. They had to stay right there and be drowned like rats. And Noah's story was only a great magnification of a little dinky local occurrence. That was a local flood that happened way back there to kill them all. They insist that human beings could not have migrated out of the valley. But they would like you to believe that some of the mountains found in Switzerland today were pushed there from Africa. Now, that's a fact. You can push a mountain from Africa to Switzerland in order to have your geologic succession of strata the way you want to make it. But man can't migrate across the top of a mountain. Migration is in the heart of man. He's always wanted to see what's on the other side of a mountain. And this earth was populated, the entirety of the earth was populated at the time of the Noachian deluge, and the Noachian deluge did literally occur.

   Now, another little interesting point, and this one is coming up in the Plain Truth magazine. If you write in for it in the near future, this exact quotation—and it lists the place where you can find it if you want to read this article—it was by a man who is certainly one of the leading theologists who has studied more than perhaps any other man about this fantastic little archerfish. Now, the archerfish is a creature that presents a problem to evolutionists because he is called an archerfish, or toxotes out of the Greek, because he spits a stream of water at prey above the water and plasters a moth or a fly and causes it to drop upon the surface of the water and then feeds upon it. Now, of course, when these stories were first brought back from India to Central Europe way back in the 1600s and 1700s, and people swore up and down they'd seen an archerfish do this, the Europeans wouldn't believe it. Oh, they believed in witches and goblins and ghouls and ghosts and trolls under bridges, but they would not believe in an archerfish. Anyhow, finally, it was proven there was such a thing as an archerfish, and then they had to believe it.

   Well, now subsequent investigation, and then of course gradually the development of the movie camera and flashbulbs and lenses that will go up to 1/10,000th of a second have finally captured the food-getting habits of that little creature on film. And what I really believe, and sincerely do believe, is the greatest picture that has ever been taken of an archerfish in full color. We took it in the Ambassador College science lab and are going to publish a full-page picture of it in full color in a coming number of the Plain Truth magazine. It shows you the stream, and it was a picture that was practically unobtainable by most sources that I've come across. Now, in this research of this one man on the archerfish, he explained one little portion of it, which is in a Plain Truth article on questions evolution cannot answer, that you can have when you get your name on that mailing list. And the fact is that shooting at these insects above the stream is not a primary means of food-getting for an archerfish.

   Now, what does that mean? Well, it means this: evolution purports that resident forces and natural causes and gradual adaptation of various species and varieties within species—that food-getting led to the development of anything from camouflage to nest-building, to food-getting, and so on. And that it was the conditions that gradually changed that made these creatures develop that type of an apparatus which is specially designed for them to survive in their own natural habitat. Oh, then the archerfish is the only fish swimming in the streams and lakes and rivers today? No, he's not the only fish. Well, why do I say that? Well, because if the archerfish had to evolve a special shooting or spitting apparatus to get his food in order to survive, then he's the only one who survived, isn't he? Because there was no food to get beneath the surface of the water, none on the surface, none to be obtained by leaping clear, none on the bottom. Or what about the millions of other fish that never had to shoot above the surface? Now, the one question that is really a problem for evolutionists is the archerfish does not use spouting or shooting at his prey as his primary means of food-getting. He gets his food at or beneath the surface or leaps clear of the surface just like any other fish.

   The theologist in his study on this said, quote, "This presents an interesting question to the theory of evolution. Leaving this question aside, it is true that the archerfish does..." End of quotation. Now, I've got those words printed exactly like that in the Plain Truth magazine for you if you want to read them. I thought that was really interesting. It's an interesting question for evolution. Leaving this question aside, they say, let's go on to something else. No. You know, you, the layman, have probably never taken the trouble to prove to yourself one way or the other whether or not there is a God, whether or not there is any basic source of truth to which you can go that tells you what you are, what man is, where man is going, how he's going to get there, and what about the world of the future. Because your Bible is true, and you can demonstrate its veracity if you want to write for these books: Does God Exist? and The Proof of the Bible. The Proof of the Bible is the title of the booklet, and they're free of charge. Absolutely no price for them. And then get busy thinking about the things that need to be thought about and get busy recapturing the values that are going to bring this world peace and get busy educating yourself for the world of the future.

   Now, to do this, you need tomorrow's magazine today it's called the Plain Truth magazine. It makes plain in the light of Bible prophecy the big happenings on this earth today. This article, as I said, on Questions Evolution Cannot Answer is coming up in a current number. It's free of charge, full color, 52 pages. There is no subscription price for it to you. Your subscription has been paid in advance. Also, write for this booklet on the Ten Commandments and the ones mentioned on this program about Does God Exist?The Proof of the Bible. They're free of charge, no price. If you send your letter to Herbert W. Armstrong, Box 111 Pasadena, California. That's Herbert W. Armstrong, Box 111 Pasadena, California. Be sure to tell us the call letters of your station.

   Until next time, this is Garner Ted Armstrong saying goodbye, friends.

   You have heard The World Tomorrow with Garner Ted Armstrong. For literature offered on this program, send your request along with the call letters of this station to Herbert W. Armstrong, Post Office Box 111 Pasadena, California, 91123. Or you may dial this toll-free number: 800-423-4444.