Herbert W Armstrong

   The problems of this world would be solved if all men could work together. A wonderful statement. Do you think it's going to happen? I don't either. If we did, we'd both be nuts. We know better. We can read the slogans on the library on the courthouse. We can go look at the founding documents of country after country. Canada. Sounds awfully good. So does that of the United States? So does the charter of the United Nations. So does the ones of the Soviet Union. They all sound very wonderful brotherhood equality. You know, in French they can even, [French words] how do they pronounce it? Doesn't get the job done though, does it? Because somewhere in the interpretation of it and the living of it and the doing of it, we fall short. Why? Well, because we're a bunch of rotten can tankers, human beings with human nature and human nature. Basically. Bellsically that's a good word. I got to hang on to that one because it's another Armstrongism, it's a freshly coined word. Sounds like a combination of Belch and basic, which gets right to the heart of everything when you stop to think of it. So basically, it is vanity, jealousy, lust, and greed, that's what we're composed of inside.

   Now, last time I had to break off for lack of time. I was beginning to talk about any isolated incident, whether you're taking advertising or used car sales or the ecology thing. I wanted to talk a little bit about pollution and the ecology and witness some of the absolute loggerheads in which people find themselves between ecology-minded organizations and big industry and the private citizen and government.

   When it comes right down to really getting the job done, everybody knows what's wrong, why we have pollution. Like a little kid about eight who wrote to President Nixon who said that he knew that all we had to do. He told the president is stop all of the smoke coming out of factories and stop all the smoke coming out of cars and quit pouring all this stuff in the rivers and everybody cleaned up after himself and he said we wouldn't have any more pollution. Now, Mr. President, he said, I'm going to start cleaning up after myself, won't you? Kind of funny? You know, the kid doesn't know any better than to think that if he stopped all that smoke and stopped dumping all this stuff in the rivers, why we wouldn't have any pollution.

   But when you stop to think about it, where do rivers come from? Well, it doesn't take any stretch of imagination. The weather patterns, the ice pack, the rain that falls in the mountains, the creeks and rivets, the smaller streams and find the rivers. Now, every single day, that river is flowing and it's flowing from various sources. Maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of sources. It's along the way. The pollution is put in. Why is the pollution put in? Well, because industry gobbles water by the hundreds of billions of gallons and industry must discharge waste.

   It takes heated water for practically everything in western movies. 44 gunshots and babies. Anything he's hurt. I don't care, hourse pulled him apart. Stepped on him, the mule backed him up against the barn and let him have it with both hind feet, heat some water. I never could figure that out. But that's an aside. But industry along these waterways of America, fantastic polluters. Giant birds in the industry. What about hydroelectric projects? And some of them burning fossil fuels. And what about many of them that are located along waterways? The dams and the like?

   So people say, well, we could get rid of pollution. No, we can't. As long as we are attuned to a technology that gives us all the things we equate with success. We want, as if with one voice, more, we say give us more, we want more homes, more jobs, we want more leisure time. We want more play things, more automobiles, more boats, more gadgets we were doing quite well before the era of the electric can opener. There were probably a few sliced thumbs and pinched fingers from time to time. But at least a lot of housewives got more activity than they're getting these days, which consist in many cases of at least bending over to put on your shoes. And aside from that, there are a lot of people who just don't get much exercise anymore. Now, they got an electric can opener. You stick the can up there and push a button or something, he the finger out of the way, presumably. And so we have one more energy slave.

   So in marketing, it isn't, will this thing be good for us? Do we need it? It's will it sell, can we make it and will it sell? It isn't, should we make it? And should it sell? And in industry, this is the whole question. Can we make a buck? Is there any money in it? It's a vast subject. It has to do with the food you eat the fantastic tons of chemicals poured down human throats every year in America and Canada, the preservatives, the dyes, the colors, the additives in our foods, the artificial pesticides, fungicides, fertilizers that are poured upon our soil and we're on this busy and merry go round because of the lust and the greed and the covetousness of human nature.

   And we cannot escape it. Why? Because human nature isn't being changed. If human nature could be changed, we could escape it. We could get off this mindless merry-go-round. We could get rid of pollution if you could change human nature. But if you look around you in the world, let's take a little bit about pollution for a minute. Air pollution and talk of that city after city, even smaller cities now are beginning to suffer from air pollution. It's not enough to say that it doesn't bother you where you are because it is not fiction. It isn't fancy. It's fact it maybe isn't quite so bad as the black death back in the fifties of London when thousands died. But that potential is always there and very concerned people are saying that should there come a fantastic temperature inversion, unusual weather.

   You know, weather is getting more unusual these days all the time. And should it remain for any certain length of time in some of the big sprawling Megalopolis? It is conceivable. I'm not predicting it's going to happen now or next Tuesday, but it's conceivable that thousands and even tens of thousands could die. So the point is air pollution is not just somebody's baby to bandy about grind axes, make political hay, get signatures on all sorts of lists and petitions and for somebody to get excited about it is with us, it is here. It is affecting us. It's affecting the paint, our homes and our automobiles, the rubber window sealers and the weather sealers and strips and so on the sheets and linens on the line. If anybody ever hangs them out of doors anymore, affecting nature itself, the trees and the plants that grow and therefore oxygen at its source. Smog air pollution has the power to corrode metal, brick and stone. It is doing even the public statues and buildings, a pretty good job of rapid decay.

   Far more so than if we had clean air. Now, smog is directly related to human nature which wants more. The highest concentration of automobiles, I believe in the world is the Los Angeles Basin. Perhaps next to that would be Tokyo, Japan next to that may be London. Now don't quote me on the latter too, but I believe that is acted to say that Los Angeles has the highest concentration of automobiles per capita of any other place in the entirety of the world. And consequently, and this is straight cause and effect. It has the world's worst smog problem, maybe its second worst. Maybe Tokyo on any given number of days per year can get worse. But to those living there, you know, I guess they can call it worse.

   Now, time was when people could move out to Palm Springs. That's if you don't know the Los Angeles area. There are a couple of mountain chains, there's a break and one mountain chain, there's a valley out there and the weather kind of pours back and forth. The coastal wind pushes it to the desert and the desert, Santa Ana, push it back the other way. And out in the plain, San Jacinto and San Gorgonio mountains, there is a kind of a desert high pass and it used to be that years before people would move out there into those cities and around the corner of the mountains at the foothill there of one great big high, more than 12,000 ft mountain to Palm Springs, California, former home of the late President Eisenhower, who had a home on about the 11th green, I think of the Dorado country club out there.

   And people used to do that to get away from the smog and air pollution. Now they're being forced to consider moving further away and they may have to go clear to the other side of the Colorado River for all I know because nowadays there have been smog alerts which means they have had to stop kids from exercising and keep them off the playground between classes in school. Clear out in Palm Springs.

   I have returned to Los Angeles many, many times in a jet at 37,000 to 39,000 ft when I was in the cockpit and really able to see out and I have seen Los Angeles smog for 200 and more miles. I have seen on a clear day up there. Los Angeles smog being pushed by sea breezes southeast to cover and I'm not lying. I've seen this with my own eyes all the way to Baja California and clear down into southern Arizona, hundreds of square miles of a yellow kind of a brownish pall spreading out. Where does it come from? About 60% of it from the exhaust of automobiles and those automobiles roaring up and down the freeway systems of southern California people escaping from their job to their home and probably from their home to their job. A lot of times then they escaped their homes to entertainment that evening and they're roaring back and forth and making a giant smoke going in no particular direction for no real definitive purpose for no stated goals and making a giant noise and a tremendous mess in the doing of it.

   This is what I call human nature in action. People come, they flock by the scores, the hundreds and the thousands of the Los Angeles area to find the good life and eventually they recoil from it because they have found not the good life, but something very far short of that. Living in an ant hill is not healthy for humans. It may be for ants, but it's not really healthy for humans, not mentally, morally or spiritually.

   Air pollution is one big basic problem that confronts us today which threatens to make our cities uninhabitable and the human nature, which is lust, greed, vanity as it is found in the automobile and in the manufactured commodities which we call upon our factories to give us. This is where air pollution comes from. Who's going to stop air pollution. You're not going to make all those automobiles stop running at any given morning. You're not going to shut down the factories. I don't care how many eight-year-old boys write to the president, you're not going to stop the wheels of this modern mechanized age of ours. And if you could, you could stop air pollution. But since you can't, it makes you wonder, will air pollution ever be stopped?

   I'll tell you this. If you can change human nature, you can stop it. And I'll tell you how.

   Think about the people, think of revolution, think about pollution, think of a solution. Go the words of a recent pop song. In these troubled times. Is there a source you can turn to for understanding for solutions to these problems. Yes. And in today's world, you can't afford to not know the answers to the many questions facing each of us.

   The Plain Truth magazine brings you monthly articles on personal finances, family living and man, the real meaning behind world news and advanced news of a better world tomorrow for you and your family, read the Plain Truth, the world's unique human experience and family magazine. There is no cost write today for your free subscription to the Plain Truth magazine. Send your request to Ambassador College Box 345 GP Sydney New South Wales. Again, that's Ambassador College Box 345 GP Sydney New South Wales.

   Frantic living to make a buck the almighty dollar some people have called it. This is at the very root in the core of the whole problem. I'm not just giving you some message about condemning the lust for money all by itself. I'm saying that there is a root cause for even some of the biggest problems confronting mankind, which is so simple that some people would accuse me of oversimplifying, I suppose because, but let's analyze it for just a moment. What about the picture of people by the millions racing up and down the freeways to jobs, 30 miles and more away every day, five days a week and then racing by the tens of thousands out of the area where they live and work to the mountains, the beaches of the desert where they jam the resort areas clog the highways, get into endless traffic jams that enervate exhaust and confuse them that make them angry and frustrated and short-tempered where they're scrambling and almost piling over each other, killing each other in the process many times, terrible accidents and the like all striving for what stop to think that if we worked right where we lived and if our lives were our work and our work were our lives and a job were not a means to an end, but the end in itself with a goal which had to do with service for other human beings.

   Stop to think of the idyllic situation where each human being raised his own food. What would he have to teach his children? Each human being with his own little Victory Garden. In this case, victory over human nature, let's say, or victory as far as the ecology is concerned, let's say.

   Now that sounds weird, doesn't it? Armstrong you clad? Sure. Except when I go to New York City, I sit there and listen to some of the greatest brains in all the scientific world telling me all about the problems of agriculture and the prodigious dumping on of pesticides and artificial chemicals. And then they turn around and they say monoculture is the problem because disease and pests can attack it. So we got to dump on all the fertilizers and pesticides. And I said, well, what about if you went to instead of monoculture, mixing it all up just like a home vegetable garden? And they say, well, that would solve it all of course. But we can't do that. Why can't we? Well, because you can't do it in vast commercial plots. That way, you can't have one man growing one crop for 10,000 other humans. And besides that, our planning machinery and our picking and thrashing and harvesting machinery isn't built to go along a road that is mixed between beets, turnips, carrots, parsnips and tomatoes. You see? So you got to have a monoculture. Why do you? Well, because you got to market it in supermarkets. Dumb, dumb. Don't, you know, that's the way society is set up. It wouldn't do for everybody to grow his own food. Why wouldn't it? Well, we've got to have front yards. Why they don't have front yards in India. Not very many of them. Maybe the Yraga or somebody does, but not very many people. The rest of the people are out eating the grass and if they're not, the cattle are, then the people don't even turn around and eat the cattle, which doesn't make any sense.

   Now, look at the automobile for a minute, we can slow the infernal things down. You know, people join these old antique car clubs and they have a ball doing it. They get out the goggles, a hat and a duster and they take off their wonderful Oldsmobile, open to the air and you see a lot more of what's going on that way. Of course, I take issue with the internal combustion engine anyhow, it's a silly principle and there are far easier principles and there are far simpler principles and far better ones to give us whatever locomotion we need. Would you believe a horse? Now these days, people don't ride a horse to work. If there are a few people like that. They're precious few in isolated areas in some of the Western States. But if we did, it would make an awful lot more sense. And the horse doesn't pollute. Some people might call it that, but don't believe it, that's fertilizer. Automobiles don't give you a thing. It's a byproduct you can use except speed and they're also an extension of your vanity of what you want to think about yourself.

   People buy the real racy sports models. They've got these snorting engines that are far too big. They have got a speedometer that reads traffic tickets. That's what it says because really the law says you can only go thus fast. Why do they even allow the things to go any faster? You know, if they're going to go faster, people are going to try to go faster in them, which means it's a bizarre game. Where do you do it? Where as Crosby said, he's got to be coming out of my trunk because he's looking all around, he's crying out this automobile and the minute he starts up, he hears the siren and he knew there wasn't a police anywhere around. So we do it anyhow, we go roaring along the road at prodigious speeds and automobiles that are built to give vent to vanity to the lust for a feeling of power to the basic competition with one's neighbors and one's peer group as a manifestation of one's stature or status in life. And automobiles do become quite a status symbol.

   I assume that if we were in a weird society where everybody danced about on Pogo sticks, that the colors we would paint on them would represent status symbols and we would all tell who is affluent and who is not. But whether he's got a polka-dotted Pogo stick or not. But we're not going to do this are we, we will limit those automobile speeds. We will not change the engine so we can get 30, 40 or 50 MPG of fossil fuels, which if man doesn't do, he's going to run out of fossil fuels sooner or later and has no more such raw resource on which to depend. We're not going to open them up to the air, take shorter trips that are really necessary and enjoy them more. Are we, we're just going to keep going the way we've gone the assembly line production, assembly line living, assembly line pollution. And then we scream at the legislators and we tear our hair and we attend sessions. We get names on petitions. We scream at the factories and we say the other guy is guilty, no human nature with its vanity, its jealousy, its lust, its greed is at the root and the core of every human problem. If human nature were altered to become completely selfless outgoing thinking, only of the other person first thinking of serving, helping, sharing, giving instead of getting accumulating, taking for the self. It would be a completely different world.

   Now, you know, the only way to get rid of war, the only way to get rid of crime, the only way to get rid of pollution and every other problem is to get rid of human nature. Change it, alter it and there's only one way that can be done. You can't do it. You'd love to change your neighbor, wouldn't you? Very likely, you know, all kinds of people you'd like to change. There are lots of people who would like to, some of the military as they call them in the Pentagon and lots of them would like to change the kids out in the streets with bare midriffs, open-toed sandals, long hair, a pet dog and a big guitar and a sign that says I'm going anywhere. I would like to change them. So you would like to change somebody. All right, you would like to change all the Russians. Probably 99% of the Chinese. Probably lots of other people, of other races. You would like to knock some sense in their head and you're pretty convinced you've got some ideas, you would be very happy to share with them if you could just, you know, kind of insert those ideas, reach inside and just twist the right little knob somewhere and then say now there you see, now you're going to think the way I tell you, you would love to be able to change a lot of other people. How about them being able to change you? Who is going to be the first one to do all this playing at the job of God?

   Well, let me tell you the only person who can change you is God Almighty. You can't even do it to yourself. Oh, you can stop certain habits and acquire others. You can quit smoking, you can go off drugs, you can clean up your speech just like you can clean up your garage. You can do that on your own strength, but you can't change your basic nature down inside on your own strength. It takes a bigger power than any of us have by ourselves. That's why I say time and again, that world leaders come right up to the solution for all of the world's ills and then shy away from it because they are not willing to acknowledge the source. The one real source for all solutions.

   Our crowded courts represent a legal system feeling the crush of its own weight. This system cannot prevent the breaking of laws since order in society begins in the mind of the individual. Broken laws are symptomatic of broken character. Self-discipline needs to be learned in the home and maintained throughout life. The late J Edgar Hoover once said that a child who has been taught to respect the laws of God will have little difficulty respecting the laws of man.

   God's law is founded on 10 basic principles. The 10 Commandments, simple, direct and effective, the way to true justice. For a clear explanation of these principles request The Ten Commandments. This free booklet shows how all ten of these time-tested principles can benefit you, write for The Ten Commandments. That's Ambassador College Box 345 GPO Sydney, New South Wales.

   Human nature must be changed if we are going to see solutions instead of larger and greater, more insurmountable and unmanageable problems. But human nature is not going to be changed because it's legislated. I'm not on a movement, a driver, a program or a part of any organization which seeks to change human nature. I've got a job to do, which is to tell you about it. That's all, give warning, preach and teach as a witness. Let the chips fall where they may, let people do with it, what they will and my job is done.

   But let me tell you one thing, the 10 commandments are not the 10 suggestions, they are enforce today. They were enforce long before there was ever a Moses. They are the spiritual principles by which man ought to live. The first four tell how to serve and to love God. And the last six tell how to serve to help, to love your fellow human being. When Jesus Christ of Nazareth summarized the 10 commandments, he said, we must love God with all of our hearts, our being our very mind and love our neighbors as ourselves. And when he said that he meant that's a powerful, monumental kind of a love when somebody loves a neighbor as much as he loves himself. Boy, that's adoration. That's nearly worship. That's the kind of a love that is so selfish, so tenacious. So all concerned. So instantly and immediately aware of the slightest little discomfiture that it has enormous proportions. Can you imagine somebody loving their neighbor as themselves?

   Think about it a little while. I think that will get through. Now, the 10 commandments are a law, the law that show us how human nature ought to be controlled. But there's only one way it can be. And that's by the source that God Almighty gives us the power of his spirit. Jesus said, you must be born again. That's not an emotional experience. That's an ultimate rebirth. But first he talked about a begettal, he talked about repentance, baptism and receiving of God's Holy Spirit. He talked about the changing the altering of human nature from basically jealous and selfish to outgoing and giving concerned for one's neighbor.

   You stop to think of just one of the 10 commandments. Take the one about bearing false witness and apply it to the entirety of the world. What if you applied it to say used car salesmen or new car salesmen or people who are advertising suits people who come on television and tell you about their product, they're trying to sell. Can you imagine what the world would be like? If everybody more or less automatically, now maybe they had to pray about it and work on it. And maybe their conscience played a part and they were doing it as they tried to overcome their own nature. Maybe it wasn't just a big brother thing where they did it automatically because that wouldn't be them increasing in character. But if they had because of conscience and because of God's own imminent presence to tell the truth, wouldn't that be beautiful?

   A guy would come out and say hi. You know, I got this big clothing store right behind me. All these racks of suits. Now, these are dogs of clothes. They're terrible. The threads. Unfortunately, these were all made in Hong Kong by women and people sitting there, you know, sewing like mad. They're turning out maybe 16 a day. Actually, they only cost me $10 a piece and I'd like to sell them to you for $54.95. But they'll last you. They'll ask you if you keep them out of the cleaners, press them, don't clean them as often as you can. You can probably get maybe like say six months wear out of my suits. But no, that isn't it. It's style. We got everything, we got the short sleeves, we got the short and the long and the tall of it, everything you can imagine down here. Beautiful suit, sharp suit. You're going to be well dressed, they may have an athlete, they may have somebody else there to tell you about. I got my suit down at so and so, you know, and so here's all of this gobbledygook about what a beautiful suit you're going to get.

   So you go down and you buy the suit and you find it's a little too big in a waist. So they're marking and gets it altered and you go home and the thing you find it's only got one back pocket. You know, they cut the middle out and do it together and over it has two but one's behind the other one. I don't know, I don't know if it's been that bad. But if they just, if everybody had to tell the truth, if a used car salesman is walking along and every now and then gets tangled in his cord, he's got his dog, bird, elephants, everything you can imagine walking around the used car lot to try to talk to people, get the kiddie attracted over there and say daddy because you know who runs the family. Stop. Let's see, this used car they get out and want to buy this one for $888.88. It's probably an Oldsmobile, 88. And some of these numbers you begin to wonder why did they do that? But they say this thing had five owners. It's been in three wrecks, it was almost totaled once the speedometer has been set back you can see the scratches there. That's illegal. But, you know, if they tell the truth, wouldn't it be an incredible world? It would be a funny world. It really would, it would be hilarious for the first few weeks. Of course, many relatives would have terrible fallings out. Husbands and wives would be going at it. I suppose divorce would probably go out of sight if people started telling the truth suddenly and I imagine the entirety of the Congress would have to resign. I mean, I'm just, you know, I'm just daydreaming with you for the moment to show you how impractical it is in our society to tell the truth. Now God Almighty says you must.

   Well, you know, that's why Jesus said love, not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. You are not of the world. He said, I have come to call you out of the world. But he said not out of the world in a sense of being gone physically because then you're sitting on cloud nine somewhere completely detached. He said his disciples are in the world. His people are in the world but they are not of it. They are not part and parcel of its attitudes of its competition, of its greed, its strife of its goals. It's 10, a false temporal goals. They have completely different purposes. They have a different approach, a different attitude. That's because they are tuned into a different wavelength and they're living for a different purpose.

   If you want to find just how completely impractical the 10 commandments are so far as this world is concerned. But why they are going to be enforced in the world tomorrow, then write for these booklets, The Ten Commandments, and Why Were You BORN? Why do you walk this earth? What is the purpose in your life? You need to know whether or not humanity was created and put here on the earth by an intelligent and almighty creator for a definite purpose. And if so, what is that purpose? And why is all of humankind seemingly totally unaware of it? You now, we for destined to be born to grow up to have hates and our loves, our fights and our heartbreak, our disease and our good health. What little of it people can enjoy work and slave and sweat and strain to accumulate a certain amount of material goods and then gradually grow in a senility and final death or maybe have our lives snuffed out by an accident or by disease. If you look at it biologically, you can't come to any other conclusion.

   Just request the booklet. Why Born? And all you need to do is to request it by sending your letter to Post Office Box 345 Sydney, New South Wales. Be sure to tell us the call letters of your station, we need that. That's all there is no cost. But tell us the name of the radio station to which you've been listening to call letters and then send your letter to box 345 Sydney, New South Wales. Until next time, this is Garner Ted Armstrong saying goodbye, friends.