The Good News of the
Wonderful World of Tomorrow

Adapted by Charles J. Voss and Sandra K. Zawada
Based on an article by Herbert W. Armstrong

Chapter 2 - One Last “Obituary” Look at Today’s World

Before we look at what actually is going to come--the peaceful, happy, joyful Wonderful World of Tomorrow--let’s take one last “obituary” look at this world that man has built upon the earth. Take one last fleeting look at the corpses of education, science, technology, commerce and industry, governments, the social order, and even religions.

Of course many see only the glitter, glamour, and tinsel of today’s tinker-toy society and think it is good. They see the temporary pleasures and blind their eyes to the hard cold facts of reality. Others, more aware of the world they live in, seek escape to remote, unspoiled areas where they can start anew “away from it all” and in harmony with nature. However, there just is not really anywhere to go that mankind, under heylel’s influence, has not polluted. Remember the man who before World War II started the thought that the safest most unspoiled place to be was Guadalcanal? ⁹

Education Is Decadent UpToIndex

Take a realistic look at this world’s civilization. We will look at modern education first because it is the mother--the alma mater--which has spawned the scientists, captains of industry and business, the politicians and rulers, the leaders in the modern social order, and the theologians.

Today’s world is what its leaders have made it. In addition, the leaders are the product of modern education. Education is defined by the Encyclopedia Britannica as “a system by which adult leaders of a society inject their philosophies, ideas, customs and culture into the minds of the growing generation.” Education is, and has been through the centuries, essentially pagan in origin and character. The pagan philosopher Plato founded our academic system.

The 19th and 20th centuries witnessed the absorption of German rationalism into the educational bloodstream--an approach that regards human reason as the chief source and test of knowledge. ¹⁰ There has been a dangerous drift into materialism and collectivism. The true revealed knowledge of our SOVEREIGN in the Hebrew Scripture is ignored and rejected. The ancient belief of gnosticism, meaning we know, was succeeded by agnosticism, meaning we don’t know (we are ignorant). This ignorance is glorified as knowledge.

Modern education trains students to earn a living in various professions, occupations, and vocations, but fails to teach them how to live. It commits the crime of developing the machine while failing to develop the man.

In modern education we find perpetuation of false values, the teaching of distorted history, warped psychology, perverted arts and sciences, all of which is worthless knowledge.

A leading expert on educational philosophy, Dr. Donald M. Dozer wrote this in and about contemporary university education: ¹¹

“Ours is an age dominated by half-truths and for this situation many causes can be found not the least of which are attributable to the processes of higher education. American universities have succumbed to the cult of faddism, sensationalism, and even vulgarism. New courses in scatology, ¹² whether masquerading as sociology, anthropology, or literature, have been given classroom platforms and respectability.... As students have become increasingly involved in curricular planning they have encouraged the idea that courses rich in content inhibit their creative impulses and represent an imposition upon them. This has led to the multiplication of colleges of creative studies which might better be called colleges of undisciplined studies where lectures are eschewed as ‘bourgeois’ and students educate themselves in ‘rap sessions’.”

A tree is known by its fruits. A mixed-up, unhappy and fearful world in chaos, divided against itself, filled with heartaches, frustrations, broken homes, juvenile delinquency, crime, insanity, racial hatreds, riots, violence, wars and death; devoid of honesty, truth and justice; now facing extinction by man-inflicted cosmocide--that is the fruit of modern education.

The first man, Adam, having the opportunity to make a choice between being limited to human reason in knowledge or yielding to the SOVEREIGN’s Commandments and learn true unlimited knowledge, made the decision to use limited human intuition and reasoning.

Yes, today’s educational intellectualism is ready to die. It will be replaced by the right and true educational system of the Wonderful World of Tomorrow.

Science and Technology UpToIndex

Today’s world looks with awe at modern science as the messiah trusted to deliver it from poverty, ignorance, disease, and unhappiness--to solve all its problems.

Science and technology, teamed with commerce and industry, promise the magic, push-button dream world of leisure, luxury, and license.

However, modern science has totally failed to reveal to the world the purpose of human life or explain its true meaning. This scientific body of knowledge remains ignorant of the true values. It does not know the way to peace. This scientific branch of knowledge has failed miserably to deliver the world from poverty, famine, disease, fears, worries, and unhappiness. It does not even know the causes of broken homes, crime, insanity, and immorality; much less how to rid the world of them.

A realistic look at the fruits of modern science leads only to disillusionment. Science and technology confine their attention to the realm of the material and the mechanical. How about the purpose and meaning of human life? The true values? Finding the way to peace, happiness, and joy? We find that these basics to human welfare are not even their concern. These essentials are outside their field and scope of intelligence.

Look again to their fruits. True enough, we do find the accelerating invention and production of intricate mechanical devices, laborsaving mechanisms that inspire admiration, spectacular entertainment, and amusement devices.

The down side is that we also observe that people have not been taught to put added hours, days, and weeks of leisure to beneficial uses. The fruit here is increasing idleness, aversion to work, covetousness, desire for more and more--and dissatisfaction with it when it is acquired. This turns out, in practical application, to be false values which only increase unhappiness.

We also find an increasing segment of adolescents, who, with money to spend and nothing but idleness on their hands, become frustrated staring a hopeless future in the face turning to immorality, drugs, violence, and--too often--suicide.

After all, the principal contribution of modern science and technology has been the production of constantly more terrifying weapons of mass destruction. We find push-button world warfare. Yes, today any one of nine or ten men could push a button and destroy whole continents probably culminating in the total extinction of all mankind.

Modern science stands exposed as a false messiah--the Frankenstein monster threatening to destroy the mankind that created it.

Commerce and Industry UpToIndex

Turning to the realms of commerce and industry, surely, here, we find an exhibition of development that excites our enraptured admiration. Here we find an astonishing condition that would cause people who lived a century ago--could they suddenly come back to life--to gasp in amazed wonderment.

The miniature TVs, radios, and cell-phones that can take pictures, connect to the Internet, and show movies and world events. The ability to take pictures with your shirt pocket telephone and send them around the world almost instantaneously would blow the socks off any one who died only twenty-years ago.

I remember as a lad that my Dad told me of how his Dad and Uncle (who worked for the railroad) arguing whether trains would go 60 mph or not. Granddad argued that the wind at that speed would tear the cars apart. Now we have railroad trains, rocket cars, boats that travel over 200 mph, and at this writing the motorcycle record is 186 miles per hour. Won’t they have a surprise when they are finally awakened from the dead?

In addition we have mammoth oil-tankers, jet and rocket planes, spacecraft hurtling astronauts around the earth in outer space in 90 minutes, and that sent men to the moon and back, unmanned spacecraft that take close-up photographs of the surfaces of Mars and Jupiter, the gadgets and modern electrical devices, the incredible modern computers--just to scratch the surface and name a very few.

Both commerce and industry are a world within a world--fast-moving, pulsating realm of high-geared activity. Surely all these magic productions cannot be bad? No, but most of them are being made to serve bad purposes as well as good ones.

And if we look further, we find these vibrant, high-pressure fields of activity based on competition and greed, appealing too often in marketing their products to vanity and wrong desires, utilizing dishonesty, misrepresentation, deception, unfair dealing. The motivating incentive is to give less while charging more.

“Is honesty the best policy?” A magazine survey some years back put this question to 103 business executives--all high in their fields. An overwhelming majority doubted whether a strictly honest policy would enable a man to rise to the top in the business world. Only two answered “Yes,” and one of these said he knew he was being naïve.

One business executive said, “People who don’t get dirty don’t make it.”
“In thirty years,” said another, “I’ve known of only three men who’ve reached executive positions cleanly, and I admit I’m not one of them.”
“The higher the executive is in the management ladder,” said a third, “the more likely he is to do some dirty work.”

An appraisal of the field of modern business reveals selfish motivation, disregard for public good, underhand practices, dishonesty, dog-eat-dog competition. We emphatically do not find here the true values and the outgoing concern for others that would give happiness to the world.

The Field of Government UpToIndex

The politicians in the field of government are said to be in ‘public service.’ They profess to be ‘public servants.’ They are installed in offices of authority and power. They execute the laws that regulate and govern the people. Theirs is the power to regulate society, guide it, and make it what it is. They are the leaders of the people.

When we turn the searchlight on government in today’s modern world, we meet once again with sad and discouraging disillusionment. Today as in ancient times, too many of those who seek offices of power over the people of cities, states, districts, or nations, promise great benefits, pose as public benefactors while their inner motives are ambitions for personal power and wealth.

The modern world has produced four more-or-less new forms of government. Each promises peace, happiness, and prosperity for its people. They are: 1) French and United States republics. 2) Swedish- and British-type limited monarchy. 3) Atheistic communism. 4) Religious monarchies.

All four are based on a system of industry and on diffusion of education. All four are predicated on the theory that every individual has the right to share in the benefits of science, industry, and the modern life.

But actually too often what we find is selfish, greedy men of excessive vanity, ambitious in their lust for rule, scheming to get their hands on the throttle of power for personal aggrandizement and monetary gain. We find secret deals, graft, immorality, deception, and dishonesty running rampant in high places.

Governments promise peace--but bring wars. They promise benefits for the people and then extract from the people the cost of the benefits plus excessive costs of government. Government promises are empty. The people are the pawns who fork over the money in order to get a part of it back. We fail to find in human government any knowledge of life’s purpose or dissemination of the true values.

The Social Order UpToIndex

What about civilization? Let someone suggest a possible stupendous worldwide calamity that might destroy civilization. People would exclaim, horrified, “What? Destroy civilization?” as if that would mean the destruction and ending of everything worthwhile--everything people have to live for.

People think of civilization as the sum-total of everything good that mankind has struggled from the dawn of history to establish. People think of civilization as the far-advanced, intelligent, well-ordered human society that is good to the point of perfection--the acme of human progress. Perhaps you have accepted this popular assumption.

Think about this, is this world’s civilization really good?

If the facets of human life and organization so far examined have brought disillusionment, surely we would think the social order ought to be good--evidencing great human progress--a proud monument to human advancement. So now we look behind the scenes. Now we turn the searchlight of truth on the social order of civilization.

We look first at the most populous nations where far more than half the world’s population lives--China, the countries of Southeast Asia and Indonesia, India, the Arab countries of the Middle East, and most of Africa as well as much of South America. And what do we see here? illiteracy, ignorance, retrogression, famine, disease, people living in unbelievable poverty, filth, squalor, and stench beyond description. Victims of famine and widespread epidemics of disease--in many places half of all babies die during their first year of life. Wretched beings, ill-housed, ill-fed, and ill-clothed.

Is that part--the biggest part--of this world’s humanity an example of progress, and a culture worth preserving?

Now we will focus the floodlight of truth on the affluent “have” nations. Do we find the social order of the Western world based on understanding of life’s purpose and true meaning, pursuing the true values that produce universal happiness?

Regretfully, quite the contrary. In purely social functions and contacts--especially among the elite of high society--we find an unhappy competition in snobbery and vanity with class distinctions, racial discrimination, religious bigotry, and selfish motives.

Look at amusements and recreations. The prevailing format in motion pictures and television is illicit sex, illicit drugs, violence, and murder. Young twelve to fifteen-year-olds hear the beat, see the wiggle, and give themselves over in a virtually possessed frenzy to rock music. Children start going steady about age twelve or thirteen, and a theologian-labeled new morality becomes “understanding” about premarital sex, adultery, and perversion.

Juveniles stare in the face a hopeless future, descend into delinquency, rebellion against society, and organizing into gangs.

One in five people today is mentally sick. Crime and violence are on the upsurge. Divorce stalks the Western world (one for every two marriages) leaving broken homes and frustrations in its wake. Even those who “mount the ladder of success” --the millionaires and billionaires--relentlessly seek more and more; and are never satisfied with what they acquire when they have it.

This world’s civilization is mentally, morally and spiritually sick. This society supplies no purpose for life, knows nothing of the true values, and has no concept of the right meaning of the word “success.”

This world’s civilization has been making progress in reverse. It has become decadent, putrid, rotten, filthy, and is now bringing about its own destruction.

Nevertheless, the future is not hopeless. This present evil world is to be replaced--in our time--by the happy, joyous, peaceful Wonderful World of Tomorrow. That is an event we should not want to miss!

What Has Religion Contributed? UpToIndex

Well, surely we should expect to find finally in religion the knowledge of life’s purpose, the true values, and the right ways that should make this world a better world--a happy world--a peaceful world.

Here at last we must surely find a stabilizing and uplifting influence for society.

Yet, shocking, though it is--incredible, if we put the searchlight of the truth on the facts and view them realistically with an open mind, we find here the most sickening disillusionment of all.

The churches of the Western world are divided and in confusion. They have not converted, saved, and reformed the whole world as they profess to have been commissioned to do. If that be their mission, they have failed miserably.

Look at the religions of the world--Buddhism, Shintoism, Taoism, Confucianism, Islamism, Hinduism, “Christianity” and the others. In most countries where these religions are embraced, we find illiteracy, poverty, degeneration, misery, suffering, despair, and general unhappiness. None of them has produced a happy world. They have spawned communal wars, hatreds, and violence.

Where, Now? UpToIndex

So we have appraised the major facets of modern civilization--this world’s education, its science and technology, its commerce and industry, its systems of government, its social order, and its religions--the civilization man has developed, swayed by Satan. Moreover, we have found them all wrong--all evil--all decadent. They are ready to die. The 6,000 years of man is ending. But the ETERNAL SOVEREIGN will soon usher in the utopian world of peace and happiness!

In addition, where have these major branches of civilization brought us? Just what is the status of 21st century “progress”? What is the actual state of the world today?

Just This UpToIndex

When we take a hard, cold, realistic view of conditions and trends, they do point inevitably to a fast-approaching world crisis of combined nuclear war, starvation, uncontrollable disease epidemics, crime and violence, and the extinction of human life on this planet.

Man has no solution. The farther he goes, the more destructive are his efforts. Yet--absolute utopia is soon to grip this earth in our time, and we shall see world peace. We shall see sickness banished; vigorous health restored; ignorance replaced with universal right education; poverty replaced with universal prosperity; weeping and wailing turned into happiness and joy!

Incredible? Why should it be? Why? Yes, why should we have a world where more than half of the world’s people is living in abject ignorance and poverty, wracked with disease and pain, living in filth, squalor, and wretchedness? Why, even in our prosperous Western nations should our lands be filled with sickness and pain; plagued by crime, violence, riots; broken and unhappy homes, juvenile delinquents of delinquent parents, frustrations with no hope for the future?

Why? Does it make sense? Do we not realize that there is a cause for every effect? Why are people blind to the cause of all this degeneration?

The Two Alternatives UpToIndex

Let’s face it. At the present, there are two alternatives. Either there does exist a living ETERNAL CREATOR SOVEREIGN of Supreme mind and total power who very soon will step in and intervene in the affairs of this world and save humanity from itself, or else the threatened extinction pictured above must inevitably soon occur.

There is no other alternative. One may blind his eyes to existing facts, and trends, and say, “Now, come on! I cannot see that this world is any worse than it ever was--nothing is going to happen. If we just ignore the conditions and don’t worry, perhaps they’ll just go away.” Nevertheless, these conditions and trends will not just go away--not unless they are caused to go away.

The Scriptures, the inspired revelation of the Supreme SOVEREIGN of mankind, have foretold today’s world conditions and trends--and give us the advance news of coming peace on earth--of universal prosperity--of happiness and joy--of veritable utopia! This is the Good News of the Wonderful World of Tomorrow. Believe it or not, it is absolutely sure. It is sure, because it does not depend on men, or anything men might do. ETERNAL is going to do it in spite of rebellious man. Man will fail. Man always has failed. ETERNAL never fails!

Read the Chapter 3 - The Cause of All World Troubles