This week’s news is dominated by the war debate in Washington, where the president and his generals urge the Congress to pour more lives and money into the Pit of No Progress.
Elsewhere in the news, Russia’s Vladimir Putin fired his prime minister and legislature, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced his resignation after months of scandal and suicide in his cabinet and Pakistan has begun to look as unstable as Afghanistan.
The weather page reports hurricanes in Texas, earthquakes in Indonesia (and worries about tsunamis); glaciers in Greenland and the Andes are melting even faster than expected, as is the arctic icecap. The health news says there’s an outbreak of Ebola in Africa, adding to the misery AIDS already inflicts on that continent.
Turn to the business page and learn that the housing meltdown shows signs of worsening, the economy is shedding jobs for the first time in four years and the dollar plunged to an all-time low versus the euro. On top of all that, this morning I opened the paper to see Led Zeppelin is having a reunion concert.
All this can mean only one thing: apocalypse. Right?
If you think so, you’ve got company. There’s a whole industry in America right now based on the notion that we are approaching the “end times.” End times is a notion shared by fundamentalists of several religions. The common theme is that humans will eventually mess things up enough that God will have to come back, like a parent descending on the rumpus room to restore order.
Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe there will be struggles between good and evil, resurrection of the dead, judgement by God and the arrival of a someone important (the Messiah, Jesus, the Madhi – aka the 12th Imam – and Jesus together).
Legions of Christians are subscribing to the kooky “rapture” theory, which is both bad theology and an argument against leaving Bibles lying around where irresponsible people can get ahold of them.
There’s a powerful attraction for the immature mind in the notion of end times. It’s self-pity raised to a narcissistic apotheosis. Instead of, “I’ll be dead and they’ll all be sorry,” it’s “God’s going to show up, take my side in the argument and tell my enemies to go to hell. Literally.”
A quick look at history shows that times have been this bad or worse on many occasions and the end of the world was expected but didn’t come. The devastation of World War II and the worldwide depression that preceded it; the 1915-1920 period with World War I, the fall of four imperial houses, the Spanish influenza epidemic and the Russian Revolution; the Bubonic plague, when one third of Europe’s population died in the space of four years.
In the end, the end times never come – or at least they haven’t yet. Instead of God coming to take our side, we wake up to another day in the world we’ve made – and that’s the point. God didn’t make the world we live in today, we did and it’s up to us to come to our own rescue. If there’s going to be struggle against good and evil, we need to decide which side we’re on (not depending on our “leaders” to decide for us) and get busy struggling.
© Mark Floegel, 2007
One Comment
Hey man, you forgot the recently found Chupacabras (Goat Sucker) in Texas, even NPR covered it. Another sure sign of the apocalypse. In times of crisis it is common for our society of faith to have visions of monsters, plagues and aparitions. Alas, reason tells us that monsters don’t exist if anything they are incarnated in the stupid white men that are destroying the planet and mining our quality of life. In the end its all about the eternal fight between reason and faith, but in my opinion faith will win, accepting dogma is so much easier than seeking knowledge. We’re fucked basically.