Denialism

TEOTWAWKI!

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by

MarkH
in

The end of the world is a common religious idea. The end of this planet and the end of time itself are ideas not unknown to cosmologists, but are not exactly an immediate threat.

To certain religious groups, the threat is now, and is welcome. “Signs” are everywhere. Of course, we’ve been down this road before, in the 9th century, a few times in the 19th century, and of course in 2000.

Turn on the TV any Sunday—there are plenty of preachers reading and reading and reading, and of course finding signs of the imminent apocalypse. Hey, there’s that whole “Left Behind” series of books reveling in the end of the world.

Aside from the fact that no one has yet correctly predicted The End, there are a few problems here. First, if God wanted you to know when the end was coming, wouldn’t he have just written a date clearly in the Bible, like, “HEY, MORTAL FOOLS, REPENT! THE END IS NIGH! 8 PM, FEBRUARY 22ND, 2010. I MEAN IT!”

Or perhaps he doesn’t want us to know, and to look for it would be a sin against him?

Or maybe, just maybe, all of this “End times” stuff is just human interpretations of human works and human fears. After all, since God hasn’t bothered to inscribe it on the clear blue sky, or appear on ABC during “Desperate Housewives”, all predictions of the End must necessarily be those of people, not a supernatural being who would know such things.

So, here we are, on our usually pleasant little globe, worrying about when it will end. That’s just lovely. But perhaps—just maybe—we should worry about what happens if it doesn’t end. Cyclone Nargis in Burma/Myanmar, Hurricane Katrina in the U.S., famines, floods, fires—all of these so-called natural disasters, while not entirely preventable, are things we can plan for. This type of large-scale planning (such as the Dutch flood prevention systems) requires casting ourselves far into the future, and actually sacrificing present comfort for future survival. Of course, if the end is near, who cares? Wait for God to take us bodily into his arms, and to Hell (literally) with everyone else.

I, for one, can’t live with that. Just because some sweaty preacher in a studio says the world is ending doesn’t make it so. I have kids, and I care what happens to them, so it really pisses me off when others say, “just come to Christ, and all will be well.” It won’t. If you put your head in the sand hoping for immediate Rapture, you are admitting that you don’t care a whit for your fellow human beings. How Christian is that?

Comments

19 responses to “TEOTWAWKI!”

  1. NJ

    Well, I feel fine…

    Reply
  2. TomJoe

    It’s not Christian. If one believes what Jesus has to say in the New Testament (Gospel of Matthew), we can’t possibly know when “The End” will come (Matt 24). We’re to behave as if it could come tomorrow, but not in the sense that we should lounge around and throw a party waiting for Jesus to come down on a cloud or a sunbeam staircase. The very next “chapter” (Matthew 25) is the famous “… what you do to the least of these …” sermon and goes specifically into “Don’t slack, because I know you can praise me, but are you really doing what I asked, when I told you to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, and tend to the sick?”

    Reply
  3. azqaz

    It seems inimitably christian. No need to think or care, just grab a bible and pluck out the passages you like and pay them lip service. Ignore the rest since they would be inconvenient.

    Reply
  4. Todd

    I was raised a dispensationalist and so this is all old hat to me, but you have to understand the significance of John Nelson Darby to truly appreciate end times preachers like LeHaye and Hagee. Before Darby, people read the Bible much like any other religious book, but he changed the way fundamentalist Christians read the Bible. To Darby, the Bible is not a linear text describing God’s relationship to man but a cipher to the seven dispensations of God. By reading the text with an understanding that specific passages apply to specific dispensations, you can derive new meaning from the scriptures. Most importantly, you can use the text to build elaborate prophecies based on current events. That’s what differentiates today’s end time preachers from those of the past. A dispensationalist preacher, like Hagee, can read from the Book of Daniel and not read a story about the Babylonian exile of the Jews, but read a news report about events happening today.

    Reply
  5. J-Dog

    This is the Internet Age, not the Iron Age dammit! God shouldn’t need to do a broad-based marketing campaign to reach everyone.

    If “He” were any kind of god at all, (s)he would target-market just Hagge and his buddies, so only they could get to experience the End Of The World. I’d be happy to help…

    Reply
  6. Philip H.

    “It seems inimitably christian. No need to think or care, just grab a bible and pluck out the passages you like and pay them lip service. Ignore the rest since they would be inconvenient.

    Posted by: azqaz”

    Sadly, what you illustrate is not a real Christian perspective, at least not to many of us who choose that label for ourselves. A real Christian knows that Christ’s message can’t be parsed or split up just support a point – you have to read and follow the whole thing. And a real Christian knows that Jesus, who was born a Jew incidently, came to save the Jews from both themselves and the Romans. Time and time again, Jesus told those to whom he was preaching that “the past is dead and gone – everything is new again” as he systematically disassembled the Old Testament. So when you hear a fndamentalist preacher calling on Old Testament scripture to condemn a particular group, action or event, that preacher is violating the teachings of the person the preacher claims to follow. Hard to call yourself a Christian, in otherwords, if you aren’t following Christ’s teachings.

    Reply
  7. Crudely Wrott

    Doomsaying is Christianity’s ultimate expression. After all, to benefit fully from the faith, you have to die. It is therefore no stretch to claim that for the whole world to enjoy the blessings of our lord it must also die, fully and finally. Only when our immortal souls, without physical encumbrance, are firmly in the grasp of our father will he feel safe enough to reveal his true intents.

    Kinda reads like a sitcom, or a drama, or a cops and robbers story, dunnit? Or, generally, like fiction.

    Reply
  8. PalMD

    Hey, I’m not here to condemn Christians or Christianity. I’ve written many times that people should be judged on what the do, not labels.

    But, Phil, a “no true scotsman” argument doesn’t work here. There is no clear guide on how to be “Christian”, or else all Christians would agree on everything.

    Christianity, like all religions, is interpreted by people. God isn’t coming to give sermons on Sunday, therefore it’s all about us. And some of us suck.

    Reply
  9. Dianne

    First, if God wanted you to know when the end was coming, wouldn’t he have just written a date clearly in the Bible, like, “HEY, MORTAL FOOLS, REPENT! THE END IS NIGH! 8 PM, FEBRUARY 22ND, 2010. I MEAN IT!”

    Gregorian calendar?

    It is my theory that the rapture has already happened and all believers of true faith, who lived without sin, cared for the earth and all people, and broke no laws of their faith have already been taken to heaven. But while both of them were sorely missed by their families, their absence didn’t make a substantial dent in the overall population of the world.

    Reply
  10. Crudely Wrott

    Dianne, I think I love you!

    (Full disclosure: I have a daughter with your name. I mean her name is similar to yours, just on less N. Well, that is, is sure do love her.)

    Reply
  11. Blind Watchmaker

    I’d like a disclosure as to how much of the money that these arena preachers collected last week is going into a “Cyclone Relief Fund”.

    Reply
  12. Crudely Wrott

    And a disclosure of how much is spent on hair, makeup, clothes and flowers. And legal advice.

    Reply
  13. Racter

    I’m not usually real big on bumper stickers, but I did get a chuckle out of the one that said:

    “When the rapture comes, can I have your car?”

    Reply
  14. Dunc

    It is my theory that the rapture has already happened and all believers of true faith, who lived without sin, cared for the earth and all people, and broke no laws of their faith have already been taken to heaven.

    Well, a heck of a lot of South and Central American leftists disappeared during the ’70s and ’80s…

    Of course, we’ve been down this road before, in the 9th century, a few times in the 19th century, and of course in 2000.

    And in the 1st century BCE, the 1st century CE, the 2nd century CE, the 3rd century CE, the 4th century CE… You can probably see where I’m going with this.

    As Neil Gaiman wrote in “Signal to Noise”: “We are always living in the final days. What have you got? A hundred years or much, much less until the end of your world.”

    Reply
  15. Dunc

    First para should have been blockquoted. When will I learn that preview is my friend?

    Reply
  16. Josh in California

    Thank you for saying that, Paul. It’s really frustrating knowing that someone doesn’t give a shit because of their selfish religious beliefs.

    And for all of you True Christians…

    Guess what? It doesn’t matter that you don’t do the same things those not-so-true Christians do. They have waaay more influence than you do in American society.

    They’re the ones going to court for the right to impose their beliefs on everyone. They’re the ones making the most noise when politicians displease them. And they’re the ones who our would-be presidents are going to pander to.

    If you want the rest of us to respect you and not lump you in with them, then you’re going to have to take a stand with the people who want to solve problems instead of ignoring them, even though some of us are Evil Communist Atheist Liberals.

    Reply
  17. TomJoe

    If you want the rest of us to respect you and not lump you in with them, then you’re going to have to take a stand with the people who want to solve problems instead of ignoring them, even though some of us are Evil Communist Atheist Liberals.

    And of course Josh, you know who is taking a stand and who isn’t, right? Sorry, but wielding a broad brush is hardly (if ever) productive. But you rationalize holding onto your reasons for lumping people together, ok? The rest of us will be mature about it though.

    Reply
  18. daedalus2u

    Anyone who thinks the end of the world is going to happen soon, isn’t following one of the Abrahamic Religions, i.e. Christianity, Judaism, or Islam but instead is following some weird doomsday cult.

    The founding Covenant of the Abrahamic Religions was the Covenant that God had with Abraham. In return for doing what God said to do and having a willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac, God Promised to Abraham that Abraham would have more descendents than there are stars in the sky (more than 10^22) plus grains of sand on the sea shore (also around 10^22).

    So far only something like 10^11 humans have ever lived (not all of them descendents of Abraham).

    If we assume that the carrying capacity of the Earth is 100,000,000,000 people per generation (that is about 50 times the present population of the Earth, ~6 billion times an average life span of 3 generation, or about 300 billion people.) If we further assume that the entire population are all descendents of Abraham. How many generations will it take for 10^22 people to have lived?

    10^22 people/10^11 people per generation = 10^11 generations. If a generation is 30 years, that is 3×10^11 years, or about 3,000 billion years. The Earth and Sun are estimated to be about 5 billion years old, and the Sun is expected to have a lifetime on the main sequence of about 10 billion years. So God will have to replace the Sun about 300 times in order to provide Abraham with as many descendents as He Promised.

    Presumably creating the Sun, or replacing it 300 times is not a difficulty for God, and presumably, He knew what He was Promising to Abraham. I suppose that God could increase the carrying capacity of the Earth, and so accelerate the timing of His Plan. Increasing the carrying capacity to a few trillion is not difficult. Increasing it enough to bring the Apocalypse closer than a thousand years would be challenging even for God.

    The area of the Earth is only 5×10^14 m2. If everyone has 10 m2 of living area, that is a maximum population of 5×10^13, or about 1.6×10^12 per generation. It would still take 20 billion years. If you cover the entire Earth with high rises 1000 stories tall, it still takes 20 million years. To get it down to 10,000 years, you would need high rises 2 million stories tall. That puts the upper floors well out of the atmosphere (well over 3000 miles up).

    While I would not presume to put limits on God’s ability to perform miracles, I think the only way a population of 10^18 or so people could be sustained on Earth would be through the continuous use of miracles. Supplying sufficient food, air, and disposing of the waste products they produce would make the miracle of the fishes and loaves look trivial by comparison. As an inventor of mythic proportion, sustaining a population of 10^18 on the Earth would be well beyond any conceivable technology I can imagine. A big difficulty is getting rid of the metabolic heat. The human body produces about 100 watts of heat. 5×10^5 people per square meter of the Earths surface would produce ~50 MW of heat per m2 which has to be dissipated. A black body will only radiate this much heat if it is at a high temperature, about 14,600 degrees K. This is more than twice the temperature of the surface of the Sun.

    Of course we all need to appreciate that God’s Promise to Abraham was still fundamentally a finite Promise, that Abraham would have a finite number of descendants. The later Promise of an infinitely long afterlife (even for the two individuals that have already been Raptured-up) is infinitely more difficult.

    Reply
  19. Adam Cuerden

    Well, let’s look at it.

    We’ve had disasters in recent times: The East Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina are not things that I want to diminish. But, despite the claims of preachers, they aren’t unique.

    The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake. Krakatoa (1883) , The Year Without a Summer (Mount Tambora in Indonesia has a volcanic explosion in 1815; 1816, the volcanic equivalent of nuclear winter causes Europe and America to have massive crop failure and livestock to die off. The Hatepe eruption in 180 A.D. that basically destroyed everything on the north island of New Zealand. The Minoan eruption (circa 2,000 B.C.) that destroyed an entire culture. About a dozen horrifically destructive floods in the Netherlands between about 1000-1800 that make New Orleans look mild. The black plague.

    Reply

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