So You Think You Want to Have a Doomsday?

In the 1960s, John Lennon asked in rather savvy lyrics whether people really wanted a revolution, had they considered all the possible destructive effects of such an extreme resort to solving the world's problems? In the sixties, people were looking for positive social change, political reform, ecological restoration, broader economic enfranchisement, and spiritual liberation. Today, we have far too many people trapped by, sometimes even addicted to FEAR. Such people often have in either the back or forefront of their minds the End of the World, and what that means exactly is different from person to person. The psychological truth of this widespread contemporary obsession is that it is an unnatural wish that keeps them one notch above despair. Well, if it is a fantasy that people cling to like a potential future reality, why have they lost faith in humanity to save this world? Or, do they not want humanity to save this world? Do they dislike this world even on its best days? It is a rough place much of the time, and for most, unfortunately, very rough. But it is also full of beauty, love and moral achievement. There are a myriad ways ancient prophecies can be read, and the end of the world has been predicted countless times for literally millenia. In a certain sense, many worlds have been lost over time on this planet, if not the whole world. The Roman world collapsed in the 5th century CE through a deluge of illiterate war-mad barbarian invaders. The rich cosmopolitan world of Yiddish Civilization came to an end with the Nazi Holocaust. The noble Plains Indian pan-cultural society came to an end with the purposeful slaughter of literally millions of buffalo by European American riflemen seeking hide bounties. What became of the glorious Sumerian civilization of Mesopotamia, whose mere fraction of surviving legacies formed the seed of every subsequent civilization stretching from the Near East to the rocky shores of Ireland? What of the Inca and the Maya? The list could go on and on. What we know of these collapses is that they involved terrible suffering and irrevocable loss. And then the world moved on, hopefully wiser, though with a certain beauty forever lost. America has seen worlds within it come to an end. The United States saw its world-renowned working class economy, and the whole flourishing society and culture built upon it, destroyed in the 1980s and 1990s through deregulation of global trade and manufacturing arrangements. Right now we are seeing the dying off of the natural world, the biosphere, which if not checked and reversed will mean the end of us too, because we need the whole chain of living things to flourish to keep food on the table and the planet from turning into a wasteland. And then there is climate change, which could, if allowed to progress, turn us into a planet of ashes. But the doomsday-wishers tend not to look at the lengthy and painful process of world-ending in its scientific implications. Rather, they seek escape: God riding down from the clouds on a white horse, the evil punished, the innocent rewarded, a clean sweep of all they regard as filth and corruption. Yet if history is anything to go on, the Day of Doom should already have happened many times over. This age is no more or less sinful than previous ages, and there are some particularly terrible eras where Divine Wrath (in its ultimate sense) should have descended and restored Eden to the world. The biggest problem with the doomsday-wishers is that, aside from trying to get other people to believe as they do, they are otherwise mostly just waiting for it all to happen. Yet, do they realize that while they passively wait, the "devil's workshop" has been busily at work to try to seal the fate of the innocent? There are plenty of cable channels and websites and books trumpeting the Day of Doom in a thousand forms, stoking the passion for escapist, morbid, vengeful passivity. When worlds end, there are typically many more of the good people who suffer and disappear than the bad. The Book of Revelations allows for far too few to survive its own version of apocalyptic cleansing. I know of enough good and decent people in my own hometown (which is far from unique) that, if I apply a logical extrapolation across all the little and large towns upon the world, there must be literally millions of times more people spiritually worthy of salvation from global destruction than that bitter book of the Christian Testament allows for. So do you really want to sit by and let the parasites have the run of things? Will the angelic cavalry arrive in time? Have you considered that maybe we have a spiritual responsibility to try to prevent the end of the world?