This is the way the world ends
Written by Luis Feliu for the Tweed Shire Echo
Thursday, 05 May 2011
For years we’ve been getting used to the idea that the world will end in 2012, as predicted by the Mayan calendar.
However, Christian fundamentalists, in an effort to increase their share of the loony market, have now gone one better than the priests of Quetzalcóatl.
Billboards are springing up all over the USA announcing that Judgment Day will be May 21, 2011, followed by the End of the World on October 21.
That doesn’t give us a lot of time to prepare, but if you diligently search the internet you will discover not only the irrefutable calculations based on Old Testament generations that have led fearless researchers to this date, but also the heartening news that “by God’s grace and tremendous mercy, He is giving us advanced warning as to what He is about to do. On Judgment Day, May 21, 2011, a five-month period of horrible torment will begin for all the inhabitants of the earth…”
The saved will be bodily resurrected while the damned have their body parts scattered all over the place. The websites do not say if God has anything special prepared for the official End of the World on October 21 – sausage sizzles and fireworks perhaps.
Yes, it is easy to sneer. Probably not one person in our community believes that Jesus Christ plans to return on May 21. But the American loonies merely inhabit the extreme end of a generally irrational set of views. They serve a useful purpose if they remind us that all religious assertions, particularly apocalyptic ones, should be challenged in the light of what we know rather than what some of us might like to believe.
God is made in our image of course, and for the spiteful bigots who are spreading this Judgment Day nonsense, God is spiteful and bigoted. But although a doomsday calendar compiled according to Bronze Age history is laughable, in America there are many weak-minded people who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, in the daily interaction of men and angels, and in the imminent apocalypse. And there is such a thing as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Let us hope that when Judgment Day comes around in a couple of weeks there aren’t any Christian halfwits in command of a nuclear silo.
