OK, kids, here’s the hard truth: the world WILL come to an end. Be it by asteroid impact, a nearby gamma ray burst, the expansion of the sun, proton decay or dark energy, someday all life on Earth will be extinguished. Humanity will very likely disappear from the Earth long before life in general does. No person is immortal. No species is immortal. We are, indeed, every last one of us unto the last of our descendents, DOOMED.
However…
While I know that I will one day die, it’s not exactly something I seek out. Hell, somewhere on my list of “reasons to avoid death” is that I will leave behind some cats that might be left in a bad way if I’m unable to care for them.
But then there’s THIS asshole:
“I was hoping for it because I think heaven would be a lot better than this earth”
OK, so your life sucks. Boo-friggin’-hoo. But for your dream of Rapture to come to pass, billions of others would have to have died horribly in pain and terror, then to spend the rest of eternity in unceasing torment.
Hmmm. How do I say “noʎ ʞɔnɟ” in a family-blog-friendly way?
There is a difference between someone who believes that The End Is Nigh, and someone who wants it to happen just as soon as possible. The former can be a kinda sad person. But the latter type gives me a major uncomfortableness. I have a hard time *not* seeing such a person as a psychopath only after his/her own gratification… screw everybody else, I wanna get me some of that Paradise I’ve heard so much about.
The end of the world means not just the death of all humans, but the end of our civilizations and our dreams. Even if some large number do get beamed up to Heaven, the Heaven that’s typically described along with the “Rapture” is a place where humans have no worth and no real future. Brightly lit and gold plated though it may be, it is a dark future where the few humans not screaming eternally in pain and terror are reduced to smiling robots, little more than knicknacks on a shelf. Bah.
Religions around the world accepted that the world would end. The Hindu religion has the world constantly being destroyed and reborn, as the universe is just the dream of a god. In the Norse faith, Ragnarok would come and destroy the universe. In the remaining texts (written a few centuries after Christianity officially supplanted the worship of Odin and Thor in the Norse world) after the universe is destroyed, a few of the gods and a pair of humans somehow survive, and start over in a new golden age. To me that always read like it was tacked on as an afterthought, an attempt to prettify and Christianize the belief system, by either turning Ragnarok into not the end, but actually the beginning, with the two humans as stand-ins for Adam and Eve (thus turning the pagan faith into a “preview” of Christianity), or by giving Ragnarok the same sort of shiny happy end that the Book of Revelation seems to have for some people. That ending just doesn’t fit in with the rest of the lore, however.
The chief of the Norse gods, Odin, knows full well that the end is going to come. But unlike the Rapturists, he is not thrilled by the prospect. Everything he does, he does to delay the end for as long as possible. It’s inevitably futile; the stupid, strong unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last, entropy will have its way, things fall apart. The gods, as well as men and the world of men, are doomed.
But doomed though we are, we can make good use of our time. We can grow ourselves and our culture; learn all that is learnable, take ourselves, our progeny and life itself out into the universe and green the stars. A few billions years of work could see the universe brought to life by our efforts. With time and effort, humanity can make itself all that it is possible for it to become.
But not if we all die. And certainly not if we actually seek death.
So… yeah. All those of you who actually *want* the world to come to an end just as soon as possible? Y’all can bite me.
14 Responses to “My problem with end-timers in a nutshell”
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Christians do not seek the end of the world, nor do we anticipate the death of the human race. We rather hope for the renewal of the world, a return to its primordial state, a state centered upon its Creator, and one which incidentally will be without entropy, human suffering or death. This is Paradise.
Those who of their free will choose not to participate in this renewal will be allowed to exist eternally in a universe centered entirely upon themselves — a state which surely deserves no other name but Hell.
This whole Rapture business is pure, made-up American nonsense. Neither the Catholic Church, nor the Orthodox, nor the Protestant have ever taught any such thing. Such teachings lie entirely outside of orthodox Christian theology. The true Second Coming will be no secret. The ultimate end of the world will be unmistakable.The thin tissue we call reality will dissolve away and we will each stand without concealment and as we truly are in the presence of our Creator. By our deeds and words we will reveal our own ultimate fates. Those who chose to love God and their neighbor will exist in perfect happiness with our loved ones and Him for all eternity. Those who made of themselves a god will spend eternity worshiping at that lonely altar of their own device.
I don’t expect you to believe any of this, of course. There is and can be no “proof” in the Baconian sense, because the scientific method deals only with the observable. God and the human consciousness lie beyond what may be observed, and therefore cannot exist to those who believe in the creed “if I can’t poke it with a stick, it ain’t real”. Such thinking is philosophically and logically unsound, of course, but I’d have to drag out Plato, Aristotle, Anselm and Aquinas in order to explain why, and I don’t feel like it tonight.
As for me, I believe it because Jesus said it, and He can’t lie because He’s God, which He proved by returning bodily from the grave in front of hundreds of witnesses.
But I’m not here to sell, but to explain, So I’ll leave it at this: God, if He exists, must by definition be perfect. Any perfect God will by necessity be perfectly just. And a perfectly just God will certainly give each of us — believers and unbelievers — the eternal fate we truly deserve.
End of sermon. Thanks for listening.
Not wanting to get into a fruitless religious debate, I’ll simply point out that your premise is flawed at it’s foundation. Specifically: “God, if He exists, must by definition be perfect.”
Ummm… no. God could be any damned thing. Assume, for example that God was more along the lines of Loki or Satan. Assume, for the sake of arguement, that the creator of the universe was, by human standards, an evil, manipulative, chaotic jackass. In that case, there are of course a few possibilities:
1: God decides to screw with mankind by getting people to believe in a fraudulent “perfect” God. God does this because, to him, it’s entertaining
2: God doesn;t even notice we’re here. God’s busy blowing up galaxies 12.3 billion lightyears away. Humans simply invent the “perfect” God.
In short, there’s no logical reason to assume that a universal creator “must, by definition,” be *anything.* Hell, for all we know… *humans* five hundred thousand years from now might have invented a time machine, go back to time zero, and cause the universe to be created. In that case, “God,” rather than being “perfect,” could well be the deep-time descendant of some drunken frat boy with a trust fund, the keys to daddys Posche Timemobile, and a desire to impress his new cheerleader girlfriend.
There is, in point of fact, no way to prove objectively that any one concept of “God” must be more likely than any other.
Plus:
> Christians do not seek the end of the world,
Not *all* Christians seek the end of the world. As recent events show, *some* Christians do.
> I’d have to drag out Plato, Aristotle, Anselm and Aquinas in order to explain why
Aquinas was particularly bad in the whole logic department. As I’ve just demonstrated, a universal creator need not necessarily be any particular religions conception of “God.” Consequently, Aquinas’ “Arguement of the Unmoved Mover” and “Arguement of the First Cause” are shown to be horribly flawed to the point of being patently ridiculous. One could just as well claim that the First cause was Cthulhu. This is, of course, blasphemy, as we all know that the First Cause was actually Azathoth.
Simply calling the hypothetical First Cause “God” tells you nothing of the First Cause’s motivations, personality or ethics… if it even has any.
Remember how Nero blamed the great fire of Rome on the Christians, and everyone since said that was a lie?
Given things like Jonestown, I could easily picture the Roman Christians setting fire to the city to speed up the return of Jesus.
> one which incidentally will be without entropy, human suffering or death. This is Paradise.
Actaully, that’s Stagnation. An eternity of Nothing Happening.
Boooooooooooorrrrrrrrrring.
He’s been taken up!:
http://www.thirdage.com/news/harold-camping-failed-doomsday-prophet-currently-missing_05-21-2011
Not really surprising. He snookered a *lot* of idiots out of a whole lot of money. Probably destroyed a lot of lives. And this time, he did so *extremely* publicly. Some percentage of them will be out to get him, either via lawsuit or by beating him to death with their bare hands. And they’ll have that “enraged retard-strength” on their side, he wouldn’t stand a chance. So, he’s either gone off somewhere to off himself (see: “Heavens Gate”) or he’s gone off somewhere to roll around in money and cackle maniacally.
He had a stroke: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2002816/Harold-Camping-Doomsday-preacher-suffers-stroke-leaves-struggling-speak.html
Now God has caused his tongue to cleave to the roof of his mouth, like he’d been eating peanut butter or some other accursed food.
>“I was hoping for it because I think heaven would be a lot better than this earth”
And who says *you’re* going to get to go???…………..
“So me and mine gotta lay down and die… so you can live in your better world?” – Mal Reynolds
“Now I lay me down to sleep, I hope the Lord my soul to keep.
But if I should die before I wake, I hope the Lord my soul to take.”
Nifty and upbeat little prayer I said every night as a child.
Mom was quite amused when I changed it to:
“Now I lay me down to sleep, I hope the Lord my soul to keep.
But if I should die before I wake, I hope the Lord will bake me a cake.”
There certainly has been a great deal of resources expended in worry about this prediction. Why?
I’m not sure there’s be a lot of “worry” about it. You basically have two types:
1: The ones who believed it
2: The ones who didn’t.
Group 2 of course includes the bulk of the media, which has probably devoted far more time, money and effort on advertising this than the nuts themselves did. They didn’t worry so much as point and laugh. And in this case… as well they should.
Group 1, the believers, seemed not so much to worry as to *glory* in it. These are the psychos who think it’d be neato keen if 95% of the human race burns eternally, just so long as *they* get to go be spiritual Stepford Wives.
I’m sure there was probably a sizable Group 3 made up of “outsiders” who were convinced, or at least partially so, by Group 1, and spent the last several weeks or months nervously awaiting horrible, horrible events. But I don’t think Group 3 spent much money on this. There was, though, at least one mother who was a part of Group 3 and who tried to murder her children and kill herself a few days or weeks back over fear of The End.
My grandmother used to talk about these people who said that the world was going to end from
the time she was younger so I just took it myself that he was just another one of those people.
I’m still plugging away on reading the Koran; about halfway through now, and it’s got the whole “end of the world any day now” routine going also.
That pastor down in Florida wanted to burn the Koran for being evil…it’s not evil…it is incredibly repetitive and boring…although the different take on Bible stories is actually interesting to read.
Did you know that Jesus was able to speak eloquently right from the moment of his birth? 😀