Apocalypse is big right now. According to a recent Newsweek survey, 17 percent of Americans expect the world to end in their lifetimes. Religious end-times novels are huge best-sellers. We have a president in office who takes the bible literally and believes himself to be an agent of God's word here on earth. He's made it his job to battle "evil-doers" around the world who adhere to fundamentalist belief systems of their own.

There something incredibly arrogant about thinking "the world will end" in your lifetime. Certainly, the world will be here even if humans eliminate themselves from it. In fact, many plants and insects would likely thrive in the high-carbon, high-radiation atmosphere that we would leave behind if we were to make the planet uninhabitable for ourselves. It's easy to imagine, 250 million years from now, some hardy species of hive insect --ants, termites, or bees -- evolving into the highly intelligent, cooperative, telepathic, hard-working, egoless beings that we silly, selfish, violent little monkey mammals never became.

Hive insects seem in many ways to be a lot closer to an enlightened consciousness than we humans ever will be. Perhaps humanity's ultimate role here on this garden planet is simply to release a bunch of carbon and radiation into the atmosphere by burning oil and exploding nuclear devices. Maybe we're here to turn the Earth into a gigantic, mutating greenhouse so that God can see what the insects are capable of becoming. The reptiles had their shot -- they produced big, stupid, hungry dinosaurs. The mammals had their shot -- the best they could do was human beings and dolphins -- pretty good, actually. It'd be interesting to see what bees, ants and termites would evolve into given a few hundred million years and a nice environment for rapid mutation.

But there I go with the Apocalyptic thinking! It's so easy (and fun) to get into that groove. Human beings frequently have great difficulty accepting the idea that the world can possibly go on without them. In fact, this denial is a normal phase of the dying process. Apocalyptic thinkers appear to be stuck in that phase. It's an extremely dangerous mindset, because there's absolutely no reason to fix, save, or preserve a world that's not going to be around once you're done using it.

Unfortunately, world affairs are increasingly held hostage by fundamentalist religious leaders who believe themselves to be playing important character roles in an ongoing end-times narrative. There is a place in this world for these people -- the church, the ivory tower, the blog. But we should not allow them to run our governments because it is simply impossible for people who are working towards the day when God will come and eliminate the unbelievers to really care about the mundane, day-to-day affairs of regular people. But most of all, it is extremely dangerous to allow these funamentalists to have their fingers anywhere near the button that can enable their prophecies to be fulfilled.


10:47 AM | Link |