Scintillae

scin-til-la: Latin, particle of fire, a spark.

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Location: Winona, Minnesota, United States

Monday, August 21, 2006

It's the End of the World (Again)

The Israeli-Hezbollah conflict recently raging in Lebanon had Evangelicals salivating. It seems that many were convinced that the fighting in the Holy Land was a sure sign that the end is near, and that the rapture is coming. Unfortunately for them, the recent conflagration was merely the latest manifestation of ham-handed US foreign policy and the Bush Administration’s lack of engagement in the peace process. And we should remember that there have been many previous candidates for the prelude to Armageddon.

When Rome was sacked in 476, essentially ending the Western Empire, there was little doubt that Our Lord and Savior was soon to return. In 1099, when the 1st Crusade finally took Jerusalem, the Christians saw themselves as ushering in the Kingdom of Heaven (Orlando Bloom movies notwithstanding). When Saladin reclaimed the city, it was a sure signal that the end times had come. Of course, the real end of the world was heralded by the fall of thousand-year-old Constantinople in 1453, which snuffed out the Byzantine Empire.

But clearly, those who saw the end of days in the above events were wrong, as were those who jumped out of windows on Wall Street when the market collapsed in 1929. Indeed, how could anybody doubt that the violent death of our world took place between 1939 and 1945? From the perspective of those in concentration camps, the horror of Hitler’s “final solution” could not have been anything else, as evidenced by composer Olivier Messaien’s most famous work, Quartet for the End of Time. But, in spite of the cruelty and the inhumanity, the world stubbornly persisted.

Obviously, we were awaiting a war in the Middle East specifically. 1967 was a good candidate, but perhaps Israel, which occupied significant territory previously in Arab hands, did a bit too well, staving off the required utter disaster. The Iranian Revolution and the energy crisis of the 1970s made it unquestionable that we should prepare to meet our maker. The 1991 Gulf War once again raised the hope of those who would be raptured away, leaving the rest of us poor saps to endure the horrible reign of the Antichrist. This was, we can be sure, merely a prelude to the 2003 Iraq War, which in more than three years has not led to the Rapture, the rise of the Antichrist, or any angels opening the Seven Seals (at least I have not heard the trumpets from here).

So, clearly, the fighting in Lebanon MUST be the first stages of the apocalyptic battle. Fasten your Rapture seatbelts, boys and girls. Any time now… But who plays the role of the Antichrist? It must be the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Yes, surely it is he. There cannot have been any previous candidates fitting the description. Well, that is unless you consider Saladin, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Hitler, Nasser, Ayatollah Khomeni, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and a few others that have auditioned for the part. It would seem that Antichrist is a difficult job to land.

The truly maddening thing is that this fascination with eschatology leads to an abdication of responsibility. If the world is not going to be here in twenty or thirty years, what does it profit us to clean up the environment or avert further global warming? Why attempt to feed the hungry of the world and cure HIV/AIDS? Why, in short, do anything except preserve one’s own piety? It seems to me, however, that self-righteous jumping up and down and shouting about how much one loves Jesus while ignoring those who are hungry, sick or naked isn’t precisely what Christ himself had in mind. Such complete disregard for one’s fellow man leads to the kind of religion that includes drinking poisoned Kool-Aid and lying down in bed to die with a purple sheet over your head so that the comet-cloaked “mother ship” can come and pick up your ‘enlightened’ soul.

If the Evangelicals are actually on to something, I suggest monitoring a very different set of indicators. When they sell all of their Halliburton stock, take their SUVs to the scrap yard and stand out in the street looking up with hands outstretched, I’ll consider preparing for the end of time. Even so, I think I’ll pass on the Kool-Aid.