Jews have been waiting for a messiah for 2,300 years to come and vanquish everyone who has ever spoken an unkind word in their general direction. Christians have spent 2,000 years enthralled with the idea that their savior will return and kill everyone who has made them servile. Muslims are anxiously awaiting the Twelfth Imam to climb up out of a well and wreak havoc on the enemies of Islam. The Buddhists are awaiting the re-incarnation of the Great Buddha, who will destroy the current age and institute the next. Science is wringing its hands over red giants, asteroids and global warming/cooling/changing/not changing. Science has so many disaster stories, I can only imagine it must be a very depressing line of work.
The Hindu have Shiva, the New Agers have whatever it is they believe, and pretty much all the rest have their version of The Endtimes cataclysm. What is this burning need to be destroyed and have some outside force do the honors? If this sort of thinking underpins all of our cultures, then what does it say about us?
First of all, I admit that I can not speak authoritatively on any of these, save christianity. Though I have studied many of them, my strongest arguments are built around the christian fairy tales, since that is my background. So if this article has a certain bent, there is a reason. However, there are numerous underlying similarities in all these tales that may allow us to pull together some common strings.
Let's begin by clearing up something that really bothers me. The word 'apocalypse' does NOT mean the 'end of the world as we know it,' also known as TEOTWAWKI. It simply means 'to reveal something which is hidden.' How that word came to mean death and destruction is a complete mystery to me. Now that we've dispensed with that matter, let's move on to more interesting things by starting with a little though experiment.
Suppose you had the desire and opportunity to control a great number of people, and you needed a simple but effective way to pacify them and prevent them from rising up and slitting your throat. You need this group of people to accept any amount of servitude, abuse, suffering, and depravity, while at the same time, deflecting any responsibility for this horror away from yourself. In fact, you set yourself up as the only possible intermediary with the cause of all this, and it is your efforts that prevent the final horror from occuring.
Easy! Implant a though virus at the core of every person's being, pounded in from birth, that the entire world will be destroyed by a wrathful god who's sick and tired of all the sin and stuff in his creation. However, if you follow everything I say, then we may be able to put this final horror off a couple of hundred years. Oh, and throw a few bucks in the basket on your way out so we can affort to focus all our attention on delaying the final outcome. And while you're at it, spend the next three generations building us a nice big church right over here, would'ja?
Yup, just the ticket! Free ride through life, ownership of some of the best land and buildings on Earth, and instead of being seen as the cause of all the crap, we are the heroes, interceding on the part of some invisible old man in the sky who's really pissed off that his image and likeness is using reason and intellect and enjoying things like sex, that he invented.
So, how do we achieve this? Well, here's come nifty old stories that have a secret meaning, but we'll interpret it all for the rubes, so they don't see the real meaning. While we're at it, Mr. Jerome, this line right here in Romans says humans are free. Let's change that to obeying the Powers That Be (namely us).
Great, now we need a way to keep them in line. Let's hire a good writer to come up with a story about the end of the world. We'll say it was penned by a guy trapped on a Greek island having a hallucination. Let's make it really vague and mystical sounding, so we can interpret it dozens of different ways. That'll keep the rubes in abject fear and terror, looking for signs and wonders. Hell, every time it rains, they'll think it's the end of the world!
Now, hmmm...I know! All of this will happen because the rubes are all worthless, useless, groveling sinners with no intrinsic value, and without us, they'll never get free of this burden. That way, they'll serve us and praise us, and every day the world doesn't end, we get credit for keeping the old man happy! What a great idea!
Ooh! This is rich! We'll tell everyone that some mystical sequence of events has to happen in order for their savior to come to their rescue. Kind of like a celestial distress signal that we need some help down here. So, this mythical nation we created must be taken over and, get this, an anti-old man takes up residence! And this guy will REALLY be bad, even badder than the old man himself!
Think about it. We'll have the rubes supporting any amount of evil, horror, terror, slavery, cruelty, and deprivation, because they think it will get them closer to being rescued from their own stupidity! Man, this is great stuff! Just to make sure, we'll invent something called the rapture, where only 144,000 people will get a free ride outta here just before the real shit comes down, even though they are creating the shit storm that they are running away from, in order to get rescued by some old man in the sky, and the whole time no one will suspect us, since we are the only hope they have of getting one of the free-ride tickets!
Oh, my...this is really rich! I bet we could easily control a billion or so people, make them do whatever we want, suffer any amount of outrage and humiliation, fight wars, give us money, build us some nice digs, and never once suspect that we are the bad guys!
Heck, we'll just use our little bad-boy country in the Middle East to raise all kinds of hell. We;ll set it all up so that our followers would give this country a pass on anything it does, so we can use it to start wars, soak up money (even from non-believers who give it to us as taxes at the point of our guns), and generally raise Cain any time and any where we choose. Best of all, it will all be written off as signs of the end times, which our rubes will all support blindly because they think it will hurry up their savior to come rescue them!
My gosh, we could rule the world! We could live in absolute splendor and glory without doing more than passing out a little bad wine and tasteless bread. The rubes would be thankful for it. We could abuse them, torture them, burn them at the stake, and god forbid, Excommunicate them if they get out of hand. We would have the rubes believing that the more they suffer, the more stuff they get in some mystical place called 'heaven.' They'd put up with anything to get some stuff in heaven, I'd bet. The best part is we'd be absolutely immune from prosecution, suspicion and retribution, because if the rubes attack us, they lose all their stuff in heaven. Worse! Hahahaha! They'd spend all eternity being treated the way we treat them! Hohohohohoho!
Gosh, it's a good thing something like this could never happen. I mean, just think, hundreds of generations duped into servitude by false promises of rewards and fake terror of punishment. After all, if people ever caught on to the ruse, they'll hang us from every lamp post from here to Timbuktu! That would be a truly horrible apocalypse/revelation, wouldn't it?
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