Why the obsession with Earth's demise? If we collectively put in a fraction of the effort cleaning up our nest as we do into awaiting its end, we'd have a pretty nice place to live. In the past 150 years, it's become almost cliche to predict the final moments of our dear planet. The number of preachers who have and continue to predict end dates based on obscure math formulae in the Book of Daniel, or the appearance of a red calf or miraculous barley, or the restart of the Mayan calendar, or various and sundry signs and wonders that have occured throughout history and will continue.
Ultimately, whether it is the meshiach, the 12th imam or the second coming, billions of people are hellbent both on doing nothing to prevent the perceived events and everything they can to help them along. The complete incongruity of this line of thought is a perfect example of Orwell's 'doublethink,' where a person can hold completely contradictory beliefs without seeing the foundational illogic of it. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
What it all boils down to is this: many religions are morally questionable and internally inconsistent. There is a Creator who gives life and wants love, and even commands that we not kill, while at the same time ordering the wholesale slaughter of people on deeply questionable grounds.
These religions have no qualms about undervaluing the lives of non-believers while proclaiming to worship a live-affirming belief system. Can there be any more screwed up thing than that?
Simply put, the moral codes of these religions are so inconsistent that they must appeal to a final judgement to vindicate their immorality. In other words, the ends justify the means. This core contradiction in the major religions of the world can only be explained one way...they are control mechanisms established by elites to both divide humanity and thus weaken the masses, and to make us compliant with their agendas.
It is axiomatic that there is strength in numbers. As individuals, we might be tempted to fight a single intruder in our house at 3am, but seven of them could be out of the question. However, if we can get the seven intruders fighting amongst themselves, we have a good chance of success by making them expend their energy and concentration on each other.
We can see that strategy at work in the world today. Certain self-appointed elites keep 7 billion people in line by simply agitating pre-installed antagonistic groups. What's more absurd is that these fighting groups have hardly an iota's worth of difference between them. Most current religions are monotheistic, share a similar code of conduct, and in several cases, have the same roots. But because this group folds its hands to pray and that one opens them, we feel compelled to slaughter each other, and in so doing, ignore the real issues facing us.
Suppose a charismatic leader stepped forward with a bunch of followers and some old manuscripts claiming that Nova Scotia was their ancestral home given to them by a bearded old man in the sky who only appeared and spoke to the leader. Would you support their claim to the island? Yet that is precisely what billions of Jews and Christians have done with a place called Israel (though thankfully the tide appears to be turning on that little fiasco).
Christians have been completely snowed into supporting this claim because they have been told that the existence of this country is a prerequisite for the second coming and final justification. Not only does this neutralize any complaint about the murderous behavior of that 'nation', Christians actually support and encourage it in order to get their final justification.
The plot is pure genius, if it weren't so evil.
What it boils down to is that a significant number of people have been conned into actively supporting actions and events they earnestly believe will lead to the destruction of the Earth and the ultimate justification of their beliefs. Does anyone else find this just a little disturbing?
On top of that, the belief in the violent end of civilization is based solely on the visions of some guy named John hanging out on an island a couple of thousand years ago. There is absolutely no other proof or justification for these visions, other than John's claim (and the churches' support) that these visions were a personal message from god.
This brings us around to a calendar and December 21st. A Meso-American culture called the Mayans (destroyed by Christians, by the way) devised a rather advanced and interesting circular calendar. It is composed of 13 baktuns together spanning several thousand years. Based solely on the supposition/theory that the 13th baktun ends on December 21st, an entire industry has sprung up promoting the idea that the world will come to a crashing halt this month.
Almost from the moment that Y2K passed uneventfully, the 2012 cult caught fire. Despite the fact the creators of the calendar made no claim of end times in all their writings, billions of dollars have changed hands promoting this idea. And no one seems to know where this idea originated. It seems to have exploded whole cloth into the popular culture, complete with 'experts' and 'mystics' to back it up.
It's almost as if our civilization has had a self-destruct button built into it as a means to restart things if we humans get too out of hand. One can perceive a hidden agenda to collapse our civilization if we get too close to achieving our full potential. It's so effective that a great many humans believe whole-heartedly in some form of end-time scenario. At the same time, this self-destruct feature includes ways to keep us divided and quibbling amongst ourselves so that we never achieve our potential.
It's so insidious, so diabolical and so effective that it can only be by design. It's hard to conceive of any other way to explain it.
The worst part of all this is that it is so ingrained in our collective psyche that it is nearly impossible to extract. If thousand-year-old prophesies of end times aren't enough, we manufacture new scenarios out of old calendars and cave paintings. One way or another, we seem hell-bent on some form of destructive convulsion and we derive a strange pleasure from the idea. It's the ultimate in collective masochism, which in itself implies some sadist feeding our peculiar bent.It would be nice to think that on December 22nd, we could put all this stupidity behind us and move on, but that's unlikely. More likely is that a new form of psychosis will rise up and take its place. Whether it be meteors or aliens or holy men riding in on clouds, we don't seem to be able to look to the future with any sort of positive viewpoint.
Perhaps on December 22nd, we could start of movement to end all end times speculation and start focusing on cleaning up our nest. Maybe we could see the follies of our ways, acknowledge the absurdity of desiring our destruction, and work towards extracting these unproductive memes from our cultures.
I'm not holding my breath.
