<img src="{att_thumb}judge-c.jpg" href="{att_link}judge-c.jpg" title="The Judgement: Hieronymous Bosch" class="frame" align="left">If you listen carefully, you can hear the voices of alarm as 48% of America continue to nurse their wounds and seek to understand what happened. It's called the End Times and it's all the rage. <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/20666" author="Bill Moyers" source="AlterNet">Battlefield Earth*</a> describes the method to the madness gripping the US. Once you learn the reasoning, you don't feel much better about it. For a little taste of the numbers that <i>most</i> interest our leadership in this, the most secular of countries, with its treasured separation of church and state and so forth, check out the <a href="http://www.raptureready.com/rap2.html">Rapture Index</a>. It is best <iq>viewed ... as [a] prophetic speedometer. The higher the number, the faster we're moving towards the occurrence of pre-tribulation rapture.</iq> <div style="clear: both"><n>*I hope everyone can appreciate the title of his talk, which is not only a <a href="http://www.battlefieldearth.com/">reknowned book</a>, but a <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0185183/" source="IMDB">top-notch film</a> and part of the basis for another <a href="http://www.scientology.org/">silly religious fantasy</a>.</n></div> <h>The End of the World As We Know It</h> This is the kind of story that only Jerry Bruckheimer could produce: <bq>All over the earth, graves will explode as the occupants soar into the heavens ... [o]n the heels of that Rapture, nonbelievers left behind on earth will endure seven years of unspeakable suffering called the Great Tribulation, which will culminate in the rise of the Antichrist and the final battle of Armageddon between God and Satan. Upon winning that battle, Christ will send all unbelievers into the pits of hellfire, re-green the planet, and reign on earth in peace with His followers for a millennium.</bq> Moyers pulls a lot of his material from <a href="http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/04/20/apocalypse-please/" author="George Monbiot">Apocalypse Please</a>, who, in turn, leans heavily on <a href="http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2004/10/27/scherer-christian/index.html" author="Glenn Scherer" source="Grist Magazine" title="The Godly Must Be Crazy: Christian-right views are swaying politicians and threatening the environment">The Godly Must Be Crazy</a>, which covers this phenomenon, in depth. Apparently, there are two discrete camps (sects?), the Dispensationalists and the Reconstructionists. The dispensationalists look at current events and the state of the world to determine how close we are to being <iq>lifted out of [our] clothes and wafted up to heaven</iq>. Reconstructionists aren't happy to sit back and let it happen --- they actively try to bring about the preconditions for Rapture, as written in the <iq>19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers</iq>. <h>End Timer Policies</h> If one assumes that the U.S. government has been taken over by reconstructionists, several of the administration's more abstruse policies and positions can be explained quite well by a framework in which, in order to bring about the return of Christ, several things have to happen. In this group, you can count the <iq>more than 40 percent of the U.S. Congress (231 legislators - all but five of them Republicans) who received an average 80 percent approval rating or higher from the leading religious-right organizations</iq> as well as most of core of the Bush administration. Here are a few of the more confusing, adamant stances taken by our government: <dl dt_class="field"> Unqualified support for Israel <div> Before Jesus shows up to stomp Satan flat, Israel has to occupy the <iq>rest of its 'Biblical lands' (most of the Middle East)</iq> and <iq>rebuilding ... the Third Temple on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques</iq>. That's more than enough to have an impact on national policy. It offers an explanation for America's unwavering support for Israel <i>no matter what happens</i>. <bq>...when Bush asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, he received 100,000 angry emails from Christian fundamentalists, and never mentioned the matter again.</bq> </div> The environment <div>If you're convinced that Jesus is going to show up any time now, clear out most of the world, kill Satan and create a paradise on Earth ... what's the point of conservation? <iq>After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back</iq> is a direct quote from Reagan's secretary of the interior, James Watt. Many of the people he worked with are now working for Bush. <bq>The secular or socialist has a limited resource mentality and views the world as a pie ... that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece." However, "the Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God's Earth. The resources are waiting to be tapped.</bq> That explains why <iq>environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed --- even hastened</iq>. The faster you kill the planet, the faster Jesus comes back to smite the evil one in an Armageddon showdown. </div> Attack on Iraq The push for an attack on Iraq, for which no reason based in reality has been found, may actually be based in fantasy instead. Reconstructionists <iq>see the invasion of Iraq as a warm-up act</iq>, as a sort of provocation to world war, bringing on Armageddon in a hurry. </dl> <h>Applying Occam's Razor</h> So, what are we to think? It seems to fit the facts; do we go with it? It may be that some people fervently believe this and are driven enough by a belief in Armageddon and sweet, sweet release from their earthly bonds to actively work to bring on the end of the world. <iq>House majority leader, Tom DeLay</iq> comes to mind here, because he <iq>wants to convert America into a "God centered" nation whose government promotes prayer, worship, and the teaching of Christian values</iq>. But still, even his biographers say that he <iq>is motivated more than anything by power</iq>. In other words, the same old story. Money and power. Nothing to see here. Same goals, different window dressing. I don't buy that the same nation that worships consumerism so fervently, puritan as they are, would consciously promote the end of the world. Saying that <iq>most of the roughly 50 million right-wing fundamentalist Christians in the United States [or 15 and 18% of US voters] believe in some form of End-Time theology</iq> is disengenuous. How many adult Americans are there? How many of those are voting Americans? How many have a political influence? The 2000 US Census <a href="http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/QTTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=01000US&-qr_name=DEC_2000_SF1_U_QTP1&-ds_name=DEC_2000_SF1_U&-_lang=en&-_sse=on">shows</a> that there were 170 million people in the 18-64 age group. So, about 30% of America is an end-timer? Most must not be so fervent, because I haven't heard one droning on about it yet. Counting the number of "Left Behind" books sold in America (<iq>60 million</iq>) doesn't <i>prove</i> anything either. How many copies of the Bible are sold every year? How many get read? Paying lip service is easy and it gets you into the club. If you read history, you'll see that all empires (both short- and long-lived) have controlled their people through fear and religion. The leaders of these empires have rarely believed the pap they sell to their citizens, recognizing it for the mind- and emotion-control that it is. (Hitler and his cabal spring to mind as having written quite a bit about their control techniques --- see <a href="http://billmon.org/archives/001650.html">Sounds Like Victory</a>, <a href="http://billmon.org/archives/001649.html">The Evil of Banality</a>, <a href="http://billmon.org/archives/001648.html">Game Plan</a> and <a href="http://billmon.org/archives/001647.html">Scenes From the Bunker</a>, all small quotes found at the <a href="http://billmon.org">Whiskey Bar</a>). The people in charge of America, though crasser and bolder than some of their predecessors, are not that noticeably different in philosophy. They are in it for power and money. <h>There's One Born Every Minute</h> A culture such as ours is naturally extremely seducable by a life philosophy that holds you as holy if you have no respect for conservation. It's a philosophy that appeals to the deepest inner child, demanding only that its followers pay lip service to a God. We are at our most foolish when people tell us what we want to hear. <a href="http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/20974/" author="Arianna Huffington" source="AlterNet">America's Finite Future?</a> points out that the end-time philosophy is something that even secular American culture has implicitly taken to heart: <bq>Acting as if we have a finite future has infected our entire culture. Just look at personal savings, which have fallen to next to nothing, with Americans socking away a meager two-tenths of 1 percent of their disposable incomes. Meanwhile, the average U.S. household carries about $14,000 of credit-card debt; one in four consumers spends more than he or she can afford; and, as a result, every 15 seconds, someone somewhere in America is going bankrupt. Which, I guess, in Bush World is how an angel gets his wings.</bq>