God, Can you Reschedule the Apocalypse?

God, Can you Reschedule the Apocalypse for Next Week?



         As a man with a logical mind, I can state with 100% surety that the world is going to end.  That is of course a very broad, and painfully obvious, statement.  I made that statement because it's common sense.  Logically, the world MUST end someday.  It's an inescapable fact of existence.  All things that exist have a finite existence.  Something is created, it exists, and it must one day cease to exist in its current form.  So to state that the world MUST end someday is stating the perfectly obvious.  What I cannot say is exactly WHEN the world will end!  Because of the nature of my perception of time, it is impossible for me to predict when the world is going to end.  Given that I have a rudimentary understanding of how stars, like our own sun, work, I can guesstimate that in approximately 3 billion years our sun will be reaching the end of its life cycle.  One result of this will be a substantial increase in its size.  As a consequence of this increase in size, the sun will vaporize the inner planets, starting with Mercury, and then Venus.  As this happens, the increased heat on Earth will evaporate the oceans and burn off the atmosphere, thus eradicating all life on Earth.  Ultimately the sun's steady increase in size will vaporize the Earth, thus bringing about the end of the world.  The sun will, of course, eventually use up its own fuel and die...most likely in a spectacular explosion known to astronomers as a “Super Nova”.  However these events are so far in the future that I can state with 100% assurance that NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER LIVE TO SEE THIS PARTICULAR END OF THE WORLD SCENARIO.  And IF humans are still around when the Earth DOES end this way, we will most likely have moved out into space and forgotten this blue and green ball of rock and mud that gave rise to our species.

         Now having explained that the world is going to end, and how I believe it will end, I come to the proverbial meat and potatoes of this commentary.  It is another inescapable fact that there are people all around us that spend lots and lots of time trying to figure out when the world is going to end.  And this is not a recent phenomenon.  People throughout history have predicted the end of the world, from Nostradamus to Saint John of the Revelation.  Lots of people have tried to predict the end of the world.  I do not know why people do this.  However, I tend to think that it is because we are curious, and we seem to have a morbid fascination with death and destruction.  Therefore, I believe that our morbid fascination with death and destruction added to the inescapable fact that the world MUST end someday equals predictions of the end of the world.

         Now I admit that I do not read predictions of the end of the world if I can help it.  I have, however, read some, whether I wanted to or not, and found most of them to be more a product of paranoia rather than a product of objective observation and calculated prediction.  The vast majority of “end of the world” scenarios that I have had the misfortune of reading have ranged from simple predicted dates for “Doomsday” to elaborate epic stories of what is to happen immediately before and during the end of the world.  Curiously these end of the world scenarios hardly ever concern themselves with what happens AFTER the world ends, with the possible exception of a few that have come out of Hollywood.  Hollywood sometimes makes end of the world movies in which there are a few survivors of human civilization to continue our species and give rise to a new civilization, but I think that is Hollywood writers injecting a modicum of hope into what would otherwise be a dismally depressing movie.

         I find that one thing that seems to accompany these “end of the world” predictions is the esoteric idea that one can predict the future as accurately as one can tell the current time.  Throughout human history there have been many people and characters who have claimed to have the ability to predict the future.  Fortune Tellers, for example, claim to be able to predict the future by reading the patterns of tarot cards or gazing into a crystal ball or reading the patterns of tea leaves.  I view these practices with a measure of skepticism, as the only real prediction of the future that they would seem to make accurately is that the person who came in to have his or her future predicted will have less money than when he or she went in to visit the fortune teller.  Now, I am not debunking fortune tellers.  I am aware that many of them believe that they are providing a valuable service, and I say, “more power to them.”  And this commentary is not about fortune tellers.  It's about people claiming they can predict the future and actually KNOW when the world is going to end.  Some who claim they KNOW the future, attribute such claims to psychic talents.  As to psychic abilities, scientists have studied them for many times many years.  The best conclusion that I have heard as to scientific studies of psychic talents is that the scientists cannot tell whether the psychics actually have unusual abilities or are simply good at guessing and have keen observational skills.  So far psychic abilities have proven virtually impossible to prove through scientific study.  Religious view of psychic abilities are wildly varied.  No matter what method employed by the person predicting the future, he or she claims to be able to predict the future.  I do not put much faith in predictions of the future, mainly because I do not believe it possible to predict the future with anything even remotely approaching accuracy.

         Think of the nature of time, and by this I refer you to history.  If you read history with the purpose of understanding the nature of time, then you begin to understand time as being a series of choices, with each choice leading to a possible future.  Each choice, in turn, leads to other choices.  These collective choices, once made throughout history, ultimately form the world as we know it.  That brings into mind the possibility of time choices having more than one outcome, and thus more than one possible future.  If you were to add up all the possible choices that would come about, even from a simple choice as going right or left at a fork in the road, you would ultimately conclude that there are an infinite number of possible futures stemming from every choice in time.  And when you consider that there are an infinite number of possible futures then it becomes quite obvious that you cannot possibly know what is going to happen in the future with anything approaching accuracy.  In fact, we cannot perceive any time other than the Present.  We cannot see the past unless we take the time to preserve evidence of the past (i.e.: pictures, a diary, artifacts, mementos, etc.), and we certainly cannot see the future, because the future by its very nature is unknowable.  Now, I might speculate that IF it were possible to see into the future, I should think that because of the infinite number of possible futures, any vision of the future one might have would be missing significant details.  For example, let us assume that years before I got married I had a vision of the future.  The vision might show me that the woman I was going to marry was slender, with a fair complexion, with dark hair to her shoulders, but I would conveniently NOT be able to see her face.  Perhaps, no matter how she stood in my vision, my future wife might never stand so that I could see her face, or worse if I could see the area where her face should be, her face would be disturbingly accurate, with nothing but an area of featureless skin.  This vision might give me a few details that might bias my expectations for a possible mate, but it would not tell me exactly WHO I was going to marry.  This example is a pleasant enough thought, but it in no way proves that the future is a knowable period in time. 

         One sub-phenomenon that I find MOST disturbing in the overall phenomenon of predicting the end of the world is the religious assumption that the mythical “Day of Judgment” is upon us.  It is a prevalent theme in the Christian and Islamic religions.  I, myself, was raised in the Episcopal church, which is a denomination of Christianity in the Catholic mode of thinking.  I grew up reading the King James Bible, with the exception of the book of Revelation.  I have, thus far in my life, avoided reading more than a few verses from Revelation, mostly because, as I stated earlier, I avoid reading predictions of the end of the world.  I have, however, heard many various abridged summaries of Revelation, so I more or less know how it goes.  Furthermore, I do not know anything about the Islamic belief in how the world is to end.  I know only that in the Islamic faith there is a concept of the “Day of Judgment”.  The Christian version basically states that Jesus will come back after one thousand years of peace, during a time of great sorrow and misery (to put it mildly), and lead the faithful to a place of safety while God destroys the world and all its evils, and replaces it with a new world that has no death, sorrow, suffering, etc.    That being said, I have heard many a Christian watch the TV news or read the newspaper, and assume that  we are “in the end times”.  Personally, I do not see HOW we could be in the end times.  If a bit of bad news and bad events is proof that we are in the end times, then logically we've been in the end times since we humans came into existence, because if there is one thing I can be certain about with regard to the nature and behavior of humans, it's that you are more likely to hear BAD news before GOOD news.  And this stems from our aforementioned morbid fascination with death and destruction.  We instinctively WANT to hear bad news.  Whether this is out of compassion for the suffering of our fellow humans or because we like to hear about the pain and suffering of other people is a matter that has been debated for a long time, and not totally relevant to this commentary.  I take the fact that both Christianity and Islam have a concept of an eventual apocalypse as meaning that the founders of both faiths recognized in their fellow humans a morbid fascination with death and destruction and an inherent trend toward undisciplined, chaotic behavior, and attempted to curtail that behavior by imposing a frightening concept of an eventual apocalypse in which the good people would be rewarded and the bad people would be punished.  The fact that the religions never actually state exactly WHEN the apocalypse is to occur is evidence that is probably Will NOT happen.  The apocalypse is to me, what the boogie man once was...a vague fear tactic designed to compel moral and ethical behavior upon what would otherwise have been a chaotic personality.  And like the boogie man, I feel that I for one have out grown the apocalypse.

         Whatever the motivations for predicting the end of the world, the results are the same.  Year after year people convince themselves that the world is going to end tomorrow, and kill themselves rather than face the end of all they know.  These people of course never know that the world still exists and that the rest of us are going on about our lives.  The end of the world suicide phenomenon is further evidence to me that the preoccupation with WHEN the end of the world is going to happen is born of paranoia, NOT a curious need to learn something one does not know.

         I do, of course, wonder why someone would WANT to know when the world is going to end anyway?  Are these people seriously convinced that they can prevent the world from ending?  That would seem to be the most noble reason.  Simply wanting to know when the world is to end just to warn others that the world is ending is like warning the cow that she is going to the slaughter house.  And wanting to know when the world is going to end, simply because one wants to commit suicide before the world ends is...well...NOT HEALTHY THINKING...I'll put it that way.  Regardless of the reasons for wishing to know when the world is going to end, I will point out a few facts to you.  There are many things out there that could destroy the world.  Some of these things are things we can do something about, such as pollution and war.  These are things that COULD end the world if allowed to progress unchecked and unhindered.  However these are also world ending factors that WE CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT.  And therefore, with regards to the world ending factors that we can do something about, I say STOP PREDICTING WHEN THE WORLD IS GOING TO END AND START PREVENTING IT.  There are other world ending factors that we absolutely have no power to prevent.  These factors are too numerous to mention here, and are irrelevant beyond the fact that they exist and are unpreventable.  These factors are also occurrences of such rarity that, by their very nature, we need not worry about them.  Logically if you cannot prevent these unpreventable world ending factors then predicting the end of the world is only serving to make your remaining time on earth miserable.  Besides, none of us is guaranteed to actually live to see tomorrow.  I guarantee that there are many people in this world that will go to bed tonight and never wake up to see the morning.  Did the world end because of this?  No, it was just their time to go.  Worrying about something that you have no power to prevent is not actually accomplishing anything, and therefore, logically, is a waste of time.  And I, for one, try not to waste my time worrying about things that I have no control over.  I do admit that I pray for my fellow humans, but that is me appealing to God to lessen the suffering of my fellow humans.  Maybe God actually listens to me and does what I request of him, maybe I am praying simply to make myself feel better, and telling others that I am praying for them to make them feel better.  Which is the truth, I shall never truly know.  I do know, however that the end of the world will happen someday.  Whether it happens in my lifetime or long after I have died and my body turned to dust is something that I do not care about, and have no interest in knowing.

         I end this commentary with a friendly suggestion.  If you are someone who worries about when the world is going to end, do yourself a favor and stop worrying.  Live a happy and productive life.  Be a good, moral person for the sake of keeping the troubles of your life at the barest minimum.  Let the world handle its own affairs, and when the world does end, rest assured that you are not likely to live long enough to see it.