Peak Oil is You
Donate Bitcoins ;-) or Paypal :-)
Page added on November 1, 2015
Is it the end of the world again?
It’s hard not to get apocalyptic when the world is falling apart.
The Christian right takes doom its stride, however. In the US and across the world, believers in End Times prophecy are dug-in to the idea that the end of all things really is upon us – and they can point to verses in the Jewish and Christian Bibles in support of this view.
So are they right?
One paragraph is not enough to summarise Christian thought on the end of the world or – to give it its technical name – eschatology. But typically, Christian apocalyptic views today hinge in part on the Book of Daniel chapter 2 (which identifies a succession of dominant world empires), and then broadens out to include at least some of the following:
Greedy pastors taking money from the faithful (2 Peter 2:1-3); earthquakes (Matthew 24:7); “wars and rumours of wars” (Matthew 24:6); a falling away from faith (Matthew 24:12); hypocritical religiosity (2 Timothy 3:5); deadly diseases (Matthew 24:7); deniers of a final judgment (2 Peter 3:5-6); an increase in famines (Matthew 24:7); an increase in knowledge and travel (Daniel 12:4); the “gospel of the kingdom” to be preached as a warning to all nations (Matthew 24:14); and the mark of the Beast (Revelation 13:16).
On first blush there seems to be a strong case.
To take Christian preachers first: men such as Creflo Dollar, Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn and Joel Osteen fleece the flock to the tune of many millions of dollars each year. Copeland openly boasts about being a billionaire. And unlike Jesus – who went before them to prepare mansions in heaven – TV preachers such as these have multiple mansions right here on earth.
However, this is nothing new. In Ezekiel 34 the prophet of that name bewailed a similar phenomenon over 2,500 years ago. The shepherds have always scammed the sheep.
Christian apologists often point to earthquakes as a sign of the End. Johnston’s Archive records 320,120 deaths from earthquakes for 2010 – a huge number indeed.
Yet when seen on a broader timeline, the number of deaths from earthquakes over the last century peaked around the mid-1970s and is now somewhere around the average of what it has been over the last 100 years. So on this metric, we cannot be at the End right now.
Wars (and rumours thereof) are prevalent as per Matthew 24:6. The last 10 years have been spent in earnest expectation of an attack by the US or Israel upon Iran, for example. That would be a strong case for a rumor of war.
At the same time, the US has warred against – and destroyed – a number of countries, while other miscellaneous real wars have gone on in the background.
Nevertheless, if we compare the figures of those recently killed in wars with the 50-80 million deaths in WWII, current wars are in decline – at least over the period since then.
We do see the religious hypocrisy of 2 Timothy 3:5 warns of: Christian pastors daily renege on the foundations of their faith. I personally struggle to understand what the Church of England, for example, believes in beyond fuzzy feelings.
On the other hand, Christ himself bemoaned the “whited sepulchres” among the scribes and Pharisees 2,000 years ago.
So while the scale may have increased, the form is not new.
Matthew 24:7 foresees deadly diseases – and immediately AIDS and Ebola come to mind.
Yet, depending on how you slice the numbers, one can argue that deaths by deadly disease – at least at the moment – are lower proportionately than at the time of Jesus.
What is beyond question is that things have been worse before today. Between 50 and 100 million died as a result of the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. Meanwhile, the WHO claims the total deaths for all time from AIDS to be 39 million.
The warning at 2 Peter 3:5-6 of deniers of a final Judgment suggests firmer ground – at least initially. Atheism is heavily promoted via media, and such priests of Unbelief as Richard Dawkins and Stephen Fry are given prominence and unquestioning support by them.
An atheist website called Patheos puts the number of outright atheists in 2015 at 11 percent of the world’s population.
Yet, when one considers that at the time at which Peter was writing, the notion of a single God was embraced by one tiny nation only – the Jews – the numbers of those who hold a position of faith are up immeasurably today on what they were then.
Matthew 24:7 warns of an increase in famines. Since famines are pumped into our consciousness by TV you would be excused for thinking they were on the increase. But they are not.
Most famines in recent history are the result of war or genocidal policies. The Bolsheviks in Russia and Ukraine and the British in India together murdered tens of millions by that means.
If we are interested in classical famine (i.e. wholesale death arising without the agency of humans), what stand out are the five famines in China between 1811 and 1873 in which 105 million died, or the Chalisa (1783-84) or Doji Bara (1789-92) famines, in which a total of 22 million died.
These sorts of numbers dwarf anything we experience today.
Christian eschatology has it that Daniel 12:4 indicates an increase in travel. Certainly, world travel has increased, as has technological knowledge. But the jury is still out for many scholars on what “many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased” means.
On top of that, modern liberal scholars place the writing of the Book of Daniel in the 2nd century BCE which – if true – undoes its position as a central pillar in the edifice of much of the rest of common Christian eschatology.
Next we have Jesus’ prediction that “this gospel of the kingdom” will be preached as a warning to all nations immediately prior to the End (Matthew 24:14).
Leaving the question of what that gospel might be, the fact is that the Christian Bible is available now to all. The Economist, for example, notes that translations of the Bible reach 95 percent of the world’s population.
So either this point can be firmly checked off as completed – in which case the End should have come – or the Christian Bible does not contain what Christ meant by “gospel of the kingdom”, or the Christians have failed to preach whatever that gospel might have been.
None of these options is attractive to the Christian right.
This leaves us with the Mark of the Beast. Certainly, technology now exists – such as VeriChip – to bring to pass those events Christians and others warn about: the inability to buy or sell without an implanted microchip.
Is this evil and creepy? Certainly.
But that is a different question to whether or not this is what is meant in the Book of Revelation.
And that is not even the Christian right’s main problem here. Its main problem is that the originator of Protestantism – whence derive the vast majority of such denominations which advance end-of-the-world scenarios come – was Martin Luther, and Luther threw Revelations out of his Bible altogether.
Luther also went on record as stating that the world would end no later than 1600.
But Luther was not alone in wrongly identifying the End. That occupation has a long and somewhat comical history.
I was born in 1967. This means that according to Bible.ca I have lived through 107 predicted ends of the world. The Jehovah’s Witnesses alone have been wrong in 1914, 1915, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975 and 1994.
There are also at least 130 recorded predictions between the time of Christ and when I was born.
Admittedly, not all the end-of-the-world predictions were made by Christians. But the vast majority were – and they were reading materially the same Bible we have today.
Now the secularists and atheists have jumped in with their global warming eschatology and are busy predicting the end of all things with the zeal of the convert.
I have two main issues with time-specific eschatology – no matter the creed.
Firstly, it increases passivity: if you accept a prophet as a model then your business should be doing what that prophet told you to do, not guessing when he’s coming back to see if you did it.
Secondly, it gives those whose treasure is in this world rather than the next a rod for your back: as long as what they are doing can be bent into a shape approaching your expectations of prophecy, you will put up with it – even welcome it.
This ploy has worked remarkably well in the case of generating support for Israel among Christians in the US, for example.
I’m not saying the end of the world isn’t upon us. Given how things are going, I’m hard pressed to see how it can’t be. I just don’t think the facts on the ground bear out the claims commonly made by Christians in support of their eschatology.
The facts may change to fit better those prognostications. But we are not there yet.
I saw a documentary about 15 years ago, which featured a man who made nuclear fallout shelters. He sold them for a living and lived all year round in one himself. At the time of filming he was in his late 70s. He was clearly going to die from old age and was pretty miffed about that fact.
His entire life had been spent in preparation for a calamity that had never come.
We are all definitely going to die one day and – from where I’m standing at least – give account of ourselves to God. That fact held true for Luther. It held true for Charles Taze Russell, the founder of the Watchtower Society. It has presumably held true for nuclear-fallout-shelter guy by now.
If you proceed from the baseline of that hard fact, you will arrive in better shape no matter if the End occurs on your watch or not.
16 Comments on "Is it the end of the world again?"
apneaman on Sun, 1st Nov 2015 12:00 pm
Not in the bible
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/
onlooker on Sun, 1st Nov 2015 12:11 pm
May I take this time out to appeal to all my fellow realists to if possible disavow from now on the nomenclature “doomer” This article captures the reason why. First because always people can gauge that the doom is insufficient to be seen as doom. Second, as the article points out timelines should be always avoided referring to tragedies and catastrophes. Third a most important the label doom denotes an emotional connotation whereas realist denotes an objective evaluation. We here are trying objectively to lay out the case that we are on a downward spiral that will lead to some very negative consequences. We do not now exactly when but we do know that everyday it becomes more likely that such negative consequence will be realized and that in fact some are already occurring. So Realist not Doomers.
penury on Sun, 1st Nov 2015 1:47 pm
Most of the people that I know that are classified as “doomers” are in fact realists. We do not expect the end of the world per se, But, what we see is the end of an era of peak plenty for the developed world. Yes that will result in the die off of the majority of the humans, if not all of them, Resistence to change by the developed nations will result in war and the die off of the populations of what we like to call the “3rd World” And yes the world will end for all of us, one grave at a time. It always has and always will. As a realist I am not attempting to save the human race, I am trying to protect those nearest and dearest to me for as long as possible, be it a day a week or twenty years.
Revi on Sun, 1st Nov 2015 2:42 pm
Anyone with a calculator and a little sense will figure it out.
That’s the scary part.
Bloomer on Sun, 1st Nov 2015 5:21 pm
Whatever happens, happens, bring it on.
We are only on this earth for a short visit. What’s the difference if we leave a few Nano-seconds early? No one going to give a shit.
Davy on Sun, 1st Nov 2015 5:56 pm
I am a closet doomer at home. My good friends and close family know this. For the past 3 years I have not sent my weekly newsletter. I have been here proselytizing to you all. For years I sent news and I actually nailed the 08 crisis. My paper trail went back to 2005 when I started pointing out the dangers.
My failure was not knowing the powers that are had a whole cage full of rabbits for their hats. 2008 was an amazing time of unparalleled economic and political action that had us all at the edge of our seats. I don’t think the powers that are realized they had these rabbits either. When they ditched moral hazard and economic fundamentals the sky was the limit.
In reference to this shitty RT article and blatantly anti-American author I find the eschatology study fascinating and profound but one must look at the broad spectrum beyond the Abrahamic traditions. Nearly all other traditions have their own versions Hopi, Hindus, Mayans, and so many others.
We are clearly at the end of a cycle. We seem to be entering a pole shift. For us humans this appears to be a paradigm shift of growth to decay. More importantly it is within Nature and ecosystem evolution and decay I see human and the greater ecosystem being changed by a devolution.
I like to tell people we are near the end of the world. I then tell them we are near the end of the world as we know it with a grin. That is so much happier isn’t it? A little sugar coating goes a long way. This end is a process. It is nonlinear and it is multidimensional. It is a decay of the soft and the hard. We see the soft decay in those abstracts of human social structures. It is hard as we see our cities decay.
Most troubling it is our biosphere with land, water, and the creatures that inhabit it. Our climate is abruptly changing for the worse. This is not the thawing of an ice age with new growth and explosion of new life, no, this is a sixth great extinction marked by death. This is the end of a stable climate that allowed enormous post ice age ecological complexity. The very last part of that complexity was the growth and development of human civilization. This will likely end soon for numerous reasons.
With the end of human civilization will come a reduction in our numbers by an order of magnitude per reasonable science. Such a die off would be unprecedented in all of human history because of the sheer numbers. We have records of previous bottlenecks through geologic history and DNA yet this coming bottleneck will feature a die off of billions.
There is no way to tell how this will occur. It is possible the die off will be one of excess deaths over births over time. This could be lower lifespans and more deaths within the general population as we knew them pre twentieth century. This does not need to be the rapture or the book of revelations although I imagine we will have local examples of all the horrors of the bible. There is no reason why we can’t all go quickly through a global NUK war.
Frankly anything and everything is possible today. We have entered the twilight zone of the surreal. We still have normality but the reality is we are all dead men walking. The coming deaths will be physical but more certainly the death will be the death of our modern way of life especially if you are one of the younger ones on our board.
We are going to descend an energy gradient. This will mean our food chain will not be ample enough to feed the billions of humans and the billions of creatures. You know when food chain as big as humans are reduced all of nature contracts. We will become locusts upon the land with other creatures becoming locust. Again, this may be a slow mild die off or quick and harsh. I suspect it will be all of the above spread across many global locals.
All locals have been delocalized by a naked dependence on the global. Those that are not dependent are near areas that are that will overwhelm many of these sustainable areas. A few lucky areas may not experience the worst. I imagine no place will be able to hide from abrupt climate change. It is possible there is a refuge somewhere where humans will eke out an existence to survive but that is beside the point. What is important is us now. What are we going to face and how soon.
Live life large now folks. Say grace every time you eat. What I mean by that is not religious although nothing wrong with religion. What I mean is cherish a good meal and happiness when you find it because it will not be long when they are in short supply.
makati1 on Sun, 1st Nov 2015 6:57 pm
Religion is for the weak. Since there is no god nor afterlife, this is all we get people. Enjoy it as long as it lasts. Any bullshit written to scare the congregation into giving more to the powers that be is just that, bullshit. Prayers never saved anyone.
This time around, there is a good reason for the end to be near and it has nothing to do with prophesy. Not in the last 10,000 years has the planet been out to destroy human kind on a global scale as it is today.
If you think a few degrees increase in temps is not serious, you have no idea of how the world works. Those few degrees makes all the difference to almost every city on earth and a lot of the land mass. They mean that all of the ice that has been captured these last 10,000 years at the poles, in the mountains and on Greenland will melt and raise the oceans 200 feet. Yes, that figure is correct. 200 feet. There goes most of the East Coast of America as far inland as I-95. That extra ton per square foot of ocean will push the sea floor down, causing quakes everywhere around the world and setting off volcanoes where there has not been an eruption for millenia.
The change in water salinity and temp in the North Atlantic will shut down the Gulf Stream bringing the arctic to Europe and North America again.
How the weather will be affected is anyone’s guess, but it will not be an improvement. We can see the changes happening today. Imagine! A hurricane making landfall in the ME!
theedrich on Sun, 1st Nov 2015 7:25 pm
Christianity is CAUSING the end. This is the clear result of every analysis since Nietzsche. When “do-gooders” spend ungodly amounts of time and money on “helping the poor” in Swampland, they are digging their own and our graves. Because the overpopulating, squalid “poor” will indeed inherit the earth. And the asinine idea that all men are created equal will accelerate their parasitism. But the believers and piggybacking hypocrites ignore these facts.
Cloud9 on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 6:58 am
Theed, theocracy was the first form of government created. It is powerful glue that binds groups together. I would not discount it if I were you. Groups like the Mormons may weather this storm much better than the isolated atheists. Hitler wished his troops had the resolve of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. A lot of small churches have a cadre that are well aware of the pending die off and are devoted to saving a remnant. While they have no qualms about offering up a prayer, they are teaching canning, reloading and gardening.
bug on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 8:35 am
Cloud, I would rather not survive the storm and will do what I can as an atheist than be a Mormon and weather it. But that is just me.
BobInget on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 10:26 am
ISIL oil fields are ‘off the map’.
When Russia (Pres. Putin) decided to move into Syria with a no foolin, massive military presence, this signaled the beginnings of far wider, even more convoluted, Middle Eastern war(s). (I’ve been a Russia watcher for six decades)
The obvious bombing of a Russia airliner is, in point of fact, a causus belli (acts of war) .
Common ‘terrorists’ don’t have public ties with established nations with ‘flags’.
The so called Islamic State has such a ‘flag’ and thousands of square miles of territory to back up their pretentious claim.
We know ISIL has direct financial and ideological links to Saudi Arabia.
We know, or should know, Russia, along with Venezuela, Iran and Iraq are aiming to ‘take down KSA’.
Never one to permit a crisis ‘go to waste’, Putin and his subordinates will slowly leak evidence linking KSA and two other Gulf states to ISIL and a long series of war crimes.
Although it’s well known ISIL gains 70% of its income from captured Syrian oil, there has been no effort on any side to ‘take out’ these oil fields that bring the Islamic State 1.4 million dollar a day in income that supports IS activities. Perhaps, these oil fields are so well hidden neither Russia or US forces are unable to target them? (IS sells that VITAL oil back to Assad and Turkey)
When Saudi Arabia fully denies any connection with ISIL or any of its affiliates, it’s begins to lose credibility with hard liner “Arab Streeters’ in Pakistan, Egypt etc. This inevitably isolates KSA from its allies.
There’s a huge cyclone hitting Yemen as we read this. This Hurricane will bring Yemen and Saudi Bombing back into the news. The terrible damage brought on by months of constant bombing, major gains on the ground by al Qaeda, a half million children nearing starvation, Saudi Arabia must own. Russia and Iran will launch a huge ‘humanitarian relief effort’ that
KSA may attempt to block.
Outside of Australia, Norway and Canada, almost every oil exporting nation worldwide is currently in crisis.
Oil is in a transition period. Everyone is trying to understand this highly volatile geopolitical situation.
I know one thing for sure, like climate change, ignoring or denial won’t make this oil centric horror show go away.
Revi on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 10:53 am
I don’t think you need to look in the Bible to see what’s going to happen. Just pay attention a little. It’s getting pretty obvious now…
BobInget on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 11:55 am
” In March 1999, Economist had a report, “Drowning in Oil”. That came at the bottom of oil price. I keep a printout on my desk. That report has been a subject of ridicule but people forget it made some good points.
The report ended with this:
Yet even this would serve only to mitigate the future risks. By all means, welcome the return of normality to oil markets and the end of OPEC’s power. But just as oil’s scarcity seemed a fact of life in the 1970s, its abundant flow might be too easily taken for granted today. Normality could last a while; but it is unwise to assume that it will endure for ever”.
(Swiped from another energy board)
Cloud9 on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 12:04 pm
Bug I was simply saying that faith in a higher power is a powerful social glue that binds people of like belief together. Together they are much stronger than individuals standing alone. While there is a tendency to look on such groups as primitive to ignore that it is a powerful survival mechanism is a mistake.
Spec on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 12:10 pm
Yeah, I’m sure the religious Zealots are freaking about the war in Syria with Russia, Iran, us, ISIS, etc.
But that is all superstitious garbage. There will be no apocalypse.
Davy on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 2:03 pm
Cloud you nailed it. Strength of any group is in its morale. You take a motivated smaller army and it will generally sweep a larger less motivated enemy from the field.