“It’s the end of the world as we know it,” go the lyrics of a song by the rock group REM.  Indeed, the end of the world seems to be a recurring theme these days.  Just recently the international newswires reported on a Russian doomsday sect that hid in a cave awaiting the impending apocalypse.  Eleven years earlier the California-based cult Heaven’s Gate made headlines when its members, fearing the Earth would be “recycled” along with all its inhabitants, sought to escape this fate by committing suicide en masse.  But millennialism (the belief that the world will soon end) is not the exclusive domain of religious extremists: various secular authorities have forecast global destruction caused by overpopulation and nuclear war among other things.  What therefore is behind such thinking and how should we interpret it?

Christian millennialists tend to base their views on two parts of the Bible: the Gospels and the Book of Revelation.  In the former Jesus states that when He comes again “Heaven and earth shall pass away” (Matthew 24:35).  This will be preceded by “wars and rumours of wars… famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes” (Matthew 24: 6-7).  In Revelation the Apostle John describes a scenario whereby the forces of Satan and those of Christ fight one another in the Battle of Armageddon, following which the wicked are thrown into a lake of fire (Revelation 20:15).  John then sees a “new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and first earth were passed away” (Revelation 21:1).  Many Christian doomsayers believe that after the Earth is destroyed Christ will reign over it for a thousand years, from Revelation 20:4’s “they [the just] lived and reigned with Christ for a thousand years.”

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Note:  I’ve added Emilia to my list of bloggers here and given her an identity of her own because she writes interesting stuff and it should be recognized.  I chose the roadrunner for her avatar because that is what she reminds me of.  She dashes in and out of Cynapse’s website every once in awhile…there’s a “beep, beep”…and she’s gone again.  You have to stay sharp to catch her.  I hope she likes it and I will add that if she wants to cross post her stuff here as Sandy does Cynapse has my permission to set up access for her.  I have no problem with that at all.

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