Media-laden society is always hearing about doomsday predictions. Only careful readers and listeners will realize how many there are. Only scholars will document how many doomsdays come and go without the forecast-doom arriving. Jim Jones may have known what he was doing when he led his group of believers to suicide before they could all be disappointed in his election.
Churches destroy evidence the way Alexander killed his brothers once the king had died. Alexander knew he would have civil wars enough, enough challenges to his anointing, without his brothers coming up with alternate wills. If the Apocalypse of John is the only apocalypse Christians know, then they'll think it's unique: a dime a dozen lowers the value (to make a redundancy joke).
I just read online about another. And John, and Nostradomos, and some of my own rhetoric came flowing past me. What brings me here to scribble these words is a thought of the purpose of false predictions in a media-laden society: if the sheeple hear false prediction after false prediciton, they'll become skeptical about doomsday predictions and lull themselves into a belief that they're secure, that nothing can harm them. If Jim Jones was full of it, and even Jesus' Kingdom of God didn't arrive soon after his death (or since, so far as we can tell), why then global warming can't harm us: and neither can smoking, or cheating, or lying, or the medacious ignorant politically agenda'd school board!
I foisted a The End Is Coming joke decades ago. A friend gave a costume party under the theme Vicars and tarts. Males were supposed to dress church-related; the females were supposed to dress as though they were hawking their wares. I dressed as a prophet: beard, long robe. I carried a doom sign. Hung from my waist, over my cod, was a sign that said "The end is c-c-coming": with an orthographic joke on orgasm you see, and over my behind was a matching sign that said, with relief, "The end is come."
No comments:
Post a Comment