I have said before that I enjoy conspiracy theories, not because I believe them but because it is fascinating to see where they come from, and where they lead. The most persistent theories through the years have been those dealing with the end of the world.
Some view the end of the world with fear, others view it with anticipation of a better afterlife, and still others see its approach as an opportunity to change course before it is too late.
The Doomsday Clock is an example of the latter approach, attempting to warn people of how close humanity is to destroying the world. For 77 years, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has announced how close to annihilation we are, with midnight representing the moment when people will have made the earth uninhabitable. From the start of the millennium until 2022, the clock was set at 100 seconds to midnight. Last year, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the clock was set at 90 seconds midnight, and it remains there this year because of continuing concerns about the war in Ukraine, the Israel-Gaza conflict, the potential of a nuclear arms race, and the climate crisis.
The world has avoided earlier predictions of its demise, and no one knows when it may end. Still, people make those predictions.
In biblical days, the apostles thought Jesus would be returning during their lifetimes, taking believers away to a heavenly kingdom. By the second century, Montanus, who claimed to speak under the influence of the Spirit, said Christ’s return was imminent, sparking what was known as Montanism. Many Christian communities were almost abandoned when believers left their homes and migrated to a plain between the villages of Pepuza and Tymion in Phrygia (modern Turkey), where Montanus claimed the heavenly Jerusalem would descend to earth.
German mathematician and astrologer Johannes Stöffler predicted that a great flood would cover the world on February 25, 1524, when all of the known planets would be in alignment under Pisces, a water sign. Pamphlets announcing the coming flood caused a general panic that led Count von Iggleheim to build a three-story ark. There was light rain that day, but no flooding.
Many 17th century European Christians saw the Great London Fire of 1666 as a sign of the end of the world, having associated the date with the number of the Beast, 666. The fire destroyed much of the city, including 87 parish churches and about 13,000 houses, but did not usher in the end of the world.
The owner of a hen in Leeds, England, created a panic about the coming Judgement Day in 1806, by writing “Christ is coming” in corrosive ink on eggs and reinserting them into the hen’s body. Great numbers of people came to see the prophetic hen before the scheme was revealed.
In 1813, a woman named Joanna Southcott, who claimed to hear voices and had predicted the crop failures and famines of 1799 and 1800, announced that, although she was 64 years old and a virgin, she would be giving birth to the second messiah, whose arrival would signal the end of the earth. She died without giving birth.
William Miller began preaching in 1831 that Christ’s second coming would occur in 1843, bringing the end of the world. He had some 100,000 followers and, when the prediction failed to come true, Miller revised his calculation, determining that the world would end in 1844. As Britannica reported, “Follower Henry Emmons wrote, ‘‘I waited all Tuesday, and dear Jesus did not come … I lay prostrate for 2 days without any pain — sick with disappointment.’”
It was only the Christians who saw an approaching end of the world. In 1910, the approach of Halley’s comet, which passes by the earth every 76 years, brought fear that it would destroy the planet, either by colliding with it or by spreading poisonous gasses. The panic was so widespread that a group in Oklahoma tried to sacrifice a virgin to ward off impending doom. Bottled air became a hot commodity. Needless to say, the world did not end in 1910.
Chen Tao, or True Way, a religious movement that blended elements of Christianity, Buddhism, UFO conspiracy theories, and Taiwanese folk religion, established by Hon-Ming Chen of Taiwan, predicted that God would appear on Channel 18 in the United States on March 25, 1988, to announce that his descent to earth would occur the following week, in a physical form identical to Chen. His arrival would be followed the next year by millions of devil spirits, massive flooding, and a mass extinction of the human population. Followers could be spared by buying passage on spaceships, disguised as clouds.
Harold Camping used numerology and the Bible to predict the end of the world 12 times, first in 1994. His most famous prediction was for May 21, 2011, which he calculated would be exactly 7,000 years after the biblical flood. When that date passed without incident, he pushed back the date to October 21, 2011.
There was speculation, based on Maya Long Count calendar, that the world would end on December 21, 2012, which marked the end of the first “Great Cycle”. The calendar tracked time for 5,125 years, but stopped on that date, and some thought it meant doomsday was at hand. With end-of-the-world scenarios ranging from the earth colliding with the imaginary planet Nibiru to giant solar flares, massive tidal catastrophes, and a realignment of earth’s axis, a man in China built an ark and survival kits were widely sold.
Concerns about the end of the world led to the popular phrase, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”
Diana Butler Bass suggests a remedy for all of the worries about the end of the world in her Sunday Musings column on her Substack The Cottage. This week, she focused on 1 Thessalonians 5:12-18:
“But we appeal to you, brothers and sisters, to respect those who labor among you, and have charge of you in the Lord and admonish you; esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves. And we urge you, beloved, to admonish the idlers, encourage the faint hearted, help the weak, be patient with all of them. See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all.
“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”
Diana writes, “[T]he body of this letter is about the question, a predicament of early Christians: how do you live at the end of the world?”
I think that I hear that question almost every day of my life right about now. I regularly get email from people who say, hey, I don’t know how to live now. I don’t understand what’s going on all around me. What am I supposed to say to my children? How are we supposed to act amid this chaos?
There’s so much talk of doom and despair. We’re coming to the end of democracy. Is this the end of the era of human rights? Is this the end of women being able to take care of their own bodies? Is this the end of the planet itself? Is this the end of everything we have ever known?
Diana concludes:
The last thing we can do is to give in. Because if we give in, maybe then we help usher in the end of the world.
But if we stand up and we say no, if we insist upon living in faith, hope, and love no matter how much doom surrounds us, no matter how awful this circumstance looks, maybe we change things.
No matter the threat, we continue to give thanks for our lives, for the lives of our friends and neighbors, for the creativity and all of the gifts that we can bring to this moment and make the human future better.
This does not have to be the end of the world, because we can pick up the same tools that our ancestors picked up — faith, hope, and love — and live differently. And as we deploy them in the midst of the challenges of our own day, we can give thanks as we move through these difficult moments.
At the end of her column/sermon, she quotes Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk, author, and proponent of the worldwide gratitude movement: “There is a wave of gratefulness because people are becoming aware how important this is and how this can change our world. It can change our world in immensely important ways, because if you’re grateful, you’re not fearful, and if you’re not fearful, you’re not violent. If you’re grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not of a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people, and you are respectful to everybody, and that changes this power pyramid under which we live.”
Jill Suttie interviewed Brother David for the the Greater Good Science Center of Berkeley, California, which “studies the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of well-being, and teaches skills that foster a thriving, resilient, and compassionate society”.
“Anything that produces happier, healthier individuals creates thereby a society in which more people are healthy and happy. This alone is a great improvement,” Brother David said. “But we can go a step further and show that grateful individuals live in a way that leads to the kind of society human beings long for. In many parts of the world society is sick. Keywords of the diagnosis are: Exploitation, oppression, and violence. Grateful living is a remedy against all three of these symptoms.”
He continued, “It is … pretty evident that greed, oppression, and violence have led us to a point of self-destruction. Our survival depends on a radical change; if the gratitude movement grows strong and deep enough, it may bring about this necessary change. Grateful living brings in place of greed: sharing; in place of oppression: respect; in place of violence: peace. Who does not long for a world of sharing, mutual respect, and peace?”
Café Chatter
On What Will They Do?: So. Things haven’t changed all that much. Other than the spread. The influence by Mother’s for Liberty. You could hardly have “Liberty”, when they make every effort to disrupt schools and teaching. You do not want NH to follow Florida.
— Candace Skurnik