The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (59 page)

But Revelation has endured in an age of technology and skepticism. Not many works of literature, not even the
Odyssey
of Homer, can boast such wide appeal over such an expanse of time. One celebrated case of this rugged durability is that of William Miller, the nineteenth-century farmer who became a prophet and made a set of intricate calculations, based on a line in verse 14 of the Book of Daniel: “unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.” Counting for various reasons this utterance to date from 457 B.C., and understanding one prophetic day to be the equivalent of a year, Miller came to the conclusion that the last of days would occur in 1843. Some of Miller’s followers refined the calculations further to October 22. After nothing happened on that day, the year was quickly revised to 1844, to take into account the year zero. The faithful Millerites gathered in their thousands to wait. One may not share the beliefs, but it is quite possible to understand the mortifying disenchantment. One eyewitness wrote,

[We] confidently expected to see Jesus Christ and all the holy angels with him…and that our trials and sufferings with our earthly pilgrimage would close and we should be caught up to meet our coming Lord…and thus we looked for our coming Lord until the bell tolled twelve at midnight. The day had then passed and our disappointment became a certainty. Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before. It seemed that the loss of all our earthly friends could have been no comparison. We wept, and wept, till the day dawned.

One means of dealing with the disillusionment was to give it a title—the Great Disappointment—duly capitalized. More importantly, according to Kenneth Newport’s impressive new account of the Waco siege, the very next day after the Disappointment, one Millerite leader in Port Gibson, New York, by the name of Hiram Edson had a vision as he walked along, a sudden revelation that “the cleansing of the sanctuary” referred to events not on earth, but in heaven. Jesus had taken his place in the heavenly holy of holies. The date had been right all along, it was simply the
place
they had got wrong. This “masterstroke,” as Newport calls it, this “theological lifeline” removed the whole affair into a realm immune to disproof. The Great Disappointment was explained, and many Millerites were drawn, with hope still strong in their hearts, into the beginnings of the Seventh Day Adventist movement—which was to become one of the most successful churches in the United States.

In passing, I note the connections between this church and the medieval sects that Cohn describes—the strong emphasis on the Book of Revelation, the looming proximity of the end, the strict division between the faithful remnant who keep the Sabbath, and those who join the ranks of the “fallen,” of the anti-Christ, identified with the Pope whose title, Vicarius Filii Dei (vicar of the son of God) apparently has a numerical value of 666.

I mention Hiram Edson’s morning-after masterstroke to illustrate the adaptability and resilience of end-time thought. For centuries now, it has regarded the end as “soon”—if not next week, then within a year or two. The end has not come, and yet no one is discomfited for long. New prophets, and soon, a new generation, set about the calculations, and always manage to find the end looming within their own lifetime. The million sellers like Hal Lindsey predicted the end of the world all through the seventies, eighties, and nineties—and today, business has never been better. There is a hunger for this news, and perhaps we glimpse here something in our nature, something of our deeply held notions of time, and our own insignificance against the intimidating vastness of eternity, or the age of the universe—on the human scale there is little difference. We have need of a plot, a narrative to shore up our irrelevance in the flow of things.

In
The Sense of an Ending
, Frank Kermode proposes that the enduring quality, the vitality of the Book of Revelation suggests a “consonance with our more naïve requirements of fiction.” We are born, as we will die, in the middle of things, in the “middest.” To make sense of our span, we need what he calls “fictive concords with origins and ends. ‘The End,’ in the grand sense, as we imagine it, will reflect our irreducibly intermediary expectations.” What could grant us more meaning against the abyss of time than to identify our own personal demise with the purifying annihilation of all that is. Kermode quotes with approval from Wallace Stevens—“the imagination is always at the end of an era.” Even our notions of decadence contain the hopes of renewal; the religious minded as well as the most secular, looked on the transition to the year two thousand as inescapably significant, even if all the atheists did was to party a little harder. It was inevitably a transition, the passing of an old age into the new—and who is to say now that Osama bin Laden did not disappoint, whether we mourned at the dawn of the new millennium with the bereaved among the ruins of lower Manhattan, or danced for joy, as some did, in the Gaza Strip.

Islamic eschatology from its very beginnings embraced the necessity of violently conquering the world and gathering up souls to the faith before the expected hour of judgment—a notion that has risen and fallen over the centuries, but in past decades has received new impetus from Islamist revivalist movements. It is partly a mirror image of the Protestant Christian tradition (a world made entirely Islamic, with Jesus as Mohammed’s lieutenant), partly a fantasy of the inevitable return of “sacred space,” the Caliphate, that includes most of Spain, parts of France, the entire Middle East, right up to the borders of China. As with the Christian scheme, Islam foretells of the destruction or conversion of the Jews.

Prophecy belief in Judaism, the original source for both the Islamic and Christian eschatologies, is surprisingly weaker—perhaps a certain irony in the relationship between Jews and their god is unfriendly to end-time belief, but it lives on vigorously enough in the Lubavitch movement and various Israeli settler groups, and of course is centrally concerned with divine entitlement to disputed lands.

We should add to the mix more recent secular apocalyptic beliefs—the certainty that the world is inevitably doomed through nuclear exchange, viral epidemics, meteorites, population growth, or environmental degradation. Where these calamities are posed as mere possibilities in an open-ended future that might be headed off by wise human agency, we cannot consider them as apocalyptic. They are minatory, they are calls to action. But when they are presented as unavoidable outcomes driven by ineluctable forces of history or innate human failings, they share much with their religious counterparts—though they lack the demonizing, cleansing, redemptive aspects, and are without the kind of supervision of a supernatural entity that might give benign meaning and purpose to a mass extinction. Clearly, fatalism is common to both camps, and both, reasonably enough, are much concerned with a nuclear holocaust, which to the prophetic believers illuminates in retrospect biblical passages that once seemed obscure. Hal Lindsey, preeminent among the popularizers of American apocalyptic thought, writes,

Zacheriah 14:12 predicts that “their flesh will be consumed from their bones, their eyes burned out of their sockets, and their tongues consumed out of their mouths while they stand on their feet.” For hundreds of years students of Bible prophecy have wondered what kind of plague could produce such instant ravaging of humans while still on their feet. Until the event of the atomic bomb such a thing was not humanly possible. But now everything Zacheriah predicted could come true in a thermonuclear exchange!

Two other movements, now mercifully defeated or collapsed, provide a further connection between religious and secular apocalypse—so concluded Norman Cohn in the closing pages of
The Pursuit of the Millennium
. The genocidal tendency among the apocalyptic medieval movements faded somewhat after fifteen hundred. Vigorous end-time belief continued, of course, in the Puritan and Calvinist movements, the Millerites, as we have seen, and in the American Great Awakening, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the Adventist movement. The murderous tradition, however, did not die away completely. It survived the passing of centuries in various sects, various outrages, to emerge in the European twentieth century transformed, revitalized, secularized, but still recognizable in what Cohn depicts as the essence of apocalyptic thinking—“the tense expectation of a final, decisive struggle in which a world tyranny will be overthrown by a ‘chosen people’ and through which the world will be renewed and history brought to its consummation.” The will of god was transformed in the twentieth century into the will of history, but the essential demand remained, as it still does today—“to purify the world by destroying the agents of corruption.” The dark reveries of Nazism about the Jews shared much with the murderous anti-Semitic demonology of medieval times. An important additional element, imported from Russia, was
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, the 1905 Tsarist police forgery, elevated by Hitler and others into a racist ideology. (It’s interesting to note how the
Protocols
has re-emerged as a central text for Islamists, frequently quoted on Web sites, and sold in street book stalls across the Middle East.) The Third Reich and its dream of a thousand-year rule was derived, in a form of secular millennial usurpation, directly from Revelation. Cohn draws our attention to the apocalyptic language of
Mein Kampf
: “If our people…fall victims to these Jewish tyrants of the nations with their lust for blood and gold, the whole earth will sink down…if Germany frees itself from this embrace, this greatest of dangers for the peoples can be regarded as vanquished for all the earth.”

In Marxism in its Soviet form, Cohn also found a continuation of the old millenarian tradition of prophecy, of the final violent struggle to eliminate the agents of corruption—this time it is the bourgeoisie who will be vanquished by the proletariat in order to enable the withering away of the state and usher in the peaceable kingdom. “The kulak…is prepared to strangle and massacre hundreds of thousands of workers…Ruthless war must be waged on the kulaks! Death to them!” Thus spoke Lenin, and his word, like Hitler’s, became deed.

Thirty years ago, we might have been able to convince ourselves that contemporary religious apocalyptic thought was a harmless remnant of a more credulous, superstitious, pre-scientific age, now safely behind us. But today prophecy belief, particularly within the Christian and Islamic traditions, is a force in our contemporary history, a medieval engine driving our modern moral, geo-political, and military concerns. The various jealous sky-gods—and they are certainly not one and the same god—who in the past directly addressed Abraham, Paul, or Mohammed, among others, now indirectly address us through the daily television news. These different gods have wound themselves inextricably around our politics and our political differences.

Our secular and scientific culture has not replaced or even challenged these mutually incompatible, supernatural thought systems. Scientific method, skepticism, or rationality in general, has yet to find an overarching narrative of sufficient power, simplicity, and wide appeal to compete with the old stories that give meaning to people’s lives. Natural selection is a powerful, elegant, and economic explicator of life on earth in all its diversity, and perhaps it contains the seeds of a rival creation myth that would have the added power of being true—but it awaits its inspired synthesizer, its poet, its Milton. The great American biologist E. O. Wilson has suggested an ethics divorced from religion, and derived instead from what he calls biophilia, our innate and profound connection to our natural environment—but one man alone cannot make a moral system. Science may speak of probable rising sea levels and global temperatures, with figures that it constantly refines in line with new data, but on the human future it cannot compete with the luridness and, above all, with the meaningfulness of the prophecies in the Book of Daniel, or Revelation. Reason and myth remain uneasy bedfellows.

Rather than presenting a challenge, science has in obvious ways strengthened apocalyptic thinking. It has provided us with the means to destroy ourselves and our civilization completely in less than a couple of hours, or to spread a fatal virus around the globe in a couple of days. And our spiraling technologies of destruction and their ever-greater availability have raised the possibility that true believers, with all their unworldly passion, their prayerful longing for the end times to begin, could help nudge the ancient prophecies towards fulfillment. Wojcik quotes a letter by the singer Pat Boone addressed to fellow Christians. All out nuclear war is what he appears to have had in mind. “My guess is that there isn’t a thoughtful Christian alive who doesn’t believe we are living at the end of history. I don’t know how that makes you feel, but it gets me pretty excited. Just think about actually seeing, as the apostle Paul wrote it, the Lord Himself descending from heaven with a shout! Wow! And the signs that it’s about to happen are everywhere.”

If this possibility of a willed nuclear catastrophe appears too pessimistic or extravagant, or hilarious, consider the case of another individual, remote from Pat Boone—President Ahmadinejad of Iran. His much reported remark about wiping Israel off the face of the earth may have been mere bluster of the kind you could hear any Friday in a thousand mosques around the world. But this posturing, coupled with his nuclear ambitions, become more worrying when set in the context of his end-time beliefs. In Jamkaran, a village not far from the holy city of Qum, a small mosque is undergoing a 20 million dollar expansion, driven forward by Ahmadinejad’s office. Within the Shi’ite apocalyptic tradition, the Twelfth Imam, the Mahdi, who disappeared in the ninth century, is expected to reappear in a well behind the mosque. His re-emergence will signify the beginning of the end days. He will lead the battle against the Dajjal, the Islamic version of the anti-Christ, and with Jesus as his follower, will establish the global Dar el Salaam, the dominion of peace, under Islam. Ahmadinejad is extending the mosque to receive the Mahdi, and already pilgrims by the thousands are visiting the shrine, for the president has reportedly told his cabinet that he expects the visitation within two years.