Meditation 119
The End?
This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end. The Doors
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According to a recent poll, some 17% of Americans claim to believe that the end of the world, exactly as predicted in the Bible, will occur in their lifetime. (Another 23% think is is going to happen after they are gone.)
This 17% is separate from those others who believe the end may come in their lifetime through a non-Biblical process, such as a major environmental disaster, an experiment in basic physics that goes horribly awry, a large meteor or asteroid striking the Earth, a major volcanic eruption, a global conflict, etc. At least these people have their fears based in a certain reality.
But a Biblical Apocalypse?
There have been Christians who have been expecting the end in their lifetimes in accordance with "The Revelation to John" (commonly called the Book of Revelations) since the first century. For some 1,900 years, Christians have gone to their graves, having expected to be alive to see the end of the world, and having been proven wrong. It's not unreasonable to estimate that at least five hundred million Christians have died over the past two millennia, each of whom expected to see an apocalypse. Every one of them has been wrong.
It should have been engraved on each of their tombstones -
"I expected to see the Apocalypse - I was wrong!"
Can anything be predicted from The Revelation to John? The experiment has been tried five hundred million times or more, and the outcome has been the same each and every time; complete failure. Five hundred million tests for predictive power; five hundred million identical results; no apocalypse.
The only accurate prediction that can be made about The Revelation to John is that fundamentalists will continue to use it to wrongly forecast the end of the world.
And I say with certainty: "The world is not going to end that way."
On my tombstone, the epitaph should read:
"John Tyrrell forecast there would be no Biblical Apocalypse. He was right!"