Archive for September, 2007
Armageddon Incorporated
Certainly, in this post-enlightenment age, the average affluent urbanised individual is more inclined to stigmatise forms of thinking that seem religious or which are not easily tabulated or appreciated in a predictive or instrumentalist way. Often, this takes the form of quantifiable (bean-counting) types of knowledge speaking loudly over the top of qualitative (personal) belief systems and not necessarily in a respectable manner. I’m reminded of a recent exchange between renowned evolutionist Richard Dawkins and an American student who asked simply, ‘What if you’re wrong?’ A fair enough question in my view — I mean, why can’t we question the findings of researchers no matter how much popular credos they have and for that fact question our own assumptions in a self-reflexive manner — but one that was not answered with equal fairness. (This is an issue I’ll take up in another later posting about the popularisation of ridicule as a normal response to non-secular belief systems — something that I like to call religious phobic fascism).
Voices from the End of the World
It is the late 1980s, a slightly more innocent time — if it can be thought of in that way — before Australian airports became obsessed with ethnicised ‘stranger danger’. A man named ‘George’, in his late forties, is distributing throughout Brisbane’s international airport a poor photostatted, slightly crumpled, typed a4-sized leaflet labelled simply Antichrist. With dramatic zeal and oratory passion, George proclaims to passersby that every ‘reasonable person’, duly perplexed at the world’s tribulations, should exhort themselves with full knowledge of the conspiratorial ‘realities’ exposed by his research. ‘The times are showing’, he announces, reading from his tract, that ‘the antichrist is coming soon. Along with the antichrist will come the 666 system’. These are ripe conditions, George maintains, for the ‘devil-possessed’ antichrist to reveal himself to the world and ‘turn us into evil’. He warns, ‘the antichrist, my fellow brother and sister of god, is a person who in a few years will be in power as a world leader. The antichrist will wipe out and destroy all people who are associated with Christianity. This will be true in a few years from now’.
Scalping the Apocalypse Ticket
If the world was to end at the turn of the millennium, as some did believe, many took comfort that Australia was seen as the best place to be during the outworking of an apocalyptic scenario. One Australian doomsday enthusiast, a regular contributor to the Canadian-based bible prophecy discussion list created in 1996, extended a warm invitation in late 1999 to all Christians worldwide who at the time perceived something ominous on the Y2K horizon: ‘I’m not saying Australia will completely escape whatever disasters befall us on or after 1 January 2000, but you will all be somewhat safer here from Christian persecution — we have plenty of “bush” to hide in’.
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