How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [119]
Actually, they always are, but for those whose apocalyptic tendencies are measured by biblical benchmarks instead of stock tickers, the stakes are much higher. For example, on a brisk April 29 morning in 1980, Dr. Leland Jensen, a chiropractor and leader of a small religious sect called the Baha‘i Under the Provisions of the Covenant, led his devoted followers into fallout shelters in Missoula, Montana, to await the end of the world. Within the first hour, Jensen believed, a full third of the Earth’s population would be annihilated in a nuclear holocaust of fire and fallout. Over the course of the next twenty years most of the remaining population would be ravaged by conquest, war, famine, and pestilence. In the year 2000, the Baha’i Universal House of Justice would arise out of the ashes like a phoenix to help establish the thousand-year reign of God’s kingdom on Earth. How did Jensen know all this? He had a revelation in the Montana State Prison, while serving a sentence for sexually molesting a fifteen-year-old patient: “I felt a presence only. It talked to me—not in a physical voice but very vividly expressing to me that I was the promised Joshua (prophesied in Zechariah 3).”
This is classic end-times imagery—an apocalyptic revelation, the demise of the world at a millennial marker, the survival of a small chosen group of true believers, the return of the Messiah and peace after massive death and destruction, and even the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (conquest, war, famine, and pestilence). The iconography and poetry of the apocalypse is at once beautiful and terrifying, from the horrors wrought on sinners in countless “Last judgment” paintings (with swirling mixtures of awe-invoking black and red colors) by such masters as Albrecht Dürer, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, and Michelangelo, to the haunting vision in William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming”:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Today’s words and images are more vivid than those of a thousand years ago, with both religious and secular end-times scenarios competing for our attention. Recall The Doors’ disquieting vision in their 1967 rock song “The End,” visually enhanced a decade later by Francis Ford Coppola in the opening scene of Apocalypse Now, as army helicopters torch a Vietnam village the moment Jim Morrison lets loose with a throaty pronouncement “This is the end … .” Or Hal Lindsey’s 1977 “rapture” scene in the film version of The Late Great Planet Earth (narrated by the foreboding baritone voice of Orson Wells), showing Christians snatched from their moving automobiles by a returning Christ. Or more recently in Kevin Costner’s apocalyptic films Waterworld and The Postman. The iconographic theme even finds its way into editorial cartoons, as in a 1996 New Yorker contribution featuring a doomsayer with his placard: “THE END IS NEAR http://www.endnear.com.”
What are millennial phenomena, how did they develop in the year 1000 and how will they play themselves out in the year 2000, and why do we find them so compelling? Even those who have no particular bent toward ecclesiastical millennialism may find in its secular twin reason enough for legitimate concern. Is the end near? If not, what does the fear of it tell us about ourselves?
WHAT IS THE MILLENNIUM?
The millennium (literally in Latin mille thousand, annus year) is a thousand-year block of time that commands our attention because we like to hew the world into tidy categories. Given the average human life span of less than a century, triple-zero