How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [127]
In this phrase—the fire that will cleanse—is the essence of the millennium. But what is the lure?
THE LURE OF THE MILLENNIUM
Most of us would never be taken in by the likes of Jones, Applewhite, or Koresh, but the attraction of the millennium is not restricted to a handful of religious fanatics and survivalists holed up in compounds and bomb shelters in rural America. In fact, a U.S. News and World Report poll conducted November 14 to 16, 1997, found that “66 percent of Americans, including a third of those who admit they never attend church, say they believe that Jesus Christ will return to Earth some day—an increase from the 61 percent who expressed belief in the Second Coming three years ago.” Linking the Second Coming to the millennium, an April 1993 poll conducted by Yankelovich Partners for Time/CNN found that 20 percent of the respondents answered “yes” to the question, “Do you think that the second coming of Jesus Christ will occur sometime around the year 2000?” One in five is not a trivial figure. And this is only those who hold to a religious millennialism. There is a new brand of secular millennial conceptions that envision the end of the world coming by global warming or nuclear war, by genetically engineered viruses or chemical bombs, by overpopulation or mass starvation, or by cosmic collisions or alien encounters. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride again. Why? What makes the story of the millennium, the apocalypse, the end, so compelling? What is the appeal of these chiliastic movements? To begin to construct an answer, let’s step back and look at the larger picture of: (1) humans as pattern-seeking animals; (2) humans as storytelling animals.
1.
We evolved to be pattern-seekers—we are the descendants of the most successful pattern finders. But as we have seen, this does not guarantee we will not make errors in our thinking. In fact, it guarantees that we will make errors in our thinking, because magical thinking is a spandrel of clear thinking. Recall the two types of thinking errors: Type 1 Error: Believing a falsehood and Type 2 Error: Rejecting a truth. The belief that the millennium harbors an apocalyptic end of humanity is a Type 1 Error in thinking. It is an error because it is more likely that the apocalyptic images in Revelation were not portents of things to come in the distant future, but commentary on their own times. The Antichrist figure, for example, is believed to allude to the Roman emperor Nero, who killed himself by falling on his sword. The battle of Armageddon described in Ezekiel probably refers to the Scythian invasion of Israel in pre-Christian times. The Bible was written for the people of that time as history, social commentary, and political analysis, not unlike what Nostradamus did in his quatrains written as social and political exegesis on the sixteenth century, rather than prophecy for the twentieth.
2.
We tell stories about the patterns we find in nature. For thousands of years before the advent of writing, myths and religions were sustained by the oral tradition of stories with meaningful patterns—gods and God, supernatural beings and mystical forces, and our place in history, in the world, and in the cosmos. We may live in an enlightenment culture of science and rationality, but we hold on to and cherish our stories