Apocalypse When?

[wolven7]

There are many groups in the world, these days, who say that they seek to bring about the "Biblical Apocalypse," as they understand it. They say that there is a definate series of events which preceeds the return of Jesus the Christ, and that only the fulfillment of those things can make certain that we (those of us deemed worthy) will see the reign of Heaven Everlasting. Or some such. But they aren't dealing with all of the legwork necessary.

There are those who say that they are seeking a more literal Apocalypse. A "Rending of the Veil," between what they see as the spirit and material worlds (remember pandemonium). But what are they doing to make it happen?

In the first case, those of you with brown coats should remember someone else who wanted to create a better world in which he was pretty sure he would not take part. Remember how that ended up. But these people are fully expecting to be rewarded for "fulfilling God's plan."

The apocalypse is a scary thought, to many. The idea that everything we know and undnerstand about the world could change, instantly. However, the thought that people are going about taking one interpretation of the event as, if you'll pardon, "Gospel" truth is scarier to me, by far.

Your thoughts on the apocalypse?

Comments

[auriam.livejournal.com]

The predictions of the Apocalypse are pretty much as accurate as most other specific religious doctrines: just people with the need for the spiritual and Meaning, talking about ideas they heard from someone else, trying to convince themselves of it by saying it over and over again to each other. Some of them try to get rich by writing apocalypse predictions or fictional depictions of it. Some of them really want it to happen because as bad as it could be, it'd finally justify their beliefs in the supernatural, God, etc (the thing the faithful most want is that which they can never have: Proof.)

The "Apocalypse" is not going to happen, at least not just as anyone predicted it. Something, however, will have to happen, because there are so many people who *believe that something will happen*, and more to the point, so many who are willing to *make* something happen. If you can't make the dog wag his tail, you wag the dog.

Bottom line: people all over the world are *excited* about the possibility of a big shakeup. Many are secretly or even openly looking forward to it - life as presented by science and rationality isn't as compelling or exciting as the life presented by the religions, Apocalypse or not. God isn't talking to (most) people anymore, there are no prophets or psychics who haven't either been debunked or refused to be tested... and people want something supernatural, and they want it soon.

My prediction, which will probably be quite a bit off, if not completely wrong, and we won't care which because if it comes true, no one will remember I made it? There's going to be an accelerating technological and scientific revolution, having to do with computation (artificial intelligence, especially), genetics and bioengineering. There are going to be a lot of people who are "rendered obsolete," everywhere. There's going to be a lot of fighting and a lot of unpleasantness. Either because of this, or pre-empting it, there will arise an oppressive almost-all-seeing-all-knowing world state, which will keep things as "normal" as possible, ie, hiding the truth and making sure the many, the poor, the weak don't band together against the few rich, powerful, and strong who run things. Eventually, people will either revolt against the system despite being hopelessly outgunned and out-teched, or they'll give in completely and become little more than slaves, with nothing but legal drugs and brain reprogramming to make them happy.

Of course, things could be different. Depending on which happens first, those who stand to lose could see it coming and fight sooner instead of later. There could be a large state-against-state war before the victor becomes the de facto world head honcho. Could be China, could be the US. It won't be either afterward, it'll be something new and worse.

But in the end, things will settle down for a time, and people will again feel that the new equilibrium is normal, even though there will probably be even more stress, depression, interpersonal alienation, and feeling of loss of meaning than there is now.

Oh, and don't forget how global warming will play into all of this: when the powerful realize it's really happening, if they haven't already, they'll start trying to grab what they can while they can, trying to make sure that at least they individually will survive. There won't be any kind of concerted global effort to reduce the causes of warming, because each of the potential heads of the new world stands to lose by decreasing its own industrial and economic power.

Dystopian? Perhaps. Farfetched? Maybe not farfetched enough. But our world today might have looked dystopian and farfetched to those only fifty years ago...

[wolven.livejournal.com]

The problem with apocalypse predictions is the problem with "The Future." We turn around, and it's today. We don't notice, because we slid into it. Which is what makes the Apocalypse what it is.

It can only be an actual apocalypse if it's sudden. Possibly unexpected, but certainly sudden, and jarring.

When you talk about rationality and science, that way, it kind of makes me want to throw up a little. As if the things in which we have faith are not the things which others may rationally know, and vice versa. Belief and knowledge rest on the same scale, most often, and the things we claim to know are only things which we can have a degree of probability. A high degree, yes, but the more we correlate anything the more we claimto be able to draw from that theory. Circularity.

Objectivity, intersubjectivity, subjectivity and relativity. All points of view, by which we can see that the things we hold as "true" are simply those which mesh best with our worldview.

And yeah. It's all dystopian. But some say that even the apocalypse is part of a larger cycle.

*shrug* Guess we'll see.

[auriam.livejournal.com]

I distinguish between "faith" and "belief." Faith I define as "belief without reasonable proof that could convince most people," stuff like experiments and observation, stuff that anyone could try if they had the equipment, the training, and the time. The only thing is, of course, most people don't have those three things, so we have to take science at its word. But think about this: we have microwave ovens, automobiles, computers... all things created by rational inquiry into the way the world works. What has religion, faith, given us? Nothing tangible - and that's what we can measure, tangible things.

There are subjective benefits to believing in things even though you can't prove them... like life after death, loving deities who want you to be happy, morality that defines what you do as "OK"... but I don't think we necessarily have to believe something that's not true in order to be happy. We can be taught only those things that appear to be "objectively" true, from an early age, and learn to live with it.

I think the problem isn't lack of meaning, it's loss of the meaning you thought was there to begin with... losing faith is a lot more jarring to a person than, say, the world ending but ending just as you thought it would, and you get to go to heaven while all the bad people go to hell. One is just the end of the material world, but you're safe, and the other is the end of all the safety you thought you had...

[wolven.livejournal.com]

There you described the very difference. Faith and Belief are different from science and observation, in the very sense that they give us something to strive toward, some unknonwn quantity. Because if we simply "learn to live with it," we never try to learn more, and then, why even be alive?

The process of the universe to create us, be it directed or random, was an aawful lot to go through for nothing. We have to create our own meaning, for it to have any staying power. Constantly and through continual examination of all things, we redefine our purpose in life.

"There is no security in this world; there is only opportunity."

[auriam.livejournal.com]

Yep. I'm in favor of continual re-examination, growth, and learning the truth as best you can, even if it's not what you wanted to hear. And I agree that making your own meaning is what being an individual is "about," if it's about anything.

Why be alive, though? Because it beats the alternative, because we're evolutionarily programmed to want to survive, and to fear unknowns, like death. That's the only "objective" answer I can give.

[auriam.livejournal.com]

I guess I mean "rationally" and "science" and "objectively" in the sense of "things we can work out through logic and math applied to observations that can be replicated by different people, unambiguous proof that doesn't depend on whether you want to believe it or not."

Or as someone said, "Reality is that which refuses to go away when you stop believing in it."

I've never really seen any unambiguous proof of the existence of magic, or the soul, or the God most people believe in, who answers personal prayers and changes things for your benefit if you ask nicely. Then again, if there is a God, maybe it doesn't want to be proven or disproven, but derives entertainment or some other kind of satisfaction from changing what it likes and refusing to act when it knows to do so would constitute unambiguous proof. I wrote a journal entry on that recently, I remember...

So, I don't know if there's such a thing as a literal Apocalypse, but I'm not counting on it. I thought Y2K had a good probability of being a disaster, but apparently we got that under control fairly handily; the only things I noticed were getting dates like 19100 at the gas pump and some badly coded webpages.

If we look forward to the end of the world, maybe we'll get what we're wishing for, but not because it's actually happening according to predictions, but because it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy which only works when enough people believe it's inevitable so they don't work to stop it.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

I believe that was Philip K Dick.

And if there was no one there to experience/believe in it, what reality would there be. Hence the intersubjectivity of all matter, energy, etc. All states depend on the interaction and waveform collapse of all other states.

I think all prophecies are self-fulfilling, in that the only way to get them to come about is for people to work toward them. SEe above, regarding intersubjectivity.

[auriam.livejournal.com]

So... there are a lot of people working for "Improvement" of the world, as they see it... and for a great number of those, the Apocalypse would be a great improvement, since according to their belief systems, the world until then is just a waiting room or testing ground for heaven and hell, and "mortal life" doesn't really matter. They'd love for the Rapture to happen, or for the Mahdi to overthrow the Infidels, or for the Maschiach to come and blow his horn to lead everyone into the final battle which cements God's hold over the people and brings about the glorious Eternal Kingdom of Zion. Buddhists yearn for Nirvana, same thing as Apocalypse plus Heaven, except that it isn't for everyone at the same time and doesn't require the world to end for everyone else.

Most people are going around acting like life is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. There's probably no afterlife or preservation of the individual mind and memories, though I can't be absolutely sure. That's the only reason I haven't killed myself - because no matter how bad life gets or hurts, death isn't an escape to somewhere better...

[auriam.livejournal.com]

Now the big thing is the whole "2012" prophecy BS. I say it's BS because just the fact that the mayan calendar ends then doesn't mean a whole lot - it's just the way their knot numbering system happened to work; they probably didn't expect to be using the same calendar for more than a couple of thousand years. They might have been working on a new one when they were wiped out. Same thing as Y2K, but a whole lot less impressive. So they would have had to add a new string to the calendars.

There are a lot of apocalyptic predictions going around. I hear people debating them all the time, on the net, in groups of friends, etc. I haven't heard much cohesive agreement on what will happen when, but I'd put my bets on some kind of utterly "normal," unpredictable but quite explicable in hindsight, events that will change the way the world works, like, say, a large-scale nuclear war, or a biological terrorist attack, or the rise of widespread population cutting measures like euthanasia, or a net-organized global uprising which takes governments by surprise and results in a few years (maybe more) of anarchy at the end of which someone ruthless and cunning will take power, as always.

[auriam.livejournal.com]

The only reason I think anything will happen at all, and that the eschatological talk isn't complete bullshit, is that things are getting less stable all around: geopolitically (the state powers are shifting as China and India become industrialized and wired), technologically (lots of new information tech being introduced more and more quickly, enabling more and more people to get their hands on the information they want, even if they probably shouldn't have it... especially weaponry and biological code), and religiously (in the West, traditional major religions are declining in membership while smaller groups are gaining; the net fragments blocs effectively by giving people more of a choice of who to associate with. In the East, Islam is using the network to grow more of a united voice, but that voice seems to be mostly against the West and in favor of expansion and conversion.)

The net makes it easier to spread information AND misinformation, true news AND propaganda, whistleblowing AND conspiracy theories, genuine skeptical debunking AND misinformed doubt, than ever before. People are hearing what they want to hear and reading what they want to read. Which means that the most interesting ideas and the most competitive memes are quickly outcompeting the less interesting and exciting ideas and the less vigorously spreading memes.

In essence, something *has* to happen, given all this instability. Could be a lot of things at once. Could be a few of the ones we've both mentioned. Does this qualify as The Apocalypse or The End Of The World? It depends on what you mean by The End of the World. The world as we know it now isn't the same as the world we knew ten years ago, which wasn't the same as twenty years ago. What changes fastest isn't the present, but our idea of the future (and our ideas about what's true about the past). It just depends on how fast things change, and whether that change is viewed as positive or negative. Large negative change everywhere at once could qualify as "the end of the world as we know it," but it certainly isn't the end of the world itself. Large positive change could be just as powerful, but it isn't usually viewed as the end of anything but as the beginning of something new and good. The Net's expansion is a good example - people talk about the Dawn Of The Information Age, but they don't talk about the End of The Ignorance Age. If the Net were to be destroyed tomorrow, it might be the End of The World as a lot of people know it, but not *the* end.

I don't think there will ever be *the* end. Something always continues, whether what survives is "good" or "bad."

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Well, if it didn't, it wouldn't be eternal, infinite, or, in essence, the universe.

[auriam.livejournal.com]

The thing is, though, the universe we *see*, that science is currently mostly in agreement on, isn't infinite or eternal, as far as we can tell; it began a finite time ago with a finite amount of "stuff," and although it can go on existing indefinitely if it keeps expanding, the limit as time approaches infinity is finite mass divided by infinite space, which is nothing. So the question on everyone's mind is "why is there anything here at all? Are we just lucky to exist during the brief time life will be able to exist in this universe?" The question is how universes start at all, and no one knows the answer to that one yet. That's where religion can retreat to, for now.

And I'm sure everyone, everyone, has some kind of irrational, unscientific, but nonetheless real belief about how the universe got here, and why they're alive, even the late Carl Sagan or good old Stone-Cold Atheist Richard Dawkins. The mind can't confront an unimaginable situation, like death or the nothingness before or after the universe, so it creates possible explanations for what they really are. Personally, I think it "just makes sense" for there to be something that endures forever, whether I can prove it rationally and mathematically or not. Irrational, I know, but I'm not an atheist, I'm an agnostic.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

If there's infinite anything, there's infinite everything, by logical necessity. Space isn't space, and even infinite space give room for infinite potentiality.

Maybe there is something infinite, maybe that infinite thing arose out of infinite nothing. It's difficult for us to know, so, yes, we speculate. But we should als investigate, come up with theories, and work to test them.

Science and religion can work in tandem, with complimentary aspects speaking one to another.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Oddly, the literal meaning of the apocalypse preempts the possibility of people remaining unaware, or directed by anything other than... the world. It's a full recognition of the nature of reality (whatever that happens to be), and is supposedly the directive force of its time. Imperative zeitgeist.

[auriam.livejournal.com]

It'd be great if everyone recognized the same nature of reality, and could stop fighting over it. But like this week's episode of Southpark, if we didn't fight over religion, maybe we'd fight over atheism.

The difference is, though, that the rational mindset, the scientific mindset, is supposed to be open to being contradicted, without resorting to "dirty tricks" to maintain control of the truth. Some scientists are impeccable at this, and others like the Korean scientist who faked embryo cloning and stem cells from adult cells, or Thomas Edison (who would go around electrocuting animals with AC current to show it was "more dangerous" than his patented DC system), are much more concerned with their own reputations and income than with Truth.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Perhaps we would.

The acceptance of change, in science, is terribly slow, which could be attributed to the nature of evidence, but in many cases it's simply that people don't want to accept the change that is put before them. Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, String Theory (maybe), and the list goes on. Pasturisation was questioned for years, despite the overwhelming evidence.

People resist change, unfortunately, and to their credit. It remains to be seen whether that resistence will be of a higher order, or lower, in the coming years.

[auriam.livejournal.com]

I think we resist change because we fear it. We fear uncertainty, unstable footing, because it might harm us. We fear because it's instinctive. But to truly experience the world is to open oneself to the experience of inevitable uncertainty and change, eventually the infinite change, from being something back to being nothing again.

I can talk about it, but I'm not really at that point yet. I am currently working on accepting the way of the world, and not retreating into false certainties and hopes that feel dishonest...

[salrushdy.livejournal.com]

it so easily to hang out in the 'waiting room' and to wait train to the paradise than even to ask yourself how you want this paradise will look like.
key words:laziness, lack of responsibility, fear, weakness

[wolven.livejournal.com]

And I understand that people are these things, and that that's why they do it, i want to know what makes them think it's ok to be those things, in the first place.

[auriam.livejournal.com]

See, it's not for them to worry about what paradise will be, because they already know it'll be perfect in every way, even if they can't define that. The idea is that the world here and now is imperfect and will never be "holy," so the apocalypse is the final Purification before the Judgement, which "punishes" those left behind in the mortal world... at least, that's how I read the Christian Fundamentalist / "Left Behind" apocalypse mythos. If you're saintly good, you get hoovered up to heaven right away. If you're somewhere between Good and Bad, or you're Good but not quite as Good, you have to wait through the Tribulation. God lets Satan think he's winning, just to fuck with his mind, then crushes him and all those foolish enough to believe in (secularism, humanism, unitarianism, paganism, atheism, homosexuality, etc), with the final "gotcha."

It's a revenge fantasy...

[unknownbinaries.livejournal.com]

People shouldn't pull for something unless they understand it. Especially is they really are doing all the work they should.

I have been one of the latter. I was (and still am) convinced that if I wasn't 'supposed' to be doing so, things in general wouldn't 'let' me. The fabric of things would be unaffected by my fuckery. And I'm pretty sure that's what happened, now. As, now, I feel that I was possibly wrong, or at least overeager.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

I still don't think there's any "should" or "shouldn't" in the universal, so much as there is the conbined experiences and preferences of all of reality, which can have an effect on your wants and desires. But if your will is stronger, than there it is.

[unknownbinaries.livejournal.com]

That's pr3cisely what I meant, though. (The three was a typo, but I'm leaving it.) It's also why I put quotes where I did. I'm not implying that the universe is consciously preventing this, though some bits of it might be. The patterns in things, the resistances, it's all a pattern to make what is going to happen, happen. To protect the things that need more time to happen. It's the Flow. Determinism via causality.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Ah, understood, then, yes.

[auriam.livejournal.com]

But what if there's no "designed" Pattern at all, just a lot of things happening because things happened before they happened, going back to... well, to the unknown First Cause? What if there's no over-intelligence directing things where to go, at least not now or yet or anymore, and things just go where they will? If our wills are deterministic but unpredictable, and are directed by our evolved but genetically variable drives (for eating, sleeping, sex, novelty-seeking, risk aversion, etc), which interact with our senses which record our environment, well, we're just running our programs, even if no one can say exactly which program any particular person is running, or what it'll do next.

So yep, things may be deterministic and there may be only one universe with the attributes we know and love (or hate), or there may be random splits every time there's a dice roll, making tons of copies (but then there's no way to tell which path you're going to take...). Either way, no one knows what's definitely going to happen, and everyone does what they think they should do to make the things they want to happen happen.

So, history could be seen as the combined decisions of every human being and animal, which are the combined decisions of DNA, which is dedicated only to replicating and preserving itself (but luckily, it gets screwed up every once in a while by radiation or teratogens, and keeps making new and more interesting things which do a better job of maintaining and replicating their patterns by exploiting new energy sources or taking the existing ones away from their competitors).

Things flow, and what will happen will happen, but we can't know what will happen before it happens, at which point we can slap ourselves and say "should've seen that coming." We make our decisions based on what we think will happen in the future, but everyone is making their decisions on the same basis; those who are the best predictors and maintainers, or the fastest changers and replicators, survive and thrive.