Given the recent demise of so many juicy and useful pseudo-threats, politicians and other fearmongers are probably watching this with anticipation. After all, it’s never too early to start planning your strategy of terrifying people into giving you more money and power.
There you go again, spoiling my fun of gloom and doom paranoia. 🙂
By the way, apocalypses are mostly in the Other Biblical Religion. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov said that “the Messiah will come without anyone firing a shot”. So I’m not one to worry about the earth being destroyed much. 🙂
I’m pretty sure that was done deliberately and for a cynically calculated reason, as a way to terrify people to make them easier to control. But then, I’ve seen too many Southern and Mid-Western preachers doing exactly that, I’m sure it has warped my opinion of religions in general, and their specific brand of Christianity in particular.
I don’t know if there was a cynical reason, besides the promoting of weird and often pseudepigraphic writing, behind the apocalyptic works of the Essenes and their erstwhile Greco-Roman Mithraic offshoot descendants (i.e. xtianity). It did turn out to be used that way though. A lot, no doubt.
In my experience, it has. In theory that might have changed in the last couple decades, and might even have been limited to only a few churches when I noted it (though if so, I have to be the unluckiest guy I know, to have hit all of them)… but I doubt it.