Apocalypses and Apocalypticism, Transcript
T&MP Apocalypses and Apocalypticism - Centre Place
Apocalypses and Apocalypticism - Centre Place
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M29psDZBWdc
Transcript:
(00:01) so apocalypses and apocalypticism so on the one hand it's a very dark topic but on the other hand i've taken it in a little lighthearted way so hopefully it'll be a combination and see if the clicker works here okay so apocalypticism which is to say obsession with the worlds and slash destruction and i'm just always um struck with this famous uh image from the end of planet of the apes and also the simpsons planet of the apes the musical you know damn dirty apes all right uh and then of course though
(00:47) nowadays i think there's more than more ways than ever to imagine uh the end so obviously we've always had uh divine apocalypse that god is going to destroy the world as an idea that people have been thinking of for thousands of years but more recently obviously we have lived under the uh shadow of nuclear apocalypse certainly um this was um what we were thinking about a lot when i was a kid and growing up and um and i think in some sense we still have reason to think about it yeah this is sort of like side related but i
(01:29) wonder if you know all the baby boomers that grew up under threat of nuclear apocalypse if their response to climate change is because they grew up with the threat of the cold war and nuclear apocalypse hanging over their heads and their best response to it was to ignore it and so they're using it could be so another another kind of apocalypse that we have right now is climate change right and so other kinds of so instead of a um one split second uh uh aggressive error in nuclear brinksmanship between the two nuclear
(02:03) superpowers which might have just totally uh made the world unlivable in in hours uh instead now we're looking at um at human-caused climate change that could has the potential to make uh the earth very less inhabitable or maybe totally uninhabitable for vast numbers anyway of of people to the point where we cause ourselves economic ruin and all kinds of chaos and things like that but in a sense that it has happening in such a slow moving way um that we are been able as a species to either largely ignore it or do this
(02:37) ostrich thing of burying our heads in sand and hoping it's going to go away and you know and nothing is still happening so another kind of both kinds of human-made apocalypses one of the ones that we think about a lot nowadays is plagues or super viruses there's certainly lots of fiction that um uh where something like this happens uh like andromeda strain to anyway there's all kinds of different storylines ah there's so many of these you're gonna get them ahead of time here this is really fun
(03:11) okay advance so asteroid apocalypse that's something that we definitely i think have been thinking about a lot more um although in a sense it would be um although it's completely possible uh it's actually very very likely yeah okay so sheen wants to point out that it's very likely but i want to point out that it's unlikely in in the in the very quick time frame of when we've been aware of it as as possibly happening so in other words because it only happens let's say every so many hundreds of millions of
(03:45) years and the idea that you would in our our very brief window of being aware of asteroids if it were to suddenly and actually having spaceships if in that kind of a um almost let's say geologic time if that were to happen at that particular moment it's quite an unfair coincidence but in any event asteroid apocalypse robot artificial intelligent apocalypse sheen also thinks that's very likely you're very pessimistic today shane okay alien apocalypse i'm going to say this one's unlikely but we think a lot about
(04:21) it so superhero supervillain apocalypse this certainly makes money for marvel and the disney zombie apocalypse which um i i think the lego zombies are funner than the other zombies i find zombie movies to be unsettlingly gross but anyway they obviously are very very popular some of the big television shows and also well anyway movies okay um so for me uh growing up uh in my family a very influential movie was called the day after which was actually even a um i think it was a home it was a made for tv movie abc movie in 1983 which was a dramatization
(05:04) of having a nuclear where it must have been a fairly limited nuclear war but anyway that destroyed a bunch of midwestern cities and then how uh regular suburban uh white middle western american people like us reacted to that and so therefore is it designed essentially to you know really pull a lot of our different fear strings and apparently it also very much unsettled ronald reagan who was the president of the time um in terms of as they look at his journal and memoirs and things like that people have looked back and said that he
(05:36) also um very much was affected by this particular movie it certainly affected our family um that's the wrong way the other way yeah so this is the right way so not zombie apocalypse so um surviving the nuclear apocalypse then so after the day after this is my family back in that you know time period 84 83 is when the movie came out so after the day after my dad bought a bunch of backpacks which he filled with survival supplies they were not for when we actually went camping they were specifically in the garage for when we got the nuclear alert
(06:12) uh and we were gonna then all go to the you know the garage put the backpacks on and we were you know gonna hightail it because my parents then also bought a farm in outside the suburban ring so we lived in minneapolis and we lived in a suburb an inter ring suburb and so then we were gonna either if you if the car still worked you know get in the car otherwise we were hiking out past chaska anyway and then in the event that the city was going to be nuked and so that was certainly something that was enough on the mind that actual
(06:42) property was purchased and so we certainly were thinking about it as kids um another one of the movies that you know was then influential at that time also 83 if you might remember it is the it's a um what's his name um sarah jessica parker's husband matthew broderick who's matthew broderick movie uh war games you know which um where norad uh uh has has an again an ai um that uh accidentally or deliberately you know is going to start a war nearly starts a nuclear war with the soviet union and almost destroys
(07:19) everything in that movie also a scary movie for the time so nuclear bringsmanship so as a combo then so that was certainly the kind of secular apocalypse that was hanging over our family but my family also um uh in that time was religious and we were mormons and mormon leaders uh taught you know in general the idea is called the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints because of the idea is that this is everybody's living in the latter days already so in other words the end times and an eminent second coming of christ is about to
(07:55) happen uh which might also be you know timed with some kind of a destructive apocalypse after which you know there'll be like a millennium and so um mormon families in the 70s and 80s uh were regularly um stored what we call the year supply of food and that just more or less meant we had all kinds of canned goods in the basement but it also meant things like um for whatever reason like we had like uh like an entire barrel of wheat you know this kind of thing and so and when that was good it was uh my we my mom actually
(08:26) at a certain point learned to grind wheat and we actually had uh we had a grinder and we actually had homemade bread from the wheat and that was good but at a certain point it's just like a lot of wheat that never got eaten you know it eventually went bad so all right so maybe in other words timing is that going to work on your left your left hand here just put your finger here when you click it's going to work yeah okay thank you so so uh mormonism so um this is a romantic portrait of the founder of mormonism
(09:00) joseph smith so uh mormonism emerged out of a 19th century millenarianism although it's i think somewhat de-emphasized today um comparatively compared to what it was when the latter-day saint movement got started in the 1830s it was really founded on a very very literal uh belief in the second coming of christ and that a literal millennial rule was very eminent and so members believed that the center place of god's kingdom the new jerusalem was going to be built in new north america and specifically in
(09:33) jackson county missouri which is where kansas city is yes sheen i wonder if there was if this millennial expectation was global because you have the same things happening in the islamic regions of the world you have baha'ism and ahmadism emerging at the same time the same kinds of mess with messianic and apocalyptic expectations well so i will point out that it it's almost perpetual so from at least from the year from the 12th century onward there it has kind of been there's been this fervor and it and it has gone up around uh and
(10:07) but like you say the baha'i is also coming at this exact same time and in fact i think the the date that everybody's kind of looking at even like 1844 there's a crossover between baha'i and also the millerites who are the the forerunners of the seventh-day adventists that's the year when joseph smith the founder of mormonism gets executed you know there's all kinds of signs of the second coming and a lot of people are excited about it and it's not just a couple fringe groups like you say
(10:36) it's a lot of different um a lot of different christians are millenarian especially at that time but also muslims okay so um at that time then in the latter-day saint movement so there's early members there's a guy martin harris who is the guy who was the financier who paid to have the book of mormon printed when it was first printed he was so confident that the world was going to end in two or three years as he wagered in a tavern that he went to in kirtland ohio that um that he he'd agreed to have his you know
(11:06) his hand cut off you know if it wasn't if the whole if the whole thing as he said wasn't wrapped up you know you know by uh i think it's like 1835 or something like that so he really you know was quite confident he later reneged on the wager so as people tend to you know so anyway but they were very very confident and so the members then were very keen on going to jackson county missouri to um it's actually the town of independence it's right next to this it's now kind of a quite an unfashionable industrial suburb
(11:38) of kansas city kansas and so they went there and attempted to build the new jerusalem nevertheless this is a frontier community so this is uh where settlers are at the very edge of european settled uh u.s and the uh and the the kansas line is is exactly right at that moment where andrew jackson is forcibly removing all of the eastern indians and concentrating them on the other side of the border which he's declared is going to you know the trail of tears the idea of it is because the united states is guaranteeing that there will be a
(12:09) permanent indian homeland west you know in the kansas area and obviously that got reneged on as well but essentially that the indians were being gathered on that side of the border and uh and so the mormons are gathering on this side of the border with the idea that the end times are about to happen and that might happen that might bring about by for example native american uprising apocalypse is one of the things that people were definitely more thinking about back then it's way less likely obviously now that
(12:38) of the population just levels don't allow for it but anyway um in running around and uh the early members would go around and more or less tell all these um settlers who are outfitting the trails for the santa fe trail and things like that the oregon trail all met there in independence and they tell these kind of um if you can imagine like cowboy western kind of guys and with a lot of whiskey and things like that and the mormons are telling them things like you know in like three years you all of you people
(13:07) drinking whiskey or whatever are going to be burned up and all of your property is going to be ours because christ is going to come and this is going to be the new jerusalem and things like that and so you can imagine that those guys didn't like that and so they kicked them all out of the county and so anyway so everybody got kicked out at um of jackson county so so we just mentioned all of this in part because my background won but then also the background of the denomination here so community of christ we also emerge we
(13:34) have that same history that's shared with all the other mormon denominations including the mormon church although we have gone in a completely different direction where we've become a very inclusive progressive church but we still have that same tradition and so our headquarters temple you can see there which is a big spiral nautilus incarnation with why we have a spiral on the wall here and you can see pictures of it in the back it's built then on that temple lot in jackson county because essentially
(14:04) that's where the center place of the new jerusalem is supposed to be and of course this place is called center place in homage to that same idea right so anyway we don't inc we no longer envision a literal apocalypse but we do have that background uh in terms of our uh tradition and by the way as we have kind of engaged in let's say a more futuristic modern progressive ideas of trying to build that kind of utopia this is a kind of an interesting 1970s planned community that members of our church moved to jackson county to gather to
(14:44) build a utopia and you could imagine it's kind of like all these domed houses and things like that because that was what people in the 70s thought kind of utopia was going to be what yeah there's going to be everybody's going to live in a hobbit hole you know or spacey hobbit hole it's all going to be like the dharma initiative you know and it was all the insides and outsides are really like the dharma initiative from lost if you remember that so anyway i just mentioned this is this is even no
(15:08) matter where you're at i mean progressives even it's a it is fairly interesting ideas that have still been alive into the modern times um on the other side uh the mormon side um the belief continues to be quite literal that there's going to be this very literal second coming and because of the idea that this building this temple in jackson county missouri is the sign that a literal second coming is happening in mormonism the mormon leaders actually when they built their temple in kansas city they built it as far from the temple lot as
(15:41) possible not in jackson county across the river way up in clay county in order to not freak out all the mormons and get them to all start moving to jackson county because they think the end time is going to happen and so their temple there is quite far away from ground zero of the apocalypse nevertheless again for utah mormons preparing for end times is something that's still quite active and so there's groups called preppers which is to say people who are preparing for the end times and it can get pretty overzealous
(16:15) so it's like more so than even what my family kind of half-heartedly did in terms of the backpacks and the barrel of wheat and so in fact actually because it sometimes gets overwhelming mormon leaders have actually said you know don't store too much food that's your you guys have got to you know do other things too so anyway still those guys are still enthusiastic about it you know anyway so all right so i just want to kind of then have in terms of that level of kind of personal background with it um to show
(16:44) kind of there are evolving attitudes to the end uh toward of how we're viewing the end and those are both religious and um and secular in terms of the growing up period so what do i want to cover a little bit tonight so first i want to look just a little bit at the history of apocalypticism i want to look at uh ancient literary and religious apocalypses of which the most famous is the book of revelation which uh you know from the christian new testament and so i want to look a little bit in particular at that book
(17:18) i want to zero in on how that book is absolutely misunderstood and misread and totally misinterpreted by all apocalyptic christian groups today i want to just briefly touch on what sometimes called doomsday cults but which is to say um uh small new religious tradition uh groups that are tight-knit and who are highly energized and motivated usually around a charismatic leader because of them thinking how uh time is tight and that we are really at the end of times and everything has to happen right now and so that really energizes you
(17:55) uh and then and then in just general just make some comments and maybe a discussion about this ongoing popularity of the end as we continuously rethink of it with the zombies getting us and everything else so just to get some definitions although we use the word now and it means now apocalypse now means cataclysmic destruction you know so we use it to mean that's what the end of the world uh it originally that word doesn't actually have that meaning when it's first applied to these texts like the apocalypse
(18:29) it actually means in the greek it means disclosure so as if you were disclosing information that you otherwise wouldn't have or you know if we were to take that from the latin to reveal revelation so which is to say revealing information that otherwise is unknown so it's taking stuff that is hidden knowledge or something that's only had by um let's say maybe a particular apocalyptic prophet and then he then is uh revealing that to all of us um and so therefore whatever here is revelation then is indirect information
(19:03) a prophet composes and discloses in response to inspiration rather than direct information from god so in this kind of time period as we'll talk about it there isn't a sense that any of these apocalyptic prophets are talking directly to god but rather in general there's a vision that's described in the vision is usually um with an angelic guide and so generally speaking the kind of prophets are thinking in those terms um just as a couple other terms we also have the word armageddon we also use that kind of as a synonym for
(19:36) apocalypse um and again it's not technically that word where it originally comes from doesn't mean future cataclysmic destruction or sometimes we have a sense of a battle or a war you know rather where that word actually comes from it's a place name like like waterloo and we maybe um if you know the alba song you know use the word waterloo to talk about you know you've met your waterloo so this means you're you know uh it's your end you know when you've had your which is in reference to
(20:11) napoleon right and so it's when napoleon has this battle when he's finally defeated uh and so armageddon is the same it's a it's um not a future battle initially but it's actually uh a past battle a battle in the past and it's a place name not a not a word and so the um past uh sort of battle that is taught being talked about here especially is uh when king josiah of judah king of jerusalem is killed by the egyptian pharaoh neko ii at a place called megiddo and so much of the hebrew bible
(20:50) as we've talked about in different lectures when we look at old testament um more important when you're talking at any text then what the time period or the context that it's narrating it may be telling a story that supposedly happened 2000 years before the author wrote the author therefore has often very little to go on or very little information about that in fact often none you know there might be some oral tradition that's a few generations uh uh predates what the author is actually writing instead when the author
(21:24) themselves are composing the text at the time they're doing it that's actually the more relevant context and because so much of the earliest parts of the hebrew bible are written around the reign of king josiah which is to say right at the end of the king kingdom of judah before it's destroyed by the babylonians so before the first destruction of jerusalem in the 6th century that it's josiah is really important and indeed because it's possible that the entire deuteronomic history which is to say most of the books like kings and
(22:00) samuel and all this kind of thing may have been actually kind of composed in josiah's reign josiah is kind of singled out as like the number one king of judah who is compared for example with king david who's the model kind of mythical legendary king that everybody wants to uh measure up to and so a lot of authors scholars have said well considering that josiah doesn't actually do anything he actually is a fairly young king and he goes out to megiddo and the pharaoh just slays him very un um heroically and you know kind of
(22:33) matter-of-factly and oh that was unexpected too there's no big prediction that that's going to happen or any reason why it would happen you wouldn't expect that the best king since david would just get summarily executed by the pharaoh and so because of that people suggested that maybe a lot of the bible is composed and is talking how great about josiah is because he's the king and then when he gets killed the people are like uh now what do we do you know kind of thing so anyways that's possibly it so in any
(23:01) event that's why megiddo is so important it's um he it's probably not a battle so in our earliest references to um megiddo um probably what's happened is that josiah has presented himself possibly as an ally or potentially a vassal to the pharaoh who's so much bigger and more powerful and he just gets killed with unexpectedly later when the bible is rewritten that part of the bible's rewritten in the book of chronicles it's upgraded to be a battle so it's a more heroic end and so
(23:31) anyway so therefore by the time that apocalyptic literature is being written it's remembered as this great battle when the big king of judah of jerusalem is killed and so that's why it has such an important mythic quality to it it's not really important real quality but mythic quality like we use like i say metaphorically waterloo okay so what about the future battle of armageddon so i just want to i want to just highlight that really quickly we'll get to revelation later although the book of revelation
(24:05) includes um uh this vision that john the revelator has of the kings of the world assembling for battle at a places that he calls uh har megiddo leaves us to say the plane of the hill of armageddon the author does not describe a physical battle actually happening in the vision instead what he says is he has there's a vision of the lamb which is to say of christ conquering with a sword that comes out of his mouth so in other words it's not like um you know jon snow with valerian steel you know cutting or actually i should be
(24:41) saying um arya that's a spoiler sorry anyway so if we're anyway anyway um it's not like that it's rather it's a complete metaphor because what's issuing out of um of the of the lamb's mouth is is coming out of his mouth it's a sword so therefore it's the gospel right and so it's the word or the gospel the news the christian gospel is what is going to uh win this battle so the battle is entirely metaphorical there's no future armageddon where uh whatever the russians and the chinese or whoever
(25:15) everybody wants to do are all going to meet up in israel and everybody's going to blow every nuke each other you know there's nothing like that in the book of revelations the book of revelations is talking specifically about uh the gospel prevailing okay so what are the origins of the idea so let's go back a little bit from that and say where do people first get this idea that history is going to end that somewhere in the future or actually generally speaking very soon that everything's about to end
(25:45) so i would suggest that um if you're in a let's say a pre-literate society you may much more frequently envision yourself in an ongoing cycle of the eternal round so we don't know because we don't have the literature but let's say in stonehenge you make a big circle uh and you're watching the calendar more or less move around you in a cycle you're aware of the cycle of the day as the uh you think anyway that the sun is circling you right so the sun is going up and coming down and you want it to
(26:18) come back you hope it's coming back but in any event uh it's doing that kind of a cycle the monthly cycle the yearly cycle the life cycle of the tribe and so ultimately though without uh the re without records you know that can be kept as a you know you tell stories the stories are about um how uh quite frankly functionally how like heroes do this and that acquire different uh powers or knowledge how you then do those in order to do things like um going hunting so in other words it's not something
(26:52) where you're necessarily envisioning um a a whole history before you that is a a past that's about to end but rather it's a cycle that you're participating in and that's going to be let's say maybe more common however once things start happening like for example you when you actually build stonehenge at a certain point you may be realized that you you know you uh then let's say 20 generations later you know i mean and you're not doing using it anymore you you come across these kind of ruins that nobody knows
(27:22) who they built and so then you are starting to see like in egypt there's societies where those have been built now you've forgotten when who anybody ever making them as hundreds of years have gone by so now you are starting to start to see that there is a past that's quite obvious that's left remains and that especially happens when you start to have literature and then one of the things that i was going to suggest in terms of there's also in apocalypticism when people are making this idea that
(27:48) there's a certain kind of temporal narcissism and so if you're a time lord and you have a tardis that can take you to any point in time does it really make sense that you'd end up so often in the late 20th and early 20th century britain you know right you might go other any other place or any other time uh but anyway you know this one is what ends up happening because this is when we all are right obviously and the same thing is true um when people from the 23rd century you know need to save their
(28:14) planet they have to come back to the year 1986 when we all live uh because of 1986 is the most important time there would be you know in 1986 just like 2019 is the most important time right now so we have a certain amount of temporal narcissism the same way that we do with uh geographic narcissism where we may be if you like me live in downtown toronto you maybe aren't really you know as cognizant of of canada let's say north of eglinton you know because i just don't go up there and i know i i i'm aware that it
(28:48) exists and it goes all the way uh odd maurice or whatever you know but anyway okay so apocalyptic authors then um saw themselves at the times and so uh whereas tv and movie writers um you know they have to if they use settings in the here and now that's going to be a lot cheaper in terms of the costumes the sets that kind of a thing and it's going to be more relatable to their audience right however for apocalyptic writers the fact that they see themselves as living in the most important moment in all of time
(29:30) um i'm going to suggest ultimately betrays a lack of temporal perspective so you aren't as aware i kind of made this point about the asteroid hitting us there's all of these you know millions and millions of years and um it would just be a quite a horrific coincidence of within just a couple decades of us being able to actually go into space that you know we actually get a space object hit us it's not that it can't happen but anyway it's just a matter of we have a there's a vast amount of how big and
(29:59) long time is i mean it's certainly um the opposite is not i mean the same is not true of nuclear holocaust obviously we've created weapons that could you know destroy the whole planet in terms of its habitability uh you know within hours right and so that's that's a different situation but uh in terms of just imagining because you have simply now inherited all of these texts now that you have a literate society and you read all the texts and you see oh boy all the people writing at the earliest texts here are
(30:29) especially alien from me uh and and they're really different and as i read all of history as it's progressed to now you kind of observe well i really am at the end of history and so it's almost just in a very obvious um or natural uh place to kind of think of yourself in the timeline because all the time that's out in front of you is completely unwritten and unknown and all the rest you can see and so you can always see that we were always in the latter days it's not just in 1980s mormonism
(31:01) it's everybody all the time has always been in the latter days compared to all of history that's been in front of us as long as we've had history so you know this is a natural observation so we're at the end now and there's you know looking backwards there's the whole past that's before us and so i'm just having here for example um i'm citing a medieval monk named joachim of fiore from the 12th century in the kingdom of sicily who ends up being actually just amazingly important in the history of
(31:32) apocalypticism and so when he existed in the 12th century he was living at the end of the timeline as it had existed throughout all of history up until when he was alive but obviously where we are now and i made this slide in 2016 obviously that's now later than that where we where we are now um you know joaquin fiore is in this kind of place that we don't even think about you know a place that is you know 800 years or something like that in our past we don't we don't have a big thought about
(32:02) um the medieval norman kingdom of sicily or something like that he's he is just retreated into the timeline and obscurity uh so he's not even part of where we think of it's just in the fog of past for us and now we're at the end of time right and by the way a thousand years from now we'll be at no time you know unless we do something really horrible then people will remember us you know but anyway let's hopefully don't and anything worse than we've already done okay so envisioning then a future paradise
(32:33) so um from that place from that perspective of you existing at the end time now some people have uh very fairly early on in history looked forward and said well what is the future going to hold or what would we like it to hold and so in some of the earliest biblical writers some of the prophets like for example isaiah they look forward to and envision let's say a a paradise they would like to see that the world improving and coming to this wonderful place where for example in some of the big imagery the swords
(33:06) would be beaten into plowshares and so that's a an imagery of human peace that there's a beautiful statue that the soviets made in the front of the u.n that's based on that but anyway that image or for example where the lion would lie down with the lamb and the child will lead so like for example the seal that we have here that image of uh this peaceable kingdom uh the painting too from this 19th century uh primitives we have a copy of that there so however that idea of a new better world that would only arise after the
(33:40) current world was violently destroyed is a later development so that wouldn't exist in that earliest isaiah it only exists in later additions to isaiah in other words that in order to get to that paradise we have to destroy everything violently here that's what constitutes i think apocalypticism and that's a later development and so this is uh coming probably anyway to the judeo-christian tradition uh in the persian period and so it may well be from this what was then a much more important religion now it's just a very
(34:14) tiny religion uh the religion of the persian empire zoroastrianism uh which is filled with um early on with these ideas of apocalypticism so zoroastrianism concerns the cosmic struggle between good and evil as ultimate cosmic forces sometimes called a dualist religion but because there's going to be a triumph of the good ultimately in time it's sometimes also a monotheist religion so there's also the concept of saviors so there will be multiple savior figures or messiah-like figures who are going to help in that
(34:51) ultimate defeat of the cosmic force of evil so again prior to this there is no cosmic devil in in first temple judaism it's added or becomes developed in this apocalyptic time period the persian period and afterwards but it's direct definitely in um in zoroastrianism and ultimately in the course of that fight what's going to happen is there is going to be a destruction of this physical world and the creation of a new physical world so the dualism that is occurring in zoroastrianism unlike what we're familiar with in kind of greek
(35:27) dualism which is very spiritual and it's talking about like a spirit world and spiritual forces of good and plato what had thought of the good as being totally immaterial and the material world as being kind of therefore negative or at least um not not what's ideal the zoroastrian dualism is definitely very physical and so there's going to be physical resurrection there's going to be physical renewal of a perfect world where there won't be evil in the next in the next one of those worlds and so as a result
(36:00) of that in that battle there has to be this cataclysm where the current world is finally destroyed and the force of evil are destroyed and so all of these then became prominent ideas during second temple period of judaism which is to say that during the time period when the persian empire is ruling over jerusalem as a province of persia and then thereafter when it becomes a hellenistic uh hellenistic kingdoms in other words ruled by the successors of alexander the great and ultimately uh roman province so it's not
(36:34) saying we can't necessarily say that um that there's a direct uh you know we can say for sure all these ideas that existed in zoroastrianism directly um are influenced into judaism but there is a definitely um this is the time period when these are being developed within judaism and therefore christianity and islam ultimately okay um so the apocalyptic in the second temple period uh tradition replaces then that earlier prophetic tradition that would be people like isaiah so in the earliest biblical texts god is
(37:11) envisioned in a much less cosmic way and also is envisioned then as being speaking let's say directly to prophets like moses and so god wrestles directly with joseph who becomes israel the patriarch moses experiences god with the burning bush this isn't true for all of the prophets of the second temple period so because the idea of god has become more developed and more cosmic in scope god is also more remote god is not just walking around wrestling with people in the second temple period and so therefore the writers who are
(37:51) writing the prophetic or apocalyptic literature of the second temple period they have they talk about visions that they have with angelic intermediaries so i talked about this for the book of revelations how essentially the angel comes and shows uh leads john the revelator and shows a kind of a tour of the heavenly spheres and so you see all the thrones and all of the cosmic angels that are singing holy holy holy around the thrones and that kind of thing this is really characteristic of the whole of apocalyptic literature so there are
(38:25) angelic intermediaries that were between god and the prophet and moreover the prophet themselves unlike john revelator who who actually is just this guy saying his own name is just some guy named john uh john of patmos or john the revelator in other words a guy named john who wrote the book of revelations he's sometimes equated or traditionally equated in christianity with john the beloved who is a disciple or an apostle one of the twelve apostles of jesus that's not the case so that's a traditional attribution
(38:58) that is actually not correct yes jane has a question saint john the divine is that i'm just trying to think if i'm who gets to that name is john the divine is the definitely the conflated do you know john the revelator no john the divine is which one beloved do you know what well i think in the uh in the king james version uh divine at that time meant a theologian someone who was equipped to interpret the bible so it's probably it's meant to be i think john the divine is meant to be a title for john the beloved
(39:42) i should think based on what you're saying in other words but but people also have by that time when they're using titles like that they have mis identified john the revelator as being the same guy as john the beloved the apostle of jesus the guy who wrote the book of revelations uh is not that guy so we you know we can tell that it's written in an extremely different greek than any of the authors of the gospel attributed to john or the letters and anyway so there's no particular reason to to think that the guy who
(40:14) wrote the apocalypse is in any way a disciple a person who knew jesus in person or anything like that but in in therefore and he also doesn't claim to be it just is something that tradition did afterwards and that's a rare thing though is what i'm going to say in terms of apocalyptic literature because actually what mostly happens is that these writers who are writing apocalypses claim that they are in fact an ancient figure so they will say that this is a vision that was given to daniel or to enoch or to adam or
(40:48) abraham or any number of other figures and so it is a pseudo-graphical or false attribution that the author themselves is making in order to get bigger authority to their text so there was a question back here when was the apocalypse of john written is the question the book of revelation and so it's like in the it's at the end of the first century or the beginning of the second so it's like in the 90s so it's um um anyway it's like it's fairly early but it's not um anyway it's not written
(41:20) by somebody who knew jesus in person okay okay um anyway this is not like the we we're very aware of the book of revelation or that particular apocalypse but in fact actually i would suggest that the second temple period was a wash in apocalyptic prophecy this was when i was a kid i would go to the suburban library and these were like two of my favorite books that i would always check out and it's just just filled with um essentially second temple period um jewish and some cases early christian uh apocalyptic literature it has includes
(41:59) all kinds of things that didn't make it into the canon essentially apocalypses by ezekiel and everybody from adam to zephaniah i write so from a to z you know and then just a few of them uh of this vast literature that's in these kind of books um uh made it into the actual hebrew bible the canon and so especially of note are the ezekiel and daniel um so that's some of the few apocalypses that are in the canon and daniel being um the last of the books of the hebrew bible to be written in the second century bc
(42:35) and then many many more so many more so these are the ones that survived because some christian monk or somebody kept on copying it and then they finally published it and it was in my uh library when i was in junior high and then i ultimately got the buy copy so i'm very happy that i have these two volumes but anyway but plenty more didn't get saved or published and so though some of those have been refounded with the dead sea scrolls so the the particular uh community at qumran most people think of the essenes the
(43:06) qumran community was very apocalyptic and they had all kinds of different apocalypses and thought of they were expecting different levels of messiahs and things like that in a literal end times that was right around the corner so we'll just go get an example of one of these apocalypses one that's fairly familiar to people because it did make it into the canon the book of daniel so again like as is typical for an apocalypse it's attributed to an ancient guy so in this case a a prophet of the babylonian period so
(43:38) the period of time after the first destruction of jerusalem but before uh you know while the captives nobles are kept in the city of babylon before they're allowed by the persians to go back and rebuild the temple this is the second temple period so between first and second temple period but it's actually written much later than that right so it's actually written between the years 167 and 164 bc which is to say in the hellenistic period during the time period of uh actually the king of syria the seleucid
(44:08) king of syria antiochus the fourth epiphanies and so um it's it's therefore doing this thing that apocalyptic writers do which is to say pretend to be an ancient person in order to give authority and then daniel's visions um in the same way that apocalypses do are brought by an intermediary so specifically they're brought by an angel the angel gabriel and um it turns out then as the angel gabriel is kind of telling daniel visions of the future or giving daniel visions the future and explaining them
(44:38) quite explicitly what they mean those are very remarkably specific and accurate all the way up to the year 167 bc and then they failed dramatically after the year 164 and so so essentially the prophecies no longer track and in fact make errors and so that's why we can date it so you know essentially scholars are able to say we know when this thing was written because we know it's very accurate about all its predictions all the way up until this moment and then they wrote it and then all the predictions that get
(45:06) made afterwards fail right so it's very characteristic apocalypse what i'm going to suggest about apocalyptic literature is that daniel shares two central characteristics of apocalyptic writers one the belief that they themselves are immediately at the end of times so they it's not daniel is not having a vision of what's going to happen in the year 2019 daniel's having a vision of what's going to happen 10 years from when the author of daniel is is living in the in the 160s bc and then two being totally wrong
(45:40) so in other words about that so the the author is wrong that the world was going to end within 10 years of 164 bc you know so it didn't end so that's generally speaking true of all apocalyptic writers that they're writing about their time uh that they think that they're at the world's end and then they were wrong so just to just kind of show how these kind of things work they also build on each other so ezekiel like the author of daniel predicted that the world was going to end his own time that
(46:11) prediction fails the author of daniel then takes the kind of timeline that ezekiel has massages it so that you're making months into years and so 70 months or you know becomes 70 years and so on and so forth in order to get to a calculation that gets to his own timeline the timeline of 160's bc uh he so that author reinterprets the time frame so that it would so it adds up to his day and then when he writes it in his book and then that calculation fails what ends up happening is then plenty of other writers like for example john the
(46:45) revelator we wrote about then continues to reinterpret that time frame so that the end would occur in his day so again it's meant to um john the revelator is assuming the end of times is going to occur within 10 20 years of uh of 90 a.d and that again fails and then that has then led to people recalculating so that every every time most recently one of the most almost all the calculations are based around for example um the establishment of israel or something in 18 you know in 1948 or the reconquest or the conquest by the israelis of the
(47:21) old city of jerusalem in the 60s whenever it exactly is 68 and so that starts the clock you know for uh different people's calculations and a certain point now that's been too many years and so there has to be something new to make the calculations uh because we didn't do it in enough time you know what i mean for the world to end so anyway there it essentially requires ongoing recalculations okay so when apocalyptic prophecies fail what do we do right and so this is a spoiler but anyway so for seven seasons
(47:56) obviously the prophetic refrain you know in game of thrones winter is coming you know has kind of foreshadowed game of thrones would end in a zombie apocalypse and then obviously after two days ago that's no longer the case so now we're no longer looking forward to zombie apocalypse we're gonna have something else so that's not what i expected to happen so i'm still staggered you know by that okay let's see where you get this to move there so why does it happen right okay so the sunk cost fallacy
(48:26) so people are get get committed um to something let's say you are definitely committed to let's say this particular calculation this particular revelatory text and you yourself have a timeline let's say you think you know the world is going to end specifically on you know uh october the 15th 2022 and so you're really you're committed to that calculation and ends up happening is that we get to that day the world doesn't end that doesn't mean though that you're going to necessarily stop digging
(48:57) if i can make it go forward there you know because what ends up happening is in sunk cost uh fallacy is you're already so deep and committed to something you know you've already put you're in for a dime you're in for a dollar right so you're always going to be um doing this thing um you know anyway where anyway as you can kind of see that one little dog has gotten way down there and the bone is nowhere to be found near that hole um you know same thing here's another one i i want to say one of the themes
(49:28) that i that's very important in terms of the aphorisms you know um uh in for a diamond for a dollar is don't throw good money after bad you know so again in the sunk cost fallacy you know the very wise woman here has said let's get out of here this is the worst movie i've ever seen and then the guy's like uh i'd rather sit rather stick it out these tickets cost me an arm and a leg in other words he's gonna you know make them um and he's actually lost their arm in the leg so in other words he's gotta he's gotta
(49:57) stay in there right so so so this is one of the things that happens so even though for example in a group when you make that date like i say like for example the millerites so this is one of those groups that we talked about with that 1844 deadline in the united states so all the millerites believed that the world was going to end on october 22nd 1844 and they actually sold all their property and they went and you know got gathered on hilltops and things like that and were ready to be taken up the fact that the prophecy failed the
(50:27) world did not end on that date did not actually uh stop them so yeah some of them you know decided okay well this was a mistake and they and they thought better of it but actually it's more likely that you actually double down on it so again because you have already committed to this belief you instead come up with different ways of saying well you know we get the calculation a little wrong or we did something wrong a little bit so we where we messed up the incantation in some way or we did something wrong
(50:56) ourselves and so it's still coming but maybe it's five years from now or so so and so so for the millerites they just look back at this moment not as the moment when miller was proved to be absolutely wrong but rather just as a great disappointment you know they were disappointed that they didn't they didn't get taken up and ultimately the movement uh reorganized itself and became the seventh-day adventists and this continues on to this day so it doesn't uh uh it hasn't that it it stops you just because you um make
(51:24) these kind of dates the jehovah's witnesses have had multiple dates for example and they're doing just fine so spectacular failure of apocalyptic prophecy is just as likely to result in increased loyalty of followers because of sunk costs than their disillusionment i mean you have to kind of admit that you were wrong or something yeah um i have a friend who pointed out a website that some atheists had made saying for those who were worried that they'd be taken up in the rapture and their pets would be left behind yes
(51:56) these people would be willing to take their pets and take care of them yeah it's a great business so yeah i know that people sell insurance for that purpose and i mean and and uh all of those christians that are going to get raptured know that atheists especially are getting left behind so it's it's it's win-win win right you know so the pets have caregivers when the apocalypse happens if you truly believe that animals don't have souls hey i don't know do the christians believe that i mean you're not supposed
(52:27) to because but anyway but um it's hard to know now the comment was depends on if animals have souls you know and and it is anyway i think that people just are very committed to at this point their pets as as their children and they're not sure that they're gonna get them raptured with them so anyway okay so apocalyptic doctrines um i would suggest in some of these cases especially in small groups um can function like conspiracy theories and this of course is jonestown so a besiege group you know believes
(53:04) that they share special knowledge that elite experts lack and so it may well be that i can explain um as an expert in you know different kinds of ancient scripture why every last little detail that everybody has in this they're explaining understanding of the uh the book of revelation isn't written by the person that they think it is you know and and doesn't say what they think it is and all these kind of things um that is not going to have any effect whatsoever uh in the same way that um if anybody's particularly subscribed
(53:37) to one of the many popular conspiracy theories um yelling at them online and sending them links is not getting anywhere that just that just gets people more in involved generally speaking in other words they're besieged and that and they have special information and you're persecuting them kind of thing yeah yeah so and it's and we and i feel like we have it more and more and more now because it's amplified because of the the connections that people can have on the internet and so they're they're you are able to you
(54:12) don't have to be in a compound like jonestown in order to all be together you can have you can create that community of conspiracy theorists where you're all sharing the same besieged um idea when everybody else around you is is saying experts have proven this is all wrong and everything like that so there's just plenty of those yeah valerie can we get um unless this has been mentioned earlier tonight when i wasn't here um but is there a possibility that if the effects of global warming as they are purported by
(54:46) experts to be already taking hold get worse that uh apocalypticism is really going to explode as people try to find some rationale and you know some way of psychologically dealing with what's happening yeah so um we have talked a little bit about climate change you know so so one of the points i want to make is you know as we kind of talked about at the beginning with uh with nuclear uh armageddon and also with climate change um just because apocalyptic prophecy is always wrong uh in terms of the literature because of
(55:23) this kind of like i say temporal uh what was it calling it temporal narcissism um you know that doesn't mean though that um people aren't capable of making the world uninhabitable or significantly decreasing the habitability um of the planet and so as you know certainly when we were um you know like i say when my family was planning for quite unrealistically for nuclear armageddon uh in minnesota it was nevertheless something that quite quite realistically could have happened in a couple occasions and same thing
(56:01) climate change could also you know really have an effect so we don't know what will happen so yeah i mean it may well be that in fact one of the reasons why there is so much more pop apocalypticism as we kind of showed at the beginning with all the different slides of zombies and every other kind of thing superhero apocalypse it may well be that because we are in a place where where we actually can have you know a realistic apocalypse is not just a conspiracy theory that that is also you know affecting the
(56:31) id and and the popularity yeah there's a comment here armageddon apocalypse what is it like it's a generalization people maybe are making assumptions that it's everywhere seems like you've looked through history something manages to live yes and or adopt yes so no that's a good point so i mean one of the things you know um that's true for example even an asteroid apocalypse as we've seen it's not that that has destroyed the habitability of the earth or destroyed all life or any such thing
(57:27) life is amazingly adaptable the main um the main fragility uh that we have as a species right now is in terms of economic stability of the number of people that we have so a very serious effect of the climate let's say could make it less capacity for us to have let's say three billion people and so if for example we were to be in a situation like what happened in europe during the black death where 50 of the population or whatever it may have only been a third but anyway somewhere in that range in some places as much as 80
(58:01) 90 everybody died uh you know that's it certainly survived in fact actually economically everybody was a little better off in europe because it had been at the straining the uh capacities but it but it's likely that you know obviously if we're sitting around living through three billion people dying um you ha it affects you you know it would affect everybody in the same way that the black death affected everybody there was a comment right here and then just a tangential thought do you think uh the increase in the apocalyptic
(58:38) occurrences around us is an indirect attempt to sensitize us to perhaps something that could be coming our way okay at some point in the future um i don't know but attempt by who to sensitize us i don't know i mean i i i think that it's rather i would rather say that i think that it's something that's in all of our collected ids you know that we're we're um concerned about the world ending and so then as a result um hollywood and blockbusters tap into that because they know uh we will
(59:15) buy tickets and go to the theater or pay subscription to watch hbo right did you need yeah you've been demonstrating the failure of apocalypses and you've mentioned nuclear divine astronomical medical but outside of the text that you've referred to we we already have a technological apocalypse that failed and that was y2k sure an expectation that all all uh transactions at banks would end because they were tied to the internet and to computers that would cease to function right after 1990. i remember that one very much but
(1:00:03) on the other hand that one maybe we averted that one by by actually employing all those programmers to fix all the code because that's what we were really doing all through the 90s so that's also possible that we actually that was there was a potential apocalypse that we averted but we in fact in that case we never know right and uh we certainly did make a lot of money yeah programmers did pretty good i had a tech company at that time so okay let's push forward so um what i want to say then in addition to then we
(1:00:32) were talking about the writer's back of ancient texts now i want to talk about the readers of ancient texts now so as apocalyptic writers suffered i think from that lack of perspective temporal perspective and they falsely at the time believed themselves to be living at the end of time they predicted that all the signs were such that they really thought within the next 10 years or so or less actually usually that uh the world would end as people then who are also um especially apocalyptic in in their sensibilities and they like these kind
(1:01:04) of texts they tend to share that same lack of perspective and imagine the texts uh refer to their their own time the reader's time as opposed to the author's time and that um obviously even though the texts actually refer to the author's time nonetheless you read it as if this is happening in my time and i have i just know someone who's uh you know a friend who who is a kind of apocalypticist he definitely believes in some kind of combination of divine slash alien apocalypse which is a weird combo
(1:01:34) but uh but he believes that he found it because he he found the truth of this because he found a book in a um in the it's like a secondhand store that he was drawn to a thrift shop you have a copy because he shares now this book with everybody and uh and and he believes that um you know like talking being given the book or being handed the book that occurs in the book of revelations that he himself was that fulfillment of that prophecy in that john the revelator wrote about in the book of revelations when he in that
(1:02:08) thrift store got a hold of this other book that has explained kind of the alien slash divine apocalypse that's about to happen that he's very committed to anyway so i'm going to say people uh i know from firsthand experience people read these ancient texts like the book of revelations imagine that the author is writing directly to them that they are being referred to in this prophecies and indeed all the different things that are happening in the text refer to things that are happening in the reader's own lifetime when indeed it was
(1:02:38) all in reference to the author's lifetime and all the things and symbols that are happening are immediately in the author's context not in they're not looking forward to 2000 years in the future here's the book so this is the book we were talking about do you want to see the book so here you go i want to see if there's any blotters in it i don't think we should promote the book so i don't think so i'm not going to say what it's called so i i'm i'm anyway no i'm not saying that you're promoting
(1:03:12) it i'm saying i'm not going to put it up in front of the camera so that everybody's going to get the book so anyway that's all i'm saying hi mom okay all right so let's look a little bit about the book of revelation so um reading future history into revelation is not new so my friend here is not the first person that has read the book of revelation and for had seen his own times so for centuries people have been doing that they've been reading the book of revelation as a future history and
(1:03:38) specifically to the reader's own immediate future people who think this way are often convinced that the signs in the visions of the book point to their own time and that those are then the beginnings of end times shaheen i'd also like to maybe suggest the idea that some of these apocalyptic ideas do resonate with people throughout the ages because they are part of what we call the eternal return of the same things like war pestilence famine these things reoccur and we like to think of it as oh it's
(1:04:11) the end and maybe it's the end in a sense but it doesn't preclude new beginnings so if you think about like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs for them that was the apocalypse right right yeah but for the rest of life on earth it was a new beginning right and and we could have that same one again as you were pointing out yeah no i agree so it's not that it's these resonate because the imagery um like you say in a lot of cases is universal and so it's not that people are are reading this way you know
(1:04:41) because they're total they're nuts or something like that but rather because they're reading it and it's these are often um you know like universal signs and imagery and things so but i still think that that when you are seeing a universal sign and think it refers to you specifically as opposed to anybody else throughout all of history joe ahima fiora or anybody else that there's a certain amount temporal narcissism or chronocentrism in other words we're not thinking about the whole sweep of history
(1:05:09) so i mentioned before this guy joaquima fiore and i mentioned him because he really did cause a major change in how christians have viewed the book of revelation because he really wrote out like a like is almost like a key to it you know where he just went through and said this means this this means this and it all refers to the 12th uh century so his time period so he um believed then that that by his calculations his reading the book of revelation the whole world would end in the year 1260. yes sorry um when when
(1:05:44) are when were the is that isn't this around the time that the mongol hordes swept through asia and the middle east and also the black death made its way into the black death is still uh you know he's not aware of it yet so it's still a century away it's it's still sort of and the mongols are still gonna come so he is like right before a bunch of apocalyptic stuff but he doesn't predict that you know so uh rather what he does is he goes through and he takes for example the seven-headed beast that's an image in
(1:06:14) there which in fact actually represents the city of rome and the roman empire at the time of john the revelator the city with seven hills that's the idea instead joachim fiora takes those seven heads and finds seven antichrists as he thinks of them throughout history that are leading from starting with king herod you know in at the time of jesus and then down to his own figure of his day saladin who obviously is able to for the muslims to reconquer jerusalem from the christian crusaders and so he already
(1:06:44) then envisions then that there is one then last final the seventh one the antichrist who has already been born in joakim fiora's life and so he essentially writes that code key that everybody has just been updating um just repeating his text and how he's described the book of revelations then for the next thousand years or not quite yet you know where um nobody had really written it out this way before but now that all this kind of end time stuff is kind of on a loop and just gets updated for your century
(1:07:17) so um just as an example after joakim but before now so protestants at the time of the reformation used images from the book of revelation to label the papacy so the catholics as the antichrist and so again those seven heads really was the city of rome but now rome is instead of being the head of christendom like it was for akima fiora for the protestants it's the catholics head and so therefore you know we can see the the pope here is a harlot you know with their crown you know on the seven-headed beast so it's you know
(1:07:47) in other words catholics are the antichrist or the pope is the antichrist some catholics meanwhile in return identified martin luther as the antichrist he's more likely to be him as far as the catholics were concerned than the pope so anyway yeah yeah so it doesn't stop scientists right so when you're in the early modern time periods isaac newton spent as much time actually more uh studying the bible in order to create what he thought of as a science of of essentially using the bible to predict uh especially the apocalypse the book of
(1:08:21) revelation to predict future history and so he wrote as much on that as he did on calculus his book on the book of revelation he argues that the texts both you know looking back in the past now predicted the conversion of constantine in 312 and the fall of constantinople in 453 in other words both things that occurred in isaac newton's own past but then when he uses the book to predict what's going to happen in the near future he gets it spectacularly wrong so again when you're making these kinds of
(1:08:56) calculations it all works out somehow all the way up to your own lifetime and then obviously it's now been since newton's death you know hundreds of years and none of the predictions as he understood them have happened and so people have had to continue to update um their calculations from revelation so um i just want to point out then these there's some modern ideas we talked already a little bit about the rapture and stuff like that and rapture insurance for your pets there's modern ideas about the book of
(1:09:26) revelation that have actually nothing to do with the actual text and the rapture is one of the big examples so there is no mention of the rapture in the book of revelation maybe people who are not um apocalyptic christians may be surprised about that maybe also apocalyptic christians might be surprised did the rapture is not mentioned in the text also the word antichrist so we talked about joachim if you're identifying antichrist or whatever throughout the text it's not in the text and in fact as opposed to
(1:09:54) how it's interpreted the author's actual intent the john the revelator's intent is to convey actually if you can imagine a message of hope as opposed to just this bleak you know asteroid destroying destruction as we think about to his contemporaries which is to say to his fellow christians in uh what's now turkey was an asia minor um who are facing persecution by local roman officials and other kinds of issues that they're having and to not to uh it's not in fact trying to make everybody in the present day freak out
(1:10:26) so he's not for seeing people in the 21st century and trying to scare us all to death he's trying to give a message of hope to people in the first century second century anatolia so part of the issue is whereas christians now sometimes look at the bible as if it's all just one book in fact the book of revelation is its own separate text that was never intended to be part of a compilation known as the bible right and so um as a result of its uh the canon and the canon existing in its present form people read little verses
(1:11:01) out of all of these different separate books as if they were all part of one text and one author and one meaning and things like that so this idea of the rapture is actually drawn from other biblical texts second thessalonians especially some of the sayings from the q sayings gospel that are found in matthew and then luke that are probably not referring to anything like rapture but in like let's say matthew and luke if the idea of it is is um like essentially there will be two men lying in bed and one will be
(1:11:32) taken it probably means just die um it doesn't mean taken up or something like that um so anyway it's a it's a conflation of texts that are not related to the book of revelation the antichrist then as a name actually comes from uh letters first and second john which i mentioned again are not written by the person who wrote the book of revelation um and so those letters that name is often conflated with the beast in revelation but it isn't any way there's no there's no direct connection in the texts
(1:12:04) so um anyway the point of it is although this is the simpsons apocalypse again so although revelation is generally misread as a future history we owe that a little bit to the joakima fiora uh when the four horsemen for example uh like sheen was saying so these are universals when war famine pestilence and death those are going to be loosed we think um on the earth what actually is the case if you read the actual text those horsemen are already loosed on the earth we are not living in a time period and john back then is not living in a
(1:12:39) time period when there's no death we're not living in a time period when there's no war or pestilence or plague you know or famine all of those things were among ancient christians and they're among us today so in other words those are not um it's not a talking about that's going to be loosed in the future rather the idea of it is the four horsemen are loosed and around and what the text is actually foreseeing is a time period when that will cease so even though it does seem like this
(1:13:09) bloody imagery and all of this kind of thing the bloody imagery is referring to the period of time when the revelator and all of us are already alive and the vision again is one of hope when those are all going to be um vanquished and and ended so those will be eliminated and so although revelations is sometimes read as god uh sending horrific monsters to destroy the world the text is actually talking about god just quote we'll say destroying those now the time has come it says for to destroy those who are destroying the world
(1:13:39) so god is going to destroy war famine pestilence and death according to the revelator and so the vision therefore is about the ending of injustice and it's a metaphorical vision but anyway as opposed to i mean with with monsters and beasts and things like that right so as a result you know when the text actually ends although people tend to focus on all the bloody destruction details you know when the text actually ends it's a vision of a hopeful vision of a new jerusalem and the idea of it and this is painted is it's always a
(1:14:11) jerusalem that has gates that are ever open so it's not a place that uh where you have to be walled against war and death or anything like that or keeping immigrants out rather it's where everybody's welcome because even death has been defeated and so ultimately then the text and the vision as it was originally intended as a word picture of that just and peaceable kingdom of god that's central to the christian gospel jesus gospel where jesus is talking about sayings like blessed are the poorest in other
(1:14:41) words this is where the poor will not experience injustice so it's a it's a vision of that um let's say realized future um that again hasn't ever happened but in any way is essentially the goal as opposed to the goal of of destroying uh the whole planet so where are we going to be in just to summarize because we've gone long it's been good discussion so to summarize apocalypticism so the cartoon here from the new yorker uh you know the the guy who's who's keeping it vague actually as we've said as we
(1:15:16) pointed out stating a date doesn't actually hurt you you know in the apocalyptic business so you know uh as we see a lot of cases actually um it's going to um you maybe it might whittle away your least zealous and most troublesome followers but the ones that you have left may are going to be doubled down and they're really going to do everything you say now you know when you've gotten rid of the trouble troublemakers so saying the end is thursday might not be a bad plan for the prophet um i like this picture because it's it's so
(1:15:50) happy as everybody gets everybody's getting raptured right before the end so although all biblical biblical apocalyptic prophecies refer to times that have passed and they are therefore all failed prophecies you know in the sense of if the prophets all thought the apocalyptic prophets all thought that it would be in their times that this destruction would happen um does their ongoing miscalculation misrepresentation they're how they're being misread continues and that's ongoing obviously unfortunately in the case of
(1:16:23) smaller new religious communities especially especially the urgency that derived from the immediate end times obviously can dangerously empower leaders because uh when the group and when the community really has the sense that you know we're at the most urgent moment in all of human history and everything is dependent on them and all the forces are closing around them to stop them from doing whatever it is the leader wants them to do in order to um you know uh make it to the other good the good side of this the millennium
(1:16:51) happens um you know whether it's the branch davidians who need to um sire a certain number of spiritual children and therefore david cresh has to be married to all the women in the compound or whatever you know or whatever is the cause of thing that you have to do um it can be still this kind of apocalypticism can be very very dangerously employed yeah valerie has a and i'm thinking a close uh parallel example is um the nazi hitler movement because they use the millennial language too like thousand-year reich they were an
(1:17:26) embattled chosen people yeah you know uh standing against evil forces such as communists and you know certain uh religious groups and they had to you know fight you know bitterly to the end to to you know in order to institute a a paradise for germany yeah so so so it's a powerful imagery motivationally that i think can be used especially for ill but potentially for good so like so many things you know so we um you know we talked about right from the beginning um how my particular denomination here has grown out of what was originally a
(1:18:08) millennial cult uh in the 1830s and so one of the ways that we have embodied that is you know we still have the vision of the peaceable commonwealth on the walls here and we still when we talk about our um our goal it includes you know abolish poverty and needless suffering we say that every one of our meetings you know so where are we going to get to that point where poverty is totally abolished not through a um in our opinion a literal uh cataclysm where everybody's raptured or anything like that but rather by us
(1:18:42) constantly working on all the different things that we do to improve society whether we're addressing homelessness or any other kind of thing that are our top issues that we are constantly working on so um so you can use this like you say for horrible ill as examples and then potentially also hopefully for for also having good effects so nevertheless so just in conclusion here anyway if our current culture is any indication of the trend um uh taking delight in the world's end will probably be with us till the end of
(1:19:15) the world so that's it hi um i have a common question the comment is i don't have watch on netflix the show purpose which is basically oh there's a show called preppers preppers yeah basically basically national geographic going through different people's houses seeing how they're preparing for the end of the world wow it's kind of like funny but fascinating in some ways and what i found quite interesting is when they ask what are you prepping for most of these people is looking into a
(1:19:56) financial collapse like the most because i get the recent economic crisis like it's so new that like oh something bigger is going to come yeah i need to prepare for that so it's how neat i had me i didn't even put that on my list because i didn't even have that as an apocalyptic thing but yeah financial collapse apparently it's like oh yeah it was i was i find it really entertaining the show is because of the show that you put in the background don't have to think much about it but it's entertaining i'm gonna look it up
(1:20:24) um so yeah about that and the question is from a scholar point of view an academic point of view from all the possible apocalyptic of like end of the world scenarios yes which one do you think is more viable like the singularity happens and the robots take over the climate change the nuclear war from all the actual like sort of like the doomsday clock that is about so which one do you think but for me yeah for you um so you know ever since i was a kid i've been a sort of a malthusian and so i definitely think that i mean
(1:21:01) part of the issue has been us um making the you know using up resources way faster than than we can and so then they're you know we we have like hundreds of thousands or even millions in some cases um years of reserved resources that are being eaten up in centuries uh in decades and things like that and so including like soil including all the fuel including ruining the entire oceans and killing all life in all oceans you know covering everything in plastic um potentially climate change all those kind of things so i guess my feeling is
(1:21:37) that um uh and then simultaneously uh uh we although there's plenty of parts of societies like like for example japan which is now already experiencing population collapse there's bunches of places like bangladesh you know where it's just pretty scary in terms of how many people are on a very tiny amount of land you know um and so and so my my kind of overall um is my kind of prophetic crystal ball whether i mean that of of pessimism like shaheen has about the ai apocalypse is pretty much with um we'll be we'll be in a place in 100
(1:22:14) years where uh technology hasn't increased in any way fast enough to deal with the suffering you know so there may well be so much degradation that just so many people are going to be suffering to the point where then there's a maybe a horrific civilization bifurcation where a couple people or you know couple portions of society or whatever are extremely wealthy and living well in scientific wonderland like um like when i was a kid in buck rogers you know like there's the one city of new chicago and everybody else outside is a
(1:22:44) um a radioactive mutant right you know or something like that so this would so i hope that's not the case but that's the concern that let's say maybe i'm most worried about as opposed to when i was a kid and you know we're thinking about the superpower nuclear apocalypse i mean at this point i don't necessarily i'm not as worried about that one as some of the others um and going on from what john said uh one of the things that is potentially apocalyptic that we don't really even hear about is that
(1:23:15) when it comes to running out of resources we are on our way to run out of mind phosphorus now we would think well what's the big deal with phosphorus phosphorus is essential for making fertilizer and it's essential for every agricultural plant that we have wheat rice corn all the fruit that we eat most of the vegetables that we eat if there isn't enough phosphorus we can't get those products they're just not going to happen and we are running out of mind phosphorus we have less than 100 years
(1:23:47) left and there's no way to replenish it yeah so there's there's just a lot of that kind of resource depletion stuff that's i think very worrisome just briefly on the phosphorus i mean the reason spacex and elon musk exist is because we lack perspective when we restrict our access to resources to simply earth yeah yeah i mean the universe is very vast yeah so there's there's there's potential but the problem with as spacex and everybody has found out is it's getting out of our gravity well and back
(1:24:19) so until such a time as we actually have a space elevator um you know which maybe we will uh you know it's very expensive i mean yes obviously they've done a wonderful thing in terms of making the rockets go up and then getting to reuse them bringing resources back uh or you know going out there and getting them it's it's just expensive to get up into space and yeah you can be maybe maybe they go be able to asteroid mine and we'll be able to get a big phosphorous asteroid and and shoot it at
(1:24:44) the pacific ocean and then we have a big asteroid of phosphorus and we solved that one but i don't know anyway but anyway there's there's a lot of other ones and so i am a little worried but there's potentially you know obviously the hope has always been that technology you know will be running in front of malthus malthus thought that again um that the world was going to end in his lifetime kind of thing in terms of all the all the problems because he didn't foresee the massive increase in
(1:25:09) agricultural output that has happened because of using things like phosphorus my question was in one of the earlier slides you mentioned each time an apocalyptic writer writes he has lack of perspective invariably because he's calling the apocalypse near the end of near recency yes near his time but is it not actually perspective for them because the only way you can stimulate people into action yes if it happens within their lifetime or within their yes or grandkids like that if something's going to happen a
(1:25:42) thousand years from now i don't care i can't incentivize people to donate me money i cannot incentivize people to point anything so actually it was driven by self-interest if i to do something for me i have to tell them it's going to happen within their grandchildren's lifetime or within them yeah otherwise i do think that they believe it you know in the in the case of it but you're right i mean in terms of for the author themselves um they they do have the they do foresee that they believe it
(1:26:11) they do see not only the signs and the signs they're not just simply um they could be any number of things that they think are actually very seriously wrong like the things that we've been talking about for our own apocalypses we can be prophets here where we're talking about climate change or these uh resource depletion or ai or anything like that and we are mentioning of it as a potential danger for our own lifetimes because then potentially we now uh you know can work on it while we still while we still have that
(1:26:37) option the problem then is that i would like to argue so so in as much as we maybe can absolve um profits of only speaking to their own time if we understand that that's that's fine and good the problem is when then we take those texts that are only speaking to their own time and then take them 2 000 years later and imagine that they are speaking to our particular audience because then you're going to almost inevitably misuse them or use them irresponsibly if we read them in their own context you
(1:27:06) can actually find all kinds of i mean i think i was even trying to do a little bit of a rehabilitation of revelation here for you which is to say if we read the apocalypse of saint john and actually the revelator in its own context we can actually find what he was trying to do and the text is much more meaningful than as a template to the year 2019 and how we're going to get destroyed here and now yeah go ahead and then yeah just uh i was going to add to what shaheen said and uh with regards to the um this
(1:27:38) factor in in fertilizer um potash phosphorus sorry but um in addition to that soil is incredibly complex and you'll know about the chain you study this um uh and and it has an array of minerals in it including trace minerals uh that are necessary for the growing of plants and also for our own nutrition and the more we strip the soil yeah you know the the less it has inherently of these uh various nutrients and they're saying already people in the first world are severely nutrient deficient in certain minerals yeah and
(1:28:17) you know our bodies our organisms evolve to to have that available and as we continue to strip the soil as it continues to get degraded um the great grain belts i think that you know that are feeding the world yeah are just no longer going to be viable it's not even just a question of climate change but also what we're doing to the very soil itself and to rehabilitate that soil would take thousands of years if not you know hundreds of thousands of years of you know natural processes and we just don't have that time yeah yeah
(1:28:49) so i'm i think we're all kind of sharing the apocalyptic concern that you know that we all kind of have and so um so i'm very concerned about those those issues too yeah absolutely well i'm firmly an anti-apocalypticist okay uh i think that this current discussion about soil exhaustion depletion of phosphorus and a population bomb i guess was stimulated by the gentleman with the beard yeah i have a beard so i can point that out but uh i i think uh what now we are our texts now that we're working on is scientific data
(1:29:35) and uh you know uh sci in in that sense i don't want to go into too much detail but i think those things like the prediction in the late 19th century that science had solved all problems and nothing else was to be discovered i think that uh and uh you know the end of oil predictions and lester brown's prediction of the population bomb yep that he made in 1970s have fizzled like damp squibs perhaps there's room for hope very very good well hopefully hopefully we can all take that away and be very optimistic and so don't
(1:30:13) don't worry [Laughter] so there's some possibility for room for optimism so yeah so hopefully um without being uh entirely ostriches and putting our heads in the in the sand and all these kind of things hopefully the awareness of the various issues is one of the reasons why we can avoid them right so maybe as you mentioned with the y2k maybe that really was going to happen and that was really going to be a problem and we actually fixed it and same thing maybe you know everybody was really not so in the 1980s about the ozone layer and
(1:30:46) they we did a couple things that i've helped a little i think yeah yeah i think that still may be still acid rain but no is it mostly gone yes okay well so yeah so rooney came to an agreement yes so there are some things that you know like they say in the simpsons um homer was saying to uh to lisa you know i remember all those years where they were where everybody every every day that people were talking about how how terrible things were with the rainforest and now we don't hear about it anymore so obviously we fixed that
(1:31:18) [Laughter] one more comment yeah here it could be oh no i let her have the mic i'm sorry thanks i'm just wondering if revelations can be read also as a personal like as a metaphor personally for what happens as you go through a spiritual journey in that you know um i think like or even just like personal growth as you go through personal growth or psychological healing or um whenever you go through some sort of like moving up a level in your consciousness you often have to go through a lot of and you have to leave an old world
(1:31:56) behind yeah right um and there's often a lot of pain involved in that like there's often physical pain or like loss of society around you and i'm wondering if there's like something in revelations that can be seen as a metaphor for that and then rising above that and then you're in the new world yeah no i no i think that there's all kinds of um responsible ways that scripture can be read symbolically and metaphorically like metaphors of those kind of things in other words spiritually um and and it should be so the problem
(1:32:25) is when we are using them very literalistically and and are are signing let's say our own mathematics to it but when you're reading it like you're talking about i think that this can be um a very much uh there are all kinds of readings of hope that are possible with the text i mean one of the one of the readings for example um uh is one of let's say liberation of unjust systems and so for example um african-american slaves read revelation as this time period when there would be liberation and freedom so
(1:32:55) then there's like in for example in in uh dixieland jazz or whatever you know when the saints go marching in or when the saints go marching in i want to be in that grand old number what's the number it's the number from revelations of the people 144 000 you know that are going to be you know when the saints go marching into that new jerusalem that's coming down in other words the book of revelation as hope for um ending a unjust system so i mean that in that case or and that's that's it for
(1:33:22) systems but it could also be like you say a spirit individual spiritual journey so absolutely [Music] you