Doom Prophets and Death Cults: A Shake Down in the Halls of Love

I hate the doom prophets – the foul, stinking, carrion eaters. These people prey on a powerful human instinct and exploit it to gratify their own egos. That's my opinion anyway; but I have evidence to back up my point of view. Here it is:

Everything dies.

We all know this. Almost as soon as we are conscious, we understand that we are mortal. Ah, we don't really totally grasp it until certain periods in our lives force the reality upon us – and after that we work hard to forget it – but we know that we will die.

And we see it all around us, every day. In the course of any life we wrestle with the specter of death. We are bombarded by it. Peripherally or directly, we are all bombarded by death all day long, every day. There are dramatic examples – soldiers dying in wars, citizens gunned down in the streets of the cities, lovers murdered by jealous exes. Incredible seismic shifts in the very surface of the Earth have pulverized Haiti and caused the ocean to boil and swallow so many people in Japan. There are countless examples of lingering deaths – two days ago I met the most beautiful, charming person; a towering, kind man of Scandinavian descent, with a stunning woman by his side; he has been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, and less than a year to live. There are the horror stories of youth: suicides, abortions, overdoses on drugs. Death can come as a complete mystery. Death can come randomly. So many die on the roads every year, every day.

So what compels a person to calculate the date on which the world will end?

Personally I think it is ego. There is some fascination with being the last of a dying breed – Charlton Heston in “Omega Man” - Ishi with his brain in a specimen jar. People want to think they will be the last to experience this crazy, terrifying life. Miserable people – I find them miserable, and pathetic, and beneath contempt. We all fight and work so hard to find the good and the reason for this life, and these doom prophets want to tell us it is meaningless, and that we live this life as a sacrifice, to move onto some “better place.” This is a “death cult,” plain and simple. You can gussy it up all you want with talk of peace and love; forgiveness – but it's still a death cult.

The world will end. A meteorite, or a massive environmental catastrophe – maybe the atmosphere will degrade, plague, disease, who knows? At some point we know the star that provides us our warmth and light will burn out, or explode. There will be an end to this planet, and to life as we know it. I can't tell you when that time will come. If I could, I wouldn't want to. The best we can do is to live our lives knowing that death is always there – and to carry on.

madbob@madbob.com