America's fascination with the apocalypse

[Ian Livingston]

I am interested in Gross and Gilles' book, and will most likely read it.
Apocalyptic thinking has apparently been a part of human culture since the
earliest communities formed. My personal guess is that it is tied in with
the fear of death that fuels all religious thinking, but we Americans owe a
special debt to Protestantism, wherein faith in prophecies regarding the
collective fate of man have acquired great substantive relevance. We are, I
believe, the first culture to ground its political and economic thinking in
the expectation that the world will end soon, so it doesn't really matter
what we do to it or to each other. Too often I hear agnostics and atheists
claim that they are free from religious thinking, but that is not possible
when every mode of thought in the West is established in religious
tradition. I'm curious about what these folks have to say.

On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 11:04 AM, Madeleine Maudlin <
madeleinemaudlin at gmail.com> wrote:

> If it's true that the New Testament is a work of fiction, and total
> eclipses are tools of hypersdimensionality, it is my theory that if you
> found out when Flavius Josephus experienced an eclipse you might account
> for how Titus was so inspired to reinvent himself in the Roman past.
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 12:19 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 12:15 PM, Alex Colter <recoignishon at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > just picked up Bloom's 'Omens of the Millennium' at the local used
>> bookstore
>> > the other day, fun stuff that apocalypse
>>
>> http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780670023349,00.html
>>
>
>


-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all creeds
the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in
reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness
groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest
urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant
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