America's fascination with the apocalypse

[Mark Kohut]

Mayan walks into a bar, orders a drink. "Should I start a tab", the bartender asks. "yeah, you do that", smirks the Mayan.
                                                                                          -----Apocalypse joke
Writer of this says he would write more, but writing apocalypse jokes is a short-lived industry. Badda boom.

From: Alex Colter <recoignishon at gmail.com>
To: Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> 
Cc: Madeleine Maudlin <madeleinemaudlin at gmail.com>; Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>; pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2012 4:37 PM
Subject: Re: America's fascination with the apocalypse


Our current notion of Apocalypse as a transformation into the Divine Man, the Garment of Light and all that, via Judiasm, Christianity, and Islam, can probably be traced back to Zarathustra. It seems that Apocalypse as Divine Revelation (after all apocalypse just means revelation) goes back even further.

And I like Miss Pagels, my copy of The Gnostic Gospels is dogeared and well written-in, alongside Mr. Barnstone's Gnostic Bible and Hans Jonas' Gnostic Religion, probably three of the most important books relating to Gnosticism and, essentially, gnostic Apocalypse.


On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 1:27 PM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:

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. 
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>On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 11:04 AM, Madeleine Maudlin <madeleinemaudlin at gmail.com> wrote:
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>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. 
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>>On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 12:19 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
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>>On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 12:15 PM, Alex Colter <recoignishon at gmail.com> wrote:
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>>>> just picked up Bloom's 'Omens of the Millennium' at the local used bookstore
>>>> the other day, fun stuff that apocalypse
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>>>http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780670023349,00.html
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>-- 
>"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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