It is time for me to advance a tendril of thought in good "Aware, Away, Awry" fashion. It will be just as insubstantial as one might think, because "insubstantial" is what thought is.
Our thoughts derive from the experience-arcs of our existences, and as such our thoughts are founded at least upon what we imagine we have established. The substance of our existence, however, exists--or, to our shame, is found to be non-existent--upon the score of whether we curate our experience-arcs as the cumulative building-up of a belief system, or whether we reckon as the value of any experience-arc its potentially doubling-back against anything we might think mistakenly to be established unmistakably.
The best of our thought-processes, actually, are those that proceed linearly through a process of questioning--which, of course, is a process disposed in part to double-back upon itself, as progress in any line of thinking is attended by a virtual mirror-image of complementary questioning of the premises of that line of thinking, a questioning that exists with each passing moment in a thought-environment enriched and expanded progressively by the thought process itself.
Religion, unsurprisingly--with its combination of considerations both ostensibly foundational and yet intrinsically untestable--is one of the realms in which this phenomenon is represented most starkly. If consideration of the divine is at hand, one might expect quite reasonably that the believer might be (or at least hope himself or herself to be) inclined to let an entire belief system crash down, rather than to persist in shoring up a belief system at the expense of exploring a new insight about the divine.
Sadly, this obstinate shoring-up is not merely tolerated in the mindset of religion, but positively encouraged and celebrated. Believers will pick up the Psalms prepared to have earth-shaking revelations about "the character of God," or will pick up newspapers (or news feeds) with every expectation of finding startling premonitions about the out-workings of revelations, but will think it unquestionably incumbent upon themselves to go to church on Sunday and work up an ever greater affinity for the teachings of their chosen denomination--as though that static body of teachings were paramount as against the presumably untamable and always incompletely known character of God.
The business of "the out-workings of revelations" is of particular salience to my generation, having been born out of the Sixties- and Seventies-era spasms of realization that the former generations' optimism about America as ascendant and exuberantly progressive was running up against some hard realities. There had always been prophets of the End Times, but never before so many reminders that--by this means or that one--things might really come to an end as we knew them. Of course, there were many potential permutations of the "this is what the Bible always said was going to happen" theme. The Left could point to the greed and violence of humanity--and to vague notions that the End-Time devastations presaged environmental disaster--but the Left was also going to be religiously tepid and religiously pluralistic.
It remained for the Right to entwine itself with Revelation-talk, and in terms of the most politically mobilizable imageries--abortion, for example (with talk of "child sacrifice"), and "godless Communism." Decade after decade of evangelical radio spurted out a digestion of the End-Time prophecies: An evil leader seen by the world to survive a ghastly head wound; an evil leader promising "Peace, Peace" when there was no peace; an evil leader making a pact with the world that he would break after three-and-a-half years; an evil leader promulgating a syncretic world religion; an evil leader who would seek to surmount one of the prongs of an up-turned pentagram-star while offering God the other. And all the while the imagery of Christendom under assault from godless Communism was woven throughout.
Of course our present situation sheds a stranger-than-ever light on those forebodings of evil. A dreadful, twisted assassination attempt leaves a candidate with an indescribably fortunate head wound (and it must be remembered that the End-Time camp is such as to recall the prophecy of the serpent bruising the heel of Eve's offspring as playing out in Jesus' heel bruised against the Cross--imagery and not proportion is what matters.) This same candidate promises peace in this or that region to be effected by himself in twenty-four hours; this same candidate comes equipped with a six-month plan to engineer a righteous autocracy so as to be able to implement it for three-and-a-half years (and then what?); this same candidate subscribes--if that--to a vague and malleable religion; this same candidate squares off obstinately against the bedrock Christian requirement of repentance and requested forgiveness. And yet this very candidate is heralded by the inheritors of a half-century of "End-Times-ism" as a person chosen by God to further the purposes of his people.
It would be an estimable pastime for persons in every niche of feelings about religion to look on this present case as an example exercise in calculating a Threshold of Antichrist Believability--that is, not as something in which one might believe, but rather as in a confluence of events that, given it did not come to fruition, would constitute such a critical mass of End-Times happenstances as to make it plain that the standard Revelation imagery is too generic and too plastic to be sensible.
And there would be another benefit to such attentions paid to the Bible prophecies. As I described before in regard to Christianity in general (preparedness to be awestruck by fundamental discoveries about God and about the out-workings of his Creation wedded perversely to a determination not to alter doctrine), so also would it be beneficial to note that the same phenomena hold true in the End-Time camp. No discoveries or realizations about the character of ancient prophecies, and no observations about how history is really working out, will change the actual dogma of End-Time Christianity: the ostensible evil, not merely of godless Communism, but of any social or political trend that can be smeared with that phrase.
It would be enough, actually, for our popular consciousness to deny to the End-Time camp the hegemony they hold over Revelation because the field has been ceded to them by the reticence and the reluctance of the Left. In short, where is this godless Communism to be found in Revelation? Revelation describes what happens when "the stars of heaven fell unto the earth": "And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains." Needless to say, the preachers have been denied the opportunity to point to Revelation and revel in how it describes "peoples republics" and "wealth distribution.", to say nothing of atheism as a principle.
And then there is the Fall of Babylon in Revelation 18: "The merchants of these things, which were made rich by her, shall stand afar off by the fear of her torment, weeping and wailing . . . . For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off, And cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What city is like unto this great city!"
It is often wondered where "the Church" is in Revelation, but there is one likely answer, at least in part. At every point, Rapture or no, there is held to be at least a remnant of the faithful. And, human nature being--lamentably, as Revelation would have it--unchanged before the end, there would be those who prey upon the faithful. and who tell the faithful what they want to hear. So also might we expect it to be among the good, capitalist, supply-side businesspeople who so crowd the imageries of Revelation. One of my indelible memories of the Reagan-era radio religion is of hearing a preacher decrying corruption among politicians, public officials, and the like, and "even some businessmen." Think of it--"even some businessmen"--as though the harbinger of the ultimate decay of humanity's morality is to be seen when not even the moral therapeutic of scrambling for a profit is enough to safeguard a person's soul.
If Revelation describes humanity being evil until the end, then five minutes before the Fall of Babylon those who constitute the "church" of that city will be busily comforting businesspeople with the notion that their profit-seeking is a moral cog of God's purpose of saving fallen humanity, and will be busy telling employers that they occupy in God's plan the place of the "master" to the "servant" who is only by a legal fiction "free."
And as far as the dreaded "Mark of the Beast" to which people will have to submit in order to buy or sell? Who more than the leadership of a people's republic would likely want--rather than to distribute such marks--to hoard them for the infamous few in any Communist regime who can effectively possess anything? Have not Communist regimes sought--perversely, in terms of their nations' economic potential--to render certain ethnic and racial groups unable to participate in the economy other than as slaves, fed--when fortunate--little better than as animals? What need of "Marks"?
No, the Mark of the Beast is an intrinsically capitalist ideation, for it relies on a perverse calculation of seeking to plumb a nation's human capital--even in the most forlorn and doomed fashion--by making people strive to better themselves, even in a thoroughly unfair and evil system. This is the world that Revelation projects into the future, and it is thoroughly lamentable that the pathology of attachment to the book by the Right has been able to bludgeon the Left away from exploring its implications.
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