Time and Armageddon
June 5, 2011 by Bill
From now until 2012, we are going to be buried and suffocated, staggering in the onslaught of superstition and ignorance. It is all going to be masquerading under the phony and scary heading of “prophecy.” This virus of illiteracy can even affect the Oval Office, as with President Reagan’s weird speculations about an imminent arrival of Armageddon in the Middle East. We are going to be smothered in the months ahead by radio, books, television and movies out to make a buck on the gullibility of the American public. It will be open season on reason, rationality and religious literacy.
What seems to be missing from the brain/mind (I use the words loosely) of most of the hysterical is the fact that TIME IS FICTION. TIME is man made. A history of man-made calendars would enlighten many. On many calendars, the millennium would already have come and gone and you did not even know you missed it.
Christian fundamentalists, of course, are panting for the day, but with the vast majority of the world it is a non-event.
In the JEWISH calendar, the year 2000, for instance, was 5760 and no big deal. For MUSLIMS, who date their calendar from the prophet Muhammad’s move from Mecca to Medina, the year 2000 would be the Islamic year 1420. Muhammad said that the “day of doom” would not come for another 50,000 years. So relax, folks. You will not even be around to see it happen.
The ISLAMIC calendar follows the cycles of the moon rather than the sun and their year of 2000 is 1418 In the CHINESE Lunar calendar it is now the year 4695, over 315 years away from the next millennium. HINDUS are now in the midst of a calendrical cycle that has over 350,000 years to ago until it ends. You won’t be around for that either. So you can plainly see that for the vast majority of the world, our millennium was a non-event if ever there was one.
With our American Indian concepts of time, this entire subject is absurd. Most American Indian languages do not have past and future tenses. They reflect rather a perennial reality of the NOW. Their accounts of creation, for example, do not tell of a PAST time but rather of processes that are eternally happening. The Maya and Hopi “prophecy” have to do with the evolutionary expansion of human consciousness. “Hopi time,” writes Benjamin Lee Whorf in Language, Thought and Reality, is true psychological time. If we inspect “consciousness” we will find no past, present or future…everything in consciousness IS and is together now.
What an interesting contrast in mentalities. Christian fundamentalists, with other “Prophecy” addicts, waiting for the world to go up in flames, with volcanoes and earthquakes going off like a holiday fireworks celebration, and California sliding into the ocean, to the beautiful thought of the American Indian looking for a new stage in the expansion of human consciousness.
Lets see now… let me think… how many hundreds of times has the end of the world been set for a date on our calendric system? Oh my, I have lost count. And imagine, look. I am still here, as are you. And the “Prophecy” addicts have gone back to their Ouija board.
