Yesterday, I linked to this: Rough times ahead. Today, Bayou Renaissance Man posted this:
It's the end of the world as we know it - and we feel terrible!
Three articles struck a powerful chord in me over the past few days. They all approach a central theme from different directions, but their conclusions are very similar: today's extremists see politics, ideology, and life itself in religious terms rather than secular. Their beliefs may have nothing to do with any Deity that we might recognize, but they're nevertheless oriented towards a cause that assumes God-like proportions in their eyes.
First, Alma Boykin (a good friend in meatspace as well as cyberspace) compares the attitudes of modern, secular millennialist extremists to religious fundamentalism:
Millennialism, leaning on Richard Landes’ definition and discussion, is an emotional, socially perfectionalist movement with an apocalyptic anticipation that rise[s] out of and then fall[s] back into “ordinary time.” Communism, Nazism, the Ghost Dance, the Millerite movement in the 1830s-40s in the US, the Münster Anabaptists, all fit this description and pattern. Society has become fatally corrupt, and there are signs that the end is coming, be it the Christian idea of the End Times, or Marx’s rising up of the proletariat against the owners of capital. The goal of the believers is to purify themselves and society so that when the End comes, they are ready for the new world that will arise. Often, they believe that their actions can bring about the coming of the End, or at least their inaction will lead to them failing to reach the better world (or for it to arrive at all – Ghost Dance.)
Much much more at the site. It pays to be prepared and to avoid large urban areas.
#1) - no, the sky is not falling but
#2) - situational awareness is a good thing to have (and continually practice).
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