Jesus Shrugs
By Jeremy Lott "It's the end of the world as we know it / and I feel fine," sang R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe. As attitudes toward the apocalypse go, you could do worse. People keep predicting the end of the world and the world keeps on taking its good time. We use the broad term "people" here because prophets of end are an astoundingly varied lot, from Catholic mystics to Viking visionaries to some of the world's greatest minds. If you don't believe us, just click all the way through to the last entry and then come back for the we-told-you-so. Here we focus more on the religious doomsayers, but even that category can be a problem. The whole human race is gripped with the fear that the world will end. (Perhaps this distraction is one reason they keep building such astoundingly ugly churches.) And let's face it: the world will end, eventually. Whether it will happen through the sun petering out or runaway rogue technology or some other historical-religious cataclysm, or a combination of all of the above, is hard to say. Jesus Christ himself threw up his hands. According to the Gospel of Matthew, he said, "But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son" -- i.e., me -- "but only the Father." As readers will soon see, that hasn't kept countless people from placing their bets. Jeremy Lott is editor-at-large of RealClearPolitics.
