It’s The End Of The World As We Know It, And I Feel Fine

The following is a chapter from the book Money, Sex, Power & Faith.

“The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.” — Terence McKenna

Some say that we will have to suffer through a catastrophe before waking to a new way of being. “The sustainability revolution will occur,” promises Richard Heinberg in The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. “The depletion of nonrenewable resources ensures that humankind will eventually base its economy on renewable resources harvested at rates of natural replenishment. But that revolution will be driven by crisis.”

And crisis has indeed been long prophesied by the religious traditions that have guided the culture we know as reality.

In the Christian tradition, the story goes that the apocalypse, the end of the world, will be preceded by the second coming of Christ, who will come like a thief in the night. No one will know the day or time, but many have tried to guess. According to the popular interpretation, first pieced together by Charles Spurgeon in the 1800s from John’s Revelation and segments from other books of the Bible, Jesus will come down on a cloud and scoop up those who believe in him, an event which will begin the thousand year war of Armageddon. It will basically…