This Years End Time

This Years End Time 

Please excuse the rush and haphazard in my writing, I'm in a hurry and want to get this out before the 21^st.

Those of you that know me understand that I have no problem with the Apocalypse – in fact, I've always encouraged it through both thought and deed, (because faith without work is a dead thing without juice or forward momentum-- as if that needs explaining.)

What bothers me is not the death of billions of people, though it's sad in a way I can't even conceive of -- it's that someone sat around and read the Bible, praise be to the lord, and after much and careful study came up with a date – and that's just sick.

Religion is all and only a faith thing – if you could prove any of it, it would be science. And the faith thing is fundamental – it's what keeps it from just being another mental illness of the delusional sort. Sure, it's fine to think of it a pure trick for social control, or perhaps a way for the powerful to keep a lid on the ragged mobility, but with the faith thing going for it, it has wings and a way to soar through the mind when open eyes and voiced reason seem pitifully inadequate to answer any honest question worth asking.

So, the concept of an accountant, with a vision of the mathematical sort, numerically rounding off this and adding to that to come up with the end of time, and then publishing it as a public relations ploy, all seems like an evil to me. I wonder not about the act of the death of all things, but rather the eyes that are being using to discover that death and make a glory of it.

When I read the bible, I see the words of Christ – (it used to be easier because they printed them in red, but they are still there if you look.) They seem like nice words until you realize that they are just the carrot being dangled before you in a massive carrot/stick sales job, and that underneath the Christian forgiveness lies an unalterable base of an omnipotent god who still requires submission and worship despite being everything and all things – or so the story goes.

And after the big bang, those lucky few will ascend to be with this hard and punishing thing of a god where the only kindness will come through the intersession of his co-dependent, graphically and systematically abused only son.

Once there, you will know the level of the wrath of god just by watching his sons’ eyes as the keys rattle in the keyhole after the Lords had a hard night out with the Buddha and the Zeus drinking Zima's to excess.

Heaven indeed, and nowhere to hide, for nothing more will be hidden from you, or anything – imagine that.

(Jews will be welcomed, but first they will have their circumcisions undone, the hard way -- a new compact for new times.)

So, I suppose this focus on the person and not the event is my fault, but I again and again come back to the human being that uncovered the secret date when all of us will be rubbed out, give or take a chosen few.

And honest, there is a god and it's bigger than I or you, but this is not it.

I have been thinking about this person for a week, and I'm pretty sure it's just one person – that's how these things work. I have not come up with my own words to tell the feeling but do have a poem that sums it up for me – it's exact in both punctuation and in its effect, and, really, it could not be clearer.

The Snow Man, by Wallace Stevens

One must have the mind of winter

To regard the frost and boughs

of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and nothing that is.