ufos

A science writer and a science fiction writer walk into a bar and debate science and human origins.

In his new book, Richard Landes argues that in addition to the obvious End Timers many secular movements—the French Revolution, Marxism, Nazism—can be better understood as millennialist or apocalyptic.

If there is any communal rite of passage at Burning Man, it is the Temple Burn on Sunday night, the event’s finale. Not everyone comes out for this event; some would rather dance to techno music or chat up a neighbor on the next bar stool instead of joining tens of thousands of Burners sitting on the ground quietly waiting for the temple to burn down, taking all their messages and their pain—they hope—with it.

The book is at once a rich, humorous history of comics, a political commentary on the absurdities of conservative British and American culture, and a deeply personal memoir. The relevant moments for us here involve those in a Kathmandu hotel room just after the writer had visited a Tantric Buddhist temple. As Morrison chills on the roof of the Vajra Hotel, he sees the temple come alive and begin to rear up like one of those living sports cars in the Transformers movies…

What happens when a breakthrough in technology leaves religious scholars without much to go on?

And so the world still turns. No rapture, no living hell, no Armageddon. We are where we were before the weekend with no signs of Christ’s return, facing the same ol’ same ol’: Arnold’s love child, Newt’s flame-out, life without Oprah. Perhaps this might be a nice teachable moment to reflect on all this—not nonsense at all, but rather an illuminating cultural moment that reveals an awful lot about the role of religion in our crazy world. What are the key takeaways from the “mediapocalypse”? Here are five for your consideration:

The film admired by Jared Loughner defies categorization but ultimately offers a dark vision.

On numerous occasions Pope Benedict has ignored the connection between Christian anti-Semitism and Nazi racial anti-Semitism, and when posed a question about German responsibility for the Holocaust he fails to address it directly.

Most principled atheists do not go beyond simple denial. They refuse to go further, to seriously question the ground beneath their feet. And, by holding on, consciously or not, to their unjustified assumptions, they end up rejecting far too little.

And other twists on end-times talk.