I first heard the term "Armageddon" back in 1965 when I was in high school and we had neighbors who were Jehovah's Witnesses. The mother once told me with utter certainty that the world would be coming to an end in 1973. I thought this was very curious. She called it "the end of this wicked system of things."
The idea that the world will be coming to an end soon is not a new one. In fact, William Miller, through careful calculation of the Bible's various dates, announced that the world would end Oct. 22, 1844. He developed a number of followers where he lived in upstate New York who sold their farms and, on the night of Oct. 21, gathered on a hill to wait for the end.
Shortly thereafter, he decided he was off by a year. So the next year, on the same date, they gathered again. Following another disappointment, he decided it might not be wise to try to be so precise. So he announced that, though the world would indeed end, he couldn't say exactly when. Of such theology the group we now call the Seventh- Day Adventists was born.
Armageddon is actually the name of a field in the Holy Land, a site of many battles. According to the Book of Revelation, it is to be the scene of the final battle before the Kingdom of God comes to pass.
Hal Lindsey's best-selling The Late, Great Planet Earth in the 1970s talked of Armageddon as being fought between the USA and the Soviet Union. Guess again.
But the idea that things will soon be very, very different -- and that getting to that very, very different place will be very, very uncomfortable -- is a theme within human thought not confined to Christianity.
I was surprised there wasn't more talk about Armageddon surrounding 9/11. The religious right was into blaming people, but you didn't hear much about it being the beginning of Armageddon. I think this is because, in fact, 9/11 is the beginning of Armageddon, and it is uncomfortable to talk about something that is finally coming to pass after centuries of crying wolf.
Then again, not everybody calls it "Armageddon." Some people refer to something called The Singularity.
The Singularity is the moment when computer capacity will have exceeded human intelligence.
Different experts have different ideas of when this will occur. Some say as soon as 20 years; other say a century. This will be "the end of this wicked system of things" because there will be an intelligence surpassing the human that can work directly in the world, rather than through prophets and martyrs, which has proven to be inefficient and unconvincing.
This "trans-human," the merger of humanity and computer capacity, is no stranger to science fiction. Remember the movies "RoboCop" and "Blade Runner"?
In the first, a human cop was grafted into a super-strong robot body. In the latter, Harrison Ford had trouble telling the humans from the robots.
Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, wrote an article in Wired magazine called "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us." He says humans and machines are coming closer together, and that humans are losing their capacity to be fully human in their attempt to duel with the machines. Sort of like John Henry in cyberspace.
This accelerating rate of change has unconsciously scared people all over the world. Everyone senses that soon things will be very different, but nobody knows how it will be.
Thomas Friedman, the European correspondent for the New York Times, grasped this in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree. He uses the Lexus as the symbol for globalization and its values. The olive tree is the old tribal measure of meaning and value.
The conflict is between globalization and the deep desire on the part of lots of people to stay within their familiar tribalisms. Fundamentalist Islam is the most active of the tribal forces and the World Trade Center was the most obvious manifestation of globalization.
Terrorism is, therefore, a symptom of the dread that comes with the uncertainty of what lies beyond The Singularity. Indeed, it is a desire to keep The Singularity from happening.
The seers of The Singularity say the only thing that could forestall it would be nuclear and/or ecological devastation: a New Dark Age.
There is a human tendency to see the future as being either awful or idyllic. I think it will be neither. Very possibly we will see both a nuclear/ecological wasteland and a computer-driven super-elite that somehow exceeds Homo sapiens.
What might a trans-human be like? What would their relationship to the remaining humans be like? Raymond Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines, refers to trans-humans as "transcendent servants."
What does it mean to be a transcendent servant? The closest I could get was my family's relationship to our two cats. I believe cats look upon humans as their transcendent servants. They expect the large, two-legged beings to provide everything, keep them safe and secure, but otherwise not to bother them.
Cats may have some vague perception that humans are involved in things more complex than they can understand, but they just don't care. We might think of ourselves as cats, and the trans-humans as our providers of life's essentials, who change our litter boxes regularly and are amused by our antics. We may also become vaguely aware that our masters are involved in things beyond our comprehension, but we won't care.
The articulation of this brave new world is the task before us. Regardless of how we might take recent events as manifestations of the even greater changes ahead, remember, as Helen Keller told us: "Security is mostly superstition."
When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, he placed it 600 years in the future. Yet some of what he wrote is already obsolete. He didn't count on change being exponential.
8But the human race of that novel, divided neatly into cloned alphas, betas and so on, may still be prophetic, as they represent a species like us yet somehow disturbingly different.
If Brave New World was Huxley's expression of the problem of the future, his later book, The Perennial Philosophy, was his solution. It develops a pragmatic, nonsectarian spirituality, a timeless way to cope with uncertainty and change. In it he wrote: "Familiarity with traditionally hallowed writings tends to breed not a deep contempt, but something that is almost as bad, namely a kind of reverential insensibility, a stupor of the spirit, an inward deafness to the meaning of the sacred words."
Sept. 11 tore away our reverential insensibility and showed that it is possible, at least for brief moments, to awaken from our stupor and deafness. Such an awakened state is the best way to face the end of this wicked system of things, however and whenever it comes.
The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.
You may want to read other visitors' comments on Rev. Darrell E. Berger's "Armageddon Outta Here" .
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