Doomsday – Good and Bad

I have a ‘passion’ for thinking about the end times.

– you may have noticed

Some might say it’s ghoulish, but that might imply I’m looking forward to it and want it to happen. It’s kind of ‘exciting’ to think about such things, probably or partly because I’ve been programmed as such by the ‘moviefication’ or ‘tellyfication’ of disasters, which always portrays disasters as opportunities for triumph, awash with heroism {of the white western variety of course}. The more sensible bit of me puts this breach of reality into check and realises that: even if I wasn’t unwittingly influenced by Hollywood depiction of the end times, the real Armageddon will be unimaginably worse.

When I was young, I grew up in the cold war. Nuclear Armageddon was never far away (probably it was never allowed to be far away) and Nuclear things fascinated me so much  that I wanted to be a ‘nuclear chemist’, even though I had probably just invented a brand new profession and didn’t actually know what a nuclear chemist would actually do! I can see very clearly that my nuclear ‘desires’ were heavily influenced by propaganda and video games, some of which lead me to believe that as a nuclear chemist in a post nuked world, I could make things not so bad – errrm somehow, that there was something one could actually do to fight and win – like bollocks you could.

MY ‘nuclear youth’ seems to have provided an early runner of Theological Armageddon but now I have more sense. I’m no psycho.

OK. lets get down to business.

I was reading a book on the Dajjal, the anti-Christ and something that had been nagging me in the background suddenly made became clear. The descriptions of the end times I had read seemed a quite unusual with regards to the modern world we live in today. They talk of people using swords, shooting arrows, horsemen, armies gathering and things unfolding as though nobody had knowledge of prophesied acts gleaned from the tens of thousands of books, oral stories, and e-media.

Why don’t nuclear weapons seem to be used? Why are conventional armies like in the time of old mentioned?

The atheists will claim because its nonsense and that the prophets of God didn’t really get divine knowledge as to these events and so naturally portrayed the end days in a very low technology society that the prophets saw in their day.

Some religious men will say it’s religious symbolism, although I think the prophets would know what a sword is and describe it correctly given that it is used as weapon, If the ‘sword’ did something other than what a normal sword does, or the swod was 100ft long, then one would have an arguement for saying the word sword was some kind of symbolism and be best word they could pick to describe something that they had never seen before.

But a possible more ‘conventional’ idea (and only Allah(SWT) knows) as to what will happen dawned upon me as to all this.

And in addition to things like swords being hung up, arrows being fired, conventional armies of old being assembled, there is no mention of the US, of South America, Of China, of Australia of most of Africa. There is no mention of aircraft, battleships. There is no mention of computers, machine guns, tanks, napalm and so forth. The descriptions are very much Middle East and Europe centered.

What explanation could account for this?

It hit me that the end-times are likely to happen in a world where there is virtually NO energy sources left. There is a description of Dajjal riding a donkey, which I would accept is symbolism for an aeroplane, but as far as I can tell, air power is all but gone from the end times and is certainly not significant at all.

A near total lack of energy would mean difficulty in travel – Hence no mention of the US, China, Australia, Russia even. Populations would be pretty much localised. The age of sail via wind power, would cause long journey times once more hence ‘isiolating’ far off lands making them very less significant in ME politics. Weapon wise, carrying a machine gun (whose whole ‘aura’ is energy expensive – including bullets!) or even muskets and rifles seem also to have felt the energy pinch. Swords however can be crafted in traditional fashion with renewable fuels such as wood.

No Nukes are mentioned so it appears that even they have fallen victim to a possible global extinction of energy. Even Dajjal’s donkey (plane) – assuming the symbolism of a donkey for a plane is correct – might be such a luxury in such a world and so its use is essentially zero – certainly there is little description of bombs/missiles (one would exptect the term flaming arrows) coming from the donkey, so it may just be a transport plane. Although the dajjal can appear to perform miracles so maybe he will have a real donkey of the unuaul description describes.

So it seems to me that in a scientifically conventional predictive way, there is a reasonalbe arguement for saying the actual physical appearace of the dajjal is quite a long way off. Oil, coal and nuclear have to be virtually extinct, or certainly unable to power any serious military hardware like a coal steam train on rails (easily sabotaged) carring cannons etc.

If all this is correct, this is ‘good’ from the point of view the end times are far, far away. But it’s bad in the sense that right now it feels like the conditions for Armageddon are already here and that at this day the world is already a terrible place to live, so I shudder in thinking how much worse it can get over the predicted ‘far away’ time for the real end of the world.

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