"End Times" (God wars, continued)
Posted: February 25th, 2010, 7:50 pm
--- (continued):
If it were simply the Church you might make inquiry, but of course The Answer is unquestionable. Imagine the first eyes to wander and witness the mythic landmarks, long before anyone thought to make a Western sort of living. Imagine the first nineteenth century cowhand on the rolling red sea of soil, blackbrush and juniper in the margins, a monotony of peace. The herd trudges and groans into mystic overflow until it drops away. His deep canyon is instantly “all there,” no slow revelation; he is a speck on a shore of mineral eons, a continuum. What happened here? He could hike below the rim, glimpse unimaginable epochs we flit over and ignore, the visionary inner eye. More likely he says a prayer and turns back or tries to find a way around. Vertical travel is tricky on a plane. Things in the sky ordain and foretell, while the earth is mere dirt, or worse. Why go down when you could go up? Religion goes back millennia, as does astronomy, while geology reaches back a few hundred years, with big breakthroughs only in the last sixty.
Earth insight flickered in the seventeenth century, but God owned the law. Question the earth’s age and goons came for you. The answer is 6,000 years, declared Pope Corleone. When De Maillet and others wrote of billions, the Church declined to burn their papers, but edited decimals to the left. Such heavy-handed time fear infuriated Lamarck and Darwin, but the scripture mob held firm. Fossils? Extinctions? Blasphemy! Fossils were planted by Satan to confuse. Tiny crinoids in Paleozoic ooze became archfiends, and strange men who poked at rocks chiseled away at the Bible itself. Heretics! Geology persevered and eventually crept (unedited) into textbooks, though it seems certain most doctrines will never fully accept rock science. Scriptural belligerence toward science and techno manifests in many other fields too (weapons perhaps excepted), but it is the specter of holy war itself that is most chilling.
But we don’t do holy war. Well, consider that in 2003 United States President George W. Bush made a phone call to French President Jacques Chirac, in a last-ditch attempt to drum up support for a military invasion of Iraq. When details of the call surfaced later, a minor stir occurred, quickly forgotten. Perhaps Bush steeled himself for this call with a pre-summit tumbler of bourbon, as some have suggested. He said: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East. Biblical prophecies are being fulfilled. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age Begins.” Verbatim. As Chirac recounted in a later interview. You’re joking, right? Damn French cowards. Russians and Germans too. Who wouldn’t crank it up for a deal like that? The Bible is a masterwork—poetry, storytelling and wisdom. Could use a better translator maybe. Don’t fear the prophets boys. Ezekiel went out for a toke or something and saw a dust devil, maybe the Lord in a whirlwind. Too quiet in the desert. You hear things, like fossils screaming, or fortunes of kingdoms on a bleak, dry breath. “Tap tap, you there? Can you mobilize the Army against Gog? I’d like that. Do it for me. And quickly now, it’s getting hot over there; we could be home soon.”
Gog? Magog? Comes from Ezekiel 38—something about an “attack from the north,” in which God (yes, God) personally intervenes, with earthquakes and all the usual (postmodern) Old Testament nihilism. Some scholars read the text as mythological, but preachers read it as the literal end. Time to start knocking off the seven seals. The killing must get much worse, but fear not, we’ll be rescued (from ourselves). A fatalistic bunch. Google it. Sample the rhetoric—“The destruction of Syria is a clearly foretold event. America will let Israel handle the task. Damascus will be a ruinous heap (per Isaiah 17:1). Iran (Persia) is a huge player among ‘King of the South’ nations. American forces will quickly bring Iran under Western control. When Iran is taken Islamic resistance will escalate in 2006-07. America, in the land of Babylon, steps undeniably onto the prophetic stage.”—forty pages in this manifesto, one of many similar works. The author relents at the end—“the hideous deception of killing in God’s name is in full swing. Radical Islam believed this deception for centuries. Christianity has also embraced this insanity, with a lofty view that America is beyond reproach.” And that, coming from a zealot. Deception for all. Everyone must get stoned. Why? No consensus yet, but it seems to boil down to Jerusalem. Who gets it? Are we getting this?
If you insist on your Almighty, what is the eschatology? Do we escalate things and wait for God? Or does God wait for us? The End Times are taught in our neighborhood churches. They attained the White House. Are these “mainstream” beliefs? And if not, why aren't they more openly rejected? A reasonable question. Gog? Magog? Google it. In Islamic tradition Dhul Qarnayn roamed the world until he found a tribe threatened by Gog Magog, purveyors of destructive corruption, and he built a great wall to hold back hostile northern nations—similar to the tale of Alexander the Great’s wall. Some scholars think Gog Magog were the Mongols, who threatened Muslim power in the Middle Ages. In Goth lore, Ezekiel’s prophecy is considered fulfilled with the Swedes. The Swedes? In British tradition Gog and Magog are depicted as giants in the Lord Mayor’s Show every year, an event dating back to Henry V. They are London’s guardians, a myth derived from the myth of Roman Emperor Diocletian and his thirty-three wicked daughters. In Irish tradition Magog is ancestor to the Irish, as well as numerous other races across Europe and Asia, as told in “Lebor Gabala Erenn.” And when Napoleon invaded Russia, Chassidic rabbis called it the “Gog Magog War,” a sign of the Messiah’s return.
Yes. Waiting on a Messiah, raising some hell. Seems to be the way. Why should you care if they choose to butcher each other, threaten the earth right up to the final bell? You care, but you reach a fork where you state your peace and move on. Howl it to heaven’s black wasteland and icy glitter, into God’s star-spangled ear if you must, the swinish politics and suicide, but get back in the truck and go on, further into a dust-borne tide. Go deeper. As most things go, in childish footsteps of a fool, getting it out is enough—from unseen reaches, recesses and shade canyons, surreal as breath. It’s out of your hands, in the hands of God (all of them). Nothing that hasn’t been said before on the naked rock. Yes old man, you made a good point now and then with your theory and complaining, but you had to yield the floor. To rock and sky. Simmering roots and reverb. Mostly it was irony, the subversion. Impossible to forget that heady stretch of blaze. Moving on now. Another town. Another realm of rock rhythms.
If it were simply the Church you might make inquiry, but of course The Answer is unquestionable. Imagine the first eyes to wander and witness the mythic landmarks, long before anyone thought to make a Western sort of living. Imagine the first nineteenth century cowhand on the rolling red sea of soil, blackbrush and juniper in the margins, a monotony of peace. The herd trudges and groans into mystic overflow until it drops away. His deep canyon is instantly “all there,” no slow revelation; he is a speck on a shore of mineral eons, a continuum. What happened here? He could hike below the rim, glimpse unimaginable epochs we flit over and ignore, the visionary inner eye. More likely he says a prayer and turns back or tries to find a way around. Vertical travel is tricky on a plane. Things in the sky ordain and foretell, while the earth is mere dirt, or worse. Why go down when you could go up? Religion goes back millennia, as does astronomy, while geology reaches back a few hundred years, with big breakthroughs only in the last sixty.
Earth insight flickered in the seventeenth century, but God owned the law. Question the earth’s age and goons came for you. The answer is 6,000 years, declared Pope Corleone. When De Maillet and others wrote of billions, the Church declined to burn their papers, but edited decimals to the left. Such heavy-handed time fear infuriated Lamarck and Darwin, but the scripture mob held firm. Fossils? Extinctions? Blasphemy! Fossils were planted by Satan to confuse. Tiny crinoids in Paleozoic ooze became archfiends, and strange men who poked at rocks chiseled away at the Bible itself. Heretics! Geology persevered and eventually crept (unedited) into textbooks, though it seems certain most doctrines will never fully accept rock science. Scriptural belligerence toward science and techno manifests in many other fields too (weapons perhaps excepted), but it is the specter of holy war itself that is most chilling.
But we don’t do holy war. Well, consider that in 2003 United States President George W. Bush made a phone call to French President Jacques Chirac, in a last-ditch attempt to drum up support for a military invasion of Iraq. When details of the call surfaced later, a minor stir occurred, quickly forgotten. Perhaps Bush steeled himself for this call with a pre-summit tumbler of bourbon, as some have suggested. He said: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East. Biblical prophecies are being fulfilled. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age Begins.” Verbatim. As Chirac recounted in a later interview. You’re joking, right? Damn French cowards. Russians and Germans too. Who wouldn’t crank it up for a deal like that? The Bible is a masterwork—poetry, storytelling and wisdom. Could use a better translator maybe. Don’t fear the prophets boys. Ezekiel went out for a toke or something and saw a dust devil, maybe the Lord in a whirlwind. Too quiet in the desert. You hear things, like fossils screaming, or fortunes of kingdoms on a bleak, dry breath. “Tap tap, you there? Can you mobilize the Army against Gog? I’d like that. Do it for me. And quickly now, it’s getting hot over there; we could be home soon.”
Gog? Magog? Comes from Ezekiel 38—something about an “attack from the north,” in which God (yes, God) personally intervenes, with earthquakes and all the usual (postmodern) Old Testament nihilism. Some scholars read the text as mythological, but preachers read it as the literal end. Time to start knocking off the seven seals. The killing must get much worse, but fear not, we’ll be rescued (from ourselves). A fatalistic bunch. Google it. Sample the rhetoric—“The destruction of Syria is a clearly foretold event. America will let Israel handle the task. Damascus will be a ruinous heap (per Isaiah 17:1). Iran (Persia) is a huge player among ‘King of the South’ nations. American forces will quickly bring Iran under Western control. When Iran is taken Islamic resistance will escalate in 2006-07. America, in the land of Babylon, steps undeniably onto the prophetic stage.”—forty pages in this manifesto, one of many similar works. The author relents at the end—“the hideous deception of killing in God’s name is in full swing. Radical Islam believed this deception for centuries. Christianity has also embraced this insanity, with a lofty view that America is beyond reproach.” And that, coming from a zealot. Deception for all. Everyone must get stoned. Why? No consensus yet, but it seems to boil down to Jerusalem. Who gets it? Are we getting this?
If you insist on your Almighty, what is the eschatology? Do we escalate things and wait for God? Or does God wait for us? The End Times are taught in our neighborhood churches. They attained the White House. Are these “mainstream” beliefs? And if not, why aren't they more openly rejected? A reasonable question. Gog? Magog? Google it. In Islamic tradition Dhul Qarnayn roamed the world until he found a tribe threatened by Gog Magog, purveyors of destructive corruption, and he built a great wall to hold back hostile northern nations—similar to the tale of Alexander the Great’s wall. Some scholars think Gog Magog were the Mongols, who threatened Muslim power in the Middle Ages. In Goth lore, Ezekiel’s prophecy is considered fulfilled with the Swedes. The Swedes? In British tradition Gog and Magog are depicted as giants in the Lord Mayor’s Show every year, an event dating back to Henry V. They are London’s guardians, a myth derived from the myth of Roman Emperor Diocletian and his thirty-three wicked daughters. In Irish tradition Magog is ancestor to the Irish, as well as numerous other races across Europe and Asia, as told in “Lebor Gabala Erenn.” And when Napoleon invaded Russia, Chassidic rabbis called it the “Gog Magog War,” a sign of the Messiah’s return.
Yes. Waiting on a Messiah, raising some hell. Seems to be the way. Why should you care if they choose to butcher each other, threaten the earth right up to the final bell? You care, but you reach a fork where you state your peace and move on. Howl it to heaven’s black wasteland and icy glitter, into God’s star-spangled ear if you must, the swinish politics and suicide, but get back in the truck and go on, further into a dust-borne tide. Go deeper. As most things go, in childish footsteps of a fool, getting it out is enough—from unseen reaches, recesses and shade canyons, surreal as breath. It’s out of your hands, in the hands of God (all of them). Nothing that hasn’t been said before on the naked rock. Yes old man, you made a good point now and then with your theory and complaining, but you had to yield the floor. To rock and sky. Simmering roots and reverb. Mostly it was irony, the subversion. Impossible to forget that heady stretch of blaze. Moving on now. Another town. Another realm of rock rhythms.
