Another religious nut saying the end is nigh... so what?

"There is no sanctuary." -- from the movie 'Logan's Run' (1976)

In Logan's Run, the world's surviving population lives in a dome city long after whatever calamity drove them permanently indoors. The rules of bubble-city life are simple: no one leaves and at thirty you get "renewed" -- an elaborate ceremony where everyone gets to watch you die. Logan is a Sandman, a bubble-city policeman, and gets assigned to find out where the "runners" are going when they try to escape the domed slice of Heaven. His mission is to find this place (called sanctuary) and destroy it.

But there is no sanctuary. The runners were all getting turned into salad by an unfriendly android named Box. Sanctuary was a mass delusion that people wanted to believe so badly that for them, it became real.

Sounds hokey, you say? Maybe a few idiots would believe in some totally fictional place, but never a whole city.

I think it's perfectly plausible. In fact I think the vast majority of people have their own version of sanctuary and they hold to it even in light of the most damning of contrary evidence.

Question: Aren't Christians always saying that the world is ending?

Answer: Yes and no.

Yes, no matter how far back in history one goes, you can always find a few disaffected individuals proclaiming the imminent destruction of the world. Jesus and the apostles actually get accused of this, although as we will see, mostly that's owes to confusion over the whole 'times' concept. Historically, the people walking around with sandwich boards telling us that we are doomed are people who have decided that civilization would be better off gone. For them, sanctuary is the apocalypse. Strange, I know. And yes, this is always a small fringe group. But they can be noisy nonetheless. After all, when you want the world to die then the end times becomes your moment of vindication (we talked about vindicating moments in Why doesn't my life make sense and What are the trumpets) and if you're off your rocker you may want everyone in earshot to know that you're about to be vindicated.

Now for the 'no'.

Most Christians do not take solace in the idea that the world is going to be burned to a cinder... and they never have. But that doesn't mean that sanctuary for this group is the place that Jesus has gone ahead and prepared for them. If you are reading this now you likely fall into this category. Don't beat yourself up over it. There is a simple reason for this; Heaven is a difficult concept to wrap one's brain around. So most of us create a kind of pleasant metaphor for Heaven. It's our sanctuary.

In History isn't what you think it is - part 1, I talked about Emperor Frederick the Second and the poor saps who accepted his fraudulent replacement. Those "sleeping emperor" myths fell out of a belief system called millenarianism -- the idea that God was going to bring about a 1,000 year long party for Christians on this world and that someone like Frederick the Second could usher those good times in. That 1,000 year long holiday was sanctuary for generations of Christians. Life was hard and a 1,000 year long party sounded so good it just had to be the true interpretation.

Millenarianism is virtually gone today. These days, the average Christian makes sanctuary out of the end times prophecies by convincing themselves that the likely time for fulfillment is at the end of their own lives. So, the typical fifty year old Christian with an optimistic outlook will say that the world will end in thirty years, whereas the twenty year old thinks it's more likely that God will come back sixty years from now. Etc. etc.

At the other end of the spectrum there is Michael Schermer, skeptic poster-child, who often mocks Christian eschatology (the notion that the world can any time in the next billion years). They're all deluded, he says. They don't realize the power of science and human ingenuity. But that's his sanctuary. It's a pleasant delusion, nothing else.

A good example of the reality came last week. Last Thursday the UK Guardian ran a story on insiders in the IEA (International Energy Agency) calling attention to the fact that they have been pressured by governments (like ours) to underreport the rate at which oil supplies are dropping. A couple of days later it ran a follow up story lamenting that the news -- which they seemed to think was a blockbuster -- had hardly caused a ripple in the worldwide press. After all, if the IEA is exaggerating the supply numbers for oil, and if our modern civilization and our lives for that matter depend on that oil supply....

But that's the thing about sanctuaries of all stripes; they can seem so believable that anything that intrudes into the fantasy is viewed as craziness. The people at the UK Guardian may have just as well been walking the streets with a sandwich board.

Now, on to Matthew 24.