By Jim Downard
The National Geographic Channel aired the second installment of their “The Story of God” series last Sunday.
I previously commented on the first episode, which had tiptoed around the motivations and social dynamics of why we humans have religions at all, and how the show kept well clear of the third rail of pondering whether our human religious instincts could run whether or not the faiths happened to be true.
This time host Morgan Freeman was investigating the “Apocalypse.”
The End of the World.
“Dogs and cats living together…” (Apologies to Ghostbusters).
That choice of topic struck me as a rather parochially God of Abraham concept, and the bulk of the show veered little from that narrow track.
Most of the people on Earth are not expecting the End of Days any time soon, if at all, however many obsessive chunks there may be on it within Christianity, parts of Islam, and bits of the Jewish asterisk. But doesn’t the rest of the planet count?
They did let the Hindus have their say, a bit, and only at the end.
Apart from that caveat, the show again trod their subject carefully but fairly studiously.
We saw the roots of Jewish End Times concern involving whether Solomon’s Temple would rebuilt after the Romans got serious with their occupation, and how the Essene sect of the Dead Sea Scrolls reflected apocalyptic expectations in pre-Christian times.
Freeman and a biblical scholar revealed the secret of 666 (it was a gematria translation of the Christian persecutor Nero) with all the hoopla and arched brows of a Dan Brown DaVinci Code thriller.
But this was no news bulletin, no scoop. Scholars have known about this 666 (or 616) Nero connection for decades.
I suspect it was given such a portentous build-up because so many people who take their End Times very seriously aren’t aware of any of that scholarship, and the show wanted it to have maximum impact.
They could have devoted a whole show, of course, to chronicling the centuries of Christians thinking the Signs and Portents had finally fallen into place. Or press on to the far more incendiary historical fact that the early Christians were expecting Jesus to return within their lifetime to overthrow the Romans and become King of Kings, and that such an event never happened.
Failed prediction.
End of Days not a gonna happen.
Move on.
That would have been a fun stance for National Geographic to take. I could imagine how the Christian and atheist blogospheres would have lit up then.
But instead of investigating that psychology of why people thousands of years after the non-event of the Parousia were still able to spin themselves into a He’s a Comin’ rapture, it was safer to press on to an equally carefully measured evaluation of the niche of end timers in Islam, expecting their final battle at Dabiq.
Religion can inspire a lot of people to do an awful lot of loony things, can’t it? Accent on the awful in ISIS’ case.
The National Geographic Apocalypse show did an end run around the contentious Christian and Islamic brands by touching on the 2012 non-prophecy of the Maya. It was just another calendar cycle turnover for them, and yet a bunch of people talked themselves into thinking the Maya were predicting something cataclysmic.
The audience could infer that, just as modern people did with a nonexistent Mayan “prophecy,” people of all ages and cultures were capable of just being silly and wrong.
Now there’s an “Apocalypse” that looks like it’s never going to end.
