{"id":33200,"date":"2017-08-14T01:00:58","date_gmt":"2017-08-14T05:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33200"},"modified":"2018-09-18T11:12:00","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T15:12:00","slug":"qotd-millenarianism-left-and-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/08\/14\/qotd-millenarianism-left-and-right\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Millenarianism, left and right"},"content":{"rendered":"

Secularists and leftists enjoy sneering at conservative Christians who believe in the Rapture and other flavors of millenarianism. Reasonably so: it takes either a drooling idiot or somebody who has deliberately shut off most of his brain, reducing himself to an idiotically low level of critical thinking, to believe such things. The draw, of couse, is that each individual fundamentalist implicitly believes he<\/em> will be among the saved \u2014 privileged to honk a great big I TOLD YOU SO! at all those sinners writhing in the lake of fire.<\/p>\n

It is therefore more than a little amusing to notice how prone these \u2018sophisticated\u2019 critics are to their own forms of idiotic millenarianism.<\/p>\n

Anybody remember Paul \u201cPopulation Bomb\u201d Ehrlich? This is the guy who predicted that megadeaths from global famine would be the defining feature of the 1970s. Or Jeremy Rifkin, the guy who told us all in 1986 that the Frostban bacterium engineered to protect plants against cold snaps would mess up the Earth\u2019s climate? Or the brigade of self-panickers (Carl Sagan was briefly one of them) who warned us all back around 1980 that an impending Ice Age was about to destroy civilization? Or, hey \u2014 how about the ozone hole; remember when we were all going to die of UV-B-induced skin cancer?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to laugh at those particular doom-mongers now; there has been plenty of time for their predictions to fail. But we have plenty of apocalypse merchants peddling equally silly scenarios, on equally thin evidence and bogus reasoning, today. And the same \u2018sophisticated\u2019 secularists who lapped up Paul Ehrlich\u2019s nonsense are swaying to the Gospel shout of global warming and \u201cpeak oil\u201d \u2014 just as self-hypnotized, and just as stone-stupid, as an Ozark Mountains cracker at a tent-revival meeting.<\/p>\n

Rather than getting to gloat over sinners writhing in a lake of fire, the draw is getting to feel superior to capitalists and Republicans and Americans; they will all surely Get Theirs and starve in their SUVs when the Collapse Comes, while virtuous tree-hugging Birkenstock-wearers, being in a state of grace with Gaia, will retire to renewable-energy-powered communes and build scale models of Swedish socialism out of macrame supplies or something.<\/p>\n

The hilarious part is how self-congratulatory the secularist millennarians are about their own superiority over the religious ones, when in fact the secondary gain from these two kinds of delusional system is identical<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Eric S. Raymond, “Peak Oil \u2014 A Wish-Fulfillment Fantasy for Secular Idiots”, Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2005-11-13.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Secularists and leftists enjoy sneering at conservative Christians who believe in the Rapture and other flavors of millenarianism. Reasonably so: it takes either a drooling idiot or somebody who has deliberately shut off most of his brain, reducing himself to an idiotically low level of critical thinking, to believe such things. The draw, of couse, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,41,11,13],"tags":[360,1235,240,456,39],"class_list":["post-33200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","category-religion","category-usa","tag-christianity","tag-esr","tag-globalwarming","tag-hysteria","tag-junkscience"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Du","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33200"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33201,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33200\/revisions\/33201"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}