Betting Against the End of the World

Throughout human history and especially in recent centuries, cults of all kinds have predicted the end of the world. You’ve probably noticed that they’ve all been seriously wrong.

The latest such silliness has come from 89-year-old Harold Camping’s Family Radio network of 66 stations. Based on his study of the Bible, Camping calculates that doomsday will be on Saturday, May 21, 2011.

Christianity is particularly prone to such nonsense. After all, the Book of Revelation is all about doomsday, though with details from a clearly delusional mind. The “son of man” appears out of the clouds with a two-edged sword coming out of his mouth: that makes it tough to eat and talk! He has seven stars in his hand: a star is a million miles in diameter and a million degrees at its core, making things pretty hot and crowded on the Earth. You get the picture.

American history is full of cults that saw no future for the world. Starting in 1843, William Miller and his followers predicted a dozen doomsdays. One would think that after the first few predictions failed, followers of the cult would disappear. Remarkably, more such cults and followers followed.

The problem is not only found in fringe Christian sects. The landscape of the twentieth century is littered with the failed predictions from a plethora of mystic and New Age groups. The members of the Heaven’s Gate flying saucer cult, to get ahead of the game, all committed suicide.

What is perhaps most disturbing about the adherents to cults that make such failed predictions or, more generally, are as crazy as March hares, is that they are not just the most poor, ignorant, or downtrodden in society.

DECEPTION...FOOLISHNESS

2 Timothy 3:13 But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.

1 Corinthians 3:19 For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness.

Romans 16:18 For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple.

I am currently reading this book. A much different story than Camping's

BTW, this book was written in 1881; you wouldn't believe how accurate it is!

Reading this book was one of the greatest graces of my life!"
— St. Thérèse of Lisieux

In the late nineteenth century, Father Charles Arminjon, a priest from the mountains of southeastern France, assembled his flock in the town cathedral to preach a series of conferences to help them turn their thoughts away from this life’s mean material affairs—and toward the next life’s glorious spiritual reward. His wise and uncompromising words deepened in them the spirit of recollection that all Christians must have: the abiding conviction that heavenly aims, not temporal enthusiasms, must guide everything we think, say, and do.

When Father Arminjon’s conferences were later published in a book, many others were able to reap the same benefit—including fourteen-year-old Thérèse Martin, then on the cusp of entering the Carmelite convent in Lisieux. Reading it, she says, “plunged my soul into a happiness not of this earth.” Young Thérèse, filled with a sense of “what God reserves for those who love him, and seeing that the eternal rewards had no proportion to the light sacrifices of life,” copied out numerous passages and memorized them, “repeating unceasingly the words of love burning in my heart.”

Now the very book that so inspired the Little Flower is available for the first time in English.

Let the pages of The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life fill you with the same burning words of love, with the same ardent desire to know God above all created things, that St. Thérèse gained from them. Let them also enrich your understanding of certain teachings of the Faith that can often seem so mysterious, even frightening:

The signs that will precede the world’s end
The coming of the Antichrist, and how to recognize him
The Judgment and where it may send us: heaven, hell, and purgatory
Biblical end-times prophecy: how to read it and not be deceived
Jesus commands us to be ever-watchful for his return, and ever-mindful that we have no lasting city on earth. The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life is an invaluable aid to inculcating in your spirit that heavenly orientation, without which true human happiness cannot be found—in this world or the next.

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