Tick tock, tick tock, goes the Doomsday Clock. Doomsday (at 12 o’clock) means, metaphorically speaking, that all human beings on planet Earth have only five more minutes to live. But don’t jump to any conclusion; or out a window, just yet.

In celestial time, five minutes could mean anything from the time it takes to boil an egg to 5,000 years from now. In any case, your degree of apprehension may rest on which word makes your pulse accelerate: Doomsday, Apocalypse, or End Times. Theoretically, they all mean the same thing: Goodbye world, it’s been fun.

My interest, though, was not spiked by “the end of the world” idea itself. I’m a bit more curious about what will cause this Grand Exit. A prominent group of scientists, while pushing the symbolic Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight, issued this warning: the world is nudging closer to a “nuclear or an environmental global cataclysm.”

And these brainy eggheads have a good reason for thinking so.

Their envisioned nuclear Doomsday is prompted by analyzing events that have taken place throughout time, especially recent events that involve national uprisings, mass genocide, tyrannical rulers, and wars, particularly the Middle East kind of war.

With five or six nations now having nuclear bombs, and several rogue nations working feverishly to go nuclear, it seems like only a matter of time before some nation drops a nuclear device on an “enemy”, and other nations retaliate with their own nuclear arsenal; then all hell breaks loose and the “Day” we fear most dawns upon us---but, leaves none of us alive to see it. That’s the nuclear Doomsday scientists warn us about.

The environmental Doomsday is another matter. Our imagination may enable us to envision a nuclear “world’s end” but an environmental Doomsday, though just as calamitous, can be more sinister because it is gradual, subtler, and “man-made”; the heating of the earth due to human activities, such as exhaust emissions, fossil fuels, power plants, airplanes, commercial trucks, deforestation, city traffic gridlock, industrial waste disposal, etcetera.

Already toxic gases, by changing the climates, are responsible for the extinction of some animal species, and portend the same fate for the human species if the earth keeps getting warmer. For example. the animal kingdom, with its canny ability to “sense” changes, is already reacting to a warming earth: bears leave hibernation early, thinking it is spring; earth tremors drive snakes out of their dens; birds get confused and change their migratory habits; domestic animals get restless and behave oddly; marine life starts to beach itself; even flying insects show more aggressive behavior.

We, or course, don’t notice most of these things because only a few of us make a study of it.  Or even care about it.

But Doomsday---the end of life on earth as we know it---has a third element to consider: the spiritual scenario; that is, Divine destruction of the world presumably for the sins of man Biblical scholars have for many years studied the words of the prophets and vivid descriptions of the “end times” in the book of Revelations. They give us a variety of beliefs on how, when, and why the end of this world---and Judgment Day---will take place. The Biblical events leading up to Armageddon and eternal darkness are; tribulations, plagues, prophesies, and promises that “true believers” accept at face value and wait for in reverent anticipation.

The most recent, and disturbing, prophetic announcement is that the Great Tribulation would begin on June 12th of this year, the day that Israel celebrates its 40th anniversary of retaking Jerusalem. But hope you didn’t cancel your vacation. There have been so many “end time” dates given which never came to pass that we needn’t lose any sleep over it. Not yet anyway.

Besides, ieven if the Doomsday Clock has validity, we still have a good five minutes to live.

James T. Moore
http://jamestmoore.us/