Thursday, November 29, 2012

Apocalyptic thinking is a Self Fulfilling Prophecy?

My experience of people who think an apocalypse is coming is that often they do not survive to see it. The reason for this is people often get into a state of mind which is: "Oh. The Change is coming and we are all going to change and move into heaven either here on earth or we are all going to die and go to heaven together."

The real problem with this point of view is that it is sort of like believing in fairy tales, because when was the last time you saw God come down from heaven and take everyone away? That's right! You haven't seen it you have only read about things like this. And the problem is likely no one has ever seen this happen.

So, if no one has ever seen this happen and 90% of the people that ever lived on earth are alive right now, what is the chance that there is going to be an apocalypse?

I suppose if you were one of the 30,000 people who died in the Japanese Tsunami and Earthquake, or one of the 250,000 who died in the Christmas time Tsunami and Earthquake in 2004 you could say that these events were an apocalypse for the people who died.

And, as I felt the heaven realms come close to earth before the 2004 Earthquake in Indonesia which affected the entire pacific region I too, was scared the month before it occurred. However, I haven't heard anyone say that either of these events was an apocalypse although I'm sure there must be some who died thinking this was the apocalypse because if you have seen the videos of either of these events if they were not an apocalyptic experience I don't know what ever was.

So, back to my orignal premise that "Apocalyptic thinking is a Self Fulfilling prophesy". Often when people are thinking this way, they don't go to college, they don't start businesses, they often don't get married or have children because they believe it is all going to end soon.

And often it does end soon with them all alone or dying with a group of people by committing suicide like at Jonestown or something like this. So, is "Apocalyptic Thinking a Self Fulfilling Prophesy?" Yes. It can be for some people and then they are gone but not like they expected to be gone.

Tied to this kind of thinking is often a point of view that goes something like this: "God is going to heal me so I won't go to a doctor!" When I grew up since my religion my parents raised me in was similar to Christian Science in that often people with curable ailments died having this point of view.
So, as a kid who loved science like I did my thought was, "So, you are going to die rather than go see a doctor?" And my thought was: "These people are kind of nuts aren't they."

I had no problem with people praying and getting healed by God. That happened a lot too. However, my thought is "Not to go see a doctor or some kind of healer" strained the logic of my mind. However, in the 1950s many more people than now were not logical at all in their thinking. I guess I was just lucky my father was very intelligent and liked science too. However, when he got prostate cancer his choice (since he didn't like medical doctors just like his Dad and way back) he eventually died when it spread to other organs and eventually bone cancer because he went on a rice diet that he had heard cured some people. But, in the end he died too because he couldn't shift out of his "Preventative medical thinking" into "Hey. Let's just stay alive if we can!" thinking. I think this is just the kinds of effects many religious people can have on each other where they sometimes (in sincerity) cause each other's deaths without realizing it.

Other times I saw people want to go to heaven as a child and put their white dress suit on and go climb Mt. Shasta in the summer at midnight. Of course, at 8000 feet to 10,000 feet or higher it is going to go below freezing most nights and they were later found dead a few weeks later on the mountain. So, my experience with religious people in this sense has made me very cynical to say the least. It's not that I don't believe in God it is that I believe, "God helps those who help themselves". And often religious people do not have this practical logic in their lives to back them up to keep them from dying in unfortunate ways.

No comments: