Word: dooms
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...seven-headed beast from The Revelation of St. John, the New Testament's dense and cryptic vision of the last things. But in these final days of the 20th century, religious millennialism has once again found a real world problem on which to hang its visions of doom--the Y2K (that's the year 2000) computer...
...that kind of uncertainty that some religious millennialists are seizing upon, and in the process moving quickly from the plausible to the hyperbolic. In pulpits and on videotapes, on Christian radio stations and Internet websites, there are dedicated prophets of doom. They warn of a cascade of Y2K calamities--massive power blackouts, the failure of hospital, factory and fire equipment, the collapse of banking, food shortages, riots. A Y2K article posted last year on the website of the Christian Coalition speculated that President Clinton might use the chaos that Y2K unleashes as an opportunity to seize dictatorial powers. The televangelist...
History, of course, is littered with premature prophets of doom. One of America's largest millennial movements was led by William Miller, a 19th century farmer. On Oct. 22, 1844, many of his 50,000 followers took to the hilltops, waiting in vain for the appearance of Christ and an army of angels. By the latter half of that century, two end-time views had become dominant among Protestant groups. "Pre-millennialism" imagined Christ appearing on earth during the reign of the Antichrist. "Post-millennialism" taught that Christ would return only after Christians had first established their own thousand-year...
...then, and not two decades earlier? Why De Jager, and not Bemer? Proximity to the millennium may have had something to do with it as well as the increasingly ominous tone of the warnings. This was Bemer's dry 1979 prophecy of doom: "Don't drop the first two digits. The program may well fail from ambiguity." Twenty years later, here's De Jager's jeremiad: "The economy worldwide would stop...you would not have water. You would not have power...
...comes naturally, really. You've rehearsed every day of your life ever since your were a small babe, thanks to the status quo. Ladies and gentlemen, you are being led to your doom and all you have to manage to do is stay awake...