Prophets Of Doom Quotes

Never surrender your hopes and dreams to the fateful limitations others have placed on their own lives. The vision of your true destiny does not reside within the blinkered outlook of the naysayers and the doom prophets. Judge not by their words, but accept advice based on the evidence of actual results. Do not be surprised should you find a complete absence of anything mystical or miraculous in the manifested reality of those who are so eager to advise you. Friends and family who suffer the lack of abundance, joy, love, fulfillment and prosperity in their own lives really have no business imposing their self-limiting beliefs on your reality experience.

I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life's precariousness, its thready breath. Beside me, my husband's pulse beats at his throat; in their beds, my children's skin shows every faintest scratch. A breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations. I do not forget either my father and his kind hanging over us, bright and sharp as swords, aimed at our tearing flesh. If they do not fall on us in spite and malice, then they will fall by accident or whim. My breath fights in my throat. How can I live on beneath such a burden of doom? I rise then and go to my herbs. I create something, I transform something. My witchcraft is as strong as ever, stronger. This too is good fortune. How many have such power and leisure and defense as I do? Telemachus comes from our bed to find me. He sits with me in the greensmelling darkness, holding my hand. Our faces are both lined now, marked with our years. Circe, he says, it will be all right. It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. They are words you might speak to a child. I have heard him say them to our daughters, when he rocked them back to sleep from a nightmare, when he dressed their small cuts, soothed whatever stung. His skin is familiar as my own beneath my fingers. I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean it does not hurt. He does not mean we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.

Now, it's a fact well known to those who know it well that prophets of doom only attain popularity when they get the drinks in all around.

Prophets of doom warn that sooner or later Homo sapiens will exhaust the raw materials and energy of planet Earth. And what will happen then?

The heroic is a genuinely terrifying idea to the liberal mind which must seek to make everything petty and small.

When God grabs you by the scruff of the neck then although theoretically you have a freedom to say 'no', in another sense, actually, you can't say no because it's like Jeremiah. 'God, you have cheated me. You called me to be a prophet against the people that I love, and all that I proclaim is words of doom and judgement.' And yet if I say "I will shut up", I can't.

Don't you feel as though you could love everything starting tomorrow, and everything could love you, if only you took an action to set into motion the coming of our new tomorrow and its tomorrow and that one's tomorrow? Shotgun loaded hand on the pump and no matter who you damage you're still a false prophet, but we drink chocolate milk and then we get muscles and smash down the droves with fists like hammers and then we pump the fists in the air for victory. I be the prophet of the doom that is you. You are the mess in messiah.

Yet can the economic pie grow indefinitely? Every pie requires raw material and energy. Prophets of doom warn that sooner or later Homo Sapiens will exhaust the raw materials and energy of planet Earth. And what will happen then?

Yet can the economic pie grow indefinitely? Every pie requires raw materials and energy. Prophets of doom warn that sooner or later Homo sapiens will exhaust the raw materials and energy of planet Earth. And what will happen then?

The prophet knew that religion could distort what the Lord demanded of man, that priests themselves had committed perjury by bearing false witness, condoning violence, tolerating hatred, calling for ceremonies instead of bursting forth with wrath and indignation at cruelty, deceit, idolatry, and violence. To the people, religion was Temple, priesthood, incense: "This is the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord" (Jer. 7:4). Such piety Jeremiah brands as fraud and illusion. "Behold you trust in deceptive words to no avail," he calls (Jer. 7 : 8 ). Worship preceded o r followed by evil acts becomes a n absurdity. The holy place is doomed when people indulge in unholy deeds.

This time of contrast shall separate the wheat from the chaff. The wise will strive to manifest a brave new world, while the foolish and unkind will suffer for their lack of common sense. And when the storm finally subsides, many will wake up on the wrong side of history.

Testimony in new age writing affirms the way in which embracing a love ethic transforms life for the good. Yet a lot of this information only reaches those of us who have class privilege. And often, individuals whose lives are rich in spiritual and material well-being, who have diverse friends from all walks of life who nurture their personal integrity, tell the rest of the world these things are impossible to come by. I am talking here about the many prophets of doom who tell us that racism will never end, sexism is here to stay the rich will never share their resources. We would all be surprised if we could enter their lives for a day. Much of what they are telling us cannot be had, they have. But in keeping with a capitalist-based notion of well-being, they really believe there is not enough to go around, that the good life can only be had by a few.

In trials of ir'n and silver fain “The dead will rise and walk again “The blesséd few that touch the light “Will aid the war against the night. “But one by one they all will die “Without a cause to rule them by “As Darkness spreads across the land “He'll wield the oceans in his hand. “Five warriors will oppose his reign “And overthrow the Shadow Thane “They come from sides both dark and light “The realm the mortals call “twilight.” “A magus crowned with boughs of fire “Will rise like Phoenix from his pyre “A beast of shadows touched with sight “Will claim a Dark One as her knight “The next, a prophet doomed to fail “Will find her powers to avail “The final: one mere mortal man “Who bears the mark upon his hand “The circle closes round these few “Made sacred by the bonds they hew “But if one fails then so shall all “Bring death to those of Evenfall.

When you're a kid, you don't get to do anything. When you're a grown-up, you don't want to do anything.

A church that does not keep step with modern scientific knowledge is doomed.

It cannot be described, this awesome chain of events that depopulated the whole Earth; the range is too tremendous for any to picture of encompass. Of the people of Earth's unfortunate ages, billions of years before, only a few prophets and madman could have conceived that which was to come - could have grasped visions of the still, dead lands, and long-empty sea-beds. The rest would have doubted... doubted alike the shadow of change upon the planet and the shadow of doom upon the race. For man has always thought himself the immortal master of natural things...

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come, Can yet the lease of my true love control, Suppos'd as forfeit to a confin'd doom. The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur'd, And the sad augurs mock their own presage; Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd, And peace proclaims olives of endless age. Now with the drops of this most balmy time My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes, Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes: And thou in this shalt find thy monument, When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.

…For many years now, that way of living has been scorned, and over the last 40 or 50 years it has nearly disappeared. Even so, there was nothing wrong with it. It was an economy directly founded on the land, on the power of the sun, on thrift and skill and on the people’s competence to take care of themselves. They had become dependent to some extent on manufactured goods, but as long as they stayed on their farms and made use of the great knowledge that they possessed, they could have survived foreseeable calamities that their less resourceful descendants could not survive. Now that we have come to the end of the era of cheap petroleum which fostered so great a forgetfulness, I see that we could have continued that thrifty old life fairly comfortably – could even have improved it. Now, we will have to return to it, or to a life necessarily as careful, and we will do so only uncomfortably and with much distress. Increasingly over the last maybe forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world, in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world. And that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater. This new world seems a jumble of scenery and props never quite believable. An economy of fantasies and moods, in which it is hard to remember either the timely world of nature, or the eternal world of the prophets and poets. And I fear, I believe I know, that the doom of the older world I knew as a boy will finally afflict the new one that replaced it. The world I knew as a boy was flawed surely, but it was substantial and authentic. The households of my grandparents seemed to breathe forth a sense of the real cost and worth of things. Whatever came, came by somebody’s work.

Like some translucen latterday Cassandra, the prophetess of doom, (Heila the Comptesse von Westarp, the former secretary of the Thule Gesellschaff) rose up from the bosom of the limp and slumbering medium (Dr. Nemirovitch-Dantchanko) to give a warning that the man who was even now preparing to assume the leadership of Thule would prove himself to be a false prophet. Assuming total power over the nation, he would be responsible one day for reducing the whole of Germany to rubble and its people to a defeat and moreal degradation hitherto unknown to history.

Rejection has value. It teaches us when our work or our skillset is not good enough and must be made better. This is a powerful revelation, like the burning UFO wheel seen by the prophet Ezekiel, or like the McRib sandwich shaped like the Virgin Mary seen by the prophet Steve Jenkins. Rejection refines us. Those who fall prey to its enervating soul-sucking tentacles are doomed. Those who persist past it are survivors. Best ask yourself the question: what kind of writer are you? The kind who survives? Or the kind who gets asphyxiated by the tentacles of woe?

Mia's mother, Nonna Celia, is to blame for that, because she's a prophet of doom. Every time I'd ask her if we could go someplace the next day or next week, her reply would be, "We might not live that long." If I'd say, "See you tomorrow," her answer would be, "If that's what God wants." Leaving so much to fate has kept me an insomniac for most of my life...

Doomed and knew it, accepted the doom without either seeking or fleeing it. Loved her brother despite him, loved not only him but loved in him that bitter prophet and inflexible corruptless judge of what he considered the family's honor and its doom, as he thought he loved but really hated in her what he considered the frail doomed vessel of its pride and the foul instrument of its disgrace, not only this, she loved him not only in spite of but because of the fact that he himself was incapable of love, accepting the fact that he must value above all not her but the virginity of which she was custodian and on which she placed no value whatever: the frail physical stricture which to her was no more than a hangnail would have been. Knew the brother loved death best of all and was not jealous, would (and perhaps in the calculation and deliberation of her marriage did) have handed him the hypothetical hemlock. Was two months pregnant with another man's child which regardless of what its sex would be she had already named Quentin after the brother whom they both (she and her brother) knew was already the same as dead...

As the Apocalyptic woman has in her hand a CUP, wherewith she intoxicates the nations, so was it with the Babylon of old. Of that Babylon, while in all its glory, the Lord thus spake, in denouncing its doom by the prophet Jeremiah: "Babylon hath been a GOLDEN CUP in the Lord's hand, that made all the earth drunken: the nations have drunken of her wine; therefore the nations are mad" (Jer. ii. 7).

it does not matter whether the actual leader is called King or Minister or party-leader, or even (as in the case of Cecil Rhodes) that he has no defined relation to the State. The nobility which managed Roman politics in the period of the three Punic Wars had, from the point of view of constitutional law, no existence whatever. The leader’s responsibility is always to a minority that possesses the instincts of statesmanship and represents the rest of the nation in the struggle of history.

Said the True Witness to the church at Ephesus: “I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent.” Revelation 2:4, 5. The Saviour watches for a response to his offers of love and forgiveness, with a more tender compassion than that which moves the heart of an earthly parent to forgive a wayward, suffering son. He cries after the wanderer, “Return unto Me, and I will return unto you.” Malachi 3:7. But if the erring one persistently refuses to heed the voice that calls him with pitying, tender love, he will at last be left in darkness. The heart that has long slighted God’s mercy, becomes hardened in sin, and is no longer susceptible to the influence of the grace of God. Fearful will be the doom of that soul of whom the pleading Saviour shall finally declare, he “is joined to idols: let him alone.” Hosea 4:17. It will be more tolerable in the day of judgment for the cities of the plain than for those who have known the love of Christ, and yet have turned away to choose the pleasures of a world of sin.

You’re my child. My beloved. My pleasure.” This is the heart of the matter. This is the message that blows quietly, sweetly through the whole Bible. It’s easy to lose it in the strictures of law, the violent stories of the people of Israel, the doom-laden pronouncements of the prophets, or the near-psychedelic foretelling of future events. It’s so tender, so gentle, that it’s easy to miss it blowing through my own little life story, with all its dramas and distractions. There are a thousand other voices, most of them much louder and more insistent, that have other things to say about who I am. They say things that are demeaning or discouraging.

If anything, the current state of the world is already a testament to our inability to either imagine a possible world different to ours or to abandon the raft of the medusa that is our present. The reality of this world seems to have bottomed out into a Hobbesian jungle in which we are stuck and which constantly grows and is cut back in vain. In the Hobbesian or game-theoretic jungle, no matter how drastically your social and political convictions differ from those of your supposed adversary, no matter how much your experience of the world seems truer or more authentic, auto-cannibalization is unavoidable. In the Hobbesian jungle, all groups not only gnaw at one another, but will also end up eating their own kin alive. We as either Hobbesians or as Platonic Universalists ought to pay attention to the truth of particularity. Universalists think that the commensuration between human experiential or local particularities is an easy path. The true enemies of universalists—the neoreactionaries—think what is universalist is misguided but they nevertheless go on and build island-utopias. The problem of both factions is that the real issue is not the universal which both camps to different degrees endorse, but the specific and discrete particularities of the human experience. Not paying attention to the problems of the latter is a sure recipe for failure, not just for rationalist universalism but also for the neoreactionary craft of methodological individualism. Without the proper attention to the depth of particularities or local conditions, we are all doomed to the cannabalistic jungle for which Hobbes is a prophet.

I want to share three warnings. First, to stand up for human goodness is to stand up against a hydra–that mythological seven-headed monster that grew back two heads for every one Hercules lopped off. Cynicism works a lot like that. For every misanthropic argument you deflate, two more will pop up in its place. Veneer theory is a zombie that just keeps coming back. Second, to stand up for human goodness is to take a stand against the powers that be. For the powerful, a hopeful view of human nature is downright threatening. Subversive. Seditious. It implies that we’re not selfish beasts that need to be reined in, restrained and regulated. It implies that we need a different kind of leadership. A company with intrinsically motivated employees has no need of managers; a democracy with engaged citizens has no need of career politicians. Third, to stand up for human goodness means weathering a storm of ridicule. You’ll be called naive. Obtuse. Any weakness in your reasoning will be mercilessly exposed. Basically, it’s easier to be a cynic. The pessimistic professor who preaches the doctrine of human depravity can predict anything he wants, for if his prophecies don’t come true now, just wait: failure could always be just around the corner, or else his voice of reason has prevented the worst. The prophets of doom sound oh so profound, whatever they spout. The reasons for hope, by contrast, are always provisional. Nothing has gone wrong–yet. You haven’t been cheated–yet. An idealist can be right her whole life and still be dismissed as naive. This book is intended to change that. Because what seems unreasonable, unrealistic and impossible today can turn out to be inevitable tomorrow. The time has come for a new view of human nature. It’s time for a new realism. It’s time for a new view of humankind.

To speak evil' is to speak this fateful, paradoxical situation that is the reversible concatenation of good and evil. That is to say that the irresistible pursuit of good, the movement of Integral Reality - for this is what good is: it is the movement towards integrality, towards an integral order of the world - is immoral. The eschatological perspective of a better world is in itself immoral. For the reason that our technical mastery of the world, our technical approach to good, having become an automatic and irresistible mechanism, none of this is any longer of the order of morality or of any kind of finality. Nor is to speak and read evil the same thing as vulgar nihilism, the nihilism of a denunciation of all values, that of the prophets of doom. To denounce the reality contract or the reality 'conspiracy' is not at all nihilistic. It is not in any sense to deny an obvious fact, in the style of 'All is sign, nothing is real - nothing is true, everything is simulacrum' - an absurd proposition since it is also a realist one! It is one thing to note the vanishing of the real into the Virtual, another to deny it so as to pass beyond the real and the Virtual. It is one thing to reject morality in the name of a vulgar immoralism, another to do so, like Nietzsche so as to pass beyond good and evil. To be 'nihilistic' is to deny things at their greatest degree of intensity, not in their lowest versions. Now, existence and self-evidence have always been the lowest forms. If there is nihilism, then, it is not a nihilism of value, but a nihilism of form. It is to speak the world in its radicality, in its dual, reversible form, and this has never meant banking on catastrophe, any more than on violence. No finality, either positive or negative, is ever the last word in the story. And the Apocalypse itself is a facile solution.

Man is an irrational creature...for he seeks pleasure instead of abstinence, lies and deceit, instead of counsel and advice, violence and war, instead of withhold and peace, and easy wanton ignorance and gluttony, instead of hard sought after wisdom and moderation...man has grown indifferent to the sufferings of his fellow man and neighbor, for he only cares as to whether there is any monetary gain or financial reward, for his immediate and erstwhile assistance...man, in this current age, has completely lost the ability to engage in disciplined learning and fair and honest debate, for instead he would rather believe in lies and falsehoods, for it only confirms his prejudicial beliefs and irrational fears, all fed to him by the so-called, "fair and balanced" news media...he is a patriot for all the wrong reasons, for his patriotism is one of selfish jingoism, instead of an objective and unadulterated, "universal brotherhood", that seeks to find common ground and common solutions across the diplomatic table, instead of blind "sabre rattling" and childish and superficial flag waving...man's blind and puerile barbarism is what will ultimately do him in, in the very end, for the prophets of the present who tried to warn him as he stood at the edge of a moral and spiritual precipice, will be the ones who will wear a quiet and confirming smile, as man and his erstwhile shadow of ignorance, will be cast into the bottomless pit, of eternal damnation and doom...

Noah had grown tired of being a prophet of doom, forever announcing a catastrophe that never came and that no one took seriously. One day, he clothed himself in sackcloth and covered his head with ashes. Only a man who was mourning [the death of] a beloved child or his wife was allowed to do this. Clothed in the garb of truth, bearer of sorrow, he went back to the city, resolved to turn the curiosity, spitefulness, and superstition of its inhabitants to his advantage. Soon a small crowd of curious people had gathered around him. They asked him questions. They asked if someone had died, and who the dead person was. Noah replied to them that many had died, and then, to the great amusement of his listeners, said that they themselves were the dead of whom he spoke. When he was asked when this catastrophe had taken place, he replied to them: “Tomorrow.” Profiting from their attention and confusion, Noah drew himself up to his full height and said these words: “The day after tomorrow, the flood will be something that will have been. And when the flood will have been, everything that is will never have existed. When the flood will have carried off everything that is, everything that will have been, it will be too late to remember, for there will no longer be anyone alive. And so there will no longer be any difference between the dead and those who mourn them. If I have come before you, it is in order to reverse time, to mourn tomorrow’s dead today. The day after tomorrow it will be too late.” With this he went back whence he had come, took off the sackcloth [that he wore], cleaned his face of the ashes that covered it, and went to his workshop. That evening a carpenter knocked on his door and said to him: “Let me help you build the ark, so that it may become false.” Later a roofer joined them, saying: “It is raining over the mountains, let me help you, so that it may become false.”14

We are of the earth, we are of the human race, our souls are large because we have begun a journey to know the Universe.

Right now, it is in the worst shape of all. This happened on your watch. Even so, ‘where sin abounds grace does that much more abound.’ There is still grace available to change this if you repent.” “You are the one who prepares the way for the Lord. You are here to prepare us for Him. How can we make this great change? The fabric of Christianity in our time is very thin. We are as weak and unprepared as you say. What do we need to do?” I begged. “As I said, the next step is the next step on this path. This path will prepare you, and I will help you. I was with John the Baptist to do this in his time. It begins with repentance. You cannot stay long on this path without a strong foundation of repentance. You must be quick to see your sin—quick to see your mistakes and to correct them. You are quick to see your sin and mistakes. This is helpful, but you have not been quick to correct them, and that can be your doom. Repentance is more than feeling sorry for your sin, it is turning from the sin. “Only a foundation of repentance will keep you humble enough to walk in the grace of God. Humility is to be teachable and dependent on the Holy Spirit. This has not been a foundation that many have built upon in your time. You must start with preaching and teaching repentance. You must start praying for the Spirit to come to convict of sin. Your generation hardly even knows what sin is. “I prayed for the judgment of God to come upon my own nation. Then I had to challenge the false teachers and prophets of my time. This is a basic duty of the prophets. Where are your prophets? Where are your apostles? Where are the shepherds who will protect God’s people from the great deception of your time? Why are the wolves allowed to devour God’s people right in front of them and they do nothing?

By the time Nixon reached office the environmental cause had grown stronger than ever, thanks in part to media attention given to Malthusian prophets of doom. Paul Ehrlich, a professor of biology at Stanford, published The Population Bomb (1968), which foresaw the starvation of hundreds of millions of people throughout the world during the 1970s and 1980s if population growth were not controlled.

There had always been prophets of Malthusian doom in every generation since Medieval times and they had always proven wrong.

She knew, as few others did, that the power to coerce depended entirely on the fear or weakness of other human beings. It was possible to use coercion, yes, but in the end you found yourself surrounded only by the weak and fearful, with all those of courage and strength arrayed against you. And many of your strong, brave enemies would match you in evil, too. The more you coerced others, the sooner you would bring yourself to the moment of your doom.

In 594 BCE, Zedekiah of Judah made a visit to Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon, most likely to assure him of his continued loyalty (Jer. 51:59), and the prophet Jeremiah, whose politics had always been pro-Babylonian, offered to help Zedekiah with this visit.  In great prophetic fashion, Jeremiah composed a letter containing an oracle about the ultimate destruction of Babylon (Jer. 51:1-58) and instructed Zedekiah to read the letter aloud and cast it into the Euphrates River, signifying with this act that any plans to destroy Babylon were doomed to fail (Jer. 51:61-64). In

Still, the rebellious artist had placed a minor Jewish prophet in the important spot where the pope had wanted Jesus. How did Michelangelo imagine he would avoid the pope’s wrath in openly defying his wishes? Replacing Jesus with a minor prophet might have doomed any other commissioned artist, but Michelangelo found a brilliant way to appease his patron. The Zechariah panel is not simply an idealized portrait of a biblical figure. Michelangelo superimposed a portrait of Pope Julius II on the ancient Hebrew prophet. Not only that, but Michelangelo portrayed Zechariah dressed in a mantle of royal blue and gold—the traditional colors of the della Rovere clan, the family of both Pope Sixtus IV and his nephew Pope Julius II. Replacing the image of Jesus Christ with a portrait of the pontiff? This was no problem for the egomaniacal Julius. It placed his visage permanently over the entrance to this glorious new sanctuary for all future popes and commemorated his family’s role as its builders.

All who do not repent shall be consumed together by the fierce anger of Jehovah as a withered oak, a waterless garden, and as tow to which the Lord shall apply the spark. Nor have the words of this section a voice for the Jew alone. They are also written for our admonition upon whom the ends of the ages have arrived. The failure of the professing Church has been even greater than that of Jerusalem, because of the greater light against which we have sinned. Soon must the Holy and the True, disgusted with such corruption, vomit out of His mouth all that is unreal and opposed to His Word. But He stands knocking at the door, and whenever there is reality and a heart for Himself, He will come in and sup there in hallowed, blest communion, though the doom of guilty Christendom is so near. Chapter Two Zion’s Future Glory The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.

Depressive realism has a very impressive pedigree. The Buddha pronounced that “all life is suffering” about 2,500 years ago, at roughly the time when the original Greek tragedies were composed. The Old Testament writers and prophets bequeathed us the concepts of human evil, sin, and the Fall, all this stemming from about the 5th century BCE when Adam behaved badly and doomed us all to suffering and death. From Paul through Augustine and Aquinas we have inherited the concept of original sin. The idea that we live in a “vale of tears” is probably from a Catholic hymn. Shakespeare put the phrases “to be or not to be” and “shuffle off our mortal coil” in Hamlet’s mouth in 1603. Robert Burton’s monumental The Anatomy of Melancholy was published in 1621 and George Cheyne’s The English Malady in 1733. DR is hardly a wacky modern idea owing its existence to Enlightenment- denying pessimists or to 20th century existentialists.

Like many other world religions, nationalism requires its adapts to adhere to a strict dogma. They must also provide a sacrifice of blood and money to its altar. It is just that nationalism is clever enough not to call itself a religion. Science, inspired by the same mechanism is not reluctant to instill guilt, call in for prophets of doom to provide us with the reason for the end of the world, through climate change, and provide us with dates of when all hell will break loose as a punishment for our environmental crimes. How to find one’s way through the maze? It seems to me that it is only reason that doesn’t require any reasons for it is itself a reason. - On Nationalism and Science as Religions

Nobody except a demented prophet of doom could have foreseen their (Jews) terrible fate. The half million Jews of Germany, less than one percent of our population, knew they faced difficult times with Hitler's ascendance to power, but they were hardly prepared for the onslaught of repressive measures against them. ...many believed he would moderate once he legitimately headed the government. They reasoned since he had gained power by making them the scapegoats, his fury was largely a political pretense to gather votes and would abate under his new respectability. They were dead wrong.

Lewis’s comments in Surprised by Joy about the impact of his mother’s death deserve close attention: “It was all sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.”[222] Lewis’s rich language uses geographical imagery to describe his emotional loss of stability and security, inevitably leading to a longing for their future restoration. He was like someone doomed to sail the seas, unable to find a safe and permanent harbour. Lewis’s writings of the 1920s provide strong evidence that Mrs. Moore’s extended family came to provide that secure base for him. She offered him emotional support and encouragement as he explored career options, and coped with his early failure to secure them. However, she was no intellectual, and was unable to function as his academic soul mate—a point which helps us understand Lewis’s later attraction to intelligent women, capable of writing serious books. Yet Mrs. Moore arguably provided Lewis with vital elements of the context he needed at this formative stage of his scholarly career.

The false prophets trust in flesh, even if that flesh is the temple in Jerusalem, the promised land, the chosen people itself, or even God’s promise to the chosen people (if that promise is taken to be an unconditional promise and not as a part of a covenant). The true prophets, regardless of whether they predict doom or salvation, predict the unexpected, the humanly unforeseeable—what would not occur to men, left to themselves, to fear or to hope.

Less mysterious was the obituary of Cardinal Siri, delivered shortly after John's death: "It will take forty years to repair the damage this Pope inflicted in four years." Siri was one of those "prophets of doom" Pope John shook his head over. In hindsight, however, Siri sounds like a raving optimist, for as of this writing the damage caused by his Council continues to metastasize, and fragments of restoration are as chimerical as John's "new Pentecost".

Gradually, and almost imperceptibly, the Age of Affluence silences the voice of duty. The object of the young and ambitious is no longer fame, honour or service, but cash. … No longer do schools aim at producing brave patriots ready to service their country. Parents and students alike seek educational qualifications which will command the highest salaries.

The Age of Decadence marks the near total loss of the sense of duty that had marked the empire in its period of growth, as expansion turns to defensiveness and a holding onto what one already possesses. Optimism turns to pessimism. This coincides with an ‘intensification of internal political hatreds’—of which no one who lived through the Brexit and Trump eras needs to be reminded. Interestingly, Glubb argues this intensification of hatred is exacerbated by a two-party parliamentary democracy.

In Britain and in America today, and in most of Europe, any such ability for self-defence seems a rapidly fading memory. Furthermore, any response to the ever-accelerating demographic transformation of our major cities that does not loudly celebrate this fact is increasingly treated as a ‘hate crime’ —such is the Age of Decadence.

For example, consider a coffee shop which has three workers who can serve 18 coffees an hour; the average unit product, which is the total output (coffees) divided by the number of input units (workers), is 6 customers per worker. Let us say adding a fourth worker takes coffee output up to 30, a fifth increases output to 40, a sixth to 45, and a seventh to 49. We can see that the average unit product with 4 workers is 7.5, with 5 workers is 8, with 6 workers is 7.5, and with 7 workers is 7.

A new energy subsidy is necessary if a declining standard of living and a future global collapse are to be averted.

Tainter essentially denies concepts such as the metaphysical, human spirit, social zeitgeists, governing philosophies, attitudes about the relationship between humans and their environment, ideologies, because they cannot be measured by the tools of science.

A simpler way of putting it might be to say that ‘civilisation is incommunicable’ across both time and space, historically and, in the present, geographically. ‘No value can survive beyond the civilisation that produced it. Values are perishable, there are no absolute truths; every truth is relative to the context of the civilisation that posits it, and when the latter is exhausted, the concept of truth also crumbles, shatters.

The members of one culture cannot understand the basic ideas of another and when they think they are doing so, they are actually translating totally alien concepts into concepts they have developed on their own.

In looking backward over human history we find that it comprises various cultures, as the Egyptian, Indian, Classical, and Western. Each of these cultures is a vast, living, human organism, endowed with an ego, a personality, with a metaphysical structure, a culture-soul. The culture soul expresses itself in all the phenomena of its history, in peoples and nations, in language and literature, in government, science, the arts, and all other conceivable human manifestations. These are the expression forms of the soul and together constitute the culture. Through them the soul actualizes itself and history is thus a culture-soul in process of becoming.

The Crusades represent the final expulsion of Magian influence from Europe and the birth of the Faustian culture.

Spengler’s theory of the state is rooted in an analysis of the four estates. The first estate is the nobility, the second estate is the priesthood, the third estate is the burgher class or bourgeoisie, and the fourth estate is the mass. Note that the ‘mass’ is not the peasant.

The abstractions of the remote city have replaced the rootedness in the soil of the familial castle.

A power can be overthrown only by another power, not by a principle’, ‘money is overthrown and abolished only by blood’, and thus ‘the conflict between money and blood’ is inevitable.

What we do know is that since 1945, and especially since the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the unchecked twin forces of unconstrained money-power and unconstrained rationalistic intellectualism have greatly accelerated the unravelling of Western civilisation to an extent that might have surprised even the man who told us that ‘optimism is cowardice’.[60]

The most important though was logico-meaningful integration. Sorokin argued that cultural systems are organized around a central value or principle that gives them order and unity. The sociologist discovers it with the logico-meaningful method.

First, civilisations come about—which is to say develop from primitive societies into civilisations—through challenge and response, a concept ‘probably derived from J.C. Smuts’ Holism and Evolution’.[11] For example, Egypt can be said to have developed from successfully responding to the challenge of how to live in an area surrounded by harsh desert.

Thus, the Hellenistic civilisation (Toynbee’s name for Classical or what Spengler calls Apollonian civilisation) apparented the Western (Faustian) civilisation.

The responses to challenges come from an elite creative minority, which enjoys a moral and social unity with the majority through mimesis so long as they remain creative and successfully respond to challenges.

Each society is wholly self-contained. It is for Toynbee a very important question whether Western Christendom is a continuation of Hellenic society or a different society related to it by way of affiliation. The right answer, according to him, is the second. … Toynbee’s principle is that if a civilization changes it ceases to be itself and a new civilization comes into being. … We must be able to say exactly where one society leaves off and another begins. We are not allowed to say that one shades off into the next.

To summarise the above, Toynbee’s cycle has the following seven-stage pattern: Heroic Age/Time of Troubles. Challenge and Response. Growth. Breakdown. Disintegration. Universal State. Universal Church.

Toynbee locates the central issue as a breakdown in the relations between the elites and the masses, or in his terminology, the creative minority and the uncreative majority.

As economic, technological, military, and political concerns and prowess supplant philosophical and aesthetic endeavours, a culture can be said to have entered its “winter” or civilization phase.

Spengler foresaw the rise of Caesarism as an antidote to the dominance of the merchants who use liberal democracy to mask their dominance.

The dictatorship of money had used democracy as its political weapon.

Gobineau understands ‘blood’ to be the common bond that unifies a civilization, a substance that is best studied historically and discursively rather than biologically. In this context, blood refers to the common values, spirit, and history Gobineau feels are essential to any civilization. … in Gobineau’s work the blood is definitively not an inanimate liquid but rather signifies the basic values, common discourse, and spirit of a civilization.

In the Works and Days, Hesiod relates the degeneration of man’s history down from the distant Golden Age of Cronos to his own pernicious Age of Iron. It is a synchronic paradigm of human history, a ‘steady declension of nature’, in which men decline in moral character and fortune from the first to the final period. His story links the ‘good old days’ of Cronos to the golden period of Eastern lore which like it, also is followed by succeeding periods of silver, bronze and iron, into which he inserts, however, an anomalous Heroic Aeon in an attempt … ‘to idealize [sic] the life depicted in Homeric times’.

If our population decreases; if we lose the virile, manly qualities, and sink into a nation of mere hucksters, putting gain above national honor, and subordinating everything to mere ease of life; then we shall indeed reach a condition worse than that of the ancient civilizations in the years of their decay.’[17

I do not ask for overcentralization; but I do ask that we work in a spirit of broad and far-reaching nationalism when we work for what concerns our people as a whole. We are all Americans. Our common interests are as broad as the continent. I speak to you here in Kansas exactly as I would speak in New York or Georgia, for the most vital problems are those which affect us all alike.

Today, the world waits for new men of courage amid of a sea of abject cowardice and greed, although it is difficult to see any on the horizon.

But upon the eighth day dark clouds overspread the heavens. There followed the muttering of thunder and the flash of lightning. Soon large drops of rain began to fall. The world had never witnessed anything like this, and the hearts of men were struck with fear. All were secretly inquiring, “Can it be that Noah was in the right, and that the world is doomed to destruction?” Darker and darker grew the heavens, and faster came the falling rain. The beasts were roaming about in the wildest terror, and their discordant cries seemed to moan out their own destiny and the fate of man. Then “the fountains of the great deep” were “broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.” Water appeared to come from the clouds in mighty cataracts. Rivers broke away from their boundaries, and overflowed the valleys. Jets of water burst from the earth with indescribable force, throwing massive rocks hundreds of feet into the air, and these, in falling, buried themselves deep in the ground.

From the highest peaks men looked abroad upon a shoreless ocean. The solemn warnings of God’s servant no longer seemed a subject for ridicule and scorning. How those doomed sinners longed for the opportunities which they had slighted! How they [101] pleaded for one hour’s probation, one more privilege of mercy, one call from the lips of Noah! But the sweet voice of mercy was no more to be heard by them. Love, no less than justice, demanded that God’s judgments should put a check on sin. The avenging waters swept over the last retreat, and the despisers of God perished in the black depths.

The Amalekites were not ignorant of God’s character or of his sovereignty, but instead of fearing before him, they had set themselves to defy his power. The wonders wrought by Moses before the Egyptians were made a subject of mockery by the people of Amalek, and the fears of surrounding nations were ridiculed. They had taken oath by their gods that they would destroy the hebrews, so that not one should escape, and they boasted that Israel’s God would be powerless to resist them. They had not been injured or threatened by the Israelites. Their assault was wholly unprovoked. It was to manifest their hatred and defiance of God that they sought to destroy his people. The Amalekites had long been high-handed sinners, and their crimes had cried to God for vengeance, yet his mercy had still called them to repentance; but when the men of Amalek fell upon the wearied and defenseless ranks of Israel, they sealed their nation’s doom. The care of God is over the weakest of his children. No act of cruelty or oppression toward them is unmarked by heaven. Over all who love and fear him, his hand extends as a shield; let men beware that they smite not that hand; for it wields the sword of justice.

The period of their probation was about to expire. Noah had faithfully followed the instructions which he had received from God. The ark was finished in every part as the Lord had directed, and was stored with food for man and beast. And now the servant of God made his last solemn appeal to the people. With an agony of desire that words cannot express, he entreated them to seek a refuge while it might be found. Again they rejected his words, and raised their voices in jest and scoffing. Suddenly a silence fell upon the mocking throng. Beasts of every description, the fiercest as well as the most gentle, were seen coming from mountain and forest and quietly making their way toward the ark. A noise as of a rushing wind was heard, and lo, birds were flocking from all [98] directions, their numbers darkening the heavens, and in perfect order they passed to the ark. Animals obeyed the command of God, while men were disobedient. Guided by holy angels, they “went in two and two unto Noah into the ark,” and the clean beasts by sevens. The world looked on in wonder, some in fear. Philosophers were called upon to account for the singular occurrence, but in vain. It was a mystery which they could not fathom. But men had become so hardened by their persistent rejection of light that even this scene produced but a momentary impression. As the doomed race beheld the sun shining in its glory, and the earth clad in almost Eden beauty, they banished their rising fears by boisterous merriment, and by their deeds of violence they seemed to invite upon themselves the visitation of the already awakened wrath of God.

The prophet, speaking of God’s dealing with ancient Israel, said, “In all their afflictions He was afflicted.” Isa. 63:9. It is still the same now. As an eagle bears her young on her wings, so the Lord puts Himself under you, bearing all your sin and sorrow. He takes it on Himself, and in Him it is lost, by the same process by which at the last “He will swallow up death in victory.”  Christ took on Himself the curse, in order that the blessing might come on us. Gal. 3:13, 14. Although He knew no sin, He was made to be sin for you, that you might be made the righteousness of God in Him. 2 Cor. 5:21. He suffered the death to which you were doomed, that you might share His life. And this exchange is made when you come into touch with Him, by confessing that “Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.” How much you lose by holding Jesus off as a stranger, or by regarding faith in Him as a theory. When you know that He identifies Himself with you in your fallen condition, taking on Himself, and from you, your infirmities, how precious becomes the assurance, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” 

The shepherd’s life of diligence and care-taking, and his tender compassion for the helpless creatures entrusted to his charge, have been employed by the inspired writers to illustrate some of the most precious truths of the gospel. Christ, in his relation to his people, is compared to a shepherd. After the Fall he saw his sheep doomed to perish in the dark ways of sin. To save these wandering ones he left the honors and glories of his Father’s [191] house. He says, “I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which was sick.” I will “save My flock, and they shall no more be a prey.” “Neither shall the beast of the land devour them.” Ezekiel 34:16, 22, 28. His voice is heard calling them to his fold, “a shadow in the daytime from the heat, and for a place of refuge, and for a covert from storm and from rain.” Isaiah 4:6. His care for the flock is unwearied. He strengthens the weak, relieves the suffering, gathers the lambs in his arms, and carries them in his bosom. His sheep love him. “And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him; for they know not the voice of strangers.” John 10:5. Christ says, “The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth; and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep. The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep. I am the Good Shepherd, and know My sheep, and am known of Mine.” Verses 11-14.

We feel that we must disagree with those prophets of doom who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand.

As with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in which intellectual and scientific reason elevated the authority of scientists over priests, techno-utopians believe they will triumph over prophets of doom by “stealing fire from the gods, breathing life into inert matter, and gaining immortality. Our efforts to become something more than human have a long and distinguished genealogy.

Love for perishing souls inspired Abraham’s prayer. While he loathed the sins of that corrupt city, he desired that the sinners might be saved. His deep interest for Sodom shows the anxiety that we should feel for the impenitent. We should cherish hatred of sin, but pity and love for the sinner. All around us are souls going down to ruin as hopeless, as terrible, as that which befell Sodom. Every day the probation of some is closing. Every hour some are passing beyond the reach of mercy. And where are the voices of warning and entreaty to bid the sinner flee from this fearful doom? Where are the hands stretched out to draw him back from death? Where are those who with humility and persevering faith are pleading with God for him?

Korah would not have taken the course he did had he known that all the directions and reproofs communicated to Israel were from God. But he might have known this. God had given [405] overwhelming evidence that he was leading Israel. But Korah and his companions rejected light until they became so blinded that the most striking manifestations of his power were not sufficient to convince them; they attributed them all to human or satanic agency. The same thing was done by the people, who the day after the destruction of Korah and his company came to Moses and Aaron, saying, “Ye have killed the people of the Lord.” Notwithstanding they had had the most convincing evidence of God’s displeasure at their course, in the destruction of the men who had deceived them, they dared to attribute his judgments to Satan, declaring that through the power of the evil one, Moses and Aaron had caused the death of good and holy men. It was this act that sealed their doom. They had committed the sin against the Holy Spirit, a sin by which man’s heart is effectually hardened against the influence of divine grace. “Whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man,” said Christ, “it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him.” Matthew 12:32. These words were spoken by our Saviour when the gracious works which he had performed through the power of God were attributed by the Jews to Beelzebub. It is through the agency of the Holy Spirit that God communicates with man; and those who deliberately reject this agency as satanic, have cut off the channel of communication between the soul and heaven.

I’d rather have drugs and liquor and divine visions than this empty barren fatalism on a mountaintop,” he wrote toward the end of his stint. These words are especially poignant when you consider that two years earlier he’d written to Allen Ginsberg: “I have crossed the ocean of suffering and found the path at last.” For Kerouac, the path of Buddhism proved too difficult, too alien to his temperament, and he eventually retreated into the mystical French Catholicism he’d known as a boy. Its fascination with the martyrdom of the Crucifixion jibed with his sense of himself as a doomed prophet destined for self-annihilation. The essential Buddhist ethic—do no violence to any living being—was a principle that tragically eluded him in his treatment of himself.

Why should I want to be rich when You were poor? Why should I desire to be famous and powerful in the eyes of men when some of those who exalted the false prophet and stoned the true rejected You and nailed You to the Cross? Why should I cherish in my heart a hope that devours me--the hope for perfect happiness in this life--when such hope, doomed to frustration, is nothing but despair?

every major discussion of ethics these days begins with an analysis of the chaotic situation of modern culture. Even secular writers and thinkers are calling for some sort of basic agreement on ethical behavior. Humanity’s “margin of error,” they say, is shrinking with each new day. Our survival is at stake. These “prophets of doom” point out that man’s destructive capability increased from 1945 to 1960 by the same ratio as it did from the primitive weapons of the Stone Age to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The thawing of the Cold War provided little comfort. Numerous nations have nuclear arms now or are close to having them. What, besides

Representative Kenneth Hardgrave lay in bed in the presidential suite of the luxurious Pasadena Ritz-Carlton Hotel smoking a cigarette. He was glad Ronald Stevens had talked him out of attending the show. Sex was much more satisfying than listening to some fanatic talk about the end of the world. His wife rolled over to get some sleep. The bed she was in, however, was twenty-two hundred miles away in Washington, while the woman in Hardgrave's bed snuggled lazily up beside him. Visions of bracelets and sugarplums danced through her head.

A man's duty is to soar in the heavens. A woman's duty is to bind him to earth.

There is, however, no need to be a prophet of doom or for us to go around living in constant dread. Our situation is definitely workable. By learning not to bite the hook now, with the little annoyances of an ordinary day, we’ll be preparing ourselves to work with whatever lies ahead with compassion and wisdom.

The Doomsday Clock agrees with true Bible prophecy watchers: Mideast midnight is approaching. But this fact shouldn’t worry the Christian who truly seeks to understand God’s truth that includes the whole Word, not just parts of the Bible. Fully 28 percent of the Bible contains prophecy. About half of that prophetic Word has already come to pass and the other half remains to be fulfilled. In other words, 14 percent of prophecy in the Bible will yet come to pass. Earthly war will soon fade into history. Peace will fill the whole world. Jesus Christ, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, will break through the blackness of the Mideast midnight hour. He will speak, and the raging godless human forces will instantly be defeated. A new era will begin. The time of fallen human history will be vanquished, and King Jesus’ millennial reign will begin. So, Bible prophecy ultimately presents a picture, not of gloom and doom, but of glorious, joyous peace!

Our economy is still reeling from the worst financial crisis in generations. Our jobless rate is too high and income growth is too low. But the U.S. recovery has outperformed expectations, history, and most of the developed world. So far, the prophets of doom who have predicted runaway inflation, runaway interest rates, a double-dip recession, a collapse in demand for U.S. government securities, and other horrors for America have been false prophets. I remember half-joking to the President that we had two types of critics attacking us for failing to produce a stronger recovery—people who were blocking our proposals to produce a stronger recovery, and people who believed in unicorns.

In Jewish tradition, we find the cautionary adage “Be in the world, but not of the world.” In the Gospels, Jesus says: “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s” (Matthew 22:21). Michelangelo was deeply troubled by a Church that was trying to imitate the grandeur of the Caesars while ignoring the humility and poverty of Christ. He recognized that the Vatican had become a place of unbridled corruption, greed, nepotism, and military adventurism. No longer was spiritual leadership concerned with delineating the differences between the “One” and the “seventy.” And so Michelangelo dared to express his anger by way of the angry prophet Jeremiah, who predicted doom for precisely those who failed to heed this very message. Of course, it was an extremely dangerous and seditious statement.

So-called Progress, for example in women’s rights, has not resulted in people being happier. The phenomenon is so persistent, long-standing, and widespread it even has a name: ‘The Female Happiness Paradox’.

In every age, there have been thinkers who might broadly be described as Prophets of Doom. This does not necessarily mean that they are pessimists, but rather that they reject the notion that history is an inexorable march of improvement. History is not, in their view, a line on the graph going up and up ‘to infinity and beyond’, but a recurring pattern of rise and fall.

Power necessitates an organised minority ruling over a disorganised mass and, if ‘elected’, represent neither the will nor the interests of ‘the people’. Liberal democracy provides a smokescreen for the ruling class and obscures the real mechanisms of power with the lie that ‘the people’ are sovereign: they are not and never will be.

The End of History did not materialise and will one day be regarded as a self-contained epoch that started in the direct aftermath of 1945 and will end at some point in the future, during which some great things were achieved and during which most educated people took leave of their senses.[17]

For most of recorded Western history, there have been two competing views of the shape of history. The first is inherited from the Ancient Greeks, reaching its most famous form in Polybius (200 BC–118 BC): the idea that civilisations rise and fall in cycles like the seasons. The Anacyclosis was developed from Plato (428 BC–348 BC) and Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC) but finalised by Polybius in The Histories.[18] It held that there are three types of governmental constitutions—monarchy, aristocracy, democracy—which each degenerate into a tyrannous form before giving way to the next in sequence as pictured below.

The sequence is monarchy, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy and ochlocracy,

For once the people had grown accustomed to eating off others’ tables and expected their daily needs to be met, then, when they found someone to champion their cause—a man of vision and daring, who had been excluded from political office by his poverty—they institute government by force; they banded together and set about murdering, banishing, and redistributing land, until they were reduced to a bestial state and once more gained a monarchic master.[