Is the World Coming to an End??

Some people seem to think so, from end-times obsessed Christians, to environmentalists, to self-sequestered suburbanites, and other folks in between. Why the renewed concern about impending doom? Among the list of 'signs' are the following that I've heard from various people:

1) Oil/gas prices will never stop rising and threaten the stability of the global economy.

2) The pollution of the environment and deepening threat of global warming threaten the stability of the global economy and contribute to all kinds of natural disasters.

3) Human wars, especially the current strife in the Middle East, may bring about a third World War, which some think could usher in Armaggedon.

4) Increasing radicalism worldwide will make it impossible to ever achieve global peace, or even come all that close.

Perhaps ironically, folks of all stripes who hold to some of these views (or others) are reacting in fairly similar ways - withdrawal. It used to be that those who thought the end of the world was imminent would literally retreat into caves, bomb shelters, communes, or go very deep into undeveloped nature to try and separate and protect themselves from the imminent doom they thought was coming. This 'head for the hills' mentality still exists today, but it looks a little different in our uber-technological society. While many still do head for the hills, even if 'the hills' of today are outer suburbia far enough away from major city centers and high risk terrorist targets, this mentality is complemented by technology. I am finding more and more that people who have 'headed for the hills' are increasingly deriving their version of reality from technology, rather than literally going out into the world and experiencing reality. It is a very dangerous thing to have larger numbers of people derive many of their basic perceptions about life from a combination of virtual mediums, rather than discovering life by breaking away from technology long enough to try out life for themselves. People think they know what's going on in the Middle East because they watch a lot of news, and they form larger worldview paradigms based on such understandings. This is dangerous. This is like saying I know how to drive a car because I took driver's ed in the classroom and saw a few videos while I was there.

News, and the technology that allows us to be news-obsessed, are not bad things. News can indeed be informative, and should be. Technology that allows us greater access to world events and the intricacies of life can indeed be a helpful factor in increasing our understanding and sophistication. But in the end, it's still driver's ed; it's a virtual tour of reality that is not a substitute for the real thing. Too many Americans are making the fatal mistake of substituting the virtual for the real thing, and allowing the virtual to dictate our attitudes about the real thing. In other words, Americans are heading for the hills because virtual reality allows people (so they think) to check out of real life and form their opinions of the world in a vacuum, in isolation, walled off from the world. If this is our orientation, it's not difficult to see why people think the world is coming to an end. It's a vicious circular, where we withdraw from the world so we can be inundated by virtual images of the world that make us want to withdraw even further because we don't like what we see, without realizing the completely imbalanced nature of what we're swallowing and blindly accepting as full-orbed reality.

Is the world coming to an end? The truth is that nobody knows for sure. But I, for one, doubt it. The strife of the Middle East, the threat of an energy crisis, the consequences of environmental plundering, and all the rest are all legitimate concerns. But it ain't the whole story. For every one of these bad events and crises, there is at least one good event and resolution that should give us hope that God has not given up on the world, and neither should we. People need to get out more.