Magazine
Evangelicals wait for armageddon
What will the end of the world be like? The question has intrigued humankind since, well, the beginning of the world. Evangelical Christians offer a unique and problematic interpretation of the apocalyptic scenario. And that’s exactly what the people behind the documentary Waiting for Armageddon set out to understand. Directors Franco Sacchi, Kate Davis and David Heilbroner capture the apocalypse-obsessed wing of the evangelical Christian community in scenes of plainspoken faith, theological collision, and hubristic tourism.
The film opens with a statistic set to ominous music: Roughly one-sixth of Americans are evangelical Christians. It is less specific about just how many of those evangelicals are anticipating Armageddon. It would be absurd to assume that every sixth person you run into in the grocery store has Rapture on the brain. The filmmakers only say that “many” evangelicals are end-timers. But it’s a financially and politically powerful group, which makes scrutiny of their beliefs a worthwhile exercise.
[The two paragraphs above are from the Utne Reader article: Evangelical Christians Wait for Armageddon]
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An apocalytic primer
Three movies were opening at the same time in 2009, “The Road,” “The Book of Eli,” and “2012″ Wired magazine wrote an apocalytic primer. It goes all the way to 500 A.D.
These disaster flicks represent the latest in a long and flaky line of doomsday scenarios from scientists and charlatans alike. Centuries before the Y2K scare prompted people to stock up on canned goods and a first-aid kit — just in case — earthlings worried that the worst was yet to come.
Soviet Doomsday Machine
That’s right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called “the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination.”