I can’t stress enough that when the end of times comes, these disease-related deaths will be amazingly easy and peaceful. Spirituality will be so commonly understood by then that people will know exactly what perfect joy awaits them on the Other Side that they’ll essentially just “step out of their bodies” and into the tunnel, fearless and full of hope. I can’t help but be fondly reminded of three of my ministers who went Home in the last year and a half. Each of them, when they passed a few months apart, was found in bed, lying peacefully on their backs with their hands folded on their chests. Their deaths were clearly as graceful, confident, and God-centered as could be. And with only the most rare exceptions—the result of what will by then be an almost unheard-of act of violence— that’s what death will be like for everyone at the end of times.
Ironically, in the first half of this century, we’re going to see the majority of today’s most devastating diseases eradicated. Cancer, leukemia, diabetes, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, ALS, Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease—all of those will be so long gone by 2050 that they’ll seem almost archaic. And yet the medical world will be caught completely off guard when, in about 2075 or 2080, there will be a sudden worldwide spread of diseases that seem almost archaic to us today, particularly polio and smallpox. We’ve become complacent and stopped vaccinating against those two disastrous illnesses in particular, and some combination of that complacency and the unhealthy atmosphere we’ve created will give them the perfect opportunity to reappear.
The environment will take its toll on our immune systems, there’s no doubt about it. It’s karmic, really, the earth’s way of paying us back for all the abuse and neglect—still another reason we’ve got to start treasuring and nurturing this planet if we ever expect it to do the same for us again. There will be dramatic increases in fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, sterility and infertility, and countless, virtually untraceable allergies. It’s probably also a form of payback that we’ll be more vulnerable than ever to diseases carried by unhealthy animals, from currently unheard-of bird flus and variations of Lyme disease to a deadly relative of West Nile virus that will arrive via insects from South America.
These illnesses and plagues will hit hard and very suddenly, much more quickly than scientists and researchers can keep up with them, let alone conquer them. And that, sadly, along with a toxic atmosphere and having nowhere to live that’s not disastrously flooded and weather challenged, is what will bring us to the end of our lives on Earth.
Not a nuclear holocaust—when all is said and done, no world leader will be insane enough to actually push that legendary red button.
Not a collision with some monster asteroid or meteor shower, a fatal, haphazard whim of the cosmos.
Just our own self-created, self-fulfilled prophecy of the end of days.
This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.
—T. S. Eliot
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