End of Days by Sylvia Browne

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 9th, 2022 in Stories

Foundation, the United Nations, Harvard, Yale, two thousand other colleges and universities, and, last but not least, the “left wing of the Democratic Party.” If these united organizations and societies have their way, according to LaHaye and Jenkins, they will “turn America into an amoral, humanist country, ripe for merger into a one-world socialist state.”

Sadly, nothing in the Left Behind series suggests that there’s any point in attending to the people and environment of our planet, seemingly because a literal interpretation of the Bible doesn’t propose any such altruism as the end of days approaches.

Is it me, or does that seem completely contrary to what Jesus had in mind?

There’s Arnold Murray of Arkansas’ Shepherd’s Chapel, who predicted in the mid-1970s that the Antichrist would appear before 1981 and that the war of Armageddon would start in June of 1985;

And Pat Robertson, who saw the world ending in the autumn of 1982;

And Moses David of a group called the Children of God, with his prediction that the real battle of Armageddon would result in a defeat of both Israel and the United States by Russia in 1986, after which a global Communist dictatorship would be established and Christ would return to earth in 1993;

And Edgar C. Whisenant, who, in 1988, published a book called 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Could Be in 1988;

And Baptist minister Peter Ruckman, whose analysis of the Bible resulted in his certainty that the Rapture would happen sometime around 1990.

The list goes on and on, and on and on, proving, if nothing else, that the passionate pursuit of the “truth” about the end of days is likely to continue until the end of days itself.

CHAPTER SIX

Doomsday Cults

I can’t say it often enough throughout this book: preparing for a disaster, including the eventual end of the world, is fine. Probably even smart. Living your life cowering in terror over it, and/or losing everything your soul truly knows about God and His love for you, is tragic. It’s the difference between building a bomb shelter for the worst eventuality and then going on about your business, or building a bomb shelter and hiding in it for the rest of your life. That’s not a life, not what God has in mind for any of us. And yet, in a way, the isolation and fear on which doomsday cults thrive are not unlike a life of cowering in a bomb shelter braced for a cataclysm that’s probably a century away. I can honestly say I would rather face Armageddon any day than experience the nightmare of the stories in this chapter, each one of which can be directly traced to a clever narcissistic sociopath preying on society’s innate fear of the end of the world and leading their victims to a fate far, far worse than doomsday will ever be.

One of the most disquieting things about the populations of doomsday cults is that they come from every walk of life, every level of intelligence and financial status, every culture and race and every faith. We don’t have the luxury of saying, “That could never happen to me or my perfectly sane family and friends.” The truth is, yes, it could, unless we educate ourselves about these destructive cults, who joins them, and who creates them. Knowledge really is power. And there’s another aspect of doomsday cults that’s imperative to bear in mind: compassion dictates that we never dismiss the victims of cults as simply a bunch of insane weirdos who deserved what happened to them. There’s no such thing as a life that doesn’t matter, especially when in most cases the only thing these victims did wrong was to run into a charismatic sociopath who happened to say all the right things when they were at their most vulnerable.