only waiting for this moment to arise.” Manson’s interpretation: in the war of Armageddon the blacks were going to rise up against the whites and destroy them. (See the above reference to Revelation 9:15 about killing a third of mankind. A third of mankind, Manson said, was the Caucasian race.) The Beatles were telling the blacks that the time had come for the war to begin. Unfortunately, the blacks weren’t moving quickly enough for Manson’s taste, so he commanded the Family to begin the slaughter of Caucasians and “pigs,” as brutally and violently as possible. The blacks would obviously be blamed, the whites would rise up in outrage, and Armageddon, the war between the blacks and the whites, would begin. The whites, in fear and outrage, would head to the ghettos to retaliate, but the blacks would ultimately triumph. They would begin rebuilding from the vast destruction this war of wars had caused, but they would find themselves unskilled at governing this new Caucasian-free planet. So naturally, they would turn to Manson and his Family, who’d been living in the “bottomless pit” (located in the California desert, according to Charlie). By that time, the Family would number 144,000 (referred to in Revelation 7) and would reclaim a world that was now rid of the unenlightened, i.e., those who didn’t listen to the warnings and the teachings of the angel of the bottomless pit, the reincarnated Christ, Charles Manson.
Charles Manson and those members of his Family who had the misfortune to follow his orders in pursuit of their own salvation— Susan Atkins, Charles “Tex” Watson, Lynette Fromme, Leslie Van Houten, and Patricia Krenwinkel—are serving life sentences for the Tate/LaBianca murders.
If you read the stories in this chapter as nothing more than cautionary tales, they will have served their purpose. But it’s my hope that, beyond that, they’ll demonstrate the tragic danger of letting fear and one charismatic, manipulative, power-driven voice turn doomsday from an eventual possibility to a self-fulfilled prophecy. One more time: anytime someone tells you they’ve received a message that even hints at harming any living creature, including yourself, you can count on it beyond all doubt that the message, if there really was one at all, did not come from God. And if they claim that they hold the key to the only true interpretation of the Bible, ask them right up front to clarify their position on the fifth commandment, which very clearly reads, “Thou shalt not kill.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The End of Days Through My Eyes
For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah. For as in those days which were before the flood they were eating and drinking, they were marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away; so shall the coming of the Son of Man be.
Matthew 24:37-39
I’ve been asked hundreds if not thousands of times when I see this world coming to an end. It’s interesting that rarely does anyone ask how I see it ending. The question is simply when, as if the only real issue is whether or not it’s time to start packing, or stop bothering to pay our bills, or to cancel our magazine subscriptions. And I suppose that’s why, while I consider the end of days to be an endlessly intriguing subject, I avoid discussing it at length during television and personal appearances: I refuse to indulge the idea that the end of days is something we should obsess about and panic about and throw ourselves around the room about. I don’t believe it’s possible to live the lives we came here to live while being perpetually braced to die.
We’ve discussed in previous chapters the many different years in which the world will “definitely” end, from the first century after Christ’s Crucifixion to the many predictions of the Millerites, the Mayan calendar’s projection of 2012, Sir Isaac Newton’s precisely calculated 2060, Nostradamus’s prophecy of AD 3797, et al. We’ve talked about the tragic consequences of letting fear of the end lead to homicidal and suicidal panic orchestrated by sociopathic frauds. If nothing else, I hope the message has come through loud and clear that there have been far too many wasted lives, and too much wasted anxiety, over an event I believe we’re actually going to create for ourselves.
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