Well? We're still here.

The "great earthquake" prophesied to begin the process of social disintegration leading up to the endtimes ultimate event, failed to appear, as foretold, again. I'm trying to figure out who gains in all this crap, there have to be 'suckers fleeced' somewhere. My bet is that the Grand Moff Tarkin who did the arithmetical computations, hasn't divested himself totally of all his worldly goods. But it appears that some poor dopes may have.

4 or 5 years back the same thing happened in Russia and a number of people in the Moscow area 'purified' themselves of everything but a clean bedsheet in anticipation of 'fahrt zum himmel'. It must have come as a shock in the ensuing years that the trip was off. Would it have been some form of welching to have 'indian gifted' all the stuff? And would the recipients have been 'doing the right thing' giving it all back? Deeply held religious beliefs and all.

That such messianic tidings should still be a regular occurrence should be of no real surprise to us. When we see the icons on which our 'world' is predicated - Bear Stearns, Lehmann Brothers, Enron, Bernie Madoff and the like - those things that 'fill the sole with joy' - proven to have the proverbial 'feet of clay', it makes the true believer start looking for alternatives. And so we have Raelians and Scientology and the fevered dreams of part-time shoe salesmen, petrologists and a host of others with 'good ideas'  for us to improve ourselves. If it isn't Donnie and Marie selling you stuff to eat that's going to give you the bod you've never had (and that mother Nature's going to alter significantly) or the shopping channeleers peddling undies and electronics , jewellry and cosmetics, investment chattels and health gizmos that will , if nothing else, make your life 'fuller', it's the glossy merchandising of a million 'lifestyle'  marketers selling everything from music to dog food. Consumerism is our faith - the market will never be empty - and religion, these days, is just another consumer choice. It's debunked as myth and superstition and used by many as the source of  'income generation'.

The ultimate 'big win' of course is the kingdom of heaven, the new Eden, Paradise ....  a place away from all this mortal coil stuff where all will be, as it was in the beginning, all blissful perfection. It didn't take the hotshots down at the temple long to figure out that magical amulets and an 'in' with the deity were marketable assets. The business of religion has been around since Ogg first saw the divine fire. But you'd think that we'd have managed to shake off the notion that 'buying' eternity isn't a sucker move of the first water. Especially if 'buying' it means letting somebody else, who ain't God either, do the driving for you. This latter happens too much. Yesterday it happened again.

The leaders of the great religions weren't into 'passing the plate' - although some of their followers had the real-world 'smarts' to realize you can't run an organization on faith alone. Judas may have been concerned about 'the bottom line', but I don't think that Jesus was - they had some words that might indicate a basic difference of opinion on the subject. I don't think Buddha was big on the collection, although generosity with ones' earthly belongings was praised as virtuous. Like other such thinkers, he pointed out that such belongings only get in the way of growth to enlightenment. All those thinkers - even including Mohamet - put that 'growth', over finite lifetime, as the ultimate achievement. All of them encourage the development of the sublime over the practical, the thought and word over the material, a way of living over a lifestyle.

Our artificial lifestyle - I say artificial because we've done a great job of dissociating ourselves from the natural in life - just cries out for the experience of 'real' that has us getting-off on survival, or reconnecting with a self,  blasted by bad choices in social 'advances' and abuse of what we used to consider 'gifts' but now take as  rights, or  ways of escaping. For with all our stuff  we enjoy watching the foibles of others with their 'stuff', our's is far neater and better-organized don'tcha know! We enjoy watching - and there's nothing much wrong with that for getting an idea of what life is like - but it leads us to trust things and people we shouldn't be trusting much at all. Yesterday it was a apocalytic earthquake that didn't happen, tomorrrow it could be a power outage - a severe one would have the same social effect over a period of a couple of weeks. Imagine the effect of no refrigeration, or heat, or even drinking water. We 'trust' a lot of institutions and organizations to make sure we have these. God doesn't have to move the earth to screw these up, we can do that all by ourselves.

Maybe those who were having 'apocalypse parties' last night to celebrate the non-event could 'smarten up' enough to consider the last points. You'd have to be a mental midget, or a bunker dweller, to think that the 'end of it all' was a good reason to party.

There's always the end of that Mayan Calendar coming up in the Fall.