In recent decades, the figure of Christopher Columbus has come in for a lot of scrutiny, especially as regards his relations with the native peoples of the Americas. What few understand is just how much worse he could have been if given the opportunity.
Every rule has its exception and no doubt some end timers are and have been ethical. Columbus wasn't really an exception, though.
Working from an ancient Christian calculation that the world, from Creation to Judgment, would survive for 7,000 years, he concluded that "there are lacking about one hundred and fifty-five years for the completion of the seven thousand at which time the world will come to an end." Signing his name as Christoferens―Christ-bearer―Columbus saw his expedition as just a part of a final crusade that would destroy the Muslim empire and usher in the Day of Judgment. By sailing west, he planned to open China and the Orient to Catholic missionaries, who would seal off the Muslim empire of Gog from its rear.That's a brief passage from Martin Ballard's The End-Timers: Three Thousand Years of Waiting for Judgment Day. The belief that we are in or near the End Times can make Christians and other religious people abandon their faith's morals, and indeed all ethics. Catholic St. Augustine and Protestant Jonathan Edwards both pushed back against apocalyptic thinking, perhaps for this very reason. They were moralists whether you agree with their lessons or not.
Every rule has its exception and no doubt some end timers are and have been ethical. Columbus wasn't really an exception, though.
2 comments:
Columbus was most definitely a mass murderer but you're right that he could have been worse - given the opportunity. Ghenghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Hitler, Stalin, and even Madame Mao caused atrocities galore. Now we have people sitting in air-conditioned rooms in Nevada controlling drones by satellite. It would appear to any thoughtful person that we're not a naturally ethical species.
It seems to me that waiting for the end of the world is like being anesthetized in that it allows the human mind to imagine a notion of cosmic justice. The bad people get what they deserve and our group wins the universal sweepstakes - whatever that might mean. It's not hard to imagine that the whole 'end of an age' thing is more about personal death denial than anything to do with what will happen in the larger reality. The world we know does indeed end for us when we're gone.
I wonder if we'd behave differently if the belief in reincarnation was common.
They say that absolute power corrupts absolutely. It could be that the promise of absolute power, the belief you can attain it a certain way, brings you pretty far down the road of corruption. I don't believe human nature is necessarily evil, but I don't think that it's necessarily good either.
That's true. We carry our own world within us. Our perceptions and our actions. And these are things that won't continue when we're gone. Can be hard to deal with, and a lot of people have violent reactions to that knowledge.
Reincarnation is a fascinating idea whether you see it as a literal truth or a helpful metaphor. Because of course the world is continuing. And contra the last paragraph, no one and nothing is completely out of it.
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