Honey and the Apocalypse

[David Wong]

So this is the creepiest fucking thing I've ever seen:



Wait, not that. Sorry, got the image file names mixed up. I mean this:



It’s the context that makes it scary, so if you don’t recognize it, you won’t get it. Do you know what it is?



It could be some kind of plant life, maybe a network of roots or bulbs. It’s not. It looks more like they’re digging up the earth’s internal organs. It’s not that, either.



But knowing what it is, and understanding its nature, may be the key to understanding everything.



So, those pics up there got me thinking about the end of the world. And I brought up something that is common knowledge in some parts of the country–but baffling and terrifying for the rest–which is the part Israel is supposed to play in the end-of-the-world scenario millions of Christians believe in. Here are some Jack Chick tracts on the subject, if you’re not familiar.



There are passages in the Bible that, if read from across the room while squinting, suggest that Israel will be the center of a world war that will trigger a string of supernatural events, including The Rapture (the instantaneous sucking of all Christians off the planet).

I was raised in a Pentecostal church where this was taught. When referring to the future, it was common for the pastor to always qualify it with, “If the lord has not called us all home by then.”



You might think this is a weird environment for a little kid to grow up in, hearing every week that at any moment all of the Christians could be instantly zapped off the earth as if in a mass alien abduction, so that the heathens below can then be subjected to seven years of plague and monstrocities feeding off their flesh…



…But as you know, I came out of it perfectly fine.

Anyway, I was pointed to this excellent blog that examines the popular “Left Behind” series of books (those books are marketed to that particular audience who’s always watching the horizon for the apocalypse). The blog is written by a Christian who seems intent on understanding the psychology of religious types who are obsessed with this concept of God figuratively tying the earth to the back of his pickup and dragging it down a gravel road.

The blogger seems to have arrived at the conclusion that the authors are simply projecting their own personality. That is, that they rearrange the scriptures to portray a violent and short-tempered God, because they themselves are violent and short-tempered.

And this got me thinking about sheep herding.

A popular author said that where you find communities full of short-tempered people, the kind who’ll draw a knife at the sound of a perceived insult, you find sheep herding in their past. Or some kind of herding. Even if it was dozens of generations ago.


Pic unrelated

The reason, he says, is because when you’re herding animals for your livelihood, there is no real way to protect them. Even a fence can be cut or climbed in seconds by a bunch of bandits. Within minutes they can run off with your only source of income, and you and your family will starve.

Your only protection, then, is your reputation. You have to establish yourself as a badass around town. You have to make people scared to even look at you or your sheep, to make women and children terrified to even use a corner of your property as a shortcut to get to a picnic. You have to make examples of people who cross you, you have to overreact, to use disproportionate response. You meet insults with violence, or even deadly force. You “defend your honor.”

And this attitude gets handed down through the generations, from father to son. Think about cowboys, and their herds of cattle, and how they’d shoot down men with six guns because they cheated at poker or questioned their mettle. Not many of us herd cattle these days, but that cowboy culture remains.



Now go to an online Bible and do a keyword search for “herd.” You get many, many results. How much of the Bible was written by herders? Did they project a herder’s hair-trigger, “insult me and I’ll smite you” attitude onto their God?

If you decide that there is a God, and if you then decide that this God must have the temperament of Tony Soprano, what does that say about you? When you look into the darkness and see a monster, are you describing the darkness, or yourself?



Maybe, just maybe, the face you put on God is the ultimate measure of what’s in your soul. If there is a Judgment Day, maybe this is what you get judged on.

And this got me thinking about ants.



Our creepy pictures up there are of an enormous ant hill. More of an underground city, really. Researchers will fill all of the tunnels and chambers with cement, so they can map out the system (the one in the pictures took an astonishing 20,000 pounds of cement to fill it all in). Then they digg out the dirt from around the tunnels, and what is left behind is mind-boggling.



Sure, there’s tunnels and chambers. Big fucking deal, right? But then they looked closer, and saw chimneys at the top of the compound, and realized they were made to circulate air through the network.



So they traced those down, and found that some chambers below were “gardens” of fungus to eat, others were full of rotting waste material. And they were all positioned by the ants so that the warm air coming off the rotting trash would create a convection current, the warm air rising up through the shafts, with vents positioned elsewhere to draw fresh air in to replace it.

This was designed by creatures that have brains the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

But it’s not just that they created this without having the ability to imagine or think (and we know they have neither). Go back to Jack Chick’s end of the world scenario, where all of the souls of the unbelievers are sucked off the earth. What happens to the body at that moment? It just slumps over, right? I mean, that’s what death is, isn’t it? The soul leaving the body?

But… ants don’t have souls at all. No religion thinks they do. And yet they built that fucking city. So… it sounds like you can get a lot done without a soul. It sounds like a soulless man could keep eating, and having sex, and raising kids, and going to work, and could even cooperate with others to build magnificent creations.

It sounds like if the soul was sucked out of the guy in the cubicle next to you, it would take you a really long fucking time to notice. Like maybe it wouldn’t be until you saw the deadness in his eyes as he nonchalantly pulls the guts out of your belly.

And this got me thinking about bees.

Specifically, the honey bees that live on bee farms. Because we humans are smarter than the bees, we’re able to trick them into spending their whole lives building hives and making honey, working tirelessly because their every impulse is telling them it’s necessary for their survival. Of course in reality, they’re building their hive inside a wooden box, and we’re going to take their honey from them and pour it on Kim Basinger on the floor of our kitchen.



So if there is a God or gods, how do we know we’re not their honey bees and that they’re not Mickey Rourke?

And this got me thinking about chili.

Do you know why jalapeno peppers are hot? It’s a defense mechanism, the burning sensation meant to discourage predators from eating them. We, because we are smarter than the peppers, chop them up and use their precious defense to make our chili spicy. Their desperate attempt to preserve their lives gives us an amusing sensation on our tongue.

So if humans have a soul, and if the gods are spirits, and if their whole ecosystem functions on this invisible, spiritual level where thoughts and dreams and ideas live… what if there is something humans generate at this spiritual level that the gods can use? What if human anxiety can be used as a condiment for their nachos?



And what if everything we do, everything that we think is for our own survival, is simply a means toward some frivolous end for the gods? The gods certainly wouldn’t feel bad about it; they’re as far above us as we are to the ants, and we certainly didn’t feel bad about drowning a whole city full of them with cement to make a YouTube video.

You know, the thing about the evangelicals up there and their Apocalypse, is that it appears some of them vote and act in such a way to intentionally bring it about. They believe Israel has to trigger World War 3, they believe that the heathens have to persecute them. The prophecy becomes self-fulfilling. And who’s to say some mischeivous spirit didn’t plant that idea in their collective consciousness specifically for that reason?

So if, hypothetically, you’re a writer or entertainer or work in the realm of selling ideas, and if you believe in the supernatural, you would have to–hypothetically–always be wondering if you weren’t being used as a tool, a means of manipulation by the gods to influence the mass of mens’ collective minds. How would you ever know? Even your suspicions themselves, or even those very concepts of what the gods/spirits/demons are, could be another level of their manipulation, specifically crafted by them to get an intended result, a container for you to stupidly build a bee hive in.



Right?

I guess what I'm really trying to say here is,

I fucked Toby's mom.

[BuckShot Brutus]

thread of the year

[daleluck1313]

I've gotta say... that was actually pretty epic.