COVID-19: Don’t let fear get the best of you

 

This 33 minute video by a Texas-based documentarian concerns the role of fear in causing otherwise rational people to hit the “COVID-19 panic button” and engage in things like buying a year’s worth of toilet paper, paper towels or pop tarts, getting into fistfights (in at least one Costco), and just behaving like world class horse’s patoots.

By now virtually all of you reading this know what to do: follow CDC guidelines to prevent getting infected and keep enough extra food, toilet paper, medicines and such on-hand to weather a few weeks to a month or so hunkered down at home.  Don’t however let dark “worst case scenarios” overrule good sense and make you part of a self-fulfilling doomsday prophecy.

Now for those evangelical and fundamentalist Christian believers who actually do believe this is “doomsday” (which is to say the “last hour of the end times”) based on a reading of modern events & news into ancient cryptic prophecies in the Hebrew scriptures and Christian New Testament: how can we be so close to the end of the age when the 3rd Temple has not been built in Jerusalem? After all, it is clearly stated in 2 Thessalonians 2:4 that the anti-Messiah (faux messiah) will enter the 3rd Temple and proclaim himself divine.  No 3rd Temple, no “we are entering the tail end of the end times”.

I have to wonder just how much “end time prophecy” books, TV shows, radio programs, movies and such have influenced not just believers but non-believers as well? But least it be said I am laying all the blame on masters of eisegesis, let’s not forget the steady diet of doomsday sci-fi movies, books, short stories and so forth many (most?) of us have fed on down through the years.  It is hard not to think that we’ve been primed (conditioned?) by certain Bible prophecy teachers and Hollywood sci-fi movies to see imminent doomsday in events or happenings that cannot possibly deliver the dark goods, while dismissing or downplaying those that can eventually upend civilization like global warming.

There is one sci-fi show I think we could gleam some wisdom from to help us get through our current difficulty: the 1981 BBC TV adaptation of Douglas Adam’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” . Specifically, the message (advice?) which vibrantly flashes on the screen of the electronic guidebook Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe: “Don’t Panic”.

Maybe Adam’s anticipated our day. The prophet Adams? Beats some of those who claim the title & role these days.

© March 2020 by Dr. Anthony G. Payne. All rights reserved.

 

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