A Brief History of the End of the World Part 2 
(Wagner plays) 
Christopher Frayling : Flames leap up to engulf the heavens,as hordes of people watch in silent awe,not a millennium night celebration,but the Twilight of the Gods and the destruction of their heaven as imagined by Wagner.If your millennium night wasn't quite as spectacular as that,and if you even suffered a slight dose of anticlimax,the world didn't end,the millennium bug didn't bite [Fax letters have even suggested a conspiracy that there was a bug in the first place,totally negating the facts.People will never believe that man is capable of solving problems he has created.The tech heads did good,why can't we accept that? -LB],and can any party really live up to that kind of build up? Well,that would only be in the tradition of millennial mornings after.The greater the expectation,the bigger the letdown,and people in millenarian movements,have often had the greatest difficulty in dealing with disappointment that the apocalyptic, life-changing,world-transforming event didn't occur ,as sociologist Eileen Barker has found. 

Eileen Barker : If you're expecting the end of the world on Tuesday at 4.30 and if you're still there at breakfast on Wednesday morning,you've got to do some rethinking pretty rapidly. Sometimes you can say,"Oh I got my sums wrong" and you can change the date,they may say "Oh well it did happen,it happened in the spirit world" or "It would have happened if people had followed the Messiah",or "It would have happened if we hadn't prayed so hard to stop it happening",or "We misunderstood the leader".People have all sorts of different responses. 

Christopher Frayling : The belief that history is leading somewhere [Ref: Pirsig "Lila" p170{teleology};Lila1],that it's a story of progress,which will perhaps even lead to a triumphant conclusion has a powerful appeal.but why do we persist in wanting to attach precise dates to the coming change? When 2000 years of post-millennial let downs should have taught us better? Well one reason for our persistent preoccupation with dates,maybe,that from the very beginning,the adoption of calendars,the measurement of time and the fixing of dates was a way of revealing and recording the meaning of the world. 

Kristen Lipencott : One of the things that almost all early cultures noticed is that there are patterns in the sky.The moon goes through a certain number of phases,the stars seem to reappear in the same place every year,and obviously as soon as men notice these sorts of happenings,they thought that these were signs that were being sent by God,or by their gods [Because of course it's by no means obvious that there is one! -LB] to help them understand the universe,and so if you look at early religions,almost all of them have a time component,but more specifically all the early religions are based on the phases of the moon [Showing that religion is nothing more than man's superstitious and ignorant notions -LB].The second really big advancement in time keeping [Ref:[Science3]Timeless; [Science4]Timelrd1;Video JB12 RI 99:Arrows of Time (Neil Johnson)] was the discovery of what was called the solar year,those 365 days,and that really had to do less with what we would call "religion" in its most basic sense,it had to do with survival.For example,if you're a hunter,if you're a farmer,if you're a seafarer [Ref:Science4: Longtude.htm;Video JB15 Longitude] there's a wonderful line in Homer saying,"No one goes to sea before the Pleides rise".These are sorts of things that are necessary to survival.The ancient Egyptians would celebrate their new year in June when the Nile River rose,because if the Nile river didn't rise,it didn't deposit its silt,so there was no agricultural season.So very early on you had this tension between what one might call the social calendar,the state calendar that was year based,and the religious calendar that was fundamentally moon based. 

Christopher Frayling : Kristen Lipencott who runs the Royal Observatory at Greenwich.The next step beyond years,was the concept of eras.Grouping years into the reigns of kings or dynasties for example.These eras seemed inexorably to acquire characteristics,and the characteristics seemed to be getting worse.From the Aztecs to the Garden of Eden,from Teutonic myth to pre-classical Greece,the eras always seemed to be in decline from a golden age [The halcyon age of yore!!!! YAWN -LB]. 

Kristen Lipencott : One of the things the Aztecs believed in was serial creations,they believed that there had been four previous ages,each of which had been destroyed by the gods because man had failed to fulfil the contract [Getting the idea yet? Man is a failure YAWN -LB].There's one where man failed to do the plantings therefore all of the men that lived in that age were eaten by Jaguars.The era that we live in now,does have a time limit,but it can be withheld by man continuing to worship his gods [Very convenient -LB].Now the problem is as we all know,there are no more Aztec people sacrificing blood. 

Christopher Frayling : And according to their calendar,time runs out for this creation in another twelve years [Which begs the question why everyone was waiting for 2000 just because its the Xtian version -LB],so if you're already missing that feeling of pre-millennial tension,there's something else to feel anxious about! But it's not the only story of decline. 

Damien Thompson : Entirely different civilisations produce almost identical structures as a way of explaining how history develops [Which is duly exploited by Hancock,Daniken etc as means to saying that aliens intervened -LB],so for example in the 8th century BC the Greek writer Hesiod,produced the by now very familiar idea of a succession of four ages.An age of gold,of silver,of bronze and finally an age of iron,a degenerative structure in which the age of iron,the present one,is one absolute unrelieved misery.Let's then compare this to,the series of Yugas (sp?) or ages in Hindu tradition,again it's a sequence of four,getting progressively worse,with the final age,the one we're now in,being the Kali Yuga,a final unutterably miserable age in which people have lost sight of their true identity by becoming too attached to material goods. [If such beliefs enter the culture,they become a self-fulfilling prophecy,as people find a vehicle and explanation for the problems that are always with them -LB] 

Christopher Frayling : Damien Thompson,author of "The End of Time".These myths though still give a relatively vague and undeveloped version of the course of history,and its significance.The most coherent,and the most intense way of making sense of the whole of history from creation to the end,which the human imagination has ever devised,appeared in Judaism and early Christianity,with the birth of apocalypse [Ref:Video A15 Equinox: "Apocalypse When?";N52 Apocalypse!].Historian and Theologian,Bernard McGinn. 

Bernard McGinn : The apocalyptic mentality or what we might call "the apocalyptic imagination" is best seen as a way of making sense of individual lives,and out of history,and in one way it's an answer to what the great historian of religion,Mercia Elleada called "the terror of history".Man,confronted by time and his own life,and a kind of meaninglessness,searches for meaning.In the apocalyptic revelations that we're given to the Jews and to the early Christians,meaning was given,a meaning that embraced the whole of history and,indeed it's been argued that the apocalyptic imagination is really the first form of what we might call "a world history". 

Christopher Frayling : But why do we feel compelled to divide history up,to label and categorise in this way? Literary critic Sir Frank Kermode,who's just revised his classic study "The Sense of an Ending" believes that it's a reflection of something fundamental,not in history,but how we observe and think about the world. 

Frank Kermode : Everything we do selects items from the flow of time [Ref: Video A30 Flow of time;[Science1]Flowtime] and makes them into another sort of thing.You can't have simple chronicle,even Anglo -Saxon chronicle,books like that are actually selective,but altogether,I think we have to impose this rather arbitrary transformation [Ref: Video JB1 Transformations] on the flow of history, partly of course,the documents used to be preserved by care,but also by chance,and we would select from them what seemed to be important.Then you'd group them into what seemed like significant episodes in the plot,as it were.You'd talk about "the Renaissance" or you talk about the (indistinct).It makes it easy to group a lot of information together and make sense of it.I know a lot of historians would oppose this,but people will continue to do it,because it's so helpful,and apocalypse is the great figure of that,because it's always about "time of disaster" which is followed by "renovation" they're the pair. 

Christopher Frayling : And it's not just the dividing up and labelling that's such a habit of thought,the actual patterns that thinkers have imposed,whether St John on 1st century Katmos,or Karl Marx in 19th century London,have shown a sometimes startling similarity.Damien Thompson. 

Damien Thompson : The way Marxists look at history and the way Christian millenarians look at history are related.The degree of correspondence is quite extraordinary.Let's just look at "the end".On the Christian side you have the terrible convulsion of the battle of Armageddon, worldwide conflict between the forces of good and evil,which is followed by the Millennium, the reign of Christ on Earth [He's a bit late -LB],after which there's the end of all history and we simply pass into eternity.Let's compare it now to the Marxist model,you have the conflict between good and evil in the form of worldwide revolution,that's then followed by a period of the dictatorship of the proletariat [Christ's reign is a dictatorship,sounds similar to me -LB], which ultimately phases out into truly eternal classless society.Now you cannot tell me that the similarity between those systems are a coincidence.That is not to say however, that we need to crudely interpret Marxism as a religious belief system,that's an over simplification,but I have no doubt whatsoever that Marx's way of looking at history has it's roots in much,much older models of time. [Such similarity can also be explained mathematically as any system faced with the same problems and conditions will have the capability of producing a similar solution,much as Mayans and Egyptians both solved the problem of building sound structures in the same way,contrary to what Hancock believes.Pyramids are a good engineering solution to the problem that is faced,and it is most likely that the clever people on both continents as human beings devised the same answer.Likewise with the various 4 ages and Marx's similarity to Xtianity.It's fairly obvious that any cellular structure can exist in certain states,as John Conway demonstrated.It can live for a period and perish,remain static,constantly change,or sequentially change in repeating cycles. Dynamic systems can be pushed into these sorts of states.Civilisations seem to run in repeating cycles,and so it is fairly easy for any historian to develop a theory of eras that will rise and fall and rise again -LB]

Christopher Frayling : Another similarity,which they,or at least their most devout readers have shared,is a belief that if you have the special knowledge,you can read the signs of history's progress towards it's fulfilment,and it's when we believe that time's passage and it's markers aren't just tools of our own devising,but are a property of the world our there,that time and the calendar begin to take charge of us.Kristen Lipencott. 

Kristen Lipencott : We see a vast expanse of nothingness,you can call it time,you can call it space,and then we make little markers in it,called "noon",or markers that are called "Britain", what then happens is that we forget that we made those markers,and we let those markers rule us. One of the things I find bewildering,is how people say "Oh gosh,now that I've got a fax machine,and I've have Email,my life just moves so quickly" [So much for unending leisure time -LB].There's a wonderful quote from a Greek playwright,who actually says,"I walked into the Agara the other day,and there was that damned sundial,my time was completely my own until they put that sundial up,and now it does nothing but eat away my time" [Ref: Audio FUJIc901A/B "The Tyranny of Time"].Again people are so willing to let themselves be conned by machines that they have created. 

Christopher Frayling : The fact is that from early on,those who controlled the calendar,and the measurement of time,used them partly,to control the rest of society.After all the calendar was an expression of the divine order,and divine will.But this didn't end,when religious hierarchies lost control of society. 

Kristen Lipencott : In many cultures,when there is a change of government,if there's a revolution,the government will change the calendar,and I think this plays on the idea that people's beliefs are tied into the calendar,so for example during the French revolution,almost the first thing they did,was get rid of the old calendar that had saint's days,that had king's birthdays,that had pagan associations,they tried to go decimal.Two things that were interesting,first off all no one actually wanted to use it [It's just the way it is,some things never change......-LB],and the second thing was that people still tried to hold on to those same beliefs,so you might call the month Fructadore,but you still really wanted St Katherine's Day.This is really what destroyed the calendar,was trying to fit all of the old beliefs into the new calendar. [Beliefs impede change because they can no longer fit the facts or circumstances and still exist.Beliefs are myths -LB].Similarly when communist Russia started,they tried to invent a new calendar,and one of the things that we get regularly are proposals to smash the old calendar and set up a new decimal calendar for the new age. [And don't forget Mao's "Year zero" -LB] 

Christopher Frayling : The importance of the French revolution,as a break with the past in other ways as well,has been under estimated,according to historian and theologian,Andrew Walker.It wasn't only the victory of one political or social view over another.To many of those who had a religious take on history,it was a sign of the approaching end. 

Andrew Walker : In the 19th century you get theorists who develop ideas that Utopia [Ref : T.More "Utopia"] is actually possible in this world,that is progress is so true to the nature of things that we will develop a living heaven on Earth.Interestingly enough,religious ideas developed against the idea of progress.Many of the so-called millennial groups today,came into existence after the French revolution.When the French revolution occurred,people realised that life has they had known it,that is Feudal society,didn't have to go on forever,there was an abrupt end to it and a new beginning.For some people,this created great joy and excitement,the birth of modern democracy,the rights of man,the idea that science would solve all problems,and so you get this whole secular development in relation to Marx. Another theory such as August Kompt and the anthropologist Frazer,for example,even Darwin,when one thinks of it,on "The Origin of Species" although published in 1859 was picked up by the Fabians,also by fascists and communist thought,to run with this idea that life would go on getting better and developing into Utopia. But some Christians and Romantics,opposed this idea,and saw the French revolution as a kind of terror,not in the literal sense of the guillotine,but in the sense that society could be disrupted,and this was a sign,perhaps,that society was going to come to an end. So you've got if you like,an underbelly of thought that goes through the modern world.The main body of thought is that we will go on getting better and better and progress is inevitable. The second body of thought,is rather more reflective and wonders whether in fact,humankind by virtue of its own nature will blow itself up,in some way or another. [The former optimistic,the latter pessimistic,recognise your view? -LB 

Christopher Frayling : We may like to think that our doubts about the belief in secular progress,whether scientific,economic or social,are relatively recent.It's salutary to note though,that at precisely the same time [It can't be,if it's relative -LB] as the idea of progress was taking hold,the most profound doubts were also emerging.The 19th century was not only the era of the heroic myths [It's ironic that Chris is doing exactly what Frank said happens - LB] of human advancement,it also saw the spread of religious millenarian reaction in America,Europe and Russia,and strangely enough,these movements actually helped to bring about some of the great progressive reforms.Damien Thompson. 

Damien Thompson : Initially,American millennial belief is of a very optimistic variety,known as "post-millennial",the idea that Jesus will only come after the perfect society has been formed,and many of the social crusaders of early 19th century America are post-millennialists who believe that for example in campaigning against slavery,they are initiating the perfect society that lies just around the corner. 

Christopher Frayling : It'd be very wrong to imagine that millenarian thinking is on the wane,or is confined to eccentric cults.Polls show that 42% of Americans believe literally in apocalypse [Yes but the UK exported its bible bashers to the continent,so it's to be expected that they will have a disproportionate number of numb skulls -LB],and as anthropologist of religion,Fiona Bowie,points out,research has also shown that some,in key sections of American society,aren't nearly as scared as they should be of playing their part in it. 

Fiona Bowie : Workers in the American nuclear industry have said that if there's a nuclear war,they would see themselves as working for Christ,in bringing about the Armageddon,which is necessary before Christ can come again [It just shows you what religious stupidity can do,under these circumstances Homer Simpson looks like an exemplary nuclear worker - LB].The dispossessed and marginalised can't realise their ambitions in this world,therefore they're going to look to spaceships,or look to ancestors or gods,to save them.If you're already powerful,then perhaps you really believe in your own power and technology.I think there are aspects of the American right,which are really quite scary in the degree of negativity they feel towards this world [Sound familiar ? -LB].It's linked to the nuclear industry and the arms industry,where people perhaps feel the need for some kind of moral justification for their actions.They're often right wing fundamentalist,bible-believing Christians [Surprise,surprise - LB],and they will look to apocalyptic verses,in the old and new testaments,in order to justify the thinking [You can't call it "thinking" it's an affront to the word,or a misuse of it -LB]. (Heartbeat sounds) 

Christopher Frayling : What has driven people,in so many different societies and across such a span of time,to brood so obsessively on the end of things? According to Frank Kermode,even when we're considering the grand sweep of history,the origins [Ref: Audio FUJIc902A/B P.Davies "Origins"] and fate of the whole universe,there's a very intimate and personal motivation for our constant search for significance and value.[Ref: R.Pirsig "Lila" {value}] 

Frank Kermode : As St Augustine pointed out,the end of everything in terms of world history, is really just a reflection of our own considerations about the end of ourselves. (Heartbeat stops) I would see the whole millennial business as having its roots in an entirely personal view of the two times in which we exist in the world,the one where we are just bowled along by succession and the one where we "see" that there is a pattern,a beginning,a middle and an end if you like,in our own lives,that our lives are punctuated by moments which are out of time [Then they're not moments!? -LB],and we value that,and that's why we value the idea that history can be treated in much the same way. [All of this points to why Xtians are scared of dying,and believe in afterlives.The terrible end time of Armageddon has a personal reflection in their own death,Armageddon is a fearful conception,reflecting the fear of death and emphasising it.The post-Armageddon period is an allegory for the personal coping mechanism of dealing with the trauma of death,by thinking that something better will occur.In that the pessimism leads to a hate for humanity and society,death is better.This view is destructive,in that it forces a delusion upon the believer that all is terrible now and everything is depressing and that later at some unknown time after death,everything will be much better.This isn't what happens,and so anyone with this view is out of touch and lost,and further dispossessed and marginalised,drawing them in to a vicious circle of contempt for humanity,so much so that they are willing to blow up nuclear power stations to "make things better".What kind of warped value system is that? -LB] 

Christopher Frayling : Frank Kermode sees time as the way we try to resolve the tension between a longing to feel that our lives have value and significance and the nagging suspicion that there may be only a succession of meaningless events. [Humans imbue things with meaning.It is the paranoid delusion of the pessimist that suffers from this tension.I have my meaning. If Julian Barbour is correct,time is a succession of "nows" with no future or past,but since we have memories from past events,the past must exist,and we envisage the future,so the conceptions create the words,but as to whether the conceptions actually exist? If not then there is no meaning that could be attached to "nows" short of our invention of the terms "past" and "future",perhaps that's why the terms exist-LB] 

Frank Kermode : We get more value out of a life that seems to be plotted,like a good novel,even if it has an ambiguous ending,as maybe good novels do.We get more value out of that than simple succession.I think simple succession is the enemy,it's what we normally call time,isn't it? And we think of it as something which brings us to the grave,but we have this other kind of time,in reserve. 

Christopher Frayling : In your book "The Sense of an Ending",you've a lot of emphasis to the time that we mark off,anniversaries,red letter days and so on. 

Frank Kermode : It reflects other kinds of importance in our lives.You might say for example,that the transformation of someone else's personality that happens when you fall in love with them,is taking a perfectly routine encounter out the ordinary order of things,and giving it some especially intense,and perhaps impermanent quality.Though I think human experience probably does contain a good many of these rather transcendental moments. 

Christopher Frayling : It's when we try to discover the significance of these moments, moments which make sense of our lives,that we begin to impose or perhaps uncover,patterns. In particular,the beginnings,middles and ends,the narrative structure,the plot of our life,and when we think about history,it's part of our personal private struggle with the unfairness of our own death [Why is it unfair? -LB],and our nervous search for meaning. 

Frank Kermode : The model of this would be,the model of apocalypse.It imposes a satisfactory and rather violent but also triumphant end to history.It's and exact image of our own death's [No it isn't.Death doesn't have a halcyon period after it,not is it a violent ending in most cases -LB] ,in fact.It's value is that it does give what history,as far as we know,doesn't have.It imposes from another level,an ending.The bible after all,begins with Genesis and ends with Apocalypse,it's got the whole thing in there,beginning,an end.We're all born in the middle,but we don't like to think that we're merely detritus that is swept along with time. 

Christopher Frayling : But in the century just past [Did it? Or did we pass it? -LB],many of us lost confidence in the whole idea that we could read a structure into human affairs,and create some sort of grand narrative out of them.Faced with the evidence of our astonishing capacity for improvement,and simultaneously for crimes against ourselves on a horrendous scale ["In our time" (InoutmT1.wri) this week,reports that more people have perished in environmental "natural" disasters than the whole of mankind's actions combined,so in what sense is it "horrendous"? Note that Pandora's box is being referred to,both good and bad occur simultaneously from the same source -LB],the imagination of many intellectuals has quailed and retreated from any attempt to discern or impose a narrative.It now satisfies itself with the playful,ironic,skin-deep commentary of post-modernism. 

Damien Thompson : Modern thought on the whole has really believed in progress.It was always aware that,it was possible that progress come to an end.That is to say the modern world had its own narrative structures.The interesting thing about post-modern thought,which has not perhaps dominated popular culture,but has certainly dominated the academy in the last 20 years,is that now throws doubt upon any kind of meta-narrative,such as the Judeo-Christian story of God loving the world and bringing it to himself [I think that's more because any sane person can discern God doesn't exist and is a vestige of moon worship -LB],or the Marxist narrative that we will build Utopia on Earth,or the capitalist rational argument,that we will simply go on building better markets,and post-modern thought doesn't like talking about narratives in terms of structures of beginnings and ends at all.The French sociologist Bordala,suggests the whole notion of an ending is a kind of a prejudice,which has disappeared from the way modern thinkers are talking.There is a congruence between the way post-modern thinkers are talking,in terms of everything now is disconnected and meaning is constantly changing,we don't really have a grasp on anything anymore,including linear structure,and the way market forces are operating,where all values and aesthetics are now subsumed under the all-powerful market,and so I think one of the problems about the new millennium as we enter it,is that intellectuals are increasingly refusing to talk,in terms not only of ends,but of moral ends. Not only is it not going to be easy to talk about the end,in terms of the end of time,but it is not going to be easy to talk about the end,in terms of the good life. 

Christopher Frayling : Increasingly,it's thought to be naive to imagine that any theory or system of belief,can reveal the meaning of stories,whether in history,politics,literature,or even in our own lives.An uncomfortable,uncertain way to start the new century,isn't it? And with a degree of good timing [It couldn't have been good timing if it undermined it -LB] that would have looked contrived in a story,science began and ended the last century by undermining our very ideas about time itself,and not just in one,but two ways.As physicist Michael Green explains,first Einstein [Ref Video M2;BB22] destroyed the concept of time as single and absolute [Contrary to what many Xtians still believe -LB]. 

Michael Green : The striking feature of Einstein's theory,is that whereas time had been considered to be an absolute property,in physics since the days of Galileo and Newton, Einstein realised that time itself that depends on the relative motion of the observers.Time is a quality that is dependent on the way in which it is observed. 

Christopher Frayling : The other great advance in physics,Quantum Theory [Ref: Audio FUJIc6019/20 J.Gribbin "Quantum";Video L5 Quantum],has raised as many important questions as it has answered [But it has answered,and is therefore an achievement -LB].In particular quantum physics has thrown up new problems for the way we understand time,even the idea of the beginning of time. 

Michael Green : To talk about the very beginning,to talk about the creation of the universe "at a moment" is really to suppose that we understand the notion of time and therefore the notion of "this moment" in a way that I don't think we can,because the whole notion of time is going be altered at very short time intervals [It's very noticeable to me that when talking of time,physicists talk of it in terms of itself,suggesting that there is some sort of circular self - referencing going on -LB],ideas that we haven't yet understood,ideas coming from quantum theory. News:- Now the UN global environment outlook is published today,and it makes deeply worrying reading,as an assessment of the main environmental problems faced across the world,it says "the environment's damaged beyond repair in some regions.For instance there'll be no clean drinking water for 2 out of 3 people in the next 25 years.Global warming [Ref: InoutT1.wri] will lead to daily reports of natural disasters.They'll be few fish to eat because there won't be any coral reefs for them to live in,and so on. [The US dumped Huey Helicopters and tanks into the sea,there are currently projects creating pseudo reefs for fish exploiting used technology or seeding natural reefs -LB] The report has been compiled by the UN environment programme,their director is Klaus Tupfler,and he talked to our correspondent Roger Harrabim. 

Klaus Tupfler : It is high time to act,the main message of our work is,there are severe problems for the environment,and for the peaceful development of our Earth,but we can act against it,but we have to do it now. 

Christopher Frayling : The old apocalyptic stories with their seemingly naive beginnings and ends,may seem to have been discredited,but the same way of interpreting the world has found new scientific or at least scientific looking expression.Nuclear terrorism,the millennium bug,comets striking the Earth,global warming,over population,pollution [Where have I heard all these recently?? -LB].Bernard McGinn. 

Bernard McGinn : The apocalyptic imagination,with its strange mixtures of optimism and pessimism has moved outside of religion,into certain forms of scientific thinking,and particularly into environmental thinking,and if you read many environmental treatises,for me they are really a form of apocalyptic rhetoric,the moves that they make in terms of possibilities,both for good and for ill of the present situation,don't use religious language,in the traditional language of the bible or the book of revelation,but they argue in the same way,that apocalyptic treatises always have,and so I think we're seeing a great growth of what we could call the "secular apocalyptic mentality",which for me at least,indicates that there is something about the apocalyptic imagination which is,if you will,"hard wired" [A timely use of the phrase -LB] into the human mind. [Or could it just be that there are a pile of pessimistic luddites and clock turners who are afraid of their own shadows? -LB] 

Christopher Frayling : At least in this latest version of the apocalypse we can do something to change the odds [Risk assessment -LB],depending how we behave.So perhaps we should be grateful for the end of the world,if the prospect makes live better today.Whether it's to come about by divine judgement or global climate change,one recurrent element of the end of the world,is that human actions have consequences,beyond the ones we usually consider as we go about our daily business,and that ultimately these unconsidered consequences may be what really matter.Islam has its own apocalyptic tradition,and like others it contemplates the end,in order to teach us about the here and now. [Which is a very simple view of space-time - LB] Islamic theologian,Akbar Ahmed. 

Akbar Ahmed : The notion of the end of time,is fairly well developed and defined in Koran,and if read the Koran,the holy book,with the sayings of the prophet,and then relate all this to what is happening around you in society,you are able to say that "Yes we are moving towards a time when,perhaps the signs that have been given to us over the centuries,are visible to us",for instance one of the signs is that people will stop respecting their parents and elders, households and families will start breaking up,there will be no shame,or no honour left,you will see that many of these signs are in evidence around us.So some people would argue that perhaps we are approaching the end of time,as predicted in Islam. Now,what we are seeing are examples of large scale societies without a sense of justice and without a sense of compassion and balance,and on this large scale,the answer to when it'll all be ending is quite clear that societies cannot maintain themselves when there's such a vast scale of injustice and lack of compassion.God is constantly telling people that "any minute maybe our last" [How does he know what God is saying? And which of the many Gods does he mean? -LB],so you need to live your lives,ordinary lives as good husbands,good fathers,good mothers,good children and so on,but to remember that you're here really in a sense because allowed you to be here.So in a sense it's a very important notion,simply to make people aware of the idea of God,and the idea of behaving as good,responsible,decent human beings. [There is a veiled attack on the West here and an insidious and noxious notion that his values of "good" should be adopted or a malevolent God will take revenge.He perceives injustice, according to whose values? Any value system that says "God says..." is not to be listened to - LB] 

Christopher Frayling : For each of us as individuals,as well,the courage to contemplate the end,maybe just what we need,in order to get on with our lives. 

Frank Kermode : The naive idea that everything will come historically to a total stop,and it maybe happening very soon,because that's what apocalyptics like to think,now that's to regard the end as imminent,as threatening to occur,but when you get past that idea,and begin to see apocalypse as a fiction,then you see that it is in fact imminent in the whole pattern,the whole plot of a life or a period,a beginning,a middle and an end,so that everything is impregnated with endness,as it were,you don't have to believe that the world's going to end next week,to have an Imamian (?) sense of endness. (Wind sound effect plays) 

Christopher Frayling : Frank Kermode.So even though the millennium has safely past,it looks as though the end of the world may always be with us,and as long as we don't become obsessed with predicting it,let alone bringing it about,all the better for that. It could be that the idea that the world will end,helps to give the world meaning,that for each of us,one day,the sun will not rise.