It has come out that the Soviets had an automated “doomsday machine” that would automatically launch their nuclear payload if its sensors detected that a nuclear detonation had happened on Soviet soil. That would have been a great deterrent… if they had told us about it. That apparently wasn’t the point, as they kept it a secret. It’s like they just built a kill switch for humanity, an automatic shutoff for if things got out of hand.

Yes, that exact thing happened in Dr. Strangelove. The blurred line between fact and fiction could drive a man mad. More on that in a moment.

Speaking of signs of the apocalypse, I saw my tale of horror and dongs break into the top 5,000 on Amazon yesterday, though that seems to change minute by minute.

The book is available one week from today, during a period of time that fans believe will be remembered by history as Dongtober. So really we’ve passed from the stage of pre-ordering to straight up ordering, which you can do now and have the hardcover book in your hands next week some time.

Finally.

So what was I talking about? Oh, right, the apocalypse.

A poll in New Jersey showed a third of Republicans think Barack Obama may be the Antichrist. As I’ve been trying to tell you from the beginning of these updates, magic rules this playground.

As somebody raised as a Christian, but having mostly non-religious friends, I’ve had many conversations patiently explaining that the message behind Christianity, of self-sacrifice for others even to the point of death (when all “social contract” morality expires) is one worth preserving even if one doesn’t believe that a man can rise from the grave. A message so important, and so easy to lose track of, that I would dare to grant it “sacred” status. Important for the future of society in the way that not lighting a match in a wading pool full of gasoline is important to your genitals.

But that line between myth and reality is more blurred for the deeply religious person than for anyone. Within the same Christian Bible you have stories clearly stated as allegory, stories that are clearly allegory but aren’t called such, and stories that are said to be factual, with the failure to acknowledge them as such a mortal sin.

Which brings us back to the apocalypse.

If you do read religious writing as mythology, as text designed to convey crucial information from generation to generation in story form, then almost all of it still makes sense, save for countless little corruptions you spot here and there where somebody clearly had an ax to grind.

But not the apocalypse. If you believe in that, you believe that all the “improving society” stuff is irrelevant. Soon, very soon, charity, mercy and forgiveness won’t matter, for the righteous and unrighteous alike will be wiped off the earth forever. Thrift and temperance won’t matter–no reason to save money or abstain from unhealthy habits, when the world is going to end at any moment. Charity won’t matter; poor and rich alike will be struck down by fire and plague. Reforming the system won’t matter, since the system is destined to be taken over by the Antichrist and subject to ultimate corruption either way.

It doesn’t make sense from any angle. Even the believer has to admit that for 2,000 years followers have been living long lives and dying in their beds, believing the whole time the apocalypse was coming, acting accordingly (perhaps to the point of not planning for the future) and never seeing it occur. The believers can insist the prophecy is true, but can’t deny that it was false for them and that those people wasted the time they devoted to worrying about it.

And yet, the belief persists.

Christianity is not the only religion that has it, of course. You see it in branches of Islam and in the Native American faiths. In the jungles you’ll find tribal religions talk about their ancestors returning and turning the sky red. End of the world cults spring up all the time, all over the world.

We have that 2012 movie coming out, about the Mayan calendar and all that (hilarious that we listen to the Mayans, since the Mayans had their apocalypse already; the Spanish stomped them into the ground more than 300 years ago).

The obsession with it, against any evidence that the belief is beneficial at all, feels almost like wishful thinking. After all, wasn’t the Cold War over the idea that some kind of final battle between the two ideologies was inevitable? And that it was just a matter of who would survive? Isn’t that why they built their kill switch?

So this is bigger than religion. It’s something coded into our culture, embedded in the lines of programming that form the software humanity runs on.

Why?

It’s almost like either in the hardware (the human brain as formed by evolution) or in the software (the culture as is handed down in countless verbal and written records) human civilization was iself programmed with a kill switch. A self-destruct sequence, set into motion eons ago.

One may ask themselves how such a thing would come about. And who could be behind it. And what they would benefit from it.

I have decided my next book, the sequel to JDatE I guess, will be devoted to answering that question.

That is, assuming conditions persist in which I am allowed to write it, and in which books are still being published and read by men. We get too focused on blaming whoever tips over the final domino, and spend too little time looking at who set the dominoes up in the first place.

Next update comes 9.29.09 or thereabouts. Release day. Wow.

Order the book. You can have it in your hands in like 10 days as far as I know.

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