The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

The view of Mount Mitchell is obscured by rain clouds and fog on this Saturday afternoon in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Ken Burns is talking about Hank Williams as “the epitome of country music” on “Live From Here” on National Public Radio out of Ashville, North Carolina.

A friend is supposed to call back soon to report in from Portland, Oregon, where the climate fires have expanded from California and engulfed Washington state and Western Canada too, which is never shown on the U.S. news maps in newspapers or on television.

More than 3.1 million acres burned in California, 26 times more than last year, and peak fire season is just beginning. One fire complex is being called the largest wildfire in the state’s history, where 747,000 acres burned.

In Washington, where fires have burned more than 626,000 acres this week, Governor Jay Inslee said the state was suffering “a cataclysmic event.”

The fires in Oregon have burned more than one million acres — an area larger than Rhode Island — and the state’s air quality is now being called among the worst in the world. Tens of thousands of people have already been evacuated, and about 500,000 are on the verge of being ordered to flee.

The End of Everything

Earlier this week, I was listening to a show on NPR’s “1A” and heard producer Michelle Harven say this in the intro.

“With everything that’s going on right now, it can sometimes feel like the world is ending. There are massive wildfires that cause fire tornadoes, permafrost melts that explode, and…the coronavirus pandemic,” Harven said without a hint of irony in her voice.

“But cosmologist Katie Mack says we should all stay calm,” she added, “at least for the next several billion years.”

In her new book, “The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking),” Katie Mack writes about how the universe works and how it could eventually come to an end.

Here’s one theory she puts forward, as summarized by The New York Times.

Other possibilities involve dark energy, a still poorly understood business that seems to be the dominant component of our universe. A dark-energy apocalypse could “tear apart the very fabric of reality, rendering any thinking creatures in the cosmos helpless as they watch their universe being ripped open around them,” Mack says. Some paths to destruction arise from theories that involve parallel universes lurking in extra dimensions. A so-called “ekpyrotic” scenario imagines collisions of “branes,” three-dimensional universes ordinarily invisible to one another. At the fringes, the cosmological theories with the best jargon and cleverest names are often the most speculative.

Whether it all ends in a bang or a whimper, Mack offers us a glimpse into what it all means — and how it all could conclude.

If you are into the science of Cosmology, you too can listen to the show segment here.

Is Donald Trump the Antichrist?

While I was listening to that show, the Facebook Messenger beep went off, and a reader sent me a link to a story by an author who has literally gone to a lot of trouble to explore the question of whether U.S. President Donald Trump is THE Antichrist.

I am NOT making this up. I am not personally a believer in this stuff. But considering a vision I describe in my book of something that happened to me a long time ago — and everything that is going on in the world – I am sort of fascinated by the subject.

Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again

Aren’t you? Who’s not?

If only we could get a televangelist like Pat Robertson to say it, and every news outlet to report it, the story could cost Trump reelection in November. That would be a good thing for the universe, the Earth and American democracy. Surely if there is a god he or she would approve of that, even if it does require a little sensational clickbait.

If you are a believer in such things, or just want to have a few minutes of fun, you might want to take a look at this piece by Benjamin L. Corey, an American political activist, theologian, author, blogger and speaker. He is supposedly a prominent figure within the Emerging Church Movement, Progressive Christianity, and radical Christianity while self-identifying as an Anabaptist. He is the author of the books, Undiluted: Rediscovering The Radical Message of Jesus, and Unafraid: Moving Beyond Fear Based Faith.

Could American Evangelicals Spot the Antichrist?

He claims to have reviewed every prophecy on the Antichrist, “and what I read blew my mind,” he says. “If my evangelical friends are correct, and if it’s entirely possible that the Antichrist is on the global scene today, I certainly wouldn’t want to be the only person in the room who didn’t recognize the Antichrist when I saw him.”

Convergence

As I was thinking about the convergence of these ideas this week while troubleshooting an electrical issue on the media camper van, I came up with a funny idea about how this might be the so-called End Times or End of the World as we know it and one way to look at how things might play out. It really is hard to take this too seriously, even though it feels really, really bad.

So here’s the idea. Feel free to take it with a grain of salt.

So let’s say for the sake oF argument that so-called Biblical prophecy is coming true right now.

What if the nearly one million deaths from COVID-19 is really Jesus just taking his Christians home to heaven? I mean about 40 percent of them were in nursing homes, and they are disappearing pretty quick. There aren’t many atheists in nursing homes.

Now what?

In this disastrous year of 2020 the people of the world are suffering pretty much every human calamity predicted by scientists who have been talking about global warming since before they called it climate change, and these kinds of calamities were not that hard to predict 2,000 years ago, considering the ignorant state of humanity in the end times for the Romand Empire.

Massive fires and horrible droughts in the American west and Australia. Powerful hurricanes and floods on the Gulf Coast and The Atlantic coast. Giant typhoons and tsunamis in Japan and other areas of the Far East.

Even locusts have reportedly devastated large parts of the mother continent of Africa, and then you have the coronavirus pandemic and global economic catastrophe.

What is the world coming too?

What will save us? A savior from the sky?

If so, this savior better have a large number of space ships to handle the 7.8 billion people on Earth — or a bunch of giant water cannons to put out all the fires and a plan to cool the planet.

Where might this savior arrive from?

For the sake of argument, there are an estimated 3,000 planets just in our Milky Way Galaxy that could sustain life in the “habitable zone,” the region around stars where liquid water could exist on the surface of a rocky planet.

How Many Habitable Planets are Out There?

Maybe God is really like one of the life forms discovered in the early 1970s show Star Trek, a wise alien species much advanced in evolution beyond ours?

Let’s face it, it would be nice to think that there might be a smarter beings out there somewhere in the universe who would know better than to elect the likes of Donald Trump as the most powerful man in the world. Whether he’s the christ or the antichrist, he’s certainly causing us lots of problems in the country and the world and doing nothing to tackle any of them.

He literally refused to come to the aid of California with disaster relief from the federal government. Does he really think the fires will only kill and displace a bunch of pot smoking liberal hippies who would never vote for him?

One of his first acts as president was to pull this leading country out of the Paris Climate Agreement, the only global framework for coming up with a plan to combat climate change due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels.

The Obama administration’s policies might not been perfect or gone far enough, but at least they had us headed in the right direction.

Trump seems to want to bring on the end of the world, maybe to please his Evangelical followers?

So if it helps to think of it this way, by all means call Trump the antiChrist on Facebook and Twitter. All we have to do is convince a few percent of people not to vote for him.

If we can get him out of the White House somehow, we might save the world yet.

If there is a new Age of Aquarius on the horizon, I may not get to the promised land with you. I’ve been to the mountain top and what I see ahead is a painful, cloudy outlook for humanity. We are so far gone it might take a bona fide miracle to save us.

Donald Trump is not that miracle. Just the opposite. Literally an antichrist.

Somehow I doubt if Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos are smart enough or rich enough to save us either with their new space ships.

So if there is a messiah out there waiting on a better planet in Perseus Arm or somewhere else in the wider universe, this might be a good time to show up.

If you want to call yourself Jesus or God, whatever. Let’s just get this over soon, right?

I literally don’t know how much more of this I can take, and I do not think I’m alone in that feeling.