Ecumenical eschatology: a calm diplomacy whose time has come (2015)

The recent obsession with the Mayan calendar was nothing but the de facto jamming of something much more constructive: by focusing on a New World eschatology, people did not focus on its Islamic and Jewish counterparts, which would have been a logical and coherent extension of group awareness on the matter of eschatology and its repercussions. Mass men steeped in End Times expectancy were interpreting a cyclical system in terms of it, an absurdly convoluted operation: in effect going straight for the junk food. 

Since Christian End Times beliefs obviously affect -- among other things, American foreign policy -- it behooves us to consider whether the same pattern is true of the other Peoples of the Book (whether as concerns foreign policy specifically or in a more general sense).

Instead of entertaining themselves with ‘tzolkins’, people should have been learning about Moshiach and Dajjal, since those figures and beliefs have serious repercussions for Christian, Muslim and Jewish relations both in the Middle East and generally; and while they were about it, and before they plundered the New World as obtusely as before, they might have learned about Kalki the Machine & the Doctrine of Four Ages.

Something does not need to be true in order for it to have mass organizational appeal, although its having such appeal is not in itself an indication of falsehood (as with the desacralization of the Doctrine of Four Ages, known as dialectical materialism, whose mass form retains some vestiges of the original model).

The beliefs of the various Christians, Muslims and Jews -- and there is sweeping internal variation -- do not need to be true in order to cross-reference to an extraordinary degree with one another in agreement as in disagreement.  One is, for instance, fascinated by the varying treatments of Simon Cyrenean in Valentian Gnosticism and Islam or of Mary in the New Testament & the Talmud; and there are many other examples which I might have mentioned to drive home the point.

Serious consideration of the eschatologies and soteriologies of peoples and civilizations, while revelatory and interesting, does not command a fraction of the attention that people were willing to fritter away on a distorted view of the Mayan sense of time and space. It is highly significant that the Jewish Moshiach (i.e. Messiah) and the Islamic Dajjal (i.e. Satan) are considered the same figure, at least in Islamic tradition; it is as significant that most Western people are ignorant of this fact. 

They are also generally ignorant of the central role played by the figure known as Isa Jesus in Islamic eschatology. If this ignorance were addressed, then it would surely contribute to world peace and possibly even end the War on Terror. Of course, the end of the War on Terror is likely to be the beginning of the American Inquisition -- see my poem "Walpurgisnacht" for an extended treatment of this "law of conservation of" concept -- so perhaps we shouldn't immanentize the eschaton.

Carl Jung, in his book Psychological Types, charitably refers to St. Anselm's ontological argument as a "psychological fact", by which he meant as distinct from a truth per se. In a similar vein, I propose that we treat these variant End Times expectancies as "eschatological facts", notice that they are present in the room with us, accept their heft in the hand, & broaden our understanding of their intertwining.