Christopher Hitchens - The Portable Atheist - Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

Finally, there is the boundless adaptability, the undying appeal and fascination of the Book of Revelation itself, the central text of apocalyptic belief. When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, making landfall in the Bahaman islands, he believed he had found, and was fated to find, the Terrestrial Paradise promised in the Book of Revelation. He believed himself to be implicated in God’s planning for the millennial kingdom on earth. The scholar Daniel Wocjik (in his brilliant account of apocalyptic thought in America, “The end of the world as we know it”) quotes from Columbus’s record of his first journey: “God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St John…and he showed me the spot where to find it.”

Five centuries later, the United States, responsible for more than four-fifths of the world’s scientific research and still a land of plenty, can show the world an abundance of opinion polls concerning its religious convictions. The litany will be familiar. Ninety percent of Americans say they have never doubted the existence of God and are certain they will be called to answer for their sins. Fifty-three percent are creationists who believe that the cosmos is six thousand years old, 44 percent are sure that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead within the next fifty years. Only 12 percent believe that life on earth has evolved through natural selection without the intervention of supernatural agency.

In general, belief in end-time biblical prophecy, in a world purified by catastrophe and then redeemed and made entirely Christian and free of conflict by the return of Jesus in our lifetime, is stronger in the United States than anywhere on the planet and extends from marginal, ill-educated, economically deprived groups, to college-educated people in the millions, through to governing elites, to the very summits of power. The social scientist J. W. Nelson notes that apocalyptic ideas “are as American as the hot dog.” Wojcik reminds us of the ripple of anxiety that ran round the world in April 1984 when President Reagan expressed that he was greatly interested in the biblical prophecy of imminent Armageddon.

To the secular mind, the polling figures have a pleasantly shocking, titillating quality—one might think of them as a form of atheist’s pornography. But perhaps we should enter a caveat before proceeding. It might be worth retaining a degree of skepticism about these polling figures. For a start, they vary enormously—one poll’s 90 percent is another’s 53 percent. From the respondent’s point of view, what is to be gained by categorically denying the existence of God to a complete stranger with a clipboard? And those who tell pollsters they believe that the Bible is the literal word of God from which derive all proper moral precepts, are more likely to be thinking in general terms of love, compassion, and forgiveness rather than of the slave-owning, ethnic cleansing, infanticide, and genocide urged at various times by the jealous God of the Old Testament.

Furthermore, the mind is capable of artful compartmentalizations; in one moment, a man might confidently believe in predictions of Armageddon in his lifetime, and in the next, he might pick up the phone to enquire about a savings fund for his grandchildren’s college education or approve of long-term measures to slow global warming. Or he might even vote Democrat, as do many Hispanic biblical literalists. In Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Ohio, the courts have issued ringing rejections of Intelligent Design, and voters have ejected creationists from school boards. In the Dover case, Judge John Jones the third, a Bush appointee, handed down a judgment that was not only a scathing dismissal of the prospect of supernatural ideas imported into science classes, but it was an elegant, stirring summary of the project of science in general, and of natural selection in particular, and a sturdy endorsement of the rationalist, Enlightenment values that underlie the Constitution.

Still the Book of Revelation, the final book of the bible, and perhaps its most bizarre, certainly one of its most lurid, remains important in the United States, just as it once was in medieval Europe. The book is also known as the Apocalypse—and we should be clear about the meaning of this word, which is derived from the Greek word for revelation. Apocalypse, which has become synonymous with “catastrophe,” actually refers to the literary form in which an individual describes what has been revealed to him by a supernatural being. There was a long Jewish tradition of prophecy, and there were hundreds, if not thousands of seers like John of Patmos between the second century B.C. and the first century A.D. Many other Christian apocalypses were deprived of canonical authority in the second century A.D. Revelation most likely survived because its author was confused with John, the Beloved Disciple. It is interesting to speculate how different medieval European history, and indeed the history of religion in Europe and the United States would have been if the Book of Revelation had also failed, as it nearly did, to be retained in the bible we now know.

The scholarly consensus dates Revelation to 95 or 96 A.D. Little is known of its author beyond the fact that he is certainly not the apostle John. The occasion of writing appears to be the persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Domitian. Only a generation before, the Romans had sacked the Second Temple in Jerusalem and are, therefore, identified with the Babylonians who had destroyed the First Temple centuries earlier. The general purpose quite likely was to give hope and consolation to the faithful in the certainty that their tribulations would end, that the Kingdom of God would prevail. Ever since the influential twelfth-century historian, Joachim of Fiore, Revelation has been seen, within various traditions of gathering complexity and divergence, as an overview of human history whose last stage we are now in; alternatively, and this is especially relevant to postwar United States, as an account purely of those last days. For centuries, within the Protestant tradition, the anti-Christ was identified with the Pope, or with the Catholic Church in general. In recent decades, the honor has been bestowed on the Soviet Union, the European Union, or secularism and atheists. For many millennial dispensationalists, international peacemakers, who risk delaying the final struggle by sowing concord among nations—the United Nations, along with the World Council of Churches—have been seen as Satanic forces.

The cast or contents of Revelation in its contemporary representations has all the colorful gaudiness of a children’s computer fantasy game—earthquakes and fires, thundering horses and their riders, angels blasting away on trumpets, magic vials, Jezebel, a red dragon and other mythical beasts, and a scarlet woman. Another familiar aspect is the potency of numbers—seven each of seals, heads of beasts, candlesticks, stars, lamps, trumpets, angels, and vials; then four riders, four beasts with seven heads, ten horns, ten crowns, four and twenty elders, twelve tribes with twelve thousand members…and finally, most resonantly, spawning nineteen centuries of dark tomfoolery, “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred, three score and six.” To many minds, 666 bristles with significance. The Internet is stuffed with tremulous speculation about supermarket barcodes, implanted chips, numerical codes for the names of world leaders. However, the oldest known record of this famous verse, from the Oxyrhynchus site, gives the number as 616, as does the Zurich bible. I have the impression that any number would do. One senses in the arithmetic of prophecy the yearnings of a systematizing mind, bereft of the experimental scientific underpinnings that were to give such human tendencies their rich expression many centuries later. Astrology gives a similar impression of numerical obsession operating within a senseless void.