The End of the World

Point The end of the world is happening. It's around the corner. These are truly the end times. Famine is rampant, War is unceasing, Pestilence sweeps across every continent, and massive Death rapes the world population. These are the four signals of the end times as fortold in the Historical Document, the Holy Bible. Everything in the Bible is true, and these are fortold as the signs of the end times. Israel will be miraculously reformed as the tribes of Israel are gathered from around the globe. Armies will march down through the area now encompassed by Russia, and into the area that is now Afghanistan. The Holy Roman Empire will reform, and in this case it's the unification of Europe. The bible tells that in the end times, everyone will receive a mark written on their skin: how many people do you know who don't have tattoos? All of these are foretold in the Historical Document that is the Bible, which is supported by scholars around the world as the literal, historical truth. The Rapture will be the final sign: at that time, it will be too late.
CounterPoint Man, where to start? You're wrong. The bible is a religious book, and it's for an outmoded religion that isn't worth examining in a historical context. The world is ending because of global environmental disaster brought on by corporate greed. The "signs of the apocalypse" you bring up are all the result of the logging of old-growth forests and dumping of chemical waste into rivers, streams and oceans of the world. There has been a six degree average rise in global temperatures over the last fifty years! If this trend continues, pollution will render more than half of the earth uninhabitable by the year 2060. The ice caps will melt and cover most of the Earth's remaining landmass with water. If we don't stop corporate greed, we will burn and drown ourselves completely. The only way to stop this death is to spread organic farming methods, stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (in which, by the way, I count GEfoods) and end all forms of globalization.
Pointedly Disagreeable Lord. There's just so much fertile ground. I'll start by sowing my seeds in the bible. The bible is what it is. It fails to meet one very important criterion as a historical document: it contains prophecy. History, by definition, is what has happened. History only contains the way the world came into being, not the way it goes out. Second, in the book of Matthew 24, back in teh history part of the bible, Joshua talks about his second coming. Now, for those who can't count, let's enumerate: 1)Jesus was born into the world, lived a holy and righteous life, at least at the end for sure, and died on the cross, thus leaving the world; 2)Jesus returned, coming back to earth. I count 2 there. He came, he went, he came back, he left again. It sounds to me like the whole End Times (they actually call it the "end of the age" or the "second coming," not the "end of the world.") happened before the book was written. So there's one end of the world set aside.
What about the dire predictions about globalization? Again, where to begin? The average temperature rise over the last 100 years has been 1 degree, not 6 or 10 or any other number. It's 1. At that rate, we'll be fine for a long time. The same scientists who are predicting global warming were screaming about a new ice age thirty years ago. Where'd that go? Global Coprorate Greed has another name: Capitalism. If you don't like it, that's great and I respect that, but don't go deciding it's the same thing as environmentalism. If you hate globalization, avoid the two biggest globalized corporate ventures: telephones and the internet. Also, and this is fascinating, if we relied only on organic farming techniques, we'd be able to feed a whopping four billion people. Wow. Four billion is a lot of people, until you realize that there are six billion alive today. If two billion environmentalists want to go ahead and volunteer to save the planet and kill yourselves, go right ahead. We'll probably cover suicide in a later installment. Oh, and as for the loggers, they aren't the ones cutting down the rainforest: it's poor people who cut down the trees, farm non-native, non-adapted crops, use up the nutrients and move on. If we could, say, introduce a strain of rice that was better adapted to the area, as has been done in Mexico and parts of Africa, they wouldn't have to clear-cut and slash-and-burn areas to raise enough food to eat. I'm just sayin' is all.