I’m a proud atheist who outgrew my religious upbringing. So why am I getting antsy about the rapture all of a sudden?
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Dear Hera,
I’m a proud atheist and since I managed to move past the childhood trauma of my religious upbringing and into adulthood, I’ve been confident that the Book of Revelations and all the happy bedtime stories from it that my father used to tell me as a child were just that — stories — no more believable than a Disney princess movie. But this Trump/Musk business has got me rattled. The world feels like the apocalypse is just around the corner, and if you were looking for a high-quality antichrist candidate, surely you couldn’t do much better than Elon Musk? What if Dad was right after all and the Rapture really is on its way?
Kindest regards,
Agitated atheist
Dear Agitated,
Nietzsche once said, “In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.” Maybe this statement made sense in the context of a fundamentalist Christian morality, in which using a comb on a Sunday was tantamount to pledging your allegiance to Satan.
These days, hell isn’t what it used to be. They’ve sold off the red velvet chaise lounges, extinguished the pits of eternal fire, and refurbished the underworld in wall-to-wall grey carpet. They’ve dismantled the wall of human skulls and replaced them with Funko Pop display cases. Gone are the sodomites and the suicides, the thieves and alchemists. My conception of hell is a never-ending Koru lounge, with catering by The Compass Group and a custom cryptocurrency.
I’m no atheist, but I don’t believe in hell or divine retribution. If you ask me, the only hell worth worrying about is the suffering we inflict on other living beings. One trip to the medieval torture museum was enough to convince me that no afterlife could be worse than the misery some people endure in this lifetime. Similarly, I find it hard to imagine a heaven without wind or trees, or a small black cat asleep in a patch of afternoon sunlight. That doesn’t stop me from entertaining a few zany metaphysical theories. What’s the point of bearing witness to the mystery, if you don’t put your money on a couple of rogue horses? But I don’t pretend to have the answers, let alone the ability to coherently articulate the question.
But even if I’m wrong, and Satan’s waiting in her red convertible to take us all to the tarnation station, I would never flatter Musk by putting him in the same league as the devil. Best case scenario, he’s a sentient human footstool or volunteer hall monitor, who keeps getting shunted between the various circles of hell and is destined to spend eternity making a nuisance of himself by laughing too loudly at Ghenghis Khan’s jokes and hanging off Thatcher’s coattails.
When we compare these notorious bedwetters to the forces of biblical evil, we’re playing straight into their PR handbook, rather than recognising them for what they are, which is a cabal of insecure mouth breathers. They want you to think they’re evil because it’s a lot more flattering than the reality. Elon Musk isn’t a nefarious Bond villain, who’ll show up on the day of judgement in an EV submersible. He’s not even Patrick Bateman. For one thing, he doesn’t have the cheekbones. He’s a garden variety loser with an emerald mine trust fund, acting out narcissistic grievances and childhood insecurities on an unprecedented geopolitical scale. He’s the spoiled cousin you always hated, who threw a tantrum every time his mother refused to buy him more Dragonball Z cards – if that same cousin had the ability to legally confiscate your insulin. He’s made it abundantly clear he cares too much about what people think of him, and is leaning into the “supervillain” archetype because it looks better on his resume than “petulant loser.”
The bad news is that none of this makes any material difference to the world’s current political trajectory. In fact, it probably makes the situation a lot worse. There’s nothing more frightening than a billionaire with hurt feelings, who has unprecedented political influence and a list of ideological resentments burning a hole in his pocket. There’s good reason to believe he’s more volatile and unpredictable than any ordinary bigot with a hateful ideology because his only guiding principle seems to be shoring up his own power and wealth at the expense of literally everyone else. At least Satan stood for something. Musk truly puts the banal in the banality of evil.
I don’t think you’re wrong to be worrying about the end of the world. Honestly, it’s a shitshow out there. But please don’t waste your energy fretting about the four horsemen. This is an all too human problem, that needs a human solution. Either that or a well-timed meteor, leaving several of the more prestigious monkey and lizard species intact.
In the words of Doris Lessing winning the Nobel, “I’m sure you’d like some uplifting remarks of some kind.” As a part-time advice columnist for an antipodean online media organisation, I don’t pretend to know how to fix things. What I do know is that prayer won’t help, and neither will live animal sacrifices. We need some kind of urgent collective action based on solidarity and class consciousness.
But don’t flatter old Apartheid Clyde by pretending he’s anything but a business hick in Team Rocket cosplay. I think we can afford to give Satan a little more credit than that.
