Daily Kos: PastorDan on the Apocalypse

Daily Kos: What Every Blogger Should Know About The Apocalypse by Pastor Dan: "One of the latest word viruses making the rounds of blogtopia† concerns the end-times language that has attached itself, lamprey-like, to the latest round of Middle East catastrophe.

It is scary. You've got Christians with their eyes almost rolled back in their sockets and their toes all but curled at the thought of 'the tribulations' underway, and Condoleezza Rice playing into their language by speaking of the 'birth pangs' of the New Middle East. That, of course, connects Christian apocalypticism to the secular end-times of the neo-cons, who are fond of speaking of World War III as a re-shaper of the world. Some of them have yet to renounce 'the end of history,' the last I checked. And then there's the Mehdi fans, convinced this latest war will usher in the age of the Shiite messiah.

Combine all that rhetoric and a boatload of weapons, and you get - well, you get pretty much what we've got in the Middle East these days. And it's only going to get worse now that Iran has given the UN Security Council the brush-off."