It's sacrilege in the modern world, but every major religion looks forward to the end of this world. In Hinduism, this is the Kali Yuga (the worst yuga), which Kalki ends by the sword. In the Abrahamic faiths, the Day of Judgement is kinda the point of it all. The Buddha's great feat is that he checked out already. The religions disagree on many things, but they all agree that this ain't it. They're all against the world, which worldly people (myself included) basically just ignore.

Satan

What is this world? What is modernity? These are expansive questions, but at some level we all know. To me, modernity is the idea that we should be fulfilled in this life, with creature comforts rather than just being creatures. 'This world' is the idea that you and I can share this experience through ubiquitous trade, travel, and telecommunications. Francis Fukuyama called something similar 'the end of history' but, in practice, it's closer to the end of the world. If anything, such ideas come from Satan.

But don't take my word for it. Let's ask the fallen angel himself, played by Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate. Pacino's Satan said, “Who, in their right mind, could possibly deny the 20th century was entirely mine.” You have to admit, he has a point. As Satan said,

You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire. You build egos the size of cathedrals. Fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse. Grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green gold-plated fantasies until every human becomes an aspiring emperor, becomes his own god. Where can you go from there?

God

If I—a groveling worm—may sum up all religions, they evolve along with us, and our material conditions. Especially energy. When all energy came from the sun, we worshiped that. When we captured solar energy in grains and stored it in temples, we worshiped those temple gods. As energy became more distributed via trade, people began worshiping one God above it all. A God who made us in their image, which leads us to the false corollary, that we are like gods. This led to just worshiping ourselves, as many people do now. Self-esteem, self-fulfillment, self-actualization, and so on.

The center of the faux enlightenment was the self, the precise opposite of actual enlightenment as practiced by the Buddha (not-self). Everything from human rights to bank accounts are centered around the individual, which is considered the most important state of being. In ze modern world, God is rarely mentioned, Gods are beneath mention, and the idea that the Sun is God is considered hopelessly backwards. But the false enlightenment got it all wrong, as our destination now proves. For all the hopes about mastering the world through knowledge, they ended up ending the world as we know it.

The truth is that God is great, gods are real, and the sun is awesome. This greedy, selfish path we chose worked for a while, but it was just a deal with the devil. Cocaine disguised as manna. It got us very high for a while, but now comes the fall. And we deserve to fall. There is no way 'through' this that doesn't continue the fundamental hubris. This is a strange idea to put in scientific, capitalist terms, which don't really have a concept of no, but our parents who art in heaven told us long ago, and over and over. God has sent many messengers, speaking the language of many times, telling us that our time was up. We thought it was bullshit because many days passed since then, but we're talking about god days, not human. As the Mahabharata says, “The learned say that these twelve thousand years (of the deities) constitute what is called a yuga. A thousand such yugas compose a single day of Brahman.” God might move slow in our perception, but when they move they move heaven and earth. And so, even in vulgar scientific terms, here we are.

End Times

Kali Yuga, end times, 'climate collapse', whatever you want to call it, who can deny that this is it. Viewed in geological, eschatological, or cyclical time, what is a century, what are the four centuries since colonialism, what are the 10,000 years since agriculture? Just a blip. The gods might move slow, but we move slow relative to bacteria. It's really just a perception difference, and we're at one of the rare points when perceptions intersect.

Given that spacetime is one phenomenon, why would a universal consciousness move at arbitrary earth speed, comprehensible within an arbitrary ape's life span? As Ashanti said, “I may not come when you call, but I'm always on time.” The timing of the end times is just a perception difference and—before 'fiber-optic impulses' addled our brains, people were capable of perceiving this. Science is just taking the long-way around to figure out what dudes-just-vibing have been telling us for thousands of years. This world is bullshit and will end in ruin.

We have been told this over and over again. Every modern religion warns that this is a fallen age, and most say that there's further falling to come. Religions are pretty much unanimous about this world being shit, and something else being much more important. They disagree on what that 'something else' is, but this sure ain't it. Not this world. Even in Confucius's day, 500 BC, he was describing his age as fallen. As The Master said, “I hate that purple has usurped the place of vermilion, that the tunes of Zheng have been confused with classical music, and that the clever of tongue have undermined both state and family.” How much worse have things gotten since then? This life, this world, these perceptions; the central tenet of every faith is the belief in something else. The idea that all of 'this' is wrong.

As Allah told the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), “Whatever you are given in this life is nothing but a temporary provision of this life and its glitter; what God has is better and more lasting. Will you not then understand?” Or as Jesus said, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Or as my Lord Buddha said, “Come and behold this world beautiful like a royal chariot, wherein the foolish are immersed and to which there is no attachment for the wise.”

As for the ancient religions, well, they were physically genocided by the modern world. Much of what they said and, most importantly, did is lost to 'this world' by definition. The people skinning all the animal spirits and strip mining the land did not want to hear it. The lie is that the superior civilization won and the lesser lost because they were savage and backwards. The truth is precisely the opposite. Those killed were, by definition, less violent. Those ancient civilizations, by continuation, would have gone thousands of years forward. In the modern tradition of getting everything confidently wrong, people in Mesoamerica were called 'Indians' in the 'New World' and it was all completely backwards. Every accusation from colonizers is a confession, and it is indeed they who butchered entire populations (human and animal) for temporary wealth and made a bonfire of the whole Earth by globalizing the concept.

Everything their own religions told them not to do they have done, and everything other faiths could have shown them to do has been violently scorned. Those that lived in relative balance for thousands of years were called 'superstitious' and killed by those who have destroyed it all in a few centuries. Their own gods were discarded for the worship of money. The proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is on fire. The ancient 'primitive' humans who worshiped nature were the rightest of all! You get what you worship and lose what you don't. Thus humans end up alone, at the end of the natural world. You can't say we weren't told.