Religionless Religion: Beyond Belief to Understanding

By Clyde Edward Brown

In these perilous times when the very survival of the human species is at stake, there is a desperate need for wisdom to provide guidance. The sacred literature of the world's major religious traditions is a source for such wisdom, but it has largely been misinterpreted and misunderstood, and, thus, instead of being a source for wisdom, it has been a source for confusion and conflict.

The ancient scriptures, for the most part, were written in a language which is quite different from ordinary language. It is a mythological language, which is symbolic, and therefore its meaning is hidden. In the Bible, for example, there are many narratives that appear to be historical, but they are history that has been mythologized, and therefore their surface meaning is not their real meaning.

Clyde Edward Brown clearly illustrates that the correct interpretation of the world's religious texts would lead to a different concept of religion. Instead of belief in the literal truth of texts that have been misinterpreted, the emphasis would be on having those religious values, such as social and economic justice, which are common to all religions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 8, 2009
• ISBN: 9781440130847

Clyde Edward Brown

Clyde Edward Brown worked for twenty-eight years at the Phoenix Public Library in Phoenix, Arizona. He has a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of Virginia.

Book preview

Contents

Preface

Chapter One: The Bible and Politics

Chapter Two: The Language of Religion

Chapter Three: The Human Predicament

Chapter Four: The Saved

Chapter Five: The Savior

Chapter Six: The Myth of the Saved Savior

Chapter Seven: A Light to the World

Chapter Eight: The Historical Jesus

Chapter Nine: The Mythical Jesus Christ

Chapter Ten: The Second Coming Metaphor

Chapter Eleven: Primitive Christianity

Chapter Twelve: Plotinus and Christian Theology

Chapter Thirteen: Monasticism

Chapter Fourteen: The Triumph of Literalism

Chapter Fifteen: What Is Religion?

Chapter Sixteen: The Real Realists

Bibliography

The God I know is not concrete or specific. This God is rather shrouded in mystery, wonder and awe. The deeper I journey into this divine presence, the less any literalized phrases, including the phrases of the Christian creed, seem relevant. The God I know can only be pointed to; this God can never be enclosed by propositional statements.

John Shelby Spong

Episcopal Bishop of Newark, NJ

All of the Buddha’s teachings are a finger pointing to the moon.

The Perfect Awakening Sutra

Preface

In the Acts of the Apostles, Philip hears someone reading from the prophet Isaiah and asks him, Do you understand what you are reading? The reply is, How can I unless someone guides me? My premise is that in these perilous times, when the very survival of the human species is at stake, there is a desperate need for wisdom to guide us. Such wisdom can be found in the sacred literature of the major religious traditions of the world, but it is hidden in ancient mythological languages that we no longer understand. Even though the texts have been translated into words that we do understand, we don’t understand the meaning behind the words. They are written in languages that are largely symbolic; thus, they must be correctly interpreted. They must be translated again, as it were, as if they are still foreign languages.

Northrop Frye, the author of The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (Frye 1982), believed that the person who studies the language of the Bible and calls attention to its meaning and relevance should not be a specialist in the Bible field. What is required is someone with a critical mind, who is able to take a fresh and contemporary look at the Bible. Thus, ironically, it is my lack of conventional qualifications—I’m not a biblical scholar or theologian—that may serve to qualify me for the daunting task of making sense of the Bible.

My eighteenth-century English literature professor wrote on one of my essays that I had the makings of a good critic. He was using the term critic in the classic sense of one who is able to interpret a literary work and express his or her conclusions in a reasoned manner. It is generally agreed by scholars that the Bible is written in largely symbolic language, but it is hard to find any who, to my satisfaction, is able to explain the overall meaning of the symbolism. As an English major, I gained insight into how to interpret symbolic language, an insight that most biblical scholars or theologians lack. Also, many years of working in the public library system, answering reference questions, and using the resources of the library for my own projects as an activist in the anti-Vietnam War and environmental movements trained me in the research techniques needed to draw on experts and scholars in the various fields covered to help me with or support my formulations. Since retiring, I have devoted about four hours a day for fifteen years to doing research, studying the Bible and the sacred literature of the other major religious traditions, and trying to put my interpretations in a reasoned order.

In doing so, it became apparent to me that all religions have at their core a mystical tradition, and the authors of their literature are mainly concerned with describing the process of spiritual enlightenment, along with giving guidance on religious values. My objective is to provide a key to interpreting the allegorical narratives of the Bible and demonstrate that all the religions, in different ways, are saying essentially the same thing, that religious values are universal and that they contain wisdom that we ignore at our peril.

This book was not written for scholars, but for the general reader; thus, I have not cluttered up the text with footnotes. I have also not cited many of the biblical quotations, since they can be easily accessed in a Bible concordance. Except when noted, all biblical quotations are taken from The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, RSV, 1973. I would ask my readers not to simply accept or reject my conclusions, but to reread the Bible, keeping my conclusions in mind to see if they make sense. I hope that I have stimulated interest in comparative religion and in the great thinkers I have cited, so that the reader will immerse himself or herself in their writings.

Chapter One:

The Bible and Politics

In the United States, the Bible is the best-selling book of all time and the best-selling book of the year, every year. It is estimated that 91 percent of households own at least one Bible, {Radosh}and, in the words of Stephen Prothero, professor of religion at Boston University, …nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that the Bible holds the answers to all or most of life’s questions and a majority claims that it reads the book at least twice a month. Amos N. Wilder, past president of the Society of Biblical Literature, asserts, We can hardly fail to recognize the fateful influence of the Christian and biblical mythos upon the western world, or the fact that for better or worse this history still conditions the contemporary outlook and attitudes, conscious and unconscious {Campbell 1970}. Boston University law professor Jay Wexler has observed: A great many Americans rely on religious reasons when thinking and talking about public issues. Ninety percent of the members of Congress, by one report, consult their religious beliefs when voting on legislation {Prothero}.

However, as Prothero points out, in the modern era, Believing in the Bible matters more than knowing what the Bible has to say. Sociologist Alan Wolfe, who studies American religious organizations and practices, concludes that Evangelicalism’s popularity is due mainly to finding out exactly what believers want and to offer it to them. As a result, more attention is paid to providing plenty of free parking and babysitting than to the proper interpretation of passages of Scripture.

Most of those who read the Bible interpret either all of it or large portions of it quite literally, and most biblical scholars and theologians are now agreed that, while some passages of the Bible were probably meant to be taken literally, most were not. The strongly literal interpretation is especially true for the estimated seventy-five million Americans who claim to be born-again Christians and for most of the preachers on the 1,600 Christian radio stations and the 250 Christian television stations. While all the consequences from this have obviously not been bad, in studying the history of Western civilization, one is struck by how often the most horrendous behavior has been justified, and perhaps even motivated, by passages from the Bible that have been misinterpreted by being torn from their context and taken literally.

In a 1922 speech, for example, Adolf Hitler declared:

My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once, in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them, and who, God’s truth, was great not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man, I read through the passage that tells us how the Lord at last rose in his might and seized the scourge to drive out of the temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight for the world against the Jewish poison … as a Christian, I have also a duty to my own people.

Hitler was obviously influenced by a misreading of the imagery of biblical millennialism. There can be little doubt, writes Damian Thompson, editor in chief of a major Catholic newspaper, that the thousand-year reign of the saints lies behind the vision of a thousand-year Reich. The Nazis believed that they had arrived at the crucial moment in human history. A new heaven, and a new earth, was within the grasp of the Elect—so long as they did not yield to the forces of the enemy. For the Nazis, who interpreted the holy war passages of the Bible literally, the adversary standing in the way was pure evil … in human form, and so resilient that he can be defeated only in a cosmic war. This was a conviction that, for them, justified the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust.

The roots of anti-Semitism go back even before the emergence of Christianity, and they can be attributed to passages of the Hebrew Bible mistakenly interpreted literally by the Jews themselves. In The End of Faith, author and philosopher Sam Harris writes:

Prior to the rise of the church, Jews became the objects of suspicion and occasional persecution for their refusal to assimilate, for the insularity and professed superiority of their religious culture—that is, for the content of their own unreasonable, sectarian beliefs. The dogma of a chosen people, while at least implicit in most faiths, achieved a stridence in Judaism that was unknown in the ancient world.

The earliest Christians were mostly Jews; however, as the movement spread, they were increasingly Gentile, and they began to see the Jews’ denial of Jesus’ divinity as the consummate evil. Paul is said to have written: The Jews who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells the Jews that their father is the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. The destruction of the temple in AD 70 was interpreted by Christians as God punishing the betrayers of Christ.

Is there any wonder, then, that European Christians for centuries viewed the Jews as evil, and indeed the very cause of evil, and that this demonization continued up through the Nazi period? The tragic irony is that the Jews’ mistaken belief in their own chosen status was turned against them. It was the Jews who became one of the impure elements (along with homosexuals, invalids, gypsies, and communists) and contaminated the racial purity and superiority of the German people, the new chosen people.

According to Harris (2004), an analysis of prominent anti-Semitic writers and publications from 1861 to 1895 reveals [that] fully two-thirds of those purported to offer ‘solutions’ to the ‘Jewish problem’ openly advocated the physical extermination of the Jews. He thinks it is fair to say that, generally speaking, the German people were Hitler’s willing executioners and that the people of other nations were equally willing. In 1919, sixty thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine alone, and he notes: Once the Third Reich began its overt persecution of Jews, anti-Semitic pogroms erupted in Poland, Rumania, Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Croatia, and elsewhere.

In the late nineteenth century, the Zionist movement emerged with the aim of setting up a strictly Jewish state, where Jews would be safe and free from persecution. At first, it was mostly a secular movement, and Zionists were willing to settle anywhere that they would be allowed to do so. However, after World War II, with Western nations feeling guilty for what had been done to the Jews, the Zionists were allowed to establish the State of Israel in the Holy Land, and the movement began to take on religious overtones.

Literal-minded Jews increasingly saw the process of settling the Promised Land as a religious event ordained by God, even though it meant displacing and oppressing the Arabs who had lived there for well over a thousand years. The fundamentalist Jews believe the metaphorical language of the prophets to be literally true, that the holy land is their homeland, which was promised to them by God, and it is their duty to settle it and become a great nation, a light for the rest of the world to follow.

Many of these Jews also interpret the apocalyptic imagery of the Bible literally. They believe that God will intervene in history by sending a savior or messiah to deliver his people from suffering and injustice. In one model, he will be a king like David, who will conquer the powers of evil by force of arms. It is a teaching concerning last things—the end of this world and the creation of a new, perfect one. In imagery used by Isaiah, the end-time events include a great cataclysm, a judgment accompanied by heavenly portents, and the Lord’s arrival as king on Mount Zion.

Christianity and Islam are also religions of the Book, and they also have versions of this scenario, which are believed in literally by many, who are convinced that it could happen at any time. Thus, the wars and chaos that seem to be enveloping the world, especially in the Middle East, are seen by many fundamentalists of all three religions as signs that the end is near; therefore, it is to be welcomed, since it will bring universal peace and salvation.

This attitude has also been carried over by many fundamentalists into their views about the environment. The Christian fundamentalist leader Pat Robertson once stated that environmentalists were the evil priests of a new paganism that will become the official state religion of the New World Order. In response, Tim Flannery, global warming activist, wrote: The equation of concern for the natural world with evil by such an influential person may help account for the results of a recent Pew Center poll, which found that 41 percent of Americans considered ‘environmental activists’ to be ‘extremists.’ Faced with mounting scientific evidence of human-caused climate change, Robertson and other fundamentalists have now become more environmentally friendly, but this change in attitude has been very slow in coming. In addition, much precious time has been lost due to the fundamentalists’ strong influence on national policy, and many are apparently still not convinced that climate change is a problem.

For many fundamentalists, environmental problems, like wars, are simply another sign that we are living in the last days. The Messiah will return at any moment for the Rapture, when true believers will be transported to heaven while the earth is being destroyed in preparation for the new earth. Why, asks journalist Bill Moyers, should they care about the earth when the droughts, floods, famines, and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the Rapture?

It is quite possible that the 9/11 attacks indicated to President George W. Bush, who is a fundamentalist Christian, that the final clash between Christ and Satan had begun in earnest. He proclaimed, almost immediately, that "Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil. According to Chip Berlet, an investigative journalist specializing in the study of right-wing movements, Bush is very much into the apocalyptic and messianic thinking of militant Christian evangelicals. He adds that Bush seems to buy into the worldview that there is a giant struggle between good and evil culminating in a final confrontation. People with that kind of a worldview often take risks that are inappropriate and scary because they see it as carrying out God’s will."

While still governor of Texas, Bush wrote: I could not be governor if I did not believe in a divine plan that supersedes all human plans, and implied that he was acting as an agent in that plan. As president, after illegally invading Iraq, he told reporter Bob Woodward, There is no doubt in my mind [that] we’re doing the right thing, not one doubt. Woodward’s impression was that the president was casting his mission and that of the country in the grand vision of God’s master plan. Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told author and journalist Ron Suskind that, in invading Iraq, Bush truly believes he’s on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence (NYT, October 17, 2004).

In the five years that have elapsed between the invasion and the time of this writing, he has still not expressed any misgivings or even shown signs that it did weigh heavily on him. This, despite the extreme chaos he has caused: the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and coalition forces, either killed or severely injured—limbs blown off, traumatic stress disorders, and so on; millions of Iraqis forced to leave their homes, with many forced to leave their own country and become poverty-stricken refugees; the vast destruction of property and infrastructure; and the overall cost of the war for our own country, reaching $3 trillion and growing.

James Carroll, author of Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War, noted in The Nation {Septembser 30, 2004} that, for Bush, Targeted enemies are entirely interchangeable—here Osama bin Laden, there Saddam Hussein, here the leader of Iran, there of North Korea. They are all essentially one enemy—one ‘axis’—despite their differences from each other, or even hatred of each other. Bush’s war, states Carroll, is a cosmic battle between nothing less than the transcendent forces of good and evil. It is an "imagined conflict, taking place primarily in a mythic realm beyond history."

Carroll notes that a few days after 9/11, Bush characterized the war on terrorism as a crusade.

If the American president was the person carrying the main burden of shaping a response to the catastrophe of September 11, his predecessor in such a grave role, nearly a thousand years earlier, was the Catholic pope. Seeking to overcome the century-long dislocations of a post-millennial Christendom, he rallied both its leaders and commoners with a rousing call to holy war.

In the name of Jesus, Carroll writes, and certain of God’s blessing, crusaders launched what might be called ‘shock and awe’ attacks.

Christopher Tyerman, author of God’s War: A New History of the Crusades, describes how the Christian crusaders headed for Jerusalem, and, after setting up camp, they proclaimed a three-day fast and, led by a priest, marched barefoot around the city in imitation of Joshua at the Battle of Jericho. Then, they overwhelmed the city’s Jewish and Muslim inhabitants. The scale of the slaughter impressed even hardened veterans of the campaign, who recalled the area [around the Temple Mount] ‘steaming with blood’ that ‘reached to the killer’s ankles.’ Jews who fled to a synagogue were set on fire, while Muslims were indiscriminately cut to pieces, decapitated or slowly tortured by fire.

The eighteenth-century philosopher and historian David Hume called the overall campaign to take back the Holy Land the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation. In trying to explain where this sort of Christian bloodlust came from, Tyerman concludes that it was not only the compromises that church fathers made with state power following the conversion of Constantine … but also the sacred text that seemed to urge more and more, such as the Book of Revelation, with its vision of a world drowning in blood and the Old Testament tales of murder and mayhem …

Jonathan Kirsch, in A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book of the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization, notes that whether it originates in Islam, Christianity, or Judaism, apocalyptic imagery taken literally has always moved some men and women to act out their revenge fantasies by taking the lives of their fellow human beings. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby concluded, in The Glory and the Power: The Fundamentalist Challenge to the Modern World, that apocalyptic visions, so taken, lead to a certain style of religio-political activism, and that style often involves violence.

Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton observes:

The apocalyptic imagination has spawned a new kind of violence at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We can, in fact, speak of a worldwide epidemic of violence aimed at massive destruction in the service of various visions of purification and renewal. In particular, we are experiencing what could be called an apocalyptic face-off between Islamic forces, overtly visionary in their willingness to kill and die for their religion, and American forces claiming to be restrained and reasonable but no less visionary in their projection of a cleansing war-making and military power. Both sides are energized by visions of intense idealism; both see themselves as embarked on a mission of combating evil in order to redeem and renew the world; and both are ready to release untold levels of violence to achieve that purpose. (The Nation, December 4, 2003)

There can be no doubt, writes Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, that the literal reading of biblical passages, as well as the sacred scriptures of other traditions, has left a trail of pain, horror, blood and death. He says, More people have been killed in the history of the world in conflicts over and about religion than any other single factor.

Hans Kung cites Catholic theologians Thomas and Gertrude Sartory, who wrote:

No religion in the world {not a single one in the history of humanity} has on its conscience so many millions of ;people who thought differently, believed differently. Christianity is the most murderous religion there has ever been. Christians today have to live with this, they have to overcome this sort of past. And the real cause of this perversion of the Christian spirit is belief in hell. If someone is convinced that God condemns a person to hell for all eternity for no other reason than because he is a heathen, a Jew or a heretic, he cannot for his own part fail to regard all heathens, Jews and heretics as good for nothing, as unfit to exist and unworthy of life. Seen from this standpoint, the almost complete extermination of the North and South American Indians by the Christian conquerors is quite consistent. From the aspect of the dogma of hell baptism or death is an understandable motto. {Kung 1984}

Thus, someone like George W. Bush is really not that much of an aberration. As Kirsch points out, The idea that the world will end (and soon)—and the phantasmagoria of words, numbers, colors, images, and incidents in which the end times are described in the Book of Revelation—are deeply woven into the fabric of Western civilization, both in high culture and in pop culture, starting in distant biblical antiquity and continuing into our own age. Even those who have never read Revelation are likely to find the plot and characters to be hauntingly familiar. These old ideas about the apocalyptic kingdom of Christ on earth, states Kirsch, were never wholly abandoned in colonial America. Now and then, the banked embers of religious true belief would burst into flame as preachers stoked the fears and longings of their congregations with the kind of hard-sell sermonizing that is the trademark of American evangelism.

However, it was not just the evangelicals. It was, after all, apocalyptic imagery, combined with a misinterpretation of the biblical doctrine of election, that formed our national myth that we have been chosen by God, as a people, to be a beacon of light that will bring liberty to the world—a notion that historians tell us has held sway in America from its beginnings to the present day. When the Puritan families set sail from England in 1630 to colonize North America, John Cotton told them that they were going to the new promised land, reserved by God for his elect people as the actual site for a new heaven and a new earth. Upon arriving on the continent, the Puritan minister Increase Mather declared, "Christ by a wonderful Providence hath dispossessed Satan, who reigned securely in These Ends of the Earth for Ages, the Lord knoweth how many, and here the Lord has caused as it were New Jerusalem to come down from Heaven."

The Native American tribes who inhabited the land were seen by the Puritans as minions of the devil. Historian Stephen J. Stein has called the Puritan mind-set the Americanization of the apocalyptic tradition. John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, referred to his territory as a city upon a Hill. Cotton Mather, the son of Increase, was convinced that the prophecies of the book of Revelation were being fulfilled. He declared, Our glorious LORD will have an Holy City in AMERICA, and he adopted the phrase "a City, the streets whereof will be Pure Gold," which became an American credo {Segal}.

It has been assumed by many that the United States was founded on Christian principles, which are embodied in the Constitution, and combined with the doctrine of election and holy war imagery. This has formed much of the basis of both our domestic and foreign policy. The notion that the United States has an exemplary mission, writes political commentator William Pfaff, has always been central to American political thought and rhetoric. The phrase manifest destiny was first used by journalist John O’Sullivan in 1839 to justify our overland expansion across the continent, with the obvious implication that it was all part of God’s will.

O’Sullivan wrote: In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High—the Sacred and the True. In order to accomplish this, we enter on its untrodden space, with the truths of God in our minds, beneficent objects in our hearts, and with clear conscience unsullied by the past, all the while slaughtering the original inhabitants of this untrodden space or breaking treaties we’d made with them.

As historian James Chace puts it, O’Sullivan was reflecting the idea of American exceptualism—that the United States was not like the nations of the old world, but was chosen by God for a special destiny. During the first century and a half of our history, the national myth of divine election was expressed through ruthless expansion within the North American continent; however, with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, it became, in the words of historian Ronald Steel, a philosophy of international action and has remained so. Even prior to this, during William McKinley’s presidency, a senator from Indiana was declaring that God has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America … We are the trustees of the world’s progress, guardians of its righteous peace.

According to Steel, Wilson thought of himself as a deeply religious man, who believed that it was his calling to improve the world along lines revealed to him by the Creator and perfected in the United States. Wilson believed he had been chosen by God to lead America in showing ‘the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.’ Steel concludes that when Wilson insisted the ‘the world must be made safe for democracy,’ he was expressing not a hope but a mandate.

For Wilsonians, writes Steel, the democratic imperative is not negotiable. Like most other faiths, it is intolerant of every system other than itself. Furthermore, he writes:

The paradox of democracy is that it can be intolerant in its absolutist demand for tolerance. It does not hesitate, whether under liberals or conservatives, to use military power to enforce surrender to its imperative. In this it is like other crusading monotheistic faiths.

Wilson’s religious conviction, based mostly on a misinterpretation of scripture, gave him great strength in the struggle against opponents. His sense of righteousness was derived from revelations of the Holy Scriptures. How could one have more authority than that? However, the spread of righteous democracy also included the spread of the capitalist economic system, the principles of which are not advocated in the Bible and, in fact, are strongly condemned.

During World War I, most of the clergy were caught up in the patriotic fever that swept through the nation, and some identified Christianity with Americanism. The evangelist preacher Billy Sunday said, Christianity and patriotism are synonymous terms. Many were convinced that the war was a matter of Christian civilization versus the barbaric Germans, who were being demonized. In Wilson’s words, we have elevated ideals and are dedicated to stability and righteousness. In justifying the conquest of the Philippines, he said, Our interests must march forward, altruists though we are; other nations must see to it that they stand off and do not seek to stay us.

In more recent times, President Ronald Reagan characterized the Soviet Union as the evil empire. In an address to the National Association of Evangelicals, he referred to it as the focus of evil in the modern world, and he predicted that history itself would soon end. Reagan was reportedly an avid reader of Hal Lindsey’s book, The Late Great Planet Earth, which holds that we are now living in the Church Age, which began with the rejection of Jesus by the Jews and will end when Jesus returns to earth and establishes his millennial kingdom. Stephen O’Leary, author of Arguing the Apocalypse, has observed, Every one of Lindsey’s proposals for domestic and foreign policy was part of Reagan’s campaign platform. Reagan told the evangelicals, There is sin and evil in the world, and we’re joined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might. No thought is given to any evil that might exist within our own country, but the Soviet Union, the focus of evil, began falling apart on its own so that a nuclear confrontation wasn’t necessary.

Reagan was raised in a church with roots going back to the Second Great Awakening of fundamentalist religious fervor. He stated the following in a 1968 interview: Apparently never in history have so many prophecies come true in such a relatively short time. In 1971, commenting on a coup that had taken place in Libya, he said, That’s a sign that the day of Armageddon isn’t far off. He probably was referring to