And they call it religion

In the current issue of The Week, editor-in-chief William Falk quotes Bill McCartney, co-founder of the evangelical group Promise Keepers: "Our whole purpose is to hasten the End Times." Falk writes that McCartney is "doing his part by trying to convert mass numbers of Jews to Christianity as quickly as possible. Those who fail to heed Christ's message, McCartney warns, are 'toast.' Iran's alarming prresident, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is just as eager to see infidels turned to toast. Within two years, he says, the Mahdi, the last of the Propet Mohammed's heirs, will return to Tehran, ushering in a bloody, cataclysmic confrontation with the non-Muslim world."

Falk points out that crackpots have been predicting the end of the world for thousands of years, but "it really now is possible for some true believer like Ahmadinejad to make radioactive toast of large portions of the human race. Even in our own, enlightened nation, 40 percent of the population believes the End Times are nigh, according to several polls... If a bloody cataclysm in Israel is all part of a vengefujl God's grand plan, why bother trying to negotiate a peace? Why not welcome a global religious war between Christianity and Islam? Strange questions for a species that's come so far over the past two millennia, and yet has not."

I think that, if the number of adherents to these apocalyptic visions continues to grow wildly, religion itself is going to be toast.