Why Armageddon Is Completely Wrong

All the theories, prophecies, religious interpretations, and even pop culture understanding of the notion of "Armageddon" whether it is the Book of Revelation, the Rapture, the Mayan Calendar date of 21 December 2012, the Islamic prophecies, any and all prophecies which have been taken to mean that we are upon a massive, convulsive ruin all have a critical flaw in their interpretation. To be clear, this is in no way an attempt to denigrate the religion behind any of these, this is a critique of the interpretations of these prophecies.

Here is the flaw, and it is a big one: if the world is truly in for a cataclysmic event, such as some Astro-physical onslaught, super-volcanic eruption, all out nuclear war, earth-crust displacement, etc., then there is absolutely no point to ever having had prophetic forewarning because such all-out annihilatory events would in fact truly ruin civilization if not end mankind; any who survived would be in a far more degraded state than Europe in the Dark Ages and so no record, no writing, no basic education, nothing at all would survive and within 30 years the clear knowledge of what had just transpired would also be lost. No one would or could remember who had come before even including the religions and figures like Jesus or Mohamed. We have seen nearly this level of societal crash as the Dark Ages began but what started the Dark Ages was merely severe social instability within the Roman Empire and deep social-political problems that had been brewing for nearly 200 years prior - what these so-called prophetic events would entail today would be many orders of magnitude beyond that. So all the effort to build up great religious followings, all the effort to establish ministries and schools of thought and civilizations, all the effort to advance our moral understanding, would be left pointless and forgotten because there'd be too few people, if any, left able to carry them on while trying to eek out a pitiful survival on an ash-heap earth. That is why the common interpretation of Armageddon must be completely wrong. If you just think it through with basic logic, nothing about it seems coherent. Why would God have bothered to forewarn us if He just meant to squash us all anyway?

Now some would say that this is where some mystical Faith-based transcendental event would step in and magically alleviate this predicament, somehow beaming-up the chosen few into a kind of Nirvana for being faithful but this also flies in the face of all monotheistic religions who flat out say the concept of "magic", as such, is a left over from a more primitive state of man long ago. God does not use magic; neat as the books and movies are, God is not Dumbledore or Harry Potter or even Gandalf or Manwe. And we do see repeatedly in the geologic record through deep time when truly cataclysmic events have happened - from the gamma ray burst of ~600,000,000 years ago and the resulting snowball earth, to the Siberian Traps 250,000,000 years ago to the Indian traps eruptions plus the asteroid strike in the Yucatan 65,000,000 years ago right up to the Tambora super volcano 70,000 years ago (which reduced global homo sapien populations to less than 50,000) - with cataclysms come mass extinctions. A mass extinction makes any attempt to foretell the event completely useless because by definition there is no escaping and no surviving such an event.

So either these "prophecies" are the cruelest, meanest and most pointless thing ever perpetrated on a delicate humanity (because of the very inescapable nature and irresistible power cataclysms have making them the ultimate Sword of Damocles) OR they are not meant to foretell a literal massive cataclysm but are instead poetic allusions to deeper meanings and deeper understandings of what may be going on in our spiritual realm, the realm of Faith and the realm of personal works. This author, for one, does believe in God and does believe that He has left us Guidance, but this author also believes that all the so-called expert interpretations and dogma surrounding the so-called end of the world prophecies are completely misinterpreted because of the fundamental, un-workable flaw in the basic logic of the argument these interpretations make. The only way the literal interpretations of Armageddon or "End of the World" could be right is if a giant Deus-ex-Machina or Magical Miracle of some sort is worked by God to save enough of humanity that it is possible to carry on with civilization without an epic, age-long Dark Age ensuing or humanity becoming plain old extinct like 95% of all life that has ever existed here, but this also would then make God a liar because He has said repeatedly that He does not use such outlandish, flashy devices.