Expecting the end of the world moment by moment is an attitude that appears already in the old church. This expectation, even weakened, did not cease to exist in the next centuries. Some regard the book of John’s Revelation as the cause of this. John’s Revelation makes the end of times vividly present, but there are more in the New Testament justifying such an expectation.
Christ’s very prompt “be ready, for the son of man comes at an hour you don’t know” (Luke 12.40), unexpected as a thief in the night, obviously refers to anyone listening and not to some far away time. This way the Second Coming becomes imminent in the Christian mentality even before the Passion. We have to admit that everything Christian is a lie and fiction, or that the moment of the Second Coming needs an interpretation that will explain the passing of so many centuries after it was first promised.
To atheists all religion is a fairytale to make us sleep well and bear the burden of our suffering and death. Since we are most interested in our own selves, it is natural that we would like, if not expect, the end of time to happen in our own time. Thus the intense expectation of the Second Coming is explained as just an even more selfish nuance of an already selfish faith.
A therapy to all of these would be the replacement of faith with modern science, where even the creation of the world does not seem to need a God, at least not the 7-days-creator and imminent judge. However, natural selection can not replace faith, not because it has not found poets to praise it, but because it belongs to a different level of thinking.
Faith can be replaced by faith. People who compare the irrational zeal of faith with an equally irrational zeal of some secular beliefs, do not understand a serious mistake they make. For such a transfer to be realized there needs be no real faith in the first place, so that a mere ideology is replaced by another ideology and fanaticism changes its ground.
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