Many readers will recognise Michael Baigent’s name from the best-selling Holy Blood, Holy Grail that opened up a hornet’s nest of controversy in the 1980s. The authors proposed that Jesus married and fathered a bloodline. Michael Baigent is hardly a stranger to controversy.
      During the tumult over this book, he may have encountered what we usually refer to as “born again” Christian fundamentalists. However, it is not just Christian fundamentalists who have a vested interest in Bible prophecy. There are also extreme elements within Judaism and Islam. It is these groups and their dangerous pronouncements that form the backbone of Racing Toward Armageddon.
      Christians follow a teaching based on the words of Jesus that says, “love thy neighbour” and “turn the other cheek.” Most Jews follow an ancient system based on honouring God in the home as they light the Sabbath candles, or read from the Torah at Temple, and most Muslims face Mecca five times a day, and forget their worries and cares as they submit to the will of Allah and the teachings of the Prophet. It is not these adherents that worry Michael Baigent, but rather the extremist political elements of these religions that advocate, and dangerously abuse, a literalist interpretation of the Bible.
      In Israel there are veritable bevies of folks who gather in groups to express visions that they claim are prophecy, usually via the Bible or Torah. One of the most well known is a group that wishes to dismantle the Dome of the Rock Mosque on the Temple Mount, rock by rock, and post it back to those who own it, which one assumes is the King of Jordan. A new Jewish temple, with a return to animal sacrifice would be built, once the ashes of a ritually sacrificed red heifer had cleansed the Temple Mount.
      Of course, the sane reader wonders, at least momentarily, if he or she is reading a somewhat far-fetched novel rather than a dissertation of the facts. Sadly, at least for sanity’s sake, Michael Baigent’s book is not a novel but a precise investigation of the facts behind what has become a veritable industry based on Armageddon.
      Having travelled to the quiet and beautiful valley of Armageddon in southern Israel, I can vouch that it is indeed a verdant and green valley filled to overflowing with crops, heavily laden fruit trees and busy farmers. It is not this reality that Christian fundamentalists focus on, but rather an obscure and once outlawed book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation of John.
      This apocalyptic book, written by a monk on the Island of Patmos about one hundred years after Jesus, was reluctantly included in the Bible. In this book, John receives a vision of a new Heaven and Earth, and the end of time. Most people are aware of some of the famous elements such as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and sweet-faced angels carrying vessels of disease along with lots of smiting.
      Most importantly, the Jesus who once told everyone to turn the other cheek and love one another goes through a metamorphosis and changes into a sword-wielding general, with a blood-sodden cloak, who now smites all non-believers. There are fiery pits, disease and pestilence along with even more smiting. The prelude to all of this is a final battle, with rivers of blood flowing all over the place in this soft and sleepy valley of current day Armageddon.
      Michael Baigent uncovers the unsavoury fact that yes, many people do really believe all of this. Surveys in the United States indicate that more than 50 percent of Christians believe in a final conflagration. The element of Armageddon believers within Islam and Judaism is harder to ascertain, however, one thing is sure: the supporters of an Armageddon-style final confrontation is growing.
      Strong proponents of this belief system included former US President Ronald Reagan and well-known evangelists like Jerry Falwell. Each of these men believed they would see the return of Jesus, presumably carrying his sword, and the battle of Armageddon. Of course, let me remind the reader that both these gentlemen are deceased without any sign of a fierce battle in the sleepy valley of Armageddon.
      As a journalist living and working in North America during the 1980s, there was a strong belief amongst many fundamentalists that the final conflagration would be nuclear war with what was then the Soviet Union.
      Others strongly believed, and still presumably do, that they will be literally lifted from their bodies in the Great Rapture and not experience this terrible final battle, along with Jesus and his fiery sword no doubt.
      It would be easy to dismiss all this as a small group of misfits encouraged by a few charismatic preachers with Messiah complexes, but the fact is that we are talking about quite a lot of people.
      It is based on the idea that if one follows, without questioning, the word of God as described literally in the Bible, and interpreted by charismatic preacher, then one does not need to take any responsibility for actions. Surely that thought system is the most insane of all.
      Michael Baigent is a storyteller of our times who dares to delve deeply into hidden mysteries and lost truths that can upset our happy delusions about the world. Most thinking people agree the world teeters on the edge of insanity and paranoia most of the time. After reading Racing Toward Armageddon, we can see a silent but strong element of sociopathic tendencies coupled with being stark raving mad within Western religion.
      There are times when the facts presented by Baigent are so saliently pathetic, such as the smiling faces of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins (see New Dawn 118) grinning like Cheshire cats as apparently they look forward to their non-Christian brothers and sisters being thrown into a “lake of fire” presumably by the prince of peace, Jesus.
        Michael Baigent asks us not to dismiss these religious adherents as mere “nut cases” but rather see that what we believed had died out is still alive and breathing. Racing Toward Armageddon reveals that there are people who do not want to think for themselves, who are lead blindly by charismatic religious leaders into imagining that God will give them heaven, including grapes and virgins, by committing suicide bombings against those who God also created. There are people who can quickly reinvent Jesus from one who spoke of love to one whose “cloak will be dripping with blood” in the final conflagration. And there are those who literally want to turn the clock back two thousand years and return to animal sacrifices, including the flowing of animal blood along stone channels in a new Jewish temple.
      We need to know what we are dealing with here – abject fear – and that of course turns you utterly mad! I heartily recommend Racing Toward Armageddon for anyone wanting the facts on how this mass paranoia works through the superstitious and fear-ridden mind.