Iain Atkinson

We begin here at the very end, as always. The task at hand is to create a new world. The world as it is is over. Let us think:
Post-apocalypse
Post-modernity
Post-earth
Post-religion

The funny thing about the apocalypse is it hasn’t been that big a deal. The Trump resounded with a ridiculous red hat. Our biggest fears can no longer be taken that seriously. Hey – what’s the worst that could happen? Nuclear war? Unlikely. Climate collapse? Doubtful. Alien invasion? Nah.

In the films, the dreaded fear lurks with symphonic resonance and intimate love-stories whose downfall the disaster figures. In real life it’s been a damp squib. There is no soundtrack or love interest.

But no, the films themselves are the soundtrack, and are our love interest. We love to make apocalyptic films the background noise of our beautifully quotidian lives, which they figure. So the drama of the films is redeemed in our being consumers of popular art. The immanence of digital media in our lives is the apocalyptic revelation.

To think all the “posts” listed above, think this equivocation: For modernity to have ended is for Christianity to have ended in the sense of being fulfilled, and is for the world to have ended. Thus modernity should be thought as a Christian phenomenon. And the world should be thought in its thoughtedness, as a modern projection, a product of modernity’s imagination. The world as it figures in the diabolic trinity — the world, the flesh, and the devil — has ended. And that is indeed the world, by the way.

What flat-earthers realize is that our discourse about the world, our living in and of the world, is conditioned by the spherical pictures of the world that modernity and finally NASA have given us. We who live on earth know where we live to be a planet. Worms don’t know that, but humans now do. Christian, modern, human beings know this. Post-Christian, post-modern, post-apocalyptic human beings know this. Our life on earth is conditioned by our imagination of where we live. We imagine this planet into existence. Finally we realize this. The planet is not really flat, but the new earth is really as different from the current earth as a flat earth would be to this sphere we’re on. The novelty of the world, the novitas mundi, is flatly before us.

I like to imagine the nostalgia felt by a human being a thousand years from now returning to earth after a couple hundred years away in another galaxy. Just imagine the love, the romance. It will be green. It will be alive. It will be a dynamic organism.

How is there a diabolic trinity? The world is the devil and is the flesh. The flesh is the body in debt to the spirit of the world. The flesh is the body pining for the origin of the world. The new body is the flesh redeemed is the origin of the world. Satan is the spirit of planet earth as it figured in the lucid perceptions of a snake.