The Story of God with Morgan Freeman (2016) s01e02 Episode Script
Apocalypse
1 Every morning starts the same.
Coffee and crossword.
And every day things seem to get worse.
Religious conflict.
Climate change.
It all seems so apocalyptic.
None of this is new, however.
We've been predicting the end of the world for thousands of years.
From Nostradamus all the way back to the book of revelation.
Something about the drama of annihilation seems to grip us.
Is it just human nature to worry and wonder about the end of days? Or is it really coming? I'm setting off on a journey to find out why so many religions predict an apocalypse.
This beast has a human name, it's number is To discover the roots of judgment day.
The suns of light shall battle the suns of darkness.
Our ancient prophecies There's no peace between us and our neighbors.
Reverberate today.
If these guys ever came to power, it would be hell on earth.
And to ask whether the end is really what we imagine Or if it's all just in our minds.
My first destination is Jerusalem.
The spiritual set of the Jews, christians and muslims.
All three of those fates predicted Jerusalem will play a role in the end of the world.
It has long been a flash point for religious tensions.
I've come here to meet yoram Hazony, an expert in the politics and theology of judaism.
I want to know why the end of days is so closely tied to this city.
You're looking at the absolute epicenter of the monotheistic world.
Right over there, that's the dome of the rock, which according to islamic tradition, Muhammad descended to heaven from right that spot, and over there, the of the mount of olives and gethsemane below where Jesus and his disciples used to meet, and of course down here is the western wall plaza, the holiest shrine, prayer location for all of the Jewish people in judaism.
This whole area is called the Temple Mount.
This is the Temple Mount? The temple was a building seven stories high, stood on top of this Temple Mount, on top of that flat area where those trees are.
In 20bc, king herod the great, build a temple where Jews could worship their god.
It was designed to last forever.
Herod says we're going to create the most spectacular physical structure in the entire middle east, maybe in the entire world.
You can see these gigantic stones at the bottom, those are called herodian stones.
The Jewish temple to the one god stood on top of that mount before there was islamic christianity.
But, in the year 70ad, the Romans sacked Jerusalem and demolished the temple.
In the centuries since, Jews have come to pray at it's remains, the western or wailing wall.
It was almost 1900 years before the site returned to direct Jewish control in 1967.
We are about 70 years into the new Israel, why hasn't the temple been rebuilt? Two reasons.
One is cause the Jews aren't ready and the other is cause the muslims aren't ready.
The state of Israel militarily, politically controls this whole area, but the state of Israel gave the Temple Mount area on the top to the muslims.
While the top of the mount is off limits to Jewish religious rights, there are sacred spaces underground, which yoram says will help me understand the Jewish vision for end times.
This is it.
We've come to the closest that a human being can come to the holy of holies, the most sacred spot in the world.
That's the room in the temple that one human being would enter once a year, the high priest, on yom kippur on the holiest day of the year and he would say god's name.
Orthodox Jews believe that without this temple, their religious rights are incomplete.
So they await the day when their temple is rebuilt.
Is there a Messiah? In judaism? In judaism? Judaism invented the Messiah, but it's not the same Messiah that most people think about.
Okay.
'Cause when christians think of the.
Messiah, they think of someone who's divine.
Yeah.
They think of, you know, the end of days.
What we have for the Messiah is a man, a king of this earth was going to bring peace among the nations in this world.
And he will not be divine.
He will not be divine.
And yoram tells me this mortal Messiah has a very specific to do list.
According to Jewish tradition, he has three things he is supposed to do.
Number one, he's gonna reconstitute the Jewish kingdom of the Jewish today.
Number two, he's gonna bring peace with the neighbors.
And number three, he's gonna rebuild that temple.
Rebuild the temple.
Here we are, this is 2015, what are you gonna do now? What is contemporary Jewish position on the temple? The Jews think of the world in terms of this dream that once existed in the world that was taken away, the Jews want to bring back into the world.
That is the reconstruction of the temple? The reconstruction of the temple as the crowning symbol of this era of justice and peace that we're supposed to be assisting to bring back into the world.
Judaism is just one of many religions that envisions the coming of world peace one day.
But, looking at this place, where so many religions intersect It's hard to imagine peace coming.
Rebuilding the temple now would almost certainly not herald an age of peace.
It would obliterate some of the holiest sights in islam.
In fact, it might even trigger an apocalyptic battle.
But, the idea of a violent end of the world is not new.
2000 years ago, not all Jews anticipated the coming age of peace.
One Jewish sect fervently anticipated the bloody apocalypse.
Archaeologist, Jodi Magness has taken me to the shores of the dead sea, where their ancient prophecies were miraculously preserved.
Welcome to Qumran.
Qumran? Right, right, this is where the scrolls were found, right? That's right.
The dead sea scrolls were found in eleven caves in the cliffs surrounding Qumran.
How did they get up there? Well, they were deposited in the caves by the people who lived at Qumran who were members of a Jewish sect called the essenes.
Essenes? Uh huh.
So, why, why come here? They came out here to the desert because they wanted to live in isolation apart from everyone else.
Jody tells me that the essenes settled here at Qumran around 100bc.
They believed an epic battle was coming.
One that would bring on the end of the world.
Thanks to the incredibly dry climate here, their apocalyptic writings have been preserved for more than 2,000 years.
Looking over the edge of the cliff here, look at what we see below us.
Holy cow! This cave is very important.
Approximately 700 different scrolls were found in this cave including fragments of the war scroll.
The war scrolls, what now, what is that? That's the scroll that describes a 40 year long apocalyptic war and one of the famous lines from this scroll says, "there shall be a war of terrible carnage.
" The suns of light shall battle the suns of darkness "and it shall end in eternal redemption.
" This war that they're talking about, is that like a call to revolution? Or is it more like mythological expectation? When you read the war scroll, one of the interesting things is that it interweaves real and then what seems to us to be fantasy.
That the people were leading them into battle are priests who are dressed in priestly outfits, the fact that they talk about angels fighting in their midst, but the soldiers are equipped in the way that soldiers at that time were equipped, so you have a combination of what seems to be very real, combined with things that to us seem to be imaginary.
Like many doomsday cults, the essenes believe the end was imminent.
And took precautions to be ready to meet god at any moment.
This is one of the ritual baths here at Qumran.
They literally believed that god's presence dwelled in their midst.
According to biblical Jewish law, if you enter the presence of the god of Israel, you have to be in a state of ritual purity.
So all of these pools were filled by the flash flood waters, but water was not replenished over the course of the year, so it got pretty gross.
Nevertheless, it was still considered pure for the purposes of ritual immersion.
You could probably come close to walking on it.
Yeah, you could probably cut it with a knife at that point.
So they were all here preparing themselves for the apocalypse? That's right.
What happened? Well, the apocalypse sort of did arrive, but not the kind of apocalypse that they anticipated.
In 68ad, their battle with the suns of darkness took place.
It was the Romans.
As part of that campaign to crush the Jewish revolt against their rule, they wiped Qumran and the essenes off the map.
So the Romans, armies just were sweeping past here when all of these people were in the way, just get rid of them? That's exactly right.
The Romans were basically subduing the entire area.
But the idea of an apocalyptic battle with the forces of darkness did not die with the essenes.
It crept into another faith.
One that was just being born.
All roads lead to Rome.
That's were I want to uncover how the Christian idea of the end of days began.
It's most famous book of prophecy, revelation, written around 100ad, foretells an impending battle with the antichrist.
"Let anyone with understanding calculate" the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person.
"It's number is 666.
" I want to know if I can calculate the number of the beast.
I've come to the biblioteca casanatense near the Vatican to meet an expert in early christianity.
Kim Haines-Eitzen.
She tells me she has compelling evidence that reveals the identity of the beast.
Good morning.
So, what exactly do we have here? Well, I've been looking at some fragments of the book of revelation.
The book of revelation? That's right.
The book of the end of days.
The end of days, the apocalypse.
It's a prophetic book, it's got loads of symbolism, but it's also very much a political book and making a political claim about the cause of evil.
The cause of evil.
Or who's responsible for evil.
So tell me about this coding because as I understand it, the antichrist was given a code so they would never call his name, they would just say it by code.
Well, there has been a lot of debate about what this number, in particular, 666, who it refers to.
There has also been a strong argument made for 666 referring to nero.
Nero was emperor of Rome from 54 to 68ad.
Around the time when the first christians began to arrive in Rome.
So how do you make 666 translate to nero? When you apply numerical values to the name, kaisar neron and you add up those numbers, you come to 666.
In ancient Greek and Hebrew, every letter had a corresponding number.
If you add up the letters of the name for emperor nero, written in Hebrew, kaisar neron, the total comes to 666.
But nero is just one of many names that can add up to 666.
Kim believes a later copy of the book of revelation found in an archaeological dig in Egypt confirms the beast is nero.
One of the interesting things about these fragments is that we've got two different numbers.
What are those letters? A chi is the 600, xi 60, sigma a six.
This one over here, we have a chi yota sigma, 616 with a line over the top.
Why is it different? You might think that this number destroys the possibility that it could be nero.
Yes.
What's striking about this is that it may help to confirm the identity of nero because this will be the number that we would get if we spelled nero according to the Latin spelling.
Nero kaiser.
Without the n, the letter n represented 50, the number 50, so 666 minus 50 616, so we've just gone So we just subtract and we time up with 616 and we have the same guy? That's right.
I'm so clever! But why might early christians have called nero the antichrist? Kim brings me to the very heart of the Vatican.
St Peter's square to show me the answer.
So we know that the code, 666 refers to the emperor, nero.
Why? Emperor nero was despised for many things including persecuting christians.
Now, in the square here, you can see an obelisk that he arranged to stand at the turning point in his circus.
Circus Maximus.
The circus neroeus.
Neroneus? Yeah, the circus stood here and was a place for chariot races, games, but he also used it then for persecuting christians.
So in 64, there was a major fire in Rome and much of the city was destroyed, nero wound up blaming christians and he executed them in great numbers as far as we can tell, right here in this circus.
Tradition says nero even executed the man many considered to be the founder of the church in Rome.
Peter.
The story about Peter was that he was crucified upside down, some of them were lit on fire.
Burning? To light the place.
It explains why they despised him so much.
So now we have the basilica of St.
Peter standing here commemorating his death.
So the irony that this is where Peter founded the church.
Yeah, it's pretty dramatic.
The crucifix on which Peter died could have been just yards from where I stand now.
Obviously, the christians hated nero.
He was the antichrist.
Even after his suicide, it appeared that he had the power to come back and rule, which is why it was safer to refer to him in a secret code.
But, the christians living under the conditions that they were living, judgment day couldn't come too soon.
The Christian idea of apocalypse took hold under the oppression of Rome.
This evil empire had destroyed Jerusalem and persecuted the early followers of Jesus.
But, the idea has since spread to a different faith.
It targets a different evil empire.
And threatens to engulf us all in the apocalypse.
I'm traveling the world to find out why billions of people believe in the end of days.
My journey has brought me to islam.
Islam is an arabic word that means surrender.
Submission to god's will.
The same god the Jews and Christian worship.
Meeting muslims face to face, I've learned that islam aims for people to live in peace.
But watching the news today, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that.
A tiny percentage of muslims are waging war against the west.
Isis and other religious extremist groups believe the apocalypse has already begun.
To understand why, I've come to New York.
To meet a man who was once a high level recruiter for an apocalyptic islamist group.
Maajid nawaz was radicalized as a teenager in the uk.
Please tell me about that radicalization.
I think it's important just to distinguish between islamism and islam, a religion.
What I mean by islamism is the desire to impose any version of islam over society.
Although ideology was sold to me as if it was the religion of islam and that's what I adopted.
I grew up facing a very, very severe form of violent racism, domestically within the uk.
I'm talking hammer attacks, machete attacks by Neo-Nazi skinheads, thugs.
On many occasions I had to watch as my friends were stabbed before my eyes as a 15 year old.
I began seeing myself as separate from the rest of society and an islamist recruiter found me in that state as a young, angry teenager and it was very easy for that recruiter.
I joined a group called hizb ut-tahrir and that's the group I spent 13 years of my leadership on.
Is that the precursor to al-qaeda? Yes, it's the first islamist organization that was responsible for popularizing the notion of resurrecting a modern day theocratic caliphate, as we now see that Isis has laid claim to.
But, my former group, they were the first ones to popularize that term.
I ended up in Egypt where I continued to recruit people to this cause.
I was eventually arrested on 1st march in 2002.
I was taken to the headquarters of the state security in Cairo, down underground in their torture dungeons.
I was blindfolded and that's when they, the worst ordeal began.
Torture? They began electrocuting everyone.
You served four years in prison? Four years, yeah.
And then you came out not so radical.
- I.
- am still a Muslim, but I am now liberal.
Now, when I was in prison and I was living with the who's who of the jihadist terrorist movements and islamist movements, we had a leader of the Muslim brotherhood.
When I saw him I thought, "my god, if these guys ever came to power and declared a caliphate, it would be hell on earth.
" Of course, when Isis eventually did declare the caliphate, that utopian dream that we all used to share has become that dystopic nightmare that we see now.
So, lets talk a little bit about Isis and the apocalyptic prophecies of Muhammad and how they're using that for their purposes.
Yeah, so there were a lot prophecies that most muslims share in common with each other.
The difference is what Isis has done is it's manipulated those prophecies to serve its own political and ideological ends.
So as an example of this end of times battle that Isis believes is going to take place in a small village called dabiq in Syria.
Now this village, has absolutely no strategic value, militarily whatsoever.
Has hardly any economic strategic value either.
But Isis has nevertheless committed resources to conquering this small village called dabiq.
They believe that the international community and the coalition must somehow be driven to come and meet them in dabiq and engage in a final battle.
Would that be part of the apocalypse that America would fall? Yeah.
Now there's a prophecy of the prophet, Muhammad that says that constantinople will fall first and then Rome will, so Isis has interpreted this piece of scripture that because constantinople has already fallen to muslims, that the next big battle will be against the west and the west will eventually fall.
The idea would be that actually in fact, that America today represents Rome.
Ah-ha.
You know, a continuation of the western civilization as represented by the Roman empire.
Why do you think the idea of the apocalypse is so appealing, particularly to so many young people? When you feel powerless, when you feel that you don't actually control your own destiny, when you feel that you have absolutely no voice, then it's incredibly tempting, though wrong, to feel like you're becoming an agent of destiny.
To suddenly feel like you do have a voice, that you are shaping history.
Maajid now runs the quilliam foundation, whose goal is to prevent Isis and groups like them from recruiting people in the west.
He produces counter-propaganda videos like this.
So we're taking real examples of people who have become disillusioned and we put them to actors voices and actually put out some of those stories.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Most informative and I'm glad you're here.
Thank you, a pleasure.
It's probably natural that the apocalypse is appealing to the disenfranchised.
They have the most to gain and the least to fear from overturning the status quo.
But it's more widespread than that.
Culturally, we seem to have a morbid attraction to the apocalypse.
It's almost as if we draw some comfort from it.
At the university of Illinois at Chicago, psychology professor, Stewart Shankman is studying our subconscious belief in the apocalypse.
He thinks it may be hard wired into our brains.
So the gist of what we're doing today is we're looking at people's different response to different kinds of threats.
Since this is a lab experiment that relies on volunteers, the catastrophe is survivable.
A sudden noise combined with a mild shock to the wrist.
A skull cap of electrodes and sensors on the subjects face capture the raw data of fear, of brain activity and her stress levels.
Together, they measure the size of the startle response.
And the first condition is called shock at anytime and during that, you might receive it when the countdown reaches one, you might receive it in the middle of the countdowns, you might receive it in between your countdowns, you might not receive it at all.
Look, there's a bit startle for the unpredictable condition.
When people are in the unpredictable condition, they don't know when this bad thing is coming.
They're gonna show a greater activity in their brain and pupil dilation.
Their heart rate's gonna increase.
Now, Stuart changes to a different condition.
A predictable shock.
Called shock at one and you will get a shock at the end of the countdowns.
Your reaction to this painful, but foreseeable shock is different.
Surprisingly so.
When people are in the unpredictable condition, their startle response is much higher than when they're in the predictable condition.
Knowing when the bad thing is gonna come creates a qualitatively different emotional experience than not knowing.
So, whatever we can do to try to make something as unpredictable, predictable, that's gonna give us a little bit of solace.
This metal mechanism could explain why so many of us believe in an impending apocalypse.
But, it may also explain the morbid appeal of doomsday cults.
I'll tell you about a kingdom level beyond here and if you want to go there, then you have to follow me.
This is the end of the age.
But is it possible to predict the end? A few years back, many people thought they had.
According to popular legend, the ancient Maya thought the apocalypse would arrive on a specific date.
December 21st, 2012.
I want to know if this is really true, so I've traveled to their ancient capital, tikal in Guatemala.
I'm meeting Stanley guenter, who's a world leading decoder of Mayan inscriptions.
So this is the temple of the masks.
And on the other side, the temple of the giant Jaguar.
This would have been the early center of the ancient city of tikal.
What about those headstone looking things, there? Those are what we call stelae.
Stelae.
Stelae.
And they commemorate periods in the Mayan calendar.
So we see that they would have been dedicated to periods of time, such as every 20 years, every 10 years and especially every about 400 years, the ending of the great b'ak'tun cycles.
The festival to mark the end of a b'ak'tun cycle would have culminated in the king sacrificing the captive.
Does that go to say that the Mayans felt that 2012 would be the end of time, the apocalypse? So we heard a few years ago, about 2012 when people said the end of the 13th b'ak'tun was going to be the end of the world predicted by the Maya and there's a monument down here, I think we should take a look at that would help explain that.
This is stela 10 and you can see we've got a king, there is his head, big headdress full of feathers.
His shoulders, all of his jewelry, down to his feet.
And if you look down below, we can actually see we have a captive.
We can see his head, we have his hands and even down to his legs.
He's all tied up for sacrifice.
So now, what did this have to do with the apocalypse? Well, we have to go around the other side, here.
Okay.
We have a date that gives us a specific point in time, we have eleven years and 360 days.
Then we have three katuns, that's about 20 years each, so we've got another 60 and then here we have nine b'ak'tuns because this is a date of about 525ad, so if you remember, we had 13 b'ak'tuns ended in 2012.
But the really interesting thing is this monument doesn't stop there.
It goes on and tells us there were 19 of the higher unit, the piktun and even higher, we have eleven of the next unit and so on.
Each one of those units is 20 times larger than the previous, so what we see on this monument then, is that 13 b'ak'tuns wasn't the end of any calendar, it was simply the end of one cycle within a whole series of nested cycles, each one larger than the other.
Just as we mark the start of a new millennium, the Maya marked December 21st, 2012 as a major event on their calendar.
The ending of another 400 year cycle.
There would have been parades, music and sacrifice.
If the ancient Maya were still here, they'd have had a huge party.
No apocalypse.
No apocalypse.
Just a beginning.
Another beginning.
And another one and another one that would go on for almost eternity.
Why not eternity? We've never found the end for the Maya, and we'll still have to keep searching.
Okay.
Thinking about the way the Maya saw time makes me realize that the idea of an end we have in christianity, judaism and islam are not universal.
For these religions, the ultimate hope is that god will intervene in the world of men, pass judgment and right the wrongs that we see around us.
But there are billions of believers out there who don't see the world that way at all.
For them, time moves in cycles, perhaps forever.
I'm headed to India to understand what the apocalypse could mean In a world without end.
India is the birthplace of two great religions.
Hinduism.
And buddhism.
Hindus believe an apocalypse comes every few billion years.
But every end leads to a new beginning and the world starts again.
Buddhists don't imagine a violent end of days.
To them, the word apocalypse does not mean a revelation of god's judgment to the world.
It's a personal revelation of truth in the mind.
It's called enlightenment.
To find out what that means, I've come to sarnath, India to meet one of the world's most revered Buddhist lamas.
His holiness, gyalwang Karmapa.
Tibetan Buddhists believe that Karmapa is the 17th reincarnation of a great teacher who lived 900 years ago.
Good morning.
- I.
- think you should wear this.
I should? Yeah, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Can we walk? Yeah.
In 1992, a holy commission hunted for the new Karmapa and found Ogyen Trinley Dorje, a seven year old son of a nomadic family in eastern Tibet.
You were kind of young for this station? Yes.
Okay, so what is it like, how do you, is it all right? One way it's meaningful, one way is a little bit heavy.
People have lots of expectation.
The expectation is heavy for a 30 year old man.
The Karmapa must teach how to find enlightenment while still working to find it for himself.
This is the start of the site that the Buddha's give first teaching.
This is the place then, where he had his first sermon after he reached enlightenment? Yes, yes.
Right.
Talk to me just a little bit, your holiness about enlightenment.
How does one even begin to go about trying to obtain that? Wow! Big question isn't it? Yes.
Huge challenge.
Huge, yeah, maybe I think the first part is maybe you need to recognize yourself like, where you're from, come from.
Why am I here? Yeah.
So I would like to get some instruction about enlightenment.
I will try, I will try.
Yeah, okay.
Okay.
I will try.
Thank you.
The Karmapa tells me meditation is the key to enlightenment.
If the apocalypse is the revelation of the true will of god, meditation aims to reveal the true will of me.
They have lots of different ways to meditate, but the simple one is to focus your breath.
That's the one I know.
You relax your mind.
And don't follow the past, don't anticipate future, just relax at the moment.
Just focus your breathing and that's all.
Yeah, we should try.
It's a lot of work to move past all the memories, thoughts and emotions To just concentrate on being To see what's left when all the noise has gone.
Okay? Beautiful.
Good? Yes.
Thank you.
Can I ask you a philosophical question? Philosophical? I will try.
It's about the westerners idea Yeah.
Of apocalypse.
The end of time, the end of being.
Is there such a thing in buddhism? If when everything stops and every The world comes to an end and mankind is judged.
We believe that every day is somewhere one universe it's like Ending.
Ending one it's Beginning.
But it's not like a This kind of judge, how do I say, judge things.
No judgment day? No, not judgment day.
This is maybe a little bit different.
So actually, what you're saying I think is that There is no end, only change? Yeah, change, yes.
One thing ends, another begins.
Yeah, maybe it's, there are not absolute sort of ending, yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
When you meet someone like his holiness, the Karmapa, I guess the thing that stands out most is his humility.
Karmapa doesn't give you the impression that he thinks of himself as greater than you, higher than you, better in any way than you.
He's here like the rest of us on this quest, trying to understand why we're here, seeking to unveil the truth, seeking enlightenment.
But the truth isn't always revealed in a moment of calm reflection.
August, 2005.
Hurricane Katrina slammed into Louisiana.
A catastrophe of historic proportions.
Some even thought the end was happening here in New Orleans.
New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to god and I believe that the hurricant Katrina was, in fact, punishment against the city of New Orleans.
Katrina was a judgement from god.
I'm in New Orleans to meet Katrina survivors.
To learn how they dealt with the end and how it changed them.
So right now, we are in flood country? Yes, sir.
This is where the water actually Yes, this is actually the 9th ward.
You were here during Katrina, is that right? Yes, I was.
I was in an apartment building and I was on the first floor and I got eight feet of water and I lost everything I owned.
Did you have a feeling at some point that this was like the end of it all? It did seem like the end to me.
Ernest was far from alone.
New Orleans residents Charles and Angela marsalis came to their local church, a shelter in the time of the storm.
We're in the carrolton Avenue church of Christ, this is, you spent a little time here during the storm.
How did you wind up here? We were gonna lodge here for the night and then we were gonna go home the next day and there was a night we could hear the wind rushing in.
It's just really, really loud.
I mean, at that time it was really scary and I just began to kneel down and pray.
We could actually, you know, see the water rising and we thought it'd be stopped, but it just kept rising.
The marsalis family was completely cut off.
More than a hundred billion gallons of water had surged through broken levees.
Three days passed before the red cross evacuated them to a marooned bridge full of desperate survivors.
It was like, pitch black dark.
Everything in that water, alligator, snakes, everything.
I mean, they had sick people, they had women in wheelchairs.
We saw the guys having drugs over here, selling drugs, guns, I felt that the devil was at work.
It was really a dark time.
It was really dark, yeah.
Now this, these are dire circumstances and dire circumstances can bring out the best and the worst in people.
Yes, yes.
How did you function through that? Well, I'm a minister and you got children of god sitting here, so I told me wife, it's time for us to get busy, we got to do something.
And so we just started singing and, and then the next thing we know in the darkness, you can hear people saying, sing this song, sing that song.
And how long, can't remember, how long did we sing? All night.
We just knew that god would get us out of there.
Not even Katrina could shake that faith of god, no way.
Jesus is a rock in a weary land, a weary land, a weary land.
Jesus is a rock in a Charles and Angela did get out in the end.
A year later they returned to New Orleans and rebuilt their lives.
The experience of getting so close to the end and so close to god drove them to start their own church.
Well, how many out here remember Katrina? Y'all remember the storm? I remember that.
Some folk even said that that's god punishment on New Orleans.
And I had to tell them folk, no! God allowed it to happen.
You know, a lot of people had their eyes on New Orleans, but they saw something good that could come out of something bad.
Had it not been for the storm, we wouldn't be here at this building, probably.
We wouldn't have met some of these people that you seen in here today.
I believe if it wasn't for that storm.
You know, Charles, that's very Buddhist.
Yeah? Yeah, the Buddhist say every ending is a beginning.
It's god's will.
God saw this before we saw this.
We just got to allow ourself to be willing to let god use us in part of that will.
Katrina didn't wash New Orleans of its sin.
It didn't come as divine punishment.
It caused suffering, yes.
But it also opened people's eyes, to cherish what they had left and to work together to build something better.
I set out to understand what the apocalypse means to people of many different faiths.
I had always thought of it as a all destroying doomsday.
But I've discovered that some people yearn for the apocalypse.
They want to be free of injustice.
They want to escape suffering.
They want a better world.
Apocalypse.
It's a Greek word meaning lifting the veil.
It's not about war, it's about enlightenment.
It's not about death.
It's a state of mind and heart that helps us see the truth.
Not some far off day of judgment.
It's here, it's now.
Coffee and crossword.
And every day things seem to get worse.
Religious conflict.
Climate change.
It all seems so apocalyptic.
None of this is new, however.
We've been predicting the end of the world for thousands of years.
From Nostradamus all the way back to the book of revelation.
Something about the drama of annihilation seems to grip us.
Is it just human nature to worry and wonder about the end of days? Or is it really coming? I'm setting off on a journey to find out why so many religions predict an apocalypse.
This beast has a human name, it's number is To discover the roots of judgment day.
The suns of light shall battle the suns of darkness.
Our ancient prophecies There's no peace between us and our neighbors.
Reverberate today.
If these guys ever came to power, it would be hell on earth.
And to ask whether the end is really what we imagine Or if it's all just in our minds.
My first destination is Jerusalem.
The spiritual set of the Jews, christians and muslims.
All three of those fates predicted Jerusalem will play a role in the end of the world.
It has long been a flash point for religious tensions.
I've come here to meet yoram Hazony, an expert in the politics and theology of judaism.
I want to know why the end of days is so closely tied to this city.
You're looking at the absolute epicenter of the monotheistic world.
Right over there, that's the dome of the rock, which according to islamic tradition, Muhammad descended to heaven from right that spot, and over there, the of the mount of olives and gethsemane below where Jesus and his disciples used to meet, and of course down here is the western wall plaza, the holiest shrine, prayer location for all of the Jewish people in judaism.
This whole area is called the Temple Mount.
This is the Temple Mount? The temple was a building seven stories high, stood on top of this Temple Mount, on top of that flat area where those trees are.
In 20bc, king herod the great, build a temple where Jews could worship their god.
It was designed to last forever.
Herod says we're going to create the most spectacular physical structure in the entire middle east, maybe in the entire world.
You can see these gigantic stones at the bottom, those are called herodian stones.
The Jewish temple to the one god stood on top of that mount before there was islamic christianity.
But, in the year 70ad, the Romans sacked Jerusalem and demolished the temple.
In the centuries since, Jews have come to pray at it's remains, the western or wailing wall.
It was almost 1900 years before the site returned to direct Jewish control in 1967.
We are about 70 years into the new Israel, why hasn't the temple been rebuilt? Two reasons.
One is cause the Jews aren't ready and the other is cause the muslims aren't ready.
The state of Israel militarily, politically controls this whole area, but the state of Israel gave the Temple Mount area on the top to the muslims.
While the top of the mount is off limits to Jewish religious rights, there are sacred spaces underground, which yoram says will help me understand the Jewish vision for end times.
This is it.
We've come to the closest that a human being can come to the holy of holies, the most sacred spot in the world.
That's the room in the temple that one human being would enter once a year, the high priest, on yom kippur on the holiest day of the year and he would say god's name.
Orthodox Jews believe that without this temple, their religious rights are incomplete.
So they await the day when their temple is rebuilt.
Is there a Messiah? In judaism? In judaism? Judaism invented the Messiah, but it's not the same Messiah that most people think about.
Okay.
'Cause when christians think of the.
Messiah, they think of someone who's divine.
Yeah.
They think of, you know, the end of days.
What we have for the Messiah is a man, a king of this earth was going to bring peace among the nations in this world.
And he will not be divine.
He will not be divine.
And yoram tells me this mortal Messiah has a very specific to do list.
According to Jewish tradition, he has three things he is supposed to do.
Number one, he's gonna reconstitute the Jewish kingdom of the Jewish today.
Number two, he's gonna bring peace with the neighbors.
And number three, he's gonna rebuild that temple.
Rebuild the temple.
Here we are, this is 2015, what are you gonna do now? What is contemporary Jewish position on the temple? The Jews think of the world in terms of this dream that once existed in the world that was taken away, the Jews want to bring back into the world.
That is the reconstruction of the temple? The reconstruction of the temple as the crowning symbol of this era of justice and peace that we're supposed to be assisting to bring back into the world.
Judaism is just one of many religions that envisions the coming of world peace one day.
But, looking at this place, where so many religions intersect It's hard to imagine peace coming.
Rebuilding the temple now would almost certainly not herald an age of peace.
It would obliterate some of the holiest sights in islam.
In fact, it might even trigger an apocalyptic battle.
But, the idea of a violent end of the world is not new.
2000 years ago, not all Jews anticipated the coming age of peace.
One Jewish sect fervently anticipated the bloody apocalypse.
Archaeologist, Jodi Magness has taken me to the shores of the dead sea, where their ancient prophecies were miraculously preserved.
Welcome to Qumran.
Qumran? Right, right, this is where the scrolls were found, right? That's right.
The dead sea scrolls were found in eleven caves in the cliffs surrounding Qumran.
How did they get up there? Well, they were deposited in the caves by the people who lived at Qumran who were members of a Jewish sect called the essenes.
Essenes? Uh huh.
So, why, why come here? They came out here to the desert because they wanted to live in isolation apart from everyone else.
Jody tells me that the essenes settled here at Qumran around 100bc.
They believed an epic battle was coming.
One that would bring on the end of the world.
Thanks to the incredibly dry climate here, their apocalyptic writings have been preserved for more than 2,000 years.
Looking over the edge of the cliff here, look at what we see below us.
Holy cow! This cave is very important.
Approximately 700 different scrolls were found in this cave including fragments of the war scroll.
The war scrolls, what now, what is that? That's the scroll that describes a 40 year long apocalyptic war and one of the famous lines from this scroll says, "there shall be a war of terrible carnage.
" The suns of light shall battle the suns of darkness "and it shall end in eternal redemption.
" This war that they're talking about, is that like a call to revolution? Or is it more like mythological expectation? When you read the war scroll, one of the interesting things is that it interweaves real and then what seems to us to be fantasy.
That the people were leading them into battle are priests who are dressed in priestly outfits, the fact that they talk about angels fighting in their midst, but the soldiers are equipped in the way that soldiers at that time were equipped, so you have a combination of what seems to be very real, combined with things that to us seem to be imaginary.
Like many doomsday cults, the essenes believe the end was imminent.
And took precautions to be ready to meet god at any moment.
This is one of the ritual baths here at Qumran.
They literally believed that god's presence dwelled in their midst.
According to biblical Jewish law, if you enter the presence of the god of Israel, you have to be in a state of ritual purity.
So all of these pools were filled by the flash flood waters, but water was not replenished over the course of the year, so it got pretty gross.
Nevertheless, it was still considered pure for the purposes of ritual immersion.
You could probably come close to walking on it.
Yeah, you could probably cut it with a knife at that point.
So they were all here preparing themselves for the apocalypse? That's right.
What happened? Well, the apocalypse sort of did arrive, but not the kind of apocalypse that they anticipated.
In 68ad, their battle with the suns of darkness took place.
It was the Romans.
As part of that campaign to crush the Jewish revolt against their rule, they wiped Qumran and the essenes off the map.
So the Romans, armies just were sweeping past here when all of these people were in the way, just get rid of them? That's exactly right.
The Romans were basically subduing the entire area.
But the idea of an apocalyptic battle with the forces of darkness did not die with the essenes.
It crept into another faith.
One that was just being born.
All roads lead to Rome.
That's were I want to uncover how the Christian idea of the end of days began.
It's most famous book of prophecy, revelation, written around 100ad, foretells an impending battle with the antichrist.
"Let anyone with understanding calculate" the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person.
"It's number is 666.
" I want to know if I can calculate the number of the beast.
I've come to the biblioteca casanatense near the Vatican to meet an expert in early christianity.
Kim Haines-Eitzen.
She tells me she has compelling evidence that reveals the identity of the beast.
Good morning.
So, what exactly do we have here? Well, I've been looking at some fragments of the book of revelation.
The book of revelation? That's right.
The book of the end of days.
The end of days, the apocalypse.
It's a prophetic book, it's got loads of symbolism, but it's also very much a political book and making a political claim about the cause of evil.
The cause of evil.
Or who's responsible for evil.
So tell me about this coding because as I understand it, the antichrist was given a code so they would never call his name, they would just say it by code.
Well, there has been a lot of debate about what this number, in particular, 666, who it refers to.
There has also been a strong argument made for 666 referring to nero.
Nero was emperor of Rome from 54 to 68ad.
Around the time when the first christians began to arrive in Rome.
So how do you make 666 translate to nero? When you apply numerical values to the name, kaisar neron and you add up those numbers, you come to 666.
In ancient Greek and Hebrew, every letter had a corresponding number.
If you add up the letters of the name for emperor nero, written in Hebrew, kaisar neron, the total comes to 666.
But nero is just one of many names that can add up to 666.
Kim believes a later copy of the book of revelation found in an archaeological dig in Egypt confirms the beast is nero.
One of the interesting things about these fragments is that we've got two different numbers.
What are those letters? A chi is the 600, xi 60, sigma a six.
This one over here, we have a chi yota sigma, 616 with a line over the top.
Why is it different? You might think that this number destroys the possibility that it could be nero.
Yes.
What's striking about this is that it may help to confirm the identity of nero because this will be the number that we would get if we spelled nero according to the Latin spelling.
Nero kaiser.
Without the n, the letter n represented 50, the number 50, so 666 minus 50 616, so we've just gone So we just subtract and we time up with 616 and we have the same guy? That's right.
I'm so clever! But why might early christians have called nero the antichrist? Kim brings me to the very heart of the Vatican.
St Peter's square to show me the answer.
So we know that the code, 666 refers to the emperor, nero.
Why? Emperor nero was despised for many things including persecuting christians.
Now, in the square here, you can see an obelisk that he arranged to stand at the turning point in his circus.
Circus Maximus.
The circus neroeus.
Neroneus? Yeah, the circus stood here and was a place for chariot races, games, but he also used it then for persecuting christians.
So in 64, there was a major fire in Rome and much of the city was destroyed, nero wound up blaming christians and he executed them in great numbers as far as we can tell, right here in this circus.
Tradition says nero even executed the man many considered to be the founder of the church in Rome.
Peter.
The story about Peter was that he was crucified upside down, some of them were lit on fire.
Burning? To light the place.
It explains why they despised him so much.
So now we have the basilica of St.
Peter standing here commemorating his death.
So the irony that this is where Peter founded the church.
Yeah, it's pretty dramatic.
The crucifix on which Peter died could have been just yards from where I stand now.
Obviously, the christians hated nero.
He was the antichrist.
Even after his suicide, it appeared that he had the power to come back and rule, which is why it was safer to refer to him in a secret code.
But, the christians living under the conditions that they were living, judgment day couldn't come too soon.
The Christian idea of apocalypse took hold under the oppression of Rome.
This evil empire had destroyed Jerusalem and persecuted the early followers of Jesus.
But, the idea has since spread to a different faith.
It targets a different evil empire.
And threatens to engulf us all in the apocalypse.
I'm traveling the world to find out why billions of people believe in the end of days.
My journey has brought me to islam.
Islam is an arabic word that means surrender.
Submission to god's will.
The same god the Jews and Christian worship.
Meeting muslims face to face, I've learned that islam aims for people to live in peace.
But watching the news today, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that.
A tiny percentage of muslims are waging war against the west.
Isis and other religious extremist groups believe the apocalypse has already begun.
To understand why, I've come to New York.
To meet a man who was once a high level recruiter for an apocalyptic islamist group.
Maajid nawaz was radicalized as a teenager in the uk.
Please tell me about that radicalization.
I think it's important just to distinguish between islamism and islam, a religion.
What I mean by islamism is the desire to impose any version of islam over society.
Although ideology was sold to me as if it was the religion of islam and that's what I adopted.
I grew up facing a very, very severe form of violent racism, domestically within the uk.
I'm talking hammer attacks, machete attacks by Neo-Nazi skinheads, thugs.
On many occasions I had to watch as my friends were stabbed before my eyes as a 15 year old.
I began seeing myself as separate from the rest of society and an islamist recruiter found me in that state as a young, angry teenager and it was very easy for that recruiter.
I joined a group called hizb ut-tahrir and that's the group I spent 13 years of my leadership on.
Is that the precursor to al-qaeda? Yes, it's the first islamist organization that was responsible for popularizing the notion of resurrecting a modern day theocratic caliphate, as we now see that Isis has laid claim to.
But, my former group, they were the first ones to popularize that term.
I ended up in Egypt where I continued to recruit people to this cause.
I was eventually arrested on 1st march in 2002.
I was taken to the headquarters of the state security in Cairo, down underground in their torture dungeons.
I was blindfolded and that's when they, the worst ordeal began.
Torture? They began electrocuting everyone.
You served four years in prison? Four years, yeah.
And then you came out not so radical.
- I.
- am still a Muslim, but I am now liberal.
Now, when I was in prison and I was living with the who's who of the jihadist terrorist movements and islamist movements, we had a leader of the Muslim brotherhood.
When I saw him I thought, "my god, if these guys ever came to power and declared a caliphate, it would be hell on earth.
" Of course, when Isis eventually did declare the caliphate, that utopian dream that we all used to share has become that dystopic nightmare that we see now.
So, lets talk a little bit about Isis and the apocalyptic prophecies of Muhammad and how they're using that for their purposes.
Yeah, so there were a lot prophecies that most muslims share in common with each other.
The difference is what Isis has done is it's manipulated those prophecies to serve its own political and ideological ends.
So as an example of this end of times battle that Isis believes is going to take place in a small village called dabiq in Syria.
Now this village, has absolutely no strategic value, militarily whatsoever.
Has hardly any economic strategic value either.
But Isis has nevertheless committed resources to conquering this small village called dabiq.
They believe that the international community and the coalition must somehow be driven to come and meet them in dabiq and engage in a final battle.
Would that be part of the apocalypse that America would fall? Yeah.
Now there's a prophecy of the prophet, Muhammad that says that constantinople will fall first and then Rome will, so Isis has interpreted this piece of scripture that because constantinople has already fallen to muslims, that the next big battle will be against the west and the west will eventually fall.
The idea would be that actually in fact, that America today represents Rome.
Ah-ha.
You know, a continuation of the western civilization as represented by the Roman empire.
Why do you think the idea of the apocalypse is so appealing, particularly to so many young people? When you feel powerless, when you feel that you don't actually control your own destiny, when you feel that you have absolutely no voice, then it's incredibly tempting, though wrong, to feel like you're becoming an agent of destiny.
To suddenly feel like you do have a voice, that you are shaping history.
Maajid now runs the quilliam foundation, whose goal is to prevent Isis and groups like them from recruiting people in the west.
He produces counter-propaganda videos like this.
So we're taking real examples of people who have become disillusioned and we put them to actors voices and actually put out some of those stories.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Most informative and I'm glad you're here.
Thank you, a pleasure.
It's probably natural that the apocalypse is appealing to the disenfranchised.
They have the most to gain and the least to fear from overturning the status quo.
But it's more widespread than that.
Culturally, we seem to have a morbid attraction to the apocalypse.
It's almost as if we draw some comfort from it.
At the university of Illinois at Chicago, psychology professor, Stewart Shankman is studying our subconscious belief in the apocalypse.
He thinks it may be hard wired into our brains.
So the gist of what we're doing today is we're looking at people's different response to different kinds of threats.
Since this is a lab experiment that relies on volunteers, the catastrophe is survivable.
A sudden noise combined with a mild shock to the wrist.
A skull cap of electrodes and sensors on the subjects face capture the raw data of fear, of brain activity and her stress levels.
Together, they measure the size of the startle response.
And the first condition is called shock at anytime and during that, you might receive it when the countdown reaches one, you might receive it in the middle of the countdowns, you might receive it in between your countdowns, you might not receive it at all.
Look, there's a bit startle for the unpredictable condition.
When people are in the unpredictable condition, they don't know when this bad thing is coming.
They're gonna show a greater activity in their brain and pupil dilation.
Their heart rate's gonna increase.
Now, Stuart changes to a different condition.
A predictable shock.
Called shock at one and you will get a shock at the end of the countdowns.
Your reaction to this painful, but foreseeable shock is different.
Surprisingly so.
When people are in the unpredictable condition, their startle response is much higher than when they're in the predictable condition.
Knowing when the bad thing is gonna come creates a qualitatively different emotional experience than not knowing.
So, whatever we can do to try to make something as unpredictable, predictable, that's gonna give us a little bit of solace.
This metal mechanism could explain why so many of us believe in an impending apocalypse.
But, it may also explain the morbid appeal of doomsday cults.
I'll tell you about a kingdom level beyond here and if you want to go there, then you have to follow me.
This is the end of the age.
But is it possible to predict the end? A few years back, many people thought they had.
According to popular legend, the ancient Maya thought the apocalypse would arrive on a specific date.
December 21st, 2012.
I want to know if this is really true, so I've traveled to their ancient capital, tikal in Guatemala.
I'm meeting Stanley guenter, who's a world leading decoder of Mayan inscriptions.
So this is the temple of the masks.
And on the other side, the temple of the giant Jaguar.
This would have been the early center of the ancient city of tikal.
What about those headstone looking things, there? Those are what we call stelae.
Stelae.
Stelae.
And they commemorate periods in the Mayan calendar.
So we see that they would have been dedicated to periods of time, such as every 20 years, every 10 years and especially every about 400 years, the ending of the great b'ak'tun cycles.
The festival to mark the end of a b'ak'tun cycle would have culminated in the king sacrificing the captive.
Does that go to say that the Mayans felt that 2012 would be the end of time, the apocalypse? So we heard a few years ago, about 2012 when people said the end of the 13th b'ak'tun was going to be the end of the world predicted by the Maya and there's a monument down here, I think we should take a look at that would help explain that.
This is stela 10 and you can see we've got a king, there is his head, big headdress full of feathers.
His shoulders, all of his jewelry, down to his feet.
And if you look down below, we can actually see we have a captive.
We can see his head, we have his hands and even down to his legs.
He's all tied up for sacrifice.
So now, what did this have to do with the apocalypse? Well, we have to go around the other side, here.
Okay.
We have a date that gives us a specific point in time, we have eleven years and 360 days.
Then we have three katuns, that's about 20 years each, so we've got another 60 and then here we have nine b'ak'tuns because this is a date of about 525ad, so if you remember, we had 13 b'ak'tuns ended in 2012.
But the really interesting thing is this monument doesn't stop there.
It goes on and tells us there were 19 of the higher unit, the piktun and even higher, we have eleven of the next unit and so on.
Each one of those units is 20 times larger than the previous, so what we see on this monument then, is that 13 b'ak'tuns wasn't the end of any calendar, it was simply the end of one cycle within a whole series of nested cycles, each one larger than the other.
Just as we mark the start of a new millennium, the Maya marked December 21st, 2012 as a major event on their calendar.
The ending of another 400 year cycle.
There would have been parades, music and sacrifice.
If the ancient Maya were still here, they'd have had a huge party.
No apocalypse.
No apocalypse.
Just a beginning.
Another beginning.
And another one and another one that would go on for almost eternity.
Why not eternity? We've never found the end for the Maya, and we'll still have to keep searching.
Okay.
Thinking about the way the Maya saw time makes me realize that the idea of an end we have in christianity, judaism and islam are not universal.
For these religions, the ultimate hope is that god will intervene in the world of men, pass judgment and right the wrongs that we see around us.
But there are billions of believers out there who don't see the world that way at all.
For them, time moves in cycles, perhaps forever.
I'm headed to India to understand what the apocalypse could mean In a world without end.
India is the birthplace of two great religions.
Hinduism.
And buddhism.
Hindus believe an apocalypse comes every few billion years.
But every end leads to a new beginning and the world starts again.
Buddhists don't imagine a violent end of days.
To them, the word apocalypse does not mean a revelation of god's judgment to the world.
It's a personal revelation of truth in the mind.
It's called enlightenment.
To find out what that means, I've come to sarnath, India to meet one of the world's most revered Buddhist lamas.
His holiness, gyalwang Karmapa.
Tibetan Buddhists believe that Karmapa is the 17th reincarnation of a great teacher who lived 900 years ago.
Good morning.
- I.
- think you should wear this.
I should? Yeah, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Can we walk? Yeah.
In 1992, a holy commission hunted for the new Karmapa and found Ogyen Trinley Dorje, a seven year old son of a nomadic family in eastern Tibet.
You were kind of young for this station? Yes.
Okay, so what is it like, how do you, is it all right? One way it's meaningful, one way is a little bit heavy.
People have lots of expectation.
The expectation is heavy for a 30 year old man.
The Karmapa must teach how to find enlightenment while still working to find it for himself.
This is the start of the site that the Buddha's give first teaching.
This is the place then, where he had his first sermon after he reached enlightenment? Yes, yes.
Right.
Talk to me just a little bit, your holiness about enlightenment.
How does one even begin to go about trying to obtain that? Wow! Big question isn't it? Yes.
Huge challenge.
Huge, yeah, maybe I think the first part is maybe you need to recognize yourself like, where you're from, come from.
Why am I here? Yeah.
So I would like to get some instruction about enlightenment.
I will try, I will try.
Yeah, okay.
Okay.
I will try.
Thank you.
The Karmapa tells me meditation is the key to enlightenment.
If the apocalypse is the revelation of the true will of god, meditation aims to reveal the true will of me.
They have lots of different ways to meditate, but the simple one is to focus your breath.
That's the one I know.
You relax your mind.
And don't follow the past, don't anticipate future, just relax at the moment.
Just focus your breathing and that's all.
Yeah, we should try.
It's a lot of work to move past all the memories, thoughts and emotions To just concentrate on being To see what's left when all the noise has gone.
Okay? Beautiful.
Good? Yes.
Thank you.
Can I ask you a philosophical question? Philosophical? I will try.
It's about the westerners idea Yeah.
Of apocalypse.
The end of time, the end of being.
Is there such a thing in buddhism? If when everything stops and every The world comes to an end and mankind is judged.
We believe that every day is somewhere one universe it's like Ending.
Ending one it's Beginning.
But it's not like a This kind of judge, how do I say, judge things.
No judgment day? No, not judgment day.
This is maybe a little bit different.
So actually, what you're saying I think is that There is no end, only change? Yeah, change, yes.
One thing ends, another begins.
Yeah, maybe it's, there are not absolute sort of ending, yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
When you meet someone like his holiness, the Karmapa, I guess the thing that stands out most is his humility.
Karmapa doesn't give you the impression that he thinks of himself as greater than you, higher than you, better in any way than you.
He's here like the rest of us on this quest, trying to understand why we're here, seeking to unveil the truth, seeking enlightenment.
But the truth isn't always revealed in a moment of calm reflection.
August, 2005.
Hurricane Katrina slammed into Louisiana.
A catastrophe of historic proportions.
Some even thought the end was happening here in New Orleans.
New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to god and I believe that the hurricant Katrina was, in fact, punishment against the city of New Orleans.
Katrina was a judgement from god.
I'm in New Orleans to meet Katrina survivors.
To learn how they dealt with the end and how it changed them.
So right now, we are in flood country? Yes, sir.
This is where the water actually Yes, this is actually the 9th ward.
You were here during Katrina, is that right? Yes, I was.
I was in an apartment building and I was on the first floor and I got eight feet of water and I lost everything I owned.
Did you have a feeling at some point that this was like the end of it all? It did seem like the end to me.
Ernest was far from alone.
New Orleans residents Charles and Angela marsalis came to their local church, a shelter in the time of the storm.
We're in the carrolton Avenue church of Christ, this is, you spent a little time here during the storm.
How did you wind up here? We were gonna lodge here for the night and then we were gonna go home the next day and there was a night we could hear the wind rushing in.
It's just really, really loud.
I mean, at that time it was really scary and I just began to kneel down and pray.
We could actually, you know, see the water rising and we thought it'd be stopped, but it just kept rising.
The marsalis family was completely cut off.
More than a hundred billion gallons of water had surged through broken levees.
Three days passed before the red cross evacuated them to a marooned bridge full of desperate survivors.
It was like, pitch black dark.
Everything in that water, alligator, snakes, everything.
I mean, they had sick people, they had women in wheelchairs.
We saw the guys having drugs over here, selling drugs, guns, I felt that the devil was at work.
It was really a dark time.
It was really dark, yeah.
Now this, these are dire circumstances and dire circumstances can bring out the best and the worst in people.
Yes, yes.
How did you function through that? Well, I'm a minister and you got children of god sitting here, so I told me wife, it's time for us to get busy, we got to do something.
And so we just started singing and, and then the next thing we know in the darkness, you can hear people saying, sing this song, sing that song.
And how long, can't remember, how long did we sing? All night.
We just knew that god would get us out of there.
Not even Katrina could shake that faith of god, no way.
Jesus is a rock in a weary land, a weary land, a weary land.
Jesus is a rock in a Charles and Angela did get out in the end.
A year later they returned to New Orleans and rebuilt their lives.
The experience of getting so close to the end and so close to god drove them to start their own church.
Well, how many out here remember Katrina? Y'all remember the storm? I remember that.
Some folk even said that that's god punishment on New Orleans.
And I had to tell them folk, no! God allowed it to happen.
You know, a lot of people had their eyes on New Orleans, but they saw something good that could come out of something bad.
Had it not been for the storm, we wouldn't be here at this building, probably.
We wouldn't have met some of these people that you seen in here today.
I believe if it wasn't for that storm.
You know, Charles, that's very Buddhist.
Yeah? Yeah, the Buddhist say every ending is a beginning.
It's god's will.
God saw this before we saw this.
We just got to allow ourself to be willing to let god use us in part of that will.
Katrina didn't wash New Orleans of its sin.
It didn't come as divine punishment.
It caused suffering, yes.
But it also opened people's eyes, to cherish what they had left and to work together to build something better.
I set out to understand what the apocalypse means to people of many different faiths.
I had always thought of it as a all destroying doomsday.
But I've discovered that some people yearn for the apocalypse.
They want to be free of injustice.
They want to escape suffering.
They want a better world.
Apocalypse.
It's a Greek word meaning lifting the veil.
It's not about war, it's about enlightenment.
It's not about death.
It's a state of mind and heart that helps us see the truth.
Not some far off day of judgment.
It's here, it's now.