How Messianic Expectations Delay the Messianic Age
Recently, I was thinking again about all those wild messianic beliefs that are floating out there, and it occurred to me that neither religious Jews, nor Christians, let alone Muslims, would recognize the Messiah if he or she were to come because that person simply won’t fulfill the absurd expectations of said believers.
Let’s take for example resurrection of dead and look at it in terms of raw numbers. For obvious reasons, there is no demographic data for most of the human existence. Yet even so, we can make some valid assumptions and roughly estimate the overall number of people ever born on Earth at around 117 billion individuals. And mind you, we are talking only Homo Sapiens here.
Now, the habitable land on Earth is roughly 104 million km². It’s an area of the overall Earth’s surface minus oceans, glaciers, and barren land. Depending on the methodology, this number may be slightly different, but in any case it includes all of forests, agricultural land, shrub, freshwater, and urban areas.
Thus, if all Homo Sapiens that ever lived on Earth were suddenly brought to life today, the average population density all across the habitable world would jump to around 1125 individuals per km². To put it into perspective, in 2022, Bermuda island had a population density of 1189 people per km². Look at the picture below what that means in practice.
Yet, even if we included barren land (entirety of deserts and mountain ranges — yes people would have to live on Mount Everest, etc.) the population density would be around 950 humans per km² (for comparison, Taiwan has a population density of c. 675 people per km² and you can see here how that looks).
And of course, neither of that tackles the dangling question of where would all the animals go, or where would all forests or agricultural products grow. Yes, I know, believers would claim that we would live on manna, and bears, tigers, or elephants would freely roam the streets because they would pose no threat. Well, lol and facepalm — just imagine the amount of animal excrements all across human settlements. (Would they perhaps live on manna too? But when you eat manna, do you need to poop? Iffy problem indeed.)
Another such example could be world peace. While it’s obvious that there is no need for some special person in this case — anyone with a modicum of common sense will tell you that if you don’t want wars, you should probably stop waging them — suppose the Messiah would come and would tell people to stop fighting each other.
As the argument goes, believers would not listen because why should they. A proof of the Messiah is the global world peace, but wars are still going on, so that person must be just some rando, so why should they heed what he or she tells them. And they would happily continue fighting each other and waiting for the promised final Redeemer.
And I could go on.
There’s that Ezekiel’s prediction of the second temple, which, in a self-fulfilling way, became the blueprint for its construction and subsequent renovations, taken to mean the prediction of a third temple just because e.g. Rambam didn’t get what the passage is all about. Thus for Jewish Messiah to be accepted, he must build the Third Temple.
Perhaps the mistake can be attributed to Ezekiel’s propensity for not getting the details of his predictions exactly right (Tyre never rebuild anyone?). But even so, the absolute abhorrent absurdity of a building where you immolate slaughtered animals in some perverse attempt to make yourself “clean of sin” should speak volumes and for itself. After all, what kind of impotent self-indulgent god would require such morbid practice? Certainly not the one with the capital “G”.
A further example might also be that literal expectation of a guy coming from the sky floating on the clouds. I really wonder whether we should seriously start to pay more attention to skydivers. In any case, I’m fairly certain that all those who pride themselves on their religious faith, be it Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, will be inevitably left behind in the meaning in which they understand the phrase, even though not exactly in its literal sense.
Well, whatever.
