Humans need fantasy to be human, to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising

ape.

Isn't that a marvelous quote from novelist Terry Pratchett?

I'll come back around to it in a little while.

It's been a tough time in our household because my mother-in-law recently died,

and it reminded me that death is coming for us all. Now, don't be alarmed. I'm not announcing

the apocalypse. I'm just stating a fact. Though it is interesting how many cult leaders and religious

prophets have claimed special knowledge about both the afterlife and the end of the world.

It's not just the heaven's gate leaders, tea and dough, saying that the world was about to be recycled,

and your only salvation would be to abandon your earth's suit and ascend to the alien mothership.

It's also the myriad preachers who thought they knew when Jesus was coming back,

like William Miller, whose prediction that the Savior would appear in October of 1844,

right before the world would be cleansed by fire, turned what was called the Great Awakening

into what would later jokingly be referred to as the

great disappointment.

That's right, as many as 100,000 true believers across the American Northeast were disappointed

that the world didn't end when Pastor Miller said it would.

Or how about Juhayman al-Oythai, the Saudi Arabian Salafi leader, who believed his brother-in-law was the Mahdi.

That's a Muslim savior figure prophesied to come to earth right before the day of judgment.

Together with 600 militants, he laid siege to the grand mosque in Mecca, the holiest site in Islam,

for two weeks in 1979, right at the time when

50,000 people were gathered there for religious ceremonies. Figures like this are both

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