Picking Fights with the Gods

The common understanding of ""apocalypse"" suggests End Times, Armageddon, and the end of the world. But the Greek word apokalypsis means none of these things. What it does mean is uncovering, disclosing, and revelatory. That ""apocalypse"" is so widely misunderstood as predestined disaster isn't due to natural evolution in meaning. To penetrate the misuse of apokalypsis is to discover mythic misrepresentation. That is, ""apocalypse"" doesn't generate End Times but--just the opposite--End Times compels apokalypsis. The actual threat of End Times--explicitly so with weapons of mass destruction and Anthropocene climate change--forces thoughtful people into a search for fundamental causes: Where do these destructive energies originate? Why are we so reluctant to recognize the obvious consequences and resistant to embrace available remedies? Why do we persist in denial and indifference? In these essays, Paul Gilk explores the underlying cultural and religious conventions (both ""conservative"" and ""liberal"") that constitute our resistance and refusal. To disclose and uncover those conventions, to dissolve our oblivion, is to awaken to apokalypsis and to realize the depth of our captivity within prevailing mythology, both religious and civilizational. If End Times is the disease, apokalypsis is the cure. ""If a stimulating and provocative read provides food for thought, then Paul Gilk's Picking Fights with the Gods is a mental feast. His take on the 'shotgun marriage' between the Roman Empire and Christianity, and the resulting religious imperial enterprise that emerged, is but one marvelous example of an original mind with an insightful take on the predicament we all currently face in the postmodern muddle we have inherited.""   --Steven Newcomb (Shawnee, Lenape), Indigenous Law Institute; Author of Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery Picking Fights with the Gods is Paul Gilk's fifth book sparked by a core question: Why are small farms dying? Also writing as C. D. (Seedy) Buckberry, the author lives without electricity or running water in the woods of northern Wisconsin where, on occasion, he sees bobcats and bears.