The End of Days Quotes

“The theater of the End is triangular, and in the eyes of apocalyptic believers on all three sides, the great drama has begun. The sound system is hope and fear; each time an actor speaks, his words reverberate wildly. Three scripts are being performed.”
― Gershom Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount

“Two of three crucial prophecies that herald the End have come true, Lindsey says: The Jewish nation has been reborn in Palestine, and has repossessed old Jerusalem. So, “There remains but one more event to completely set the stage for Israel’s part in the last great act of her historical drama. That is to rebuild the ancient Temple …”
― Gershom Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount

“what Dayan said sitting crosslegged in Al-Aqsa was a victory over history: The war didn’t need to be the triumph of one religion over another.”
― Gershom Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount

“the books faithfully represent the apocalyptic vision known by the unwieldly name of dispensational premillennialism—a vision that, among other things, misdirects relations between real-life Jews and born-again Christians, and in the worst case could bend the future of the Middle East.”
― Gershom Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount

“Pioneer social psychologist Leon Festinger made sense of that behavior in his 1950s study, When Prophecy Fails. Festinger and two colleagues closely followed a tiny American sect that predicted natural disasters from which the faithful would be saved by flying saucers. When the prophesied time passed, the small group of believers suddenly began trying to convince the world of their beliefs. Festinger's explanation: When a person believes in something, and the belief is clearly proved wrong, a gap opens between what the person sees and what he or she knows is true. You can shed the beliefs, but if you've staked a lot on them, that hurts. One medicine is an explanation proving that the belief is still true. And the best way to convince yourself is persuade others: "If more and more people can be convinced that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must, after all, be correct."
Ergo, when a messianic figure dies or disappoints followers, or when a date set for the End passes, believers are likely to respond by evangelizing. At the least, they'll look for reassurance that they're right. That may explain why monthly sales of Left Behind books actually doubled in January 2000, after the Y2K bug failed to trigger the End.”
― Gershom Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount