During the Cold War, many individuals around the world, especially in America and the Soviet Union believed that the end of the world was very soon because of the high amount of nukes both sides controlled. There was a shift in belief of an apocalypse from God to an apocalypse from nuclear weapons.

In the 9-minute clip “Duck and Cover,” students in school are being taught to go under cover the moment they would hear a siren. In other words, they’re being conditioned to know fear and death is imminent when a nuclear weapon strikes. This in turn causes mental conditions such as paranoia to form. The threat of a nuclear bomb has elevated from devastating attack in WWII to the end of the world in the Cold War.

In fact, Strozier’s study states, “Nuclear weapons represent the religion of our age.” In the film “Dr. Strangelove,” paranoia was shown almost everywhere. From General Turgidson’s paranoia to anything related to Russia to General Ripper’s paranoia of communists tainting the “precious bodily fluids” of Americans through water fluoridation. Even when both sides of the army were fighting each other, there was paranoia because all personnel in Ripper’s base stuck to protocol and didn’t bother to use their brains about the situation when firing on other American troops. The role of the nuclear bomb was a thing of both great pleasure for some and great fear for others in “Dr. Strangelove.” The pilots who were on orders to carry out “Wing Attack Plan R” loved the divine power of destruction so much that one of them even dropped with the bomb itself. The characters in the war room on the other hand, thought of the bomb as their annihilation. Although the film is a satire, it is still able to show the symbolic power of a nuclear bomb as well as the paranoia associated with fundamentalists in a more “modern” view for the time.

I feel as though throughout the second half of the novel, Kirsch is trying to set up the fact that the Book of Revelation’s place in the biblical canon is very controversial because it has impacted the world from the time it was written to what it is now today. One key example of my reasoning is when Kirsch quotes Jesus stating that there will never be a person who can predict the end of the world, not even himself. He even uses the author “John” to show that it’s mainly because of the name that it’s actually in the Cannon. He parallels the Gnostic Gospels and the Shepherd of Hermas with the Book of Revelation by showing how the former two were rejected from the cannon because of the origin of the author. He states that the name John could’ve caused many to think that he was once of the original 12 disciples thus automatically earning Revelation a spot in the cannon.Nevertheless after he establishes the fact that the book’s place is questionable, he moves on to how it has affected history.

The following chapters after chapter 4 reference various figures in history and their interpretation of the Book of Revelation ranging from criticisms to the church or a semi literal metaphor for the end of the world. For instance, Hildegard of Bingen interpreted the book metaphorically and believed that the antichrist will arise from the church because she thought the woman in labor symbolized the church and the beast inside her symbolized the antichrist. Brother John on the other hand, was able to use the Book of Revelation in order to tell people of the sins of the church in part due to the fact that indulgences were rather popular at the time. Nevertheless as the world modernizes, the Book of Revelation is used less for religious critique and more for a literal end of the world for its readers.

When I read the Book of Revelation, it played out as if it was some religious movie that involved with Jesus as well as a large cast of characters. I never directly involved myself with Christian material such as the Bible, but I could see why people who had prior experience with reading the Bible could benefit from reading the Book of Revelation. There seemed to be a lot of references to characters and in fact, it’s the last book of the New Testament, so expecting that whoever read the bible were to have read it in order, the reader would’ve been accustomed to almost every character. Therefore, I don’t think I fully understood the deeper meaning behind the text since it pretty much took it for face value.

Kirsch seemed to fuse both religious themes and historic significance between certain items in the Bible. For example, in chapter two, he lists the messiahs that the Jews used to believe and the one that would eventually be known as Jesus (46-48). He also uses references to other books within the Bible in order to show an ideal messiah, and tying that in to the history of the previous messiahs when Jews and Greeks were in conflict, one could speculate that certain books in the Bible are trying to glorify a messiah’s role (49). I admire how he is able to use history and religion to show “why” certain things were shown. Also, while I read the Book of Revelation, the video game Halo popped up into my head because of its constant use of the number seven. Nevertheless I like Kirsch’s ability to balance religion and history without preaching to the reader.