T'wasn't that long ago that it was bible thumpers who ran through the streets proclaiming that the end of the world was at hand. Perhaps the thumpers are still running amok, but these days their proclamations and shouts are drowned out by the apocalyptic left -- the godless left, that is. After the biblical Apocalypse comes Christ's glorious eternal reign on earth. After the left's apocalypse comes... nothing, nada, zero, zilch. The left has visions of cataclysm dancing in their conceited heads and it ain't pretty.

"Nothing" is the endpoint of godlessness (why gussy it up by calling it "secularism?"). The left is increasingly godless, and like all the other bilge and poison spewed by them over the decades, today's bad stuff is infiltrating the broader culture. About a third of twenty-somethings are "religiously unaffiliated." The number is anticipated to rise.

The science channels regularly feature cataclysmic programming -- everything from speculation about meteor strikes a-coming to an endless rehashing of the meteor strike that dinged the dinos some 66 million years ago. The History Channel gives us "Mega Disasters." The Discovery Channel presents global warming claptrap, complete with dire visuals. A lot of global warming doom shows like to depict the Big Apple underwater, with Miss Liberty's torch poking up above the waves (a quasi rip-off of the original Planet of the Apes classic final scene).

Or scenarios offer the devastation that awaits L.A. when that Big Shake hits... or when that Big Tsunami crashes along Southern Cal's white sand beaches, swallowing surfers, rollerbladers, and near-naked sun worshippers. Or the Category 100 tornado that one day will rip up Kansas City, Dallas, and Buffalo (et al), thanks to crazy Jupiter-class winds stirred up by -- yessiree, you guessed it -- manmade global warming.

Even when it comes to doom, gloom, and destruction, the left-dominated pop culture can't escape its conceit: If man can't build a utopian world he can and will devastate the existing one. Cool, very cool -- and very pathetic.

Recall the recent excitement over the meteor that exploded above Chelyabinsk in the Russian Urals. That was a newsworthy event, given its oddity and potential for real disaster, so it served as a source of healthy fascination and speculation. But it doubtlessly fueled or bolstered the thriving world-will-end-by-meteor-strike industry.

This from the website Windows to the Universe:

Movies such as Deep Impact and Armageddon seem to have triggered questions from all over the world!

There has been talk that the asteroid 1997XF11 will crash into the Earth in the year 2028. The bottom line is that this asteroid poses no threat to the planet Earth in the next century. But, it will pass by the Earth over and over again in the next centuries, so it is worth knowing what we could do if it ever gets too close!

There's also the concurrent morbid fascination with the dark, the lurid, the supernatural, and violent death on cable, in movies, and in fashion. Yes, fashion.

Consider all those tee-shirts, hoodies, and sweats with skulls or monstery intimations of demons on them that kids buy and wear (as well as maturity-arrested adults). This crappola hangs on racks at Wall Mart and Macy's; the stuff is marketed at internet sites by the gazillion. Dark, lurid, and death emblazoned apparel t'ain't advertising light, hope, and goodness as the aims of modern society. Where are the good angels? What you wear is what you are -- or, at least, what you'll accept. Societal and cultural deviancy are being defined downward at a Target near you.

Cable TV is populated with ghost, ghoul, and demon shows. Ever watch the creepy "A Haunting" on Destination America? How about "Ghost Adventures" (The Travel Channel) or "Ghost Hunters" (Syfy), featuring Zak and Jason, respectively, leading teams around dark mansions, mines, and bars with night-vision cameras and Geiger counters (or some such). For every wholesome kid's movie at AMC or Cinemark, there's three or four blood and gore soaked horror flicks (and the demons usually win). Most everyone likes a good scare, but...

Then there's real crime programming. Ted Bundy, Charlie Manson, and the Night Stalker retellings are only the tip of the iceberg. "I Survived" (Bio) gives graphic moment-by-moment accounts of rapes, bludgeonings, knifings, shootings, abductions, and you name it of victims as told by the victims, who, thank goodness, have lived to tell their grim tales. Sure, the victims survive, but what's the program saying about the wider world in which we live? It's full of some really bad hombres, si? Watch out -- with crime swirling about stronger than those manmade tornadoes that will one day rake the planet, stay locked up at home (not abroad), watch "I Survived," and patronize the show's sponsors (via the internet).

Why is the left so focused on its version of the end times? Why all the morbid and macabre pop culture? Because, ultimately, man as God is pure, unadulterated vainglory; puffery for the deluded and deceitful. Humans, flawed, erring, and sinful, can never create a heaven on earth -- ever. Manmade utopias are fictions dreamed up the Rousseaus, Marxs, Nietzsches, and assorted crackpots, control freaks, and haters (including American progressives like Dewey).

The left witnesses daily that its creations -- governmental, societal, and cultural -- are fatally flawed; the world as created by the left is decaying and decadent. Europeans are spinning down the drain, literally not replacing themselves -- and the United States, thanks to Barack Obama and the left elite, wish to follow Europe in its splendid suicidal march. And as even a blind man sees, the American left's Follow Europe compulsion pertains to more than government; it's the whole gooey, disgusting nihilistic enchilada.

The left has vainly tried to remake mankind and society and all that its has come up with is a mash -- a horrible mash of gas chambers, ovens, killing fields, and gallows; statist bullying; bovine citizenry; rotting cities; dead babies; flash mobs; shiftless, illiterate youths; corrupt pols; gang-banging; boozing, drugging, and sex hedonism; perpetual adolescence; STDs; climbing suicide rates; serial and mass murders; marriages, broken and redefined into meaninglessness; kidlessness; kids foisted on government-run villages -- phew!

The left's utopian blueprint was put in place decades ago, throughout the West and here, chiefly, and is still a work in progress. Yet in recent times (say, back to the 60s, when the bad started to reach critical mass with the counterculture, drugs, riots, upsurges in crime), the first harvests began coming in, and bitter they've proven to be. Expect worse to come, if the present shadows don't change -- and change pronto.

The left is today bankrupt, morally foremost. Its vision sullied by failed works -- works dashed against hard realities. Failure atop bloody failure.

Once, in the early 20th Century, the left, however wrongheaded, was brimming with confident optimism. Mankind could be perfected, societies advanced. Equality, fraternity, and abundance awaited the left's retooled human. Innovation, invention, and technological wonders would lift the human race to bright, airy mountaintops never believed attainable.

But a century or more later, the left is mouthing platitudes, and has degenerated into a tawdry, snarky bunch grabbing for power, perks, and privileges while seeking to impose its will on the masses who it couldn't forge into New Men.

The left's ideology -- its religion -- lies shattered. Left-wingers won't acknowledge that truth publicly; many can't acknowledge it among or to themselves. Lefties are more inclined to rationalize their failures and project them onto the rest of us. Classic psychology.

But the evidence of the left's titanic flop is seen in grim popular culture, and the fixations and obsessions with human-induced or natural cataclysms. It's there, practically, with its advocacy (or countenance) of abortion and euthanasia; it's there in the health care rationing and death panels in Europe and Canada that are coming with rapidity to the U.S. (and here already to a limited degree at VAs and through Medicare and Medicaid).

The left in the West is in the process of suicide. The tragedy is that the left wants a murder-suicide; in other words, the left wants to take us with them. Nihilists can be like that, truculent, grossly selfish, and terribly destructive.

Watch any of the crime shows on cable. You'll get the idea.