Racing Toward Armageddon

The Three Great Religions and a Plot to End the World

By: Michael Baigent

Narrated by: John Lee

Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

Will current generations live to see Armageddon? Are there really sinister forces at work, encouraging its imminent arrival? If so, who exactly are they?

In his latest investigative book, Michael Baigent takes us to the assembly hall of the UN, the boardrooms of major businesses and powerful lobbying groups, the cabinet meetings of world leaders, the ranches of cattle breeders, the churches of the faithful, and the narrow winding streets of modern Jerusalem, revealing to us the many diverse, public, and clandestine figures behind a perilous messianic agenda.

By unveiling truly bizarre alliances, revisiting centuries-old ghostly events still haunting the birthplaces of religion, unraveling complex threads of history to discern the difference between myth and prophecy, and providing a thorough explication of the religious texts underlying all of this madness in the context of the times in which they were written, Baigent presents a very different view of the past, present, and future than that perpetuated by many loose interpretations of scripture.

What are faith force multipliers? Which members of the U.S. military top brass have fought to employ them? Which world leader belongs to a secret messianic society called the Hojjatieh? What is the Chalcedon Foundation? And what is the correlation between its tenets, those of sharia law, and the fulfillment of end-time prophecies?

The answers to these questions and others will intrigue, mystify, and enrage you, whether you're a person of faith or a staunch secularist. But the author's goal is not simply to shock the reader - it is to help diffuse the time bomb that has been set by the hard-liners of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

In the end, Baigent asks these questions to deliver an urgent message: that spiritual yearning is actually a deep and personal issue of awareness, one that can bring hope and tolerance to the world, rather than the self-superiority and control that are born of fear and conflict.

©2009 Michael Baigent (P)2009 HarperCollins Publishers

Interesting conspiracy nitpicking

The author seems to have had a messy research desk, because he keeps jumping from one thing to another in a way that shows that he's throwing the blame for everything wrong with the world on belief systems he has little to no understanding about.

He did almost reach a bold conclusion at the end, but backed off just short of stating it and instead went the secular way, which would definitely boost sales and make it more acceptable to people who like to have authors pat them on the back. I'm talking about how he almost admitted that Islam is right and all gods are one.

I hope the next author has more backbone, and writes boldly to the logical conclusion instead of appealing to a wider audience.

Brilliant!

His research was impeccable. Questions I've had about some of the new religions dominating the American landscape were answered. There are extremists in all three of the Abrahamic religions try to bring on Armageddon and the rapture. These people are increasingly dangerous as they gain power in the government arena. Their goals are religious and their premise as Bagient so brilliantly deconstructs is wrong. This would all be about more groups waiting for their religious truths to light up the skies except for TGEIR infiltration into the highest levels of government. I hope our Constitution can hold these theocrats at bay.

a real mind opener

I've actually listened to this book several times and always pick up some bit of information I had missed previously. Well thought out, researched, and executed.