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by Bryan Zepp Jamieson
04/26/04 http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Religious/rapture.htm
Folks in most developed countries are utterly flabbergasted to learn
that
evolution is controversial in the United States. They think - at
first - that the controversy lies in scientific
debate over the exact
mechanisms of evolution, or the course taken that led from one species
to another. Although,
they reason, with our knowledge of DNA and the
functions of the genes becoming ever more exact, there are less gaps
in
our store of knowledge to debate over.
So, these folks ask, why is debate increasing in the United States?
That's
where the flabbergasting comes in. In the US, the debate is
over whether evolution occurred at ALL, and there are
a good 30% of
the population who not only completely reject the idea of evolution,
but stridently demand that evolution
be taught on an equal footing
with amazing fairy tales about great world wide floods and an account
of creation that
not only contradicts all scientific knowledge, but
even itself (the bible has two contradictory accounts of creation).
There is a large chunk of the population that believes the earth
stopped rotating for 36 hours during the battle of
Jericho, or that
representatives of every species on earth were crammed into a boat
sixty feet long, and (for the
sake of creation science) that dinosaurs
and humans once cohabited the planet.
No, really. About 30% of
Americans run around believing stuff like
this. They're serious. Some of them want to change what's taught
in
schools to mesh with these notions.
The best selling books on the fiction lists over the past 7 years or
so
are the "Left Behind" series, which purport to be a "fictionalized
but realistic" account of the Rapture, the End of Days,
when all good
Christians go to heaven and the rest of us have to stay put and deal
with the IRS, TV commercials, Britney
Spears and all the rest of
Satan's imps. It's all based on the book of Revelation, the final
book of the bible written by St. John the Seriously Stoned, who acts
as a reminder that magic mushrooms grow on the
Greek island of Patmos.
The problem is that Revelation, like most such mystical babble, says pretty much whatever
you want to interpret it to say. And for 1500 years or so, nobody interpreted it in any way similar to the "Left Behind" series.
But then, according to a book just out by Lutheran Minister Barbara R. Rossing (The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in
the Book of Revelation, Westview), a girl in Scotland in 1830 had a series of "visions" (barely pubescent girls and religious
mania sometimes combine like that, usually with unfortunate results) and a preacher named Darby elaborated on them, inventing
different epochs with different rules to mask over the general incoherence of the girls vision. Rossing concludes, "The Rapture
is a racket."
Biblical prophecy is utter drivel. As Parke Godwin once put it,
"Christians have been
waiting 2,000 years for the other shoe to drop"
why it hasn't happened yet, despite all the "wars and rumors of wars"
and countless other "signs" that are a normal part of the human
condition, and of course, simultaneously explaining
why it's going to
go ahead and happen any day now.
The one point all the thousands of such prognostications had
in common
is that none of them were worth anything. In fact, the bible itself
debunks all efforts of prognostication
in advance, not only saying "no
man may know the hour or the day," but even Christianity's central
figure, Jesus,
made it clear that he expected the Big Wrap-Up to occur
in the lifetimes of his audience, so no later than 100 AD.
I don't
guess that happened.
Usually the doomsday prophecies are reasonably harmless. A small
group
of people hole up somewhere for the rapture, and when it doesn't
happen, they just figure their leader made a mistake
in the
arithmetic, and most go right on believing. Sometimes the leader
convinces his followers that the way
to not get left behind is by
signing everything they own over to the leader, and come the day of
reckoning, the group
finds that they got left behind in a different
sort of way. Unusual events can trigger it in individuals: a few
years ago, we had an unusual display of northern lights, and one woman
went howling out into the street, convinced
the End was Nigh.
Fortunately, friends and relatives corralled her before she could hurt
herself and she got over
it.
Sometimes you get suicide cults, such as at Jonestown, or Waco, or the
flying saucer people in San Diego.
These tend to clump around
"odometer moments" where the year or an anniversary of some other
event tends to have two
or three zeros at the end, and the millennia
years tend to bring about many predictions of doom, doom! I say. The
most famous one in the last millennium showed that such nuttery isn't
the sole province of religion, as thousands
sold their homes and
headed for the hills to wait out the fall of civilization caused by
Y2K.
Sometimes, entire
nations succumb to such madness. The Zulu Nation
committed mass suicide charging Enfield rifles with nothing more
than
spears on the word of a young girl that a vision had told her the
Zulus would win. They didn't. The
French fought the English based on
visions from a young girl, Joan of Arc, and actually won, driving the
English out
of France. Then, showing remarkable wisdom, they burned
Joan of Arc at the stake, since the only thing worse than
a prophet of
doom is a prophet of doom who is correct. Look up the story of
Cassandra (another young girl -
perhaps we need to start putting
masking tape over their
mouths when they turn 10 or so). Religious nuts
with a vision can
wreak remarkable damage, as in the case of Innocent III, Rasputin, or
Pol Pot (communism became
a secular religion). Some, such as
Cromwell, even had good intentions in the beginning, and became
exasperated
when people remained blind to God's will. Unfortunately,
that particular type of exasperation comes readily to theocracies,
and
usually means lots of dead people strewn about the countryside. It
did then, it does now. And of course,
claiming religious vision is a
province of nearly every dictator in history. Hitler furnishes us
with any number
of quotes about how he was performing God's will.
The Rapture gained traction in America in 1970 (per Rossing) when
Hal
Linsey wrote "The Late, Great Planet Earth". She wryly notes that
Lindsey has had to revise his prophecies
in subsequent editions as
both the Soviets and the Red Chinese became less credible antichrists.
Now it's Islam
that is the antichrist. Maybe next week it will be the
New York Yankees, who would have had my vote all along.
None
of which would have meant much more than society having another
crackpot special interest group for unscrupulous politicians
to pander
to and manipulate in the normal course of events. But this is
America, where large percentages of
the population believe in UFOs,
that Elvis lives, and that Saddam was involved in 9/11. Having a
large population
of ignorant and gullible is a drawback to begin with,
but we are in a culture inculcated to believe ignorance is just
part
of being a good neighbor, and gullibility is a sign that you have an
open mind.
Having an administration
that is willing to exploit the Rapture crowd
as a source of cheap votes is just one of those things you expect in a
Democracy.
Reagan used them to his advantage, and then spent the next
eight years promising them everything they wanted while making
sure
the country wasn't ruined by them actually collecting on the promise.
What we have now is something worse.
Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney
believe in the Rapture - they even had some crackpot come in and
lecture astounded
Pentagon chiefs on Bible codes - the notion that the
placement of words in the Bible signified strategy for the military
to
follow in the 21st century. Condi Rice believes in the Rapture, and,
along with Karl Rove, has worked strenuously
to convince Putsch that
only an Israel that controlled all of its supposed ancestral lands -
much of the middle east,
including Baghdad - was what would be needed
to take Condi up to heaven.
And Putsch himself?
Yes, he believes
in the Rapture nonsense. The rest of the crackpots
in the administration couldn't be doing what they're doing if
he
didn't.
American foreign policy is in the hands of people who are seeking the
end of the world in order
to hurry their personal salvation.
Which leaves the question: in a potential second term, would Putsch
encourage
a nuclear war in order to kind of hurry his ascension along?
Not dead, in jail, or a slave? Thank a liberal!
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