This Is Pure Genius

If that's a real book, I'd like to read it.

I'm guessing it's mostly satirical (jews don't believe in the rapture). I wouldn't mind giving it a read, sounds like it could be interesting.

And neither do 90% of Christians. Of course, the 10% that do have a near lock on the US Congress. This doesn't cover the Supreme Court Federalist Bishops who are seeking a return to Medieval Christendom. 

The Rapture was unknown to South Baptists and such until recently. Books like the Left Behind series and TV evangelist shows have spread the Rapture theology in other mostly Evangelical churches and eve some uneducated Catholics are buying to it even though it is an heretical belief. 

It was an obscure idea within Fundamentalist Evangelical millennialism cults which by the 19th century were getting ready for the Second Coming. It had been two thousand years and “signs and wonders” were lining up just right according to a too close reading of the Bible. But the Rapture itself was not taken seriously by most evangelical theologians.

Then came the Bomb. 

America has always been a hot test kitchen for Christians to try out new kinds of spirituality and Bible readings without the official church’s goons stopping you.

Your former church is all about spreading the word of God’s salvation to save as many people from the torments of eternal hellfire and to help bring about a New Heaven and a New Earth which God has promised his faithful followers he will bless them with. However, Armageddon will not be pretty and there will be suffering even among the righteous.

So the Rapture gets one into Heaven just as Jesus is coming down to start WWIII with Satan (and Libber forces), so no pain and the faithful have a front row seat to watch Battle World Earth from. 

I don’t think it is coincidence the Rapture caught on when the American apocalyptic minded Christians began pondering what a nuclear war would be like. Modern Science makes Christian prophecy possible, at least annihilation part. That’s some irony. 

Postmillennialism itself is heretical because it presupposes the mind of God. Jesus himself warns against this sin of pride and to not do this. No man knows. You can expect Christ’s return (amillenarism) because he was preaching the Kingdom of God, which was an already hot apocalyptic movement going on a century or more before he took it up, which required Jews to be purified and prepared for the new King David, the greatest of all Jewish heroes, to recreate the glory that was Solomon, before he, that is Jesus, died. He promised he would return before the last of his disciples dies him or herself. And he said this after he allegedly come back from the dead. (It seems Jesus looked nothing like his former self, he had to keep convincing people.) 

This eschatology belief, which was/is heretical in old and modern Judaism as well, was transferred several decades after it was obvious Christ was not returning and none of the original disciples remained, into portents of Jesus’ Nativity and Resurrection and mining the Hebrew Scriptures to reconcile what they got so wrong. 

Who is Jesus and when is he coming back become the central arguments between bickering factions of Christians for centuries until the Catholic Church finally won out over the last remaining Arian Christians. This set up the parameters of discussion for future millennialist eschatologies. Even so, there was no mainstream Protestant break from this orthodoxy until the 19th century as the end of the millennium approached and many new piety churches were no longer being persecuted by mainstream churches. Heretics are now called heterodox. 

The eschatology rests on this passage: 1 Thessalonians 4:17. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be suddenly caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will always be with the Lord.

Jesus never said this, Paul did. 

Paul is writing a letter offering up comfort and advice to his friends and followers, probably no more than a few hundred, in far off Greece, he was a big letter writer. He says, 4 “For we know, brothers and sisters loved by God, that he has chosen you, 5 because our gospel came to you not simply with words but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and deep conviction. You know how we lived among you for your sake. 6 You became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you welcomed the message in the midst of severe suffering with the joy given by the Holy Spirit. 7 And so you became a model to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia. 8 The Lord’s message rang out from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia—your faith in God has become known everywhere. Therefore we do not need to say anything about it, 9 for they themselves report what kind of reception you gave us. They tell how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, 10 and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.” 

Now these former Greeks pagans do not know a thing about Jesus only that if you believe in his power to save you from God’s and to help you here and now. Just keep the faith. 

(This is the first time in history a new religious cult proselytized itself in such a way. Believe in my God, turn away from the idols. All other cults including the Roman cult did not care what other cults believed, so long as you acknowledged the Unknown God, the one above Zeus. The God the philosophers believed.) 


Paul could write like a motherfucker. Damn good. Anyway, he’s talking about what they believed in hope will happen to them and their dead loved ones when Jesus returns within the next few years or so and to not mourn these people or ask why did they die before Jesus would he return. He is giving them reasons to remain hopeful this new cult will pay off and not go back or move onto the next pagan temple. That’s not what Jesus said he promised.

Paul and followers had to keep coming up with reasons for new converts to remain in the early church since they had not reproduced their population yet. This required more fine tuning of the message and eventually pagan ideas themselves creeped in until Jesus became a Roman like Jove and the Apocalypse the war to end all wars. I daresay those hair-raising Revelation stories attracted a lot of interest from younger men. 

Yes they do, Harold. All futurism is. No human being knows how the world will end, all we can do is guess. If anyone attempts this while speaking for the church, they are subject to excommunication. There is no blueprint for what will happen despite what is written in Revelations or any other eschatology passages in the Bible. The Apocalypse of John is allusions that can have multiple interruptions, it’s best left alone by the faithful. Why do you think the Roman Catholic discouraged reading the Bible until Vatican II?

The Church itself almost didn’t include it in the final canon, but it was such a thrilling read and could be applied to any of the Roman Empire regimes at the time. But they never had a doctrine interrupting this one line in Bible as a physical assumption of living human beings literally into the clouds to meet Jesus on his way down to begin 1000 years of Tribulation. Had anyone said so in the olden days, they would’ve been burned at the stake. Paul is not speaking literally. That’s obvious in the context of what he wrote. 

This Apocalyptic preaching ministries are a chaotic buffet of cherry picked passages that do not say what these fat and sleek little preachers are selling to the uneducated. 

Read the Wikipedia history on the Rapture. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapture