I Can't Decide Whether You Should Live Or Die

[dexfarkin]

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/05/the-anti-anti-rapture-position.html

Ah, hand-wringing apologists urging us not to taunt the marginally sane believers that last Saturday was the due date for the Trump and the Call. It vaguely reminds me of the letter that a group of GOP Congressmen sent to President Obama asking him not to politicize their support of the Ryan plan, which would eliminate Medicare. Essentially, it boils down to the same thing:

"We believe in and wholeheartedly support something that means the mass suffering of a huge number of people in order to revel in our own narrow interpretation of reality and moral superiority, but it's unfair to use it against us when our ideas prove disasteriously unpopular and/or wholly false."

I'm told that people quit their jobs, sold their possessions and homes, in some cases, put their pets to sleep, and otherwise acted like brainwashed cultists (which, let us be honest, they are) in the face of their belief to be one of God's special children ready for an eternity of sitting on his lap. Maybe this would be worth some level of sympathy if it wasn't for the sheer odiousness of their beliefs.

It is a toxic stew of self-righteous ignorance and the gleeful anticipation of punishment on every person who ever listened to their twaddle and said 'that doesn't sound right'. In my experience, devout people fall in one of two camps - those who believe, and want you to believe, but in the face of refusal will quietly offer to be there if questioned - and the others, who threaten you will destruction if you fail to fall into line. The former represent the experiences that have taught me that faith and belief can be a positive force. The latter are simply intolerant kooks who have found a more socially acceptable format to wrap their hate up in.

Which is why I won't shed a lot of tears for people who believe with every fibre that the vast portion of humanity deserves to be ended in pain and suffering and fire which they get to observe from the bosum of Heaven like some grisly reality show. If they believe in their vengeful God, I guess the naked contempt for their happiness is fitting; an eye for an eye after all.

Comments

[iamgerg.livejournal.com]

My 1000 words

[writteninsable.livejournal.com]

Yeah... some guy in my area signed his BMW over to his neighbor and gave a bunch of stuff away - he was on the radio talking about it. *shakes head*

I suppose I don't feel contempt for them so much as a bewildered sense of pity. It's got to be a lonely sort of existence, waiting for everyone around you to be smote.

[pathology-doc.livejournal.com]

Ultimately any Christian worth the name would have remembered Christ's admonition that no man may know the day or the hour, and told these idiots to go fuck themselves - actually I'm disappointed that senior Catholic Cardinals, Episcopalian moderators, etc. don't do more to call this bullshit out.

I'm told that people quit their jobs, sold their possessions and homes, in some cases, put their pets to sleep, and otherwise acted like brainwashed cultists (which, let us be honest, they are) in the face of their belief to be one of God's special children ready for an eternity of sitting on his lap.

The irony here is how attached they still were to their possessions, to go to the trouble of getting rid of them. SERIOUSLY, people - if you're going to be taken bodily into heaven and everyone else is going to get smashed up in an earthquake that's double-figures on the Richter scale, why go to all the trouble? Just fucking leave it there. What really gets me is not the insanity of their belief in "the Rapture": it's the mind-blowing inconsistency of their behaviour leading up to it.

The mature Christian who looks toward the Second Coming does so in anticipation of final, perfect communion with God. I suspect a lot of these people saw it, in contrast, as the way out of their earthly woes... which is why so many desperate people continue to get sucked into shit like this. Unfortunately some of them take others out with them - like the deluded (and, I suspect, chronically psychotically depressed) woman who slit her children's throats with a box-cutter before trying to do the same to herself. What passes for evangelical Christianity in the United States keeps missing the point, but arch-atheists like PZ Myers don't make the problem any better by getting just as much of a hate-boner on for evolutionist moderates as for fuckbags like these.

[jim-smith.livejournal.com]

In my experience, devout people fall in one of two camps - those who believe, and want you to believe, but in the face of refusal will quietly offer to be there if questioned - and the others, who threaten you will destruction if you fail to fall into line. The former represent the experiences that have taught me that faith and belief can be a positive force. The latter are simply intolerant kooks who have found a more socially acceptable format to wrap their hate up in.

This is a completely fair distinction, but bear in mind that a lot of people don't bother to make it when they criticize the intolerant kooks, just as a lot of atheism opponents don't distinguish between regular atheists and the obnoxious prick varieties. That's why both sides are always playing the umbrage card, because each has well-meaning sorts getting attacked for something they don't do.

The May 21 crowd frankly brought the ridicule upon themselves, and to be blunt they should be able to take it because they would expect this sort of "persecution." Evangelicals arguing that the Rapture is unpredictable but nevertheless imminent are a different stripe, but invite the same response for basically the same reason, whether they know it or not.

However, what bothers me is the implication that the discrediting of May 21 somehow disconfirms any form of Christian eschatology, or Christian doctrine altogether, as though Harold Camping is somehow representative of the whole religion, or even a large portion of it. Far be it from me to deny anyone their "the world didn't end" party, but the defeat of one crackpot who doesn't understand his own dogma doesn't really settle the broader debate.