According to the website the Rapture will occur today at 6 pm, local time. Yes, it said local time. Why should those snobby Euro-Christians get raptured first? Everyone knows America has the best born-agains. USA! USA! According to Rapture “expert” Harold Camping about 200 million people will be raised up to Heaven, leaving 7.8 billion of us to be punished by God. Vengeance is mine, sayeth Lord.
Those of us who are rational struggle to understand the End-Times Fever. Why do so many believe in the Rapture? Obviously, there are a lot of sad little people in the world. And by sad I don’t just mean stupid but unhappy. People whose lives are so miserable they cannot wait for it to end. And what could be more appealing to the poor, the downtrodden or the just plain dumb than instant heaven? Why struggle with a job, a mortgage, car repairs and kids, when you can go to your eternal reward today?
Other Rapturists are simply full of hate. They hate secular society because it doesn’t fit into the tiny Christian shoebox where they live. These people are happy to sit at the right hand of the Lord, but even more delighted to watch their enemies get tortured by Satan, at the bequest of their all loving Father. And their enemies are legion: gays, abortionists, sexual active women, blacks, Jews, liberals, Hollywood, Obama – you name it and they can tell you why that group deserves to burn in hell. And they can tell you when – after 6 pm today.
Conspiracy theorists love to feel important. And the Rapture is the mother of all conspiracies: a special few who know the truth about hidden powers, evil plans, and events only they can understand. And most importantly secrets. Rapturists have secret and you don’t. They want to tell you the secret but if you don’t believe them, it’s because you are too blind to see, or you’ve been duped by Satan or Obama, who many Rapturists feel are the same person.
Think how special the Rapture crowd feels. Out of the billions on the planet, they are the chosen ones. “God loves everyone”, but a Rapturist knows “he loves me more than you.” How reassuring to be that special. Moderate Christians dismiss the extremist Rapture crowd for not being loving and Christ like. But Jesus himself really set the tone here. After all if you claim to be the Son of God and tell the world they have to believe in you to get to Heaven, then don’t be surprised when your followers become arrogant. Christians can sugar coat their beliefs with that “gosh I’m just trying to be a good person” rhetoric, but bottom line they know that they are the Chosen Ones because the Bible, the Pope, their parents or voices in their head tell them it is so.
“How silly,” main stream Christians say, “to believe that Jesus will literally come down and take people away.” Is it any less absurd to think Jesus died and after three days rose from the grave? That he had special powers to raise the dead, cure blindness and turn water into wine? But, Christians protest, Jesus was the son of God and God can do anything. Except, I guess, vacuum 200 million believers into the sky at 6 pm today. Apparently that’s just too much to believe even for most believers.
The amazing thing about religion is not the moral code, the sense of community, or the will to do good. No, the true miracle of religious belief is that people want to believe so badly that they filter reality through a sieve, only keeping what fits, and rationalizing the rest. As a non-believer, I’m not waiting for Heaven, not at 6 pm today nor the end of my life, but at 6:05 I look forward to hear the believers explain why God changed his mind.
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