h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

'Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back."

Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the country. They are the people who believe the Bible is literally true -- one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index.

That's right -- the rapture index. Google it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the "Left Behind" series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious-right warrior Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.

Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): Once Israel has occupied the rest of its "biblical lands," legions of the antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon.

As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to Heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow. . .

. . . millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed -- even hastened -- as a sign of the coming apocalypse.'

http://truthout.org/docs_2005/013105F.shtml

anhaga, when I was first a Christian, I was in a church that believed the whole Rapture thing! It took me years to find out that it *wasn't* mainstream, or even accurate theology. (Which *is* an issue for me, tho' obviously not for you and others...)

It's really a truly terrible idea, responsible for a lot of the uncaring attitude some people take towards ecology and other things.

au contraire, it is an issue for me, just as is the Wahabi hold on Saudi Arabia. I know that the whole 'rapture' thing is not part of the mainstream of Christianity, but it is becoming frighteningly close to the mainstream of American Christianity and, most terrifying, to the mainstream of American political culture.

There are many American Christians who don't realise that it's not "theologically correct", and don't know that the whole doctrine dates no further back than John Nelson Darby in 1832. (Darby founded the Brethren, which is the group I was in - there are two branches, the Open and the Exclusive - I was in the Open.)

Then I joined the Anglican church, a particular one which regarded the Brethren as a cult, because they had many ex-Brethren there. (A woman I knew in the Brethren, a chapel regarded as dangerously liberal by the others in Auckland) used to call them The Siblings.))

I still have affection for people I knew in the Siblings, because the chapel I attended was for the most part, attended by truly loving and happy people. Not the kind of scary condemning and hate-filled people who, judging by what I read, make up fundamentalism in the USA.

(Some of my experience on h2g2 has led me to believe that there is a kind of atheistic fundamentalism which can be as hate-filled as any religious one. Fortunately followers of such an extreme non-faith are rare, and the majority of atheists are reasonable live-and-let-live people.)

I get the impression there are a lot of hurting people out there on every side of every fence. Sadly, people who are hurting often find their only way to communicate is by hurting someone else, which, of course, is not communicating.

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True...