“we’re better than you areeeeeeeee……”

As I want to spend what’s left of my time here on earth with my family, I decided not to write a new post on today’s rapture. Instead, here’s something I first posted back in October 2004.

I’m confused, do we get to keep our clothes when the rapture comes, or not? What about false teeth and hairpieces? I think you should be able to keep all that stuff, and your money too… What good is it being in the presence of God if, without your glasses, you can’t see him?

Clearly the young lady up front got to keep her breast implants and the Collagen in her lips though. That’s encouraging.

HERE ARE A FEW OF MY FAVORITE COMMENTS:

Mark: I just had a thought… what if the rapture is just a giant cosmic vacuum cleaner sent to suck up all the debris on earth?

Mark: And it seems to be implied, by this image, that only hot, young women and men with clothing from the 1970’s will be spared god’s wrath.

Mark: If I’d known it was this cool, I’d have become born again year’s ago. Seriously, if they’d just come out and told me that it was only going to be attractive white people, and that we’d get tennis shoes with rocket boosters, I’d have signed up without a second thought… No wonder these people want to apocalypse so badly.

Keith: Call me a snob, but I’m for a segregated heaven – free souls to the right, souls still stuck in bodies to the left. If you think about all of the people that have already died, then the “bodied” people are going to be a very small minority – the handicapped of heaven.

Dave Morris: I think Pat Robertson and his 700 Club junkies deserve a lot of credit for popularizing the end times bullshit. I remember watching that crap on TV back in the late 70’s / early 80’s with him interpreting the book of revelations. My mom was a big fan. I liked the idea of the Beast. I liked dinosaurs when I was a kid and the thought of a big reptile coming to earth and wreaking havoc interested me a lot. It also smacked of the good versus evil on the grand scale – like Ultraman versus Godzilla.

( As an aside, I would pay good money to see a well made (read: poorly made) monster film of GIant Jesus versus the Beast.)

Another component of the early evangelical absurdity was the Non Denominational Prayer Groups. She used to drag my brother and I along to her Friday evening NDPG meetings in the basement library of Our Lady of Good Counsel in Plymouth where these pasty and saccharine people would stand in a group, ask questions, open the bible and find some meaning in a random passage. The most baffling part was watching these grown ups, mother included, “speaking in tongues.” Still sends a low voltage shock up my spinal just recalling the scene.

My brother and I, needless to say, grew tired of all their nonsense. We would take books out into the hall and throw them at each other ( we were fond of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drews ), smash chairs together, tear up the flowers outside, etc. Eventually my mom left us at home with good ol pops, the self proclaimed Hedonist, and the boob tube. So much for our salvation.

I remember my mom buying those little comic books for me at the local christian bookstore- on Ford road just east of Canton Center across from Meijers. Eden Books maybe? I remember one being on the rapture. Don’t remember the specifics. Do remember the floating people though.

One interpretation of the rapture I remember was that the dead would be brought up first. I had a lot of questions about this one. Sounded pretty cool to me. Pops only shook his head at me when I asked these questions. ” Go ask your mother.”

I use to try and reason out what exactly the Rature and all the other end of the world prophecies mean, but any attempt at it requires leaving reason behind so it is useless. My feeling is that most of the outspoken Evangelicals / Pentecostals out there have had some tramatic event in their life that has put everything on the level of the emotional. Reason is no longer worth a damn because reason cannot explain their experience or the world around them . Their suffering is a mirror of Christs suffering and through this corollary, their life has purpose. Look at how well “the Passion” did. Every kick, thorn, puncture wound, etc. was a corollary to some perceived personal injustice that could not be reasoned out. I’m not kidding.

And then I start thinking about how evil travels and what the manifestations of it are…

Ken: Dave, you didn’t even touch upon the three days of darkness and how we shouldn’t answer the door while it is in progress. That was the thing that hit it home for me!

Also, I see that Archie, Jughead, Betty, et al. are left behind. And rightly so, the fucking sinners!

Dave Morris Yeah. The three days of darkness was the one that got me up in a nut. Before the grand finale of corpses flying through the air and the pit of hell opening up so that King Size Christ can toss all us useless pieces of shits in, there is something about the three days of darkness and how there will be no light – save for the blessed candles that my mother and many others have stocked away in their basement. No shit. There is something else about a red light that cirlces around the earth. I can’t remember what it is supposed to do. I have blocked a lot of this out. I had already forgotten about not answering the door. There was a comic book about that one too. Not the kind of stuff you give to a 10 year old. Fucking bizzare.

I remember trying to reason that one out. Magnetic pulse from nuclear war knocks out all power for 3 days, the darkness is from all the dust kicked up from the bombs, etc. Story of my life – trying to stuff a square peg through a round hole. I know the pieces fit.

Shouldn’t you be in bed getting your rest Ken? It is late out there in AtlGA. Sleep tight. Make sure you ask the Lord to take your soul if you happen to die before you awake. I suppose that if you are truely good, he’d just take it irregardless of whether you ask politely or not.