Rapture, sweet rapture - won't you lay your hands on me?

Good music plug - if you've not listened to A.A. Bondy's American Hearts, DO IT.  NOW.  It is an excellent new folk album.


In other news, the internets (and other media outlets) have been abuzz with Rapturerama.  The biggest winner in this is probably Harold Camping who, assuming that he still gets to hang out with the rest of us after 6 PM PST passes, will be laughing all the way to the bank.  I wonder just how much money this guy has made off his Rapture prediction; if nothing else, he's managed to turn his name into a household catchphrase for the next few days yet...and free publicity, even this kind, is still good for business.  No wonder folks like Barb Rossing talk about a "rapture racket."


Since I'm assuming that I will not be floating toward the heavens without my pants in a few hours, I feel as if I have some time and space to reflect on this schpiel.  It's easy - far, far too easy - to make fun of Camping and his band of fundamentalist loons who have spent the past several months paying obscene amounts of money for billboards and the like.  There's one not too far from me, in Boone - at first, I thought it was a clever ad for a radio series ABOUT the end of days, rather than an actual ad FOR the end of days.  


And, trust me, I have done plenty of mocking.  Schadenfreude is my middle name, and when right-wing Christian nutjobs are involved, you can bet I will be on the front lines of the Humor Brigade...after all, I grew up in the sort of spiritual climate in which apocalyptic-minded fundamentalists sprout up like mushrooms in a humid basement.  It's my own personal version of scream therapy; I have a tremendous amount of fun at the expense of the sort of people who made my spiritual life a living hell of guilt, confusion, and self-hatred as a child and young adult.


But...at the end of the day, this whole "the Rapture is coming!" malarky is just sad, for three reasons.  One - the whole Rapture crap theology load of "organic fertilizer" is just that...a load of non-biblical BS.  The fact that so many people have been deluded into thinking that it's in the Bible breaks my heart.  If you'd like some good historical perspective on this, I recommend reading two books - one is The Rapture Exposed by Barbara Rossing; the other is Mysterious Apocalypse by Arthur W. Wainwright.  Also, if you have a Scofield study Bible...please, for all of our sakes, STOP reading his heretical nonsense.


Number two - people are making tremendous amounts of money off Rapture fear-mongering.  Just think of how much money the Left Behind series made - the things sold like sex novels (to steal a phrase from Kurt Hendel).  Never in the history of humanity have two people made so much bank from books that combine awful writing with awful theology.  Others, like John Hagee, fund their entire ministries from book and video sales that combine this sort of abyssmal (in the fullest sense of the word) distortions of scripture with a radical Right Wing political agenda that, ultimately, aims at ushering in the "end times" by encouraging Zionism so as to provoke conflict in the Middle East.  These people don't love Israel; they want to use Israel as a means to an end.  I, personally, feel as if the biblical mandate to "pray for the peace of Jerusalem" means including all of its residents, including Arabs, in that prayer, and it ought to preclude supporting the sorts of actions that involve trampling on people's human rights.


Number three - ALL of this, probably including my own overly volatile writing on the subject, does not do ANYTHING to improve the reputation of the Church.  On one side, the Harold Campings and John Hagees of the world make the rest of us look like neanderthalesque buffoons whose "Christian love" only extends to those who look and think and act and speak and believe just like us.  On the other, those of us who feel the need to speak out against the madness that has infected too much of the Church end up perpetuating the image of Christians as a bunch of contentious, quarrelsome children (of the Heavenly Father).  I claim my own guilt in this.


I suppose change starts with me, with learning to tone down the snark and the angrily impassioned outcries about the corrupting of the Gospel that, sadly, has come to define what it means to be "Christian" in the eyes of too many people.  Maybe someday, I'll learn.