SUMMARY OF LEARNERS
INTRO & VOCAB
Author's Note: The word 'Rapture' cannot be found in the Bible. Some biblical allusions reflect something like it—but not enough for praiseworthy prophecy. This is not serious biblical scholarship, but it is being abused as fantasy fiction and vicious wish fulfillment.
Jesus said the hour of His Return was unknown even to Him, and known only by His Father. He warned us of false prophets who would dare proclaim it (Mark 13).
Stage a train wreck and call it Good News; stuff as many innocents aboard as you can, to their doom. Whether you choose to play this dirty trick or not, you shifty fundamentalists, I choose this other.
“For that matter,
“Historians of olden
times affirm that, far from fighting this error, priests endorsed it with all
their might. It was said in church councils:
‘It approaches, the Advent of God in
His terrible majesty, the Eternal Shepherd
before Whom every pastor and his flock will be summoned.’ Chroniclers report that sermons in
“Rich and poor alike, the great and the small, came running to give, ever fearful of appearing too stingy before The Eternal, and returning anew to bring some offering fit to draw the Sovereign Judge’s favor. And not only did they give, but they prayed everywhere, figuring the remaining days that one could hope to live. An unspeakable trance paralyzed the world, fear was everywhere; and the contracts of the day bore a funereal headline in Latin, ‘The end of the world is nigh!’
“Priests who received gold, abbots and bishops whose holdings swelled with rich domains, exhorted all the great sinners who sought to expiate their sins and whose future worries no longer troubled them, to let go of worldly things, of so often ill-got riches that they would not need in order to die. ‘And monks awaited in cloistered abstinence, in solitary struggles of the heart, amidst temptations, falls, remorse and strange visions’ for that fatal moment, because they, too, believed in the end of the world, and it is allowable to think that they hoped to disarm celestial anger through prayers and acts of kindness. And if some were rash enough to target a gullible public with odious scams, surely many more shared the common outlook.
“Otherwise, one would
have thought that nature herself seemed to be preparing for some vast
cataclysm; the three or four years preceding 1,000 were lush with evil of all
kinds: floods, famine and pestilential disease, everything seemed in accord to
gather a succession of disasters destined to ruin mankind. Nonetheless,
the year 1,000 arrived and the world remained. Once that fatal date passed
without fulfilling its grim promise, humanity felt itself aroused and
reborn. And it can be said that it was from that moment on, that the
priesthood’s real power began, since it found itself holding substantial wealth
that was a great help to secure its dominion over the world. Superstition
reigned mistress supreme over the spirit of men.”
<http://www.paris-pittoresque.com/histoire/16b.htm>
Most of the Rapture took place in about two weeks. Then it purred along as people Disappeared in ones and twos … here and there, now and then.
At first, it was only earsplitting preachers, televised evangelists and radio sermonizers who Disappeared. The New Year began on a Sunday. Most airwaves thudded to dead air time. Radio sermons and media preachers shut up mid-pomposity. Silent TV test patterns replaced nonstop pleas for more cash, bigotry and exclusion in the holy name of Jesus Christ.
Pulpits emptied in front of panic-stricken congregations. They fled when their preachers Disappeared. Only later did they realize what they had been fleeing. Then they came back and prayed much more fervently, despite dwindling numbers. Many stayed and stayed, and prayed and prayed. That was futile. Only a few were Chosen.
You see, it took special talents to be Chosen. First, you had to crow and preen your own salvation. Second, you had to dream of casting the rest of humanity into the deepest, darkest pit of Perdition without a second's hesitation or remorse. Finally, you had to foretell Christ’s nearing Return, which prophesy Christ said was impossible even for Him, much less for some wolf in sheep’s clothing, some mortal blasphemer brandishing a Bible.
Only God knows the time of His Son’s Return, and only God can pronounce it. Christ spoke this truth categorically—no mere man may deny Him.
Jesus said that God will forgive every sin, except for blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, the Comforter He left us pending His Return. What do you think that could be, but this denial?
As for the Exile of the Jews and their restoration to the Promised Land: that has already taken place twice in history, and could repeat itself another half-dozen time in the hundreds of thousands of years to come, should God will it, or never again. No dependable Sign of His Return, in any case.
False prophets! Get on your knees before your congregants and beg them forgiveness for your evident lie, carefully forbidden in the Bible! The rest of you, the lambs of God, pay no heed to their blasphemy! Be always prepared for His Return (like a thief in the night), but never again deceived by empty clamor of His imminence.
It was difficult for most people to reconcile Jesus' commands to love our enemies, our neighbors as ourselves and to die for our friends, with the idea that most eternal souls were expendable refuse. That kind of discrimination takes grandiose vision, fanatical leadership skills, immense heartlessness and a giant ego: special talents only a few possessed.
At first, churches were packed standing-room-only; long lines snaked around the corner. Eventually, they went vacant. The rest gave up and took their families home, as mournful as kids skipped over during a pickup ball game.
People just Disappeared. One moment, they’d be there, spouting vicious nonsense; the next, they’d be Gone. They’d grimace, as if suffering from a heart attack; some would gasp, as if to scream… then they’d be Gone. Witnesses reported hearing a vague popping noise as atmospheric pressure refilled the small void left by those Swept Away. Then they smelled something like a cap-gun going off, vaguely sulfuric …
They reported that when the
People in tall buildings Disappeared more easily, so did
mountain climbers―or so it was reported.
Some people who used ladders to climb down from a rooftop, left a foot, an ankle and a half-shin behind, neatly severed, along with the corresponding shoe, sock and pant leg. Evangelicals got wise and started camping out on rooftops. No one could get them down; few tried. Eventually, some were Gone. The rest, the best, remained.
Within a few days, the right wing was amputated from Congress and from every State Legislature. The Republican Party was reduced to a shambles; the Democratic, not much better. Forty-five remaining Congresspeople met in emergency session to appoint temporary replacements. Half the Supreme Court was Gone, as were most Federal Judges: the most dependable reactionaries. The Oval Office was vacant and so were the offices of most political appointees.
Under emergency rules, an Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services took over the Presidency, pending crash elections. That doctor was an outspoken agnostic by the name of Dean who was about to be fired by the Administration. She'd made too many waves about family planning, universal health care and corporate-sponsored malnutrition and pollution. There was nobody senior to her. No one complained and she was elected President shortly thereafter. She turned out to be quite good at her new job, much better than the last half dozen or so.
The military snapped to DefCon 1, but could find no one
to nuke. Many missile command bunkers
and Pentagon offices were empty. A few
cadets rattled around at
Fox News went off the air, so did CNBC and other news affiliates. AM radio commentary was Gone. Media executives and talk show hosts Disappeared (guess which ones). The main newspapers went temporarily out of print. They had to find new senior editors, publishers and sponsors. No one was left to invoke “journalistic balance and objectivity” and thus pay due reverence to evil.
Basically, if you had spouted lies and ranted hatred loud enough, you were Gone. If you had been terrified enough by the members of another group to advocate killing them, you were Gone. If you had killed, starved and tormented people other than by accident, you were Gone. Persist in doing so by accident … you get my point.
In their fantasy, many of those Swept Away had already sacrificed everyone to traumatic Armageddon on Earth and then to eternal damnation. Quality mass education? Ecological sanity? Peace and justice for helpless foreigners? Why bother! Wasn’t this planet God's ash tray? Couldn’t He purify, in His own good time, all the filth and horror Christianity might induce to hasten His Return? As far as they were concerned, those excluded from the Rapture were no more valuable than rotting garbage. While they were absolutely right about being Swept Away, it turned out the Earth and everyone Left Behind gained tremendously from their Departure.
What became of those Caught Up in the Rapture? Who cares? Good riddance!
Sure, there would be disasters, potent signs in the heavens, and wars and rumors of wars, just as there had been for thousands of years; nothing prophetic in any of that. But with surprising ease, things got a lot better for all of humanity.
What was most funny? It wasn’t just fanatical Christians who Disappeared. Muslims did, too. Those who Disappeared had complained that there wasn’t any real Islam anymore; that they were the last true believers in Allah. All their neighbors were just filth-loving, pro-Western heretics fit for execution by jihad. Those who Disappeared tended to cling to Wahhabi and other brain-fried fanaticisms that preached mass murder for the greater glory of Islam.
Whether Texan or Saudi, all those big talkers and all their big talk Went Away. Papers drifted untended across empty Taliban madrassas and fundamentalist Christian campuses whose students wandered home when their Bigotry 101 coaches Disappeared.
The same thing happened to Hindus. Rabid nationalists, mosque wreckers, library
burners, lynch mob leaders, all of them Disappeared. No one was left to blame Indian Muslims and
Untouchables for every social problem.
No one was left, in all of
On a gorgeous afternoon typical of their beautiful
country, the Kashmiris raised their new state flag in front of the government
complex in
Jewish settlements on the
Besides, no one was left to fantasize about turning
A few Orthodox and Conservative Jews Went Away, as did
most of the neo-Zionists. Many remaining
Jews had to settle for Reformed Rabbis, so few of the others remained. Fattah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad? Ancient Palestinian history. The
Atheists did not get off any more lightly. The Chinese Central Committee became the
Chinese Central Nothing.
The entire political apparatus of North Korea Disappeared. Its people finally got real food shipped in as fast as cargo ships could unload. They blew up munitions, wrecked weapons and nukes and filled in fortifications, smiling all the while. South Korea disarmed in the time it took to destroy every landmine along the border and build superhighways and rail lines across it. The border was guarded by determined grandmothers who shamed soldiers on both sides into going home. That task wasn’t hard.
Every Khmer Rouge Disappeared, without exception. Vietnam liberated itself from its liberators. Colombia discovered how nice peace was, for a change. Africans and South and Central Americans let out deep sighs of relief and got to work rebuilding. The sound of gunfire was no longer heard in Congo jungles or around the Great Lakes. Government buildings emptied in Khartoum, and those of their petroleum-fascist financiers. A black Sudanese woman could return home, after having got water and fuel for her fire, in perfect safety. There wasn’t a “technician” left in Mogadishu, and far fewer firefights, there or elsewhere.
The same thing happened all over the ex-communist world, everywhere thuggish tyrants had thrived like maggots. Violent fanatics, drug lords and kleptocrats Disappeared from Party headquarters, torture chambers and prison blocks. They Vanished, regardless of stripe and creed, whether they were political insiders, mafia muscle, snarling Nazi skinheads or guerilla hooligans. To be of Nazi confession was to be Gone.
Within a few months, the Earth became a Very Different Place.
In the United States, gay marriage, abortion on demand and robust equal opportunity initiatives were quietly legislated and then forgotten. No one argued. You could burn the flag or fly it proudly; nobody cared enough to violate your civil rights. Campaign finance reform was swift and draconic; it passed both Houses of Congress without debate. Family planning was subsidized across the planet. Military subsidies were slashed by ninety-nine percent, as were its domestic expenditures. Somehow, we were more secure than ever.
Praying in school was something one did in the quiet of one's own skull, the civilized way. Jesus had explicitly forbidden us to pray in public and in church. His words from Matthew 6 were fully obeyed, now that the disobedience theocrats had Left, who’d given Christ a bad name and turned almost everyone away from His Way, the Only Way, now obvious to everyone.
America rebuilt itself as a twenty-first century powerhouse, after generations of inexcusable neglect.
We ARE in the twenty first century – unless I’m mistaken – and not stuck in the Middle Ages, being ruled by ignorant barbarians?
Not surprisingly, the same thing happened elsewhere. The poorest regions of Earth boasted higher standards of living than the richest had known before the Rapture. A golden age of Learning… Public schools welcomed everyone, EVERYONE, and got more than enough funding to do their job. People wondered what the problem had been, since solutions were so simple and obvious …
Prisons emptied. Either you had really needed to serve time in one—at which point, you were Gone. Or (the case for the majority of prisoners) you didn't, really—at which point, the people who’d set you up were Gone and you could go straight home. Most prisons grew smoking herbs, tended by a few remaining petty criminals and the best among their guards.
All those Gathered by the Rapture added up to a few million, at most: less than one in a thousand human beings. Normal people, with normal strengths and weaknesses and a normal range of sins, had nothing to do with it. Only exceptional whackos got Caught Up. Nonetheless, the world’s population dropped dramatically within the next few decades, by universal consent. Babies became rare and precious beings, all of them—not as common and neglected as dirt.
Most people became Judeo-Buddho-Hindu-Christo-Muslims: a cooperative and eclectic amalgam of each creed's best elements, the obvious path for those who wanted to practice religion but hated its organized strife. After all, God is Allah, is Krishna, is every God, and None of Them and Nothing and Everything anybody could ever fantasize—all at the same time, with hands tied behind His/Her/Its/Nothing’s back. God is BIG, you see; not small and musty and cramped like your typical fundamentalist's mind. Nobody Left Behind could argue with that, and nobody wanted to.
Fundamentalists of every orthodox creed would have fought to (someone else's) death so that would never happen; but they were out of the picture now. No one was left to exploit faith and divert charity for personal profit, to preach mayhem for the salvation of souls and thus give religion a bad name.
Atheism became a very difficult idea to get enthused about, since something must have caused the Rapture. Eventually, everyone discovered the love of Jesus Christ—in a manner the fundamentalists could never have foreseen, foretold or shared honestly. (See Matthew 6-5).
Most large corporations folded; their MBAs, CEOs and CFOs having Disappeared. People bought only what they needed and sold only what was needed—no more and no less. Most advertising vanished and so did its revenues.
All of a sudden, television became interesting. Imagine that, smart television! The planetary IQ doubled virtually overnight. You could turn on the radio and listen to fine music for hours on end, or to thoughtful dialog, not endless patter about nothing interrupted by the occasional trash pop ditty. Even MTV started playing good music reliably.
Slowly but surely, people began replanting Eden. They discovered you could plant groves of Scotch Pine (Pinus sylvestris) in the bare laetrile soil of strip-mined tropical ex-rain forests. Those groves would attract birds and animals and their seed-filled dung; then the jungle would grow back spontaneously. Millions of such groves sprang up, brainchildren of the Gaviotas community. Industrial applications of terra preta replaced chemical fertilizers in agriculture and began restoring the soil.
Across the world, the poor discovered they could build their own dependable, cool-in-summer, warm-in-winter, earthquake-resistant housing from sun-baked earth brick Domes of Rumi, very cheap. No one needed to go homeless, now that all the house wreckers had Gone, and now that Nader Khalili had shown us the right way to do it.
Anywhere on Earth, a weary traveler could knock at any door and expect welcome, a good meal and clean water. Everywhere on Earth, good farmers could grow their crops with good clear water never again tainted by violence.
What Man never managed to accomplish, God alone made happen. During this ultimate revolution, tyrants were Sent Packing and the meek inherited the Earth: bloodlessly, as promised and right on schedule. Everyone rejoiced in newfound grace, prosperity and freedom. No one missed the dearly departed fanatics, except, perhaps, for their mothers and children: those few who remained.
Even now, I fear I do not differ enough from the Chosen to be spared their Fate. I, too, condemn fellow human beings I despise and fear. I, too, count on God to grant me salvation, while I deny it to them.
Please, most merciful Lord, do not condemn me to spend all eternity with them! That would be true Hell. God's justice must surely…
[Notes found on an abandoned rooftop].
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