The Rapture is Coming!

DAMN! I overslept!!!

This is why churches have back doors. When the predicted end doesn’t come, the “prophet of doom” can slip out, leaving the congregation to feel like fools.

I have never had the pleasure to hear a sheepish explanation for why one of these many ends didn’t happen. People seem to immediately forget they were suckered into believing it and act as if it was never predicted.

Maybe Jesus did come back on October 28, 1992. He just took one look at what Christianity had become and decided they all deserved to be left behind.

Guys, did anyone bother to look up their quote? I have the NKJV and the RSV right in front of me and neither one of them has 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 saying that. I don’t know what Bible they are using, but my NKJV says:

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks;for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

The RSV says:

Rejoice, pray constantly, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

NEVER take a Fundie’s word for what the Bible says. Look it up for yourself because they seem to lie, make-up their own text, or something, just to scare and brainwash people. LOOK IT UP for yourself, regardless if your an atheist, agnostic, or other non-theist. I didn’t become good at knowing what the Bible says, by taking it on blind faith.

If you don’t look it up for yourself, you’ll miss the seeing the B.S. being dished out and I’m telling you, sometimes you need a shovel to get through all the B.S.

olvlzl is right. The Rapture is not in the Bible and is not a part of historic Christian doctrine. It was invented by a pastor in the 19th century who got kicked out of his church for preaching it, and then it got popularized among fundamentalists by evangelists like Dwight L. Moody. After the Depression, two World Wars and the rise of Christian liberalism it got even more popular among fundies who were convinced that the world was getting worse and worse and the end was near. It then filtered into evangelicalism and became the predominant end times theology for most conservative evangelicals and especially among Baptists and Pentecostals. However, it is much less common among the more intellectually oriented evangelicals.

Anyhow, I grew up in a Rapture-believing church, though I’ve long since left that theology behind. My favorite Rapture book from my childhood was this one.

Mike’s right. It is 1 Thessalonians 4:16-18, however, it isn’t talking about the Rapture. As Mike and olvlzl said, the Rapture is not in the Bible. Some little old lady had a “vision” and this pastor went with it, in the 19th century- as Mike said, except he didn’t mention the little old lady and her vision.

Like I said, you just can’t trust what an Evangelical Fundamentalist says. Always look it up for yourself and double check what they say. Well, I make this a rule regardless who says- even if Spong says it. When I quote something I always check and double check to make sure I have it right.

End Times, Judgement Day, Armageddon, you guys still believe in the Book of Revelations right? Those crazy Christian Fundamentalists making up “the Rapture”. Scotty, beam me up. Surely they didn’t really need to add any more insanity.

@olvlzl, no ism, no ist,

Shortly before I “deconverted” from xianity, I stopped taking many sections of the Bible literally (I had always been a Bible literalist) and especially Revelations.
One day, in Bible Study at church, I merely suggested that some Eastern churches didn’t accept Revelations as canonical. I got a real steely gaze from the youth pastor. Every god-damned word is sacred to some xians.

“You guys do know the difference between fundamentalism and most of Christianity, don’t you?”

I sure didn’t. I thought I was in the majority of xianity and all these new-fangled liberal heretics were just trying to water down the “message.” Actually, I still feel like there’s a lot of candy coating, but, now I’m in favor of it.

Well, it’s true that the specific doctrine of the Rapture is a nineteenth-century concoction, but the promised return of Jesus on clouds of glory is right out of the gospels. Take a look at the thirteenth chapter of Mark, especially verse 32. Of course, Jesus’ reported promise that he would return before his disciples’ generation had passed away was as bogus as all the succeeding dates that have been promoted. The belief that the End Was Near turns up in just about all the New Testament books, not just the Revelation. (So it doesn’t matter if the Revelation really should be canonical or not.) Early Christianity was an apocalyptic cult, as far as we can tell, and Jesus probably was an end-of-the-world preacher as well as a faith-healer and exorcist; that’s how the gospels depict him, anyway.

It’s ironic. Barbara Rossing’s lousy book The Rapture Exposed got a lot of favorable notice, not just from liberal Christians but from lefty-liberals. But leaving aside her shoddy scholarship, Rossing also believes that the Revelation is a god-inspired prediction/prophecy of events that would happen hundreds, even thousands of years in its future, and that Jesus will come again, just as the gospels say. The theological difference between her and Tim LaHaye basically comes down to quibbling over details of the End Times, not the nutty belief itself.

The “End Times” is a really bad sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, isn’t it?

Martin Luther dismissed the book of Revelation calling it “an epistle of straw.”

If you’re interested in one of the great popularizers of the rapture and associated whackinesses, check out Clarence Larkin. He was a source for many American fundamentalists of the early 20th C. This fella’s stuff is still in print, I think. His drawings of end-time “dispensational” scenarios are art artifacts from the 19th c. but nothing else.

No one can predict when is the rapture time.
If its predicted, people will just stay in church and pray.
Our GOD is full of surprise and power, like when he create this world.
So we can only pray, wait and the most important is to do His Ten’s commandments with humble heart. Nothing less nothing more.

So we can only pray, wait and the most important is to do His Ten’s commandments with humble heart. Nothing less nothing more.

Jesus said that you had to feed the hungry, visit the prisoner, love your enemies and pray for them, heal the sick (you favor universal healthcare?), forgive seven times seventy times, etc. Are you saying that these teachings by Jesus aren’t requirements?

Polly, the “rapture” is rather a detailed description of what it’s adherents believe is going to happen, including that there are going to be lots of empty clothes lying around that will need to be picked up and washed (clue, I’m not picking up after them). What “the second coming” means is less clear. Some people say that Jesus will come down in a physical body on a cloud, some believe it’s not physical, some believe that the “second coming” is in the form of the church…. They’re not similar concepts one being very rigid and defined the other being defined very diversely or not at all. Some people say they don’t know what it means, which is about as honest as you can get.

I don’t know, when they used to talk about “the end of time” when I was a kid, we Catholics didn’t expect it to immediately solve all of our troubles. We suspected those were just about to start.

Re. Terry’s silly faithgasm:

No one can predict when is the rapture time.
If its predicted, people will just stay in church and pray.
Our GOD is full of surprise and power, like when he create this world.
So we can only pray, wait and the most important is to do His Ten’s commandments with humble heart. Nothing less nothing more.

Observation: Spelling and grammatical accuracy are directly proportional to one’s level of education, and spelling and grammatical accuracy are inversely proportional to one’s level of religious faith.

Therefore, religion and idiocy are directly related.

Surprising? No, but funny to see it evidenced.

No one can predict when is the rapture time.

Actually anyone can predict the rapture, many crackpots have. I’ll predict the rapture on 11/9/07 on which I will have been married five years. The fact that someone has put up with me for five years should mean the end of the world.

So we can only pray, wait and the most important is to do His Ten’s commandments with humble heart. Nothing less nothing more.

How does one do all of the those shall nots? Most of the 10 Cs are stuff NOT to do . . .

@Karen,

A Thief in the Night.” I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to who were subjected to that movie in junior high or high school church youth groups and utterly traumatized.

Add one more to the traumatized list. I saw that movie when I was young enough to be disturbed by it.

I saw one of the Left Behind movies with Kirk Cameron – not by choice. It was SOOOOOOO LAME!

As to the 2nd…”return” of Christ: It seems that the only real difference is what happens to everyone on Earth and whether Satan gets to make a cameo on the world stage in human guise. Either way, whether there’s a “rapture” or not, JC is supposed to be coming back and setting things right. So, what I’m getting from all this, is that the “rapture” doesn’t mean JC makes landfall. He does that later at the official “Second Coming.”

I wonder if there is any event that could transpire that would shock a goodly-number of our eschatologically-minded Christians into realizing that these scenarios of theirs are all bullshit? All the previous predictions and predictors have passed away in shame and still there are plenty of suckers out there to fill the pews on Sunday and lap up this crap. The fact that none of what is predicted ever comes to pass as it was predicted doesn’t seem to daunt these folks. You can’t disprove a negative–when prophecies don’t come to pass, it’s back to the reinterpretations and the sanctimonious utterances about “God’s will” or “God’s infinite patience” or “God’s mysterious ways.”

I don’t mind these people believing in their comfort-thoughts (as they pound down their comfort-foods–there are a lot of fat-asses-of-the-faith out there–somehow the sin of gluttony gets shortchanged by this crowd), just so long as they keep it to themselves. When they start sending up candidates for our Chief Executive, then I’ve got issues with them.

Oh yea good prediction! FRIENDLY ATHEIST?! Jesus IS comming back soon and i just want to wish you luck! Your gonna need it!