This post has content warnings for: uspol, christian hegemony, child abuse, its that kind of post.
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- ectafoole.itch.io/
Writer & narrative designer, full time queer mess. Put the gay deer in Caves of Qud.
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in reply to @pervocracy's post:
This entire post is awesome, but I want to pull on this one particular thread:
what even is the hurry to get to Armageddon? you're going to be resurrected anyway, right?
I remember reading something written online by a person who is very Christian, but in an academic way. And they were talking about how the American focus on Revelations and the Rapture just struck them as so deeply, fundamentally anti-Christian. That it's only possible to pine for the Rapture if you otherwise miss the entire point of Christianity.
To them, and I'm probably mis-quoting and mis-remembering and it's been years, but what I remember them saying was that the Big Deal of Christianity is that a Christian doesn't need to fear death. The promise of salvation means that death isn't scary. I'm not a scholar of Christianity so I don't know if this is doctrinally true but I have the impression that it's historically true.
Christians that prioritize the Rapture are motivated by a fear of death. There's a loophole that lets them cheat their way into Heaven. They can have Heaven, without dying. Skip the line. Skip the process. And this person was so... despaired, I think, by the sheer volume of people who claimed to believe in the trappings of Christianity but whose apparent fear of death meant that they weren't fully convinced in the promise of Salvation and were still motivated by that fear that they already supposedly been saved from.
Thinking about what you wrote, I almost feel like the Fear of Damnation has subsumed the Fear of Death in modern American Christian Superstition. That the boogeyman is gonna catch you, but instead of killing you, he's gonna Hell you. And the Rapture, getting yeeted straight up to Heaven, is the only way to guarantee Salvation because every second until the Rapture is a constant exposure to the risk of Damnation.
Was it Fred Clark/Slacktivist? If not you might want to check him out; he's done a lot of writing about the Left Behind novels that focuses on these points.
so much if it is SO heretical that if it somehow turns out christian scripture is all true american evangelicals are going to hell faster than queer atheists. somehow this particular blasphemy, more enormous than any i've ever uttered, this satan-fearing gnosticism, does not bother them
it's been 15 years since a co-worker asked me, "don't take this the wrong way, but do you worship the devil?" and that don't take this the wrong way continues to haunt me. there's a lot lurking under the surface of that question, Helen!
"Why yes I do, and since you asked so politely, I suppose I won't use my Satan-issued evil eye on you!" is the only expected response I can come up with lmao
Edit: also appreciating the "if you're a Satan worshipper you have to tell me! No lying, the power of Christ compels you!"
I mustered a "don't worry, I am an agent of satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial" (a very old joke) on the spot, but "why do you ask" would probably have been a better use of the time. not that I really expect to have gotten a sincere answer out of Helen "fingernail polish is vanity, and ungodly, and I will not help stock it" Lovejoy
It feels like the pining for Armageddon thing is at least as much about the people they think won't be saved as it is about those they think will.
i'm reminded of a joke i heard somewhere about a time traveler going 300 years into the future to see humanity thriving. clean air, technology, people are happy, etc. shocked, he asks someone what happened because at his point in the timeline things were going very bad with climate change, rising fascism, etc etc. the person from the future answers that the rapture happened and society was finally able to progress now that all the christians were gone
...i just wanted to add a bit of levity because god the way things are now are depressing and lowkey horrifying with how much religious cranks lust for the apocalypse and how that's literally driving our politics. hate it here so much lmao
The philosophy gets laundered to us in bizarre ways, too, especially when it interacts with other right-wing conspiracy theories.
For example, it seems pretty obvious, in retrospect, that the flood of "millennials ruin everything" think-pieces for the last twenty years, because...
- Strauss-Howe Generation Theory (which itself somehow permeates culture despite being complete trash) predicted that the cohort maturing around the year 2000 would be the next Greatest Generation.
- Millennialism predicts something rapture-adjacent, and also sounds like the other thing.
- There were plenty of predictions of an impending end-of-the-world around then, most popularly 2012.
- We had an excuse for a massive war in the Middle East, that could easily have become World War III.
...But the kids failed to sign up in droves to be cannon fodder against an ill-defined "enemy." And so, they must have been lazy, destroyers of culture as they got high on avocado and fancy coffee.
You know, maybe it already happened. Maybe Christ came back in like 35 AD, gathered up all his homies, and peaced out. And the rest of us have just been living in hell for the past 2000 years.