SEF

Oh, in case it isn't obvious, the majority of this guff is in Revelations. There are two separate resurrection events in chapter 20 but it is fairly obvious that these follow all the blood and gore in the preceding chapters. So there is no quick escape route for the people who believe in this stuff but are lying to themselves about it (other than killing themselves first I suppose; but suicide is usually regarded as a sin; which would put the mark of the beast on them for being such cowards; so their fate would be precisely that worst one which they are trying to avoid!).

Clivedurdle

The following is from Umberto Eco Baudolino. It is unclear where he got it from, but he says it is teaching of the Torah.

You Christians do not understand that the sacred text is born from a Voice. The Lord, haqadoch baruch hu, that the holy one, may his name always be blessed , when he speaks to his prophets, allows them to hear sounds, but does not show figures, as you people do, with your illuminated pages. The voice surely provokes images in the heart of the prophet, but these images are not immobile; they liquefy, change shape according to the melody of that voice, and if you want to reduce to images the voice of the Lord, blessed always be his name, you freeze that voice, as if it were fresh water turning to ice that no longer quenches thirst, but numbs the limbs in the chill of death,"

This dispensationalist fundamentalist stuff feels very much like attempts to freeze, to determine, to kill.

I am surprised that Christians do not condemn these ways of thinking out of hand!

judge

George Lamsa who greww up speaking Aramaic in the middle east before migrating to the U.S.,wrote a book explaining the meaning of idioms that occur in the bible.
It seems that many time we mistakenly take idioms literally when to an Aramaic (or perhaps semitic generally), they are familiar figures of speech.

He wrote on page 65 of his book on idioms that to meet him in the air means to hasten to greet him.

It has nothing to do with meeting the Lord in the air IMHO


There are many other interesting examples of phrases that westeners have mistakenly taken literally

aikido7

Here's something relevant I just found from:

http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action...article=030710

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The Left Behind series represents but one example of a message articulated every day on Christian radio and television and in the steady flow of Christian books that follow the theological approach to the Bible called "premillennial dispensationalism" (see glossary, this page). This powerful Christian tradition emerged in England in the early 1800s, when two theological themes began to merge: Jewish restorationism (the concept that the Jews must return to Palestine in order to fulfill the prophetic scriptures), and the literal and futuristic interpretation of the apocalyptic texts. Conservative Christian support for a Jewish state was clearly articulated in 1839 when the great evangelical social reformer Lord Shaftesbury published an article in the London Sunday Times calling for the English Parliament to support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Shaftesbury's rationale was based on the premillennialism of Rev. John Nelson Darby—a renegade Irishman who eventually led a movement called the Plymouth Brethren—but it took on a distinctively political agenda.

Shaftesbury drew a relationship between three themes: 1) The idea that Jews must be restored to Palestine in order to fulfill the prophetic scriptures at the end of time; 2) the need for England to support a Jewish state in Palestine to fulfill that goal and to work toward the evangelization of Jews to Christianity; and 3) the belief that God would bless Britain if it supported the creation of a Jewish nation in Palestine, a matter that had colonial implications in England's competition with other European powers.

Darby is credited with bringing premillennial dispensationalism to the United States. His seven missionary journeys to North America influenced major American preachers and evangelists to adopt these "latter day" doctrines. Among them was Christian author William E. Blackstone, who in 1891 enlisted more than 400 leading politicians in a petition to President Benjamin Harrison, seeking his support for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. President Harrison ignored Blackstone's petition, but it reveals nascent support of Zionism within Christian and political circles in the United States some eight years before Jewish Zionism marked its official political beginning.

When Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl gathered Jewish leaders in Basle, Switzerland, in August 1897—the meeting that launched the political platform of Jewish Zionism—Blackstone urged Herzl to adopt Palestine as the location for the state, which he argued would eventually find significant political support from "Christian nations" of the West.

The influential Lord Arthur Balfour, the conservative Tory leader of the time, was a true believer in biblical prophecy. It was Lord Balfour who penned in 1917 the Balfour Declaration, which granted the Zionist movement its first international legitimacy. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George was even more committed to the Christian Zionist orientation than Balfour and advanced the cause of British support for Zionism at every opportunity. Thus it was no accident that the Balfour Declaration was "written into" the final peace treaties at Versailles that ended World War I and granted to the British Empire the "Mandate" over Palestine.

SEF

I agree that the literal-interpretation "westerners" (ie modern people, and usually non-jews) are at fault - for mistaking both the individual metaphors and the allegorical nature of the entire text. Jews don't make that sort of basic mistake (usually!) because it's their culture and mythology. This is fundamentally what comes of ignorant and frequently moronic Christians stealing someone else's work and trying to pretend it belongs to them. Then again, the Jews stole many of the stories off the Sumerians etc first. So they are all pretty hopeless at telling the truth.

Clivedurdle

This is getting worse! So Shaftesbury and Balfour with very strong biblical backgrounds, invent the concept of a return of the Jewish people to Israel following Darby's ideas to help Jesus return quicker!

This gets written into the Versaille treaty - which is meant to have a direct relationship to the rise of Hitler.....

So the nutters who want Apocalypse Now have had for at least one hundred and fifty years very strong political support - Britain was the major world power for most of the nineteenth century.

So, are all the issues in Iraq and Israel/Palestine now traceable back to Darby, Shaftesbury, Balfour et al? The concentration camps?

The modern fundies are following a well worn track!

Have these beliefs in the rapture led to at least one of the world wars and the major current source of instability in the world?

Mosor

It is also the cause of Hitler's violent anti-semitism. The Jews, including many in Germany, began sending money and support to Britain because of their promised Jewish homeland. This is why Hitler would always rant that Germany had been "stabbed in the back" by the Jews.

dado

James Watt was Reagan's Secretary of the Interior. he once publicly stated environmentalism was pointless because Jesus would be coming soon anyway.

Chili

The rapture argument started when the first protestants felt left behind. In Catholicism it is the ego that raptures so that which remains is in heaven . . . or at least will be instructed by the BVM how to get into heaven (she will be our guide in purgatory just as she was for Jesus so he could become fully Christ). Protestants don't quite see it that way and I think that they actually are waiting for JC to come back and sort of drag them into heaven.

This rapture concept is obvious from the rapture parables where there is always two men or two women (never a man and a woman or even more than two people), of which one is taken and the other is left behind. The one who is left behind is the True Identity now set free from the oppressive ego identity that actually wanted to go 'up' to get to a better place.

The Catholic Church understands this concept and will never agree with the 'clean-up' of Israel so JC can come back. She knows that the tribulation must take place in the mind of the believer before Christ will 'land' there. In other words, the second coming of Christ will not be universal event but must take place in the mind of the individual believer.

Clivedurdle

This is definitely getting very very bad!

An externalisation and freezing of an idea about humans becoming psychologically whole - "how to get into heaven" - is taken literally as applying to the real world - but if this so called real world is the result of a psychological misunderstanding, a projection, how real is it? - and we end up creating the seeds of our own destruction.


Oh what fun! Where's my get out of the funny farm card?