dimbulb

Anyone who believes or spends more than six seconds worrying about any of this shit is being taken.

James Brown

I'm not going to get involved in a debate about eschatology. There are more interpretations of the End Times scriptures then there are people.

funinspace

Ah...Fruchtenbaum. A Christian borrowed my copy of The Footsteps of the Messiah a long time ago, and never returned it. Now that you mention him, my foggy memory realized that in those dozen years, I'm pretty sure I attended churches on both sides of that argument. So my #7 post was in error...its been a long time since I spent much time fussing over end times machinations.

Cheerful Charlie

The one "taken" is the believer, the one left, the unbeliever.

Matthew 24
30 And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

31 And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

Matthew 25
31 When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:
32 And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:
33 And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

Cheerful Charlie

Robert Tulip

Thank you Decypher. I find eschatology fascinating, from a purely scientific perspective. Any readings of a 'beam me up' type of rapture are magical and unscientific and should be ignored as wrong. Heaven does not exist, except as a vision of a transformed earth.

The comparison to the Flood is that at the end of the age, (ie the Age of Pisces), the prediction is that most people on the earth will die from famine, war and plague - hence the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Only 144,000 humans will survive to establish the Sabbath millennium of peace and recovery in the Age of Aquarius, according to Revelation 14.

So being taken is bad, because it means dying in the apocalyptic collapse of human civilization at the end of the age. It is a story that fits well with the reality of climate change, the idea that if we keep pumping 40 gigatonnes of poisonous CO2 into the air every year, there will be an event akin to what one external observer called an earth-shattering kaboom. As another song put it, won't be water but fire next time.

The Gospels say humans are so stupid that we are on a wide and easy path to extinction, and cannot see the narrow hard path (science), that is our only salvation. We have to eliminate the supernatural weeds from religion in order to find the true natural grain.

Perhaps there is still time for a paradigm shift to base Christianity on scientific knowledge and prevent the predicted collapse. I personally believe that our planet could sustain a human population of fifty billion in a peaceful, wealthy, happy and biodiverse manner, if we reorganise on a scientific basis.

funinspace

Oky doky, but Australia has 5.7% of the world’s land mass (excluding Antarctica), so your share of the population will be 2.85 billion people. Your current population is about 23 million. Get ready for more than a 100X increase in population… Just map out where 124 new Sydney’s will go, as a start.

Robert Tulip

I have replied to this at Geoengineering in Science Discussions.