Revolution and Revelations

Also, as far as I can tell, no adherent of the Lindsay/LaHaye eschatology thinks that there is any doubt about the outcome of the Battle of Armageddon. But some of them would like to hasten the arrival of that battle, because that would hasten the Second Coming, and would put an end more quickly to evil. Something like that.

Anyone who really wants to understand this stuff, and where it comes from, should read Paul Boyer’s terrific book When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture.

There’s a good history of pre-millenialist Christianity in American culture since World War II called When Time Shall Be No More by Paul Boyer. It’s about a decade old, so it’s a little out of date, but it covers the ’40s through the ’80s very well, as well as touching on the earlier history of premillenialism in the U.S. Boyer does a very good job of suggesting why this belief system is so popular, despite all the failures of prophecy.

“arrange for unsaved neighbors to feed the cat” — fantastic!

But I’m the one who’ll get a tiny commision when JQ buys it from Amazon.

Yeah, I’ve got to find a way into that racket. A nickel here and a nickel there, and pretty soon you’ve got a dime.

And John: I understand your dilemma, which is why I wondered not why you got it wrong but why “so many people” do. It’s a strangely common error.

Darn, Kieran beat me to mentioning When Prophecy Fails … I’m pretty sure this book was the first use of the phrase “cognitive dissonance” so its time is now.

One thing I’ve always wondered: was Festinger’s UFO cult the basis for the one in the second half of P.K. Dick’s Confessions of a Crap Artist? The similarities seem too close for mere zeitgeist …

Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States Sara Diamond (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995) is the most current book — and it directly addresses the political aspects.

The underlying politics of apocalyptic Xtian ideology probably has much more to do with spreading popularity of the beliefs than anything else.

Fredrick Clarkson, Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, Common Courage Press, 1997 has been highly recommended, though I haven’t read it myself. Fred’s work on the Christian Right fills in areas where Sara hasn’t.

I thought belief in the possibility of a revolution continued into the Reagan years. e.g. Tracy Chapman’s “Talk about a Revolution” is copyrighted 1982. (But maybe she wrote it sooner?)

There’s a butterfly called the Viceroy that pretty accurately mimics the Monarch’s color-and wing-shape.
The Monarch is poisonous – the Viceroy isn’t. The Monarch evolved bright markings to warn predators away. Not only does truth have nothing to do with the outcome, the dishonesty, the lack of truth, the camoflage is paramount.
The educational system most of us spent our lives in until adulthood instills a sense of the primacy of accurate logical thought. But madness can be every bit as powerful, every bit as organized, and every bit as victorious as sanity.
The tacit assumption of the human race rising from a swamp of ignorance is the result of that misconception, that madness, or delusion or illogic, is always a detriment. But it seems likely that we haven’t risen steadily up from some dark origin, but have fallen repeatedly into chaos and anarchic unknowing, and struggled to rise again each time.
In the artificial environments of human-controlled landscape the mad, the illogical, the delusional should be inferior, the rules say they should, most of us have been rewarded all through school and in our working lives for good sense and pragmatic realism, so we expect the world itself to follow suit.
This has its parallel in the sense many people have of moral behavior being an evolutionary advantage.
George Bush, and a great portion of his congregation, is a vibrant refutation of that sense of logical order, though a cynical case could be made for just the opposite position, in his case personally.
As late as a year ago Crooked Timber showed clearly the majority academic disdain for fundamentalist beliefs, as though they were trivial, amusing, only important because they kept showing up in mass media.
I see this image, some ancient priest with a table of the solar eclipses, promising the people he’ll darken the sun; they scoff – he does – everything changes.
Carl Zimmer’s The Loom has a post up about the common ancestor we all share, living his or her life 2,300 years ago.
That would be a very important life I’m thinking, to us.
Enough to build a religion around, if you could.

“Okay, honestly — apocalyptic Christianity and Christianity are the same thing. ”

In part, yes, in the metaphoric, original sense of apocalypse as mystical revelation, it’s not even an exclusively Christian thing, most religions define themselves as mystical, prophetic revelations.

But it’s not true in respect to literal and fanatical beliefs of end of the world prophecies, this “rapture” trend John is talking about. That is pretty much an exclusively American thing, today, at least within a western context of Christianity. Also, it’s more of an Anglo-Protestant thing, you don’t get this obsessive literal reading of the Apocalypse in mainstream Catholicism, for instance.

I think that particular trend has more to do with certain aspects of American history, politics and culture, rather than Christianity as a whole. Especially when it comes to the marketing success of those apocalyptic book series.

A Christian who believed in the Rapture, etc., should logically vote for the less Christian presidential candidate on offer (as long as he is reasonably competent, etc). The only exception would be if a (Rapture-believing) Christian presidential candidate has a non-RB-Christian (but competent) VP candidate. Here’s why:
Come the Rapture, which our voter expects any day now, he, and all RB-Christians, will be whisked up to heaven and be generally OK. Meanwhile, all non-RB-Christians will be stuck on earth – not damned, but fated to suffer the rise of Antichrist, and all manner of other unpleasant stuff.
Although our voter will himself be OK, he should pity his less godly fellows. If the President has been raptured, they will be left without leadership in an extremely difficult time; if, on the other hand, he hasn’t, he will at least be around to organise emergency aid, civil defence against the swarms of locusts which bite like adders and sting like scorpions, and so on. Don’t forget – the non-Raptured are not damned: if they repent, they still get a chance at heaven.
So he should vote for a non-Christian president – assuming that the candidate is not so manifestly evil/incompetent that the definite damage he will do pre-Rapture will outweigh the possible good he will do by staying at his post post-Rapture. (after all, the Rapture might not happen during his term of office at all – then you’d feel a bit silly.) The ideal is a born-again President, who then hands over (via Rapture) to a competent but non-Christian VP when the End of Days comes along.
And, from this argument, a virtuous RB-Christian should surely refuse to be Raptured, preferring to stay behind and help out his less-believing friends in the troubles to come. After all, would John Wayne have got on the helicopter to be evacuated? Hell no! He’d have stayed on the ground with the rest of his squad! Similar, in fact, to the bodhisattva, who refuses Nirvana in favour of returning to earth.
Which leads me to suspect that, since no true Christian (selfless, pitying his fellow man in misfortune, etc) would agree to be Raptured, the Rapture is a trap. Don’t think they’re being lifted up – they’re going down.

Norman Cohn has written a follow-up to his fabulous Pursuit of the Millennium, titled Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (Yale University Press, 1993). I’ve not read it but bound to be worthwhile.
Useful website: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/readings/endtime.html

Growing up in an environment of true believers who all still honestly feel that the world may not last their lifetime, let alone mine, I’ve noticed that their primary M.O. seems to be disengagement, not the rabid entree into politics we’ve witnessed on the far-right fringe.

I think this comes out of the rejection in Evangelical Christianity of Calvinist predestination. If you believe that humanity has an expiration date, and it’s fast coming up, there’s no reason to get particularly involved in politics. Really, your focus should be on the conversion of lost souls in the limited time left.
If, however, you believe, that we do have the ability to change our future, then your investment is in staving off the apocalypse and buying ourselves some time. After all, plagues and wars in the Holy Land have happened before without the Messiah appearing, so why not assume that if only you can legislate the world in moral rectitude, you’ll get to meet your grandchildren?

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*raises hand* guilty.

I think it’s really funny to read the Christian literature from the 70s and early 80s that all expect the End Times to be right around the corner, and in some cases insist that we were (about 20 years ago or so) living in the final 7 years of something or another. Go to http://www.chick.com and take a look at some of that nutbag’s older tracts. Good stuff.

I think Christianity loves the possibility of a coming Apocalypse because so much of Christianity relies so heavily on fear to win converts. The end is coming! God will judge you! Better clean up your act right now! Comical. I think if Jesus was the Son of God and he came back today, most fundies would decry him as a liar and as the antichrist.

Which reminds me of something funny I saw that a protestor at an Edwards appearance had said. She said “It’s hypocritical for the Democratic party to be pro-abortion and against the war in Iraq”. The logical turnaround of that statement is that it is hypocritical for the Republican party to be pro-life and for the war in Iraq. But fundies never think that hard, and everyone knows logic is the evil lesbian twin sister of science.

What is about apocalyptic Christianity as a belief system that protects it from empirical refutation?

If you start from the basic assumption of Christianity, apocolyptic or otherwise– that an invisible Ming the Merciless lives in the clouds, and that he knows and controls all, than it really isn’t a stretch to think that Lord Ming’s End Time scheme is simply being thwarted by those Damn Secular Rebels, with their Enlightenment ideals.

A natable common attribute among End Time Fundies is that they seem to lack nearly all Critical Thinking Skills. They don’t trust rational thought (that’s what the underlying implication of the Fruit of Knowldege story at the beginning of Genesis instills: that Knowledge is the root of all sin) and thus, tend to employ a patchwork approach to decision making. The Bible says this in one book, that in another and as long as we follow both, never mind that they contradict one another, then the Great Plan will work. It’s those Heathanish doubters who empluy Pagan magic like Socratic Logic and empirical observation that muck things up and if they’d simply have a little more Faith in Lord Ming’s Plan, everything would come up brimstone and Hellfire (for the sinners you know, not the faithful, who will be sitting in Cloud Kuckoo land watching the apocalypse from a safe distance).

Let’s not forget that the desire to believe in the End Times is similar to the desire of all of us to believe that the times we live in are important for some reason… the most [this], the only time [that]. Take the not-too-moldy Wired articles expecting the Dow to top 10,000 soon — the so-called Long Boom.

The times we live are are special, because they’re (probably) the only ones we’ve got. Yes, the Internet has irrevocably changed human life, but so did toothpaste (can I get an AMEN) and the cotton gin. I think it’s sad that some people believe “now” is special only because the world is about to end — there are so many other reasons to know that there is no time like the present!

I use to watch the televangelists talk about this stuff but got out of the hobby 10 years ago or so. Used to love Jack van Impe. (He’s still around and consulting the White House, if I recall correctly).

Anyway, it was interesting how the Antichrist would keep changing. First it was Gorbachev (this was the late 80s) then it was Saddam. Then the King of Spain (no really). The EU was the Beast. But since I don’t follow it anymore, anyone know who the current Antichrist is supposed to be?

anyone know who the current Antichrist is supposed to be?

Last I checked, John Kerry and Hilary Clinton were neck-and-neck, with Dan Rather coming up fast on the outside.

“anyone know who the current Antichrist is supposed to be?”

Too many candidates–perhaps George Soros after he has been made UN Secretary General by a coalition of European and Muslim countries who unite to create a decadent atheist, socialist jihad, chanting “Natural Selection au Akbar”.

dubious-
Mutually-Assured Destruction Armageddon was a very real possibility that those who warned of it hoped could be avoided.

Biblical Armageddon violates the laws of physics, and those who warn of it claim it to be a certainty.

I suppose “reasonable” vs. “not reasonable” can be described in terms of a dofference in “degree of reasonableness”, one being 100%, the other being 0%, but to me it looks like a difference in kind.

I think this comes out of the rejection in Evangelical Christianity of Calvinist predestination.

I think you misread Calvin. Predestination is largely summed up in the five points of Calvinism (the oft mentioned “TULIP”: Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistable Grace, Perseverance of the saints.)

Essentially, we as humans do not have an inner element of God to rely on- we are totally depraved and cannot fall back on some sort of universal grace. Only God can save us, and he does so because he is God and for no other reason. Therefore, the atonement of sin in Christ’s death is not universal- it belongs only to those whom God will allow to share in it. This does not mean that the atonement has an internal limit, like some sort of spiritual gas tank- if there are an infinite number of elect, there is enough salvation to cover them all. The postulation that man is totally depraved and that God chooses who will be open to being saved naturally leads to this. It follows, also, that God’s choice must therefore be something that you cannot escape. If you can receive grace, you will receive it. There are no half-measures.

What this means to evangelical witness is that election is something that humans cannot comprehend, and that the community of God is something formed by those called by grace. It is desired that they reach out, because on this world, who can know what form the acceptance of grace will take? After all, the only real proof can’t be seen by humans.

I’m also convinced that a lot of fundamentalists are misreading Calvin, too- it always seemed to me that one of the fundamental features of election would have to reasonably be that humans cannot judge its presence. We are, after all, totally depraved and divorced from God as we are.

I hope that clears things up a little.

You mean we aren’t going to have a revolution? Crap.

If you told me in 1987 that in 4 years the communist party of the soviet union will be banned by the soviet government, I’d probably die laughing.

According to my lights, I agree that MAD-Armageddon had single-digit probability per year or so, whereas Biblical Armageddon has a virtually nil (who knows, maybe I’m mentally ill and ignoring the obvious evidence of God) chance.

So yeah, I was smoking crack there.

Most commentators here are assuming that apocalyptic ideas are exclusively found in Christianity. Christian eschatology took up a Jewish prophetic line you find in Ezekiel and Daniel. (I especially like Isaiah’s vision of the messianic banquet, in which God’s people will drink vintage wines to the sound of a chorus of 1000 camels.) What happened to Jewish apocalyptic? The Essenes and the rebels in the Jewish war, especially the Sicarii, were under its influnence; I suppose the tendency was largely eclipsed by rabbinic Judaism thereafter, but it pops up much later with Sabbatai Zvi. Are there any apocalyptic Jews today? Some Lubavitchers wonder whether Rabbi Menachem Schneerson was the Messiah. Are there any apocalyptic Muslims? I read that there’s an apocalyptic doctrine in Buddhism.

perianwyr-
Good exposition, though you don’t place yourself, as speaker, in any other context vis. the material.
I’m struck, again, by the parallels with biological reality that go masked in the dogma. Especially the concept of inalterable election.
Born with it. That’s just how it is and it can’t be changed. Like visual acuity or blonde hair.
There are those mystics who hint that we’re confused, that this time/space thing is an illusion created by our limited field of view. That what is really going on is already done – it’s changeless- we’re going through the changes, but everybody else is back home watching so to speak.
It’s hard to think about, but the past is still there, five minutes ago or 50,000 years, it’s right there; we’re not, is all.
We’re here. Or, rather, here.
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Interesting that as this thread developed Pat Robertson hied his portly self to Jerusalem, to praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.
Interesting too that the incontrovertible evidence of total system change in the global climate wasn’t even brushed aside during the presidential debates, it was as though it didn’t exist, as though it couldn’t be.
Kind of a general reaction I expect. Oh no.
Whether or not the visions of John on Patmos were allegories of Roman political disintegration or earthly human fall and salvation, we’re in it bigtime, we’re in it prophecy or no.
And the people who caused it are still running things. That seems important in a way I can’t get fully ahold of, that the news is so unbelievably disheartening no one wants to talk about it, and that the guys who did it are still playing “Who dies with the most toys wins”.
Someone told me the parable about the rich man entering the kingdom of heaven was supposed to read “…easier for a taw to pass through the eye of a needle…” that it had been mistranslated as “camel” and made silly. But still.