Of Rapture and the End Times

October 26, 2005 D. H. McKee

If I were a mean-spirited person, I would say that I hope to be left behind when the Rapture comes. When Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the authors of the hugely successful (and profoundly mean-spirited) Left Behind series of novels, are whisked bodily off the Earth into blessedness, along with Falwell, Robertson, Dobson and their followers, we might just have a chance to create a society marked by peace, universal brotherhood, justice and — yes — reason.
I grew up with apocalypse, in the heart of the East Tennessee Bible Belt, driving those two-lane blacktops with their endless signs tacked to telephone poles, fence posts and trees — “THE END IS NEAR,” “JESUS IS COMING SOON.” I always wondered why so many Americans want to believe in imminent apocalypse.
I suppose we like having our pants scared off — like our affection for Halloween haunted houses, except with bigger stakes. And if you want to sell books, or fill your megachurch with willing tithers, you can’t find a more scary topic than those galloping horsemen, Death, War, Famine and Disease.
Science Musings by Chet Raymo

2 Responses to “Of Rapture and the End Times”

bogdan
19 years ago

yeah man, maybe once all the reasonal people are gone we can finally be free to do whatever we want. hopefully theres enough voilence so i can get a peice. maybe the pot will be more fresh, fuck i’ll be able to grow whatever i want in my kitchen.
dmckee
19 years ago

Well, I’m not sure that’s the point of Chet Raymo’s piece. Sure we’d all like to be able to grow pot in our kitchens, but his point was that the UNreasonable people (i.e. the fundamentalist X-tians) would be gone, so the world might just be more reasonable without them. Sure, there might be anarchy if any large chunk of the world’s population suddenly disappeared, but if the X-tian fundamentalists can dream of being whisked away from a world which they so strongly control, it might be everyone else’s dream to live in a nice peaceful world after they’re all gone.

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As a guy who occasionally curates art shows and wrangles artists together, I often have to edit and post artist bios, profile pictures, and artwork images. This can be a problem, since many artists and writers aren’t used to selling themselves. Artists rarely know how to present their art for display in a brochure, and writers aren’t used to writing about themselves.

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