TYPICALLY, CATHOLICS DON'T believe in "the rapture" and if anyone knew anything about what I say about religion, they would know I especially wouldn't. It is bull shit. I'm not saying a few idiots who remain nominal Catholics while having read the lower ends of popular protestantism (so low that I won't honor it with an upper case letter) or, more likely, listening to it in the media fall for that dispensationalist crap but that, as your snarky question if I'm all ready for this only latest prediction of the date when all those clothes will suddenly be left on the floor as their naked owners are raptured up into the air, only shows they don't read much about the religion they profess. I'm no sure but I think that imagery is either "Late Great Planet Earth"* or the even bull shittier "Left Behind" fiction, so far more of the TV age than anything biblical.
It was popularized through the various dispensationalist cults of the late 19th century and especially by the bull shit commentary on the KJV by Cyrus I. Schofield.**
There are nutcase Catholics and catholics but this rapture bull shit isn't part of Catholicism and predicting the date of the "end of the world" is something that's surprising to find so popular within Protestantism. Here's how the old King James Version in Matthew 24 debunks that practice:
36 But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. 37 But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. 38 For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, 39 And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. 40 Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left. 41Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.
42 Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come. 43 But know this, that if the goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up. 44 Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh.
45 Who then is a faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath made ruler over his household, to give them meat in due season? 46 Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing. 47 Verily I say unto you, That he shall make him ruler over all his goods. 48 But and if that evil servant shall say in his heart, My lord delayeth his coming; 49 And shall begin to smite his fellowservants, and to eat and drink with the drunken; 50 The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of, 51 And shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Jesus didn't know the date but some evangelical carny huckster does?
I apologize for that KJV stuff, if I wasn't talking about that kind of protestantism I'd have given it in the Good News or Common English Bible. I don't know about you but the use of the language KJV and its imitators sets off my B.S. alarm due to that being the use it's generally put to in American culture. It's too bad because despite its defects as a translation (ALL TRANSLATIONS AS WELL AS ALL EDITIONS OF SCRIPTURE HAVE DEFECTS) as a literary project it was excellent.
I think the evangelicals will all be in place the day after today just as they were when the original Adventist apocalypse failed to arrive on schedule. And the second one and every one set since then and believed in as fervently by such nutcases as who take such bull shit seriously but not to do to the least among them what they would do for God, to love others as they love themselves or to do unto others as they would have done unto them. No one who professes Christianity but who fails at even approximating those acts should ever be taken as a representative of Christianity.
* Someday I might write again about what a two-faced, pseudo-lefty the very cynical and bitterly aging Orson Welles was. If I'm skeptical of evangelical "christianity" I'm far more skeptical about anything that derives from show-biz, either "christianity" or "leftist" politics.
** Schofield was one of those family-abandonning, divorcing, remarrying adulterers I talked about the other day. I think he was probably screwing around on his wife even before he abandoned her and his kids. That didn't keep him from a second career (he'd been a particularly shifty law-readin' lawyer and sleazy politician) in "evangelical ministry." He had absolutely no academic or scholarly credentials when the frickin' Oxford University Press published his massive "Schofield Bible," almost 1400 pages of the KJV with his extensive on-the-same-page commentary. That book was massively marketed by the various evangelical outfits and popularized such nonsense as well as such dodgy stuff as "christian zionism" (lower case intended) which was a superstitious reading of Scripture popular with many a rabid antisemite of the time and down to today. I find the suspicion that the Oxford University publishing of such a book by a man without any academic credentials or career was funded by the zionist Baron Edmond de Rothschield - who would have had the pull to get them to do it in the first place - is believable if not provable. Its popularization of millennialist protestant notions about that most unfortunate of all Biblical books, Revelations, in which all the Jews will be living in Palestine and either convert to "christianity" or be obliterated, drives American foreign policy far, far more strongly than any Jewish zionism that there is. It would seem that Oxford is still cashing in on that franchise, today
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