Political Fiction: "The Siege of Jerusalem"

[fugue]

It straddles the fact-fiction line; got a bunch of footnotes supporting various facts.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Oct04/Moralis1015.htm

Excerpt:

The very beginning goes back about twenty years, to my college days. In a class discussion, one participant said that Jerusalem should be evacuated and then annihilated with nuclear weapons, so that it would be uninhabitable. "It's like when you were kids," he explained. "If you and your brother were fighting over a toy, your mother would take it away and say, 'Fine, if you can't share it, neither one of you can have it!'" He pointed out that millions had died over possession of the city for millennia; it was time to put a stop to it. Making Jerusalem an independent city would have been a better idea, but it was part of the original plan for the creation of Israel and Ben Gurion buried it. <1> That was clearly not going to happen.

I did not endorse my classmate's position. I thought that negotiation was always possible, and therefore it was far from necessary to destroy a city of such historical importance, let alone its religious value to so many. It was, however, the seed that suggested the solution for a related problem: Christian rapture theology.

I moved to Texas shortly after my graduation from college; I loved the hot, dry weather and loathed the fire ants but ended up leaving because of the screaming nightmares I had about the plans of Christian Reconstructionists, nightmares that continued for several months after I moved back to the Northeast. Having grown up in a Midwestern Christian community, I knew, of course, about the story of the rapture, how the Christian god is supposed to raise his faithful directly out of their clothing into their paradise. What I didn't realize is that many Christians do not feel this should be left to their deity to accomplish in his own good time, but that they must bring it about by making the prophecies in their sacred text come true. <2>

Their plan has several steps . . .

[checks-n-balances]

1. Looks pretty interesting - thanks!!

I can relate, since I almost got snookered into believing the rapture theology as a young adult, back in the '70s. (Lucky me, I was shown the light about it, but nowdays there are way too many people believing this "stuff".)