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Rapture Environmentalism: 'the last tree is felled, Christ will come back'

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Q Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-06-04 07:13 PM
Original message
Rapture Environmentalism: 'the last tree is felled, Christ will come back'
"James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ."

Published on Monday, December 6, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

On Receiving Harvard Medical School's Global Environment Citizen Award

by Bill Moyers


As difficult as it is, however, for journalists to fashion a readable narrative for complex issues without depressing our readers and viewers, there is an even harder challenge - to pierce the ideology that governs official policy today. One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the oval office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

Remember James Watt, President Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, 'after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.'

Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the country. They are the people who believe the bible is literally true - one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index. That's right - the rapture index. Google it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the twelve volumes of the left-behind series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious right warrior, Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.

Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): once Israel has occupied the rest of its 'biblical lands,' legions of the anti-Christ will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.

I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious, and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four angels 'which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of man.' A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed - an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144-just one point below the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of god will return, the righteous will enter heaven, and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1206-10.htm
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Liberal Veteran Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-06-04 07:15 PM
Response to Original message
1. Okay...now that's a whackjob theory if I ever heard of one.
Does that include the ficus tree in my livingroom?
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immoderate Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-06-04 07:26 PM
Response to Original message
2. Apparantly this is an American thing!
It's no wonder that foreigners think we're nuts. Think about one third of our population believing this.

Inconceivable! (Hope you saw the Princess Bride.)

--IMM
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w4rma Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-06-04 08:00 PM
Response to Reply #2
6. Think about CEOs of major corporations believing this.
Edited on Mon Dec-06-04 08:02 PM by w4rma
Think about the owners of Clear Channel, CNN/AOL and the folks who run FOX believing this.

Think about the fact that they are running our country and know better than to speak about this stuff too much in the open, until they can grab up enough power so that public opinion of their crazyness doesn't matter at the ballot box.
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immoderate Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-06-04 08:36 PM
Response to Reply #6
15. You gimme da chills!
--IMM
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SammyWinstonJack Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-06-04 07:26 PM
Response to Original message
3. Just when you think you've heard it all.
some moran proves you haven't. :wow: I'm about fed up with these religious wack jobs! :grr: Self serving self righteous cretins.
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yardwork Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-06-04 07:33 PM
Response to Original message
4. This is important. Thank you for posting this!
One of the points that rings true to me is that many of these believers are "sincere, serious, and polite."

I know a woman who believes all this shit, I'm pretty sure. If it weren't for the fact that she loudly supports the chimp, whom she declares to be a "godly man," she would sound just like a Democrat. She is kind, generous, polite, thoughtful. She doesn't like it when people or babies or animals get hurt. For some reason everything she believes in gets tossed out the window because "chimp is a godly man."

We're dealing with mass hysteria. It's like the middle ages when the plague struck and people behaved in all kinds of bizarre ways, only this time the plague is invisible.
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The Doctor. Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-06-04 07:47 PM
Response to Original message
5. Here you go....(It's lengthy, so wait till you have the time...)
The Real War.


The Human Race is in jeopardy. Currently, a vast war is raging unseen below the surface of our consciousness.

We believe we are engaged in conflicts for many different reasons and under the impetus of many ideals. For the most part, this is true.
We are at war in the Middle East for a number of reasons depending upon whom you ask. We are at war here at home over issues of freedom, happiness, and values.
We are at war with economic forces that will spell our demise as a nation unless we all become economic warriors with the understanding that triage may become a very real necessity.

But there is a greater war, one from which all of these symptoms arise. It is the War for the salvation or obliteration of the human race.

I have come to understand, through study of human nature and human consciousness, just what fate humanity has mapped out for itself. I have come to describe my theory as “The Human Omega”.
No one can argue that humans are not an ambitious species. In fact, we know very well that humanity will ALWAYS reach for what it perceives to be within it’s grasp. It is because of this that we have come so far as a species.
We have the capacity to become so much more than we are, and that is precisely what we have done for millennia. We will reach forward to grasp new concepts, new ideas, and new technologies we are not now even capable of imagining. We will take hold of our own evolution. Whether it takes one hundred years, one thousand, one million… it does not matter; it WILL happen.
I have no doubt that left to explore and flourish humanity will attain transcendence tantamount to true divinity. We will become our own God, made in our image and vice-versa.
Our descendants will become masters of time, space, and consciousness.

All we need do is survive.

One of the greatest hallmarks of the human race is the retention of knowledge. As we acquire the technology to retain information we utilize it – immediately.

Perhaps you are reading this on a website – imagine the amount of information that site backs up and retains. There may be a Library of Congress’ worth of posts, threads and information held in the server memory and backed up for permanent storage.
Now… think of how much information was stored only thirty years ago - A fraction of a fraction of what we store today. How will we preserve everything we want to?

Our divine descendants may well deal with that too, but their methods know no boundaries we can imagine. As masters of time, space, consciousness, and perhaps a number of other curricula we cannot imagine, why not save EVERYTHING?

The trend toward this human destiny is utterly inexorable. Having studied how the human race reaches in all directions around the globe and ever further into the farthest reaches of space, into the future and farther into the past to understand the origin of life on earth. As we delve ever deeper into ourselves, into our intricate intellectual makeup, into our genetic composition, there can be no question we will one day achieve divinity.

Should there exist even a shred of human curiosity in our descendants, (Considering curiosity drove them, I imagine more than a shred will persevere.) they will most likely preserve every consciousness that has ever existed.
Everything will be preserved, perhaps they will have no need for machines, or their machines are woven into the very fabric of the universe; but every event, every dream, every thought, every blade of grass ever to exist, everything from the very beginning of time until the end will be forever preserved in living memory.

If this seems far-fetched to you, try to explain an automobile to a Neanderthal.
I don’t understand how these things would work any more than he would understand what makes a Porsche run… but he can understand what it does… as I can this.

So when a consciousness passes from life, that consciousness will find absolute access to every bit of knowledge, every event, and every perspective in the universe. Even yours.
You will come to know everything, and to be anything.
This is the gift our children can give us, our descendants, with the impetus to preserve gifted to them by our common nature, will preserve all.
The vast loop of the continuum will be closed, linear time will become meaningless, and we BECOME divine… We achieve the Human Omega.
For all intents and purposes – this may already be the case given that time is not linear.
We cannot know what philosophy our descendants will operate on, we can only know that we will not know or understand it until we rejoin the Omega Consciousness. We can pretend all we want to be right or moral, but there will certainly be more to the truth than second-guessing the will of God.

This brings us to the Great Fear.

There is no question that we are in pain. We witness the atrocities we visit upon each other, the tortures, the injustices... so much pain.
It is said that those who do evil do so because they are in pain.
One cannot imagine a pain they have not felt, but, in some fashion or another, they experience the pain they have caused.
This then becomes a cycle; The Tormentor is in pain because of the pain he has caused. He does not realize that his pain is self-loathing; he cannot understand his masochism – for he is immediately aware of his victim’s agony. He seeks to cause pain to punish himself. The Tormentor turns his pain back into anger that seeks to inflict pain once again.
This pain is unfathomable, but it does not merely reside in the individual, it pervades the human super-, sub-, and unconscious. It is passed around from person to person, culture to culture, generation to generation.
Like a virus, this pain begets itself perpetually; it will not perish until we rise above it.

Just like Jesus said.

But ‘it’ does not want that.
Without getting into Human Superconscious Theory, this is best explained by saying that this vast human suffering has taken on a life of it’s own. Somewhere in the interface between this vast suffering and human empathy, there has evolved a disturbing dissonance, which has yielded a self-sustaining entity.
Pain begets not only pain, but the methods of its continuation as well.

There is an operative effect on the human psyche because of this pain. There is fear.
This fear is so deeply embedded in our racial subconscious that it too has a ‘life of it’s own’.
The fear is of spending eternity with the pain we have caused.

We know that there are one of two ultimate outcomes for the human race.

One is the transcendence of humanity by constant growth and enlightenment.

The other is absolute Oblivion

The pain we are in are the cumulative screams of millions upon millions tortured alive, the tears of a child who didn’t want to die hungry the day the death squad came, the mother putting a plastic shopping bag over the head of her baby to futilely try to save it from the poison gas as she succumbs to a rasping death.
There is a great awareness of this horrific torment, both in the victims, and in the tormentors.

This is a pain so great it begs for Oblivion. To forget forever, to have never been is it’s only desire.

This pain has been at war with our destiny for thousands of years.

Should the Human Race survive, this pain will be preserved forever in the consciousness of The Human Omega.
Should the Human Race be extinguished, there will be no Human Omega, and we will all descend into the soft, eternal nothingness of oblivion.

This vicious agony has not sat still and waited for us to extinguish ourselves, nay – it has spent countless centuries engineering our demise.
Through the human subconscious it has worked to trigger our own undoing, and these are the times it has been brought to bear.

Being so imaginative, we have tried to devise methods to explain the world around us with little or no empirical rational.
Religion was one of those methods.
When we developed empathy as a race, we had to find a way to justify taking the life of a screaming animal for our own sustenance. We developed more humane means of doing so and also ‘told ourselves’ that a higher power said it was ok to do so.

Our survival was that ‘higher power’; we called it ‘God’.

But we took religion, which has roots in Human Superconscious understanding, too far.
We let the pain in.
Pain and Religion don’t mix. Just like Jesus said.

We created the ‘Deadly Meme’ of our own destruction.
There can be no doubt that the anger of ‘fire and brimstone’ and the ‘Wrath of God’ was not written out of enlightenment, but rather out of the realization that there was so much wrong… so much pain. These writings had such beauty and wisdom, they were accepted as carte blanche and absolute truth, and therein lay the danger.

For over a thousand years, huge portions of the human race have invested their faith in stories that tell them they will be favored when all else perish in fire.
They read that if they did ‘this’ and believed ‘that’, they would be given such rewards they cannot imagine. And so the faithful have divested themselves of human conscience, the precursor of faith, to acquire those rewards.
Such a powerful impetus as faith extends far beyond and much deeper than the empirical actions of the faithful, however.

This notion of the ‘end of the world’ has been invested in by so many, over such a period of time, and with such fervor – it may be impossible to stop it.

Because of a number of books written from the perspective of this pain, we may not survive as a race.

This belief in the end of the world has fueled the actions of so many of our leaders. They are so certain Armageddon is upon us that they have no intention of preserving our resources or our restraint. They have been fooled into believing that their actions are divine and that the destruction of the Human Race has no impact on achieving divinity.

The greatest deceiver has deceived them. The very thing they believe they are waging war against has fooled them.

They will go to any lengths to carry out its will by lashing out at the agony and creating more. This cycle will wind itself into a literal firestorm of extinguishing rage.

We must not allow these things to occur, we must not allow our leaders to take us into a holy war in this age of mass destructive capability.

For then surely we will embrace oblivion.


-Dr. Garth Eldritch




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Tom Yossarian Joad Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-06-04 08:02 PM
Response to Original message
7. Do I need to wear clean underwear for the rapture?
Or is God really going to make us all sinners by making us nekkid?

I'd hate to be lusting on my way to heaven.

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sangh0 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-06-04 08:16 PM
Response to Reply #7
9. Don't worry
Your underwear will be miraculously cleaned while you ascend to Heaven by the Dry-Cleaning Angel.

I'm tellin ya', the service is even better than a Disneyland hotel.
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Tom Yossarian Joad Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-06-04 08:20 PM
Response to Reply #9
10. Good to know, but think about it... Going into heaven with a chubby?
Yikes!


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sangh0 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-06-04 08:25 PM
Response to Reply #10
11. It's Heaven
How could you NOT have a chubby?
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Tom Yossarian Joad Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-06-04 08:28 PM
Response to Reply #11
12. Wow.... Heaven must be like a forever viagra....
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sangh0 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-06-04 08:33 PM
Response to Reply #12
14. It's so sa-we-e-e-e-et!!!
I told ya, the service is better than a Disneyland hotel. And that reminds me, do not, I repeat, DO NOT forget to try the room service!!
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jimshoes Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-06-04 08:13 PM
Response to Original message
8. Hold on while I get my purple blanket
and white sneakers. This guy is loonier than Marshall Applewhite of Heaven's Gate or Jim Jones of Jonestown, Guyana.


Flash!!!!!! This just came in on my tin foil headband radio, it's time to drink the kool aid because the rapture is slated to begin on Jan. 18, 2005. :evilgrin:
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dethl Donating Member (462 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Dec-06-04 08:31 PM
Response to Original message
13. Wow...they're all coming out of the woodwork now...
n/t
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