Here is the ultimate break if you have too much work to do – this Saturday is heralded by billboards as the day that Christians get “caught up” and floated into the sky. I am going to have my camera ready.
… and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord
(Christian Bible Thessalonians 4:15-17)
And based on the people I have met in the rapture movement, I am going to be sure to be firmly anchored to the ground, for fear of spending eternity with them.
I have this vision of St Peter standing in front of the iron gates, while an eager Rapture person asks him, “Is this it? Is this heaven? We finally made it!.” And St Peter will look up with a sad look, saying, “Heaven? You were in heaven and you trashed the place. You wanted to leave, so we brought you to the other place.”
We all do know that we do face very real threats of human annihilation from an asteroid hitting the world, a giant solar flare that reaches earth, a nuclear war, the slow environmental disaster or a fast deadly virus. And if we can’t do complete annihilation, then we, humans, always manage to have a few wars going on. Maybe, just maybe, Saturday might be the day, just click on “There’s More”.
Now to be fair, the Christian faith is not the only one predicting doom, here is a Lakota prophecy:
The rains will change their fall and winds alter their course…And where there is winter, there will be spring….There will be great plagues that you do not understand… These plagues will spread through your waters and through your blood and food because you have disrupted the natural chain.
The prophecy that is most troubling is that the Mayan calendar specifically says the world will end in 2012. It seems ironic and appropriate that civilization that was destroyed by the incoming Europeans should haunt us with its prophecy.
Indeed the very conservative Club of Rome used science (gasp) in a book, “Beyond the Limits,” published in 1992 to say:
Once the population and economy have overshot the physical limits of the earth, there are only two ways back: involuntary collapse caused by escalating shortages and crises, or the controlled reduction of throughput by deliberate social choice.
Well if I am going to include predictions from science, then maybe we ought to go for global warming all the way:
Global warming threatens to extinguish hundreds of millions of human lives and nearly a third of the planet’s wildlife, an international panel of climate scientists said in a report issued today.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that the world’s poorer nations face spiraling rates of death and disease due to increased risk of droughts, floods, storms and other severe climate effects spurred by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
Up to 30 percent of animal and plant species could be wiped out by a global temperature rise of 2.7 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius), experts said.
The IPCC forecasts a rise of between 3.2 and 7.1 degrees Fahrenheit (1.8 and 4 degrees Celsius) by the end of this century.
(National Geographic News)
Hmm, no other predictions of bodies floating into the air. Maybe the floating is just done in a spiritual sense.
So maybe, just maybe, this Saturday, all the Christians will float into the sky and go into a huddle. Perhaps there they will hear the word, “You made a mess, now go clean it up!”
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