From Where Does That "Rapture" Story Originate?
By James Donahue
Fundamental Christians not only put their faith in a god-man named Jesus who proved his deity by supposedly rising from the dead three days after he was murdered, but they believe in a wild "rapture" story.
This story claims that the deity named Jesus is going to come back in the clouds and at the sound of a trumpet, all true believers will be lifted up off the ground and swished into the sky where they will then ascend with him into Heaven.
After appearing before the judgment seat and having all of their sins laid bare before God, the angels and everybody, the Christian believers will then don white robes and return to Earth with Jesus to fight the wicked armies ascended for the great Battle of Armageddon, somewhere in the Middle East. The battle will be the worst ever fought, with blood from the dead soldiers and horses rising as high as the axles of the chariots.
Jesus and the "saints" are supposed to win this battle, and after this, Jesus will take his throne in Jerusalem and rule over the Earth. There is supposed to be peace for a thousand years. And somewhere in all this, God is supposed to make a new Heaven and new Earth so it won't matter what we do to this one.
So the Christians believe.
This belief in a rapture is so strong among the "Armageddonist" Christians that numerous books and films have been created warning of what will happen to those left behind on the day of the "Second Coming." Critics have called these publications nefarious, war mongering, and threats to world peace, which they are.
Armageddon is the name of the battlefield where this war is supposed to occur. It is said to be located in Israel at a place now known as the Hill of Megiddo. Megiddo is the place where a great battle between the Hebrew and Roman armies once occurred. It ended tragically, with all of the Jews committing suicide before they were overpowered by the Roman army.
This strange Christian doctrine encourages violent behavior between Christians and people of other beliefs, destruction of the environment, bigotry and, in the end when Jesus fails to return, total despair.
With new evidence emerging that the story of the deity of Jesus, and especially his rising from the grave after three days, has been a fairy tale all along, one would think Christians are getting a little nervous about their dependency on Jesus to grant them an escape route from our dying planet.
Where did this rapture story come from? It is a fabrication by Bible scholars, who have pieced together a few lines from Old Testament verses and packaged them with some amazing promises by Paul, the New Testament snake oil salesman, to build a case for a story so silly it is amazing that anybody ever accepted it from the start.
Yet today, the world is in deadly peril because leaders in the U. S. government, who are Bible-thumping born-again believers in the story, are so anxious to force the return of their Jesus, they threaten to use their powers to launch a fabricated Battle of Armageddon right in the heart of the Middle East.
The promise of this fantastic gathering of believers is found in a letter written by Paul, the self-proclaimed apostle that never personally knew Jesus but built a ministry based on angelic visions after he had his supernatural experience on the Road to Damascus.
In his first letter to the Thessalonians, in Chapter 4:13-17 Paul wrote:
"But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: 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."
These verses, written by a possessed character who came along long after Jesus was murdered, turned Christ into a deity, and then established a religious system carefully crafted by his own deranged mind, are the foundation for this dangerous and destructive behavior that we are observing today.
Paul also mentioned this event in another letter written to the Corinthians. He said: "Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality."
So where would Paul have gotten such an idea? We suspect he came upon the Gospel of Mark that contained the following: (Mark 13:26-27) "And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven."
Paul took this image and embellished it, thus creating a fantastic story about a god that was not only going to rise from the dead, he was going to bring all of the dead Christians up out of their graves and then swish away all of the living Christians.
The extreme craftiness of the message is clearly observed when we think of the way it carves into and attempts to discredit the work of real contemporary science that is even now struggling to find a way for humans to escape a doomsday scenario created by overpopulation and humanity's failure to protect and preserve the living Earth.
Humanity now is at a critical crossroad where we all must choose between doing nothing and going extinct, after extensive suffering, or finding an escape route out of this mess. The way out may be the creation of new bodies that can exist without lungs and a need for oxygen, can endure an extreme environment and travel in space in search of other habitable planets.
The bodies we have are not capable of doing this.
There also is another future event that the New Testament story is designed to impede. That would be a final gathering of a few humans . . . enough to maintain the genetic diversity of our kind . . . for a shift from this world into a parallel one. Is this another fable? The concept of parallel universes is but an unproven theory.
As far as putting a faith in a god that comes down out of the sky and calls all of his followers off to glory . . . forget it. It is a fable created by a madman 2,000 years ago that should have been thrown out with the trash with all of the rest of Paul's nutty writings.
By James Donahue
Fundamental Christians not only put their faith in a god-man named Jesus who proved his deity by supposedly rising from the dead three days after he was murdered, but they believe in a wild "rapture" story.
This story claims that the deity named Jesus is going to come back in the clouds and at the sound of a trumpet, all true believers will be lifted up off the ground and swished into the sky where they will then ascend with him into Heaven.
After appearing before the judgment seat and having all of their sins laid bare before God, the angels and everybody, the Christian believers will then don white robes and return to Earth with Jesus to fight the wicked armies ascended for the great Battle of Armageddon, somewhere in the Middle East. The battle will be the worst ever fought, with blood from the dead soldiers and horses rising as high as the axles of the chariots.
Jesus and the "saints" are supposed to win this battle, and after this, Jesus will take his throne in Jerusalem and rule over the Earth. There is supposed to be peace for a thousand years. And somewhere in all this, God is supposed to make a new Heaven and new Earth so it won't matter what we do to this one.
So the Christians believe.
This belief in a rapture is so strong among the "Armageddonist" Christians that numerous books and films have been created warning of what will happen to those left behind on the day of the "Second Coming." Critics have called these publications nefarious, war mongering, and threats to world peace, which they are.
Armageddon is the name of the battlefield where this war is supposed to occur. It is said to be located in Israel at a place now known as the Hill of Megiddo. Megiddo is the place where a great battle between the Hebrew and Roman armies once occurred. It ended tragically, with all of the Jews committing suicide before they were overpowered by the Roman army.
This strange Christian doctrine encourages violent behavior between Christians and people of other beliefs, destruction of the environment, bigotry and, in the end when Jesus fails to return, total despair.
With new evidence emerging that the story of the deity of Jesus, and especially his rising from the grave after three days, has been a fairy tale all along, one would think Christians are getting a little nervous about their dependency on Jesus to grant them an escape route from our dying planet.
Where did this rapture story come from? It is a fabrication by Bible scholars, who have pieced together a few lines from Old Testament verses and packaged them with some amazing promises by Paul, the New Testament snake oil salesman, to build a case for a story so silly it is amazing that anybody ever accepted it from the start.
Yet today, the world is in deadly peril because leaders in the U. S. government, who are Bible-thumping born-again believers in the story, are so anxious to force the return of their Jesus, they threaten to use their powers to launch a fabricated Battle of Armageddon right in the heart of the Middle East.
The promise of this fantastic gathering of believers is found in a letter written by Paul, the self-proclaimed apostle that never personally knew Jesus but built a ministry based on angelic visions after he had his supernatural experience on the Road to Damascus.
In his first letter to the Thessalonians, in Chapter 4:13-17 Paul wrote:
"But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: 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."
These verses, written by a possessed character who came along long after Jesus was murdered, turned Christ into a deity, and then established a religious system carefully crafted by his own deranged mind, are the foundation for this dangerous and destructive behavior that we are observing today.
Paul also mentioned this event in another letter written to the Corinthians. He said: "Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality."
So where would Paul have gotten such an idea? We suspect he came upon the Gospel of Mark that contained the following: (Mark 13:26-27) "And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven."
Paul took this image and embellished it, thus creating a fantastic story about a god that was not only going to rise from the dead, he was going to bring all of the dead Christians up out of their graves and then swish away all of the living Christians.
The extreme craftiness of the message is clearly observed when we think of the way it carves into and attempts to discredit the work of real contemporary science that is even now struggling to find a way for humans to escape a doomsday scenario created by overpopulation and humanity's failure to protect and preserve the living Earth.
Humanity now is at a critical crossroad where we all must choose between doing nothing and going extinct, after extensive suffering, or finding an escape route out of this mess. The way out may be the creation of new bodies that can exist without lungs and a need for oxygen, can endure an extreme environment and travel in space in search of other habitable planets.
The bodies we have are not capable of doing this.
There also is another future event that the New Testament story is designed to impede. That would be a final gathering of a few humans . . . enough to maintain the genetic diversity of our kind . . . for a shift from this world into a parallel one. Is this another fable? The concept of parallel universes is but an unproven theory.
As far as putting a faith in a god that comes down out of the sky and calls all of his followers off to glory . . . forget it. It is a fable created by a madman 2,000 years ago that should have been thrown out with the trash with all of the rest of Paul's nutty writings.