I know I've said this a lot lately, but, Seriously?
Apparently, and I've seen stuff like this before, there are Evangelical and Fundamentalist nuts who hope that Trump somehow causes the Biblical End Times.
I'm just sayin' I don't think all that will work out the way they think it will.
I mean, given the current behavior of many Evangelicals, now might not be the opportune time for them to be hoping that Jesus comes back. I mean, that's like the big time Evangelical Pastor saying he hopes Jesus comes back and catches him diddling the pool boy, but I digress.
We've got the religious right stuck in financial scandals, political scandals, a sex scandal or three, there's the whole Trump thing, they're also supporting murderous Fundamentalist Muslim leaders in Saudi Arabia. I mean, come on, if you could work in dime-a-dozen Televangelists with bad make-up and hair, a Right-wing Central American dictator, and Sun Myung Moon I think you'd have a full 1980's bingo.
Funny thing, as somebody who actually WAS a religious kid in the 1980's, I honestly don't recall that the time period was all that religious. In fact, aside from the whole Iran thing (and the Iranians were also Soviet allies) even most of our adversaries in the Middle East were more the secular Communist type. I mean you could always point to Afghanistan (Surprise, Surprise, I know) but at that time, even the Islamist religious nuts were on our side.
You know what really wasn't a thing, back then, though? End Times Prophecy Nuts.
Granted, I was a mainstream Christian, if also a budding political and theological conservative. Granted a lot of the books this stuff is based on were written in the 1970's, but it would take the environmental worries of the late 1980's and early 1990's, the fall of the Iron Curtain, (yes) an increase in liberal attitudes more globally and the creeping approach of the 21st Century (and yeah, that really was the big one, there) to actually popularize the End Times prophecy movement. I had lapsed religiously from the early to mid-1990's but, following some severe problems in my life, I went back to Church later on.
American Christianity, like much of the rest of the country, was convinced that the turn of the Millennium was some major turning point and that it would herald the Second Coming of Christ and this and that and the other thing. The secular world was of course, worried about global warming (El Nino, at that time) the "Y2K virus" (fixed simply by changing the date-format on one's computer, but a lot of little $5 fix-it disks got sold to the technologically ignorant) and basically on all fronts the beginning of the same national midlife crisis that's led us to our current political mess.
I worked my night shift as a line cook at the Canada Creek Ranch club house on New Years Eve of 1999, made it through my shift without the world ending, and got home at around two in the morning on January 1st of 2000. As I recall, Rose (my girlfriend at the time) was still up waiting for me. We smoked a blunt, made love, and went to bed. When I woke up a few hours later...awakened by the mad barking of my Schnauzers and her Yellow Lab at something or other outside, the world as we knew it was still the same as it had been the day before as history slid by, effortlessly making itself.
There was little more that came of the "Y2K Virus" or the end of the world than a few humorous stories in the local newspapers. The casting about in the world of End Times Prophecy nuts and the online message boards thereof for the next year-and-three-quarters was subtle at first, but silently frantic. I basically exited the movement within a few days. Me and the girlfriend broke up in the Spring, I very quickly ended up with another girlfriend, we got married and then that fell apart and turned into the start of a long, acrimonious divorce process Then 9/11 happened and despite a brief outbreak of religiosity...which my increasingly loony ex-wife provided me a window into...there was no comparable outbreak of End Times fever.
Of course, that might have to do with the Bush administration's steady insistence that the resulting war was against terrorists, and not Islam, against criminals who profaned their own faith, not the nations they hailed from, and from the fact that...flawed as their convictions may have been, American conservatives still had the courage of their convictions
Since then, the only End Times whatever that's even made a dent were Harold Camping's failed predictions in 2011, the whole 2012 Mayan Calendar thing, and this odd "Trump is going to cause the End Times" bullshit that's popped up sporadically since 2016. Meanwhile, Climate change is obvious, and cultural, demographic and social change is both causing the Conservatives and the right-wing Christians to lose their mind and combining with age, bad health choices, politics that's gotten nutty enough to cause even many of those people to vote for the other party and the aging process, the human-generated Apocalypse of the Opioid crisis, their own monstrous behavior and an utterly mule-headed refusal to adapt to ensure that by the next time we have a presidential election there's probably not going to be enough angry old scared white people to carry conservatism forward without significant change or at least a lessening of racism.
Speaking of, it needs to be pointed out that Cyrus I. Scofield, the author of the "Scofield Reference Bible" and the extensive margin-notes on which much of this modern End Times claptrap is based was a former Confederate soldier.
If that doesn't help you see how deeply racism and Fundamentalism and the modern beliefs of large chunks of American Christianity are entwined, I can't help you.
But the key is that more people are starting to realize this kind of stuff.
In short, they're probably going to get their apocalypse, but no Jesus, and for once their bullshit will mostly affect them.
Now let me teach you, as I was taught.
If you actually read the whole Bible, including Matthew 24, and not just the disjointed passages that make up the "End Times Prophecy" narrative you could make the argument that we've always been living in the End Times. Many of the events about which Jesus prophesied have already happened. There are always false Christs and False Prophets and disasters in various places and wars and rumors of wars. Sin is a part of the human condition! Revelation was written by John of Patmos to be a message of hope to oppressed people living under Roman brutality, not to be some kind of war-porn for the perpetually-aggrieved, the religiously fanatical or the sexually repressed.
In fact, the only things their heaven really consists of are gloating about themselves being the only ones there and telling their small angry god how great he is.
Sorry, but I just wasn't taught that way.
I've written most of this article with ferrets attacking my socks. If they don't get to go into the afterlife...just do us all a favor and send me where they do get to go.
I'm not interested in being an ego-boost for an egomaniac wannabe of a god.
So really, if you think about it, I guess I was wrong. These people don't have to declare Trump their God. They were just waiting for somebody with those qualities to arise for them to worship all along. All he does is fit the bill.
Matthew 24:27 King James Version (KJV)
27 For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
And no, that verse is not speaking about Donald Trump. I did a study of the Bible years ago, for my Baptist church men's group about whether or not America or any of its leaders played an important role in the events of the End Times.
You know what I came up with?
Nope. We don't. Of course that might just be because the Americas were unknown to the actual writers of the Books that became the Bible.
Personally, I've reached the conclusion that American politics and American religion alike will probably be a lot more functional if we can just get over ourselves (and particularly in the case of men in general and religious people in particular, that unending need to be told how great we are.) Bonus points if we can get over our various political, sexual and social hang-ups and try to resist the lure of confirmation bias.
We'd best get at it and stop contradicting ourselves.
It is late, choose now. The world is ever-ending.
But at the same time, the world is ever making itself anew and the End is not yet.
The message of Revelation...indeed of any true religious or spiritual tradition...is one of hope and the future, not of an end to the future. Yes, the world may end. No, we're not going to see it coming, nor will most of us live to see it, but when it happens everybody will know. So live life and stop waiting for the world to end.
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.
We'd best act like it.
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