Stealing Heaven (Spiritual Warfare, One.)

Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is his name:

That strengtheneth the spoiled against the strong, so that the spoiled shall come against the fortress.

They hate him that rebuketh in the gate, and they abhor him that speaketh uprightly.

Forasmuch therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.

For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right.

Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time; for it is an evil time. ~Amos 5:8-13

I saw this while I was out today. My Mom and I had to take her sick, geriatric Maltese to the vet, and it was my job to wrangle the other dogs while she did that. I've been thinking since, about what to write...

Anybody remember Harold Camping?

In late 2010 and early 2011, Harold Camping's End Times prediction that the Rapture would take place on May 21, 2011 was kind of a big deal.

And by "Kind of a big deal" I mean "Everybody I knew with any serious knowledge of Christian Eschatology was laughing at it." For me, that happened to include a lot of people at the time, since I was basically part of a house-church.

In other words, we'd eat breakfast on Saturday mornings at Cranker's restaurant in Mount Pleasant or at my buddy's house, laugh like a motherfucker about it...and then back that shit up with Scripture. We went all in on telling people that it was bullshit as a voted-on group policy. *I* typed up and printed out what we decided. (We were also against the 2012 Mayan calendar bullshit.)

But I'm 100% serious when I say this garbage was all over the place, just like the Q-Anon horseshit is now. Between Harold Camping and the Mayan calendar garbage, there was a lot of it going around.

Just like there had once been with all the Y2K ridiculousness and that certainly came to nothing.

But motherfuckers wanna believe.

Hell, we worked with people who'd bought into it, and who had to be talked out of this bullshit.

People abandoned jobs and lives, divorced their spouses, and gave Harold Camping their life-savings. At least one person committed suicide because of these bullshit predictions.

And don't listen to what they tell you. It's not a message of Hope.

It's a message of "Heaven isn't Heaven if everybody gets to go." 

It's a message of "I'm going to get whisked away to Heaven by Jesus and you're going to stay here and get zapped into charcoal briquettes while I get to watch." Trust me, them getting to watch is the most important part, as far as these fucking people are concerned.

It needs to be said that, not only are these fucking people's beliefs about this shit both explicitly political and inherently racist (They like Capitalism mostly when it hurts other people) but that their actual stated (and written about, including in fiction) belief in their End Times Narrative is that the "End Times" specifically will be when people other than White Far-Right "Christians" hold power over the World. 

They are not subtle about this. 

I'm serious, read the "Left Behind" series books. They come right out and say it shit like that cell phones, LGBT people and solar power are "From the Devil."

Capitalism (but only for those deemed worthy) is Heaven. Everybody in the world getting enough to eat is Hell. It's literally "The Cruelty Is The Point" sacralized.

It's all about a certain kind of people (Conservative White Men) holding ultimate authority in the world, right up to the fact that those books populate the Antichrist's cabinet or supreme council or whatever you want to call it with People of Color and women, and nearly everybody is thus presented as the worst possible right-wing stereotype of whatever.

And yes, I've been hearing the "We Are Living In The End Times" crap from these idiots to one extent or another for my entire damned life. I was a mainstream Christian, though. 

So, of course I didn't "Do" End Times eschatology until I was an adult. I was Evangelized into it while serving in the Air Force, and even then it took a couple years to get all the way into it...and despite being a conservative I never bought into all the political aspects.

For a long time, the entire narrative changed every time anything happened, so you really couldn't.

And then Trump came along, and conspiracy theories took over in their own right, and now it's all Antivaxxer woo, pro-Russia crap, Q-Anon lies and racism. Jesus has been kicked out of His own End Times story. 

These same people would have you believe Trump is Christ.

When you point out that the New Testament in general (and Revelation in particular) spend a lot of time talking about exactly this happening, these fucking people either ignore it or try and use conspiracy theories to argue against you.

Actual truths like that Barack Obama is a Christian with a church background,  Joe Biden is a devout, practicing Catholic, that Ukraine is a (small-C) conservative and very Christian nation...and that authoritarian countries like Orban's Hungary or Putin's Russia genuinely are not (per measured levels of religious observance) or that most of the growth in Christianity has been among Black and Brown people in the Global South for over a generation...don't compute with these fucking people. They don't care. 

They don't want to know. Hell, if they did it wouldn't matter.

Because none of this stuff was ever really about any of that anyway.

Because it's all about Power and Wealth and a certain kind of people being able to imagine they have the market cornered on both or that people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are just like them. The fake religiosity is just to fool the feeble-minded. It's not an accident that these people's concept of Heaven reads like a materialist power-fantasy, because it is one. 

For fuck's sake, Twitter has been shoving a lot of Calvinist and Reformed theology bullshit in my feed. You know, the beliefs of Apartheid South Africa.

It's not an aberration or an error that modern Christianity is full of grifters and scammers and that the traditional beliefs and the people who hold to them have been rudely shoved aside. 

It's the point.

And they'll believe whatever false prophecies they have to and otherwise destroy themselves if they think it'll help them keep this grift going. 

These fucking people would try to steal Heaven if they thought they could, and thought they'd get away with it...in just the same way that Harold Camping got a whole lot of people to give him a bunch of money in the last few years before he died. This Q-Anon bullshit will work out the same way.

I don't think God works that way, for one, but you can't tell these people a damn thing.

He who dies with the most money is still dead. The Prosperity Gospel is a lie. 

The Rapture is a false doctrine made up by an English kook and propagated by a former Confederate soldier.

Look at the history of this crap. These fucking people are not your friends and they tell you straight up what kind of world they want to live in.

And then they have the balls to call all this "Spiritual Warfare."

Last Post

Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! to what end is it for you? the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light.

As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him.

Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness, and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it?

I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies.

Though Ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts.

Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols.

But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream. ~Amos 5:18-24

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And so tomorrow, as we take the campaign South and West, as we learn that the struggles of the textile workers in Spartanburg are not so different than the plight of the dishwasher in Las Vegas; that the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of L.A.; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people, we are one nation. And, together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story, with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea: Yes, we can. ~Barack Obama