Day Of The Lord? (Left Behind Is A Lie V, Nine.)

Hear ye this word which I take up against you, even a lamentation, O house of Israel.
The virgin of Israel is fallen; she shall no more rise: she is forsaken upon her land; there is none to raise her up.
For thus saith the Lord God; The city that went out by a thousand shall leave an hundred, and that which went forth by an hundred shall leave ten, to the house of Israel.
For thus saith the Lord unto the house of Israel, Seek ye me, and ye shall live:
But seek not Bethel, nor enter into Gilgal, and pass not to Beersheba: for Gilgal shall surely go into captivity, and Bethel shall come to naught. Seek the Lord, and ye shall live; lest he break out like fire in the house of Joseph, and devour it, and there be none to quench it in Bethel. 

Ye who turn judgment to wormwood, and leave off righteousness in the earth,

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.

Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: and so the Lord, the God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye have spoken.

Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate: it may be that the Lord God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph.

Therefore the Lord, the God of hosts, the Lord, saith thus; Wailing shall be in all streets; and they shall say in all the highways, Alas! alas! and they shall call the husbandman to mourning, and such as are skillful of lamentation to wailing.
And in all vineyards shall be wailing: for I will pass through thee, saith the Lord.
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 5:1-24

I saw this the other day, a woman got dragged out of a Republican event in Idaho by three Party rent-a-cops for objecting to proposed State-level Medicaid cuts, and was evidently illegally detained (and she's apparently considering filing assault charges, and rightly so.)

First off, this is America, I don't give a damn how Red your State is, it ain't the Soviet Union.

Second, I'm just sayin' it's Idaho, there is a very, very good chance that this woman is, herself, a Republican. You see, there's plenty of Republicans on Medicaid, or those who care for aging relatives that are, or have disabled children that need it, and so on. Most of those people work and pay taxes and even if they didn't, they live here and should get a say in what goes on.

You see how that works??

Third, I don't give a damn how much you love your particular ideology, this isn't right.

But then, I strongly suspect that if America was what we say we are, we wouldn't keep seeing pictures of Luigi Mangione with the impression being given that these fucking people felt they needed the Death Star from Star Wars on Overwatch even though the dude is handcuffed and shackled.

To me, that projects neither that we are the "Land of the Free" nor that we are whatever kind of Macho-Crusader Nation "Conservatives" think we are this week. I'm a veteran, excessive force isn't the flex a lot of people seem to think it is.

And I'm sorry, but the more I think about it, the less I think this crap (not to mention the whole Trump thing) is some kind of recent social contagion but more the natural result of certain beliefs, ideas and things being allowed to proliferate and permeate the culture; Calvinism, for one.

Oh, sure, there's others; Hypocrisy, Narcissism, the list goes on. But here's the thing, those are as much individual bad traits as they are societal failings and that's hard to control for. But we, especially the "Christian Nation" folks, actively stopped being what we told ourselves we were a long damn time ago:

I'd like to start with these two jokers, John Nelson Darby, and Cyrus Ingersoll Schofield, the founders of modern Christian End Times Prophecy Bullshit.

John Nelson Darby was an Anglo-Irish preacher, trained as a lawyer, but also a basic religious fanatic even though he had no background in theology. He nevertheless became a preacher in the Church of Ireland before leaving and being instrumental in the founding of the Fundamentalist sect called the Plymouth Brethren. Mind you, this denomination historically crops up in some pretty weird and significant places. 

Orde Wingate, the famous-yet-gibbering-insane British commando who would later fuck up the Japanese leading the Chindits in Burma got his start in Special Operations training Jewish settlers in then-British Palestine in self-defense against their Arab neighbors, many of those he trained would go on to found the Israeli Defense Force. Orde was the son of a Plymouth Brethren fanatic and former British Army colonel, from a family with deep ties to the sect.

But here's the thing, founding one Fundamentalist sect wasn't enough for old JN Darby, he caused a split in the original group and then went on to personally found the Exclusive Brethren, an even more tight-assed Fundamentalist sect. But where he's most relevant to the current moment is that he's the first big propagator of Pre-millennial dispensationalism (Link) and belief in the Rapture. (Link)

Now here's the thing, that crap still had to be translated into American.

Enter Cyrus Ingersoll Scofield, Old Cyrus was a former Confederate Soldier (and deserter, in case you think that his service conveys any level of character) former lawyer, politician and violent drunkard with a history of disgrace, scandal and stints in the local hoosegow who converted to Evangelicalism and started a career as a preacher in the late 1880's and early 1890's, rapidly becoming famous and then picking up the doctrines of people like John Nelson Darby (who was already dead by then) and preaching them, then distilling all that crap into the Scofield Reference Bible (which, mind you, I once owned a relatively recent edition of. I am not unfamiliar with this shit, personally) which was first published in 1909. 

This was during the heyday of early Christian Fundamentalism including the Azusa Street Revival (Link) which founded Pentecostalism specifically, and Christian Fundamentalism was a movement then gaining steam, until it was all exposed as a bunch of bullshit in the Scopes Trial over the teaching of Evolution in 1925 (Link) and after which it settled into a long, sulking period of insularity and violent ideation, which, as much as anything else feeds into the current moment.

Scofield also had an outsized influence on the formation of Christian Zionism and the popularization thereof.

In other words, modern "Conservatism," Evangelical Christianity and of course Donald Trump would've got nowhere without these two motherfuckers.

These fucking people's preference for criminals, drunks, nuts and racists and shit is not a new thing.

Nor is their hunger for somebody...anybody...to come along and smite the people they don't like. Jesus was a no-call/no-show so they replaced Him with Antivaxxer Woo, Conspiracy Theories, and Donald Trump.

But, the rot goes all the way back to the beginning, to before the beginning, really.

And again, it's going to come down to a fight to get rid of these assholes, and they'll probably still get some part of the country out of it because this shit is that pervasive.

You either believe in Freedom...in not having your life controlled by people who think the meaning of life is to lurch closer to the End Of All Things...or you don't. It's worth noting that the same fucking people are abandoning belief in the Rapture now, not because it's been proven wrong (which it is) but because if it's true they don't get to fight.

Do you get the seriousness of this now?? These fucking people don't believe what they say about themselves...but they expect you to.

Good Lord, but that sounds almost Soviet, doesn't it??

And as I intend to get into in a subsequent series, they desire the End Times so much that they intend to become the Beast Of Revelation their own damn selves if that's what it takes. Left Behind is a lie, and I can show you why that is.

You have been warned, now what are you going to do about it?

Слава Україна!

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

(Note: This is another case of me being "That Guy" here. Ronald Reagan is the son of a bitch who made Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians full partners in the Republican coalition.)

Eight

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. ~George Orwell, 1984.