Rapture Mania in the USA: Social Pathology?

From: frank (odlh90_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 03/28/05 

Date: 28 Mar 2005 03:19:50 -0800

Below is an article describing the phenomenon of rapture mania
sweeping, the sheer number of people who believe armageddon will occur
within their life time.

For anyone who is familiar with Emile Durkheim the sociologist, do you
agree the social phenomenon of rapture mania described below is a form
of social pathology, a form of anomie?

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Waiting for the Sky Taxi
March 26, 2005 By TygrBright

Oh, those wacky Rapture-maniacs.

How we love to mock them, with their bizarre "countdown clocks" and
their tacky literature and their oh-so-mockable bumper stickers. And
there is much within the bizarre range of pre-millenialist theology
that would be comical, if it weren't for the astonishing numbers of
humorlessly devout believers in this nihilistic mutation of Christian
eschatology. According to a 1999 Newsweek poll, forty-five percent of
American adults believe that the events described in the Book of
Revelations will occur on Earth within their lifetime.

Given the escalated level of these beliefs on the loon-o-meter, why
should they be food for concern, no matter how widespread they are?
After all, an overwhelming portion of the world's population believed
in strange creation myths involving turtles and dragons, etc., not to
mention a flat earth, and we've managed to muddle through alright.
Where's the harm in people believing a bearded white guy will appear
on a cloud and fwoooooosh! them up into the sky to live on in bliss
while all the people they don't like get left behind to endure
unspeakable torment?

Well, there's the basic hostility, selfishness, and lack of contact
with reality revealed in such a belief. But heck, that's their
problem, right?

If it were only that. The whole Dispensationalist mythos is so creepy
in its obsessive rumination on the intimate details of torture and
suffering that will be inflicted upon the sinners who fail to
sufficiently hate fags and abortionists and godless liberals that it
makes my stomach queasy to contemplate it. I'm not going to recap the
details here. But although there is no logic, there is a kind of
rhetorical consistency in its reiterative descriptions of pain and
destruction. In other words, the Rapture-maniacs are definitely all on
the same page of their sadistic hymnal, singing at the tops of their
lungs. And one of the elements of their belief is that it is part of
their obligation as "Christians" to do everything they can to help
bring about the events of the "end times."

But don't ever point out to them the inconsistency between their
belief that:

A. The Earth has to reach a fever-pitch of total abandonment to sin in
order to bring about the Second Coming;

B. They have an obligation to do whatever they can to bring about that
Second Coming; and yet…

C. Somehow they have to stave off the abominable sins of homosexual
tolerance and women's control of their reproductive choices, even if,
(apparently,) this will reduce the sum total of sinfulness needed to
precipitate the Millennium.

Again, sinister as these beliefs are, and widespread though they may
be, why should we be concerned?

Bill Moyers has covered this in far more detail and with much greater
cogency than I could ever manage. (See his article here.) Basically,
it comes down to two things:

A. The Rapture-maniacs' numbers and fervency have made them a
frighteningly potent political force in America; and

B. Because they think Jesus is on his way to pick them up any day,
now, they not only feel no obligation to make the world a better place
for their children and grandchildren, they think that making it worse
will hasten the Divine Air Taxi on its journey to suck them up to
Eternal Blissland.

Okay, if that doesn't scare you, you probably fell asleep during
Alien, too. I'm not ashamed to admit that it gives me the willies. And
it makes me ask what I think is a critical, and much under-examined,
question:

Just how did such a bizarre, contra-survival belief take such a firm
hold on so many people, in a relatively well-educated culture where
science, technology, and materialism are pervasive?

What's up with that?

These are not citizens of a non-industrialized tribal culture that
still believes the sun is pushed under the flat earth by a giant
tortoise all night to rise on the other side in the morning.

Why would someone embrace such a nihilistic, suicidal belief system,
so devoid of logic, so dependent on Lovecraftian fantasy?

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From: Joe Ray
Date: 03/28/05 06:04 AM
 Member Since: 08/24/2000
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Why would they rush, like lemmings, to promote a vast war in the
Middle East and irreversible ecological destruction of the Earth's
resources?
Why would they pin their hopes to the fantasy of Jesus and his giant
Rapture-vacuum?

Why, indeed.

I looked into the roots of Rapture-mania, the early incarnations of
the Dispensationalist phenomenon and its various offshoots and
competing sects.

The initial flourishing of this darkly despairing contortion of
Biblical eschatology happened at a time when the benefits of the
Industrial Revolution were distributed with growing inequity to an
elite class. A large segment of society in rapidly-urbanizing Britain
and Europe was left staring hopelessly at a better life that seemed
forever beyond their grasp. The many toiled among new and alien
machines that brought only misery to them, and wealth, power, and
luxury to others.

Rapture beliefs spread like wildfire in the wake of the failed social
revolutions of the 1840s, in the latter half of the nineteenth
century. The new technologies of the Industrial Revolution had made
the poor aware that there was someplace else to go, but they had no
hope of going. It was reserved for others-better educated, born into a
more fortunate class, gifted by circumstances of birth with access to
the new horizon of luxury and wealth.

Their demands to share those benefits had just been brutally crushed
in the backlash of the failed revolutions. Economic and political
power seemed irrevocably consolidated into the hands of a small
elite-an elite who despised them for their ignorance, their credulity,
their lack of sophistication.

Into this aching gulf stepped John Nelson Darby, C.I. Scofield, Edward
Irving, Henry Drummond, and the proto-millenialists, with a pleasingly
vengeful reading of Revelation and Thessalonians. The believers-humble
and theologically 'pure'-are slated for eternal bliss. The sinners,
the worldlings, the abandoned hedonists enjoying the fruits of
Industrial Revolution wealth-for them, it is boils and rains of fire
and unending tortures of the most graphic description.

The believers were beset by profound alienation from a world exploding
with new adventures of science and rich possibilities of wealth, and
constrained by fear of change, poverty, and social pressure.
Rapture-mania is a pathology-but many, if not most, pathologies arise
as defenses against worse despair, depression, and hopelessness. After
the failure of the social revolution, the rollback of any attempts at
progress, the slow loss of the early liberalizing gains in
post-Napoleonic Europe, what was left? Liberalism was defeated; it
offered no hope. It was a cruel chimera, a broken reed, to be turned
upon and despised for its failures.

Fast-forward to the Information Revolution of the 20th century, and
the liberal advances that seemed to promise the distribution of its
benefits to all. And then the failures, the rolling-back of liberal
gains, the growing disparities of wealth between the elite few and the
decidedly un-elite many, the fury of denial of that UN-elite status,
overlaid on a growing uneasiness and despair. The opaque and
ever-growing complexity of information technology that seemed to take
its benefits further and further from the grasp of the "ordinary
person" and into the realm of a highly-educated few who could design
chips and write mysterious code.

Now, again, we see large numbers of otherwise educated individuals,
profoundly alienated, turning their backs upon the liberalism that
seemed to betray its promise to them, embracing the bitter fantasies
that sustained their great-grandparents through a similar social
cycle.

If, as Bill Moyers believes, it is a matter of urgency to keep the
nihilistic fury of the Rapture-maniacs from irrevocably damaging the
Earth's habitability through war and ecological destruction, we must
turn our attention to the issues of what makes Rapture-mania, and how
it can be unmade. I suggest that the cure is successful social
reorganization that will restore hope to the hopeless, and open
opportunity to those who feel locked out of the possibilities of
modern technology and culture.

The last wave of Rapture-mania finally abated in the wake of the
Progressive revolutions that followed World War I. They reformed labor
laws, curbed the excesses of the corporate classes, and spread a
social safety net under the feet of the vulnerable. If we want to save
a habitable world for our grandchildren, we need to pull the rug out
from under Rapture-mania with a new wave of hope and opportunity. We
must demonstrate that there is hope in this world, not just in
cloud-cuckoo-land. That making this world a better place can be even
more satisfying than contemplating the richly-deserved tortures of the
sinning class.

The Rapture-maniacs have a strong hold on political power and are
doing their best to make things more hopeless, rather than less so.
They can hear the throbbing engines of the Great Sky Taxi loud in
their ears, and they're not about to listen to the feeble voices of
the ineffectual liberals who couldn't even hold onto the gains we made
in the mid-20th century.

Yet somewhere inside, a great many of them, perhaps most of them (at
least those who are not making a cushy living off exploiting the
vengeful bearded white guy Jesus myth,) know how creepy and unpleasant
this psychotic fantasy really is. If something better comes along,
even a faint hope of something better, it might be the catalyst that
will begin the return to sanity.

Now, more than ever, the fight to restore hope takes on urgency. It
may be the only thing that saves our grandchildren from choking in the
reeking effluvia and starving in the devastated wasteland awaiting the
"Rapture."

http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/05/03/26_taxi.html