Des Downunder On Sundays

By Des Rutherford, Adelaide, Australia- Rapture- The Day After.

So did anyone get raptured? I thought not, although it may be hard to tell. If the Rapture occurs only in the spiritual realm then we might never notice. It would certainly explain why there are so many soulless people still on Earth; people who have lost the human spirit of life.

It is now 6.10 pm on the 21st of May 2011. I've waited until now before declaring that the Rapture has been aborted. At least it has here in Australia. Then again, most of Oz probably thought there was little to be aborted in the first place, believing the Rapture to be nothing more than a delusional concept.

In the US however, such a miscarriage on the scale of the prophesied rapture would be unthinkable in some states, where terminating defeatists of even their lifelessness is frowned upon, especially if they have been considered whole for more than a trimester.

I think it is safe to conclude that the prophecy was falsely alarming, if not alarmingly false.

It will be interesting to see what the pro-rapturists do today (Sunday 22nd May).

How will they react to the unfulfilled prophecy they so vehemently proclaimed would occur yesterday?

It is in light of that somewhat concerning question that I admit to worrying for the welfare of these unraptured believers. Their depth of commitment to their religion and prophecies can have severe repercussions when the dogma is challenged rationally, or any prophecy fails to be fulfilled. Normally they can protect their personal belief through their irrational faith, but where they pitch their belief against reality, they will be confronted by the conflict between what they want to believe and the opposing undeniable reality.

Cults have a history of harming themselves and their followers when their faith is exposed as unsubstantiated hokum; when they feel their belief has no validity beyond the exposed irrationality. Be advised: Don't drink the kool-aid.

This is why most clergy rarely preach anything remotely connected to reality. It is much easier to claim a belief is real if the only supporting evidence is in an old book written in a dead language and translated by people who have already determined that religious preconceptions have more validity than our real experience of life.

Interestingly enough, a lot of religious writing is emblematic of human psychical growth similar to the way that the problems of ancient Greek and Norse Gods were symbols of the human condition. The stories of those gods were cathartic parables of human truth and self discovery.

Today religion, in its fundamental form, has sought an escape from reality, to establish a misguided hope for eternal after-life, rather than to explore, expose, and elucidate the wonder and grandeur of reality, and the concept, not of obedience to false idols, but of finding and confirming the here and now of our experience, with all the sanity that love brings to us when we say yes to this life.

It should not be surprising that fear built on ignorance and threat establishes the basis of so many religions in their quest to seduce followers and so control them. Where once religion was a useful means to expose life's quests and meanings through metaphorical tales, the fundamentalists, extremists, Pharisees, and barbarians turned those tales into threats of impending doom, or into fearful laws demanding absolute obedience, the only escapes being prayer to the deity, an ecclesiastical bribe, and repentance made, for sins which they claimed are part of the human condition.

Breaking down the false concept of sin and repentance is nigh on impossible for those who have succumbed to the religiously abusive extremists. Neither rational argument nor facts will sway those minds away from the indoctrination of a religious zealot.

Nevertheless, failures of prophecies as public as yesterday’s rapture may well cause many people to examine their own relationship to life's realities.

I suspect that even an announcement from God Himself proclaiming His non-existence would not be sufficient to convince some people that He is a figment of Man's conception. The idea of god is Man's creation, and is merely part of our evolution towards fulfilling our potential as life fully aware of itself. In that, we are as Gods.

Those people who praise a religious view of human love, compassion and acceptance, are not the problem for our humanity towards each other. No, the real demons are those who insist their dogmatic religious values are irrevocable interpretations that must be the ones to rule our cultures, regardless of the suffering they cause. They have a narrow world view that is dictated by an authoritarian psychopathology which limits acceptance of the value of diversity in all life forms.

It is therefore not surprising that people like Bryan Fischer, Maggie Gallagher, Tony Perkins, Peter Spriggs, Cindy Jacobs, Gary Cass, David Barton, Linda Harvey and Pete LaBarbera amongst an asylum of others (including the recently deceased Bin Laden, and the long gone Adolph Hitler,) do not understand the nature of their own psychosis. Reality is not what you want it to be, Reality is what is. If you cannot recognise what is real, then you had best stay in the padded cell of your mind and keep out of the way of the rest of humanity which is busy making wedding preparations for gender free marriages, not to mention trying to undo the harm that you and your cohorts have so maliciously bestowed on the rest of us, ever since you decided to try to impose religious hypocrisy and hate under the pretence of love.

To those who belong to the above list of fanatical extremists I say, “You seem to forget, ignore and perhaps are even paranoid, that LGBTQ people and their straight allies, regardless of their religions, know and have always known the value of love. We know what true love is, and we have, often at personal cost, protected humanity throughout the ages from your ancestor's persecution and attempted assassination of freedom, life and Love.”

“We will not allow your attempt to twist the truth of love and life into another Inquisition.

Stand aside, and let true love celebrate our natural rapture of this life.”

To those who don't belong to the above list, but are in search for meaning to life, you can always tell a genuine 'spiritual' guide; they never ask for money or favour.

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