Posted on 12/21/2004 2:48:52 PM PST by MississippiMasterpiece
A VERICHIP is a tiny, implantable microchip with a unique identification number that connects a patient to his medical records. When America's Food and Drug Administration recently approved it for medical use in humans, the news provoked familiar worries in the press about privacy-threatening technologies. But on the notice boards of raptureready.com, the talk was about a drawback that the FDA and the media seemed to have overlooked. Was the VeriChip the mark of the beast?
Raptureready.com runs an online service for the millions of born-again Christians in America who believe that an event called the Rapture is coming soon. During the Rapture, Christ will return and whisk believers away to join the righteous dead in heaven. From there, they will have the best seats in the house as the unsaved perish in a series of spectacular fires, wars, plagues and earthquakes. (Raptureready.com advises the soon-to-depart to stick a note on the fridge to brief those left behindhusbands, wives and in-lawsabout the horrors in store for them.)
Furnished with apocalyptic tracts from the Bible, believers scour news dispatches for clues that the Rapture is approaching. Some think implantable chips are a sign. The Book of Revelation features a mark that the Antichrist makes everybody wear in their right hand, or in their foreheads. Rapturists have more than a hobbyist's idle interest in identifying this mark. Anyone who accepts it spends eternity roasting in the sulphurs of hell. (And, incidentally, the European Union may be the matrix out of which the Antichrist's kingdom could grow.)
Christians have kept faith with the idea that the world is just about to end since the beginnings of their religion. Jesus Himself hinted more than once that His second coming would happen during the lifetime of His followers. In its original form, the Lord's Prayer, taught by Jesus to his disciples, may have implored God to keep us from the ordeal.
Men have been making the same appeal ever since. In 156AD, a fellow called Montanus, pronouncing himself to be the incarnation of the Holy Spirit, declared that the New Jerusalem was about to come crashing down from the heavens and land in Phrygiawhich, conveniently, was where he lived. Before long, Asia Minor, Rome, Africa and Gaul were jammed with wandering ecstatics, bitterly repenting their sins and fasting and whipping themselves in hungry anticipation of the world's end. A bit more than a thousand years later, the authorities in Germany were stamping out an outbreak of apocalyptic mayhem among a self-abusing sect called the secret flagellants of Thuringia. The disciples of William Miller, a 19th-century evangelical American, clung ecstatically to the same belief as the Montanists and the Thuringians. A thick strand of Christian history connects them all, and countless other movements.
Don't get left behind Apocalyptic belief renews itself in ingenious ways. Belief in the Rapture, which enlivens the familiar end-of-time narrative with a compellingly dramatic twist, appears to be a modern phenomenon: John Nelson Darby, a 19th-century British evangelical preacher, was perhaps the first to popularise the idea. (Darby's inspiration was a passage in St Paul's letter to the Thessalonians, which talks about the Christian dead and true believers being caught up together in the clouds.) It is not easy to say how many Americans believe in Darby's concept of Rapture. But a dozen novels that dramatise the event and its gripping aftermaththe Left Behind serieshave sold more than 40m copies.
New apocalyptic creeds have even sprung from those sticky moments when the world has failed to end on schedule. (Social scientists call this disconfirmation.) When the resurrected Christ failed to show up for Miller's disciples on the night of October 22nd 1844, press scribblers mocked the Great Disappointment mercilessly. But even as they jeered, a farmer called Hiram Edson snuck away from the vigil to pray in a barn, where he duly received word of what had happened. There had been a great event after allbut in heaven, not on Earth. This happening was that Jesus had begun an investigative judgment of the dead in preparation for his return. Thus was born the Church of Seventh-day Adventists. They were not the only ones to rise above apparent setbacks to the prophesies by which they set such store: the Jehovah's Witnesses of the persistently apocalyptic Watchtower sect survived no fewer than nine disconfirmations every few years between 1874 and 1975.
Which way to Armageddon? Why do end-of-time beliefs endure? Social scientists love to set about this question with earnest study of the people who subscribe to such ideas. As part of his investigation into the apocalyptic genre in modern America, Paul Boyer of the University of Wisconsin asks why so many of his fellow Americans are susceptible to televangelists and other popularisers. From time to time, sophisticated Americans indulge the thrillingly terrifying thought that nutty, apocalyptic, born-again Texans are guiding not just conservative social policies at home, but America's agenda in the Middle East as well, as they round up reluctant compatriots for the last battle at Armageddon. (It's a bit south of the Lake of Galilee in the plain of Jezreel.)
Behind these attitudes sits the assumption that apocalyptic thought belongsor had better belongto the extremities of human experience. On closer inspection, though, that is by no means true.
Properly, the apocalypse is both an end and a new beginning. In Christian tradition, the world is created perfect. There is then a fall, followed by a long, rather enjoyable (for some) period of moral degeneration. This culminates in a decisive final battle between good (the returned Christ) and evil (the Antichrist). Good wins and establishes the New Jerusalem and with it the 1,000-year reign of King Jesus on Earth.
This is the glorious millennium that millenarians await so eagerly. Millenarians tend to place history at a moment just before the decisive final showdown. The apocalyptic mind looks through the surface reality of the world and sees history's epic, true nature: apocalypse comes from the Greek word meaning to uncover, or disclose.
Norman Cohn, a British historian, places the origin of apocalyptic thought with Zoroaster (or Zarathustra), a Persian prophet who probably lived between 1500 and 1200BC. The Vedic Indians, ancient Egyptians and some earlier civilisations had seen history as a cycle, which was for ever returning to its beginning. Zoroaster embellished this tepid plot. He added goodies (Ahura Mazda, the maker and guardian of the ordered world), baddies (the spirit of destruction, Angra Mainyu) and a happy ending (a glorious consummation of order over disorder, known as the making wonderful, in which all things would be made perfect, once and for all). In due course Zoroaster's theatrical talents came to Christians via the Jews.
This basic drama shapes all apocalyptic thought, from the tenets of tribal cargo cults to the beliefs of UFO sects. In 1973, Claude Vorilhon, a correspondent for a French racing-car magazine, claimed to have been whisked away in a flying saucer, in which he had spent six days with a green chap who spoke fluent French. The alien told Mr Vorilhon that the Frenchman's real name was Rael, that humans had misread the Bible and that, properly translated, the Hebrew word Elohim (singular: Eloha) did not mean God, as Jews had long supposed, but those who came from the sky.
The alien then revealed that his species had created everything on Earth in a space laboratory, and that the aliens wanted to return to give humans their advanced technology, which would transform the world utterly. First, however, Rael needed financial contributions to build the aliens an embassy in Jerusalem, because otherwise they would not feel welcome (a bit lame, this explanation). Although the Israeli government has not yet given its consent, the Raeliansthose persuaded by Rael's accountcontinue to welcome donations in anticipation of a change of heart.
The Raelians' claim to be atheists who belong to the secular world must come as no surprise to Mr Cohn, who has long detected patterns of religious apocalyptic thought in what is supposedly rational, secular belief. He has traced egalitarian and communistic fantasies to the ancient-world idea of an ideal state of nature, in which all men are genuinely equal and none is persecuted. As Mr Cohn has put it, The old religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one, and this tends to obscure what otherwise would be obvious. For it is the simple truth that, stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism are with us still.
Nicholas Campion, a British historian and astrologer, has expanded on Mr Cohn's ideas. In his book, The Great Year, Mr Campion draws parallels between the scientific historical materialism of Marx and the religious apocalyptic experience. Thus primitive communism is the Garden of Eden, the emergence of private property and the class system is the fall, the final gasps of capitalism are the last days, the proletariat are the chosen people and the socialist revolution is the second coming and the New Jerusalem.
Hegel saw history as an evolution of ideas that would culminate in the ideal liberal-democratic state. Since liberal democracy satisfies the basic need for recognition that animates political struggle, thought Hegel, its advent heralds a sort of end of historyanother suspiciously apocalyptic claim. More recently, Francis Fukuyama has echoed Hegel's theme. Mr Fukuyama began his book, The End of History, with a claim that the world had arrived at the gates of the Promised Land of liberal democracy. Mr Fukuyama's pulpit oratory suited the spirit of the 1990s, with its transformative new economy and free-world triumphs. In the disorientating disconfirmation of September 11th and the coincident stockmarket collapse, however, his religion has lost favour.
The apocalyptic narrative may have helped to start the motor of capitalism. A drama in which the end returns interminably to the beginning leaves little room for the sense of progress which, according to the 19th-century social theories of Max Weber, provides the religious licence for material self-improvement. Without the last days, in other words, the world might never have had 65-inch flat-screen televisions. For that matter, the whole American project has more than a touch of the apocalypse about it. The Pilgrim Fathers thought they had reached the New Israel. The manifest destiny of America to spread its providential liberty and self-government throughout the North American continent (not to mention the Middle East) smacks of the millennium and the New Jerusalem.
Science treasures its own apocalypses. The modern environmental movement appears to have borrowed only half of the apocalyptic narrative. There is a Garden of Eden (unspoilt nature), a fall (economic development), the usual moral degeneracy (it's all man's fault) and the pressing sense that the world is enjoying its final days (time is running out: please donate now!). So far, however, the green lobby does not appear to have realised it is missing the standard happy ending. Perhaps, until it does, environmentalism is destined to remain in the political margins. Everyone needs redemption.
Watch this spacesuit Noting an exponential acceleration in the pace of technological change, futurologists like Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil think the world inhabits the knee of the curvea sort of last-days set of circumstances in which, in the near future, the pace of technological change runs quickly away towards an infinite singularity as intelligent machines learn to build themselves. From this point, thinks Mr Moravec, transformative mind fire will spread in a flash across the cosmos. Britain's astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees, relegates Mr Kurzweil and those like him to the visionary fringe. But Mr Rees's own darkly apocalyptic book, Our Final Hour, outdoes the most colourful of America's televangelists in earthquakes, plagues and other sorts of fire and brimstone.
So there you have it. The apocalypse is the locomotive of capitalism, the inspiration for revolutionary socialism, the bedrock of America's manifest destiny and the undeclared religion of all those pseudo-rationalists who, like The Economist, champion the progress of liberal democracy. Perhaps, deep down, there is something inside everyone which yearns for the New Jerusalem, a place where, as a beautiful bit of Revelation puts it:
God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away.
Yes, perhaps. But, to be sure, not everyone agrees that salvation, when it comes, will appear clothed in a shiny silver spacesuit.
2Pet. 3:3 Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts,
2Pet. 3:4 And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.
2Pet. 3:5 For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water:
2Pet. 3:6 Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:
2Pet. 3:7 But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.
2Pet. 3:8 But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
2Pet. 3:9 The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
2Pet. 3:10 But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.
2Pet. 3:11 Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness,
2Pet. 3:12 Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat?
2Pet. 3:13 Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.
2Pet. 3:14 Wherefore, beloved, seeing that ye look for such things, be diligent that ye may be found of him in peace, without spot, and blameless.
2Pet. 3:15 And account that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation; even as our beloved brother Paul also according to the wisdom given unto him hath written unto you;
2Pet. 3:16 As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.
2Pet. 3:17 Ye therefore, beloved, seeing ye know these things before, beware lest ye also, being led away with the error of the wicked, fall from your own stedfastness.
2Pet. 3:18 But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and for ever. Amen.
Good answer. Everything is finite. Therefore expecting an end of some sort is neither unreasonable nor is it illogical.
A bit egotistical maybe to think that it will happen in our life time but humans are egotistical by nature and see most things as they relate to us.
I fail to see any reason for puzzlement.
That's what pidgeon holes are for.
...hmmm I thought they were for pigeons....Can you explain what a cob web is next? I mean spiders make spider webs, do cobs make cob webs?
Read "The Parousia" by J. Stuart Russell. Makes a lot of sense. Available at Amazon.
[Middle English coppeweb : coppe, spider (short for attercoppe, from Old English ttercoppe : tor, poison + copp, head) + web, web; see web.]
>>>> Why do end-of-time beliefs endure? <<<<
Its because people dont know there Bible. They Just listen to the sound bites.
There is No End Of The World coming up. If we follow down the wrong path (which it seem like) There will be some very bad hard times coming up but no end times. As in the
end of the world.
It always amazes me that all these people can go to Mass. And chant Now And Forever And Forever And Ever Amen and then go out and say The end of the world is near
Read carefully the kingdom on earth will go on forever & ever.
And, sooner or later, one of them will be right.
Pasadena Star-News
NASA discovers dozens of galaxies
Ultraviolet detectors used to find new stars
By Kimm Groshong
Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 21, 2004 - LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE -- A long- sought-after Holy Grail for astronomers is a complete understanding of how galaxies such as the Milky Way formed.
But since scientists believe most of the formative steps took place more than 10 billion years ago, directly observing that process by looking at galaxies more than 10 billion light years away is pushing the scope of modern technologies.
At least that was the case until recently when NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer, also known as GALEX, discovered what appears to be three dozen "newborn galaxies' much closer to Earth than any of those older galaxies.
The newborns are only about 100 million to one billion years old, scientists said during a teleconference from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Tuesday.
"These galaxies give us a great opportunity to study the processes that give birth to galaxies in an up-close-and-personal way,' said Tim Heckman, the leader of the study from Johns Hopkins University. "It's almost like looking out the window and seeing a dinosaur walking by.'
The Galaxy Evolution Explorer mission, launched in April 2003, is designed to complete the first survey of the sky in ultraviolet light in order to study how the universe came to contain the stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies that currently exist.
Since young galaxies produce new stars at a rate about 100 times faster than normal, GALEX can locate them by looking in wide areas of space for exceptionally bright areas in the ultraviolet.
Caltech leads the GALEX mission and is responsible for its science operations and data analysis. JPL manages the mission for NASA.
"These newborn galaxies are near us but they are very rare,' said Chris Martin, a Caltech physics professor and the principal investigator for Galex. "In a single image, we might see many thousands of galaxies ... and one of these is one of these new galaxies,' he said.
Numerous problems hinder astronomers' observations of older galaxies. "We can't obtain detailed information because these newborn galaxies in the early universe are faint and small and also because observations at certain wavelengths are just not possible at such great distances,' said Alice Shapley, an astronomer from UC Berkeley.
But she said the newborns may actually represent the same type of building blocks that formed the Milky Way. "The GALEX sample is so close by that we can obtain exquisitely detailed information from it about the processes that are involved in star and galaxy formation,' she said.
Shapley added that the project of gathering such additional detailed information about the galaxies' compositions and structures would be an ideal job for the Hubble Space Telescope.
Heckman noted that the group's data is "quite incomplete' since the discovery is so new. "We would very much like to get get more information about these galaxies,' he said. Another possibility is a combination of GALEX's observations with those from the Spitzer Space Telescope, which tracks heat rather than ultraviolet light.
Kimm Groshong can be reached at (626) 578-6300, Ext. 4451, or by e-mail at kimm.groshong@sgvn.com .
When God brought down soviet communism, despite the doomsayers' confident assertions of its invincibility, the fortune tellers immediately started scurring around looking for other antichrist candidates to cower before.
What will they do when Islam suffers a global collapse of credibility?
Winners and lovers shape the future;
Whiners and losers try to predict it.
"Winners and lovers shape the future;
Whiners and losers try to predict it."
GOD is the writer of history, past, present and future. Not Man. God and God only shapes and controls the Future. Christians are to pray each day "That Your Will be done Lord, Not mine." Mans ways and plans are not God's ways and plans. He is Lord and God.
Christians who speak of future things as are spoken in God's Word are NOT predicting the future. They are only reiterating what God has already told man the future holds for them.
I didn't really expect an answer to that, but thank you, I assumed it was a derivitive of some sort of spider web but was never sure:)
You are right, and that is also how they all felt as well.
From nothing comes everything. Just think. were all star dust from type II Supernovas.
From one of the biggest bangs comes us! If that dont describe Genesis I dont know what could.
There was that thread the other day. About that atheist after looking at the Universe. Said there must be a guiding intelligence.
And were does it say in all that. That its the end of the world?
Not only is it in the more that once in the Bible! But at every Catholic Mass its chanted
World With Out End Amen
The Bible is VERY clear that the world will go on! Here on Earth and in Heaven.
Better read your Bible once more :)
Heaven is the final abode of the saints. While the term may be used to describe the dwelling place of the righteous during the intermediate state, the term more properly denotes the eternal state of the righteous after the resurrection. the millennium And the judgment.
A Real Place
Heaven is a real place. In the Scriptures it is called a place (John 14:2), a country (Hebrews 11:14-16), a city (Hebrews 11:10, 16; 12:22; 13:14; Rev. 21:10-27), and a house or mansion (John 14:23). Some of these expressions are no doubt figurative, but they stand for something. The Bible knows nothing of a nonmaterial, spaceless, ethereal kind of abode in eternity. Heaven is more than a condition of the soul, more than a state of mind, more than mere thoughts and ideas. It is a dwelling place consisting of material reality.
In addition to the biblical descriptions of heaven, there are two other biblical truths of the Christian faith which demand that heaven be a real place. The first is the bodily resurrection and ascension of Christ, and the other is the bodily resurrection of the believers. The nature of heaven must correspond to these two facts. It is inconsistent, on the one hand, to believe in the bodily resurrection of flesh and bones with the capacity to eat and drink (cf. Luke 24:39-43; Acts 10:41), and, on the other hand, to think of heaven as only symbolic and allegorical.
A Glorious Life
What kind of life will we have in heaven? Many things could be said at this point, but we can only mention a few selected statements.
First, it will be a life of individual perfection. We will have new, perfect bodies (I Corinthians 15:42-58); our minds will be renewed (I Corinthians 13:12); we will have moral perfection, for sin will be completely abolished from our nature and practice (I John 3:2; Ephesians 5:27; Revelation 21:27). Imperfection is such a part of our experience now that it is almost impossible for us to conceive what this life will be like.
Second, it will be a life of harmonious social relations. People from all walks of life and from all races and nations will be in heaven (Revelation 7:9), and yet there will be no quarrels, disagreements, crimes, nor wars to mar the fellowship. In heaven there will be no fear nor mistrust of one another (Revelation 21:24-27).
Third, it will be a life free from all natural evils. The body will no longer be subject to sickness, decay, hunger, pain, weariness, nor death (I Corinthians 15:53; Revelation 7:16; 21:4). The ravages of nature will no longer be a threat for there will be a new heaven and a new earth with these taken away (Romans 8:18-22; Revelation 21:1).
Finally, we know that heaven will be a life of unbroken fellowship with God. Our relations with God are so often hindered here. Sin often hides his face from us, and our limited understanding causes us to look through a glass darkly. But then we shall see Him face to face and behold Him in all His beauty (cf. Isaiah 33:7; Matthew 5:8; Revelation 22:4; I John 3:2). This will undoubtedly be the chiefest of joys in heaven, the bliss of all bliss. Oh, happy day!
An Eternal State
It is sometimes said here, "All good things have to end sometime." This is not true of heaven. Heaven is the eternal state of the righteous. There will be no end to it. There will be no danger of ever falling from that blessed state, nor having it taken away from us. It is a world without end. Amen!
Never said Heaven not a real place.
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