Let a conservative say it so you don't have to:
Sarah Palin is now the heroine of the Republican base. Scary. During the campaign it became obvious that she is completely ignorant on the principal issues. It never became widely known that she is a religious nut: she believes in the imminent End of Days and the "Rapture," in which the saved will be suddenly wooshed up to heaven — a notion that has no basis in scripture or anything else. She believes she was elected governor because of a laying-on-of-hands by an African clergyman who had run a witch out of town for causing automobile accidents.
This stuff makes William Jennings Bryan look like Martin Heidegger.
—
Jeffrey Hart, Reagan speechwriter.
"a notion that has no basis in scripture or anything else."
ReplyDeleteAs if you know anything about it.
As if you know anything about it.
ReplyDeleteOoh, Pouty McPoutalot doesn't like being reminded that the favourite fantasy of loony evangelicals is All Made Up.
If Gov. Palin's church does, in fact, hold such a belief, it might point out "For the Lord himself, with a word of command, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God, will come down from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. ..." 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 (NAB).
ReplyDelete1 Thessalonians 4:16-17
ReplyDeleteIndeed, this is one of the passages that most clearly indicates that the Scripture is saying that Christ would be back in Paul's lifetime. (Not just the "we" in the quoted passage, but the notorious, and conveniently excluded, previous verse 15: "Indeed, we tell you this, on the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will surely not precede those who have fallen asleep.")
And other commonly cited witnesses for Rapture-fantasizing seem most clearly to deal with the resurrection of the dead, not an assumption of the living.
In any case, one charitably assumes that Hart meant to include the whole "End of Days" farrago of nonsense in his allusion to "the imminent End of Days" -- based in no scripture more than the Gospel of Hal Lindsey.