It occurs to me that when Thanos snapped his fingers and half of all living things disappeared, there must have been a lot of Evangelical Christians who would have seen this as the Rapture.
Being as it was actually a random process, they would have been somewhat confused by the results. Why did plants and animals get raptured? Why did so many sinful non-believers get raptured? And, most of all, why didn’t I get raptured?
When the details about the Avengers’ battle with Thanos went public, would they have accepted the disappearances were a non-religious event? Or would they have argued that Thanos had been the toll God used to carry out the Rapture? Would Evangelical Christianity have become stronger now that it was “proven”? Would people have seen other events as fulfilling other parts of Revelation?
And what would happen five years later when everyone returns?
I know; I’m discussing a movie. Put that aside and work with me.
I think some would consider it the Rapture, but the fact that so many baptized infants would have not been taken would have quickly had Christian authorities questioning it.
After all, a baptized infant is saved, and has no ability (or likely desire) to sin on their own. That’s actually one of the parts that never quite worked for me about the Snap/Anti-snap. The youngest we see in much direct media (well, granted, until I stopped watching the many spinoffs) is around highschool, and they just handwaved it away as just ‘awkward’.
But infants through toddlers? Oh, that’s going to be rough on those left behind and suddenly taking care of a new baby when they’re years older.
So you’d have expected in the Rapture that all such young/pre-sin children would be saved/gone, or possibly none.
But I’m sure there’s plenty of random, self-proclaimed preachers who would have come up with every single possible fanwank you could imagine. I just think centralized Christian faiths would still be trying to decide 5 years later.
I wonder how many deaths occurred because people were on airplanes when they were snapped away. When the reversal happened, wouldn’t those same people be immediately in free fall because the airplane wasn’t in the same place 5 years later? Or is the airplane considered a closed system, so people would just reappear in that same plane? Would they solidify inside of people if they’re reconstituted onto the seats they were sitting in when they left?
These are the thoughts that kept me out of the really good schools.
You think it’s confusing here? Consider the planet 1billion ly away, who know nothing of Thanos or infinity stones, where suddenly half the population disappears without a trace, then just as mysteriously returns. And no one ever explains it to them.
The easiest mental solution to this is that the combined reality-altering power of the stones is essentially sentient enough to understand your intent and go with that rather than functioning as a monkey’s paw and bringing people back to life in mid-air or outer space because the Earth has moved since then, etc.
If the average person could figure out what you mean when you say you want those people back, I’m sure the awesome power of the Mind Stone can noodle through it as well.
Look at the problem on a larger scale and it becomes so much worse.
People live on planets. And planets move like airplanes. If all those living creatures reappeared at the same spot they had disappeared at five years earlier, they would be in outer space.
Or if they appeared on a planet they’d die as the air in the space they appeared in gives them fatal embolisms.
You kind of have to assume that the Stones/genie/magic spell in question handles little details like that for the scenario to work. That’s why malignant wish-givers in stories can always find a loophole to screw you over, after all; you can’t think of every last detail and specify the desired results perfectly, there’s always room for malicious compliance.
The OP is discussing Evangelical Christians and the Rapture. Evangelicals don’t baptize babies, Catholics do. Evangelicals wait until children are about 10-12.
Also many evangelicals have historically had no problem at all with the issue of children being either taken or abandoned in the Rapture. If anything would cause them to doubt it’s the fact that they, personally weren’t taken but left with the “sinners”.
Isn’t it pretty clear at this point that a whole lot of fantastical stuff is happening - before the Snap?
There was that abortive invasion in NY a few years before, the other one with different aliens in London after that, and now more spaceships and aliens are popping up all over the world just before the Snap. I think most people, even fundies, would figure that factored into it somehow.
Maybe it’s not always half of all life on every planet. Maybe on some planets everything goes away, then comes back five years later. So nobody would know that anyone else was gone, because everyone was gone. Of course there would be other evidence of a five-year gap that would need to be explained. That might be even weirder.
What if the pilot was dusted but non of the passengers were? They all die in the crash but they weren’t directly snapped. Do they get brought back too? Or does some pilot have to deal with massive survivors guilt because he was the only person who ultimately survived the event?
Sure, but if one group of “false” gods worshipped by ancient people can turn out to be superpowered aliens, who’s to say that Yahweh isn’t also just some dude from Rigel VII?
The point is, every theologian in the MCU has probably been working overtime for close to a decade by the time the Snap happens.
