I was going to ask what the 2 witnesses lying dead for 3 days while everyone sees them, then bodily rising to Heaven symbolizes but I don’t care about your imaginings.
No offense.
I’m not “imagining” anything, vanilla, i’m jsut telling you how Revelation was interpretated by the first 1800 years or so of Christian history and how it is still interpreted by the Churches serving most of the world’s Christians.
The “two witnesses” are variously interpreted as being Elijah and Moses, Elijah and Enoch, a metaphor for the Christian Church or a meyaphor foe the Old and New Testaments. Take your pick.
The author’s point was to remain faithful to the prophets and scripture, even if they appeared to be defeated or “dead.”
Then whose imaginings do you subscribe to? Just curious. You seem to believe the Bible is to be read literally. Where do you get that notion? It’s not Biblical (at least, not that I’m aware of). People started that idea. So whose imaginings are you following?
The ironic thing is that a literal reading does not permit an interpretation of a “Rapture.”
Good point. If the Rapture were a coherent Biblical doctrine, there would be no debate about it, much less the pre-tribulation / late tribulation questions mentioned above.
I don’t know if I’d go that far. I don’t think a literal reading forbids it. It just doesn’t state it (except maybe that “Two are in the fields, one is taken, one is left” stuff…I have no idea what that means.)
…:eek:…He just cited his work well and made a coherent argument. Would you care to elaborate on why you felt the need to respond with this, vanilla?
Please be specific and back up your assertions.
I girded my loins and Googled.
Lo! mine eyes beheld the glory of “The prophetic speedometer of end-time activity”
Most of the categories I understand (Famine, Drought, Plagues, Interest Rates, Liberalism etc), but one catagory “Date Settings” stumped me. The site explains:-
But WTF does that mean?
Many dispensationalists have set specific dates or specific time periods, usually not far in the future, for the Rapture and the return of Christ, only to have those dates come and go without the End Times arriving. You can probably remember reading newspaper stories about the occasionl doomsday cult gathering in a compound or on a hilltop somewhere to await the Lord’s coming. This can be and often has been a serious embarassment for dispensationalists. This guy apparently believes that Satan encourages some fundamentalists to set specific dates so that Satan can embarass and discredit the dispensationalist movement. The Jehovah’s Witnesses in particular have embarassed themselves by setting specific dates for the Second Coming, but most fundamentalists don’t consider the JW’s to be legitimate Christians. (I’m not even sure they could be considered Darbyites, as I’m not terribly familiar with their doctrines.)
The problem with this guy’s attitude is that you don’t need to set a specific date or time frame and have it fail to make an ass of yourself. Anybody with a three digit I.Q. can see for himself that these people have been squawking about the Rapture and the Second coming for more than 170 years, and it still ain’t happened yet. I grew up with dispensationalists (which probably explains to some of you Dopers out there why I can be stubborn and argumentative to the point of driving other people crazy) and I’ve been hearing this stuff for more than forty years. The Second Coming ain’t happened yet. While this stuff might have scared the pants off me when I was a child and even in my early teens*, as I gradually learned more about the dispensationalists I became ever more unimpressed with their doctrines; but the thing that impressed me most was that the Second Coming never seemed to get any closer no matter how much time passed.
*And why, I wonder, do so few critics of dispensationalism take note of the emotional trauma these warped doctrines can cause some people, particularly children? Are there any studies of this anywhere?
As has been said many times in this thread, the End Times have always been imminent, as evidenced by Revelation and its references to 1st Century Rome.
One would think that the number of times that apocalypse-fans have named a date or event only to see it pass leaving them so embarrassed that self-fulfilling suicide becomes a viable alternative would teach them to keep it vague.
They never learn, [url=http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=4560359&postcount=131]even on this message board![/ur]
And for the code-literate, I give you…
That’s a really good point. When I was 14 I took a bible history class at high school. They called it “bible history” as a disguise. The class should have been called “swallow this religion that we’re about to forcefeed you.”
When we learned about revelation/“the rapture” it scared the living shit out of me, literally to the point that I lost a lot of sleep over the course of several months.
That class was one of the largest factors that drove me down the road to skepticism and atheism. It broke my heart and really disillusioned me when I found out that “facts” our teacher had told us, such as the missing day theory and the finding of Noah’s Ark, among many others, weren’t true.
Thats what Got me saved. Reading about the rapture; I didn’t want to be left behind, though there were none of those books around then.
I am glad for it.
Hmmm, there’s some pretty good evidence in this thread that the rapture was just made up in the last 150 years ago. Will that have any effect on the way you feel or will you simply ignore it, much the same as you ignored my earlier post directed at you?
you mean the rapture was just figured out not just made up.
It was just made up. It’s not present in a plain reading of Scripture.
No, it wasn’t just made up.
As I was taught as a child/young teen:
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First there will come a man who seems like an angel. He’ll promise miracles and actually deliver on them (so he probably won’t be a current politician, no matter what anyone says) and by doing so will lead people to follow him. And those folks will all get some tattoos to show that they’re following him. Eventually the righteous will realize that he’s too good to be true, and he’ll be outed as the antichrist. His followers and many people who are netural will not believe.
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Next there will be a lot of disasters, like the seas turning to blood, and weather like in The Day After Tomorrow that’ll cause a lot of pain and suffering. This will be paired with the advent of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, who probably won’t go about on motorcycles.
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When the shit is really about to hit the fan, so to speak, all the righteous will be removed. That’ll leave all the bad people, and the ignorant on earth, while the good people are off…somewhere. I always had the impression that they were on another planet, but I’m not really sure about where they’re supposed to be. Where do you suppose “paradise” is?
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For 1,000 years the devil will hold dominion over the earth, but God will keep an ear out for people who repent and remove them from their unpleasant existence. Apparently, if you don’t repent before you die, you’re really screwed.
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Once the 1,000 years are up, the dead will rise up and be judged, as will those who are still on earth. The good people will go to heaven/paradise and those who never saw the light will not suffer eternal torment. Instead they will be erased from the minds of all, and it will be as though they never existed. (I suspect that Madeleine L’Engle was taught this as well, since it’s very similar to the being “X’d” in her books)
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For another 1,000 years all the shiny happy people will hang out with Jesus on that other planet or whatever it was.
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Then, once that period is over, there will be another war in heaven, this one being the one where the angels and those Jewish virgins are on God’s team. God, being the hero in this story, will triumph and defeat the devil who will then be cast into a lake of fire to burn forever more.
Amen.
Again (as always) we see here a hodgepodge of interpretations of snippets of scripture taken out of context and cobbled together.
And once again, I challenge any Rapture believer to cite the passages – and here’s the important part – along with all other Biblical passages which reference the same keywords and concepts (to prevent cherry-picking, which can always be used to create false scenarios) together with an explanation of their full context.
In other words, show all the evidence, everything the Bible has to say, whether it fits your preconceived notions or not.
You’ll see that the Rapture cannot be defended.
And also, if this is a coherent scriptural doctrine, how in the world could it have taken well over 1500 years for anyone to notice it, given that literally thousands upon thousands of people during that time dedicated their entire lives to studying the books of the Bible?
It all falls apart. The Rapture is a heresy. Jesus didn’t teach it. It is a human doctrine, not a divine one.
If I had the option of selecting only the passages of my choosing, and piecing them them together as I chose without reference to context, I could demonstrate that the Bible teaches any manner of things that it does not in fact teach.
Vanilla, get over your fear of being left behind. It doesn’t serve you. When did Jesus preach fear as a means of knowing God? Why is it so hard to drop the things that people have taught you, and open yourself up to what the Bible might really have to tell you?
This is Great Debates, not Great Nanner-Nanner Boo-Boos. Please defend this statement.