Stephen M.H. Lawrence wrote:

"running dogg" wrote:

(snipped for brevity)

Most disturbing to me are the
fundies who want to force God's hand and destroy the earth through human
means so that God will be forced to bring the end and restore the
destroyed earth through divine intervention.

My only concern with the dispensationalists is the thought that some
are willing to commit sinister acts to "foreshorten" the second coming
of Jesus. I don't believe that's hype, by the way; even though you might
consider my experience anecdotal and empirical, and you might accuse
me of solipsism (wouldn't be the first time that's happened), I've met
a number of end-of-the-worlders who have expressed a willingness
to do "whatever it takes" to hasten the coming of the Messiah. That's
odd thinking at best; God's got His own agenda, as far as I can tell,
and His agenda is sovereign and not subject to the whims of His creatures.

The Jews teach that God is unknowable, that it is impossible for mere
humans to know his thought processes. Since Christianity sprang from
Judaism, I find it quite odd that so many "dispensationalists" (probably
a more accurate description than "fundies", since not all those who
believe in the literal truth of the Bible are end of world types, but a
word that the people in question are likely unfamiliar with) think that
they know what God is thinking, and that God is a machine that you can
push the right buttons and get the second coming out the other end,
since traditional Christianity teaches just the opposite. That and
American Christianity's annoying tendency toward "witnessing" in direct
contradiction to the words of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew, are two
big reasons why I'm no longer a Christian.

Once you become familiar with the New Testament, not reading it by rote
as so many dispensationalists do but taking the time to think it over,
you'll see that what passes for Christianity in today's world, and
especially in America, is far away from the teachings of Jesus. The
fundies' willingness to commit evil acts, acts that Jesus would never
condone, in order to force Jesus to show up greatly troubles me. David
recently posted a LONG article about how fundies are against the
environmental movement on religious grounds: if humans hurry up and
destroy the earth, then Jesus will have no choice but to restore it per
Revelations.

This thinking is not new, nor is it limited to Christians: the Jewish
Zealots burned Jerusalem's food supplies in order to force God to
intervene and save them from the Romans. When that didn't happen, they
burned their own food supplies expecting the same result. Ultimately
they committed suicide rather than face the fact that God had not smited
the Romans and that they were about to die by the sword. If the fundies
find themselves caught in an irreconcilable position between hard
reality and their religious expectations, will they do the same-and drag
the rest of us along with them?


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