Misc. comments 8

[redbird]

To tamiam:

I always post more comments than I get; this doesn't seem weird to me, partly because I'm doing a lot of straightforward "today's exercise numbers"-type posts, and partly because I spent a lot of years in apas where I mostly wrote mailing comments.

I'm the one who pulls out the reference books to reply to an LJ acquaintance who says there's no plural of "eschaton"--though ladysisyphus replied to that comment--and explains pet microchipping when someone asks in a community.

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To yonmei, who asked for an imaginary memory of time spent with her:

You convinced me that a mountain that high was just like an airplane, so I wouldn't mind the heights.... A breeze blew down from the glacier as we lay on the wildflowers in an alpine meadow, smoking hashish, drinking mangoes, and making love. It was beautiful, and then the eagle joined us. Oh, what the two of you did with those feathers!

How was I to know that golden eagles are allergic to mango?

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Along the same lines, to coyotegoth:

I was in Paris for a week, and got to the Rodin Museum before it opened, so I'd have plenty of time and no crowding.

And there you were, selling postcards of Barcelona and insisting on addressing me in Aramaic, a language neither of us knows. I still have that picture of Sagrada Familia, addressed to someone in Belgrade.

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Writing noodling about a possible sf background, in response to rysmiel, who suggested a future "in which the Rapture is a centuries-old historical footnote that served to winnow the human species of some of its most reactionary members and made progress ever so much easier":

I'm not enough up on (yet in some ways too much up on) the Christian mythos to be able to use that: I'm not sure how you'd get the Rapture without the end of the world, but I do remember that according to the books (as distinct from the "say nice things to/about our virtuous selves" version) there's supposed to be a thousand years of suffering before the Rapture.

Hm. Lots of Believers swept off a badly damaged Earth, and then the space colonists have to decide whether to try to return/rescue people/rehabilitate the planet?

Comments

[avram]

I thought the thousand years of suffering starts right after the Rapture. That's why the Rapture is supposed to be important: it lets God's favorite people skip out on the nasty stuff.

Or maybe not. I've just googled up a bunch of rapture timelines, and it's confusing. Looks like there's an unpleasant Tribulation period right after the Rapture, but I don't know how long it's supposed to last.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

What of the fiction in this setting I have skimmed through mostly seems to go for seven years of suffering. And does not seem self-aware enough about the process of writing fiction for this to be an artistic judgement rather than a matter of faith.

wrt the plural of eschaton, I'm now pretty sure there's a ship called Eschata Martyr somewhere further on in that particular future.

[the-gardener.livejournal.com]

But isn't the Rapture nonsense entirely a fundamentalist invention?

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

It's a rather distorted reading of the Revelation of John, I'm not aware of anyone outside late C.20 USAn Christian offshoots holding it as an item of faith but I couldn't swear as to where it originated, save that it clearly came from someone who was really terrified of death and wanted a Get Into Heaven Free pass without passing the grave or collecting $200.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

According to a site I found after googling on 'rapture darby', there is evidence that the Rapture originated in the fever-dreams of Miss Margaret Macdonald, a dying member of the British religous movement of the 1830s which gave rise to the Pentacostalist denomination. Her ideas were popularized by the roughly contemporary preacher John Darby, who claimed to have discovered them independently. (That's the hostile reading, of course; Darbyist claim that he came up with the idea separately and it has no relation to Macdonald's belief. Who knows--they may be right.)

There's evidence of something like a "rapture" belief being promoted in isolated works from the eighteenth century. But as a widespread belief, it definitely traces back to Darby.

[lysana.livejournal.com]

I'm too lazy to click that link... were all the timelines from pre-Tribulation believers, or are some of them mid-Trib and post-Trib Rapturists?

[acrobatty.livejournal.com]

Which reminds me of a recent thread about practical jokes, one of the best of which was played (or possibly just thought about) on a fundie dormmate:

Leave clothes of other dormers near his door as if the people in them had just been beamed out. Scream. When he turns up, say "John! I don't know what happened! Look -- there was this big light and music and suddenly Rebecca and Thomas and Peter were just GONE!"