|
Breaking the News to See What's Inside! |
| Volume 3 Issue 2 | NOVUS ORDO SECLOHUM | June 2005 |
| CURRENT ISSUE | ARCHIVES | ADVERTISING | SUBSCRIPTIONS | WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE? | NOT FEATURED |
BUY THIS ISSUE The Power of Scrapture The Giant Cabbage under New Management! National/World News: Inside the Bush Administration Market Forces Koran 'n Toilets Setting the Record Straight on Guantanamo Alaska State News: Fairbanks Burro Ass- embly Passes Beautification Ordinance Wildland Fire Report Released People: An Interview with Jesus H. Christ Jesus Christ Seeks Name Change Dr. Geyges Advises: Dr. G's Guide for the Perplexed Jackson Trial in Netherland |
The Power of Scrapture  “Beam me up, Scotty.” Star Trek aficionados will recall this mantra of Captain Kirk's when, having made his mark on a newly discovered strange world, he needed to make a quick exit. Star Trek was, of course, science fiction, which blends the development of knowledge through a systematic study of verifiable occurrences with far-out flights of fantasy—somewhat of an oxymoron. Remove the “oxy” part—Greek for “sharp, keen”—and we are beamed right into the world of religion where flights of fancy are enshrined in Holy Scripture. Given the mental effects of constricting oxygen flow, some even talk about religion as a deoxymoron, but such critics should heed the wisdom of common folk, which is engraved in the aphorism: “Truth is stranger than fiction.” Fiction is that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that Social Security is almost broke, that privatizing health care will improve it, that global warming is a myth; the truth is that these fictions stand as truth despite universal acknowledgment that they are not. Or, to quote our brave, consummately wise Defense Secretary: “The absence of truth does not imply that truth is absent.” Ironically, however, fundamentalist Christians address flights of fancy with studious and analytical rigor, which has led them to the one and only reasonable conclusion about existence: That they will soon be whisked away in the Rapture. Documented in the self-validating Bible, the Rapture is the Christian equivalent of being beamed up by Scotty, if Scotty were God with His Hands on a mega-teleporter. According to a large number of people (particularly in God's own country, defined in both the Old and New Testaments as the United States of America), Christ's second coming, or parousia, will be heralded by born-again Christians being spirited up to heaven. This teleportation will occur instantaneously, leaving airplanes without pilots, babies in their high chairs waiting to be fed, the White House with no key personnel, and the Abu Ghraib prisoners suddenly with no guards. If we believe the Holy Scrapture, before (or after... possibly during) the Rapture will come a time of Tribulation, which will, in turn, be followed by the devastation of our planet. The Forces of Evil will rise but will eventually be routed by Jesus who, having learned to be more Old-Testament after his rather pathetic first round on Earth, will reclaim His Kingdom in the greatest mass extermination since Noah's days. Heathen, secularists, infidels and other prehensile folk say that despite the heralded Armageddon, they can't wait for the fundamentalists to vanish into thin air. But the Chosen are not ready to go yet. Fully aware of the Fiend's past failures to adhere to God's script, they are making absolutely sure that the Scraptural prophecies are fulfilled by getting the devastation well under way before packing their bags. One might, of course, question an omnipotent God who can't keep his angels from falling and thereafter behaving like rebellious teenagers, a God who allows free will but punishes it with eternal damnation, a God who raises a few pixilated momes into the sky before obliterating the rest of his own creation. In fact, some demonic wretches, prone to such opprobriums as cogitation, say that fundamentalist eschatologies are a load of crap. They point to the fact that no human has ever been spirited away (without eventually turning up with missing parts, face down in a rice paddy; falling Houdini-like, bound and blind-folded, from high-flying helicopters into the sea; or ending up shakled and hooded in US-run or -sponsored penitentiaries). Fundamentalists would retort, with all the compassion they can muster, that such critics may as well start bathing in marinade sauce. They will join the long grilling list of candidates for the Antichrist, who include, according to well-researched Rapture Web sites, Bill Clinton, King Juan Carlos, Bill Gates, Ronald Wilson Reagan (6 letters in each name), PBS's dinosaur, Barney (“behold a great red dragon” - Revelation 12:3 (halftime score)), and, of course, Pope John Paul II, who refused a feeding tube during his last days, proving his righteous anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-contraception positions were a front, and that he indeed was an anti-war, anti-poverty Beelzebub in a frock. A new addition to the Antichrist watchlist is surely George Galloway, the Scottish member of parliament who recently testified before the US Senate Sub-Committee on Investigations, and excoriated the entire U.S. legislature for the war in Iraq, for the new-found American appreciation for torture, and for funnelling billions upon billions of dollars to war profiteerers. The Scot branded himself an unbeliever by stating that the Iraq war was launched based on “a pack of lies” and daring to disparage the righteous by asserting Donald Rumsfeld once supported Saddam Hussein. Given a chance, this Scot would also have depicted eschatology as “a load of crap.” Ironically, after his testimony, the pagan anti-war rabble that festers in the American urban landscape was chanting: “Beam us up, Scotty! Beam us up!” In all seriousness, though, I don't think that the raptured, the ruptured, the raptors, the rappers, or the rapparees would disagree about the load of crap. Proof is in another pithy aphorism: “Life is a crap shoot” (distasteful as the visual image may seem). The theological difference rests in whether we think the dice are loaded or not. True believers will confirm that dice—just like every cruise missile, every 1,000-lb bomb, every bunker busting nuke—are loaded by God. US military personnel and White House officials are just the hand of God, doing His work as they quake in anticipation of His return, in expectation of the parousia (a state of being aroused by paranoia). They are even building a massive space defense shield to provide a security cordon to True Christians when they ascend to the heavens. And, like rolling a 2 on a field bet in craps, the space shield doubles the blessings by bringing immeasurable profits to mega-corporations. For the way to God is to find the Answers, and as aptly noted in Ecclesiastes 10:19 (p.m. EST): “Wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things.” So from Christening to Rapture, the way to Godliness is by increasing profits, whether they be in the pockets of Haliburton so that it may distribute them freely among the Deserving, or Bechtel so it may bring electricity to open the eyes of the infidel at Abu Ghraib, or Monsanto so it may splice into Freedom Fries the gene for recognizing Tom Delay's divine nature, or Philip Morris so it may fill hearts and bodies with the breath of God, or Scott so it may provide us with holy toilet paper to spirit away the basest abominations produced by the nether-regions of our bodies, so that the flesh may be cleansed … which brings us right back to eschatology (Canadian for “scatology,” eh!), and perhaps a clearer understanding of what it really means when fundamentalists chant: “Beam us up Scotty.” |