The End is Near?

If you hear people talking about these prophecies in Revelation, in Daniel, in Ezekiel, Gog and Magog are Russia and Iran. No, they’re not. If you hear people talking about this to try to predict the future, they do not have the first clue what they’re talking about, and none of what they’re saying is accurate. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we seek to increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation. About the same. How are things, Dan?

Man, I’m ready to combat. I’m going into combat here.

Let’s do it. Let’s… We’re going to minimize the… The militant, the military metaphors to some degree, but I guess I do use combat. So confront. I could use confront.

Okay. Battle. No, it’s all… We got…

Nothing hard to avoid that. Yeah.

All right. Well, it’s tricky.

Yeah. We’re going to try not to lean too much into it then.

But today’s going to be a fun one. Today… We’re… We’re… We… We’re… We’re… It’s… It’s end times. You know, I don’t know if people are aware of this, but there are certain…

In the end times, there are certain…

Events occurring right now that are leading a lot of people to be talking end times talk.

And imagine that unlike… Which happens like years of history, right?

Exactly. Every time there’s any world event, somebody’s gonna come up with a way to make that the end times. But we’re gonna be talking second coming. We’re gonna be talking rapture. It’s gonna be exciting. I’m excited about it.

All right.

I think we should just dive in with our new segment, Ex Eventu.

Ex Eventu, which, as everybody knows, means after the fact. This is… It’s…

I feel… I feel like it’s a Harry Potter spell.

I’m pretty sure it’s not Exu…

But yes. What we’re talking about right now, to… To launch into this is some prophecies because I wanted to get into with you, Dan, the idea of the second coming of Jesus. It’s a thing that is talked about much. It is a very important event in Christianity and in the… The sort of… I don’t want to say the lore in… Anyway, in… In the… In what’s happening in Christianity. It’s…

Right.

It’s everything. It’s… It’s the Messiah, but… But this time in the person of Jesus or something. So let’s talk about where the idea comes from, what it means, because there are a couple of things that I find confusing about it, to be perfectly honest, and I’ll… Maybe I’ll just point those out as we go along. Okay, so why don’t you launch in and sort of give us… Give us a quick primer on… On Jesus coming back.

I will do my best. It’s going to get complicated, though, because there are the positions that Christians have had historically on this, and particularly now in the 21st century. The 19th and 20th century saw the innovation of very new approaches to this question. And so we have different categories and subcategories within subcategories of ways of thinking about this. But to go back to the primary texts, the foundation of this is what is called the Olivet Discourse from the Synoptic Gospels. This is found in Matthew 24 , in Mark 13 , and in Luke 21 . And scholars are in pretty widespread agreement that Mark is the earliest Gospel. So our earliest version of this discourse is found in Mark 13 . And this is where we get the wars and rumors of wars and… And things like that that are very commonly repeated every time something goes on in the Holy Land.

So can you answer something for me? What is a rumor of a war? I don’t… What does that even mean?

Yeah, that’s… That’s the King James Version’s rendering. The word there means report, report, or rumor. So you will hear wars, and you will hear reports about wars.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

It just sounds like. It just sounds like people are, like, on the. On the sly. Hey, yeah, yeah.

I don’t know if you know about this new war.

There’s a war happening. It just seems like such a weird… A weird phrasing. Okay, so… So you’ll see some wars and you’ll hear about other wars’ reports.

Yeah, yeah. It’s just kind of rhetorically… It’s a rhetorical flourish.

Okay.

And the idea… And let’s see. Mark 13 , it starts in verse 5. This is from the NRSV. Then Jesus began to say to them, beware that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name and say, I am he, and they will lead many astray. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. This must take place. But the end is still to come. And so what we’re talking about is the eschaton, which is a fancy word for the end times. And so from that word, we get this idea of eschatology, which is discourse about or the study of the end times. And Christian eschatology is in many ways baffling, very complex. But it is always an attempt to try to look at the text, look at the history between the texts and now, and then try to situate ourselves within what’s going on there. And there are, like I said, just different categories that people talk about. The main divisions of eschatology.

And this is not my area of expertise, this is something that I know on a pretty basic academic level. But you have, starting with preterism, then futurism, and then you have historicism. And those are the three main ones. Idealism is another one that’s not really talked about much. But preterism is the idea that everything that Jesus is talking about here, that all culminated with the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. Okay, so preterism is basically, they were talking about the Jewish War and everything that was going to happen right up to Rome destroying the Temple. And then everything after that is immaterial. It is not a part of, it’s not a focus of those texts. And then we’ve got historicism, which is the idea that everything between the writing of the text and now reflects these events. So things in the medieval period and things in late antiquity and things in, you know, the 19th century.

And we’re basically scattering these things out across history and saying, well we could interpret this as, as an example of that. And this is where we get into idealism, which is this idea that this is all symbolic and so these things can be repeated throughout time because you know, this is about empire or this is about, you know, capitalism or something like that. The beast is, is nation states. And so idealism is kind of like this is all symbolic. Historicism is, this is a prophecy about this event that happened 700 years ago in history.

So, so, so the first two, the preterist. Preterism.

Is that preterism? Yeah.

And historicism are both claim that all of the prophecies that about the end time prophecies have already occurred.

Kinda for historicism, some of it is still going on. But preterism, yes, it’s all, it’s. We’re well past all of that and, and I get tagged and some guy on TikTok has like self-published books about how everything happened in 70 and so everything else after that is, is. Doesn’t matter at all. It’s you know, Christianity is over kind of thing and, and then Christianity is over.

Everybody go home.

Yeah, basically, yeah, you can, you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here and and then we’ve got futurism, which is the idea that these are all prophecies about things that are going to take place in the future. And this is probably the most, among the most common today. And these are not hard and fast categories. You have kind of, you know, the edges kind of bleed into each other for a lot of folks for, for some of these. But futurism is the idea that this is about things that are going to happen in the future, that all we’re still waiting on this kind of thing to happen. So it gets even more complex when you then talk about what’s going to happen in the future. Yeah, because you’ve got a handful of different things that are going to happen. You have a millennium that’s going to happen and we’ve had a couple of those since.

Yeah, since the book was written. So.

Yeah, let’s see. Yeah, you have millennium in this case.

Does mean a thousand years.

Is that thousand year? Yeah. And sometimes this is understood as a thousand year reign of Jesus on the earth. You have, you have premillennialism, you have amillennialism and you have postmillennialism.

Okay, don’t keep going into all these categories. We, we’re going to be here all day.

Yeah, but then you’ve got tribulation, which is understood. Usually it’s like a seven year period of just intense suffering and persecution and things like that. And you’ve got pre-trib, mid-trib and post-trib ideas. And basically, yeah, this is how people are interpreting these texts. Jesus’s second coming is going to usher in the tribulation or Jesus and this is the Rapture, specifically Jesus come. The rapture is going to happen when Jesus comes. And we’ll get into that a little later. Then you have this idea that the tribulation has kind of phases, it’s ebbing and flowing and right before it gets really, really bad, that’s when the rapture is going to happen. And then you have the post-tribulation idea that the Rapture happens at the end of the tribulation and different ideas. There are different ideas about what precisely the tribulation is going to mean. The relationship of the tribulation to the millennium, whether there’s another second coming.

And so, you know, it all gets. Go ahead.

I, I’m just, I’m trying, I’m trying to understand why there are these different ideas about what could happen. Because I know that it seems like, you know, when I’ve been researching this for this episode, you know, I look in 1 Thessalonians 4 . And it seems like there’s kind of an order of operations. It seems like things happen in an order. But you’re saying that there are multiple orders being proposed. So is that because that the different authors have different orders that they’ve put things in?

Yeah. So a while ago I did a video where I talked about how some people talk about reading the Bible is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. And you have to look at the picture on the box, right? And this is, this is kind of the 30,000 foot view. You have to look at the Bible as a whole in order to be able to interpret the different constituent elements. And I said, I think it is better thought of as a pile of Lego blocks. And I got, I got ridiculed for saying Legos because just in case you were not aware, I was made abundantly aware Lego is not, does not have a plural.

Yes it does. Shut up. I, I’m sorry to all of you who, who are very, very into the, the, the, the semantics of a toy, just shut up. We can refer to it as Legos, everyone does. But anyway, go on.

So I, I suggested with that it’s better to think of this as a, a bucket of Lego bricks or blocks or there is no design. You’re putting it together to create whatever you want to create. And with the Second Coming, people are looking at all parts of the Bible. We’ve got this assumption of univocality that because it all is referring to one thing, because it is all speaking with a single unified, consistent voice from a single, unified, consistent perspective. If anybody references the eschaton in any part of the Bible, you can bring them all together. And that is going to give you the maximum coverage of what’s going to happen. And so you have to triangulate what is going on from Daniel and from Ezekiel and from Isaiah 2 , and from 1 Thessalonians and from Mark 13 and from Matthew. And you have to put it all together to try to figure out what’s going on. And the whole time you’re doing this in a historical situation, you are embedded within history.

And so whatever’s going on around you is going to color these things. And so this is why with the horrific things that are happening in Gaza and Palestine, in Israel right now, you immediately have people going, oh, Daniel 9 , Daniel 9 . And we get all these different interpretations where people are going, well the, the one group has to come down from the north and the other group has to come up from the south and they’ve got to sign a seven-year peace treaty with the Antichrist. And, and, and so this is all an attempt to take this giant mass of Lego bricks and create something that is going to be rhetorically meaningful, or useful to the groups to whom we’re speaking. And so frequently this is leaders speaking to their congregations. These are people on social media like me, just crying out for attention, just wanting to remain relevant. These are people trying to combat other positions that might have more attention than their own.

So whatever makes this Lego creation more meaningful or useful is going to be how they’re going to do it. And because there are so many different bricks, there are so many different ways to put this together.

Well, and it seems to me that, like, some of. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being a part of this show and, like, you know, consuming your content, it’s.

That it was a mistake.

A lot of these bricks. Yes, exactly.

I quit.

A lot of these bricks don’t actually line up with each other, so you have to, like, hide some bricks with other bricks in order to. To harmonize or to come up with a single narrative that works sort of completely.

Yeah. And this is something that is required for all of these renegotiations with the text. And one of the biggest things that needs to be overlooked, except for the preterist view, which only really holds if you accept this as actual, real predictive prophecy. But we’ve got in Matthew 16 , this statement, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom. And this seems to be a pretty clear prophecy on the part of the author of Matthew that this second coming, Jesus’s kingdom arriving on earth, will happen within the first genera, that first generation of followers of Jesus.

In other words, that does seem like an important point. It seems like unless those dudes are still alive, that. That seems pretty solid.

Yeah, it seems like that. The idea here is that this is coming quickly, and this is what we see in Paul as well. Paul thinks all of this is going to happen any day now. And so we all need to be totally prepared. And it does not happen within that first generation, which requires you kind of reinterpret what Jesus is saying here. Oh, well, generation can mean the whole race of humanity and. Or, you know, stuff like that. And. And so you have a bunch of reinterpretations, and then the. The Son of man coming in his kingdom is. Is reinterpreted. Oh, well, maybe this is a reference to Christianity taking over the Roman Empire. And now we have the kingdom that is Jesus’s. Maybe it’s talking about that, maybe it’s talking about Jesus’s resurrection. That’s Jesus coming in his kingdom. So it gets reinterpreted and, and so yeah, you have the LEGO block being, you know, covered by other Legos being incorporated into a different design in an effort to ensure that whatever way you put these things all together, they inform our experiences and they help us make the text more meaningful and useful to us.

Ultimately, the goal for most of these folks, preterism is a little bit different, but for most of these folks, the goal is to find a way to make this connect with us and help us understand how we relate to all of this and how we are a part of the story. The idea is to extend the narrative from all the way back then down to today so we can be a part of the same story.

Yeah, I hear a lot of pastors, you know, when they talk about the second Coming or when they talk about the Rapture or whatever they, they, they talk about. I think there, I think there was a, a scripture in Thessalonians. I’m not sure where it was. Anyway, scripture about be prepared, you know, be doing the work. Don’t. And I hear a lot of pastors talking about don’t get caught off, don’t get caught off guard, like you’re not doing it. Yeah, be, you know, and it, and, and it’s a good way to say like it could happen at any time. So you gotta, so you, you’ve got to be ready. There’s vigilance, but it does create, I don’t know, like a, an anxiety. We’ll talk about that in the, in the next, in, in the, in the second half of the show. But I just think there’s a, like it’s a double edged sword where yes, you’re, it’s a good way to say, hey, let’s all be prepared. Let’s all be ready to go when, when this thing happens.

And let’s, let’s keep our vigilance up. But also the other side of it is a massive amount of like angst about like, is it coming? Is it coming? And that’s where we get this vigilance where we’re watching every world event. Is that a rumor of a war? Is that, is that the war? Is this the one sort of thing?

And yeah, and we’re, we’re kind of on the, the back nine of the whole Covid thing. But you know, that was a, that was a huge part of this as well. All the pestilences and we saw all the folks talking about trying to read Covid into the, the scriptures. But yeah, you’ve got Jesus talking about this coming like a thief in the night. And you have the, the, the virgins, the wise virgins and the foolish virgins who are not prepared for the bridegroom to show up. And I, I think this is particularly harmful when we take it from hey, be good Christians to we need to change things so that we’re prepared for this and we need to ignore other problems because this is coming so soon.

And I definitely have seen that, you know, people talking about who cares about the environment or who cares about this, that and the other thing. Yeah, yeah, Jesus is coming.

Yeah. And, and we see this and particularly again going back to the horrific things happening in Gaza and Palestine and Israel right now, you see folks saying, well, the only resolution of this is Jesus’s second coming. And so all these people need to get with the program and become Christians, which is phenomenally ignorant and phenomenally harmful and turns this and tokenizes the lives of these people that are being lost, that are being destroyed, that are being forever changed and turns them into just pawns in this game, this eschatological game where we get to sit back and have a front row seat to the end of the world and we’re grabbing our popcorn and talking about this like this is something to be excited about when the reality is this is not the eschaton, this is just horrific, horrific suffering.

Well, and this is not something we haven’t seen over and over and over again. And if you’re using the same images, the same, the same things happening to be to mean this is the eschaton, this is the end times. Even though it happened 100 years ago, it happened 50 years ago, it happened 300 years ago, it happened, blah, blah, blah. You know, you can point to the same thing happening all the time. How is there any reason to believe that this is any different? Yeah, and, and so, yeah, it’s kind of disgusting to see people using it in that way.

Well, and I think one of the things that makes it easier to reduced to that is the fact that those events that have happened in the past we didn’t directly experience, they are entirely abstract to us. And so it becomes easy to think about the things that we’re actually experiencing right now as a lot more real as a lot more. There’s a lot more of a. Spanish words are coming to my head. Can’t remember the English words. Things. There’s, there’s just in fairness to you.

You did just come back from England, so how would you know any English words?

Yeah, well, I was, I was more recently though, in Germany and Amsterdam, so.

Well, okay, well, then the Spanish all makes sense.

Yeah. So. And, and funny enough, I heard an awful lot of Spanish, so there. It, it makes it. Because these are things that we are actually experiencing. It makes it a lot more easy to say this is real. Everything else is conceptual, is abstract. And, and then you have people making excuses. Well, and multiple fulfillments of this kind of stuff. And so for instance, Isaiah 2 , verse 2, where it talks about in that day, the. The mountains of the. The mountain. The Lord’s house will be established in the top of the mountains and all nations will flow into it. And all this kind of stuff. Within the Latter Day Saint tradition that has had multiple fulfillments. We had prior to the church arriving in the Salt Lake Valley, that was understood to refer to the establishment of the New Jerusalem. Once we did arrive in the Salt Lake Valley, that was understood as the building of the Salt Lake Temple. And then we had the Olympics and what was it, 2002.

And, and, and Gordon B. Hinckley, if.

The Winter Olympics is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, that something weird is happening.

Yeah, well, and you know, Mitt Romney’s got a prominent position in the fulfillment of that prophecy, but that was interpreted as one of the fulfillments of this prophecy. And so you have these texts get pulled into multiple different uses and you have multiple fulfillments of prophecy. And that brings up one of the other main texts that is used for this, which is Daniel 9 , the prophecy of 70 weeks. Have you heard about this one?

Yeah, and I want to get into it.

So we have this prophecy in Daniel 9 and the first thing to note about Daniel is that this is not something written by a historical Daniel during the Babylonian exile.

How dare you.

This is vaticinium ex eventu, the name of the segment. So, okay, fine. The Book of Daniel is brought together from some traditions that were collated and finalized in the middle of the second century BCE. In fact, we can probably date it to within maybe two or three years of when it was. It was probably written around 167ish BCE. And the reason we know this is because the story is the earlier in time it gets, the closer it gets to its ostensible composition in the beginning of the Babylonian exile. The less historically accurate it is. Right. The closer it gets to 167 BCE the more historically accurate and the more detailed it gets. And then once we get past 167 BCE it all falls apart. None of it is accurate. And so this is a vaticinium ex eventu prophecy. We are, it is being written, and most of it is being written in or being gathered and collated.

Some of the traditions probably date to earlier around that time period. But we have this idea of. So this is the NRSV, Daniel 9:25 . Know, therefore and understand. From the time that the word went out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the time of an anointed prince, there shall be seven weeks. And for 62 weeks it shall be built again with street and moat. But in a troubled time. Now this is, this is the author basically redoing the prophecy that we originally find in Jeremiah about how long the Babylonian exile is going to last. Jeremiah said it would be 70 years and then everything would be restored. And we did come back, but during the Persian period, Israel did not become an independent kingdom all over again. So for someone from a later period, they look back on this and go, and that’s not really what we were expecting to happen. So it must not have happened yet. So we’re going to redo the prophecy.

And now it’s not just 70 years, but 70 weeks of years, which would be 70 times seven.

Okay, 70 weeks of years, yes, I’m pretty sure that’s not a thing, but okay, keep going.

And then, so we have our seven weeks and we have our 62 weeks. And then it says after the 62 weeks, an anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing and the troops of the blah, blah, blah, blah. And then he shall make a strong covenant with many for one week and for half. And this is that seven year peace treaty that people are talking about being signed right now. Okay, so Basically we got 7, 62, and then we got another week. And so that would be the 70 weeks. Now, Jeremiah’s prophecy was around 6, supposed to be around 605, 604 BCE. Some people read this, the 7 and then the 62 as back to back. I think it’s more likely that they overlap, you have them running concurrently. Because if you go 62 weeks of years from 605 BCE, the beginning of this period of exile, you get 171 BCE, which is when a high priest named Onias is killed.

And this is right before Antiochus Epiphanes and the Seleucid empire comes in and ravages.

No idea what any of that is. But okay, so I’m just gonna believe you, but we don’t have time, we don’t we can’t get into all of this. We don’t have the time.

Okay, I’m gonna, I’m. We’re gonna. The short, short version. Yeah, yeah. So, so basically Daniel is writing from the late 160s BCE and redoing the prophecy about how long the exile is supposed to last, so that it is all culminating right there around 167 BCE. Okay. But now 2,167, 193 years later, whatever. We’re looking back on this again and saying, well, that didn’t turn out the way they thought it was, so we’re going to redo it.

It must have been about now.

Yeah, must have been about now. And so you’ve got all kinds of different ways to redo the math, to play with these numbers to make it sound like this is all happening today. So if you hear people talking about these prophecies in Revelation, in Daniel, in Ezekiel, Gog and Magog are Russia and Iran. No, they’re not. That does not work at all. If you hear people talking about this to try to suggest that the, try to predict the future, they do not have the first clue what they’re talking about and none of what they’re saying is accurate. So there’s a lot of anxiety out there about what’s going on. And leaning into this kind of stuff will only make the situation worse and will only spread more harmful and more problematic ideologies that are only going to make it harder and harder for us to get out of these problems and actually come up with solutions that are going to lead to a better world rather than just more anger, more anxiety, more conflict.

So this is an ex eventu prophecy. Don’t be afraid.

Well, speaking of problematic theologies, I think it’s time to move on to our next segment. What is that?

Ma na in Hebrew. So, manna. What is it.

Today’s What is that? Is the Rapture. And, and I, I gotta say, I, you know, I, I grew up in the LDS tradition that you’re a part of, and I never heard the word rapture. I never heard anything about a rapture. And so when I started to hear that word, and when I started to hear people very, very adamant about what’s about to happen or about its coming or about the Rapture, I was A, confused and B, couldn’t really find it when I looked for it in the Bible, like, I, I didn’t know what it was referencing. So talk us through. Where did the concept come from? Where is it in the Bible? What are we talking about? What is the rapture?

So the word rapture comes from the Latin translation, the Vulgate translation of the New Testament, and specifically 1 Thessalonians 4:17 , where we have this statement and reading from verse 16 to 17 from the NRSV, it says, for the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds, together with them to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.

So this is caught up in the clouds, baby.

Caught up in the clouds. And this is appealing to imagery that is associated the storm deity imagery, basically. So the. The New Testament concept of Jesus coming in the clouds, that comes from Daniel 7 , which itself is drawing from earlier storm deity imagery where the storm deity was the rider of the clouds. So this goes all the way back to Baal in the second millennium BCE.

Wow.

And so it’s going all the way down to Jesus. Jesus is coming in the clouds. And it says, we’ll be caught up together. And the word there, harpagesometha, has reference to being snatched, but also just being caught up to make off with someone’s property by attacking or seizing, to grab or seize suddenly so as to remove or gain control, to snatch, to take away.

So we who are alive, who are left, will be stolen in the clouds.

That’s how some people think about it. When you hear people talking about the Rapture, it’s like you’re gonna wake up one day and there are going to be a pile of clothes where.

Oh, yeah, I’ve seen that imagery a lot.

Yeah. But what this is referring to is Paul here is using imagery associated with a new sovereign’s arrival to their kingdom, where what would happen is when the person is approaching the whole city, comes outside the city gates and goes out front, and there’s a kind of reception committee out there, and then they travel with the. The new sovereign back into the city where they take up their rule. And so Paul is kind of reorienting this vertically because our sovereign is coming from up. Right. Right. And so clouds are up, so. Right. Right. So just like Jesus ascended, Jesus is going to come down. And so the idea is we’re all going to rise up into the clouds to meet him, not to then take a trip in our big old rocket ship into the heavens, but to come back down with Jesus. So that Jesus can take up his rule on earth in his kingdom on earth.

Now, this is, you know, but people reading this 2000 years later who are not familiar with these literary conventions, with this imagery, are not understanding what’s going on here. And so you got this guy named Darby, John Nelson Darby, in the early 19th century with, I believe, the Plymouth Brethren, if I’m not mistaken, who, again, triangulating with a bunch of the other Legos that we find in the Bible, decided to try to work this into a theory about what was going to happen and came up with this idea of the Rapture, that this is about the people. The. The people who are followers of Jesus, who are alive when he comes, are going to be snatched away to go up to heaven with Jesus.

And so this is as recent as the. The early 1800s. The early 1800s.

Yeah, I don’t remember the exact year, but it would have been, I think, the 1830s is when Darby initially came up with it.

Okay.

Translations of the Bible that John Nelson Darby analyzed in 1833.

Okay.

So, yeah, this is a very recent idea. You don’t have any concept of the Rapture for the other 1800 years between Jesus’s death and Darby. And this wouldn’t really gain a bunch of traction until it was picked up in a study Bible, the Scofield, I think it was called the Scofield Reference Bible, which was popular in the United States. And these days, most Christians around the world don’t accept the Rapture. It’s almost entirely. It’s concentrated within the United States. It’s U.S. Protestants primarily, who maintained this concept of a Rapture. It’s U.S. Protestants primarily, who maintained this concept of a Rapture. And speaking about the end of the 20th century, the beginning of the 21st century, a series of books called Left Behind were very influential in kind of embedding this Rapture anxiety in a whole generation of evangelicals who carry that with them to this day.

Yeah, there’s two sides to this coin because there’s rapture delight as well. There is rapture anxiety. And we should talk about that, because I have. I have spoken to many people who, like, for spent many years or decades of their lives just really freaked out about this idea, but other people delight in it. Oh, I can’t wait. I get to be. I get to be caught up with Jesus and all of the sinners and all of the bad people and all the people that I fought against my whole life and all the people that I dislike and all the Democrats or whatever are going to have to stay and be in the tribulation, and it’s going to be awful for them and blah, blah, blah.

Well, that would be the pre-trib concept of the Rapture.

Yeah, okay. Yes, exactly. But I mean, I think that’s, I think that’s pretty common. Is, is that, is this pre-trib idea of like. Yes. Every, all the good people get raptured up so that they don’t have to be part of the horrible tribulation.

Right.

And then all of us sinners are going to be left here and then, you know, the, the, the various tortures will happen to us. And there’s something, there’s something a little gross about just about both sides of that coin either taking delight in it.

Not great.

You, you don’t look good, guys. It’s not an awesome look to, to be delighting like that. And as we talked about, that’s the same delight that people are taking when they see signs that they think are leading to the Rapture, including horrific things happening.

Yeah. Bloodshed around the world. They’re like, oh, yay.

Yeah, yeah. Or, yeah. Or, or the, or the, you know, the climate change or whatever. A lot of people are saying, aha, this is the prophecy. It’s going to happen now. It’s like, yeah, but you’re taking delight in something that’s really very scary. And then on the other side. Yeah. All these poor people who live with just terrible fear that they’re not going to have been good enough. They won’t be caught up, they’re not going to have made the cut, or someone that they love dearly won’t make the cut. And, and they’ll be, they’ll be left to be tortured.

Yeah, that’s. I, I don’t think a lot of people think about when they’re coming up with a lot of the, the rhetorical ways that they try to emphasize the importance of certain principles that we live within Christianity or whatever worldview. There are a lot of ways we, we try to rhetorically emphasize how important things are. And what we tend to not think about is the unintended consequences of using that rhetoric. And within the Latter-day Saint tradition, you have the, the idea of chastity is something that is emphasized and punctuated and rhetorically and hyperbolically kind of centered. And so you have the, the whole. For those of you who are not at all familiar with the Latter-day Saint tradition, for a long time they would tell, and I’m sure it still goes on in some parts of the, of the United States, they would compare a young woman who has lost her virginity prior to marriage to a chewed piece of gum.

Yeah. Or to a licked cupcake or something like that. And they were like, nobody’s gonna want a cupcake that’s already been licked or something like that. Which is awful imagery anyway. But what they don’t realize is, is that they are embedding within the psyche of these young, impressionable children the notion that I am not worthy. I am not even worthy to live if this happens. And so it inevitably will for a portion of the population who then get to feel like they would be better off dead. And we’ve even had. Over the pulpit, church leaders say that, you know, I once told a story during General Conference about a young man who was going off to war and told his mom, I know that you would rather I come home in a box than unclean, meaning unchaste. The idea being, I am not worthy to live.

And you have people who take their own lives because they are riddled with that kind of stuff. And so rapture anxiety is another example of not thinking about the negative consequences, of trying to emphasize how important these beliefs are to children. And so I wish people would think for a second about those negative consequences. So people don’t have to do that. People don’t have to go through that, because that kind of thing can stay with somebody throughout their entire life.

Absolutely. I think it’s fascinating that this Rapture idea, it’s- it’s so thin when you look at the- the the verses in the Bible that are used to justify this idea, it’s so obvious to me. You know, I read First Thessalonians, I- I’ve read some of the other verses that people have used. It’s very clear to me that, that- like, I can see why- how you could justify that concept, this concept of the- of the Rapture with those verses, but I don’t see how you can say with any degree of certainty that that’s definitely what these verses are talking about. These verses are really oblique, you know what I mean? Like this.

Yeah.

You can’t say, absolutely. This is what this means.

Yeah. Using the Lego metaphor, this is a rickety tower.

Yeah.

They have constructed, and it is- it is wobbling, but because it gives them a sense of exceptionalism, like, oh, we’re special, we’re going to be taken. That makes things particularly useful and meaningful for the in-group. It’s a way to kind of shore up boundaries and things like that. And it also is a very useful rhetorical tool. Are you going to be left behind or are you going to be taken with the rest of us? And it’s a good way to draw a firm hard boundary and say you need to be on this side of the line, everybody else is on the other side of the line. It’s a very us-versus-them kind of approach, which for groups is very utilitarian, helps them stick together. For the whole, it is phenomenally harmful. But that’s something odd about so many folks who suggest that they believe everybody is a- is a child of God is that they are firmly set on keeping many people on the outside and keeping others on- on the inside.

Which I, I think leads to one of the funny approaches to- to the Rapture. You talked about Rapture anxiety. You talked about, and I forget what word you use but rapture euphoria or fantasies or something like that. I think a wonderful response to this has been those folks who are approaching the Rapture euphorically from the outside. I can’t wait for all the self-righteous Christians to vanish and leave us alone.

Jesus, please come take your people here. They’ve been really mean to us and if you could just snatch them up, that’d be great.

There was a- there’s a Brigham Young quote and I don’t know the words exactly, but something to the tune of if Mormons go to hell, then we’ll turn out the devil and make a heaven of it. And I think there are a lot of non-evangelicals or atheists who are like, if the Rapture takes all the Christians away, then Earth will become heaven. Because the Rapture stuff tends to be a pretty myopic, close-minded, kind of insular approach to living in a world that is not ending anytime soon, at least because of anything supernatural going on. Our myopia and our misanthropy might lead to us destroying it before too long. But yeah, I think the folks who pound the Rapture drum the loudest are the ones that most people would just like to see disappear.

In a good way. In a good way. Go up to heaven. Do your thing.

Go, go. Yeah, knock yourself out. Have a great time in the clouds. That’ll be, that’ll. You’ll like it. They’re fluffy.

Yeah, as, as, as Delta says, keep climbing. I’ve been on Delta planes a lot in the last couple of weeks.

Yes, you have.

Yeah, I’ve had to stare at that, that motto for a while now.

Oh, wow. I, I’m just impressed that you haven’t. Or confused that you haven’t figured out how to tune it out completely yet. Because I’ve been on a lot too and I just, I have no idea what they say in that thing. I know I’m supposed to pay attention, but. All right, well, let’s. What, what’s. What’s our final thought here?

Yeah, because I think the. The final thought is that this. This rhetoric does a lot of damage not only to the psyches of new generations, people who are growing up in a time when their. Their brains are. Are formulating a concept of their identity and their position in the world around them. We don’t want to embed that field with this idea that you could wake up and all your loved ones could be gone and you could be left behind because you rubbed one out the other day to a Katy Perry video that you saw or something like that. That kind of anxiety is so corrosive, and it also interferes with our ability to govern in a world where we have so many issues that we have to address to have so many people with their hands on levers of power who can say things as brainless as, Well, Genesis 8:22 says that the climate, you know, climate change is a hoax, and so we’re going to stand in the way of making a better world.

That is so phenomenally harmful. And the notion that people are giddy about people suffering and dying on the other side of the world, people that they’ve never met, that they will never have to think about in anything other than a purely abstract sense, that they are happy about this or that they think this is an opportunity to evangelize and to say, those Jews better become Christians soon, because that’s the only thing. That’s the only way they’re going to bring an end to this suffering that is so unimaginably harmful.

And it’s not just that. It’s also that they’re using unrelated texts, they’re using the Bible, pretending like it’s talking about this moment, this thing, and then saying that that’s how we should structure policy. That’s how we should structure our approach to a world tragedy.

Yeah.

Which leads to not caring about what the best possible outcome is for everyone involved, but rather only looking to what’s the best possible outcome to make Jesus come again.

Yeah.

And that’s all they’re looking to. And that’s. And. And they’re pressuring, you know, they’re voting for people who have that. That particular view. It’s not a worldview, it’s a theological view. And they’re. And they’re basing their ideas of world policy and sort of international relations on something that doesn’t even apply.

Yeah. And this is something that we’ve talked about a number of times, not enough times, we’re going to talk about them again. But the texts have no inherent meaning. We create meaning with the texts. And so a lot of folks will respond, Well, that’s what the Bible says. It’s the word of God. That’s what the scriptures say. No, it’s not. It is what you have decided will make the text most meaningful and useful to you. Unfortunately, that translates into something that is harmful to the people around you because you’re trying to make it most beneficial to you. And so something that it’s a drum I’ve been beating my entire time on social media and will continue to beat. Nobody has any other option but to negotiate with the text. Anybody who sees the Bible as authoritative in any way, shape or form has no option but to negotiate with the text. And in those negotiations we should consider what our priorities are.

Are they to structure power and values in our favor? Are they to serve our identity politics or are they to achieve some kind of progress for everybody? The people that we interact with on a day to day basis and the people on the other side of the planet that we will never know personally. Are we trying to help others? Are we trying to progress humanity? Or are we just trying to shore up our access to power and resources and ensure the people we don’t want to have access to power and resources don’t have it? If so, I would suggest that that is a phenomenally corrosive approach and that is a misuse of the biblical text. And so if anything else, hopefully we’ve shown that this approach to the Rapture that is very common these days, this approach to understanding geopolitics and world events that is associated with the second coming and the Rapture is not supported by data, is not supported by much at all apart from a concern for structuring power and values.

And even if we say this is a valid way of interpreting these scriptures that you know, it is, it is a, it is a colorable defense. It is a, you know it. Even if we were to say that why are you choosing that interpretation? Yeah, we need to be. You, you absolutely must be asking yourself why you’re choosing to follow one interpretation over another. And if you’re. And because it is a choice to do that. Because it’s, because just because it’s a possible interpretation doesn’t mean that it’s the right one. And if you’re doing it because it makes you feel special in your special group of elect people at the expense of a bunch of other people. I know. I’m just reiterating what you’re saying, Dan. I’m just saying the same thing in different words. But if you’re. But I, I wanted to emphasize that this is a choice that you’re making and there are ugly choices and there are good, there are.

Are lovely choices. And, and you need to ask yourself, am I making the ugly choice? Am I choosing the ug. An interpretation of scripture that makes me feel good at the expense of others? Or should I choose a different, a different path? And I don’t think people think of it as a choice. I think a lot of. No, I think a lot of pastors present it as facts or whatever. A lot of, a lot of spiritual leaders present it as this. There is no choice in how we believe in what we’re believing. This is the only way to think.

Yeah. And it’s just not true if anybody standing over a pulpit is telling you you have to think about it this way or else you’re not one of us, they’re selling you something. And we’ve talked before about how nobody is immune from the influences of our intuitive identity politics and stuff like that. Not me, not you, not anybody else. I get accused all the time of being like, yeah, well, you are too. It’s like, I know, I’ve acknowledged that. The difference is I then turn around and I interrogate what I’m doing and I try to get to the bottom of my own intuitions and what’s motivating me to, to try and find out, is there something there that shouldn’t be there. And I think you will run up against this line where you realize, I don’t want to cross this line because it’s going to reveal ugly things about myself. That’s the line you have to cross because that’s how you get over those things. That’s how you heal from it.

That’s how you become better and you make those ugly things, not ugly things. Everybody has to go through that many times in their lives. And the people who demur, the people who say, I don’t want to see those ugly things about myself, those are the folks who never remove those ugly things from themselves. So please think critically, be self-critical about where these things are coming from and let’s make a better world for everybody.

Can’t think of a better way to end this episode. Thanks so much, Dan. I think that was amazing. If you friends would like to be a part of making this show a thing, please feel free to be a patron. You can join us at patreon.com/dataoverdogma where you can get an ad-free version of every show, you know, depending on what tier you select. And by the way, patrons, you have to go and select a tier. Now there’s a whole thing, things have gone weird over at Patreon. We’ll solve it. But, but yeah, you can, you can have extra content that we produce every week. So please feel free to go over there and become a patron. We, we really appreciate our patrons. If you would like to write into us, it’s contact@dataoverdogmapod.com. Thanks so much. We’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye everybody.