Fundamentalists are dangerous regardless of which relegion they believe in. The world teeters on the brink of disaster based on the conflicting ‘end-time’ scenerios decreed by the bishops of varing branches in Abrahamic tradition. One group believes that heaven and 17 virigins await the suicide bomber. One believes god gave them title to the land because they are ‘the chosen people’. The third, and perhaps most deluded of the triad believe they will be swept up into heavn directly [without having to suffer the indignaties of death] by god in ‘The Rapture’ any minute now. All Christians, believe in some kind of extraterrestial saviour sweeping in and saving them [the true believers] and only them from the hell/fire/brimstone that awaits the rest of us. The sects, and their danger level, get divided on the question of when all this is gonna happen.The butterfly of history was flapping its wings when in 1830, Margaret McDonald, a cultish Scottish visionary who belonged to a sect known as the Irvingites, claimed while in a trance that the rapture would occur before the period of persecution. This position, now known as the "pre-tribulational" view, also was embraced by John Nelson Darby, an early leader of a Fundamentalist movement that became known as Dispensationalism. Darby’s pre-tribulational view of the rapture was then picked up by a man named C.I. Scofield, who taught the view in the footnotes of his Scofield Reference Bible, which was widely distributed in England and America. Many Protestants who read the Scofield Reference Bible uncritically accepted what its footnotes said and adopted the pre-tribulational view, even though no Christian had heard of it in the previous 1800 years of Church history.
How can this arcane bit of the self delusion matter to us heathens? In his confirmation hearing before Congress, then-Secretary of the Interior James Watt was asked to discuss his plans for the use and maintenance of America’s national parks, public lands and natural resources. His reply: "Hey, why bother?" In Watt’s funhouse mirror opinion, there wasn’t much point in trying to save and preserve the nation’s wildlife and wilderness, since the Rapture was sure to happen at any moment and very shortly thereafter, there wouldn’t be any wildlife or wilderness to preserve.
Fundamentalists are morons. Our future, our children's futures depend on the exposing of these morons and their dangerous ideologies to the light of reason.
“Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.”- Tom Robbins
