Climate Change, the Rapture, and the Apocalypse

by Charles S. Oaxpatu

Fundie Stupidity at Work for You

Check it out folks!!!  Another record hot summer is coming, and the following timely  news article was hot off the press just yesterday:

Carbon Dioxide Hits a Landmark Quantity

I would like to be 18 years old and live another century at that age. Why? I love watching American history and world history (good and bad) unfurl before my eyes. Archaeologists, historians, and social scientists like to do stuff like that. Here is the slogan:

A Witness to History

Why? Christian fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals are two human groups who live in denial of man-induced climate change. They do not believe it exists, and even worse if it did exist, they do not believe in fixing the problem. They believe it is a liberal/progressive plot to empty their pockets for no good reason. Worst of all, many fundies think all the horrifying things that “might” (in their minds) come out of it will be their greatly anticipated Tribulation Time or The Apocalypse. They think Jesus will be coming to rescue them (and them alone) by rapturing them out of here—because they are all so very special and so very righteous above all other people: blah….blah….blah. We have all seen the love strokes the fundies are always giving themselves—and most people outside of fundie circles would rather have a green puke than watch them sprinkle such sugar on themselves day and night.

I want to be camping out on a street corner in the worst of it during the year 2070 and watch the global average air temperature hit an increase level of 4 degrees C.  I want to see the looks on fundie faces when the jaws of environmental catastrophe finally grab them like a predator—and leave them with no ability to deny it. As the old Chinese proverb says:

You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth.

When their heads are locked tightly in the man-induced global warming tiger’s mouth, they will be unable to rationalize it away or deny it. I want to hear it all on that future street corner:

Why didn’t someone see this coming????!!!! Why didn’t someone warn us about this????!!!! Why didn’t somebody do something???!!!!

Then I will inform them that they were warned about its coming for decades, and Christian fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals refused to hear the truth and refused to do anything about it—and even fought hard against doing anything about it when there was still time—and it would have worked.

I might have to camp out on that street corner for a few years if the city will let me. I want to see the overwhelming fear and horror on all the fundie faces when they realize they are standing smack dab in the middle of the worst tragedy in human history—and it will never get any better. It will only get worse, and worse, and worse with each passing year.

Most of all, I want to see that precious moment—that oh so very precious moment—when the fundies finally realize that there is no rapture—because a British preacher invented it out of thin air in the year 1830—and Jesus is not coming to rescue them from this so-called Tribulation Time. I want to kick back, relax, and watch the fundies ripping the clothes off their bodies with their bare hands because they can no longer endure the anguish they created for themselves and all the peoples of the Earth when they ignored God’s plain and loving warning, through his climate change scientists, decades before that moment of anguish began.

Lastly, the greatest moment of ecstasy for me, as I sit on that street corner, will come a few years later when all the Christian fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals will be gathered in the streets—unable to endure the anguish anymore—and they are forced to cry out to the skies the words Jesus predicted people just like them would one day cry out:

At that time ‘they will say to the mountains, “Fall on us!” and to the hills, “Cover us!”’ For if men do these things while the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?” (Luke 23:30-31)

Oh-h-h-h-h-h-h.  It will be dry all right!!!  They can count on that!!! They will see drought everywhere!!!  Then the skies will shout back down to the fundies the words they most deserve to hear—words my fundie uncle, Malcolm P. Parker, made famous in our family when I was growing up in the Nashville area:

I wouldn’t give them a drop of water or a blade of grass if  they were a goat grazing on a concrete pasture.

Then the gathered fundies (drenched wet with sweat from all the heat and surrounded by parched land, withering crops, and diminishing drinking water) will say:

Goats. That sounds familiar. Something about goats in the Bible—in the New Testament somewhere. I can’t remember what it was or where it was because I am so hot I can no longer think straight.

Sitting on my street corner, I will then say to the fundies:

You must be thinking about those goats in Matthew 25:31-46. As the old Pogo comic strip might say about you fundies: “We have met the goat, and he is us.”

Then the gathered Christian fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals in the streets will cry out to the skies:

We were your most faithful human beings—far above and beyond the faith of all other human beings on Earth. We were just plain better people, and you know that Lord!!! We were your cat’s meow!!! We memorized all your ancient laws, made new laws out of every verse in the New Testament, and then let our preachers make even more new laws on top of those. We kicked the Book of Galatians square in the ass and made obedience to all those laws the most important thing in our lives—while giving some lip service here and there to Jesus and his grace—but it was mostly all about your laws—and make no mistake Lord—we expect to be rewarded handsomely for being thoroughly anal law obeyers—because obedience is what it’s all about.

Then the blistering sun and its ray-shattered skies will cry back to them and prophesy about man-induced global warming and their horrifying environmental predicament:

It never was about laws and obedience. It was all about grace and love—not obedience to laws. But if you insist on laws and insist that your obedience to them was the do all, be all, and end all of existence on this Earth, then you must have missed these words in the New Testament.  You fundies and your time here on this Earth are about finished—and every damned one of you missed these important words in the Bible:

The nations were angry, and your wrath has come. The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and your people who revere your name, both great and small and for destroying those who destroy the earth.” (Revelation 11:18).

Goat loading for you fundies begins at Aisles 3, 14, 35, 149, and 666!!!  If you think the climate on Elm Street is hot now…

Well—an old guy like me can at least fantasize some about the fundie future—and laugh out loud about it.

Way back in the 1980s, I was in a newly found career crisis. I prayed to Jesus and prayed hard about the right career road for me to take. Most of all, I asked Jesus to find me a new career that would serve both Jesus and the welfare of all mankind. I asked for a career with both meaning and mission. Through a strange miracle—and it really was a miracle—so strange it could have only come directly from Jesus—and I even felt it in a moment by the sea when it was locked in place for me without my full knowledge.

That new career turned out to be protecting our natural environment here on Earth and participating in the environmental clean-up process for some of the worst and most dangerous chemically and radioactively contaminated sites in the United States. My official title was Environmental Analyst or Environmental Scientist. I did that work for 27 years—until the work essentially ran out one day in 2014—when my company and I had completed nearly all of the work on our major contract project.

I was really concerned about that because my lay-off came while The Great Recession of 2008 was still underway, and in my area, it was impossible to even buy a job doing anything. Strictly for economic reasons, I needed to work more years—or so I thought. I tried to get another full-time environmental science job, but no such job came. I fretted about it quite a lot and spent one morning fretting about it rather deeply in various ways.

Then it happened in the afternoon of that same fretting day, while I was in my Honda van and driving west on a local highway. It came out of nowhere when I least expected it. It was “The Voice,” the one I told you about in an earlier blog article. You know. The bus and the fire. The oddball marriage prophecy that came true.

A feeling of enormous warmth, peace, kindness, and love came suddenly and wrapped itself all around me as I drove my van westward. “The Voice” came to me and said only two kind words:

Mission Accomplished