be forewarned: i am probably going to accidentally trounce on beliefs without meaning to and without any malice. apologies in advance. i’m thinking aloud here.
all this talk about raptures is puzzling to me at best. and that’s at best.
i had to do a little reading about the concept of rapture, as it is a christian concept and thus obviously nothing i was taught as part of my time with mrs. hannah felder, the torah-ettes, and our stunning hebrew school curriculum. there’s a piece of the christian bible called thessalonians (which i had to practice saying, i would add — that word is a tongue twister and made me feel like i had a lisping challenge) where paul writes one of his epistles. (i remember reading a bit about him in college through the confessions of st. augustine. that paul was pretty prolific.)
(speaking of prolific paul, i always love being at weddings with BS when they get to the part of paul writing to the corinthians. my husband always makes me laugh: dear corinthians, he’ll whisper, STOP. how’s the leather business? STOP. etc.)
so that thinker named paul, he took on the thessalonians as well, only this time, he was talking about christians being taken up to G-d. and i’m no theologian (so i will defer to my friends who are), but it sounds like depending on which sort of christian you are delineates how the whole rapture scenario plays out. but ultimately, my understanding is that as long as you are christian and have declared Jesus as your savior, you are good to go toward that heavenly reward.
see, here’s where i get a bit perplexed and i’m hoping someone out there can help me out. in judaism, i think we earn our place in heaven by good works. i don’t think the concept is limited to jews, either — i think anyone who does good on earth can enter heaven (if it’s a concept he or she believes in, obviously. not everyone does.) you don’t have to belong to any particular religion; you just have to be a decent human being. now obviously, behaving as Jesus would want you to would put you in this category, methinks, as Jesus had some pretty critical ideas that i can appreciate. but in our non-christian worldview, i don’t think you have to be christian to earn your place with The Big Entity Upstairs.
so is it enough to surrender yourself to Jesus or G-d? i’m thinking about all those poor people who stopped their lives in their tracks last week because they believed that rapture was imminent. they handed out pamphlets; they paid for billboards; and they did everything they could to spread the word. i respect their right to share their ideas. however, is that all there is to it? just believe and you’re done?
you need to understand that i am somewhat skeptical about organized religion, including my own. but a worldview i do embrace is all about your behavior here on earth. how you treat people in the here and now is everything to me. and frankly, i am not doing this because i am hoping that i end up in G-d’s good books (or the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s, for that matter.) i do that simply because i want to be part of a world where people treat each other kindly and fairly. i’m far from perfect on this front, of course; but it’s something i strive for every day. it’s something i try to share with my kids every day. and all these people who are eager to die and be lifted up to heaven — have they completely given up on improving life on here in our world? i find people like that to be the scariest people of all.
i know that life for some people is very, very hard. i know that i count my blessings all the time — i have a healthy family, i have access to lifesaving medicine, i have people i love and who seem to like me, etc. — so it may seem pretty easy for me to talk about good works and good deeds. but when you look at history and see persecuted peoples, people under the greatest of stresses, there are countless stories of grace and courage and, as my tribe would put it, mitzvot. i think, for example, about the righteous among the nations, non-jews who risked their very lives saving jews during the holocaust.
isn’t that sort of deed enough to earn your place in heaven?
but is that really a good reason to do the right thing? no one really knows what happens to you after you die. maybe heaven. maybe worm food central. who really knows? and i don’t begrudge anyone their beliefs, but you can’t really control what happens to you after you die. you can, however, control how you behave in the here and now. you can create heaven… or hell… right here on earth, as the temps sing.
and shouldn’t that be the focus?
This is something I’ve grappled with over the years having been raised a Christian (though at times not with full-on vigour) but having married an atheist/scientist. We’ve talked religion on many an occasion and we both completely respect those who pursue and live by whatever they choose, provided it does not harm others.
We struggle with organized religion, though, as it has often caused more trouble than good. (don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of good that has come from it, as well) And if people find solace, peace and meaning from it, all the more power to them.
My father is a born-again Christian and I have posed the question to him before: “so if I’m a good person and live a good life but I don’t believe in Jesus, I don’t get into heaven, but if a serial rapist and killer repents at some point and accepts Jesus in their heart, they’re in?”
Sadly, the answer was yes. Which I struggle with.
While I still spend time contemplating a higher power/spirituality/our place in the world, I will continue to try and be a good person and contribute. All the rapture-talk these past few weeks put me a little on edge because I didn’t yet feel I had come to a place of my own understanding on it all. But alas, we’re all still here. Tornados are still crashing down, hungry children are perishing, many are suffering: we have opportunities each and every day to make a difference and be good people. I agree with you, Sher: let’s not forget we are citizens of this world right now and that’s all we can really control.
Great post. Very thoughtful and thought-provoking.
Will you post your rapture playlist next? 🙂
great comment, cynthia. and exactly — all this rapture talk has put me on edge, too. it was almost like there’s this sense of a club: follow our rules and you are admitted to our playhouse. i respect everyone’s right to their own beliefs, but i can’t help sometimes feel like all these “clubs” are more about only accepting people who are likeminded. which i guess is what clubs are all about, but i’d feel a lot better just being part of a fragile, flawed, but much more open club that’s open to anyone who believes whatever, just as long as they believe in the cause of human beings. so yeah, i guess i have a rule, too. but it’s rather broad.
and yes, of course: the rapture playlist.
Last Night On Earth – U2
Twilight Time- The Platters
Jesus Is Just Alright – Doobie Brothers
Heaven Is A Place on Earth – Belinda Carlisle
Heaven’s Missing an Angel – Tavares
Hayride to Hell – Hoodoo Gurus
Hell’s Bells – AC/DC
It’s The End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) – REM
Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell – The Stooges
Straight To Hell – The Clash
Holiday in Cambodia – Dead Kennedys
Hell is for Children – Pat Benatar
Castles Made of Sand – Jimi Hendrix
Sacrifice – Elton John
Faith – George Michael
Rapture – Blondie
Just Like Heaven – The Cure
Heaven – Psychedelic Furs
You Make Your Heaven and Hell Right Here on Earth – The Temptations
The End – The Beatles
Wreke, you are correct about Judaism’s beliefs on heaven. Actually, the whole of Judaism is based on action rather than belief.
As a person who “does religion for a living,” it is personally liberating to know that I don’t have to believe all of it all of the time (or any of it all of the time – really, there are some days where going through the motions is the best I can ask of myself, not unlike the times when I go to the gym but phone it in and don’t break a sweat on the elliptical – hey, I’m still making it to the gym, so I get some credit, right). It is also professionally frustrating, because as any lazy person will tell you, it’s a heck of a lot easier to believe one thing for the “get into heaven” pass than it is to follow a bunch of rules that only get you into heaven if you believe in it. Fortunately, most of my students see the wisdom in “not doing unto others what is hateful to yourself” (which is the correct version of the increasingly misquoted Rabbi Hillel), because eventually they figure out that no one can know for sure, so we’ve got to do the best with what we have here.
So heaven can truly be a place on earth (just like Hell. In the Caymans).
poor rabbi hillel. he needs a better press agent on both the misquotation front as well as the royalties front. dude is missing out on righteous bucks. 😉
i had a long think when my kids were young (well, when BC was young; i had things well figured out by the time jools entered the picture.) would it matter much if they had religious education in the church or in the synagogue? it was pretty much all down to me, and i ended up doing what i know. but the driving force for any religious upbringing was mostly to help us develop and strengthen a moral framework in our kids, something which i think you can get from either place (or from plenty of other religious teachings as well outside of churches and synagogues. obviously, neither group corners the market on morals.) i have always had a hard time with the concept of faith, at least faith in anything not human. and do i care whether my kids believe or not? not at all. but i *do* care how they treat other people. i *do* want them to care about people who aren’t as lucky as they are. i want them to stop and *do* something about people or animals or whatever it is in the world that they feel needs their assistance, money, attention. if they grow up with that in their hearts, i will be satisfied.
as an aside, my mom collects magnets from all over the world, so when we were in the Caymans, i was sure to purchase a magnet from Hell… which, i would add, has a place of pride on her fridge.
Hey Sheryl,
Just wanted to chime in and note that both the concept of Rapture and that of being Saved (“accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior”) are specific to Evangelical Christians, not tenets of Christianity as a whole (I don’t know what the numbers are but Evangelicals are not the majority). And those evangelicals who really thought the rapture was taking place this weekend are an even smaller subset (not all Baptists, etc.). It’s the fundamentalist sects who take a literal approach to everything biblical (ie., they believe the earth was created in seven actual days, whereas other Christians acknowledge the creation story as metaphorical). In Catholicism for instance, there’s a belief that at the end of the world Jesus will appear (the Second Coming) but that’s quite distinct. Yes, there is a tenet about baptism getting you to heaven, but when I grew up I was also told you could be in heaven if you weren’t baptized, and there were a lot of stories about the good Samaritan or other “foreigners” etc. that showed that sinners could go to heaven and blah-de-blah, you didn’t have to believe as long as your actions were in keeping with the general goodness concept. I think you couldn’t be technically “with Jesus” but if you didn’t believe in him then no big loss, so….
For better or worse (!), in Catholicism there is a pretty definite emphasis on actions vs. belief alone getting you to heaven (and all kinds of odd, historical other terms like limbo and purgatory to connote strange halfway points to heaven…..and then during elementary school they suddenly “dropped” limbo, which was supposed to be where unbaptized babies hung out, so…ok. I don’t know.)
The Evangelical strains of Christianity pretty much originated and/or thrived here in the US, incidentally; there’s a great deal of thought that it’s our American culture that has propagated an odd sort of Christian strain of entitlement (like, “god wants you to be wealthy” which is daft). It was a Puritan guy who came up with the Rapture idea in the first place, I believe.
Anyway — not a member or an apologist for any of these, just want to point out it’s not a universal Christian thing. Not sure my comment was long enough, though. 😉
Now this kind of dialogue is something we can all believe in.
bettina,
thanks VERY MUCH for the comment! as weird as it sounds, i am still learning the differences between the various christian groups. i know mostly about catholicism, a) because my dear pal who grew up across the street (hi jenjen!) practiced all her catechism stuff with me around (it took me years to figure out why “fruit of the loom” was in her prayer :-), and b) because i’ve married into a catholic family, so at least as far as family rituals (birth, weddings, funerals), i have a certain level of familiarity (though certainly far from expert.) i’m fascinated with the differences in christianity — in judaism, we have a few differences, but they are, for the most part, pretty stark (i.e., orthodox are pretty traditional, no matter which subset), save for the reform and conservative jews — as time moves on, i think the two have more in common, though conservative jews are more old skool than are the reform in terms of using hebrew, keeping kosher, etc. in christianity, though, there seems to be so many, many more groups, and i would love to learn more about the differences (and similarities!!) among them. i’ll have to ask a friend of mine who recently became a clergyman to see whether he has any books to recommend. i’m sure there are quite a few out there 🙂
A big ROTFLMAO to BS! The rich Corinthian leather!
As for reading up on the subject, I recently read what I thought was a pretty interesting book that focused on differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. Having been brought up Catholic (and having subsequently forgotten most of what I learned), I only knew that Protestants did not have celibate priests and they had a different ending to the Lord’s Prayer. This book, Rome Sweet Home, by Scott Hahn, was a gift from a friend who knows my husband likes to read about Christianity. It chronicles the journey of the author and his wife from Protestantism to Catholicism. I think I learned a lot more about Catholicism from reading this book than I ever understood as a kid – particularly how it differs from protestantism. In particular, Hahn wrote about how Martin Luther departed from Catholic tenets by declaring that faith alone (“sola fide”) was sufficient for a person to earn redemption. No actions required. I never thought of Catholicism as a particularly deed-oriented religion – the concept comes through much better in Judaism, through the emphasis on mitzvot – but I guess I did get just a bit of smug satisfaction out of realizing that the religion I was brought up in had the right idea on this issue. Not going back to the Church, though – I still dislike the institution for the same reasons I always did!