the rapture

By Christopher Cudworth

Obama to Lincoln: “It’s a lot harder being President these days. People can’t be civil.”

So much of history depends on chance. Recently a man named Omar Gonzalez jumped the White House fence and entered the building. He was armed, but not with guns. The Las Vegas Review–– a media company based in the gambling mecca––carried the story online:

“President Barack Obama and his daughters had just left the White House by helicopter on Friday evening when the Secret Service says 42-year-old Omar J. Gonzalez scaled the fence, darting across the lawn and through the unlocked North Portico doors before officers finally tackled him.”

It’s only speculation to wonder what might have happened had Obama been home to encounter an intruder carrying a knife. Surely the fit and adroit President would not just have stood there and waited for an attack. They must train the President to protect himself in some ways? Yet even if the Secret Service does not provide such training, good old gut instincts would take over for Obama, a man young enough to stay fit playing sports on a regular (but not excessive) basis.

Suppose the intruder had stumbled onto Obama working at his desk. The two might have scuffled and knife or not, Obama likely could have overpowered the man eventually. There might have been blood spilled and shouts, whereupon the Secret Service would finally arrive and the intruder would indeed have been subdued.

If such personal heroics had ensued, what would the reaction of the media have been? We might recall the coverage given to the incident in which George W. Bush reportedly gagged on a chunk of dry pretzel. The President almost succumbed to a salty snack. It made the headlines for sure.

But a President fighting off an intruder by his own power? That would have made major headlines. And had there been video released by the White House that showed the President in action saving his own life, such footage would go viral. Experts would scrutinize its verity. Ultimately someone would accuse the President of wagging the dog, trying to shore up his reputation as a tough guy in the latter stages of his presidency.

The conspiracy theories would have dominated coverage by Fox News especially. Already during Obama’s presidency the news network has demonstrated a major propensity to lead with specious questions about Benghazi and complaints about whether Obama actually deserved any credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden.

It is a unique point in American history when news media wielding the power and scope of Fox News invest so much time and effort digging into such non-stories, and presenting speculation as fact while simultaneously giving so much time and support to people whose ideologies serve as “real news” and “fair and balanced” ideas about issues such as global climate change or teaching religion public school classrooms.

Such topsy turvy “reporting” has created a climate in which it is suitable for even a Supreme Court Justice such as Antonin Scalia to spout the opinion (and it is his own) that the United States Constitution serves the purpose of religion over the rights of all others.

That’s where all this is going, and it has poisoned the flow of reason in public discourse. So much so that had an intruder reached President Obama, and had he fought for himself in the face of Secret Service failures, no one would have believed the event. Not completely.

It may be that the game is played both ways. As a result of so much falseness in the media, there is no doubt that Presidents long ago learned to play the media game to the point where Americans cannot really trust what anyone, not even the President, has to say about anything.

We’ve never gotten the full truth even about the Kennedy assassination back in 1963. Recent releases from the Kennedy library reveal that Jackie Kennedy Onassis believed the then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson had motive to kill her husband and assume the Presidency.

That was Democrat vs. Democrat. Or was it really? Could a man with such bully motives and methods as LBJ truly be grouped with any particular political party? There were so many interests that wanted JFK dead it was truly no one man that did it. The mob or the CIA certainly had their reasons to participate (cooperate?) in such actions.

But that remains speculation until that day the one line of evidence is revealed that points a finger at the exact incident or moment where the motives and actions are revealed.

That’s why Fox News can get away with what it does these days. Because lacking hard evidence that such conspiracies actually do have consequence, and without proof that both liberal and conservative causes have the audacity to ignore reason and law in pursuit of power, the rest of us are left guessing about the truth.

Even our fullest sources of truth such as the Bible are subject to gross speculations and wild interpretations. Some of these are anachronistic in their literalism while others engage in flat-out denials of modern knowledge to the point of insincerity. Yet some 30% of Americans still believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible and millions fall prey to ridiculous theories about the Rapture that the Bible itself clearly debunks as sinful and stupid to abide.

News outlets such as Fox know they can exploit and manipulate such naive and cynical, angry and feckless minds to their own advantage. It has occurred to such a degree that half the Fox audience would have questioned the verity of any report of a President defending himself while the other half might have welcomed a different, less positive outcome.

Have you any doubt this is true, simply visit the websites where Obama-haters regularly reside. Try the Tea Party News Network for starters, whose very headlines contain a leading bias in many cases. Then witness the barely disguised racism in the commentary on those stories, and absorb the hatred for our current President. It would obviously not take much for a person driven by the hatred apparent in such places to take up arms and make a charge for the White House on his or her own.

Ask Gabby Giffords about how anger-driven violence can enter your life, changing it forever. And consider how other politicians fail to act even when challenged again and again by violent forces to legislate change in our nation.

What we can really learn from recent attempts to attack the President is that its hard to believe how far we’ve come from that day in 1963 when the nation and the world stood in shock at news that Kennedy had been assassinated. Those were not more innocent times, we all now know. Instead what we know now is that corrupt influences have become more bold and adept at the lies they are willing to tell and the acts they are willing to perpetrate in order to gain and maintain power.

Sometimes it only takes one man and one “lucky” shot at murder to change history. Abraham Lincoln fell to such a shooter, but it was an uncivil society that gave birth to his motives and the courage to act.

Because it is never just one man and one gun who does the killing. It is all of us, and how we abide by truth or accept something far less as fact. That’s the lesson we have long failed to learn.

Painting by Christopher Cudworth of Chicago skyline with peregrine falcon.

As a very young artist I was fortunate to receive a series of commissions from a man who would go on to earn great wealth. At the time I met him, he was in the early throes of a vision that led to one of the top investment trust companies in America. A decade or more later he sold his firm to a larger entity for a profit of $400 million dollars.

For a short period of a couple years I worked for that company. That was a strange experience in some ways. The man who founded the company was also a zealous Christian fundamentalist. He formed several churches during his life. At times it was rumored that he wrote the sermons himself, critiquing the pastors he hired to deliver them.

With his growing wealth he accumulated a collection of some of the rarest bibles in the world. Then he built a bunker residence in western Michigan. If it weren’t for the fact that the man was quite sociable and publicly driven to convince the world that his visions were true, it might all seem rather like a Howard Hughes story.

Sadly, the man literally died of disease that hardened the flesh and organs of his body. His trust outlived him and is overseen by a team of trusted managers to provide for his wife and family.

So this is not to criticize the man personally. As stated, our relationship was an interesting one. At a time when I was no longer working for the company, he called me up for additional art commissions. He was thinking big as usual. “I want two 4′ X 4′ paintings of falcons for either end of my board room,” he told me. “I can hire you for $1500 or I can hire Robert Bateman (a famous wildlife painter) for $50,000. Do you want the job?”I took it, and hauled those paintings in for approval several times. He finally purchased them.

So I knew him well enough to at times discuss aspects of life and faith and success. During one of our transactions I asked for a little more money because I’d worked particularly hard on a painting of a bald eagle. I was 17 years old, and requested $120 for a painting upon which we had agreed on a price of $100. He pulled out his Bible and gave a short sermon backed by scripture. The point he was trying to make is that a ‘bargain is a bargain.’ Yet he still payed me the extra $20.

He was certainly a man of convictions. As his wealth grew so did his ability to focus on theological issues. He developed his own theory about the coming Rapture. It was based on a series of convoluted scriptural references that was essentially debunked by fellow Rapture conspiracists who debate such things with avid furor.

So interesting that it’s all based on the original conjecture of a host of believers convinced that the Bible holds patent clues as the End of Time. One particular 1800s American preacher named John Darby particularly popularized the myth of The Rapture. From there it spread into a myriad of strangely fantastical versions of Armageddon based on bible takings from the books of Daniel and the Book of Revelation.

But the Rapture was not all that fascinated my wealthy friend. He funded a search for Noah’s Ark and provided money to the leading creationists of the early 80s.

All this literalism and reverse literalism made for a complex vision of a man who was obviously smart enough to become one of the wealthier men in America. Yet when I stood in our office one day talking toe to toe with one of the leading creationists of the day, he could provide no answers to the simplest questions of biology or geology. All it took to confound the man about the age of the earth was a simple illustration of the theory of plate tectonics. He was instantly at a loss to reconcile such hard evidence of times past.

That’s because creationism is essentially a science of denial, not one of discovery. It depends on anachronism for its verity. It has no forward progress in its makeup. No new knowledge can come from it. It is nothing more than a lockbox for a literalistic worldview of the origins of the human race and the universe.

At the same time it is something of a Pandora’s Box, because creationism, upon its release in the world, knows no limits in its mad schemes to rule the worldview of all those who encounter it. Creationists work hard to promote their very limited perspectives on history. They depend on props like a literal world flood to explain geology, and Noah’s Ark and the character of Adam to describe all the types of animals in the world.

Yet they cannot explain the complex fact that blind salamanders in Tennessee caves somehow migrated out of their native environment all the way across an ocean to reside in an ark for forty days and forty nights. Then they swam and crawled across deserts (with no working eyes!) to get back to their dark, watery caves below the earth. There are millions of creatures just like this, that had no way to navigate or manage a trip across thousands of miles of ocean just to get to an ark.

Yet that is what the man with all the wealth in the world wanted to have everyone else believe. He put a ton of dough behind the idea, and might certainly have helped fund projects like the insane Creation Museum in Kentucky if he felt that it might convince a few more people that the Bible was literally, infallibly correct.

We’re stuck with these inane beliefs because people with low levels of insight on scripture and science refuse to give in lest they find their entire worldview is a house of cards. And so it is that between 30% and 50% of Americans who hold these views are still trying to jam prayer into public schools, and force textbooks to present a Christian form of creationism as possible fact.

The great wealth of Christian knowledge lies not in the sick obsession with proving an anachronistic view that even Jesus would have laughed at. After all, Jesus taught using highly organic, highly symbolic parables to present spiritual concepts. He lampooned the Pharisees and others who sought to turn scripture into rigid laws and a worldview that punished people for believing otherwise.

And Jesus insisted to the wealthiest men of his time that the best thing they could do to enter the kingdom of heaven was to relinquish their wealth and seek sources of greater insight. Because when you have enough money to buy what you want to believe, you tend to ignore and resist everything else. And that’s the problem in America right now on many sides of the aisle.

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