iFrank wrote:
After researching the rapture, it’s not in Gods Word. Others mis-read words and are led astray . What says you?
About "the rapture"? I think it could make a really good adventure story. I did read one rapture novel; it had "the antichrist" in it and part of that was interesting.
So, let me try to break down what the rapture is, or is supposed to be: It would be an event, in which some people vanish from Earth, all together in the same instant, and suddenly they're somewhere else, either in Heaven or on their way there; and all the other people are just left on Earth.
You mentioned "God's Word". It doesn't concern me much, whether something is said to be "in God's Word" or not.
I haven't spent very much time thinking about the rapture. I doubt there will actually be such an event. But supposing there were a rapture, what would be the meaning, or meanings, of it? What would it say about what kind of God God is? What would it say about the meaning of our lives? What would it say about how we know things or whether we can know things? What would happen to the people who are still on Earth after the rapture -- would they end up all going to "Hell"? Would they have some chance of eventually getting to "Heaven"?
After thinking about that for a few minutes, I think the rapture is part of the idea that there is a Heaven and a Hell, such that each human being on Earth cannot really be sure of which place he or she is going after death. I think it is unrealistic that God would operate that way. In particular, the idea I got about Hell, when I was a child attending a Protestant Christian church, was that once you're in Hell you're suffering horribly there forever with no hope of ever getting out; _and_, while you're on Earth, you cannot know just how good you have to be to avoid that fate. You could try to be perfect all the time. That would be a rather dreary life on Earth, always straight as an arrow, always doing your best. If I really believed that was how God works, I wouldn't have any time to relax on Earth, and _still_ couldn't be sure of avoiding Hell. I don't think God is like that. I think God is more reasonable than that. If my father can forgive me for something I did wrong, then surely God could do as well as my father does. I don't imagine that a good God would have a cutoff time, death, after which I would have no hope of ever being forgiven. I can imagine there might be a Heaven, but I find it harder to believe that there's a Hell where people can never be forgiven.
There's also the possibility that there's no God, or that what God there is (or what gods there are) are entirely different from how we currently imagine God to be. I think there is at least one God, and that God is something we cannot fully understand. But I don't think about it much. I think that God is like a friend, and God is polite and elegant, such that God does not interfere with the normal workings of nature. I think the universe came into being and is how it is exactly the same whether there is a God or not. And as for God, God is part of the universe. (Or, God is part of the multiverse.). God is probably an abstraction which is the most polite, elegant thing there could be in the universe. But I also think that there is some kind of God which can be a friend to any of us. I don't know whether the friend and the abstraction are the same God; they're probably two different kinds of god. That's what I think: there are at least two different kinds of god: there's an abstraction and there's a friend. I don't spend much time thinking about either one. Both of them are reasonable and forgiving. And if there were no god, we wouldn't have _that_ friend, but we could still learn to love each other and we could learn to love ourselves. And maybe that's the same as the friend god.