Rapture! The End is Nigh

It is my sad duty, much-loved readers, to report that tomorrow sees the Rapture. Put another way - tomorrow is Judgement Day. By means of a complex arrangement of numbers, in association with Daniel (of Bible fame, ladies and gentlemen), a little Paul of Tarsus, some other biblical geezers and all rooted, I am led to believe in the birthday of Noah, we know with absolute certainty that tomorrow is the day. I would try to explain it, but frankly I don't have the time. 

Oh, and the end of the world is October 21st 2011. End of. Splat (unless you are one of the 144,000 spiritualised Jews who will be on the bus outta here). 

It seems that we are just dying to have the end in our lifetime. I am only a mere 38 years old and I have lost count of the amount of times that the world was going to end during the moments that have formed my brief yet short life. By rights, I should be an angelic creature by now, harp in hand. Added to this is a conversation I had with my very lovely Jehovah's Witnesses who supply me with good conversation and reading material regularly. Interestingly, they share my view on this Rapture thing, but have another slightly peculiar notion regarding eras, and in the vein that so many seem to have that we are in the End Times. Apparently, we are experiencing the Seventh World Power, and following previous 'powers' such as the Babylonian, Medo-Persian, Greek and Roman, we are now in an age of the British and US Power. It would seem that we Westerners are going to be the sign of the end - perhaps those who will bugger it all up for the rest of you. To me, it just seems to be that we humans just love a tragedy and that we would just love it if it all bent 'belly-up' while we were taking tea! Yes, we have had a few wonky winters and a couple of warm summers (though the last three Augusts have poured drizzle upon my Vernacular bonce), but a little warm precipitation the End Times make? No. Nor the fact that there are scallywags nicking one another's smartphones. We are just desperate for it all to go Pete Tong while we are watching.

The great Christian apologist and Godly favour-doer Prof Richard Dawkins must be loving this. To me, and to him, and indeed to my Witness friends, this is silly. I have not cancelled my milk, my move to Whitton, my old age and dotage, my next funky hair-cut or any jolly thing. I expect to see Christmas. I expect to see Christmas and celebrate the birth of a King of Love, the solution, the answer. I expect to celebrate the Incarnation of the God who loves and who blessed my wife and I with children that they may live and live in relative freedom, the same way as he will bless parents with newborn children this day and tomorrow. Does my God of Love expect to squash me like a proverbial fly before the London Olympics? Nope. Why? Because God is, I am delighted to say, altogether more sensible and balanced than humankind! 


(Thanks to Bp Alan for bringing this to my attention a little after I wrote this piece: http://youtu.be/hmX-lZOYcVA )

Soap Bubbles

It is blog posts like this that keep me out of Wikio Religion and God-bothering rankings because they dilute my pious message of Godly things. Then again, posts like this grant me an opportunity to be grumpy - and it has been a while, after all!

Now, I am still young (had I mentioned that?) so can still remember some of the things of childhood. Poking poos with sticks, mucking around in buckets of green-tinged stagnant water that are already inhabited by mosquito larvae, digging holes in the mud with bare hands, carting the festering cadavers of post-mortem sparrows with glee, man-handling worms and bugs, burrowing into one's nose with one's digit, bum scratching, ear-picking - and then the best of it all: tea time. That was childhood for me. Grubby, messy, germ-ridden, filthiness. And then tea. Where I come from, by the way, 'tea' is the meal you eat in the evening (and a drink that the elderly drank), as distinct from 'dinner', or that most bourgeois repast - 'suppah' (even now, I have never knowingly eaten a 'suppah', and 'dinner' is of course what you eat at dinner-time, not tea-time. Get it?). No, tea was our end-of-the-afternoon-before-bed feast. 

I know that you are wondering where I am going with this. I doubt you can predict the waffle of my mind, so explain I better had. 

The thing is this; childhood is, in my modest opinion, to do with playing with dirt and then eating food. Schooling fits in somewhere and church too for some of us, but dirt and food largely sum up childhood. I can remember once, gleefully carrying the long-dead Mr Sparrow of the family Sparrow around my Nan's garden in a macabre requiem procession (I was liturgically minded at six). Then, I'd be called in from the yard for tea, maybe wash my hands (but maybe not, to be honest) and then tuck in to sandwiches, crumpets or eggy-bread. 

And then Reckitt Benckiser (the makers of the soap-thing you see here) come along fill the minds of all parents with dread fear that their kiddies are in mortal danger not from the vile diseases that exist in rotting garden birds, or the bacteria that revel in a cat-poo house - no, the greatest peril to the fabric of our society is, my dear friends, the spout on a soap-dispenser. So terrible is this risk, that if you are a parent of any decency, you must buy a 'No-Touch' Soap Dispenser. Why? So that after poking poos and the giblets of dead things, you may not - before you wash your hands - get germs on them from the soap spout. 

Is it me? 

And it doesn't end here. Oh no. The makers of those odd bottles of foul-stinking purple detergent that you lob under the rim of your lavatorium would tell you that it is to kill germs in there. Marvelous. Marvelous because only yesterday I was saying to Mrs Acular how long it had been since I last used my porcelain trumpet as a Tandoor oven and baked naan bread in it. Only the week before I had pondered how long it had been since I last served my kids' dinner in the toilet. 

I think that we, the buying public, are certifiably stupid. I do. I bet that eight-million sensible folk, with one accord, all believed that the greatest peril to our offspring is in the germs we acquire just before we clean the germs off with the expensive soap that is really good at killing germs off of our hands ... just before we fling a rib-eye in the loo and bob for it like an fair-ground stall. Frankly, I am surprised I survived past the age of seven. Frankly. 

The Might of Women

This is Woman - she is to be feared.

Not because of her mighty claymore sword, not because of her intimidating glare. Not because of her feminine charms and not because she looks acceptably good in a leather skirt.

No, this is Woman and she is to be feared by all who behold her (except for a few days a month when she unclean and should be ignored, and more properly mocked for her weakness).

But I hear you asking 'why?'

I will tell you why: because Woman is mighty even enough to defeat the grace and love of none other than 

...God. 

She touches the matter of communion, and even the power of the Holy Spirit is neutralised by Woman. With her frightening Woman Ray and her alarming Female Photon she will break the connection that holds God and his church together - whatever she touches becomes Godless. The world may only be safe in the hands of none less than Man, the conduit of all the mighty universe-forming powers of God. 

Can Man save the day from Woman? 

Will God be vanquished by this scourge of the known Galaxy?

...tune in next week for 'The Ludicrous Opinions of Some Christians' to find out. If you missed this week's thrilling episode, it will shown again on the Sacramental Assurance Player

[This is a work of irony, by the way - before you comment that I am a 'traditionalist']