Reading Time: 10 minutes It’s been so eye-opening for me to see just how deeply and painfully these movies have affected so many people with their terrifying, traumatizing message. I’ve heard from a great many people over this past week who wanted to share how frightened they’d been by these movies. So we’re going to be looking at why these movies had the effects they did. I’ll start with a retrospective–come join me!
Rapture
Posted inReligion
“A Thief in the Night” Sequels: The Pre-Review Chat Post!
Reading Time: 2 minutes As horrible as the first A Thief in the Night was, as little happened in it narratively, and as awful as it was according to every single of filmmaking that exists, what blows my mind is that the creators of it found funding for not one–not two–but THREE other sequels.
Posted inReligion
A Thief in the Night: Mega-Fest-A-Bonna-Palooza Review!
Reading Time: 22 minutes This is the mega-review of A Thief in the Night, which is one of the big granddaddies of Christian Rapture porn. It’s a movie where nothing happens and none of the characters are distinguishable except by hairstyle, and yet somehow it traumatized millions and millions of Christians in the 1970s and 1980s. We’re gonna find out […]
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Here’s Our “A Thief in the Night” Pre-Review Party!
Reading Time: 5 minutes It sure looks like it follows all the usual tropes of these sorts of movies. Blah blah, Christians get Raptured and the world falls apart. Blah blah, one world government. Blah blah, everyone forgets about human rights–which fundagelicals are not super-good with anyway, remember–and the ebil gubmint starts executing people for holding beliefs they don’t like–which Christian leaders have traditionally done for centuries and only stopped doing because of human rights advances.
Posted inReligion
Why Apologetics Fails At Its Stated Goals.
Reading Time: 10 minutes In the case of Christian apologetics, we see one of the clearest examples of that mismatch, since their creators often explicitly state what their goals are–which allows us to test their claims very nicely. I’ll show you why Christians don’t generally like to state clear goals, why apologists do it all the time anyway, and how to test those statements against the group’s actual system.
Posted inReligion
Recasting the Movie: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Edition.
Reading Time: 9 minutes Today, we’ll look at how a dead German philosopher came into a resurgence of popularity–only to play an unexpected role in the Christian Right’s ongoing love affair with its own ego.
Posted inReligion
The Weird and Wacky Rise of Fundagelical Preppers.
Reading Time: 9 minutes One weird bit of right-wing fundagelical Christianity is their growing obsession with survivalist-style food hoarding. In this new trend, the worlds of apocalyptic fantasizing, awful food, eagerness to gloat, and sheer financial greed collide–and the results aren’t appetizing.
Posted inReligion
The Rapture Didn’t Happen in Tim LaHaye’s Lifetime After All
Reading Time: 7 minutes Tim LaHaye, co-author of Left Behind and general Christian reality-denier, has just died at the age of 90. Thus ends a career marked by denial, grandiose ideas, wish-fulfillment, and Endtimes fantasizing–and one that led its owner into positions of great influence.
Posted inReligion
Christian Marketing Sucks: Rapture Scare Edition.
Reading Time: 10 minutes Well! The end of the world is coming (again) this week. Do you know where your Christians are? Yes indeed, because you see, the very last deadline for the very last bit of the Blood Moon Rapture Scare (sometimes called “Four Moons”) is upon us. Orchestrated largely by professional false prophet and bloviating loudmouth John Hagee, the Blood Moon Rapture Scare posits that because lunar eclipses are occurring around the dates of four important Jewish holidays between 2014 and 2015, the Rapture is going to happen before they’re all done. A bunch of people who actually understand anything about astronomy in general and lunar eclipses in particular are now head-desking repeatedly, but it only gets worse from here–sorry, gang. Today we’ll be talking about why these Rapture scares are, increasingly, bad ideas for Christianity.
Posted inReligion
The Twin Selling Points of a Fundamentalist Rapture Scare.
Reading Time: 9 minutes In the same way, it is simply bizarre to me that people who have built up this total conspiracy theory around all these “Bible codes” and arcane secret societies and government plots seem to be so incapable of coming up with what really should be one of the easiest parts of their predictions: what’s going to happen, exactly, and when. But that’s not even the worst part of these constant streams of Rapture scares.