The Second Coming (Of …)

All that follows is going to be both ignorant and silly; I want to get ahead of any evangelicals who may stray to this post by ceding them whatever ridiculous thing it is that they are going to say in riposte.

So here it goes…

I am a fallen away Irish Catholic (Roman, also).

I have found the belief in god and the belief that an apparently documented human being – Jesus - is also god and that to complete that dual goat rodeo we, need a third person, the holy ghost, to be about as ridiculous as believing that cats have souls.

Actually, I believe that cats have souls.

As I “grew up” I went to four years of Catholic grade school.

That was grades 5, 6, 7 and 8.

Then I went to four years of Catholic High School (one of the worst and most dangerous of the Catholic priests in the abuse debacle taught me Sophomore religion; apparently he didn’t find me attractive; I thought he was pretty smart; he was, he always said, “Jesuit educated”).

I learned a lot there at Central Catholic.

The other four years of grade school were public schools and Catholic schools, but there was no continuity – we moved around all of the time, sometimes more than once a year, so I am leaving them out of my academic body count.

I will, however, say that what I got from public school in those years was vastly superior to what I got from Catholic schools in those years.

Which is one of the reasons why I so firmly believe in public education in America: and don’t lose sight of the fact that trump et al want to get us all back to brainwashing institutions of the private or the religious sector (Catholic schools, by the way always made me feel like an American patriot).

Back to what I was meaning to talk about: the Baltimore Catechism was pretty much the sole source of religious training in the Catholic schools.

I have vague memories of kind of a readers digest of the Bible, but I cant remember anything tangible I took from any encounters with it.

But, from somewhere, I remember one thing.

Jesus is coming back and he will judge the living and the dead and he will adjudicate those judgements, and then he will take the winners from that judgement day into the Valley of Josaphat and commence a thousand year reign.

I have no idea what happens after the thousand years.

I think I remember one other thing.

We will know that Jesus is coming back – soon – when Israel rebuilds the temple that the Romans destroyed way back when.

That temple, I think I know, was, and therefore will be again, in Jerusalem.

Evangelicals all – I think – believe this.

In fact they, as I think I understand things, want to induce it.

“Let’s get on with this Valley of the Josaphat deal” I think I hear them shouting.

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I guess this all comes down to whose beliefs are going to win.

Since, in the context of that remark, I have no beliefs, that question is meaningless to me.

But in a larger – let’s say “rational” - context it might matter (the return of a – probably – great man who has been, without his approval declared by a clique who benefitted amazingly from the declaration, 400 or so years after he was assassinated by the Jews, to be “god the son” bears, I think some sober consideration) to those of us who don’t want the world to descend into a sea of flames, again – we already did that with Hitler.

So I get some beliefs real fast.

The dominant among them is the belief that humanity needs to cease justifying everything they do – most of it violently irrational – by the mythical words of an unprovable presence.

If you need to believe in god, just do it.

But quit making my life and the world that I inhabit untenable due to your beliefs.

After all, I don’t EVER try to make YOU believe anything.

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The point to all of this?

donnie just declared Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel.

So, why, everybody is asking.

The only reason I can think of why he would do that is to mollify his Evangelical base.

That would likely set the Arab world in flames.

So, in a country that eschews an established religion, one group’s religious beliefs drive a catastrophic turn in our foreign policy.

BUT, I hear from the Evangelicals, “Jesus is coming back and he will judge the living and the dead and he will adjudicate those judgements, and then he will take the winners from that judgement day into the Valley of Josaphat and commence a thousand year reign. And we will know that Jesus is coming back – soon – when Israel rebuilds the temple that the Romans destroyed way back when.”

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And the dominos will begin to fall.

And the second temple will be built.

And …

Fade to – stupid – black; (or white, equally stupid).