Well, Tuesday came and went, and no one got Raptured.
Not that I was expecting to go myself. If anything, it was more likely the ground would open up and swallow me, kind of like what happened in Numbers chapter 16, wherein three guys named Korah, Dathan, and Abiram told Moses they were sick and tired of wandering around in the desert, and where was the Land of Milk and Honey they'd been promised, and anyway, who the hell put Moses in charge? So there was an earthquake or something and the ground swallowed up not only the three loudmouthed dudes but their wives and kids and friends and domestic animals, which seems like overkill. Literally. Not surprising, really, because the God of the Old Testament was pretty free with the "Smite" function. By one estimate I saw, according to the Bible God killed over two million people to Satan's ten, so I'm thinking maybe we got the whole good vs. evil thing backwards.
In any case, even that didn't happen on Tuesday, because here I am, unswallowed, as well as my wife and three dogs. I haven't heard from my sons in a couple of days, but I'm assuming they're okay, too. So all in all, it was an uneventful Tuesday.
The batting-zero stats of Rapture predictions from the past didn't stop people from completely falling for it yet again. One woman sold all her belongings because she was convinced she wouldn't need them any more. Another gave away her house -- like, signed over the deed and everything -- and at the time of the article (immediately pre-Rapture) was looking for someone to give her car to. Another one donated her life savings, quit her job, and confessed to her husband that she was having an affair with a member of her church so she could "get right with God" before the Rapture happened -- and now is devastated because she's broke, jobless, and her husband is divorcing her.
It's hard to work up a lot of sympathy for these people, but at the same time, I have to place some of the blame on the people who brainwashed them. No one gets to this advanced stage of gullibility unaided, you know? Somewhere along the line, they were convinced to cede their own understanding to others -- and after that happens, you are putty in the hands of the delusional, power-hungry, and unscrupulous.
Which brings us to Peter Thiel.
You probably know that Thiel is a wildly rich venture capitalist, the founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and was the first outside investor in Facebook. His current net worth is over twenty billion dollars, but the current wealth inequity in the world is such that even so, he's still not in the top one hundred richest people. But the fact remains that he's crazy wealthy, and has used that wealth to influence politics.
It will come as no shock that he's a big supporter of Donald Trump. But what you might not know is that he is also a religious loony.
I'm not saying that just because Thiel is religious and I'm not. I have lots of friends who belong to religions of various sorts, and we by and large respect each other and each other's beliefs. Thiel, on the other hand, is in a different category altogether. To give one example, just last week he gave a talk as part of his "ACTS 17 Collective" ("ACTS" stands for "Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society"), wherein he said that we can't regulate AI development and use because that's what Satan wants us to do -- "the Devil promises peace and safety by strangling technological progress with regulation." Limiting AI, Thiel said, would "hasten the coming of the Antichrist."
Oh, and he's also said that environmental activist Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist. Which is a little odd, because as far as I can tell she's already here, and has been for a while, and thus far hasn't done anything particularly Antichrist-ish. But maybe there's some apocalyptic logic here that I'm not seeing.
Thiel is absolutely obsessed with one passage from the Bible, from 2 Thessalonians chapter 2:
Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.
Don’t you remember that when I was with you I used to tell you these things? And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming. The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.
So what is that mysterious force that "holds back" the evil one, what St. Paul called the "κατέχων"?
Well, Thiel is, of course. He and the techo-nirvana he is trying to create. "[When the] Antichrist system collapses into Armageddon," religious commentator Michael Christensen writes, "only the few survive. A techno-libertarian, [Thiel] entertains a kind of secular rapture: off-grid bunkers, floating cities or even planetary colonies. In his apocalyptic vision, these survivalist escape hatches offer a way out of both collapse and tyranny—but only for the wealthy and well-prepared."
What's kind of terrifying about all this is how influential people like Thiel are. His ACTS 17 Collective gatherings play to sold-out audiences. His message, and that of others like him, then filters down to people like Pastor Joshua Mhlakela (the one who got the whole Rapture-Is-On-Tuesday thing started), and they then pass along their "repent or else!" fear-mongering to their followers. It's why my lack of sympathy for the folks who bankrupted themselves because they figured they'd be Sitting At The Feet Of Jesus by Wednesday morning is tempered by, "... but was it really their fault?" Sure, they should have learned some critical thinking skills, and been taught to sift fact from fiction.
But they weren't, for whatever reason. And afterward, they were immersed in scary apocalyptic terror-talk day in, day out. Who can blame them for eventually swallowing it whole?
It's easy for me, outside the system, to say the people who fell for Mhlakela's nonsense are just a bunch of fools. But the truth is more nuanced than that, and a hell of a lot scarier. Because brainwashing doesn't happen in a vacuum.
The puppetmasters behind it are almost always the powerful and rich -- who all too often not only get away with it, but profit mightily from it. A terrified, brainwashed populace is easier to manipulate and extort.
Which exactly where people like Peter Thiel want us.
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