Time to Evict the Strong Man

I keep getting fallout from my dream of the Rapture.

In case you haven’t read my account of the dream, I was sitting in my grandparent’s house–a place I associated with security and belonging–when I was suddenly buoyed up through the ceiling by an invisible force. I passed through the ceiling as though it weren’t there. It was as if the world had suddenly filled with water, and I was a cork.

Until just now, I hadn’t thought of the dream in terms of buoyancy, but it makes sense. The first rapture–the flood–involved people being lifted by buoyancy. Also, in the Bible, water represents voices and words. Human society is a lake of words, and God gives us the power to float above it. That’s what the story of Peter walking on water was about.

When I say I’m getting fallout from the dream, I mean it has had emotional repercussions. I am very disturbed that I was left here on earth. In the dream, for a second or two, I really believed I was done with this mess. Now here I am, back in the snake pit, treading mud.

The feeling of disappointment grows stronger with time, not weaker. Man, I wish the dream Rapture had been the real thing. I don’t see myself getting any relief from this feeling in the future. I expect to grow more and more alienated from the earth. I was in the doorway of heaven, or at least I thought I was. Nobody who has been that close wants to turn back. It’s like standing in the doorway of a penitentiary, thinking you’ve been released, and then finding out it was a clerical error.

Ouch.

I’m not going to complain; it’s a good thing to be sobered up like this and to have my desires changed. Medicine doesn’t always taste good.

My experience makes me think of the flakes who developed a sort of psychosis after they watched Avatar. James Cameron (an atheist who wants to prove Jesus was a fraud) transported them to a fantasy land that conformed to their strange hippie ideals.

In the movie’s world, there was no industry. There was no work. There was no property. People were nearly naked, and liberals love nudity. Everyone looked like a cat (what is it with leftists and cats?). There was no God, except for a female, all-accepting God that sided with the hippies against the white male crew-cut-wearing capitalist technocracy. The world of the blue people was an occultist’s paradise; bring your tarot cards, crystals, RU486 prescription and bong and join the revolution! But after two hours, the projector went off and everyone had to leave. The theater doors opened, and everyone was ejected back onto the cold, reality-besmirched sidewalks of earth.

People developed a strange homesickness for Pandora, the giant blue hippie cat world. They grieved because they couldn’t move there. They were very upset; some contemplated suicide. They found earth inferior to Pandora, and it was hard for them, as precious PJ-wearing hipster snowflakes, to bear.

That’s kind of funny, because the name “Pandora” is associated with a curse. It comes from a myth. Zeus put all the evils of the world in a jar, and things were going great. Then Pandora opened it, and the world was cursed. Pandora was the prototypical bad wife. She was not a good helper, and she loved money. She was the pantheist Eve. Not a good person.

The Avatar crowd feels homesick for a God-denying cartoon that promotes demon worship. I feel homesick for heaven.

It’s very sad. I’m going to get what I wish for, but the thing the others wish for doesn’t exist. In fact, their desires lead to a place of eternal humiliation, pain, guilt, and regret.

I hate to say it, but one of the great things about heaven is that people like that won’t be there. They’re hard enough to put up with down here. I don’t want to continue to be abused by them in heaven.

In a way, death is like a flea dip. Heaven is a private club and an exclusive nation. There are no illegal immigrants in heaven.

I can’t celebrate another person’s damnation, but being free from their constant opposition and filthy behavior and words? Yeah, that I can celebrate.

The dream changed me. I don’t know if it will help anyone else. I notice there are a lot of recent Rapture dream videos on Youtube. I’m not the only one who is disturbed.

In other news, I finally finished Inferno and got started on Boccaccio’s The Decameron, which is making my End Time fixation considerably worse.

These books are part of Columbia College’s Literature Humanities reading, which I am doing now as penance for skipping a lot of it when I was young. I am surprised how the reading helps in my relationship with God.

The Greeks and Romans help me because they show me that Satan’s main religion–pantheism–is ancient and universal. It’s not “Greek mythology.” It’s Egyptian. It’s Roman. It’s Asian.

Dante helped me, because he reminded me that to a large degree, Catholicism is a continuation of pantheism. Mary is Venus or Aphrodite. The Catholic God is a lot like Zeus. The saints are like other false “gods.” Dante even calls God “Jove,” which means “Jupiter.” His vision of hell is full of mythological figures, and some are even in authority.

Boccaccio is helping me, because he wrote about the plague. He wrote about a time that was thought by many to be the End Time.

Boccaccio lived in Florence when the bubonic plague passed through. In a short time, the population decreased by maybe 65%, depending on whom you believe. The mood among the characters in his book is apocalyptic, for obvious reasons. Presumably, it reflects his own mood. The book isn’t a first-person account, but it was written by an eyewitness, so it should be an accurate gauge of how people felt and behaved.

Here’s how it works. Several affluent Florentine women are tired of Florence. The city is full of dead bodies. Every day, they learn of the deaths of people they know. Criminals run wild, because the government has broken down. Contagion appears to be worse in the city, too. They decide to leave. With the help of three young men, they form a group and tour their country houses. They plan to move from one house to another and enjoy life while the plague rages.

To ward off boredom, they tell each other stories.

The first story is pretty funny (spoilers ahead). It’s about a lying homosexual named Cepparello. According to the story, he hated the truth and loved everything evil. He was a glutton, a pervert, a drunk; you name it. At one point he ended up a guest of two moneylenders, and he became ill. They knew he would die, and they had to do something about his body.

If they threw him in the street because of his evil nature, people would think badly of them. They already had bad reputations because they were usurers. If they called for a confessor, and the man told the truth, he would be thrown in the street anyway, because he was so evil. If he refused confession, again, they would look bad.

The liar helped them out. He had them call a priest, and he gave a “confession” that made him seem so holy, he was made a saint. He was buried with honors, and everything was fine, except for the liar, who went to hell. After that, people who didn’t know the story prayed to him for help, and God honored the prayers because their ignorance wasn’t their fault.

It’s somewhat remarkable that Boccaccio’s characters admit they pray to saints. Catholics like to use words other than “pray” to cover up the practice, but Boccaccio is honest about it. He even says the liar was “worshiped” as a saint.

Conditions during the plague were interesting. For one thing, everyone was well-off. Most people were dead, so their belongings were inherited or taken by others. Same wealth in fewer hands. Also, many people gave up religion and sinned as much as possible. They figured they didn’t have much time left, so they should enjoy themselves. That’s bizarre; when you think the end is near, if you have any sense at all, you will do your best to reform. Apparently, the plague drove some people to behave in a way that sent them to hell.

It reminded me of the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew. I remember that time. The cops couldn’t get around well, and they had their own homes to protect and fix, so people were on their own. The phone system was dead. The National Guard had to be called out to stop looters, and because they were too busy to process everyone correctly, they and the police would beat looters and turn them loose. Folks sat in their yards with guns across their laps, in front of signs that said things like, “WE SHOOT LOOTERS.”

Andrew wasn’t the plague, but it showed how people act when restraints are removed.

The ethos Boccaccio endured is coming back, and it will strike the entire planet, not just the Old World. We will see plagues and genocide. Governments will turn against citizens (more than they already have). There won’t be any country houses to escape to. Because we have the model of the plague before us, we know how people will act. Some will repent, and some will make the perverse decision to abandon God when they need him most.

It looks like plagues are getting worse. Where I live, a pregnant woman who goes outdoors risks giving birth to a severely deformed baby, and there is absolutely nothing we can do, apart from avoiding mosquitoes. We can’t cure it. We can’t treat the babies. We have no vaccine.

Human beings don’t know what a plague feels like any more. We aren’t going to be emotionally ready for the plagues that are on the way. We endured AIDS, but that plague is almost entirely restricted to people who deliberately expose themselves. Zika–the mosquito plague–doesn’t work that way. Bugs bite whomever they land on. They don’t care about your sexual morals or your feelings regarding drug abuse.

Boccaccio is teaching me about apocalyptic thinking, which goes hand in hand with the expectation of the Rapture.

Incidentally, Boccaccio is a good read. It’s the first book I have really enjoyed since I finished the reading in Thucydides. Inferno was moderately enjoyable, and it was much less painful than, say, Homer. But The Decameron is a book you can read purely for pleasure.

I wonder if the remaining books will continue teaching me about Christianity. I decided to substitute Lord of the Flies for the estrogen-heavy, affirmative-action-motivated Toni Morrison book that was on the syllabus I used. What could be more appropriate for a person who is thinking about the Tribulation? I haven’t read Lord of the Flies, but it’s about a bunch of kids who go feral because they have no supervision. My mother thought it was a great book, and she recommended it, but I never got around to reading it.

Think about the future (what little of it there may be left). Consider what’s truly important. You and James Cameron will be dead before long. You need to prepare.