[HN Gopher] Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the A...
___________________________________________________________________
Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of
Earth (2019)
Author : naves
Score : 23 points
Date : 2025-12-29 19:12 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.boundary2.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.boundary2.org)
| k310 wrote:
| There is plenty on earth, and a very high quality of life if it
| weren't for the insane concentration of wealth and
| overconsumption (think mega data centers to spare us from
| thinking, among others) resulting in environmental ruin.
|
| And if we got along instead of divisiveness, nationalism, and
| religious wars, incredible unlocking of value tied up in
| militaries and relieving consequent mass suffering.
|
| It's a choice.
|
| People have chosen poorly.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| There is a conspicuous lack of ceiling mounted escape hatches. A
| realistic belief in rapture necessitates avoiding being trapped
| in vaulted ceilings.
| jandrese wrote:
| I think the visions of people floating up into the sky are
| somewhat fanciful and are the result of people reading too
| literally into a translation. The actual Rapture is just
| whichever people qualify suddenly dropping dead on the spot as
| their souls are whisked away. Some probably get put on life
| support machines but never wake up again.
| deadbabe wrote:
| This is the biblically accurate version. In heaven the body
| has no more purpose than the clothes people wear, so the
| bodies should just drop dead empty of souls.
|
| However, a more terrifying interpretation could be that the
| bodies have no reason to just drop dead just because the soul
| is gone, instead, they would continue functioning as
| P-Zombies. This could mean the rapture already happened and
| we're just not aware of it. If you are not a P-Zombie, you
| weren't raptured. This could be a premise for a pretty cool
| story.
| jact wrote:
| >In heaven the body has no more purpose
|
| This is not the biblical teaching about the body. The hope
| emphasized in the Bible is for the _resurrection_ of the
| body. This is why Jesus is resurrected bodily, and not as
| some kind of ghost. If the body was some kind of
| superfluous thing like clothes, this would make no sense.
| This is also why the Nicene Creed says "I look for the
| resurrection of the dead, and the life of the World to
| Come." The World to Come likewise is a renewed version of
| this world, where Heaven _and_ Earth are united, in the
| same way that the body and soul are. This idea of the soul
| shedding the body is Platonic, not Christian.
|
| The rapture itself is considered to be nonsense by
| virtually all biblical scholars, both secular and
| religious, but how it became such a widespread belief among
| Americans is probably for another website.
| jandrese wrote:
| In the event of the Rapture America is doomed. How is a country
| that loses 60% of its population supposed to compete with the
| Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Shinto, etc... countries that
| were almost untouched? Does the Left Behind series even talk
| about this? I've never read the novels, but what little I know of
| it made the scope seem focused on the USA. Does the rest of the
| world just carry on as normal and it's just America that goes all
| Mad Max?
|
| Honestly, one would expect New York City to be one of the less
| impacted locales on account of the cultural diversity and general
| high level of sin according to Evangelicals. Same with
| California. It's the Midwest that gets wiped out.
| ggm wrote:
| "America" to these people, is the set of collected souls. They
| would deny what's left behind is America, its just the landmass
| north of Mexico.
| blipvert wrote:
| Perhaps we should rename it as the Peninsular of North
| Mexico?
| Avshalom wrote:
| Left Behind is a very poorly written series so it doesn't
| address any of this well but: most christians don't get
| raptured but also any child under 12? does regardless of
| religion. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25011483-the-
| anti-christ... (which uses the left behind books as a jumping
| off point) is worth reading as an explanation of the political
| world we live in.
|
| The book sort of constantly forgets that every child under 12
| in the world means that every one on the planet should be
| deeply traumatized.
| croisillon wrote:
| ah, light black on dark white, my favourite reading setup
| ggm wrote:
| Reminded of the spoof "subscribe to have certified athiests look
| after your pet post rapture" thing.
| nospice wrote:
| "Linked theoretically, conceptually, and politically, both to
| each other and to their unacknowledged or obfuscated ideological
| origins in accelerationism and nihilism, these endeavors, and
| their proponents in government and technology sectors, represent
| the ultimate preppers, ready to start anew somehow and somewhere
| else: in a self-contained unit like Biosphere 2 or HI-SEAS, on
| the newly discovered "habitable" planets, or on Mars."
|
| Hmm... I think it's a lot of convoluted, wordy sentences just to
| paint a scary picture of an invented strawman the author
| disagrees with.
|
| It's ironic because the usual accusation levied against
| "preppers" is that they're weirdos who are afraid of fellow man,
| but the author is playing the same game. It's all nebulous yet
| clearly connected: the Apple campus in Cupertino, 1960s civil
| defense posters, the NSA, Sim City 2000, Biosphere 2, Elon Musk,
| Jeff Bezos, rural gun nuts, Christian doomsday cults... and what
| are they working toward? Unclear, but it's _obviously_ something
| bad.
| doug_durham wrote:
| I found the article interesting until they brought up the Apple
| headquarters. It's just an office building. Steve Jobs was
| obsessed with people walking around and bumping to each other.
| That's why it's a circle. The landscaping mimics the area around
| the Stanford dish where he liked to go on walks with people a
| talk through things. That's it. Jony Ive brought the minimalist
| architecture. No greater meaning. These types of articles tend to
| lose their way when that try to attribute meaning to things that
| have no specific meaning.
| nradov wrote:
| It's sort of like how all those pseudo-intellectual literature
| professors and critics who are incapable of creating anything
| original waste their lives away trying to find deeper meaning
| in certain books. Often they end up fooling themselves by
| perceiving patterns in noise. Sometimes a cigar is just a
| cigar.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| This is a thoughtful piece, and I'm surprised that most of the
| comments here are focusing on the evangelicals who are thirsty
| for the Rapture. While misguided, those people aren't much of a
| problem, as they are mostly waiting for the end times,
| grandiosely sure that they are among the chosen.
|
| All that discussion of evangelicals is really a setup for the
| real focus of the article: people like Yarvin, Musk, and Theil,
| who have the power to actually have the influence and money to
| cause significant damage to society. And they are acting on it.
| Although there are cranks on the left who think the solution to
| the problems of capitalism is its demise, they are not in a
| position of power. It is ironic it is the so called conservatives
| who are actually trying to destroy society as we know it.
| timbit42 wrote:
| There is no rapture coming. The idea of the rapture didn't even
| exist until Morgan Edwards came up with the idea in 1788. It
| didn't become popular until John Nelson Darby developed and
| popularized it starting around 1827-33 by conflating verses from
| different books of the Bible.
|
| In Matthew 24:40-41 (also Matthew 13) it speaks of one being
| taken and one being left, but the people being taken are being
| destroyed by an invading army, like happened in Jerusalem in 70AD
| when the temple was destroyed. You want to be the one left
| behind. You also see this in Genesis when the people were taken
| away by the flood and they perished.
|
| In 1st Thessalonians 4:17, it talks about being caught up but it
| isn't speaking about what we understand as the rapture today. It
| is referring to a convention where a Roman ruler would
| triumphantly return to a city and the people would go out to
| greet him and return with him to the city.
|
| The beast was Nero (his name in Gematria adds up to 666). All of
| the end times events either happened 1900 years ago or aren't
| ever going to happen.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-12-29 23:00 UTC)