What the Rapture Might Look Like & How It Already Does, pt. 1

I used to watch Jack Van Impe with my dad late at night for sheer entertainment. A delightfully bizarre show: Jack’s asthmatic, skull-wearing-skins-and-a-blonde wig-of-a- wife, Rexella, reads some news headline from a respectable paper or magazine, speaking of increased violence here, famine there, etc. Jack then takes that news story and links it at impressive speed to a slew of biblical passages—usually something from Daniel, the Four Gospels and Revelation. Sometimes his real-time verbal-biblical footnoting nears the rate of one verse per sentence uttered. After about twenty or so minutes of this, broken up with an offer of the week, presented by helmet-haired and professionally-voiced announcer Chuck Ohmen, Jack makes the pitch for the viewer to get born again. As I’ve said before—and often—this pattern lies behind some of the most basic and ubiquitous hypnotic trance induction in our Spectacular Cult-Sure. Scare the isht out of someone, get them emotionally worked up, and you can bypass their reasoning faculties, rendering them highly suggestible. From there, one only need suggest the behavioral/mental modification desired. When done by openly-identified hypnotists, healers like the late Milton Erickson, it’s with the full conscious awareness and consent of the client. Meanwhile, the marketing guys, preachers, and politicians using hypnotic techniques do it with neither “truth in advertising” nor “your best interests” in mind. And far from doing it on an individual basis, they do it on a mass scale.

One of the most powerful, though unacknowledged hypnotic inductions is the one called Fundamentalist Christian Eschatology. And watching Jack the “Imp“, Rexella the “Queen,” and Chuck the “Omen,”provided me an understanding of this end-time theology-cum-trance in the U.S. and that’s what I’d like to focus on now, and consciously, I hope. Hell, it should be apparent that many among us, believers and non-believers alike, are focused on it at an unconscious level already, so we might as well air the topic out.

Per the fundy reading of The Book of Revelation, we live in the End Times!, the final days before the Second Coming of Jesus and his thousand year reign of peace, which doesn’t happen until many terrible, terrible events go down in the world: plagues, famines, pestilences, wars. All this terror takes place on a scale never before seen and for seven straight years (called the Tribulation). The grand suffering culminates with the Battle of Armageddon, when all the world’s remaining armies meet up in Jerusalem to duke it out. China marches into Jerusalem. The Russian bear marches in. What’s left of America and the European Union. (The latter is JVI’s pic for the “Revived Roman Empire” of the Antichrist, though the so-called U.S. government really gives it a run for it’s money. My bet is “Rome” will be something that sub/consumes both.) The only thing that prevents the total annihilation of the human species is Jesus’ triumphant return. And this time he brings angelic reinforcements to make sure the bloodletting stops and everyone plays nice.

While the story might end happily enough, it’s not a very fun one to really live.

Luckily for the true-believers (the fundies and evangelicals), they miss out on most, if not all of this horror. Either right before this seven-year Tribulation happens or, at least, before it reaches its worst period, they receive the “Come up hither!” call as Jack Van Impe says. Like the prophet Enoch, they are lifted up off the Earth to watch the horror show from the safety of their very own Skybox seating up in heaven. One minute the born-again Christians are here, the next, they’re gone.

Poof.

That’s our blockbuster Tim LaHaye-style plot, anyway. But it isn’t just entertaining or disturbing. No, spectacles often amount to more than that. And I will posit that the whole fundy apocalpyse may actually, literally happen. This is despite the likelihood that the Book of Revelations’ may have also served the purposes of morale-boosting propaganda for the early Church and/or been written as veiled polemic against the Roman authorities of the time (e.g. Nero). This is also despite the deeper purpose of Revelations as an allegorical navigational tool for those undergoing the processes of kundalini awakening, spiritual gnosis and initiatic enlightenment. Yes, the literalist apocalypse may actually happen, at least in appearance, despite all the other explanations for St. John’s Revelation, not because the born-agains’ beliefs are true, but because the Archons of our Spectacular Times intend to enact it-as a grand ritual, a blood-soaked spectacle, for our age—in hopes of terrorizing, duping, and further entrancing those who will live through and survive the tale: the potential slaves upon which Archons need to feed.
And as with the Tribulation, a Spectacular simulacrum of the Second Coming and the rest of it, the Rapture may appear to happen—at least to others. And the rank and file born-agains, though not their Spectacular Priestcraft- handlers like Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye, Jack Van Impe, Billy and Franklin Graham, etc.—may seem to “disappear,” just not in the way they hope. There will be one sort of Rapture for the Televangelical Controllers, and a far different one for their fleeced flock.

For Your Convenience, The Mark of the Beast: Saving the Children and Your “Net Worth”, One Chip at a Time

Once upon a time I believed that certain strains of the fundamentalist movement represented the canaries in the coal mine of our rapidly toxifying Cult-Sure, so to speak. After all, these guys were warning about the surveillance society (which they linked to Satan) decades ago. And their ranks included the first people—folks like Jack Van Impe— to warn of microchip implantation of the populace for global tracking, coercion and enslavement. And they, not unreasonably, equated microchipping humans with the “mark of the beast.”

Now, in the late double aughts, that danger has received wider public attention via Aaron Russo’s powerful documentary on the dishonestly-named Federal Reserve Bank, America: From Freedom to Fascism, and as a plot-point in Douglas Rushkoff’s excellent graphic novel Testament. But both of those are a bit less mainstream than the pro- chipping fluff pieces that have shown up in recent years in sources as dispirate as London’s Daily Mail to ABC News with Diane Sawyer, not to mention the curious drive to “chip the kids” that I found awhile back at several websites tied to a certain organization that tends to make some among us quite nervous. (And if you don’t want to bother to click the link for the proof, just think “compass and square.”)

The pro-chipping propaganda has even made it into Backstage, the actor’s weekly newspaper for the week of May 10-16, in an article pushing the convenience of automated check-ins for actors going to auditions. The very telling passage from that article is this:

Some actors who have used the Casting Frontier technology at auditions joke that they’ve been reduced to a bar code. At a recent audition at Ocean Park Casting, actor Karen Peterson said with a laugh, “I’m ready for the chip to be embedded in my arm so I just have to scan myself.” [emphasis added]

Yep. Just one big joke. And when it makes it’s way to the friendly fascist lap-dog Sean Hannity’s radio show, that says something, too. On Hannety, the issue certainly gets played for a joke. And it’s a joke he attempts to make a caller the butt of, replete with oogy Twilight Zone music, just in case you fail to “grok” exactly what you’re supposed to believe. But, the strain in the lapdog’s voice and the desperation of his audio gags tell us a tale of the fear held in by his corporate muzzle.

Speaking of dogs, a friend has just recently had his chipped after he went missing for three days (the dog, not the friend). When he talked about doing it, he even mentioned chipping the kids, not in a pro-or con way, mind you, just as an option that’s out there now. it’s in the mindscape for real now, folks.

As Kent Daniel Bentowski would point out, we’re seeing the strategy of gradualism in action. If you would chip a beloved dog so that he won’t go missing, why wouldn’t you, the argument goes, chip your kid in this terrifying post-9-11 age? That’s certainly one of the hypnotic suggestions being made for microchipping the populace. Just take a look at this piece from the London Times, which in the classic ploy, uses the heightened fear-induced suggestibility of the British public in the wake of the heavily publicized reports of the kidnapping of Madeline McCann in Portugal, to implant the “chip” meme:

If your child could wear an implant – a microchip that could tell a computer where he or she was at any time to within a few metres – would you buy it? After the horrific snatch of three-year-old Madeleine McCann from her bed in Portugal, the answer from many parents seems to be “yes”.

And of course, using the principle of social-proof, the report, already in its first paragraph aims to create the illusion of a groundswell of support for chipping the kids. This hypnotic illusion is then reinforced by framing the story to immediately include a corroborating paragraph, which includes another fear-induction ploy, by embedding the story of child murders:

Professor Kevin Warwick, who developed the technology that made it possible for the first child in Britain to volunteer to be “chipped” in 2002 – after the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman – has been bombarded with e-mails over the past few days from parents desperate to keep tabs on their children. As we talk, another e-mail drops into his inbox from a mother of two young children who says that she is deeply anxious about Madeleine’s disappearance and wants to know more about the chip technology.

And yet, most of this terror, whether it’s child abductions or the next irregular warfare (terrorist) attack, only exists on T.V. and other major media (Hello, Hannety! Hello London Times!), even after 9-11. And most of that terror only exists in the heads of those who’ve been programmed hypnotically to believe it—and the heads of those doing the programming.

Hannety won’t cop to wanting to chip his kids just yet, but give it time. He won’t be the last or the loudest to tout how reasonable it all is. It’s like Oprah’s The Secret- mongering. If you can get the folks at home to all unconsciously visualize the same horrors and inevitabilities, well…that makes those images quite a bit easier to manifest in the real world. And that’s precisely the dark mojo trickery we may be dealing with.

The Technocracy Comes Out of the Closet: Putting a Price on Human Life in the Cashless Society

“You can’t put a price on human life.” It’s a sentiment representing compassion and humanity and it may be discarded if mass-chipping of the population becomes successful. It’s already pyschologically in place when we hear talk of the “net-worth” of a businessman or celebrity, as if the “net-worth” of hir financial holdings was somehow magically the same as hir worth as a human being. It’s a sleight-of-mind trick based upon some very dangerous false assumptions—the same positivist assumptions Western scientists, technocrats and monied elites have been addicted to since at least the turn of the last century. And it goes a little something like this: if you can’t see or quantify such things as the soul or spirit or essence of an individual (much less spirits or, dare we type it, that nameless Big Something sometimes called God or Tao or the Ineffable), then it’s best to cut it out of the equation altogether. Just pretend it’s not there. And conveniently enough, once you pretend, you can easily believe it’s not there . Having cut yourself off from direct experience of a phenomenon in this way, you no longer see, feel or intuit it.

Poof.

It’s gone, like a Raptured Christian fundamentalist.

It simply never existed.

And why not just deal with quantities, with surfaces, anyway? It seems to work so effectively, especially when you’re concerned with things that require automation and the practical application of abstraction—things like mass production of goods, economic “science” and statistics. Yes, it seems to work well. Just not for individual human beings.

If you absorb that hypnotic media repetitions of “celebrity/politician/businessman X’s “net-worth” equals hir “human worth,” if you begin to believe it, it becomes easier to believe the equally false correlary: “My value as a human being is much less than that of the rich, famous, and powerful—just look at my savings account.”

This devaluation of human life is also pervasive in the way reports of each natural disaster or tragedy gets framed. In our newscasts, the financial cost of the event, be it earthquake, flood, hurricane, etc., often gets equal or greater privilege of place than the cost in human lives. That is, unless those lives are being used to sell a war. (How’s that for a demonstration of the callous cynicism of the Ruling Archons of Spectacular Cult-Sure?) We have already begun to be conditioned to place a finite value, and a very limited one, determined by the surface spheres of commerce, technology and celebrity idolatry, upon human life. The name of the game in our Cult-Sure is quantity trumps quality or, rather, quantity is the only quality.

Thus, if the technocrats among us (and the Archons who stand behind them) have their way, it may not be so surprising if one day we see the following kind of interaction become routine:

“What’s the price of a human life?”

“Which human life? Scan your arm and we’ll see.”

Those whose financial assets are meager or non-existent will then find that, more than ever, their value as human beings will be equally meager to non-existent. And therein lies the greatest threat, in my mind, of the chipping propaganda. It will serve as a convenient excuse, gussied up by a veneer of dubious financial rationalism, for large scale genocide and slavery.

And what of those, like so many libertarians and born-agains, who will refuse to get chipped? Far from being low-value and valueless humans, they may not get perceived as humans at all. In fact, they may, for all intents and purposes, be non-existent to the chipped populations and their chipped overseers. (Rest assured, in the “spirit of equality,”the technocrats will chip themselves as well. They’ll do it both to lead the rest of us by example and to keep each other committed to the delusional Utopian course of action they’ve laid out).

Yes, the non-chipped people of the future, and not just the fundies either, will become non-existent, invisible. Perhaps in more ways than one. Being the unseen among the chipped masses: this is what the Rapture might really look like, much to the disappointment of the fundies. And yet, this may open the way for a true salvation, one found in living life outside the mythic script laid out by others…

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I’ll be tying up those loose ends re: the Televangelical Controllers, the Second Coming script, and how the non-chipped might disappear in Pt. 2…