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Let's play the "What if..." game. If atheism (hopefully) becomes more accepted among today's generation, would there be a "rapture"? Like, what's the cue for an apocalypse according to christianity? At what point do we finally get to say, "See? Nothing happened. No second coming, no rapture, nothing. There is no god, definitively." I feel like that should be a thing.

Jake625 4 Apr 30
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According to the bible jesus is already late for the second coming.
Im going to have to paraphrase
It goes something like. No one should taste death until the second coming of man or something like that. So as a christian they are force to believe that it a lie or there are some 20000 year old folks walking around.
Hmmm what is more likely

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The rapture is still coming, no matter how many times someone's prediction is wrong. God works in mysterious ways. God has a plan. It's not for us to understand.

......and all that other bullshit that they use to justify their beliefs and bullshit.

@kozmic What's funny is, religious people can be and usually are rational people in other aspects of their lives, but for some reason when it comes to this mumbo jumbo they are unbelievably irrational. It's so weird.

Yep

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No it would just be normal. Just like it is today.

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More like a rupture

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In spite of the signs of the Apocalypse teased in the NT, the answer is "whatever you think the cues should be". There's the beauty of faith based reality. Whatever someone convinced you, or you convinced yourself, without any credible evidence, to be true... that's it. IMO, pizza with pineapple is as credible a sign as I've seen.

...offended look
And pineapple on pizza is wrong because.....,?
hurmphs

That's my point, everyone has a different view of what constitutes an apocalyptic sign. And guess what? Nobody is wrong! Enjoy the pineapple pizza, @njoy_life_2. The Apocalypse can't touch you. ?

@zeuser
😀, thank you kindly, dear sir!

0

, "See? Nothing happened. No second coming, no rapture, nothing. There is no god, definitively."
This is a problematic question as it conflates Conceptual Philosophic reality with Practical reality.

With a lot of hard work, with sweat, blood, and tears, we sometimes wrench things from the Philosophic land of Concepts into practical reality. No one believed the plane would fly, except the inventor who flew it; when trains were new people thought the speed alone would not allow you to breathe, until they did it; My own mother told me the Moon was made of green cheese as a boy, until Neil.

In Conceptual Philosophic reality exists everything which was ever imagined or ever shall be imagined. Thus the Gods of Homer and Egypt reside alongside Yahweh as concepts.

Few believe in the former today, but they will remain concepts for a very long time.
Many believe in the latter both as a concept and as a reality which is unfalsifiable.

So when you ask "When will the lack of evidence disprove a conceptual notion?", it will not, it will prove it impractical, or so impractical as to be implausible or impossible.
People will believe, for a long time despite that due to cultural and cognitive bias combined. In the past, in Religion, this was often expressed on the battlefield, would the followers of Thor win or the Christians? When enough Christians won enough times, there were scant few Norsemen left to follow the Norse Gods and so their world became Christan.

It is not any Atheists Job or duty to disprove that which was never proven, namely some god or other. Rather just illustrate it has never been proven, why it is likely never to be proven, and that there are actually better explanations for reality.

Proving God is a Theists headache, not mine.

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I am not sure where the term rapture ever came from. I have checked my concordance and the word does not exist there. Maybe some preacher racked himself on the saddle horn on the way to church and claimed it was a sign of the rapture and the end of the world.

Rapture is a euphoric feeling of grandeur as claimed by those in deep meditation. comes with flashes of light.

@factorbelief There is psychopharmacology for that

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You will never persuade such nuts. They are operating in a world of irrational thought and will continue to do so. There is nothing that you can do or say to dissuade such irrational fools.

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I'm hoping instead that organised religion has some kind of rupture.

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Christian dogma on this topic is not 100% uniform. There is in fundamentalist eschatology a seven year "great tribulation" during which the "antichrist" or "the Beast" who is sort of Satan's agent on earth, is supposed rule the entire world and controls all commerce and access thereto by virtue of some sort of mark you must have on your forehead in order to buy or sell anything. Various sects believe that the rapture will occur just at the start of this period (pre-tribulationist), in the middle of it (mid-tribulationist) or at the end of it (post-tribulationist). And then of course there are Christians who don't believe in a rapture at all.

The rapture is more of a fundamentalist thing. Other parts of Christendom prefer to conflate the "we will all be caught up [to heaven] in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet" verbiage with other prophecies such as the ushering in of the so-called Millennial kingdom. Others take these predictions as totally figurative. Here's a decent summary if, for some reason, you care:

[en.wikipedia.org]

Predictably the pre-trib position is the most popular among premillenialists because it means all True Christians are spared the tribulation period.

One of the reasons for the various views on this topic is that the "propecies" (like all claimed fore-telling of events) are correspondingly vague (yet florid). The Revelation of John is like a fever dream and the various passages elsewhere in the New Testament aren't much better. Fundamentalists tend to "free form" all over this. For example one of the people instrumental in my family's conversion in the early 1960s was a chalk artist who would do illustrated talks about the prophecies. At one point there is a passage that talks about giant hornets with "long hair" that torment people by "stinging" them. She imagined these to be fighter jets dropping ordinance during the final conflict of Armageddon, and drew them accordingly. After all, she reasoned, jet contrails being witnessed by someone from the 1st century would look to them like "long hair". So go the post-hoc rationalizations with which fundamentalist eschatology is rife.

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Been waitin' for The Rapture for 66 years...

N7EIE Level 6 Apr 30, 2018
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Don`t hold yer breath. The end of the world is always nigh. This has been going on since the dark ages. Apocalyptic prophecies are not even confined to religion.
It was 50 years ago......

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IMO the rapture is allegorical to the end of the world. Literally, to be relevant and seem possible, this refers to one's death. In that way, there is positive reinforcement of a unprovable contention every minute of the day. Lies, fear and loathng are very lucrative. Interesting to realize those promoting religion are actually covert atheists.

jeffy Level 7 Apr 30, 2018
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They have no cue. It is an annual event.

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It doesn't matter if atheism becomes "accepted" or not.
There is never going to be a "rapture". You know, because it's fiction, just like
everything else in the bible.

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Well, in their bible it says that war is a sign of the end times, people denouncing faith (If I remember correctly) and a bunch of other things, so I don't think we will ever get to say "See, you're wrong". Because they'll just shake their heads, shake their fingers at you and say "See, it's close to the end days, it's only a matter of time!".

@RobLes Yup! But they won't listen to that. Just belittle you or other people for "believing in the wrong god".

Yep they intentionally left it vague and described disasters that have always happened and will continue into the foreseeable future so the bullshit is evergreen, pretty smart way of executing idiocy all things considered. So the only way we can get around it is to create world peace from humanist principles but the only way that’s gonna happen is for the religious to die out anyways so the argument will have ended itself. I’m afraid there will be no “gotcha!” Moment unless aliens show up soon and teach them better.

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