Archive for July 25, 2023

Serious Irony Alert Rapture and Bronny

Posted: July 25, 2023 by datechguy in catholic, Church doctrine
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Today I was thinking on what I was going to write when I saw yet another story about people thinking the “end times” or “rapture” will be this year.

Back in the 1970s, I used to joke that someone was going to write a book titled, Jesus Is Coming Back in the 1970s, only to publish a new and revised edition a few years later titled, Jesus Is Coming in the 1980s.

Little did I know that on January 1, 1988, Edgar Whisenant, a former NASA engineer, would publish 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988. Hundreds of thousands of books were sold or given away, creating a national frenzy.

There is actually a long history of this (think the Millerites who became the 7th day Adventists when they stopped predicting the day the world would end) you would think that Christ explicitly saying:

But of that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.

Matt 24:36

would have put an end to this but it hasn’t so the foolish and the grifters continue to play “the end is near” game.

When I saw that piece I tweeted out what I always say to those preparing for the end times and the great tribulation:

If you are practicing your faith properly then the end times will have no fear. So stop worrying about the world’s end times and live the type of life that prepares you for your own.

Less than one minute after I tweeted that out News broke:

For those who don’t know Bronny James is the son of LeBron James the greatest playing in NBA history who is currently active (I’d take Bill Russell over him as the Goat). His father is one of the richest and most famous athletes in the world. Thanks to his skill and hard word he has achieved great things ins sport and was in the posittion to give his family all the best of everything. It’s been widely assumed that he was staying in the NBA so that he could play his final year with his son after he was drafted.

I suspect he would give all of that up to reverse today’s breaking news.

I wish the best for young Mr. James and his family but let this be a big reminder that not a single one of us, no matter how rich, how connected or how famous is promised tomorrow so the best advice in the world remains this: Get Baptized, Go to confession! Get yourself right with God today because it may be too late tomorrow.

Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven.

Thank God for the Atom Bomb

Posted: July 25, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

With the premiere of the motion picture Oppenheimer, the nuclear naysayers are starting to creep back into the public arena.

Writing in Time, Mary Robinson, the pacifist former president of Ireland, says: “As a young woman, I marched alongside hundreds of thousands of protesters against ‘the Bomb.’ Now a grandmother, I am appalled that my grandchildren still face the same specter of nuclear war.”

When I taught journalism, I had students read two sides of the nuclear debate. John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which many consider the finest piece of journalism in the 20th Century, chronicles the lives of six people who survived the bombing. Hersey’s descriptive prose underscored the horrors of the atomic age.

The other side of the debate—and one few people understand—comes from Paul Fussell’s view from the front lines of Allied soldiers launching an invasion of Japan.

As a lieutenant in a rifle company, Fussell was poised to go to Japan after the Axis had surrendered. He notes that hundreds of thousands of soldiers like him were heading toward Japan in an attack that would take a year and cost one million casualties. That’s one million Allied casualties—most of whom would be Americans.

Fussell writes: “In general, the principle is, the farther from the scene of horror, the easier the talk. One young combat naval officer close to the action wrote home…: ‘When I read that we will fight the Haps for years if necessary and will sacrifice hundreds of thousands if we must always like to check from where he’s talking; it’s seldom out here.’ That was Lieutenant John F. Kennedy.”

Fussell notes that the Japanese government planned to launch counteroffensives with its two million soldiers, 10,000 kamikaze aircraft, and even young people and seniors to defend the islands.

When news of the attack on Hiroshima reached his unit, Fussell and his fellow soldiers almost couldn’t believe the news. He quotes from American historian John Toland:

…[W]ith quiet disbelief coupled with an indescribable sense of relief. We thought the Japanese would never surrender. Many refused to believe it. . .. Sitting in stunned silence, we remembered our dead. So many dead. So many maimed. So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past. So many dreams lost in the madness that had engulfed us. The survivors of the abyss sat hollow-eyed and silent, trying to comprehend a world without war.

Fussell returned to the United States and became a well-known scholar of culture and literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He died in 2012.

Despite his many noteworthy articles and books, “Thank God for the Atom Bomb” is the one most people remember.

Here is the entire article: https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/undervisningsmateriale/Fussel%20-%20thank%20god%20for%20the%20atom%20bomb.pdf