Food for thought...

This is from an email a friend sent to me, and I thought it worth sharing with all of you (with permission!!) The context is a discussion of the meaning of suffering, and the profound good that can come of suffering in the broader sense. But I really loved this bit about the rapture and Fundamentalists, so here it is:

This, for me, is the single greatest reason why the Protestant Fundamentalist notion of a 'rapture' is rather silly: It asserts that God will beam up to heaven all the 'good Christians' so they can be spared the suffering of the trials and tribulations right before they happen. Such a belief reveals a perception of 'suffering' and 'punishment' (Take THAT, evil non-Christians! God's gonna get you GOOD while everone else watches your sorry asses from our luxury sky boxes in the comfort of heaven!) that couldn't get much more simplistic or one-dimensional. It misses the point of what punishment even is, and shows that fundamentalists are better suited and more inclined to the 'law written in stone' of the Old Testament, as opposed to the 'law written in our hearts' that marked the catyclismic transformation of the New Testament. To put it another way, the people of God once obeyed Him because they did what God told them. But God wanted more for us: he wanted us to to ultmately obey him not because we can grasp that he calls the shots, but rather because he wanted us to recognize for ourselves that it was the right thing to do. (This is an oversimplification of the Catholic Church's perception of Salvation History, but that's a big part of it: God leading his people to him in gradual stages. And Fundamentalists seem either too stubborn or too afraid to develop their relationship with God beyond lazy blind adherence.)