History isn't what you think it is - part 2

It's been a running joke in the law enforcement world for the fourteen years that I've been associated with it: "Why didn't you just try to shoot the gun out of his hand?"

The department's legal liason will read the incident report while the grand jury listens. Then queries... and before long, without fail, one of the jurors -- typically an older woman or man -- will fire off the question that make the fields of reality spin, twist, and do little jerking motions. The juror has no idea, mind you, that they may have well have just asked, "why didn't you just throw the tree nymph at him?" or "why didn't you just ram him with the unicorn?" or that the question wouldn't have made any less sense even if it had only been a random collection of words, "bacon crispy sally port?" The question is asked and it has to be answered, preferably without making the juror feel like a moron... which is tricky.

Now there's a reason for this line of questioning, and it has to do with cowboys who save the day, dress in clothes that look like they are trying to wave passing motorists into a new steak house and occasionally break out into song. You see, there is a generation in this country that grew up watching cereal westerns on this new-fangled contraption called the television set. These people watched their dapper heroes shoot a few hundred guns out of the hands of a few hundred bearded badguys' hands and, at some point, came to believe that this kind of trick shot was really possibly.

"Hah", you say, "silly old people." Except that the same thing is happening today, and it's making it hard for prosecutors to convict defendants of murder, rape, and just about anything else. It's sometimes called 'The CSI effect' and it involves the disappointment that jurors experience upon finding out that their is no good computer reconstruction of the event, no biochemical evidence taken by equipment that only NASA possesses, and only a few so-called eye witness statements given by average looking people who are really kind of boring.

The point is that we all have our misconceptions. We all have those little tidbits of knowledge that we heard or saw and accepted as truth without ever considering if the thing had a valid reason or matched those aspects of reality that we could observe and verify. There's a big one of these in the world of end times interpretation.

You could call it, "The Late Great Planet Earth Effect" and it owes its force to the '71 novel and the influence it had over a Christian populace that was already traumatized by cold war nuclear tensions and knew next to nothing about what the scriptures actually teach on the issue. Now, plenty of theologians have challenged individual aspects of the book, but they seem blind to one of the basic assumptions that led the authors down such an exotic collection of rabbit holes in the first place: the assumption that the end times prophecies will all be fulfilled during a brief period of clearly supernatural happenings.

For the moment, let me simply put the question this way -- what if it's not so simple? In the next post I will go to what I believe is the key to understanding the end times prophecies. And I think that if you simply remove the preconception of a seven year period of supernatural bloodletting, the answer to what Daniel is saying become crystal clear.