Thanks, everyone, thank you for listening in. I’m mentally healthy, except for the parts of me that are not, and the parts that I need the assistance of meds for. They all add up to make me a person that some people adore, that some people are indifferent to, and that some people consider a confrontational, judgmental asshole. This makes me think of two questions. First, maybe everyone falls into those same three categories when others deal with them, but the important thing is the percentages, the proportions. Like, if 2% of people adore you, 10% are indifferent, and 88% think you’re an asshole, I believe the formal term for that in academic jargon is not good. You may have heard the current president of the United States is, well, causing a bit of a stir in the world. In an interview, his niece Mary said that he has “no redeeming characteristics.” That’s a direct quote. Ouch. Only one person’s opinion of course, but it pretty clearly puts the president into the 100% asshole category. Apart from extremes like this—an opposite one is that a basket of golden retriever puppies is almost universally considered 100% adorable (those bastards!)—the rest of us have to meander through life trying to figure out what every new person thinks of us. No one has a running tally, like a personal pollster who keeps track, so that when you’re approaching triple digits in either the indifferent category or the asshole category, you can consult your cumulative total and be assured that at 55, 30, and 15, you’re not doing that badly overall. — I’ve been following politics a bit more closely lately, as one does when, you know, the term World War III pops up in more articles and podcast episodes than it did last year. And if that’s not bad enough, there are some people who are actually happy to see such destruction going on in the Middle East. No, I don’t mean the president or the administration, that’s a given, but a demographic I would just call stupid and deluded if I was too tired to come up with anything, but when I’m alert it’s very specific: white evangelical Christians. The ones who believe in the Rapture, an event so momentous that even the The is capitalized in some news sources. A quick lesson. The Rapture is the event mentioned in the Bible which promises that at some time and under certain conditions, Jesus, yes, that Jesus, the son of God, is going to be reunited with Christians. And I mean all Christians. This is going to be the show of shows, because Jesus is not coming down to earth to save them from the shitshow that atheists and other evildoers have created, but they’re all going to meet in the sky. But wait, there’s more. This includes not only Christians on earth who are pulled up like when those helicopters rescue the few survivors from a sinking ship, but also dead Christians. And, no, I’m not making this up. They all meet Jesus in the air, but the Bible is short on details. Is this congregation happening like just a hundred cubits off the ground where the vertigo for the live Christians won’t be so bad, or are we talking like kilometres in the air, at a point where most people are scared shitless floating around like that, Jesus or no Jesus, and where air traffic control might possibly be triggered as well? Anyway, the important thing is that many evangelical Christians can’t wait for this to happen because it also either signals the Second Coming or actually is the Second Coming, where Jesus clears out the non-Christian trash from the earth and establishes a term of power well beyond any that even human earth dictators have. Jesus has promised a thousand years. That’s a long time and if he’s good, he can get some serious shit done during that period. Unless Satan is still around to mess things up. And so the evangelical Christians believe that the Rapture occurs after a gigantic war in the Middle East, and so they couldn’t be more pleased that the drones and missiles are flying around likes loaves and fishes, because they know this is the rough road to eternal life in Heaven. Hey, a few thousand kids get killed or mangled, but God gotta do what God gotta do.