The end is nigh, the end is nigh
Oh no! The Rapture is approaching! The Rapture Index is currently 156. This is slightly down from its all time high of 182 just after the September 11 bombings.
BTW, in the unlikely event that any of you are as ignorant as I was about the full depth of Christian gullibility, I'll briefly explain what the rapture is. It refers to the belief that sometime during the armageddon (maybe at the start, maybe in the middle, maybe at the end), god will physically, bodily lift all the believers and they will be yanked up to heaven. Better hope you weren't mangled in a nasty accident just before the Rapture, eh, that would suck
After the christians are all safely raptured, they sit around on fluffy clouds, watching as the resulting battle between Jesus and the antichrist completely destroys the planet and kills all the nonbelievers. This is supposed to last about 7 years. Anyone unfortunate enough to live through the whole thing just ends up going to hell anyway.
There's really no full description of this in the bible, though, since it was basically spun from the literal interpretation of two passages that Paul wrote to the Thessalonians:
16. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.
17. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. (Thessalonians 4:16-17)
It seems as though everyone thought Jesus' second coming was imminent, and Paul wanted to reassure them that if they (or their relatives) shuffled off their mortal coil prematurely, they would still live happily every after (dead in Christ rise first). That's pretty much the only reference to it.
Some christians have also cherry picked a few other scattered passages about other topics, smothered them with an enormous dollop of interpretation, and tried to cobble it all together into this elaborate story about the end of the world.
The bible says (in Matthew, about the return of Jesus) that nobody will know exactly when it will happen. However, Jesus said it would be within a generation. Whoops, got that a bit wrong, didn't he?
The Rapture Ready people seem to think it is very imminent and they have a very complicted algorithm for calculating the impending likelihood of the rapture, with 45 categories, including:
- The level of satanism and the occult
- High inflation and high interest rates
- Nuclear tensions and arms proliferation
- Globalism and world alliances (breaking down of barriers between nations)
- Liberalism and civil rights
- Volcanoes, earthquakes, drought, plague and famine
The higher the level of all these things, the more ungodly the world, and the closer it gets to armageddon. Many of these people seem to believe (sometimes even overtly state) that by contributing to the worseningof society, they are hastening the (desired) coming of Jesus. At the very least, they don't believe that christians should be (for instance) environmentally conscious, because that might delay the end, and also because god will soon destroy the whole world anyway. If only we could convince them that they should hasten the end times by supporting (apparently evil) liberalism and civil rights.
I can't figure out why they need to predict the date anyway. The only reason I can see that it would be useful is if they were planning on living an enjoyable but sinful life right up until the last minute. If they really believed that they lived their life in a god-approved fashion, why would they be concerned when the rapture occurred? They'd only need to know when its coming in order to maximise their sin time, and avoid getting caught with their pants down.