Some things are just too good to be true. Eternal Earthbound Pets, it seems, was one of them.
All the sordid details, after the jump:
The day the rapture sweeps the land,
And plucks up true believers,
Among those heathens Left Behind
Are Labrador Retrievers
No Saint Bernard will make the trip
Nor Cockapoo, nor Hound;
The Lord may be my shepherd,
But my Shepherd stays aground.
No Poodles, Pugs, or Pekingese;
No ifs or ands or buts—
The rapture takes God’s faithful,
But it doesn’t take the mutts.
Believers who are worried for
The welfare of their pets
Are offered, now, an answer
If they’d like to place their bets.
“Eternal Earthbound Pets” exists
To serve those Left Behind;
It’s rapture pet insurance, if
Believers are inclined.
Of course, not all believers think
Their pets will all be lost;
Their pets may go to Heaven, too
(Thus saving them the cost)
And Fido sits beside them, cos
In Heaven, all is well;
Together, they can laugh and spit
At sufferers in Hell.
Alas, it was all a hoax:
The owner of a business who claimed he would provide atheist rescuers for Christians’ pets left behind in the Rapture now says his service was an elaborate hoax and never had any clients.
That’s right, no clients at all, ever.
“Eternal Earth-Bound Pets employs no paid rescuers,” Bart Centre wrote in a blog post on March 16. “It has no clients. It has never issued a service certificate. It has accepted no service contract applications nor received any payments — not a single dollar — in the almost three years of its existence.”
The bad news is, people will howl “fraud!” over this, though a total of zero people lost money. How much money went Harold Camping’s way?
Bart Centre is doing it wrong, apparently.
Hoax or failed business model?
Another fun rhyme, btw.
@1 Die Anyway
Neither hoax not failed business model. He made quite a bit of money from the advertisements on his web site.
So, in a way, it was a rousing success.
i could swear i heard of someone doing this same “business” in the 90’s.
I can’t figure out why this is a surprise. It belongs right up there in the satire hall of fame with “The Onion” and Andy Borowitz’s column.
I would have been more upset if he’d actually taken money from people who were deluded enough to think this was a legitimate service. He disabled the pay section of his web page to avoid this for fear of it actually happening..
He made money from the ads and donated it to charity.
No people or animals were harmed by this Ad.
Thanks for your comment, Joan–I’ve seen some annoyed people (I wonder if they were also annoyed by Harold Camping), but it seems he did the right thing at every step.
Was the reason for their annoyance because they actually thought all dogs would go to Heaven, because they truly thought he was exploiting people for money,(a really good reason to be annoyed )or because they were ticked that Atheists were making fun of their beliefs? (another good reason. Also true.) I am not all that sure, but I believe that web site was up there quite awhile before the Harold Camping kerfluffle made it and Hump famous/infamous.
I can’t help but think there are some people who wanted it to be legitimate, and would have liked people to sign up in good faith. I find that thought cringe worthy.
Joan,
You’re a wise woman…and you get it.
Yours in reason,
Bart
subscribing to comments
[FTB: The rapture itself is a hoax. Saw this on the web.]
PRETRIB RAPTURE SECRETS
How can the “rapture” be “imminent”? Acts 3:21 says that Jesus “must” stay in heaven (He’s now there with the Father) “until the times of restitution of all things” which includes, says Scofield, “the restoration of the theocracy under David’s Son” which obviously can’t begin before or during Antichrist’s reign. (“The Rapture Question,” by the long time No. 1 pretrib authority John Walvoord, didn’t dare to even list, in its scripture index, the too-hot-to-handle Acts 3:21!) Since Jesus can’t even leave heaven before the tribulation ends (Acts 2:34,35 echo this), the rapture therefore can’t take place before the end of the trib! (The same Acts verses were also too hot for John Darby – the so-called “father of dispensationalism” – to list in the scripture index in his “Letters”!)
Paul explains the “times and the seasons” (I Thess. 5:1) of the catching up (I Thess. 4:17) as the “day of the Lord” (5:2) which FOLLOWS the posttrib sun/moon darkening (Matt. 24:29; Acts 2:20) WHEN “sudden destruction” (5:3) of the wicked occurs! The “rest” for “all them that believe” is tied to such destruction in II Thess. 1:6-10! (If the wicked are destroyed before or during the trib, who’d be left alive to serve the Antichrist?) Paul also ties the change-into-immortality “rapture” (I Cor. 15:52) to the posttrib end of “death” (15:54). (Will death be ended before or during the trib? Of course not! And vs. 54 is also tied to Isa. 25:8 which is Israel’s posttrib resurrection!)
Many are unaware that before 1830 all Christians had always viewed I Thess. 4’s “catching up” as an integral part of the final second coming to earth. In 1830 this “rapture” was stretched forward and turned into a separate coming of Christ. To further strengthen their novel view, which the mass of evangelical scholars rejected throughout the 1800s, pretrib teachers in the early 1900s began to stretch forward the “day of the Lord” (what Darby and Scofield never dared to do) and hook it up with their already-stretched-forward “rapture.” Many leading evangelical scholars still weren’t convinced of pretrib, so pretrib teachers then began teaching that the “falling away” of II Thess. 2:3 is really a pretrib rapture (the same as saying that the “rapture” in 2:3 must happen before the “rapture” [“gathering”] in 2:1 can happen – the height of desperation!).
Other Google articles on the 182-year-old pretrib rapture view include “Pretrib Rapture Politics,” “Pretrib Rapture Scholar Wannabes,” “Famous Rapture Watchers,” “Pretrib Rapture Diehards,” “X-Raying Margaret,” “Edward Irving is Unnerving,” “Thomas Ice (Bloopers),” “Walvoord Melts Ice,” “Wily Jeffrey,” “The Rapture Index (Mad Theology),” “America’s Pretrib Rapture Traffickers,” “Roots of (Warlike) Christian Zionism,” “Scholars Weigh My Research,” “Pretrib Hypocrisy,” “Appendix F: Thou Shalt Not Steal,” “Thieves’ Marketing,” “Pretrib Rapture Secrecy,” “Deceiving and Being Deceived,” “Pretrib Rapture Dishonesty,” and “Christ’s return is NOT imminent!” – all by the author of the bestselling book “The Rapture Plot” (see Armageddon Books).