That’s the sentiment Terry of Rapture Ready expressed. Don’t believe me? Here’s the direct quote:
There are two important statistics to note:
1. Each month about 160,000 people visit Rapture Ready.
2. Every year, the mortality rate claims around 1 percent of the population.Internet usage by the elderly is somewhat lower than that of the general population, but it still means that hundreds of you people who are reading this right now will not be here the same time next year.
For you folks who become part of the mortality figures in the coming days, I commission you with the same task: When you meet the King of Kings, please ask Him to pour His grace and guidance on this web ministry.
You unsaved folks who happen to be reading this article and think it is total nonsense, you are pure gold to this cause. Once you meet your unfortunate end, you’ll cry out 10 times louder from bowels of hell than a saved person who might be distracted by the glories of heaven.
Charming, eh? That isn’t the worst of it. He wrote this missive after his mother’s death a few weeks ago. Before she died, he asked her to go tell Jesus to send more traffic to his website.
Seriously.
I have a mission for all of my readers here on Pharyngula, too. I want you to stay alive. You don’t have to continue reading this site, unless you really want to; traffic is not that important. But if, as you are going about your daily life, you happen to meet someone who thinks Rapture Ready is a wonderful resource, I want you to be sure and tell them that they are a demented fuckwit. Just for me.
Consider it done, PZ — though there’s not much chance of me ever meeting a real live rapture ready reader. Shame, really.
I do wonder though, how does having some people scream 10x louder than everyone else help the cause? Is the cause a specific decibel level? Christian love = everything louder than everything else? Weird.
And yet, fundamentalist morons think that those people who are too rational and mentally healthy to share their depraved death cult mentality are the morbid do-nothings.
Wow, how’s that for messed up priorities? What a narcissistic prick!
You mean the saved people aren’t crying just as loud in ecstasy? Meh, heaven doesn’t sound that fun.
I’ll try to give this person the tiny benefit of the doubt and assume that he doesn’t mean that the saved will be hearing the screams of the damned in heaven and, like, getting off on it.
I’m not a huge fan of the “demented fuckwit” thing, but this is really the sort of person that the term was meant for.
Hey, if hell exists and a god can send me there after I die, doesn’t that show that my life had meaning after all?
(In our black suits and dark sunglasses…..)
We’re on a mission from Pod.
I’ll happily call such a person a “demented fuckwit”, and furthermore I’ll eagerly pee upon the shoes of dainty, above-all-that white people who see themselves as FAR TOO ‘ELEVATED’ to call anyone a “demented fuckwit.”
And not only a fuckwit but a toady as well. “Hey, when you get to Heaven, could you put in a good word to the G-man for me?” Why is it that I keep hearing that religion brings out the best in humanity?
And is it sort of a tacit admission that God doesn’t listen to your prayers on Earth, and you have to grab his ear up in Heaven?
Rapture Ready: We’re more wrong by 9 AM than most people are all day.
Waddayamean, not a wonderful resource? It seems like the best of all possible resources!
Teh baby jeezus weeps with joy when he hears the screams of the damned. It’s like burning pigeons, but with extra righteousness.
Rey Fox
I believe St Thomas had something to say about that:
“That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell.”
— Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Ha! We were just there, last night. The whole sordid Han and Warda episode has given Mr. thalarctos an idea for a paper, and while we were discussing it, he was clarifying some of the doctrinal aspects of the brand of fundamentalism he was raised in. He googled to find a point about it, and Rapture Ready was the very first hit.
My first reaction to RR was “Gaaaah!”. Mr. thalarctos totally agrees, and at the same time points out that it’s fairly “mainstream”, as far as batshit-crazy-end-times stuff goes. While that may be true, I don’t think my cortex could handle anything crazier than what I read there last night.
If I’m such a bad person that I should be sent to hell then why would I care if other people are sent there too? Doesn’t misery love company? Would I get tortured less for saving people after I’ve been damned for eternity?
Boy howdy, that guy’s nuts. He does confirm my suspicions about the sincerity of the concern these fundie whack-jobs show for other people. His mother’s dying and all he can think is “Ooooo… She can deliver a message about my website!”? What a despicable man.
While I was there, I wandered through the FAQs and found this gem under evolution:
Shucks, PeeZed, I guess that means you’re not a real scientist. If only you could find God… It is, after all, through him all ‘pods were made!
thalarctos, I don’t know if you wandered into the forums when you looked at RR, but they’re a mixture between horror fiction and comedy goldmine — far beyond mainstream as far as I can tell. The saddest two things about the site, though, are the number of people so taken in that they stop living their life in expectation of the imminent rapture and the decidedly mediocre expectations of a heaven created by a supposedly perfect, omnipotent, benevolent God. Those are generally along the lines of “I’ll eat lots of cherry pie, and I’ll hug Grandma. And Jesus.”
The rapture monkey syndrome is poorly supported by the bible. To the point where most Xians including a lot of fundies don’t buy it, consider it heresy.
Rapture monkeys have such miserable, empty lives that all they can do is hope god shows up, destroys the earth, and kills 6.7 billion people. Not exactly the most cheerful and unlifting thought to guide your life IMO.
Besides which god already promised himself after the first Holocaust that he wouldn’t do it again. Of course, the claimed but nonexistent literalists ignore anything that conflicts with their ideology. Whatever, point out genesis 8 to them and watch them turn reason, logic, and their mind into pretzels. It can be amusing for whole minutes. LOL
I thought Christian theology maintained that the dead were kept on ice until Judgment Day, so no-one would get a chance to either put in a good word upstairs or wail from downstairs until after the End of the World.
Yeah right. The earth is flat, the sun orbits the earth, and the stars are just lights stuck on the dome over the world. That will come in handy for the next Astronomy 101 class which will last 5 minutes.
I avoid sites like AIG and Rapture Ready. It is too depressing knowing those people are nominally part of my species. Besides which, I always get a Microsoft blue screen message, “Your computer is under attack by the Forces of Darkness. Press any key to continue.”
I’d like to tell them they are a demented fuckwit, but then they will never listen to a word that I say. Besides, I’d probably end up saying that to my mother at any rate. I’d rather keep asking them questions and make them really uncomfortable when they realize that they cannot answer them. But shit, they probably won’t ever change their minds anyway.
“I imagine that if God had thought homosexuality was okay, then he would have created another man…or just two women”
And God looked upon what he had done, and it was AWESOME.
Christian theology, of course, comes in many varieties, and I would not at all be surprised if some or many theologians have held that. However, the notion is pretty dramatically contracted by Luke 23:43, where Jesus tells one of the crucified robbers he’ll be in paradise that very day.
Right on, raven. In Christian theology, God is supposed to be trustworthy, but when he is not, then who judges God? A bigger and better God? Of course, if he is not trustworthy, then these individuals really have something to worry about. What’s to keep God from pulling off some kind of bait and switch scheme? Just to see the looks on their faces when they see they were swindled? That’s what you get when you have a capricious God–you get the Trickster.
Of course when you’re dealing with individuals that construct their theology by quote mining their own sacred books (called proof-texting by more critical Christians). I just had an encounter with some of these individuals. What struck me is that even if they had a direct quote from Jesus that contradicted some bit of nonsense they were promoting, they can always come up with a explanation out of thin air that had absolutely no support in the text. “What Jesus really meant to say was …”.
It always reminds me of the Life of Brian, one of the best critiques of their particular brand of stupidity.
MAN #1: I think it was ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers.’
JESUS: …right prevail.
MRS. GREGORY: Ahh, what’s so special about the cheesemakers?
GREGORY: Well, obviously, this is not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.
Assuming rationality has always been my mistake. Nevertheless I’m always surprised by the violence they are willing to do to their sacred texts, ripping and shredding the obvious meanings in order to reach some irrational conclusion.
actually, no, catta (love your handle! ringtailed lemurs, right?) I don’t think I could have handled anything other than the “articles” in the FAQ. That brought the crazy quite enough for one visit.
I couldn’t have said it any better. There’s so much waste there–wasted lives, minds, passion, enthusiasm. It’s very sad.
I find the most amusing way of making Rapturist’s heads explode is by simply asking them, “yeah, but….if you’re living the way Jesus commanded, why are you obsessed with the Rapture? If you’re right with god and it happens, you’re in good shape. And if it never happens, you’re going to heaven anyway, right? So why spend all your time worrying about it?”
The answer of course being that Rapture theology has one purpose only, which is to keep people frightened, which keeps them coming to church. Never mind that the whole concept of “teh Rapture” was invented out of whole cloth by a British fundamentalist minister in the 1830s.
I find the most amusing way of making Rapturist’s heads explode is by simply asking them, “yeah, but….if you’re living the way Jesus commanded, why are you obsessed with the Rapture? If you’re right with god and it happens, you’re in good shape. And if it never happens, you’re going to heaven anyway, right? So why spend all your time worrying about it?”
The answer of course being that Rapture theology has one purpose only, which is to keep people frightened, which keeps them coming to church. Never mind that the whole concept of “teh Rapture” was invented out of whole cloth by a British fundamentalist minister in the 1830s.
Raven,
thank you so, so much for that… *LOL* I can’t believe I never thought of that. AMMO!
-HD
There are 60,000 Xian sects.
They differ, sometimes radically. The Moonies believe Moon is Jesus the 2nd, the Mormons added another whole book, and on and on.
They frequently hate each other, and in times past massacred each other by the tens of millions over minute doctrinal points.
Today since the US government hasn’t seen fit to supply them with automatic rifles, tanks, fighter jets, and artillery, they just name call each other a lot, “Fake Xians versus Real Xians”.
And yet they all start with the same book!!!
The more ambitious among them quote mine to contruct towering anthills of whatever they want. Most have never read the book and don’t really care. And they all have standard all purpose excuses, mistranslation, not in the oldest version, but it says over there that…, Jesus really meant, and so on.
Rapture Monkeyism is one of the more extreme and pathetic of the new Xian quote mined anthills. And not well accepted by most denominations.
Another example of the kind of believer who wants to be a toady to the ultimate bully. How nauseating. The snotty little misanthropic fucker’s actually celebrating the torment of other people.
-jcr
So we’re fewer in numbers but 10 times as loud? I commission all of you going to the bowels of hell to be as loud and annoying as possible. Drive Jesus and crew nuts for all of eternity! Woo hoo! We win!!
Does he mean to say that hell is somehow worse than knowing millions of people flock to hear the perverted fleckspittle of individuals like this?
I would’ve thought that’d be a logical impossibility; you know, like God making a rock so heavy He couldn’t lift it.
Ah, more of that “sophisticated” theology that Richard Dawkins just doesn’t get, I see.
You have to be aware that in the next chapter, god says to Noah and his sons, only that he won’t flood the earth again. The brighter among the fundies know this. Presumably if god wants to nuke the earth, that isn’t covered by the covenant. That god, he always leaves himself a loophole.
So this looks like a contradiction in the literally true, fully consistent bible. But it isn’t. In chapter 8, god is talking to himself. In chapter 9 god is talking to humans. One has to assume that god talking to himself trumps what he said to humans.
Doesn’t matter. Fundies are so adept at tying their minds into knots that anything that doesn’t fit into their self made theological anthills gets tossed without a thought. As many have noted, they are always lying about something and occasionally killing someone to the point where the 10 commandments were reduced to the Eight Commandments.
“There are two important statistics to note:
1. Each month about 160,000 people visit Rapture Ready.
2. Every year, the mortality rate claims around 1 percent of the population.”
PLEASE stop visiting this site you are increasing the rate at which folk die.
There’s a correlation, just like the Pirate graph
Thanks! Yep, them’s the critters. If I were a scientist, I’d be all over them. As it is, they’re all over me whenever I get to see them, but the results of their observations haven’t been published yet.
And yes, the worst thing about the RR-brand of lunacy isn’t the bile directed at nonbelievers, it’s how many people get suckered into wasting their lives like this with no sense of the joy and wonder available in this life.
“I commission all of you going to the bowels of hell to be as loud and annoying as possible. Drive Jesus and crew nuts for all of eternity!”
My cries of torment will sound much like this:
Hey, I thought you begged god to do you favours in prayers, but now you have to die and go to heaven to ask for stuff???
What is this, some sort of three wishes thing when you get there?
No problem, I’ll tell them they are halfwits, but I need to quote the bible to make them understand it. Apparently their brains are in idle mode, unless you mention the key words like god, jesus , bible and Huckabee!
Wow this is quite scary. And it’s not like this guy is out of mainstream. There are quite a few people who actually believe this garbage. What a way to show us all that Jesus loves us.
Richard
http://lifewithoutfaith.com
” I’ll eagerly pee upon the shoes of dainty, above-all-that white people who see themselves as FAR TOO ‘ELEVATED’ to call anyone a “demented fuckwit.”
Quick- call the Museum of Comparative Hermeneutics– the DF holotype has escaped from its pickle jar.
” I’ll eagerly pee upon the shoes of dainty, above-all-that white people who see themselves as FAR TOO ‘ELEVATED’ to call anyone a “demented fuckwit.”
Quick- call the Museum of Comparative Hermeneutics– the DF holotype has escaped from its pickle jar.
Any rapture freaks out there? What if you don’t get lifted, or you get lifted and your ma doesn’t? At least you can offer a head start in the ensuing chaos. I am will ing to offer RAPTURE INSURANCE for you (or if you get lifted) your choice of loved ones. 0ne thousand dollars buys you tem million dollars worth of insurance. Send funds, policy will follow. We have never failed to pay a valid claim!
Any rapture freaks out there? What if you don’t get lifted, or you get lifted and your ma doesn’t? At least you can offer a head start in the ensuing chaos. I am will ing to offer RAPTURE INSURANCE for you (or if you get lifted) your choice of loved ones. 0ne thousand dollars buys you tem million dollars worth of insurance. Send funds, policy will follow. We have never failed to pay a valid claim!
I’d rather not call him a demented fuckwit, actually. That fits more with astrologists and other such “spiritual” hogwash. The beliefs with essentially benign consequences: “the stars directed your destiny & you’ll still die but maybe go on to live as energy or something”
Because, to the question in #30, the very idea of hell as it’s traditional depicted is pretty horrific, isn’t it? It’s a place where you are punished and tortured for not believing forever, without end or chance of deliverance.
And if you choose to worship a deity that would place someone in hell because that person couldn’t be brought to believe in their own creator, with the very gifts that being is supposed to imbue in people, then you are not a demented fuckwit. You are a bad person.
Sorry for the run on sentence.
– with around 1,500,000,000 Christians or near-Christians. Which means that there are around 1,500,000,000 different ideas about what a Chistian is, does, and believes in. If there is a God, Trinity, or Trinity plus Mary, there will be a lot of re-education to do or a lot of disappointed Christians.
A few years back I stumbled on this site. wandering through it I discovered that one of the yahoo’s wrote that his stint at the NCO Academy was a “waste.” Being a former graduate, I promptly wrote the base commander, the public affairs office, and the commander of his unit. I was irate that the USAF spent $1000’s to send him there and he declared the experience to be a “waste.” Not so much that he didn’t get anything out of it, but that he declared this to the rest of the world.
Seeing that he was wearing E-5 stripes on this latest page, and that one must be an E-6 to attend the Academy, it’s possible those e-mails may have had an effect. (The base commander expressed regret that such a comment was placed in a public forum.) Can’t understand why he wouldn’t want others to see that extra stripe. Apparently he “retired” after 20 years, which is required if you’re an E-5.
Before she died, he asked her to go tell Jesus to send more traffic to his website.
hasn’t he ever heard of search engine optimisation…or Google?
you sick
What a selfish prick. Here’s a message I wish his mom would carry:
“Hey God, Zues, Thor, Ra, Vishnu…whoever…hi good to see you, say, um, do you think you could do something about the following: AIDS, dengue fever, famine, starvation, war in your name, ectopic pregnancies, hemmorhoids, cancer….I know you can fix all these if you really wanted to.”
But no, he wants the big fairy in the sky to make people visit his web site. To be sure, his mother wasn’t able to deliver her message but I suppose it’s the thought that counts.
Are souls corporeal? Can they be effected by physcial matter? Do they have nerves? If none of this takes place then wouldn’t hell just be a rather annoying place to be? The fire won’t burn you, you won’t feel it, but it will constantly be in your face so that to me would just be annoying, but for the first 5 minutes it might actually be cool. Like the scene where the T1000 walks out of the fire unscathed.
OK, I thought that people would be miserable if their loved ones didn’t get to heaven, so they’d simply forget all about them when they got there. Plus, if anyone they knew hadn’t been told about Jeebus, they’d be carrying that guilt with them to heaven. But now they’re all happy and celebrating because the unsaved are screaming in torment? Do they just forget that they knew the folks whose torture they’re gleefully enjoying? Can they be happy and feel guilty at the same time, not knowing why they feel guilty because they’ve forgotten everyone who didn’t get to heaven, even though they should be completely happy? Oh, my head.
A friend of mine quoted Chris Hedges the other day, “There is nothing wrong with taking a moral stand, but when we take a moral stand and then use it to elevate ourselves to another moral plane above other human beings, then it becomes, in biblical terms, a form of self-worship.” So why is it that it always seems that the ones doing this are on the theist side?
You unsaved folks who happen to be reading this article and think it is total nonsense, you are pure gold to this cause.
I immediately hit “Save” in my browser. Am I OK now?
You guys just don’t get it. Both Terry and God love and care about us. Can’t you see that? I can’t believe you people don’t see that…
Insanity, thy name is xianity…
heaven doesn’t sound that fun.
If you haven’t read Mark Twain’s “Extract from Capt Stormfield’s trip to heaven” – I highly recommend it. It’ll give you a really good idea of exactly how fun Heaven is likely to be.
http://www.mtwain.com/Extract_from_Captain_Stormfield's_Visit_to_Heaven/index.html
There are some priceless gems in it – like the question of what age your loved ones are when you meet up with them? You know, that beautiful child you lost at age 3? What if, in heaven, she’s a 23-year-old emo girl? And if you expected to sit on the right hand of the father, your place in line is #193,288,284,290th. I particularly liked the bit about Shakespeare being one of the prophets – but that none of ’em can hold a candle to the shoemaker from Hoboken, NJ, who led a perfect life and now even Muhammad has to look up to him. etc. etc. Great stuff.
Like everything else about religion, if you examine “Heaven” critically, it comes apart in merriment.
Here’s a thought I had earlier today which I’d like to share with your esteemed readers:
Assuming that Heaven and Hell exist: Is there not a single soul in Heaven that mourns for the tormented souls in Hell? Anyone who doesn’t is obviously not worthy of being there. If they all do, then Heaven must be a really miserable place. Hell on the other hand is probably full of atheists like us who are saying to each other; “It’s bloody hot in here isn’t it? But at least we’re rid of all those self-righteous bastards!”
Maybe Heaven is actually Hell and vice-versa. God’s got a real sick sense of humour, hasn’t he?
There’s nothing wrong with this demented fuckwit’s sentiments.
He wishes his readers would drop dead. I wish the world was infested with fewer fundies.
There’s no conflict.
I’ve been to hell. I make connections through there all the time. The wailing of the lost souls is pitiful, and the passport lines are pretty torturous, but as long as I don’t have anyplace else to go I’m guessing Heathrow Airport won’t be too bad a place to pass eternity.
Cue the inevitable Sam Kinison – besides; I could be a tour-guide in Hell. I’ve been married twice.
All I can say is that if that god of theirs really does exist and is exactly as portrayed in that book of theirs, and they are representative of the kind of people who are going to make up the future population of heaven. . . .
. . . I think I’d prefer to go to hell.
A few months ago, I was talking with Mom about her eventual departure. Because we both knew she was soon going to meet the Creator of the universe, we concluded there was a special opportunity for her to convey a special message. We agreed that when she met the Lord, she would ask Him to bless Rapture Ready.
Someone needs to get out more often.
I feel sorry for people like this who think they have all the answers.
What a pitiful way to live a life.
How does going to heaven solve anything? I’ve never heard a good reason from a theist why the souls let into heaven can’t rebel against god.
Oh, and while the thread is still on the relative conditions of heaven and hell, let’s not forget this:
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/hell.htm
Indeed, the Rapturists are not bad primarily because they are deluded; they are bad because a prime tenet of their “faith” is the joy that they will receive from watching the torments of the damned. A religion based upon getting pleasure from the pain of others is a particularly evil one — as are their followers.
Enjoys the pain of others = vile, pustulent boil, immoral, hate-filled bastard
Mark Plus:
I was raised in my Xian upbringing to believe that once you were in Heaven, you’re pretty much like (to my agnostic eyes now) a soulless drone. More and more it sounds like you’re not in a blissfully cheerful existence — more like… a god-bubble without any cares, loves, hopes or dreams. So I think the idea of a rebellion is pretty much moot up there…
Which just goes to show you that Xians — especially the RapTards — are totally fooling themselves.
My dad calls ’em “cafeteria Christians”.
Why are all the crappiest people so desperate to invent a heaven for themselves?
Because they can’t look themselves in the mirror and say: I’m just a human being.
They have to grant themselves special “Christian” status and bestow afterlife privileges on themselves and spend their lives exaggerating their own frigging importance.
The human brain can seriously fuck itself up.
“I want you to be sure and tell them that they are a demented fuckwit. Just for me.”
Aye, aye Cap’n!
Regarding these “Rapturenuts”, they call to mind the advice from Mark Twain “Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.”
I love the Internet; every day I learn something new!
Today I learned that a prayer from a dead person is more effective than a prayer from a living person.
I’m not sure why that is. Maybe the prayer-energy gets absorbed as it passes through the Earth’s atmosphere, so it’s weaker when it arrives in Heaven?
Apparently, somehow, Mom’s message didn’t get through.
Otherwise, why would he now be trying to get hundreds of strangers to run the same errand?
Shagata Ganai @ 65 – that’s one of my favorite lines.
I use it whenever someone tries to convert me.
Wouldn’t that mean that prayer causes global warming?
Besides which god already promised himself after the first Holocaust that he wouldn’t do it again. Of course, the claimed but nonexistent literalists ignore anything that conflicts with their ideology. Whatever, point out genesis 8 to them and watch them turn reason, logic, and their mind into pretzels. It can be amusing for whole minutes.
It’s even funnier when you point out that he goes back on his word later. That god is such a liar.
Nope; it’s not enough just to be omnipotent (in other words, to have the vigorish), but God left himself a big fat loophole in addition:
Notice that he said nothing about a comet hitting the earth, all-out nuclear war, global climate catastrophe, or any number of other ways to destroy the earth–just floods.
That God–what a joker!
Heh, here in NYC, only one guy ever spoke to me about the rapture, a co-worker. I asked him if he believed the rapture was imminent:
So, the rapture is probably going to happen soon?
Yes, probably any day now.
Can I have $200?
What?
If the rapture is imminent, could I have $200? It’s not a make or break sum of money, and you’ll be raptured up any day now.
Uhhh… guhhh…
You really don’t believe in it, then, if you did, you’d have no problem giving me the money.
Uhhh… guhhh… gotta go!
We had witnesses, so he never spoke about it to anyone on the job ever again.
He wrote this missive after his mother’s death a few weeks ago. Before she died, he asked her to go tell Jesus to send more traffic to his website.
Oh my .. dog.
OK, so say you believe in jesus. First thing you want to talk to him about is your website traffic? WEBSITE TRAFFIC??
There’s some deep thought right there.
So, demented fuckwit/rapture ready is the next google bomb?
Come the Rapture… we’ll have the Earth to ourselves.
Any rational people interested in secession? I have a “PZ Meyers is my Homeboy” button and live in Minnesota–so we could from a focal point around Morris, although Madison, Wisconsin would be easier… Anyone interested?
Dear, but not as dear as God or mother Mary, mom,
Once you meet your unfortunate end, you’ll cry out 10 times louder from bowels of hell than a saved person who might be distracted by the glories of heaven.
Love in Christ, your son,
Terry
P.S. Tell Dad I said hello, okay? :>)
Um… Isn’t that a little dishonest, PZ? I can see nothing in that missive that can be reasonably, rationally be interpreted as “I hope you die soon.”
I yell “DEMENTED FUCKWIT!” at the TV several times a day. (It seems to increase during election years.) Does that count?
Oh man… I need to register a domain… challenge the religiots to prove they believe in the rapture…
…by sending me a copy of their will showing how they are leaving everything to me. Since all of their good god-fearing friends and family are going to heaven, and everyone else is gonna burn, they should have no problem doing that.
Dear Terry,
Thank you for the thought! I’m afraid I do not care if you die sooner or later, but I would wish you actually lived a few minutes of the single, precious life you now have before you die.
Sincerely,
— A mere mortal
The first I knew of the Rapture was a bumper sticker on a car I used to go by on my way to work in Vancouver. It said:
“In case of Rapture, this car will be unmaned (sic)”
After I investigated and found out what the Rapture was, I understood how someone could print a bumper sticker with such a blatant spelling error, and how someone else could buy it and stick it on his car.
by sending me a copy of their will showing how they are leaving everything to me.
too late, I already have dibs on their cars.
Except that wills are for when people die. If people just vanish, they’d have to be declared legally dead, which isn’t going to happen quickly or easily (and might even be near-impossible for non-family to accomplish).
Except that wills are for when people die
there are plenty of other ways one can decide who gets what in the case of your disappearance.
Just give me power of attorney and I’ll show you.
I would think that a decent universe-maker could find a much easier way to get rid of people: just disintegrate them into a quark-gluon plasma. I’ve always found it odd that there is so much drama involved in killing off people in the Bible. And then there’s also the issue of overkill, there’s always an incredibly high head count. It’s like it’s some sort of game where a high score wins.
Floods, fire, locusts, pestilence, demonic monsters, bottomless pits, etc. It’s always so theatrical. So just who is the performance for?
On the other hand, in a more serious manner, I wonder if the apocalyptic would be so prominent in the NT if Jewish apocalyptic literature hadn’t been so popular in the 1st century. The Apocalypse of John clearly takes cues from much older books, like the Book of Enoch. Actually the Book of Enoch is a pretty fascinating read. If nothing else, it explains of a lot of names used in Kevin Smith’s Dogma.
The Apocalypse of John clearly takes cues from much older books, like the Book of Enoch.
strangely enough, there was a multi-part special on the history channel covering just that very thing today.
The Book of Enoch appears to be the basis of all the fun horror/scifi biblical-type end of times movies that have come out in the last 20 years or so, too.
the stories are just so much more colorful than the book of revelations (they seem much more coherent and less like an acid trip, too).
“Except that wills are for when people die. If people just vanish, they’d have to be declared legally dead, which isn’t going to happen quickly or easily (and might even be near-impossible for non-family to accomplish).”
That’s why my plan makes sense. If they truly believe their BS, and think I’m scum for not believing, they don’t have to worry about evil godless me getting anything. They’ll be raptured, I’ll be burning in hell without getting their homes, and they can laugh at me.
If I’m right and they’re wrong, I get their homes when they die.
Put up or shut up.
Incidentally, I’m just wondering – are there orgasms in heaven? If sex is bad, and there are no orgasms, aren’t at least several every day, then heaven isn’t heaven, right? If there ARE orgasms, it can’t be for marrieds only, since I’m not married and never will be. And if I don’t get orgasms, it’s not heaven. How does that work? Does God provide the orgasms for the unattached? Does Jesus fellate the single? Sorry to get graphic but I think it’s a fair question. I’m not going without an answer first, dammit.
Hmm, is god not listening to prayers anymore? So now you have to find someone dying and tuck a message in with them so they can drop it off in heaven?
I suppose next people will just write a message down, hand it to someone heaven bound, and then kill them. Assuming web traffic is all that important. Fundies, who knows what goes through their tiny, miserable minds.
Let’s hope it doesn’t catch on. If the new method of communicating with god is “Dear God, Please bring me a pony, hand the note to mom, and empty a clip into her” then Dumbfuckistan is going to be rather bloody for a few months. Whatever, we can always recolonize the South-Central USA later.
“Dear God, Please bring me a pony, hand the note to mom, and empty a clip into her” then Dumbfuckistan is going to be rather bloody for a few months.
we’ll quote you on that when it does.
“hey, don’t blame us, it was raven who put the idea in their heads!”
after all, you’re talking about a country fascinated with movies like “Jackass”, and lots of parents that still blame “rock and roll” and video games for making their kids “evil”, along with a government that takes Orwell’s commentary as instruction manual instead of warning.
:p
I would love to grant your request, but that would include calling my parents demented fuckwits. And they buy my groceries :/
However, if I manage to meet any fundies on campus I’ll surely oblige ^_-
what if the rapture is cancelled due to lack of interest.Actually demented fuckwits is to nice a term for them, has to be something lower on the pole for them, just not sure what it is as yet.I do know that these so called people fell out of the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down and it was a tall tree
Once you meet your unfortunate end, you’ll cry out 10 times louder from bowels of hell than a saved person who might be distracted by the glories of heaven [citation needed].
After the Rapture hits, you Christophobic misotheists can have a great time looting the born-again’s houses. We won’t be needing our stuff anymore. Oh, and you might want to suck down a copy of raptureready.com website before it disappears – at least that will give you some idea of what the next 7 years is going to be like. And the thing about hell… “I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked.” says God.
What, God’s going to rapture the webservers?
at least that will give you some idea of what the next 7 years is going to be like.
But what is your scenario doesn’t work out, and you end up being around those 7 years of tributlation? And you would have to face martyrdom or damnation (gulp!). That was the canonical view before dispensationalists infected Protestant Christianity with their zany charts.
Rapure-mania has feathered more nests in the last half century than any other Christian heresy. That’s why it’s no surprise to find an old-school prophecy salesman like Salem Kirban has now incorporated his “ministry” as “Second Coming, Inc.” Or course he’s diversified now and also promotes a special weight loss diet. Now that LaHaye and Jensen are rich beyond the dreams of avarice from their Left Behind franchise (books, movies, first person shooters, action figures, etc.), will it be easier for these rich guys to get into heaven? Smaller camels, needles with gigantic eyes–is that what money buys for you now?
And more importantly, are they going to take up some of the 144,000 available tickets to Heavenland(TM)? Will other particularly holy machines get to go as well? I’m pretty sure my toaster is as saintly as anything.
Be assured PZ, that I will let these moronic cretins know
what I think of their deranged minds. This is the only and
best way to impress upon these derandged retards that they
are truly unbalanced. Just keep hammering away at their
insane nonsense and be ascerbic as possible. We will never
convert them to reason, so the only way is constant and
extreme ridicule and daily offering of proof to bring their
freaking imagined god down and smite us. Screw that useless
method of attempt at reason; remind them constantly they
are demented retards. I look for every opportunity to do
so and the occasion arises when this comes my way. My
remarks make my day.
Hey, I just like hearing that I’m “pure gold.”
We have a Rapture Monkey in the house! Unfortunately, it is just Ross Nixon who seems to be one of the dimmer bulbs on the tree. Goes with the territory, you have to be sort of stupid, miserable, and evil to believe that god is going to show up any minute, destroy the earth, and murder 6.7 billion people. And call that a Good Thing.
You do realize that most Xians consider the Rapture nonsense to be heresy and just plain wrong. Including a lot of fundies.
You do realize that god already promised himself in Genesis 8 that he would never destroy the earth again?
More to the point, the Rapture Monkeys have been predicting the imminent end to the earth for 2,000 years and seriously since the mid 1800’s. They’ve been wrong consistently. Another example of stupidity and desperation, they can’t even learn simple lessons from history.
PZ is only half right. They are demented fuckwits. Big deal. They are also rather dumb and rather malevolently evil. Really, Demented, Stupid, Malevolent Fuckwits just barely covers it.
What happens to the body of a christian cyborg at the rapture? Do the biological parts go to heaven, and the technological parts get “left behind”?
I’ve read Revelation, where you rapture-delusionists get your material. You mean we’ll live in a world where kings rule over us, warriors ride horses into battle and fight with swords, and mythological monsters attack us? That sounds more like “Lord of the Rings” than the kind of world we live in now.
Time for a theme song
After the Rapture hits, you Christophobic misotheists can have a great time looting the born-again’s houses.
While I do love miso, it’s not my favorite soup, and I surely don’t consider it a deity worth worshipping.
I am Dārayavauš, the Great King, King of the Kings, King of the countries, King of Sumer and Akkad, King of Babylon and Assur, King of Media and Persia, and I’m sure Elam is mentioned somewhere, King of the four parts of the world…
And the funny thing is, you seem to be the third person ever to notice this. The first two are Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.
:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D
Then read it again. The good man wishes that people die so they can carry his messages up, because prayer apparently doesn’t work anymore.
And then of course, it’s all about the Rapture, so he wants everyone to die soon, not just his readers.
Understand: we are not insulted or horrified that this guy wants to see a higher bodycount. We are amused. We’re laughing.
I am Dārayavauš, the Great King, King of the Kings, King of the countries, King of Sumer and Akkad, King of Babylon and Assur, King of Media and Persia, and I’m sure Elam is mentioned somewhere, King of the four parts of the world…
And the funny thing is, you seem to be the third person ever to notice this. The first two are Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.
:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D
Then read it again. The good man wishes that people die so they can carry his messages up, because prayer apparently doesn’t work anymore.
And then of course, it’s all about the Rapture, so he wants everyone to die soon, not just his readers.
Understand: we are not insulted or horrified that this guy wants to see a higher bodycount. We are amused. We’re laughing.
Bah, never mind Genesis. Mark 13:30-37 is where it’s at.
Bah, never mind Genesis. Mark 13:30-37 is where it’s at.
Well, gee, it looks like Jesus is 2,000 years late. Do they have traffic jams in heaven?
And how come Dad and his kid disagree? Aren’t they supposed to be the same being anyway?
Actually it looks like the Second Coming already happened and no one even noticed. Or Mark is just plain, flat out WRONG.
In the Behistun Inscription, Darius (Dārayavauš) also talks about his god Ahuramazda using pretty much the same kinds of expressions incorporated into christianity centuries later.
For example: “King Darius says: Ahuramazda has granted unto me this empire. Ahuramazda brought me help, until I gained this empire; by the grace of Ahuramazda do I hold this empire.”
The names of the gods change, but the underlying psychology (soliciting favors from an imaginary alpha male) remains the same.
That thing about telling his dying mother to ask Jesus to help his website is just so goddamn creepy I don’t even know what to say.
Just.. wow.
Then please explain why His alleged mortal representatives take great, almost sexual pleasure in imagining how their earthly rivals will be thrashing in the Lakes of Fire for all eternity.
What is your guys’ obsession with sex?
A they’re just have a healthy sex drive.
What’s your excuse?
I’ll try using English next time.
Did Jesus know everything?
Mark, Matthew and Luke say no. John (twice) and Paul (Letter to the Colossians) say yes. I suggest a celebrity deathmatch.
Did Jesus know everything?
Mark, Matthew and Luke say no. John (twice) and Paul (Letter to the Colossians) say yes. I suggest a celebrity deathmatch.
To be fair, Paul is not really explicit — does knowing the Day of the Lord, which will come like a thief in the night (1 Thessalonians 5:2; 2 Peter 3:10), count as part of “all treasures of wisdom and knowledge”? Inquiring minds want to know. <yawn>
To be fair, Paul is not really explicit — does knowing the Day of the Lord, which will come like a thief in the night (1 Thessalonians 5:2; 2 Peter 3:10), count as part of “all treasures of wisdom and knowledge”? Inquiring minds want to know. <yawn>
Pope Benedict vs. Uwe Boll!
I have no idea why that popped into my head. Hey, maybe it was a divine inspiration!!!!
Maybe Jesus is asking a rhetorical question in Mark 5:30. You know, “Whose hand is this? I found it on my ass!”
You know, “Whose hand is this? I found it on my ass!”
But there weren’t any Catholic priests yet!
unfortunatelly his prayer may have been ‘answered’… you linked to his site. Please tell everyone not to visit his site so he doesn’t claim his prayer got answered
I’m still absorbing the whole “looting the houses of the raptured”. I’m kinda hoping it’s soon, cuz i got med school loans to pay.
It’s just such a wacked out idea in the first place. What’s so great about being bodily assumed into heaven, anyway? If your body has problems, or you dislike it, or you are sick, in pain, or already dead and decomposed, this business of having your body in heaven isn’t such a wonderful thing, IMHO. Very shortly after the rapture, heaven would look like a scene from “Shaun of the Dead”, and smell like a garbage dump.
Or middle aged, overweight, and too much hair in all the wrong places? I mean, how is Meg Ryan going to want me when I get up there like that?
The new URL for the site with that particular article on it, since it’s updated every week is:
http://raptureready.com/nm/187.html
Rapture Ready is well known to some of us; check out http://www.fstdt.com, go to their “Search Quotes and Comments” section and in the “Board” criteria, type in Rapture Ready.
Make sure you have alcohol on hand.
I’m not sure what most Christians would actually say on this, but functionally they generally seem to believe that souls do have some kind of sensory organs. Otherwise, ghosts (and angels and demons, I guess) would be blind and deaf, and out-of-body and near-death experiences would be much more boring.
If souls didn’t have nerves, though, you wouldn’t perceive the fire at all. Hell (and heaven) would simply be an eternity of sensory deprivation.
John Paul II, C.S. Lewis and assorted other Christians have taken the suffering of the damned to be more metaphysical–they’re permanently separated from God, and that’s (for some reason) the greatest misery imaginable. Presumably you don’t need sensory organs to suffer in that case.
Crap. That’s supposed to be http://www.fstdt.com with no comma in the linked code.
A minor point, it’s Todd Strandberg, not Terry James who wrote that particular piece of psychotic dribble.