The Rapture Index
The Apocalypse is almost here. When it arrives, the true believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported into Heaven. From there, they will watch everyone else suffer a seven year plague of boils, sores, locusts and frogs. This lifting up is the rapture, in which the non-believers will be left behind.
This sounds a bit like a Christian version of the fundamentalist Islamic view held by the 9/11 suicide bombers. All they had to do is crash a plane into the World Trade Center in order to spend an eternity in paradise with 72 virgins.
This rapture nonsense is the handiwork of a couple of 19th Century preachers and was recently made popular by the Left Behind series of novels. The novels made a fortune for the authors. Millions of people believe it all to be true and Scripture-based.
These folks not only believe that there will be a rapture – they are convinced that it is almost here. War in the Middle East, gay marriages, hurricanes and tsunamis, etc., etc., all “prove” that the Antichrist is among us. There is even a rapture index, which is at the “fasten your seat belts” stage.
Former PBS host Bill Moyers took on these rapture morons in a recent speech. The problem, as noted by Moyers, is not that there are people who believe this stuff. It is that they have taken control of Washington. Their numbers, while in the millions, are still relatively small in comparison to the entire electorate. But they clearly made the margin of difference for George W. Bush and his colleagues in Congress. Too many in Washington are either rapture morons themselves or are beholden to them. [The 2005 Wolverine Café posting had a link to the full text of the Moyers speech, but I didn’t find it for this 2019 reposting. Some of it is at this link.
Their agenda, to bring on the rapture as fulfillment of biblical prophecy, is driving the war in Iraq and the destruction of the environment.
Why Iraq? From a short passage in Revelations, we all know that there are four angels in the great river, Euphrates, which will be released prior to the Second Coming. Obviously, America needs to take over Iraq and free the angels, and thus bring about the rapture. [There are many links to this stuff but I didn’t feel like including them here. They are easy enough to find, if you are of a mind to do so.]
The Christian right’s attack on the environment is catalogued in great detail in Glen Scherer’s The Godly Must Be Crazy in Grist Magazine. To some rapture-ites, preservation of the environment is irrelevant since the earth has no future. Others are in a “no worries” state of mind – the Lord who performed the miracle of the loaves and the fishes can easily whip up a few more billion barrels of oil. To still others, the destruction of the environment is to be hastened as a sign of the coming apocalypse.
From Moyers: ”Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offsprings are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.”
And there it is: Oblivious to the facts. Oblivious to reality. Dangerously close to control of Washington.
The Rapture Index
This is an attempt to summarize the rapture index, but frankly it is beyond belief in synopsis form. It has to be read to be believed, and even then it is difficult. This is on raptureready.com. It’s banner quotes Revelations 3:11 – “Behold, I come quickly.”
The index lists 45 categories and gives each category a score. The higher the overall score, the more likely we will be at Rapture. Under the scale, a rapture index of 85 and below is “slow prophetic activity”. An index of 100 to 145 is “heavy prophetic activity”. If the index is above 145, then ”fasten your seat belts” since we are approaching rapture.
As of February 6, 2005, the index is at 150!
[Update: As of April 8, 2019, the index is at 179!]
The scores in each category stand on equal footing. Thus the scores for “Beast Government”, “Satanism”, and the “Antichrist” count the same as scores for the “Wrath of God” stuff – volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, etc. [Yes, the tsunami was a good thing. It pushed up the “wild weather” score and thus moved us closer to rapture.]
Why aren’t we at Rapture yet?
The answer is that the world received some surprisingly low scores in a few categories. For example, drug use is down among teenagers. Yassar Arafat’s death has revitalized the peace process in the Middle East. The world hunger situation has stabilized. Wal-Mart is falling behind in its plan to bar code all of its products with radio tags (this is “Mark the Beast”). These trends signal that perhaps this world is not coming to an end, and pushed the index down.
How do we achieve Rapture?
It seems obvious, at least to some of us at the Café: All we need to do is get more drugs into the hands of teenagers, sabotage the peace process in the Middle East, starve the poor around the world, and let Wal-Mart do its thing.