Rapturously Waiting

This is one of the best things I have seen on the web lately. For the entirety of recorded human existence, there have been people convinced, for one reason or another, that the end of the world was at hand. Every single one of them, from 3000 BCE to the 20th-century has been wrong, including Jesus himself, who told his followers that their generation would not pass from the Earth before the beginning of God's Kingdom.

Eschatologists, those obsessed with the so-called "end of days," have used all kinds of crazy methods to try to predict the apocalypse, such as complicated but arbitray mathematical calculations based on various trivia in the Bible, guesses as to the length of time between events in the Bible (such as how long a Biblical "day" lasts), and astronomical events like the planets lining up in 1989. Of course, these methods turn up results that always prove false, which you think would pretty much prove that talk of the "end of days" is pretty stupid. But it doesn't.

Now, we have people using computers and the internet to predict the "end of days," or, as premillenial dispensationalists call it, "the rapture," high-tech methods to make the same irrational guesses about an event that isn't going to happen (at least not for billions of years, until the sun burns itself out, a span of time longer than humans have existed).

Let's see. According to the scale given for the so-called "Rapture Index," which has no explanation accompanying it to tell us how they came up with this scale, our current Rapture Index of 156 is in "fasten your seatbelts" range, ie, "the Rapture's a-comin'!" (I find it ironic that they use "fasten your seatbelts," which would seem to indicate that they, rightly, are trying to keep from being sucked up into the sky to be judged by their immoral God). But you know what's funny? If you talked to any strong believer in the end times living anywhere in the world throughout history, they would tell you that the "Rapture Index" was just as high and give you just as many reason for it to be as this site does. Jesus though the "Rapture Index" was sky high. Boy, was he wrong!

What's funny is that there is no real biblical support for the idea of the "rapture," and the categories they use here to measure how close we are to it are pretty arbitrary.

False Christs 2...
Defined as: A false Christ is anyone who claims to be equal or greater than God.
How does this defintion not fit Jesus? And I wonder who these two guys are that are claiming to be equal or greater than God. I would have thought there would be a lot more.

Unemployment... Huh? What the hell does unemployment have to do with the Rapture? I don't ever recall Jesus looking at the latest unemployment figures in the Bible.

Inflation/Interest Rates /The Economy... Where? And, once again, where does the Bible tell us that higher interest rates and inflation are signs of the endtimes?

They define the Inflation measure as: Back in 20's and 30's the collapse of the German government was mostly do [sic] to hyper inflation. It was also a major factor in the rise of Hitler. That damned inflation! I guess Hitler's rise had nothing to do with the circumstances that caused the inflation, oh, like World War I and the treaty which put a huge economic burden on German? Because, of course, inflation always leads to National Socialism. History proves it!

Nuclear Nations... Okay, I really gotta go back and read my Bible again. Where is the Gospel of St. Oppenheimer again?

Defined as: (Rev.9:18) The use of nuclear armament during the tribulation will kill over 1/3 of the human population. Only in our time could this seem possible. Blasphemy! The authors of this site shall go to Hell! God doesn't need nuclear armaments to kill over 1/3 of the population! What about the Flood? Freakin' heretics.

Volcanoes/Earthquakes... You might as well put 'oxygenated atmosphere' on the list too. There have been volcanoes and earthquakes longer than there have been humans or even life itself! How, exactly, does this help us measure the immediacy of the end of days?

Civil Rights... For or against? How do you measure this? After all, Jesus' idea of 'civil rights' was, "Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's."

Famine/Drought/Plagues/Floods... An oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, the water cycle, photosynthesis, hell, why not add gravity while we're at it?

Climate/Food Supply... What about them? I guess Jesus was a climatologist now too, even though he probably didn't know the Earth orbited the sun or was a sphere.

But at least we have some helpful comments. Such as, Leadership: The death of Arafat removed leadership obstacles. Leadership obstacles to what?

And, The Antichrist: The EU is looking a new President. I assume there is a "for" missing in there somewhere. So, now, the EU is the Antichrist? I mean, these same idiots were saying that the Soviet Union or Iran were the Antichrist years before there ever was an EU! If Jesus knew so much about the future, why didn't he clue his followers in not to start expecting the end until they could pay for admission at EuroDisney with actual Euros?

Earthquakes Two powerful aftershock related quakes rock Japan. News Flash! It is raining somewhere on Earth! News Flash! People are fighting somewhere on Earth! News Flash! The sun is shining somewhere on Earth!

Once again, when humans are this stupid and irrational, I wonder why anyone even questions the answer to the Fermi Paradox of why no aliens have visited us yet: Why would you go out of your way to visit such a stupid bunch of people?