Spurred by a post here that mentioned that some Pat Robertson followers have the date of the Rapture pinned down to a very specific 13 Sept 2007, I thought it best to do a bit of emergency last minute research on the Internet.

Rapture? Some of you will immediately think of a 70s or 80s (?) record by Blondie or the name of a current band. Get with the programme. It means Armageddon, the Apocalypse, and lots of other really Bad Things..

OK, I’ve already confused you haven’t I – human extinction and rapture? Not easy to see an upside, is it? Don’t fret, there are loads of websites that can only see the end of humanity on earth as a Very Good Thing.

I’m following Google here, which is a broad measure of the top ranking sites on a given topic. Number One with a bullet is Rapture ready.com (I just can’t bring myself to post a link)

First off, shake off the immediate impression that the rapture ready website a joke. Although the evidence is doing its best to prove otherwise.

There is a page that offers a prophetic speedometer of endtime activity(rap2.html). It has a league table of world (US, mainly) events ranked according to whether they are bringing the rapture nearer or not. I must have misunderstood this bit though, because I assumed that the Rapture was supposed to be Jahweh doing some righteous smiting rather than caused by human action. So I suppose He is leaking out indicators, just warming up for the big smite, so as to give us time to repent. Well, you can relax a tad, the Index stands at 158 but was minus 1 today.

You can even download copies of the Rapture index when it was really high, like in the Gulf War. There are some fantastic categories like Beast Government, which sadly turned out to be the innocuous news that Bulgaria and Romania were joining the EU. Disappointingly, they may never reveal what Gog is as

“23 Gog: The lack of activity has downgraded this category. “

Bah.

Ironically,

35 Date Settings Several organizations have been talking about Iran launching an attack against Israel on 22 Aug. The claim is based on the doomsday beliefs of Iran’s President.

So the President of Iran is onboard then? Is he setting things up ready for the smiting? Or is he trying to get a jump ahead of the Born-again Christians’ rapture by starting his own Shi-ia alternative a week early?

Ah, at least something is starting to make “sense” (Well, have some internal logic, anyway) apparently it’s a pre-tribulation Rapture (rr-pretribulation-rapture.html), the date of which is unknown. So the indicators are clues for those lucky buggars who’ll be spared the godly smiting to be visited on the rest of us.

If you suddenly see people disappearing on a cloud, you know where they’re going – to a heaven where they’ll apparently be really rich.

This is really really impressive. Good news for us ungodly folk!

It appears that after all the good people have been raptured – I guess that makes them the raptives – their web sites will still be here for the rest of us, and we’ll all fight to grab some of their wisdom before we get smited. But there’ll be such a high traffic that they won’t be able to keep up and will fail.

The Rapture Ready domains will only be up for limited amount of time before they expire or collapse from high traffic demand. Because everything that happens during the tribulation will be of a life-and-death matter, it is very important that tribulation saints copy and share the key files found on this site.

I guess the implications are pretty clear here – get your rapture warnings now while you can still google them. Oh and send some yankee dollars to the guy because he seems quite distressed that other unworthy rapture websmites are getting loads and his isn’t. But, following “faq192.html”, don’t ask what he does with them, because God will get really offended and quite probably consign you to the smited section.