EnRaptured

The makers of the Rapture Ready Index are getting really quite upset about the prospect of Obama’s winning. (Make it so. Please, make it so.)

So upset that they seem to see Obama in a rapture-causing category almost all of his own.

…If Obama should win in November, I plan to issue the most dire warning I’ve ever issued during the history of this ministry.

That will be pretty damn dire then. Isn’t that their whole raison d’etre? Issuing dire warnings? And this will be the most dire.

I admit to being too dumb to understand the whole “dire warnings” thrust of the Index. Aren’t these people counting the minutes until they get raised up to heaven on a big cloud? Is their Index supposed to list bad things or good things, from their perspective?

In fact, if they really believe that an Obama victory will issue in the end of the world, then why are they condemning the “liberal” media for supporting him? Shouldn’t they be welcoming him for supposedly hastening their coming move upstairs?

Why are they supporting the emetic McCain/Palin combo, then?

(Well, not quite. They barely mention McCain. All their hopes seem to be on Palin, who is much scarier even than McCain to my godless self – and quite a threat to moose, wolves and polar bears, too, apparently.)

Of course, they manage to get in a sly insinuation that Obama is a mysteriously secret Muslim. This is utterly confusing, apart from obviously being the worst kind of nonsense, although it seems to be believed by a fair proportion of the people on their chatboards. How can such people both blame Obama for the words of his former Christian pastor and still see him as a Muslim? (Quite apart from their bizarre assumptions that “Muslim” is just a euphemism for “being a suicide bomber” and would self-evidently disqualify anyone from the presidency.) But, again, if they really believe this, shouldn’t they be welcoming it, following what I hesitate to call their logic?

Rapture Ready’s avid enthusiasm for the prospect of the destruction of humanity is expressed perfectly in another disturbing piece on the same page, which complains that the US is stopping the rapture by failing to support Israel:

The perfect prophetic storm is upon this last-time generation. To understand the darkly serious truth of America’s tinkering in the matter of forcing Israel to make human peace with its enemies, we must delve heavily into the relevant prophetic Scriptures.

(If only the US would force Israel to “make human peace.” ) They reckon that America and the UN are interfering in god’s plan for Israel.

…America’s and the Quartet’s (U.S., E.U., U.N., and Russia) attempts to force the making of a Palestinian nation upon land that is Israel’s by divine right.

I’m not going to be too snide about people with absolutely no education in history, let alone modern international politics. These are tough subjects and I am already marvelling that people as mentally challenged as the RR gang can write sentences and use the Internet.

I am going to challenge “god’s plan.” Either their god wants the world to be scourged of us evil humans or he doesn’t. If he does, but is too idle to do it himself, shouldn’t they be welcoming any potential anti-christ figure who fills the bill? If god wants the US to support Israel right into the jaws of Armageddon, why can’t he bloody do it himself?

Look, RR people. I wouldn’t dare suggest you try reading history books or anything. But there are plenty of other holy books that you could take as literally true. You could take the Eddas or the Mabinogion or the Baghavad Gita or the Dao de Jing (however they are spelled.)

I’m not saying that you still couldn’t do serious damage if you believed in any of these books as accurate prophecies but at least the rest of us would get a break for a few centuries while you worked up an appropriately life-destroying worldview.

Misplaced ads

There is a tradition of posting weird searches that bring people to a blog- even using a poetry format. So, what about the GoogleAd links that take people away from skeptics’ blogs?

I am an atheist has links to the-end.com:

2008: God’s Final Witness
Unprecedented destruction will come in 2008, leading to America’s fall

(Oh shit, I blogged about this very site’s endtimes nonsense a few weeks a go. For free. :-()

Called to be a monk, nun, priest? Take Free Online test Now To see if God is calling you.

From vocationsplacement.org. Well, OK, but I think I know the answer already so I’ll skip the online test and check out the free holiday destinations. Lose interest when I see that the destinations are generally states that I don’t recognise by their initials. I can’t find Hawaii. Look, I’m not prepared to pretend to be Catholic and pray for a couple of weeks for Wisconsin. But thanks for the offer.

Sexed-up Atheism- Dawkins Pantheism adds reverence for Nature, Universe, Life

(Pantheism.net) Well, no great argument with these people, except that I have a fastidious revulsion at the use of the term “sexed-up” to mean “slightly more interesting”.

The Enlightenment of the Healy (me neither) has an advert for hidden-advent.org:

Desiring Lord appearing? Expecting Lord’s return? A pleasant surprise is awaiting you

Hidden advent? Is that a really obscure pre-Christmas calendar? No. It’s one of the most eye-burningly ugly sites you’ll ever see. It deals with The Work of the Lord’s Hidden Advent In China However, the site is even less comprehensible than the title. I click on a link that says

Typical Cases of Leaders in Catholicism and Christianity in Mainland China who Resist Almighty God Being Punished

Not understanding the English, I have to click the link. I now understand even less than I did before.
It has a series of bizarre tables by province. Eg Henan.(65 Cases Selected) I pick a randomly numbered case:

Liu X from Dengzhou City, female, 48 years old, a believer from the Born Again denomination. In February 1999, someone preached God’s end-time work to her, but she didn’t accept it. In March, another person preached it to her again, but she said: “What you believe in is a false way and a cult. I just believe in Jesus. If I were to die, I would die under Jesus’ name.” Two months later, Liu X got uterus cancer, and she lost all her hair after chemotherapy.
In the autumn of 1999, the brothers and sisters preached God’s end-time salvation to her again, but she still resisted and condemned it. Right after that, her innards began to rot. She suffered unbearable pain and failed to respond to any medical treatment. ….. Her oath “rather die than believe” was fulfilled eventually.

They list “Two hundred cases selected from among tens of thousands of cases”. They all involve people dying a painful untimely death for not accepting the end-times idea. Who’d have thought there could be a religious group that compared unfavourably with the Phelps family?

Back in the real world, the advert still says “A pleasant surprise is awaiting you “. Loki forbid that they ever try to give a site visitor an unpleasant message….