The Rapture Index: 'Fasten Your Seat Belts'

Hi! In three days you will all be dead
By Mark Morford / May 18, 2011

Good news for you! All worries, over soon. All concerns laid to rest. Everything transformed in a white-hot eyeblink of OMG WTF into a lukewarm puddlepool of odious harp music, angel squeals and tepid moral pudding. I know, right? Finally!

This much we know: In a mere 72 hours (give or take, time zone depending, sometime before brunch) millions of true believers shall be whisked off to a cloudless overlit megadome where no one has sex and no one reads books and everyone is huddled together in a massive quivering vanilla cuddleparty, despite the requisite 500 layers of scratchy taffeta. Please remove your jewelry.

Are you ready? Whatever will you wear? Who will feed your dog? Hurry on now, you only have ... oh dear ... three days left until May 21, the oft-repeated, now infamous date of the Rapture, as predicted by Oakland's own nutball octogenarian and world-famous sideshow pastor Harold Camping, after a lifetime of careful biblical calculations and number-crunching and blah blah etcetera you know the rest. (If you don't know, here's a handy FAQ).

So anyway, it's Armageddon, real soon now. Do you have plans? Have you made proper arrangements? For those of us left behind to suffer this terrible beautiful planet after the fanatical Christians depart, there will be plenty to do. There are looting groups forming on Facebook. There will be Rapture parties galore. Brunch parking will be awesome. After all, Armageddon is on a Saturday. Were you thinking Sunday? As if. Sunday is when God rests, barbecues some wild salmon, watches "Idol."

Perhaps we shouldn't be so cocky. Perhaps the good pastor isn't so very far off. The world, you have to admit, is in a bleak state indeed. Arab nations are in turmoil, prophetic biblical lands are war-torn and decimated, oil is threatening to dry up, fresh water too, the euro is on shaky ground and the American empire is on the verge of bankrupt implosion. I know! What else is new?

But that's not all. Ominous signs abound in nature, too. Permafrost is melting fast, honeybees are offing themselves en masse, dead dolphins are washing ashore, epic flooding is destroying the south, tsunamis are poisoning Asia, the Duggars just won't stop procreating. 2010 is now officially on record as the Weirdest Weather Ever, and 2011 is on track as the year we break seven billion horny hell-bound bipeds on a floating rock that never really wanted more than, say, a couple million. Fun for us!

It all adds up, no? But then again, something doesn't feel quite right. Something feels a little too ... positive. Glowing. Possible.

Flashback to the Dark Days of Bush, when the fundamentalists were all giddy from inhaling the toxic fumes of their own homophobic xenophobic bloviation and doom-tracking lists like the Rapture Index were happily sucking at the tit of guys like Ted Haggard; megachurches were all the rage in collective psychosis, and even Bush himself said God told him that launching a few wars and murdering thousands of Islamic innocents was "totally cool" with Him.

In other words, End times predictions were hotter than Ashton Kutcher's tweets, except Kutcher was a 20-something dork and Twitter hadn't been invented yet. What a time it was.

Still, nothing happened. The world felt far more desolate and off-kilter than it is now. America was diving headlong into its ugliest period in nearly a century, conspiracy theories were a dime a dozen, and Fox News' juggernaut of idiocy was just hitting its stride. Angry Jesus simply could not have picked a better time than, say, 2003 to be wildly disgusted and wipe us all out so He could start over with some feral bunnies and a fistful of opium poppies.

It's tough not to feel a twinge of disappointment, then. If you're anything like me, maybe the curious, ironic part of you likes to sigh, sip its Maker's Mark and say, "Gosh, wouldn't it be interesting, wouldn't it be fascinating if once, just once, someone were actually right about just one insane fringe theory of doom?"

Aliens among us, peak oil, 9/11 holograms, a single global currency, lizard overlords from the fifth dimension, Area 51, Osama bin Laden killed and secretly frozen in 2002 and kept in Dick Cheney's freezer and then thawed out 10 years later just so Generation Facebook can gawk at his withered mug and go, "Him? Really? That frail, filthy imp of human pathos is the reason I have to take my goddamn shoes off at the airport and suffer the Tea Party, Alex Jones and Islamophobia?"

Maybe we've been going at it all wrong. Maybe if there's one thing we've should have learned by now about the Rapture, about the end of everything, it's this: It's a slow bitch.

Climate change, the end of oil, the Pacific Garbage Patch, it all takes awhile to knock us completely flat, relatively speaking, despite how all our zombie movies and Armageddon porn fantasies have us vanishing in a bloody, cataclysmic, CGI-enhanced poof.

Here's a fun thought: Maybe Armageddon is already happening, piece by piece and storm by storm, but we clever humans are smart/dumb/lucky enough to adapt just enough to stay barely one step ahead, to stretch poor Mother Earth's resources a little further and to whistle past the graveyard one more time to make it home in time for some pizza and porn. Barely.

Maybe the Rapture isn't meant to happen in a big megawhoomp zap, like a giant piñata filled with little candy Jesuses exploding all over the Colorado Rockies. Maybe it's actually an epic saga, unfolding slowly over time, like the world's longest vaguely depressing but beautifully shot documentary film. Fantastic lighting! Expert camerawork! Stirring, hardscrabble tales of love and hope! Too bad everyone dies in the end.

Or maybe it's just this: Maybe for one moment this Rapture Saturday you pause, you step back from it all, you take a breath and a deep, hard look, and you realize it's not really so bad after all. You note how, through the muck and the bleak, infinite blessings abound. Because they do.

You do nothing at all, really, except realize the eternal truth, known since humankind was knee-high to a mystical hiccup: The Rapture is instantly available, at any moment, in any breath, if you just widen out a little and take it all in.

No harps. No angels. No nutball pastors. No deities. Hell, no religions whatsoever. You don't have to actually go anywhere at all. Except, you know, inward. Simple, really.

Source / SFGate

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