Airs – Ian Lance Taylor

Left Behind

On Bruce Schneier’s blog he pointed out a service on the Left Behind website. Left Behind is of course a reference to the popular series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins (my capsule review: first volume is a decent thriller, subsequent volumes become increasingly pointless, I stopped after four). The website lets people who expected to be taken up in the rapture leave messages behind for their loved ones who remain on Earth. They suggest including banking information and power of attorney.

Schneier points out the obvious security problems here. I certainly hope that people who use the site do it by storing a physical document somewhere secure–perhaps a bank vault–and using the service to tell their loved ones where it is, rather than, say, putting banking information on a web server owned by some random people nobody knows.

That aside, it would be fascinating to see what sorts of messages people write. There must be quite a temptation to write something along the lines of “Boy, I bet you wish you’d listened to me!” But I guess that if you want to be worthy of the rapture, you’ll do your best to be nice. It would also be interesting to see just who people leave messages for; what if you aren’t sure whether your friends will be picked up in the rapture? Would it be insulting to leave them a message?

The basically cool idea of the rapture sadly has only a weak basis in the Bible, pretty much just 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 “With a shout of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of God’s trumpet, the Lord himself will come down from heaven, and the dead who belong to the Messiah will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.” The context is Paul advising against grief for people who have died, because those people will be raised first. It’s hard to reconcile the rapture with the book of Revelations, although people manage it through what I considered to be selective quoting.

For this kind of radical Christianity, the last word should always belong to the amazing Jack Chick.

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4 responses to “Left Behind”

  1. tromey Avatar
    tromey

    I’ve been reading Slacktivist for a while now — he is reading Left Behind and writes an article every Friday detailing what he’s read. It is both hilarious and interesting… http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/

    Geeks may prefer the SF version of the rapture, Vernor Vinge’s singularity 🙂

    BTW the ads that showed up on this page were awesome.

  2. ncm Avatar
    ncm

    Me, I hope everybody who puts banking information there not only gets their account drained instantly, but has their identity stolen so they end up deeply in debt. I’d call it a stupidity tax. Sadly, actually participating would be technically a crime, so I’d have to leave the collection to others.

    Really, if they’re leaving their money for *sinners*, how does it matter which *sinner* gets it — or, indeed, when? The ironic bit is that anybody who leaves money for *sinners* is probably sinning right there, and then ought not to get taken up at all. Although I suppose they could go bathe in the blood of the lamb again afterward.

  3. ncm Avatar
    ncm

    BTW, I tell people the Rapture already happened in 1348, and nobody noticed. It’s too late, you missed it. Now we’re muddling along in the End Times.

  4. Ian Lance Taylor Avatar
    Ian Lance Taylor

    And speaking of 1348, I recently read an interesting article on the pandemic of 541 to 750 (unfortunately you have to actually pay to read the article on the web). That was the Dark Ages, so nobody much wrote about it, and in fact it’s not clear how bad it was. But it might have been very bad indeed.

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