This whole Rapture thing is bananas.
The thing that sucks about the Rapture (well, that would suck about it, if it were actually going to happen) is that I know some pretty awesome people, and I don’t want them to get Raptured. (That I feel that way, much less am expressing it out loud makes me unRapturable. I’m okay with it.)
But, seriously — can’t there be two levels of non-Rapture (or Hell or whatever it’s called?)
Why don’t we send all the right-wing, gay-hating, forced birthing, family values hypocrites — you know, the people who don’t deserve it — right on up with Jesus. Then for the genuinely Rapturable, can’t we have them stay here, but, like, give them extra bacon on their sandwiches and free HBO?
That seems fair to me.
Anyway, here is some Rapture-related info:
And this is an oldie but goodie — for all you atheists out there:
You’re welcome.
JGabriel
ABL:
If the rapture were real, then — by definition — pretty much anyone who expected to be raptured would be ineligible.
.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@JGabriel: So very true, that.
Betty Cracker
I live in a little town with one traffic light. Yesterday, a creepy-looking dude in a suit and broad-brimmed hat was standing at that intersection selling (not giving away, selling!) bibles in preparation for the world’s end. The local fundamentalist church was packed on a Friday night.
I guess some folks are taking this seriously. Not the guy in the hat, though. He was just out to make a buck.
Anyhoo, since the nutbar who started all this May 21 Rapture stuff predicted it would begin at 5 AM on the International Date Line, he’s already been proven wrong. Or else there are none righteous in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, etc. No not one. (Fellow Jesus Camp escapees will get that allusion.)
Joseph Nobles
My favorite response to the Cameron banana video is that everything they say applies equally well to the penis. Of course, you can’t peel every penis back these days, but you could when God made them.
Second favorite is pointing out that the modern dessert banana is a result of decades of selective breeding.
stuckinred
Such bullshit and people fucking eat it up. Speed on brothers and sisters, hell’s only half full!
Hell is only half full
Room for you and me
Looking for a new fool
Who’s it gonna be?
It’s the Dance of Shiva
It’s the Debutantes ball
And everyone will be there
Who’s anyone at all
Monkey wash donkey rinse
Going to a party in the center of the earth
Monkey wash donkey rinse
Honey, don’t you want to go?
Monkey wash donkey rinse
Going to a party in the center of the earth
Monkey wash donkey rinse
Honey, don’t you want to go?
Left eye, right eye
Take a look around
Everybody’s heading
For a hole in the ground
And it’s the Dance of Shiva
It’s the Twilight of the Gods
Thunder and lightning
‘Til the break of dawn
Monkey wash donkey rinse
Going to a party in the center of the earth
Monkey wash donkey rinse
Honey, don’t you want to go?
El Tiburon
@Betty Cracker:
Was it Pat Robertson?
JPL
I slept through the rapture.
HeartlandLiberal
I think this photo sums up how I feel about this pretty well:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/5721271896/
PurpleGirl
The video by somegreybloke is soooooooooooooo great. It’s good to start the day with a hearty laugh.
JPL
What’s the best way to rid a yard of bamboo?
Xenos
Down in the Hole!
Not rapture-related, but along with Chocolate Jesus seem to be the final commentary on the subject.
JGabriel
Betty Cracker:
Well of course not. They’re not Americans, are they?
Besides, they all socia1ist healthcare. Jesus don’t brook no commies!
.
Linda Featheringill
@JPL:
Move.
JGabriel
Damn. If the skies aren’t filled with ascending floaty Christians, I’m gonna have to cancel my Rapture Skeet Shoot.
.
Luci
That’s pretty good JGabriel! I never thought of that, but it’s pretty funny! You know, it’s almost impossible to find something halfway intelligent to say about something this damn dumb! I’m not even gonna try.
Odie Hugh Manatee
I heard the group that is pushing this nonsense has raised some serious money. I guess a fool and their money really do part ways quickly.
What I find hilarious is that these so-called rapture ready bible lovers think that the end date is something they can be told by someone ‘special’. I thought the bible said that nobody will know in advance when that day is to come.
Heathens! What would be funny is that if there was an end of days and it turned out everyone who didn’t believe in it was raptured, leaving the idiots with the gaping, drooling stares even more agape, drooling and staring.
Back to fun now. I’m binding my SourceMod commands to my G510 gaming keyboard. Working on L4D right now. Gotta be ready for the zombie apocalypse!
@JPL:
Get a panda?
MonkeyBoy
ABL sez:
The whole point about the Rapture is that the Rapture Sucks
According to most official versions of Christianity, good people, even darling little girls, don’t go to heaven when they die. Instead they have to wait around just being skeletons with all the flesh rotted off until the Rapture when all good people would ascend to heaven and have new flesh put on their bones.
Since most folks didn’t know if they were really good enough to go to heaven there was a common folk strategy to get up their by being sucked up maybe by accident.
Everybody knew that Christian Saints would be admitted. This produced a thriving market in their bones. All early churches had to be established with a holy relic (bones of a Saint). The whole reason people were buried near a church (or their bones dug up and stored inside a church) was that when the Rapture came and the Saint’s bones were sucked up to heaven, the bones of people who might not really deserve the up journey just might be sucked up with the wind sucking up the Saint.
So yes, the Rapture sucks and maybe if you are correctly positioned then you might get sucked up by accident.
debbie
A couple of weeks ago, I was driving behind a car whose license plate holder read, “In case of Rapture / This car will be unmanned.” He drove like a typical Ohio driver, so I thought, “Who would notice?”
JGabriel
Justin Elliot @ Salon:
Make sure to go to bathroom before 6 pm. Best set an alarm to remind you to go at 5:30. You don’t want to be caught floating in mid-air while struggling to pull your pants up from around your ankles.
.
JGabriel
MonkeyBoy:
It’s true, I tried to get a saint’s bone last week but the prices were outrageous. I ended buying St. Francis’s dessicated p3nis from a seller on E-bay.
It may seem like a flimsy peg on which to hang my chances of surviving the rapture, but I’m told St. Francis would stiffen up in the mildest of breezes. I figure the rapture will create a pretty big wind, so I should be safe. It better work, because, come hell or high water, I’m grasping that dick like it’s my last hope.
.
Omnes Omnibus
@JGabriel: Around this time last year, I got to touch a shiny silver and glass object containing a piece of grotty brown cloth that supposedly has the Blood of Christ on/in it. I don’t think the nice Catholic Church people in Bruges would mislead me. Most people kissed the thing; I, an agnostic with a strongly Protestant background, could not bring myself to do that.* I wonder if this will affect my Rapturability in any way.
(*) Wandering around that particular Church and looking at everything in it gave me an urge to to post Theses on a church door and break up the monasteries.
Madeline
@debbie:I followed a car with that bumper sticker into the grocery parking lot awhile ago, and we happened to park next to each other. As we were both walking up to the store, I pointed to her bumper sticker and said to the woman, “kinda presumptuous, isn’t that?”
She didn’t get it.
moonbat
@JGabriel: You owe me a new keyboard. And some anti-depressant meds to deal with the guilt I felt immediately after I laughed my ass off.
doofus
I, for one, am glad the Rapture has finally come. Although I am sad that Michele Bachmann’s presidential campaign will end today. I had the popcorn all ready.
SFAW
Two thoughts on that:
1) I wuz reminded of the old line “Drop your St. Francis’s p3nises and grab your socks”
2) You could have saved yourself some big bucks, and done a practice run on yourself first, see if it worked.
Kirbster
If your “Rapture Party” includes a film festival, may I suggest the movie 2012?It’s a glorious trainwreck of a disaster film where they didn’t miss a single cheesy special effect, stock character, or cliched piece of dialog. It was on Encore last night and I doubt the timing was a coincidence. Never underestimate the cynicism of a television programming executive.
Ash Can
@JGabriel:
It’s not easy to win a thread this good, but you managed it.
Ija
@Kirbster:
Why John Cusack, whyyy? You used to be so cool.
Kane
All of the fundamentalist Christians are going to leave Earth and rise to the heavens. That doesn’t sound like an end to the world, that sounds like a fresh new beginning for the rest of us.
El Cid
__
Jesus: “WTF? Who sent all these crazy assholes here? They what? Eternity with me? Are you shitting me? I got nailed to a couple of railroad ties and blood-drowned and dragged my dead mummy-wrapped ass out of a cave, and somebody up in here thinks it’s funny to send a bunch of weirdo assholes into my me-damned yard so they could scream about ‘the gays’ and ‘the godless’ and wave their national flag and talk about how it’s ’cause of me? Yeah, somebody up here better be laughing real good, because your eternal pension is going to involve a transfer order and quicklike.”
doofus
@Kane: This brings up a tricky etiquette question. What do you say to that fundamentalist Christian(s) in your life that is(are) still on earth tonight? I rather get the impression that they were planning on going to heaven. Being stuck down here with all us sinners will really suck for them. So how do we make it better?
Jake
Sorry to be boring on this thread, but, my scholarly training forces me to write:
The notions of being “caught up in the clouds on the Last Day” is of course grounded in the text of the New Testament, primarily the Pauline corpus (the authentic letters of St. Paul). However, the notion of the Rapture, followed by the years of tribulation under the Antichrist’s rule, etc., that whole Tim LaHaye thing, is actually a quite recent, and highly creative, interpretation of the text in Revelations. Leaving aside the highly debatable notion that Revelations actually should be read as a road map of the Second Coming instead of an allegorical attack on Rome, the Rapture etc. version is essentially a 19th century invention.
OK, sorry to be boring. I have no axe to grind in this war over what is “true doctrine” for Christianity, since I am not a Christian, but it is worth noting that this is not some sort of ancient, time-honored fundamental set of beliefs that is being discussed here.
Violet
I forgot to turn off my phone before going to bed and someone phoned at 5:53 a.m. It shows “No number” and they didn’t leave a message. I’d totally forgotten about The Rapture. Could it have been some sort of Rapture Alert Call or something?
Not a great way to start a Saturday morning, being jolted awake by your phone at 5:53 a.m. Not happy, but my fault for not turning it to silent or turning it off.
El Cid
@doofus: “Well, I guess the good Lord looked upon the Earth, and decided that there was still a lot more work for we his servants to do, as much as He would like to relieve you of your daily suffering. Either that or he had to cut the budgets of the angel-based public transport.”
ppcli
@doofus: You could say “D’ja hear about what happened at the local Mosque? Big pileup of empty cars in the parking lot. Piles of clothes in the driver’s seats. And nobody can find the family who runs the Halal Shawrama Hut either. Very Strange.”
Omnes Omnibus
@Ija: Cusack does stupid big budget films in order to pay for his cool, arty films. I saw an interview with him a few years ago where he explicitly said that. It is part of his deal with the studios.
Kane
Communion wafers are people!
Ija
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yeah, but the cool arty films haven’t been so cool lately. Hot Tub Time Machine was just so so.
Ija
@Ija:
Oh wait, maybe HTTM is the big budget stupid movie. My bad.
JGabriel
doofus:
“You’re still here?”
You mean honestly? Treat them like someone who just received terrible news, like their spouse fathering out-of-wedlock children or losing a job they’d spent their entire lives studying to perform — i.e., if possible: expect that they might not be able to function properly; that they may be feeling shell-shocked, betrayed or broken; give them space to heal; be accomodating and forgiving.
Edited to Add: And, no, I don’t think I’d be able to do it myself. I’m not exactly the sheltering type. That’s why I said: If possible. But shelter — a place to recover — is what they’ll need.
.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ija: “Grosse Pointe Blank” gives the man a lot of credit in my book. He can do quite a few so so or even shitty movies before he empties his account with me.
Omnes Omnibus
@JGabriel: So, what you are saying is that pointing and laughing would be rude?
JGabriel
@Omnes Omnibus:
Heh. I’m saying it wouldn’t be helpful — even while admitting that pointing and laughing is probably what I would do anyway.
.
Kane
@doofus: What do you say to a child who discovers there is no Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy?
Ija
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yeah, that was a great movie. A great movie starring Minnie Driver, no less. I’m more partial to Say Anything myself.
jeff
I’m going to be having brunch in Brooklyn Heights at rapture time. It’s actually crisp and bright this morning for a change! I have to say that Cameron guy was super sexy in the 1980s, when he also played an idiot on TV.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kane: WHAT! Then who the fuck brings the Easter baskets? There were fucking coins under my fucking pillow. Don’t tell me there is no Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy, you fuck. Asshole.
doofus
@JGabriel:
Perhaps I should have been more specific. The main thing I was wondering is whether they would rather have sex or drugs at a time like this. I am not sure exactly how to find prostitutes and cocaine in my neighborhood, and so I wanted to get started on that right away. I don’t really like them enough to spend the money on both, so I was hoping for some guidance about which one would be better in a time of sorrow. I’m on a budget after all.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kane:
@Omnes Omnibus:
Kane, I am sorry for calling you an asshole wrt the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy thing. It was uncalled for; jerkwad was the appropriate term and I should have used it. Jerkwad.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Linda Featheringill:
Fire’s an option.
stuckinred
@Omnes Omnibus: Lt has the quickstep.
SFAW
WTF for? After you get Raptured, you won’t have anything to spend it on, anyway.
I understand about planning for worst-case scenarios, but you don’t need to anymore.
Just make sure you’re not near JGabriel when you begin your ascent. Or don your Kevlar vest before liftoff.
Kane
It’s difficult to prove that God doesn’t exist. You’ve got to have faith.
Yevgraf (fka Michael)
I was gonna suggest a 5 gallon can of gas and a match on the bamboo issue…
THE
Helping to make the world safe for atheism, one falsified prophesy at a time.
doofus
@SFAW: I think you are making a mistake (which you wouldn’t if you knew me). I ain’t getting raptured. I do, however know a few fundamentalist Christians who seem to think of themselves as “holy.” I am betting that all of them will still be here after the Rapture rolls through town. Since they are all going to hell anyway, I figured I could get them something nice in the mean-time. I just don’t got a lot of money, so I figured I could supply prostitutes or drugs, but not both.
Marc McKenzie
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
I always thought it was funny that they know the exact date and time….I mean, in the Bible, isn’t it said that no one knows the day or hour?
Jeez….
But a L4D fan, huh? Heh heh….one of the best damned zombie games ever (although I cannot decide which one I like more–L4D 1 or 2). So when the hell is L4D 3 coming?
JGabriel
@doofus:
If they’re in good physical shape, prostitutes. If not, then they’re just gonna feel worse when they come too quickly, so go for the cocaine instead.
.
doofus
@doofus: Thank you for the advice JGabriel. Now this sinner’s gotta go mow the lawn.
THE
Yeah the bamboo. Well I had a friend who had an entire back yard taken over by it, so he ended up with a 4 meter high lawn.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@Joseph Nobles: That’s the problem with pig-ignorant people. They don’t know that they don’t know stuff. They’re always talking about homosexuality being unnatural, but so are *clothes* for their Christ’s sake.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
Well you can tell
by the way I use my walk
I’m a woman’s man
no time to talk
Music loud and women warm
I’ve been kicked around
since I was born
And now it’s all right, it’s ok
and you may look the other way
We can try to understand
The New York Times’ effect on man
(chorus)
Whether you’re a brother
or whether you’re a mother
you’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Feel the city breakin
and everybody shakin’
and were stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive
polyorchnid octopunch
@Ija: I’m sure he’s got bills to pay, just like everyone else.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@Omnes Omnibus: That was just you being tested. When the rabbiture comes, you’ll be carried up in a jellybean filled basket along with the rest of the true believers. Mostly grade schoolers.
Thad
If the banana is perfectly shaped, then why did god make all the other fruit different? Why did he put seeds in grapes (and leave it for us to fix)? Seems like shoddy engineering to me.
Thad
As a landlord, if any of my tenants are raptured, do I get to keep their security deposit? How should I dispose of their possessions? In most cases where someone runs out on a lease, I am obligated to store it for a period of time before treating it as abandoned. Does that apply here? Just trying to get ahead of this… :)
Damned at Random
@Thad: Yeah- when he finishes that banana, I’d like him to explain fucking pomegranates
DougW
@JPL: Dynamite. Lots of it.
me
Cause I heard it in the wind
And I saw it in the sky
And I thought it was the end
And I thought it was the 4th of July
Barb (formerly Gex)
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1844251&l=a0c8a10039&id=1601743291
Hey, what’s one more bad rapture joke?
Paul Madrigal
Harold Camping
Family Stations Inc. 290 Hegenberger Rd. Oakland, CA 94621–
For more information call toll free 1-800-543-1495
or e-mail:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
chopper
@JPL:
cut down. dig up crowns and runners. thick sheet mulch. then keep pulling up the new growth from the runners you missed.
Ronzoni Rigatoni
@Thad: Ol’ Thad:
Remember the “God is an Engineer” jolk?
Electrical engineer guy sez “God is one of us. Just look at all those synapses cracklin’.”
Chemical Engineer sez, “No, God is a Chem Engineer. It’s chemicals that cause all the reactions that make life possible.”
Civil Engineer: “You’re both nuts. God is a Civil Engineer. Who else would run a sewer line through a recreational area?”
Villago Delenda Est
@Kane:
It’s even more difficult to prove that He does…which is why the fundies so desperately want to put a veneer of science on their loony beliefs.
ABL
@Kane: George Michaelism.
Ken
We fixed the banana, too. The wild varieties have more seeds than pulp. The domesticated bananas are propagated by root cuttings, so are all vulnerable to the same diseases and could be wiped out en masse. That actually happened in the 1950s.
As for the bamboo – take off and nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Rachel_Lee
Can’t think of a good Rapture joke? Don’t worry, it’s not the end of the world…
lige
What really happened:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2075707453142&set=o.23177406165&type=1&theater
grumpy realist
What’s even more hilarious about all the interpretation of Revelations is that the guy who writes it says right out in the beginning “I saw in a vision…..”
I wish all those who believe in the Rapture in any form be herded into one enclosed state with no more technology than that available in 70 AD, handed Bibles, and told to get on with their own civilization. A mentality that doesn’t believe in modern science doesn’t deserve to have access to it.
Chet
Everybody’s saying don’t worry
They say don’t worry
They say don’t worry
They say don’t worry
But they don’t know
There can be no show
If there’s a hell below
We’re all gonna go
quaker in a basement
@Betty Cracker:
If he said his name was Hazel Motes, you’ve slipped reality and fallen into a Flannery O’Connor tale.
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
@me: probably my favorite old Soundgarden tune. Dig it
alice eastlake
Did you know Jesus did show up? He was the jockey who came in first at the Preakness.