Rapturous

If you’re reading this, it means that neither you nor I have been subsumed into the Rapture.

As far as I can tell, no one appears to have been.

I rather suspect that I was never in the rapturous category, for which I confess great relief. The target demographic are not the sort of folks with whom I’d enjoy hanging out—non-bibbers, unhumorous, credulous and generally with a right-wing poker up their butts. But I did kinda hope that those who made the cut would have gone to their reward, thus clearing out the traffic and ease the competition for resources down at the grocery store.

Christian prophets have been predicting the Second Coming of Jesus since the Second Century (when it was pegged at 500 CE, based on dimensions of Noah’s Ark), and they’ve been rolling around ever since. I last wrote about the one that was meant to occur in 2011, with billboards advertising it in The Valley They Call Silicon. There may have been a couple that were called since then, but I evidently didn’t hear about them. In any case, the Almighty has failed to deliver on every one of these, so you’d think that people might be a little more skeptical about the predictions.

But you’d be wrong.

Sadly for the whole world, the core of the End Times believers—evangelical Christians—hold enough sway in the US to fuck things up globally, inasmuch as they elect Republicans to national office on the supposition that it’s been predicted that a war in the Holy Land will usher in the Apocalypse, with the attendant ascension into heaven of all the true believers, and this shapes our current foreign policy.

And you see how that’s turning out.

(Pretty sure that everyone who had to listen to yesterday’s unhinged gibbering by the Kleptocrat at the UN was fervently hoping that this time the Rapture would come just to end that crime against humanity. I only got it in snippets and I wanted to open a vein.)

Well, but no—just like every previous time we were promised an end to it all, that great and terrible Lucy pulls the football away. So welcome back to the secular world.

©2025 Bas Bleu