deeplyshallow // autoreply: i am away from my computer

autoreply: i am away from my computer

Spend much time on the Internet this past week, and you’ve probably seen this. Click it. Look at it. Then come on back.

Did you see this?

We have set up a system to send documents by the email, to the addresses you provide, 6 days after the “Rapture” of the Church. This occurs when 3 of our 5 team members scattered around the U.S fail to log in over a 3 day period. Another 3 days are given to fail safe any false triggering of the system.

Allow me to first point out that the quote marks around the word Rapture are theirs. I didn’t add them.

The gist of the site is simple: For an annual fee you can store messages to the ‘lost’ with YBLB. After the ‘rapture’ of the faithful, YBLB will automatically disburse your messages to those lost souls left behind. Your lost friends will read your words, realize their predicament, and convert on the spot, thereby saving their immortal souls.

Let’s forget, for a moment, that Revelations is one of the most wildly interpreted books of the Bible, and that believers of different faiths — even of the same faiths — disagree with just what any of it means. The lion represents Russia! No, it represents China! No, it represents aliens! Et cetera. Forget, if you will, that for every five people who interpret the definition of the Tribulation period to mean one thing, there will be twenty who believe it’s something completely different. Person A believes that if you miss the Rapture, you can still be saved, perhaps if you refuse the ‘mark of the beast’. Person B believes that if you miss the Rapture, you’re done for.

Forget all of that. Let’s focus instead on this basic truth: the existence of god has not been proven. Individuals may choose to believe whatever they like, interpreting the Bible and personal experiences to mean that there is or isn’t a god. But if you’re looking for clear, incontrovertible evidence of a higher power, then you’re going to keep on looking, because nobody can offer that sort of proof.

This site is a con game, exploiting people of faith for its own profit. For forty bucks a year — and maybe less, if enough gullible people sign up — they’ll take your personal messages and slap them on a server. The messages will be sent if three of the five YBLB team members fail to login — not much of a failsafe, given all the potential scenarios. Vacations? Sudden deaths? Internet outages? OH SHIT, THE RAPTURE!

Which is just flat-out exploitative.

I was raised to believe that one day — very, very, very soon — like any second now — God was going to return and take all the true believers back up to Heaven, where you would get all kinds of very cool things. Maybe even wings. I was just a kid the first time I heard about this, so naturally it sounded good to me. The flipside, however, is that if you blow it and you aren’t the purest of pure, et cetera, blah blah blah, you probably won’t make the cut. And this isn’t like failing to make the recess kickball team. You don’t just sit down and watch everyone else have a good time. You won’t be able to sit down, because your butt (along with every other part of you) will be forever on fire. Yess.

Cue irrational childhood fears that take twenty years to begin to deal with.

As a kid the concept of missing the rapture was so very much on my mind that if something real-world didn’t make sense to me, I immediately explained it by convincing myself that the rapture had happened, and I was screwed. (It didn’t help that kids like me were beset from all sides with fear-inspiring Christian propaganda, everything from Frank Peretti novels to ‘innocent’ Bible-story-based Nintendo titles — particularly a low-quality novel by Ernest Angley called Raptured, which was all about a girl who missed the rapture but still made it to Heaven by resisting the Antichrist and martyring herself by way of decapitation — this after she watched her family boiled in oil and their limbs hacked off.) I remember a summer day when I woke from a nap, all of nine or ten years old, and couldn’t find anybody in the house. Mom wasn’t anywhere to be found, Dad was AWOL, my sister had vanished. I looked everywhere — the neighbors on either side hadn’t seen anybody, and our friends down the street weren’t home — and ultimately panicked myself into thinking that God came back and took them all, and left me here alone.

That’s the kind of thing that this web site preys on: irrational fear. I was a kid, and I grew up and started rethinking things, but a lot of people don’t. The same people who will donate a thousand dollars to Benny Hinn so that he can buy a new jet are the sort of people who will spend their money and time to email their family after God picks them up and takes them home.

Beyond this, the site — which is pretty light on content — raises all sorts of questions, such as: What happens if you, Mr. Lost, receive one of these emails, and you click Reply? Will the raptured person have an autoresponder? An out-of-office reply? What would it say?