hmmmm.... or you could buy a safe, install it in your house, tell your nearest and dearest and it would cost you a lot less!
Here's a little story I just ran across. It's one of those things that you read and it hits you like an ice-cream headache - for a few seconds your afraid your brain is gonna shut down, but then it starts up again and everything is OK.
hmmmm.... or you could buy a safe, install it in your house, tell your nearest and dearest and it would cost you a lot less!
wow thanks for bringing this to the forums attention
the reply posts are truly funny
Hmm... Cousin Bob’s gay, so I know he won’t be going. And Susie in the office across the hall sleeps around... Oh, and Jack’s son is always playing those violent video games! Okay, I guess that about rounds out my ‘told you so’ e-mail list. Now to put together my social security number, bank account information, and list of various PINs and passwords so that those nice, anonymous Christians at You've Been Left Behind LLC can start encrypting them...”Gah, this is another one of those 'why didn't I think of that?' ideas.
1. Invent creative way to prey on religious dogma coupled with seemingly benign benefit.
2. Charge subscription fee for very little, if any, real work that can't really be externally verified.
3. Profit!awesome stuff you really couldnt make this up could youWho will start the clock to send out emails six days after the rupture? Do they have one Atheist working for them?! 'Now Atheist Ann, in the event none of us show up for work...'
Last edited by martingold; 6th-June-2008 at 07:51 AM.
I've been reading today about Georg Cantor, and his investigation and formulation of the different types of infinity.
For those who don't know, aleph null e.g. refers to the standard infinity - these are what is known as 'countable infinities', in so far as - theoretically - you could number all the even numbers, or all the fractions.
But then you go up to the uncountable infinities - starting at aleph one - such as decimal numbers. Since, e.g., pi itself has an infinite number of digits after the decimal point, and so does e.g. the square root of two, and since you can add the digits in one to the digits in the other and come up with a completely new decimal number, these are uncountable.
It seems to me that there is a similar hierarchy of irrational beliefs. (Ya wondered where I was going with this, didn't ya? Admit it!)
You have your baphl 0 beliefs - that there is a sky person who is perfectly powerful, perfectly knowing, and perfectly kind.
Then you have your baphl 1 beliefs - that the bible's blatant internal contradictions can be safely ignored and you can accept the whole thing as literally true - meaning that evolution must be untrue because there hasn't been enough time for it to work.
Your baphl 2 beliefs might be that, given baphl 1 belief in the bible, it therefore follows that the most astonishing education systems the world has ever seen, producing scientists who have virtually wiped out some diseases which previously slaughtered humans like pigs in an abbatoir, should be turned on their head and evolution taught as a really quite useless explanation for the complexity of life.
Then way up the hill, baphl x I suppose, you have the belief that all the predictions of the Revelation of St John will come true. Starting next month. I couldn't bring myself to believe in such cobblers if I hit my head against a door 30 times a minute for 24 hours.
Though that raises an interesting point. Belief is subject to the mind deciding that the evidence for the belief makes sense enough to store it in the box marked 'ok that makes sense'. You'll also have a box marked 'incontrovertible belief'. (as well as other boxes marked "best sex i ever had" and such like)
On the occasion you bang your head against a door 30 times a minute over a 24 hour period, your brain and therefore your mind, could be damaged. Ow.
Perhaps only box 1, but there is real life evidence of (the figurative) box 2 being scrambled for some mentally damaged people; especially if it is backed up by the testimony of your carers. It happens. It would be scary if it happened to you.
When your mind is the only thing between you and infinity, it's best to to be too blasé about these things
Personally, whenever I meet a believer in the Rapture, I enthusiastically endorse and encourage their beliefs, thus boosting their baphl score as much as possible. My opinion is, the logical endpoint for Rapture enthusiasm is surely a suicide cult. So eventually, we rid ourselves of an entire useless portion of the population a la Golgafrincham.
Luckily though, I've never met a Rapture believer.
Lee Child's latest Jack Reacher novel features an end-times enthusiast who decides to speed things up a bit, by making the wars in the middle east more savage than they already are. Only a story, of course, but I have heard before that there are people who look for the 'portents' in Revelation and then try to work out how to hurry things along.
Nothing beats the Simpson episode when the rapture happens and Lisa is the only one to rise upward surrounded in bright light, only to be pulled back with "where do you think you're going young lady" by Homer
Interestingly , when i was looking for that quote - I came across this and am seriously considering buying it
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