125: Apocalypse
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From WBE Chicago, Public Radio International, it's This American Life, My Red Glass. Hello, I'm Paul Lalande. You see, the world you're sitting in right now is a completely different world than the one I'm sitting in recording this message. An event the Bible calls the rapture has taken place, and millions or even billions of people have vanished from the face of the earth, including myself and all of the men you're going to see on this video today. You know, while we can't begin to imagine what the world you're sitting in right now must be like, we can at least say we knew this was going to happen, and we can answer many of the questions that are so important to you right now. This is a video called Left Behind, and it exists to solve a problem. In the view of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians who try to understand the prophecies in the Bible, we, as a species, run the verge of some terrible events, that will usher in the end of time and the return of Jesus to the earth. But the very first thing that will happen at the start of these times, according to these Christians, according to the Bible, is that good Christians will be lifted away to heaven in an instant. It's what they call the rapture. This video and others like it are designed to explain to those left behind exactly what's occurred and what happens after the Christians are all gone. I would assume that there's a lot of fear. There is a lot of tension. I would assume that newscasters are speculating as to the disappearance of millions and millions of people on planet earth. You are wondering what's going to take place next. I would refer you to the Bible. The Bibles are still left all in the world. Well, the true believers have just been taken out as those crazy Christians used to tell you they would, and they've all been suddenly, without warning, snatched out to meet Christ in the air, and they've been changed from mortal to immortal. Much of this videotape is a warning. It says that after the Christians all vanish, there will be seven years of tribulation with a false prophet, an antichrist. The video tries to warn us against all of the lies that the antichrist will tell, but it's very tricky business because the people putting together the videotape do not know what exactly the lies will be. And as we sit and ponder that, we think about if the rapture took place in the world in which we live today, the one frame of reference that most people would have for this event came from something that's been very popular in this world for the last decade or so. It's called Star Trek, and it's called the Transporter Beam, Beam the Up Scotty. So stories will begin to explode that people have been taken off this planet on UFOs, that they've been sent to other planets, to slave planets, or that they have just been brought up to a UFO for some reason or another. This is simply not true according to the scripture. It is a lie that we know is forthcoming. There's a kind of left-behind industry turning out product right now. A series of novels about what will happen after the rapture during the years of tribulation, particularly by the Bible, has crossed over from the Christian bestseller list to the mainstream charts. The latest book in the series is at number seven on the New York Times bestseller list this week. It's out half million copies in its first two weeks.
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