After a weekend away in Greensboro, NC, preaching at my former congregation as part of their 100th anniversary celebration, I returned to the Net today, only to find out that certain people have been planning to be away permanently. According to the Christian Post:
Christians who believe they might one day be physically swept up to heaven in the Rapture will be able to send e-mails to loved ones left behind on Earth nearly one week after the apocalyptic event takes place, thanks to a new website.
YouveBeenLeftBehind.com lets subscribers send an e-mail message to up to 62 people exactly six days after they’ve disappeared from the face of the Earth, Wired Magazine’s Threat Level reports.
The website, run by Mark Heard along with four other Christians, dispatches the e-mails when at least three staff members fail to log in for six consecutive days. Its main purpose is to give Christians one final shot at evangelism.
In addition to the e-mail function, users of YouveBeenLeftBehind.com can also store personal and financial documents on the site. Up to 150 megabytes of information would be sent to up to 12 people after the presumed rapture.
“In the encrypted portion of your account you can give them access to your banking, brokerage, hidden valuables, and powers of attorneys,” explains the site.
“There won’t be any bodies, so probate court will take seven years to clear your assets to your next of kin. Seven years, of course, is all the time that will be left. So, basically the Government of the Antichrist gets your stuff, unless you make it available in another way.”
This kind of thing is so loopy that I’m not really sure what to say, other than that it sounds like a plot point in a bad novel. I do wonder, however, what would happen if all of the site’s staff members were to get seriously ill at the same time. You could have who-knows-how-many people’s personal information sent out to friends and relatives, who would then think the individual in question had left this world without notice when they hadn’t. The site’s owners would then have given sensitive financial and estate information out to people who might have no scruples about, say, cleaning out the individual’s bank account, which they could do, because the latter’s assets wouldn’t be frozen, because they were, in fact, still walking around.
At which point I suspect a lot of people would begin to wonder just who the Antichrist really is.
