Cody Carson is an inventor, and he’s also one of those weird fundamentalists who believes in that load of unbiblical nonsense that is the Rapture (this is not to imply that if it were Biblical, it wouldn’t be nonsense). He has invented a device to detect when Christians magically disappear.
A Spring Clamp Switch was the type of vanishing sensor I built to demonstrate a working model of a Rapture Alarm in a demonstration given to a church congregation a few years ago. I used this type because it is easy to understand and can be built for less than $7. I purchased a medium size spring clamp and a pull chain switch from a local home center. I then drilled two holes in the handle of the clamp. I mounted the switch in one hole and mounted the pull chain in the other hole. Squeezing the clamp once cocked the switch. Releasing the handles cause the chain to be pulled, thus activating the switch. I then hooked the switch up to a light and placed the clamp onto a broom handle. When I snatched the broom handle out of the clamp, the light came on. When mounted to an arm or leg of a deceased Christian, the sensor would activate when the body vanishes, thus detecting the rapture.
In my demonstration, I clamped the sensor to a cow’s leg bone to represent a bone surgically removed from a Christian organ donor. This was to demonstrate that rapture related devises could be constructed in controlled lab settings and would not require the use of a grave or tomb. That sensor was wired to a computer tower and when the bone was removed from the clamp, the congregation heard an audible alarm.
A switch that triggers when you remove something is completely trivial to build, and hardly qualifies as an ‘invention’. But the absurdity of Carson’s thinking only slowly sank in. First I thought he was going to have Christians walking around with this switch attached, which would hardly be useful at all if the Rapture happened — his alarm could go off in all kinds of situations, while a person vanishing would be obvious and unusual, so all he’s doing is adding opportunities for false positives.
And then he mentions attaching it to dead bodies. Getting a bit creepy there…but OK, he believes the dead will vanish as well as the living. Still, his crude switch isn’t going to work: dead bodies do decompose and gradually vanish.
And then: a bone surgically removed from a Christian organ donor
. Ewww.
So I keep reading along as his proposals get more elaborate and pseudoscientific.
Theoretically, a tomb could be constructed as a small lab resembling a hospital room with a patient. The “patient” or test subject, could be fitted with various types of sensors to record quantum changes that would occur during the resection and vanishing of a body. Because the bible says that the vanishing will happen instantly, the data would be recorded at an ultra high speed so that it could be slowed down for study. The data would have a ten second recording window and would store information in a similar manor as the rapture video recorder. Experiments that could be monitored from this tomb lab are not limited to but include: sound, EKG, moisture, bone density, body weight, movement, radiation, infrared light, body heat, room temperature, air pressure, RF radiation, white noise, fast time video, radar, etc.
I have no idea why he’s fussing over this BS. Doesn’t he expect to be raptured, and then he’ll know without all the gadgets?
But then I read this:
If the rapture is timed with the chain of natural disasters that have already been predicted by scientists for the 2010 – 2012 time frame, the fulfillment of the long predicted biblical prophesy could be partially overlooked because of the heavy death toll and mass destruction that would follow in the wake of multiple global disasters.
And I look at the date of the post: it’s from 2009. I guess I missed the chain of natural disasters predicted by scientists 3-5 years ago, and completely missed the vanishing of all those Christians. I guess we needed Carson’s gadgets after all.
Carson’s last post, by the way, was in 2012. At the end he was just dumping memes that never caught on, usually a photo of himself with some godly quote from himself attached, like this one:
With wisdom like that, I’m sure he must have been sucked right up into heaven.
Thank goodness he has that actor job to fall back on.
When a man is gentile with a woman……
Oh, goy!
I have a theory that The Rapture occurred and no one noticed because no one qualified. Everyone got “left behind,” just like Nicholas Gage and Kirk Cameron. :-b
There. One less thing to worry about!
It seems just anyone can call themselves a philosopher nowadays.
Carson invented a deadman switch. Color me unimpressed.
Oh FFS, what would these daft people do without the word quantum?
There was a rapture, wasn’t there? When all those GOP Congressmen had their brains sucked out? The brainless zombies were left behind, however.
That explains the military issue boots I just found down the way, just an empty pair of boots. Voila! The Rapture is real! But then, I’m still in my shoes. Oh geez, Marge…
The mildly deranged penguin has a Patented-Pending Universe Disappearing Confirmer©™® — A cheeseboard surrounded by peas. If the cheese disappears, the Universe has been vanished / destroyed. Nothing can penetrate peas in a defensive formation. The hard bit — which makes this valuable equipment worth far more than its price of 666USD (or 3000USD for two (be certain the Universe has vanished! get four for a special price of only 10000USD!!!)) — is subduing and aligning the peas. The mildly deranged penguin has spent femtoseconds of her valuable time in working out how to do that. Postage & Packaging extra (subdued and aligned peas are difficult to ship), Same century delivery not guaranteed, May contain nuts.
Not only a philosopher, but a former US Marine!
Can anyone come up with an example where someone who drags in their military record (in a context where it’s not directly relevant) as a credential *wasn’t* a total wanker? If it’s not that, it’s being a Mensa member. (No criticism of Mensa implied, only the credentialist abuse of it).
How is it possible to be ‘gentile to a woman,’ please? maybe I should work up to it. I’ll try being english to my mum for an afternoon.
@12: Well to start with: if you’re circumcised, you’re disqualified.
I have the bar set pretty low for “rapture” Christians, so when I read the words in the picture, I was at least relieved that it at least implies that he opposes
routine abusediscipline of wives by their husbands.God gave man greater strength for the provision and protection of women…not to dominate or abuse women by force…
And then my expectations went south.. I expected him to emphasize the “protection” aspect, as in “strength to fight off other men from abusing his women”, but he went the other way. ” ‘strong’ means to be gentle”.
About his “rapture alarm”, he says it needs to monitor the skeletons at very high speed cuz the rapture will happen instantaneously, … but then he only gives the rapture a 10 minute window in which to occur? color me impressed (sarcasm}.
Inquiring minds want to know. If you get a body part from a Christian, cornea, kidney, etc. will that also rapture?
Re: AnthonyBarcellos #4
God is probably sitting at his desk thinking, ‘Any moment now’, while playing with the flip cover of the big red rapture button. His computer screen displays two counters: world population, which keeps counting up, and Good Christians, which stays resolutely at zero. Which is what happens when you don’t edit your holy books properly and they end up contradicting themselves.
I’ve got to admit: If I were a kid forced to go to church that had one of these devices every Sunday and listen to boring lectures, I might be tempted to find a way to tamper with the device and replace the bone piece with a chunk of dry ice or something.
I’m having a “Poochie was from another planet?” moment here. In the rapture dead bodies are going to disappear? Meh, I guess so.
By the logic of his contraption, it is unnecessary. We would know the rapture by the piles of clothing and stuff left behind by the Christians ruptured in the nude. I doubt Christ would be taking inventory, deciding clothing is appropriate garb for heaven, but ankle bracelets aren’t.
RAPTURE ALERT!!!
FWIW, the End Times start September 28, 2015 after the last of 4 blood moons. According to Blitz and Hagee among others.
It won’t happen of course. The Apocalypse/Rapture/End Times/Tribulation happens every year or two. And no one ever sees it.
Re: Eamon Knight @ #11…
I can give you an example of not mentioning military service even where it might be appropriate to do so because the person who served considered it to be irrelevant.
At the time of his death, my father was a civilian employee of the US Navy. His boss, a Navy Lieutenant, was quite disconcerted to find out after the fact that my father had served in the Navy for 6 years and the Maritime Service for 12 years. Especially since he had risen to the rank of of Lieutenant Commander in the Maritime Service.
Anyone who has served in the US Marine Corps knows that you never refer to yourself as a “former Marine”… unless you’ve been dishonorably discharged or something.
“Retired Marine”, yes. But not “former Marine”.
I think I’ve figured that out. (And, no, I’m not going to consult the Rapture literature to see if I have this entirely wrong, or if on the other hand—more scarily—I have it right.) There’s got to be a global Resurrection of all two millenioa of dead Christians, right? Well, then: one Quantum Second before the Rapture, all those bodies whisk back into living existence, and then are Raptured together with the current inventory! So, no dead bodies disappear! Problem solved.
Clearly it’s time to invent a device for Resurrection Detection.
@20
His logic is that the media will see the rapture, disappearing people, left behind piles of clothes and christ walking about shaking his finger and then the media with its atheist agenda will lie and come up with stories and natural explanations and claim it was all part of the natural catastrophes.
But his invention will have filmed proof that he and other christians can use to prove it was the rapture after all.
Of course, his invention requires several volunteer christians to purposely sin and stay behind so they can present the proof. Will it be worth it?
====
Basically this guy has heard very different things about the rapture than I have. He seems to think only dead christians are raptured (uh, what’s the point) and live christians stay behind. And he thinks atheist will continue with “business as usual”. I was under the impression that the point of the rapture was that it’d be absolute and undeniable and that us atheists couldn’t possibly continue to delude ourselves and it’d be as clamouring in misery “oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck”.
The reason corpses and a lot of bones will be magically transported to somewhere undetectable along with the living is the living will need something to eat.
woozy wrote:
Well, if the living True Christians are going to magically ascend to heaven with their physical bodies, the dead True Christian bodies should go too, right? To be honest, I’ve never understood the obsession over physical bodies in heaven in regards to this, but very serious, important theologians have spilled massive quantities of ink on it.
As most know, the current Rapture beliefs aren’t found in the bible. Xians just make up their religion as they go along and it can change by the hour. It’s all Make Believe not anchored in reality.
According to John’s Drug Trip, the Raptured will be 144,000 Jewish male virgins. Sort of leaves all the xians out right there.
Okay. Read his site. Here’s his theory:
There are true christians, and there are failures who think they are true christians. The rapture is going to happen and there are going to be huge numbers people dead. The failures are going to wonder “gee, was that the rapture; was I left behind? Am I a false christian. No, i *have* to be a true christian.” The media is going to say “That wasn’t the rapture. Just a bunch of nature disasters.” The failures will say “Phew, I knew I was a true christian. Time to continue sinning ’cause it’s not the End of Days so no worries.”
His invention allows the failure to look at the evidence and say “Oh, fuck! It *was* the rapture. I’m a false christian and I *was* left behind. Oh, well, time to witness and spread the word like I never did before ’cause now it *is* the End of Days.”
But seriously, the dead bodies are going to disappear?
He confuses “manner” and “manor”. I always like that.
I think, after just a few seconds, it would be a lot easier to just rig a cellphone with an impact sensor and app. If it gets dropped, it chirps a few seconds until picked up and deactivated, or phones in to Central. A whole bunch of dropped phones at once would indicate the Rapture.
Of course, good Christians wouldn’t be carrying cellphones. (I say the Rapture happened a long time back, taking a few Anvilanian farmers and the Sasquatchii. We remnants are living the Tribulations.)
Besides his amazing Rapture detection invention, he has also figured out how to stop rape. From his bio:
Okay, so far, so good…
Uh oh…
Rape is just about lust, huh (and totes not power or hate)? And we can stop lust (and thereby rape) if the womenfolk just stop being sexy and everybody follows holy law? What a novel idea that has never been tried anywhere else before!
It’s kinda like in Dragon Ball Z. In there, only plot-significant characters get to keep their body in the afterlife. Everyone else just ends up a blue-white blob of ectoplasm.
Time to parrrrrtyyyyyy!!!!! going to “heck” anyway, so might as well have fun till then; and it’s comin soon, so party up!!!
This inventor guy sure knows how to motivate the good christian behaviors, don’t he?
But what if the Rapture Detecting Switch ends up getting Raptured along with the person wearing it?
Is this the sort of thread where we link to the skit/movie scene/whatever of the inflatable dolls fooling onlookers into assuming the rapture is occurring?
I’d search for it myself but no.
Sven@23:
People are always saying that. I’m sure they (including you) sincerely believe it. I’m sure that the Marine Corps fosters that belief, explicitly and implicitly. But I know one counterexample (whence the belief, insofar as it incorporates a universal claim, is false), although I’m in no position to prove my case other than by appeal to my own memories: my father enlisted in the Marine Corps the day he graduated from high school in 1928; he was stationed (at various times) at the Naval War College, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, on board the old Rochester (“last of the coal-burners”), and in Nicaragua (during the Second Nicaraguan Campaign, when the USMC helped Somoza assassinate Sandino). He referred to himself as a “former Marine”, multiple times, in my presence (long after his years in the Marine Corps and, later, in the US Army during WWII). And, yes, his discharge was perfectly honorable. However he was not in the least sentimental about the military as an institution.
My next startup will license this patent-pending technology to answer the question “is rapture happening now or not?” Who’s with me?
Any discussion of the Rapture™ is prima facie evidence the participants have too much time on their hands.
Worldwide deaths each day: About 80,000 (about 16,000,000 per year). I’d say that was a pretty good “Rapture” (assuming they were ALL worthy Christians).
For his next big game-changing invention he’s working on a round object that rotates about a fixed central axis which can be used to move heavy or bulky objects around with minimal effort.
“Carson invented a deadman switch. Color me unimpressed.”
Since the switch is fitted to a dead person and it detects when they “disappear” (ignoring the obvious slow decay process), wouldn’t that make this an undeadman switch? Note that it would not be able to detect zombies, a vastly more likely scenario than the rapture.
Wouldn’t be easier to just upload the raptured minds into a virtual reality and leave the messy biological stuff behind?
God would be running a much more efficient operation if he had read a few science fiction novels before setting off.
…and will the raptured people be sent to Sheol, the old-testament analog to Hades? Neither a good or bad place, just a bleak storage place for secondhand souls. Hardly something to look forward to.
I blamed the dog for dragging away the body.
Again, my unfamiliarity with Rapture Theory may be leading me astray, but are “minds” even in the ontology of the kind of people who believe in The Rapture? (I mean, I know—or think I know, via The Annotated Alice—that Bishop Berkeley believed in, or at least wrote about, “the mind of God”; but I don’t think Rapture Theorists are very likely to approve of Berkeley if they’ve heard of him at all.) They presumably (as I understand non-Rapture-Theoretical Christian doctrine, which is not necessarily very deeply, particularly given my stringent requirements that a collection of propositions must satisfy before it can be rightly said to be “understandable” by me) do believe that (1) human beings have souls that are distinct from “the messy biological stuff”, (2) the ultimate fate of every “soul” is, in fact, to “leave” its associated “messy biological stuff” behind, and (3) at that point the disincarnated “soul” is effectively uploaded to one of two realities that, if not “virtual”, are in any case neither of them the “reality” of our common present experience. I’ve always assumed that the Rapture was somehow the prologue to the thousand-year tribulation of John’s revelations, and that Raptured Messy Biological Stuff is, just like pre-Raptured MBS or Left-Behinder MBS, only a temporary storage medium for the “soul”.
I may be overthinking this, of course…
So but for this switch, those of us left behind would not even notice or be sure?
Uh huh. Sounds like a quantum event, all right, and even better than I had hoped.
I always figured that it would be easier for God to just create a bunch of alleged souls for Heaven, from scratch, and not bother with actually reviving people. I mean, who is going to check on him, and how would word of the fraud get back to Earth?
Of course, when you go shopping for a quality Rapture Detector one needs to make sure it was constructed with quality True Christian Parts™. Too many of the competitors don’t check that the parts were donated by True Christian™ but actually only supplied by false christian, good in deed and sincerity but not true Holy Spirit. Cody Carson I’m sure checks his body parts for True Christian Goodness™ by … well, okay, I think I’ve found a flaw in his plan…
leerudolph:
Sure, they are. Dualists don’t have much use for an (ancient Greek) distinction between mind and soul. It’s a choice of language, and they’re just dualists, believing in material stuff and immaterial stuff (whatever you call it), not tripleists or monists or anything else. If there are any mental capacities left over after the soul does its job, which your body is responsible for, that is usually left totally unexamined or mysterious. (For example, reflexes might be assigned to the body, as opposed to the soul. But there’s no telling what they might say about various things, like perceptions, etc.)
Anyway, there is basically a “ghost” camp and a “zombie” camp, when it comes to the rapture or the afterlife generally. Some people think your soul will still exist, while others think your body is resurrected. There’s been no general agreement about that over the centuries, and of course they have no good way of settling it. I would guess that the “ghost” side is probably more popular, but it doesn’t really matter.
Yeah, you certainly don’t hear a lot about the Holy Zombie.
For those who are puzzling over the finer points of theology, here’s more than you wanted to know:
Standard Christian orthodoxy has AFAIK always been that when a Christian dies, their soul (or spirit) goes to Heaven and exists in a disembodied state until Christ returns to earth — which is to say, descends from Heaven in glory. He raises the dead, the bodies of whom are somehow reconstituted in a new “glorified” form. So Christian souls then get their bodies back, upgraded to v2.0, and live forever in that state.
What Pre-Tribulational Premillenial Dispensational (got that straight? It’ll be on the midterm) theology added c. 1900 is that, seven years before Christ’s final Return, all the Real True Christians are bodily assumed into Heaven (much as Elijah is depicted as being in the OT, and also Mary according to Catholic tradition). That’s the Rapture. They spend the next seven years hanging out in the heavenly equivalent of one of those corporate box suites at a major league stadium, watching the rest of us endure wars and natural disasters (the “Tribulation”). Which will sure teach us a lesson, won’t it? The 144000 someone mentioned upthread are Jews who convert to Christianity during this period and evangelize the world for Jesus.
Don’t ask me how I know all this; it’s too embarrassing.
Slacktivist has a good commentary on the Left Behind series that covers a lot of the Rapture beliefs and where they came from.
I’m a little disappointed that no one has noticed “The data would have a ten second recording window and would store information in a similar manor as the rapture video recorder. Experiments that could be monitored from this tomb lab are not limited to but include: sound, EKG, moisture, bone density, body weight, movement, radiation, infrared light, body heat, room temperature, air pressure, RF radiation, white noise, fast time video, radar, etc.”
‘Cause the EKG readings and body temperature readings of corpses are fascinatingly complicated.
@leerudolph:
OT:
Any citation of TAA automatically counts as a win, from my perspective anyway.
/OT
Eamon Knight @ 51
I am quoting from an article called How do I refute the Jehovah’s Witnesses?
Therefore, obviously, that number in the Bible has to be a metaphor, which the Jehovah’s Witnesses GOT COMPLETELY WRONG in 1878 and a bunch of times later on, too!
After that, the gloves come off in the article, and the infighting got nasty.
@55: I believe this is the article you’re referring to: http://www.catholic.com/quickquestions/how-do-i-refute-the-jehovahs-witness-claim-about-the-144000
That’s a Catholic apologetics site. The Rapture, Tribulation, in fact the entirety of the Dispensationalist fantasy is a Protestant fundamentalist invention (and not even universal among them).
How utterly fucking arrogant do you have to be to make a meme of your own quote?
Also, why is the Rapture Video Recorder™ in a manor? Is this guy rich?
“He raises the dead, the bodies of whom are somehow reconstituted in a new “glorified” form. ”
And this is why 3D printers are so useful.
— — — —
“So Christian souls then get their bodies back, upgraded to v2.0, and live forever in that state.”
God is spoofing Riverworld?
— — — —
“bodily assumed into Heaven (much as Elijah is depicted as being in the OT)”
As Ripley noted, you should always be careful about getting someone’ s body past quarantine.
In the end, God had to invent the Predators to work as pest exterminators. And all that acid blood played hell with the Silver City.
Some 50% of the resurrected are going to be children who died before the age of five. They will need a lot of parenting (and consueling) before they can be let go on their own. What if the rapture is a child-caretaker recruitment thing?
Or does heaven have several billion child nurse robots?
Wouldn’t resection of a dead body be better described as an autopsy? Surely an omniscient god would already know whether you’d been naughty or nice without inspecting your remains for sin…
Every time I see an empty shoe out in the street (and I seem to see them a lot) I think ‘Uh-Oh!! Bloody Rapture has started, again!”
richardelguru,
But in nine cases of ten, that is just the bodysnatchers from space (scary theremin background sound).