In Case of Rapture, This Web Site Will Be Unmanned

Recently I came across a site called Rapture Letters, which has a unique mission in the world. I'll let them explain it:

The rapture: When all the believers in Jesus Christ, who have been born again, are taken up to heaven.

After the rapture, there will be a lot of speculation as to why millions of people have just disappeared. Unfortunately, after the rapture, only non believers will be left to come up with answers. You probably have family and friends that you have witnessed to and they just won't listen. After the rapture they probably will, but who will tell them?

We have written a computer program to do just that. It will send an Electronic Message (e-mail) to whomever you want after the rapture has taken place, and you and I have been taken to heaven.

If you wish to do something now that will help your unbelieving friends and family after the rapture, you need to add those persons email address to our database. Their names will be stored indefinitely and a letter will be sent out to each of them on the first Friday after the rapture. Then they will receive another letter every friday after that.

This site is a deeply original fusion of 20th century technology and 19th century mysticism, which by itself earns my deep respect. Personally, I find this whole school of cosmology silly, but you know, you'll never catch me telling people what they ought to believe. (I leave that to the evangelicals.)

Believers in the Rapture imagine that at the moment the blessed event occurs, no matter where they are, no matter what they are doing, their souls will be magically transported away from their bodies and spirited into heaven. Popular depictions of the event show the spirits of the saved joyously flying through the air to meet God. Unfortunately for the people who are left behind, there's no telling what the "saved" might be doing at that precise instant. Have you seen those bumper stickers which read, "In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned"? There's an entire school of evangelical writing devoted, in part, to gleefully depicting the immediate impact of the Rapture. Tim LaHaye, in particular, has made a fortune writing in this vein. It's not hard to see that it could be a disaster for those who aren't "saved", and for this reason we occasionally come across Internet rumors like this one, which posits that airlines are in the practice of pairing their Christian pilots with non-Christians just so that in case of the Rapture, there will be someone still piloting the plane.

By the way, the Rapture is not specifically mentioned anywhere in the Bible -- it's an interpretation that had its visions-induced origin in the 1830s.

Digressive Dialogue

Um, don't people who believe in the Rapture believe that the Bible is the literal word of God?

Why, yes, they do, Bobby.

Then, um, what are they doing interpreting it?

They're doing the same thing everyone else does with it.

But when we interpret it in a different way from them, they say we're going to hell for that.

Why, yes, they do, Bobby.

Are they right about that?

I don't really know, but probably not.

However, I'm game to entertain the possibility of a Rapture, and being technically inclined, my mind naturally turned to the technical question: Just how does the Rapture Letters server detect the fact that the Rapture has occurred? What sort of program could you write, what kind of circuit could you build?

The only workable solution, it seems to me, is a "deadman's switch", run by a system operator who was certain to be taken in the Rapture. Every day the certainly-saved sysadmin would advance a timer on the computer system. Perhaps the timer is set to a time 72 hours ahead; perhaps two weeks. However far ahead it's set, the system will detect when the timer runs out, implying that the sysadmin is no longer on Earth, and triggering the release of the Rapture letter to the "lost". In fact, I emailed raptureletters.com and received confirmation that this is exactly what they do, and the site implies that the timeout value is about a week. Aside from the irony of the name ("deadman's switch", heh) this is a pretty good system, but I have to wonder: how does the sysadmin know he or she is "saved"? The obliging folks at raptureletters.com answered that question as well, though I feel the answer was a bit terse: "I am the sysadmin and I am saved,"

Before I got that answer, I imagined a couple of ways around the problem. If there are several sysadmins, and all of them are required to advance the timer, then there is a relatively high probability that the event will be correctly detected. Let's say each sysadmin has a 90% chance of being taken; therefore if you have two sysadmins, there's a 99% chance the server will detect the Rapture, and if you have three sysadmins, there's a 99.9% chance. As a backup, the sysadmins surely know someone who would be taken (you'd think, wouldn't you?), and they could initiate the email flood manually. (But do they pretend they're not around to answer return emails? And what do they tell their unbelieving friends? "The Rapture's occurred, just like I told you it would, and no, I wasn't taken"?)

When I got the answer back from the sysadmin, though -- "I am the sysadmin and I am saved," I realized it was a waste of time to imagine solutions to this interesting technical question. Rational solutions to real problems require uncertainty to be taken into account, and web sites look like they'd need rational people running them. After all, they run on rules. But we make the assumptions that undergird those rules and they don't need to be rational. The certainty displayed by the Rapture Letters sysadmin, the irrational certainty, is admirable in its own way. He or she is saved, that's the end of the story. There's no need to consider alternatives, and no requirement to wonder about possible failure modes. Leaving aside yet another question -- isn't it God's decision whether you're actually saved? -- it must be very comforting to be that certain that you, too, will be taken on that glorious day, and you will be vindicated to everyone who didn't believe as you do ("they just won't listen"). Too bad I can't see my way into being that certain without being dishonest with myself in a really fundamental way.

I do have one final question for the sysadmin of Rapture Letters. When their server sends out thousands, possibly millions of identical emails, how do they intend to keep them from being filtered out as spam?

PS. I signed up to get an email, just so I'll be sure I don't miss it when it happens.
PPS. I know. I'm going to Hell.