E-mail for Those Left Behind

OK, you've got your spiritual ticket ready for the Rapture, when God calls all the believers directly up to Heaven, leaving the non-believers behind to endure sudden freeway pile-ups, airplane crashes, and interrupted Amway sales pitches. But what about your non-believing friends, or even family? The poor sods won't understand what's going on, because they don't believe any of this stuff is for real. And with no Christians left to explain it to them, they'll be damned!

Fortunately, there's Rapture Letters, a free service that promises to send a condescending lecture about the Bible to your faithless loved ones after you've been taken to paradise. Every Friday.

What I don't understand is how, exactly, this system is going to work. The operator of the site is presumably born-again, and will vanish along with all the other devout Christians. Does he have some kind of process running on this system which will detect a large-scale supernatural phenomenon, and act in response to that? I don't think that's scientifically possible.

Has he hired a non-believer to launch this apocalyptic spam manually? What if this person accepts Jesus in the meantime, or - in light of the overwhelming evidence he's just seen - converts right after the Rapture and vanishes himself before he can start the program? What if he just snorts "good riddance" and pulls the plug?

Or is it some kind of "dead man switch", requiring the operator to log in once a week to confirm that he hasn't been Enraptured? Well, what if he just... dies? And maybe his backup forgets to check in on time, because he's overcome with grief? Or what if the operator himself loses faith and gets Left Behind himself? Will he recognise what's happened and launch the deliveries, or will he remain in denial and keeping logging in and postponing them until the "real" Rapture?

For that matter, what if someone signs up to have a letter sent to someone on their behalf... but is still around after the Rapture? Is there a way to cancel the message if you no longer believe? After all, think of the embarassment if your boss receives one of these self-righteous messages on the Friday of the Rapture, and you're still around and have to go to work on Monday!

These are important questions, because this guy is promising to do something which could very well determine the fate of your loved ones' immortal souls! If he doesn't live up to what he says, you'll never get the chance to witness from the great beyond to your pagan aunt, agnostic son-in-law, or Mormon neighbor. You wouldn't buy a life insurance policy from just anybody without first knowing how they're going to pay your beneficiaries after you're gone. I'd need even more assurance for this eternal-life insurance scheme for my friends and family.

Of course you have to consider the possibility that your loved ones will be among the many who'll die as a direct result of the Rapture, and won't even get this second chance. What if the non-believer uses a Christian-operated ISP which crashes from lack of monitoring after the Rapture happens, and he never gets the message? Wouldn't that be ironic!

But hey, that's just God being God, so I guess there's nothing you can do about it. He never promised you a chance to do this. In fact, the whole instantaneous-disappearance-without-warning aspect of the Rapture suggests that he really doesn't want you to be able to tell those left behind what's going on. Can you get left out of the Rapture for trying to subvert God's will this way? That'd really suck.

Ultimately, it's a free service, so you can't really expect any kind of guarantees. The operator of it does accept donations however, to help fund the collection of e-mail addresses for later e-witnessing. It'd be a damn shame if the mass mailings didn't happen because they ran out of money to keep the mail server online. The legal bills for violating anti-spam laws will be a major burden on the outfit after it actually goes into action. (This doesn't qualify as "opting in".) So I'm ready to send them a big check. But only if they promise not to cash it until after the Rapture.