Posthuman Blues

The grotesque irony about the imminent Fundamentalist "Rapture" ("imminent" now for a couple thousand years) is that aficianados believe that it's an entirely physical event.

For the uninitiated: The "Rapture" is when Jesus appears and the bodies of righteous Christians are physically levitated into the sky, sans clothing -- a distinctly stomach-turning notion in itself. For believers, ascending into the sky is synonymous with ascending into heaven. So I can't help but wonder what would be in store for these poor bastards if the Rapture actually occurred as scripted.

Firstly, you can only "ascend" so far. Then the air starts getting really thin. Before you know it you're in outer space, and by then you're quite dead. Does one's corpse continue to "ascend" once beyond Earth's atmosphere? I mean, how far does it need to travel to reach the "kingdom of heaven"?

Not that it matters -- by this point, Fundamentalists will be nastily suffocated and disfigured from exposure to hard vacuum. And in any case, there's no "up" or "down" in space. So, based on my careful study of gospel tracts and the rantings of sidewalk preachers, I've deduced that the naked, bloated bodies of True Believers will begin a short-lived orbit around the planet.

Why "short-lived"? Because I figure that once Jesus (who, after all, initiated this whole misguided pageant) realizes that his faithful are messily dying instead of rejoicing in heaven, will abort the spectacle ASAP. So, just like the space-junk they are, the millions of righteous cadavers in low Earth orbit will plunge back into Earth's atmospheric envelope within a matter of hours, illuminating the sky as they burst into flame.

(Meanwhile, those of us "left behind" get to watch.)