I'd seen this before, but it still blows me away. Then again, I find it hard to wrap my head around the unbelievable arrogance of people who feel they'll be saved and others won't. How's that for a god of infinite compassion? Nyeh, I do hope it isn't a scam, because no matter how much I might disagree with it, I don't like seeing the stupid have advantage taken of them. And, to be honest, I don't believe it is, but I do believe it's likely to be trivially hackable.

I really like "There won't be any bodies, so probate court will take 7 years to clear your assets to your next of Kin". They've really thought about this :)

And they say they'll decrease subscription when more people join, which is good (if true).

And a reputable electronic safe-deposit box would actually be useful for many things.

However, I notice:

(a) There's no indication of when the vaults open. Presumably when the maintainers decide there's a rapture? But what if there's doubt? Should it happen if just you disappear? What if there's a rapture but you don't go? What if there's a rapture, but aliens claim they did it?

(b) So... this site, run by Christians, is going to send all the important emails after the rapture. Who, exactly, is going to send them? Are the maintainers going to regularly rape bunnies in order to make sure they're not raptured? Or just hire some guys who do that sort of thing anyway? They going to trust these lapinophile hirelings with the the immortal souls of friends of the best Christians?

(c) There's no personal contact info. This isn't run by Pete, Goodchristian, just by a PO box.

(d) $40/year? OK, that's not that much, but it's not as if they have to do anything for it. They just have to own a hard disk with a bunch of data on. They store up to 500MB, for a one-off value of about 5p. And there's a one off transfer of up to 500MB, for a bandwidth cost of maybe the same amount? So what's the other £19.90 per year for?

ETA: Oh, I see they do have a plan, there's a dead man's switch type arrangement. That does make sense. It doesn't seem especially well thought out -- what if something goes wrong? But does make sense. And would be a reason for an ongoing salary.

Of course, there's absolutely no way to distinguish this service from /dev/nul unless the rapture occurs, when it may not matter.

Ah, well.

As natural20 mentions, there's a certain arrogance about certain people, that they can't even consider the possibility that they might not be raptured away to live with Jebus. This is actually what gets my (sacrificial?) goat. I don't mind religious people, the people I know are perfectly decent folk. It's these weirdo extremist nutters that get me. The arrogant, stupid ones. That said, I think I understand their mindset a bit more after reading the excerpt from "The Great Derangement" here. I'm really quite glad this sort of church isn't very common, or representative.



I quite liked a suggestion for the site that went as follows: Get lots of people to subscribe to this service, and then disappear. After 6 days, start all the emails going. Obviously the people running the _site_ got raptured, but _YOU_, dear paying subscriber, didn't! Particularly mean, but amusing.




Edited at 2008-05-30 01:23 pm (UTC)

holy cow, that's like darwinism for the modern age. only their stupidity won't get them dead, per se.