For only $40 a year, you can store the email addresses of all your heathen family members and friends, and they’ll receive messages and documents from you exactly six days after you’re taken up in the Rapture [1].
There are no real guidelines for what you should say to those who are Left Behind, but here at The Door we would advise against being excessively snarky. I know it’s tempting, but “nyah nyah nyah” is never attractive in a Christian, even a recently raptured one.
Would God Do That?
Everybody knows that something happened to the Philistines when they captured the Ark of the Covenant and placed it in the temple of their own god, Dagon.
Traditionally the affliction suffered by the Philistines is called hemorrhoids. Everywhere the Philistines took the Ark, in fact, the people would be stricken with ’opalim, which is translated in the King James as “emerods” and in more modern translations as “tumors.” It’s been assumed that the word denotes some kind of swelling, but that doesn’t explain why there was an injunction against ’opalim being pronounced aloud when the scriptures are read. Now archeologist Aren M. Maeir of Bar-Ilan University in Israel says he’s figured out what the word means. The Philistines, he says, were afflicted with erectile dysfunction. In a fascinating article [2] based on excavations at the Philistine cities of Ashkelon and Tell es-Safi, Maeir concludes that the curse on the Philistines “involved penises rather than hemorrhoids,” although he doesn’t go so far as to say definitely that they were given flaccid members. The meaning could also have been “penile pain.” Let’s ask Harrison Ford. Better yet, let’s ask his wife.
Go to the Light! No, Go Away from the Light!
Spirituality For Kids is the children’s auxiliary of the celebrity-ridden Kabbalah Center of Los Angeles [3], which now apparently has branches in New York and London--where did you expect? Lawrence, Kansas?--and some people are starting to get a little queasy about children’s spirituality classes taught by Donna Karan, Demi Moore and the Material Girl. Supposedly kids in the New York schools, for example, are taught how to identify the Good Guy voice inside them [4], and use that instead of the Opponent voice, which will lead them into error, crime and confusion. (This is elementary school we’re talking about. Good angel/bad angel--isn’t that, uh, Manichaean?) Once you’ve identified the Good Guy voice, you can go to the light, and then share the light. Isn’t this what happened in Poltergeist when the little girl got trapped in the demonic dimension? Just asking.
This Caliph Is a Pussycat
The Ahmadi Muslims, who believe among other things that Jesus survived the “attempted crucifixion” and is buried in Kashmir--hey, who has the movie rights for that?--just celebrated the 100th anniversary of the revival of the Caliphate [5], which is supposed to be the organization run by the guy who’s both the spiritual and temporal leader of all the Muslims in the world but, as it turned out, has just been the leader of the Ahmadi Muslims ever since the first one, in 1908, claimed to be the Messiah and then fell short on special effects. The Ahmadi Muslims [6] are kind of the Seventh-Day Adventists of Islam, prophesying about the end times and then dying and then prophesying some more. They think jihad means “freeing oneself of impurities,” so let’s give a big thumbs up to any denomination that rules out killing infidels.