This Saturday's Rapture: What You Need To Know

The world is ending this weekend ...or is it? Because of some billboards put up by crazy fundamentalist doomsayers, an "Internet Meme" has spread around the Internet about an alleged apocalyptic event here on Earth this Saturday, May 21. We've prepared an easy "clip 'n save" listicle so that you know what to do when your iPhone quits working and people are suddenly acting weirder than usual. Who put the "rape" in "rapture," anyway? Let's find out!

• While there's no mention of any "rapture" in theentire Bible, that hasn't stopped American Christians from completely making up one of the tenets of their homespun religion.

• So where did they get this from? Just a random line in Thessalonians 1 about dead people plucked from their graves, which is basically an echo of that nonsense in Matthew 27: 53 (and nowhere else in the Gospels) about corpses bursting out of their graves and then haunting Jerusalem for a few hours while Jesus was busting out ofHistomb.

• The English language nounrapturecomes from the Latin verb rapiōand the Koine Greek ἁρπάζω, which means "snatch." But notthatkind of snatch. Our version actually comes from the Latiinrapere-- which means "rape." So the rapture literally means "a bizarre fantasy about being raped by Jesus, in the upper atmosphere."

•  Many pranksters plan to leave sets of shoes and clothes here and there on Saturday afternoon, so that fundamentalist Christians might see these abandoned garments and think therealChristians got sucked up to meet the Lord already. This is a very mean prank. Plus, would American Jesus actually allownaked peopleinto His Kingdom? American Jesus is pretty uptight!

• Remember the whole Y2K thing? We had this scheme, back in 1999, involving the hijacking of a couple of Staten Island Ferry boats and then putting a thousand-foot-tall inflatable Jesus aboard (one giant foot on each boat) and then we were somehow going to make this thing circle New York City with Wagner blasting from the speakers in Christ's nostrils, all during the Times Square new year's celebration, and then people watching the teevee throughout the country would freak out and jump from their first-floor windows, possibly spraining their ankles. Only the drunks out having fun and not watching television would be spared! And then 9/11 happened about a year and a half later and we figured New York had suffered enough, plus Y2K was long in the past by that time.

• There arethousandsof newspaper articles and "lame stream media" reports on this pretend non-event.

• Meanwhile, unemployment is pushing 10% officially and 25% in the real world, the residential real estate market continues to collapse, Greece is going to default and destroy the Euro currency, the CIA is investigating some kind of pretend Web money, and the nuclear plant in Japan actually suffered a complete, ongoing "China Syndrome" meltdown.

• Therealrapture is this: America is no longer a Christian nation. They are truly vanishing -- not by being snatched up by The Lord, but through the more common exits of death and disillusionment.

And now we do the Hip Hop Dance: