On a scale of one to basketball: The rapture is here

On Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018 the Cleveland Browns won a football game. Given their recent record, recent drafts, recent front office moves, and recent malaise over Cleveland since the LeBron departure, it’s safe to say that a Browns victory is the literal least likely thing to possibly happen. Yet here we are a week later with a ‘1’ in their wins column.

Super weird that this happened. Tug of war team one is pulling really hard to the right.

J.R. Smith attended this game. You’ll never guess what happened next:

Shirtless J.R. has returned directly in response to the Browns victory. This is normal. In fact, one might say that the return of shirtless J.R. was inevitable.

This was it. Both the incredibly uncommon and the absolutely inexorable were occurring at the exact same place, at the exact same time, and in response to one another. The two extremes were intertwined like a dumb squirrel that didn’t look both ways and the wheel well of a truck. Unlike the scattershot plot points above, you-know-who knew precisely that this would be a time to launch the second coming.

So what happened? Look to the very end of this video:

After a few earlier lightning strikes, a bright white flash engulfs the entire field and the video cuts out suddenly.

Have you noticed how J.R. Smith hasn’t been heard from in days? He was smitten. Have you noticed that the Cleveland Browns haven’t played a game since that day? Because they were smitten. Did you notice that LeBron James, our closest thing to experiencing God on earth, knew to get out of that city in advance? He was spared of the smiting. It’s here, man. The end isn’t nigh, it’s now.

They said that the rapture was going to come when it was least expected. (And they did, by the way. They said that. I read it in the Bible. It’s a fun book. Great book. Extremely unnerving book. It’s worth reading if you have the time. Might be of interest now, frankly, though it’s a little bit late.) Those with a cursory knowledge of Catholicism thought might know the general “you do not know the day and the hour” stuff, but let’s not be vague here. Here’s one quote in particular to drive the point home:

“For this reason you also must be ready; for the Son of Man is coming at an hour when you do not think He will.”
– Matthew 24:44

And this hour has been warded off for quite some time by those you’d least expect to be doing it. Indeed, the people who go on public access TV and street corners proclaiming “the end is nigh!” are actually just delaying it. Sources tell me that god’s been ready to put an end to this whole mess since the mid-70’s, but people constantly being told to “look to the heavens” and “prepare thy soul,” means that at every given moment someone somewhere is expecting the second coming absolutely right then.

There hasn’t been a single reprieve in vigilance for decades, not a single gap, no matter how tiny, for the four horseman to sneak through. You think it’s exhausting to have someone constantly on vigil for the second coming? We have seven billion people to rotate in and out. God has been taking on the burden for his team all by himself this entire time. Say what you want, but it’s hard to be omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent when you haven’t had a nap in over 40 years.

With the proliferation of online doomsayers on YouTube and Facebook and things getting rapidly worse since Nov, 8, 2016, god needed to find another way in. The classic “wait until they let their guard down” approach wasn’t going to work. If anything, the number of those on guard was only going to increase over time.

So God decided to get into quantum dogmatics. He needed to find the theoretical moment when the rapture would be least expected on average, and attempt to strike then. Over about 19 months, he plotted out, person to person, individuals’ rapture anticipation at the given point in time. It looked something like this:

Now, that doesn’t look like much, but I didn’t label the axes and put it in a box in order to make it deliberately confusing. Let’s take another look with a bit more information.

What you’re seeing here is probably very much in line with what you’d expect. When the things going on around us are exceptionally weird, a default thought for many of us is “Yep. That’s a sign of the apocalypse.” On the complete opposite end is “Wow. Everything is so nice and predictable right now. How nice. Wait a second. This is the exact type of time when the bible said the apocalypse would be coming. That’s a sign of the apocalypse.”

In between these two extremes, the vigilance drops. In fact, you can plot a nice little bell curve on there, except it’s more like a basin than a bell in that case. But a basin curve isn’t a thing, so don’t call it that.

As we can see, the bottom of that parabola seems to be touching zero, but as we’re all still here, we can assume it never quite made it. That would have been the point that the rapture could have been slipped, but that absolute bottom was attained.

And it makes sense. The absolute bottom is the perfect middle ground between weird and normal. The thing is, it’s difficult to know when things are just so middling that it’s exceptionally middling. There’s no internal alarm that goes off within us like when things are at extremes, so the moments pass unnoticed.

This is where quantum dogmatics comes in. God shifted tactics. Instead of looking for the moment when things are most middling, he began looking for moments that contained both extremes. One would think the exceptionally weird and the exceptionally commonplace (to the point of inevitability) would even each other out. Both sides tugging equally hard on either end of the rope would keep the center stable.

I understand if you’re not convinced. After all, if this were happening wouldn’t we have experienced the effects ourselves? Or at least heard reports that it was happening?

Us kids these days are used to things happening in an instant, what with these smart phones and internets and nintendos. Well, the apocalypse was made to happen in less technological times. The rivers of blood and flying angels were only designed to outrun messengers on horseback. Depending on where you’re located in the world, the eternal night may not reach you for weeks or even months.

And to answer the second question, the apocalypse kicked off in Ohio. There is an extremely high probability that the plagues, and trumpets, and unending agony were largely indistinguishable what life in Ohio has always been like. In all likelihood, Ohioans didn’t notice that anything had changed.

But hey. If you don’t believe me, you don’t believe me. You do you while you can still be done. I for one am making peace with the world around me checking things off my bucket list. I went to Taco Bell twice yesterday. I wouldn’t recommend it.