In fact, in light of that, I’ll have to cut my 50% estimate in half to 25%, and I’ll add caveat 5) My preferred interpretation is wrong.

(Philip – I’d never heard your church’s interpretation before, and I’ve heard a few… what kind of church?)

Re: #1: No need to worry about the world going on forever. Either we’ll make it inhabitable, a collision with an asteroid will destroy it, or eventually the termination of the sun with a bang or a whimper will finish us off.

I grew up in the church, listened to Garner Ted Armstrong on the radio (taking seriously his derision of evolution by mocking the idea that ground squirrels could evolve into flying squirrels by jumping from trees until one sprouted wings and survived the fall), watched Billy Graham on TV (even met him), was saved and witnessed from the pulpit, and heard a great deal about the end times from my parents’ prayer groups.

If I recall the sequence of events correctly, the Jews return to Israel and build the new temple, the anti-christ appears and gathers an army, desecrates the temple and is defeated by the army of God. Then follows the first rapture of the 144,000 designated Jews. The great tribulation then occurs and lasts for several years followed by the resurrection of the dead believers, the second coming and the great rapture of believers. More follows.

This series of events always reassured me because I figured I had plenty of time to “get right with God” since I had a couple years after 144,000 Jews disappeared and the tribulations transpired. Even if the tribulations weren’t bad enough to be recognizable because of all the sinfulness that preceded it, I figured 144,000 Jews disappearing wasn’t going to be missed for long. (This is probably the root of my subsequent fall from grace when I went to college.)

It’s plausible that all these events preceding the second rapture could occur within 50 years but it seems improbable.

1) Just a failure of my imagination — I can’t imagine the world going on forever, especially with the drastic and accelerating pace of change. I just can’t see God waiting until humanity lives 99% of the time in a virtual world, for example.

2) I’d expect the rapture before any earthwide calamity, which I don’t know if we can avoid forever — nuclear war, 12-monkeys type biological warfare, etc.

3) Supposedly mankind will become more sinful towards the end — it’s kind of hard to judge if that’s happening now, so I won’t try. But I think medical technology presents the opportunity for a lot more kinds of sins (say, cloning yourself just to harvest organs — that might be wrong, I can’t even say for sure).

4) Most importantly, prophecy says that the end will come within the generation that sees the jews restored to Israel, as happened in 1948. There’s still enough ambiguity here that I’m not taking this event as 100% fulfilled, though.

Great idea. I’m going to put an ad on craigslist today offering to pay someone to care for my pet after the Rapture. I’ll report back on responses.

Did you borrow any logic from the classic Doomsday hypothesis?

Which is to say: no matter how funny the joke, I will take every opportunity to ruin it :-)

And, maybe most of those who are haven’t heard of this service, or have made their own private arrangements for their pets.

Maybe they’re using craigslist.