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The Rapture Fall 2009?

Submitter’s comments: This is an unintentionally hilarious site because… first of all, the guy must have some incredibly convoluted arithmetic. If the Rapture happens in the Fall of 2009, one would naturally think the ending of the 7-year tribulation period will be at the end of 2016, not 2015 as the site says.

Second, because he keeps changing his mind about the date. PZ Myers over at Pharyngula has lampooned this page at least twice because the predicted Rapture date keeps changing — always to a date just a few weeks in the future. (On the plus side, this DOES force the site owner to keep the site up to date!)

And third, well, this is just such a great example of the Over-The-Top school of web design. Animated horizontal dividers (the one at the top is positively twitchy). Ghastly color scheme (aqua, red, yellow, blue, and…pink?) Type styles, colors,and background changes. (What is it about all the red, yellow and blue lettering on sites like this?) Video links up the wazoo. (To his credit, they don’t all automatically load and start playing when you hit the page.) The mushroom cloud is just the finishing touch.

I particularly liked the quote: “Global food supply is near the breaking point and out the lowest level in 30 years! The world demand for food now out strips what the farmers can grow! To make matters worse, the Honeybees are dying off![1]”

Best of all, any problems with the web site are clearly and demonstrably *NOT HIS FAULT.* Proof? This testimonial: “First, I want to say how much I have valued your web site during this past year! With so many web sites out there who do not believe in a pre-tribulation rapture, your site is like a cool oasis in a dry desert!…You can always tell if a site is effective if the enemy tries to squash the effectiveness of the work. In other words, if souls are being saved, and people are being drawn closer to the Lord, Satan tries to nullify the effectiveness.”

[1] This is, of course, not actually funny, because it’s true that agriculture depends a lot on honeybees. But the phrasing makes it sound like the ULTIMATE catastrophe….

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Speaking of timing (and timing is everything), I just updated the Over-the-top Web Sites page. I most certainly will have to add this page and, I suspect, we have another contender for Worst Sites of 2009. In fact, we have so many OTT web sites, I might have to give them their own category.

My favorite quote has to be “You can always tell if a site is effective if the enemy tries to squash the effectiveness of the work.” Using the same wonderful “logic,” I guess this must mean that Amazon.com, Microsoft.com, macys.com, pbs.org, and 85% of the web aren’t effective because “the enemy” isn’t trying to squash these sites.

It’s 3.6Mb of downloadable crap. I tried for an hour to try to re-create this masterpiece so I could have a WPTS Rapture page and I couldn’t! I couldn’t figure out how to get CSS to limit the background color to just the text.

The Rapture Fall 2009?