A Heathen's Guide to the Rapture

By Jim Gerard, Nation Books. Posted January 17, 2008.

This is an excerpt from Jim Gerard's book, Beam Me Up Jesus: A Heathen's Guide to the Rapture.

Pretend you're a Hollywood studio exec and you have a pitch meeting with a writer. He comes in and says: "O.K., let me start with a little back story. It's the twenty-first century, but still millions and millions of people believe in this invisible super-ghost who lives somewhere way, way up in space, see, and he created the entire universe and saw everything and knew everything that had ever happened or will happen -- like a super giant security camera in the sky. The people who believe in him think of him as a magic helper who protects and watches over them. It's as if Santa Claus worked for the NSA -- He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake and engaged in suspected terrorist activities, etc.

"Yet, even though this ghost has, like, all the super powers of all the superheroes rolled into one, plus other powers that no superhero has even conceived of, and he has hundreds of millions of followers, he is so insecure and possessive that he demands everyone on Earth follow him or else he condemns them to an eternity burning in a nonstop forty-hundred-alarm fire, boiling in lava-like shit and battery acid and other really fiery stuff and being constantly stabbed by devils with pitchforks. Also, two thousand years ago, he sent his only son back to Earth to redeem humanity from their wickedness by getting hung on a Cross and, you know, the whole Mel Gibson treatment.

"Now, here's where the story takes off: After two thousand years watching humanity slaughter each other and get really shit-faced and have wild orgies and just, like, slack off, except for a few people that invented stuff or tried to urge people to follow the super-ghost, the son plans to return to Earth from outer space. But before he does, he's going to beam up to heaven all those people who believed in him, levitate them right out of their clothes, wherever they are -- on an airplane, asleep, on the toilet, in the f-ing grave!

"Yeah, corpses and cadavers and ghouls blasting out of the ground! It's Saw Meets Night of the Living Dead with a touch of Superman. I mean, throngs of people filling the sky like locusts -- it's an air traffic controller's nightmare!

"Meanwhile, the people left behind are just freaking out -- I mean, imagine you're on this airplane going to France and suddenly the pilot just disappears! Whoa! Then you look outside and you see like hundreds of naked people whooshing up past you -- I mean, we'll make most of them really bodacious babes, and then throw in an old dude going 'Whoaaaa!' for laughs. And the plane just nosedives. Boom! Planes are crashing -- trains, boats, computers -- it's complete chaos. We see another plane and the pilot suddenly sees all these naked flying people coming right at him and he has to swerve to avoid them and plow! Right into the side of a mountain!

"Cut to a scene where this Mafia wiseguy is about to hit this guy when the guy just flies up into the sky, and the wiseguy is like 'Maron! What the hell?' and he crosses himself. Huge laugh. And families are broken up and companies have to close because, like the entire sales department just took off ... right through the AC vent!

"Anyway, nobody knows what the hell's going on! We show the news reports and CNN's blaming it on the Muslims and Fox News is blaming it on the liberals. We cut to the White House and the President is chewing out his Cabinet because, like, 'Is this some secret Pentagon weapon? Why wasn't I informed?' Cut to close-up of this pious secretary, and she says, 'Sir, it's the Rapture.' And then the President is like, 'What are we going to do about it?' and some other Cabinet guy goes, 'There's nothing we can do.' And as the Secret Service sweeps the President away to an undisclosed location, where they fill him in on what the Rapture is.

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Jim Gerard is the author of Beam Me Up Jesus: A Heathen's Guide to the Rapture.

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