Rapture Ready is an Evangelical Christian website, originally a Usenet forum, founded by Todd Strandberg[1] in 1987, that promotes the belief that the rapture will occur in the near future, with true Christians being taken up to Heaven.[2] The site tracks the real-world occurrence of events that Strandberg believes are prophesied in the Bible,[3] and uses these to calculate what Strandberg sees as the approach of the rapture.[4]
Originally, Rapture Ready (then called "Rapture Index") consisted of threads in Usenet newsgroups such as alt.bible.prophecy and alt.christnet.second-coming.real-soon-now. In 1995, Rapture Index became a website. In 1997, it was renamed "Rapture Ready".[5]
On Nov. 5, Todd Strandberg was at his desk, fielding E-mails from around the world. As the editor and founder of RaptureReady.com, his job is to track current events and link them to biblical prophecy in hopes of maintaining his status as "the eBay of prophecy," the best source online for predictions and calculations concerning the end of the world.
One of the clearest examples of this can be found in a popular, fundamentalist, evangelical Web site known as Rapture Ready
Rapture Ready, a Web site that tracks current events and compares them with biblical prophecies to calculate the proximity of the rapture.
That is how Todd Strandberg reads his paper. ... he's the webmaster at raptureready.com and the inventor of the Rapture Index, which ... tracks prophecies: earthquakes, floods, plagues, crime, false prophets and economic measurements like unemployment that add to instability and civil unrest, thereby easing the way for the Antichrist. In other words, how close are we to the end of the world?
Mr Strandberg began the Rapture Index in the 1980s as an attempt to standardise signs that the end-time was a-coming. In 1997, he renamed his site Rapture Ready, but it still features the Rapture Index, adjusted weekly.