Not entirely
convinced he isn’t a poe, but Cody Carson at least appears to be a crackpot
fundie inventor (a “philosopher, inventor, filmmaker, actor, author, former
US marine”) who believes i) that the Rapture is imminent, and ii) that a device of his
invention is able to detect when Christians disappear from Earth – it’s a Rapture
Alarm, in his own terminology. Well, it’s not much of an invention;
it is a … switch that triggers when something physical is removed, which is
something that probably hasn’t been patentable since shovels. And since
attaching a switch to living people is sort of pointless and silly – you
wouldn’t really need a switch attached to your body to tell close-by audiences
that your body suddenly vanished in thin air – Carson wants to attach it to …
dead people, whose bodies apparently also vanish. Then he talks about building
tombs equipped as small labs to record “quantum changes that would occur during the
resection and vanishing of a body” to give us a “controlled lab setting”, because science. There
are some questions here one might feel that Carson has left unasked, including
(but not limited to) “why?” (After all, marketing
the device would need to overcome the obvious obstacle that the people
who believe in the Rapture are exactly the ones who expect to vanish in
the Rapture themselves.)
But in
fact, he has a … point, sort of. Carson’s invention was presented back
in 2009, and “if the rapture is timed with the chain of natural disasters
that have already been predicted by scientists for the 2010–2012 time frame [yeah, that use of the word
‘scientists’ explains a bit here], the fulfillment of the long predicted
biblical prophesy could be partially overlooked because of the heavy death toll
and mass destruction that would follow in the wake of multiple global disasters.” If that doesn’t sufficiently
answer all your obvious questions, you aren’t in the target audience.
Carson’s
online presence seems to have faded after 2012, at which point he was mostly
sharing wisdom attained through his work as a “philosopher”. We don’t
feel the need to share said wisdom here, though.
Diagnosis:
Yeah, whatever. We’ll leave him alone from now on. Probably harmless.
Hat-tip:
Pharyngula