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When the EU started, it was a fanciful idea of a trading block. Then it progressed to an actual community, and now it is almost like the United States of Europe. Where can it go from here other than having a president? At that point, that's where the Antichrist comes in. He could be the first president. The Bible says he is elected by ten kings of that revived Roman Empire.

If you look at some of our previous indicators, we were down as low as 57 in 1993. Since then, we have not been lower than 158 in 2000. I believe it will stay at this level. I don't think Europe will disband. I don't think the now commonplace ability to create mark of the beast technology will uninvent itself. We won't get low again. There's too many indicators that are irreversible.

But what does it mean that it is so high? Are we closer to the end times?

The Rapture itself is an unknown event, so it doesn't matter how high the index gets. The Rapture could happen when it is at 120. Instead, the index is more of a speedometer than it is an indicator. This is just how fast we are getting there. I view it as a ship getting close to an iceberg in a fog. It doesn't matter how fast you are going when you hit it, but this is a way to be aware that it is approaching.

Where does the index tell us we are right now?

We are entering in the time of "think not." If you compare the reactions after 9/11 to the ones after Pearl Harbor, there's a big difference. The reaction in 1941 was very profound on society. 9/11, on the other hand, has lost a lot of its impact.

Recently North Korea talked about nuking America, and they're getting the capability to actually attack us, but yet we have no reaction whatsoever. Maybe we've become desensitized to these events. The Bible says more time than any, the end times, will be denoted by a time that you think not. That is probably one of the most significant indicators of the end times, and we may be seeing the start of it. [According to the index], we are certainly in a state of flux, where we've broken out of a period of stability and are heading on a progression.

How did the Rapture Index begin?

It started with my observations of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It has been a perfect indicator of how our economy is going since its inception in the 1800s. I thought we could apply this to the end times.

Really, it is a way to standardize observation of the end times rather than just guessing. Sometimes I think, "Man, a lot of those things predicted in the Bible are really happening." But once I factor together all the various components, I see that the total occurrences are actually dropping.

It is natural to see one event, like the beginning of a war, and focus on it. But it may not be the trend if the other 44 categories are dropping. The index was a way to add a scientific approach to this. I wanted a standardized way of looking at all these different indicators. I defined 45 categories and rank them one to five based simply on whether they are increasing or decreasing.

The movement is based on whether they are rising or declining. Rather than assessing importance, we look at occurrences. Obviously, some indicators are more important than others. "Mark of the beast" would be more important than "wild weather." But I found when we made some of them worth more points, there was no real difference. The index worked well without giving them an added value.

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March (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47