Good luck finding enough of a Congress to get bills through. 
Why don’t we just stick with the OP for now, o.k.?
Is this so confusing that a title change is necessary? I thought the OP would be sufficient enough explanation, but some here seem to be confused as to what the topic is: What happens if all who claim to be of a certain religion(in this case, Christianity), no matter how sincere their claim is, disappear suddenly from the face of the Earth, and we never find out what happened to them. If you want to talk about who might or might not deserve to be “Raptured”, Great Debates is probably the place to go.
“Western” society collapses. If all you have to do is profess a religion, regardless of observance or sincerity, you’re going to suck up most folks. Even the liberal atheist heathen heartland of the SF Bay Area is going to take a heavy hit. Even more liberal, secular western and northern Europe will also be devastated. Nominal membership in the UK Church of England is something like 25 million in England and Wales alone. If nominal is enough to do it, Britain is screwed. Ditto everywhere else - 2/3 of Swedes are nominal members of the Church of Sweden. You simply can’t function as a nation with those sort of losses.
Worse than that the bulk of the “survivors” will be urbanites lacking in the necessary skills to keep things like agriculture humming along in any mass way capable of sustaining said cities. Countries will probably balkanize quickly and yeah, atheists will become scarce ( weird nutso cults probably won’t, though ).
Will someone rush in to fill the gaps before everything collapses? Not easily. And not likely - I’d predict even most Asian nations are going to huddle up protectively in shock. By the time they react, the former Christian west will be in the toilet.
Speaking pseudo-seriously, I’d expect the souls to be Raptured will be those who are truly devout, those share a “personal relationship with Christ” but do NOT go around trying to manipulate policy based on their manufactured belief system and their petty egos. There are hundreds of millions of people who identify as Christian but who keep it to themselves, visit church on Sunday and perhaps pray before bedtime; many of them are liberal or centrist, or even conservative, but don’t necessarily profess political beliefs beyond checking the Dem/Rep box on the voter registration form.
Therefore, the souls left behind (if they even have souls) are the Santorums, the Cheneys, the Westboro Baptist People, all those congressman who passed anti-gay legislation before being caught in public restrooms with male hookers, and so on and so forth – all the hypocritical, power-hungry jerks who are already in positions of authority and social influence. And now they can fill the empty seats with other hypocritical, power-hungry jerks.
Oh, and all the atheists & non-Christians will be stuck here too, with them. Aaaaaiiiiiggghhhh!!!
Since when does an OP like this ever stay on topic??
Changed the title as you asked.
What is this ‘just a few years ago’ to which you refer?
Also, the vast majority of Christians have no truck with this rapture crap.
If more than 2 billion out of the 7 billion people suddenly disappear, I think the resultant chaos would be fairly unpredictable, to say the least.
I predict that Kirk Cameron would become even more insufferable. If you can imagine that.
Kirk would be gone.
Thank you.
Then by your own definition this thread has nothing to do with the Rapture, does it? I’m asking that you stop this off-topic hijack, please.
It would be terribly confusing and things would be crazy. I don’t know enough about what the bible claims the rapture would look like and you can bet I’d be reading up on it. But if what happened differs too much from what the bible claims will happen, I’ll be even more perplexed.
It would be a good day to kill somebody you want dead.
I find the premise of the OP fascinating, but I am bothered by the idea that possibly billions of people who were not Christian but professed to be for expediency would also disappear. That’s a lot of good people being punished for something they didn’t actually believe.
Wouldn’t extreme land grabs by the Old world be the obvious outcome. With the majority of Asian countries and sizable amounts of African countries being untouched by this ‘rapture’ type event, the governments of said countries would probably send forces to Europe and the Americas to stake their claims on the remaining resources and land. If many countries do as I predict then wars will inevitably be started with the Asian counties pushing the African countries out and India, China and Japan going at it.
I’d help myself to some pretty stained glass windows. I know just the place for them.
I’m sorry, but I couldn’t see another way of putting it that wouldn’t turn this into a “Who are the real Christians?” Great Debate thread…and even then, some tried to turn it into one.
If all professed Christians disappeared overnight, then those atheists who claim that the existence of God is infinitely unlikely would of course see no reason to change their philosophical position - since, for instance, the possibility that the disappearance was engineered by a race of super-advanced aliens who had successfully identified all professed Christians and wanted them removed for reasons presently unknown would have to be infinitely higher.
You are channeling me (or vice versa). I was going to ask whether anyone would notice if all the people who actually practice Christianity were to disappear.