There are several views on when the Rapture will happen relative to the events in the Book of Revelation:
Pretribulation
Midtribulation
Prewrath
Posttribulation

These are subsets of premillennialism, the view that Jesus Christ will rule the Earth for a thousand years after his Second Coming. But there are several views on when JC's Second Coming will happen relative to that happy period:
Premillennial -- JC will rule for 1000 years before he judges everybody
Postmillennial -- a True Xian commonwealth will be set up and it will exist for 1000 years before JC returns and judges everybody
Amillennial -- The "millennium" is really the existence of the Xian Church, without any hint as to when JC will return and judge everybody

And even such odd interpretations as
Preterism -- the events described in the Book of Revelation have already happened, with that book being a symbolic description of them

There's even a Wikipedia article on Summary of Christian eschatological differences.

I think those last three lines contain the real position of most believers, with very few taking the position that human psychology alone will protect them from the ravages of torture...

Restricting one's discussion to the latter extreme is like disputing the physical ascension of Jesus into heaven by showing how Newtonian mechanics demonstrate that human beings can't fly, and then tacking "maybe they believe something SUPERNATURAL happened..." onto the end.

That's a perfectly fair point, Eunomiac, and of course it's not an argument that I can disprove. Maybe Jesus will give his end-times followers supernatural power to withstand torture indefinitely. I'm not aware of any evidence of such a thing ever happening in human history, but I can't prove absolutely that it won't happen. (Although as an aside: Isn't this basically saying that God will permit his own followers to be tortured, but at the same time take away their ability to yield to their torturers' wishes so they have no way of stopping it? Yikes. I suppose that's consistent with the copious scriptural evidence that depicts the Christian deity as a sadist, but even so, that's disturbing.)

However, I don't think that's the scenario that end-times believers have in mind (if they've given any thought to it at all - after all, they don't expect to be here). As the quote at the beginning of my post shows, LaHaye and Jenkins seem to be under the impression that the ability to withstand torture if you really want to is a universal human capacity. And the Left Behind books never confront this problem in any serious way. From what I recall of them, the few believers who are captured are swiftly executed and are never really tortured at all.

If the rapture-believers face this problem directly and still believe that God will give his followers the magical ability to resist torture, then so be it. In that case, I'll direct them to the point raised in the last paragraph of my post: though believers may fantasize themselves to be exempt from the basic rules of human psychology, that fantasy has proved to be a delusion time and again. If the end-times world ever actually arrives - which, of course, it never will - and the Christians hope that this time a magical exception will finally be made for them, then they're welcome to that foolish hope. The more miracles they postulate for themselves, the further isolated their beliefs become from reality.

In terms of who's left on earth after the rapture, it's believed that these will be people who belatedly recognize Christ's divinity and pledge their lives to him too late to be raptured but not too late to resist the antiChrist and spread the gospel.

The 144,000 who are mentioned in Revelation as being "redeemed from the earth" after the tribulation are supposed to be people of Jewish descent who become Christians after witnessing the rapture and persevere through the tribulation to stand in glory with Jesus after the tribulation is over.

Okay, stupid question. And I have to say, highlighting that problem in factual, 'aside', fashion is a great way to make me want to scream and throw things at the walls.

On topic (ostensibly), I suspect LaHaye and Jenkins really just don't know what they're talking about -- but no doubt if they were challenged they'd give the supernatural explanation as a convenient excuse.

Actually you were nearly right in your first sentence. It is fiction, or perhaps fantasy, although the "science" bit is definitely missing.

One of the tenets of faith of Christian end-times believers is that, in the tribulation period after the rapture, the world will be taken over by a planetary government ultimately run by the Antichrist. True Christians will be a tiny, hounded minority in this totalitarian vision, forced to live underground and always on the run from the forces of evil, and those who are captured can expect torture and execution.

I thought that all True Christians were raptured into heaven at the time of the Rapture. If this is after the Rapture, what True Christians would be left on Earth to live underground, be on the run, be tortured, etc.? What am I missing?