It's amazing how quickly a person's tune can change when you ask him to back his beliefs with money. I used to know a guy who followed some guru who made yearly predictions about international affairs and natural disasters and such using some sort of Nostradamus-inspired system of prophecy. This guy claimed that the guru was right "100% of the time" and that I should be taking these prophecies very seriously. So I started recommending ways that he could profit from this information. For example, if the guru predicted that the ice caps would melt and northern Canada would become habitable again, I'd suggest the obvious: buy a big tract of land up there. And suddenly his cast-iron certainty about the future would disappear.

When asked to really consider how a person could take advantage of these incredibly vague and open-ended prophecies (is there any other kind?) beforehand -- rather than looking back at them through the lens of hindsight -- he found that he didn't know what to do about the future any more than I did, especially financially. He didn't bring this guru up as often after that.

This coming from a Christian who thinks there wont a be a 'rapture' and most of hte so-called 'end of times' stuff has already happened.

Every day, investors purchase bonds in the secondary market because they believe the cash is worth less than the bond. These bonds are sold to them by people who believe the bond is worth less than the cash. Every single trade is done by people who believe they are making a better choice than the other guy.

A different proposition might be to propose a loan that doesn't begin to pay interest until after the expected rapture date and is invalid in the case of rapture.
Less complex, easier to understand, a steady income stream, and you can collect the collateral in case of default.

I don't consider "market forces" to really be capable of doing much besides saying what people want to buy. They clearly aren't powerful enough to weed out all the quack medicine around, and instead feed into it. I realize this was more of a joke than anything, but I'm pretty sure at the end of these rapture bond periods, you'd end up with a massive loss and debtors unable to pay you back.

This on top of the fact that with most Christians, they take up a "none shall know the day nor the hour of my coming" position. Sure many sects in the past didn't, but it's memetic survival of the fittest. Ideas that predict events in the unspecified "future" survive and proliferate far longer than ideas which predict events at specific dates, excepting those ideas that are actually correct in their predictions, such as relativity predicting the courses of the planets around the sun for centuries from now.

At any rate, I don't think it's wise to muck around in "sure thing" bets like these. Too much can go wrong.

This also goes for if you loaned to mega churches. Who's to say which ones will actually still be around in 10, 20, 50 year's time? That's a huge chunk of time for people to get arrested for corruption charges or for someone to say something that causes the followers to jump to another mega church. These aren't invincible institutions, they're castles built on sand.

It really seems like an invitation to disaster, and it's certainly very plausible considering how the housing market is doing lately.

As Random Guy pointed out, it is a scheme to swindle people based on their irrational beliefs...

So make the scheme available only to the evangelical churches rather than their individual members. Admittedly those institutions make their money by conning the congregation in the first place, but perhaps when they see their 10% going to pay off the bond interest they'll get wise.

The OP a clever challenge, and I'm pleased that you're calling the dispensationalist's bluff. Being amillenial, however, it doesn't appeal that much to me.

Nevertheless, I have been trying to think of a suitable wager we could engage in, based on the "facts of the world" and the future. This is the best I have been able to come up with, if such a scheme is possible:

You and I could both invest a very reasonable amount in some sort of secure, interest bearing trust fund that remains locked for, say, five centuries. After such a long time, the fund should be considerable. I'm no economist or financial wizard, but perhaps a financial professional and a lawyer could set it up properly.

Anyway, we could create the trust fund with specific instructions that at the end of the 5 centuries, this considerable sum would be payable to either an atheist group or a Christian group pursuant to a set of real-world criteria. For instance, if Christianity has maintained its current prominence after the time limit, the money would go to the Christian church. If, as you seem to predict, freethought has won the day and the Christian church has receded into the dustbin of history, the money would go to an atheist concern. Obviously, the terms would need to be tightened, but you get the idea.

We may or may not ever know the outcome, but it would be interesting for our spiritual and freethought descendants, and we would be great benefactors for someone, regardless.

Most likely your notion of what constitutes a con is more accurate than mine. I used that term merely in context of taking unfair advantage, since reason and evidence so clearly show their ideas to have no factual basis. There is no fraud in the casino taking the sucker's money, but to me this, while also quite open and legal, is still taking an unfair advantage, and thus is a bit of a con.

So it does seem to me more ethical to refrain from taking unfair advantage, while I can very much sympathize with the desire to have a real 'put your money where your mouth is' way of interacting, since we repeatedly experience that mere logical argumentation never phases faith.