VUL's...are they still bad?

I have been told that now is the best time to purchase a VUL because interest rates are so low and the market has no where to go but up, hopefully. Is this true?

personally, i think "bad" is relative and perhaps asking whether VULs are "appropriate" or not is a better way to put it. semantics aside, the goal of investing in the VUL to me is the more important issue. Even though VUL is a form of permanent insurance, it is different from par Whole Life (WL) in several ways:
1) the premium for Cost of Insurance (COI) increases as one gets older in VUL whereas the COI for WL is spread out evenly over the life of the policy
2) the VUL is more susceptible to market gains/losses than WL (which guarantees growth, albeit more slowly) thus during a huge market downturn, one may have to put in more premium to keep the policy in effect.

from a pure investment standpoint, investing in taxable equities (Mutual Funds/index funds) would make just as much sense from your reasoning (cf "because interest rates are so low and the market has no where to go but up"). If you have insurance need, Term or WL, can accomodate this.
Of course, this all assumes you are maxing out all tax-advantaged accounts (401ks, IRAs). a pervasive theme on this forum has been the appropriate "type" of VUL investor is someone who has high-income (or high-dispensible income, anyway), is willing to overfund the VUL close to the MEC level for a set amount of time, has maxed out other tax-advantaged accounts, and has a permanent insurance need. Otherwise, there are probably less expensive (both in financial terms and opportunity cost terms) alternatives.