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(The Rapture) I must have blinked and missed it.
14 years ago
General
As I write this, it's a tad after 6:00 p.m. on a lovely Saturday afternoon. At present, there are no earthquakes tearing through the Earth's crust. No stinging locusts are picking at me or anyone else in my vicinity. There's not a risen corpse to be seen anywhere, and the air is filled with the sweet perfume of the evening's roses and the sound of chirping finches outside my window. No horn of Gabriel. No cosmic retribution. I find myself thinking, for an Apocalypse it's been a wonderfully nice, warm day.
Turns out the guy responsible for all the end-of-days hullaballoo is a local in my neck of the woods - one Mr. Harold Camping, president of Family Radio. He lives in San Francisco, which is not much of a drive from where I live. I'm almost tempted to go check on him, just to see how he's feeling. Come to think of it, how are all of his followers doing right now? The ones who believed him with all their hearts when he said that today was the last day of life as we know it?
Are they disappointed? Befuddled? Angry? Confused? Resigned? Deep down, are they a tad embarrassed that they stood on street corners for months, wearing sandwich board signs proclaiming that today, May 21, 2011 would absolutely and without question be the day of the Rapture? That today was the day when that tiny minority of saved folks would be whisked up to Heaven to spend an awesome eternity with God and Jesus while the rest of the human race (and, presumably, every other critter on Earth) would be tormented with plagues of locusts, earthquakes, volcanoes and overwhelming despair before God simply pulls the plug on the universe (October 21 of this year, apparently), causing it to blink out of existence forever?
I have to say, I'm rather glad it didn't happen, not least because it would have seriously put a crimp in my upcoming vacation plans. Thing is, I wouldn't really want to live in a universe ruled by that sort of God anyway. According to Mr. Camping's interpretation, God's end-game is ultimately a crap shoot, a form of theological Russian roulette wherein your status as "saved" or "damned" is all but beyond your control. You could be the most devout, kind, humble, church-going Christian in the whole world, but since there's only room for 3% of the world's population in the afterlife (that's only a couple hundred million, give or take), the odds are pretty good that you still wouldn't make the cut. It's most likely locusts and then oblivion for you.
That's right, oblivion. Not Hell, oh no. Mr. Camping is an annihilationist, meaning that the unsaved simply cease to exist after God's finished with them. No soul, no Purgatory, no damnation, no nothing. Which begs the question, why the months of torment, if God's simply going to wipe you out anyway? What, exactly, are all of the gnashings of teeth and howls of anguish and stings of locusts supposed to accomplish? Is God going to torture us just to make us extra, extra sorry that we weren't among the winners of his rigged cosmic lottery before he disappears us forever? Sorry, but if that's God's game plan then he's just being a jerk.
I do feel a bit bad for Mr. Camping and his followers. Not so much because they didn't get their way today, but because these are people who peer out at the world from between trembling, clenched fingers and see nothing worth saving. To them, this planet, indeed this entire universe, is just a doomed, meaningless way station on the road to somewhere better, somewhere that they can spend a blissful eternity in their own private "we told you so" club. And think about this... they spent $100 million dollars on banners, billboards, radio ads, pamphlets and signs just to get the word out. $100 million to basically tell the rest of the world "hey, great news! Me and mine are going up to Heaven! Sucks for you, what with all the locusts and disaster and the world ending. Guess you'll be sorry then, at least until you disappear forever." That's not just a sad, paranoid perspective, it's a colossal waste of resources. How many blankets could they have bought with that? How many bowls of soup, or shots of insulin, or water purifiers, or school books, or new trees, or antibiotics, or vials of morphine, or new shoes, or sandbags for flooding rivers could they have got?
I am not a religious person, but I have to believe that if there is a God, then maybe his plan is for us to use our time here on Earth making it a better place for ourselves and for everyone else who happens to live here, whether they're part of our little group or not.
Turns out the guy responsible for all the end-of-days hullaballoo is a local in my neck of the woods - one Mr. Harold Camping, president of Family Radio. He lives in San Francisco, which is not much of a drive from where I live. I'm almost tempted to go check on him, just to see how he's feeling. Come to think of it, how are all of his followers doing right now? The ones who believed him with all their hearts when he said that today was the last day of life as we know it?
Are they disappointed? Befuddled? Angry? Confused? Resigned? Deep down, are they a tad embarrassed that they stood on street corners for months, wearing sandwich board signs proclaiming that today, May 21, 2011 would absolutely and without question be the day of the Rapture? That today was the day when that tiny minority of saved folks would be whisked up to Heaven to spend an awesome eternity with God and Jesus while the rest of the human race (and, presumably, every other critter on Earth) would be tormented with plagues of locusts, earthquakes, volcanoes and overwhelming despair before God simply pulls the plug on the universe (October 21 of this year, apparently), causing it to blink out of existence forever?
I have to say, I'm rather glad it didn't happen, not least because it would have seriously put a crimp in my upcoming vacation plans. Thing is, I wouldn't really want to live in a universe ruled by that sort of God anyway. According to Mr. Camping's interpretation, God's end-game is ultimately a crap shoot, a form of theological Russian roulette wherein your status as "saved" or "damned" is all but beyond your control. You could be the most devout, kind, humble, church-going Christian in the whole world, but since there's only room for 3% of the world's population in the afterlife (that's only a couple hundred million, give or take), the odds are pretty good that you still wouldn't make the cut. It's most likely locusts and then oblivion for you.
That's right, oblivion. Not Hell, oh no. Mr. Camping is an annihilationist, meaning that the unsaved simply cease to exist after God's finished with them. No soul, no Purgatory, no damnation, no nothing. Which begs the question, why the months of torment, if God's simply going to wipe you out anyway? What, exactly, are all of the gnashings of teeth and howls of anguish and stings of locusts supposed to accomplish? Is God going to torture us just to make us extra, extra sorry that we weren't among the winners of his rigged cosmic lottery before he disappears us forever? Sorry, but if that's God's game plan then he's just being a jerk.
I do feel a bit bad for Mr. Camping and his followers. Not so much because they didn't get their way today, but because these are people who peer out at the world from between trembling, clenched fingers and see nothing worth saving. To them, this planet, indeed this entire universe, is just a doomed, meaningless way station on the road to somewhere better, somewhere that they can spend a blissful eternity in their own private "we told you so" club. And think about this... they spent $100 million dollars on banners, billboards, radio ads, pamphlets and signs just to get the word out. $100 million to basically tell the rest of the world "hey, great news! Me and mine are going up to Heaven! Sucks for you, what with all the locusts and disaster and the world ending. Guess you'll be sorry then, at least until you disappear forever." That's not just a sad, paranoid perspective, it's a colossal waste of resources. How many blankets could they have bought with that? How many bowls of soup, or shots of insulin, or water purifiers, or school books, or new trees, or antibiotics, or vials of morphine, or new shoes, or sandbags for flooding rivers could they have got?
I am not a religious person, but I have to believe that if there is a God, then maybe his plan is for us to use our time here on Earth making it a better place for ourselves and for everyone else who happens to live here, whether they're part of our little group or not.
No. Man. Knows.
That includes members of the clergy, Mr. Camping.
Nice journal, by the by. I had never even heard of annihilationists until today.
Thanks! Yeah, from what I understand of it the annihilationist philosophy is kind of an ironically theistic version of the atheistic concept that we cease to exist when we die... it's like they both argue the same thing, but for completely different reasons.
For some reason, some people seem to have a need for a god that that is hateful and mean. If they look hard enough, they usually find one - in the form of a man who is misleading them. I am a Christian myself, but the God I believe in isn't into torturing people and wiping them out. Some people seem to do a darn good job at those things on their own! One sure sign of a false prophet, at least in regards to Christianity, is when someone says that they know when the rapture and second coming of Christ will occur.
The Christian Bible says that no man knows the day or the time, and that it will come as a surprise, like a thief in the night. People will likely be going about their usual business, and it would just happen without expectation. I suspect that everyone, including Christians, real and fake, will be caught by surprise. Even the mainline Christian churches don't even fully agree on the order of events around the rapture, just that it will happen in some form. Even after it occurs, it is not the end for those who are left behind. From what I can understand from studying, many of those will still end up with God in the end.
In a sense, it is supposed to be a time of increased suffering, most likely inflicted by men upon men. Those left behind are supposed to be in a state where their hearts are torn between good and evil, in ways that would become hard and ultimately impossible to avoid. It's not hard to imagine - large scale terrorist attacks happening on a weekly basis in multiple countries, a few large natural disasters, and then the economic collapse that we've put off so far. The world economy could morph into something we hardly recognize in a relative short span of time. The evil one world government mentioned in Revelation is not as impossible as it once seemed. That is not supposed to be realized until around the time of the rapture though, and it would probably be from a very rapid shift in power that, like the rapture, would take everyone by surprise. The anti-Christ is supposed to come into power over the world then. The Bible describes it as devolving into an evil world dictatorship in a matter of only 42 months (3.5 years). Some Biblical scholars say the rapture is before the anti-Christ comes into power, others say it is after the anti-Christ, but before the war of Armageddon that removes him from power. I tend to think it is before - otherwise it wouldn't be the unexpected surprise that it is supposed to be.
What I think folks like Mr. Camping and his followers fail to see is that faith is supposed to be enlightening. My personal take on Christianity (and this is only my opinion) is that many of the stories in the Bible are meant to be taken as instructive metaphor, not absolute fact. It isn't the specifics that matter so much as the overall meaning. Whether or not you believe that Jesus existed and said the things he's meant to have said, you have to respect any school of thought that basically says "be good to each other, learn to forgive, and don't live with hatred in your hearts." I don't hear anything like that coming from Camping... all I get from his broadcasts is a bunch of hooey about "then the seventh seal will crack and boiling blood will rain down for approximately seventeen years on all the wicked lands who allow perverts and deviants to live among them." For Camping and company, religion seems to be nothing more than an elaborate revenge fantasy based on a strict, unyielding and above all unquestioning adherence to God-as-angry-authority-figure. They obsess over the minutiae of the old stories, apparently without having gleaned a single shred of deeper meaning from any of them.
Exactly. Even some of the teachings by Jesus in the New Testament are presented in that way. It can be an effective way of teaching. Some people think that everything has to be literal all the time. If a passage in the Bible says that the penalty for stealing a sheep is a certain price, many people will look at it and say, "that doesn't apply to the modern world, because almost no one has sheep any more." They can't seem to look at the bigger picture and apply it to the concept of stealing in general.
Followers like Mr. Camping get caught up easily in the smallest of details, like numbers, times and places, while missing the big picture. Even if they could learn every detail of the Bible, with perfect understanding, it has no value if their hearts are full of hatred and vengeance. When a person chooses to put hatred aside, they are opening the doors to understanding what actually makes a difference in the long term. Sadly, some who call themselves Christians, have more less love in their hearts than those who they condemn.
Would you mind if I shared this on my facebook, as long as I gave credit back to you with a link?
The birds kept chirping around here, too.
You should get praise more often!
It spawned some good musings that you shared, so the whole 100 mil wasn't a total waste.