What do you do when you have disposed of all your belongings, traveled across country to be with loved ones, and waited for the predicted Rapture and end of the world on May 2st?
That was yesterday, and we're all still here on May 22nd.
Retired civil engineer and 89 year old Harold Camping had a following for his Doomsday prophesy that the world would end on May 21, 2011; and the true believers would be "raptured" up into heaven. His Bible-based prediction did not come to pass, just as the hundreds of previous predictions of the Rapture through the centuries have failed to materialize.
It's a familiar story by now. A small group of believers await the latest calculated Doomsday, truly believing that they are among the few who heed the call of the Lord.
But what happens to them, I wonder, when it doesn't come to be -- as May 21st did not and as every one in the past has also failed to be?
Think about it: thousands of predictions of Doomsday through the centuries -- and not one of them has been correct.
What then?
Ralph
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
25 year old John Ramsey quit his job in order to help spread the word about the coming Rapture. He donated "a couple thousand" to Harold Camping's Family Radio Network and convinced other family members to join him.
ReplyDeleteOn Saturday, they all huddled together in the living room, holding their Bibles open and listening for the news -- but it didn't come.
Now they have to resume their lives. But John says he doesn't think Camping was doing a scam -- he reads the bible and has done the math himself that pointed to May 21.
But, he says, life goes on. Now he and his wife have to plan for the birth of their first baby, due as early as this Friday. When they thought the world would be ending last week, it didn't seem necessary. Now it does -- and John has to find a job because he's about to be a Dad.