The World's End Reimagined

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/23/doomsday-leader-flabbergasted-that-the-end-didnt-arrive/

First off, I imagine everyone’s happy that I was able to celebrate my 24th birthday. But it’s been a week since Harold Camping’s failed prediction of the beginning of the end, and he’s already long since initiated his contingency plan, now saying the world will end in October, even though the catastrophic earthquake he said would happen May 21 didn’t occur anywhere in the world. In his own words, it was an “error of interpretation, not of fact,” In short he’s bought himself about 5 months to gather as much profit as he can to spread his Christian message in the meantime. He qualified, however, that his ministry won’t use their time to change their message and warn people that the end is coming conclusively at the new date. Instead, they’re doing everything else to spread the gospel across the U.S., or whatever else they’re doing with what amounts to about 18 million dollars just from 2009 in earnings Some have said Camping is just using these people to amass all this money and it wouldn’t surprise me, though people can do very disturbing and unsympathetic things in the name of some greater good. In the case of our elderly preacher here, he thinks gathering all this money is to a greater good of spreading God’s word, even at the cost of people putting themselves into bankruptcy because they trust in his charismatic teachings about biblical eschatology. It’s that charisma that can make people think Camping might just be a sociopath feigning his religious beliefs in order to manipulate people into giving him money and praise and then just abandoning them to their own devices when things go bad.

He tried to soften the blow of disappointment to his followers by saying that God decided not to make the world suffer with 5 months of tribulation, which is an odd amount of time compared to what seems to be a much longer stretch in Revelation, where he’s no doubt drawing some of his inspiration about Armageddon from. Of course, this could just be more psychological tactics to keep the people following him in spite of such despair. A lot of the followers were apparently not in a huge panic over this, but merely humbled by their own human arrogance to even think that they could predict the end of the world at all. But I wonder if everyone that followed Camping before will continue to do so when he hasn’t exactly succeeded in his message the last time in 1994 and now he has a second failure under his belt. If it were me, I’d probably have developed some stronger skepticism, but then, my mind might be wired differently enough that I wouldn’t have ever conceivably been sucked into this conspiracy. The combination of saying God is merciful and that God is faithful is probably what’s keeping these people from falling into utter despondency after many of them have sold a great deal of their belongings and devoted a good portion of their lives this year with energy that could have been directed towards their families and other more practical affairs compared to this fiasco of biblical numerological superstition. Not to mention there’s the whole reinforcement that your faith must be strong in times of trouble, so people will persist even after bankrupting themselves at times, having isolated themselves from their families for months or more and otherwise wasting their life hoping for the afterlife to come.

Lorenzo DiTommaso, associate professor of religion at Concordia University in Canada, who’s writing a book titled The Architecture of Apocalypticism, says this change in plans for Camping’s warning of God’s impending judgment is not unusual, especially when you consider it’s observable across history that these sorts of movements have caught themselves before they completely crash and reinterpret things as spiritual instead of physical, such as what happened with certain groups that split off from the Millerites after the Great Disappointment of 1844, saying Jesus returned spiritually instead of physically in a flash of clouds and light. I’m curious on that one though, because wasn’t Jesus already in heaven and the spiritual realm by association? So how did he spiritually return, unless you’re referring to the spiritual realm on earth? Maybe they thought Jesus would do some great revival? That technically could be argued to have happened about 40 years or so after the Great Disappointment, called the Third Great Awakening. Resulting denominations from this period included Christian Science and the Holiness movements. This period was at the very least a likely response to the failure of the Millerites and a reinterpretation of Jesus’ second coming to require that people reform the entire earth, which of course meant people had to spread the Gospel with more vigor than they had before. DiTomasso also notes that in these kinds of movements, faith supersedes theory and theory serves only to interpret the evidence. To simplify this, it means that your belief that the end is coming will always override the failures of predictions based on “human” methods, like mathematics and such. And any theory, or model if you will, only serves to reinterpret the evidence as is necessary, such as Camping now saying that his May 21st date was seemingly superfluous or incorrect to begin with and that October 21st is the real final date. The general message seems to be that the spiritual end of the earth was May 21 and that the physical end of the earth is October 21. So if this is indeed Camping’s beliefs, he’s following neatly along with post-Millerite reactions over a century ago; what a concept!

Overall, this doesn’t surprise me, and yet, I wonder what will happen in the far future when October comes and goes and nothing happens at all; no earthquakes, no firestorms, no meteors, nothing at all. Will the date be recalculated a third time or will it just be surrendered to God’s plan and forgiveness will be begged for, because he’s only a lowly human? Either way, I won’t bother myself the least over it, except of course in this brief article. I’d much rather expend my energy on fruitful pursuits instead of worrying about the end of the world creeping up on us slowly over the next billion years or so. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

May 21-Save The Date (Or Not)

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/17/my-take-may-21st-doomsday-movement-harms-christianity/
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/18/tick-tock-goes-the-doomsday-clock/
http://inthearena.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/17/harold-camping-prepares-for-judgment-day-may-21-2011/
http://www.albertmohler.com/2011/05/16/the-end-is-near-the-false-teaching-of-harold-camping/
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/19/my-take-doomsdayers-show-what%e2%80%99s-wrong-with-all-religion/

Straight from my New Zealand friend, head of Spritzophrenia , I have relative confirmation that no earthquakes have happened and that nothing out of the ordinary has occurred in a place that is no doubt waking up around the time I actually post this.

Many Christians would agree with non-Christians that this predicting the date of the end of the world is nonsense. But they’d also argue that being able to tell the exact month, day and time by mathematics is unbiblical. Jesus himself says in the Bible, Matthew 24:36 specifically, that no one but God would have that specific information. Even Jesus is not privy to this information by a Christian consensus. As I mentioned in an older post about this whole Rapture and doomsday hoopla, “Faith, the Future and 2011”, the head of this ministry predicted the world would end in 1994, but there would’ve been little chance of me hearing even a peep about his claims 16 years ago. Camping, not surprisingly, simply said his math was off and recalculated. Now he apparently also knows that in October, things will go from bad to worse. The months of tribulations will end in what is presumably described somewhere in Revelation about the world being completely destroyed. Most Christians would probably disagree with Camping in the same way they’d disagree with young earth creationists who say the Bible enumerates a 6000 year history through the calculations of Archbishop Ussher, putting a precise date and time of the creation of the world which is still thrown around to substantiate this argument. The same Christians who’d condemn young earth creationists on their willful ignorance of scientific facts you can find through multiple disciplines would say Family Radio makes Christians look more fanatical than they actually are. My parents are pretty private about their beliefs and discuss these issues in private as well. It’s that sort of individualist practice of religion balanced by a sense of community that enables modern Christians to appear more sophisticated than they may actually be. The communal aspect is what binds them to a status quo they fear to break and become defensive of when people challenge it. The individual aspect is admirable, even if it can be as unjustified as any atheist who doesn’t learn and contemplate their nonbelief. Just saying you don’t believe means nothing if you don’t justify your nonbelief. I imagine most Christians have just as much of a problem with Family Radio as atheists and agnostics would, but for different reasons. Christians seem to be more concerned with what is an ever degrading public relations problem, with the continued coverage of the Catholic sex abuse scandals in Europe and many so-called “Christians” demonstrating hypocrisy on family issues (Newt Gingrich anyone?). Put all that into a pot and then add apocalyptic/millenialist groups like Family Radio and it’s no wonder Christians either strongly denounce them or try to ignore them, so as not to give them the satisfaction of getting public attention. But curiosity usually gets the best of us and so we come to coverage in a separate article of the group’s behavior just a few days before Armageddon.

It’s easy to call this a fringe group or a cult, but if anything, they’re an interesting study in what might be considered New Religious Movements, similar to what happened in Japan post World War 2. In the wake of 9/11, a tragedy of similar gravity with our country being invaded, but not brought to its knees, inspired many people to speculate that the end times are near. In America, though, people claiming the coming apocalypse have existed since the 19th century at the earliest. What was called the Great Disappointment happened in 1844, with the Millerite movement, which apparently then branched off into Seventh Day Adventism groups. What happened back then is likely to happen this time, throwing people into further despair or, with some of the members of Family Radio, a kind of solemn acceptance. Some of the members have left to be with their families, while many are still persisting, turning away the media, since according to them, it will be pointless to cover it. Some of these people allegedly don’t take the prediction seriously and are going to work next week anyway. This brings up a twofold consideration. It’d be one thing if the earthquakes and such happen, but not a single person in the world mysteriously disappears. But it’ll be another thing entirely if neither the earthquakes nor the “twinkling”, as one person put it jokingly, happen at all. It’s one thing to predict the end of the world, but to be as specific as Camping is with events is another: a series of earthquakes, dead bodies strewn everywhere, etc, and all the believers apparently going up to be with God secretly in the destruction. It’d be one thing for nothing to happen to anyone, but the prophecy of earthquakes to be vindicated, since they could just claim they weren’t part of the elect, which is involved with their Calvinist theology that God has preordained both the saved and the damned. But if nothing happens out of the ordinary, they’re going to be at least a temporary laughingstock and the target of questions as is usually the case with journalism. It’s not like anyone could change their minds, and they’re about the same size as Westboro Baptist Church, only without the inbred family vibe you get from the latter. The explicit prophetic aspect of this group distinguishes it from WBC in that there’s a set time before they have to regroup, though I hope the results of a failed prophecy from a man who’s on his last legs (almost 90 years old) might change the minds of some of these people and perhaps turn them towards a strong skepticism about these sorts of claims. Part of the difficulty with skepticism for many people is that it involves a kind of thinking we’re not used to. It has to be practiced and few things ought to be taken for granted except principles that work consistently. Once you start creating exceptions to your skepticism about religious claims, it tends towards a partiality that negates what might have been an initially credulous argument. Whatever happens on this “doomsday”, skeptics will remain. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.