Alex Massie Alex Massie

The End of the World is Nigh

The Rapture is almost upon us. According to Harold Camping, the 89 year-old Family Radio network in Florida. The righteous, he has calculated, will ascend to heaven at 6pm EST tomorrow (11pm in the UK). Those of us not fortunate enough to be called to Heaven must suffer the consequences of the damned. As you might expect this has occasioned much hooting and hollering on Twitter today. I made a feeble joke about it myself.

And now, via Hopi Sen, I feel a wee bit of a heel for mocking the afflicted. This is Camping’s second Rapture date, the first having mysteriously failed him. While we need not necessarily spare too much sympathy for him, his poor followers, few though they may be, merit are in a pitiful place tonight. Bogus as it all may be (nay is) there comes a moment when it all feels a bit like piling on to an unecessary degree.

The Slacktivist (a terrific blog, incidentally), explains why a measure of charity, even perhaps especially from unbelievers (though he doesn’t put it like that) might be in order. Writing of an old preacher he once knew, he explains how:

He expected the Rapture to occur any day, any moment, but he also knew that he was an old man and that, if the End tarried another year or five or ten, he might well die before Jesus came like a thief in the night. Once he was dead, he would be powerless to prevent the living from having his body cremated and if that happened he would be eternally separated from God. This is what he believed and what he lived in fear of every day.

Witnessing that terror and hopeless fear, seeing the suffering that it brought, I stopped thinking of his “Bible prophecy” obsession as a kooky, but mostly harmless set of beliefs.

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