Yawn. I’ve been through some SERIOUS ones, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, the nuclear test ban fracas, and the design some idiot was peddling to the superpowers, a c-bomb. You can’t scare me with a mere prediction of doom at 6pm…whose time zone, I wonder? Local to the yokel who published this nonsense, or did he have something more general in mind?
Oracles throughout history have made their budgets on a relatively small number of no-fail prophecies. You hear it first from the Wave Oracle. In the following year: 1. there will be a great earthquake, 2. a government will fall, 3. a great storm will come from the sea, 4. a famous person will prove to have feet of clay, 5. there will be a flood causing great destruction, 6. there will be a famine in Africa, 7. a famous person will demise.
For an apocalypse, this is pretty benign. Chillin’ at home with my wife – clean the house, do some yardwork, go to the dump and maybe a wine tasting, make dinner. Nice day for a rapture. Or not. According to Those Who (Claim To) Know, I don’t make the cut.
Fine by me. Maybe this way I get to read another Bren book, unless CJ (or her publisher) is *much* more virtuous that I thought.
I was stuck on the interstate heading to Chicago behind a large tanker carrying liquid sulphur and for a while we effectively parked along side a Bible camp. I kept wondering if it was going to smell for those in the camp (it certainly did) and make them think they had missed the Rapture….
Wicked~!
Back in the early 80s, when I was High School, there was a group absolutely convinced that the apocalypse would come in 1987.
One fellow in my class was so convinced, that he intended to drop out of school and spend all his time saving as many souls as he could til then.
He was a brilliant kid, and I was shocked he wasn’t going to go on to college. But he saw no point in it. The World Was Going To End. And I asked him, “what are you going to do if it doesn’t?”
For a moment, he hesitated. I saw it in his eyes. But then he summoned his resolve. And said, “The World Will End, so that doesn’t matter.”
I’ve always wondered what happened to him. And I feel great sympathy for the people who are following this new “End of Days” preacher.
I recall one doomsday in about 1964 or 5 which was capped by a bomb scare at our school. So we sat on the curb, waiting while they checked the building—again. I had brought out my algebra book and notebook, and several friends who hadn’t started laying bets on the likelihood of doomsday. Me: “I know it WILL be doomsday tomorrow 5th hour if I don’t have this done.” So I started doing the exercises. All of them over the next fifteen minutes lost the courage of their convictions and began bumming paper and my algebra book.
I’ll be so glad when this day is over (and I think it already is in parts of the world) and everyone finds the world is still here though unfortunately still burdened by those believers who thought they’d be raptured up to heaven. This belief that a certain day is the Day of Judgement is old. Way back in the 19th century William Miller predicted that the world would end on a certain day and when it obviously didn’t he produced some other dates none of which came to pass; his followers finally accepted Matthew 24:36 – “But of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only” and became Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses who would wait for their god to surprise them. Later, in 1925, Robert Reidt predicted the coming of the apocalypse on February 6 and guess what? He was wrong. This time it’s a preacher named Harold Camping who had predicted the world would end once before on September 6, 1994 and has now come up with a new date. I get the feeling that with all the hoopla about the Mayan prediction of world-endage on December 21, 2012 he wants his deity to get there first.
However, just in case the world does end, it’s been nice knowing you *vbg*
I know people are freaking out about the end times…what happens if we find out we’ve been living in the prologue all along? And that dolphins and cats are actually the main characters. People aren’t worried about the right things. 0_0 Also, be nice to cats. It might just pay off later on.
Carry on, Camping. In answer to CJ’s question in the original post, Harold Camping had said that it was going to be a rolling apocalypse, going through 6pm in each time zone (not sure how that was going to work out for Samoa, in the middle of moving themselves across the dateline). So, those of us in the early hours had plenty of time to scoff. As it happened, I was sitting at 6pm Sydney time at the dining table next to the most good, king and religious person I know, and couldn’t resist watching her closely at 6pm just in case she vanished. Best line I’ve heard so far: ‘If you come across someone who really believed in the Rapture and is disappointed, comfort them by saying “it’s not the end of the world …”‘.
er .. that would be “kind” not “king” …
Memories of childhood; a true story, I swear! One of our Town Characters decided, on what evidence I have no idea, that the world was coming to an end. So she packed a lunch, took her umbrella, and climbed up on the roof of her house to await the Rapture. Picture a round, grandmotherly person sitting in the shade of her open umbrella, eating her bologna sandwich, perched on the peak of her rooftop. Sunset came and went and night settled in and, no Rapture in sight, all sandwiches eaten, she folded her umbrella and gathered up her garbage and climbed down and went to bed. I have always loved the practicality of it.
The End is supposed to come at 6 p.m. Pacific time, so your time — I don’t know if they adjusted for Daylight Savings Time or not. But only the super righteous get to go; the rest of us will be left, so I guess I can’t use it as an excuse not to do the dishes tonight. Oh, sigh!!
A rolling Rapture? Now that’s a new one. “All passengers boarding at Gate Eleventy-Dozen, please have your raiments ready….”
Hmm, you know, if I was waiting on transfiguration / transmutation, I think I’d go for something a bit more than a bologna sandwich. I do like bologna though.
….Waitaminnit, a *bologna* sandwich. Ooh, one detects a subtle and refined sense of humor at work, there….
I fear Mr. Camping shall have to do some fancy footwork to explain why he and his Elected Few Whoevers were not translated into their heavenly bodies.
Now, I’m not averse to the idea that there could be other states of being that we don’t fully sense, and that possibly we move to the dimension next door. — But I hold to the opinion, why would one want to know the exact time, place, and manner of one’s own demise, or the people one loves? It would be anticlimactic, among other things.
Still no sign of the Apocalypse over here. For your daily dose of silly, I quote The Tick:
Interviewer: Well, can you… blow up the world?
Tick: Egad. I hope not. That’s where I keep all my stuff.
Anyone who says the world will end at such and such a time will always be wrong. That’s when I go to the silly parties, they’re pretty fun.
Someone on Twitter said that he had done the math too, and that he learned it was the RAPTORS that was coming, and he was hiding in the closet. That got a laugh from me, though apparently it was true for you and Jane. Maybe we should have taken him more seriously.
Did you read about the mother who told her 16 year old daughter that the daughter wouldn’t be included in the rapture (while the parents, of course, would)? the parents had quit their jobs and stopped making payments to the college funds several months before. Awful situation. I think the whole scam is pretty funny until I read about children being abused that way. My own two were very frightened from things people had said to them at school and nothing I said reassured them much. But we were pleased when we found an article Friday evening about how it was now 6 pm May 21st in Tonga and no earthquakes or disappearances of the holy had been observed.
Why on earth people use religion as an impetus to abuse their children eludes me—as does the attitude of courts that treat parental rights as superior to the rights of a child to grow up unwarped.
But definitely raptors.
SOME RAPTURE!! The sun came out for the first time in a week. Wait! That did have a certain amount of rapture to it.
Since Saturday was my birthday, it would have been a genuine bummer if the rapture had actually happened and I wasn’t “raptured” (on the other hand, if I had been raptured, it would have been one heck of a birthday present!) Ray Bradbury wrote a powerful short story on this very “end of the world” theme. It’s in his book “The Illustrated Man.” It’s called “The Last Night of the World.” Recommended reading.
Anybody who believes their deity of choice is going to deal them a “Get Out Of Jail Free” card is sadly deluded. We are all in this thing called Life together. There’s only one way in, and only one way out. And all of us will have to play out the hands we were dealt, win, lose or draw, down to the last card.