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:
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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.
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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. I began to realize that it was a framework that burdened its followers with the inevitability of disappointment, false hope, denial and an inconsolable fear. Its adherents were its victims. There were other victims, too, but its main damage was wrought in the lives of those who most believed it.
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[...] Talk to anyone who grew up in a Rapture-believing church or family and they will tell you stories about panic-inducing moments when they found themselves suddenly alone and feared that everyone else had been raptured while they had been rejected by God. This guy thinks that’s funny, but it’s actually traumatic. That’s why no one forgets the horror of such moments. Laughing at one’s own trauma can be transformational and healthy. Laughing at someone else’s trauma is just cruel.
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That fear and trauma, we were sometimes told, was a good thing. It was a holy terror — a reminder to make certain that we prayed the right prayers and felt the right feelings to ensure that we would not be among those left behind. This is what they thought the scriptures meant when they spoke of “the fear of the Lord” — the powerless terror of the child of an abusive parent.
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And that terror is what Harold Camping and his followers are feeling now. And it is what they will be feeling again Saturday evening, after that terror and despair first abates, then metastasizes in the realization that the world has not ended and that they are not the righteous remnant they staked their identities on being.
Religious mania is a terrible and often terrifying thing but in this instance the rubes and victims are Camping's poor, pitiful (and pitiable) followers. There seems little need to mock the so-obviously disabled. After a while it becomes unseemly. Camping merits your scorn; his followers your sorrow.