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Rapture next Saturday?!!Next Saturday, there will be an earthquake. Not one of those little tremblers that knock photographs off the wall and Buddha statues off the bookshelves. It will be a doozy, even in non-seismic zones. Geologists won't be able to explain this with their fancy charts and graphs, so don't bother asking them about it.
"This enormous earthquake will cause all of the graves, pits, and mausoleums all over the world to be thrown open," writes Harold Camping, founder of Family Radio, a Christian broadcasting company based in California. "Whatever is left in them (corpses, bones, dust, ashes, etc.) will rise."
Welcome, readers, to the last week of life as we know it. Camping, and his millions of followers around the world, are convinced that the date of the rapture is May 21, 2011.
Biblical scholars have argued the matter for centuries but the rapture, the "catching up" of the true Christians, refers the New Testament, 1 Thessalonians 4: 17. In short, Jesus is coming back and he's taking the good people with him. Everyone else: nuts to them.
Camping is not only a radio man and biblical scholar.
He first trained as an engineer and knows his way around numbers. He's been through the Old and New Testaments, with his calculator and his dictionary of allegories. He first discovered, in 1992, that the world would end in 1994. He was apologetic about his error, when Jesus stood him up, but undaunted.
"I did not come to the finished product until three years ago," Camping recently told Washington Post. "It was at that time that God showed some exquisite proof."
In a week, 200 million of us true believers will be raptured. Jesus will show up and meet us in the air. Then we'll go to heaven. The rest of us will suffer various torments that go far beyond the inconvenience of all those corpses and bones and ashes all over the place. There will be fires. A lot of us will lose our skin. We'll weep and gnash our teeth against God. As unlikely as this seems, we'll fight in a battle of Armageddon against Jesus and the people in heaven, on the side of Satan, knowing full well that we will lose.
Then, on Oct. 21, the world will end for good. All this talk of rising credit card debt and climate change will seem pretty dumb by then. God, in his incomprehensible wrath, will have fulfilled his promise to the world.
There have been several end-times. On the home page of the Family Radio website, there's a no-smoking sign with 2012 taking the place of a cigarette. Take that, Mayan calendar kooks! In 1996, Toronto author and philosopher Mark Kingwell published a book called Dreams of Millennium: Report from a Culture on the Brink. In it, Kingwell charts the anxieties attending the coming turnover of the year 2000 and looks back at similar moments in history.
"The Second Coming has been variously predicted for, among other years, 666, 1033, 1260, 1284, 1492, 1496, 1524, 1588, 1656, 1666, 1789 and 1844," writes Kingwell. "In fact, the real growth of millennial fever had more to do with rapid social and technological change, swift population growth and industrialization than with data-crunching mathematics."
Whole religions have been designed around end-time predictions. We talk so much of God, and fail so much in our earthly endeavours, and experience so much inequity and horror and pain, that nothing could be more wonderful than a deity descending from heaven and punishing the wicked. That is, our enemies.
To prophets like Camping and all who have come before him, everyone who does not buy and act on his message is, by definition, wicked.
Camping and his followers have been travelling across the U.S., warning people of the coming rapture so they might wail out for mercy. This is an act of benevolence. Even now, a week before the big day, Family Radio is soliciting funds to continue their good work even though they have assets worth more than $100 million.
There are several expressions of the spiritual impulse: some of us write, some of us dance, some of us paint, some of us drive across the country in painted vans howling, "Repent!" and asking for cash.
Many questions remain. Camping has been infuriatingly vague about the identity of the antichrist, for example. Is it Barack Obama? Paris Hilton? One of my colleagues is quite sure that Snoop, his springer spaniel, is the antichrist, as he recently bit a porcupine and caused no end of trouble for everyone.
All kidding aside, Snoop is at risk. Jesus is not coming back for spaniels. Enter: the American entrepreneurial spirit.
In 2009, a man named Bart Centre launched a company to take care of pets for the six months after the rapture. He charges $135 for the first pet, with each additional animal going for $20, and has documented proof that his caregivers are unbelieving blasphemers who will by no means be among the chosen few. Centre takes all payments up front, renewable in 10-year increments.
For the unbelievers among us, it is a useful exercise to imagine these are the last seven days of our lives. Seize the week! This is as good a time as any to fulfil unrealized ambitions, to skydive or finally say "I love you" to Norman in accounting, to eat steak tartare, to buy a last-minute ticket to Jerusalem.
It has been splendid sharing the Earth with you, these last years. If you are flying to meet Jesus in the clouds next Saturday afternoon and the thought of all that money going to waste vexes you, my contact information is, as ever, below.
Read more: http://www.edmontonjournal.com/sports/n ... z1MRZTHO1m
urabus wrote:Does that mean I don't havE to study for my exams in june?
urabus wrote:Does that mean I don't havE to study for my exams in june?
urabus wrote:Does that mean I don't havE to study for my exams in june?
urabus wrote:Does that mean I don't havE to study for my exams in june?
urabus wrote:Does that mean I don't havE to study for my exams in june?
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