Fred Clark has some rather poignant thoughts about those who honestly believe that the Rapture is coming on Saturday.
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.
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.
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.
Read the whole thing. This all goes back to the dangers of letting yourself become trapped by powerful story. Like Fred, I do wish there was something I could do to reach out to these folks.
Alex Knapp writes about pretty much everything under the sun, including politics, art, religion, philosophy, sports, music, culture, and science. He also actively writes about politics at the political blog
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I wasn’t raised in a rapture-believing family, but from 5th grade to about 10th grade, I closely associated with an evangelical faith and a congregation that either professed belief in it or entertained it as a possibility.
I never had that moment, per se, when I was alone and thought I had been left behind. But I did have a lot of nightmares about the end of the world coming in the form of nuclear bombs (it was the early to mid 80s, when the Cold War rhetoric was reheated).
To the actual point you make about wishing to help these people: I’m not sure what you could do. But they’ll learn things just as I did, or not.
I was raised in a rapture-believing family but we were of the “it’ll be a SURPRISE!” flavor rather than the “we’ve figured out that it’ll be on Wednesday” flavor.
In the late 80′s, I remember a particular prophecy not coming to pass… I was sitting in the kitchen, waiting and looking out the window and noticing that nothing was happening. There was a part of me that was scared of being judged… but looking forward to the “heaven” part of afterwards and, of course, seeing all of my dead loved ones again.
To the best of my knowledge, the rapture did not happen that day. I was not particularly surprised but some of my family members were very angry (and the ones that weren’t angry about the rapture not happening were angry on behalf of those that were).
Being somewhat post-rapture, I can’t help but notice a lot more pointing and laughing this time compared to what happened back in the late 80′s/early 90′s.
I suspect you have the poorly-labelled “New Atheists” like Dawkins and Hitchens to thank for that. They asked, “Why shouldn’t we ridicule a ridiculous belief just because it’s called ‘religion’?” and soon enough, some people started laughing.
I think along the way, they forgot their manners. I come by my atheism honestly and after serious contemplation. Granted that there are many people (both believers and skeptics) who have never given the matter much thought. But I’ve no reason to believe that any particular believer I come acros has not gone through the same serious, honest process I did, just because they come out of it with a different posture than me — and it’s rude to simply assume that the Harold Campings of the world are (were?) not sincere in their beliefs.
That doesn’t mean I won’t mock the belief itself. But Prof. Knapp is right; Camping and his true believer followers are no doubt feeling a significant shock to their egoes right about now.