An email to my father

( Discussing the much-publicised rapture/apocalypse predicted by Harold Camping which may or may not have begun back in May this year )

In fairness, the volcano in Iceland almost happened on time... Besides that, it's some serious straw-clutching.

Did you see the website before the rapture was due to occur? Google wecanknow. It was... Interesting. I was talking with a friend about it last week - I don't understand how or why you'd start a doomsday cult without a "God sometimes needs a little help/he's testing our faith"-style suicide pact, because without one, there's a 99.99999999etc percent chance you're going to end up with a lot of very pissed off ex-followers. A little digging around the site's supporting materials revealed that they put a lot of weight behind the scripture that suggests apocalypses can take a while to get going, so there was obviously a get out clause built in (whether consciously or not). 

My main point, though, in response to my friend's suggestion that Camping was "exploiting people the way all religion does", was that the lack of a suicide pact/kool aid guzzle suggests that Camping is indeed just like all the big religions, in that any exploitation/broken eggs is an accidental side-effect of his evangelising his own deeply-held beliefs. He wasn't looking to take advantage of people, but rather to save them.

End of Days cults are a standing fixture in human history, but I think it says an awful lot about how deeply and irredeemably fucked the world often appears to be, that so many people would buy into this one. The media on both sides of the pond overstated how many Americans were crazy enough to go along with it, but it was definitely more than a few tens of crazies, and I'm inclined to feel the media's bigger crime was (and is) painting a picture of a world gone bad which the average Joe has no regency over. The Fox News (and Glenn Beck) inventions of such macabre mannequins of vitriolic ignorance as Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, formed against a backdrop of The New World Order, The War on Terror, and a frightening and confusing vision of a Middle East in violent turmoil (democracy=good, cheering Arabs=bad, average Joe=arghhelp!!) has inevitably bred an even angrier, more disconnected and frightened kind of Deep South Bible Belt Confederate-Flag-waving lunatic. And those who aren't driven to stockpile arms and point a loaded and cocked shotgun at their bolted front doors day and night will instead hide in the churches, praying their God will spare them the myriad shameful end scenarios the TV told them about.

It's a sorry state of affairs when people can feel so hopeless that they actually welcome the end of the world. I shudder to think what Bill Hicks would've made of it all.