I grew up in Tulsa, and during my teen years in the 1970's an earlier wave of delusional thinking about the rapture swept through fundamentalist churches because of Hal Lindsey's 1970 book, The Late, Great Planet Earth. I knew people in Tulsa who took this nonsense literally, believed that we had reached the "end times," and expected to get raptured at any moment. I also encountered another wave of the delusion in the late 1980's caused by Edgar C. Whisenant's book, 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988.
Now we've just witnessed yet another round of this insanity thanks to 89-year-old Harold Camping, who probably needs to go into a nursing home and have someone assume power of attorney to make decisions for him. If my 84-year-old father with Alzheimer's had started talking like Camping, we would appropriately attribute his ramblings to impaired cognition instead of divine revelation.
I also feel sympathy for the children whose parents have sabotaged their futures because of this nonsense. A woman in Lancaster, California, reportedly tried to murder her children to spare them from the apocalypse. The New York Times ran a story the other day about a family whose parents drank Camping's Kool-Aid, much to their teen children's consternation. The story quotes the 14-year-old son as saying, “I don’t really have any motivation to try to figure out what I want to do anymore, because my main support line, my parents, don’t care.” I imagine today this boy has lost respect for his parents, yet he still has to live with them until he reaches his majority and can move out. No child should have to experience that. I wonder how many more children have to put up with similar parents after the failure of Camping's doomsday.
Naturally other christians have issued disclaimers to distance themselves from the Camping scandal. Either they say their churches have different interpretations of eschatology which don't involve a rapture; or else they believe in something like the rapture, but quote Jesus' verse about not knowing the timing, while also denouncing Camping as a false prophet.
Yet the rapture goes to the heart of the christian message. As near as anyone can tell, christianity started out as a doomsday cult with explicit prophecies about Jesus' "return" as some spooky super-powered entity within the lifetimes of his earliest followers. Those followers would have all died by 100 CE or so, so logically the cult should have gone extinct by then. Instead the later generations of christians devised rationalizations to keep the cult in business, adapting to the prospect that humanity faced an indefinite secular future ahead of it, but with the doomsday belief still in the background somewhere. (In a way, one of the rationalizations invented in the Arabian peninsula for Jesus' nonarrival turned into Islam. And does the Muslim belief about getting the 72 virgins in heaven as a reward for committing suicidal attacks against infidels make any less sense than belief in the rapture?)
The recurring doomsday prophets in the christian tradition - and the tradition has produced hundreds of them - keep making christians uneasy because they remind them of their religion's unfulfilled predictions. Camping just provides the latest reminder of the irrationality in the christian foundational documents which many christians find too embarrassing to acknowledge.
At least these prophecies now generate more mockery than adherence. At one time whole communities would get caught up in end times hysteria. L.A. radio hosts John Kobylt and Ken Champou show more of a proper response to this folly:
I've known a few people in my lifetime who, by contrast, grew up as atheists, and who therefore never had to suffer from exposure to christian doomsday propaganda. To me they seem nearly like characters from some advanced, enlightened civilization out of science fiction.
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