I Missed the Rapture So I'm Writing This Blog Entry

As I wake up here and sleepily stumble over my computer, the fact that I still have a computer in my room tells me I must have missed the rapture that was predicted on May 21, 2011. To be honest, most mainstream Christians have been laughing their heads off—or at least shaking their heads sadly. After all, they say, we can't know the day or the hour when Jesus will appear in the sky and all believers will float off into paradise. But with each new nutcase predicting the end of the world, religous people should laugh less and less, because each time it comes around it becomes a little more obvious: what's absurd about these predictions is not just the date that is set—deep down we all know that it's the idea of a rapture that is, well, just a little crazy.

Since we all know that Harold Camping, the person at the forefront of this 2011 rapture prediction, is a loony with silly ideas, let's take a closer look at exactly what he and his eBibleFellowship is teaching:

  1. Just a few thousand years ago some SuperBeing said a few words and poof the world existed.
  2. The SuperBeing created human-creatures in a garden, but a talking snake convinced them to disobey the SuperBeing, so the SuperBeing flew off the handle, kicked them out of the garden, and decided to punish all human-creatures with death (which until this time hadn't been invented).
  3. Thousands of years later the SuperBeing decided to himself turn into a human-creature and have the other human-creatures kill him as a sacrifice. It turns out that this whole sequence of events had been part of the Super-Being's plan all along.
  4. If you don't believe and accept the SuperBeing's suicide mission to Earth thousands of years ago, The SuperBeing will boil you in a lake filled with fire.
  5. For all the human-creatures who do believe, the SuperBeing will one day appear in the sky (in human-creature form) and all the believers will float up to meet the SuperBeing. Then they will all go to some happy place, although the details of this place are a little sketchy.
  6. This floating-up-to-meet-SuperBeing event will happen on May 21, 2011.

Isn't that a crazy story? Yet the kicker is that, besides the last point, this is what mainstream evangelical Christians believe! Yes, your next-door neighbor in the American Heartland believes all of it, hook, line, and sinker—except for the actual date, of course, because (they say sadly but knowingly, shaking their heads), "no one can know the day nor the hour."

All the above nonsense sounds perfectly reasonable to perhaps an entire quarter of the US population! What helps this story sound halfway reasonable is that, when Christians tell it to each other in churches on Sunday, they cloak the entire narrative in religous terms like "God" and "salvation" and "redemption" and "redemption"—words that make the story sound plausible to them simply because these words are used over and over in the story, and have been since these people were born. It all sounds familiar, with these religious formulas repeated endlessly, and familiar seems true.

But Christians, tell me seriously: You're educated now. You live in a world of computers, jet planes, and satellites. Many of you have college educations. You know what causes disease, and your cell phone is probably more powerful than any computer that existed in your parents' generation. You know what planets are, you know how to read and write, and you talk to hundreds of people every day around the world by electronic messages. Tell me honestly: in the above narrative, only the prediction of a particular date for the rapture is absurd, yet the rest of the story sounds completely believable?

Most Christians—at least Evangelical Christians—will still say that, while setting the date of the rapture is loony, the rest of those beliefs are as rational as addition and subtraction. But I can't help but believe that, with each new nutcase heralding (pun not intended) the end of the world, Christians realize deep down a little more that the whole story is nothing but silliness.