The Rapture: Should we be laughing?

“I do not understand why nothing has happened.” That was how Robert Fitzpatrick reacted to the failure of the world to end on May 21, said Samuel Goldsmith in the New York Daily News. The New Yorker had spent $140,000 publicizing a prophecy made by Christian evangelist preacher Harold Camping that the “End of Days” would occur at 6 p.m. last Saturday. “Obviously I haven’t understood it correctly because we’re still here,” Fitzpatrick told reporters in Times Square, as the world inconceivably kept on turning. Camping himself, who has spent almost 20 years predicting the Rapture on his Family Radio network, claimed to be “flabbergasted” that he and his flock had not risen bodily into heaven, said Will Kane in the San Francisco Chronicle. Meanwhile, his “dejected believers” were left with a dilemma: How do you live in a world you thought would no longer exist?

All right, we can all stop laughing now, said Tiffany Stanley in TheNewRepublic.com. It’s easy to indulge in the cheap schadenfreude of mocking Camping’s “sad group of apocalyptic believers,” but these people bet their entire lives that he was right. Most quit their jobs, and one young couple with a toddler and a baby on the way spent their life savings. The “tragic characters” taken in by Camping’s cult deserve our pity, not “smug superiority and cheap laughs.” Oh, lighten up, said Andrew Sullivan in TheDailyBeast.com. These “Book of Revelation crackpots” thought that the dead would rise from their graves, and that true believers would literally float away to heaven, as the vast majority of the human race died in agony. “Such nutballism begs to be made fun of.”

Besides, Camping’s followers will probably be just fine, said Vaughan Bell in Slate.com. Doomsday cults and other religious fanatics have evidence-proof belief systems that prove “resilient to challenge from outsiders.” History shows that the prophecy will be reworked, and the followers will “carry on, often feeling more spiritually enriched” that they have passed a crucial test of their faith. Camping’s acolytes, in fact, already have a revised revelation, said Elizabeth Tenety in The Washington Post. The evangelist announced on his radio show this week that Saturday’s Rapture was a “spiritual, rather than physical event”—and that the real end of the world would come on Oct. 21, 2011. “You’ve been warned.”

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