So, the Rapture Didn't Happen...

Lots of discussion the last week or so about the declaration by Harold Camping from familyradio.com that 6pm Saturday the 21st of May was the point at which Jesus Christ would return and the rapture would occur.  This was apparently supposed to happen at 6pm in every time zone, meaning those in the Americas would receive plenty of advance warning as the time zones progressed around the world.

Well first of all, what exactly is the rapture?  Those Christians who attend certain fundamentalist denominations believe from their interpretation of the Bible that as the end of the age approaches, that humanity will devolve into wickedness and evil, such that it will be intolerable for the believers and the righteous followers of God.  Therefore Jesus Christ will appear in the air and lift all His followers up into the air and bring them back to heaven, whilst abandoning the rest of the world to its wayward and sinful path, an event that marks seven years of tribulation beginning before the visible return of Christ and the overthrow of the antichrist.  This interpretation of the Bible was popularised in the early 1970's by Hal Lindseay in his book, "The Late Great Planet Earth," and most recently in the "Left Behind" series of books and movies.

The first thing to say in critique of this view is that this interpretation of the Bible represents only one of several divergent views that characterises Christian eschatology (the study of the end times).  I will not go into the others at this stage, as it is not completely relevant to the critique I am making.

Secondly, I find it sad, and yet faintly (if not outrightly) comical that people will continue to believe the regular succession of preachers who choose to place a date upon the end of the age and the return of Jesus Christ.  The reader interested in placing these latest events in historical context would do well to read up on the Great Disappointment of the 1840's, which lead to the Seventh Day Adventist movement, or the continual revision of the date of Jesus' return by the Jehovah's Witnesses.  Even the Bible itself has a passage that says that noone knows the day or the hour when Christ will return, and yet individuals insist on trying to predict a date based on convoluted interpretations and mathematics.

At this point let me add a disclaimer to my opinions, I spent a good deal of my 20's in various churches, and studied Biblical theology for a couple of years.  I will not claim to be a great scholar on this subject, or even a modest scholar.  The founder of the college I attended had though researched eschatology as the subject of his doctoral thesis, and was thus well qualified to teach the subject.  I myself completed a substantial essay on the various eschatological positions held by the churches and did considerable reading on the subject.  As I write this I do so from the perspective of an ex-christian.  I am not an atheist, more agnostic, although I believe in religious writing and mythology we see many valuable lessons and archetypes that allow us to grow as people and give back to the world.

In the end the question of why preachers feel the need to try and pin down a date is one we need to think about.  Christianity is a religion that basically promises the presence of the future.  The Kingdom of God as proclaimed by Jesus Christ is both an immediate reality, and a promise to believers of the shape of things to come, much as contemporary anarchist thought makes much of the establishment of temporary autonomous zones.

It may seem natural then for those in Christianity, who have patiently awaited their whole lives the promise of the future made present, and who fear they may not see it in their lifetime, to begin to contrast the hazy memories of youth, and what seemed like simpler and more wholesome times, the world re-imagined through the lens of Norman Rockwell to look upon the present and declare it to be altogether more evil or sinful or what have you than the remembered idyll of youth and to think that things are getting so bad that it can't be much longer before God hits the big reset button and makes everything right again.  In that way then it can seem that the desire to see the future made now and the world made anew and pure is a kind of longing, a longing for I am not sure what, perhaps a reaction against a sense of being betrayed, of justice denied, a response to disappointment. 

In response though we have to ask then how many more will pin their hopes on such predictions and be disappointed, disillusioned and jaded with religion as a result?  That could be seen as a negative thing, but instead see it as a positive.  It's a wake up for many people, not in the sense that religion would have us think, that we live in fear of the return of a jealous god who will punish the unbeliever, but rather as a lesson in bringing us back to the reality of our existence on this planet.  We cannot wait for a miraculous divine intervention to fix our lives, or to fix the planet.  We as human beings and part of this wonderful interconnected organism that we call the earth, need to accept that we are responsible for our fate as a whole, as well as individually, that we need to love more and hate less, practice compassion and good will to all living beings, and love and respect our mother earth who sustains us and gives us life through the soil, the water, and through the air we breathe.  We cannot continue to disrespect our world, or other people, or animals, because we all depend on each other for life, and we don't get a magic get out of jail free card from Jesus or any other god.  We are all here, you, me, all of us, and it is time to accept that as a fundamental truth of our existence, and to start to live it.