The Great Hoover in the Sky: Sucked Up in Judgment

A fellow by the name of Harold Camping is claiming that he has biblically calculated the Day of Judgment…. and people are believing him. It doesn’t hurt that this civil engineer happens to have 66 radio stations to help promote his hypothesis (honestly, I’m a little surprised he hasn’t either bought or sold a station to avoid that number). The interesting thing is, people believe him even though he has been wrong about this before.

In his book, Harold Camping 1994?, he claims to have used the Bible to calculate when the world will end – September 6, 1994 (or maybe between September 15 and 17). The interesting thing isn’t that the world didn’t end. The interesting thing isn’t even that he now claims to have made a miscalculation.  The interesting thing is that he, like almost all others who make these kinds of calculations, places the biblically predicted time within his lifetime. In his case, also like many others, it also happens to be relatively imminent. (I could say that it is just imminent enough to allow time to capitalize on it’s occurrence, but that would be rather cynical and far be it from me to be cynical about something like this).

Purely statistically speaking, given the timelessness of time, and the odds of a random person deciphering the mysterious numerology of the Bible only to find that it points to the second coming and the end of the world within their own lifetime are mindbogglingly astronomical.  Yet, many people believe.

Never mind that the Bible itself tell us that no one will know the time, not even the angels. Never mind that his methods mean treating the Bible as if it is a cryptic document. Never mind that the book of Revelations is a book of hope, not death and destruction, writing to a people suffering under the rule of a heavy handed Roman government. All of those things are just facts that get in the way of believing that the day of The Great Hoover in the Sky is upon us (as I’ve noted before, I can’t help but believe God would have upgraded by now. So, it is probably a Dyson).

Ultimately this is all a rush to judgment. Damn the facts, I want to be saved while others are left behind. It leaves me asking, “what should we do on May 22nd?”

I have a thought: when the Holy Dyson doesn’t suck up the holier-than-thou, let’s celebrate with a judgment free day. See if you can spend a whole day without judging people for their religion, their sexual orientation, the way they drive, the way they talk, their level of education, the way they dress, the color of their skin, their political alignment, or any other of a long list of things upon which we judge each other daily.

If you truly want to see heaven sooner, that’s how you get there.

(Update: I just found a FB page that promotes this idea. Check it out).
(Update 2: You can listen to my Rapture sermon here: “The End is Near(er)“