Tom Bartlett wrote a powerful, heart-breaking article entitled “A Year After the Non-Apocalypse: Where Are They Now?“, which discusses Harold Camping’s end-times prediction of May 21, 2011, and the fallout of the failed prophecy.
Here is an excerpt:
“If you’re absolutely sure the world is going to end on a specific day, and it doesn’t, what do you do? How do you explain it to yourself? What happens to your faith in God? Can you just scrape the bumper stickers off your car, throw away the t-shirts, and move on?
In order to find out, I got to know a dozen or so believers prior to the scheduled apocalypse. I sat at their kitchen tables, attended their meetings, tagged along on trips to Wal-Mart, ate pizza in their hotel rooms, spent hours with them on the phone. Then, after Jesus was a no-show, I stayed in contact with them — the ones who would talk to me, anyway — over the following days and months, checking back in to see how or if their thinking had changed.
I learned a lot about the seductive power of radical belief, the inscrutable vagaries of Biblical interpretation, and how our minds can shape reality to fit a narrative. I also learned that you don’t have to be nuts to believe something crazy.”
Click here for the full article >>
As an ex- Seventh-day Adventist, a denomination that is forever connected to the failed prophecy of the Millerite movement, I have many friends and relatives who believe the end of the world is just around the corner – one going so far as to recently tell me that he is “100% sure” that Jesus will come in the next 10 years. So this is a topic that is very dear to my heart.
I have been studying the psychology behind end-times beliefs for a few months now and am planning for it to be the next topic that I address in my “Featured Documents“, but that is still quite some time away. However, I can’t imagine I would ever come close to covering the issue as eloquently as Tom Bartlett did in his article today. So go ahead and check it out.
Two things frustrate about the issue, although I appreciate the way the article was put together. One thing is that when a religious person makes a religious mistake, everyone sinks their teeth into the situation and tries to discredit their belief, anyone attached to them, and religion in general. On the other hand, when someone makes a big mistake in science we just say, “Oh that is just part of the process.” Why is it that religious people are expected to have all the answers (apart from those who actually claim they do)? Why can’t religion be about trial and error? The way I came into my beliefs was a mixture of my cultural and my experience of trial and error in all types of belief systems. I don’t even come close to having all the answers, but I also shouldn’t be expected to. Just as a historian is not expected to have a slideshow projected reference of history in his head and a physicist is not expected to have unraveled all the mysteries of the universe, a religious person should not be expected to get it right all the time. What does matter is the pursuit of knowledge and perfection, not the blind expectation to already have it.
This leads me to frustration number two. Why is it that people are always trying to nail down the future like they have some special foresight into the endless streams of fate. Many people do rely on prophecy and ideas presented in religious texts, but in our modern day, there is nothing in any religious text that gives a valid date for anything up and coming in our universe’s future. I believe God will have a second coming, but I don’t presume I know when, and those who do are naive. All I can do is live the best life I can and hope there is a happy ending.
I found it in interesting in MIB3 a character from a race of aliens who experienced a different dimension of time in which they lived and experienced all time simultaneously. I have always pictured God’s experience with time the same, but on another level of existing outside of it as well as experiencing all time at the same time. The problem with future time is that it is entirely dependent on a variety of factors coming together perfectly. It comes down to a lot of “ifs”. The past looks very linear because it has already taken place, but the future is like a spider web. Because we have freedom of choice, our choices impact the outcome of the future. God knows all possibilities of the future and plans accordingly knowing already which stream the future will follow. The bible is very clear that God knows the end from the beginning, but also that there are cause and effect relationships for God’s dealing with the world. If people would have come on the Ark, they would have been saved, but God knew they wouldn’t. If the disciples would have preached to the whole world, God would have come back in their lifetime. If a certain set of circumstances are met, God will come back. There is an endless stream of probability to when that time will be, and only God knows which stream will really take place. I don’t think trying to tap into that stream of probability is stupid, but to believe we have all the answers for the future is more naive than thinking we have all the answers for the past.