Enraptured

OK, let it be said up front that I am an unbeliever. Not a doubter, not an alternative religion participant, not a searcher and definitely no longer interested in becoming any of the above. This is probably the reason that this whole Apocalypse Yesterday failed to hit my radar until a couple of days ago, when I encountered an entry regarding it on another blog.

I try not to mock religion. As has been pointed out to me uncountable times by practitioners of one faith or another, I can’t prove there isn’t a God any more than they can prove there is one. But this is one of those times, like drinking the Kool-aid or waiting for spaceships behind the comet that I simply cannot even fathom what made people believers. I have an easier time understanding how one 89 year old man calculated this date than in comprehending how so many people actually believed him when he made the announcement.

And what made this headline news? Billboards, 5,000 of them. Oh, and twenty circulating RVs plastered with the announcement. Apparently you can buy more than Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame if you have the money for international billboards.

While that explains why this story became a media darling, it doesn’t explain why people bought into it. Why didn’t they question a few aspects about it such as:

• Why was Kiritimati supposed to go under first? It’s Christmas Island for crying out loud. Surely that would be reason enough to leave it alone till last. I’ve never heard the denizens of Christmas Island were inherently more evil than any other place in the world. Is it just because that’s where the time zones start?

• If so, why would God even care about human time zones? After all, it was humans that invented time zones in 1847; there is nothing Biblical about them. It just seems to me that if God chose to wipe out unbelieving humanity, it would be just as easy to do it all at once and get it over with.

• And while I’m going on about the timing of the event, why 6:00 pm? Hours, like time zones, are human inventions. You can trace those back to the first century (maybe before, if you take the ancient Egyptians’ way of calculating time as “hours”, since they divided the day into twelve parts). At any rate, if there’s any mention of hours in the Old Testament, it must be a loose translation of something else since the measurement of time known as hours wasn’t in use back then. Putting all that aside, if God were to pick a specific time, then it seems to me that 3:17 and 16 seconds pm would have worked just as well.

• Why would God bother predicting this anyhow? It makes the world predetermined. If God says that the world is going to end at a specific time, then it’s a done deal. Why not just do it now, and get it over with? What’s the point of allowing wickedness and evil to continue unabated for centuries before finally getting around to doing something about it? It’s as though we’re saying God has a to-do list, and there’s no open time on the Holy Calendar to pencil in “exterminate humanity” until 2011.

• Getting down to the meat of the matter, what’s with this whole “The wicked will be punished for five months before the world finally gets around to ending” thing anyhow? It seems to me at this point in the production, there’s only two ways this can play out for the unholy. They either suffer and go to Hell, or they suffer and die and that’s all she wrote. If they’re just going to die with no afterlife, why bother with the suffering part first? After all, they aren’t going to remember it once they’ve been obliterated. If instead non-Christians are going to Hell, why bother with a preliminary of suffering? Surely that’s what Hell was designed for. Why not just anti-rapture the losers straight there, so they can know the true meaning of turning the heat up?

If God exists, then the ability to reason is a God-given talent. While I wouldn’t presume to know the mind of God if such a thing existed, I’d have to believe that a just, loving God would not give us the ability to think things through rationally and then deal with us in an irrational manner. If God doesn’t exist (as I believe)(and don’t push the “as I believe” in my face; I dealt with that in the second paragraph) then rational thinking still leads you to the same conclusion. The Hell you face is of your own devising. I suspect there are people waking up to this fact today.

And there ends my version of the Sunday Sermon for this week.