Doomsday, Take Two

Posted May 31st, 2011 at 12:18 pm (UTC-4)
2 comments

You know how it is when you tell people a riveting story about a good movie or book or sporting event? They want to know how it turned out.  So I waited to be sure it hadn’t really happened before I wrote about the most recent End of the World.

Harold Camping admits his doomsday prediction was off, but only by six months.  So he’ll be back in the news in late September.  (CrazyInSane, Wikipedia Commons)

Harold Camping admits his doomsday prediction was off, but only by six months. So he’ll be back in the news in late September. (CrazyInSane, Wikipedia Commons)

By now you have probably heard that Christian preacher Harold Camping, an 89-year-old retired civil engineer and self-taught biblical scholar whose broadcasts on more than 200 U.S. radio stations and two TV stations have brought him a devoted following and lots of money, prophesied God’s judgment day for Saturday, May 21st.  It was to start in New Zealand and, by 6 p.m. EDT, reach us here in Washington.

Details were a bit fuzzy.  Sometimes Camping spoke of a more gradual destruction of the Earth that would just start on the 21st.   But some catastrophe was sure to get the (fire)ball rolling toward the world’s demise on that date.

Camping’s Family Radio Network bought space on billboards from coast to coast and printed millions of pamphlets about his doomsday prediction.

This message, similar to ones that the Family Radio Network posted on billboards across the nation, appeared on the side of a semi-truck outside Camping's Oakland headquarters.  (AP Photo/Jose Sanchez)

This message, similar to ones that the Family Radio Network posted on billboards across the nation, appeared on the side of a semi-truck outside Camping's Oakland headquarters. (AP Photo/Jose Sanchez)

Camping told his flock, and anyone else who would listen, that he picked the date after somehow calculating that it fell exactly 7,000 years to the day after the first of 40 days and 40 nights of rain that, the Bible says, created a great flood that killed all of naughty mankind.  The virtuous prophet Noah and his family, however, were spared.  As told in Genesis, the Bible’s very first book, Noah, expecting the worst when the skies grew threatening, built a huge boat called an “ark,” on which he, his wife, his sons, and their wives — along with two of every other kind of animal that Noah herded aboard — rode out the terrible storm.

While some devout followers took Reverend Camping’s End of Time prediction quite seriously and made whatever preparations they could, most Americans made light of the idea.  Some even threw raucous “Doomsday parties” raising toasts and cheering as the hour of reckoning passed uneventfully.

Others, including me, marked the occasion by informing our spouses that we wouldn’t be available for any household chores that day.  Why cut the lawn if it and everything else would be swept away or incinerated by day’s end?

Some people celebrated, but others worried about Armegeddon back in 2000, which many people pegged as a most worrisome change of millennia.  (AP Photo/Jan Bauer)

Some people celebrated, but others worried about Armegeddon back in 2000, which many people pegged as a most worrisome change of millennia. (AP Photo/Jan Bauer)

All the Doomsday angst recalled the days before the change of the calendar from 1999 to 2000, which a lot of people treated — apparently incorrectly — as a change of millennia.  This set the world to buzzing with apocalyptic predictions and preparations.  And for some time there have been other nonreligious visions of the End of the World, such as astronomer Carl Sagan’s prediction of a nuclear winter, in which life above the microbe level is destroyed when an atomic cloud halts photosynthesis.

Ted Daniels, a former psychotherapist who turned to the study of folklore at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, chronicled all this and more.  Over seven years, he collected more than 1,200 examples of prophesies and predictions of apocalypse and salvation, many pegged to the turn of the millennium. He edited them down into chapters for a book, A Doomsday Reader: Prophets, Predictors, and Hucksters of Salvation.

If you want to dig into the doomsday subject, here's a good source. (NYU Press)

If you want to dig into the doomsday subject, here's a good source. (NYU Press)

All doomsday prophesies say pretty much the same thing, Daniels told me, back around change-of-millennia time:  “Clean up your act, change your behavior, or this awful thing will happen.”

Of course every doomsayer has been wrong so far.  This includes the scruffy guy on the streetcorner with the “The End is Near” sign, and probably including Nostradamus, who is said to have predicted just about everything, including who will win the World Cup each year.

So Reverend Camping and those who believe every word of his doomsday scenario are the latest to have a credibility problem.

“They say, ‘Yeah, but this time is different,’” Daniels told me about End of Worlders generally.  “‘This time it’s gonna happen.  Look at the signs: the wars, the disasters, the earthquakes, the volcanoes, the huge storms.’”

Well, about the time of THIS end of time, volcanoes DID erupt again in Iceland.  Terrible killer tornadoes DID sweep through the American heartland.  No wonder even rationalists may be wondering, ever so quietly, if something apocalyptic might be up.

This NASA photo shows the latest ash plume over the Grimsvoth volcano in Iceland.  The timing on "doomsday" was interesting, but fortunately the event was isolated and (as far as we know) did not trigger other world-ending cataclysms.  (AP Photo/Jan Gustafsson)

Al Allen, for instance, strikes me as the kind of guy who would want logical explanations, if not hard scientific proof, before he believed doomsday projections.  He’s a retired chemist, after all.  But Allen, who lives in Winter Haven, Florida, told the Orlando Sentinel that he’s a Harold Camping follower and was sure the preacher was right.

“This thing is a certainty,” he said.  That was BEFORE last Saturday.

Whether he knows it or not, Allen — and Reverend Camping — may be flouting the New Testament with their End is Near talk, however.  According to Mark Kolto-Rivera, a religious scholar whom the Sentinel interviewed, that book says “in black and white that no man and no angel in Heaven — only God — knows when [the End of the World] is going to happen.”

Broadcaster Camping shrugs off what he calls a “miscalculation” about Earth’s final day last Saturday.  He told a crowd of journalists that he now views May 21st as an “invisible day of judgment” and that he was off by exactly six months in his prediction.

His recalibration pegs doomsday for October 21st.

Now that we have more time to prepare, here’s a clarification or two, provided by Ted Daniels.

Allison Warden believed that the rapture was at hand, and even traveled about to spread the message.  (AP Photo/Gerry Broome)

Allison Warden believed that the rapture was at hand, and even traveled about to spread the message. (AP Photo/Gerry Broome)

Contrary to the popular notion, he says, “apocalypse” does not mean the End of the World.  Rather, it’s a more drawn-out time called the “End Days.”  “Apocalypse,” from the Greek, translates in English as “revelation.” That’s the title of the last book of the Christian Bible, whose near-to-final words are, “He who testifies to these things says, ‘Yes, I am coming soon.’/Amen. Come Lord, Jesus.”

Literally [“apocalypse’] means “an unveiling,” Daniels says.

And that’s crucial, I think, to almost all prophesies.  The prophet comes back from what he takes to be contact with God or some superhuman source with a unique vision, a unique knowledge about what’s going to happen to the world and what people must do in order to get through that process.

The Book of Apocalypse [Revelations] is vivid in its description of the horrors, of the tribulation and the torments that the unbelievers, the unjust, are going to suffer at that time.  Some of the believers, too, but they at least have the hope of martyrdom ahead of them. The rest of us, we’re in deep trouble.

As I mentioned, back around the turn of the millennium a decade or so ago, even more people than today got worked up about this sort of thing.  Admittedly, the MOST excited seemed to be media folks looking for something offbeat, as well as comedians and street vendors who sold T-shirts.

Then as now, lots of folks associate apocalyptic events with nut-case fringe groups or far-out radicals living in yurts in the remote American West.  But I came across a Newsweek poll that reported four in ten — 40 percent — of Americans, and 45 percent of Christians, surveyed believing the world would end in their lifetimes.

So a lot more than the far-out radical fringe gets stirred up when doomsday stories get beyond the sensationalist tabloids.  No wonder Reverend Camping got so much attention.  (Of course he bought some of it as well.)

This is a depiction of the apocalypse as painted on the ceiling of an Orthodox cathedral in Macedonia.  (Wikipedia Commons)

This is a depiction of the apocalypse as painted on the ceiling of an Orthodox cathedral in Macedonia. (Wikipedia Commons)

“Ideas of an apocalypse are absolutely central to monotheism in general, Christianity in particular, and Americans above all,” Ted Daniels told me.  “You cannot completely discard the idea of the Second Coming [of Jesus, to judge us, no doubt harshly in most cases, for our Earthly behavior] and still be a Christian.  It’s pretty central. If you’re a Jew, according to [medieval Jewish scholar] Maimonides, you must accept that the messiah will come.  Islam has essentially the same idea.”  But, Daniels adds:

You will also find the Earth kind of running down and collapsing into general chaos and then starting over in a new golden age in both Hinduism and Buddhism.  There’s no apocalyptic part there, because they don’t have the concept of sin.  Therefore there’s no need for the battle [of Armageddon] between good and evil.  It’s the process of the law of karma working itself through as far as they’re concerned.

While doomsday prophets seem like lunatics to nonbelievers, a lot of them — not to mention their followers — give every appearance of genuine belief.

Wonder if this van is getting a slight paint job correction about now?  (AP Photo/Jose Sanchez)

Wonder if this van is getting a slight paint job correction about now? (AP Photo/Jose Sanchez)

According to the New York Times on the day before Harold Camping’s incorrectly predicted day of reckoning, “Thousands of people around the country have spent the last few days taking to the streets and saying their final goodbyes.  They expect to be absorbed into heaven in a process known as the rapture.”  Their convictions, the paper continued, “have frequently created the most tension within their own families, particularly with relatives whose main concern about the weekend is whether it will rain.”

In a separate story, the Times quoted pastor Dave Nederhood of the Christian Reformed Church of Alameda, California, not far from Camping’s broadcast headquarters in Oakland.  “My concern is for the people who have bought into his lie and have sold their belongings, quit their jobs, left their churches and their families and now are sitting at home listening to Family Radio and waiting for the end,” Nederhood said.

Fortunately nothing worse, akin to the suicides of 39 members of a California religious cult called “Heaven’s Gate.”

Marshall Applewhite was dead serious about a coming, comet-related catastrophe.  Then he and many of his followers got a head start on passing through "Heaven's Gate."  (AP Photo)

In 1997, 21 women and 18 men were found lying peacefully, wearing tennis shoes and matching dark clothes, with no noticeable signs of injury. The cult had become obsessed with the comet Hale-Bopp, which was expected to pass near the Earth at the time.  Heaven’s Gate members believed that an alien spacecraft was on its way, hidden behind the comet.  In late March 1997, as the comet reached its closest distance to Earth, Heaven’s Gate leader Marshall Applewhite and 38 of his followers drank a lethal mixture of phenobarbital and vodka and settled down to die over several days.  They had been hoping to leave what they called their bodily “containers,” enter the spacecraft, and pass through Heaven’s Gate into a higher existence.

Four years earlier David Koresh, the leader of another sect, the “Branch Dividians,” died in a Waco, Texas, compound along with 54 other adults and 21 children during a fiery standoff with the FBI. “He had several opportunities to surrender during that standoff and never took it,” Ted Daniels told me. “He clearly convinced his followers that just about anything he said was as good as the word of God.  That’s a pretty heavy talent.”

Asked by reporters if he feared that followers might harm themselves rather than face the terrible end that he has now thrice predicted — we didn’t mention another false alarm back in 1994 — Harold Camping responded, “I am not the authority.”

Ted's Wild Words

These are a few words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word that you'd like me to explain, just ask!

Flout. To disregard, show contempt for, or even mock accepted rules or custom. The word is often confused with “flaunt,” which refers to showing off, as in the famous expression, “If you got it, flaunt it.”

Raucous. Loud, boisterous, disorderly.

Yurt. A circular, portable, tent-like structure favored for centuries by Central Asian nomads.

2 responses to “Doomsday, Take Two”

  1. Eaglekiss says:

    I cannot but agree with Harold that there must come the doomsday. It must be very near as there are not so many reasons why this world should continue as it has been so far. Just look at how suffering people are today (as have always been!) to see that there are not so many reasons to lengthen this suffering. Look at sick and starving people in Africa. Look at the bloodsheds in the Middle East. Look at all the fanatics, murderers, oppressors on the one side and the starved, oppressed populations on the other side and you will agree with him. However, I do not think anybody can know exactly when it will come. But It must be very near!

  2. Sajid says:

    We can derive a lot of information about historical events and future prophecies from Quran as it is the book that reveals many truths about the creation of this world and other natural phenomenon. There are many signs of doomsday stated in Quran and told by Prophet (PBUH) as it was one of the duties of God’s Messenger to unveil the end of the world.
    “God is the Knower of the future; He does not permit anyone to unveil such knowledge. Only through the messenger that He chooses does He reveal future and past events” 72:27
    Being Muslims we believe that only God has the knowledge of future and he has unveiled few signs through His Messenger (PBUH) through which we can conclude the time of end of this world but still no one ever can judge the exact time.
    “The Hour (End of the World) is surely coming; I will keep it almost hidden. For each soul must be paid for its works.” 20:15
    End of the World Coded in Quran:
    Quran has stated about the culmination of this world as:
    “The day will come when this earth will be substituted with a new earth, and also the heavens, and everyone will be brought before GOD, the One, the Supreme.” 14:48
    “When the horn is blown once. The earth and the mountains will be carried off and crushed; utterly crushed. That is the day when the inevitable event will come to pass.” 69:13-15
    Signs of Approaching End of the World
    The splitting of the moon:
    This already happened in June 1969 when man landed on the moon and brought back moon rocks. People on earth can go now to many museums, colleges and observatories to look at pieces of the moon.
    “The Hour has come closer, and the moon has split.” 54:1
    The Creature (27:82):
    The Quran has predicted that at the right time God will produce a creature that will be instrumental in unveiling God’s signs. This was fulfilled, the creature was the computer which was instrumental in unveiling the Quran’s numerical code, and proclaiming that the world has neglected God’s message.
    “At the right time, we will produce for them a creature, made of earthly materials, declaring that the people are not certain about our revelations.” 27:82
    Gog and Magog:
    They re-appear, in accordance with God’s plan, in the year 1700 AH (2271 AD). Gog and Magog are mentioned in 18:94 and 21:96. If you count the verses from 18:94 to the end of Sura 18, you find them 17. If you count the verses from 21:96 to the end of Sura 21, you find them also 17. This is the Quran’s sign that Gog and Magog will re-appear in 1700 AH.
    “They said, ‘O Zul-Qarnain, Gog and Magog are corruptors of the earth. Can we pay you to create a barrier between us and them?” 18:94
    Appearance of God’s Messenger of the Covenant (3:8l):
    A consolidating messenger, prophesied in the Quran, comes after all the prophets have delivered the scriptures, to purify and unify. This prophecy was fulfilled in Ramadan 1408.
    Reappearance of Jesus:
    Another indication given in the Quran as a code for unveiling the end of the world is derived from the following verse:
    “He (Jesus) is to serve as a marker for knowing the end of the world so that you can no longer harbour any doubt about it” 43:61
    There are many other signs of end of the world revealed through Quran Recitation, like, appearance of Imam Mehdi, appearance of Dajjal, 72 apostates in Islam, Landslides, Earthquakes, rising of the suns from west etc.
    It is our firm belief that nobody ever can estimate the exact time of end of the world, regardless of all the signs stated by Mayan and other resources, there are many other signs yet to appear before us. The end of times is near for sure, we should live our lives according to the teachings of Islam rather than believing on rumors and speculations.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Ted Landphair

About

This is a far-ranging exploration of American life by a veteran Voice of America “Americana” reporter and essayist.

Ted writes about the thousands of places he has visited and written about as a broadcaster and book author. Ted Landphair’s America often showcases the work of his wife and traveling companion, renowned American photographer Carol M. Highsmith.

Ted welcomes feedback, questions, and ideas. View Ted’s profile. Watch a video about Ted and Carol by VOA’s Nico Colombant.

Photos by Carol M. Highsmith

Calendar

May 2011
M T W T F S S
« Apr   Jun »
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031