Not with a bang or a whimper

You’re reading this, and it’s after May 21 in most time zones, so the world apparently didn’t end Saturday. Not with a bang or a whimper.

I wasn’t awakened by earthquakes so violent they ejected the Saints from their graves. (I’ll try to update this if I was.) I bet that when I get up Sunday, I’ll find that millions of people weren’t raptured, either, with billions of us phonies and secularists left behind to suffer, suffer, suffer until October 21.

So all that Harold Camping, Family Radio prophesy porn was, once more, just fantasy, no matter how Camping and his acolytes longingly lingered over the numerical precision of their fantasy (“4990 + 2011 – 1 = 7,000” versus “36-24-36”).

I had planned lengthier discussion here, but when the “conversation” heated way up earlier in the week, I jumped the gun and posted most of it Friday. As I put on the finishing thoughts Saturday morning, the gloating, leering press is reporting that this apocalypse was supposed to roll around the world, time zone by time zone (a nuance I hadn’t noticed, silly me!) and that the seismic activity thus far is your typical 30-40 Richter 2.5 events per day.

To Harold Camping:

Now that your prophecy has failed (or perhaps you’d say it was Bible prophecy, not yours, that failed), do you suppose the number of people in the world who profess Christ has gone up? or down? Are you proud of yourself? How does it feel to have widespread mockery and infidelity as the legacy of your 66 years of defiantly heretical “Bible study”?

You’ve said you’re positive about your predication and “there is no ‘Plan B’.” Let me suggest a Plan B for you: Muzzle your mellifluous mouth once and for all, get to an Orthodox Church, and emulate the Righteous Thief, casting yourself on Christ’s mercy. You may not be on a cross like the thief was, but you’re not getting any younger, and there’s no repentance after death for all the heresy you’ve cherished and souls you’ve misled.

To Camping’s deluded followers:

You have been misled. I hope you didn’t give away all your property, though I read that some of you did. But I hope even more that you’ve still got a scrap of sanity left. Read my prior post and if it feels like cold water in a desert, get to an Orthodox Church, where what’s left of your sanity can be annointed, and fed, and nurtured, and communed, and edified, and whatever other salutary term you can think of. If God can save Saul and turn him in into Paul, it’s surely not too late for you.