Getting rapturous about another lot...

What a privilege to have been graced with new enlightenment as a result of my posts about the rapture and Mr Camping. A benefit all the more welcome for having been entirely unexpected.

As a result of my most recent post, I received a comment pointing me to a site run by the Merkaba organisation. I was told that it contained information that is proving controversial, which is curious – the controversy has completely passed me by. It’s appalling, isn’t it, how one can live in a society and simply not notice a major debate of this kind?

To my shame, I have to confess I’d never even heard of the organisation before.

The site includes a sonorous audio message which started off by telling me that Harold Camping was talking complete rubbish. Imagine my shock. This cast a wholly new light on the whole Camping prophesy business. Might he have been wrong, I asked myself? Was there perhaps some incontrovertible evidence out there of his having been mistaken? Had I missed it?

It seems that Camping and his followers are suffering from ‘diseased right-brain thinking.’ I hope they’re aware of that – they might be able to get it treated. Though perhaps not those who’ve given away all their worldly possessions in readiness for the rapture, if they’re dependent on the US health system where ability to pay remains a pretty significant factor in access to care.

The Merkaba people utterly reject Camping’s idea that the world will end on 21 September. This is complete rubbish. It will clearly end on 21 December 2012. This is a date not deduced by some ‘dart throw’ method from questionable interpretation of the bible, but one that was (imagine a particularly sonorous voice here) ‘given us by the ancient ones who built pyramids that still cannot be duplicated today.’

I don't want to quiblle, but I rather suspect that we could duplicate the pyramids today. The problem is that nobody can be bothered to do it just to prove some sect wrong.

Anyway, the rapture may not have happened on 21 May, but then it was never going to. Then Merkaba assures me that sometime between the later months of 2011 and the early months of 2012, there will be a ‘massive coronal ejection’ of matter from the sun which will strike the earth and that will bring about the rapture.

Coronal Mass Ejection - the initial sign of the coming rapture?

And then, finally, the end of the world on 21 December 2012.

Isn’t this wonderful? We now have several predicted events we can await with pleasure, knowing that we’ll be able to wake up the following day and have a bit of a laugh at the expense not just of one set of doom-mongers but two. I know you can’t get a hell of a lot of laughs out of prophets getting things wrong, but even a bit of a chuckle is a good way to start a day, and it’s kind of Camping and Merkaba to want to provide us with at least that much.

It may also give me material for a couple more blog posts. And who knows what enlightening comments they might generate.

Sackcloth and Ashes

When we have the energy, and we try to dredge it up most weekends, we play badminton on a Sunday morning. It’s fun and it’s good exercise, but on top of that the atmosphere has its own special charm:  we play to the sound of hymns being sung to lilting African melodies and strong African rhythms.


This is because as well as the badminton court, the centre where we play houses not one but two African churches on a Sunday morning. In one of them, the worshippers turn out immaculately dressed in smart suits or long dresses. In the other, they wear flowing all-white robes. Both congretations sway, sing and dance. The children dress like the adults and smile when we turn up. If worship can be dismally solemn in a lot of churches, in those two it is unstintingly joyous.

Last Sunday, we had badminton, we had our singing and dancing churchgoers, we had sun and blue skies. Everything to encourage good cheer. And yet surely we should have woken to floods and earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and pestilence, with the rapturous amongst us long since raptured. If anyone deserves to be rapt, some of them would certainly be members of our two congregations, and yet there they were on Sunday morning, still among us, still as full of cheer as ever.

Harold Camping, who predicted the rapture and the start of the end of the world for Saturday, is apparently now admitting that he got the calculations wrong. Wrong? You think so? Perhaps that is the truest statement he’s made for a while. Is it time for him to don sackcloth in penance?

But he goes on to say, demonstrating his unerring command of the English language, ‘we have to be looking at all of this a little bit more spiritual, but it won't be spiritual on Oct. 21, because the Bible clearly teaches that then the world is going to be destroyed altogether.’ So he was wrong but basically he was right.

Camping used to be a civil engineer. I was once told that where a  mathematician will tell you that 1 + 2 makes 3, a physicist will tell you that it’s between 2.5 and 3.5 and an engineer will say, ‘well, it’s approximately 3 but let’s say 8 for safety.’ Sound like Camping to you?

That being said, things have started turning nasty – or I should say gone on turning nasty – in various parts of the world. Iceland, for instance, is producing another cloud of volcanic ash for us. The same thing happened last year. And two years before that, one of the first calamities of the financial crisis was the Icelandic banks crashing, spreading devastation far beyond their shores.



Unlike Camping's, Iceland's message is unambiguous

What have the Icelanders got against us? What have we done to trouble their tranquillity? And do they realise they’re playing with fire? I mean, they’ve got enough to contend with as it is, and surely they know that if Britain, France or the US get the impression another country is dissing them, the next thing you know is the bombers go in. Just as soon as the ash clears enough to allow planes to fly.

I wonder whether Camping is looking for the source of our tribulations in the right place. The damp squib that rapture day turned into on Saturday rather suggests that God doesn't really have it in for us just yet.

On the other hand, should we be getting concerned about some character in Rejkyavik?

It's goodbye from me. And all of you

It seemed important to get this post up in a hurry, since I have it on good authority – well, authority anyway – that the end of times happens this evening. At 6:00, apparently, though of course we’re on British Summer Time here, so I assume we have an hour longer – I presume divine institutions, when organising events like raptures, would base themselves on Greenwich Mean Time when they prepare the schedule for England.

So, it’s goodbye to all my readers. To the small number of you who will be caught up in the rapture, and ascend naked to heaven to join the Lord and his Saints, I can only say congratulations and happy eternity. For the rest, well see you shortly, I suppose, and let’s hope things don’t turn out quite as vile as we've been led to believe.

The authority on which I’m basing my plans for the rest of the day (the rest of time, actually) is of course the Bible, but transmitted via the Reverend Harold Camping of California (natch). At the cost of seeming churlish, I have to point out that he did previously predict the end of times for September 1994, which is perhaps a good reason for marginally downgrading the credit due to his forecast for tonight. Time to take a leaf out of the credit ratings agencies’ books – let’s downgrade Camping from triple-A to A. I reckon that’s about as reliable and rigorous a downgrading as the ratings agencies generally manage.

The biggest problem with Camping’s prophesy, though, isn’t the fact that he’s been wrong before, it’s his name. However seriously you might want to take his pronouncements, it’s really hard, isn’t it, with a name like that? It just kicks off far too many unfortunate trains of thought.

• For instance, I keep wanting to ask what he’ll do at the end of the world – fold his tent and steal away?
• Is Camping blessed with second site?
• Does he have the support of enough strong guys?
• Should we congratulate him on driving a peg so firmly into the ground?
• Might the police suspect him of prophesying within tent?

Camping out with the bible

That kind of thing introduces an unfortunate note of levity. Obviously, if he’d been called Tiresias or Isaiah, we might be able to take him much more seriously. And then I might have spent the next few hours cancelling any arrangements for the evening and preparing myself to meet my maker (not, I suspect, an occasion from which either of us could hope to gain very much, as a headmaster once told me when I was eleven).

And I certainly wouldn’t already be planning my first post-rapture blog post.