Why does this sound so familiar?
How long has it been - seven years?!?!! - since I was immersed, absorbed, spending hours of my time in the ridiculous but oh-so-entertaining maelstrom of Harry Potter ship debate? I hardly ever think about it any more, but sometimes something reminds me and it all comes flooding back. That just happened when I read this.
It's an article called "A Year After the Non-Apocalypse: Where Are They Now?"
A reporter tracks down the remnants of Harold Camping’s apocalyptic movement and finds out you don’t have to be crazy to believe something nuts.
It's about those people who put up all those billboards last year saying that the world was going to end on May 21st. You remember them, right?
There are some passages that really resonated with me:
It’s been noted by scholars who study apocalyptic groups that believers tend to have analytical mindsets. They’re often good at math. I met several engineers, along with a mathematics major and two financial planners. These are people adept at identifying patterns in sets of data, and the methods they used to identify patterns in the Bible were frequently impressive, even brilliant. Finding unexpected connections between verses, what believers call comparing scripture with scripture, was a way to become known in the group. The essays they wrote explaining these links could be stunningly intricate.
That intricacy was part of the appeal. The arguments were so complex that they were impossible to summarize and therefore very challenging to refute. As one longtime believer, an accountant, told me: “Based on everything we know, and when you look at the timelines, you look at the evidence-these aren’t the kind of things that just happen. They correlate too strongly for it not to be important.” The puzzle was too perfect. It couldn’t be wrong.
And what happened on May 21st:
Some believers stayed up all night. They watched TV or sat in front of their computers, hitting refresh on their browsers, confident that reports of a massive earthquake originating near New Zealand would soon appear. Other believers went to sleep, assuming that they would awaken in the presence of the almighty.
When the sun rose on May 21, they were taken aback. Maybe it would happen at noon. When noon passed, they settled on 6 p.m. When that came and went, some thought it might happen at midnight. Or perhaps it wouldn’t happen until May 21 was over everywhere on the planet. “It will still be May 21st in American Samoa (last time zone before the International Date Line),” someone posted on Latter Rain, an online forum for believers.
By Sunday morning, new theories were floated. “It was God’s plan to warn people. It was His purpose to hide the true meaning behind May 21. It’s about us suffering what He went through,” a believer commented. One hypothesis had it that three days would elapse before the actual rapture, just like the three days between Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. Someone else wondered if it might be seven days considering that seven is a holy number, or forty, the same amount of time Noah was forced to sail around with a boatload of animals.
The May 21 disappointment is analogous to effect of Book 6 plus the Melissa/Emerson JKR interview on the H/Hr true believers. Some of Camping's followers were disillusioned but most rallied around the "real" world ending on November 21:
As it turns out, believers had insisted for years that the earthquake and the rapture would take place on May 21-but the world wouldn’t be destroyed by fire for another five months. This wasn’t a new date. They knew all along that October 21 was significant. Believers concluded it was God’s merciful nature that had spared the unsaved the terror and torment of an earthquake. “If we have to endure til October 21, I’ll prayerfully do it with a merry heart,” a believer wrote online.
While there were no public displays in the lead up to October 21, there were powerful private emotions. “Of course I’ll be disappointed if it doesn’t happen,” a believer who had helped organize the RV caravans prior to May 21 told me. “But I feel like God’s not going to let us down.”
A father of three boys who works in the financial industry told me he was fairly sure this would be the end. Not a hundred percent, but close. After May 21, his faith was so shaken that he apologized on Facebook to the friends he had tried to convert. But as October 21 drew closer, he found himself wanting to believe again. “I’ve been convinced for 10 years that this would be it,” he said. “I think it will be the end of everything.”
Of course, November 21 was just as big a let-down as HP Book 7.
The article talks about how Camping's believers suffered, not just in lost jobs, destroyed savings, etc., but emotionally, in lost confidence and trust and, in some cases, loss of religious faith. Unlike the H/Hrs, though, they weren't locked into a vicious virtual combat with rival believers of a different (and successful) prediction and they didn't face as much mockery and scorn either. They did face a lot of mockery and scorn, of course, but most of that was before their prediction failed, when they could blithely and serenely ignore it. After their prediction failed, when they were confused and vulnerable, the world quickly forgot about them. Also, there was this:
I was struck by how some believers edited the past in order to avoid acknowledging that they had been mistaken. The engineer in his mid-twenties, the one who told me this was a prophecy rather than a prediction, maintained that he had never claimed to be certain about May 21. When I read him the transcript of our previous interview, he seemed genuinely surprised that those words had come out of his mouth. It was as if we were discussing a dream he couldn’t quite remember.
Yeah, we didn't let the H/Hrs get away with anything like that - not with all their certainty conveniently posted on the internet, which never forgets.
I have no particular point here. Just ... remembering.
It's an article called "A Year After the Non-Apocalypse: Where Are They Now?"
A reporter tracks down the remnants of Harold Camping’s apocalyptic movement and finds out you don’t have to be crazy to believe something nuts.
It's about those people who put up all those billboards last year saying that the world was going to end on May 21st. You remember them, right?
There are some passages that really resonated with me:
It’s been noted by scholars who study apocalyptic groups that believers tend to have analytical mindsets. They’re often good at math. I met several engineers, along with a mathematics major and two financial planners. These are people adept at identifying patterns in sets of data, and the methods they used to identify patterns in the Bible were frequently impressive, even brilliant. Finding unexpected connections between verses, what believers call comparing scripture with scripture, was a way to become known in the group. The essays they wrote explaining these links could be stunningly intricate.
That intricacy was part of the appeal. The arguments were so complex that they were impossible to summarize and therefore very challenging to refute. As one longtime believer, an accountant, told me: “Based on everything we know, and when you look at the timelines, you look at the evidence-these aren’t the kind of things that just happen. They correlate too strongly for it not to be important.” The puzzle was too perfect. It couldn’t be wrong.
And what happened on May 21st:
Some believers stayed up all night. They watched TV or sat in front of their computers, hitting refresh on their browsers, confident that reports of a massive earthquake originating near New Zealand would soon appear. Other believers went to sleep, assuming that they would awaken in the presence of the almighty.
When the sun rose on May 21, they were taken aback. Maybe it would happen at noon. When noon passed, they settled on 6 p.m. When that came and went, some thought it might happen at midnight. Or perhaps it wouldn’t happen until May 21 was over everywhere on the planet. “It will still be May 21st in American Samoa (last time zone before the International Date Line),” someone posted on Latter Rain, an online forum for believers.
By Sunday morning, new theories were floated. “It was God’s plan to warn people. It was His purpose to hide the true meaning behind May 21. It’s about us suffering what He went through,” a believer commented. One hypothesis had it that three days would elapse before the actual rapture, just like the three days between Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. Someone else wondered if it might be seven days considering that seven is a holy number, or forty, the same amount of time Noah was forced to sail around with a boatload of animals.
The May 21 disappointment is analogous to effect of Book 6 plus the Melissa/Emerson JKR interview on the H/Hr true believers. Some of Camping's followers were disillusioned but most rallied around the "real" world ending on November 21:
As it turns out, believers had insisted for years that the earthquake and the rapture would take place on May 21-but the world wouldn’t be destroyed by fire for another five months. This wasn’t a new date. They knew all along that October 21 was significant. Believers concluded it was God’s merciful nature that had spared the unsaved the terror and torment of an earthquake. “If we have to endure til October 21, I’ll prayerfully do it with a merry heart,” a believer wrote online.
While there were no public displays in the lead up to October 21, there were powerful private emotions. “Of course I’ll be disappointed if it doesn’t happen,” a believer who had helped organize the RV caravans prior to May 21 told me. “But I feel like God’s not going to let us down.”
A father of three boys who works in the financial industry told me he was fairly sure this would be the end. Not a hundred percent, but close. After May 21, his faith was so shaken that he apologized on Facebook to the friends he had tried to convert. But as October 21 drew closer, he found himself wanting to believe again. “I’ve been convinced for 10 years that this would be it,” he said. “I think it will be the end of everything.”
Of course, November 21 was just as big a let-down as HP Book 7.
The article talks about how Camping's believers suffered, not just in lost jobs, destroyed savings, etc., but emotionally, in lost confidence and trust and, in some cases, loss of religious faith. Unlike the H/Hrs, though, they weren't locked into a vicious virtual combat with rival believers of a different (and successful) prediction and they didn't face as much mockery and scorn either. They did face a lot of mockery and scorn, of course, but most of that was before their prediction failed, when they could blithely and serenely ignore it. After their prediction failed, when they were confused and vulnerable, the world quickly forgot about them. Also, there was this:
I was struck by how some believers edited the past in order to avoid acknowledging that they had been mistaken. The engineer in his mid-twenties, the one who told me this was a prophecy rather than a prediction, maintained that he had never claimed to be certain about May 21. When I read him the transcript of our previous interview, he seemed genuinely surprised that those words had come out of his mouth. It was as if we were discussing a dream he couldn’t quite remember.
Yeah, we didn't let the H/Hrs get away with anything like that - not with all their certainty conveniently posted on the internet, which never forgets.
I have no particular point here. Just ... remembering.