The end of the world as we know it
I had a great vacation last week. My family celebrated with my brother as he was awarded his E.D.D, I visited Sequoia/King's Canyon National park for the first time and Yosemite National Park for the fourth. I went snowshoeing in May. The world didn't end.
Now, I'm not surprised. Harold Camping is not the first person to predict the end times and he will, sadly, not be the last. My personal belief is that every such prediction will be wrong because the end times are a delusional construct of people who feel the need to believe there is only one way to do life "right."
And it is spelled out in a book.
But they don't understand exactly how so they need loons like Harold Camping to interpret it for them.
I'm sorry - that was unfair to call Mr. Camping a loon. I should have called him a crook.
On Saturday night, when it was entirely obvious that the rapture had not taken place as predicted, I made a lot of jokes on the topic but near the end of the evening, I admitted that I was joking primarily because the whole thing pissed me off.
Camping made national news with his predictions and his followers were out in the streets preaching the rapture was on the way. These people had abandoned their lives and their families and, in many cases, given most (if not all) of their money to Camping's ministry.
And that is their fault. They did it to themselves. Nobody made them turn their money over to him.
But Camping isn't an idiot. He's probably not even a loon. He's a greedy fuck who knows that there are people out there who will buy the bullshit he is selling and will gladly give him their money so he doesn't have to earn his own. Oh sure, he said it was to put up billboards (I saw one while I was in California) and I'm sure he used a few dollars to that end.
I'm also sure that he used that money for other purposes. He can say that it was their own fault they gave him that money and he is right. They are gullible fools who gave up their lives to follow a crazy prophesy and having deluded themselves into doing what they have done, they will most likely delude themselves into believing that they made the right decision.
Camping has already stated a new date for Armageddon and no doubt his followers will fall all over themselves to give him more money.
And it makes me angry because Camping knows this and while it may be their choice to give him that money, it is his choice to be a dishonest fuck and ask for it. If he honestly gave a damn about them, he would have said "give your money to the poor - to your families - to your children." He knew they would have listened and done as he asked.
He didn't do that, though, he told them to give their money to him.
In the 80's, Jimmy Swaggert told his follwers he needed to earn millions of dollars or god would "call him home."
He made it. You know why? Because Swaggert, like Camping, knew that his followers were gullible and they trusted him and if he fed them a line of bullshit that sounded convincing enough, he could get them to do it.
Maybe I shouldn't be so hard on the people who gave them that money. We are all pretty gullible. I can't tell you how many times I've watched an infomercial and though "I would totally use that." Typically, I am smart enough to think about it for a few days - long enough to recognize that I don't need whatever the heck it was that I thought was so awesome.
We fall for sales pitches all the time. People like Camping know this and they exploit it in the worst possible way.
If I spend money on a dehydrator I don't really need, I still end up with a dehydrator. Hell, if I buy a lottery ticket, I have a better chance of winning than Camping's followers had of being called home.
If I send money to Harold Camping, I have nothing. I don't end up being raptured and now my kids can't go to college, I can't make my house payment and I'll be eating ramen for the next month if I'm lucky enough to afford food.
So this whole thing makes me mad because Camping is a household name for his actions and he will find a whole bunch of new followers to shower him with money until the next end times, now reset to October 21st.
We can joke all we want but in the end, what he is doing is serious and the only reason we don't call him a crook is because somewhere, deep down, we figure his followers kind of deserve it. Thing is, Camping probably figures the same thing.