It’s May 21, 2011, Rapture day. At 6pm today we should see Earth ripping apart at the seams and the chosen few floating off into Heaven, in case you didn’t know how it worked.
I’m not sure which time zone we’re talking about because hey – it’s already 6pm around a good part of the world and I haven’t yet heard reports of the planet going ka-plooey. Of course it could still happen. We could see a comet strike today (though it’s unlikely that would happen without some kind of foreknowledge from astronomers.) We could have a 10.0 quake, which to date has been strictly a theoretical event. If it occurred, according to scientists, that doomsday scenario where the earth was destroyed would be true. Except for the floating off into Heaven part. (From a scientific view anyway.)
I was raised in a church where the Rapture was taught as a future, physical reality. Trouble is that if you read the Bible it is a very fuzzy matter. There’s only one space I can think of which references the event as it’s described. If you’re interested, it’s I Thessalonians 4:17 and reads: “Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.” Trouble is that in that part of the Bible it has exactly zero reference to when this will happen. It definitely doesn’t say May 21, 2011. And even for the churches which believe in the Rapture concept, the “when” part is hotly debated. It’s all tied in with the Great Tribulation, you know. And then there’s that whole “only God Himself knows” which the Bible says explicitly.
I guess the folks who sold everything they owned figured their leader was calling God’s bluff or something. I find that supremely sad – no pun intended.
I am not discounting the concepts of prophecy, whether you call it that or call it ESP. There’s more than a little evidence of prescience and I think there will definitely come a time at which the planet itself goes extinct. But like Ezekiel’s wheel within a wheel, I suspect that a lot of the things prophesied back in the day were misinterpreted. If, say, you plunked down a fully functional computer or a holographic representation in front of a pre-bronze-age shepherd, would they call it a computer or a hologram? Would they even THINK of it in those terms? Would they ever dream that a holographic representation had a fully human origin? After they recovered from their initial heart attack, they’d probably create some kind of record – written or verbal – of their experience and almost certainly chalk it up to the supernatural.
Think about it this way, as a future event. Say Earth is in a legitimate doomsday scenario. The Universe has painted a big red target on our world, and a nice big juicy 500-mile-wide asteroid is on its way. There’s no way to deflect it. If that happened right now, today, there wouldn’t be a single thing we could do except die in the collision.
But a couple of hundred years from now might well be a different story. We could conceivably have a means of exiting the planet and finding a new home. Or maybe the asteroid would be large enough to destroy life but allow that Planet Earth could return to tough but survivable conditions within a decade or thereabouts. In that case we take a significant population into a mega spacestation at high orbit, with the expectation of returning after the world was habitable again.
Sounds a bit like the survivors would be taking that aforementioned ride through the clouds, doesn’t it?
I’m not discounting a spiritual element, not at all. I absolutely believe there is a God, albeit not a human-looking God with a long white beard. I know for certain that there are many, many realities which fall outside the scope of what science can explain or even suspect. We’re learning that the power of faith, or the mind, or whatever you want to call it, can indeed manipulate matter on its tiniest scale. It’s not unscientific to believe that the sub-molecular scale may not be a restriction. There is more than a little evidence for reincarnation, though I’m still firmly planted on mush when it comes to my convictions there. I’m willing to concede to the possibilities on all levels.
Even that maybe the world will end at 6pm tonight.
With all this in mind, I thought some of you would get a kick out of this:
I took the quiz and it came back at 100% neo-pagan, which means most of my beliefs would be compatible with Wicca and such. My second match, if I remember right, was Buddhism. Interesting on both counts, considering I was raised a fundamentalist Holy Roller. I always disagreed with some elements of what my church taught, just didn’t realize until later how many disagreements I had with the religion’s doctrines.
I’d love to hear what the rest of my readers get when they do the quiz. Please post to the comments!