Save the date: Rapture will come Saturday

  • Accord­ing to 89-year-old evan­gel­i­cal Harold Camp­ing, all the faith­ful will be Rap­tured at 6pm on Sat­ur­day, May 21. Seems like news you could use, if only to make the appro­pri­ate deci­sions re: dessert & alco­hol con­sump­tion on Fri­day.  Camp­ing has used “com­plex math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­las” to arrive at that date — they’re the same for­mu­las that pre­vi­ously gave him a Rap­ture date in Sep­tem­ber of ’94, so you know they’re sci­en­tific.

    Accord­ing to this arti­cle in the Den­ver Post:

    By the end of the week, peo­ple will quit talk­ing about the bill­boards pro­claim­ing: “Judg­ment Day May 21.”

    The dooms­day ad cam­paign, on bill­boards and at bus stops coast to coast, is cour­tesy of Fam­ily Radio, a California-based non­profit Chris­t­ian network.

    The cam­paign also launched an armada of col­or­ful end-times vans and RVs, of which at least one has been cir­cling Denver’s Civic Cen­ter like a vulture. …

    Undaunted by the lack of sup­port from the reli­gious main­stream, the Fam­ily Radio web­site offers up Camping’s math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­las as proof that May 21 is the big day.

     

    So there you are. These things hap­pen often enough that it’s not really blog­wor­thy, though of course every­one wants to hang out with these guys on the big day just to see how they han­dle the whole real­ity thing. It’s one of the few place where athe­ists and lower-case-o ortho­dox Chris­tians would agree.

    Or so I think. Inter­est­ing to view these charts at the bot­tom of the story.

    Based on a Salt Lake City sur­vey of about 1,000 Chris­tians, white evan­gel­i­cals are twice as likely as other Protes­tants, Catholics and non-Christians to think that recent nat­ural dis­as­ters are evi­dence that we’re com­ing to the end of the road.

    And we Ortho­dox didn’t get asked, of course. Just as well — we’d skew their out­come. I believe the Ortho­dox teach­ing is that the entire Church Age is, in fact, the “end times” that was referred to in the Book of Rev­e­la­tion. That’s what I think I’ve heard, but I’m open for cor­rec­tion on that point.

    As to whether all the good peo­ple are going to get taken up to be with the Lord on Sat­ur­day night … I think I might need to get talked into it.


    Related posts:

    1. Bright Sat­ur­day … now, what did you forget?
    2. Intro­duc­ing Ortho­doxy in 50 words or less
    3. Being “taken care of” by Muslims
    4. More about Chris­t­ian percentages
    5. Con­gre­ga­tional singing: Can I get an AMEN?

    May 16th, 2011 | Grace | 6 Comments |

6 Responses and Counting...

  • debd 05.16.2011

    you said: “And we Ortho­dox didn’t get asked, of course. Just as well — we’d skew their out­come. I believe the Ortho­dox teach­ing is that the entire Church Age is, in fact, the “end times” that was referred to in the Book of Rev­e­la­tion. That’s what I think I’ve heard, but I’m open for cor­rec­tion on that point. :”

    That’s the teach­ing I’ve heard as well.

  • s-p

    It depends on who you talk to. There are plenty of “apoc­a­lyp­tic prog­nos­ti­ca­tors” in Ortho­doxy too, and not just con­verts. Most of the Ephraimite monas­ter­ies in Amer­ica and more ahem “tra­di­tion­al­ist” Ortho­dox folks believe we are in the end times and they pretty much teach the same stuff you hear from fringe Protes­tants about bar codes, implants, credit cards etc. being marks of the beast and on and on. So it would depend on who you talk to within Orthodoxy.

  • Word­mama

    So how do you like this amaz­ing post-apocalyptic world? Not quite what I was expect­ing, somehow.

  • chris

    Ask most Chris­tians how many they thing are truly saved. Around here many would guess about %10.

    So..

    Jesus saves, but he also burns and tor­tur­ers in the lake of fire forever.

    Nine times out of ten Jesus is here to burn you for­ever for your sins.

    That’s the kind of God you serve and wor­ship. It’s no won­der the Bible says most of the world will try to kill him in the bat­tle of Armaged­don. Imag­ine if we were able to kill the butcher. What a won­der­ful world we could have with­out peo­ple being cast into hell.

    Rein­car­na­tion seems a whole lot bet­ter, when you com­pute the high cost of Jesus’s ‘LOVE’.

  • Grace

    LOL. Now there’s a the­ory. The Rap­ture hap­pened, but apart from a cou­ple Scot­tish ter­ri­ers, no one made the cut.

    Actu­ally, you’ll want to hold onto your hat for this one. Just heard that the guy who started all this says now that he was wrong … about the math, that is. New Rap­ture date: Octo­ber 21. So there you go.

  • Grace

    (BTW, sorry I didn’t post this reply ear­lier. Went out of town and for­got that the new tem­plate doesn’t post com­ments until I approve them.)

    Really? I haven’t heard much from Ortho­dox friends along those lines, but then, I’m sam­pling a lot smaller group than all the peo­ple you would’ve heard from. I sup­pose every­one wants to believe that they can see the fin­ish line from where they are.

    Well, there’s another blog post in here some­where, so I bet­ter col­lect up my thoughts and get on it.

Leave a Reply

* Name, Email, and Comment are Required