Waiting for the Rapture? May 21 Is Just Days Away

The unusually wet and rainy May weather has a lot of us feeling chilly this week.

A good number of our fellow humans are, at the same time, feeling a bit chiliastic, because they have accepted the prediction of radio preacher Harold Camping that the Rapture will begin this Saturday, May 21, with the world itself coming to an end five months later.

Camper is the owner of a network of religious radio stations called Family Radio, based in Oakland, California. As Stephen Cox noted in Liberty magazine in December 2010 (PDF; pp. 19ff), the network has some 100 stations in the United States and an unknown number of other stations elsewhere. He also points out that Camper predicted the world would end in 1994, but turned out to be wrong.

Not that Camper is alone. He's just the latest in a long line of false soothsayers whose predictions prove groundless. (I won't misuse the word "prophet" to describe Harold Camper. In a theological sense, prophecy has nothing to do with predicting future events. It's much more about speaking truth to power, as Nathan did with King David.) In fact, beginning with the Millerites in the 19th century, predicting the end-times has become something of an American religious tradition.

This sort of fascination with the end-times is, in fact, a fairly recent phenomenon. While the early Christians seemed to accept the idea of an imminent return of Jesus Christ, that belief dissipated rather quickly.

E. Ann Matter, a professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in an essay called "Exegesis of the Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages" (found in The Year 1000: Religious and Social Response to the Turning of the First Millennium, edited by Michael Frassetto):

The last book of Christian Scripture, with its vivid imagery and sweeping promises of the triumph of the faithful over the persecutions of Antichrist, has always captured the imagination of Christians. Some contemporary groups fully expect to see the Last Days soon, and they offer exacting interpretations of the clues hidden in the last book of the New Testament for how this could happen. Sometimes these interpretations take the form of fiction [citing Tim LaHaye's and Jerry B. Jenkins' Left Behind series]. This is a long tradition. In fact, the Apocalypse was among the first biblical texts to be systematically explicated in Latin, even as it was one of the last to be accepted into the canon of the New Testament and given a liturgical role.

That early exegesis was, however, soon rejected by most orthodox Christians, and the Revelation of John took on a more allegorical function, beginning with interpretation of the book by St. Jerome (translator of the Bible into Latin). As Matter notes, "it would seem that at least from the earliest stage, the book appealed especially to those whose theology deviated from the orthodox consensus" [p. 29].

Several pages later, after reviewing the literature from the third century through the ninth and tenth, Matter goes on to point out:

All the Apocalypse commentaries from the Carolingian world thus show the continuing assumption of the text as an allegory of the Church, and a continuing process of filtering specific interpretations from earlier commentaries to support that assumption. There is little in these texts that shares the radical assumption of the imminent end evident in the Apocalypse which was such a subject of fascination to the earliest Christians and now again attracts a following. Instead, early medieval exegesis presents the Apocalypse as a book about the integrity and purity of the Church on earth [p. 36].

Last year, I interviewed Charlottesville writer Kristin Swenson about her widely-reviewed book, Bible Babel: Making Sense of the Most Talked About Book of All Time.

She explained what the book is about in just a few words:

The book is for general readers. It does not take a particular religious perspective. It’s also not dismissive of persons of faith but provides background information about the Bible: what is the Bible, where does it come from, [and] what’s in it, so that folks can make sense of the way the Bible shows up in contemporary culture.

In Bible Babel, Swenson takes a couple of pages to discuss end-times theology and how different branches of Christianity -- not to mention Judaism -- hold very different views on the Rapture and the Second Coming. Let me quote her at length:

The idea that Jesus will return and take the faithful up into heaven at some dramatic moment in the world's last days has captured the imagination of thousands of fundamentalist, evangelical, and nondenominational Christians. "Rapture," the term used to describe this event, is not actually in the Bible. Bible-based Jews, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and many other Christian denominations do not accept the premise, yet Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins's creative depiction of the rapture in the Left Behind series has clearly struck a chord. Tens of millions of these books have sold since the first was released in 1995, and several have become popular movies.

Ironically, it's the faithful who are described by the term "left behind," in the rapture proponents' central biblical text -- 1 Thess 4:16-17. Paul wrote that passage to assure people that their loved ones who had died before Jesus' return would not be overlooked. Those who were dead, Paul wrote, will rise first, and then the living (the ones who were left behind) will join them, "caught up in the clouds ... to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever." The Greek word arpazo, translated "caught up," is raptus in Latin -- the basis for the English "rapture." Of course, what LaHaye and others mean by the people "left behind" is those who are not caught up at all.

Although the rapture as it's popularly understood has little biblical support, the idea that Jesus will return is prominently represented. Sometimes called the Parousia (reflecting its Greek root in "presence, coming"), the expectation of Jesus' returning to earth to initiate a new age permeates the New Testament, and it is a central feature of Christian doctrine and theology today. Even though the Bible strongly maintains that people cannot predict exactly when Jesus will return, people try anyway. Hal Lindsey wrote The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), fairly certain that his was the end-time (specifically, the 1980s). Not everyone who believes in a coming rapture agrees about its chronological relationship to other end-time events, but they share the certainty that it will happen. Then, as a popular bumper sticker warns, "In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned" -- to which unbelieving humorists respond with the bumper sticker, "Come the rapture, can I have your car?" In a curious twist, the Rapture Ready Index recommends that you "fasten your seatbelts" when the number measuring end-time-like world events indicates the speady approach of the rapture [pp. 215-16].

Stephen Cox concludes his December 2010 Liberty article [PDF; p. 22]:

What will happen next?

One thing is certain: the Rapture will not take place on May 21. Nor will the total destruction of the physical universe occur on the following October 21. But what will happen to Family Radio?

Will the Depart Out movement collapse, like the Millerites? Will the Campingites try to reinterpret their message, as they did after the disappointment of 1994? Will they succeed? Or will there be a palace revolution?

I believe that the last is likeliest. People who have invested their careers in an organization are reluctant to part from it, no matter what happens, and in this instance there has been good reason for dissenters to stay and bide their time. Camping is the sole source of the sect’s peculiar theology, and he is 89 years old. (Not that he is senile — he isn’t. His method of argument is the same that it was 25 years ago, when I first found him on the dial.) It is difficult to imagine that Family Radio’s internal proletariat hasn’t made plans for what happens after his death — or even before it, when May 21 fails to justify his teachings. I look for a battle at Family Radio; and with luck, the battle will be public.

In any case, we are unlikely to see a more informative experiment in what happens when prophecy — definite, ceaselessly emphasized, widely disseminated prophecy — unmistakably and climactically fails. Every student of American civilizationshould plan to tune in to Family Radio on May 21 — not with the possibility of being caught up to heaven, but with the certainty of being caught up in a fascinating event.

In an update ("The End Is Nigh") published on the Liberty web site on May 3 (the magazine converted to web-only earlier this year), Cox makes a suggestion that could make this coming weekend highly entertaining:

Harold Camping is not a politician or a professor of environmentalism, whose prophecies can never be proven wrong because they’re ridiculously non-specific. No, he has said exactly what he means by the end of the world, and he has said exactly when the end of the world will happen. You can check it. I hope you do. Go to Family Radio’s website, find out where its nearest radio station is, and tune in during the evening of May 20 (US time), when, Camping believes, Judgment Day will begin in the Fiji Islands. Then listen through the next few days, as Family Radio responds to the disconfirmation of its prophecies. Or does not respond — until it figures out how to do so (and that should be interesting also).

As for myself, after 16 years of Catholic education (and thus holding a fundamental rejection of newfangled fundamentalism), I think the best way to spend May 21 will be to party like it's 1999 -- perhaps listening to Blondie's classic recording, "Rapture."

Then, we can listen to Harold Camping's explanation for his mistaken calculations.  I have a hint for him:  he forgot to count leap-year days in his meticulous enumeration of the number of days from the Crucifixion to May 21, 2011.


Readers of this blog post may also like:  As the Millennium Turns (Revisited) from December 31, 2004.

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Slip of the Tongue?

Catching up on my reading this week, I found a front-page story in the Washington Post about creationists who visit natural history museums to explore how real scientists display the evidence for their theories.

As reporter Steve Hendrix explains it, this is

part of a wider movement by creationists to confront Darwinism in some of its most redoubtable secular strongholds. As scientists celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, his doubters are taking themselves on Genesis-based tours of natural history museums, aquariums, geologic sites and even dinosaur parks.

About a third of the way through the article, one finds this curious statement by one of the creationists:

"Why should we be afraid to test our worldview against reality?" asked Bill Jack, a Christian leadership instructor who leads groups across the country for a company called Biblically Correct Tours.

I gave that paragraph not just a doubletake, but a triple-take. It looks like Mr. Jack, at least, acknowledges that the creationist "worldview" is at odds with reality.

His honesty is refreshing. I hope this represents the beginning of a trend.

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There's a Huckster Born Every Minute

A 21st-century equivalent of the Cardiff Giant is set to open this week in Kentucky.

Back in the 1860s, an intricately carved gypsum statue of a large human was planted on a farm near Cardiff, New York. When it was dug up by unsuspecting workmen (who had been directed by the spot to dig a well by the people who planted the fake), it became an immediate sensation. Thousands of people traveled to see the "giant" and paid as much as a dollar a head to see it (an extraordinary amount for the average person in 1869).

When P. T. Barnum asserted (correctly, it turned out) that the giant was a "fake" -- he was displaying his own phony giant, asserting that it was real -- one of his competitors told a newspaper that "there's a sucker born every minute." That phrase has, ever since, been inaccurately attributed to Barnum himself, even to the point that it became the theme of a song in the Broadway musical, Barnum, almost three decades ago.

What has this got to do with Kentucky in 2007? One of the reasons the Cardiff Giant was such a successful hoax in the 1860s was that, as HistoryBuff.com notes, "many an evangelist at the time had been preaching that there were giants in the earth." People were inclined to believe in the hoax because people they would otherwise trust planted a suggestion in their minds that it might be true, just as huckster George Hull could plant the fake giant and wait for the right moment to bring it out of the ground.

Now, according to Sunday's Washington Post, a group of extreme anti-intellectuals from the evangelical movement are set to open a "Creation Museum," in Petersburg, Kentucky (near Cincinnati), which cost $27 million to build, a "museum" that is every bit as much a hoax today as the Cardiff Giant was in its time:

The Creation Museum, a project of the socially conservative religious organization Answers in Genesis, mocks evolutionary science and invites visitors to find faith and truth in God. It welcomes its first paying guests -- $19.95 for adults, $9.95 for children, not counting discounts for joining a mailing list -- just weeks after three Republican presidential candidates said they do not believe in evolution.

Opinion polls suggest that about half of Americans agree. They dismiss the scientific theory that all beings have a common ancestor, believing instead that God created humans in one glorious stroke. Similar numbers say the world's age should be counted in the thousands of years, not billions, as established science would have it....

The Creation Museum is located for easy access near an interstate and an airport on 49 acres of rolling hills where woolly mammoth roamed until about 10,000 years ago. Designed to inspire Christian belief, the facility was largely built with contributions of $100 or less, although three families gave at least $1 million each, said Mark Looy, an Answers in Genesis co-founder.

To put together a museum with pizzazz, the planners recruited Patrick Marsh, the designer who created the "Jaws" and "King Kong" attractions at Universal Studios in Florida. The exhibits, backed by dozens of professionally produced videos, keep the action lively, and the content coming -- "to create something of a 'Wow!' factor," said Looy, who expects 250,000 visitors the first year.

Set aside for a moment the shocking statistic that millions of Americans are either willfully or unsuspectingly ignorant enough to think that the universe is only a few thousand years old. The blame for that should most likely be laid at the feet of the government schools. (Though that does not fully explain those otherwise intelligent politicians who wish to lead our country, but whose egos are bigger than their brains.)

Fortunately, there are some distinguished scientists ready to speak out against this fraud. Physicist Lawrence Krauss pulled no punches in a commentary during Friday's edition of the National Public Radio program, Marketplace:

... if you want to renounce modern science as flawed, then an intellectually honest approach would be to also renounce technologies such as airplanes, cars and even radios that work using precisely the same scientific principles that tell us the earth is well over 6,000 years old.

But that's not the approach the Creation Museum takes. It renounces knowledge, but has spent lavishly on creating the illusion of science.

So, they've created a museum that appears scientific, but that simply lies about the science instead.

Krauss, who teaches at Case Western Reserve University, concludes, rightly in my view (as I have written elsewhere):

Religion doesn't have to be bad science. And, similarly, bad science shouldn't be defended simply because it might have a religious basis.

While religious tolerance is important, there should be little tolerance for promoting or consuming such religiously motivated scientific fraud.

He also laments, however, that

Alas, such scientific fraud is not subject to legal intervention unless there is a financially injured party.

But what of the intellectual injury to thousands of young children who might visit the museum — built to be within a day's drive of two-thirds of the U.S. population — and who come out confused about science, the very thing that can give them a competitive edge in the modern world.

I think Dr. Krauss concedes too much when he says this fraud "is not subject to legal intervention."

At $19.95 a pop for adults and $9.95 for children, with an expected quarter-million visitors in its first year, surely we can find some intelligent tourist willing to plop down a couple of Hamiltons or a Jackson to tour the exhibits, only to emerge disillusioned and disappointed at the lies told to him, with a willingness to pursue a class-action lawsuit on behalf of himself and all the thousands of others who were subject to the high-tech Answers in Genesis con game.

Anyone heading to Petersburg, Kentucky, this summer? If so, I might be able to find you a good plaintiff's lawyer.

But I'm a Carnivore!

An article from WorldNetDaily that asserts soy-based food products cause homosexuality -- tofu in particular -- is taking a beating in the blogosphere. When I sent a copy of the article to a group of friends, the first response I got was: "This has got to be satire."

Sadly, it's not.

Still, one might get the impression from its headline that the article originates from The Onion: "A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals." I should say, from the original headline when it was first posted on line. The editors at WND must have caught wind of what a laughingstock the piece is and they have since changed the headline to read "Soy is making kids 'gay'." Not much better, but somewhat less diabolical.

Written not by a physician or nutritionist or any sort of scientist, but rather by James Rutz, a self-appointed minister at "Megashift Ministries" (which sounds like the name of a 1970s-era gay bar), the opinion piece makes some astounding claims:

The dangerous food I'm speaking of is soy. Soybean products are feminizing, and they're all over the place. You can hardly escape them anymore.

I have nothing against an occasional soy snack. Soy is nutritious and contains lots of good things. Unfortunately, when you eat or drink a lot of soy stuff, you're also getting substantial quantities of estrogens.

Estrogens are female hormones. If you're a woman, you're flooding your system with a substance it can't handle in surplus. If you're a man, you're suppressing your masculinity and stimulating your "female side," physically and mentally....

Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That's why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today's rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products. (Most babies are bottle-fed during some part of their infancy, and one-fourth of them are getting soy milk!) Homosexuals often argue that their homosexuality is inborn because "I can't remember a time when I wasn't homosexual." No, homosexuality is always deviant. But now many of them can truthfully say that they can't remember a time when excess estrogen wasn't influencing them.

Rutz ends on a somewhat hopeful note, for those of us who frequent Asian restaurants:

Soy sauce is fine. Unlike soy milk, it's perfectly safe because it's fermented, which changes its molecular structure. Miso, natto and tempeh are also OK, but avoid tofu.

I do avoid tofu, not because it's "feminizing," but because it's unappetizing.

Real scientists have already debunked Rutz's ridiculous ramblings. Vivian Paige points to a rebuttal (if I can call it that -- a rebuttal should be reserved to reply to an authentic argument) at Science Blogs that says, in reference to Rutz's assertions about delayed menarche in girls and puberty in boys, that

I searched PubMed, and there's nothing on soy and menarche or menstruation; I found a few articles on soy and puberty, and they say things like "The literature offers no evidence of endocrine effects in humans from infant consumption of modern soy-based formulas" and "To date, no adverse effects of short- or long-term use of soy proteins have been observed in humans and exposure to soy-based infant formulas does not appear to lead to different reproductive outcomes than exposure to cow milk formulas" and "Available evidence from adult human and infant populations indicates that dietary isoflavones in soy infant formulas do not adversely affect human growth, development, or reproduction." There are many more papers on its putative effects on breast cancer and the symptoms of menopause, and even there it's a study in ambiguity: some reports of slight positive effects, many more stating that there isn't a detectable effect.

There doesn't seem to be any strong evidence that eating tofu will turn your sons into girlie-boys, I'm afraid; there are better grounds to be concerned about known endocrine disruptors like atrazine and PCBs.

Andrew Sullivan, meanwhile, goes back to Alfred Kinsey himself to knock down Rutz's assertion that homosexual men have small genitalia. Quoting a 2004 article in the Archives of Sexual Behavior ("The Relation between Sexual Orientation and Penile Size") that examined a Kinsey survey of the 1940s, he says:

The relation between sexual orientation and penile dimensions in a large sample of men was studied. Subjects were 5,122 men interviewed by the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction from 1938 to 1963. They were dichotomously classified as either homosexual (n = 935) or heterosexual (n = 4187). Penile dimensions were assessed using five measures of penile length and circumference from Kinsey's original protocol. On all five measures, homosexual men reported larger penises than did heterosexual men. Explanations for these differences are discussed, including the possibility that these findings provide additional evidence that variations in prenatal hormonal levels (or other biological mechanisms affecting reproductive structures) affect sexual orientation development.

(I know I'm now going to be inundated with visits derived from Google hits for "penile size," "larger penises," "penile length," and "penile circumference." Those will be high on the list, along with "Jeremy Sumpter nude," "creationists circumcision," "granddad sex movies," and "Alex Trebek shirtless." I hope those readers stick around to read some more, but I digress ...)

Waldo Jaquith also got a nice discussion going on this topic, in which he makes the equally plausible claim that evangelical megachurches cause homosexuality (at least in their pastors).

Just when you think you've seen it all, now the third-graders will have a new name to tag their less-than-butch friends with: "tofu-eater!" (And when I say "third-graders," you know who I mean. And him, too.)

Fantasy vs. Reality?

In my brief report on the new documentary film, Jesus Camp, which was screened at the Virginia Film Festival, I pointed out how the pastor in the film warns against imaginary "warlocks" and states that if Harry Potter had been around in Old Testament times, he would have been "put to death."

I saw that movie on Sunday morning, not finding out until later in the day that Parade magazine, the Sunday supplement carried by many U.S. newspapers, reported on efforts to ban Harry Potter books from school libraries:

Now there’s an effort to pull the world’s most popular wizard, Harry Potter, from school libraries in Gwinnett County, Ga. Why? Some parents say kids can’t tell fantasy from reality and will try casting spells on classmates.

"Casting spells on classmates"? Who's having difficulty telling fantasy from reality here? (Hint: It's the parents who believe in magic spells, not the kids who like reading adventure stories.)

Those parents must be the product of government schools, where critical thinking is in short supply.