The Willingness 2 Believe in 1 Thing, Anything is Powerful

[really]

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.
By Tom Bartlett

For a while, their message was everywhere. They paid for billboards, took out full-page ads in newspapers, distributed thousands of tracts. They drove across the county in RVs emblazoned with verses from the books of Revelation and Daniel. They marched around Manhattan holding signs. They broadcasted day and night on their network of radio stations. They warned the world.

That warning turned out to be a false alarm. No giant earthquake rippled across the surface of the earth, nor were any believers caught up in the clouds. Harold Camping, the octogenarian whose nightly Bible call-in show fomented doomsday mania, suffered a stroke soon afterward and mostly disappeared from sight. The press coverage, which had been intense in the weeks leading up to May 21, 2011, dwindled to nothing. The story, as far as most people were concerned, was over.

But I wanted to know what happens next. If you’re absolutely sure the world is going to end on a specific day, and it doesn’t, what do you do? How do you explain it to yourself? What happens to your faith in God? Can you just scrape the bumper stickers off your car, throw away the t-shirts, and move on?
In order to find out, I got to know a dozen or so believers prior to the scheduled apocalypse. I sat at their kitchen tables, attended their meetings, tagged along on trips to Wal-Mart, ate pizza in their hotel rooms, spent hours with them on the phone. Then, after Jesus was a no-show, I stayed in contact with them—the ones who would talk to me, anyway—over the following days and months, checking back in to see how or if their thinking had changed.

I learned a lot about the seductive power of radical belief, the inscrutable vagaries of biblical interpretation, and how our minds can shape reality to fit a narrative. I also learned that you don’t have to be nuts to believe something crazy.

“I Can’t Afford to Doubt”

On the night of October 22, 1844, they huddled in a barn in Port Gibson, New York. They stood by the graves of their departed loved ones in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire. In Cincinnati, Ohio, 2,000 of them walked through downtown and climbed a hill to a park overlooking the city. Inside homes, on rooftops, in fields, alone or en masse, they waited for God.

These were devotees of William Miller, the prosperous farmer turned self-taught biblical scholar. It’s impossible to know for sure how...
A Year After the Non-Apocalypse: Where Are They Now? | (A)theologies | Religion Dispatches

[P_Synthesis]

Great article.

Interested in the long, sorry history of failed prophecy? You really might like John Michael Greer's Apocalypse Not. Have fun!

[paqart]

Originally Posted by P_Synthesis

Great article.

Interested in the long, sorry history of failed prophecy? You really might like John Michael Greer's Apocalypse Not. Have fun!

Funny thing about this is that this morning the only thing I wrote in my journal is that you posted something today. I went online to check, but didn't see it, and now it's here. Now I'll have to check your posting history. I haven't seen much from you in a long time, but maybe I'll get surprised by a bunch of posts in a thread I wasn't reading.

In case you are curious, my impression in the dream was that you had written a long post that you wanted me to read.
AP

* I just checked and found the post in the new podcast thread, and no, I hadn't read the thread yet (the type was still dark blue when I checked.) I think I woke up at about 8am when I wrote the dream. According to the time stamp on the post, it was written at 18:47 yesterday, but the timestamps all use US time, so they are always off by at least six hours for us. Do you remember when you posted in Greenwich time? My record was made at about 8:00 Greenwich +1.

Correction: I wrote the note in the middle of the night in the dark, then went back to sleep (as happens sometimes). A few hours later, I woke at 8:00. Looks like there is at most about a 2-3 hour discrepancy, but I was asleep when you wrote the message.

[P_Synthesis]

The time was 12:37pm according to the thread now, which sounds about right to me. However I was thinking about the post prior to that.

For some reason, my clock in Skeptiko is set to, I think, Arizona time, which is where I lived before coming here, so the time stamps are always off by about eight hours for me.

AP

[paqart]

P_Synthesis,

I was just trying to find your last post and then realized that in replying to it yesterday, I hit the "edit" button instead of "reply." Those buttons should be on opposite sides of the screen instead of beside each other. However, my apologies for that, it wasn't intentional.

I'll respond in the other thread to your longer post.

AP