Will Kane reports for the San Francisco Chronicle that Harold Camping, whose rapture predictions proved premature, is flabbergasted. Me too.
To be clear I'm not flabbergasted that the earth remained intact and that Christians continue, like the rest of us, to be sojourners here below.
I'm flabbergasted at the economy, which remains broken; the climate, which is trending more than Bieber on a good day; the mean-spirited partisanship of Washington, with leaders on the left and right feckless in the face of our ills; the raging global war against terror, which is simultaneously hideous and necessary; energy crises in the Gulf and Japan, which show that we need to speed up and slow down, also simultaneously....
However much Camping believes he extracted his sense of doom from scripture and prophecy, like the rest of us, his insights were formed by this riptide of negativity.
Camping also could look abroad and see the growth of the Chinese and Indian economies, which are lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. He could focus on the upsurge of democracy in north Africa and the middle east. Such news could have leavened his sense of overt doom. But even these news items can be used to buttress a doomsday sentiments.
In fact, Camping's doomsday thinking is remarkable only for its oddity, its religious zealotry, and for the fact that most of us enjoy making fun it. That we do so to conceal our own sense of (secular) doom goes unnoticed; and for that, we owe Camping a big thank you.
