"And it will come to pass that a large hand will come from the sky and carry off all dumb people"

There’s a popular bumper sticker that reads: ‘God must love stupid people – He made SO many’.

Nothing proves the accuracy of this statement more than the all the nonsense about the ‘rapture’  which, surprise, surprise, didn’t actually come to pass as predicted.

A frightening number actually believed that today was the day they were going to be among the elect people to go sailing up into heaven in good time to avoid end of the world on October 21st. (“These dates can be trusted because they come right out of the bible” – yeah, right!)

Presumably they imagined spending their first five months in paradise gloating smugly down on all us poor sinners as we endure torment and fail to survive the forthcoming floods, fires and earthquakes that would engulf the planet.

Instead they must feel pretty miffed that things haven’t gone according to plan. “Don’t worry – it’s not the end of the world” is, I guess, a comment that would give them little comfort.

Harold Camping, the 89 year old broadcaster on Family Radio in California is one the main voices that have been preparing people for this day. This is a man who said Christ might return on September 6th 1994 (don’t you just love that ‘might’).

It’ll be interesting to hear how he explains away his latest miscalculation.

An anonymous London poet, who goes under the pseudonym ‘The Factologist’, is someone who gives us a more reliable perspective in a poem I found on Poem Hunter  called There Is No Judgement Day :

The
afterlife
is not a
place;
we don’t
move
on to
another
rat race.
Death is
just
sleep,
without
a sound
or a
peep;
you won’t
have to
answer
to a
mythical
creep.

Related articles:
Make My Bed? But You Say the World’s Ending  (New York Times)
Apocalypse not now: The Rapture fails to materialise (Guardian.co.uk)