You probably know about Harold Camping and his following who thought the Rapture was happening today. To give you a refresher, the Rapture is an instant when all the Christians of the world would meet Jesus in the air. Speculators on this event believe that Christians would disappear from the Earth, leaving all their earthly possessions and a world of chaos behind. There are several verses of the Bible saying that no one knows the time of the Rapture, including Matthew 24:36-44, which the Camping folks have ignored.
“But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.” (KJV) Most of the chapter discusses Christianity’s version of the end times as told by Jesus, and Jesus emphasizes once again in verse 42 to “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come”. Camping definitely wasn’t paying attention to his holy book.
The really sad part is that people believed Camping. One family stopped saving for their children’s college educations and got so embarrassing that their kids had to distance themselves. Luckily their kids saw reason and didn’t believe their parents’ nonsense. Another man put a significant chunk of his life savings into those Rapture advertisements. Don’t think you can reason with Harold Camping. He hid in his house all day, and he refused to entertain the possibility that the rapture wasn’t happening. He’s in for a rude awakening tomorrow, but as he already falsely predicted the end of the world once, he has some explaining to do. The sad part is that this false prediction won’t make too many of his followers see sense. He’ll make his explanation, some calculation error or whatnot (which is all based on numerology, something that many Christians frown on), and his followers will keep on following without questioning the possibility that all of his predictions could be wrong. Yet if for some reason a god did exist and rapture eir believers into the sky, that could turn a lot of nonbelievers into believers because of the presence of proof. Why is critical thinking so hard?