May 21st, 2011 is Judgment Day

And to almost think I missed the news.

I have made no particular preparations for the big day; so the last laugh will be on me when it comes.

Harold Camping of Family Radio will be my Cassandra.  He says that the rapture will occur on May 21st, with the world ending on October 21st, and who am I to say otherwise.  Since I do not go to the correct church I am doomed.  Actually going to a church is not the answer.  There is no anwer if you are not one of the elect.

I Hope God Will Save Me (pdf)

Harold Camping, Family Radio

Christian." This means that they identify with a religion that uses parts of the Bible to support its claim that it is the Gospel that will bring people to God. Each and every religion, whether very slightly related to the Bible, or whether apparently quite true to the Bible, claims that it has the most correct way to become reconciled to God. This is true of well-known denominations such as Roman Catholic, Baptist, Reformed, Presbyterian, Seventh-Day Adventist, Jehovah's Witness, Mormon, etc. Sadly, none of these denominations has a sufficient understanding of the nature of what is required for an individual to become reconciled with God, that is, to become saved from the wrath of God, which is the punishment for their sin.

Unfortunately, those who have placed their trust for their salvation in any of these religions are still in deep trouble with God because their religion cannot save them.

We should be aware of the fact that today no one can be saved in the churches. According to God's timetable, the church age has come to an end, and the Holy Spirit has abandoned the churches. However, the Bible instructs us that outside of the churches a great harvest of true believers is being brought into the kingdom of God. (You are invited to contact Family Radio and request the free books, The End of the Church Age and After and Wheat and Tares.)

I won’t go into the details.  I don’t want to claim expertise, but he looks like he has picked up version of Calvinism where Jesus spares the sins of the elect.  The matter of personal belief is not of issue as we cannot be saved by our own efforts. It is often referred to as limited atonement.  Calvin apparently did not discuss the rapture, so there are some differences.  I rather like Calvinism in its daring to take the literal words of the people and drive them to the most extreme logical point that you can find.  Calvinists (IMO) are the most fundamentalist of fundamentalists.  And if you don’t like the idea of an elect, than what exactly is the idea of Israel being the “chosen” nation.  That wouldn’t seem very fair to a Hittite.

In any case, what lead me to this discovery was a story in the New York Observer about a rally that Harold’s Host (my name) in New York City.  I gather that the Greater New York City area, The Big Apple if you will, is not a major stronghold of the elect.  The organizer was Matt Lewis.  The turnout was a motley bunch.  One of the participants apparently has an eerie resemblance to Charles Manson.



The Original



Rapture for Radicals: Hipster Prophet leads May 21^st Proselytizers to Ninth Avenue Food Festival, Dana Vachon, New York Observer, May 17, 2011.

Thus blessed, they strapped on backpacks retrofitted to carry signboards proclaiming Judgment Day May 21, showing a shadow-figure man cowering before a blazing sun, "Cry mightily unto God ... " written just beneath him, and "The Bible Guarantees It" written on a golden seal of approval, stopping just shy of "As Seen on TV." Then the men-made-billboards maundered east, away from the river, through the cool spring morning to proclaim the really, really bad news.

Weariness would be a major theme for the day. It quickly became clear that the apocalyptic proselytizers lacked the mad ebullience so essential to their trade…

They were mocked and ignored and soon clung together in uncertain groups, weakly sloganeering, and so fiery preaching became cheerless loitering. Soon even imminent destruction couldn't hold them to their purpose: the toddlers began singing "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" with the three sullen teens who presently gave them piggy-back rides.

They head off to a street festival to spread the word, but the followers are absorbed by the greater entity and begin to break up.

Soon you could not see any of them, and it seemed as though the May 21 movement, like so many other bad ideas, had been corrected by history's great steadying rudders, the shortness of the human attention span and the ineffable pleasure of just hanging around.

It seemed things could not get worse, but they did.

First they came for Charles Manson.

He had entered the Food Festival late, triumphant, unbreakable, earphones firmly in place. He tried to save a woman selling calzones, then, rejected, turned to a group of acne-plagued, braces-suffering high school seniors who, he could never have known, had yesterday checked into a nearby Days Inn on a class trip from Raleigh. They were Born Agains from North Carolina's Wake Christian Academy, and they didn't just want to talk apocalypse—they wanted to own it.

They agreed with him that God would destroy humanity after floating the faithful to heaven. However, they believed that only faith in Jesus Christ could ensure one's place among the elect. Here they differed from Manson, who felt that faith-based salvation was vanity. But the Born Agains were far better read and soon set about questioning his scholarship, casting doubts confirmed when he opened his RCA Discman to show the source from which he had been drawing his awesome power all day long: James Earl Jones Reads the Bible, disc 6, John 2:15.

"Yeah, mang!" said Manson as Montana, "That's the Whirl Ga!"

And if there is a soul, one felt it there as he said this, because he meant the Word of God.

The young fanatics from Raleigh are not to be denied.  They hunt down the bible doomsters, and battle verse for verse with.  With the raw enthusiasm of youth on their side, it is a route.

I was of course to happy to hear that the locals (to my location) had won the Battle of the Apocalypse.  When the real one comes it will be good to have them around.

Picture



I think the students are the ones with the spears.  Charlie was cut out of the frame, but that looks like him running on the left.