The Rapture will have to wait for another day
Posted May 22, 2011 04:57:29 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
TORONTO – Well it’s Sunday, and the world remains pretty much the same as it was yesterday.
Saturday came and went without the colossal earthquake that 89-year-old California preacher Harold Camping had predicted would herald the return of Jesus Christ and the final judgment of humankind.
Some of Camping’s followers had even dispensed of all their earthly possessions in anticipation of the biblical Rapture.
But most people, including many Canadians, chose to use the prophesy as fodder for apocalyptic jokes, or an excuse for a last day of debauchery, full of boozing and ribald encounters.
Twitter hummed with tweets — like the one from a Vancouverite who observed that “People are making rapture jokes like there’s no tomorrow.”
On Facebook, an event calling for post-Rapture looting had more than 800,000 people pledging to take part.
And of course there were those who sought to make a buck off the End of Days prediction by peddling wares such as T-shirts emblazoned with “I Survived the Rapture.”
As for Camping, he previously forecast that Doomsday would come in 1994 — later explaining that he had erred in his biblical calculations.
He has yet to say exactly how he got it wrong this time.
