I first encountered the devotional poetry of John Donne in secondary school. Because of his pamphleteering against my then religion, it took me a long time to warm to him, but eventually I came around. I particularly loved the title of his poem At Round Earth’s imagined corners, his attempt to square the circle of religious beliefs, and reconcile it with what had been discovered about the true shape of our world. There are lines of his work which will stick with me forever because of their beauty and eloquence: “Dull sublunary lovers’ love, whose soul is sense, cannot admit absence because it doth remove those things which elemented it”. In Batter my Heart, a poem with fantastically vivid imagery, he calls upon to God to beat him, break him and very shockingly, to rape him, but of course he puts it in a more artistic way than I have. It’s interesting to note this because tomorrow, Fundamentalist Christians the world over are hoping for the same; for God, Yahweh, Jehovah, El, in a sense, to “rape” them, the word rapture itself being derived from the verb ‘to rape’. In a Hades-and-Persephone-like manner, to snatch them up into the skies and leave the numberless infinities to our eternal damnation. If mandatory eternal praise of their dull, and obviously sublunary God is their idea of Heaven, and since Limbo is apparently off the cards, then I’ll gladly take alternative; I may be going to Hell, but at least all my friends will be there with me.
The latest in this line of idiocy, is the soon-to-be-proven-wrong Harold Camping who, like William Miller and Homer Simpson before him, added up some numbers in the Bible and believes that the world will end tomorrow. His reasoning, if it can be so-called, is that he believes tomorrow to be the 7,000th anniversary of the Deluge, a perfect time for God to smite us wicked sinners with our sinful life saving medical science and godless concept of Human Rights, and cast us into the Inferno. I can safely say that tomorrow, Saturday the 21st of May 2011 shall be as extraordinarily mundane a day as any other. Hungover College students will recover from a night of exam conclusion revelry, athletes will be out training at early hours, and kids will watch Saturday morning television. If you see shoes lying about on the street, don’t get too excited. The physical distance between us and the theocrats will sadly, endure neither breech nor expansion, it’s simply a joke being played by some witty skeptic, hoping to make one of these sheep panic and think that they’ve been left below. Despite the Zombie Warning issued by the Centres for Disease Control in the United States, I wouldn’t expect our graveyards to burst open either. Why? Because there is no reason at all for it.
I’ve heard it touted in the media at least three times since 1995 that the world was going to end, and yet here I am still. As I child, I was fearful of the end. Adults were talking about the Y2K while documentaries on the History Channel went on about Nostradamus and Biblical codes foretelling 9/11 and other disasters (consistently predicted after the fact). All of the prophesies of the end of the world from Jesus of Nazareth to Miller to Paco Rabanne have one thing in common; they’ve all been wrong. The first Christians expected the second coming to be within their lifetimes, and after not just centuries but millenia of being proven wrong by the dawning of each new Raptureless day, it’s absolutely insane of them to still think that maybe this time he’ll come back. Maybe this time Big Brother will come and usher us into the promised Celestial IngSoc, maybe Beloved Leader and Dear Leader will take us into the DPRK in the skies. It’s absurd, and it cannot be believed by any sane person that the Universe will come to an end tomorrow.
But there plenty of real ways that the Earth could end; meteor strikes could throw up dust and ash into the atmosphere and blot out the sun. A gamma-ray burst for a distant quasar could strip away our atmosphere, or far more likely, a group of religious fanatics, Muslim or Christian, could get their hands on apocalyptic weaponry and do God’s job for him since he apparently lacks the eschatological zeal of his disciples. Just see what one follower of Camping had to say about his relatives: “I know I’m not going to see them again, but they are very certain they are going to see me, and that’s where I feel so sad”. How bloody callous and unfeeling would one have to be to sit back and watch innocent people rounded up and tortured by an autocratic authority, while you suck up to it and wait for your reward? If it were true, it would be nothing less than collaboration with a fascistic regime.
Camping, like all his predecessors and all his successors will be proven wrong by the passage of time, but it won’t just be the Fundamentalists who believed him, who said their goodbyes to their infidel relatives, quit their jobs and sold their homes who will be disappointed. They may have to live in a world of Original Sin, but we’re the ones who have to put up with their lust for Catastrophe, their egging on the angels at oblate-spheroid-Earth’s non-existant corners to blow their trumpets and end it all.
