Doomsday Flop – What a Disappointment (for some)

by Jack

Well here we are once again folks, but did you ever have any doubt? The doomsday predication by Rev. Camping now joins a long list of other erroneous doomsday predictions.

Camping’s prediction is one thing, but the real story is the people who actually fell for it. Some husbands walked out on their family and some wives threw them out. Some spent down their 401ks and lived it up, others quit their jobs and drove across country to be with Camping in his Church parking lot for the Rapture.

Rev. Harold Camping had a very tight knit group of followers and he was able to use the Bible to reinforce his [personal] message to convince his followers that Judgment Day was nigh. Psychologists tell us that we’re pack animals at heart and that might explain why we join goofy things. It’s the way we have survived for millennia, so it’s important for our sense of self to belong to a group and in some groups, once in it can be very hard to get out. .

Life creates a whole lot of stress and to be able to turn your life over to your group leader takes it all away…at least for a time. It only seems natural that we might easily fall for leaders with all the answers to life’s problems. Remember L. Ron Hubbard? He created tremendous personal wealth exploiting this part of our human psyche. The remarkable part of his story is he said exactly what he was going to do and then did it, and still people fell for it!

Remember the Heaven’s Gate cult? Here was 21 women and 18 men, all very intelligent and some well educated and they were coerced into committing suicide in three groups on three successive times until the last were dead. Their prophet told them this was the only way to escape their earthy bodies and join the Mother ship flying by earth at just the right moment.

Rev. Camping’s end time’s message fit neatly into our very human vision that all things must have a beginning, middle and an end and for his followers the end was in sight. They had become the privileged few who knew for a fact it was over. They had become a pack above all the others in the final hours and it was glorious and in this great Godly moment they had inserted themselves into the grand plan! That too must have been incredibly rewarding, while it lasted. Of course come Monday reality has returned, but despite their humiliation I suppose it’s for the best if they can learn from it.

Thanks to some quirk of brain wiring there will always be these kind true believers among us. They will never be able to question their pack leaders authority or take on life’s uncertainties by themselves. For some, like the Heaven’s Gate cult, it will be a terminal character flaw.