An 89-year-old American preacher named Harold Camping with an infinitesimal following but an attention-getting message has predicted—based on some arcane mathematical equation he clearly deems far more reliable than his failed doomsday forecast of 1994—that the Rapture will occur this Saturday. That means, according to Camping, that about 200 million Christians will ascend to heaven and the rest of us—atheists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and non-select Christians alike—will be subjected to five months of increasing horror (presumably even worse than the drip-drip of new Schwarzenegger progeny revelations and the threat of more serial blowhardery from a continuing Newt Gingrich candidacy), until the world finally explodes.
Meanwhile, the British physicist Stephen Hawking has come under fire from people of faith for recently telling the newspaper The Guardian the following: “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.” Previously, in his 2010 book The Grand Design, Hawking had asserted, “Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing”—meaning that as Hawking sees it, in the Beginning, there was nothing but the laws of science—no God in sight.
Finally, earlier this spring Rob Bell, pastor of Mars Hill Baptist Church, a 10,000-member congregation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, provoked the ire of evangelicals by suggesting in his book Love Wins that God’s love is more radical than we mortals possibly can imagine, allowing for the redemption of everybody—Christians and nonbelievers, do-gooders and murderers, saints and monsters. In Bell’s theology, hell isn’t some big barbeque pit where sinners eternally twist on skewers, but, rather, is the stuff of such earthly pestilences as violence and war. Whether, conversely, Bell envisions a celestial cocktail party at which Gandhi sings Bavarian beer hall songs with his pal Hitler while smiling Holocaust victims hum along, I’m not sure. I haven’t read the book. But the idea that one needn’t submit to Jesus Christ to achieve salvation similarly offends devout Christians who believe you can’t ascend the stairway to heaven without the Son of God authorizing the climb.
Not even evangelicals seem to think much of Harold Camping’s doomsday forecast, citing the biblical passage in which Jesus says humans won’t know the day or hour of final judgment. I’m also going to go out on a limb and assume Stephen Hawking isn’t canceling whatever Sunday-morning plans he’s made in lieu of church this weekend. (Although you’d think he might at least cut Camping a little slack for basing his apocalyptic vision on math, even if it’s convoluted and arguably insane math.) Predictably, there’s news on Yahoo! today that various groups around the country have smirkingly scheduled “Rapture parties” this Saturday, at which one assumes they’ll cavort as if there’s no tomorrow.
The reason I call myself an agnostic and not an atheist is that, while I’ve trouble imagining the existence of a supreme being and consider the Bible (Koran, Torah, insert name of divine text) no more holy and sacrosanct that any other book(s) written by human beings, I frankly Just Don’t Know how this whole existence thing got started, or when and how it ultimately will end. My pea brain can’t conceive of a “time before time,” or of a God who’s Always Been but one day got bored with nothingness and decided to amuse Him-/Her-/Itself with a gangbusters laser-light show. For all my respect for Stephen Hawking—who’s not only a mental giant compared with me but awesomely has parried with Homer on The Simpsons— I have just as much trouble wrapping my feeble mind around the idea that science somehow Always Was and at some point spontaneously created the universe.
There’s another reason I prefer to describe myself as an agnostic. I’m seriously hedging my bets. While I’m quite prone to believe that this world is all there is—as attractive as I find Albert Brooks's vision, in the film Defending Your Life, of an afterlife in which you can eat everything you want without gaining a single ounce—there’s a tiny part of me that is absolutely chicken-shit of pissing off some Big Guy (or Big Girl or Big Entity) that might, just might, exist after all and hate nothing so much as an absolute denier. My thinking is, maybe if I keep an open mind—even if it’s open just the teeny-tiniest crack—and then it turns out that there really IS something to eternity other than the Big Sleep, I just might sneak in. Or, maybe there’s a hell, and I’m at least spared that fate—because I declined to put a damning exclamation point on my doubt.
For me, too, agnosticism bespeaks a certain humility. The thing I despise about religion is that it’s all ultimately rooted in the conviction that I’m Right and You’re Wrong. It’s an us-against-them belief system. In my view, people who trumpet their atheism are equally self-righteous. In their absolute certainty, they’re saying they have the answer, the final word, and that people who think differently are naïve at best and idiots at worst. While I personally don’t think people of faith—whatever faith—are right, I can’t say with 100-percent conviction they’re wrong. With 95 percent conviction, maybe. But that leaves just enough wiggle room that I don’t feel completely arrogant—and that I might still, somehow, squeeze my way into a heaven that almost surely, in my view, doesn’t exist.
So, to recap, I’m thinking that 200 million people aren’t suddenly going to vanish two days from now, that this old world will keep spinnin’ ’round long past October, and that you can’t spell Camping without “camp.” But that doesn’t mean I’ll be knocking back beers at any Rapture party come Saturday. That would be tempting fate. Of that, I’m strangely certain.
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