It's about 2:30 Pacific Time and unless JHVH is planning on scooping everyone up on Oakland time in deference to Harold Camping, the evangelist that spilled the beans on Judgement Day (TM), it looks like another false start.
In spite of all the humor and various facebook plans for post-rapture looting and all, this guy has done some real damage. Even if you dismiss the poor slobs who sold everything in anticipation of no longer needing earthly goods as a case of congregatio emptor, there is still the rest of us to consider. No matter what you believe, if you were raised in a Christian household, somewhere deep within your lizard brain that does not think but only reacts, you are just a little apprehensive. If the first web page you tried to load this morning didn't come up, you wondered just a bit.
Now you are angry. Mr Camping probably created 250,000 new Atheists today. This is, on the balance neither bad nor good, except that since they became Atheists out of anger and not reason, they probably won't be particularly happy for quite some time. He probably made a few hundred thousand new Witches and Buddhists too who presumably will be significantly happier without all that guilt hanging like an albatross...or a millstone, around their neck. It all balances out I suppose.
You can't really blame them for believing that their God would capriciously save a tiny minority based on an arbitrary and unevenly applied set of criteria while dooming the vast majority to unbearable suffering and torment.
What better God for a country that worships free-market Capitalism and is governed by a Plutocracy?
Be seeing you.
Yeah, so all in all, in some ways perhaps it was a good thing. Interesting note, however, from a friend who lives in a small Kentucky town. We were chatting this morning and it was a complete nonevent there, despite its probably having been on the news. If there had been no Internet, Camping would have been largely unheard and unnoticed, as he has been for decades. He 'got' me back in the 80s when I was still a news-watching Fundie, but a lot of us would never see the meteor coming.
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