This van drove past the Melrose while Betty, John R., JFM and I were having lunch. I got a photo of it as it sat on 15th Street waiting for a green light. A few minutes after it passed, an SUV with big yellow posterboard Judgement Day signs plastered over its rear and rear-side windows (isn't it, er, ILLEGAL to block your field of vision like that?) drove past the diner, heading east on Snyder Avenue. The waitress remarked that she had seen several similarly-marked vehicles during the course of the day. I wonder if there were even more of them driving around, or whether it was just the same few making a circuit repeatedly all day.
Either way, I feel legitimately sorry for anyone who quit their job and burned through their life's savings, thinking that they wouldn't need either one after May 21 because they were going to "meet the Lord in the air". I feel only partially sorry for anyone who decided to run up enormous debts in advance of May 21, thinking that they would never have to pay for any of it, because gaming the system is decidedly UNpious and would probably have eliminated them from being Raptured up anyway. And for Harold Camping, the delusional self-styled preacher who started this mess, I wish his family would seek involuntary mental health treatment for him.
I'm curious to see how quickly the lawsuits start being filed by the people who feel deceived and cheated, particularly those who gave Camping and his Family Radio their life's savings to help spread the word about this bogus Rapture event. After all, one of his slogans was "The Bible GUARANTEES it!", and he was on TV, radio, and in print stating things like "This will happen beyond the shadow of a doubt", "There's no way this doesn't happen", and so on. That's the kind of verbiage that has led to people being held liable for damages in a court of law.
You know what upset me the worst about this whole thing? I read an article last Tuesday about the May 21ers, and some of them were planning to euthanize their pets (!!!) in advance of the Rapture. Their logic was that they didn't want their pets to suffer on earth between May 21 (the day of the Rapture) and October 21 (the day when the Lord would come back and destroy the Earth completely). The thought of those innocent pets being betrayed so terribly by their misguided owners literally made me cry. :-( I hope that the vets either were able to talk the owners out of it, or covertly re-homed the perfectly healthy pets. I certainly would have done my best to do the one or the other, had I been the vet.
In any event, Watch This Space for any reports of lawsuits that I happen to run across. And if you feel like utilizing Bible verses to determine how best to end up in Heaven with the Lord for all eternity, let me direct you to a few that will actually be of use. First of all, remember that in Matthew, Jesus is quoted as saying that not the angels, nor the Sun, but only the Father knows the day and the hour that the world will end. So instead of worrying about that, we need only worry about our own behavior between now and the time we stop breathing. And how, pray tell, should we behave? Well, Jesus has another quote for that: the most important Commandment is that we should love God with our whole heart, soul, and mind, and the second-most important Commandment is that we should love our neighbor as ourself. He said the whole of the law and the prophets is based on these two commandments. So there you have it. Two commandments to follow, and you're good to go for all eternity. Simple, isn't it?
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