Source/Credit: The Patriot-News
By Diana Fishlock, David Wenner | May 20, 2011
In 1844, a group of Middletown-area residents gathered on an island in the Susquehanna River to await the end of the world.
Nothing happened.
Their leader, a western New York farmer and Baptist by the name of William Miller, double-checked his calculations.
He had made a mistake: Judgment Day would fall in 1845.
They returned to the island a year later. The sun rose the following day.
The next year, they stayed home.
Now people are predicting the Rapture, when they believe Christ will bring the faithful into paradise, will be at 6 p.m. today.
“This has happened over and over and over again,” said Douglas Jacobsen, professor of church history and theology at Messiah College in Grantham.
That’s how many people are reacting to the prediction that the Rapture, or Judgment Day, will come today. Such predictions are nothing new.
They started in ancient times, repeated again around the millennium and then in 2003.
“I’m not going to call them silly. I’m not going to call them crazy. I’ll just call them wrong,” said Jerry Cowan, pastor at Valley Baptist Church in Lower Swatara Township.
A half-dozen local religious leaders from different denominations said the subject has hardly been mentioned among their congregations.
This latest prediction originates with Harold Camping, the 89-year-old founder of Family Radio Worldwide.
The Rapture is a relatively new notion compared to Christianity itself, and many Christians don’t believe in it. And even believers rarely attempt to set a date for the event.
Linda Cassell believes in the Rapture, but not this weekend.
Sure, she heard the news about Saturday. She also heard it back in 2003. It wasn’t time then, and she doesn’t believe it’s time now.
“We’re getting a lot of bad weather around the world and stuff, but there’s still babies being born,” said Cassell, who lives in Camp Hill and said she has read the Bible 40 times. “I don’t think God is going to get rid of a lot of children, I really don’t.”
She, like everyone else who was interviewed for this story, plans to spend Saturday like any other day.
Tyler Shover will play baseball. He is 20 and lives in Camp Hill.
“I’ll just go and enjoy,” he said.
The possibility of Rapture will be in the back of his mind, Shover said, “But I don’t really believe it. If I ran into anyone who believed it, I might think they were a little out of their mind.”
If Jesus is coming, there’s nothing to be nervous about, said George Castro of Hampden Township. “I don’t make plans ahead of time.”
Paul Gallo of Londonderry Township plans to paint on Saturday, just as he was Friday afternoon. “Every day’s special,” he said, painting the image of a big yellow house on his canvas.
Nearby, his friend Bill Anderson made a chalk drawing of Mount Calvary Episcopal Church.
“I think it’s amusing,” said Anderson, who is a secular humanist. He’s 75 and lives in Camp Hill. “People do some pretty amazing things. I’ve long ago gotten over being surprised at the outlandish things people do.”
Frisel Benavides called the Rapture a myth. Spiritually, nothing is happening Saturday, he said. He thinks when the world does end — generations from now — it may be some combination of scientific and spiritual reasons. He is 35 and lives in Camp Hill.
“We don’t know if there is any type of technology that could be used, if people will come back to life or what,” Benavides said.
The Rev. William Alford of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Harrisburg and his congregation haven’t paid much attention to this prediction, he said. “God knows. We don’t know. So there’s no sense in worrying about it.”
Exactly the point Bob Griffin made. He’s 42 and just moved to Camp Hill. He’ll go on a bike ride with his daughter, he said.
He absolutely believes in the Rapture, he said. “But it’s a lot of things that have to happen first. Right now, we’re just in labor pains.”
Akram Khalid, the president of Ahmadiyya Muslim Community of Harrisburg/York, said his congregation puts no stock in the Rapture predictions. He said the Quran states that the Messiah figure will appear well before the Judgment — not suddenly, out of nowhere — and will invite everyone to join God.
Joe Aponick, a spokesman for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg, said the church believes “that Jesus will return at the end of time to judge the living and the dead.”
The advice of local pastors is to live every day like tomorrow is Judgment Day, whenever that might come.
“The Bible says we have to be ready — not get ready, be ready,” said Robert Myers, pastor of Carlisle Church of God.
And today?
“It’s just another day, I guess, a day without rain,” Cassell said. “So how could the world come to an end?”
BY DIANA FISHLOCK AND DAVID WENNER, dfishlock@patriot-news.com, dwenner@patriot-news.com
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Read original post here: Prediction of Rapture occurring Saturday fails to alarm many area residents
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