Our Last Day on Earth

I guess this is it.  Our last day on earth.  According to the careful calculations (and dubious assumptions) of Harold Camping, the rapture of the Christian faithful will definitely occur tomorrow.  I'm trying to decide whether to pay the mortgage and send back the Netflix video.  I saw in the newspaper this morning that there is an atheist group is offering to take care of our pets for us once we've gone.  Give them the money now, and if the rapture occurs within the next ten years, they'll look after Fido and Boots (or Sophie and Mrs. G, in my case).  I thought that was a generous offer on their part.  A quick google search turned up this website on the issue.  At only $10, it might be worth the risk

I was in college when there was a 10-day window during which the rapture was predicted to occur.  There was a little booklet called "88 Reasons why Christ will Return in 1988" (I still have it somewhere on the bookshelf).  True story:  I was living on the third floor of Oakwood Hall, and one afternoon during this 10 day window could not find another person on the floor.  With some concern I ran down to the second floor and saw a couple of guys, but they gave me little comfort because I had reason to believe they might have been left behind anyway.  Now in full-fledged panic mode, I started looking for the holy rollers.  Finally finding a few, I decided then and there to put childish ways behind me. (I'll just leave the meaning of that ambiguous.)

Jerry Walls

For a saner take on the silliness, Christian philosopher Jerry Walls was on NPR's Talk of the Nation on Wednesday talking about it:  http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=136432488&m=136432483.  It's worth listening to.

On a related issue, I've been wondering some about the connection between corpses and resurrection bodies.  It always seems to come down to skeletons.  But why do our bones get some sort of privileged position among body parts?  Sure they seem to last the longest after the mortician/taxidermist has his way with our dead bodies.  And there is Ezekiel's fantastic story about the dry bones getting reanimated.  But even then, most of the Christians who have died over the last two thousand years don't even have their bones together any more.