A Year After the Non-Apocalypse: Where Are They Now?

[SecularMotion]

For a while, their message was everywhere. They paid for billboards, took out full-page ads in newspapers, distributed thousands of tracts. They drove across the county in RVs emblazoned with verses from the books of Revelation and Daniel. They marched around Manhattan holding signs. They broadcasted day and night on their network of radio stations. They warned the world.

That warning turned out to be a false alarm. No giant earthquake rippled across the surface of the earth, nor were any believers caught up in the clouds. Harold Camping, the octogenarian whose nightly Bible call-in show fomented doomsday mania, suffered a stroke soon afterward and mostly disappeared from sight. The press coverage, which had been intense in the weeks leading up to May 21, 2011, dwindled to nothing. The story, as far as most people were concerned, was over.

But I wanted to know what happens next. If you’re absolutely sure the world is going to end on a specific day, and it doesn’t, what do you do? How do you explain it to yourself? What happens to your faith in God? Can you just scrape the bumper stickers off your car, throw away the t-shirts, and move on?

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/5983/a_year_after_the_non-apocalypse

[NRaleighLiberal]

1. they just emulate this legendary "editorializer"...

http://www.hulu.com/watch/2364/saturday-night-live-weekend-update-emily-litella-on-violins-on-tv

[Warpy]

2. There was a National Geographic special on a cult in northeast NM

whose leader predicted a day on which he would metamorphose into a higher being and prepare the way for Jebus's return. The day afterward, the cult members all denied it was ever going to happen and would simply walk away from anyone who asked them questions about it.

It was odd to watch because there had been extensive footage of them in the weeks leading up to it being able to talk of nothing else. The next day, they simply denied remembering it.

The cult leader eventually went to prison for pedophilia, NM being rather unkind to gods on earth. Presumably the cult is managing without him, praying daily for his return.

Cults are bizarre, to say the least, and cult members will think whatever the charismatic fraud at the top tells them to think. If the faithful are still watching Camping online, this is likely where they're at.

Some of the not so faithful are suing.