About a decade ago, during a period of late-adolescent, almost apocalyptic urgency, with a sudden conversion to Roman Catholicism only a short time away, I discovered an unusual way to relax. At home, in my basement bedroom, I\u2019d play Quake, a violent computer game. It was fairly typical teenage-boy stuff. But instead of listening to some kind of death metal while I played, I turned to an unlikely soundtrack: the Bible call-in show \u201cOpen Forum\u201d \u2014 specifically, the soupy baritone of Harold Camping, the octogenarian radio evangelist.<\/p>\n
At the time, I had no idea why this combination worked so well. But thinking back on it now, the shoot-\u2019em-up video game actually dramatized the condition of total depravity at the center of Camping\u2019s theology. He kept reminding me that we\u2019re really, really bad \u2014 just like the demons (or whatever they were) I was battling on the screen \u2014 and only saved by God\u2019s supercharging grace. I could sense that a change was just around the corner, and maybe this odd activity helped free me from my old world and shepherd me into a new one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Now, Camping is the man behind the predicted Rapture on May 21st\u2014this coming Saturday. For the rest of the essay, I reflect on that, and on what The Daily<\/em>‘s DEK describes as “what end-timers can teach the rest of us.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[45,46,26,76],"class_list":["post-1526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-becoming","tag-millenialism","tag-new-religious-movements","tag-prophecy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1526"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1526"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1529,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1526\/revisions\/1529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}