pezar wrote:
I don't think this is quite what Thomas Jefferson intended when he said that Congress shall not mandate a religion, nor compel Americans to follow any religion. He wanted to avoid the religion fueled wars that consumed Europe for many centuries. Almost immediately after Americans realized that they could not be forced to follow a religion, all sorts of bizarre sects and cults sprang up ("Second Great Awakening", 1830s) and some of them were quite dangerous, such as Millerism, which postulated that the world would end on October 21, 1844. Millerites across New England abandoned their farms and gathered, waiting for Jesus's arrival. When He failed to show, they called it the Great Disappointment. Miller, by the way, died before his prophecied date, so a Jonestown was averted possibly by sheer luck. I speculate that Camping was betting on being dead by May 21, 2011 (he is 89), and thus escaping blame.
I was also reminded of Miller. He had several math formulas dervived from scripture that all pointed to that same date as the end of the world. As you said all of New England was waiting in village commons to be raptured. If he had lived in the 20th centurey with mass electronic communication the Miller craze might well have spread beyond New England to the whold planet.
An anti Camping christian site also mentioned the Millerites. The site claimed that the Jehovahs Witness (whom the site branded as heretics) are a legacy of the event- founded by Millerites who continued to move the goal post after that date proved wrong. The site authors feared that this modern end of the world cult would also evolve into another permanent heretical church.
21 May 2011, 5:09 pm
