Dear Santa, can I have an Apocalypse for Christmas?

The people who say that world is going to end in 2012 are about to be in for a big surprise – at least if you consider Family Radio Worldwide a reliable source. According to this nationwide Christian media organization, the world will actually end on May 21, 2011. Take that, Mayan calendar, you just got served.

Now it’s easy to discount people like Harold Camping, the 89 year old president of Family Radio Worldwide, as the kind of crazy but mostly harmless fringe Christian that the majority of reasonable Christians tend to ignore. However, as it turns out, the real problem is that they actually do ignore him. As far as I’m concerned, there is too little outcry from Christians in this nation against people like Harold Camping, a man who truly believes that the world is about to end and who broadcasts his Apocalyptic message on literally hundreds of radio stations across the country. Atheists, on the other hand, are chastised and derided at almost every turn by the religious for our attacks on the sacredness of Christmas – sometimes even by those who generally consider themselves socially moderate on other counts.

How can this be? How is it that every year at this time we have conversations about the “War on Christmas” that secular atheists like myself are supposedly waging, but at no point does the national media ever draw attention to what are essentially Christian doomsday cults? For the record, I love Christmas. It’s absolutely one of my favorite times of year, and I have no desire to impinge on the celebrations of it or diminish the joy others find in it. None other than PZ Meyers is with me on this one, by the way, noting in a recent blog post that one of the things atheists should do this time of year is, “have a good time, adopt good traditions like midwinter festivals as our own, and join in with the community.” That said, I won’t stand by and watch as the Harold Campings of the world wage real battles against ideals that I hold dear. You know, like the ability to hold a coherent thought or the desire to actually try to “know” things.

It’s important to note that Family Radio Worldwide stations are listener funded. And anyone who produces media content for an audience knows how difficult it is to effectively engage a reader or listener in a significant enough way that they act on what you’ve produced for them. For every person who takes the time to comment on a post, buy a product you’re selling, or donate to a radio station you run, there are dozens (if not hundreds) of others who sit by idly and take in your content but go no further. The fact that they’re taking it in at all though is a sign that they’re receptive to your message. So to have an organization that had, according to Wikipedia, a net worth in 2007 of $122 million signifies a very extensive listener base. And this is my point – Harold Camping is a nut, but more importantly he’s a nut with an audience; and his audience is very large. We ignore them at our peril.

Harold Camping’s audience is large enough that he broadcasts all over the United States and to many other parts of the world as well. This means that almost every one of us has likely met someone who truly believes what Mr. Camping is preaching. Sometimes we may know who these people are, but I’ll bet that most times we don’t. They could be your child’s teacher, or maybe your boss. In any case, many of them are certainly people of some influence. And this is what needs to be remembered and pointed out every day. It’s not acceptable to believe that the world will end on May 21, 2011 and still teach our children or run our businesses or lead in our governments. How could these people possibly think about and devise the kind of long term strategies these jobs require if they literally don’t believe there will be a long term?

I close with a Tale of Two billboards:

When I see images like the one above, I smile in agreement; but I ultimately see the futility of them. What Christians, even the moderate ones, see in a sign like that is little more than a group of people picking on their deep-seeded and important religious beliefs. Attacking the average person is this way is not going to win any support among them. Instead, I really believe that a more effective billboard to get Christians to start thinking about where the real problems in our country come from would be something like the billboard I made and posted below.

Signs like this will start to force moderate religious people to ask, even if only fleetingly at first, which side of the supposed battle between faith and reason they’re actually on. And once they begin to do so, I truly believe that most Christians will see that they have far fewer shared values with people like Harold Camping than they do with people like me. I mean let’s face it, none of the intelligent or reasonable Christians believe that the rapture is going to come on May 21, 2011 any more than I do.

Then again, there sometimes is a part of me that wishes that it would. At least then I could stop devoting any more thought to morons like Harold Camping and celebrate Christmas with my family in peace.