News of (yet another) prophetic failure by Jesus to destroy the earth was greeted with a mixture of dismay and bemusement this week, as California radio preacher Harold Camping scrambled to deal with the fallout.
Per the Atlantic Wire: "I can't tell you what I feel right now. I haven't understood it correctly because I'm still here."
So is Rev. Camping even considering changing his allegiance to another diety? Say to someone who can demonstrate a little more follow through? Not likely: "I don't think I'm going to stop listening to him. . . . I gotta listen to him."
Well, of course. Why should Camping defect? Just to whom could he defect, for starters? Be it some 1,000+ seat megachurches in L.A. or the 700k "monster-"mosque in Mashhad, Iran or the lowliest roadside shrine outside of Wallawallajapur, India, there isn't a single diety willing or able to show a little backbone and actually choke off all life on the planet as promised. All talk, no walk.
Meh. I just can't understand how we all got here, this Age of Mediocrity. In my day, if a god didn't deliver the goods when His chosen instrument had anounced the intentional to blot out the sun or cover the people in a rain of boils or choke the life from every man, woman, child and beast with a sulforous mist for some supposed moral infraction or another, He found Herself a backnumber pretty quickly.
Ever hear of Paederastes, Tyrant God of Thanatos? No? Not surprising. When this ancient Hellenic diety showed a remarkable preference for swilling uouzo with the Furies instead of showing up on time and laying the city of Syracus waste, as per the promise of his oracle Euphamistikos in 238 B.C.E., he was laughed out of the Union of Metaphysical Archetypes. I have no idea what he's doing nowadays, but the last I heard, he couldn't coralle enough believers together to pull off a decent toothache, much less an apocolypse of holocaustic proportions.
Listen, I'm not blowing my own horn here. I never had any aspirations to be worshipped on some vast, global scale. I was a simple ethno-urge, not much more than a tribal tutelary spirit for the Nahuatl-speaking people who migrated to Tenochtitlan, and I never pretended to be anything else. Shit, even in the heyday of my cult in the 16th century C.E. it was well-recognized that I myself was but one incarnation in a line of horrific Night Lords that stretched all the way back to the now-forgotten Olmec civilization of 1500 B.C.E.'s San Lorenzo Valley. But Me-Damn-It, when I received the grizzly, day long blood sacrifices of tens of thousands of happless pesants and captured warriors, I showed a little gumption and gave back some blood in return. Just ask Mictlantecuhtli, or "smiley" as we call him these days, how he likes me now.
Ah, why should I even bother? Nobody ever listens anyway. It's been like, what, 5,772 years or something and the best Yahweh can show for himself in all that time is some cream-puff of an avatar who couldn't apocolypse his way out of a soggy kreplach, much less pull off the extinction of all life in the universe! Meanwhile true-blue gods of horror and mayhem go ignored and dispised . . . .
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