Since the world didn’t actually end this weekend

I was on vacation last week so I was pleasantly surprised that Baltimore was actually NOT a smoking, depopulated ruin. Huzzah! I rolled into town and found that it was pretty much the exact same way I left it. So I guess that the Christian fundamentalists were wrong about the “Rapture”… again.

Seriously, however, the thing I’ve always wondered is why do Christians want God to destroy the planet and murder seven billion people.And why would a loving God who knows that human beings are flawed (but willing to try hard) suddenly decide to kill everyone? It never made any sense to me.

What does make sense in a diabolical way is how the Church stokes up fear and hate in order to make a quick buck. From what I read online, Harold Camping (mastermind of Family Radio and the May 21st Doomsday) made a $30 million profit on the latest doomsday scare. People quit their jobs. People gave him their life savings. People severed ties with loved ones. For what?

I think there’s a lesson to be learned here. My take on the May 21st “Judgment Day” is this: Maybe the universal deity did judge humanity. Maybe deity decided that it’s okay to have a world filled with both gays and straights, monotheists and polytheists and atheists, liberals and conservatives, smart people and idiots. If everyone were just one religion, one ideology, one orientation, and one level of ability, the human race would be stagnant. Humanity might have its share of problems, but it is NOT stagnant!

I have a hard time believing that deity would consider a prayer aimed at Allah to be inferior to a prayer to the Goddess, or a prayer honoring Shiva is inferior to a prayer to Jesus. How we honor each other and how we honor deity is much more important than the name we use when addressing deity.

Perhaps the “judgment” is that we, as a species, still have lots to learn, plenty more to experience, and have many more avenues for growth before we’re ready for the next stage of development. But I do believe that, whatever the future brings, we are loved by deity and that deity will occasionally nudge us in the right directions so that we can become what we were destined to become. We will not be “left behind” because deity is already with us all the time – within us now, in the ecology, in rocks and seas, in the stars, and in all the possible unseen dimensions. We will never be abandoned, found unworthy, or banished by deity. And that, my friends, seems to be the “Judgment” that came down this weekend.

Blessed be