When I fell for a doomsday prophecy - Mortifying Disclosures
I was 13 years old when I happened on a Prodigy bulletin board message one rainy evening in November 1992. It was from a religious broadcaster from Oakland, Calif., who had just published a book arguing that the end times were two years away. I’d never heard of Harold Camping, but his credentials — a background in engineering, a Berkeley degree — seemed at odds with the caricature of a quack I’d been trained to associate with this kind of claim. I’d also never actually seen or heard someone present a detailed case for the Apocalypse. My parents had raised me Catholic, but that was mostly to make their parents happy and to meet other people. Groton, Mass., was hardly a nest of religious fanaticism. I’d assumed that the arguments of doomsday believers were akin to the unkempt “End is near!” sign holders we’d occasionally encounter on trips to Boston.
But this bulletin board was almost reasonable. It opened with a concession about how crazy the idea seemed and an acknowledgment that many previous Armageddon forecasts hadn’t panned out. Then it explained — in clear, calm and perfectly punctuated sentences — why Camping’s theory was so different.