Just another manic Doomsday

"No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's a popular trend at the moment to make fun of all the folks (a surprising number, honestly, although I don't believe I know any of them personally, perhaps not so surprisingly) who believe that tomorrow will bring the End of Days. And I'm not going to lie, I've been enjoying it just as much as the next smartass. Large scale kookery is a gift for snotty people like me.

But then, it's worth noting that I get a pretty regular stream of email and comments from Christians who seem to take it personally that we're not raising Schuyler to be a Christian. Some of you take it almost as a given that this represents a failure in parenting. I am challenged regularly on whether or not it's fair to Schuyler, denying her a Christian life or a church family. Oddly, I never get emails from Jewish or Islamic readers asking why I am denying her the experience of their faith. But there are more than a few Christians who behave as if they are entitled to take a stab at bringing my child into the flock.

It even happened at Schuyler's school recently. I caught some grief from Christian readers a couple of years ago when I expressed displeasure because a teacher gave Schuyler an angel sticker, leaving us to explain what that meant. Those same folks will be equally irritated to hear that we were deeply annoyed a few weeks ago when one of Schuyler's public school teachers told her that when people die, they turn into angels and go to Heaven.

"What's the harm in that?" I can already hear it. We're overreacting, they'll say, just like they did before. They can't see that it's problematic for us because suddenly we are put in the position of having to address issues of religion and faith with Schuyler, not because we think she's ready (because she's absolutely not), but because someone else decided she is. It doesn't matter that we are her parents. A higher power is calling, after all. And to a Christian who believes all this, it doesn't seem unreasonable at all, I suppose.

If you've grown up with it, the basic points of the Christ story seem perfectly plausible. I keep reading how mainstream Christians are upset about this rapture thing because it makes their religion look ridiculous or even cult-like. The Bible says we can't know the day or the hour that the Apocalypse will arrive, after all. Christians don't want their perfectly reasonable faith being tarnished by silliness.

But here's the thing. To those of us who aren't believers and who aren't raising our kids as Christians, it's no more or less silly than the rest of it. It's hard for us to distinguish how a virgin birth or a resurrection story are perfectly believable, but the end of the world? That's just crazy talk.

The difference with the rapture, particularly when you attach a date to it, is that unlike the rest of the stories, this part is empirically disprovable. If you're reading this on Sunday, you already know that it was bogus. (If you're actually waiting until Sunday to declare its goofiness, I salute your objectivity.) It's uncomfortable for some Christians because it's easily dispatched with.

We are an agnostic family. That's how we're raising Schuyler, which (in addition to not being a threat to Christianity) is our choice and our privilege, just like any other family. That we are doing so in a very Christian community is a challenge that we've knowingly taken on, but non-Christian families do the same thing all over the country, and they all face this kind of thing on some level or another. It's not a tragedy. It's not a burden that we bear. It's a pain in the ass, at the very worst.

But if the idea of the holiest of you flying up into the air tomorrow strikes us as amusing, that's just the price you're going to have to pay. You've made your choice, which to us looks no more or less valid than choosing to worship Odin or Zeus or a character on a box of breakfast cereal. To you, my choice seems sad. To me, yours looks silly. I don't see that changing any time soon. Maybe on Saturday, but I'm not holding my heathen breath.