To Rev. Camping and Congregation

Dear Sir and Congregation,

I write to you after having received your package in the mail today.  In it were the items I requested from your website this past weekend: books, pamphlets, and information about your ministry.  I must confess I did not expect to receive these materials so soon, if ever.  I imagined you being inundated with requests for the same materials by many people the world over given the considerable media attention your group and its claims have received.  The speed with which you responded, seemingly to get the materials to me before the May 21, 2011 deadline your reverend predicts, convinces me of the depth of your belief and the sincerity with which it is held.

That said, I must also confess to the ulterior motives I had when making the request from your site.  I am an atheist and someone who disbelieves not only your specific claims about the coming weekend, but also the belief system within which you make such predictions.  I was brought up a Christian, devout in my fundamental evangelical beliefs until my late teens.  At that time, questions in my life were not being answered as I thought they would, given the promises of my Bible and the sermons of my pastors.

I found myself alone and questioning, traversing a park green in the middle of many nights, crying and wailing for a god who was not there and, as I came to discover, had never been there.  I was alone in the universe, as were my fellow humans on this planet we call home.  I could no longer abdicate my personal responsibility for my actions to the influences of whims of invisible beings.  I could no longer hope for a reward or fear a punishment and adjust my behavior accordingly.  I could only stand alone with what I had and what I could gain in terms of knowledge and wisdom, to carve out a good life for myself and to help others as I could.  It is a process I continue to this day.

It was not a process without a price.  I paid a heavy toll in the loss of my prior innocence and in gaining a gritty, albeit realistic view of the world around me.  I stared into the abyss and the abyss did nothing at all, because there was never anything there to stare back.  The acknowledgment of oblivion, of endless nothingness awaiting me after death was as profound a shock and englightenment as any spiritual experience I had ever encountered.  I no longer feared death and, indeed, saw my life as being something worth living for the now of it, rather than what it might gain me after it was over.

The process hurt.  I had been a man with profound strength of intellect and will, blinded and hobbled by religion, but lead to the temple to stand between its pillars one last time.  In the agony I experienced in Sherlock Park, Cookeville Tennesse that fateful night,  I shoved the pillars with a strength of questioning and curiosity I had forgotten I possessed.  The temple crashed around me and a part of me truly died.  I felt the death of it acutely, as if something was carved directly from my muscles and bones.  When I emerged from the rubble of my religious tabernacle, I found myself in the world anew.  No longer were questions forbidden or doubts frowned upon.  No longer did I fear some invisible being over my shoulder, pushing and pulling through me in some kind of cosmic wrestling match with some other being.  I was free.

I write to you now in the hopes some of these words are with you during the wee hours of Saturday night and into Sunday morning.  You are going to find yourself there and none of the things predicted having come to pass.  You will be where I was one star filled summer night, in a sleepy little town in the south, and you will find the tears flowing unbidden.  You will have two options: embrace or anesthetize.  Some of you will indeed embrace a new beginning, free of the shackles which chained you to this day for so long.  Others will seek a way of re-establishing your belief, made all the harder by the stubbornness with which your pastor has refused to give an "out" for his coming second failure of prediction.  It is my sincerest hope that you choose the former over the latter and, in doing so, surround youself with outside friends and loved ones, even those who do not believe as you do.  Be open to their counsel and support.  Most of all, be honest and open about any feelings you might have which lend themselves to thoughts of harming yourself others.

With the same passion and sincerity in which you carefully mailed me the materials I selected, I implore and hope you find a brighter path on the glorious dawn of May 22, 2011.  It's a Sunday which might decide the course of the remainder of your life and I wish you well in a new world of light and freedom from dogma.  We have a lot of work to do, as a species, and though you are few in number compared to the rest, we need all the help we can get.  I bid you welcome.  The new heaven and new earth are right here, waiting for us to make them.

 

Sincerely,

Brian McKinley Ragle

Washington DC

May 18, 2011

 

[caption id="attachment_1182" align="aligncenter" width="645" caption="Great Disappointment II, collectibles"][/caption]

P.S.

 

As I feel bad that you went to the trouble and expense of sending me your materials, particularly so quickly, I will be sending you $20 to defray the costs I estimate you incurred.  Please accept it as a compensation of your time and effort and not as a demonstration of faith in your belief.