As we know, the results of the failed prophesy on May 21, 2011 came as quite a surprise to its many believers in it. What were their reactions when the sun went down that day, and came up the next day, with those people still planted into this side of heaven?
Consider the post by Tom Bartlette on May 2012:
A father of three boys who works in the financial industry told me he was fairly sure this would be the end. Not a hundred percent, but close. After May 21, his faith was so shaken that he apologized on Facebook to the friends he had tried to convert. But as October 21 drew closer, he found himself wanting to believe again. “I’ve been convinced for 10 years that this would be it,” he said. “I think it will be the end of everything.”
Another engineer I came to know had spent most of his retirement savings, well over a half-million dollars, taking out full-page newspaper ads and buying an RV that he had custom-painted with doomsday warnings. Even when I pressed, he wasn’t willing to admit any doubts about whether October 21 would really, finally, be it. “How can you say that when you see that all this beautiful information is in the Bible?” he asked me, his voice rising. “How can everything we’ve learned be a lie?”
I was struck by how some believers edited the past in order to avoid acknowledging that they had been mistaken. The engineer in his mid-twenties, the one who told me this was a prophecy rather than a prediction, maintained that he had never claimed to be certain about May 21. When I read him the transcript of our previous interview, he seemed genuinely surprised that those words had come out of his mouth. It was as if we were discussing a dream he couldn’t quite remember.
Other believers had no trouble recalling what they now viewed as an enormous embarrassment. Once October came and went without incident, the father of three was finished. “After October 22, I said ‘You know what? I think I was part of a cult,’” he told me. His main concern was how his sons, who were old enough to understand what was going on, would deal with everything: “My wife and I joke that when my kids get older they’re going to say that we’re the crazy parents who believed the world was going to end.”
In the beginning, I was curious how believers would react, as if they were mice in a maze. But as time went on I grew to like and sympathize with many of them. This failed prophecy caused real harm, financially and emotionally. What was a curiosity for the rest of us was, for them, traumatic. And it’s important to remember that mainstream Christians also believe that God’s son will play a return engagement, beam up his bona fide followers, and leave the wretched remainder to suffer unspeakable torment. They’re just not sure when.
My notes: What is saddest of everything these people had lost, were those that lost their faith, such as the next one.
Among those I came to know and like was a gifted young musician. Because he was convinced the world was ending, he had abandoned music, quit his j ob, and essentially put his life on hold for four years. It had cost him friends and created a rift between some members of his family. He couldn’t have been more committed.
In a recent email, he wrote that he had “definitely lost an incredible amount of faith” and hadn’t touched his Bible in months. These days he’s not sure what or whether to believe. “It makes me wonder just how malleable our minds can be. It all seemed so real, like it made so much sense, but it wasn’t right,” he wrote. “It leaves a lot to think about.”
(please see these comments and more on the following post at: A Year After the Non-Apocalypse: Where Are They Now? | Religion Dispatches
My notes: Unfortunately, I did not find much about what personally happened to even a few of the people that asks that question of "Where are they now?" I have tried to post the latest news about it. I did go to the Wheat and Tare video on Amazon Prime and read some of the comments there after I had watched it and found that there were people that had the same questions as I did about the fact that it is truly an unfinished project because we got about 5 minutes or so about what happened to those that were in the documentary and what they had to say about what they were feeling, after it did not occur.
And so I am concluding this part of my series on this particular video. In the meantime, is there anything else that can be said of false prophets in general? Come back next time to find out. Thanks for your patience with me during this busy time for me, and also for your support to my blog. You do have no idea how you encourage me everyday when you come here! Please invite others to come that may be interested in learning as I try to present truth from God's word. Have blessed day!
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