Today in my playwriting workshop, someone whose opinion I respect said that he felt that Harold Camping, the Family Radio fraud who predicted the Rapture that didn’t happen, should be prosecuted. “He’s a con man!” this person said. “People suffered because of this!”

And I know that’s true.  But, finally, shouldn’t we ever expect that people, well, think things through? Intelligence should be rewarded, and those rewards should be the incentive for pursuing education and thoughtful, intelligent discourse. Because if we remove those rewards, we’re protecting the stupid people and disincentivizing the learned. And by “stupid,” I don’t mean the incapable; precisely because they’re incapable, those people we should help. But the willfully ignorant should ultimately pay a price for their willful ignorance, shouldn’t they?

I never thought the Rapture was coming today, and neither did you. How much sympathy can we have for those who quit their jobs, sold their possessions, and toured America because they thought these were the last days? And what should  we do with that sympathy — reimburse them somehow?

In this parade of fools, who was the most foolish? The people who will go on working for and following and believing Harold Camping, because while he didn’t get it right today,  they “have not found anything close to the faithfulness of Family Radio.” That’s just stupid.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 21st, 2011 at 9:58 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.