Same Stories, Different Beliefs -- What Rapture!

Benito Franqui just doesn’t get it. He has asked himself the question many times in his life, starting as a young boy in Puerto Rico and well into middle age. He even toys with it these days at the ripe old age of 74 as he enjoys retirement in Orange.

How is it, he first asked way back when, that so many people believe all the Bible stories and he just couldn’t bring himself to do it?

That was a daunting question for a 9-year-old who was home-schooled and raised as a Catholic. But it became no less daunting as a grown man, wondering how people could believe in, literally, an end game in which the world as we know it would end and believers would ascend to heaven with the second coming of Christ.

Rest easy, we are not here today to counsel Franqui. He has on his own settled comfortably into the secular humanist camp and edits a newsletter for the Humanist Assn. of Orange County. But when I tell him about a weekend conference in Chino Hills in which a number of speakers will talk of Biblical prophecy and how current events presage the end times, Franqui brightens.

Would he want to attend such an event, even though he doesn’t agree? Oh, yes, he says.

“In fact,” he says, “I’d like to participate.”

Too late for that, but Franqui is at one end of a spectrum I’ve always found rich in human intrigue: how can people, all aware of the same information, arrive at such fundamentally different conclusions?

How, in the 21st century, do we still have such an epic divide between people who believe that the Rapture may soon be upon us and others who think those folks are nuts?

I ask Franqui if he’s ever considered that the other side is right. “Of course,” he says. “As a true scientist, I try to think as closely as I can to a scientist. It’s true there’s always the possibility I might be wrong, but I have to go with what looks most probable at any particular time.”

Franqui is a former aerospace engineer. As he passed through middle age, he flirted with various belief systems before settling on one that relied on science to explain things and personal morality in doing things.

He worries about end times prophecy because he fears that some in that camp are all too eager “to accelerate the timetable” by forcing military action. He’s well aware that the potentially scary developments in the Middle East now are serving to convince doomsday prophets that the end is near.

But even the Christian evangelical camp isn’t of one mind about what’s happening, says Bill Alnor, who lives in Northern California and publishes “The Christian Sentinel” magazine. He notes that predicting the end is far from an exact science, noting that renowned Orange County preacher Chuck Smith of Calvary Chapel once predicted that the Rapture was coming in the late 1980s.

Alnor, who teaches journalism at the Cal State East Bay campus and is the author of four books, believes the Rapture is a very real thing and is being played out along the lines of prophecy laid out in the Bible. However, he says it’s neither wise nor necessary to lock the moment into a particular time frame.

I ask Alnor, as I did Franqui, if true believers could be wrong about things. “That’s why I try to be cautious myself,” he says. “I, in a sense, am a little skeptical. I want to hedge my bets. I would never set a date. It looks very clear to me, this could be the time, but I’m very mindful of all the times in the past when people have been wrong.”

His belief in the Rapture’s occurrence stems from Bible prophecies that he says have been borne out and, specifically, the modern-day emergence of Israel as a nation. More recently, he says, the seeming arraying of nations against Israel in its Mideast struggles conforms to prophecy about the end times.

He notes, however, that evangelicals have been talking about the end times for quite some time, but adds that not all subscribe to an end times theory or see current events as signs of the apocalypse.

And, indeed, some evangelicals think some of their fellow believers spend too much time thinking about the Rapture and not enough about life in the present. Alnor doesn’t subscribe to that, but says that even people who believe the Rapture is unfolding disagree on its timing.

That’s probably the kind of mental workout that exhausted Franqui.

True believers, he says, are sure they’ve found “absolute truth” in the Bible and want to enlighten others. Franqui professes to no such certainties, but has made peace with that.

“I’m more satisfied with asking questions,” he says.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.