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.
