ghafla

Sometimes, a sensationalist story is born somewhere. Something utterly wild, something ridiculously audacious in its claims. It grabs everyone's attention. It provides a distraction.

This time, it's a prediction of the Rapture made by a random spokesman based on very shaky Bible research.

Every joke and every post regarding this sensation, sadly including this one, has time and again irked me for one important reason. It is hypocrisy of me to talk about it, since I am lending myself to it as well - the only excuse I have is that I want to make the following point.

The whole thing is an obvious farce, in my opinion. A distraction that serves to turn heads away from more important thoughts and issues, clogging people's brain RAM and CPU time for nothing (as it is doing with mine, unfortunately). And every single moment of time we spend propagating it is time that, in my opinion, is wasted...

This is not the first time our society is given such a delicious morsel by the media to distract itself with. A lot of sensations are like this. Sometimes, there is a piece of importance in there. I don't feel the exact same way about Osama Bin Laden's death, for instance. He was a dangerous man, devoured by dangerous ideas. However, the Rapture noise has no real importance. All that's going to happen is a bunch of people feeling a little embarrassed about themselves for having fallen for it.

Once you start talking about such a distraction, your approach towards it doesn't matter much. Some of the jokes are amusing, but even joking about the whole thing still propagates and increases people's awareness of the topic, thus further spreading the distraction, the ghafla, turning our eyes away from more interesting or important matters for a moment, blocking out our valuable mindspace.

I think we should be more mindful of the harm those distractions cause and more cautious with the choice on whether to discuss such news at all or not bother. A distracted mind is the easiest to deceive, to control - its energy is redirected elsewhere, its eyes turned away, allowing something important to be slipped past without it being noticed.
Turn your eyes away from the gadfly.