Saturday, April 09, 2011

Ending the world prematurely.

Mental Floss gives us a list of the many declaration of end times.

Yup. There have been plenty of them. And in many cases they were taken damn seriously. People have given up property, all their worldly goods, even cut themselves off from loved ones. And others have died for their beliefs in this regard. So it is always worth being aware of the sheer number of times the final calls were announced for this world.

The Quick 10: The End is Near! Wait, No, It’s Not. 


...
1. 1284. When the Pope decrees something, people tend to listen. And they did, in 1213, when Pope Innocent III wrote that “the end of this beast is approaching, whose number, according to the Revelation of Saint John, will end in 666 years, of which already nearly 600 have passed.”
...
6. 1910, with the appearance of Halley’s Comet. French astronomer Camille Flammarion predicted that a seven-tailed comet was coming to Earth, and gas from the comet’s tail would “impregnate” the Earth’s atmosphere, setting it and all of its inhabitants ablaze in a fiery explosion.
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9. September 11, 12 or 13, 1988. Edgar Whisenant, a former NASA engineer, was so sure about his calculated date that he wrote a book called 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will be in 1988 and boldly stated, “Only if the Bible is in error am I wrong.” When he was, in fact, wrong, he published The final shout: Rapture Report 1989, followed by the less-certain 23 reasons why a pre-tribulation rapture looks like it will occur on Rosh-Hashanah 1993 and And now the earth’s destruction by fire, nuclear bomb fire.
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And as a reminder we are all still here.




Addendum: Forgot link at top.

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