Sunday, May 22, 2011

Been off for a bit.

I haven't been doing much in the way of blogging for awhile. Well as you may have heard the world'd coming to an end, and stuff.


Winds, rains, and storms...and stuff. Plus the nice holy man, and all of his people, his groups, and his billboards say so.



So it's all kinda depressing.

End of the world. And I haven't even finished my laundry, or vacuumed.

.
.
.

Damn. Apparently the world already ended earlier. Knew I shouldn't have taken that nap. I always miss out on these sorts of things.



Yeah. Not so much for the logic.

End of the world...come on.

But, of course, most nobody was paying serious attention to this. To this one. But not always.

First consider this lot with the billboards. They are not some small unfunded church. This group is all over the country. They have some reasonably deep pockets (they have the money to put up more signs than atheist groups do, and more forbearance from locals than atheists get). So this is more than that Terry Jones lot. Remember that these folks were more . And these folks thought the world was ending. They aren't alone in that.

For example:


Jehovah's Witnesses
1914 - That's the key date when everything changes and Jesus comes into his own. Now a century has passed.


Seventh-Day Adventist
1844 - The day that Jesus returns to Earth (the end). Of course once that didn't happen it became a "spiritual" event. You know, like how God answers prayers in indirect ways, how prayers and saints help medicine after the fact, etc.


General Christians
How did it all begin? With a a promise from Jesus that those he met would see him again in their lifetimes. Meaning, the end was coming damn soon. And...two thousand years later...eh. Of course, we then got the Wondering Jew, an immortal at the crucifixion who walks the Earth as an immortal. So the words of Jesus still stand as he's alive. How freaking weak.


And of course we have had tons of "crazy cults" (cause the main ones are the respectable sort).


Shermer on it.



Brett Erlick on the Rapture



That is the point though people always come up with an end event and obsess. Sometimes a small group buys punch and sneakers and heads off. Sometimes a religious movement embraces it. Or a religious movement is birthed from the dates given.


The thing to remember is whether you ignore this one, or laugh at it, when one comes that you feel like just buying into...Step back. Look around. Think. Research. Don't be Homer Simpson.

1 comment:

tom sheepandgoats said...

The formula is simplistic. The notion (nailing the day) is presumptuous. The baggage (trinity and hellfire) is typical. And he sure has flummoxed a lot of followers. But he is 'keeping on the watch.' No one can say he's not doing that. As so many before him have done. As you pointed out.