The End of the World is Almost Here
Over the weekend, I went to the geek convention known as Wizard World. When we were leaving the convention there were a lot of people handing out fliers for their comics, art, bands, websites, etc. There was also a woman handing out religious pamphlets. I of course took one, but didn’t have the time to converse with her about it. The pamphlet is all about May 21st, 2011… the End of the World!
The flier is being distributed by Family Radio, a Christian ministry not affiliated with any church. I am actually pretty familiar with Family Radio. When I was in college, I used to sit in my friend Greg’s dorm room and listen to the group’s leader Harold Camping tell his followers that the End of the World is coming on September 23rd, 1994.
My friend Greg was a devout follower of Camping back then. He is still a pretty crazy Christian but at least can admit that Camping was wrong. But Camping knows how to milk a profitable enterprise when he sees one. So when the world didn’t end in 1994, he just switched the date. I don’t know how many dates he predicted the end of the world for, but his current one is May 21st 2011.
First the pamphlet assures the reader that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and that it is unchanged and that each and every word is original. This is of course not true. Even most fundamentalist Christians acknowledge that some insignificant words have changed. For the record, quite a lot of the Bible has changed, but that is beside the point. The pamphlet then goes on to state that “by careful study of the Bible we learn that in the year 4990 BC God brought a flood.” God told Noah that he would have seven days to escape the flood. Since a day to God is a thousand years to us, that means 7000 years. Then the calendar was off by a year so that means 7000 years after the flood would be 2011 AD. Camping does other bullshit calculations for the day and the month, but suffice to say that it really is fascinating bullshit.
It really does amaze me that even with Camping horrible track record that people still believe him. Camping makes millions with this stuff and has a small army of loyal believers in cities across the nation handing out these pamphlets. This shows the real power of religion and why I can say pretty definitively that all religions are false.
The mere fact that Harold Camping has been able to dupe so many people with such obvious bullshit time and time again shows just how easy it is to fool people. I bet this woman is not stupid either. She is probably a pretty smart lady. Yet she has been fooled so completely by such obvious bullshit. This is a microcosm of all religion; smart people being duped to believe some super retarded stuff.
Filed under: Biblical Scholarship, culture war, End of the World, Preaching, prophecies, Religion, the bible
