This is an interesting piece I listened to on my way home from work a couple of days ago (from NPR's All Things Considered). I linked the piece here since it is worth a listen. It's about the whole business of doomsday and how it has been on the rise in recent years.
If you listen to the piece you will hear an excerpt from an ad with parents waking up concerned that their children were missing (you know, they ascended). In other words, beware of God since he is kidnapping your children next Saturday! :rofl:
Also, I think the DU admins should consider selling white robes to raise some money for the site. There is demand out there since "the worthy" need the white robes for next Saturday. They can't just ascend to heaven wearing unheavenly clothes.
Divining Doomsday: An Old Practice With New Tricksby Barbara Bradley Hagerty (NPR)
...like many people interviewed for this story,
Liquori has bet everything on this date.
"I'm separated as a result of a difference of belief," he says. "My wife got sick of me."
He used to have a job and owned a house on Long Island.
"I have sold everything off," Liquori says. "I have no more personal ambitions but to get the Gospel out to warn the world."
(...)
So far, end time predictors have batted zero. The most famous was William Miller, a Baptist minister who believed that Jesus would return in the early 1840s. According to Catherine Wessinger, a historian of religion at Loyola University, New Orleans, on the night of Oct. 22, 1844, believers gathered on hilltops to watch Jesus return... It was deemed the Great Disappointment.
(...)
"People have been predicting the end of the world in Christianity since the time of St. Paul," says Cathy Gutierrez, a religion professor at Sweet Briar College.
She says usually end times prophets do not predict a specific date. That's way too risky. But she says the predictions have come fast and thick in the past 60 years, largely because of one event in 1948: the creation of the state of Israel.
(...)
Gutierrez says this convergence is less about the end of the world and more about the rise of instant media.
"If you're looking for signs of the end, we are more than capable of delivering them directly to your computer or to your television within seconds," she says...
...She adds that for end times Christians, looking through a biblical lens can give chaotic world events — the tsunami in Japan, the fighting in Libya — a meaningful pattern. Things happen for a reason, and all history marches toward a fitting denouement.
"And it's going to come to a definitive clear end — good guys win, bad guys lose," she says. "It's the most comforting novelistic plot that we know."
And for that reason, Gutierrez says, there will always be people predicting the triumph of God, and the fall of unbelievers.
To listen to the NPR story:
http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=136239062&m=136250335
To read the full article:
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/12/136239062/divining-doomsday-an-old-practice-with-new-tricks
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