The end times

[DMB]

Over the centuries there have been various prophecies about when the world would end. The world fails to end and then the prophecies have to be tweaked a bit to change the new situation. I'm not very much into the churches that make such predictions. Does anyone here know about the ones that are doing it now?

[Christina]

There's always my personal favorite Strong City (http://www.strongcity.info/) and Wayne Bent/Michael Travesser. That long discussion at the Hub with all of those cult members is still my favorite religious discussion that I've had on secular forums.

[Utu]

Each of these pages has many predictions but I highlighted my favorite/the most recent.

Here's a list all the way up to 1990:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/end_wrl2.htm

For contemporary or near contemporary claims these pages lists some:
SEP-08/09: The Lord's Witness and the True Bible Code predicted that a nuclear bomb will hit the UN plaza in Manhattan on the Sabbath, sometime between sundown on SEP-08 and sundown on SEP-09. This is the same group who predicted that the UN would take over the world sometime between 2001-MAR-26 and APR-24 and that a word-wide famine would being during 2001-SEP.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/end_wrl1.htm

2010+ In early 2005, Roderick C. Meredith, leader of the Living Church of God wrote in his church's magazine Tomorrow's World that the end of the world is near. He said that events prophesied in the Bible are "beginning to occur with increasing frequency....We are not talking about decades in the future. We are talking about Bible prophesies that will intensify within the next five to 15 years of your life." This prophecy, or a local sermon based on it, may have been partly responsible for triggering a mass murder in Brookfield WI on 2005-MAR-12. Church member Terry Ratzmann, who was experiencing serious depression and facing unemployment, shot 11 people, killing 7, and then killed himself at a church service.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/end_wrl18.htm

2003 : Comet

A group of aliens, called Zetas, have been kind enough to warn us Earthlings about our impending destruction. Through their human contact they have warned us that the world is destined to be wiped out by a comet, which passes by every 3657 years. Unfortunately, during 2003 the Earth will pass through its tail causing our planet to stop rotating for several days. As if this were not bad enough there will be violent winds, firestorms from the sky and gigantic tidal waves. When the chaos eventually stops the ice caps will melt and the land will return to the sea.
http://www.weird-websites.com/justweird/endofworld.htm

[2009] According to Earth changes prophetess Lori Adaile Toye of the I AM America Foundation, a series of Earth changes beginning in 1992 and ending in 2009 will cause much of the world to be submerged, and only 1/3 of America's population will survive. You can even order a map of the flooded USA from her website!
http://www.abhota.info/end6.htm

Thomas has a number of predictions for this period. He foresees the arrival of the Antichrist sometime in 1999-2000, the approach of Cassini in August 1999 as a "holographic or parallel event" signaling a possible nuclear crisis in Russia, and Armageddon, another nuclear war, in 2007.
http://www.2think.org/hundredsheep/skeptic/predictions.shtml

2012
The 2012 Doomsday Prediction is a cultural phenomenon consisting of present-day speculation that cataclysmic and apocalyptic events will occur in the year 2012. This idea has been disseminated by numerous books, internet sites and by documentaries airing on the History Channel since 2006. The forecast is based primarily on a claimed end-date of the 5,125-year Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, which is December 21, 2012, and incorporates warnings from climate experts and other environmental scientists that the Earth has reached a "tipping point" that could generate mass extinctions, as well as interpretations of assorted legends, scriptures and prophecies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_21,_2012

There was also the recent paranoid speculation about CERN creating a worm hole that would swallow the earth.

Damn, this stuff is common:

Doomsday Prediction Fails…Again
What's Next for Yisrayl "Buffalo Bill" Hawkins?
By VIC WALTER
June 13, 2008
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=5058926&page=1

Dammit, either the world ended while we weren't paying attention or it ended in secret. Why are we always left out? :bang:

[reddhedd]

Around here, a lot of Baptists are looking to Revelations to explain everything...and I know the JWs still keep looking for the end.

Whatever my coworkers denominations are, they totally believe the end time prophecies...I keep hearing conversations about the crime rate, the economy, the flooding and droughts, etc....followed by a comment such as "Well, we're living in the last days, so what can you expect?":confused:

[VoxRat]

Yesterday I noticed one of the tabloids as I was buying my groceries announced (in usual restrained supermarket tabloid font) that the current economic crisis was all predicted in the Bible.

Sorry; can't give you any details. I didn't read it.

[RBH]

Man, I don't know why these people can't get it through their heads that the Rapture is over! It occurred in 1947, and all 7 true believers were raptured up to heaven (6 of the 7 were from the interior of New Guinea, while the 7th was from North Dakota), and we are now living in the post-Rapture times. It turns out the various translations of Revelations were slightly in error: The main tribulations visited on the earth post-Rapture are Eminem and the Beastie Boys.

[Christina]

*cracks up

[DMB]

Man, I don't know why these people can't get it through their heads that the Rapture is over! It occurred in 1947, and all 7 true believers were raptured up to heaven (6 of the 7 were from the interior of New Guinea, while the 7th was from North Dakota), and we are now living in the post-Rapture times. It turns out the various translations of Revelations were slightly in error: The main tribulations visited on the earth post-Rapture are Eminem and the Beastie Boys.

Thanks, RBH. I really needed to know that.

[DMB]

Thanks, Uti, for all the interesting links.

Does anyone understand the psychology of those who go on believing even when the prophecies fail?

[Utu]

There is Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance. Festinger describes it as dissonance between contradictory ideas.

An early version of cognitive dissonance theory appeared in Leon Festinger's 1956 book, When Prophecy Fails. This book gave an inside account of belief persistence in members of a UFO doomsday cult, and documented the increased proselytization they exhibited after the leader's "end of the world" prophecy failed to come true. The prediction of the earth's destruction, supposedly sent by aliens to the leader of the group, became a disconfirmed expectancy that caused dissonance between the cognitions, "the world is going to end" and "the world did not end." Although some members abandoned the group when the prophecy failed, most of the members lessened their dissonance by accepting a new belief, that the planet was spared because of the faith of the group.[5]

Apparently, people don't intuitively operate on falsificationism. In Festinger's classic case, the believers attributed the failure of the prophecy, not as their beliefs being wrong, but as them saving the world as a result of their faith.

Basically, if there is a line of interpretation that comports with what they already believe and it entails minimal change, that is what they will adhere to. It's some sort of conservation of belief. People are ingenious at coming up with explanations. The reptillians failed to show up and devour the UN! The Illuminati must have stopped them . . . .

When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

[DMB]

I like this one too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Disappointment

[lpetrich]

Whatever my coworkers denominations are, they totally believe the end time prophecies...I keep hearing conversations about the crime rate, the economy, the flooding and droughts, etc....followed by a comment such as "Well, we're living in the last days, so what can you expect?":confused:
That's so abysmally dumb.

Natural disasters? They have been around since the formation of the Earth -- and the Earth owes its existence to a certain sort of natural disaster. I'm talking about other Solar-System objects striking the Earth.

Back at IIDB, now FRDB, I remember once trying to track down evidence of hurricanes over geological time. But for most of that time, the most I could usually do was to find evidence of climate zones and climate cycles. However, there are some "tempestite" deposits here and there, evidence of strong storms like hurricanes.

Earthquakes? Plate tectonics. Need I say more?

Volcanoes? There are lots of lava flows and volcanic ash preserved in the rocks.

Turning to human society, people have been griping about it going downhill for centuries.

Crime? That's been around for at least as long as recorded history.

Economic slumps? The boom-and-bust business cycle has been noted for well over a century; the first economist to note them was Clément Juglar in 1860.

[RBH]

Man, I don't know why these people can't get it through their heads that the Rapture is over! It occurred in 1947, and all 7 true believers were raptured up to heaven (6 of the 7 were from the interior of New Guinea, while the 7th was from North Dakota), and we are now living in the post-Rapture times. It turns out the various translations of Revelations were slightly in error: The main tribulations visited on the earth post-Rapture are Eminem and the Beastie Boys.

Thanks, RBH. I really needed to know that.Happy to be of service. :)

[Coragyps]

Unfortunately, during 2003 the Earth will pass through its tail causing our planet to stop rotating for several days.

W? T? F? I don't remember that happening at all!

I think RBH has the Real Story pegged, anyway. Silly postmillenialists!

[Notta]

OMG!! THESE are the end times!! Here's proof:

I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint. -Hesiod ca. 8 BCE.

[lpetrich]

That quote is likely bogus. Google Answers has a long discussion of it (http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=398104); it's hard to track it down to its original source.

But William Shakespeare made one of his characters say:
I would there were no age between ten and three and twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting...

-- an old shepherd in "The Winter's Tale"

[Notta]

What about the supposed quote from Aristotle along the same lines?

I like Mark Twain the best: When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.