The Clever Badger I'm not dead yet!

Tick Tock… (UPDATED)

It is a little over a month before Judgment Day, according to Harold Camping¹.

Harold Camping, circa 2008

Earlier this month, followers of Camping put a couple of billboards similar to this one on the main road I drive to get to work.  This is one of them:

May 21 - It's Getting Close

Camping is a kook.  There's really no more polite way of saying it.  He previously predicted that the end of the world would occur on September 6, 1994, which it clearly didn't.  Camping's excuse,  presumably given on September 7, 1994, was that he'd made a math error.  I suspect he'll have a similar excuse on May 22.

Here, from Wikipedia, is a version of Camping's "proof":

1. According to Camping, the number five equals "atonement", the number ten equals "completeness", and the number seventeen equals "heaven".
2. Christ is said to have hung on the cross on April 1, 33 AD. The time between April 1, 33 AD and April 1, 2011 is 1,978 years.
3. If 1,978 is multiplied by 365.2422 days (the number of days in a solar year, not to be confused with the lunar year), the result is 722,449.
4. The time between April 1 and May 21st is 51 days.
5. 51 added to 722,449 is 722,500.
6. (5 x 10 x 17)² or (atonement x completeness x heaven)² also equals 722,500.

This isn't so much a proof as it is Camping pulling some numbers out of his ass and fiddling with them until he comes up with a date that he thinks fits.  Where did he get the idea that "atonement x completeness x heaven" is the key to anything?  Why square the product of those numbers?  What about the numbers 7 and 12?  You can't swing a dead cat in the Bible and not hit the numbers 7 and 12 somewhere.   Given a little time and creativity, I have no doubt that Camping (or some other enterprising doomsayer) could come up with a superficially interesting "proof" to peg Judgment Day at just about any date they wanted to.  (Really, anyone who tries to extract a hard date for the end of the world out of the Bible is pulling numbers out of thin air.  No human endeavor has such a consistent history of spectacular and invariable failure as Bible-based end-times prediction.  Refer to the books by Johnathan Kirsch and Sharan Newman that I linked to here.)

Some writers have compared Camping to a cult leader, in that he's telling his followers to abandon their existing churches and join his movement.  I can see some validity in the comparison, and in clips of his sermons and radio call-in show, he comes across as very authoritarian and refuses to acknowledge that he might be wrong.  The few comments I've read from his followers suggest that they've bought into his claims completely, and have internalized the view that if they're still here on May 22, it's because they weren't good enough, not because Camping is a batshit-crazy lunatic, and that sort of blind devotion to the leader's pronouncements is a common feature in cults.

What's not clear at all is how those people will respond when they are here on May 22 and nothing magical has happened.  Maybe they'll all re-set and get ready for October 21.  Maybe they'll realize that Camping is just a religiously deluded old man and try to regain something of their previous lives.  Or maybe not.

I sincerely hope they don't do anything rash.

-Jay

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¹Camping predicts Judgment Day for May 21, 2011, and the actual end of the world on October 21, 2011.  Not that the distinction makes Camping's ravings any more credible, but I wanted to point it out in the interest of accuracy.

It’s The End of The World As We Know It (CORRECTED 13 April 2011)

(CORRECTION - Harold Camping's claim is that Judgment Day will take place on May 21, 2011.  The end of the world proper will take place, according to Camping, on October 21, 2011.  Apologies to anyone who made plans based on my erroneous report.)

I watched 2012 a couple of weeks back.

I don't have a good explanation of why I felt the need to burn 158 minutes of my life that I won't get back watching a movie that, according to my daughter, makes little children cry because of its badness.

But, nevertheless, I watched it.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around a literally Earth-shattering event in 2012 that wipes out the vast majority of the population as the Earth's crust reshapes and devastating tsunamis wipe most of the world clean.  The world leaders, who knew this was coming, sort of prepared by building several large ships (arks, in a very ham-handed attempt to echo the Genesis flood narrative) that a few hundred thousand people could fit on.  Things go awry when things start falling apart several months ahead of the December 21 date "predicted" by the Mayans¹.

It's easy to watch a movie like 2012 and mock the absurdity of it, but in doing so, we often forget that the world is littered with failed end-of-the-world prophecies and predictions.

By way of example, there is currently a movement in the U.S. that claims that the end of the world will start on May 21, 2011.

The group behind this nonsense, Family Radio Worldwide (led by 89-year-old Harold Camping),  follows in the long and ignoble tradition of trying to guess when the world will end based on clues in the Bible.  There have been many attempts to do this - hundreds if not thousands - and they've all failed miserably².

There's a basic pattern at work in such guesses:

1. Start with the presupposition that the Bible is completely true and accurate.
2. Assign some world event to an event supposedly predicted in the Bible.
3. Play some complicated games with numbers and dates to come up with a date that the world will end.  Or that Christ will return.
4. When the predicted date passes without incident, punt.

Now, most people of a skeptical nature will dismiss the presupposition in Step 1 out of hand, at which point the whole enterprise comes crashing down.  There are simply too many wild inaccuracies in the Bible to seriously entertain notions of inerrancy and infallibility.  For example, let's briefly consider the Biblical claim of Genesis 30:37-39 (KJV), wherein we're supposed to accept that having goats mate in sight of streaked rods will result in streaked offspring:

³⁷ And Jacob took him rods of green poplar, and of the hazel and chesnut tree; and pilled white strakes in them, and made the white appear which was in the rods.

³⁸ And he set the rods which he had pilled before the flocks in the gutters in the watering troughs when the flocks came to drink, that they should conceive when they came to drink.

³⁹ And the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle ringstraked, speckled, and spotted.

No.  Just...no.  We've got a very good understanding of how things like coat patterns in goats work, and it has nothing to do with showing streaked sticks to other goats.  As trivial of an example as this is, it stands to demonstrate that the Bible does contain mistakes and falsehoods.  If you're someone who thinks that Biblical inerrancy is a reasonable proposition, I strongly encourage you to try to step outside of your own worldview long enough to spend some time seriously looking into the matter.  The Skeptic's Annotated Bible makes for a good starting point for this³.

The second and third steps work together.  In more recent times, the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948 serves as the anchor for the calendrical sleight of hand.  Typically, whoever is trying to figure out the date of the end of the world grabs an assortment of events and durations from the Bible and shuffles them around until a date pops out.  More often than not, that date is not too terribly far out from when the "prophet" makes his prediction.  (In other words, they don't come up with dates ten thousand years in the future or five hundred years in the past.)  In modern times, they'll usually tie the date in with elements of Rapture⁴ theology, although that hasn't always been the case.  The problem here, of course, is that given some creativity, selective reading of the Bible,  and a little ambiguity in historical dates (owing, for example, to different calendar schemes), a clever "prophet" can manipulate his "prediction" to fall on just about any date he wants.   It's not terribly unlike when a stage magician presents the audience with a card trick that relies on a forced card rather than a truly random selection.

Step four is an interesting one.  Invariably, the date of the end comes and goes without event.  This would lead a normal, rational person to conclude that the "prophet" was wrong, assuming there was any reason to think otherwise in the first place.  However, what often happens is that the "prophet" preempts such a conclusion by claiming that, for example, God has responded to the prayers of the faithful and spared the world.  Or, perhaps, a previously undetected error in calculations revealed that the "prophet" was off by a year or so. Family Radio Worldwide has convinced their believers of a somewhat different possibility:

If May 21 passes and I'm still here, that means I wasn't saved. Does that mean God's word is inaccurate or untrue? Not at all.

-Allison Warden, 29 year-old follower of Harold Camping

That's an interesting new twist.  So the end times will start but she just wasn't good enough?  This, I suspect, is an extension of the horrible notion that all humans are pretty much worthless and vile creatures with no measure of value apart from how Christian they claim to be⁵.  It would be instructive to follow up with this group and see how they explain the fact that none of their membership vanishes mysteriously on May 21.  I wouldn't be surprised to see them claim that some of their number have disappeared, but won't really be able to back that up.

I'm not sure why people like Harold Camping want to set a date for the end of the world.  Maybe it's because they sincerely believe in what they're doing.  Maybe they're in it for the notoriety.  Maybe they're just kooks.  But people have been predicting the end of the world for thousands of years, and they've always failed.

What I am quite confident of is that on May 22, 2011, the world will still be here.

(If you're interested in some ways that the world might really end, I have to throw a plug out for Death from the Skies! by the ever-awesome Phil Plait.  Phil's just cool.  Read his book.  Twice.)

-Jay
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¹I'm not going to spend much time on the Mayan prediction business.  It's basically equivalent to saying that the world will end on December 31^st because that's the last day on the calendar.

²There are several good books on the subject of End of the World prophecies. Two that I recommend are Johnathan Kirsch's A History of the End of the World and Sharan Newman's The Real History of the End of the World: Apocalyptic Predictions from Revelation and Nostradamus to Y2K and 2012.

³Through the years, I've engaged with numerous people who claim to know the Bible very well, and who claim to hold it in very high regard.  It often becomes quickly apparent that they've never actually read it, and that they know very little of the history behind it.

⁴The Rapture, in my opinion, is one of the best examples to be found of what happens when people run amok with the Bible and fail to treat it as the human-created collection of literature that it is.

⁵Different churches use different terms, but the point of the argument is that one must accept that God, who on one hand is supposed to be kind and loving and protecting is also so petty and tyrannical that He would make every human live under threat of eternal punishment because of the actions of two people (ignoring for the moment that Adam and Eve were purely mythical people) that He had to have been able to anticipate.  Those two character traits are totally incompatible, and I personally cannot do anything other than categorically reject a doctrine that would require me to believe this.

The Vileness That is Westboro

Do you know this man?

Fred Phelps

This is Fred Phelps.  There's a special little corner of hell reserved for him.

Fred is the leader of a vile, hate-based organization known as Westboro Baptist Church.  Westboro has made a name for itself by staging protests at things like the funerals of soldiers, the funerals of hate-crime victims, other Christian groups that they don't like, and, recently, the San Diego Comic-Con.

Fred, and his congregants (which are mostly members of his extended family) hate pretty much anyone that isn't them - gays, Catholics, most mainline Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus - and aren't afraid to say so.

The Westboro theology (one can almost freely interchange Westboro the organization and Phelps the person) is built on the premise that they're right and everyone else is wrong, and woe be unto those who might question anything that the church teaches.

This is brought out in stark clarity in this video of an ABC news segment about a young woman named Lauren Drain.  Ms. Drain is the daughter of two Westboro members who was thrown out of the church for having the temerity to raise questions about hypocrisies that she saw within the group. (From Yes But However, via Skippy.)

Ms. Drain has found herself completely cut off from her parents and younger siblings over her criticisms of Westboro.  Her young sister has rejected her, and her parents speak of her expulsion in much the same way as you might talk about throwing a spider out of the house.  "That's the Lord" is how Ms. Drain's mother responds when the question is raised about kicking out other children questioning Westboro.  No remorse.  No hesitation.  No thought.

One might be tempted to dismiss Westboro as an irrelevant fringe group, and indeed mainline Christian groups generally distance themselves from WBC.  I think that's a mistake.  The ease with which parents can cut themselves off from their children and siblings can disengage from siblings is chilling.  The degree of venomous, hateful indoctrination received by the children within the group is alarming.  No preschooler should ever be singing "God hates the world".  That's sick.  That's evil.

Westboro is a shining example of what unquestioning faith and obeisance to an ideology can lead to.  The way to combat such an ideology is to drag it into the harsh light of day and confront it.

-Jay