It’s The End of the World (again)
Harold Camping, Christian radio broadcaster and international spokesperson for the Apocalypse, has predicted that the world will end this October 21st.
(Coincidentally, this also happens to be the same day that The Experiments broadcasts on Channel 4.)
You probably remember a lot of hubbub about the world ending earlier this year on May 21st. You should also remember then that the world did not end and that the Faithful were not spirited off to Paradise, leaving the rest of us with their pets. That was Harold’s prediction as well.
Harold divines his dates for doomsday using a complex numerological system that incorporates Jewish Feast Days, the Lunar calendar, the Gregorian calendar (naturally) and a complex method of interpreting the phrase ‘begat’ in the Bible as an indicator of what the year was. He’s no newcomer to the End of the World racket, either. His previous predictions for our ultimate end include May 21, 1988, and September 6, 1994.
Of our latest date with destiny, Harold says:
“I do believe that we’re getting very near the very end. We’ve learned that there are a lot of things that we didn’t have quite right and that’s God’s good provision. If he had not kept us from knowing everything that we didn’t know, we would not have been able to be used of Him to bring about the tremendous event that occurred on May 21 of this year, and which probably will be finished out on October 21, that’s coming very shortly.”
So you would probably be safe in assuming that if God neglects to conclude our Earthly business at the end of this month, Harold will be back on the airwaves with a new save-the-date for our souls in the not too distant future.
This reminds me of a fun game you can play when you’re out and about: You can control when the traffic lights are going to change by saying: “They’re going to chaaaaange…now!” until they do.
Harold Camping is also the published author of 1994? and Adam when?
The Good Book?
Chances are that you may already be familiar with Penn & Teller, but what you mayn’t have heard yet is that Penn, the looming, bombastic ‘talkier’ half of the legendary magic duo has just released a book: ‘God, No!’
In it he tackles, you guessed it, issues of Faith from the perspective of a confirmed Atheist.
He’s currently doing Press duties to promote the publication, even going so far as to sit across a table from the delightful Piers Morgan who, in Penn’s own words;
“Seems he hadn’t read the book, and I had no idea what he was trying in the interview. Odd.”
You can see a snippet of that odd interview here, read a short essay that Penn’s penned for CNN giving a flavour of the book here and, if you’re ready to go the whole hog, you can buy the book here.
Do let us know if you’re going to get it, or have got it already, and what you think of it in the comments below!
Malaysia permits divorce by text message
Getting a quickie divorce has taken on a whole new meaning in Malaysia after it was decided that a man can divorce his wife with a text message.
The government’s adviser on religious affairs, the man who counsels Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, said as long as the message was clear and unambiguous it was valid under Islamic Sharia law.
“SMS is just another form of writing,” Dr Abdul Hamid Othman was quoted by the New Straits Times daily newspaper as saying.
The decision follows a Malaysian court’s ruling on Thursday in favour of a man who served divorce on his wife via a text message.
Sharia judge Mohamad Fauzi Ismail declared that the divorce declaration was valid and that as such the marriage between the plaintiff Azida Fazlina Abdul Latif and defendant Shamsudin Latif was annulled, the Utusan Malaysia newspaper reported.
Russian court bans Scientology literature as ‘extremist’
A court in a Moscow suburb has banned works by the founder of the Church of Scientology, officials said Thursday.
The Shchyolkovo court ruled that “What is Scientology?” and other books by L. Ron Hubbard “contain calls for extremist activities,” the Prosecutor General’s office said in a statement.
It said that once the court decision comes into force, scientology books will be put on the federal list of extremist materials banned for release throughout Russia. The court made the ruling following a request by local prosecutors.
A court in the Siberian city of Surgut had earlier made a similar decision, but then overturned it. Scientology officials said they would protest the decision.
“There have been many legal violations, the case is unfounded and the trial was hasty,” the group’s attorney Sergei Korzikov told The Associated Press. “We could not defend our legal interests.”
Full story at the Washington Post
The Ledge, a movie guaranteed to cause controversy in the US
To all the liberal minded Brits who go about their day with nothing more than a rather infrequent “be a winner not a sinner” from a Christian with a megaphone outside Oxford St Tube, a story like the one told in the movie The Ledge might seem a little over dramatic. However the idea of “coming out as an atheist” to your family is downright scary to some and focusing your movie on the topic of free-thinking is a brave move for both actors and producers alike.
According to a recent gallup 2011 poll America is still a very religious society with over 92% saying “yes” to the question “Do you believe in God?”. It’s a regular topic of conversation on main stream news channels and has caused outrage even when used as a topic for jokes in mainstream entertainment.
Many stories have emerged of atheists being persecuted, mostly by the Evangelical groups inside institutions such as the Armed Forces, but there also instances where non-believers have received even harsher treatment when using legal methods to oppose religious practices, such as the case of Damon Fowler and Ellen Beth Wachs.
So the release of the film The Ledge will at least be a controversial one in the US – it’s being heralded as the “Brokeback Mountain” for American atheists and could cause a wave of renewed interest in the movement.
The story focuses on the lives of two people from opposing ends of the spectrum, who become enrolled in a lethal game that neither God nor the police can stop. It stars Charlie Hunnam from Sons of Anarchy, Patrick Wilson, Liv Tyler and Terrence Howard.
Saudi women are driving for change
Thousands of women activists in Saudi Arabia planned to start driving on Friday in defiance of a longstanding ban that prohibits women from even getting a drivers license.
The protest action comes after a campaign launched on social media began calling for women’s right to drive in the Kingdom.
Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world where women are banned from driving in major cities and towns, although they may drive in small towns and villages or in private housing compounds—some of which extend to many square miles. The Saudi Shura Council recommended in 2008 that the ban be relaxed, allowing young women to drive subject to some restrictive conditions.
Kumaré: A True Film About a False Prophet
American filmmaker Vikram Gandhi made up a guru character and a phony religion, then filmed a documentary as he developed a following. The result raises questions about belief and self.
Priest Sex-Abuse Case Hits Church of Pope’s Adviser
Time Magazine: The latest sex-abuse case to rock the Catholic Church is unfolding in the archdiocese of an influential Italian Cardinal who has been working with Pope Benedict XVI on reforms to respond to prior scandals of pedophile priests.
Father Riccardo Seppia, a 51-year-old parish priest in the village of Sastri Ponente, near Genoa, was arrested last Friday, May 13, on pedophilia and drug charges. Investigators say that in tapped mobile-phone conversations, Seppia asked a Moroccan drug dealer to arrange sexual encounters with young and vulnerable boys. “I do not want 16-year-old boys but younger. Fourteen-year-olds are O.K. Look for needy boys who have family issues,” he allegedly said.
According to investigators, Seppia told a friend — a former seminarian and barman who is currently under investigation — that the town’s malls were the best places to entice minors.
The evidence amounts to at least 50 messages and phone calls. In the tapped phone conversations, the drug dealer contacted the boys and gave their phone numbers to the priest, who paid them with cocaine or 50 euros each time for sexual intercourse.
“[The investigators] made us listen to that man saying terrifying things about our children. Things so terrible that I cannot repeat them,” a father of one of the boys said.
Seppia’s defense lawyers are expected to argue that those conversations — monitored since Oct. 20, 2010 — were just words, sex games that were played by adults. It was just a game even when he claimed to have “kissed on the mouth” a 15-year-old altar boy, according to the defense.
Full Article at Time Magazine via La Stampa
Rapture: Harold Camping issues new apocalypse date
Harold Camping, the voice of Family Radio in Oregon, USA, today announced that the rapture had in fact started, but we couldn’t see it because it was “invisible”.
Camping predicted that on May 21st 2011, 200 Million Christians (all American of course) would be lifted up in to heaven, the rest of us would be left on earth so that God, in all his infinite love, could spend 5 months slowly killing everyone with fireballs, earthquakes and general nastiness.
Thousands of Family Radio listeners donated money, some gave away everything they owned and the estimated $100 Million raised helped plaster billboards across the US and Europe. It also funded a fleet of elaborately emblazoned rapture vans.
Reports of people raptured on May 21 turned out to be elaborately and carefully planned hoaxes (see top image) by non-believers. Also organised were a series of “Rapture After Parties” and similar low profile events across America.
However skeptics may be in for a surprise, according to Camping they haven’t yet escaped judgement. It turns out the rapture was “invisible” and we can’t see it happening.
Camping, now 89 years old, first predicted the rapture in 1994, but changed his mind when it didn’t happen. His third attempt is now 5 months after the 21st of May (October 21) and he is still asking for funds to help spread the word.
According to the New York Times, when asked if his organisation would return any of the money raised, Camping stated “We’re not at the end. Why would we return it?”.
Today is the end of the world – so what are you doing tomorrow?
Preacher and evangelical broadcaster Harold Camping has announced that Jesus Christ will return to Earth (if you’re in New Zealand then thats now) Saturday, May 21,(this is his second attempt) and many of his followers are traveling the country in preparation for the weekend Rapture. They’re undeterred, it seems, by Mr. Camping’s dodgy track record with end-of-the-world predictions. (Years ago, he argued at length that the reckoning would come in 1994.) We’ve yet to learn what motivates people like him to predict (and predict again) the end of the world, but there’s a long and unexpected psychological literature on how the faithful make sense of missed appointments with the apocalypse.
The most famous study into doomsday mix-ups was published in a 1956 book by renowned psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues called When Prophecy Fails. A fringe religious group called the Seekers had made the papers by predicting that a flood was coming to destroy the West Coast. The group was led by an eccentric but earnest lady called Dorothy Martin, given the pseudonym Marian Keech in the book, who believed that superior beings from the planet Clarion were communicating to her through automatic writing. They told her they had been monitoring Earth and would arrive to rescue the Seekers in a flying saucer before the cataclysm struck.
Festinger was fascinated by how we deal with information that fails to match up to our beliefs, and suspected that we are strongly motivated to resolve the conflict—a state of mind he called “cognitive dissonance.” He wanted a clear-cut case with which to test his fledgling ideas, so decided to follow Martin’s group as the much vaunted date came and went. Would they give up their closely held beliefs, or would they work to justify them even in the face of the most brutal contradiction?
When Prophecy Fails has become a landmark in the history of psychology, but few realize that many other studies have looked at the same question: What happens to a small but dedicated group of people who wait in vain for the end of the world?
Full story at Slate.com
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