The Clock Is Ticking
Four years ago I noted a report from the WWF that said global warming could be dealt with but we had to take the proper measures in the next five years. Since plans for worldwide reform have not yet been adopted, despite all those climate conferences, I have to assume, so far, the WWF is disappointed. Which means we have one year left, or it's too late.
So a year from now, if (let's face it, when) we don't reform ourselves enough, I have to ask: will the WWF stop talking about this issue, or will it give us an extension?
PS A Robert Fitzpatrick of Staten Island has spent his life savings to warn everyone the world is ending on May 21st. It's very easy to say there'll be a Day of Judgment and then leave the date open, so I like a man who'll put his money where his mouth is.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:04 AM
9 Comments:
When did Rowdy Roddy originally announce this- during Wrestlemania XVII?
The world will not end on May 21, 2011. That's silly
Everyone knows the world will end on December 21, 2012
What amazes me is not the people who announce these things, nor even the people who believe them, but the people who stay loyal to a prophet even after his prophecies turn out to be false! The Adventists churches bitterly remember October 22, 1844 as "The Great Disappointment", and yet they survived and flourished after it passed.
P.S. One blogger has refuted this guy's prophet's predictions and showed that they make no sense, even on their own terms. His refutation is clever, but I think that clever people shouldn't waste time refuting things like this.
The real problem with predicting the end of the world is two things will happen.
1) You'll be proved humiliatingly wrong.
2) You may get a few seconds to gloat before it's over.
Still, as I said, with so many making vague predictions that can never be falsified (but can be proved "true" after the fact), it's nice to see someone lay it on the line.
1844 gave us "millernarianism" which is great because it suggests a connection with the end of the millenium even as it derives from the more pedestrian "Miller"
" ... it's nice to see someone lay it on the line."
I agree. Back in 1977, when I was in junior high school, I read Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth. He argued that the Rapture would occur within a generation of the rebirth of Israel, and then asserted (without evidence) that "in the Bible, a generation is forty years". Yet in the text he avoided saying more, presumably figuring that his readers could do the math on their own (1948 + 40 = 1988). I understood it as quite specific, and yet it gave him wiggle room years later since he hadn't explicitly made the prediction.
At the time, however, I found his claims very persuasive. To this seventh grader, Lindey's prediction eleven years in the future felt distant enough to be plausible, but close enough to be exciting. And since the Catholic CCD program my parents had sent me to was completely devoid of any content (it was basically babysitting), I had never before in my life read a book that took the Bible seriously, so I had no way of knowing that Lindsey represented just one strain of Biblical interpretation. Having never heard any other views on the matter, I believed his prediction for at least a couple years after reading his book....
I also carried a prediction with me from childhood. Sometime in the 70s (during my teens) I saw a documentary on Nostradamus. I was impressed with the prediction of Napoleon and Hitler (Hissler in Nostradamus' writings, they said). And then came the big one - something about the city between two towers being destroyed by fire from the sky in ---- 1999. Since I lived near NYC then, I took seriously the suggestion that this was a prediction of nuclear bomb hitting NYC in 1999. When 1999 came and went, I was gratified that my suspicions that it was all hokey were confirmed.
You do realize, don't you, that 1999, translated into binary as taught by the public school system, is 2001? Don't you?
Keep laughing, boys. The Earth has two days left.
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