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General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: hnumpah on May 21, 2011, 07:37:40 PM

Title: Didn't notice a thing
Post by: hnumpah on May 21, 2011, 07:37:40 PM: Not even a twitch.

Did the world end for anyone else? Anyone get raptured?
Title: Re: Didn't notice a thing
Post by: Plane on May 22, 2011, 12:23:59 AM: (http://arthurkingoftimeandspace.com/2558.png)
Title: Re: Didn't notice a thing
Post by: Plane on May 22, 2011, 01:00:54 AM: Quote
Bart Centre says he'll be there. For $135 (plus $20 for each additional critter; PayPal accepted), he promises to look after your dog or cat or hamster or even llama once you are spirited away to heaven.

Centre started his company, Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, two years ago. But business didn't really boom until Harold Camping set the date of the Rapture at May 21, 2011.

http://www.npr.org/2011/05/21/136475372/after-the-rapture-who-will-walk-your-dog (http://www.npr.org/2011/05/21/136475372/after-the-rapture-who-will-walk-your-dog)
Title: Re: Didn't notice a thing
Post by: MissusDe on May 22, 2011, 01:22:27 AM: (http://a5.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/250671_1797197580698_1562494124_31608398_2084907_n.jp])
Title: Re: Didn't notice a thing
Post by: kimba1 on May 22, 2011, 09:52:15 AM: just thought

the rapture did happen,b but turned out nobody qualify to be taken so we`re all still here.
Title: Re: Didn't notice a thing
Post by: Plane on May 22, 2011, 09:59:57 AM: Can we call the roll?
Title: Re: Didn't notice a thing
Post by: sirs on May 22, 2011, 12:47:57 PM: the math had to be off, right?
Title: Re: Didn't notice a thing
Post by: hnumpah on May 22, 2011, 01:35:57 PM: When Doomsday Isn't, Believers Struggle to Cope
Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer

If you're reading this, Harold Camping's predictions that the end of the world would start Saturday (May 21) failed to pan out.

That's good news for most of us, but Camping and his followers were looking forward to the end. After all, they believed that they were likely to be among the 200 million souls sent to live in paradise forever. So how do believers cope when their doomsday predictions fail?

It depends, said Lorenzo DiTommaso, a professor of religion at Concordia University in Montreal who studies the history of doomsday predictions.

"If you have a strong leader, the group survives," DiTommaso told LiveScience. "Sometimes the group falls apart. Most often, the answer given by the group is that the prophecy is true, but the interpretation was wrong." [Read: Why People Look Forward to the End]

In 1994, Camping predicted a September doomsday, but hedged his bets with a question mark. On his website (familyradio.com), Camping wrote that he had misunderstood a key biblical passage, but since that time, biblical evidence for a 2011 end had "greatly solidified."

Doomsdays without doom

The classic study of "doomsdays gone bad" took place in 1954. A Chicago woman named Dorothy Martin predicted a cataclysmic flood from which a few true believers would be saved by aliens. Martin and her cult, The Seekers, gathered the night before the expected flood to await the flying saucer. Unbeknown to them, however, their group had been infiltrated by psychologist Leon Festinger, who hoped to find out what happens when the rug of people's beliefs is pulled out from under them.

Festinger's study, which became the basis of the book "When Prophecy Fails" (Harper-Torchbooks 1956), revealed that as the appointed time passed with no alien visitors, the group sat stunned. But a few hours before dawn, Martin suddenly received a new prophecy, stating that The Seekers had been so devout that God had called off the apocalypse. At that, the group rejoiced ? and started calling newspapers to boast of what they'd done. Eventually, the group fell apart. Martin later changed her name to "Sister Thedra" and continued her prophecies.

Other failed doomsday prophets have struggled to keep their followers in line. One self-proclaimed prophet, Mariana Andrada (later known as Mariana La Loca), preached to a gang of followers in the 1880s in the San Joaquin Valley of California, predicting doomsday by 1886. But Andrada was not consistent with her predictions, and believers began to defect. Trying to keep one family from leaving, Andrada told them one of them would die on the journey. Sure enough, the family's young son soon fell violently ill and passed away. The family accused Andrada of poisoning him. She was arrested and found not guilty, but never returned to preach to her followers.

Searching for explanations

How Camping's followers will cope with a failed doomsday prediction depends on the structure of the group, said Steve Hassan, a counseling psychologist and cult expert who runs the online Freedom of Mind Resource Center. [After Doomsday: How Humans Get Off Earth]

"The more people have connections outside of the group, the more likely it is that they're going to stop looking to [Camping] as the mouth of God on Earth," Hassan told LiveScience. "Information control is one of the most important features of mind control."

In his experience, Hassan said, about a third of believers become disillusioned after a failed prediction, while another third find reason to believe more strongly. The remaining group members fall somewhere in between, he said.

Doomsday groups in history have run a gamut of responses after failed predictions, said Stephen Kent, a sociologist at the University of Alberta who studies new and alternative religions. On occasion, a leader will admit he or she was wrong; other groups will come up with a face-saving explanation. Some groups may blame themselves, rationalizing that their lack of faith caused the failure, Kent told LiveScience. Other groups blame outside forces and redouble their efforts.

"One of the options is for the group to say, 'Society wasn't ready, Jesus felt there weren't enough people worthy of rapturing. Hence, we've got to go out and convert more people,'" Kent said.

After the apocalypse

Often, a failed prediction leads to splinter groups and re-entrenchment. After Baptist preacher William Miller predicted the end of the world on Oct. 22, 1844 ? a date thereafter known as "The Great Disappointment" when nothing happened ? his followers struggled to explain their mistake. One subset decided that on that date, Jesus had shifted his location in heaven in preparation to return to Earth. This group later became the Seventh-Day Adventist church. [Infographic: Doomsdays Past and Present]

Sociologists and doomsday experts agree that Camping is likely convinced of doomsday rather than perpetuating a hoax or running a scam. A con artist, Hassan said, would never set himself up for failure by giving a firm date.

A belief in doomsday gives followers a clear sense of the world and their place in it, Kent said. Those comforting beliefs are difficult to maintain after the world fails to end.

"This could be a fairly sad day for these people," Kent said. "There will be some greatly disheartened people who may be terribly confused about what didn't happen."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110521/sc_livescience/whendoomsdayisntbelieversstruggletocope (http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110521/sc_livescience/whendoomsdayisntbelieversstruggletocope)

I, however, remain unshaken in my belief that it is all hokum.
Title: Re: Didn't notice a thing
Post by: Xavier_Onassis on May 22, 2011, 01:37:32 PM: the math had to be off, right?

=================================
Theology majors only have to take "bonehead math" courses.
It almost certainly takes more advanced math to apply numerology to the Bible.
Title: Re: Didn't notice a thing
Post by: hnumpah on May 24, 2011, 01:28:52 AM: Radio host says world's end actually coming in Oct
by GARANCE BURKE, Associated Press

OAKLAND, Calif. ? As crestfallen followers of a California preacher who foresaw the world's end strained to find meaning in their lives, Harold Camping revised his apocalyptic prophecy Monday, saying he was off by five months because the Earth actually will be obliterated on Oct. 21.

Camping, who predicted that 200 million Christians would be taken to heaven Saturday before global cataclysm struck the planet, said he felt so terrible when his doomsday message did not come true that he left home and took refuge in a motel with his wife. His independent ministry, Family Radio International, spent millions ? some of it from donations made by followers ? on more than 5,000 billboards and 20 RVs plastered with the Judgment Day message.

Follower Jeff Hopkins also spent a good deal of his own retirement savings on gas money to power his car so people would see its ominous lighted sign showcasing Camping's May 21 warning. As the appointed day drew nearer, Hopkins started making the 100-mile round trip from Long Island to New York City twice a day, spending at least $15 on gas each trip.

"I've been mocked and scoffed and cursed at and I've been through a lot with this lighted sign on top of my car," said Hopkins, 52, a former television producer who lives in Great River, NY. "I was doing what I've been instructed to do through the Bible, but now I've been stymied. It's like getting slapped in the face."

Camping, who made a special appearance before the press at the Oakland headquarters of the media empire Monday evening, apologized for not having the dates "worked out as accurately as I could have." Through chatting with a friend over what he acknowledged was a very difficult weekend, the light dawned on him that instead of the biblical Rapture in which the faithful would be swept up to the heavens, May 21 had instead been a "spiritual" Judgment Day, which places the entire world under Christ's judgment, he said.

The globe will be completely destroyed in five months, he said, when the apocalypse comes. But because God's judgment and salvation were completed on Saturday, there's no point in continuing to warn people about it, so his network will now just play Christian music and programs until the final end on Oct. 21.

"We've always said May 21 was the day, but we didn't understand altogether the spiritual meaning," he said. "The fact is there is only one kind of people who will ascend into heaven ... if God has saved them they're going to be caught up."

It's not the first time the 89-year-old retired civil engineer has been dismissed by the Christian mainstream and has been forced to explain when his prediction didn't come to pass. Camping also prophesized the Apocalypse would come in 1994, but said later that didn't happen then because of a mathematical error.

Monday, rather than give his normal daily broadcast, Camping took questions as a part of his show, "Open Forum," which transmits his biblical interpretations via the group's radio stations, TV channels, satellite broadcasts and website.

Camping's hands shook slightly as he pinned his microphone to his lapel, and as he clutched a worn Bible he spoke in a quivery monotone about some listeners' earthly concerns after giving away possessions in expectation of the Rapture.

Family Radio would never tell anyone what they should do with their belongings, and those who had fewer would cope, Camping said.

"We're not in the business of financial advice," he said. "We're in the business of telling people there's someone who you can maybe talk to, maybe pray to, and that's God."

But he also said that he wouldn't give away all his possessions ahead of Oct 21.

"I still have to live in a house, I still have to drive a car," he said. "What would be the value of that? If it is Judgment Day why would I give it away?"

Apocalyptic thinking has always been part of American religious life and popular culture. Teachings about the end of the world vary dramatically ? even within faith traditions ? about how they will occur.

Still, the overwhelming majority of Christians reject the idea that the exact date or time of Jesus' return can be predicted.

Tim LaHaye, co-author of the best-selling "Left Behind" novels about the end times, recently called Camping's prediction "not only bizarre but 100 percent wrong!" He cited the Bible verse Matthew 24:36, "but about that day or hour no one knows" except God.

"While it may be in the near future, many signs of our times certainly indicate so, but anyone who thinks they `know' the day and the hour is flat out wrong," LaHaye wrote on his website, leftbehind.com.

Signs of disappointment also were evident online, where groups that had confidently predicted the Rapture ? and, in some cases, had spent money to help spread the word through advertisements ? took tentative steps to re-establish Internet presences in the face of widespread mockery.

The Pennsylvania-based group eBible Fellowship still has a website with images of May 21 billboards all over the world, but its Twitter feed has changed over from the increasingly confident predictions before the date to circumspect Bible verses that seem to speak to the confusion and hurt many members likely feel.

Camping offered no clues about Family Radio's finances Monday, saying he could not estimate how much had been spent on getting out his prediction nor how much money the nonprofit had taken in as a result. In 2009, the nonprofit reported in IRS filings that it received $18.3 million in donations, and had assets of more than $104 million, including $34 million in stocks or other publicly traded securities.

Josh Ocasion, who works the teleprompter during Camping's live broadcasts in the group's threadbare studio sandwiched between an auto shop and a palm reader's business, said he enjoyed the production work but he had never fully believed the May 21 prophecy would come true.

"I thought he would show some more human decency in admitting he made a mistake," he said. "We didn't really see that."

___

Associated Press writer Tom Breen in Raleigh, N.C., and Videographer Ted Shaffrey and AP Religion Writer Rachel Zoll in New York, contributed to this report.
Title: Re: Didn't notice a thing
Post by: sirs on May 24, 2011, 01:36:28 AM: See?....must have been the math was off. It's the only "logocal" explanation, right? ;)
Title: Re: Didn't notice a thing
Post by: Xavier_Onassis on May 24, 2011, 10:45:59 AM: Actually, I would say that his calculations were immaterial. The fact is that although numbers can be important in SOME circumstances, they are NOT helpful in THIS circumstance. The various authors of the Bible simply threw numbers around to bamboozle the masses, and there is no mystical significance to the numbers at all. The Hebrews used their alphabet to indicate numbers, but they did it in a way in which words can be spelled with them, not as the Romans did. Roman numerals spell few words and fewer when used in proper numeric sequence ICI is a nice French word, but no one writes any number like that, and CII is not a word at all.

Predicting the future by numerology is like building a car out of cheese. No matter how good the cheese is, the car will not be adequate transportation. Numerology is a dead end when it comes to prophesies.

These morons refuse to think. They say God knows and understands everything. He knows what we think and how we think, and how to communicate his prophesies to the most simple-minded of us without a lot of numeric gobbledygook. What possible purpose would it be to hide a prophesy in a mess of numbers that it would take 2000 years to figure out?

This old fart is 90 years old. All his life he has been waiting for Jesus, and deep down inside, he knows that like every preacher before him, he is going to die a perfectly normal, non-end-times, unraptured death. And he just can't stand it because he thinks that for some reason he is "special", so he makes these stupid predictions...twice...and probably he will hammer together another before he joins the Choir Celestial.

My prediction is that he will not be successful in his silly numerology, because numerology is a bogus "science".
It is not mathematics, it is not even arithmetic, it is as bogus as a mosquito-powered aircraft or a goat powered motorcycle.

Unlike this preacher, I admit I COULD be wrong, and make no guarantees, because no one knows the future. Probably not even the Demiurge Himself.
Title: Re: Didn't notice a thing
Post by: sirs on May 24, 2011, 11:32:57 AM: Actually, the whole math reference, from both my postings, were a joke ::)
Title: Re: Didn't notice a thing
Post by: Xavier_Onassis on May 24, 2011, 11:52:22 AM: Ha.
Title: Re: Didn't notice a thing
Post by: sirs on May 24, 2011, 07:15:41 PM: (http://media.townhall.com/Townhall/Car/b/wright0524color20110524053134.jpg)
Title: Re: Didn't notice a thing
Post by: Xavier_Onassis on May 24, 2011, 09:14:41 PM: Yeah, Rev. Camping said he made a clerical error or something, and now the Apocalypse is on for October 21st.He was five months off, he says.