Blogs by David A. Schwinghammer
We're Still Here!
5/21/2011 7:56:37 AM
Why is the national media covering this nonsense?
Well, six o'clock in New Zealand has come and gone and the earth quakes have not started. Harold Camping, an educated man who should know better, must have a very red face. You have to give him credit, though; he did do one heck of a job promoting this bull. Supposedly people gave him millions to do it.
Camping says he based his prediction on the 7,000th anniversay of the flood in the Bible. What flood? There's no historical evidence there ever was one or that it happened seven thousand years ago. There is some evidence that one occured in Mesopotamia around that time, however. That doesn't mean that the flood in the Bible caused the Grand Canyon as some of these doofs contend.
Naive people need to stop taking the Bible literally. Camping's prediction sounds a whole lot like the Book of Revelation, which was somehow included in the canon despite the objections of such church leaders as St. Augustine. He finally agreed, providing it would be taught symbolically.
But I'm getting a little ahead of myself. When Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the early fourth century he insisted that the church get its act together and come up with a compilation (canon) of church teachings. At the time they were dealing with the albigensianism heresy. And so the church fathers gathered up as many "holy" writings as they could find. They threw out some, such as the Book of Enoch, which is crazier than the Book of Revelation and the Gnostic gospels. The more familiar gospels were kept of course, but they weren't written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They were anonymous. Later the church's public relations department, one of the greatest in history, found it necessary to assign them to credible personages. The Book of Revelation was also probably accepted because it was obvious John of Patmos was talking about Rome and that the anti-Christ was Caesar; it was kind of a pep talk for the Christians who were being harassed by the Romans.
There was no such thing as the Rapture until the 1840's when the Seventh Day Adventists predicted the believers would be gathered up and ascend into heaven and the non-believers and sinners would suffer for a thousand years.
Camping also predicts that the world will blow up in October, so I guess we all have that to look forward to because the tabloid press is sure to cover it. If that doesn't work, there's always the Mayan prediction for December of 2012.
Thousands of people throughout the world fell for this stuff. They gave aways their property; they even gave away their pets, all because a stupid old man with a lot of money had access to the press. Now we know how so many teabaggers got elected last fall.
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