Friday, October 21, 2011

Harold Camping says the world ends today.

Be ready, we may have to fight flying insects with goat heads or something. Yeah, sure he wasn't spot on come May, but he's certainly right this time. He's gotta be right.

8 comments:

Kay said...

Oh my not again. I didn't realize that he had another date for it.

As far as I know, that's not even biblical.

Tatarize said...

He made it up using the Bible. That's pretty much the definition of Biblical. And very likely wouldn't have if the Bible didn't say the end was coming really soon (though within Jesus' generation). The NT is pretty much apocalyptic failures with various excuses. The fact that 2000 years of Any Day Now, hasn't been right ever doesn't mean saying it'll happen isn't perfectly Biblical.

It depends a bit on the Christianity, but suggesting that some belief isn't Biblical is always going to be short sighted. The Bible is the big book of multiple choice, given pretty much anything, you'll find some Bible support for it somewhere (most of the time). You'll also find the exact opposite kicking around.

Kay said...

Okay off the top of my head, in Revelation 10 an angel told John not to write what the seven thunders said. It also states in the beginning of Revelation whoever adds to this or takes away from it, the same shall be cursed.

It gives indication of when the time will be neigh, but clearly states we will not know the day or the hour.

I am curious as to how he used the Bible to make his point. Do you know?

Kay said...

And sorry it took me a couple of days to check if you responded, I forgot that I had. I don't get my email notifications.

Tatarize said...

Camping generally has said that it was impossible to know until after some time. Which is why he didn't know for a long time. But, those passages about the day or hour were generally added because at the start Christianity was always about the Apocalypse which was to occur within Jesus' generation. As time goes on the Bible got a bunch more stuff added to it to say extend the time and apologetics as to why the end didn't happen. The reason for the "day or hour" bit is because previous predictions of the end of the world were proven wrong the day after. Just as Harold Camping's predictions were. Christianity is in some respects a long list of failed doomsday predictions and apologetics about those doomsdays. Such that about half of all Christians expect that the end will come within their lifetime even though it's been a couple thousand years of failed prediction after failed prediction. And to some respects it may be that Christianity came about from a failed prediction of the coming Messiah.

Revelations is also a later apocalyptic text, and not necessarily indicative of early Christianity.

You could check his site if you want the math. I saw a rundown of it and it wasn't that impressive. Compared to things like the Witnesses prediction that the end of the world would be in 1912 which was based on really good math, or one of the early contemporary end of the world predictions with the Millerites who actually gave rise to a number of American forms of Christianity. Dating back to the origin of the Rapture in the late 1820s by Darby.

The math sometimes isn't that terrible. Sometimes it is that terrible. But, you can tell from bits of the Bible where the predictions fail and new predictions come around skewing the old math. Like making Daniel's days into weeks, and predicting the end of the world around the time of the author's writing.

Long story short, it's plenty Biblical and goes back to a long Christian tradition of saying that the world would end, that we first see with Jesus inaccurately predicting over and over again that the end was near, and Paul, and then the later authors. Camping is simply one link in a very long line of people stupid enough, to, for religious reasons, think the world is ending shortly.

You can't fault him for making shit up and pulling nonsense out of his ass... as that's the core of religion.

Kay said...

I had put a comment here, but it didn't post.

My question was, is this script added to the original text (Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic), or to the different versions of the Bible?

Tatarize said...

>>My question was, is this script added to the original text (Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic), or to the different versions of the Bible?

We have little clue what an original text of the Bible would be written in, other than probably not Aramaic. Not only do they get added, they follow set patterns so you can actually see rather text book diversification of the texts where things get added and removed and messed with but each copy has different tweaks done to it. Which is why the Dead Sea Scrolls are so hugely different than other copies of those texts. Each text pretty much needs to be hand copied every time so various things will always sneak in and somebody can easily add things. And since you tend to get multiple copies we can quite commonly run into an entire diversified tree of versions of a particular text. And many of the early Gospel texts are no exception. It's only by a fluke that the copies of the NT texts that ended up in the Bible ended up in the Bible. There were a lot of other variations and edits that didn't. I'm not even talking about the gospel texts that didn't make it into the Biblical corpus, but even striking variations of some of the texts that did, which didn't.

Kay said...

Thank you Tatarize, and not that it matters to you but just to correct myself. I had stated that is says in Revelation 10 and angel but it was a voice from heaven that told John not to write down....