In James Randi’s SWIFT this week I was interested to see that yet another prediction of the end of the world has passed, I hadn’t even heard of this one.
Apparently, according to http://2007rapture.com/, the second coming and subsequent rapture was supposed to happen in 2007 (summer in the North to be more accurate). I couldn’t access the URL, it was probably being bombarded by the mini-DDOS attack that comes with becoming instantly thrown onto the public stage and your domain having a 1GB traffic cap.
Fortunately we have the great Wayback Machine serving-up embarrassing reminders of days-gone-by. Here is a section of the website as it read on 27 April 2007, just because I couldn’t paraphrase it any better (the emphasis is entirely Shelby’s):
I can just immagine him shouting to the kids; “Did you swim today? Huh? Don’t you want to be saved? Huh? Get out there! I don’t care if it’s only forty degrees! Jesus is waiting to collect all of us and you’re not playing your part!”
We can be grateful that this person wasn’t running the website Rapture Letters using his definite knowledge of the date of the rapture, otherwise there would have been a small flurry of junk mail towards the end of 2007. Oh, and I hope the person who maintains RaptureLetters.com has it in his/her will that somebody needs to push the button every week. I’d hate to think that I’d get one of those messages every week once he/she kicks the bucket.
Sliding away from religion but still on the matter of apocryphal apocalyptic dates, I’m reminded of one of my favourite such websites http://www.nostradamusonline.com which has some more predictions we can point and laugh at. When I visited the site in 2006 (and scraped a copy to keep on my computer) the book cover was shown to predict the Third World War starting in 2007 and ending with the destruction of the world in 2012. Funny that when we visit the site today it says that the war will run from 2008 to 2012. Okay, so we all know that Nostradamus was notoriously vague with sevens and eights which numerologically are the “numbers of amphibological indeterminacy” (or whatever claptrap) so we can forgive a little slip-up like that. But according to the Wayback Machine, this book was first published with a cover predicting WWIII starting in 2006 and ending in 2012. Three strikes?
Anyway, it’s good to see that year after year the good doctor keeps the same date for the end of the world. We only have a few more years before we can officially point and laugh. But he is not the only one. There is a widely held belief that the world will end on 21 December 2012 because the ancient Mayan calendar was worked-out mathematically far ahead of time to a point in the future which correlates to 2012/12/21 on our calendar. Did they know something when they stopped there? Must be! Can’t possibly be that there was never going to be a need to calculate this calendar forward to years after a random point in the future when the mathematician most certainly wouldn’t be alive anymore. Back then it must have seemed a great timespan for the empire to rule the known world. The conclusion that they “knew something” is the conclusion drawn by sites like December 21 2012, The official Website for 122112 Information (among others) and many published authors.
Speaking of predictions and apocalyptic stuff, here is a website I came across while searching for lost and missing ships, http://www.greatdreams.com/
It’s quite convoluted and confusing to go through, but the laugh is worth it. It has everything from polar shifts to crop circles,from seismic events to martian impacts, from the 2008 presidential campaign to economic predictions,and of course the obligatory end-of-the-world junk, all courtesy of someone called Dee Finney who jots down every dream she has. I wonder what medication she’s on? ;D
Lol, I wonder, after the initial rapture, will the newly saved people rescued by these automatic emails have to wait for the next rapture, or do you just say your prayer and up you go? If the latter, I would not be able to resist saying something along the lines of “Beam me up Scottie…” ;D
It really is a laugh. ;D Her 2008 predictions are …
I’m quite confused by her practice of dehydrating people, but that aside…
The majority are (as is to be expected) vague enough so that she can’t be called on being wrong. For example, “An upsurge of accidents involving children” or “Serious fires and explosions”. What does “action” mean in “More action with UFO” and in “Tremendous planetary action”? And is “Tremendous” supposed to mean “unexpected” (as in Jupiter disappearing) or “predicted but still noteworthy” (such as the near passing of 2007 TU24 past Earth on 29 January 2008)?
I can call the majority as false already … “US total financial restructure” (mentioned twice - perhaps it will change and then quickly change back while we’re all asleep?) is impossible unless the next election results in a win for the nonexistent communist party or socialists in the US. “a full restructure of the internet” is impossible. Perhaps she means that Google will refresh their indices? Or perhaps she predicted Bluegray maintaining / upgrading this forum … hmmm … : Maybe we are only supposed to expect a restructure which isn’t going to happen, she will say that her prediction of expectation was true in some feeble logical leap.
“The US will experience an upsurge of earthquakes, large explosions and volcanoes activity”. What is an “upsurge”? California has more than 1400 (detectable) earthquakes of varying intensity per year. Will there be more or will there be more of a greater intensity? Yellowstone (on the US’s list of volcanoes) is always exploding, spewing-out geothermally heated water. Perhaps the constantly active volcanoes of Hawaii will continue to be constantly active?
Interesting that point 6 joins together two points completely unrelated, so that if one is shown to be obviously false, perhaps the other is subtly true?
Oh, I could spend days predicting her ways out of these feeble predictions. And I don’t need to have dreams to see how.
Message modifications no longer work, reporting an “message already submitted” error. bluegray V, please delete my preceding (truncated) message.
Er, at the risk of being labelled a pedant, “desiccate” is in fact the correct spelling. However, in the context in which it appears it’s a malapropism so the appended “(sic)” (← tag problem here: with square brackets, the message is garbled) in the quotation isn’t entirely misapplied. Like “supersede,” it is one of those words one can win spelling bets on because people will usually insist adamantly that it is D-E-S-S-I-C-A-T-E until, that is, a dictionary is brought to bear.
But no matter. For what it’s worth, here’s my prediction, a stronger one I think than merely the manufacture of feeble excuses: A single big earthquake in the Pacific “Ring of Fire” (and it is seismically a very, very active region) of Richter magnitude 7 or greater will be claimed as an unequivocal, even a roaring, success. To put this (somewhat) in perspective, globally on average one magnitude 5 or greater event occurs every day. The Richter scale is logarithmic with respect (roughly) to the event’s energy release and if the epicentre of a crustal magnitude 5 event occurred at your house, there is no doubt that it would be flattened.
As for an increase in UFO activity, that prediction inevitably becomes a truism once it is understood that in a relative sense the volume of uncritical people appears to be growing faster than Earth’s human population…
Hmmm, that was my intention, to highlight the misuse of the word when the original author probably meant “dissect” (which, in context, probably sounds like backyard surgery rather than an analysis of current events). I did recognise that the word was spelled correctly (you’ll have to take my word on that). The use of “[sic]” ( see, it works for me ) isn’t entirely valid in this case because I went on to comment on the missuse of the word thus nullifying the need for the in-line marking. That then probably made it look like I was indicating that I had faithfully transcribed a spelling error.
Overall, the right idea is conveyed; the quote is full of “sic”-ness indicating my general disgust at the author’s grammar and style.
Oh, okay, apologies then – my intemperance led me to suspect otherwise, a not unreasonable suspicion, I think you’ll agree, given the more usual application of “[sic]” and the tiny fraction of able spellers.
And hey, waddaya know, it’s the open/close quotation mark variants that cause the tag problem!
Now that’s something we most assuredly can agree on.
Wish I could have gone to the website before the rapture. I recently found an “Atheist TShirt/Bumper sticker” list in the blogosphere, and one of them would have been particularly fitting to email them in this case:
“When the Rapture Comes, Can I Have Your Car?”
And actually that was in the comments, not on the list. My trailer tag came from the list.
Maybe we are only supposed to