ApocalOOPs and other terms for failed predictions

A lot of people are busting out the jokes today to mock the doomsday dud predicted by Harold Camping and Family Radio. It does seem like we should have words to describe this scenario when a prediction, particularly one of this magnitude fails to occur.

Two that I have been promoting are ApocalOOPs and Flop-pocalypse. I've also been promoting the Load of cRapture and NostraDumbAss themes to describe a prophet who gets things like the date of the Christian Rapture wrong. What funny terms have you heard today to describe the epic failure of a prophecy like the one on May 21st, 2011?

Creative Reasons that the Rapture Ruptured on May 21, 2011

After all the media hoopla about Family Radio and this Harold Camping dude who spent $100 million promoting the idea that the world was going to end on May 21st, 2011, I think it would be entertaining to come up with reasons that the world didn't end. Just saying "Because Camping has a funny name," or "He's a senile old coot!" would be examples of reasons that are not particularly creative.

OTOH, here is an example that I have been promoting, already in this blog, but I would like to see some from others.

1. God's Cosmic Vacuum Cleaner broke down: The Christian Rapture can be thought of as God turning on the Great Cosmic Vacuum Cleaner in the sky. When he does housekeeping, ever couple thousand years, it will suck all the Christian suckers right out of their clothes and straight up into the dust bag which Christians call Heaven (unless god has a bagless model). However, apparently something happened. My personal theory is that Jerry Falwell, who was quite "larger than life", got stuck in the tube. Even with all God's immense sucking power, he couldn't dislodge Falwell. So he had to throw the vacuum into reverse and try again in a few thousand years again, when Mr. Satan, the local vacuum salesman, pays another visit.

Make your suggestions as simple or complicated as you want, as long as they are creative.

Apocalypse Nawwww

Nawww, there was no apocalypse yesterday. Just a lot of hot air from Harold Camping and his followers who reportedly spent $100 million promoting their false claim that the world would end on May 21st, 2011. You know what they say about a fool and his money. Anyway, now he is supposedly in hiding. However, in terms of PR, he will probably cash in. He will charge for interviews, revise his predictions, sell a book, etc. His followers were already selling t-shirts and bumperstickers to cash in on the hype. When will people wake up and realize they are being duped not just by Harold Camping, but by their own Christian preachers. It's a very cushy job and telling fairy stories sure beats having to work for a living. The fact is that many christians believe 99% of the nonsense that Camping spewed, but they just don't have the courage to stand up and admit it because they know they will be laughed at and proven wrong like Camping was.

So full of cRapture about the Rapture

We witnessed yesterday a classic example of religious hype and hyperbole. Harold Camping and his minions at "Family Radio" spent an estimated $100 million promoting the utterly false claim that the world would end on May 21st, 2011. For that reason, I proposed nominating Camping for my 2011 NostraDumbAss False Prophet of the Year award.

Yet, already this story is going down the memory hole. It was all over top news sites yesterday, but now people have conveniently lost interest on Sunday, and are going back to their churches for more helpings of Harold Camping style nonsense. Tomorrow, there will be new preachers and self-appointed "prophets" trying to feed us a new load of cRapture about the Rapture. Try to remember this when you sit in your pews listening to your preacher who thinks he has it all figured out, but likely doesn't have the first clue what he is talking about. No, you'll say, my preacher, priest, etc is a great (yet humble) guy who admits that he doesn't know all the answers, and it's just all those other people out there who are crazy. Camping's followers thought the same thing about him. Most crazy people insist they are NOT CRAZY. We all think we are being reasonable, all the time. We all think that our own beliefs are well justified and it's everyone else who is the looney tune. But the fact is that, if you are a Christian, or especially a fundamentalist christian, you believe in at least 98% of all the same things Camping does. You still believe in the load of cRapture called the Rapture. You and your church simply doesn't have the courage to attempt to predict a precise date. You simply hide behind vague prophecies that are more difficult to prove wrong because the wording is so slippery that you can contort them to mean whatever you want. The fact is that many devout christians have been predicting the same thing as Camping for 2000 years and have never been right. You yourself probably believe that this nonsense event of the Final Judgment will happen in your own lifetime. It's not politically correct for Christians to martyr themselves like they used to do and like they still do more fashionably in the Middle East. However, they can fantasize about the whole world burning up in horrifically violent events, just to gratify their own egos and allow them to say that they were right. We Camping wasn't right and neither are you. And don't tell me that the sun will one day burn up the Earth or that we might get hit by an asteroid. That has absolutely nothing to do with armies of angels fighting a final battle between good and evil and god judging you for eating pork or working on the sabbath.

Harold Camping's Load of cRapture

Well the so-called "christian rapture" (or crapture for short ;-) ) epically failed to materialize today on May 21st, and it's already May 22 in some parts of the world. Therefore the prophecy of Harold Camping is proven false. We didn't see hundreds of millions of holier than though christians flying upward into the air to be with Jebus and play harps on clouds. This may leave some very arrogantly over-confident christers scratching their little noggins and scrambling like mad to find any excuse for why their god has failed to return for thousands of years. After all, Harold Camping and his (manson) Family Radio network claimed that the Bible "guarantees" that the world would end today. If so then many of us didn't notice. Of course, I am sure he will come up with a load of excuses, or should I say a load of cRapture reasons that he got the time wrong. They are, after all, alway discovering new, lost scriptures which never made it into the Bible. I suppose that I shouldn't come up with too many alibis for Harold, because I wouldn't be surprised if he uses excuses like this. This might permit him to take one more swing at pretending that he knows when the world is going to end. But, as it stands, all he has produced is a load of cRapture predictions which have proven to be full of cRapture errors.

Theory about why rapture was an epic fail today

For fundamentalist christians (fundies), the rapture is like a super sucker vacuum that sucks those suckers right out of their clothes, and deposits them naked in heaven, where they have a big orgy in the clouds. Well, that last part isn't exactly true, though the word "rapture" sounds like it might involve sex. However, rest assured that fundies hate sex. They just have lots of theological terms that sound like what they're not, such as being "born again", which sounds like it might involve being painfully shoved back inside your mother.

Nevertheless, the part about God turning on his cosmic vacuum is how they seem to envision being taken up to heaven. My theory then, as to why the rapture didn't happen is that some very fat Christians got caught in the tube. Recall that there are people like Jerry Falwell, which even God's own vacuum cleaner would have trouble sucking through a tube. If he got caught up there then God probably had to throw the vacuum into reverse and drop everyone back down to Earth to try again in a few thousand years, when he develops a more powerful vacuum.

Harold Camping projected winner of the 2011 NostraDumbAss Award

In a previous post I proposed the creation of a "Nostra-Dumb-Ass False Prophet of the Year Award", to recognize the tireless work for failed doomsday prophets. Note that, while I have used the term "Nostradumbass" for years, a websearch will reveal that many others have likewise used the pun, which is why I have added the additional titles, which might be variously abbreviated "NDA (Nostra-Dumb-Ass)" or "NdaFPotY"

In any event, while there have been many through the centuries and millennia, such as Nostradamus himself, this is a new award, so it would presumably start with people from the year 2011 and on. Therefore, I think Harold Camping, who predicted that the world would end today, on May 21st, 2011, would be a shoe-in for this year's prize. But I don't think that Harold alone deserves the full honor of this prize. After all, what about the thousands of people who sheepishly hang on his every word without thinking for themselves. Who is worse, a person who tells a transparent falsehood, or the people who uncritically lap it up, refusing to take responsibility for their own thinking and do their own homework. Of course, there is still time for someone to come up with a more outlandishly over-the-top kind of "prophecy" that will "out-crazy" Camping, et al.

Perhaps there should also be a special procedure for inducting historical figures. However, at present, I think the focus should be current or modern figures, since there are many of those. The historical figures could be inducted honorifically, without the same amount of fanfare.

Are failed doomsday predictions making more atheists?

One often wonders about the motives of failed doomsday prophets. Were they really just "trolling" us in internet parlance. That is, are they really just trying to get a rise out of us or enjoying trying to scare us? Do they think that we might temporarily turn more religious, at least for a day, in the hope of pulling off what the eminent theologian Bart Simpson called a "presto, chango, death-bed conversion"? Is God that easily fooled that he would accept as sincere a day of good behavior based upon fear, in exchange for a previous lifetime of doing as one pleased?

I submit that, especially with the enhanced communication abilities in the modern world, the repeated failure of these doomsday prophets will result in less religiosity and more atheism. Therefore, rather than seeing these "scary" predictions as noble lies to help win souls for christ, the reality is that these people are likely causing more people to laugh at and turn away from religion.

These individuals making or following various cultish predictions concerning doomsday appear sincerely to believe their claims, but they demonstrate that they have little regard for moral responsibility. That is, they have not thought about the consequences of their actions and how their overtly displayed, and embarrassing false certainty will lead others to become less religious. If "soul-winning" is a noble thing, according to their their faith tradition, then losing souls must not be looked upon too favorably from on high. While I know this won't deter people the very next day from making new false predictions, they should at least consider the moral irresponsibility of their actions.

For atheists, these false predictions should be an god-send. Unfortunately, many atheists don't seem to know how to capitalize on such things. Believers will just shrug this off and go on to believing the next dubious prediction tomorrow, not even remembering the trail of false hopes an vain claims their their religion has lead them into. Perhaps atheists need to make a bigger deal out of such things. Perhaps they should have a special word for when doomsday predictions fizzle and gloom and doom go kaboom. I have proposed some candidate terms like "dumbsday", or "dudsday", or "dundersday". Instead of a prediction, one might have a "predorktion" to describe the phenomenon when the prophets boff-it. At the very least I think that a secular group like American Atheists should hand out an award called the "NostraDumbAss Award", to failed prophets, and people like Harold Camping should be this years nominee.

Perhaps it would fun to make a t-shirt with a list of failed doomsday prophecies, each one being exed out, and a few that are yet to come, such as 2012, and a few blank spaces that say .

0% success of doomsday prophecies

Faith is false certainty, pure and simple, and nowhere is more false certainty on display than in the actions of doomsday cultists. Every year, and often multiple times a year we hear about groups, large and small, arrogantly insisting that they have the all-important knowledge that the world will end. Of course, it always turns out the opposite, and we like to see such blatant arrogance fall upon its face. By its very nature, they can only be right once, so, in some sense, it might even seem unfair to point out that they have a 0.0000000% success rate at predicting the end of the world. However, in a more general sense, we do use trends to predict many other future events. Geology and Astronomy tell us that the Earth has existed for billions of years. Even our distant, caveman ancestors probably feared the world was ending every time an eclipse or a severe storm, earthquake, or volcano ravaged an area.

In the relatively short time that humans have been making up stories and pretending they were true, which is the basic role of religion, the predictions of final battles and supernatural cataclysms have been fulminated fast and furiously. The fact that none of these claims have even been close to correct might give us reason to question the fundamental premise of whether an immediately impending, supernatural doomsday is a justified belief at all. Sure, there might even eventual, natural phenomena that cause a global catastrophe, but what non-faith-based reason do we have for believing that non-natural world-ending events are even remotely reasonable?

In almost all cases, doomsday predictions are not just a little wrong, but starkly, dramatically wrong these days. That is, they are not even a little bit right. There isn't even a little event, like a moderate earthquake, or a respectably-sized hurricane, which frightened our caveman ancestors. We get a perfectly unremarkable day of mostly sunshine and clear skies. Of course, since true believers ignore evidence that contradicts the fictional narrative they enjoy telling to themselves, this has little effect. Yet, as alluded to above, we are actually worse off than our caveman ancestors in terms of our predictions, because now we can't even predict supernatural cataclysms based upon some kind of evidence that nature gives us.

I am suggesting that we should start counting, and why not arbitrarily decide to start counting now, when doomsday turns to dudsday. After all, the media devotes considerable hype and attention to these kinds of stories, if for no other reason than the human interest angle. Camping has been wrong before, and yet, people go on believing him anyway. However, for that matter, Pat Robertson also predicted that the world would end in the early 1980's and few people seem to hold that error against him. Shouldn't there be some kind of consequence for making a false prediction of this magnitude, which is at least as severe as a parking ticket or jaywalking? It would not infringe upon religious belief either, any more than current parking tickets infringe upon your ability to worship on a sunday morning. Saying that any minister who publicly predicts a current time frame for the end of the world, and then ends up being wrong should have to pay a symbolic fine of $50 would hardly seem excessive.

In any event, we certainly seem to have different standard for religion leaders than almost any other kind of leaders. If our political leaders screwed up in major ways like this, we would see considerably more ridicule. If a football coach bet everything on a play and lost then there would be massive scorn heaped upon him (or her). However, religion makes it against the rules to ridicule it, even when it produces ridiculous claims. Why is it that we have declared it off limits and in poor taste to ridicule the ridiculous, as long as a person declares the ridiculous statement to be religious?

Those who did criticize Camping often did so with kid gloves. Some religious people expressed their own religious certitude that Camping was wrong because of their different beliefs. Some have pointed out that Jesus himself declared that nobody except "the Father" knows when doomsday will happen (Mt 24:36). What is less well remembered is that Jesus also had his own failed doomsday predictions, and in many ways was the father of the Christian cottage industry of doomsday prophecy, claiming that the high priest caiphas would live to see Jesus return at the second coming (Mk 14:62).

The point is that it is not clear why we should feel any more comfortable with other religious beliefs using their whacky claims in an attempt to counter the whacky beliefs than Camping. Why should we believe their counter claim any more than Campings, when both are just going on unsupported claims? What got us into this mess, in the first place, was accepting, uncritically, whacky religious claims, and it would seem that the solution should be to reject them up front, or at least not give them so much deference and attention as we see today.

Calling BS on May 21st Rapture

According to a media campaign with far more money than sense, Harold Camping and his "Family Radio" insist that the "rapture" will occur tomorrow. As popularized by the Tim LaHaye _Left Behind_ series of books, the "rapture" involves god turning on his huge Cosmic Vacuum Cleaner (tm) and sucking the bodies of devout Christians right out of their clothes and up into the dust bag known as heaven. According to bizarre, illogical, and impossible to follow numerological arguments and word games by Camping, he has determined that this event, predicted "any time now" for the last 2000 years, will happen tomorrow. As I have pointed out to many people, there is hardly a year that goes by that someone doesn't think the "End of the World" will happen. Camping himself claimed this would happen in 1994. However, he says that he made a math error on that one. However, he now thinks the bible "guarantees" that it will happen tomorrow.

As fun as it is to prove these people wrong again and again, it might be cool to fake them out too. People have done this before too, leaving sets of empty clothes around the office, sitting on the chairs to make a christian co-worker think that people had been "raptured" out of the office and that he or she had been left behind. It might be fun to wander around with halloween makeup in zombie hordes, or to dress up in devil costumes, and pretend to writhe in agony in front of churches. The zombie hordes would be a reference to the fact that even the long dead are supposed to be resurrected. The devil stuff would be just for fun.

It's conceivable that a person could use a powerful LCD projector and project an imagine that looks like Jesus onto a cloud, perhaps from a high building. I wonder how many people would be taken in by that kind of thing. At least it would be based upon some kind of evidence, unlike the stuff from Camping, et al.