Doomsday rhetoric scary to children.

I read a recent article talking about how kids are being bombarded with these messages from the likes of Harold (NostraDumbAss) Camping, and misinformation about 2012, so that it is becoming increasingly difficult for parents to calm their fears. Indeed, the target audience for fear based messages is often naive, relatively powerless children. It's a lot harder to scare adults, which might be why Jesus said, "unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." (Mt 18:3). I wonder if he also makes Saint Peter wear a Mickey Mouse costume.

The article goes on to say "Kids of preschool age have a hard time determining reality from non-reality". I wish it was only kids. One sees the same phenomenon in religious fanatics. Perhaps this is a vain, Peter Pan Syndrome style effort to hold onto childhood forever. Camping apparently has managed to do it for 89 years.

Thy Will Be Done ... well duh.

I read a story about a priest in Joplin who lived through the May 24th, killer tornado there. Naturally, he prayed, since that's the only tool he's got in his box, and he thinks that this is what saved him. His prayer, according to his hero in the mirror version of the story, was to constantly repeat the phrase "thy will be done" as he took cover in the bathtub. Well duh, if there is an all-powerful god then he doesn't need this priest's permission to do what he is going to do anyway. Therefore to pray to god telling him to do what he is already doing right now, and presumably planned to do is beyond ridiculous.

Now I know some people will say, "you missed the point". This guy humbly resigned himself to his fate and that's what God wants us to do. Well it hardly matters whether people resign or not. God could kill people who resigned themselves or spare them, just as he can kill or spare people who do not resign themselves. If it is your fate then it is going to happen and there is really no resigning to even do because it would still happen, even if you protest that you don't want it to.

Besides, I can't be the only one who suspects that this priest is trying to compare himself to Jesus in the Gethsemane. Recall that he also resigns himself to be crucified (which was the whole point of him coming to Earth, according to Christian doctrine). Do you still think the priest was being oh so humble by comparing himself favorably to Jesus?

Why the Bible can't predict tornados in 2011

If you do web searches, you will find people wondering if the bible predicted that there will be tornados in Missouri in the month of May, 2011 AD. Of course, common sense would tell you people in the Ancient Near East, writing three thousand years ago had no clue that was a land half way around the globe called Missouri, much less having blow-by-blow details on how many people might be killed by a particular storm on a particular day, or the dollar amount of the property damage, etc. It should be obvious that there are billions of people today and therefore billions of large and small events happen to them every single day, month, and year all over the globe. The bible cannot possibly predict them all, and it's not much of a "prediction" anyway when it doesn't actually tell you any specifics and you can only fill in the details after the event has happened.

Other Harold Camping style religious nutters take the view these storms were send as a "message" from the Almighty, expressing his displeasure with this or that, for there is always something to claim that God is displeased about. Strangely, it seems that god is always displeased around the same time each year in these same states where tornados are known to be frequent, as opposed to Vermont or Washington state, where they seldom ever occur.

It's a curious way for god to "send a message". It's about like god trying to "tell us something" by making it hot and dry in the desert, or rainy in the tropics. More importantly, it makes god culpable for the deaths, rather than being able to blame it on "nature" or "randomness" or the "free will" of people who happened to be in its path. People who believe that god steered the exact course of the storm, destroy this building and sparing that one, or killing this person and only maiming that person must really think the God they worship is a monster.

Indeed, if anyone else decided that he was just going to start randomly killing people to "send a message" and "express displeasure", we would judge this person a psychopath. The case in point today is Jared Loughner. He killed people in his qust to send his insane, nonsensical message to the rest of the world. Even many right-wingers (who are overwhelmingly religious fanatics) had to grudgingly admit that Loughner was without any kind of justification for his actions. Yet when something even more destructive, like a tornado strikes, and there is nobody to arrest, they attribute it to God and say that it was good?

Harold NostraDumbAss Camping Says Judgment Was Spiritual

Just as I predicted, the False Prophet Harold Camping claimed that the World was Judged on May 21st, 2011, but only in a spiritual sense. Yeah, that's the ticket. I had already suggested that he would claim that christians were invisibly raptured and replaced by exact look-alikes, to fool us, so unbelievers would think it didn't happen. God is apparently really sneaky like that. This is the same logic that anti-evolutionists use to argue that God and/or Satan planted phony fossils with phony radio-isotopic dating to "fool us" into thinking that the Earth is billions of years old. Sorry, Harry, even many of your gullible followers won't be fooled again.

Hey, I've got another BS line you can use. When you said "May" 21st, you really meant it "may" or "may not" happen. Oh yeah. That's a good lie, isn't it. The funny thing about bible "literalists" is that every time they get caught in a lie they say, "Aw shucks, I didn't mean that *literally*. I just meant it figuratively/spiritually." Yeah right. I guess Adam and Eve and Noah and Jesus can't be taken literally. They are just figurative. Hey, maybe the whole apocalypse thing is "figurative". How does he know it's real when he admits that the rapture is only "spiritual". What a fraud this Camping guy is.

Holy cRapture Harry Predicted Another Rapture

Holy cRapture/ Harry predicted another rapture,

This time in October / Are we sure that he's sober

Cause the last one was just over

And who will believe him / Do his gray eyes deceive him

Plus, what when this one fails? / And the false prophet finally bails

With all his ill-gotten loot / Not bad for a wrinkled up, old koot

Sorry, I was trying to write in very bad verse, the way NostraDumbAss or some of the other mystics of yore once did. Harry, you don't get a DO-OVER. You know you ain't got a snowball's chance in hell of being right. You're just trying to dump your stocks and rip off the rubes one more time before they lynch you. Or maybe you're hoping to die before then.

See you in October, and this time you better put your own money up with a bookie in Vegas. And we aren't letting you triple down and push it off until December 31st, when you get it wrong in October.

Harold NostraDumbAss Camping Says Rapture Coming in October

Well Harold Camping has finally spoken out his NostraDumbAss and, rather than apologizing, and admitting his error, he has done what so many fanatics do instead. He has doubled down and re-predicted that the Holy cRapture will occur in October of this year. Webs of lies have ways of getting thicker and thicker. His current failed prophecy has lead him to now make another one which is almost certain to fail and which is based upon absolutely no credible evidence. The most notable recent evidence against is the fact that he called it wrong two days ago. He now wants to continue to terrorize the world with his religious extremism and his extermination of human life fantasies. This is truly sick, but it is also something that I predicted. See, I have a better record of prophecy than Camping, but perhaps that is because I do not rely upon the stone age nonsense which comprises the majority of the Bible. You know the saying that one of our former presidents struggled mightily with, "fool me once....."

Bieber is So Going to Hell for Gomez Kiss

Justin Bieber (or Just a Beaver as I've heard him called) is a self-proclaimed extreme Christian who tried to cash in his Christian beliefs with his Never Say Never video. However, apparently Justin has forgotten the words of Jesus in Matthew 5:27-28, after snogging Selena Gomez on stage. See Jesus believed that if you even looked lust a woman lustfully that you had committed adultery with her in your heart and were bound for hell. He also recommended that if your right hand caused you to do something wrong (though it's not clear that it's your hand's fault, now is it Beav?) that you should cut it off. In this case if your lips or even your lower manly anatomy causes you to do something wrong, then Justin may want to follow the advice of his hero Jebus and lop that little sucker off. It's not like it would change the pitch of his singing voice much, and at least he wouldn't have to tramp around with little tempresses, who are only going to get him an a poolside view at the Lake of Fire. Come on Justin, have the courage of your convictions. I know you probably thought that the world was going to end this weekend and now you're trying to lose your cherry, in case your hero Harry Camping only miscalculated the end of the world by a few days. But Jebus will be very disappointed in you.

Joplin Tornado called "The Beast" after book of Revelation?

In keeping with the doomsday theme over the past couple days, apparently there was a major tornado in Joplin, MO, and apparently it is being called "The Beast", which sounds like a reference to the Book of Revelation. If that were true, however, one would expect it to kill either 666 or 616 people, depending upon the variant translations which give those number. Most people are not aware that the oldest versions of this rather questionable book of the bible quote a figure of 616.

More interesting is that, according to news stories, plenty of people in Joplin think that God and prayer saved them. The same God who sent the tornado and killed others who were likely devout and busy mumbling the same scared prayers into their hands, decided that certain people were more worthy to save than others.

In any event, if this tornado was the long awaited "Beast" of the Book of Revelation, then it is certainly underwhelming. The Beast was supposed to kill way more people than that, and not just in a modest size down.

In any event my sympathies do go out to the people of Joplin. Nobody deserves such senseless tragedy. If there were an all-good, all-powerful god pulling the strings, then such things would most assuredly never happen. The fact that they do tells us that humans will have to learn to help our fellow man to cope and recover as best we can. That doesn't require belonging to any particular religion. None of them have a monopoly on compassion. Humanism is arguably a better approach, because it is a secular philosophy that doesn't waste time with imaginary dieties and prayers to supernatural forces. Instead it dispenses with the prayers, rolls up its sleeves, and gets to work.

Thanks to the secular miracles of science and modern technology, we have radars, and other forecasting systems which can help us reduce the dangers of these kinds of storms, and then more quickly and effectively respond in the aftermath.

Joplin Tornado. Any gay people targetted?

Religious looneys, from Harold Camping to Pat Robertson, and Bradlee Dean, the homophobic preacher in Minnesota who attacked President Obama's faith today, all love to blame gays for all kinds of dark and sinister things. Camping said that his apparently falsely predicted apocalypse this weekend was partly due to the fact that our society tolerated gay people. Others like Robertson and the late Falwell tried to blame 911 on gay people and later claimed that hurricanes or the devastation in New Orleans was also due to, you guessed it, gay people.

The interesting thing is that, if God hates gay people so much, and sends these natural disasters to try to kill them, he sure does seem to have bad aim. He usually ends up killing all kinds of people who aren't gay at all. Recent strings of tornados across the Southern US and flooding along the Mississippi seem to have inordinately targeted the Bible Belt and people who tend to be fanatic christians. If God really wanted to get gay people, it would seem that he could target the gay pride parade with lightning bolts and tornados and spare the rest of us. I know that the ancient Hebrews had a philosophy that God would punish the innocent for the sins of the guilty, perhaps to make the innocent survivors angry and willing to lynch the evil doers. However, this seems both inefficient and morally unjustifiable. In any event, I suspect that Joplin was far from a hot-bed of Sodom and Gomorrah activity.

Camping to speak out of his Nostradumbass tonight

Reports now indicate that Harold Camping is planning to put out an official statement today, and has given brief comments to several news organizations, promising to tell them more in his "open forum" later tonight. It doesn't sound like it will amount to much. After all, he still believes this event is imminent, and he still apparently believes that the time of its occurrence can be determined from the creative interpretation of various bible passages. So, he is really only sorry about being wrong, in all probability, he is unrepentant and will give it another shot in the future, though it's likely that most people will find his message even less credible than before.

One (not so) creative excuse from Family Radio employee Michael Garcia for the "delay" or LAPSE in the apocaLAPSE is that god is doing it to separate those who have faith from those who don't. However, it's not clear how such a delay would accomplish this. People from Family Radio undoubtedly had FAITH, even though it was MISPLACED faith that turned out to be completely FALSE. Other people without FAITH in this prediction turned out to be correct. Why should god punish people for not believing Camping's falsehood, when that is, in point of fact (not faith), the correct position to have taken. How would it make us better people to have believed Camping's lie?

Family Radio finally shuts up but no apology

So far, Harold Camping and his Family Radio have stayed silent about the the FAUXpocalypse they predicted for this past Saturday, May 21st. According to news sources the radio station is just playing lame music and giving out canned platitude advice about life. Camping finally seems to have nothing to say, or perhaps is meeting with focus groups, lawyers, and other like-minded Christian "apologists" to come up with excuses and look for ways to weasel out of his claims. BTW, I have said this many times in other forums, but it bears repeating here, especially among the iPhone generation. As much as I wish it were the case, Christian Apologetics is very definitely not about apologizing for all the things they get wrong on a regular basis. Instead, as one would expect from extremists, it is actually about the exact opposite. It is about making up excuses so that they do not have to apologize. Unfortunately, the English word "apology" means something rather different than the Greek term "apologia", which actually means defense, which anyone studying Plato would surely know from the trial of Socrates, for example. I realize that I am going out on a limb here with my own prophecies, but I predict that there will be little or no actual apology in the English sense of the word and plenty of "apologia" or defensive rhetoric from Camping and his followers, with at most Camping falling on his sword because....duh....he is the primary person to blame here. My own personal definition of "Christian Apologetics", BTW, is "how to lie like a five-year-old and sound less convincing". We will definitely see a lot of that on display in coming days.

Moment of misCONCEPTION

We laugh at failed apocalyptic predictions, like those made by Harold Camping and "Family Radio" over the weekend. However, many people fail to connect the dots about his other looney beliefs. Why was it called "Family Radio". One reason is because they do not believe in contraception or abortion, even if the latter would save the life of the mother. That is apparently a family value. There was a failed effort in the US by the religious extremist party known as Republicans, to "Defund Planned Parenthood". People like Senator Kyl claimed that "well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does" is provide abortions, when the actual figure that every reputable source quoted was 3%. It is this kind of misinformation which fuels these religious extremists and emboldens them to attempt to terrorize the populace with other phony claims, such as the ridiculous notion that the world was going to end on May 21st, 2011. I wonder if John Kyl received any donations from Family Radio or Harold Camping.

These days, only the lunatic fringe believes that contraception is murder, but it didn't used to be that way. This same lunatic fringe now maintains this fiction that there is a "moment of conception", which is scientifically false. To begin with, it is *fertilization*, not conception, and it does not happen in a "moment". It takes place over a considerable period of hours and days. However, these same people with their John Kyl and Harold Camping style misinformation want to insist that a fertilized, single-celled organism, which has no brain or capacity for feeling pain is the equivalent of a fully-born human baby. Here's a 90% figure that is true. 90% percent of abortions happen before the first trimester. Most abortions are more like contraception than the ridiculous fantasies of Kyl and Camping. They stop the development of a pregnancy at such an early stage that nothing significantly human has even developed. The christian doctrine of pre-formism used to maintain that the sperm contained a fully formed, miniature human being, just ready to be planted in a woman's soil, where it could grow into a larger baby. The reality is that nothing like this actually happens. It takes time to build a human, like it takes time to build a house and if you stop building the house after the first few 2x4s have been nailed together, it was never really a house to begin with. It might have been a house if one continued building, but we can't say it was a house already once the first nail touched the first piece of wood, even if the builder had a blueprint for a house in mind when he started hammering.

Imagine what the money could have been spent on

Family Radio and their gullible adherents wasted an estimated $100 million promoting the ludicrous fanatasy that May 21st, 2011 would be the end of the world. One individual reports spending $140,000 of his own money in order buy posters and advertising to get the word out. Imagine if the $100 million had been spent on targetted charities. It might have helped children, prevented domestic violence, housed homeless people, and even been used in various kinds of medical research. Given that the present use of the money accomplished nothing, any good it did would have been notable. However, the reality is that, not only did this money promote nothing but a falsehood, it also accomplished the opposite of what these people intended. It made religious extremists look foolish anew. It destroyed the "Family Radio" brand, and probably means that it will go out of business or be sued into bankruptcy and those working for it will likely lose their jobs. More importantly, it make people more skeptical. Perhaps that is the only good that it unintentionally did, though true believers wouldn't see skepticism as a good thing.

What is God's Holy Hold up Anyway???

Jebus failed, as he has failed every day, for the last 2000 years, to return "any day now". The recent false prophecy of Harold Camping and his Family Radio group highlights the increasing frustration that believers have with this tardiness. It is high time that the question be seriously put -- what in the world could be God's holy hold up? The bible has been translated into every conceivable language. Missionaries have covered every part of the globe for centuries. Modern communication means that even people in the amazon rainforest are using cellphones and getting internet access. Everyone who wants to hear about Jebus has heard about Jebus. Every day that goes by provides more evidence that Jesus is not coming. It gives us more reason to doubt.

Some insist that he is still waiting to allow more people to be saved, but it is not clear that this is happening. People like Harold Camping are causing more people to doubt than believe. Events in the world are making people more skeptical. Furthermore, population has been growing faster in recent centuries and decades than ever before. This is actually making the job of saving all those people harder than ever. It would have been much easier to have come shortly after the death of Jesus, or at least after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire.

Others just insist that god is really really slow. They say that it takes 1000 years to equal one God day. There are sloths and inch worms that could beat god apparently. Doesn't this make God guilty of the sin of "sloth" for going so slowly about handling things? I must have missed the part in the Bible where it said God's butt was made out of lead. Seriously, he has not shown a good hustle. That is not what we would expect from a perfect being. He needs to get a move on.

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.

The only Judgment that got passed....

It was Judgment Day on May 21st, for Harold Camping and his Family Radio freakshow, who were judged to be charlatans and fools in the eyes of the world for confidently promoting the falsehood that the world would end. Some people are claiming that they spent in the neighborhood of $100 million on their media campaign promoting their silly ideas. However, one wonders how much they made as well. These individuals did attempt to cash in, in various ways, selling t-shirts, and other merchandise, as well as soliciting donations. While I doubt that they broke even, I suspect that some, especially at the top, profited from false prophecy. Harold, I think you know that the Bible doesn't look kindly upon false prophets. Was it really worth it to throw your credibility away like that...or what you had left of it, since you made similar predictions in 1994? I guess time and IRS tax returns will tell.

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.

Let the Bible Backstroke Begin

Now that Harold Campings false prophecies about the world ending on May 21st, 2011 have been proven false, one can expect the Bible Backstroke to begin. In this Olympic sport, the objective is swim around words and verses so quickly that believers can deny that anyone ever made a mistake. As I've pointed out already, fundamentalist christians believe 99% of what Camping does. They simply are too cowardly to step out from behind vague language and put their money where their mouthes are like Camping did. Sure Camping was a nut for thinking that he could do it, but a lot of you people think the same nutty things and just don't have the courage of your convictions. Remember that as you are having a nice hearty laugh with your minister as he feeds you another load of nonsense this sunday.

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.

Being full of cRapture means never having to say you're sorry.

Doesn't it seem like Family Radio and Harold Camping, who promoted the idea that the world was going to end today, owe the world an apology. If nothing else they could at least say, "sorry we tried to freak you guys out". If Harold does even that, I might think slightly more of him. However, I suspect that he will not, for the same reason that many religious people refuse to be reasonable about their extremely whacked out beliefs. He's too wrapped up in his own self-importance, and clearly is living a parallel universe of delusions, which only makes occasional contact with the real world to tell us that we're all going to hell.

I suspect that his followers will not apologize for their own roles in this either. Instead they will play the victim without admitting their own responsibility for being gullible. As I have noted before, who is dumber -- the person promoting the fanciful deception, or the many who lap it up without the slightest critical thought?

In fact, I expect to see the opposite. Instead of admitting that this will make it harder for them to be as dogmatic and arrogantly certain of their own infallibility, I suspect that some of them will say that the experience "strengthened their faith". There's a prediction that actually has at least a snowball's chance in hell of being right.

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 .