October 2011
31 posts
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Exit Mundi, for when you've really, really got to...
Here’s a one-stop shop for all the possible end of the world scenarios, from old favorites to things even I haven’t thought of—it’s called Exit Mundi.
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“There is a kind of universal answer to the question,” Kirsch tells me in a...”
– From “Apocalypse Now, Apocalypse Then” by Brian Resnick, an Atlantic Monthly blog post that examines why Harold Camping was neither the worst nor the last to predict Armageddon.
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"Comet Armageddon" in the star system next door
Ian O’Neill of Discover.com blogs about the actual apocalypse currently underway in a neighboring star system to our own. NASA’s Spitzer space telescope has discovered signs of what’s called a “Late Heavy Bombardment”—basically, a comet shootout—that’s much like what happened in our own system about four billion years ago. The graphics and video are...
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A Korean Armageddon cult making headway in Vietnam
According to this website, anyway, a Korea-based doomsday cult that promises to make its adherents safe from being run over by cars (!) has gained more than a foothold in Vietnam. In fact, it’s now being run by its Vietnamese adherents.
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When the apocalypse is a wet one ...
… like, say, a tsunami, or perhaps that global flood in 2012, here’s what you need to survive: a personal flotation pod.
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The Hmong apocalypse of 2011
via Religion Dispatches:
Jason Bruner brings up something that is related—if tangentially—to Harold Camping’s predictions.
When broadcasts by Family Radio were translated by Hmong Christians and interpreted in light of their understanding, they took it to mean that they were getting a homeland. The Vietnamese did not agree. It resulted in violence, which has been very poorly...
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A neurological defense against the apocalypse
According to some European neuroscientists, we’ve got a predisposition to discount the likelihood of bad things happening to us. Bad things, you see, happen to other people.
And that means that, even though we love to watch the apocalypse destroy the world, we never really believe it will happen to us.
Basically, human optimism is a neurological bug that prevents us from remembering...
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“At bottom, that’s what Rapture belief is all about: the denial of death. That’s...”
– from “It’s still not the end of the world” by Fred Clark at Slacktivist.
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Camping has learned SOMETHING...
… but it’s not what you think.
He has not learned that predicting the Rapture and Armageddon is a fool’s errand. Instead, he has learned to hedge his predictions with the word “probably.”
Apparently he’s been chastened somewhat by his last misfire—he now says the world will “probably” end on Friday. “We’ve learned that there’s a lot of things we didn’t have quite...
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The number one reason why the world is really...
…at least, according to Buzzfeed.
They’ve got a great post—“50 Reasons Why the World Is Ending on October 21”—just in time to shore up the latest date from the media’s current favorite apocalypto-nut (apocalyptonaut?), Harold Camping.
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A little something for the survivors
And boy, will they need it.
These photographs of seed vaults show where the ability to re-seed the Earth will come from, if it’s ever needed. The Svalbard “Doomsday” vault in Norway is designed to survive an apocalypse, should one ever arrive. via io9
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Apocalypse is sexy!
“Apokaluptò, I disclose, I uncover, I unveil, I reveal the thing that can be a part of the body, the head or the eyes, a secret part, the genitals or whatever might be hidden, a secret, the thing to be dissembled, a thing that does not show itself or say itself, that perhaps signifies itself but cannot or must not first be handed over to its self-evidence.
“Apokekalummenoi logoi are...
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“Films about the end of the world are essentially thought experiments. They...”
– “There’s no end of apocalypse movies” by Dennis Lim in the L.A. Times.
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Yet another way to make money from...
Check out this tour by “Mayan Elders” who are going to share information from their culture about “crystal skulls” (Indiana Jones, anyone?” and the transformation that’s coming about as the Mayan Long Count calendar finishes a cycle.
But, hey! If you register this month, your name will go in for a drawing for a “real” crystal skull—just like...
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“So what does the future really hold? Every generation of Jesus’s followers has...”
– Jessica Fostvedt, “Doomsday, Apocalypse and Rapture, Oh, My,” blogging for Scientific American.
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WatchThose old Cold War bomb shelters? Well, now they’re “disaster shelters,” and at least some people are making a living off Armageddon without lying to people about it.
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We don't need an excuse to mock
The Christian Post has this article about concern among fundagelical Christians that Harold Camping’s End Times predictions have led Christian beliefs to be more openly mocked.
Family Radio broadcaster Harold Camping’s faulty predictions about the end of times is somewhat of an embarrassment for Christians who blame the California Bible teacher, and other fringe believers, for...
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Camping: Oct. 21 end will be "quick and quiet"
In this update from the Christian Post, we learn that Rev. Harold Camping has “restudied” his calculations, and is now convinced that October 21 will be the real end of everything. Believers will be Raptured, and everyone else on the planet will be killed.
The California Bible teacher, who confessed that he has “restudied” his predictions, said in the recording that the...
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Mark your calendars
That’s because the Family Radio/Harold Camping calculations are coming around again. October 21 is the “back-up” date for Armageddon, if you’ll recall, and, well, it’s October now.
That means that not only will Camping’s “true believers,” like Johannes Coetzee, the Family Radio leader in South Africa, will be spending time talking to reporters....
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That driver's license is the work of the...
Well, at least the high-resolution biometric photograph is the work of the Antichrist, as predicted in Revelation 13:16-18 and 14:9-11. Who knew the number of the Beast (which is the number of a man) would be on our driver’s licenses.
In Oklahoma, anyway.
The Rutherford Institute has filed suit on behalf of Oklahoma resident Kaye Beach, who asked for a religious exemption to...
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Asteroid apocalypse? Less likely than we feared...
That’s not to say that it won’t happen, but the asteroid apocalypse (ably illustrated in films like Deep Impact and, naturally, Armageddon), is less likely than we feared.
That’s because a recent NASA survey of near-Earth objects—asteroids and such—found that there were fewer of them that previously thought. NASA’s report is here.
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A weekend after the world ends
If you’ve got a hankering to pretend the world has already ended, the good leather-clad folks at Wasteland Weekend can help you out at their gathering in a Southern California desert.
That’s where they dress—and, without the blood loss and body count, behave—as if they’re living in the world of the Mad Max movies. Here’s a report from Wired, complete...
