Seven Doomsday Prophecies

I think is safe to assume that everyone survived the Rapture on Saturday, if not then I shall miss you as a reader. Congrats on getting into heaven though, what's it like up there? Who's up there with you? Are there lots of parties and dinner engagements? Is everyone really smart? Do you dress really fancy?

As for everyone else, let's face it, there was no Rapture. Harold Camping was once again rambling about his "special upgrade" and the end of the world and was once again proven wrong. Of course, Camping isn't the first person to "predict" the end of the world (and won't be the last thanks to the Mayans). Campings failure at predicting the end of the world gave me the inspiration to write a special "Seven" list on doomsday prophecies.

The Jupiter Effect (1982)
The year 1982 was a magical year that marked the birth of none other than me and the year that all nine planets were supposed to align and cause mass chaos. John Gribben and Stephen Plagemann theorized that a rare alignment of all nine planets in 1982 would create a combined gravitational pull that would place huge stress on the planet's tectonic plates, causing killer earthquakes and severe changes in Earth's climate. The two men even wrote a book about their theory, that caused quite a stir at the time, but after the alignment passed without incident their professional reputation took quite a beating. Even though the two men were completely wrong, it was one of the first popular doomsday sceneries which held nature responsible for the end of the world rather than God's wrath.

The Battle of Armageddon (1999)
Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) was a noted psychic who made a number of predictions during the 1930s while in a trance state that went either unrealized or their fulfillment is open to debate. Of his various catastrophic Earth predictions, the epic Battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ were by far the most popular. Obviously, when these events failed to materialize on cue, it also made him as wrong as many of his contemporaries as well, though in having been dead for fifty-five years at the time, it made him one of the few end-time prognosticators who didn't have to suffer the consequences of his failed predictions.

Y2K Bug (2000)
In 2000, I was a senior in high school and actually did believe some of the hype of the Y2K bug. I didn't think  it was going to cause the end of the world, but I did think it was going to give me a hiccup when I went to Wawa to buy a cup of coffee before school. As you may have remembered, a bunch of computer geeks gave everyone anxiety after they claimed that computers would get confused by all those zeros and do all sorts of nasty things. Not only would we get a hiccup when trying to buy our morning coffee and newspaper, it was supposed to shut down air traffic control radars, resulting in numerous mid air collisions as pilots blindly crash into each other. The Y2K bug would also cause computers to forget to send coolant into nuclear reactor cores, causing them to blow up like a hundred little Hiroshimas. As a result, in the weeks and months leading up to the big event, there was a run on everything from bottled water to toilet paper as people prepared for Microsoft Armageddon, only to awake the next morning with one too many bottles of water. Who could have known all that was needed to prevent doomsday were a few software patches and a bit of diligence.

Late Great Planet Earth (1970)
Few people got the Christian community anticipating the Rapture, the appearance of the Antichrist, th eBattle of Armageddon, and the seven year Great Tribulation period than did the steamboat captain turned preacher Hal Lindsey, whose landmark 1970 book, The Late Great Planet Earth, became an overnight international bestseller. Outlining a remarkable chain of events designed to culminate in the Christ's triumphant return at the end of the seven year cycle of abject horror, literally millions of Christians looked to 1988 (the fortieth anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 when the doomsday clock literally started, according to Lindsey) as "the date." While in all fairness Lindsey never came out and specifically named the year, it was apparent by his arguments that the 1980s was to see all the events described in the Book of Revelations come to pass which, to readers in the 1970s, was pretty scary stuff. Remarkably, Lindsey suffered little from his prophetic faux pas and went on to write several more books on the end of times and even acquired his own cable TV prophecy show today, demonstrating that nothing breeds success quite like failure.

Heaven's Gate (1997)
On the morning of March 26, 1997, San Diego police were called to a rented mansion in the upscale community of Rancho Santa Fe, California to investigate reports of a possible death. When the police arrived at the home, they were made a horrific discovery: thirty-nine rapidly decomposing bodies. Each body was dressed in identical black shirts, black sweat pants, black and white Nike tennis shoes and lying in their own bunk.

Who were these people and why did they all commit suicide within a few days of each other? They were the members of a group of cultists known as Heaven's Gate, a tiny group of dedicated believers who had been convinced by a former music teacher turned New Age guru, Marshall Applewhite, that planet Earth was about to be recycled and that the only chance to survive was to leave it immediately in the spaceship that rode in the tail of the then recently discovered comet Hale-Bopp. Unfortunately, the only way their souls could hitch a ride on this spaceship was by ingesting poison and releasing themselves of their Earthly shells so they might make their "transition." Apparently, his followers took him seriously enough that over three dozen of them joined him in taking their own lives as part of a ritualistic suicide act, demonstrating that doomsday beliefs are far from being simple, harmless fun.

The Great Disappointment (1844)
New York farmer turned Baptist minister William Miller (1792-1849) was by all accounts a good and decent man who had a remarkable power to persuade people to his ideas. This turned out to be to his great detriment, however, when after undertaking an exhaustive self-study of the Old Testament, especially the book of Daniel, he came to the conclusion that Jesus Christ would return to Earth in all His glory on October 22, 1844. How he arrived at that precise date is the result of a fairly complex series of calculations, but suffice is to say that by 1840 his powers of persuasion were sufficient to induce upwards of 50,000 (with some estimates being as high as 500,000) of his fellow New Englanders to buy off on his teachings. When the day came and went without Christ's return, however, the disappointment was, to put it mildly, more than a little palpable. Almost overnight his burgeoning church folded, leaving him a man without a congregation. Undeterred, Miller recalculated and finding a simple math error, decided he had been off by one year and named 1845 as "the year." After Christ stubbornly refused to return that time either, Miller largely gave up and lived out the final years of his life a virtual recluse, devastated by his great disappointment but never for a moment giving up on his belief that the Second Coming was "imminent." Not to worry, however, for a small remnant of his church survived him to become the foundation for the fairly substantial Seventh Adventist Church today which, while no longer setting dates, still maintains a strong end-times mentality.

Rapture Day (2011)
Harold Camping, an American Christian radio broadcaster, predicted the end of the world through the use of mathematics. Prior to his 2011 predictions, Camping predicted Rapture Day would occur in September 1994, with the world ending five months later. Obviously, nothing occurred in September 1994 so Camping sat down to recalculate the end of the world a second time. Camping based his belief on the cycles of the Jewish feat days in the Hebrew calender (described in the Old Testament), the lunar calender, and a close approximation of the Gregorian calender tropical year. Rapture day would begin on May 21, 2011 at 6 pm with earthquakes in New Zealand and would then proceed to make it's way around the world. Only 3% of the world's population was to be raptured, with their bodies floating to heaven. As for everyone else, they were to spend the next five months in Hell on Earth, with God eventually destroying Earth and the entire universe five months later on October 21.