Tag armageddon

And Now, the Backpedaling

(Alternate title: Invisible Rapture.)

Harold Camping, who got his fifteen minutes of fame predicting the end of the world this past Saturday, has started the backpedaling.

In a rambling discourse to reporters outside his Family Radio International office, Camping, an 89-year-old retired civil engineer, indicated he had misread the signs in predicting that the faithful would be lifted up to Heaven Saturday, leaving sinners to suffer through five months of disasters until the Earth was consumed in a fireball on the End of Days.

God did “bring judgment on the world,” on Saturday, he said, but there will not be any terrible buildup to the end. When it comes, it will happen quickly, he said.

Funny how a “spiritual” apocalypse looks exactly like an apocalypse that isn’t there. I guess he doesn’t want to consider the alternate possibility: that he’s a superstitious fool who thinks that a many-times translated mishmash of writings from the bronze age has any bearing on the modern world. That would be too simple.

Last time he predicted the end of the world, his excuse was that he’d forgot to carry a two or something. This time, it’s that something happened, but we didn’t see it because it was invisible. I’m disappointed. Both of those are tired old excuses that have been used time and time again by previous prophets of armageddon. Would it have been too much to expect him to spend some time coming up with something new? I suppose it was.

We’ll Have Ample Warning of the Apocalypse

People have been arguing for ages now that the end of the world, as foretold in John’s shroom trip the book of Revelation, will be upon us any minute now.

But I think the Bible makes it clear that we’ll have ample warning — thousands if not millions of years — before that happens.

Revelation 6:12-13 says:

12I watched as he opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, 13and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as late figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind.

As I understand it, all seven seals have to be opened before Armageddon, and the seventh seal can’t be opened until the stars fall to earth.

The thing is, we know where the closest stars are. The nearest one is four and some change light years away. Even Kent Hovind concedes that stars up to 100 ly away can be located via parallax.

We can also directly measure the velocity with which stars are moving toward or away from us by looking at their spectrum shift.

What this adds up to is that we’ll be able to tell when neighboring stars start moving toward us. Since stars are such massive objects, they have a lot of inertia. They can’t just turn on a dime. We’ll see them slowing down and shifting direction. And even when they’re on a collision course with the solar system it’ll take centuries before they get here.

Of course, there’s the whole business of the size of stars compared to the Earth. When the events of Rev. 6:13 occur, I doubt anyone will describe it as “stars falling to earth”. When those stars collide, they’ll destroy all of the inner solar system planets. Which raises the question of where, exactly, the seventh seal will be opened.

But I’ll let the theologians worry about that. And Michael Bay, because that seems like the kind of movie he’d make.