Jan's Stinkin Blog: RELIGION: Get ready for the end...

Saturday, December 11, 2010

RELIGION: Get ready for the end...

Might as well get all my issues out by the end of the year…

This one is a doozie. The headline read: BILLBOARDS TO PROCLAIM JESUS’ RETURN ON MAY 21, 2011”.

HERE IN THE Detroit area, we will see around 20 billboards proclaiming the message; other cities will get many more billboards (40 in Nashville).

First, who is doing this? It appears a web site (www.wecanknow.com) is, in conjunction with a Christian radio network called Family Radio; the billboards are being installed in cities where Family Radio is available.

What is the message? That a “RAPTURE” will take place on May 21, 2011 where the “chosen” will be “raised” to be with HIM. Those left behind will suffer through an earthquake where graves will open and on October 21, 2011, the world will end with “God destroying the universe and everything in it”.

This info is from the Detroit newspapers and the Web, so I am not making this up.

Harold Egbert Camping (89) is the founder of family Radio and the man doing the calculating. He also predicted the end in 1994 but he must have miscalculated and if the end does not come in 2011, he probably miscalculated again. At his age, he will not have too many chances to miscalculate again.

Predicting the “END TIMES” has been going on for thousands of years. Jesus himself thought the end was nigh but he was wrong, obviously. St. Paul preached the imminent coming of the kingdom but had to alter his story when nothing appeared to be happening. He also had to alter his story because his people were selling all their belongings to wait for the end.

This has happened many times in modern times. I remember a story about people having to be saved from a cave in Russia because they were so sure the end would come that they did not take any food with them and nearly starved to death; I guess that would have been an end of sorts.

The newer predictors of the end times have an elaborate formula for coming up with the exact date of the end; all based on something in the Bible. Knowing that the Bible was written by many, many authors and redacted countless of times and translated many times, means that its originality is very much in doubt, especially on a word for word basis.

I will give you and example. The prediction is stating that“Rapture” will occur on May 21, 2011. The word “rapture” is being used to indicate that the “chosen” Christians will disappear from earth or be whisked from earth to be with Jesus somewhere in heaven. You may remember Edgar Whisenant who sold millions of his book “88 Reasons Why the Rapture will ne in 1988”. There was even a movie where I think people, including the pilot vanished from an airplane while in flight.

Anyway, the whole concept of “rapture” is based on what St. Paul said in one of his epistles (1 Thessalonians 4:15-17), “…who will greet the Lord in the air”. Scholars will tell you that the words spoken by Paul meant that people will greet the king outside the city and escort him into the city; that’s what those words meant when they were written sometime in 52 AD (CE). That is why you can’t trust every word in the Bible to mean what you want it to mean or think it means.

Family Radio also urged people to leave their churches and denominations because they are all corrupt and I guess will no longer lead you to salvation. So where should the people go and what should they do?

It is easy to dismiss this whole thing as religious lunacy but these are real people and many of them at that, believing in this man; its bad enough that a majority of Americans believe in the second coming of Jesus…but that is another topic and another blog.