On The End That Wasn't - An Agnostic Ponders

During the course of one weekend in late March fourteen years ago, thirty-nine people (in three groups over the course of three days, by the way) living in a rented house in a suburb of San Diego ingested large amounts of phenobarbital washed down with vodka. Lying in their bunks and dressed in identical clothing (right down to the brand new Nike sneakers) plastic bags were secured over their heads to induce asphyxiation. The first group of fifteen succumbed that Saturday, the next fifteen the next day and the last nine the next.

The bodies, decomposing and shrouded in liturgical purple, were discovered by the police on Wednesday. The stench must've been overwhelming.

This was the Heaven's Gate cult and they did this voluntarily because they firmly believed that an extra-terrestrial space ship travelling behind the Hale-Bopp comet would take them to the "next level above human" if only they would shed the "vehicles" that were their human bodies.

It was an extreme act of faith to say the least.

Now here is a most dangerous questions to ponder:

• Did they make it? That is to say, did they make it to the next level above human?

Everything hinges on that question. If they made it to the next level then we really can't say they committed suicide, can we? Certainly not in the same sense that we say that Kurt Cobain or Vincent van Gogh or Vince Foster committed suicide.

If they made it then those 39 didn't ingest all that phenobarbital with a vodka chaser to end their lives but to continue their lives.

So again I have to ask, did they make it? And if you answer no then how do you know that they didn't?

You could point out that there was no ship following the Hale-Bopp comet, that with the world's telescopes focussed on the comet, no one saw (or said they saw) a spaceship following it. Ergo with no ship, no journey to the next level etc.

Ah, but this is where the discussion gets dangerous, doesn't it? If you are going to use logic and scientific evidence (or lack thereof) to undercut an act of faith or other metaphysical assertion then you have to allow scientific evidence to be used to verify any other act of faith or metaphysical assertion.

For example just as there was no scientific evidence that there was a UFO following the Hale-Bopp comet, there's also no scientific evidence for the existence of Heaven. Or of The Resurrection. Or of God. Believing in each is, in itself, an act of faith.

You could point to other afterlife belief systems from other religions and say that because what the Heaven's Gate group believed wasn't among them, it was therefore incorrect. But that gets you into trouble as well. Does one ascend into Heaven via one's good deeds and faith or via faith alone? Depending on who you ask it's one or the other that's wrong. One faith, analysed through the the tenets of another, will always come up short.

So saying Heaven's Gate theology was wrong because it wasn't more like other, more mainstream, theologies isn't saying much at all. All you've really said is that it was different.

So all that being said, we now turn to Harold Camping's end-that-wasn't. How do we know it didn't happen? Well, for one thing, most everyone that was here on May 21 is still here now.

Even Harold Camping.

And he's moved the goal posts. From the AP:

A California preacher who foretold of the world's end only to see the appointed day pass with no extraordinarily cataclysmic event has revised his apocalyptic prophecy, saying he was off by five months and the Earth actually will be obliterated on Oct. 21.

Harold Camping, who predicted that 200 million Christians would be taken to heaven Saturday before catastrophe struck the planet, apologized Monday evening for not having the dates "worked out as accurately as I could have."

Precisely. There's more:

Through chatting with a friend over what he acknowledged was a very difficult weekend, it dawned on him that instead of the biblical Rapture in which the faithful would be swept up to the heavens, May 21 had instead been a "spiritual" Judgment Day, which places the entire world under Christ's judgment, he said.

The globe will be completely destroyed in five months, he said, when the apocalypse comes. But because God's judgment and salvation were completed on Saturday, there's no point in continuing to warn people about it, so his network will now just play Christian music and programs until the final end on Oct. 21.

The New York Times points out that Camping's prophecies have been "widely derided" by mainstream Christianity. It has been for a while. How do they know it's untrue?

The P-G's own Ruth Ann Dailey explains:

Jesus himself said, in a long passage (Mark 13) about the end of time, "[The] day and hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."

More specifically, it's Mark 13:32. So if Jesus tells us no one will know the answer then how can Harold Camping? That was Ruth Ann's apt rhetorical question.

But was Jesus himself a reliable source of information on the End? Perhaps not. In the scripture verses that immediately precede Mark 13:32 we read in Mark 13:30-31:

Assuredly, I say to you, this generation will by no means pass away till all these things take place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away.

The "these things" are the signs of His immanent return: the sun and the moon darkening and the stars falling out of the sky. All those things were supposed to happen within the lifetimes of the people who lived during Christ's life.

Jesus said so. It's in the Gospels.

And yet that didn't happen either. He must've gotten it wrong.

I'll end with my own rhetorical question (I believe this is from Bertrand Russell, though I can't find the original): Why should we believe any proposition for which there is no evidence? That's where human beings get into trouble.

These aren't small meaningless questions either. Just think about the millions of human beings slaughtered over the course of human history for believing in the wrong faith or the wrong God.

The Stupidest Thing I Ever Read In The Trib

From today's Sunday Pops section of the op-ed page:

And, of course, this was inevitable: a sideshow of unfounded speculation that killer tornadoes are the result of supposed climate change. NBC weatherman Al Roker was one of the first cluckers out of the box to mention climate change, according to The Daily Caller. Perhaps Mr. Roker and other climate crusaders could lend some of their credibility to doomsdayologist Harold Camping. After all, he, too, dabbles in very much the same "science."

If this is the Daily Caller article to which Scaife's braintrust is referring, they didn't even get it right. No where in there does it say that Roker was one of the first to mention climate change. But this is what The Daily Caller says Roker says:

On Monday’s “Martin Bashir Show” program on MSNBC, “Today” weatherman Al Roker had a theory on what’s behind the weather. Broadcasting live from the site of St. John’s Hospital in Joplin that took a hard hit from Sunday’s weather, Roker assessed the tornado that hit Joplin to be on the top-end of the Fujita Scale.

“Well you know the National Weather Service is probably on the ground now and they will assess the damage,” Roker said. “Some people are saying an EF3. I would put this probably between an EF4 and EF5, which is the top of the Fujita Scale.”

Roker also offered a theory on why tornadoes are seemingly touching down in more urban areas as of late. His answer: Climate change.

Unfortunately for Scaife's braintrust, the speculation isn't unfounded. Take a look at this from 2007:

Previous climate model studies have shown that heavy rainstorms will be more common in a warmer climate, but few global models have attempted to simulate the strength of updrafts in these storms. The model developed at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies by researchers Tony Del Genio, Mao-Sung Yao, and Jeff Jonas is the first to successfully simulate the observed difference in strength between land and ocean storms and is the first to estimate how the strength will change in a warming climate, including "severe thunderstorms" that also occur with significant wind shear and produce damaging winds at the ground.

This information can be derived from the temperatures and humidities predicted by a climate computer model, according to the new study published on August 17 in the American Geophysical Union's Geophysical Research Letters. It predicts that in a warmer climate, stronger and more severe storms can be expected, but with fewer storms overall.

On the other hand, it'll take decades of data to conclude whether the current season of bad weather is an anomaly or a trend. But as Bryan Walsh at Time.com writes:

But guess what? It doesn't matter. We already know more than enough about climate change to fear it. We know enough to embark on the long-term changes to our energy economy needed to reduce carbon emissions and blunt the impact of what no less than the Department of Defense has called a major threat to national security.

Did you know that? Did you know that the Department of Defense has called climate change a threat to national security? I do.

The braintrust obviously doesn't. For the scientifically ignorant braintrust, it's on as solid ground as Harold Camping's conclusion that the world was going to end on May 21.

We can, perhaps, forgive the good Reverend for allowing his faith to shred his rational thinking. When I think of Reverend Camping I wonder whether Abul'-Ala' al-Ma'arri was on to something. We are, after all, a nation where a quarter of us don't believe in the science of evolution, so how small a jump is it for a fringe to count the begats to "establish" the beginning of the world and that to "establish" the date of The Flood and then from that to "establish" the end of the world?

Not much. Obviously.

But for a "news" source (even one as tenuously connected to the news as Scaife's op-ed braintrust) to equate such real science as climate change with such drivel as Camping's end-that-wasn't is just beyond stupid.

Even for them.