Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine. - REM, "It's The End Of The World"
When you've fallen on the highway
and you're lying in the rain,
and they ask you how you're doing
of course you'll say you can't complain --
If you're squeezed for information,
that's when you've got to play it dumb:
You just say you're out there waiting
for the miracle, for the miracle to come. – Leonard Cohen, “Waiting For The Miracle”
As no doubt the bulk of our readership is aware, the alleged Second Coming has come and gone – a foofaraw of ‘biblical proportions’. The heavens did not split open, no reverberant shook the world’s pillars, and millions of people did NOT suddenly fly up into the heavens. No, not even the alleged 144,000.
For my own part, a short heavyset black woman was canvassing our apartment complex as I went to retrieve the mail this afternoon. We greeted each other, and she asked if she could speak to me. I said sure. She immediately started in with trying to hand me materials (in this case, it was some dogma on a printed blue page in a plastic sleeve), and when I saw that it was religious in nature, I wouldn’t take it and I informed her that I was an atheist. I was wearing my “Atheism: Thinking for ourselves since the evolution of the brain” T-shirt. I informed her she wouldn’t get very far. Nor did she. She immediately tried a sloppy version of the Paly’s Watchmaker crap, asking me “Who put the breath into you? Who put the stars in the sky?” etc. My response was: “Nobody. Religion is just humanity’s effort to cast its own shadow onto the universe.” Failing there, she started blabbing about the bible. Oops, bad move: I know my shit. I told her absolutely NONE of the ‘prophecies’ ever came true; the bible is like the internet, 99% full of shit. She tried to whip out that old “In Isaiah, there was a prediction..” To which I pointed out that the verse is out of context, it was entirely topical, and that that is known as contextomy. She blithered on about sinning, I told her that was a lame effort to explain mistakes. We went round and round in that vein – I kept my cool, and she proved to be quite polite as well as unflappable. We parted ways amicably enough (I was pretty much laughing out loud through most of her ‘fishing’ expedition), and she went on to bother other folks, including the elderly lady upstairs (with whom I wagered a neat 1,000 USD that nothing would happen today), that went on for some hours.
I’ve been (lackadaisically) monitoring various news sites, and wouldntcha know it, there’s not been a single report of people being spirited en masse into the sky. Surprised? No, not really.
In fact, the oncoming ‘Second Coming’ as been something of a long-running joke, both in realtime as well as the blogosphere. My musician buddies from Mojo Hannah were cracking wise about it last night (mentioning the Pre-Rapture Agreement, etc.)
Sadly, it is not all humor and fun. As I mentioned in March, a mother went wankola and tried to harm herself and her two kids. And now some teenagers have no money to go to college because of Camping the Con Man. News from New Zealand is as expected: nobody’s rocking the boat down there either. And as an extra treat: the senile old vulture predicted this back in 1994.
So there you have it. Nothing happened – AGAIN. And again, without a doubt, there will be the more hidebound of these crazies proclaiming their faith and insisting it will still happen. Which it won’t.
[On a side note, given what I now know about the ‘bible’ – I say we dispense of the term ‘of Biblical proportions’ because….well, again, nothing happened the way it says it did. If anything happened at all.]
Till the next post, then.
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