Skip to main content

When Prophecy Fails


Another Doomsday has come and gone, making those who believed in Camping's vision feeling rather dejected afterward.  Fortunately, there's Leon Festinger's classic book, When Prophecy Fails, to help guide these perplexed Christians through another day.  What was intriguing to me is Camping believed only 200 million souls would be called up to heaven, leaving approximately 1,8 billion Christians behind, not to mention countless other lost souls.  I guess only born-again Christians need apply.

Comments

  1. I read today where he has now moved the date to October.

    ReplyDelete
  2. If all else fails, try another date, although I imagine for the folks of Joplin, Mo, it did feel like Judgement Day.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I see the October date is the end of the physical world (while this weekend was only a spiritual one). Just think what these "prophets" (or profits) could do if they went to work prophesizing the doomsday of global climate change.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I see some crazy woman slit her daughters throats with a box cutter and then tried to kill herself before police arrived. Fortunately, the girls survived. I wonder if ol' Harold will own up to this and other suicide attempts he inspired,

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110524/sc_livescience/faileddoomsdayhasrealdeadlyconsequences

    ReplyDelete
  5. Oh, that's terrible!

    What scares me the most about all of this is that these people for the most part vote. We wonder what is wrong with our political system, but you have to wonder also what ever happened to the idea of an educated electorate.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

O Pioneers!

It is hard not to think of Nebraska without thinking of its greatest writer.  Here is a marvelous piece by Capote, Remembering Willa Cather . I remember seeing a stage production of O Pioneers! and being deeply moved by its raw emotions.  I had read My Antonia before, and soon found myself hooked, like Capote was by the simple elegance of her prose and the way she was able to evoke so many feelings through her characters.  Much of it came from the fact that she had lived those experiences herself. Her father dragged the family from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, when it was still a young state, settling in the town of Red Cloud. named after one of the great Oglala chiefs.  Red Cloud was still alive at the time, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in the aftermath of the "Great Sioux Wars" of 1876-77.  I don't know whether Cather took any interest in the famous chief, although it is hard to imagine not.  Upon his death in 1909, he was eulogi

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Colonel

Now with Colonel Roosevelt , the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud.  -- Janet Maslin -- NY Times . Let the discussion begin!