Hands off the Bible, you cretins!
A memo to selected Seventh-Day Adventists…
My favourite rugby team, The Sharks, based in Durban, South Africa, was playing the Australian Waratahs in a must-win home match when my doorbell sounded. With the Sharks trailing 3-8 I was not amused.
The young man at the door presented me with a smile and a DvD – “on the end of the world, oom (South African for older man and boy, do I hate that word!) as predicted in the Bible.”
“What?”, I exclaimed, “the future and you know it already!?”
“Ja oom”, he smiled with a reddening face.
At least he had sufficient brain function to blush.
It turned out to be The Final Events of Bible Prophecy, by Doug Bachelor.
Guys, here’s a news flash: All – every single one! – TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It) prophecies have failed to materialize.
You Adventists should know this better than most. Bill Miller got 21 March 1844 wrong, bought 7 more months from his fleeceable flock and when the sun rose on 23 October Miller was… discredited. Can I be gracious of a moment or what!?
Your Mrs. W said on June 27, 1850 that there were “months” left before “The Day” and told yet another fleeceable flock at an 1856 Adventist conference that some of the delegates “will be alive and remain upon the earth to be translated at the coming of Jesus.”
I’d like to meet some of your 120, 130 and 140 year old Adventists, I would!
In your pathetic apologetic eisegesis in service of membership targets, you have compromised a second century BCE raconteur, called already as early as the second Jewish revolt (132-135 CE) by Jewish expositors who rejected the notion of Daniel as a prophetic book even then… and have reduced John the Seer, speaking eloquently to his Mediterranean contemporaries – who were plainly enamored with the sky and its happenings – about the victory of God’s Messiah as attested in the sky, to a blabbering idiot speaking things he never did.
To eviscerate a crowning jewel in literature – the Bible – such, is scandalous gentlemen. Shame on you!
When – in about 7.5 billion years – the ever-expanding sun, transformed into a red giant, engulfs this beautiful blue-green rock we lovingly call Earth, melting away any evidence it ever existed and sending molecules and atoms that once were our home floating off into space… “the world will end”. Long after the expected 1 billion year reign of animals and plants.
Unless of course NASA misses an aligned meteor before the sun acts up.
And rest assured in this perspicacious observation by the creator of the Peanuts strip, Charles Schultz: “Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia.”
Get real!
Nathan Bond
Ps. The Sharks lost and as a South African I shall now be obliged to support Pretoria’s Blue Bulls against my Sharks next Saturday – a concept as repugnant to me as “Biblical prophecy”.
… all of which serves to show that religious belief is often intimately tied in with one’s sense of security – even when that “sense of security” entails the imminent annihilation of everything one has known because of course one is assured of a special place in the hereinafter. Oh, and the destruction of everything just so happens to include all that one disapproves of.
Yet again, religion emerges as a vehicle for warped minds.
Con-Tester
May 9, 2009 at 9:50 pm
I don’t know that you should be so sure about the end of the world not happening. Next week you’ll be singing a different tune under those wildebeest horns when the Sharks (sadly, but someone has to do it) send you off down under (where it’s already tomorrow, verstaan?) to your semi-final (where, of course, you will rise again).
bewilderbeast
May 13, 2009 at 1:07 pm
I’m more superstitious than you! Nyeh, nyeh-nyeh, nyeh, nyeh!
Con-Tester
May 25, 2009 at 8:35 am
Ecc 1:4 One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever.
According to the above, it seems to me that some “Christians” are confused.
Hans Matthysen
May 27, 2009 at 9:35 pm
And – hallelujah, hosanna, amen! – today, everyone with two brain cells and an attitude to rub together has abducted the work of Calvin and Luther as a licence to construct their own peculiar set of Christian “facts,” all biblically derived of course, and unshakeably held to be true.
No wonder believers can be so amusingly daft.
’Nuff said.
Con-Tester
August 3, 2009 at 10:46 am
Con-Tester, let me rephrase what I said; it seems to me that most “Christians” are confused.
Hans Matthysen
August 6, 2009 at 8:41 pm
Yes, that’s just what I’ve been saying all along – except that I’d’ve replaced “most” with “all”.
Con-Tester
August 7, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Hans klotkop skryf ;it seems to me that most “Christians” are confused.
Nou foken toenou. Jou foking heilige spook is ook confused jou doos.
DW
August 8, 2009 at 11:14 am
Con-Tester, the law of average would rather agree with most, than all.
Hans Matthysen
August 21, 2009 at 10:39 pm
Actually, given the performance we’ve seen thus far, we should in place of the “Law of Average” invoke the “Law of Substandard” or, even better, the “Law of Abysmally Deficient.”
Con-Tester
August 22, 2009 at 8:25 pm
DW, jy besef seker nie dat ‘n doos nogal baie plesier kan verskaf, jou poepol.
Hans Matthysen
August 21, 2009 at 10:43 pm