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9. Elizabeth Clare Prophet & the Church Universal & Triumphant, 1990



While all the attention lasted only a short time (with much of it being negative) for a time in the late 1980’s the founder and spiritual head of the Church Universal and Triumphant, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, (a.k.a. Guru Ma), had quite a few people convinced that a nuclear war would start on April 23, 1990, which convinced many of them to stockpile food and guns in her underground bomb shelter in Montana.  While the federal government is always encouraging preparedness in the face of potential disaster, the church proved to be a bit too prepared for their taste and they promptly seized her arsenal of firearms and convicted a handfull of her followers—including her husband—on federal weapons charges.  Curiously, the lack of nuclear war did not immediately spell the end for her movement as they continued to hunker down in her Montana bunkers for some time afterwards, with some of them not venturing out until only recently.

http://www.toptenz.net/

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7. 1000 & 1033 CE



Considering the role the number 1,000 often plays in scripture, it would be hard to imagine that the turn of the millennium would not be considered extremely significant, especially among those who took the book of Revelation’s thousand year millennium reign of Christ literally.  Interestingly, many scholars tend to dismiss the notion that the change of the millennium created any great disturbance among the population of Europe, though others challenge this premise and insist that there is far more evidence for apocalyptism being rampant around the year 1000 than previously thought.  Some also note that over the last few decades many medievalist scholars have come to view the period around the turn of the millennium as a time of great social and cultural transformation, making it possible to speculate that doomsday expectations around this period may have been more influential than earlier historians were willing to concede.  Further evidence suggesting that doomsday fever continued right up to 1033CE—the 1,000th anniversary of Christ’s death and resurrection—are contained within the writings of the Burgundian monk Radulfus Glaber (985-1047CE) as well as other chroniclers of the age.

http://www.toptenz.net/

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5. Y2K Bug, 2000



Probably no end-time, “this is it!” date has been as well advertised and yet produced the least splash than was the belief, promulgated by computer geeks everywhere, that with the turn of the millennium, creaking old twentieth century computers would get confused by all those zeros and do all sorts of nasty things or, at a minimum, simply shut down.  While millions of people waking up on January 1st, 2000 with the blue screen of death pasted on their monitors might not sound like that big a deal, it was supposed to really snarl up the day-to-day operations of the planet by doing things like shutting down air traffic control radars—resulting in numerous mid air collisions as pilots blindly crash into each other—and forgetting to send coolant into nuclear reactor cores, causing them to blow up like a hundred little Hiroshimas.  As a result, in the weeks and months leading up to the big non-event, there was a run on everything from bottled water to toilet paper as people prepared for Microsoft Armageddon, only to awake the next morning none-the-worse for wear (and with a huge stockpile of non-perishables to boot.)  Who could have known all that was needed to prevent doomsday were a few software patches and a bit of diligence.  (Of course, we’ve since learned not to take these things so seriously, haven’t we?)

http://www.toptenz.net/

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4. Hal Lindsey and the Late Great Planet Earth, 1970



Few people got the Christian community anticipating the Rapture (an event in which all the good Christians of the planet instantaneously vanish), the appearance of the Antichrist, the Battle of Armageddon, and the seven year Great Tribulation period than did the steamboat captain turned preacher Hal Lindsey, whose landmark 1970 paperback, The Late Great Planet Earth, became an overnight international bestseller.  (It even remains in print today, despite being thoroughly discredited by subsequent events).  Outlining a remarkable chain of events designed to culminate in the Christ’s triumphant return at the end of a seven year cycle of abject horror, literally millions of Christians looked to 1988 (the fortieth anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 when the doomsday clock literally started, according to Lindsey) as “the date”.  While in all fairness Lindsey never came out and specifically named the year, it was apparent by his arguments that the 1980s was to see all the events described in the Book of Revelations come to pass which, to readers in the 1970s, was pretty scary stuff.  Remarkably, Lindsey suffered little from his prophetic faux pas and went on to write several more books on the end times (each with similarly unrealized fulfillments) and even acquired his own cable TV prophecy show today, demonstrating that nothing breeds success quite like failure.  Way to go, Hal!

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3. Heaven’s Gate, 1997



On the morning of March 26, 1997, San Diego police were called to a rented mansion in the upscale community of Rancho Santa Fe, California to investigate reports of a possible death.  When they got there, they where to make a most horrific discovery: there, each lying in their own bunk and dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants and wearing brand new black-and-white Nike tennis shoes, were thirty-nine rapidly decomposing bodies, the apparent victims of a mass suicide pact.

Who were these people and why did they all commit suicide within a few days of each other?  They were each members of a group of cultists known as Heaven’s Gate—a tiny group of dedicated believers who had been convinced by a former music teacher turned New Age guru, Marshall Applewhite, that planet Earth was about to be recycled and that the only chance to survive was to leave it immediately in the spaceship that rode in the tail of the then recently discovered comet Hale-Bopp.  Unfortunately, the only way their souls could hitch a ride on this spaceship was by ingesting poison and releasing themselves of their Earthly shell so they might make their “transition”.  Apparently, his followers took him seriously enough that over three dozen of them joined him in taking their own lives as part of a ritualistic suicide act, demonstrating that doomsday beliefs are far from being simple, harmless fun.

http://www.toptenz.net/

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1. Jehovah’s Witnesses, 1874, 1914, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, & 1975



One group that has traditionally been very into end-times prophecy are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose propensity for picking failed years for Christ’s return are legendary.  A group founded in 1874 by a one-time Millerite and Congregationalist by the name of Charles Taze Russell (1852-1916), since its inception, no denomination has been more guilty of repeatedly setting dates than have the JWs, usually to their own detriment.  Though Russell originally proposed several dates for Christ’s return starting in 1874, his most famous doomsday date was October 1, 1914, a date which happened to dovetail nicely with the start of the First World War (which Russell—an ardent pacifist—and his followers believed to be the start of the Battle of Armageddon).  When Christ didn’t physically return on schedule, however, Russell—taking a cue from some of Miller’s followers—simply suggested that the Lord had returned “invisibly” instead, though without defining exactly what that meant.  In any case, it didn’t seem to impact the vigor of the church to any great degree, which continued to see extraordinary growth in the intervening decades after Russell’s death in 1916.

Undeterred by their 1914 “miss” (or, apparently, unaware of Christ’s aforementioned “invisible” return) church leaders, under the leadership of Russell’s energetic successor, “Judge” Rutherford, went on to name several other years as the date for the Savior’s return. 1918, 1920, 1925, and 1941 were all proposed at one time or another, but each passed uneventfully (with the exception of 1941, which saw some little ruckus being played out in Europe).  While these “misses” seemed to have little deleterious effect on the church or its continued growth for several decades, the church’s penchant for date setting almost did it in when it announced that 1975 was to be the year of Christ’s final, visible return.  (This sure-fire date was based on the belief that Adam was created in the year 4026 BCE, thereby making 1975 the 6,000th anniversary of that miracle.)  Encouraging JWs to sell their homes, quit their jobs, and forego all planning for the future in deference to praying and doing door-to-door evangelizing until the end came, with the dawn of 1976 came considerable buyer’s remorse and, with it, a general exodus from which it was to take the church decades to recover. As a result, the organization has been considerably more careful about date setting since, though apocalyptic, ends-time beliefs continue to permeate their teachings to this day.

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i believe so, too.  i'm just wondering why 6 out of 10 predictions (in this particular list, anyway) are from the u.s.  make it 7 if we include the y2k bug.  add more if we include the dishonorable mention category.  the author (he writes well, this seeming debunker), of course, is also american.  do you happen to have a neighbor there who's into end-of-the-world blues, lorenz?  

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Honestly? I think part of the reason why people spew such 'end times' predictions is to get money. Many of them get money scaring people and some people donate to their so called 'churches'. One must be careful of the deception of many of these 'liberal theology churches' that put a lot of emphasis on personal interpretation rather than on Authoritative Interpretation from The Holy Roman Catholic Church.

Many of these so called 'new age televangelical churches' are heretical cults. The heaven's gate church , was a cult.

The devil lurks about deceiving many. May God rebuke him.

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More loonies there...



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Bwahaha! Morag wa na ra bay active sa TB nga taga didto...
 


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