Something happened at midnight on January 1, 2000, and what happened was that nothing happened. That's significant, because all kinds of chaos was supposed to be triggered by the Y2K bug. As far back as 1998, the doomsdayers started coming out of the woodwork with internet warnings of what lay in store for us. Periodically, someone using a phony e-mail address sent out the following message, which was updated each time to let readers know how much time was left before the end would come. It is being published just as it was received in order to give readers an idea of the intellectual level of the sender.
You have been found guilty. Of creating wars, starvation, poverty, crime etc. worldwide by overpopulating the world to death.
Your Sentence is death by self annihilation to be carried out starting in january with the collapse of all the economies and everyone starting to eat everyone
You have less then a month to live. Are you comfortable? Got enough food in the house? Electricity working? Got fuel for the car? Well come January 1, 2000 all that is going to change.
Well that little Y2K problem is going to collapse all the economies in the world. No more food, electricity, fuel, communications etc. all those things are going to shut down like that "snap" (maybe a week or so) with them multi-warheads flying around and everybody eating everybody and the survival of the fittest will become the law until the antichrist takes over the world.
You can stay here for that it's best to get out of here before that happens
But the rapture will not occur until the universe is properly displayed
Stand up and open your mouth !
Such ignorance as this wouldn't deserve serious comment if didn't happen as often as it does. The oldest subscribers to TSR all know that doomsdayers have been predicting the end of the world all of their lives, and it was coming even before they were born. The Millerites and Russellites were given specific dates for the second coming by their leaders, and the faithful made serious preparation to meet a Jesus who never came. One would think that the failure of the predictions would have spelled the end of these religious groups, but they both survive today in the Seventh-Day Adventist and Jehovah's Witness movements. Even obvious prophecy failures aren't always enough to jar believers out of their delusions, because the doomsdayers just revise their interpretations and recalculate or claim "spiritual fulfillments," and the faithful gullibly swallow their "explanations."
This, of course, will be no surprise to those who have studied the New Testament with any degree of seriousness, because even the "inspired" writers claimed that the end was at hand and had to devise explanations for their faillures too. As noted in Brian Rainey's and Farrell Till's replies to Roger Hutchinson's article (pp. 5-8, 16) in this issue, New Testament writers obviously believed in the imminent return of Jesus. Some of the passages that taught this are quoted on pages 10 and 16 of this issue, so there is no need to requote them here. There are, however, other passages that show the belief that Jesus was going to return soon. When Jesus sent his apostles on their so-called "limited commission," he told them to go only to "the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (Matt. 10:5) and to flee to another when they were persecuted in one city, because "you will not have gone through the cities of Israel before the son of man comes" (v:23). It's hard to see this as meaning anything except that the writer thought that Jesus would return in the lifetime of the apostles, but, of course, inerrantists will no doubt have some imaginative ways to point out to us that it didn't mean what it seemed to be saying. The apostle Paul indicated to the Thessalonians that some Christians of that era would live to see the return of Jesus. He referred to "we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord" (1 Thess. 4:15) and then said that "we who are alive and remain" would be caught up "in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air" (v:16). This too is hard to understand in any way except that Paul thought that Jesus would return in his time, but we will eagerly wait for Roger Hutchinson or someone to tell us what the passage really meant and that we are slanting it to "achieve the conclusion we want."
Like their modern counterparts, when the predictions of the end failed, the New Testament doomsdayers also had to engage in damage control. In the second epistle to the Thessalonians, which many scholars doubt was written by the apostle Paul, the writer tried to patch up his earlier prediction that some of them would be alive at the second coming of Christ. Concerning that coming and their "gathering together to him," he told the Thessalonians "not to be soon shaken in mind, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as if by us, as though the day of Christ had come" (2:1-2), because it seemed that a new twist had been added. "(T)hat day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition" (v:3). If this was what God had decreed all along, then why didn't Paul just say that in his first epistle? Apparently so much time had passed since the first prediction that someone felt the need to explain why that prediction had not yet been fulfilled. The explanation was that other things had to happen first and then Christ would return, and the early Christians apparently bought it, just as the Millerites and Russellites did centuries later.
As Farrell Till showed in his reply to Hutchinson on pages 7-8 and 16 of this issue, a slightly different track was taken by whoever wrote 2 Peter. The first epistle of Peter had warned that "the end of all things is at hand" (3:7), but when time went by and the end did not come, damage control was necessary, so a second epistle of "Peter" was written to explain the failure in the way that Till pointed out in his reply to Hutchinson (p.16): "With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."
For almost 2,000 years, the gullible have bought this excuse,
and it will not be the last excuse that we will hear to explain why
predictions of "the end" failed. There will be more predictions and
more failures and more "explanations." Meanwhile, we are still here,
just as there will be people still here when the next predictions fail.
Like the poor, it seems that we are destined to have doomsdayers with
us forever.
