During the first week of the year 2000, Gary North issued a public apology to the world at large, and a blunt confession that he had been wrong about Y2K. He took a sabbatical from public life for a while, but later began publishing essays on culture and economics on lewrockwell.com.
Now it is possible that the Y2K hype was a self-canceling prophecy. To some extent, the "dot com bubble" was fueld by Y2K remediation, a massive preventive investment in Information Technology.
Being a dispensationalist means never having to say you are sorry. As each marriage and book ages out, Hal Lindsey recycles it. Re-writes the book, with new names and dates to carry the same tired plot line. Trades in the wife for a younger model. He's on marriage number 4 at the moment -- but I've lost count of how many times he's re-written The Late Great Planet Earth.
There is apparently a market for that kind of tripe. Something about being a cheerleader for Satan's team must engage our imaginations, and appeal to the fallen Adam within us all.
What few critics know is that at least a decade before his Y2K kick began, North (who has a PhD in history) cross-pollinated his discussions of biblical covenants and generations with his observations that history moves in 200- to 250-year cycles (punctuated by profound world-changing events such as the Reformation and the American Revolution). It was at this time, IMO, that North's Y2K expectations took seed. He began predicting that, if he were right about these historical cycles, some world-changing historical event would manifest itself around the time of the new millennium (i.e. 200-250 years after the American Revolution). Y2K wasn't even on his radar at that time. But when the Y2K scare came along, with it's threats of shutting down global communications and commerce, it seemed tailor-made to fulfil his expectations. North bought it - literally - devoting his many businesses, ministries, and personal fortunes towards preparing the world (and especially Christians) for a Y2K meltdown.
In hindsight, people behave as if Y2K just fixed itself. Did it? Or does North get any credit for investing his own money to sound the alarm early enough to prompt it's fixing? Yes, he made a fool of himself, and it cost him dearly. But in it's aftermath, what no one has noticed is that while North was wrong about the anticipated event, history may have proved him right about the covenantal cycles. He was expecting a world-changing event around the turn of the millennium - and in hindsight, 9/11 (with it's islamic terrorist jihads abroad and it's political machinations at home) may have been the very event he predicted.
"I've lost count of how many times he's re-written The Late Great Planet Earth."
Yeah, and I'm sure it just gets better and better with age. ;-)
"He's on marriage number 4 at the moment"
I didn't know that. A friend of mine calls that kind of stuff "serial polygamy".
It's easier to escape life with the non-biblical fantasies that Lindsey promotes than it is to accept that we are supposed to be here to improve this world, not just waiting for our turn to get taken out of it.
The enthusiasm for the LB series is more of a reflection of our culture than anything, this idea that someone else will take responsibility for us. We are reaping the seeds of socialist indoctrination.