Regards, Ivan
Or, he'll show up tomorrow and make all the second guessing moot.
Good one, Ivan! Hope you don't mind if I use your post as a springboard to expound on your excellent point (I'm just in that kind of mood today.)
Well, yknow, this is another one of those position papers (for lack of a better phrase) that gets foisted on a nervous public every few months.
It has all the (now classic) elements:
--The end is near because terrible things are happening in the world. When was this not the case?
--A whole laundry-list of abominations to make the authors point.
--Cherry-picked Bible-verses offered as proof. (Every quoted Bible verse is taken out of the larger context, because the Bible is a very big book.)
--Hal Lindsey is trotted out again, ostensibly in the hopes that those old enough will have forgotten that we were supposed to have suffered Armageddon years ago.
--The ancient astronauts will return.
--Terrorist atrocities will continue (DUH!)
Notice how we capitalize the world "Earth" these days, as the environmental movement and its Mother Earth Gaia worship permeates every aspect of our lives. (We also capitalize Jupiter. So what? And Gaia gets its greatest publicity from the cartoon Captain Planet, brainchild of Ted Turner, a recognized nut-job that even Jane Fonda cant abide anymore.
Modern Israel has been in a state of perpetual war since its founding in 1948. An earlier doomsayer generation predicted its destruction 30 years later. Hmm. 1978?
Depending on your age, youve seen, heard or read again and again of various cultist groups claiming to predict to the day when the world will end.
As each predictive group has been proven wrong by the continuous ticking of the clock, they tend to retreat into vapor. (Lindsey now needs the Internet to keep preaching: his 1970s book-sales are way down.)
Faith is important in this ephemeral world, but until we reach the afterlife (whatever that may be) all we have at our disposal is the human spirit. Personally, Im a little tired of spiritual experts who have been their noses in the air haranguing me since childhood to just give it up and believe in them (books now available at Amazon-dot-com.)
The world will end when God decides it should. Not when Hal Lindsey or Anthony C. LoBaido says it should. We can each read a hundred or a thousand books about it, but none of us will be any better able to speak for the Creator than we are right now.
But thats part of the allure of this stuff, isnt it? It would feel really good to truly believe that you are privy to divine information that the average schmuck will never be, because he hasnt read the same books.
But he cant be a man
Cause he dont smoke
The same cigarettes as me.
Mick Jagger
Satisfaction