The boy who cried wolf 155 times
Every now and then I check back in with “The Lord’s Witnesses” at TrueBibleCode.com. (The Lord’s Witnesses may be an actual group of people, or maybe just one guy called Gordon.)
Since 2006, the Lord’s Witnesses have been confidently predicting the start of Armageddon, usually to be heralded by nuclear explosion in Manhattan, in the very near future. Which is to say, weeks, or a few months at most, from the date on which the prediction is made. It’s all based on careful analysis of encoded data in the Bible. It’s really very simple.
Over and over and over, the Witneses have been wrong. But there’s seldom even breathing space of a few days between the expiration of the last nuked-New-York deadline and the arrival of another, equally confident prediction that it’s now very likely to happen by a new deadline. They always apologise for their previous error.
The Lord’s Witnesses (who aren’t connected with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, except that Gordon used to be a JW) are so darn snappy about producing the new predictions that I suspect they may work on the new predictions before the old ones have expired, possibly just so as to have something to do while waiting for the Whateverocalypse.
The Witnesses have now reached the entertaining conclusion that the large number of times they’ve been wrong to date (155 times, according to them; a few more if you take every line of the frank list of mistakes on the front page as one error) may, itself, have numerological significance!
This stands to reason, of course. Why would God tease them like this, if not to enlighten them to another aspect of His ineffable plan?
(A plan which seems to have been in progress for rather a while. According to the Bible, Jesus Himself clearly predicted His own second coming before everybody then alive had died. Perhaps there’s some troublesome immortal out there extending the deadline.)
It’s refreshing to see an apocalypto-church, however small, whose org-chart doesn’t taper to a point composed of people who are making out like bandits, and socking away the believers’ cash in investments that’re obviously incompatible with an actual belief in the imminent end of the world.
But at least sometimes those guys get caught. In the early 1990s, there was a Korean church called “Mission for the Coming Days” whose Australian branch was headquartered in a block of flats just up the road from my house. (Apparently there was a Korean “Hyoo-go”, meaning “Rapture”, movement at the time, and the Mission for the Coming Days was the biggest single church in the movement.)
The MftCD predicted the end of the world on October the 28th, 1992; that date stuck in my mind, since it was printed in big letters on the side of their van, which I passed every time I went to buy groceries.
As you may have heard, it didn’t happen.
Some Korean followers of the Mission for the Coming Days committed suicide, I would imagine at least partly because they’d given everything they owned, including their homes, to one Lee Jang Rim, the guy in charge of the church. Some other Hyoo-go enthusiasts tried to kill their preachers.
I think that Lee Jang Rim himself, though, moulders in a Korean jail to this day. The giveaway was his substantial investments, some of which matured after the predicted end of the world.
