So as everybody now knows, there was no Rapture or Apocalypse or whatever yesterday. Can we be done with Millerism yet? Please? The whole idea of predicting "the end of the world" - when, in fact, "apocalypse" doesn't even mean "end of the world" - from "clues" hidden in the Bible has now failed every single time, and not for a lack of trying.
David Meade, the man who made yesterday's prediction even backtracked on Friday, probably in an attempt to remain relevant for another couple of weeks, and said that yesterday wasn't the actual end of the world, but rather "the beginning" of the end of the world. Harold Camping tried the same thing, and he was just as wrong as I'm sure Meade will turn out to be.
The Bible is not a puzzle. Traditional Jewish Kabbalists do meditate on particular passages, and try to find deeper meaning within them by analyzing gematria and so forth, as we modern magicians do with our own highly divergent system of attributions. But the whole idea of tying that to predictions of real-world events is just plain wrong.
For one thing, there are so many versions of the Bible that if you're working in English you are basically hosed. Remember the whole "Bible Code" thing years ago? They came up with a few passages that they claimed could be linked to past events because they had an enormous sample size, but the method turned out to have no predictive power at all.
In the years to come, my guess is that people are going to throw this at Meade, and he'll pull up a bunch of evidence showing that the world "really did change" after yesterday. He probably will even have some dead-ender followers who keep believing, just like Harold Camping did. But you can make that case for practically any date if you reach far enough, because the world changes every day and any event can be a turning point for something.
David Meade, the man who made yesterday's prediction even backtracked on Friday, probably in an attempt to remain relevant for another couple of weeks, and said that yesterday wasn't the actual end of the world, but rather "the beginning" of the end of the world. Harold Camping tried the same thing, and he was just as wrong as I'm sure Meade will turn out to be.
David Meade, who claimed the world is ending Saturday when a mysterious planet collides with Earth, is now backtracking on the calamitous claim.
Meade said the world won't end on Sept. 23 after all, but instead Saturday will only mark the beginning of a series of catastrophic events to occur over several weeks.
“The world is not ending, but the world as we know it is ending,” he told the Washington Post. “A major part of the world will not be the same the beginning of October.”
Meade said his prediction is based on verses and numerical codes found in the Bible, specifically in the apocalyptic Book of Revelation. He said recent events, such as the solar eclipse and Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, are omens of the approaching apocalypse.
The Bible is not a puzzle. Traditional Jewish Kabbalists do meditate on particular passages, and try to find deeper meaning within them by analyzing gematria and so forth, as we modern magicians do with our own highly divergent system of attributions. But the whole idea of tying that to predictions of real-world events is just plain wrong.
For one thing, there are so many versions of the Bible that if you're working in English you are basically hosed. Remember the whole "Bible Code" thing years ago? They came up with a few passages that they claimed could be linked to past events because they had an enormous sample size, but the method turned out to have no predictive power at all.
In the years to come, my guess is that people are going to throw this at Meade, and he'll pull up a bunch of evidence showing that the world "really did change" after yesterday. He probably will even have some dead-ender followers who keep believing, just like Harold Camping did. But you can make that case for practically any date if you reach far enough, because the world changes every day and any event can be a turning point for something.
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