May 20, 2011: You know this rapture nonsense is getting out of hand when the New York Times (versus the Post) covers it with some seriousness (Rapture Prophecy Tests Family Split on Belief).
But these guys have no idea how old and tiresome this end of the world prediction business is. It's embarrassing and useless, sort of like predicting exactly at which point ocean your plane will crash into a mountain.
Most fundamentalists have probably never heard of Sabbatai Zevi (-1676) but should get to know him. He claimed to be the Jewish Messiah and had a huge international following. But at the age of forty, he was forced by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV to convert to Islam or die. He chose the first option and by all accounts lived the rest of his life in relative peace and comfort.
This created a scandal and international embarrassment among his followers so deep most of us, including those who have studied religious history, may not have heard of him. Karen Armstrong goes into this episode in some detail in her wonderful history of fundamentalism, The Battle for God. Religions tend not to focus or dwell on their many false trials or predictions, giving us the illusion of a single, unbroken chain of authority.
Those who believed in Zevi were sincere, god-fearing people. They probably could have passed a polygraph test had one existed at the time. No doubt they were filled with joy at the fact that Yahweh had been so kind as to choose the .0000008% of the Earth's existence (see below) they happened to live in to bless them with his one and only messenger, but they, alas, were wrong.
I have lost count of the number of people who have predicted the end of the earth in my lifetime alone. Some have been correct in a very narrow sense of the world (their world ended when they killed themselves) but predicting your own suicide is not my definition of clairvoyance.
But forget all the biblical numerology no doubt someone used to predict that Saturday will be the mother of all weekends. We need not know anything about the contents of the black box used to make a prediction if the output is so absurdly low as to be, for all practical purposes, impossible.
Let me explain. As someone unlucky enough to have been in an earthquake, I like to compute the odds of being in another one anytime I visit somewhere seismically active. If I find that the last major earthquake in a region was 900 years ago, and that only 3 were recorded over 3,000 years of history, let's say, I will be much less anxious than if I find that over those same 3,000 years, a powerful earthquake occurred every century. If you are visiting this area for 1 week, then, all things being equal, your probability of being in a devastating earthquake during your visit will be equal to 1 in 5,200, arrived at by reducing the 1/100 risk of an earthquake per year by 52 (the number of weeks in a year).
We can use similar logic to determine the odds of the earth ending during our lifetime. Without knowing anything about metaphysics or scrutinizing ancient texts, by using 4.54 billion years as the best guess of the age of the earth, and the observation that it has not ended yet (but will one day), we can then ask the odds of it ending during our lifetime. Let's be optimists and put our lifespan at 80 years, the rough life expectancy at birth of someone living in the West, so we can divide 80 by 4.6 billion to determine the probability of the earth ending during any individual's life span.
As you can imagine, this is a very, very small number, about 0.0000017621145%, or 1 in 56.75 million. To put this in perspective, the odds of winning a single state lottery are 1 in 18 million (or over 3 times as great). Someone claiming that the world will end in his lifetime is 3 times as stupid as someone announcing that he will win the lottery.
But the mathematical case against fundamentalism has only just begun. Most of those predicting the end of the world are already adults, not newborns with 80 years of life ahead of them. A reasonable assumption would be that on average, those holding this belief are halfway through their lifespan, reducing the window of prediction to 40 years. They are not predicting that the earth may end in anyone's lifetime but in theirs, which is half over. This increases the odds against them to 113.5 million to 1. Now the person predicting he will win the lottery looks 6 times smarter than our rapture-anticipating fundamentalist.
But there's more. Fundamentalists are not predicting a range but a specific day for the earth's demise. Let's assume for the sake of kindness that they beat the 113.5 million to 1 odds and get the lifetime part right. What are the odds then that the earth will end on any given day of their lifespan? 1 in the number of days in 40 years, or 1 in 14,600 (40 x 365).
But since there are 113.5 million 40-year time windows in the earth's history, we must multiply 14,600 times 113.5 million... drum roll, please.
The odds of the earth ending on any given day equals 1 in 1.675 trillion. To put this in perspective, this is the number of seconds in 53,077 years.
So to state that the odds against fundamentalists are astronomical is beyond an understatement. And when you consider that these are the same people using the same document that led them to date the creation of the earth to about 4,000 BCE, an error of proportional magnitude as claiming Los Angeles is only 17 feet from New York.
Of course, even educated people agree with fundamentalists that the world will end. But this remote future astronomical event is not what the Rapture crowd is predicting (nor is any sane astrophysicist predicting that the earth will end on July 2 of the year 788,1974,994).
There are certain events so unlikely and sources so unreliable that those predicting the end of the world on Saturday - or any day - are as wrong today as followers of Zevi were in the 17th Century.
But these guys have no idea how old and tiresome this end of the world prediction business is. It's embarrassing and useless, sort of like predicting exactly at which point ocean your plane will crash into a mountain.
Most fundamentalists have probably never heard of Sabbatai Zevi (-1676) but should get to know him. He claimed to be the Jewish Messiah and had a huge international following. But at the age of forty, he was forced by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV to convert to Islam or die. He chose the first option and by all accounts lived the rest of his life in relative peace and comfort.
This created a scandal and international embarrassment among his followers so deep most of us, including those who have studied religious history, may not have heard of him. Karen Armstrong goes into this episode in some detail in her wonderful history of fundamentalism, The Battle for God. Religions tend not to focus or dwell on their many false trials or predictions, giving us the illusion of a single, unbroken chain of authority.
Those who believed in Zevi were sincere, god-fearing people. They probably could have passed a polygraph test had one existed at the time. No doubt they were filled with joy at the fact that Yahweh had been so kind as to choose the .0000008% of the Earth's existence (see below) they happened to live in to bless them with his one and only messenger, but they, alas, were wrong.
I have lost count of the number of people who have predicted the end of the earth in my lifetime alone. Some have been correct in a very narrow sense of the world (their world ended when they killed themselves) but predicting your own suicide is not my definition of clairvoyance.
But forget all the biblical numerology no doubt someone used to predict that Saturday will be the mother of all weekends. We need not know anything about the contents of the black box used to make a prediction if the output is so absurdly low as to be, for all practical purposes, impossible.
Let me explain. As someone unlucky enough to have been in an earthquake, I like to compute the odds of being in another one anytime I visit somewhere seismically active. If I find that the last major earthquake in a region was 900 years ago, and that only 3 were recorded over 3,000 years of history, let's say, I will be much less anxious than if I find that over those same 3,000 years, a powerful earthquake occurred every century. If you are visiting this area for 1 week, then, all things being equal, your probability of being in a devastating earthquake during your visit will be equal to 1 in 5,200, arrived at by reducing the 1/100 risk of an earthquake per year by 52 (the number of weeks in a year).
We can use similar logic to determine the odds of the earth ending during our lifetime. Without knowing anything about metaphysics or scrutinizing ancient texts, by using 4.54 billion years as the best guess of the age of the earth, and the observation that it has not ended yet (but will one day), we can then ask the odds of it ending during our lifetime. Let's be optimists and put our lifespan at 80 years, the rough life expectancy at birth of someone living in the West, so we can divide 80 by 4.6 billion to determine the probability of the earth ending during any individual's life span.
As you can imagine, this is a very, very small number, about 0.0000017621145%, or 1 in 56.75 million. To put this in perspective, the odds of winning a single state lottery are 1 in 18 million (or over 3 times as great). Someone claiming that the world will end in his lifetime is 3 times as stupid as someone announcing that he will win the lottery.
But the mathematical case against fundamentalism has only just begun. Most of those predicting the end of the world are already adults, not newborns with 80 years of life ahead of them. A reasonable assumption would be that on average, those holding this belief are halfway through their lifespan, reducing the window of prediction to 40 years. They are not predicting that the earth may end in anyone's lifetime but in theirs, which is half over. This increases the odds against them to 113.5 million to 1. Now the person predicting he will win the lottery looks 6 times smarter than our rapture-anticipating fundamentalist.
But there's more. Fundamentalists are not predicting a range but a specific day for the earth's demise. Let's assume for the sake of kindness that they beat the 113.5 million to 1 odds and get the lifetime part right. What are the odds then that the earth will end on any given day of their lifespan? 1 in the number of days in 40 years, or 1 in 14,600 (40 x 365).
But since there are 113.5 million 40-year time windows in the earth's history, we must multiply 14,600 times 113.5 million... drum roll, please.
The odds of the earth ending on any given day equals 1 in 1.675 trillion. To put this in perspective, this is the number of seconds in 53,077 years.
So to state that the odds against fundamentalists are astronomical is beyond an understatement. And when you consider that these are the same people using the same document that led them to date the creation of the earth to about 4,000 BCE, an error of proportional magnitude as claiming Los Angeles is only 17 feet from New York.
Of course, even educated people agree with fundamentalists that the world will end. But this remote future astronomical event is not what the Rapture crowd is predicting (nor is any sane astrophysicist predicting that the earth will end on July 2 of the year 788,1974,994).
There are certain events so unlikely and sources so unreliable that those predicting the end of the world on Saturday - or any day - are as wrong today as followers of Zevi were in the 17th Century.
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