The End Is Near..Repent

Waiting for the end of the world...

...and waiting, and waiting. We're at Harold Camping's home base as the big day arrives

Fox News Anchors Report Of Apocalypse Today

by Frances Martel

While we’ve got less than an hour to go before the official End of the World begins, but Fox News is already calling this Rapture prediction a dud. Weekend news anchor Gregg Jarrettinstructed viewers to “take another sip of your martini” and comfortably resume life, introducing a report that “no cataclysmic upheavals” had occurred so far and a medical segment on how to deal with the psychological effects of a loved one believing the Rapture would actually happen.

Yes, in fact, it appears that the world is still around after all, despite what Harold Camping, a man with a radio show who spent $100 million to warn people this was happening, said. After a report on all the non-news happening in the world– the Rapture was supposed to begin in New Zealand, and no dice– Fox News brought on a psychologist to try to explain how people could believe this was actually happening, and what to do if you knew someone like this. Calling it “the opposite of faith,” Dr.Henry Cloud explained, noting that it was a search for “rigid, authoritarian, black and white certainty to an uncertain world” that led people to donate money to this cause. He also suggested explaining to a loved one that “just because some crazy leader is wrong doesn’t mean your faith is wrong” is the safest bet to go. Jarrett later popped in to once again recommend cocktails.

Mr. Preacher Harold Camping silent as Rapture fails to occur...

By Reuters 

  With no sign his forecast of Judgment Day arriving on Saturday has come true, the 89-year-old California evangelical broadcaster and former civil engineer behind the pronouncement seemed to have gone silent.

Family Radio, the Christian stations network headed by Harold Camping which had spread his message of an approaching doomsday, was on Saturday playing recorded church music and devotional messages unrelated to the apocalypse.

Camping previously made a failed prediction Jesus Christ would return to Earth in 1994.

In his latest pronouncement, he had said doomsday would begin in Asia, but with midnight local time come and gone in Tokyo and Beijing and those cities already in the early hours of May 22, there was no sign of the apocalypse.

The Oakland, California, headquarters of the network of 66 U.S. stations, which has international affiliates and had posted billboards around the country warning of a May 21 Judgment Day, were shuttered with a sign in the door that read "This Office is Closed. Sorry we missed you!"

The headquarters, which appears to be normally closed on Saturday, was also shuttered on Friday.

Camping, whose deep sonorous voice is frequently heard on his radio network expounding the Bible, could not be reached immediately for comment on Saturday.

On Friday, the shades were drawn and no one answered the door at his house in Alameda, California.

Atheists in different parts of the country were planning celebrations and get-togethers to mark the failure of Camping's May 21 prediction to come true.

In Oakland, the same city where Camping's network is based, over 200 people gathered at an atheist convention where speakers jokingly took note of the Judgment Day pronouncement.

In New York, at least one of Camping's followers continued to hold out hope that Judgment Day would come.

Retired Metropolitan Transportation Authority worker Robert Fitzpatrick, 60, said he spent more than $140,000 of his savings on subway posters and bus shelter advertisements warning of the May 21 Judgment Day.

"God's people are commanded to sound the warning, to sound the trumpet so to speak so people know," Fitzpatrick said of his advertising blitz.

Fitzpatrick said Camping led him to believe Judgment Day would be May 21, but added that he disagreed with the broadcaster's prediction it would begin in Asia.

In Fitzpatrick's view, from his reading of the Bible, Judgment Day would begin around 6 p.m. Eastern Time. He said on Saturday that he still had no doubts Judgment Day would come this day.

"I wouldn't even entertain that question because there's too much proof from the Bible," he said.

The headquarters, which appears to be normally closed on Saturday, was also shuttered on Friday.

Camping, whose deep sonorous voice is frequently heard on his radio network expounding the Bible, could not be reached immediately for comment on Saturday.

On Friday, the shades were drawn and no one answered the door at his house in Alameda, California.

Atheists in different parts of the country were planning celebrations and get-togethers to mark the failure of Camping's May 21 prediction to come true.

In Oakland, the same city where Camping's network is based, over 200 people gathered at an atheist convention where speakers jokingly took note of the Judgment Day pronouncement.

In New York, at least one of Camping's followers continued to hold out hope that Judgment Day would come.

Retired Metropolitan Transportation Authority worker Robert Fitzpatrick, 60, said he spent more than $140,000 of his savings on subway posters and bus shelter advertisements warning of the May 21 Judgment Day.

"God's people are commanded to sound the warning, to sound the trumpet so to speak so people know," Fitzpatrick said of his advertising blitz.

Fitzpatrick said Camping led him to believe Judgment Day would be May 21, but added that he disagreed with the broadcaster's prediction it would begin in Asia.

In Fitzpatrick's view, from his reading of the Bible, Judgment Day would begin around 6 p.m. Eastern Time. He said on Saturday that he still had no doubts Judgment Day would come this day.

"I wouldn't even entertain that question because there's too much proof from the Bible," he said.

(Additional reporting by Erik Tavkar: Writing by Alex Dobuzinskis: Editing by Jerry Norton)

Source: Reuters US Online Report Domestic News

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

(Additional reporting by Erik Tavkar: Writing by Alex Dobuzinskis: Editing by Jerry Norton)

Source: Reuters US Online Report Domestic News

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

  

Focus On The Family Admits To Their Failure On Gay Marriage

These are excerpts from an interview by world news(christian news) with 'Focus on the Family’s Jim Daly.' I am posting this article because I found it so interesting that the head of the serpent which calls it self Focus on the family, which is really there to make sure that GLBT humans are kept from marrying each other, or getting any civil rights purely because they are born gay.  Murderers can marry, people that are decent, law abiding or even heroes in the military can't just because people like focus in the family say we can't. 

Obviously these people have tapped into fear, hatred, misunderstanding, ignorant views on society and what is different of what they know; By tapping into this source which they have accumulated millions. Enough to live well on these type of 'gig' but to have enough left over to preach across the nation and the world that gays are not deserving of equal rights and should not get marry because it will affect the marriage of other people?

But it just so happening than in the US these funds are drying up, because people are coming to terms with the reality or I should say insanity of their position. 

Now coming back to the interview, Jim Daly admits to this fact. I thought it would be interesting to have my readers see with their own eyes what the head of the serpent is saying.

Adam Gonzalez for adamfoxie*

The interview:

We're winning the younger generation on abortion, at least in theory. What about same-sex marriage? We're losing on that one, especially among the 20- and 30-somethings: 65 to 70 percent of them favor same-sex marriage. I don't know if that's going to change with a little more age—demographers would say probably not. We've probably lost that. I don't want to be extremist here, but I think we need to start calculating where we are in the culture.

Where are we? We've got to look at what God is doing in all of this. . . . Have we done such a poor job with marriage, is He so upset with our mishandling of it in the Christian community, along with our lust of the flesh as a nation, that He is handing us over to this polygamy and same-sex situation in order to, perhaps, drive the Christian community, the remnant, into saying, "OK, there's no no-fault divorce in our church"?

So churches would have a standard of marriage higher than the state's? We'd say, "The piece of paper that you get at the state to recognize your marriage is worthless. It's like registering your car. But if you're going to be a part of this church and you're married, you're going to be committed to your marriage. There's no easy way out." What if the Christian divorce rate goes from 40 percent to 10 percent or 5 percent, and the world's goes from 50 percent to 80 percent? Now we're back to the early centuries. They're looking at us and thinking, "We want more of what they've got," because we're proving in front of the eyes of the world that marriage in a Christian context works.

What's the current perception of gay activists about Christian marriage? I sat down with one. He said, "You guys haven't done so well with marriage. Why are you upset about us having a try?" We've got to look at our own house, make sure that our marriages are healthy, that we're being a good witness to the world. Then we can continue to work on defending marriage as best as we can.

 by adamfoxie*

TNT Basketball Commentator Charles Barkley Stand Against Homophobia

Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images

TNT basketball commentator Charles Barkley took a stand against homophobia

 in sports this week.

On the following piece by Scott Stinson, Mr. Stinson portrays Charles Barkley as a gambler. Barkley can attest to that.

Mr. Stinson points out that Barkley is taking a gambler's position now on taking a stand against homophobia and that Barkley has at times taken opposite positions on the same issue. Also true. But what I would like to point out and the reason for posting this piece at adamfoxie* is that Mr. Barkley did not have to take this position. This is not a position you take after lifting you finger up to the wind and feeling which way it's blowing. I wish for the day that such a thing would become truth, but so far today it is not so.

As for a person to take Barkley's position on Gay players and homophobic players is because he most feel that is the right thing to do. As a black man, as a man in sports and as a human being he most feel is the best thing for all three I just mentioned.

I appreciate you reading this post and is up to you to let me know wether you agree with me or not.

Adam Gonzalez 

The following by Scott Stinson  

Let us take a moment to appreciate the greatness of Charles Barkley.

Not for his skills on the basketball court, although he was plenty great at that: an 11-time all-star and 6-foot-6 rebounding champ.

And not for his talent as a basketball analyst, a role in which he has delivered probably the greatest collection of lines since someone dreamed up the idea of pinning a microphone on a former athlete’s lapel. To wit, on student-athletes: “All I know is, as long as I led the Southeastern Conference in scoring, my grades would be fine.”

Let us salute Barkley’s famous outspokenness — “I can be bought. If they paid me enough, I’d work for the Klan,” he once said — which took him to a new place this week, when he became easily the most famous athlete to say he has no problem at all with homosexuality in the context of a pro sports team.

In an interview on a Washington radio station, he said he was certain he had gay teammates over his Hall-of-Fame career — and insisted he didn’t care.

He went further still, arguing that the long-held belief that professional sports is the last bastion of homophobia — or maybe it’s tied wth hip-hop music on that score — is an unfair myth perpetuated by the media.

“It annoys me that they try to act like all us jocks are going to be homophobic,” he said on a podcast with ESPN’s Bill Simmons. “It does a disservice to team sports to say we would not like a gay guy … and that guys wouldn’t want to play with him. It doesn’t work like that in sports.”

“Dude, we just want guys on our team who can play,” he said later. “On team sports, we don’t care what colour or religion a guy is, as long as he can play. … You know who I don’t want to play with? Guys who suck at their sport.”

Barkley’s comments come in what was a remarkable week for the issue of homosexuality in sports. Rick Welts, the president and CEO of the Phoenix Suns, came out as gay to The New York Times on Sunday. Will Sheridan, a player on the Villanova Wildcats from 2004-07, came out as well to ESPN — and said his teammates were aware of his sexuality and accepting of it. Both men said they hoped their decision to go public would make things easier for gay men to be accepted in the sports world — where only a handful of athletes have ever come out, and only when their playing careers were over. It seems, after a week like this, that we are edging closer to the moment when a closeted athlete comes out, and in so doing topples one of final walls of societal intolerance. But are we?

Welts and Sheridan both say they were not confronted with bigotry when they came out. Welts’ boss, Suns owner Robert Sarver, called it “pretty much a non-event.” Sheridan says his Villanova teammates — at a Catholic university — never bothered to tell their coach. And Barkley says if he knew a teammate was gay “we never said a bad word about the guy.”

Still, a prominent athlete has not yet identified himself publicly as gay, and even if Barkley is right about teammates shrugging their shoulders and moving on, the public would not. It would unquestionably, for some time at least, become a thing. Sheridan, whose Villanova team went to the NCAA tournament three times in his playing days, told ESPN that he knew if he came out publicly, it would become the story of his team.

“I knew it would be a big deal and I always felt like I was part of something bigger,” he said. “This wasn’t about me being gay. It was about our team trying to do something together. I didn’t think it was appropriate.”

He’s right; it would be a big deal. The problem is trying to guess how big a deal it would be. And for how long?

For a closeted athlete who is considering coming out, Welts said, “They don’t have anybody who’s gone before them to know how that will actually play out. So more than anything it’s the fear of the unknown, of not knowing.”

This is the impossible calculus, then: even as athletes from Steve Nash to Sean Avery record public-service messages promoting tolerance, and men like Welts decide to, as he said, “engender conversation about the topic” in sports, it will take an athlete willing to out themselves mid-career to know what will happen when they do. Maybe it will take a young player who is good enough to know that the desire for his talents will win out over discrimination against his sexuality. Maybe it will be an older player, with a legacy established and a final contract already signed.

Until then, it remains a barrier that no athlete has tried to leap.

Welts, for one, does not share Barkley’s view of the male sports world, telling the AP that it’s “definitely not in step today with where society’s thinking is on the whole topic.”

Barkley says otherwise.

“America is homophobic. America has always discriminated against gay people,” he told the Simmons podcast. “They try to pass the buck and make it like all the jocks are going to be offended if a guy comes out.”

And so Barkley, a compulsive gambler who once admitted to losing US$2.5-million on blackjack in six hours, has put a big wager on the tolerance of his fellow athletes.

I hope he’s right.

http://sports.nationalpost.com/

For every Westboro Hate-Monger who shows up $1K for Pro Gay Charities

Lisa Lampanelli has put the evil Westboro Baptist Church into one hell of a pickle -- they wanna protest her show tonight ... but for every hate-monger who shows up, she's gonna donate $1,000 to a pro-gay charity.


Lisa is performing in Topeka, Kansas -- home of the evil church -- and when she got word that members of the church were planning to protest her show -- because she is such an outspoken supporter of gay rights -- Lisa hatched a plan.

She's going to donate $1,000 for every protestor that shows up ... to the Gay Men's Health Crisis-- the nation's oldest HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and care services provider.

Lisa tells TMZ, "It's gonna be hilarious to write out the checks to the GMHC and have them send thank you notes to the WBC for their 'generous contributions.'"

"I'd love to see their inbred faces when they open those thank you notes! Hopefully their jaws will drop so fast that their three remaining teeth and cro-magnon foreheads will plummet to the floor."

Permalink:

http://www.tmz.com/2011/05/20/lisa-lampanelli-concert-donation-gay-mens-health-crisis-westboro-baptist-church/

Enraptured by the Rapture

By Alan Boyle

If you're reading this, the Rapture hasn't happened yet.

If it had happened, you might have been taken up to heaven with 200 million other members of the elect. (Or is that 144,000?) The alternative is even spookier: being left behind to face five months of tribulation leading up to the end of the world and Jesus' judgment. (Or is that seven years?)

The prediction that the end times would begin in earnest on May 21, 2011, was made years ago by Harold Camping — the preacher who heads Family Radio, a worldwide religious broadcasting concern. His prophecy is based on calculations so kooky that other end-time prophets say he's giving them a bad name. 

The real question is: Why has there been so much buzz over Saturday's scheduled Rapture?

"Obviously, what could be a bigger news story than the end of the world?" University of York historian Nicholas Guyatt, author of the book "Have a Nice Doomsday," told me. "It's absurd to think the world is going to end on Saturday, but even if there's an infinitesimally small chance that it's true, we should be interested."

One thing that sets Camping apart from most end-timers is that he sets actual dates. That runs counter to the usual Christian interpretation of the end times, which focuses on a passage in Matthew in which Jesus says "you do not know the day or the hour." It also runs counter to the lessons learned from centuries of failed doomsday predictions.

"Even among evangelists who believe in the Rapture,  most of them know we're not supposed to be trying to set dates," said Jerry Jenkins, co-author of the popular "Left Behind" apocalyptic book series.  "For one thing, it's going to make us look foolish on Sunday."

Jenkins jokingly acknowledges he's "one of those kooks who really believes it's going to happen one of these days." The 16-novel series he wrote with minister Tim LaHaye provides a fictional account of the end times, going all the way to the Second Coming. The tale is based on an interpretation of the end times known as pre-tribulation dispensationalism — which starts with some believers instantly disappearing in the Rapture while leaving others to fight it out with the Antichrist and his minions.

"It'd be a horrifying and chaotic event," Jenkins said. "I'm still a little confused whether Camping thinks that's going to happen, or whether there'll be an earthquake."

Nonsense from numbers
Jenkins and many others are also confused over how Camping came up with his prediction. This year-old posting from Church of God News runs the numbers: Saturday supposedly marks 7,000 years since the Noah's Ark flood, and 722,500 days since Jesus' crucifixion. By Camping's numerology, 722,500 represents (5 x 10 x 17) x (5 x 10 x 17), or the square of atonement times completeness times heaven. 

"Now the above is utter nonsense," the Church of God News' Bob Thiel wrote. That sounds about right.

Jenkins says such number-based predictions "happen fairly frequently" in the end-time game. "It's sort of seasonal," he said.

In fact, Camping himself predicted years ago that the world would end in 1994. When the prediction failed, Camping said he got his initial calculations wrong and corrected the figures to come up with Saturday's doomsday date.

Funding the Apocalypse
Lots of money is being spent on promoting the Rapture, however. Family Radio's financial records indicate that the nonprofit organization had $122 million in net assetsin 2007. The figures for the following year, 2008, show $41 million in expenses, resulting in net assets of $86 million. And judging by the billboard ads, bus ads and direct-mail campaigns promoting the Rapture, the spending rate must have risen substantially since those reports were filed. After all, if you're going to heaven on Saturday, why wouldn't you spend it all?

Ehrman noted that this sort of pre-doomsday spending spree has happened before, when he was teaching Bible classes in the 1980s. One of the books that came out back then was"88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988."

"I had students in my classes whose parents literally sold the farm because they didn't need it, and then it didn't happen," he recalled.

Some Family Radio listeners, such as Staten Island retiree Robert Fitzpatrick, have spent tens of thousands of dollars of their own money to promote the Rapture. That worries Jenkins. "There are very well-meaning people who are telling me they're getting rid of their life savings," he said. "I wonder who's going to take care of them when it's all over?"

Gerry Broome / AP file

Allison Warden shows off her car, emblazoned with messages about Saturday's scheduled Rapture. Warden, of Raleigh, N.C., has been helping organize a pre-Rapture campaign using billboards, postcards and other media in cities across the U.S.

The big spending spree is one big reason why this particular date has gotten so much traction. But end-time tales do not live by billboard ads alone. Guyatt says this time in history is particularly well-suited for doomsayers.

"Whenever anything really bad happens, it kind of gives their case a little support," Guyatt said. "So if you think of the turbulent times we've had over the past decade — 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan — it kind of feeds on that. Maybe it's not formal, but we have an affinity with the view that the world is becoming a more dangerous place, or maybe our days are numbered."

And every Twitter tweet, Facebook update, Rapture party invitation — for that matter, every blog post — turns up the wattage ever so slightly on the doomsday spotlight. "What's given this traction is the billboards and the media," Guyatt said. "At some point the ball is rolling, and we help tip it a bit further, because of you, because of us."

How imminent is 'imminent'?
Leave it to the veteran end-timers, who have been through all this before, to provide perspective. "I applaud the discussion," Jenkins said. "I think people should be thinking about this."

Jenkins' writing partner, Tim LaHaye, has said on many occasions that events such as the Japan earthquake and tsunami are signaling that the end is near. The way Jenkins sees it, the end of the world could well be imminent, but "our definition of 'imminent' is clearly not the same as God's."

"If he waits one more day in his mercy, it could be a thousand years in our time," he said.

So what will Jenkins be doing on Saturday?

"We're just going to carry on with the usual activities," he told me. "One of our granddaughters is going to have a ballgame."

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com