Non Rapture

Check out the video that TheThinkingAtheist just put up on YouTube. TheThinkingAtheist does a good production job on his videos and there are several that I like. At the same time this whole End of World (EoW) episode bothers me on the big picture level. I am very sorry for the people who got scammed. I am sorry about the bad things that unstable people have done because of this, and are likely to do in the next few days when it completely sinks in. But what I am really sorry about is the way societies all over the world give nonsense a pass so things like this will keep happening.

Is this a teaching moment? Is it time to get people all around to look at the origins of religious texts and come to understand that they are just what normally happens when the old oral traditions of long gone tribes get written down, and then changed through generations of copying and translating? These old stories may have some moral value to some people, but are not sources of future prediction.

So, does science v. religion in the classroom matter? Look at this case. The EoW prediction was worked out from the date of Noah. Even if you take the crazy "worked out" on faith, science shows that the story of Noah and The Flood could not have actually happened. This is not in the same epistemological class as trying to prove that someone's pet deity does not exist, this is about on the ground (and in the ground) facts and evidence. If you are properly educated about the science, you automatically know that someone coming along with a prediction based on what is demonstrably not true, is almost certainly working a big scam.

What can we do? We can publisize the known tendency for EoW scams to keep popping up and try to get people to remember it can be as bad as Jonestown. We can publicize where the religious texts come from and show the flaws in claims of divine guidance. Don't give Bible or Koran quotes a pass, make the user produce evidence. How can we stop from being fooled again? TheThinkingAtheist would surely agree: we get people to THINK!