My last blog post :(

Since the Rapture is happening this Saturday, May 21, and I doubt I’ll have time to write another post until then, looks like the earth will be destroyed and I won’t be around to write another blog post here. And if I survive the apocalypse, then all the Christians will have been sucked up to heaven and no one will be around to share their ideas about Christianity with me, so I’ll have nothing to write about. Or I’ll be whisked away up to heaven too and all my ponderings about God and the Universe will finally be answered. So thanks for reading, commenting, and supporting my search for the divine.

This potentially alarming (and fucking ridiculous) prediction comes from Christian radio host Harold Camping, who used his civil engineering background to feverishly compile calculations from the bible to arrive at this Saturday as the end of times. Or, as my friend Gary put it, he’s “cherry-picking random numbers from the bible, multiplying, adding, dividing, and hockey-pockey-ing them willy-nilly, until they come up with this date.” Camping claims this prediction to be 100% accurate: “I know it’s absolutely true, because the Bible is always absolutely true.” To see for yourself, here is the scientific method by which Camping predicting the date:

1. According to Camping, the number 5 equals "atonement", the number 10 equals "completeness", and the number 17 equals "heaven".
2. Christ is said to have hung on the cross on April 1, 33 AD. The time between April 1, 33 AD and April 1, 2011 is 1,978 years.
3. If 1,978 is multiplied by 365.2422 days (the number of days in a solar year, not to be confused with the lunar year), the result is 722,449.
4. The time between April 1 and May 21 is 51 days.
5. 51 added to 722,449 is 722,500.
6. (5 × 10 × 17)² or (atonement × completeness × heaven)² also equals 722,500.
Thus, Camping concludes that 5 × 10 × 17 is telling us a "story from the time Christ made payment for our sins until we're completely saved."
7. 722,500 days from Christ’s crucifixion would be this Saturday, May 21, 2011.

This prediction has become noticed by enough people around the globe to become the next official moronic prediction about the end of the world, among countless others proven to be false as the dates harmlessly came and went.

For the record, Camping self-published a book in 1992 called “1994?” in which he predicted, with 100% accuracy, the Rapture would occur in September of 1994. After that date came and went, he revised his theory by claiming to have made a mathematical error. And after that, someone else predicted the Rapture would happen on December 31, 1999, and when that didn’t happen, a bunch of other nutters predicted any number of other dates that they pulled from a large orifice on their body located between and below their hip joints.

Either that or the Rapture did actually happen on one of those dates, and, to quote Gary again, “no one noticed, because the only person who went missing was some random hermit in rural India.”

Oh and by the way, if I’m still here on Sunday, and the earth hasn’t been shaken to pieces by earthquakes, then I will be sure to write another post here soon. Whew! I knew you were scared there for a second.

The US as a Christian Nation?

It’s common these days to hear Christians proposing the idea that the United States was founded on Christian beliefs, and we are in fact a Christian nation. Rather than give my immediate opinion on this idea, I’d like to bring up the most common arguments used, and respond to them with some facts about the founding of the US and see what conclusions can be drawn.

Argument: Our nation’s motto is “In God We Trust”. It's even printed on our currency.
Response: The original motto of the US in 1776 was “E Pluribus Unum,” which is Latin for “One From Many”. It wasn’t until 1814 that Francis Scott Key first mentioned the phrase “In God We Trust” in the last (and rarely sung) stanza of what would become our national anthem. It was used on coins as early as 1864 (almost a full century after the founding of the US) and has gradually made its way onto all of our currency since. In 1956, at the height of the cold war scare and communist witch hunt, the US adopted the phrase as our national motto in order to differentiate ourselves from communism, which usually promoted Atheism. This has also had the unfortunate side effect of linking Atheism with “evil communists”, which is no more true than the Pope being Jesus reincarnate.

 You know what else is on our currency? “The Great Seal”, a very pagan symbol with a pyramid and an eye peeking out of a glowing triangle. The phrase “ANNUIT COEPTIS” appears there, which some argue is a reference to the Christian God, however the phrase is taken from Virgil's book IX of the Aeneid, "JUPPITER OMNIPOTES, AUDACIBUS ANNUE COEPTIS”, which translates as “All-powerful Jupiter favor [my] daring undertakings.” The Roman supreme god Jupiter is at the heart of this phrase, not the God of Abraham.

Argument: We are “One nation under God”, as it’s said in the Pledge of Allegiance.
Response: The original Pledge reads as follows: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

In the 1940s, a number of Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to say the Pledge at all, claiming that the pledging one’s allegiance to a flag represented idolatry. The hand-over-your-heart gesture was actually added after WWII, because the original outstretched arm solute used for the Pledge too closely resembled the Nazi salute. It wasn’t until the 1950s that “under God” was proposed, failing several times until it was brought up to the Eisenhower administration. Eisenhower, ironically enough, had just been baptized Presbyterian a year earlier, and thought it a wonderful idea. He introduced the final successful bill that added the phrase to our pledge.

Argument: Isn’t the US founded on Christianity?
Response: The 1st Amendment to the Constitution states very clearly: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” Thomas Jefferson interpreted this with the explicit phrase “separation of church and state”. The word “God” does not appear anywhere in the entire US Constitution. The Declaration of Independence mentions the phrase “the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God”, which in no way specifically indicates the Judeo-Christian God.

The Declaration also has the phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The phrase “all men are created equal” is very much against literal bible doctrine, as the bible teaches from Genesis a very top-down hierarchy: God-man-woman-animal. And Catholic dogma even inserts priests between God and man. And “their Creator” does not specifically reference the Christian God, and could be interpreted as the earth, nature, one’s parents, or any thousands of other gods. And the fact that the word Creator is capitalized doesn’t indicate a deistic reference, any more than the capitalization of the words Right, Life, Liberty, and Happiness do.

Also many of our Founding Fathers were deists, freethinkers, and some even outright attackers of Christianity. Even their graves, tombs, and monuments have no references to Christianity whatsoever.

Argument: The statue of Moses outside the Supreme Court building shows that the US was founded on the 10 Commandments.
Response: The two tablets Moses holds are actually blank, and he sits next to Confucius and Solon, and this is all on the East side of the building, representing great law givers from the Eastern part of the world. On the rest of the building are 17 other notable law givers, including many notorious pagans, even Mohammed holding the K’oran. And on the actual entrance to the building is a scene of pagan figures that represent Order, Liberty, and Authority.

In fact most government buildings are designed after Roman and Greek styles, with pagan statues and references all over the place. And the statue of Moses is more reference to Judaism than Christianity, since his events took place well before Christ.

Conclusion: based on these very brief responses to common arguments, I conclude that the United States is in no way founded on Christianity. In fact it was founded with the deliberate and very specific absence of any religion for the sole purpose of preventing our government from interfering with our unalienable right to practice or not practice any religion we choose. I feel that all references to God added into our practices and doctrine are very baby steps in ultimately violating this covenant, which history has proven countless times only results in the removal of religious freedom. As counter-intuitive as it seems, keeping a 100% secular government absolutely GUARANTEES that no one at any time will EVER be able to change how you worship.

For a more detailed read on the subject, read this guy's blog on The US Not Founded on Christianity. He also has a great entry called Pagan America, which gives an overwhelming number of direct pagan references in US government. There are so many in fact that it's a wonder people don't think we're Greek, Roman, or Egyptian, or wonder why our motto isn't "In Gods We Trust."

Poor black kids

Is it just me, or does anyone else feel a weird vibe every time see happy white American folks doing mission trips to African villages and coming back with a photo album full of themselves hugging poor little black kids? It’s almost like the act itself and the visuals are of a token value. These missionaries feel so good about showing up in a foreign country, dressing the kids up in what always seem like private school uniforms, teaching them about Jesus, taking lots of happy photos, then coming home and sharing it with their church amidst crying squeals of cuteness from the congregation. It almost has the air of visiting a bunch of cute little abandoned puppies.

Or like it’s some kind of rite of passage as a Christian. You may already love Jesus, and you may help out in your local soup kitchen, but you’ve reached the ultimate state of showing God’s love when you visit Uganda and hug a village of poor black children for a month and post all the pictures on your Facebook.

I’ve never been on one of these mission trips, so I don’t know exactly what goes on over there. I don’t know the state these villages are in, nor these children, so I don’t claim to know anything about the work they’re doing there. I’m sure they provide food and medicine and clothes and hope and all that wonderful stuff. I’m just relaying the tone of the act itself as I perceive it. It seems so… stereotypical.

In America, right here within our own borders, about 50% of the impoverished and destitute people are white. They’re human beings, and they may not even be Christians yet (and hence in need of being “saved” like the African children), but they’re starving. And neglected. And maybe fatherless. And living in the same set of clothes for years at a time. And they’re not a 15 hour flight away to the Sudan. I wonder why you don’t see many Facebook photos of college students taking a mission trip to Kentucky and hugging lots of poor dirty white kids? Or what would be even more ironic, to see photos of a cleanly-dressed black man during his mission trip to Tennessee with 8 raggedy, dirty white kids grabbing on his leg and smiling.

Celebrities aren’t helping the stereotypical sense of this foreign aid either. How many African kids has Angelina Jolie adopted? Like 800? Madonna tried to start a private school for African impoverished girls (only to have the designated $3.8 million vanish into thin air, as well as the hopes for the school itself). And every time I see a gossip magazine in a grocery store checkout line, it’s Sandra Bullock and her little African adopted baby, fresh from the village with a necklace of colorful wooden beads around the boy’s neck, as if to make sure to say, “Just in case you didn’t get it, MY NEW BABY IS FROM AFRICA!” Hell, judging by the look on the baby’s face, even HE seems to be growing tired of the stereotype.

Let’s also not forget some big reasons why many countries in Africa are so freakin’ destitute and volatile to begin with. Residual effects of colonialism (usually by European countries) created many unstable tribal relationships, causing constant civil violence and unrest (anybody watch Hotel Rwanda?). The World Bank has caused much governmental restructuring by the incessant amount of loans to African countries and the financial slavery that inevitably results. And the abundantly valuable natural resources such as oil and diamonds are exploited by other wealthy nations, which drives a lot of the African working class into slave labor and war (a big reason why many including myself hate and boycott the diamond industry).

So instead of showing up to help in the African villages stamped into poverty by other parts of the world, maybe the entire world should just leave Africa alone for a few decades and let them be a nation by themselves. I think the African people are more apt to cope alone than any other country. They were, after all, the first modern humans on this planet capable of rational thought, and their ingenuities enabled them to survive the worst of odds and spread across the globe over the last 150,000 years. If they can do that, surely they can sort out their own tribal differences, establish their own sovereign forms of government, clean up their own drinking water, sell their own diamonds and maybe become a first world continent. So maybe the whole world should help by just chillin’ on Africa. Perhaps then there won’t be as many poor villages in such desperate need of happy white missionaries.