Get out your party hats!
-Headline of the day-
"The Rapture Is Not Saturday -- It's Tonight."
End times lunatic Harold Camping predicted the Rapture would come "at exactly 6 p.m. on May 21, 2011." The problem? Time zones; six o'clock where?
According to the report, "The Rapture is at 6 p.m. on May 21, 2011, where ever it's 6 p.m. first, with the 'fantastically big' world-ending event taking place on a time zone by time zone basis." This means that first on the cosmic chopping block is "the International Dateline at 180 Longitude -- roughly the between Pago Pago, American Samoa, and Nuku'alofa, Tonga."
So, what time is it there? As of this writing, Sat. May 21, 2011 9:26:07 -- you can check it here (under Samoa or Tonga). That's 9 am, so we've got a little time yet. After that, "Everyone will be weeping and wailing because they'll know in a few hours it'll come to their city," says Camping.
So if you're planning a big "end of the world" shindig for tomorrow, you can forget it -- knowing what happened in Tonga is really going to spoil the suspense. Make it a "we survived the end of the world" party and dance your heathen ass off. (The Atlantic)
-The Tale of Gingrich-
Appearing on The Colbert Report, John Lithgow gives voice to a florid, overheated press release by Newt Gingrich's campaign:
Pretty good, but I still like this version better. (YouTube)
-Bonus HotD-
"Tea Party Rally Fizzles in South Carolina."
Seriously, it was just sad. (Political Wire)
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LooeyNoorey 61p · 723 weeks ago
Of course "rapture" to 50 million American evangelicals is the "pretribulation rapture view" - a secret return of Christ said to occur several years before the final Second Coming to earth - but most are unaware that it was never a part of any Christian theology before 1830. And their leaders fight hard to cover up recently uncovered facts about its shady 181-year-old history - facts about its rampant plagiarism, devious revisionism of early "rapture" documents, and other dishonesty that journalist/historian Dave MacPherson (known as the "Rush Limbaugh of the Rapture") has been uncovering since 1968.
The mainstream media have somehow overlooked his highly endorsed research even though No. 1 religion expert Dr. Martin Marty featured it in 1980 in Christian Century and said that Time or Newsweek should air it. And even though rapture traffickers like Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye, Thomas Ice, and Todd Strandberg keep airing their venal distortions of it. And even though Bill Moyers touched on it in 2005 in the Minneapolis paper in his article "There is No Tomorrow" which mentioned the "fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers" who have "captivated the imagination of millions of Americans."
If this fringe-British-invented "pretrib rapture" escapism had never existed, American fundies could never have had fun (or built fortunes) with their mega-selling books and date-setting schemes. MacPherson's bestselling nonfiction book "The Rapture Plot" is in libraries and bookstores, and his many articles on Yahoo, Google, MSN etc. include "Pretrib Rapture Politics" (showing how anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, and anti-Muslim the rapture is!) and also "Pretrib Rapture Dishonesty."