The end of the world is coming and I am having a blast!

Cartoon from The Friendly Atheist.

Completely unrelated to whatever crazy old Harold Camping might be thinking or doing is the fact that, for the last few months I have been having and continue to have one of the best times of my life.

And I want the party to go on!

But not cranky old Harold Camping. A retired civil engineer (I can't believe we share the same profession!) he has been spreading the word around the world that the end is to come on Saturday, May 21st. Two days from now.

And he has billboards in such places as Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Iran! If anything, you have to admire his tenacity.

But he is not trustworthy. His prophecies have backfired on him at least once before, as he had already predicted the end of the world would be on September 6th, 1994. Either he was wrong or I am now living in the Matrix and have not noticed it.

His calculations for claiming the end of the world are downright ridiculous. First, he seems to assume the world is 6,000 years old, as fundamental christians like to believe. Then he places the year of the (non-existent) Flood as 4990 b.c.e and he adds 7000 years (because the bible says somewhere that 1000 years is like a day). Then he does some other cockamanied calculations to arrive at the May 21st. date. When asked, he says that on that day, at 6 in the evening there will be a huge earthquake. Where? Everywhere!

That is why it shames me to know he is an engineer. You would think a member of our time honored profession would know that it cannot be 6 pm everywhere in the world at the same time. It is all nonsense and a lot of crap.

Of course, people like me have been having a blast with the whole thing. Many other predictions of the end of the world have come and gone and nothing has happened, which causes even some christian church officials to denounce doom-sayers like Camping "because they give the church a black eye" when the alleged prophecy fails to happen.

Camping and his cohorts are up for another great disappointment, like the Millerite thing back in 1844. Unfortunately it seems that, like when other prophecies failed, their faith may be somehow reinforced and they will come up with all sorts of explanations as to why the Rapture failed to happen. Unless, of course, there is some "Kool Aid" involved and they are no longer around to explain themselves. We will see... on Sunday.

In the meantime - party on!

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WWJD or Shakespeare??

Blogging is a funny thing. Sometimes what you first think of is not what you eventually post. Sometimes the topic takes you elsewhere. And sometimes you change your mind before you even post.

And then sometimes you just can't make up your mind.

Today I had to endure mass. No need to explain why, I tried to get in late but was actually on time and it took 50 minutes, which was long for a weekday mass. The priest's homily upset me. He was commenting on the gospel reading (Matthew 15 - 21 and on, the woman from Canaan) and of course he embellished the story by making it appear as a lesson on perseverance. For some reason that I cannot fathom, You Must Persevere When Asking Things Of God.

That is not what the gospel says. If anything, those people asking themselves all the time what would Jesus do (WWJD) should realize this is not good behavior.

Jesus did not want to help the canaanite woman because she was not jew. (No, I am not going to quote scripture here - read the passage elsewhere as I have placed a link to it above). Of course, in light of the mindset of jewish Jesus and his jewish disciples, he was not doing anything wrong - the gospel was to be preached to the jew people, not to the outsiders, who were not "worthy".

That was OK for the jews at that time in that place. It would be bigotry today. So if you are asking yourself WWJD, he would show you how to be racist and intolerant.

Anyway, on the way home my daughter asked me for help doing homework, she had to paraphrase one of Shakespeare's sonnets. I never studied english literature (didn't have to... I studied spanish and latin american literature...) so I have never really read Shakespeare in the original english.

And it made up for my 50 minutes at church. And I will quote Shakespeare here for your enjoyment. What a beautiful little poem of love!

SONNET 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee

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Is the Bible the Good Book?

Today I was trying to get up to date with one of my favorite podcasts, Skepticality. I was listening to episode 67, where Swoopy interviews Michael Adelson. From the show's very notes "Mr. Adelson had the good fortune to study with the late Rabbi Sherwin Wine. Rabbi Wine founded Humanistic Judaism, a secular movement which provides atheistic and agnostic Jews around the world with a means for organization, mobilization, and a sense of community."

I found the interview very interesting especially because Mr. Adelson speaks about what Humanistic Judaism means and how they treat the Tora and the Bible. They regard the Tora, for instance, with the utmost respect and admiration, recognizing the cultural significance it holds for Jews. However, they don't lose sight of the fact that the Tora is a book, meaning that they feel free to agree with parts of it, admire parts of it and reject the parts that do not seem good.

These words resonated with me. I feel the same about the Bible. There are parts that are nice, parts that are admirable and some that are, well, not good. (How about Lot giving his young daughters away to an angry mob to be ravished? is that good and moral behaviour?) And one of the wonderful things I have experienced in the last year or so as an agnostic is the freedom to feel and judge these things in their proper, humanistic and historical context. Yes, some of the 10 commandments are good rules for social behaviour. But as Reggie Finley (the Infidel Guy) says, the commandment about not lusting for your neighbor's wife is just not fair to our human nature. I may not be able to avoid lusting for my neighbor's wife, teacher, colleague, friend, whoever, if I see her and I find her desirable. That is only human and we should not punish ourselves for that. (Now, acting on that lust is a completely different thing altogether but that is neither here nor now.)

There is no denying the large influence of Christianity and the Bible in our western civilization, as I have said before. We must acknowledge it and embrace it. It is here and it is part of our way of life and values, even for skeptics, agnostics and atheists. But the Bible is a book, written by humans, with all the errors and inconsistencies that come with human nature. Some of it is fiction, some romance, some poetry and some symbolic, almost none of it is a historical account.

As free thinkers, it is our duty to let people know that they can also embrace the freedom of being religion-free. I do not advocate Richard Dawkin's , Christopher Hitchens' or even Sam Harris' activism but I do believe everyone has an opinion to voice and defend. And ideas to get respect for while respecting others' own ideas.