The End of the World

As some of you may have read, a doomsday cult has just emerged from a cave in Russia after finally realizing their prediction on the end of the world somehow was not accurate. Imagine that.

Appropriatley, Scott Adams gives some advice on what to look for when joining a cult.

Allow me to give you some advice: If you ever decide to join a cult, the first thing you should ask about is the quality of their doomsday cave. A poorly constructed cave could kill you, and that would take most of the fun out of doomsday.
You should also look for a cult leader who has some specificity about the exact doomsday date. Otherwise you’re just sitting in a cave for an extra month for no good reason. I’d want the comet to strike earth a minute after I wiped my feet on the cave’s welcome mat. That way the people who got all of my worldly possessions wouldn’t have time to enjoy them. The big problem with picking a doomsday date is that it so obvious when you are wrong. For most other decisions, you can generally make a case for why your wrongness was really right. For example, you still hear people say Saddam had WMD but he did a good job of hiding them. There’s no way to disprove that sort of assertion. But when the world doesn’t explode on Tuesday, it’s hard to make a case that it did. You have to go with something like “The comet was heading this way, but we prayed it off course. You’re welcome. Give me back my stuff.”

He also links to an excellent site which records all the doomsday and rapture predictions by loonies. Here is a little nugget:

1993 CE - Benny Hinn, bizarro televangelist so far out of orbit you couldn't pull him back in with a tractor beam, prophesied that '93 would be the year the faithful would be Raptured up like dust bunnies in a handy-vac. He also prophesied, in his inimitable, loving Christian way that two years after that, God would destroy all those sinful, evil awful, vile, icky homosexuals... Mm hmn, me thinks the lady doth protest too much.