The World's Still Here...

Well, as the more perceptive of you may have noticed, the planet wasn't annihilated in an enormous nuclear conflagration yesterday. Yisrayl Hawkins' website hasn't updated yet with an excuse, and the "ask Yisrayl" link is down, so the world is regrettably denied his perspective on his third spectacular failure of prophecy. To be fair though, I don't think that website gets updated much - the "Current News" section's latest article is from July of last year - so maybe it'll be a few weeks before he gets around to telling us about how he miscalculated or his God decided to give the world a reprieve.

Apparently poor Yisrayl just hasn't quite mastered the art of prophecy, which is actually pretty simple as long as you follow a few simple rules:

1.) Be vague - The vaguer you are in your predictions, the more likely it is that something will happen that seems to match up with what you said.

2.) Never set dates - This is very, very important. Nothing spoils a good prophecy like being flat-out wrong, and concrete dates have a way of falsifying what are otherwise damn fine crazy pronouncements. If you must set a date, set it far enough in the future that you'll probably be dead by the time it arrives. That way you don't have to answer any questions that might come up.

3.) Make "predictions" about things that have already happened - Whether it's forging prophecies after some dramatic event has occurred or just basing your prophecies on historical events, this technique works almost distressingly well. Sylvia Browne has pioneered a modified version of this: Claim that you had a crystal clear vision of [dramatic news item] but that you didn't get the chance to warn people before it came to pass.*

4.) Predict things that are obvious - War in the middle east. Political infighting in the United States. Bad weather and natural disasters. Take your pick - all of these things are dramatic and unpredictable, but also commonplace enough that they're safe predictions to make.

5.) More prophecies = More hits - Also called the shotgun approach, the strategy here is to make as many predictions as possible, because if you put enough of them out there surely some of them are going to seem correct.

For a cool, readable discussion about these rules and few others in the context of Nostradamus, the king of huckster pseudo-prophets, I strongly recommend The Mask of Nostradamus by James Randi. Also worth checking out is Randi's ever-growing list of end of the world prophecies that failed.

*This was Browne's excuse for failing to predict the September 11th attacks, even though she was on Larry King Live just a week before the attacks.

The End of the World...Today?

Well crap. If only I'd listened to Texas prophet Yisrayl Hawkins - then I'd have gotten expedited shipping on the copy of Rambo that I bought online over the weekend. Turns out, according to this yahoo, that the world is going to end today! Hawkins is the leader of the House of Yahweh in Abilene, Texas. It's a cult/survivalist group that expounds a weird mixture of Judaism and Christianity that is predicated on Hawkins' secret knowledge of the magical lost name of God. Hawkins and his brother, whose name is apparently "J.G.", came back from a trip to Israel in the 1970s convinced that their coming was prophesied by both Testaments of the Bible and that their mission was to revive the world's one true religion and deliver magical tidings to all mankind about the coming end of the world. That whole line sounds sort of familiar, doesn't it?

Hawkins has written innumerable books, including this one in which he makes Scientology-like claims about "billions" of aliens influencing life on earth and this one in which he explains how "Birthdays, Christmas, Halloween, Easter, Thanksgiving," and countless other things are actually Devil worship. Those of you who look him up on Amazon will also note that he's written a bunch of his own scriptures, which he quotes at length when he's challenged on his theology. (It must take a pretty big sack to write your own entire Testament in modern times and then try to convince people that it's real...and yet the existence of the House of Yahweh and the Mormons prove that enough people will buy into it to perpetuate it as a religion.)

Always cavalier when it comes to his conclusions about observable reality, Hawkins made a recent appearance on Nancy Grace in which he stated that "scripture shows" that global warming is being caused by sexually transmitted diseases. He's also been predicting the end of the world for years. He first said that it would end in September of 2006, then on June 12 of last year, and finally he concluded that it would end today with the start of an enormous nuclear war.



A quick tour of his website is somewhat instructive. Among other things, Hawkins (who has been charged twice with bigamy) glories in the return by the Texas Supreme Court of 400 children to the child raping FLDS cult at the Yearning for Zion Ranch. He also rants and raves about "Mary worship", which is a fundie code word for Catholicism, and constantly tries to invoke the First Amendment in order to stop the press from criticizing him.* I'm currently reading an article about how "persecuted" he is by the public at large for telling folks that the world is going to end this afternoon, though he doesn't seem to mention his repeated failed prophecies from before. He is quick, however, to invoke the Holocaust as proof of a conspiracy against him (somehow), which frankly is pretty disgusting.

In any event, once today is over with and the world is still here, it should be interesting to see what he has to say for himself. If the precedent set by Hawkins and every other prophet is any indication, he'll announce that he miscalculated and the end of the world will be next year.

* Here's a hint Yisrayl: The First Amendment does a lot of things - it guarantees you the right to this crazy religion you made up, it guarantees the right of the press to report on you being a nutjob and a bigamist, and it guarantees me the right to make fun you about it. It also guarantees you the right to rant and rave on your website about anything and anyone you like so long as you're not knowingly lying or threatening violence. Turns out we all win. :-D