Just because it's "Live" Science...

SPECIAL REPORT

As I perused news stories last night, I found on LiveScience dot com a story on the purported End of the World that we were supposed to undergo yesterday.  Jeanna Bryner, the managing editor of this "prestigious website actually titled her story, "The End Of The World Is Today:  Here Is Why We're Still Here."  Now you would think that disproving yet another prognosticator of doom would be a fairly easy task- and yet, she manages to make herself look just about as bright as our fearless Groundhog of Armageddon.

She starts out:

Today is the day.

It's the beginning of the end, according to practiced doomsday diviner David Meade. On April 23, 2018, Meade says, the sun, the moon and Jupiter will line up in the constellation Virgo (in actuality, they will not be in that constellation) — an alignment that has biblical disaster written all over it.


So far so good, although one might question what the alignment of stars has to do with anything Biblical.  But she'll soon jump the tracks.  Before that though, she gives us a good laugh:

Sadly, perhaps for Meade, the planet Jupiter will appear not in Virgo but in the constellation Libra from Earth's perspective; the sun will appear to align with Aries, while the moon will lurk in the constellation Gemini today, according to The Sky Live.

For those of you uncelestially familiar, that means his "alignment" actually covers 58% of the zodiac.  Thus, I would have to say her statement, "Meade did a lot of numerical and cosmic gymnastics to come up with today's apocalypse ", is a to-say-the-least" moment.


So where does she go wrong?  Well, apparently she took GQ's recent advice on reading the Bible:

In the Bible, Revelation 12:1-2 speaks of a "woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head," who labors to give birth to a dictator who will ultimately bring about the world's end.

"...labors to give birth to a dictator who will ultimately bring about the world's end."  Just. Wow.

The Catholic Church will tell you that the woman is Mary, and the babe is Christ.  The Protestants will patiently explain that the woman is symbolic of Israel, her appearance the connection to Joseph's prophetic dream in Genesis 37.  Both will tell you that the dictator she mentions is actually the Dragon in the following verses who tries to KILL the babe.  So unless she gets her info from the Necronomicon, I think she failed to do the scientist's first duty- Do the research.

She tries, then, to put the onus back on Meade with this passage:

This celestial alignment is, according to Meade, just the beginning of the cosmic catastrophe. From there, a rogue planet called Planet X will supposedly pass by Earth in October and cause a planetwide mess (worldwide volcanic eruptions) that will culminate in the return of Jesus Christ — also based on the Book of Revelation.

There are a few problems with this part of the prediction. For one, Planet X, also called Nibiru, is fictional. And whereas scientists are looking for an Earth-size planet that they sometimes refer to as "Planet X" or "Planet Nine," this is a different world altogether from the one described by Meade and others.

Nibiru, in fact, is the baby of conspiracy theorist Nancy Lieder, who floated the idea in the 1990s. This rogue planet — a body that astronomers who stare at the skies, looking for actual alien worlds, would not miss — was the basis for the failed 2012 Maya apocalypse, among others.  

Of course, depending  on how you interpret several OTHER passages of Revelation, you can make a case for several "Nibiru-like-objects" getting past those same astronomers- much like the school-bus-sized asteroid that they nearly missed last week.  But that's not here nor there.  What does go in our story is, she couldn't bear to be the only Biblical illiterate in her article.  She goes for her coup-de-gras to Allen Kerkeslager, a professor of ancient and comparative religion at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia:

"The author of Revelation was wrong in his predictions, so neither this book nor any other ancient book is of much relevance for predicting the future," he told her.

So, tell me prof:  Any remotely intelligent Bible studier would say to you, "How could the 'author of Revelation' be wrong about predictions that AREN'T SUPPOSED TO HAVE HAPPENED YET?  Kerkeslager's statement is roughly the equivalent of telling someone picking the Yankees to win the 2018 World Series that they were wrong, despite the event still being 6 months away.

So how did he manage this?  Because, as I have often told you all- organized science is not trying to prove anything that doesn't start with the agenda.  And the agenda is, God doesn't exist.  Even if you have to make stuff up.

"How dare you? This is serious science!"

So here's the $10,000 question for the day- who is dumber- the guy of questionable sanity that ignores ONE verse of the Bible (Matt 24:36, "No one knows the day..."),  or two alleged intellectuals that try to trash-talk a book they've obviously never read?

BTW:  I have learned that Kerkeslager teaches a course on the letters of Paul.  After such a quote on Revelation, I bet he's a real gas (likely hydrogen sulfide).  In fact I looked at the comments on Rate My Professor, and I had not before seen the words "awful" and "sucks" so many times.  In fairness, there was one comment that said, "I am an atheist, and I was spellbound."  Well put, mon ami, well put.