Doomsday for fun and profit

I have written about Harold Camping and his now-discredited prediction that the world was going to end on May 21. At the time I wrote my first post, I was more interested in the fact that both Camping and the ELCA were pushing crackpot theological ideas. I still stand by that original post.

But in one important aspect I completely missed the boat. I should have (but did not) anticipate the secular media's feeding frenzy and the efforts by many secular journalists to smear all Christians as primitive, superstitious barbarians. That was a major error on my part.

An interesting post by James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal captures perfectly my thoughts about this entire affair. Taranto writes:

To reject traditional religion is not, as the American Atheists might have it, to transform oneself into a perfectly rational being. Nonbelievers are no less susceptible to doomsday cults than believers are; Harold Camping is merely the Christian Al Gore. But because secular doomsday cultism has a scientific gloss, journalists ... treat it as if it were real science.

Exactly. For as long as I can remember, the secular media has preached Doomsday in one form or another. In the 1970s and 80s, the secular media solemnly informed us that nuclear war was inevitable, unless we agreed to all of the demands of the Soviet Union. Critics who suggested otherwise were demonized as bloodthirsty warmongers who wanted to slaughter all of humanity in order to feed their irrational Cold War paranoia.

Another favorite scare tactic of the secular media is imminent environmental catastrophe. It was the fashion of many newspapers, magazines, and TV shows to warn about runaway global cooling in the 1970s. Later, this suddenly (and without explanation) morphed into global warming, which suddenly morphed again into the one-size-fits-all threat of climate change. Even though the evidence for any of these was laughably thin, dissent was harshly punished by the secular media.

There are two things I find interesting about the secular media's taste for Doomsday predictions (of the secular variety). The first is that salvation - purely secular salvation - is available. If we just get rid of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, free enterprise and embrace the authoritarian worldview of the secular media and others who fancy themselves our moral and intellectual superiors, then the human race will achieve Paradise (and without that pesky Jesus to contend with).

The second is the fact that when it comes to predictions about the end of the world, the secular media's accuracy is identical to Harold Camping's: zero percent. Not a single doomsday prophecy the secular media has made (on nuclear war, the environment, or a score of other hot-button political issues) has come true. Not one.

The Psalmist writes, "Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help. His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish." That also goes for the princes' press agents and their scare tactics.