"Of course, if the world does end on Thursday sceptics will face a position of unthinkable embarrassment."

"See? The moon become all dark and red.. ooooh! We were partially right..."

Jehobah's Witness in 1925: 1914 was a pretty bad year.

Well DUH! Of course you need to wear white robes to avoid electro-magnetic waves from Communists.

It would only seem appropriate.

http://www.imagedeposit.com/Ad_images/Imagedeposit_dot_com_Big_ID_1233__NedSTRADAMUS.jpg

please? sorry if you have to re-type a long, tearful life story

(note: there are still six hours left of the day for Pacific Americans, but since this idea was borne in Japan, where it is already Friday, I still declare it so.)

But we all seem to still be here. Mind you, I did hear tell that it wasnt just the 15th that was the end of the world, but that they think this planet will sweep past us btwn now and the end of the month!?

AAIIEEE start storing the cans of beans and moving to Tasmania everyone!

So we're all still here then.

The Church of the Subgenius predicted the 5th of July 2007. Has there ever been an official retraction or apology and a 'we got it wrong' type speech from any of these herberts? ever?

i believe they prefer to be called bobs, not herberts.

I think you'll find they're predicting the 5th July 2008.

On a lighter note (not), when I was, oh, eight or nine I guess, I was told that a detailed story explaining how armageddon would come in four or five years (ie., the christian one, with the antichrist and all that). Of course, being a little kid - and we were more innocent back then - I took a detailed story to be a convincing one, and therefore spent the next few years waiting for wars, plague, and death to come. Part of what was convincing about the story was the fact that it was sort of undisprovable, because I wasn't told something specific like July 5, 2008 - it was just a range of three years or something.

It sounds silly now, but it really completely traumatized me for a long time (and probably has some lasting effects that I don't even fully understand). I mean, what nine-year-old (and not particularly religious) kid regularly wakes up having nightmares that the agents of the antichrist are walking the earth and could begin slaughtering innocents at any moment?

If anyone ever deserved to have their ass sued off it was the "counsellor" who saddled me with that.

out him/her here!

When I was in my teens, I used to go talk to members of the New Israel of Yahweh who hung out on the boardwalk at Ocean City, NJ. They predicted the end of the world, or the second coming, or something like that, and when I asked them how they could be sure, they said the prophet Jeremiah (returned to earth, and living in Atlantic City) had told them. Next year, when the deadline had come and gone, I asked them what had happened, and the explanation was that someone in the group had misinterpreted what Jeremiah had said. That was an educational interaction.

If anyone ever deserved to have their ass sued off it was the "counsellor" who saddled me with that.

I had the same experience, mitya. Scary monsters, murders, Dr Who, all fine. But watching some documentary pegged onto some crank's prediction that the world would end the following day -- I had to be talked down from my state of fear by my parents.