(September 3, 2014 at 1:28 pm)Darkstar Wrote: I knew this thread would be a barrel of laughs the moment I opened it, but to actually set a date? That clinches it.Give or take 24 hours. Heh.
The founder of the Jehovah's Witnesses was forecasting the end of the world before he even founded the sect, and being wrong didn't even slow him down. After he died in 1916 (two years after yet another of his end-of-world dates came and went) the next president of the Watchtower Society picked up the baton and ran with it, predicting the end of the world in 1918, 1920, and 1925 before dwindling membership numbers indicated that being wrong all the fucking time was bad for business. Still, they continued to indicate that the end was near in the 1940s and mid-1950s, before famously targeting the autumn of 1975 as the big date. They've taken a subtler approach the last 40 or so years, but they continue to warn the membership that the end is right around the corner.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
