The End!!

[Angrboda]

Chuff is god. TAKE THAT! you skeptical atheists!

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"The prophecies of seers still resonate even today, influencing the lives of tens of millions of people worldwide. In the United States, William Miller declared that Doomsday would arrive on April 3, 1843. As news of his prophecy spread throughout the United States, a spectacular meteor shower by chance lit up the night sky in 1833, one of the largest of its kind, further enhancing the influence of Miller's prophecy. Tens of thousands of devout followers, called Millerites, awaited the coming of Armageddon.

When 1843 came and went without the arrival of the End of Days, the Millerite movement split into several large groups. Because of the huge following amassed by the Millerites, each of these splinter groups would have a major impact on religion even today. One large piece of the Millerite movement regrouped in 1863 and changed their name to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, which today has about 14 million baptized members. Central to their belief is the imminent Second Coming of Christ.

Another splinter group of Millerites later drifted toward the work of Charles Taze Russell, who pushed back the date of Doomsday to 1874. When that date also passed, he revised his prediction, based on analyses of the Great Pyramids of Egypt, this time to 1914. This group would later be called Jehovah's Witnesses, with a membership of over 6 million.

Other segments of the Millerite movement, however, continued to make predictions, hence precipitating further splits each time a prediction failed. One small splinter group of Millerites was called the Branch Davidians; they broke off from the Seventh-Day Adventists in the 1930s. They had a small commune in Waco, Texas, which fell under the charismatic influence of a young preacher named David Koresh, who spoke hypnotically of the end of the world. That group met a fiery end in their tragic encounter with the FBI in 1993, when a raging inferno consumed the compound, incinerating 76 members, including 27 children, and also Koresh."

— by Jon Krakauer (on Mormonism)