14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that pastors, priests, and believers of different creeds really have a thing for predicting widespread cataclysms on Earth, in the hope of getting people to join their ranks and repent. And while the final devastation is, indeed, predicted in the Book of Apocalypse, and some current events may be construed as signs written in the Bible, several individuals really take this over the line. A good example is New York City's Times Square Church founder David Wilkerson, who now urges people to stockpile supplies and non-perishable foods, as God's wrath is upon us.
It's odd how every such doom sayer believes that the end of the world will begin in the place where he or she preaches. For instance, Wilkerson is convinced that the Apocalypse will start from Manhattan, which is what only residents of that area would believe.
Strangely enough, his line of thought follows the same pattern as all American sci-fi movies, in which aliens always disembark in Central Park (or somewhere else in the US) and always speak English. On a side note, the Apocalypse could very well start in Mongolia or Zimbabwe, not in Manhattan.
“An earth-shattering calamity is about to happen (...) It will engulf the whole megaplex, including areas of New Jersey and Connecticut. Major cities all across America will experience riots and blazing fires (...) There will be looting – including Times Square, New York City,” the pastor says in his warning.
He claims to have been given this information directly by the Holy Ghost, which is something anyone of us can say, as there is no way to prove it. However, this “warning” is not about reason, but about turning to people's fears. And it's well-known that individuals who are afraid can be easily manipulated.
There are several others who preach disasters based on their own misinterpretations of the Holy Book. But what makes their so-called “prophecies” appealing to some is the very fact that they are based on the Bible. Reverend Jerry Falwell, for instance, maintained that the sins of America were responsible for the airplane attack on the World Trade Center complex, and that Katrina was the divine retribution for the sins of the city of New Orleans.
It's disappointing that people nowadays still seek to explain natural occurrences via unnatural causes. It was not God's wrath that a tornado hit a major city, but the fault of people for building it in the land where tornadoes had always roamed, even before civilization appeared. But the mind is hard-wired to believe in God, and some crooks take advantage of it by making persons afraid with their very stupid predictions of the future. In the Bible, Jesus himself is quoted as saying that the Apocalypse is due to return before the generation that witnessed his first coming dies. And he is already about 2,000 years late.