WHAT JUPITER MENACE?

It seems that every few years or so, somebody comes out with a book or documentary film which claims the world is about to meet its end. This is nothing new as various religions throughout history have predicted cataclysmic judgements on the world. So why hasn't the world suffered the doom prophesied in various ancient writings and modern-day videos?

One movie which gained quite a lot of attention back in 1982 was The Jupiter Menace. According to the film, great disasters have destroyed civilizations for millennia. Even the poles of the earth have shifted as recently as a few thousand years ago, according to the documentary.

The movie producers claimed that Jupiter has an eleven-year cycle, just like the sun has high and low sun spot activity each eleven years. In December of 1982, the planets were in the same quarter of their orbits around the sun. The producers of The Jupiter Menace thought this alignment would create gravitational strain on the earth, causing it to wobble on its axis. A further conjunction in the year 2000 would spawn even more cataclysmic earthquakes.

Using computer models, the movie producers showed what would happen in a magnitude twelve quake. The Richter scale only goes up to ten but they wanted to show the total destruction which would occur if a quake a thousand times worse than a ten happened.

The film makers brought in psychics and scientists to back up their claim of the earth's impending doom. Survivalists were also featured to make the point that people needed to prepare for the total collapse of society. Even the Bible was co-opted  to show that the world would undergo cataclysmic events in the next twenty years.

May 5, 2000 has come and gone, yet the super conjunction never caused the utter devastation claimed by the movie. In the past thirty-one years, earthquakes and tsunamis have occurred but at nowhere near the colossal levels predicted by this sensationalistic documentary.

Knowing the Bible well, I can tell that the verses cited were taken far out of their contexts and apocalyptic language was interpreted by the film makers in a wooden, literal way. This is a common practice among end times prognosticators when they sell their alarmist books and videos. It makes money as well because people want to know the future. I'm glad I know my future lies in God's hands, not in my stockpile of food or weaponry in some remote location.

I described how I once believed such wild claims of the end times in How I Was Razed. In this memoir, I showed how I came to learn about the providence of God and how to properly read the Bible. Check out my new book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Virtual Bookworm Publishers.

ONE-HUNDRED PERCENT WRONG ONE-HUNDRED PERCENT OF THE TIME

As 2013 ends, keep in mind that predictions of the end of the world have been wrong all the time. Tons of books have been written and sold about how this or that event marked the beginning of the end, yet we're still here. So why do people keep predicting doomsday? It makes them money, that's why.

Remember back in January of 1974 when the Children of God cult predicted that a comet would destroy the United States? Kohoutek was supposed to be bright and close to the earth, yet it actually looked very faint. I didn't hear about how many people took it seriously but I'm sure some did leave America.

Remember Y2K? Many people were duped into buying a year's supply of dehydrated food because society was supposed to collapse when the computers crashed. Apart from minor glitches, nothing happened.

I certainly remember the false prophecy of a man who calls himself Brother Stair. He predicted, wrongly of course, that fifty percent of Americans would be dead in 2003. Again, I don't know how many folks took him seriously. I certainly didn't.

Jack Van Impe made a lot of money in the past with his sensational prophecies. One of his videos was entitled "2001 Countdown to Eternity." I'm glad that a friend gave me a VHS copy rather than me having to purchase that over-hyped baloney.

Then there was the Mayan calendar fiasco last year. Many false prophets claimed that since it ran out on December twenty-first, the world would end in flames. However, it cycled back to the beginning again.

Whichever way you celebrate the new year, you can relax in the knowledge that the world won't end because some preachers claim it will next year. They were wrong before and they'll be wrong again.

Nobody knows when Christ will return. He'll come when he comes. As long as you belong to him, you'll be safe when he does arrive to make a new heaven and a new earth.

I wrote extensively about a house church minister and his bogus prophecies in my newly-published memoir, How I Was Razed: A Journey from Cultism to Christianity. Please check it out at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Virtual Bookworm.