BBC News website article mentions JW's failed dates of doom.

by ThomasCovenant 3 Replies latest jw friends

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  ThomasCovenant

  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-24432491

  It's a line which has proved too tempting for second-guessing believers ever since. Jehovah's Witnesses have been accused of having made predictions for 1878, 1881, 1914, 1918, 1925, and 1975 as dates for Judgement Day. The US radio evangelist Harold Camping built up a ministry worth millions of dollars predicting that 21 May 2011 would be the big one. Camping later admitted he was probably mistaken, and donations to his ministry suffered an apocalyptic fall themselves
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  besty

  Why do people make bold predictions of doom?

  Why do journalists pose headline questions that aren't answered in the copy?
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  slimboyfat

  Interesting besty,

  Myles Allen, who's professor of geosystem science at Oxford University, says that "competing hyperbole" is not helpful for actually understanding climate change. "People talk up the rate of climate change in reaction to other people blatantly talking down the problem... which is why we don't make an advance on policy."
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  steve2

  The Watchtower publication, The Truth That Leads To Eternal Life,released in 1968, used the secular publication, Famine: 1975 to bolster speculation about the significance of the organization's timeline for the end (i.e., the culmination of 6,000 of human existence in the mid-1970s) .