Doomsday soothsayer errs again

By Lionel Gayle

The Scandinavian volcano that erupted last week got me worrying whether the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, also known as the Doomsday seed vault, was in any danger.

So I checked up on my geography and found out that Grimsvotn, one of Iceland’s most active volcanoes, was miles away from Norway’s Doomsday seed-bank.

In fact, the Global Seed Vault is on the Norwegian Spitsbergen Island, built 120 metres (390 ft) inside a mountain cavern, about 1,300 kilometres (810 miles) from the North Pole.

Honestly, if the cataclysmic eruption had destroyed the seed-bank, I wouldn’t have shed a tear, but I would’ve been disappointed. The fact is that I’m fully aware that all the Doomsday deposits – thousands of seeds and a wide variety of plants – are duplicates from seed-banks in countries around the world.

If Svalbard was hit by a natural disaster last week, my main concern would’ve been whether that destruction was a prelude to Armageddon and the Rapture, predicted to happen at 6 p.m. Saturday, May 21, 2011.

California preacher Harold Camping, 89, who had predicted the Judgment Day, said 200 million Christians were expected to ascend to heaven after the destruction of the earth. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/05/23/national/a110014D10.DTL).

But it seemed God didn’t set foot on planet earth on Saturday, and there was no news of any extraordinary happenings from around the world, where Camping has an audience through his Family Radio International.

At a media conference at his radio studios, he told reporters that the End Times had actually begun on Saturday and would continue until October 21, 2011 when God would destroy the world.

Unlike other critics and observers, I am not calling Mr. Camping a false prophet, even though his prediction that God would’ve destroyed the world in 1994 also came to naught. I guess he has chalked up that error to a miscalculation on his timeline chart.

If this is any consolation, the Jehovah’s Witnesses had a better calculation system, but Jesus didn’t come in 1975 as they had predicted. And in fact, it seems the organization has scored zeros on all its predictions since American Charles Taze Russell, in the late 1870s, founded the precursor to the current Watch Tower Society. (http://4jehovah.org/help-1975-prophecy.php).

As for those nincompoops who reportedly gave away all their worldly possessions in anticipation of last weekend’s elusive Rapture, what were they thinking? From my observation, it’s never a safe move for desperate souls to put all their trusts in religious cults. Remember the Jim Jones suicide pact in which more than 900 perished at Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978, and the 1993 Branch Davidian fire that claimed at least 76 lives near Waco, Texas?

It’s really a sad state of affair when some clever religious leaders use their charisma to hoodwink the hopeless into shedding their possessions in exchange for embracing a silent and absent God. Like the late reggae star Bob Marley said: “Babylon System is a Vampire … building church and university/deceiving the people continually” (Babylon System from the album Survival by Bob Marley & The Wailers, Island Records, 1979).