The Guardian
October 8, 2015
Adam Gabbatt
The leader of a Christian group who claimed that the world would end on Wednesday has admitted his prediction was “incorrect”.
Chris McCann, head of the eBible fellowship, warned that the planet would be destroyed “with fire” on 7 October. This did not happen.
“Since it is now 8 October it is now obvious that we were incorrect regarding the world’s ending on the 7th,” McCann said.
McCann originally told the Guardian that by Thursday the world would be “gone forever: annihilated”. McCann based his claim on an earlier prediction by Christian radio host Harold Camping, who said the world would end on 21 May 2011. Camping’s forecast also turned out to be incorrect.
As the clock struck 12 in timezones around the globe, turning Wednesday into Thursday, it became apparent that the planet had not been destroyed. McCann, who is based in Philadelphia, said on Thursday it was “surprising” that the world was still in existence.
Prior to 7 October he said there was a “strong likelihood” the world would be rent asunder, but did admit there was a chance he could be incorrect.
“Well, a strong likelihood means that something was pretty well set to happen (in this case according to the biblical evidence),” he said. “Yet there is a possibility it may not happen.
“So it was surprising that it did not occur. But the comforting thing is that God’s will is always perfect.”
In 2011 Camping used his radio station, Family Radio, to notify people that the world would end. When that turned out to be incorrect, he revised his prediction to October 2011. That also turned out to be incorrect, and Camping retired from public life soon after. He died in 2013, at the age of 93.
The eBible Fellowship believed that Camping’s 21 May 2011 was actually “judgment day”. The fellowship thus claimed the world would end 1,600 days from that date: hence 7 October 2015.
McCann said “one of the big pieces of evidence” in his prediction was that 7 October 2015 was the last day of the Feast of the Tabernacles, or Sukkot. (Most online sources say Sukkot ended on 5 October.)
“Once the last day of the feast passed it soon became apparent that we were incorrect about the world’s conclusion on [7 October],” McCann said.
While the world did not end, McCann said on Thursday it would be obliterated “soon”.
“I also know that God knows exactly when that end will come,” he said. “So we’ll keep studying the Bible to see what we can learn.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/08/christian-group-doomsday-prediction-adjustment-ebible-fellowship
October 8, 2015.
New York Magazine
Melissa Dahl
Maybe there is no one reading this because there is no more internet, because there is no more Earth. According to a prophecy from a Christian organization called eBible Fellowship, on Wednesday, October 7, the planet was supposed to be destroyed "with fire," according to Chris McCann, the leader of the online-only religious group. “According to what the Bible is presenting it does appear that 7 October will be the day that God has spoken of: in which, the world will pass away,” McCann told The Guardian. “It’ll be gone forever. Annihilated.”
You have to wonder: What happens to doomsday cults when the world doesn't actually end? The classic text on this subject is When Prophecy Fails, a 1956 book by three University of Minnesota psychologists — Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter — who "joined" such a cult in order to study its members. The belief system of this group, as Psych Central reported back in 2011, was a kind of mash-up between Christianity and UFO conspiracy theory: The two leaders claimed to be receiving secret messages from aliens, one of which had "revealed itself ... as the current embodiment of Jesus." Eventually, the leaders said that the Jesus-alien had warned them of a great flood that would destroy Earth and everyone on it — except for the members of this group, who would be spared.
There was a particular time and day that the flood was supposed to happen, and this time came and went. Nothing, as you might've guessed, happened, and so the three undercover psychologists got to watch the cult members' reactions. At first everyone was stunned; one of the leaders openly wept. But things began to turn around when the leader the researchers referred to as Mrs. Keech alerted the group to another message she'd received from the aliens: Because of the faith of this little group, the world would be spared! As Maia Szalavitz pointed out in a piece for Time, this resulted in "a blitz of proselytizing," with the group members "more convinced than ever that their beliefs were correct."
Szalavitz also notes that this is an example of cognitive dissonance at work. Most people are uncomfortable holding two opposing ideas in their heads, and so they do their best to resolve that discomfort as quickly as possible. In this case, that resolution came by the cult members clinging even more closely to their belief system, insisting that they weren't wrong and that this new prophecy says so.
But, by some reports, that same psychological principle seemed to play out in a very different way for the believers in Christian radio host Harold Camping's prediction that the world would end on May 21, 2011. Journalist Tom Bartlett spent some time with some of those believers in the days before May 21; a year later, he checked back in for a story in Religion Dispatches, an independent online magazine. Bartlett wrote:
I was struck by how some believers edited the past in order to avoid acknowledging that they had been mistaken. The engineer in his mid-twenties, the one who told me this was a prophecy rather than a prediction, maintained that he had never claimed to be certain about May 21. When I read him the transcript of our previous interview, he seemed genuinely surprised that those words had come out of his mouth. It was as if we were discussing a dream he couldn’t quite remember.
There's a little bit of personal revisionist history going on, in other words — another attempt to realign the facts of what actually happened with what they'd believed. The October 7 Apocalypse prediction wasn't the first — and it surely won't be the last — of its kind. But even though believers in these things seem (and, indeed, usually are) extreme, there are lessons here for any of us who've had to figure out how to move on when something you expected — loudly and publicly — to happen doesn't end up happening. It's embarrassing, but life moves on. Unless, of course, one of these prophesies is eventually right, and it doesn't.
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/10/what-happens-when-the-world-doesnt-end.html#
The Guardian
Adam Gabbatt,
October 6, 2015
While our planet may have survived September’s “blood moon”, it will be permanently destroyed on Wednesday, 7 October, a Christian organization has warned.
The eBible Fellowship, an online affiliation headquartered near Philadelphia, has based its prediction of an October obliteration on a previous claim that the world would end on 21 May 2011. While that claim proved to be false, the organization is confident it has the correct date this time.
“According to what the Bible is presenting it does appear that 7 October will be the day that God has spoken of: in which, the world will pass away,” said Chris McCann, the leader and founder of the fellowship, an online gathering of Christians headquartered in Philadelphia.
“It’ll be gone forever. Annihilated.”
McCann said that, according to his interpretation of the Bible, the world will be obliterated “with fire”.
The blood moon – a lunar eclipse combined with a “super moon” – occurred without event on 27 September. This was despite some predictions that it would herald the beginning of the apocalypse. Certain religious leaders had said the blood moon would trigger a chain of events that could see our planet destroyed in as little as seven years time.
According to this new prediction, however, there will be no stay of execution. On the day of 7 October, the world will end.
“God destroyed the first earth with water, by a flood, in the days of Noah. And he says he’ll not do that again, not by water. But he does say in 2nd Peter 3 that he’ll destroy it by fire,” McCann said.
The expectation of the world ending this fall stems from an earlier prediction by Harold Camping, a Christian radio host who was based in California. In 2011 Camping used his radio station, Family Radio, to notify people that the world would end on 21 May of that year. When that turned out to be incorrect, Camping revised his prediction to October 2011. That also turned out to be incorrect, and Camping retired from public life soon after. He died in 2013, at age 93.
McCann believes that Camping’s 21 May 2011 prediction did have some truth, however. That day was declared to be “judgment day” because it was actually the day God stopped the process of selecting which churchgoers will survive Wednesday’s massacre, McCann said.
Following 21 May 2011, God turned his attention to deciding which non-churchgoers to save, according to McCann. The eBible Fellowship believes that God said he would devote 1,600 days to this task – bringing us to 7 October 2015.
“There’s a strong likelihood that this will happen,” McCann said, although he did leave some room for error: “Which means there’s an unlikely possibility that it will not.”
The eBible Fellowship, which McCann was at pains to point out is not a church, is a predominantly online organization. The group does hold meetings once a month, however.
Scientists have several theories about when earth will be destroyed, although none of the data points to this Wednesday. The most widely accepted theory is that the sun, which is already gradually increasing in temperature, will expand and swallow up the planet. Some scientists believe this could happen as soon as 7.6bn years’ time.
Whether the planet is destroyed next week or several thousand million years in the future, McCann’s plans for the coming week will remain the same. He and his wife, a fellow believer in Wednesday’s end date, had three birthdays in the family before then, which they planned to celebrate.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/06/end-of-world-7-october-ebible-fellowship
The leader of a Christian group who claimed that the world would end on Wednesday has admitted his prediction was “incorrect”.