A collection of essays and rants, inspired and taken from a series that I have been writing for several years concerning this subject. A stirring account of how certain issues are poisoned by organized religions and why we as a society would be much...
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"Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one." – Richard Dawkins
Would you like to know what the scariest thing about this picture is? I'll give you a hint; it's not his boots or the beard. The answer: there are actually a lot of people out there who believe what the sign says, a whole lot, especially in the United States of America.
I've actually met someone like this, a man walking the streets with a sign draped over him that declared the world was going to end. Rather than laugh at this man, I offered to buy him a cup of coffee if he would agree to tell me why he thought the world was going to end. He refused to accept my offer, saying that he didn't need to explain himself and his views. He was right, he didn't have to. My offer was one of curiosity, but it was interesting that a man with such radical methods to preach his word would refuse a chance to sit down and express his views. Chances are he assumed I was trying to stop him from showing off his sign and oppress him. I had no such intentions but I was given the chance to see something I had only seen spoofed on television: someone walking around with a legit belief that the world as we know it was going to end.
In 2011, this kind of practice was taken to a new extreme. I had traveled to visit my parents in March of that year. So when I was visiting Mom and Dad in Tennessee, they took me to this incredible place to eat for lunch. It was a diner called 'The Iron Porkchop', which in itself is very blasphemous because pork is outlawed by pretty much every religion, so I was game to go there. When we got there, there was a billboard across the street from a very cool diner we went out to for lunch. I couldn't help but stand there and look at it for a few moments, because I was amazed by two things. First that someone actually believed it, and second that someone believed it enough to put up this enormous billboard in front of the Iron Porkchop:
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I can assure you the discovery of this billboard didn't ruin my lunch. I still went inside and had a chicken fried steak with macaroni and corn, which was delicious by the way. But for a long time after that, I was curious to what would make someone so convinced the end was near that they would design and pay a great amount of money to post this sign up for all to see. To me this was the man on the street times a million. Even if the sign was right and the end was near, why waste money trying to inform people about it? Do you have any idea how expensive those signs are? How many homeless people could have been fed or sheltered with that kind of coin? Surely if God wanted to inform people that the end was near, the book details specific signs that would/should inform the believers that the rapture was upon them. I don't remember seeing billboards amongst them in the Holy Scripture so what kind of person would waste the time and money to put this up?
