Common Sense

Are there really people out there who are this stupid?

“I woke up one Monday morning and God said, ‘Go buy a newspaper,’ ” Mr. Baxter said. His evangelical travels found him in a small town in Louisiana and a paper wasn’t easy to find. But when he read the headline, he knew he had solved the mystery. “On the front page, it said, ‘Germany sells Leopard tanks to the Netherlands.’ Germany was the leopard.”

Mr. Baxter believes that end-time biblical prophecies are coming to pass.

‘God told me to go buy a newspaper’? Are you sure he didn’t want you to try and solve the word jumble instead of read that story? Please.

The simplest explanation is probably the correct one. He’s a charlatan and he’s simply bilking these people of their hard-earned money. With 2,500 people in his audience, if they all gave say $20 that’s… $50,000. Man, I’m in the wrong business.

And trust me, you don’t have to go to college to know that there are lots of naive people out there willing to believe anything you tell them so long as you say it with conviction.

This story even mentions the long history of people prophecying doom and gloom. None of it has come to pass. It’s because none of the people who claim to know what “prophecies” are in the Bible actually understand anything in said book. So what, he read Revelations 19 times in 30 days. I could read a French newspaper through 100 times and still not understand a word of it.

I’ve read the Book of Revelations myself, and there aren’t any actual prophecies in there. What it is is a story by a holy man named John of Patmos that involves strange visions and the idea that a lamb is what overcomes “the beast” in the end fight between good and evil. There’s no laundry list of things for us to look for so that we know the apocalypse is nigh (that doesn’t mean we can’t speculate, though). No mention of seven years of darkness and no mention of an antichrist. That’s all stuff that bad people who wanted your money made up to scare you.

This guy Baxter has nothing but contempt for his flock. You can tell because he doesn’t even bother trying to have plausible explanations for rank hypocrisy. The meeting described in the article is one in which he rails against national ID cards. But…

The presentation began on a surprising note. Indeed, just before Mr. Baxter denounced government data gathering, he asked listeners to fill out information forms placed on every seat…

Noting the irony, he explained his request on grounds that the speedy fulfillment of biblical prophecy might soon necessitate speedy communication.

“I mean, if we find out the rapture is going to happen in three days, wouldn’t you like us to send you a letter?” he asked.

If you find out the rapture (something that isn’t mentioned in Revelations, either) is going to happen in three days, he damned well better do something more than send out a letter.

Luckily for us, he has a magazine called End Times, and those information cards double as subscriptions to the magazine. I’m fairly certain he is not actually human.