There are only 10 more days until May 21, which is Judgment Day when the Rapture happens! What, you didn’t know this? You don’t even know what the Rapture is? Let me fill you in.

The Rapture is the name given to the occasion when all the true believers in Jesus will be suddenly taken up to heaven, prior to him coming back to Earth in all his glory to smite all the sinners who are left behind and then destroys the world. Or something like that. It is all a bit confusing but the main thing to bear in mind is that it is definitely not a good sign if you are still here on May 22 because that means you are not among the chosen few. You are going to be in for a rough time for the next five months before the world comes to a final end on October 21, 2011, totally messing up the baseball World Series that starts on October 19. If the currently hot Cleveland Indians make it to the World Series and the Earth is destroyed before they win, it will confirm the dark suspicions in the minds of Cleveland sports fans that god hates Cleveland, probably because of their repulsive Chief Wahoo symbol.

How do we know that Judgment Day will fall on May 21? This website tells you how they calculated the date. They say that a close reading of all the clues in the Bible says it will occur exactly 7,000 years after Noah’s flood. Even some Rapturists may be surprised that this implies that the Rapture will occur in 2011 CE since according to Bishop Ussher’s famous calculation, the Earth was supposed to have been created in 4004 BCE and Noah’s flood occurred on 2348 BCE. So, according to Ussher’s chronology, 7,000 years after the flood would mean that the Rapture would occur in the year 4653 CE, which gives us plenty of time to destroy the world in other ways, such as with global warming or nuclear wars, and save Jesus the trouble of coming back to do it himself, since I am sure he has lots of other demands on his time.

There have been other predictions of the end of the world that failed to materialize. But the authors of these new calculations say that, although based on the same Bible as the earlier ones, this time they have got it right. Their new dates are as follows.

• 11,013 BC—Creation. God created the world and man (Adam and Eve).
• 4990 BC—The flood of Noah’s day. All perished in a worldwide flood. Only Noah, his wife, and his 3 sons and their wives survived in the ark (6023 years from creation).
• 7 BC—The year Jesus Christ was born (11,006 years from creation).
• 33 AD—The year Jesus Christ was crucified and the church age began (11,045 years from creation; 5023 calendar years from the flood).
• 1988 AD—This year ended the church age and began the great tribulation period of 23 years (13,000 years from creation).
• 1994 AD—On September 7th, the first 2300-day period of the great tribulation came to an end and the latter rain began, commencing God’s plan to save a great multitude of people outside of the churches (13,006 years from creation).
• 2011 AD—On May 21st, Judgment Day will begin and the rapture (the taking up into heaven of God’s elect people) will occur at the end of the 23-year great tribulation. On October 21st, the world will be destroyed by fire (7000 years from the flood; 13,023 years from creation).

Don’t confuse this end of the world with that predicted by the Mayans. Because their calendar only went up to 2012, some people interpreted it to mean that they somehow knew that the world would end that year. But since the Mayans were heathens who did not know Jesus and their calendar was not based on the Bible, they obviously cannot be trusted.

Notice that we are supposed to have gone through a period of ‘great tribulation’ that began in 1988 but frankly I had not noticed anything particularly different happening that year or since. But in hindsight, the signs were all there. In 1988 Bobby McFerrin’s song Don’t Worry, Be Happy won a Grammy award for best song (as well as awards for best album and best male vocalist) which we should have recognized as the sign of the Apocalypse. The title itself was likely code to reassure anxious true believers that they would be saved. Another missed clue was that at 1:15 in this music video (which includes Christopher Reeve and Robin Williams), McFerrin is suddenly whisked up out of his shoes and socks to heaven. People disappearing suddenly and leaving their clothes behind is a dead giveaway that the Rapture is occurring.

I think the evidence is overwhelming that May 21 is the day, so basically we have just ten days left to shape up and get on god’s good side or have to evade slaughter in the following five months, which would be pointless since we would end up in hell on October 21 anyway.

Where presumably our punishment will be that we will have to listen to Don’t Worry, Be Happy on an endless loop.

The Sunni rulers of Bahrain are destroying Shia mosques and attacking demonstrators in this majority Shia country. There are deadly clashes between Christians and Muslims in Egypt.

Religious apologists are always telling us that their religions are peaceful and that those who perpetrate violence are not being true to it. But it does not seem to strike them as odd that nothing seems to rouse people to a murderous fury more easily than to feel that their god of peace and love has been slighted.

There is an interesting relationship between education and religious belief. It is often assumed that increased education leads to greater levels of disbelief in god. The fact that religion is in rapid decline (as I tried to document in my series Why Atheism is Winning) and heading towards extinction in the developed world, where levels of education are highest, suggests such a correlation.

But it would be wrong to infer that this implies a direct causal relationship between education and lack of religion. The stronger causal relationship is that increased modernity leads to decline in religion, and modernity involves more than just education. Religion thrives on fear of death and the afterlife, and it could be that improved standards of living and a lowering of fears and insecurity about living life in this world are what undermine its appeal. The negative effect on religion may thus be indirect, by enabling greater levels of modernity and higher standards of living.

Even if one infers a direct link between education and disbelief, the relationship need not be monotonic in that people with lower levels of education are necessarily greater believers. I wrote about four years ago that “a longitudinal study of 10,000 adolescents actually found the opposite effect, that those who did not go on to college had greater declines in attending services, in the importance or religion, and in disaffiliation from religion” and that there is some evidence that religious belief can actually increase when people go to college. Why? Because they learn how to better find rationalizations for the beliefs they were indoctrinated with as children. Thus up to a point, an increased amount of formal education can actually lead to greater belief because it suppresses people’s natural curiosity and makes them more accepting of the verdicts of ‘authorities’ (such as ‘experts’ and the authors of textbooks), while not being able to distinguish between reliable authorities who use good evidence and closely reasoned arguments to arrive at judgments, and unreliable authorities (like priests and theologians) who simply assert dogma as if they were deep truths, without providing any evidence to back them up.

It seems as if belief in religion follows the pattern described in the poem An Essay on Criticism by Alexander Pope (1688-1744) that goes:

So by false Learning is good Sense defac’d.
Some are bewilder’d in the Maze of Schools,
And some made Coxcombs Nature meant but Fools.
In search of Wit these lose their common Sense,
And then turn Criticks in their own Defence.

Many of the arguments for god by theologians and philosophers are so incredible that one finds it hard to imagine anyone taking them seriously, unless one has surrendered logic and common sense and substituted for them a rudimentary skill at rationalization that blinds one to the flaws in the arguments. As Michael Shermer says in his book Why People Believe Weird Things (2002, p. 283): “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.” Or, as George Orwell put it even more acidly in his Notes on Nationalism (1945) in the context of people willing to believe in political absurdities, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

But while some learning can increase religious belief, still deeper learning usually leads to a decline again. This widely quoted passage from Pope’s poem makes this point:

A little Learning is a dang’rous Thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

The evidence is quite convincing, for example, that very high levels of education, especially in the sciences, are strongly correlated with disbelief in a god. The Pew survey of religious knowledge in the US found that “academics in the natural and social sciences at elite research universities are significantly less religious than the general population. Almost 52 percent of scientists surveyed identified themselves as having no current religious affiliation compared with only 14 percent of the general population” and “In a poll taken in 1998, only 7 percent of the members of the US National Academy of Sciences, the elite of American scientists said they believed in a personal God.”

It is not increasing education alone but what kind of education that also matters. After all, many theologians have great amounts of formal education but that does not prevent them from putting forward the most absurd question-begging claims for religion. I think that two kinds of attitudes towards knowledge lead to greater disbelief.

One is when people begin to take a skeptical attitude towards their most cherished beliefs and begin to ask for evidence and reason in support those assertions that they had previously taken for granted as self-evidently true. This tends to naturally occur in the highest levels of scientific education where one needs to do this to be taken seriously by one’s peers.

But this can also happen without much formal education for people who simply have a thirst for knowledge and an inquiring mind and a critical bent. Some of the sharpest minds I have encountered have belonged to people who did not go to college at all or dropped out and simply educated themselves. But to be able to do that more effectively, they need access to the literature. It used to be that serious thinkers used to write books aimed at the general public but with the advent of modern universities and technical journals, scholars started writing for other scholars and this changed the nature of their output, making them fairly opaque to the general reader, and thus resulted in a very small readership.

For a long time self-educated people were limited in the availability of accessible books and articles on science or atheism or critiques of religion. The recent spate of serious books aimed at the general public and written by the new/unapologetic atheists has changed all that. Suddenly all that powerful but hitherto esoteric knowledge has been made accessible to anyone interested, and the fact that these books are selling by the millions is evidence that many people have long sought such knowledge about religion and how advances in science have undermined belief in god.

The other attitude that leads to skepticism is when people go more deeply into their religion and religious texts and I will look at this in a subsequent post.

The godless heathen are spreading their message everywhere. I got an email from blog reader David about a billboard that he and fellow members of the NCW Freethinkers Meetup in eastern Washington state have put up.

David says that the region is very reactionary and religious and so this was quite a bold move on their part, even though the billboard does not directly undermine belief in god but only asks for the separation of church and state to be maintained. But I suspect that there are a lot of closet skeptics in that region as well, and this billboard will hearten them that they are not alone.

So well done David and the NCW Freethinkers!