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What you’re seeing is not a casting call for Gandhi: The Musical, nor is it a collection of Mahatma Gandhi clones popping out of some strange moustachioed alternate dimension, but rather the making of a world record!
To mark the 64th anniversary of Gandhi’s passing, 485 kids gathered together to celebrate their fallen leader by dressing up like him, complete with glasses, moustache and bald cap, and in doing so set a world record.
I wonder if any of the students who took place in the world record costume party went on to become Groucho Marx impersonators?
Photo: Mohammad Ismail/Reuters
Afghan calligrapher Mohammad Sabir Khedri worked for five years to create the world's largest Koran, and man, is it large:
LinkThe lavish book has pages 2.28 meters (90 inches) by 1.55 meters (61 inches) in size ... The Afghan Koran weighs 500 kg (1,100 lb) and its 218 pages of cloth and paper, bound inside an embossed leather cover made from the skins of 21 goats, cost half a million dollars to create.
From our pal Dan Piraro of Bizarro, here's a reminder to update the Ten Commandments to include "Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's iPad?"
LinkEnglish is a fascinating language, particularly in that most of our words come from other languages. While most words come from some sort of root words that have travelled from ancient languages to more modern lexicons, some come from myths and stories of gods and goddesses, particularly from stories from ancient Greece. Here are a few fascinating English words with roots dating back to stories of Zeus and his fellow gods.
If you’re familiar with Greek myths, then you’ll immediately recognize the name of the Titan who was forced to hold up the heavens after angering the Olympians. Even if you didn’t recognize his name from myth though, you certainly recognized the modern use of the term for a group of maps. The connection is logical, but it wasn’t used in the cartography until the sixteenth century.
Image Via Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez [Wikipedia]
These words may not seem to have much in common definition-wise, but there is a good reason they start with the same root –they are both related to time. Chronology deals with the way events happened over the course of time and chronic describes something that takes place over a long period of time. Wondering where we got these words? Well, they are all related to Chronos, the god of time.
Image Via Jorbasa [Flickr]
This is one of the more famous Greek stories-turned-words. In the ancient tales, Echo was a mountain nymph who talks excessively with her gorgeous voice. Her voice was so lovely that she would often distract Zeus’ wife Hera with her long and entertaining stories while Zeus would sneak away and make love with the other mountain nymphs. When Hera found out about Echo’s role in her husband’s activities, she punished her by taking away her ability to speak, except in repetition of the words of others.
There are many differing ends to the story, but in all of them, Echo eventually dies in some heartbreaking manner, leaving her voice to haunt the earth, where it can still be heard to this day.
Pirates
and file-sharers, rejoice! The Missionary
Church of Kopimism (just say it out loud) has been recognized as a
religion in Sweden:
Since 2010 a group of self-confessed pirates have tried to get their beliefs recognized as an official religion in Sweden. After their request was denied several times, the Church of Kopimism – which holds CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred symbols – is now approved by the authorities as an official religion. The Church hopes that its official status will remove the legal stigma that surrounds file-sharing.
All around the world file-sharers are being chased by anti-piracy outfits and the authorities, and the situation in Sweden is no different. While copyright holders are often quick to label file-sharers as pirates, there is a large group of people who actually consider copying to be a sacred act.
Philosophy student Isak Gerson is such a religious file-sharer, and in an attempt to protect his unique belief system he founded The Missionary Church of Kopimism in 2010. In the hope that they could help prevent persecution for their beliefs, the Church then filed a request to be officially accepted by the authorities.
After two failed attempts, where the Church was asked to formalize its way of praying or meditation, the authorities finally recognized the organization as an official religion. The Church’s founder is ecstatic about this news, and hopes that it will motivate more people to come forward as ‘Kopimists’.
Can I get "Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Amen?"
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This Christmas, give you fellow priests a present they won’t soon forget: a smack to the face with brooms!
That’s what about some priests did while preparing Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity for Orthodox Christmas on January 7:
The outburst, broken up by baton and shield-wielding Palestinian police, came to head as the Greek Orthodox and Armenian clerics, who each control a portion of the church along with Roman Catholics got into the scuffle over a ‘turf war.’ The Church of Nativity is believed to be built over the cave that marks the birthplace of Jesus.
Bethlehem police Lt-Col Khaled al-Tamimi was quoted in Reuters as saying that no one was arrested “because all those involved were men of God” while the BBC reported that the 1,700-year-old church is in bad shape because priests can’t agree on who should be footing the bill for its repair.
Calvinist preacher Roger Williams emigrated from England to the colonies with a wave of Puritans in 1630. He was fleeing religious strife, but found controversies in America as well -with the leaders of his own sect.
Williams did not differ with them on any point of theology. They shared the same faith, all worshiping the God of Calvin, seeing God in every facet of life and seeing man’s purpose as advancing the kingdom of God. But the colony’s leaders, both lay and clergy, firmly believed that the state must prevent error in religion. They believed that the success of the Massachusetts plantation depended upon it.
Williams believed that preventing error in religion was impossible, for it required people to interpret God’s law, and people would inevitably err. He therefore concluded that government must remove itself from anything that touched upon human beings’ relationship with God. A society built on the principles Massachusetts espoused would lead at best to hypocrisy, because forced worship, he wrote, “stincks in God’s nostrils.” At worst, such a society would lead to a foul corruption—not of the state, which was already corrupt, but of the church.
The philosophy Williams developed to deal with the struggle came to be called “the separation of church and state.” And although the concept is a part of what the United States is about, people have argued over what it really means ever since. Smithsonian has an extensive article on Roger Williams and his ideas. Link
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From the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, here's a 16th century memento mori rosary carved out of ivory featuring man on one side and skeleton on the other: Link - via The Hairpin
There were almost 4,500 Hasidic rabbis at the International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries in Brooklyn, and 3,000 of them posed for a photograph together. Not all of them got into the frame, but this is still a big picture! There’s a link to the high-res version at NBC if you want to find someone you know. Link -via Buzzfeed
(Image credit: Tina Fineberg/chabad.org)
Can
a Catholic university that's so Catholic that it's actually called Catholic
University of America, be too Catholic?
That's what law professor John Banzhaf thought and he's filing a human rights complaint against the school:
A lawyer has filed a human-rights complaint against Catholic University, on the grounds that the prevalence of Catholic imagery there violates the rights of Muslim students. Catholic University admits students of all faiths, but attorney John Banzhaf says there is almost nowhere on campus where Muslims can "pray without having to stare up and be looked down upon by a cross of Jesus."
Wait,
let me check my calendar. Yup, 2011. So it's surprising to read about
a New York public bus line that still forces women to sit in the back.
Here's what happened when Melissa Franchy boarded the B110 bus in Brooklyn and sat down near the front:
For a few minutes she was left in silence, although the other passengers gave her a noticeably wide berth. But as the bus began to fill up, the men told her that she had to get up. Move to the back, they insisted.
They were Orthodox Jews with full beards, sidecurls and long black coats, who told her that she was riding a “private bus” and a “Jewish bus.” When she asked why she had to move, a man scolded her.
“If God makes a rule, you don’t ask ‘Why make the rule?’” he told Franchy, who rode the bus at the invitation of a New York World reporter. She then moved to the back where the other women were sitting. The driver did not intervene in the incident.
The B110 bus travels between Williamsburg and Borough Park in Brooklyn. It is open to the public, and has a route number and tall blue bus stop signs like any other city bus. But the B110 operates according to its own distinct rules. The bus line is run by a private company and serves the Hasidic communities of the two neighborhoods. To avoid physical contact between members of opposite sexes that is prohibited by Hasidic tradition, men sit in the front of the bus and women sit in the back.
Is it gender discrimination or a reasonable approach to accomodate religious rights?
Sasha Chavkin of The New York World reports: Link | Follow up at The New York World and The New York Times
Would
you like to get 50% off your car's oil change? All you have to do at the
Kwik Kar Lube & Service in Plano, Texas, is recite a Bible verse.
Store owner Charlie Whittington is standing by what he asking customers to do for a deal. “If I’m standing for what I believe, so be it,” he said. “Bring it on.”
The verse is popular for containing the central beliefs of traditional Christianity:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (NIV)
Whittington said he did it as a conversation starter in an effort to talk to people about what he believes.
“It’s one thing about America,” he said. “You can go and do what you want. I’m not making you do anything and I’m tired of people making me do something.”
Is it a righteous bargain or religious discrimination? Would you recite a biblical verse even if you're an atheist simply to get the deal?
The Ein Prat Fountainheads welcome the High Holidays with a joyful adaptation of Shakira’s World Cup song “Waka Waka”. The lyrics are at the YouTube link. Dip your apple in the honey! Happy Rosh Hashanah! -via The Daily Beast
Halloween is coming up soon and what better time to talk about superstitions than a holiday focused on spirits and symbolism. Whether you’re superstitious or not, discovering the origins of these common beliefs is a fascinating look at religion and human psychology. So enjoy!
The fear of Friday the thirteenth and the fear of the number thirteen are both so common that they each even have their own psychological names, paraskevidekatiaphobia and triskaidekaphobia, respectively. But who ever decided that one number is unluckier than any other or why it’s particularly bad for the thirteenth day of the month to happen to fall on a Friday? As it turns out, there are a lot of reasons behind the superstitions surrounding the mystical number.
In Christianity, there were thirteen people at the Last Supper, including Judas who has been rumored as being the last person to sit at the table. In Viking lore, Loki was the thirteenth god and in the story of Norna-Gest, when uninvited guests showed up at an infant’s birthday party, bringing the number of guests up to thirteen, the last of the guests cursed the child. Even ancient Persians were weary of the number thirteen because they believed the twelve constellations of the Zodiac would each rule the earth for a thousand years, but after the cycle ended (in the thirteenth millennia), the sky and earth would collapse into chaos.
Interestingly, the fear of Friday the thirteenth is actually a relatively recent development. In fact, historians have found no evidence that anyone ever had talked about “Friday the thirteenth” until the 19th century and the earliest mention of the evils of the date were seen in an 1869 biography of Gioachino Rossini. Even then, the myth didn’t really get going until the 20th century, when Thomas W. Lawson’s novel Friday, the Thirteenth became a best seller. After the book became a household name, so did the stories about how unlucky the day was.
In reality, the idea of Friday the thirteenth being unlucky is most likely a result of the fact that both Fridays and the number thirteen are both considered unlucky. Friday has been considered unlucky since at least the 14th century, as Chaucer mentioned the superstition in The Canterbury Tales. The most likely reason for people to consider Fridays unlikely is that according to scripture, Jesus was crucified on a Friday. It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to imagine that people decided that if Fridays are unlucky and the number thirteen is unlucky, then any time the thirteenth occurs of the Friday, it’s really unlucky.
The fear of Friday the thirteenth is still very common. In fact, around 19 million Americans are affected by a fear of the day and many are so scared that they refuse to leave their house on Friday the thirteenth. Accordingly, the Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute estimates that businesses lose around $850 million ever time the date rolls around on the calendar.
Images Via W.J.Pilsak [Flickr] and wiccked [Flickr]
When I was a kid, I was told that this superstition came about because in medieval times it would cost an average person seven years to save enough money to buy a mirror. As it turns out, this is bull hockey and the origin of the superstition is a lot more spiritual and a lot older than the one I was told.
The Romans were the first people to create glass mirrors. They also believed that their invention had the potential to steal part of the soul of the person using it. If a person’s reflection were distorted while using a mirror, then their soul would be corrupted and trapped as a result. Fortunately, the Romans believed your soul could be renewed –after seven years time. Until that point though, the person would suffer from bad luck since they did not have a whole, healthy soul to fight off evil.
If a person wanted to shed their bad luck a little sooner, there were a few methods to free your soul including grinding all the pieces of the mirror into a fine dust or burying the pieces under a tree during a full moon. While these options seem a little challenging, they still seem way easier than waiting seven full years to get your soul renewed.
Image Via eeekays photography [Flickr]
We’ve all heard of underground societies, but rarely is the term used in such a literal manner as these amazing underground cities featured on Dornob.
Cities, empires and religions have risen and fallen around these unique underground havens once used by early Christians to hide from Roman armies, yet they remains occupied to this day – 100 square miles with 200+ underground villages and tunnel towns complete with hidden passages, secret rooms and ancient temples and a remarkably storied history of each new civilization building on the work of the last.
Read more about these amazing homes and enjoy the stunning pictures at the link.
Today is the feast day of St. Lawrence, who tradition says was martyred by being roasted alive. He supposedly even made a joke about it: “Turn me over, this side is done.” St. Lawrence is now the patron saint of cooks, which may be a nod to his famous sense of humor.
What will Catholics eat today in honor of the saint’s feast day? Some traditions call for cold cuts and other uncooked foods, in pious avoidance of anything that would too closely resemble Lawrence’s burned flesh.
But others go the opposite direction, celebrating the manner of his death with a barbecue. As Evelyn Vitz, author of A Continual Feast: A Cookbook to Celebrate the Joys of Family & Faith throughout the Christian Year explains on her blog, “We decided that serving barbecued chicken is a great way to signify his triumph over the fire.” A contributor at the Catholic Cuisine blog interprets the theme another way, with cupcakes decorated to look like grills, complete with little shish kebabs made of frosting.
Smithsonian has the story, and a list of other saints connected with cooking. Link
Pastor Joe Nelms offered this prayer before the Nascar Nationwide series race in Nashville last Saturday. Boogity boogity! -Thanks, Bill!
When you get your photo for your driver’s license taken you are not allowed to wear a hat or head covering unless it is for religious or medical reasons. One Austrian follower of the satirical Church of The Flying Spaghetti Monster won the right to wear a pasta strainer on his head on religious grounds for his driver’s license.
Pastafarian Niko Alm, follower of the One True Flying Spaghetti Monster, won the right to appear in his driving-license photo with a pasta strainer on his head after it was formally recognized by Austrian authorities as “religious headgear.”
I know a lot of people don’t believe in ghosts, but for those who do believe (or are undecided about their existence), this great Oddee article features 10 ghost pictures and recordings that are certain to be accepted by the believers and debated by the skeptics. What do you guys think? Are ghosts fact or fiction?
A 65-meter high minaret stands in Afghanistan, built around 1190 CE. It is covered with religious carvings and calligraphy in more than one language. But this ancient and remote edifice is surrounded by the Hindu Kush mountains in a country at war, so these pictures will be the closest you get to it -for now.
Amazingly, this imposing structure was standing forgotten for centuries… until rediscovered in 1886 by Sir Thomas Holdich; then forgotten again and rediscovered in 1957. Then the Soviet invasion in 1979 again prohibited access to the area, and since then only a handful of people from outside of Afghanistan have seen the minaret, because of its middle-of-nowhere location
Read more about the Minaret of Jam and the ancient multicultural city that once surrounded it. You’ll also see lots more pictures at Dark Roasted Blend. Link
A new exhibition in London’s Mica Gallery will feature contemporary Egyptian art, much of which depicts themes and imagery from the Arab revolution. The exhibit includes graffiti from the streets of Cairo re-created on a gallery wall and a mummified man wrapped in pages from the Qur’an. Read more about this exhibition at the Guardian link.
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It seems to be a universal truth that a thing reviled is also a thing revered, depending on location. While rats are an annoyance and a pest (as well as known harbingers of disease) in most of the world, they are sacred inhabitants of the Hindu temple of Karni Mata in India. Accidentally killing one of these holy rodents brings a hefty fine of replacing the rat with one made of gold, while having one skit over your feet is a blessing.
The story of Kari Mata, revered as an incarnation of the goddess Durga, the rats, and lots more pics of the temple are on The Ark in Space. Link
Image: owenstache
I can’t imagine living in a city where every paintable surface is the same color, even this lovely blue. But that’s how they roll in Chefchaoen, Morocco; the city’s buildings, walls, stairs, railings, flowerpots, doors–everything, all blue. Founded in 1471, the entire city was painted with tekhelel, a natural dye made of shellfish.
In the bible, Israelites are commanded to use this dye to color one of the threads of their prayer shawl.
Though tekhelel is no longer available and the city’s population of Jews has diminished, the tradition has carried on through the centuries. Blue pigment is sold in pots and bags throughout the city, and residents faithfully refresh the paint on their homes, flower pots, balcony railings, doors and practically everywhere else in the community. Even the interiors of many of these buildings are painted blue.
The pigments may vary in color now, ranging from periwinkle to aqua, but the effect is no less spectacular, providing a monochromatic stage from which every other color dazzles, particularly the merchandise hung on walls outside of markets and shops.
It’s pretty and I understand the symbolism, but I think I’d go with a clean white wall inside–or anything but blue, actually.
via WebUrbanist
Karl Stefanovic, an Australian newscaster, got a chance to sit down and talk with the Dalai Lama. Naturally, he took the opportunity to tell the Dalai Lama a Buddhism joke. At least, Buddhism as it is popularly understood in the West — your own theological mileage may vary. Watch and see how well it went over.
via reddit
Ed Wozniak, who brought us lists of Norse and Hawaiian dieties, has a list of gods in the pantheon of the Inuits, whose homelands stretch all around the northernmost regions of the world. Some have downright scary stories, like the sea goddess Sedna.
She was the daughter of the god and goddess Anguta and Isarrataitsoq and, like countless female figures in Inuit myths, she refused all prospective husbands. Sedna instead had sexual relations with dogs and the “freakish” offspring of these unions were said to be white people and Native American tribes that the Inuit were often at war with. A ghoulish twist to the story is how Sedna took to using her parents as food (a recurring theme in Inuit myths because of the scarcity of food in the frozen north at times and how instances of cannibalism during such famines were much-discussed). Sedna devoured both of her mother Isarrataitsoq’s arms and had finished eating one of her father’s arms before he was able to subdue her and take her out to sea in his canoe, intent on banishing her to the sea. Continuing to struggle, Sedna clutched the sides of the canoe as her father tried to submerge her, prompting him to take his long knife and cut off her fingers. Since, to the Inuit, loss or mutilation of the hands was often seen as a horrific transformation into something new, the myth states that Sedna now embraced her fate, transforming her now-fingerless hands into flippers and transforming her severed digits into the various species of sea animals.
Read more about Sedna and eleven other Inuit deities at Balladeer’s Blog. Link
First they blew your mind when they told you Pluto isn’t actually a planet, then they told you that not only is Atlantis real, it’s been sitting in the bottom of some mudflats in Spain for a few thousand years. It seems history and science keep changing right in front of our eyes and pretty soon, nothing we learned in school will be true any more. Well, if you can’t deal with change, then you aren’t going to like these four things you learned in school are actually completely bogus.
If you learned one thing about Egypt in school, it was that the pyramids are marvels of ancient technology…and that they were built by slaves. There are movies based around slaves working on the pyramids and every one has seen at least half a dozen pictures of the poor workers straining under the hot sun as their cruel masters wait, whip in hand, for someone to slack off.
But working on the pyramids might not have been so bad after all. While it was still hard work to construct the massive monuments, recent research has shown that the workers were more likely skilled masons who had the right to leave whenever they wanted. Evidence to back this claim is supported in the fact that the workers had their own tombs right beside the pyramids. Egyptologists point out that someone that low on the social ladder would never have been buried so close to the pharaohs.
Image via anniemarieangelo [Flickr]
Ok, maybe not everything you learned about dinos back in school was wrong, but a lot of it sure was. For one thing, there is no brontosaurus. Yeah, that giant lumbering monster we all learned about in grade school was actually an apatosaurus with the head of a camarasaurus. The worst thing about this inaccuracy is that it was discovered over a century ago, but up until recently, everyone (including a lot of elementary school teachers) still insisted on calling apatosauruses brontosauruses.
I guess one mislabeled dino isn’t that big of a deal…but the incorrect visual representation of just about every dinosaur imaginable is. By now, you’ve probably heard that many dinosaurs probably had feathers, a huge change for those of us who grew up thinking about giant lizards roaming the prehistoric plains. But even those that probably didn’t look like giant birds still looked way cooler and more versatile than the oversized iguanas popularly imagined. These days, we even know what color some dinosaurs were, and they are a far call from the multitude of green shades we once imagined. If you really want to know just how different dinosaurs were compared to what we were taught, check out this great article on Listverse, about the Top 10 Dinosaurs That Aren’t What They Were.
Image via Geoff S. [Flickr]
If you learned chemistry or biology in high school, you were probably taught that there are six chemical elements known as the “building blocks of life.” They are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus. These components make up the chemical composition of DNA and without them, life isn’t possible…or at least, we thought it wasn’t possible.
Last year, scientists discovered a bacteria species living in a salt lake in California that was missing one of the building blocks of life, phosphorus, and instead had arsenic in its place. For some people, this might not seem like such a huge deal, particularly considering that arsenic is very close to phosphorus in its physical and chemical properties, but it’s a huge deal to scientists who suddenly saw a massive expansion in the scope of potential living things. It really makes a difference in intergalactic research, since the discovery opens up whole new planets as potential life-supporting ecosystems.
Image via Artful Magpie [Flickr]
Maybe this wasn’t the case for all of you, but when I was in school, the teachers seemed overly fascinated with telling us how much better humans are than other animals. They’d tell the class, “we’re the only animals who have complex emotions,” “no other animal is self-aware like we are,” “humans are the only creatures who use tools,” “we are the only species to communicate through complex language,” etc. I don’t know why they felt our fragile homo sapien egos were so threatened by other creatures, but I always thought that was a little strange. As it turns out, it was completely incorrect too.
Recent studies show that elephants mourn the loss of their companions and many animals, particularly dogs (who have evolved in the companionship of humans), have far more complex emotions than scientists had ever imagined. And chimps don’t just have emotions; they also are self-aware enough to understand how their own actions will affect those around them.
Well, we still have our intelligence to set us apart from the beasts right? Not so quick you homo sapien- supremacists. Actually, there are a lot of intelligent animals out there, many of which use tools and converse amongst themselves. Chimps have used spears to hunt for thousands of years, octopuses use coconut shells as both camouflage and as protection, and dolphins use sponges to help uncover fish that are hiding in the sand.
As for language, bees have an incredibly complex language system allowing them to communicate what type of flower is located in a given place and how to get to that location. Monkeys not only communicate with one another vocally, but they even understand grammar rules. In fact, in some ways, animals are actually ahead of us in the language game. While humans cannot yet speak the language of any other animals, primates can be taught sign language so they can communicate with us in our own language.
Image via Mundoo [Flickr]
If this crushed your memories of grade school, I’m sorry, but now it’s your turn to get revenge. What have you learned isn’t true even though they told you it was a “fact” back in school?
So, obviously the world didn’t end on May 21, 2011 – but don’t you worry. Harold Camping, the Family Radio preacher who was behind the (most recent) doomsday movement said that Armageddon is still coming.
The new date? October 21. So mark that on your calendar for the next End of the World Party (I’ll bring chips):
Harold Camping, who predicted that 200 million Christians would be taken to heaven Saturday before catastrophe struck the planet, apologized Monday evening for not having the dates "worked out as accurately as I could have."
He spoke to the media at the Oakland headquarters of his Family Radio International, which spent millions of dollars_ some of it from donations made by followers — on more than 5,000 billboards and 20 RVs plastered with the Judgment Day message.
It was not the first time Camping was forced to explain when his prediction didn’t come to pass. The 89-year-old retired civil engineer also prophesied the Apocalypse would come in 1994, but said later that didn’t happen then because of a mathematical error.Through chatting with a friend over what he acknowledged was a very difficult weekend, it dawned on him that instead of the biblical Rapture in which the faithful would be swept up to the heavens, May 21 had instead been a "spiritual" Judgment Day, which places the entire world under Christ’s judgment, he said.
The globe will be completely destroyed in five months, he said, when the apocalypse comes. But because God’s judgment and salvation were completed on Saturday, there’s no point in continuing to warn people about it, so his network will now just play Christian music and programs until the final end on Oct. 21.
Link | And if that doesn’t work out, there’s always 2012!
On another note, the failed doomsday prediction is fun and games for most of us, but has deadly consequences to a few others.
Just because Armageddon is happening Saturday as foretold by Family
Radio Worldwide’s Harold Camping doesn’t mean you have to give up the
love of your pets. One group is offering services to take care of your
furry loved ones while you are in Heaven. You can make arrangements to
have your pet cared for at the link.
You’ve committed your life to Jesus. You know you’re saved. But when
the Rapture comes what’s to become of your loving pets who are left
behind? Eternal Earth-Bound Pets takes that burden off your mind.
An all-female religious sect has sprung up in Russia with a rather unusual belief that Vladimir Putin is actually Paul the Apostle. I can see why. I mean, just look at him all macho and shirtless. Surely you agree (heck the guy’s even met Reagan!):
"According to the Bible, Paul the Apostle was a military commander at first and an evil persecutor of Christians before he started spreading the Christian gospel," the sect’s founder, who styles herself Mother Fotina, said.
"In his days in the KGB, Putin also did some rather unrighteous things. But once he became president, he was imbued with the Holy Spirit, and just like the apostle, he started wisely leading his flock. It is hard for him now but he is fulfilling his heroic deed as an apostle."
Link (Photo: Ria Novosti)
Photo: Mito Habe-Evans/NPR
The End of the World has been foretold time and time again, but this time it’s for real. Well, according to Brian Haubert and a small group of true believers, anyway. They claimed that hidden in the Bible are some clues that the world will end May 21, 2011.
NPR’s Weekend Edition takes a peek inside the Judgment Day movement (and the radio show behind the latest J-date):
"I’ve crunched the numbers, and it’s going to happen," he says.
Haubert says the Bible contains coded "proofs" that reveal the timing. For example, he says, from the time of Noah’s flood to May 21, 2011, is exactly 7,000 years. Revelations like this have changed his life.
"I no longer think about 401(k)s and retirement," he says. "I’m not stressed about losing my job, which a lot of other people are in this economy. I’m just a lot less stressed, and in a way I’m more carefree."
He’s tried to warn his friends and family. They think he’s crazy. And that saddens him.
"Oh, it’s very hard," he says. "I worry about friends and family and loved ones. But I guess more recently, I’m just really looking forward to it."
Haubert is 33 and single. Brown is married with several young children, and none of them shares his beliefs. It’s caused a rift with his wife — but he says that, too, was predicted in the Bible.
"God says, ‘Do you love husband or wife over me? Do you love son or daughter over me?’ There is a test. There is a trial here that the believers are going through. It’s a fiery trial."
As May 21 nears, Brown says he feels as if he’s on a "roller coaster." What if he is raptured but his family is left behind?
"I’m crying over my loved ones one minute; I’m elated the next minute," he says. "It’s all over the place."
