Separating the Sheepish from the Goats

People sometimes say that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, but Sordel heard a longer version of that which makes rather more sense. "Which is better: a stopped clock or a clock that is slow by five minutes?" The paradoxical answer, the clearly incorrect answer, is that the better clock is the one that is stopped because it is right twice a day.

People going around celebrating the purported accuracy of a stopped clock are missing the point.

Doubtless (in some sense or another, one day) the world will end, and there's a chance (since there are many churches) that a small band of devoted religious followers will on that day be celebrating the arrival of "The Rapture" or somesuch. Should a Pythonesque hand descend on that day from a fluffy cloud and gather up God's True Believers, they might feel entirely vindicated.

The correct division is not, however, between those who happened to be right and those who happened to be wrong, and in this those atheists delighted at the conspicuous humiliation this weekend of Family Radio Worldwide are just as mistaken as the ardent followers of Harold Camping.

The correct division is between those who are sort of muddling through but inaccurate and those who, while accurate, are totally broken.

There is no rational eschatology under which the people who are saved are those who happen to adhere to a religion in which salvation is accorded to those either a) born into the right race/religion or b) able to calculate a correct date based on conjectural dates of events in the Old Testament.

If God's hand is going to descend from a fluffy cloud and gather up Jews, or Jehovah's Witnesses, or Harold Camping, then the god running the system really hasn't given the rest of us much to go on.

It's true that God might not play into human ideas of fairness, but being saved by an unfair god is not really much different from being damned by it. Salvation should not be like buying a lottery ticket.

Broadly speaking: if a religion only functions accurately at one moment of history, you'd be better off with one that is somewhat helpful whatever the day, date and time.