Really?

      Perhaps half aware that its unsupported arguments are not entirely persuasive, and perhaps a bit uneasy about its own greedy accumulation of worldly  power and wealth, religion has never ceased to proclaim and forecast an Apocalypse and a “day of judgment.” It apparently bothers no one that Jesus himself predicted it would occur while some of his peers were still  alive. When this obviously failed to happen, “scholars” fudged the data and have continued doing so as recently as last year. This has been a constant scam since the first witch doctors and shamans learned to predict eclipses and to use their half-baked celestial knowledge to terrify the ignorant. It stretches from the epistles of  Paul, who clearly thought (and apparently, hoped) that time was running out for humanity, through the LSD like fantasies of the book of Revelation, which were at least memorably written by the alleged Saint John the Divine on the Greek island of Patmos, to the best-selling pulp-fiction Left Behind series, which, although supposedly  “authored” by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, was apparently generated via the old Bob Newhart-esque shtick of letting two orangutans loose on a word processor. “To be or not to be, that is the gazortenplat!”