False Messianic predictions are NOT victimless crimes

As predicted here 90+% of the worlds population did NOT go poof and vanish into thin air on the much anticipated Doomsday 6 PM EST this past Shabbos. The only thing to go poof and vanish into thin air was Harold Camping himself.

Well, you may ask,where's the harm in yet another crackpot X-tian Adventist being exposed as a fool, fraud, delusional or all three? So what if atheists all over the world are having another good belly-laugh at the Harold Campings expense?

A. Gullible people who believed him suffer in very real measurable ways. One Staten Island פתי is out 140 Gs!!! Not to mention the grief and mental anguish in seeing ones most cherished beliefs completely debunked.

B. The Atheists of the world conflate all deists into one undifferentiated mass. To the secularized, westernized individual the Quran burners, the Hillary photo-shoppers and the rapture-a-waiters are all about the same. As different as a Fruma yid looks from an Adventist or a burkha-Donner, to the average secularized Joe-(or, worst of all, Yossel)-in-the street we are all about the same and each and every news item like this that goes viral continues to paper the file on our collective irrationality and craziness. We are all, every last religious person on earth, malevolent and highly dangerous to the balance of humanity at worst or not-to-be-taken-seriously at best.

C. Here's the worst part: While my enmity for all things X-tian in general and Catholic in particular is well known, per the following Rambam I must grudgingly concede that X-tianity is a dark cloud for world Jewry with the silver lining of advancing the vast-eternal -plan:

י אף ישוע הנוצרי שדימה שיהיה משיח, ונהרג בבית דין--כבר נתנבא בו דנייאל, שנאמר "ובני פריצי עמך, יינשאו להעמיד חזון--ונכשלו" (דנייאל יא,יד). וכי יש מכשול גדול מזה: שכל הנביאים דיברו שהמשיח גואל ישראל ומושיעם, ומקבץ נדחיהם ומחזק מצוותן; וזה גרם לאבד ישראל בחרב, ולפזר שאריתם ולהשפילם, ולהחליף התורה, ולהטעות רוב העולם לעבוד אלוה מבלעדי ה'.

יא אבל מחשבות בורא עולם--אין כוח באדם להשיגם, כי לא דרכינו דרכיו ולא מחשבותינו מחשבותיו. וכל הדברים האלו של ישוע הנוצרי, ושל זה הישמעאלי שעמד אחריו--אינן אלא ליישר דרך למלך המשיח, ולתקן את העולם כולו לעבוד את ה' ביחד: שנאמר "כי אז אהפוך אל עמים, שפה ברורה, לקרוא כולם בשם ה', ולעובדו שכם אחד" (ראה צפניה ג,ט).

יב כיצד: כבר נתמלא העולם כולו מדברי המשיח, ומדברי התורה ומדברי המצוות, ופשטו דברים אלו באיים רחוקים, ובעמים רבים ערלי לב; והם נושאים ונותנים בדברים אלו, ובמצוות התורה--אלו אומרים מצוות אלו אמת היו, וכבר בטלו בזמן הזה, ולא היו נוהגות לדורות. ואלו אומרים דברים נסתרות יש בהם, ואינן כפשוטן, וכבר בא משיח, וגילה נסתריהם.

יג וכשיעמוד המלך המשיח באמת, ויצליח וירום ויינשא--מיד הם כולן חוזרין ויודעים ששקר נחלו אבותיהם, ושנביאיהם ואבותיהם הטעום.

For those of you not fluent enough to understand the above here's the main thrust: The ways of providence are mysterious indeed. And although X-tianity and Islam have brought incalculable suffering to the Jewish People and, in the case of the former, has caused much of humanity to worship a false G-d in the great historical sweep leading towards the Messianic Era it is davka these two religions that have popularized some manner of Torah and Mitzvos and have brought the belief in and anticipation of the arrival of a personal Messiah to the farthest reaches of the earth. And so the long history of these two faiths have been a partial fulfillment Zephaniah's prophecy: For then will I overturn to the peoples a language of clarity, that they may all call upon the name of the L-RD, to serve Him with one consent.

But this only holds for as long as these religions retain some modicum of credibility. The more ludicrous and ridiculous they become the more the world backslides into the darkness of Torah and Moshiakh denying skepticism. With every cult-leading madman with a Messianic-complex psychosis, with every end-of-days calculator who messes up the deadline, humanity as a whole takes an entropic step backwards into time, back to the era when Torah, Mitzvos and Moshiakh were unknown to all but the Jews. Instead of a Safah berurah we have the confusion and contention of the babbling generation of the dispersion again. A thousand cut-throat-competitive schools of thought are contending, but all the "rational", "scientific", "empirical" and "credible" ones have consigned the concepts of Torah, Mitzvos and Moshiakh to the dustbins of mythology, anthropology, legend, ahistorical nonsense and just-so stories.

Who knows how many of Campings followers have lost their faith completely and how many other sundry Adventists have had theirs severely shaken? Who can calculate the damage of millions of smug skeptics and Atheists, including Jewish ones, who have had their LACK of faith confirmed by this episode never to be reexamined again for as long as they live?

Rabbi Berel Wein has said that modern Jewish History, with all of its "isms", shmad and mass disaffection began in the wake of the revelation of Shabbetai Tzvi's SR"Y fraudulence. With every Messianic pretender exposed as either a charlatan or a lunatic, with every doomsday that comes and goes with continued tomorrows, more and more people lose their faith never to find it again.

This is bad for the Jews and for Hashem's plan for the balance of humanity as well. And this is why humble me is convinced that when Khazal cursed those who calculate the end of days with a withering תפח עצמותם של מחשבי קיצין it was not limited to Jews predicting the coming of Moshiakh ben Dovid.


בא המבדיל והעמידן על אחת
"Those who cannot tolerate Havdala cannot appreciate Qedusha"