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Comment by whiddershins | Hacker News Reader

There's an interesting concept I read about, how members of doomsday cults tend to believe MORE strongly after the doomsday date passes and everything is shown to be false.

It's something about cognitive dissonance.

I wonder if there is a known way to convince someone who is in this state. Cult debunkers and such might have thoughts?

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William Miller predicted Jesus' return in the year 1843. When that didn't happen, he adjusted his calculations to mean March 21, 1844. When that failed, it became October 22, 1844. He kept modifying his prediction whenever it failed. You'd think being constantly proven wrong would make people stop believing him.

That's how the Seventh-day Adventist Church was started. A church that today has more than 18 million members.

You can't reason people out of something they didn't reason themselves into.

This is also how the JW's started, and frankly continue. The simple, sad reality is:

People mostly believe what they want to believe.

Once the snowball starts rolling, the later generations don't care much for the ridiculousness founding myths. It just becomes a traditional culture. Same for all religions, and heck, even nations

You could argue the same thing about Christianity in general; didn't Jesus prophesize his return to occur within a very short time after his death?

Who knows. It's hard to tell at a 2000 year remove, when it's known that various scriptures have been heavily edited, redacted, etc. Mostly it seems like he was an early version of "Reform" Judaism that turned into a cult.

Any supporting materials to what you just said?

http://www.nola.com/religion/index.ssf/2011/03/changes_to_th...

http://www.npr.org/2011/07/17/138281522/how-bible-stories-ev...

https://skepticalteacher.wordpress.com/2012/04/22/the-embarr...

Beyond that, it's the entire history of the document, with the first 400 or so years being particularly amusing. To be clear, it's not like the same isn't true for other scriptures. You know that lovely story about Moses' birth? Just a ripoff of Sargon of Akkad's origin story, which was almost certainly not original.

Whoever wrote the texts in the New Testament was clever enough to specify it vaguely. Short, for god, can be very long for you, mere mortal. Of course, there slipped an error in some of those texts where Jesus promised that this "short" means "within the lifetime" of those who he was speaking to. But, again, the Bible is so full of much more blatant inconsistencies that this got drowned down below. The believers don't mind, though...

Its that part that gives meaning to meaningless life's. You are not just somewhere in the middle - another layer in the boneyard, you are the last generation. Being special.

The workaround for that "lifetime" bit is the claim that one or more of the people present were allowed to live forever. There is no end to the layers of explanations.

SDA here -- that's partially true, but at some point he did realize there was no actual prediction in scripture about a specific date for the second coming. The church has made no such claims since the 19th century.

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