c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) I was working on the news desk when Afghanistan was invaded. A couple of copy editors started talking very seriously and very gloomily about “end times.” They speculated that various events might be signs or evidence that our warranty had run out.

One of them said he’d sure like to see the front page of a newspaper from five years in the future. Assuming there was a newspaper. Assuming there was a future. He was worried and sad that his young daughter wouldn’t grow up.

I said I was sure he would dance at his daughter’s wedding. And his fear of an imminent apocalypse should not deter him from making the payments on his new carpeting.

That was in 1979, at another newspaper, after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

The guy danced at his daughter’s wedding. I am sure he was not disappointed.

Some people would have been. A friend has a relative who belonged to a group that believed The End was coming in 1989. She was sorely disillusioned when it didn’t happen, and she hasn’t been the same since.

A self-styled preacher named William Miller famously predicted the world would end in 1843 and then 1844. When the dates came and went, his followers called it “The Great Disappointment.”

Other famously predicted dates for The End were in 1914, 1920, 1925, 1943 and 1975. Plus 1999 and 2000, which was Y2K. Super-scary, kids.

Nostradamus, the Professor Marvel of this stuff, supposedly predicted the world would end in August 2006 _ a month that became so big for end-is-near predictions it entered the mainstream media and prime-time television.

Commentators who cited events in the Middle East and various forms of hokum went so far as to pin down the date as Aug. 22, even claiming Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad planned a “cataclysmic event” for that day.

It’s a good way to keep suckers tuned in and afraid. It abandons rational discussion in favor of whacked-out soothsaying.

But August turned into September, when the BBC reported that villagers in Kenya were relieved that a local sect’s predictions that the world would end by Sept. 12 didn’t pan out.

Unlike TV commentators, the sect’s leaders went into hiding. One blamed the media for ruining their image.

When it comes to keeping the faith, however, you can’t beat the self-proclaimed Bible scholars called the Lord’s Witnesses, who claim to have the “true Bible code.” They have a Web site and issue press releases.

“On April 29th,” they note, “we started predicting dates for a terrorist nuclear bomb at the United Nations.”

Based on their research, they predicted it absolutely would happen between May and September.

After a few “mistaken dates,” they got some attention for predicting with “98 percent confidence” that the United Nations would be hit between June 29 and July 4. They warned “everyone with faith in God to be at least 20 miles away from midtown Manhattan.”

July passed without incident, so they tried again.

“This bomb must go off on a Sabbath in August in our current understanding,” the group’s president said. “If it does not, then we have run out of options.”

Promises, promises. It’s not over until they say it’s over, and maybe not even then. After 12 wrong tries, they found another option and nailed it. An attack would come between 2 p.m. and sundown on Tuesday, Sept. 26.

Tuesday ended. September ended. The window closed.

But as I was writing this, they revised the date again, to Friday, Oct. 6.

I guess that’s the power of faith in these matters. Even when options run out, you can avoid disappointment and keep looking for the worst.

KRE/JL END FERAN

(Tom Feran is a columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland.)