Rev. Dana Cornerstone's July Dreams About December 2020: Sucker Bait for Deluded Christians
On July 15, 2020, I ran an article about a pastor and part-time dishwasher who described dreams he had. He predicted disasters for December. You can read my article here.
Nothing special happened in December.
At the time, the video had received over a million hits. Today, it is over two million.
The video is here, for all the world to see, and most of the world to howl in derision at the Christians who took it seriously.
I ended my article with this:
When none of what he has said will happen happens, who will he say really spoke to him?That is the plight of Pentecostals who go public with revelations they say are from God. He will face this issue before the year is out.
But I know when I hear God's voice. I know what God's voice sounds like to me. I know when He speaks, and I know when I have a dream that I know is Him.In short, "God talks to me. He confides in me -- not the leaders of Christendom. Me. And me alone."
I'll get back to this in late December.
It is now mid-January. That is why I am running this.
SUCKERS FOR SENSATIONALISM
Fundamentalists are always ready to hear somebody like this man come forward with predictions that don't come true. They thrive on it.
Wikipedia provides the story of Edgar Whisenant.
Edgar C. Whisenant (September 25, 1932 – May 16, 2001) was a former NASA engineer and Bible student who predicted the rapture would occur in 1988, sometime between Sept. 11 and Sept. 13. He published two books about this, 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988 and On Borrowed Time. Eventually, 300,000 copies of 88 Reasons were mailed free of charge to ministers across America, and 4.5 million copies were sold in bookstores and elsewhere. Whisenant was quoted as saying "Only if the Bible is in error am I wrong; and I say that to every preacher in town" and "[I]f there were a king in this country and I could gamble with my life, I would stake my life on Rosh Hashana 88."Whisenant's predictions were taken seriously in some parts of the evangelical Christian community. As the date approached, regular programming on the Christian Trinity Broadcast Network (TBN) was interrupted to provide special instructions on preparing for the rapture.
When the predicted rapture failed to occur, Whisenant followed up with later books with predictions for various dates in 1989, 1993, and 1994. These books did not sell in quantity. Whisenant continued to issue various rapture predictions through 1997, but gathered little attention.
He died in obscurity. He had achieved his 15 minutes of fame. They were expensive minutes. He has a permanent Wikipedia article on his delusions -- and the delusions of the millions of fundamentalists who took his nonsense seriously.
I would like to think that Christians would learn from experience about their rag-tag prophets. But they don't. Here is another.
Harold Egbert Camping (July 19, 1921 – December 15, 2013) was an American Christian radio broadcaster and evangelist. Beginning in 1958, he served as president of Family Radio, a California-based radio station group that, at its peak, broadcast to more than 150 markets in the United States. In October 2011, he retired from active broadcasting following a stroke, but still maintained a role at Family Radio until his death. Camping is notorious for issuing a succession of failed predictions of dates for the End Times, which temporarily gained him a global following and millions of dollars of donations.Camping first predicted that the Judgment Day would occur on or about September 6, 1994. When it failed to occur, he revised the date to September 29 and then to October 2. In 2005, Camping predicted the Second Coming of Christ to May 21, 2011, whereupon the saved would be taken up to heaven in the rapture, and that "there would follow five months of fire, brimstone and plagues on Earth, with millions of people dying each day, culminating on October 21, 2011, with the final destruction of the world."
MOTIVATION TO BELIEVE
Why do fundamentalists succumb to these delusions over and over? They do not change their behavior in response to the messages of doom. They do not sell their homes to move to safer places. They do nothing any differently than before.
Then what is their motivation? This: they want to be inside an exclusive secret society of people in the know. They are Ralphie . . . before he decodes the message.
Ralphie was not conned a second time. He grew up . . . fast.
The small-time prophets do not grow up. They are not trying to sell Ovaltine. They are trying to be remembered as people to whom God gave His secret coded message. God chose them to reveal His secret coded message of imminent doom -- not to His church . . . to them! This implies that the church is an afterthought for God.
By invoking the name of God, they move their predictions into the category of what under the Old Testament was called false prophecy.
My advice (again): ignore these people.