Historical Remediation

     The Veggie Tales is a television series for young children that often depicts stories from the Bible and has many valuable lessons to be learned throughout the stories. Veggie Tales was created by computer animation designer Phil Vischer and Mike Nawrocki and first aired nationwide in 1992.  In the Veggie Tales movie Jonah the veggie characters run into a few car troubles on the way to a concert and end up going into a restaurant called Seafood.  In this restaurant is the singing trio called "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything", who in fact do something when they tell Jr. Asparagus about the story of Jonah, in a hilarious way of course, and in doing so teach Jr. about compassion, mercy, and second chances.  



Doomsday Debacles: Shoko Asahara and Heaven's Gate (Numbers 4 and 3)

     You know you are truly crazy when you stage your own doomsday prophecy. That is exactly what Shoko Asahara, born Chizuo Matsumoto in 1955, attempted to accomplish on March 20th, 1995. In 1984, he established the Aum Shinrikyo religion, a combination of Asahara's personal interpretations of yoga, aspects of the Buddhism, Christianity, and the writings of Nostradamus. The name Aum Shinrikyo comes from the Japanese word "Supreme Truth". In Asahara's book, published in 1992, he declared himself "Christ" and the "Lamb of God". He proposed that his mission was to liberate the sins of the World and carry the burden of their sins onto himself. Asahara believed that he could take away the sins and bad Karma of the people by exchanging with them his spiritual power. Drinking his bathwater and blood was something that Asahara claimed that his followers should do. He believed that the world would end in a World War III kind of scenario. Asahara prophesied that Mount Fuji would erupt and that there would be a gas attack on Tokyo. Perhaps to expedite his claims, Asahara and a few of his 40,000 followers released Sarin gas into three subway lines in Tokyo Japan. Four people died immediately and 5,500 people were injured. Japanese authorities arrested Shoko Asahara two days after the gas attack and over a decade later in February 24th he was sentenced to death.

Heaven's Gate, a cult founded in the early 1970s in Texas, was lead by Marshall Applewhite. They believed that the "Level Above Human", a variation of Heaven, could be reached when a spaceship came and saved the true believers from doomsday. In 1997, when the comet Hale-Bopp was visible from Earth, Heaven's Gate predicted that some mysterious object was in the comets tail. Heaven's Gate soon prepared for boarding the UFO that was come to save them. The Californian police entered Heaven's Gate's compound to find 39 dead bodies, dressed in black tunics. They had committed a mass suicide via deathly tonics or suffocation.

Doomsday Debacles: Halley's Comet and The Large Hadron Collider (Numbers 6 and 5)

 

Halley's comet, a ball of icy dust discovered by the British Astronomer Edmond Halley, is visible from earth every 76-ish years. Astronomers at the Chicago's Yerkes Observatory claimed that when Earth passed through Halley's comet tail on May 1910 it would emit cyanogen gas, a poisonous miasma, onto Earth. They stated that this cyanogen gas would cause widespread death on Earth. The people who believed this claim stuffed towel under their doors and placed paper over the keyholes in their doors. Believers even bought “comet pills”, specialized masks, and bottled oxygen to escape the toxic waste that was supposedly going to be emitted from Halley's comet. People who were correct and believed that the Halley's comet doomsday prophecy was a bunch of bologna held rooftop “comet parties” to observe the harmless beauty.

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is a 17 mile circular particle accelerator located under Geneva, Switzerland. This particle accelerator collides Hydrogen protons, or positively charged particles in the nucleus, at near the speed of light in order to recreate the physical properties of the universe at the time of the Big Bang.  The Big Bang is a theory that attempts to explain how the universe developed from a very tiny, dense state into what it is today. The LHC aids in the discovery of subatomic elements or particles. However, many people believe that black holes, or regions of space having such massive gravitational fields that no matter or radiation can escape, will be a byproducts of the LHC. They believe that these black holes will engulf the world, thereby destroying everything on it. In some sense, these people are correct. The LHC does create black holes, however, they are infinitesimally small. These black holes are microscopic, being only a couple cells across. Also, these black holes are only present for seconds, even milliseconds. So, these black holes don't exist long enough to encompass the Earth.