Harold Camping has been the center of media attention for the past couple of days, which I guess is what you get when you spend $100 million dollars to advertise that the world is going to end, before finding out you were wrong…again!

That’s right, in case you weren’t aware, this is Camping’s third “certain” doomsday prediction. The others happened over a decade ago on May 21, 1988, and September 7, 1994, so long ago that my professors remember the controversies from the time they were students here at my seminary. It’s sad to know that the same guy has been able to gather a following twice now—and it am sad to say that it reflects poorly upon the American people and upon Christians that a false prophet is not easily recognized and discounted—Camping should have disappeared into oblivion after his first incorrect prediction.

Unfortunately, Camping is not willing to concede his position this time—he believes that the date has triggered a new era in God’s judgment of the world, and he’s pressing for us to wait another five months for the climatic events that God will begin on October 21st, 2011. Four dates, really? Come on Harold, give up already!!! You’re embarrassing the rest of us, and your repeating history you should have learned from!

Another man has created his own religious movement by predicting the end of the world before. William Miller predicted that the world would end on October 22nd, 1844, based on the passages available in the book of Daniel. When this didn’t happen, the movement went on to change a physical appearance of Christ into a spiritual one, and evolve an entirely new religious movement out of the “Christian” prediction that Christ was coming.

Needless to say, this trick is getting old. I hope Harold Camping really is confident in his works, because he faces a severe judgment from the God he says is coming to the earth. I’d hate to be in his shoes when Jesus sets the record straight, in person!

Read more about William Miller and the Seventh-Day Adventist movement here.

The Baptist Press posted an article recently about the destructive power that pornography is having upon the generations of people who have had free access to it at an early age via the internet. I believe they are right–porn will be a lot bigger issue in the future as people act out of increased exposure to it and as they try to relate to the opposite sex with a severely skewed paradigm of sexuality.

Their ability to be the husbands and the fathers God intended them to be is being shriveled and shrunk and stifled and twisted and distorted by exposure to ever more hardcore, Internet pornography

I believe that we are looking at in the next 10 years truly an avalanche, a tsunami of sex crimes against women and girls, because we’ve got a generation of boys that have been exposed at an earlier and earlier age to hardcore pornography,” Land said. “And the mathematics are a certain number who view it will become addicted to it, a certain number who become addicted to it will eventually act out what they’ve seen on screen.

~ Richard Land

Read the article by clicking here…

The lightning flashed, the thunder clapped, the sirens wailed, and Swiss Tower residents spent a few hours together huddled in the lower floor hallways…watching television and popping popcorn…so American.

Our disposition as Americans is to expect the things we have seen on television—things that will contribute to cool stories and safe-but-scary visions of the power of nature. Somehow we all operate with the idea that “it will never happen to me”. And that’s a problem.

It’s the same problem that the hundreds of victims I counseled in Alabama had. Too many of them told me the same thing, ”I didn’t think it could ever happen to me.”  And their assumption led them to stay in their homes instead of taking shelter—later enduring the storm that ripped the home apart, threw them across the yard, and in one ladies case—sucked her out of the bathtub and into the tornado’s chaos.

I have said it once, and I’ll say it again. Tornados are the worst. Hurricanes and Wildfires can be predicted, evacuated, and avoided. Tornadoes come without much warning, a lot of destruction, and no one to blame for the devastation they leave behind. They leave destruction that traumatizes the people who endure them and the people who attempt to save others after the event—normal people who live life with the memories of the death they witnessed after the storm had passed.

It’s tornado season—if you’re playing the “it will never happen to me” game this season, please decide to play it safe from here forward. Get educated on the dangers, and take precautions whenever a tornado might strike. Get to shelter, a basement, or an interior room without windows, which shatter in the tornado every time—preferably the bathtub which holds the walls around it together. Wrap yourself in a blanket, tarp, or other protective wrap in case you get pelted with debris. Expect the tornado to rip off the roof of your home. Expect it to utterly destroy any vehicle in its path. And expect it to hit you!

In this case, I would definitely rather be safe than sorry…and I hope I might have convinced you to do the same.

See some of the devastation from Alabama here.

Read more about tornados here, including the facts that most tornados occur in the United States and that they have hit many city centers.

What would the exodus look like in today’s world, check it out:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIxToZmJwdI[/youtube]

I recently upgraded phones to the LG Quantum Windows 7 Phone, and I want to share my joy and my experience with you, in case your in the place to be in the market anytime soon. Let me pursue this dialog in three ways: (1) Why I have AT&T’s service, (2) Why I chose the Windows Phone I did, and (3) Why I am leaving Apple’s iPhone behind me (good riddance!).

Why I have AT&T:

I was a T-mobile customer until 2009, when their service became so bad in my apartment, that I had to make a switch. When I shifted to AT&T, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my monthly minutes dropped from 1000-1200 a month to less than 500. That’s how many people that Stacy and I call are AT&T customers, and for us, that was awesome.

To further the awesomeness, I knew that staying with GSM technology with cellphones would allow Stacy and I to make calls in countries outside the U.S. – a dire necessity when you plan on doing missions work one day. A switch to Sprint, Verizon, or MetroPCS would mean changing technologies and a dead phone in other parts of the world. Read more about that subject here.

In addition to this, AT&T allowed us to keep using our phones—making the switch cheap, and also keeping us from signing a two year contract…something I have only done once—and never want to do again!

Why I chose Windows 7:

Windows has been advancing by leaps and bounds lately, and all of its Windows 7 software is quite incredible. There has been a lot of talk lately about people using Apple’s OS or Google’s new Chrome OS, and while I agree that the competition is quite good—the truth remains that most of the world is going to stick with Windows. Simply put, its cheaper than Windows (something that matters A LOT overseas), its available in more languages, and people are already very familiar with it.

However, on top of that argument, I have found Microsoft to be MUCH better at protecting my privacy than Google or Apple. A great example of this is Apple’s recent controversy over the iPhone. Apparently Apple thought that it would be harmless to keep a full record of every location that the phone has been over its lifetime without telling us that this data was being recorded. Huh? I guess that’s a feature that Steve Jobs forgot to mention! Oh, and Google is also doing this too! This is one of many headlines over the past year that have included privacy controversies with Google or Apple. I just feel better knowing Microsoft has managed to stay under the radar on these same issues. That matters to me! Read more about Apple’s iPhone controversy here.

“So if a thief got his hands on your iPhone, he can figure out where you live and loot you there, too. Same goes for a hacker who gains remote access to the consolidated.db file…

Imagine if you were suspected of a crime and police wanted to know where you were at 5 p.m. Thursday. They could subpoena your iPhone, dig into this file and, looking at the various data points, get a good idea of where you were at that time.”

In addition to this, I have to admit, I like the Windows OS. It is very effective, and very fast. It has a lot of applications, just like Android and iPhones, and it integrates REALLY well with Microsoft Office and Mail services. For the first time, I am able to read my email or update my calendar or add a contact on the phone, on the web, or on the computer and have it automatically update on the others! How nice!!!

Lastly, and VERY important to me, the LG quantum has a physical keyboard. I have been typing on the iPhone for a year now, and I can’t spell on the dang touch keyboard at all. Somehow touching the right keys evade me every time on the stupid iPhone—I would have gone insane without spellcheck help on that device. But now, thanks to Windows Phone, I have found I can type on the phone’s screen or on the physical keypad pretty easily. It’s a nice upgrade that saves me frustration.

Why I am Leaving the iPhone behind:

Well, if my earlier comments on the keypad and the privacy issues weren’t enough, then here’s the big reason—COST. The iPhone 3G was getting ridiculously slow—after only having the phone new from AT&T after 1 year. That’s just sad that a device can be so poor in performance when it can be bought brand new. The truth is, an upgrade without a 2 year contract would have cost me a minimum of $300—probably more like $500. I can buy a laptop for that, so I’m not interested in having a phone that costs so much. Instead, I am selling my iPhone for $100 and getting the LG Quantum for $140. A $40 upgrade price is pretty good to me!

Want to read more about my phone choice, see a great review here.

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