[irrelig]Whew, we barely got this one done before the return of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, which should happen any minute now. In this podcast we discuss the Seventh Day Adventists, a church that arose from the ashes of the Millerite Great Disappointment of October 22nd, 1844. We cover some of their cherished but quirky beliefs, and highlight the foibles of such luminaries as William Miller and Ellen G. White, prophetess of the movement.
Yes, this podcast is late. But that’s only because we here at Irreligiosophy held off on publishing this episode until Sunday, out of respect for the Seventh Day Adventists’ Saturday Sabbath. And that is God’s own truth — may Jehovah strike me down as I type thi
7 Responses to “34: Seventh Day Adventists”
Sadly, I was surprised at how silly the Seventh Day Adventists are. Every time I think that Christians have reached maximum absurdity, I learn something new that forces me to recalibrate my sense of absurdity.
I agree. Every time I think Christians have scraped the bottom of the barrel in terms of stupidity, they always prove me wrong.
I had a good friend in the navy who was a seventh day adventist. He was kinda lapsed but you could tell his parent’s religion kinda messed things up in his head every now and then.
I wish I had known then that it was a Millerite offshoot, I would have destroyed his religious upbringing in about thirty minutes on the internet.
The Millerite’s are a great topic incidentally, though you guys covered the gist of it with this episode. Altogether, good episode and thanks.
Many many moons ago I used to host a web site called the Conspiracy Arc-hive. I would archive weird and wacky conspiracy postings I found on the web and usenet. I would get odd emails from people concerned archived posts about how to resurrect a vampire were advanced majicks not for public consumption blah blah. If there was a question about ownership I would email them back. Like once a former virulent neo-nazi who wrote up the “nazi faq” emailed me asking me to remove his faq. He had gone straight, saw the error of his ways, and this faq was a sad reminder to him of his past ways.
Okay, so one day I got some email from a guy who wanted something or another about 7th day adventist usenet post taken down. It was short, hard to understand, gave no reason why. I emailed him back asking for more information. I never heard anything.
Fast forward a few months, this same guy shows up in the lobby of my friend’s internet hosting company (he kindly provided me space and bandwidth for free to host the conspiracy arc-hive). Here’s where the memory gets hazy. I think this guy was from some “reformed” scion. He had flown in from xenu knows where to get the document quietly removed. He was actually flying around North America paying visits to other hosting sites that had this document available for view.
My friend with the hosting company got him to reveal maybe more than he should. It turns out there was a libel case between the churches. The document had been published dead tree media style at some point. I think the scion had lost and the judgment required the scion church to destroy all copies and no longer distribute the libelous material under penalty of having to pay a multi million judgment.
Someone in the scion church didn’t agree with the court’s ruling and posted the text of the document to usenet. No one ever goes on the internet, right (circa 1996)? And no one was ever going to invent a search engine, right?
Anyway, to the horror of the scion leadership, they discovered this document was out on the net, posted there clearly by one of their own (people tended to use real names back then), and if the “real” church discovered the material was published to the net, well, lights out.
Alas, I can’t remember any more details than that (this was about 13 years ago). No clue now what was in the document that was so libelous.
Whoah, that is a bizarre story, Karl. He actually went to the hosting company in person to try to get the document removed? Unbelievable!
I had no idea the Scientologists and 7th Day Adventists had bad blood between them, but I do know Scientology as a whole can get pretty litigious when it doesn’t like someone. Good to hear they were on the receiving end this time, and lost.
Scientologists have bad blood between everyone. :/
This podcast is simply AWESOME. I am seriously going to get around to buying you guys a beer someday.