So is this guy joking or is he just an enormous dickhead? Deepak Chopra apologized for causing the 7.2-magnitude earthquake felt in parts of Mexico and the southwestern United States on April 4th…

A 33-year-old Philadelphia man has been arrested and charged with making YouTube death threats against Eric Cantor. The video has since been pulled down, but in it Norman Leboon promised that Cantor would “receive my bullets in your office, remember they will be placed in your heads. You and your children are Lucifer’s abominations,” according to Talking Points Memo.

When Google provided the FBI with Leboon’s IP address, they discovered that local police already had a warrant for his arrest for another threatening video. When federal agents visited him Sunday, Leboon said he was the “son of the god of Enoch,” and that he had made over 2,000 threatening videos. He allegedly admitted to making the Cantor video three days earlier, and called Cantor “pure evil.” Another video warns that, as punishment for removing his videos, “all the YouTube employees both men and women will lose their first-born sons.” (see below)

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Thought about becoming an end-of-the-world prophet? It’s not the make-or-break enterprise you might think, as much as your gut feeling may be that mobs of angry parishioners await the fortune-teller who talks them into making room on the calendar for the final trumpets, the Rapture, World War III, the return of Jesus, global computer meltdowns, or post-game shows on life hosted by great messiahs stepping out of the pages of history — only for the poor dupes to find themselves paying bills the next week.

Time and again, it hasn’t worked that way. The beauty of blown prophecies is that failure is the beginning of success. That is, if you adopt the techniques of history’s most successful faulty prophets. Through time-tested rebranding methods, they’ve reinvented failure as proof that they were righter than anyone could have imagined.

The very glue holding your congregation together can be a mistaken prediction and what you’ve invested in it. Thousands of apostles of Shaini Goodwin of Tacoma, Washington, known to admirers as the “Dove of Oneness” and to the Tacoma News Tribune as a “cybercult queen,” hold out for a Judgment Day that will justify all of her bad guesses.

Every year is supposed to be the year it happens: the revelation of NESARA (the National Economic Security and Reformation Act), a secret bill purportedly signed by President Bill Clinton. We are just a hair’s breadth away. When the gag order is lifted, NESARA will free the world from debt, stop the Iraq War, and — according to one Utah group of adherents, filmed in the documentary Waiting for NESARA — unmask Republicans as space aliens masquerading as fiscal conservatives.

For other bad prophets, it turns out it’s the thought that counts. Maybe the seer was on the right track but just jumped the gun, the sense is, and interest heightens in the original questions he raised. Just consider theologian William Miller. His followers believed his prediction — based on calculations he derived from the Book of Daniel — that Jesus would return between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844. This misfire was soon followed by the Great Disappointment of 1844, when a crowd of 100,000 people, many of them sober, respectable reformers and abolitionists, assembled to see the end-times that Samuel S. Snow, a Millerite (that is, a follower of Miller), had marked down for the 22nd of October. Supposedly using a more precise version of Miller’s formula, Snow had worked out the exact day, and after some initial hesitancy Miller enthusiastically endorsed this specific prediction. As the clock ticked and everyone waited awkwardly for Christ, someone pointed out that the Holy Land had a seven-hour time difference. The sting of failure was worse for all the mockery they took from the townspeople: “What, not gone up yet?”

No, they were still here. For now. And yet Miller’s bad guesses, far from leaving a foul taste in everyone’s mouth, made them newly anxious about the great return they’d prepared themselves for. It even inspired the creation of new denominations, including the Seventh Day Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a church that has since slated Jesus’ return for 1874, 1914, 1918, 1941, 1954, and 1975. And Miller awakened the fascination with the Rapture that today drives sales of Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind books, which sell in the tens of millions, several years after the year 2000 failed to deliver on the millennial holocaust of non-Christians wished for by many Americans.

How can your sect rebound from failed prophecy in better shape than ever? According to one school of science, the answer starts with understanding the principle of cognitive dissonance.

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Read the entire article and many others in the Disinformation anthology Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion, edited by Russ Kick, available on Amazon and in all good bookstores.

About The Author: John Gorenfeld is a writer living in San Francisco. His work has appeared on Salon.com, the Guardian and other publications, and he has appeared on NPR, ABC News and CSPAN. In 2004 Gorenfeld made national news after exposing a secret Capitol Hill party for a cult leader, and then wrote a book about it.

Evangelist Tony Alamo used his stature as a self-proclaimed prophet to force underage girls into sham marriages with him, controlling his followers with their fears of eternal suffering.

But the judge who sentenced Alamo on Friday to 175 years in prison for child sexual abuse warned of another kind of justice awaiting the aging evangelist. “Mr. Alamo, one day you will face a higher and a greater judge than me,” U.S. District Judge Harry F. Barnes told the preacher. “May he have mercy on your soul.”

Barnes leveled the maximum sentence against the 75-year-old, who preyed on followers’ young daughters and took child “brides” as young as age 8. A jury convicted Alamo in July on a 10-count indictment accusing him of taking the girls across state lines for sex.

Alamo, who has made millions through his ministry, also must pay $250,000 in fines. He will return to court for a Jan. 13 hearing at which Barnes will determine if the five women who testified about their sexual abuse will be paid restitution. Federal prosecutors say an expert believes each one should get $2.7 million for the physical and mental abuse they endured.

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