I thought I should do another debunking article, as there are lots of people who are getting really scared by this BS. The Daily Express particularly is promoting David Meade's book heavily with more than two articles a day on this totally non notable author for the last week. The other "red top tabloids" are joining in. These journalists seem to forget that vulnerable people, including young children read these stories. Parents report children as young as 12 or younger who are scared by this.

Why Nibiru is as Daft as an Extra Dry Continent in the Pacific as Large as Australia

First - Nibiru does not exist. It’s just a daft idea. However, people often say to me - "If Nibiru was about to hit Earth we'd see it in the sky as big as the Moon already". That's not true. It is total BS and nonsense, but not for that reason.

You detect planets using telescopes. The brighter ones are easily visible to the naked eye too, but you need to know what to look for. You just don’t detect planets by using a mobile phone camera and pointing it at the sun, or looking for giant disks in the sky as large as the Moon, or by looking out for earthquakes or volcanoes or fires, or hurricanes or interruptions in mobile phone signals.

These people have mislead you and spun a whole lot of BS about planets. They are not astronomers. You have learnt your “astronomy” from tall tale spinners. They are a bit like the sailors in ancient times telling tall stories about people living in distant continents with their heads below their armpits.

You need to unlearn what they have taught you.

You can know that there are no extra planets in the sky for the same reason that you know that there isn't an extra continent in the Pacific as large as Australia. You don't know from your own observation. You would need to do many voyages or plane trips to criss-cross the Pacific to make sure there isn't an extra island there as big as Australia. But you know for sure that there isn't anything like that there, at least I hope you do, because you have a rational trust in the work of geographers and sailors and pilots and nowadays satellites too. Even several centuries ago you'd be sure of it.

Would you believe someone who said

“There’s an extra continent in the Pacific Ocean, exactly the same shape as Australia, and NASA is hiding this from the rest of the world. All sailors and pilots who tell the rest of the world about it are murdered.”

And they give this alleged satellite photograph as “proof”?

Yet you can’t disprove this from direct experience - most of us have never sailed or flown over that remote area of the Pacific. We have no way to disprove it with our own eyes.

But we know there are thousands of people who have sailed across those waters - even before satellite photography, everyone in a region of the world with reasonable understanding of geography would know for sure that there aren’t any extra continents there. Even before the discovery of Antarctica, mariners knew the Pacific well enough so that they knew there were no extra large continents still to be discovered. Only tiny islands remained to be found. Now we have found all the small islands too.

It's the same with planets. If there was an extra planet in our solar system, inside of Neptune, it would be as obvious to astronomers as an extra continent the size of Australia in the Pacific would be to geographers. I'm talking here about a visible dry extra continent above the surface.

We know that because of the work of thousands of astronomers for centuries, and there are tens of thousands of astronomers right now, and hundreds of thousands of amateurs - like the sailors constantly criss crossing the Pacific, flying over it, the satellite operators etc.

In this section I've said "dry continent" because geologists say there may be an extra submerged continent, with New Zealand as part of what remains above the surface. That's not a case of finding a new continent, never visited by mariners before, however, but of having a new understanding of what we discovered long ago.

We can make discoveries like that in astronomy too. For instance the discovery of an ocean inside the tiny moon of Enceladus. We can't see inside these distant objects, and there are many mysteries to unravel there. For many of them, then all we know of a distant world may be a tiny single pixel of light in a photograph.

So, yes we can find out more about New Zealand and deduce that it is part of an ancient continent that has been thinned out through continental drift.

However, a new dry continent the size of Australia can’t suddenly appear in the middle of the Pacific. That would be magic. Similarly a planet can’t suddenly appear in our solar system from nowhere. Even small changes are noticed quickly. Sometimes comets approach the inner solar system and with all the amateurs and professionals looking at the sky for the smallest change in it, they are spotted many years before they get here.

re.

As an example this is Comet Siding Spring as observed by an infrared telescope.

The big fuzzy thing is a galaxy called NGC1316. This is a multiple exposure and the comet is that faint red patch.

You would need a telescope with a mirror at least 8″ in diameter (20 cms) to see it. This comet was never a naked eye object. It did a close flyby of Mars, passing at distance of a little over a third of the distance to the Moon. For a while, when its orbit wasn’t well known, there seemed to be a tiny chance it would hit Mars but astronomers soon found it would miss.

They discovered this tiny object, at most 800 meters in diameter, 22 MONTHS before its flyby of Mars. Because it's a comet, it has a fuzzy halo that makes it a bit larger than it would be otherwise. Still, that gives you an idea of how well we know our solar system, the inner part of it, that we find such small objects so far away.

You would not see anything. So you have to have the same trust you have of geographers, that astronomers are looking at the sky, hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers, and tens of thousands of professionals in just about every country world-wide. But it is rational to trust them.

It is not rational to trust someone who has never contributed anything to our understanding of astronomy, never discovered a single asteroid or comet, never helped track asteroids or comets, and quite possibly never even bothered to look for the real planets in the night sky. They say such absurd things that I think for instance David Meade probably doesn’t know how to find the pole star. Or if he does, he clearly doesn’t understand its significance.

These people are clowns, daft, really silly. Like someone professing to be an expert on sport who says that Usain Bolt won Wimbledon in 2008. If you had as much understanding of astronomy as you do of geography, you would just LOL at him and wonder how anyone could possibly say such daft things about our planets.

What's more, unlike the situation with geography - the whole night sky is visible to any of us to look at. Except of course that some of it is only visible from the other hemisphere. But there is nothing there that is only visible from the South pole, or the North pole, or only visible from a plane flying at high altitude above South America as this clown David Meade claims.

"This system is, of course, not aligned with our solar system’s ecliptic, but is coming to us from an oblique angle and toward our South Pole. This makes observations difficult, unless you’re flying at a high altitude over South America with an excellent camera. As it intertwines and approaches it, will come from our south and loop all the way to the extreme north, then come back south again as it exits our orbital path."

BS. Tosh, Nonsense. There's no part of the sky that you can only see when flying at high altitude above South America :).

You see the northern celestial pole from the entire northern hemisphere, and the southern celestial pole from the southern hemisphere. You can check this for yourself, for whichever hemisphere you live in.

So - you can't see the entire Earth and search for extra continents except by using satellite photographs. But you can see the entire night sky between you, if you have a friend in the opposite hemisphere. And all of us except those at the poles can see the celestial equator, where the sun and all the planets track across the sky.

So you can actually duplicate these observations for yourself and learn how astronomers in ancient times discovered the planets and track them. And by learning a bit of basic astronomy you can see why astronomers would just LOL at the idea of Nibiru any time from around the eighteenth century onwards.

Why David Meade Hasn’t “Predicted the Future Using Signs and Numerology”

He bases it all on “signs”. Do you think he could use “signs” such as occurrence of the number 33 in the Bible or his analysis of the pyramids to predict the solar eclipse and to tell you where to stand to watch it and how long it would last for your location, and whether you’d see a total or partial eclipse?

Would you go to him for advice on where to see the solar eclipse at all?

Of course not. He wouldn’t have a clue. His only way to predict the eclipse is to go to astronomy websites and look up what they say. So why would you think that he has the ability to predict the sudden appearance of a planet that no astronomer has ever seen on the day of the eclipse and it hitting Earth on the 23rd September?

Or would you go to him for any other type of disaster? Would you ask him to predict the path of Hurricane Irma so that you know when to evacuate? Scientists must have saved thousands, to millions of lives by warning people in advance - could he have done the same? Of course not. Numerology is no use at all for predicting natural disasters and helping people to prepare for them.

The reason he gives for the 23rd September date is because someone in a blog post worked out that this is a date when all the visible planets are so close to the Sun that they can’t be seen. Then because this also happens with Jupiter in the constellation of Virgo (not visible, so close to the sun that we won’t see this), then he says this means that it is a sign of a virgin giving birth and so, by some contorted logic, of the end of the world.

That’s not David Meade’s “calculation” but someone else who he just quotes and accepts everything they say without any questioning at all. For debunking see Debunked - an alignment of the visible planets behind the sun on 23rd September 2017 is a sign of the end of the world.

The constellations are just patterns of stars as seen from Earth. The stars are usually not connected with each other at all with some of them small stars close by and others large distant stars that may be a hundred times further away. It’s just a line of sight effect.

This video shows the stars of the big dipper seen from various angles

Different cultures have given them different names too. The ancient Chinese would have said the constellation of Virgo consisted of stars from the Turquoise Dragon of the East and of the “Three Enclosures”.

To understand what an “alignment” means here - well point at the Moon. Then your finger is aligned with the Moon. That's an alignment. The planets are far closer to us than the stars, and similarly just as your finger is sometimes between your eyes and the Moon, so also sometimes Jupiter is between Earth and the stars that make up the very very distant constellation of Virgo. It has no astronomical effects or significance. That's all it is.

And then, anyone can make up any story they like based around those names.

You can use “signs” to foresee anything. You could say “Because Jupiter will be in the constellation of Virgo and close to the sun in the sky, this means that there will be rainbows seen in the sky throughout the US on the 23rd September”.

Or “my favourite baseball team will have its best season ever this year”, or anything you like.

There is no need, apparently, for any causal connection between the “sign” and the thing that is supposed to be the result of this “sign”. So you can just say anything as the result.

But for many people, apparently, as soon as someone says ominously

“it’s a sign”

all critical thought goes out of the window. They say

“Oh, I see, it’s a sign, therefore what you say will happen must of course happen, how stupid I was not to see that before”.

That is a recipe to become gullible to anything any charlatan wants you to believe. Because “it’s a sign” can be used to prove anything from anything if you think that form of reasoning is valid.

E.g. -

“On September 23rd then Jupiter will pass through the constellation Virgo and she will be crowned by planets in Leo - so therefore a famous queen is going to give birth on that day and her child will be a great ruler who will unify the world”.

I’ve just taken the exact same “sign” but changed what it’s a prophesy of. You can play the same game yourself.

Just use association of ideas. What does it suggest to you? Then call that a “prophesy”. Nobody can say that you are more right, or wrong, than David Meade. Write a book that gets lots of sales and you may even be able to appear on talk shows explaining how you have proved that a famous queen is going to give birth to an illustrious child on 23rd September. You don’t know which one but you have totally proved that one of them will. So you would say on the talk show.

Who can say you are wrong, or right, if they believe in “signs”?

As for all the numbers that seem to link together, it is very easy to find all sorts of patterns in events, numbers, texts etc. That’s because there are so many ways to combine letters and numbers. Mathematicians sometimes do this for fun. For instance, there’s a famous puzzle to write all the numbers from 0 to 100 using four 4s. This puzzle dates back at least to the late nineteenth century. It was published in an book by W W Rouse Ball in 1882, and earliest mention in print goes back to 1881. Four fours

Here is an example

7 = (4 + 4) - (4/4)

Can you write every number from 0 to 10 in this way? What about writing all the numbers from 0 to 100 using four 4s plus mathematical operations such as addition, multiplication, subtraction, factorial, square root etc. To get as far as 100 requires some serious mathematical talent, but it can be done. Here are the solutions: Four 4’s puzzle. You can go further also.

This page goes up to 386. Representation of numbers with four 4's

It follows that if you have some text that has four 4s in it, you can use numerology to transform it to mean any number you like between 0 and 100, or indeed up to 386 and probably further too.

And here is a fun spoof of numerology, short exchange of emails after 9/11: Numerology and Numerology Parodies

Subject: Look at this: It's very strange....

The date of the attack: 9/11 - 9 + 1 + 1 = 11
September 11th is the 254th day of the year: 2 + 5 + 4 = 11
After September 11th there are 111 days left to the end of the year.
119 is the area code to Iraq/Iran. 1 + 1 + 9 = 11
Twin Towers - standing side by side, looks like the number 11
The first plane to hit the towers was Flight 11

I Have More.......

State of New York - The 11th State added to the Union
New York City - 11 Letters
Afghanistan - 11 Letters

The Pentagon - 11 Letters
Ramzi Yousef - 11 Letters (convicted or orchestrating the attack at the WTC in 1993)
Flight 11 - 92 on board - 9 + 2 = 11
Flight 77 - 65 on board - 6 + 5 = 11

Dave's response:

Oh my God! How worried should I be? There are 11 letters in the name "David Pawson!" I'm going into hiding NOW. See you in a few weeks.

Wait a sec .. just realized "YOU CAN'T HIDE" also has 11 letters! What am I gonna do? Help me!!! The terrorists are after me! ME! I can't believe it!

Oh crap, there must be someplace on the planet Earth I could hide! But no.."PLANET EARTH" has 11 letters, too!

Maybe Nostradamus can help me. But dare I trust him? There are 11
letters in "NOSTRADAMUS."

I know, the Red Cross can help. No they can't... 11 letters in "THE RED CROSS," can't trust them.

I would rely on self defense, but "SELF DEFENSE" has 11 letters in it, too!

Can someone help?

Anyone? If so, send me email. No, don't... "SEND ME EMAIL" has 11 letters....

Will this never end? I'm going insane! "GOING INSANE???" Eleven letters!!

Nooooooooooo!!!!!! I guess I'll die alone, even though "I'LL DIE ALONE" has 11 letters.....

Oh my God, I just realized that America is doomed! Our Independence Day is July 4th ... 7/4 ... 7+4=11!

~Dave

PS. "IT'S BULLSHIT" has 11 letters also.

Then you also get coincidences too. For instance

US crude oil imports from Norway strongly correlate with the number of drivers killed in collision with a railway train,
World non commercial space launches strongly correlates with the number of sociology degrees awarded in the US.
Divorce rate in Maine strongly correlates with per capita consumption of margarine.

If you have enough data you can find numerous coincidences of that sort. See 15 Insane Things That Correlate With Each Other

So now hopefully you can be a bit less gullible when you see a page like this?

“4. First contact is in the state of Oregon, the 33rd state in the USA. The last contact is in South Carolina on the 33rd parallel. This eclipse happens on day 233 of the year. If the Revelation 12 sign is valid, then the eclipse is also 33 days before September 23, 2017. Jesus is thought to have been 33 when He died.”

“5. Just for fun: It is 99 years (3 x 33) since the last eclipse to go coast-to-coast in the US, in 1918. From September 23, 2017 (Revelation 12 sign) to the end of the year, December 31, 2017 is 99 days (or 3 x 33). The number of days from the 1918 eclipse to the August 21 eclipse are 26,234 days. (2+6+2+3+4 = 17; 2017?). From August 12, 2017, the date of the Charlottesville Virginia “State of Emergency” declared to the August 21, 2017 Great Solar Eclipse is 9 days (3+3+3) and the dates are also mirrored – 12 and 21.”

“33 has a special relation to earthquakes because the Richter Scale uses the number 33. Each whole number that goes higher on the scale is 33 times more intense than the whole number below it. (Keep this in mind for a special treat below!)”

The August 21, 2017 Eclipse – 33+ Fascinating Facts

Do you think they could use such methods to predict the solar eclipse? Or anything astronomical? Why believe you can use such methods to predict that a planet will suddenly appear during the eclipse and then hit Earth 33 days later on 23rd September?

If you follow these people, you will never cease to be scared that the world is about to end. There is always a sign of some sort that someone uses to predict that the world will end a few months or weeks into the future.

Here are some past examples

There are many more.

And now this one:

Debunked - an alignment of the visible planets behind the sun on 23rd September 2017 is a sign of the end of the world.

If you believe in signs, and take these “prophets” seriously, that would mean you will be scared the world will end at least a dozen times a year, probably more often.

If I debunked all the red top tabloid / Before It’s News stories, and the numerous end of world videos that pop up probably several times a week on YouTube, I’d be writing full time, just about every day doing nothing but debunking probably.

PATTERNS IN CLOUDS AND DIRT

You have probably all seen faces in dirt, in clouds, etc. It’s the same thing. The human eye is fantastically good at spotting patterns - to the extent that when there is no pattern to be found, it still sees things.

That probably helped back in the day when the pattern might be a saber tooth tiger. It’s better to be scared of a tiger several times when nothing happens than to not react on the one occasion when it really is a saber tooth tiger. Or a cave lion.

Though actually - seems that perhaps ancient humans weren’t that scared of lions. They got close enough to them to paint them in relaxed poses like this:

THIS IS A SIGN - LIKE CHICKEN LITTLE TREATING AN ACORN FALLING ON HIS HEAD AS A SIGN THAT THE SKY WOULD COLLAPSE

The words “This is a sign” in this context usually means:

“I noticed something strange and therefore I’m completely sure, indeed adamant, that some completely unrelated strange thing is going to happen like the sky falling on my head”

With Chicken Little there was some excuse, something did fall on his head. It was just an acorn but he was little and not very accustomed to things like acorns. In this case though, it is just a “sign” which has no connection with anything, the connection just made up out of thin air like Frigg spinning fog in the clouds except there isn’t even any fog to spin.

Viking goddess Frigg spinning clouds

CROSSING SITES OFF YOUR LIST OF PLACES TO TRUST ABOUT SUCH STORIES

So - I hope based on this you can now cross the Express and the Daily Star off your list of papers to pay any attention to on these matters? They don’t check a story. They can publish a story based on anonymous facebook comments (published in the story but they don't say who they are quoting, just say "someone said on facebook ...") or a YouTube video by an unnamed uploader.

They are well known in the UK as the “red top tabloids” that often publish sensationalist and even hoax stories. It’s like every day is April Fool’s day. But they don’t give any clues to tell you which articles are the “April Fools”.

I'm sure they are reliable on some things. Their sports news, for instance, and obituaries. A newspaper would be in serious trouble if it published fake obituaries. But they are not reliable in this area. They publish numerous fake doomsday stories.

This is a rational thing to do, to cross them off your list. Once a news site publishes fake news without checking it, then it is rational to distrust it in this topic area. You can no longer rely on it for such stories. There are many sites that regularly publish stories prophesying that the world will end based on “signs”.

Indeed if a “news” source publishes an article claiming to use “signs” to predict an astronomical event - or mentions Nibiru at all - except to debunk it of course - that by itself is enough to cross it off your list of reliable sources in astronomy.

Comparing How David Meade Says he Found a New Planet With How Astronomers Do It

This is one of the telescopes the astronomers are using to search for a planet way beyond Neptune: the Subaru telescope with a mirror 8.2 meters (26 feet) in diameter - the mirror alone is as big as two story house.

Subaru Telescope - one of several big telescopes used in this search.

This is how David Meade is telling us to search for planets:

Photo from here: PxHere

He says we should also use this:

All Gizah Pyramids

And this:

Open Bible

Here are some of the discoveries made by astronomers - these are just the round worlds they have found so far in our solar system:

The round worlds in the solar system: An updated graphic

In addition they have found

700,000+ asteroids and other “minor planets” in our solar system previously and many comets.

David Meade has found

O objects previously

Now do you still think David Meade has discovered a new planet?

This 23rd prediction thing is not particularly Christian!

It's just a rag bag of lots of things. Zecheria Sitchin based it on his "translations" of the Sumerian tablets. So he didn't think of it as to do with the Bible. Nancy Lieder thought it was ETs talking to her via an organic implant in her brain. That's not very Christian is it?

Then alignments of pyramids - that ties it in with the Egyptian religion which again is nothing to do with Christianity.

This is Anubis the god associated with death, mummification and the afterlife in Egyptian mythology. Do you believe in Anubis? If not, why pay any attention to alignments of chambers inside pyramids? What has that got to do with Christianity?

For that matter why would the Egyptians design the Great Pyramid of Giza so that the chambers align to fulfill a Christian prophecy that would be made 2500 years later, and then deciphered by David Meade another 2000 years after that using passages from the Bible? How does that make any sense?

It is just a case of grabbing some lines from the Bible and mixing them in with all the other stuff. It's not really that Christian at all. And the Bible of course doesn't have any future dates.

As far as the Bible talks about the future, the most natural reading is that it's talking about the first century AD. At any rate, that is what would be the main concern of those who listened to Jesus and the first apostles. That’s why it is entirely reasonable for Christians to read the book of Revelation and other passages in the Bible as talking about the persecution that Christians faced in the first century AD and events to do with that.

And the Bible of course warns about false prophets. Most branches of Christianity warn against false prophets.

No matter what these people say to you - the Bible does not have a passage in it predicting the end of the world when Jupiter enters the constellation Virgo simultaneously with the Sun and with other planets in Leo .

That's something that happens every so often anyway. Previously on Sept 24 1827, September 6, 1483, September 5 1293 and September 14, 1056.

What the Bible has is an enigmatic long passage about a lady appearing in the heavens with the sun, stars and moon. "Appears", not "always there" as it would be for a constellation.

She then gives birth - how would a constellation give birth? Then amongst other adventures, her child is snatched out of the grasp of a great red dragon (Satan) by God who cares for him, and she goes off into a desert for three years (1021 days) and is looked after by God. Have you ever heard of a constellation giving birth? Can a constellation wander about in a desert? You can read the whole story here.

He has no support from any Christian churches AFIAK.

That’s true also of the ones that take the book of Revelation as talking about a future event in reality - they also warn against this sort of thing. Here for instance is an article by one of them: Calm Down! The World Isn't Ending on Sept. 23

Recent history is littered with more of these embarrassing predictions. It hasn't been that long since Edgar Whisenant, a Christian layman, wrote 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988. Millions of believers bought that paperback book. Other Christians have made similar predictions—such as the Y2K scare in 1999 or Harold Camping's infamous warning that the world would end on May 21, 2011.

End-times date-setting hinders the cause of Christ. It's wrong-headed and irresponsible for any Christian to tell an unbeliever when Jesus is coming back or when the world will end. That's not the message we were commissioned to preach. Dates and deadlines don't have the power to save souls—only the gospel can do that.

When we share Christ with others, we don't need to provide a date for His Second Coming. Instead, we should tell them about the miracle of Calvary and remind them: "Today is the day of salvation" (2 Cor. 6:2). Hundreds of thousands of people die every day without Jesus, whether or not He returns in their generation. This alone should motivate us to avoid foolish distractions and false prophecies so we can get busy with the task of evangelism.

Our job is to preach the good news—not the bad news!

All the storms, floods, fires, earthquakes, riots, political tension, terrorism and nuclear attacks have put fear and anxiety in people's hearts today. But the answer to all this bad news is not a doomsday prediction; the answer is Jesus, who gives us supernatural peace so we can live securely in a chaotic world

That’s by Lee Grady who is a minister of the International Pentecostal Holiness Church

I think the Jehovah’s Witnesses are the only major branch of Christianity that actually issue predictions of the end of the world.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses forecast the end of the world in 1878, 1881, 1914, 1918 and 1925, 1975 and then "before the end of the 20th century". When each date failed they then started a new one, saying that the previous prediction had been fulfilled "in part". They still think the world will end in the near future but don't give a date any more.

It's all based on the passage "This generation will by no means pass away until all these things happen" from Matthew 24:34. They now take this as applying to Jehovah's witnesses that were anointed at the time of the 1914 war and the ones who were anointed before all of those passed away - and say that the world will end before all of those in turn pass away. There, "anointed" means Jehovah's witnesses that claim to have had a personal revelation of Jesus.

See video here. So - that is a major religious group that still thinks that the world will end in the near future and though they don't give a date, they do give a kind of "fuzzy date".

Of course the world never ends on those dates. But that doesn’t seem to phase them. If you are a Jehovah’s Witness - I wouldn’t presume to tell you that your religion is mistaken on this. You have your way to handle it. But this is not a prediction by them anyway so I doubt if they give it any thought.

The Mormons and the Seventh-day Adventist Church are also of the view that their days are the “last days” but I don’t think they forecast any dates.

Again this is not a prediction by them either. He doesn’t claim to belong to any of these apocalyptic branches of Christianity.

Not to put too fine a point on it, he is none of these, at least he doesn't claim to be, nor do any of them say that he is a prophet of God either or that he has insight into the future.

So he has no religious support.

He is just a meddler and bullshitter who is mixing together passages from the Bible along with all this other nonsense about pyramids and this Nibiru myth and all the baggage that comes along with it. He is just a bullshitter.

For anyone else, there’s nothing Christian about it.

Amongst Christians, there's a wide range of views on how to interpret the book of Revelation, summarized in "From Adam to Armageddon: A Survey of the Bible", page 178 as

"A view that Revelation must be understood in the context of its own time and the events symbolized in its pages as having already taken place.
" A view that only a portion of the revelations have occurred and that the work offers clues to the remaining portion of human history.
"A view that the book is best understood spiritually, and no attempt should be made to interpret it in the context of history.
" A view that the book is prophetic and its prophecies are yet to be completely fulfilled.""

The idea of a literal Armageddon is the fourth of those common ways of interpreting the Bible.

The book of Revelation was added to the Bible at quite a late date. It was originally regarded as heretical by some of the early Christians.

As the author of "From Adam to Armageddon" says

"Regardless of whether Revelation holds the secret of the time and place that history as we know it will end, it holds the view that how one lives matters greatly. That alone makes it of value for those who use it as an authority for their lives.

"Its vision may have been intended primarily to support Christians facing death for their first century faith, but it has served a much broader purpose for continuing Christianity. A book of comfort and devotion, it has called people to faithfulness over the years, while assuring them of the faithfulness of the God it proclaims."
(From Adam to Armageddon: A Survey of the Bible - page 180 )

So, it seems it is intended primarily as a message of hope, originally written for Christians who faced death as a result of their faith and now a general message of hope to Christians in trouble.

That's why the view 1, that the events described in the book of Revelation have already taken place is also a reasonable view to take, After all, how would it be a message of hope to prophesy to Christians of the first century AD about events that would happen 2000 years into their future?

Or indeed the view 3, that it is best understood spiritually.

In both cases it has no future predictive power since it either describes events of the first century AD, or it is meant to be taken spiritually, as a message of hope, with no intention of prophecy of actual events in the world.

Many Christians do take it in those ways.

If you need to follow this up further for your own religious grouping you need to talk to whoever it is you follow and respect - your minister, your priest, whatever.

For more on this also, see my Debunked - The world will end because the Bible (or some other sacred book) says so

Taking the apocalyptic statements literally

"This generation will by no means pass away until all these things happen" from Matthew 24:34

The most natural interpretation here, since Jesus was talking to the people of his time, is that the world was going to end in their own lifetime. Is it likely that by “this generation” they would have understood him to mean a generation 2000 years into their future?

Despite all the various readings that people like the Jehovah’s witnesses use to try to interpret it differently, that's the most natural interpretation of all. I don’t mean that disrespectfully.

Since we are still here and the world didn't end within the lifetime of the people listening to Jesus, then if you think of the Bible as the “word of God”, it has to be interpreted in some other way. So all the rest of it is based on various later authors’ ideas of other ways to read it.

Challenge to prove that it isn't real

Those of us who debunk this are often challenged to "prove it isn't real". We are told "Until you disprove it I'll continue to believe it".

Well you can of course believe anything you like. Believe in the tooth fairy if you like. But before someone can give proof that it isn't real, you have to know what it is that "it" is supposed to be that they are supposed to debunk.

If "Nibiru" had a calculated orbit - not just a sketch of an oval on a piece of paper - but a real orbit, then it would be easy to show it isn't there. If they ever gave a location in the sky to look for it, again it would be easy.

But they don't. They say "photograph the sun and you will see it sometimes at sunset or sunrise". Or you may spot it beside the Moon. Or you may spot it appear momentarily in the East as the sun sets in the West. Or it may be north, or south. According to them it can appear anywhere in the sky. It can be any visual size from the size of the sun or moon to a star like spot.

If you say "I photographed the sun and it wasn't there" they say "Try again and you'll find it eventually" or they say "Look at all these photos - other people are seeing it - that you can't is your fault, you aren't looking properly".

It's dead easy as I said to check there isn't an extra bright object next to the sun, which is the usual way they describe it. To anyone with an astronomical background, this sounds like a star - a bright object next to the sun, supposed to be visually similar in size to the Sun or possibly a bit smaller - but they vacillate between calling it a star sometimes, and a planet at other times and at other times they say it is a whole solar system with many planets of its own. Anyway whatever it is supposed to be, just block out the sun with one finger and look above, below, to left, or to right. It's not there. That disproves that idea, that we have two suns, for most people. And you only have one shadow, not two.

But they say - Keep looking, you'll spot it eventually. How can you disprove something like that?

They may say they have co-ordinates - and point you at the coordinates of a distant object hundreds of light years away in Google Sky! The Peanut nebula, or this star:

If you ask for co-ordinates of Nibiru they are liable to give you the co-ordinates of 2MASS J05422123 2236471, the striking reflection nebula off the gas and dust around a very distant young "T-Tauri" type star.

It's easy to disprove that one. That's not a planet, it's a reflection nebula about a distant star.

But after you do that, they just ignore you, and come up with more and more of this bullshit.

It's just bullshit. Bullshit, because it is meaningless nonsense, is immune to disproof. How do you disprove bullshit? Whenever you say some part of the bullshit is false, they just waffle on with more bullshit and ignore what you said.

If you think there is some clear idea amongst all this, something real - try describing it as you would for a planet. Where in the sky do you think it is? How bright is it? Is it as bright as the Sun, as bright a the Moon, as bright as Venus at its brightest, as bright as Sirius, or is it a faint star?

Which constellation is it in right now? Which constellation was it in last month? Which constellation was it in last year?

Try answering those questions and you may, just possibly, begin to see that it is all indeed just bullshit.

Why It Is Absolutely Fine Not to Listen to Bullshitters

Brian Cox referred to Nibiru as “this imaginary bullshit planet” - and those are well chosen words. Here is Harry Frankfurt's definition of "Bullshit". For the bullshitter, “… he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, … except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose."

A lot of the Nibiru and doomsday nonsense is BS in exactly this sense:

Short summary:

Liars need to at least think they know what the truth is, in order to lie. What they conceal from us is the truth.
Honest people also need to think they know what the truth. is to tell the truth.
Bullshitters don’t need to know what the truth is, or think about it, or care about it. What they conceal from us is that they don’t know or care whether what they say is true or false.

First video:

And a quote from the end of that extract:

"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it.

When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false.

For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly.

He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose."

From On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt, Princeton University.

(It’s from an earlier era when it was normal to use “he” throughout referring to both men and women)

BULLSHITTERS ARGUING THAT YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM

Within a sentence or two they say some BS thing such as that IRAS discovered Nibiru in 1983, or that Robert Harrington found Nibiru and was murdered to keep it secret etc. Things that you can disprove for yourself easily by just following up the cites in the debunking articles.

You can use my bullshit tester to catch them out. Nibiru Bullshit Tester - How to check if they know anything about astronomy.

The mark of a bullshitter is that they just don’t care about such things. They say anything that forwards their purpose, even if it can be disproved with a one or two minute Google search.

But then they will say, or you might feel that

“You have to listen to us otherwise you are biased and only hearing one side of the story”

That is one of the main ways they get you caught up with it, they spout BS and then say you have to listen to their BS because if not you are only hearing one side of the case. They may also say that everyone else is lying or mistaken. So then you go on to read page after page, or watch video after video in an effort to hear both sides of the story.

And because they are bullshitters and don’t know or understand or care about astronomy at all - the result is you get more and more confused. You end up thinking you don’t understand anything about astronomy. What is actually happening is that you have been unable to make any sense of bullshit.

That is normal. Bullshit doesn’t make sense and you don’t have to try to make it into anything sensible.

That is their job, not yours. If they say BS - then it’s them who have failed and who have misunderstood - not you!

Also, there is no need to listen to anyone. That’s for you to decide, whether someone else is worth listening to. If someone tells you that you have to listen to them - that’s actually something of a warning sign most likely. They are probably bullshitting if they say that, especially in this topic area

YOU DON’T HAVE TO LISTEN TO BOTH SIDES OF A BS ARGUMENT

Especially, you are not biased if you click away from bullshit. Once you realize that these people are talking BS, then it is not only okay to click away - that is the natural and logical and rational reaction. Indeed that’s what just about anyone does who hasn’t been caught up in this morass.

It’s rather like when you find dog pooh in a street. It is natural and normal to step around and avoid it. If you have the right tools with you, then the right thing to do is to pick it up and throw it in a bin.

There are many reputable lists of fake sites now. Wikipedia has a page which compiles several of them together into a single list. List of fake news websites - Wikipedia. But of course that is not a comprehensive list of all the BS on the web, and we will never have such a comprehensive list. It deals with some (not all) of the worst ones but it is good to develop a bit of a BS detector yourself.

But as well as that there are many sites that publish a mix of accurate and fake news. The British “red top tabloids” like the Daily Express, Daily Star etc are famous for this. We have millions in the UK who read these papers every day. It’s what they want to read and I think most of them realize that a fair bit of the news there is fake or at least sensationally exaggerated.

So - although a fake news site list won’t list the Daily Express - it is fake news when it comes to Doomsday Stories. It’s like April Fool’s day, over and over, except they don’t say “You’ve been fooled” at the end.

So - just treat any stories like this on the Daily Express site as fake news. That’s basically what it is.

As for learning how to do it yourself, well you can just take a look at some of the stories on a website.

If the stories in the topic area that interests you are bullshit, well it’s perfectly rational and reasonable to cross them off your list of news sites that you visit, on that topic, or indeed, at all. There are far too many news sites anyway to visit them all, even all the top ones, every day. There’s no obligation at all to visit any of the fake or bullshit news sites or blogs, not just every day, but ever.

Now a website or paper may be BS in some topic areas and not in others. It may be 100% reliable on matters of sport, say, and as for obituaries, I don’t think even the Daily Express would publish a fake obituary.

I’d say actually that if the website has a story about Nibiru, or Hercobulus or Wormwood, and it is not a debunking site, that’s plenty of reason to write it off ones list of reliable sources for information on astronomy. That’s not bias, that’s just getting rid of BS.

Generally, yes, it is good to hear both sides. But people who write BS take advantage of that as a way to get you to listen to them. And you don’t have to read Bullshit.

NO NEED TO READ BOTH SIDES OF EVERY CONSPIRACY THEORY EVEN IF THEY CHECK THEIR SOURCES

Indeed you don’t have to read both sides of a case either even when they do check their sources, and are reasonably sincere. As an example, you don’t have to read both sides of every conspiracy theory you come across.

If you carefully read both sides of every conspiracy theory that’s out there you can easily spend most of your life just reading conspiracy theories. There are better ways to spend ones life. So, I think even for the ones that seem well sourced, it’s entirely reasonable to say

“I have read enough for myself, and just don’t find it credible. I have better things to do with my life, so I’m not going to bother to follow up that one”.

Or even

“Not another conspiracy theory! I’m tired of them and can’t be bothered reading it.”

Again that’s not being biased. That’s just deciding how you choose to spend your life. There is no obligation even to read enough on the latest conspiracy theory to know what the theory is.

CHOOSING HOW TO SPEND YOUR LIFE

Even if it is some major political decision, say, about whether the UK should stay in the European Union in the recent BREXIT vote here in the UK, or who you think should be president in the US. Well you don’t have to take part in politics.

Democracy depends on enough people voting to be a reasonable gauge of public opinion. But it is not an obligation on anyone to vote on every or any issue.

Voting is voluntary, which means, that if you don’t want to vote or even think about a political issue, or read anything on it, or listen to anyone’s views or evidence or ideas about it, that’s up to you.

It’s all entirely up to you. If anyone says you have to think about it, or have to investigate it, or have to vote, they are way out of line there.

Again it is a matter of choosing how to spend your time. If you think your time is better spent on music, on poetry, on gardening, on having a good time with your friends, well that is what makes us civilized, that people are able to do such things.

NO NEED TO READ NEWS AT ALL

Many people who are scared of Nibiru tell me that they feel they have to compulsively keep reading the stories. But from their descriptions, it doesn’t sound much like OCD.

The main difference is that for I think just about everyone who contacts me about Nibiru so far, they feel that they have an obligation which comes from outside. They think that they have an obligation to society, almost, to read these stories and watch the videos. But you don’t have to do this at all. You are getting scared. Even once you know they are nonsense they still scare you.

So, take a break from it. Stop reading altogether, or at least have a holiday from it. The world will continue spinning as you do so.

Indeed, this applies not just to fake news, hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and bullshit stories. You don’t need to read news at all. Why not have an occasional holiday from reading news altogether?

INDEED - YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO GO ON RETREAT FOR YEARS ON END IF YOU WANT TO - NOT SPEAK TO ANYONE, NOT READ ANYTHING

Indeed some people go into retreat for years on end. I’m a Buddhist so I’ll share a story from a Buddhist tradition, but it’s the same in many other traditions, e.g. Christian retreats, that you can go on retreats, shorter ones or longer retreats.

Here is a video about a Buddhist nun who spent many years in a cave, not only not reading the news, but not even speaking to anyone. It’s Tenzin Palmo and she wrote a book about her life, Cave in the Snow. Here she is talking about it,

Or if you prefer to read it as a story - a shorter account of her life here on the Guardian: 'I spent 12 years in a cave'

These retreatants feel they are doing something worthwhile. When you are in a retreat in a cave, you won’t vote, or listen to political speeches or read the news. When you come out of your retreat, there may be a new president or political leader of their party, there may have been wars, revolutions of technology, new countries, a changed political landscape. The priorities of three years or ten years earlier may be all forgotten.

There may be many things that they could have voted for, surveys they could have responded to, emails they could have written in favour of various good causes.

There will be famous actors they have never heard of, athletes who have won gold medals, sports teams that have won championships, even wars and other world events they have never heard of. There are many things they could have done with their life instead of going on retreat, including helping others in many different physical ways.

But if you go on retreat - you aren’t saying that you think everyone should go on retreat. You are not undermining democracy. You are not undermining the Olympics or the World Cup or the World Snooker championships or the yearly Cheese Rolling Competition, or whatever it is that is your thing - or the work of the many people who help others in so many ways, doctors, nurses, charity workers.

You just think that you yourself, at that particular stage of your life, should go on retreat. There can be many reasons for that. Again that’s one of the things that makes us civilized, that some people can go on retreat. And in societies or social groups where retreats are normal, people who support them as they do that also feel that their retreat is a worthwhile thing to do, too.

When meditators go on retreat, then generally they are doing it not just for themselves, but for everyone. They are creating a space in their life and in everyone’s lives indeed, for not just themselves but for everyone, by being in retreat. It’s almost like they are creating an opening out to oxygen and fresh air for all beings by finding space to go on retreat. At least that’s how they think about it.

Of course it is not for everyone to go on retreat.

However, perhaps reading about the lives of retreatants can give you inspiration to realize that yes, it is okay to have a holiday from reading the news every day, if it makes you scared and anxious. It is absolutely okay to find ways to create a bit of space in your life.

Not necessarily sitting in a cave, meditating :). That’s a path for very few people and never has been something that more than a few people follow.

Just something else that is not obsessively reading bullshit news about Nibiru. Whatever it is that you find helps you to get a bit of the oxygen and breathing space that meditators get when they go on a long retreat. Again not just for yourself either, for everyone.

You can find that space and openness in just a moment, whatever it is that brings that space into your life.

This is a new version of my Debunked: You should always read both sides of the argument about Nibiru - or indeed anything - added the extra material about Harry Frankfurt's definition of "Bullshit" and did some minor rewrites.

This article starts with a plea to journalists, in a section about the effects these stories are having on people that contact us. Then I do the debunking in later sections.

Plea to journalists - the heartbreaking effects of your stories on the vulnerable

I get contacted by numerous people who are really really scared by this, and others who field their questions report the same. You can also see for yourself from their comments on the two online petitions, here, have a look at the comments to get an idea of the scale of the problem. Click “Join Conversation” to see more of them.

Also from the discussions in our online facebook groups such as Doomsday Debunked.

All of us have experience of people who come to us saying they have felt suicidal in the past about this. Sometimes they may say they are still feeling suicidal. Joy gone from their life. Crying and crying. School children who can't concentrate on their studies because they are scared the world will end. Young adults with children who are afraid to go out of their house, full of anxiety, every day, they wake up scared of the world ending. Others who are just so anxious that it's interfering with their life plans, distancing them from their partners / friends / relatives. It's seriously messing up their lives. And even when they find out that it is all a hoax and nonsense, this still has impacts on them, even months to years later. That they find themselves just scared, upset, without really knowing why. And they can't stop these scared thoughts running through their minds even when they know it is nonsense.

It's heartbreaking. These are folk that were leading normal happy lives before. It's not anything to do with pre-existing mental conditions, because they almost invariably say their lives were just fine before they read the stories or watched the videos and they wish they could roll back to before that happened. Often they are on medication and getting therapy for anxiety and depression. It is all just caused by this relentless "propaganda" about "Nibiru" and the end of the world that they face in certain news feeds and video channels.

Journalists - please stop this nonsense! Give some thought to these scared people. From the messages I and others who try to help them are getting, it's not at all impossible that some children or young adults (maybe with young children themselves) have actually committed suicide over this.

It's well established in the UK that it is okay for journalists to publish sensationalist and even fake news in the likes of the Daily Express and the Sun, and there are millions of people who pay to read their articles. But in my view this goes well beyond the bounds of acceptable and entertaining sensationalist journalism!

This chap is totally non notable, the only thing that makes this notable is that the Daily Express, especially, and other red top tabloids have been pushing his book over and over, all summer. That would be no problem except for these knock on effects that this particular type of story is causing vast amounts of suffering and misery amongst vulnerable people.

Your metrics probably tell you that these articles perform very well. Lots of clicks on the titles in Google news. Get to the top of search results. Lots of audience retention. I get told by those who contact me that they find themselves reading and re-reading these articles obsessively. It's because they are scared, it's because you are scaring some of them out of their wits. I'm sure that's not your intention!

Please journalists, debunk rather than promote these ideas! You can get an idea of how to do it from my articles, which are based on many conversations helping these scared people to realize that they have been "had" and that it is all a hoax and nonsense. You can see my other recent article as well: The World Is NOT Going To End On 23rd September - Or October - David Meade&Nibiru - FAKE PROPHET ALERT

Here is David Morrison, let him have the last word in this article. This is from 2012 but nothing has changed in the story since then except the "prophesied" date:

Also if you want to help make a difference, you can sign and share these two videos - and do have a look at the comments to get an idea of the scale of the problem. Click “Join Conversation” to see more of them.

And if you need help - well message me of course and comment on any of these posts - and do take a look at our facebook group Doomsday Debunked.