By Patrick
Scott Adams has some free advice:
If you ever decide to join a cult, the first thing you should ask about is the quality of their doomsday cave. A poorly constructed cave could kill you, and that would take most of the fun out of doomsday.
You should also look for a cult leader who has some specificity about the exact doomsday date. Otherwise you’re just sitting in a cave for an extra month for no good reason. I’d want the comet to strike earth a minute after I wiped my feet on the cave’s welcome mat. That way the people who got all of my worldly possessions wouldn’t have time to enjoy them.[...]
The big problem with picking a doomsday date is that it so obvious when you are wrong. For most other decisions, you can generally make a case for why your wrongness was really right. For example, you still hear people say Saddam had WMD but he did a good job of hiding them...But when the world doesn’t explode on Tuesday, it’s hard to make a case that it did. You have to go with something like “The comet was heading this way, but we prayed it off course. You’re welcome. Give me back my stuff.”
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2008/04/tips-for-joining-a-cult/218357/
