Anyone who thinks that Christians have cornered the market on gullibility should look here where you will find predictions by eminent prognosticators – many of them scientists – along the lines of:

What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?

Democracy will be dead by 1950. (John Langdon-Davies, A Short History of The Future, 1936)

The light bulb: Everyone acquainted with the subject will recognize it as a conspicuous failure. (Henry Morton, president of the Stevens Institute of Technology, on Edison’s light bulb, 1880.)

The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty—a fad. (The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Co., 1903.)

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible (Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist).

Who the hell wants to hear actors talk? (H. M. Warner, co-founder of Warner Bros)

Rockets are too far-fetched to be considered. (Editor of Scientific American)

The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine. (Ernest Rutherford, shortly after splitting the atom for the first time.)

Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality in 10 years. (1955)

X-rays will prove to be a hoax. (Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1883)

And I haven’t even started on failed global warming predictions. Take heart Harold Camping, compared to this bunch, you look pretty rational.