You may remember reading or hearing of the Korean Christian group who predicted that Christ was going to return on October 28, 1992, all Christians would be taken to heaven, and the rest of the world would enter the terrible catastrophes of the end times. Well, we're still here, and unless you count the presidential election which was held a month later as a terrible apocalyptic catastrophe, I don't see that the ordinary catastrophes were much worse than usual.

There's nothing new in this miscalculation of what we have come to call the second coming or the second advent of Christ. For centuries, Christians, especially those who belong to sectarian groups, have been attempting to use the scriptures to calculate the timing of the second coming, and always without success. This practice bega…