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From The New York Post-
Even Jesus has been priced out of Manhattan.
In Riverdale, The Bronx, on the second highest peak in all five boroughs, sits a mansion fit for a king — and we don’t mean LeBron James.
The house, variously known as Chapel Farm, Fair Hill or Chapel Hill, was built in the 1920s for one special resident to live in: Jesus Christ.
The idea was, when Jesus returned to earth (via the 1 train, presumably), he would decamp to The Bronx and rule from this opulent, 17-room dwelling. It’s a promising sign for those living in the northernmost borough, which will apparently survive the wars, famine, disease, earthquakes and anarchy the Bible predicts to signal the end of days.
And soon, all this could be yours. It’s set to hit the market in February for $10 million.More here-
http://nypost.com/2015/12/27/mansion-built-for-jesus-is-on-the-market-for-10m/
From Aeon-
In December 2013, a hoax began circulating on the internet claiming that Pope Francis had called a Third Vatican Council that, among other things, purged a literal hell from Catholic doctrine. ‘This doctrine is incompatible with the infinite love of God,’ Francis purportedly said. ‘God seeks not to condemn but only to embrace… Hell is merely a metaphor for the isolated soul, which like all souls ultimately will be united in love with God.’ The piece quickly went viral on Facebook and other social media platforms – minus the element of parody. The remarks did not seem too out of line with the new Pope’s own attitude of embrace over condemnation.
This January, an article in the US online magazine Religion Dispatches offered some clues as to why the story took off so dramatically. ‘Millennials Invent New Religion: No Hell, No Priests, No Punishment’ went the title. The author, the Rev Candace Chellew-Hodge, described how her students at a community college in Columbia, South Carolina, when tasked with inventing a new religion, uniformly avoided ‘a concept of hell, or any form of punishment for not following the prescriptions of the religion’. When asked why they had avoided hell, one student replied that ‘Religion today is so ... judgmental.’ Chellew-Hodge took this to mean that her students lacked a ‘full-featured understanding of religion’, and so overlooked ‘the core ideas of human suffering, the concept of discipline, and the very real threat of punishment’.
More here-
http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/why-has-the-idea-of-hell-survived-so-long/
Something different-
We know that the world isn't going to end on the 21st of December (or at least isn't more likely to end then than any other day), but it's always nice to remember that there's a firm precedent for the world not ending on schedule. It didn't end in 1844, when William Miller and Samuel S. Snow convinced the Millerites to give away all their possessions (resulting in the Great Disappointment). It didn't end with Y2K, and the Large Hadron Collider didn't suck us all into a black hole.
History is lousy with doomsday predictions, from the ancient Assyrians through this year's self-professed prophets of the endtimes. But while some preachers wait for the Rapture (the Western doomsday du jour) and other folks fear we've doomed ourselves with particle physics or nuclear technology, some apocalyptic predictions are a little stranger than others. Here are eight predictions that go beyond the Second Coming, with unlikely prophets, bizarre pseudoscience, and a few predictions that are way out there—even for doomsayers.
More here-
http://io9.com/5966908/8-of-the-weirdest-predictions-for-the-end-of-the-world?utm_source=io9.com&utm_medium=recirculation&utm_campaign=recirculation
From The New York Post-
