"Awake, O sword, against my shepherd,
against the man who is close to me!"
declares the LORD Almighty.
"Strike the shepherd,
and the sheep will be scattered,
and I will turn my hand against the little ones.
In the whole land," declares the LORD ,
"two-thirds will be struck down and perish;
yet one-third will be left in it.
This third I will bring into the fire;
I will refine them like silver
and test them like gold.
They will call on my name
and I will answer them;
I will say, 'They are my people,'
and they will say, 'The LORD is our God.' "Zechariah 13:7-9
As a child in a Bahá'í household, I heard a lot about the last days from a Bahá'í perspective. I'd heard the Zechariah prophecy paraphrased many times, only I'd heard it was a prophecy of Shoghi Effendi. This was during the Cold War, so the idea of entire populations perishing was a commonly accepted outcome. I remember that my father, a chiropractor, even predicted that this horrible unforseen calamity, as Bahá'ís know it, would occur in 1981. It was a scary time to be a child.
Little did I know that at the same time there was another Bahá'í chiropractor by the same name (Jensen) making similar predictions:on a brisk April 29 morning in 1980, Dr. Leland Jensen, a chiropractor and leader of a small religious sect called the Baha'is Under the Provisions of the Covenant, led his devoted followers into fallout shelters in Missoula, Montana, to await the end of the world. Within the first hour, Jensen believed, a full third of the Earth's population would be annihilated in a nuclear holocaust of fire and fallout. Over the course of the next twenty years most of the remaining population would be ravaged by conquest, war, famine, and pestilence.
Michael Shermer, How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science, page 192
What I find interesting about this Leland Jensen episode, other than the curious parallels in my family, is the way that the BUPC handled the failure of Jensen's prophecies. It reminds me of the rationalizations made by mainstream Baha'is over the failure of `Abdu'l-Bahá's prophecies of peace in the 20th Century and other such tests of faith:
Psychologists who studied Leland Jensen and his Baha'i sect ... discovered that when the end of the world came and went, they did not quietly disband and go home. Psychologist Leon Festinger applied his theory of cognitive dissonance to failed prophecy, and argued that the stronger one's commitment to a failing cause, the greater the rationalizations to reduce the dissonance produced by the disappointment. Thus, paradoxically, after the 1980 debacle in the bomb shelters, not only did Jensen and his followers not abandon the cause, they ratcheted up the intensity of furture predictions, making no less than 20 between 1979 and 1995! Jensen and his flock applied one or all of the following rationalizations: (1) the prophecy was fulfilled—spiritually; (2) the prophecy was fulfilled physically, but not as expected; (3) miscalculation of the date; (4) the date was a loose prediction, not a specific prophecy; (6) God changed his mind in order to be merciful; (7) predictions were just a test of members' faith.
Michael Shermer, How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science, page 202