TLC,
Interesting article about NESS energy and Hayseed Stevens in the September/October 1999 issue of Skeptic Magazine. The article is by Dr. Donald U. Wise, professor emeritus of geology at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Dr. Wise attended Hayseed's presentation on January 8, 1998. Here are some interesting points - here are some brief quotes from that excellent article:
1) The Prophecy Club has a network of local chapters with its headquarters in Topeka, Kansas. It is a fundimentallist Christian organization with television programs scheduled on 8 stations. It also has radio programs on 58 AM stations and 6 shortwave stations as well as on six satellite channels.
2) This particular presentation was one of 12 being made from Boston to Spokane by "Hayseed" Stevens in January and February 1998. The newsletter lists fifty additional seminars to be taught across the nation by four other speakers during this time period, each charging $7 per person admission. Advertised seminar subjects include how America is being taken ofver as part of a "New World Order", prophecies of financial crisis, secret codes embedde in the Bible, and prophecy warning about governmental plans concerning the use of UFOs to 'destroy the religions of the world and switch them to the religion of the Antichrist'.
3) Joning approximately 150 other people, I paid at the door and entered the rented lecture room at a local convention center. At the back of the room were five sales tables laden with vidio tapes, recordings, and a variety of pamphlets of prophecy and doom. From later in the article: The more immediate financial aspects of the evening were well-covered starting with the $7 admission charge ($7 x 150 = $1,050) to cover rental of the room, etc. The plethora of video tapes for sale, mostly at $20 to $40, certainly met their production costs, as did several thin pamphletsw selling at $5 to $10 each. Considering the admission cost it was surprising to see an additional offering with helpers passing collection plates through the audience. The number of $10 and $20 checks in thos plates was impressive. Following the mid-evening break, Stevens proceeded to extol the great works done by the Prophecy Club and to propose htat this warranted an unheard-of second special collection. He noted that no one should feel any pressure to contribute and that this offering should be made from the heart. He made a show of announcing his personal check for $1,000. As the plate was passed this second time, he kept rephrasing the theme that this offer should be voluntary, that there was no peer pressure to do God's work, and so on. I watched in amazement as people around me wrote additional checks and put more $10 and $20 bills into the plate.
3) Stevens described the origin of this Israeli oil bonanza by using a version of geology straight out of creation science. A large 1992 poster from the Creation Evidence Museum was displayed with the title 'Creation in Symphony' as Stevens gave glowing attribution of the work to his friend, the 'brilliant' creationist writer Carl Baugh. The prposed model involved a 6,000 year-old earth with a molten interior at 10,000 degrees. Floating above the molten interior and keeping the surface 'insulated' was a huge layer of hydrocarbons, the motehr lode of Earth's petrolium resources. Above this, and just below the crust was a layer of water in some kind of density inversion. Slow seepage of the water layer produced the humid jungle-like conditions of the Garden of Eden with its great vapor canopy. To create Noah's flood, God used an earthquake to rupture the crust and allow the trapped water layer to pour forth as the Biblical 'fountains of the deep'.
According to Stevens, that Dead Sea fault zone marks the boundary of the Earth's greatest tectonic plates. (In reality the fault is only a medium-scale plate boundary separating the African plate from the Arabian plate.) After the escape of the waters, the deep fracture tapped the mother lode layer of petrolium which bled upwards to form the asphalt and tar seeps in the region of Sodom and Gomorrah. According to Stevens's interpretation of prophecy, God originally intended all this oil to be the baszis of Israel's future riches and greatness. But unfortunately, the people became evil and undeserving so God caused the fault to move. The resulting friction ignited the oil and it exploded under Sodom and Gomorrah. Somehow the heat was so intense that it created 'and entirely new form of sulfur which meted ad 10,000 degrees and rained doen on those evil people as fire and brimstone'.
Regards,
John Sladek |
