You Must Be Joking: Judgment Day

But wait, you say!  I haven’t done my laundry yet, or been to Machu Picchu, or eaten every flavor of Ben and Jerry’s.  It can’t be the end of the world on Saturday.  That’s just uncool.

I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

Harold Camping, the president of Family Radio International and the source of this particular apocolyptastic prediction has predicted the end of days before.  His first “guaranteed” expiration date for humanity was in September of 1994.

Woops.

But he’s super serious this time.  His calculations are so fool-proof this round that, as he or any one of his followers will tell you, there is no Plan B.  It’s apocalypse or bust come May 21.  Apparently this is absolutely for sure, no kidding, the 100 percent positive day that “good” Christians (we suspect that means the ones that give Camping money) will get on God’s invisible escalator and be whisked up to heaven.  The rest of us get to hang around for another 153 days of hell on Earth until the end of the universe.

True believer, Kevin Brown, explained it to NPR like so:

“Starting in the Pacific Rim at around the 6 p.m. local time hour, in each time zone, there will be a great earthquake, such as has never been in the history of the Earth.”

“It’s just the horror of horror stories,” he continued, “and on top of all that, there’s no more salvation at that point.  And then, the Bible says it will be 153 days later that the entire universe and planet Earth will be destroyed forever.”

Hmmm… so the end of the world starts at 6 p.m. local time in the Pacific Rim?  As in the geological term referring to the entire parameter of the Pacific Ocean, including places like San Francisco and Beijing?

I hate to break it to you Kevin, but San Francisco is NOT in the same “local time” as Beijing.

I mean, not to nit-pick or anything.  Mostly because you don’t have to nitpick this prophecy to find the, urm, logic holes.  They’re right there in the middle, and they’re approximately the size of Australia.

Let’s start with the 6 p.m., local time deadline.  What, God couldn’t be bothered to do the whole thing at once?  Or maybe the almighty is trying to be nice.  Give everyone one last Saturday?  Why not midnight then?  Or noon?  If God is going to end the world scheduled rolling black out style, you’d think he or she would at least pick a nice symbolic number, wouldn’t you?  This 6 p.m. time has to be the most boring time for an apocalypse ever.

Then there’s the fact that most Biblical scholars would tell you that even when Jesus talked about the apocalypse in the Bible, he made it clear he had no idea when Judgment Day would come.  If the freakin’ Son of God doesn’t know when it’s happening, how did Harold Camping figure it out?

“I’ve crunched the numbers, and it’s going to happen,” Kevin Brown told NPR.

What numbers?  Apparently, there is a code in the Bible that reveals the timing of the end of days.  If you just do the math, you too can figure it out.  Of course, to get the code right, you have to read the whole thing.  That’s how Camping messed up and got his 1994 number the first time, apparently.

“I, at that time, had not gone through the Book of Jeremiah,” he explained to NPR, “which is a big book in the Bible that has a whole lot to say about the end of the world.”

Tough to decode the secret, end of the world code embedded in a big ole’ confusing book like the bible WHEN YOU HAVEN’T EVEN READ THE WHOLE THING.

The sad part of this story is the number of people who are ruining their lives over this kook’s half-assed math.  NPR’s story alone involved interviews with several people who have budgeted out their savings in order to spend every last penny to their name by this Saturday.

Boy is Sunday going to suck for them when they realize they’ve been had.  Of course, what’s going to happen to these poor people come Sunday isn’t funny at all.  Let’s just hope they’ve got friends and family who really are good Christians (or Muslims or Jews or Hindus or Buddists or Wicca or just plain old nice people) who will take them in and help them develop a Plan B for being stuck here in the real world with the rest of us.

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