May 21: Doomsday, The Rapture, A.K.A The Day I Do My Laundry

Tomorrow is the big day, if you think 89-year-old California radio preacher Harold Camping is right, the world will end on May 21.  Set your watches or smartphones, Harold Camping’s prediction is that at 6:00 pm local time in each of the world’s regions — starting in New Zealand at 0600 GMT — the Rapture will happen.  The Rapture, when all true Christians will ascend into heaven and join their vengeful anti-socialist, homosexual hating, pro-gun loving God.

Camping bases his prediction on complex mathematical calculations comprehensible only to himself.  The Christian Science Monitor tried to figure it out:

Camping says that because Jesus was crucified on Friday, April 1, 33 AD, and that it takes exactly 365.2422 days for the earth to complete one orbit of the sun, we can conclude that, on April 1, 2011, Jesus was crucified exactly 722,449.07 days ago. Add 51 days to this to get to May 1, and you get a figure of 722,500.07.

Round that down to the nearest integer, and you get 722,500, which is an important number because it is the square of 5 x 17 x 10 . The number five, says Camping, represents atonement. Ten represents completeness, and 17 represents heaven. Multiply all these  together – twice – and you get 722,500. Therefore the apocalypse kicks off on Saturday, May 21.

Camping, a multimillionaire who runs one of the largest Christian radio networks in the world, made an earlier calculation that the End would come in September 1994. That obviously didn’t happen, but he’s convinced he’s got it right this time.

Jesus himself warned: “Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh” (Matthew 25:13).  So the guy they idolizes and pretend to follow told them they won’t know the date of Judgement. Yet for 2,000 years knuckleheads have been taking money from the faithful in the name of Biblical prophecy.

So what if the Rapture actually does take place on May 21?  Will all of the whining, hypocritical, literalist, fundamentalist Christians disappear from the face of the earth?  Can they take the radical fundamentalist Muslims and Jews with them, they all the same God, the God of Abraham.  They’ve killed in his name, oppressed their fellow human beings, acted belligerently in the pursuit of their own salvation, and made a mockery of the true wisdom contained in the Bible, the Koran, and the Torah.

I think the rest of us will get along quite well, once they’re all gone.

If Harold Camping is wrong again, can we seize his assets and give them to the poor.  Rather than obsessing about the hereafter, why not make the world a better place here and now, rather than howling about how much you want to leave it.

And for the record folks, the only true rapture I’ll acknowledge is Blondie’s…