My last blog post :(

Since the Rapture is happening this Saturday, May 21, and I doubt I’ll have time to write another post until then, looks like the earth will be destroyed and I won’t be around to write another blog post here. And if I survive the apocalypse, then all the Christians will have been sucked up to heaven and no one will be around to share their ideas about Christianity with me, so I’ll have nothing to write about. Or I’ll be whisked away up to heaven too and all my ponderings about God and the Universe will finally be answered. So thanks for reading, commenting, and supporting my search for the divine.

This potentially alarming (and fucking ridiculous) prediction comes from Christian radio host Harold Camping, who used his civil engineering background to feverishly compile calculations from the bible to arrive at this Saturday as the end of times. Or, as my friend Gary put it, he’s “cherry-picking random numbers from the bible, multiplying, adding, dividing, and hockey-pockey-ing them willy-nilly, until they come up with this date.” Camping claims this prediction to be 100% accurate: “I know it’s absolutely true, because the Bible is always absolutely true.” To see for yourself, here is the scientific method by which Camping predicting the date:

1. According to Camping, the number 5 equals "atonement", the number 10 equals "completeness", and the number 17 equals "heaven".
2. Christ is said to have hung on the cross on April 1, 33 AD. The time between April 1, 33 AD and April 1, 2011 is 1,978 years.
3. If 1,978 is multiplied by 365.2422 days (the number of days in a solar year, not to be confused with the lunar year), the result is 722,449.
4. The time between April 1 and May 21 is 51 days.
5. 51 added to 722,449 is 722,500.
6. (5 × 10 × 17)² or (atonement × completeness × heaven)² also equals 722,500.
Thus, Camping concludes that 5 × 10 × 17 is telling us a "story from the time Christ made payment for our sins until we're completely saved."
7. 722,500 days from Christ’s crucifixion would be this Saturday, May 21, 2011.

This prediction has become noticed by enough people around the globe to become the next official moronic prediction about the end of the world, among countless others proven to be false as the dates harmlessly came and went.

For the record, Camping self-published a book in 1992 called “1994?” in which he predicted, with 100% accuracy, the Rapture would occur in September of 1994. After that date came and went, he revised his theory by claiming to have made a mathematical error. And after that, someone else predicted the Rapture would happen on December 31, 1999, and when that didn’t happen, a bunch of other nutters predicted any number of other dates that they pulled from a large orifice on their body located between and below their hip joints.

Either that or the Rapture did actually happen on one of those dates, and, to quote Gary again, “no one noticed, because the only person who went missing was some random hermit in rural India.”

Oh and by the way, if I’m still here on Sunday, and the earth hasn’t been shaken to pieces by earthquakes, then I will be sure to write another post here soon. Whew! I knew you were scared there for a second.