Ready For The Rapture?

By Steve Hynd

Harold Camping, who looks uncannily like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, has prophecied the End Of The World this weekend - on a rolling timetable starting at 6pm on the 21st in each time zone. Tina Dupuy has some insights into the mental workings of this ex-engineer turned Apocalypse predictor, over at The Atlantic.

This self-professed Christian man of science -- and current syndicated world wide call-in radio host -- has studied the Earth's age in depth. He took five years out of his life to just research it. He says he looked at tree rings and such and finally came upon the truth: Much to his surprise, 1988 was the 13,000 birthday of the world. Anyone who says any different is mistaken.

...Camping's tic is to bombard skeptics with arithmetic. Noah's flood? 4990 B.C. (of course).

Camping writes on his site:

'Just before the flood Noah was instructed by God that in seven days the flood would begin (Genesis 7:10-16). Using the language of 2 Peter 3:8 that "a day is as a thousand years," it is like saying through Noah, who was a preacher (2 Peter 2:5): "mankind has seven days or 7,000 years to escape destruction." Since 2011 A.D. is precisely 7,000 years after Noah preached, God has given mankind a wonderful proof that Judgment Day will occur in the year 2011.'

In short, if you add two and subtract for leap year (noting there is no year zero), then multiply by three (because of the Holy Trinity), then you have something infallible. See, he's done the math. The math is in the Bible. The Bible is infallible. Discussion over.

It's all ridculous tosh, of course - but has served to make campling a celebrity to his followers and, crucially, not a poor man. Donations go up in the run-up to these apocalyptically predictive dates. Campling's Family Radio has made $100 milion pushing his nonsense. Campling once wrote a book predicting the End Times would be in 1994 and now Dupuy notes that he's has already written a pamphlet just in case his predictions for this weekend flub. It's called "We are almost there!" It's a rolling fear-fest to bilk the credible and in my humble opinion prophets (for profit) like this should be prosecuted for fraud when their predictions don't pan out.

In the meantime, though, there's plenty of amusement at the expense of the dumb to be had. It's certainly not PC to mock the afflicted like this but...what the hey, they set themselves up for it.