The End of the World

There’s a lot of talk about the world ending this Saturday, May 21, 2011.

In a matter of speaking.

A Christian Protestant sect called Family Radio led by 89-year old Harold Camping has been quite vocal over the last six months publicizing their belief in this matter.

I do not believe it. Not as a thinking Catholic man.

Allow me some background.

In the summer of 2000 I was working the late shift computer help desk for a large hotel chain. Me and the wife, then only the fiancé, were new to the area, and I was still figuring out what to listen to on the radio dial. I came across Harold Camping’s radio program driving home from work one evening, and I was hooked in a weird sort of way for a week or two.

At this time I was very much interested in religion and spirituality, very much the seeker, though at the tail end of a decade-long sampling of a buffet of beliefs. Zen, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, scientific materialism, quantum mechanics, Kantian and Nietzschean philosophy – you name it, I explored it, even if was only to read a few chapters in a few books. No doubt about it I was being drawn inexorably deeper within the religion I was born into, Catholicism. However, at this early gestation period, I still did not know heresy from traditional Catholic belief, so I was intrigued by Camping, particularly his rock-solid unshakable faith in the printed Word of God.

It seemed every night a crank caller would come on the radio show and either mock him or try to get the better of him in Biblical sparring. The mockers made me sympathetic to the old guy; the sparrers made me incredulous how stubbornly single-minded he was to whatever version of the Bible he adhered to, even in the face of solid logical arguments, whether from an opposing religious or a materialistic point of view.

Forgot about him for a couple of years until he started turning up on some obscure channel on our cable teevee. The deep droning voice, the elephantine ears. Don’t get me wrong, I respect him in a sort of way, maybe the same way I’d respect the alleged genius of a Richard Dawkins. But I have long, long since gave up listening to him.

He made it back into the news last October promoting the idea that the Rapture will begin on May 21, 2011.

Do you know how he arrived at that date?

From what I gather, it’s a simple math equation. One based, however, on lots of vague assertions.

Numbers have meaning for Camping. 5 = “atonement”. 10 = “completion”. 17 = “heaven”.

Got it? Why exactly they have these meanings I’m sure is spelled out in his book, or the books his followers have published. Maybe some websites, too.

Anyway, if you multiply these numbers together and square the product, you get

5 x 10 x 17 = 850

850 x 850 = 722,500

Now, assume Jesus was crucified on April 1, 33 AD. Add 722,500 days to that date and you arrive at ... May 21, 2011.

How they pinpoint the exact time of 6 pm eastern to the beginning of earthquakes, though, I don’t know.

Despite me being a weirdity buff, an enjoyer of all things unusual, creepy, conspiratorial, head-scratchin’ strange, and plainly unexplainable, I scoff at end-of-the-world predictions.

Why?

Well, this isn’t Camping’s first end-of-the-world prediction. In 1992 he published a book asserting the Rapture would occur in September 1994. That was almost seventeen years ago now, all Rapture-free.

And I also believe in the moral literalness of the Bible. My Bible contains a passage in Matthew, chapter 24 verse 36, which states, after a 13-verse description of the Great Tribulation –

“But of that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.”

So, Jesus doesn’t know the exact time of the end, but Harold Camping does?