According to professional apocalypse predictor/silky-voiced radio host Harold Camping, the Rapture's going down today. But Camping's not alone in his doomsaying. Many kooks have made similar dire claims in recent years. Here's a Whitman's Sampler of apocalypse-predicting nuts.
So according to Family Radio grand poobah Camping, massive earthquakes should have already begun in the mid-Pacific and will be wending their way around the globe all day long. New Yorkers can expect seismic horror at approximately 6 PM. And just as your Friday night hangover loses its venom. Rats!
Until it explodes into a mushroom cloud of excrement this October, our planet will becoming a great rotting paella of unfathomably horrible shit for a solid five months. Presumably Mother Earth will be vajazzled with gossamer God lasers raining down from firmament. Endangered species will spontaneously combust into walls of angel bullets, and the flaming sword of Michael the Archangel will cleave the continents like so many limp slices of liverwurst.
Fortunately, all us heathens won't notice the Rapture's a-ripping. Camping believes in annihilationism, which means you and I won't spend eternity being harangued by the bad guy from Legend (while Bryan Ferry serenades us). No, our souls will sort of just fart out of existence. Maybe we'll fade into the void. Or we'll all be reborn in a universe that's a giant pinball machine. Only Harold Camping knows for certain!
In any case, Camping's heathen-baiting isn't anything new. Since time immemorial, people have been screaming about the end of time. Hell, folks have been doing this with clockwork regularity over the past 30 years.
Between all your Y2Ks and Nike aficionados trying to hitch a ride on Hale-Bopp, Camping's just a flash in a great big skillet of crazy. Here's a bunch o' bungled contemporary apocalypses.
PS: If the Rapture doesn't hit today, we only have a year to wait until 2012. Then we'll have time to buy cushy fallout shelters and build homemade, lava-proof survival pods in our backyards.
