peter young’s listopia

I've seen it as a growing meme/virus on the outer fringes of my Facebook friends list – but thankfully not yet on my LJ FL, you guys are far too intelligent – that we are now in the last days before the Rapture on 21 May 2011. I don't wish to give further currency to this crap, but like many atheists I'm once again rather looking forward to the day after, hopefully when the planet has been harvested, swept clean and entirely divested of its millions of credulous Christian fundamentalists, the day we can all begin to party. But we poor saps who are Left Behind can only enjoy our decadence for five months, as the man who dreamed up this nonsense has further predicted that The End Of The World Itself must happen on 21 October.

If you want to know with whom this meme-ified bollocks originated, it comes from the warped and money-grubbing mind of Harold Camping, a California radio host. The details, via Wikipedia:

According to Camping, the number five equals "atonement", the number ten equals "completeness", and the number seventeen equals "heaven".
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.
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.
The time between April 1 and May 21 is 51 days.
51 added to 722,449 is 722,500.
(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."

Top marks if you can follow that. Camping had previously predicted the end of the world would happen on 6 September 1994 in a self-published book. Richard Dawkins (for it is He) has made his own prediction for 22 May 2011: that Camping will give a revised date and appeal for money so he can update his billboards.

For further entertainment, here are a couple more previous fundie TEOTWAWKI/Rapture predictions, the first of which was perhaps not taken as seriously by some as the second:

When Glenn Beck was a news commentator at CNN he predicted 22 August 2006 "is the day that Israel might be wiped off the map, leading to all-out Armageddon... [It] could be the day that agnostics get down on one knee and start to pray, 'Sweet Jesus, are you coming today?'"

He was backed up by Bernard Lewis writing in The Wall Street Journal, who pointed the finger at the possibility of Ahmadinejad chucking a nuke at Israel on that date as a final answer to US concerns about Iranian nuclear development. "What is the significance of Aug. 22? This year, Aug. 22 corresponds, in the Islamic calendar, to the 27th day of the month of Rajab of the year 1427. This, by tradition, is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to 'the farthest mosque,' usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back (cf Koran XVII.1). This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world. It is far from certain that Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events precisely for August 22nd. But it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind."

Fundamentalist preacher Yisrayl Hawkins predicted a thirteen-day nuclear war would start on 12 September 2006. The day after, he revised it to 12 June 2007. Then it became 12 June 2008. It must have been in 2006 that I watched Hawkins preach to a crowd of thousands in Nairobi's Uhuru Park, and hundreds of his followers throughout Kenya later hid in their basements and donned gas masks on the appointed date. As his website can attest, he's still in business and selling you shit.

But in case we're all wrong, here's how the soon-to-be-Raptured can plan ahead for their bereaved cats and dogs. A steal at only $135! I like the top FAQ: "Is this a joke?" Yes.

If you read your weekly horoscope – as I most certainly do not; typical Libran, far too level-headed to believe such a complete pile o' crap – you may have noticed that your star sign has changed this week. You might even have been an Ophiuchus all along, a 'serpent slayer' no less, and you would never have known it if you were born between 29 November – 17 December.

I may be on the wrong side of 50 but I can still recall a previous attempt at adding not one but two new zodiac signs: Ophiuchus, and Cetus the whale, which, my spies tell me, are the only two Zodiac constellations not recognised as star signs. This was as far back as 1970, proposed by Steven Schmidt (typical bloody Cancerian, can't leave anything alone) in his book Astrology 14, and I can even remember reading this article in my old man's Time magazine, now reproduced online, when I was just 10 years old.

So I'm now a Virgo, apparently. Whatever. Worse pay, better hours.

You, my travelling public, may recall the dark days that befell us in the wake of the August 2006 revelations that British trrrists were, at the very edges of the realms of possibility, planning to mix liquid explosive cocktails on board transatlantic flights. And that there was therefore an immediate, overnight and deliberately panic-inducing ban on passengers carrying most liquids on transatlantic commercial aircraft. What's often overlooked is that this ban could not have been decided on just the day before it was imposed when the news of the very early stages of the plot 'suddenly' broke one early morning; it is something that actually must have taken at least a week to be properly coordinated by the transport security organisations on both sides of the Atlantic: to ensure all US and UK airports had sufficient awareness and the necessary procedures and materials in place, as well as the creation of long, well-prepared documentary-style public information TV news items of the background to the supposed trrrist plot that suddenly appeared on both sides of the Atlantic on the same day, collectively indicating the coordinated UK and US governmental purpose of simultaneously educating the public and, not to put too fine a point on it, keeping them scared. Over those few days we were given a textbook example of actualising the potential for news manipulation by governments, and in the thoroughly terrorised society in which we already live it was one that was seized upon and enhanced. Consequently, we were then witness to the farcical and ill-thought-out scenario of passengers being forced to pour whatever (presumably potentially explosive) liquids they were carrying into single, giant tanks at some airport security gates in the US. Fortunately nothing actually exploded, but over on Making Light this was all usefully dubbed the Exploding Shampoo Plot, although sadly that excellent name never really caught on.

So, thanks to the Home Secretary we had at the time, a pugnacious piece of lowlife called Dr. John Reid MP (his website informs us he enjoys reading history and solving crosswords in his spare time), for the last two years I have of course felt immeasurably safer now that all the potential trrrists in my tender care have been forced to place their toothpaste and bottles of baby milk inside a protective, all-purpose (and presumably explosion-proof) sealable plastic bag. This security measure has since been adopted by just about every country on Earth, and I have personally experienced degrees of enforcement that vary from the draconian to the I-really-don't-give-a-fuck. It is also now a commonly voiced opinion wordwide in aviation security, along with much of the travelling public everywhere, that this limit on liquids (and the necessity for the meaningless inconvenience of a sealable plastic bag in which to put them) has to be one of the weakest and most wasteful transport security measures ever introduced. The end to this farce is now in sight.