End of Days: The world is ending (by Xavier)

Screw the Dec. 21, 2012 doomsday prediction!  Didn’t you know the world is ending this month!?  In fact, if you’ve been on the UWW campus recently, some Christian nutjob has been passing around this pamphlet that’s touting the world is going to end on May 12^th – that is, next week!  Yes, that’s right.  Finish your finals, say your goodbyes, and then get ready to die because the divine almighty has finally had enough.  [sidenote: most other nutjob Christians are saying that the world is going to end on May 21^st – but what’s nine days when we’re all going to hell anyway?).

How is this date arrived at?  Well, sit down and have yourself some good ‘ole Biblioarithmetic!  Read some Bible verses, take them out of context, slap some completely inappropriate literalness all over them, then attach conjured dates and numbers to make those verses sing whatever doomsday prediction you want.  It’s a recipe to make any conspiracy theorist smile.

But seriously, why does this shit happen?  Where do these crazies come from?  Well, I’ll tell you.  It comes from a scary brand of Christians who are just dying for Christ to come back and smite all us heathens while whisking away his chosen for the glories of heaven.  It comes from pure, unadulterated egoism.

You see, when Jesus said that someday he would come back, people believed him.  Then those people died.  Then others thought that Jesus must have been referring to their time period.  Then they died.  Then others started getting worried that maybe Jesus wasn’t going to be coming back, but then they had the novel thought that the date and time for Jesus’ second coming was “coded” in the Bible (hello Dan Brown! But that’s another story…).  And so for many Christians, the Bible became not so much a book, but a cryptic message just waiting to be cracked.  For instance, Isaac Newton was a HUGE Bible cracker.  No shitting.  Unfortunately, this practice continues today and present-day Bible crackers are nowhere near the intelligence of Newton – let’s call them Bible “quackers.”  And the whole point of the Bible quackers’ efforts is to feel special.  They want to believe that they are living in THEE special time when Christ is finally coming back.  [my mind is also wandering to Glenn Beck, but again that is another story]

These people have to believe that Christ is coming back soon because their faith hangs in the balance.  If it wasn’t embarrassing enough that Christ is already over 2000 years overdue (oh my god, as if that by itself doesn’t say something loudly – I mean, come on, how long should people wait before you just start saying something like, “uh, yeah, I don’t think he’s coming back…let’s go get some pie instead), they have to keep cranking their quacky numbers to predict more and more dates that fall within their lifetimes.  It’s the rare instance that people predict a second coming party 100 or 200 years in the future.  Where’s the fun in that if you can’t be there, right?  So there have been thousands of second coming predictions that fall within reach for the predictors.  Selfish bastards.  All of them.

The rightful place for those predictions are in hell – and I’d encourage their predictors to follow them, if I may be so honest

But if I’m wrong, and the world really is going to end next week, I think I can make a safe prediction and say that I am so fucked!