The End Is Near...Repent, Sinners!

The world is going to end in the year 2011, according to Harold Camping, founder of the conservative Christian radio franchise "Family Radio", and he has written a book about it [link].

Oh, well. We had a good run. These last 13,024 years (which according to Mr. Camping is how long the universe has been around, despite overwhelming physical evidence to the contrary) have been a blast.

Oh, wait. He already wrote a book predicting the end in 1994 [link]. Well, I'm sure he got it right this time.

"Family Radio" in Chicago is at 91.9 FM, right next to NPR, which is 91.5 FM. The signal strength is a little better where I live, so on a few occasions I have inadvertantly tuned my analog clock radio to "Family Radio", and been roused in the morning to hateful threats and predictions of my impending damnation. Normally, I would just dismiss lunatics like this without giving them a second thought, but members of my family seem to have been persuaded by his predictions. His teachings are the reason for my father's beliefs about dinosaurs, which I incorrectly stated in a previous post. He does in fact believe that dinosaurs existed, but he believes that they existed at the same time as humans.

What I find most ironic is that there are a great many real, physical things which may lead to the demise of our civilization. They are all, for the most part, man-made, and also of little or no concern to these radical right-wing religious types. I think Kurt Vonnegut said it best here.