And Now, the End Is Near (So, Do We Face the Final Curtain?)

Will it never cease?

Once again, old Harold Camping is proclaiming the end of the world, which, by the way, will happen on May 21, 2011. That's just a week and a half away so better get ready. Have you done your penance? Are you right with Yahweh/Christ? Are you screaming at the citizenry to "Be saved or suffer eternal damnation"? Then you, along with Camping, are at best misguided and at worst deluded. But I know you're not among that number, are you?

Camping predicted the world's end back in 1994. When it didn't come about, he said that he had left out some important calculations from the Book of Jeremiah. The new date was set and now it's just around the corner.

Since at least the 1840s (and from my research, even as far back as the 4th and 5th centuries), screamy evangelical types have been predicting the end of the world by calculating various trails of clues in both the Old and New Testaments. They have always gotten it wrong and then made some kind of excuse that they had simply miscalculated, that further checking revealed a still future date, but this time, it was on target.

And here we sit, intact, and still sinning. But wait, there's more...

So, get this, people. No god is going to destroy the world--ever. We might, but no god will. We might bring all life to an end on old Mother Earth simply by being so greedy and stupid that we ruin the water, the air, the land, and even the upper atmosphere with our pollution, our denuding of the forests and grasslands, our killing off species after species, our over-consumption. Until one day, we wake up and we have nothing left to destroy. That's all she wrote. We're history.

It doesn't have to be that way. Each of us has the capacity to change, right where we are. Eat less, waste less, use less gas, electricity, paper, plastic. Open the mind and the heart. Become aware of yourself as part of the problem so that you can become part of the solution.

No god is going to destroy the earth. No god needs to. It seems we're doing it for him. Stop doing that!

It's your call. Choose wisely. The world is counting on you.

P.S. By the way, for those of you who believe that the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation predict the end of the world, know this: Daniel had no idea that the world was not the center of everything or how vast the universe is. His perspective from that little place in the desert was extremely limited. And John the Revelator was p.o.'d at the Romans. His diatribe was directed at them, not us. He died a very unhappy and unsuccessful prophet.