Tomorrow’s the big day

One day ’til rapture.

So apparently I’ve got approximately thirty-three hours to get all my affairs in order before all hell breaks loose on earth. Tomorrow at 6:00p.m. one of three things will happen:

1. Nothing will happen. Nothing rapture-related, at least. Surely something, somewhere will happen tomorrow at approximately six o’clock in the evening. But in this instance, it won’t have anything to do with god or religion. Not in a rapture sort of way.
2. Rapture happens and my wife and I have to try and survive after having been left behind. We will most likely band together with our closest friends and come up with a plan.
3. Rapture happens and my wife has to cope without me because I’ve just ascended into Heaven. What? Why would that happen? I’m a baptized Catholic, whereas my wife has been nonreligious her entire life. Some people live under the philosophy of “Once ‘saved’, always saved.” That means I’d be taken away with Jesus whether I like it or not.

I’ll reiterate again that we should know what’s going to happen some time today because Christmas Island (among other places near Indonesia in the same time zone) will be seeing 6:00p.m. May 21st in approximately 13.5 hours. I’m sure CNN will cover it if people just start disappearing in a huge, not-so-quick-by-god’s-standards-or-power, wave across the globe.

This “wave of rapture” will be accompanied by massive, global earthquakes. When they make it to America tomorrow evening, things get a little confusing. Most of the state of Arizona, for example, does not abide by the Daylight Saving rules, whereas some parts of the state do. Some parts of the state that do not use Daylight Saving are inside and completely surrounded by the part that does not (research Navajo Nation to see what I’m talking about). Massive earthquakes will allegedly hit in the Daylight Saving portions of the state one hour before they hit the rest of the state, according to Harold Camping. You’d think that the Christian god, with all his power, could just shake the whole planet at once.

All of that isn’t what I meant for this post to be about, but I figure I might as well load it up since it might be my last. As I alluded to at the end of my last post, here are some ways you can prepare for the rapture, as well as some ideas for passing the time (or surviving) once rapture has happened and you’ve been left behind:

1. Get out of and away from large structures such as skyscrapers and other tall buildings. Rapture (and the massive earthquakes that come with it) is supposed to occur at precisely 6:00p, local time. This means that depending on where you live you should have several hours’ preparation time once you’ve determined this is really happening. Don’t be one of the rapture’s first victims by succumbing to the earthquake!
2. Stay off the road! At precisely 6:00p local time, according to Harold Camping 200 million Christians will suddenly disappear. This will include Christians who are driving in their cars at the time. This means a whole lot of running vehicles suddenly becoming driver-less, and a whole lot of traffic accidents.
3. DON’T FLY. You think you’ve got a chance against a driver-less car? How about a pilot-less airplane? If you’ve got a flight that’ll have you in the air at the time of rapture, you may want to skip it.
4. On a related note, reschedule that root canal you were going to get at 6:00p on Saturday. Don’t want your dentist disappearing mid-drill, do you? Credit to AD’s Ed for these last two.
5. Don’t assume anything. Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, if at six o’clock nobody around you suddenly disappears do not say to them “Oh, I see you also don’t believe in Jesus.” This might cause a fight, especially if that person is bitter for having not been raptured despite believing in Jesus.
6. Seek weaponry. The chaos ensuing from the realization that rapture just happened will occur almost immediately. You will need to protect yourself. If you do not have access to firearms, cutlery and bludgeons are good alternatives.
7. Find a better place to live. Unless you live in a gated mansion, you’re gonna need to start seeking shelter. The world just became a far more dangerous place. The upside? Lots of new, free real estate just opened up. The downside? Everyone’s gonna want some. My friend Rachel recommends settling down in a church. It’s not like anyone needs those things anymore.
8. Write a bucket list (thanks @dema33alya). You’ve got a maximum of five months left to live, so it’s time to do all those things you’ve promised yourself you’d do before you die. And being that the world will be in complete chaos, you could die any day now so you’d better get started. Never been to Disney World? Now’s the time to go – I hear the lines this time of the end of the world are super short!
9. Kiss your moral boundaries goodbye. Look, it’s tough for me to say this, but if all this turns out to be true and the Christian god exists then he just slapped you hard in the face with a “I know you’ve been good and all, but you just couldn’t find it in yourself to believe in me and really, that’s all I care about. Check this shit out – I just raptured every member of Westboro Baptist Church just because they believe in Jesus.” Once all hell breaks loose, all bets are off. You will have to loot some places and cheat some people just to survive. You’re damned anyway, right? (blame AD writer meiochi for this one)
10. Read the Left Behind book series. Why not? You just got left behind; maybe you could use some pointers (thanks Holly). You could even make a game out of it. Spot the differences!

Hopefully you are now well-prepared (and well-warned) for the rapture. Remember, rapture will occur at 6:00p local time, wherever you are. I would live-blog during the rapture but frankly, I don’t expect anything noteworthy to happen.

Here is a list of all my “countdown” posts, for easy access:

• 21 May, 2011 – posted 21 April, 2011
• Counting down: Day 10 – posted 11 May, 2011
• Counting down: day 9 – posted 12 May, 2011
• The Final Countdown: day eight – posted 13 May, 2011
• Countdown: day seven – posted 14 May, 2011
• Countdown: Six – posted 15 May, 2011
• Five days! – posted 16 May, 2011
• Four more days – posted 17 May, 2011
• Three days away – posted 18 May, 2011
• The countdown is nearly over! – posted 19 May, 2011

Five days!

Five days ’til rapture.

In five days, according to the crazies following Harold Camping, all hell breaks loose. Earthquakes strike in every country successively, starting at precisely six o’clock in the evening in every time zone. As I mentioned in my last “countdown” post, the first earthquakes will hit on Christmas Island, Jakarta and Singapore (because they’ll see 6:00p before anybody else) at precisely eleven o’clock at night, my time, on May 20th. Nineteen hours later, we’ll get it here.

The Camping Crazies seem to have this all mapped out pretty well. Camping himself perused his Bible, word for word and page for page, and came to the decisive conclusion that rapture will occur on May 21, 2011, and that the world itself will be destroyed exactly five months later on October 21, 2011.

This all comes from the belief in an inerrant Bible and the belief that the world was created in 10,000 (or so) B.C.E. From there they are able to determine precisely when Noah got on his boat and traveled the world. The Camping Crazies use Bible numerology and symbolism and figure that May 21, 2011 is exactly 7,000 years after Noah’s flood. Seven thousand years, and to god a year is to a day or something like that. Just Google it. Anyway, after reading how the Camping Crazies came to their collective conclusion, you can’t really deny that it sort of makes sense. I’m not saying I believe in their nonsense – it’s still nonsense – but it’s sensible nonsense.

What I do believe is that they’re reading just a little too far into the Bible. You can twist a book’s words and make it mean whatever you want it to mean. Given five decades (this is how long Harold Camping has been studying his Bible to determine the end times) I could probably find references to the killing of Osama bin Laden on May 2nd, 2011 in the Pyramid Texts. The point is that you can make anything mean anything, and given enough time you could probably do it pretty convincingly.