oh, holy irony

T minus 15, y'all. T minus 15. And if you don't know what I'm talking about then you're missing out on a hilarious story and also, you're going to hell. See, the world is coming to an end everybody! There's proof, says Harold Camping. He knows because he's the 89-year-old Christian fundamentalist radio host with a T-89 who calculated the exact date of the Rapture! Says the Washington Post:

Camping, an engineer by training, says he came up with the very precise date of May 21 through a mathematical calculation that would probably crash Google's computers. It involves, among other things, the dates of floods, the signals of numbers in the Bible, multiplication, addition and subtraction thereof.

Yet, while that reporter, Michael S. Rosenwald, thinks these calculations are hard to understand because they're complicated enough to crash one of the most sophisticated computer networks in the world, I think it's probably a safer guess to assume no one can understands them because they most likely look like the scribbles of Always Sunny in Philadelphia's resident paint huffer, Charlie Kelly.

But seriously. People have left their jobs based on the ranting of this bat-sh*t octogenarian. And not just people with job descriptions like "conspiracy theorist," "village idiot," or "Tea Party organizer." No, these are people who might be your coworkers. The Post talked to one who worked in an insurance office in Maryland, and another at the Department of Homeland Security. Yes, apparently while yours truly was once denied a government security clearance (albeit from another, more classified organization) because I lived abroad for more than half of the last seven years at the time (which you'd think would've been an asset for this organization), some idiot named Gary Vollmer who thinks he's going to be "instantly transformed into [a] glorified spiritual body" in 15 days is in charge of making sure the terrorists don't get in. Um...

And speaking of terrorists, isn't this whole belief that Jesus is going to return (if not now, but some other time in the future) and rain fire upon the Earth just reducing the guy to a terrorist? Really, in this view, the Lord is basically Osama bin Laden, but with a much better hideout.

I mean, seriously. Come on. I'm not an atheist (I'm one of those dippy agnostics), but I just can't get behind any religion that calls for the mass destruction and eternal suffering of non-believers (especially if said non-believers are good people, living their lives in accordance with the rules of logic and optimizing happiness for all) via acts of divine terrorism. That's just evil. I can see the bumper stickers now: The Rapture -- Never Forget.

Anyway, kudos to the Post for alerting me to what is surely going to be the most anti-climactic weekend in this old man's life. I'm looking forward to the follow-up interview on May 22.