Forget 2012, the world will end in 2011

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Just when everyone was starting to make plans for the new decade, comes the news that it’ll end even sooner than we thought it would. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

[Harold] Camping, 88, has scrutinized the Bible for almost 70 years and says he has developed a mathematical system to interpret prophecies hidden within the Good Book. One night a few years ago, Camping, a civil engineer by trade, crunched the numbers and was stunned at what he’d found: The world will end May 21, 2011.

So there you have it. Camping has predicted the apocalypse in the past – apparently we weren’t supposed to last much past 1994. And yet, here we are. So. Yeah.

How do the employees of Camping’s Oakland office feel about the whole thing?

“I’m looking forward to it,” said Ted Solomon, 60, who started listening to Camping in 1997. He’s worked at Family Radio since 2004, making sure international translators properly dictate Camping’s sermons.

“This world may have had an attraction to me at one time,” Solomon said. “But now it’s definitely lost its appeal.”

And once it loses appeal to Ted Solomon, then obviously we all have to die.

But, of course, the End of Times prophecy game is hardly limited to Harold Camping or the 2012 conspiracy theorists. In 2008, before he moved to Fox News, Glenn Beck hosted Joel Rosenberg on his CNN Headline News show, and they got to talking about the Antichrist:

An interesting argument, and coupled with Camping’s prediction, it might be something worth thinking about when making New Year’s resolutions. Like maybe resolving to do whatever you feel like for the next two years – spend all your money or quit your job because to hell with it. Literally.

On the other hand, you could do none of that, and resolve to improve your life somehow – y’know, the way you do every year. Because if the judgement does come down from on high like these guys say it will, you’ll probably want to be someone who just carried on living a good, rational, life, rather than one who frightened everyone and then took their money to fund your own theories of the apocalypse.