Not Holding My Breath

The hoopla's begun! Apocalyptic crackpots are crawling out of the woodwork in anticipation of the END OF THE WORLD (they do tend to talk in capitals), and the SECOND COMING. Tomorrow is the day which has the 'number of the beast' marked on it; although, I haven't quite figured out how they manage to deal with that silly little zero just before the last six. If you're going to ignore the next to the last number of the date, then the day when the world's going to end pops up much more frequently (ie. 6/6/96 would become 6/6/6, wouldn't it?).

Some day last week I saw a huge ad in the Houston Chronicle with pretty small print predicting all manner of horribleness happening before the end of June. Something to do with preachers lying to their members and falsely interpreting texts and some other mangled hermeneutics that I couldn't read because the grammar was atrocious and the print was so small.

It just tickles my funny bone when someone goes off and predicts a precise date for the End Time. That day is one that'll sneak up on us when we aren't looking, even Jesus tells us he doesn't know the date!

A minister friend of mine tells of the time he and a few friends sat down and scoured the scriptures to figure out the exact date when Jesus would return. They pondered the symbolic significance of all the images in the Revelation, looked at Old Testament clues, researched and argued all the details until they were absolutely certain of their calculations. The date just had to be October 22nd, 1976. The problem was - It was 1978.

So ....... I'm not holding my breath. Let the zaniness begin!!

An absurd PS - Since there are 24 time zones, does the Apocalypse start in one place on 6/6/6 and then move forward hour by hour?