Oh Joy. Oh Rapture.

Okay, since today is one of the latest in a series of doomsday deadlines (and, as yet, nothing has happened) I thought it would be fun to write about it.

First of all, before I even get to playing Devil's Advocate and actually discuss the scientific analysis of the Rapture, I will explain the context of the idea of the Rapture itself.

From very early on in the Abrahamic faith called Judaism, there are stories of people taken up into the heavens, for whatever reason. Perhaps the best known examples are not found in many books because they were deemed apocryphal, yet the ravenous need to learn everything possible about the nature of god, the angels, and heaven has made this a small technicality. The Book of Enoch, the first of all the Old Testament texts which is written in the first person, describes an event which is mentioned oh-so briefly in Genesis:

"And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him." - Gen 5:24

This is all you get in the mainstream religious stuff, but in the Book of Enoch you get a startling story of what today we would call an alien abduction, where Enoch is whisked up into a vessel in the sky where God and all the angels pilot it around. Each of them is named, and they have specific tasks they perform aboard this ship, and in the end Enoch is returned, but even though it seems like a very short time has passed for him (a year or two at most) down on Earth the flood has occurred and many decades have passed.

I should like to point out that this story, like all the stories in both the Old and New Testaments, is not fresh; an earlier story that is almost identical to that one can be found in the epic of Gilgamesh, written centuries earlier, and on a wall, which is a little harder to cover up and get rid of than simple papyrus.

Anyway, moving forward in time, you get Christ, and whatever else you believe about him, it is pretty obvious that no one can agree on what the hell he was actually talking about. While religion has the dubious distinction of being one of the only reasons people with money actually spend it on anything, it is also the reason why so few people can get along; knowing you're absolutely, positively right about something means that any seed of doubt must be eradicated, by any means necessary, which is why atheists are just as bad about all this as religious people... the only difference is, atheists live in a day and age where it's no longer acceptable to commit genocide just because you don't agree with someone, although I'm sure if they could have Crusades, they would.

Now, I don't really want to explain the Rapture, since I think it is either completely metaphorical or a colossal load of bullshit, so here is a wikipedia entry about it (the perfect forum for discussing this topic, I believe):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapture

As you can see from this extensive entry, that's all that most people have to say about it; their opinions range from truly believing they will float up into the sky to high-five Jesus down to simply passing away quietly in their sleep. Whatever the case, the idea is that some massive purge will happen, leaving many behind to suffer. To me, this sounds almost exactly like what happens after a nuclear attack or meltdown, so I choose to look at it in a metaphorical sense. Anything that happens after the actual "event" is purely speculative.

Okay, so now we come to the mathematics used by this former civil engineer to arrive at both his original proclamation (1994) and his latest one (2011). Since we don't have Lewis Black to take a fossil out of his pocket and say "fossil," we'll have to have a little discussion about that, too:

There are these things called fossils. They take a very long time to form. They are usually the bones, carapaces, or debris left over from lifeforms who lived a long, long time ago, because when protected in the ground from the harmful forces that swirl over the surface of our planet at any given time, they won't decompose. Fossils range from being hundreds of thousands to millions of years old, and they tell us an awful lot about whatever God or the aliens or the flying spaghetti monster was doing before we showed up. Now, other cultures have stories which predate what Mr. Camping calls the beginning of the world; some of my favorites come from the areas which are now India and Pakistan, stories of great, big, colorful deities who wage war with each other and use humans as pawns.

...Krishna, by the way, was a carpenter, born on December 25th.

Now, as we look at the history of our time on this planet, there is one particular thing we must take into account:  It is REALLY scary. Like, poop your pants scary. SO SCARY that for a very long time we didn't even know what the hell that big glowy thing was in the sky, and when it went away for a while each day we went apeshit, killing newborns and all sorts of other stuff. So, when there is so little to be certain of, you really need comfort, something that lets you know there's a reason you exist. Religion is great at this, because it's the same as just saying no: so simple, it's foolproof. Nancy Reagan had it right:

"But what if I start to think that maybe Gabriel really did show up six hundred years after Christ and try to help out the descendants of a handmaiden?"
"JUST SAY NO."

"But what if it seems strange that Jesus shares almost exactly the same story as Horus, an Egyptian god who was hanging around 4,000 years earlier?"
"JUST SAY NO."

"But what if it turns out that this was all just some huge fluke, or worse, an experiment by extraterrestrial beings who now feel kind of ashamed of all the tinkering they did with our genetic make-up and have since left us relatively in peace to quietly destroy ourselves, thus freeing them from any responsibility to the consequences of the project?"
"WHAT PART OF JUST SAY NO DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?! BURN THAT HERETIC!!!"

Now, clearly you can see I'm somewhat biased here. I do try to be open-minded, but blind devotion to ANYTHING is a bad idea, be it politics, religion, or a country club. If we were meant to be a herd, we would be; we would all believe the same thing, and original thought would hold no quarter in the development of our species. But it does, so I must, in good faith, dispute the irrevocable and irrefutable nature of religion as hypothesized by so many over such a long time. Besides, I don't think I would enjoy sitting in heaven if I had to listen to Kirk Cameron babble on all day about tricking your own intelligence, or whatever.

So... back to the Rapture. While many people subscribe to this idiotic notion, the REALLY crazy ones pick specific days. Setting yourself up for failure is not something pretty to watch; I take no delight in seeing peoples' hopes and dreams dashed. I feel terribly sorry for the people who waste away all their life savings, drown their children, or feel compelled to suck others into their mania simply to feel right about things. OF COURSE the world is in bad shape:  it was in bad shape when Revelations was written, too. All doomsday prophecies are reflective of the times they were written in; they're cryptic not because there's a hidden message in them for a specific date or time period, but usually because they were poking fun at the current establishment in a way that would ultimately lead to being nailed to two sticks of wood, or worse. The fact is that EVERY SINGLE GENERATION has had a moment where they assumed the end of the world was nigh... and the smaller your world, the more likely it is. We aren't seeing a tremendous ramping up of doomsday believers, we're seeing an increasingly more connected world, where you can listen to the ramblings of a man two continents away, or see pictures of earthquake devastation thousands of miles away, or see the earth from space any time you want on the NASA channel and watch massive hurricanes twirl across its surface. The possibilities are endless, and so, while I cannot subscribe to the myth that God and/or Jesus and/or Muhammad will come back to take away all the "good" people, I must endorse the very real possibility that all life on this planet could, indeed, be obliterated. It may be by our own hand, but it is much more likely it will be by something far beyond our control, like an asteroid or the Yellowstone supervolcano. It is this uncertainty, this terrible inability to fight back against forces greater than ourselves, that makes us so pathetically desperate for some rhyme and reason in the universe.

Alright... now I'm going to blow your minds.

First of all, here is my favorite part of this recent hoop-la: instead of rational people coming out saying "The world is not going to end at 6p.m. on Saturday, May 21, 2011," OTHER religious folks who would not otherwise seem fanatical under normal circumstances simply repeat the same clunky piece of verse over and over again:

"But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only." Matthew 24:36

Great! So, instead of just saying this isn't very likely, they're giving us ANOTHER GODDAMNED ABSOLUTE:  You can't know, so just be vigilant. This is the principle the war on terror relied on:  it is never, ever, ever threat level green. Big brother is always watching you. Don't ever step out of line, for in the next instant you shall be smited.

...Smitten? Smitted? Smat?

...Screw it, moving on; now, I am going to analyze this statement for what it should mean, using quantum theory. I told you:  mind blown.

If God alone knows when the end will be, it is because he is the end (and, supposedly, the beginning). However, the law of conservation of energy states that for everything destroyed, something new takes its place. Therefore, if God is both the beginning and the end, he is happening simultaneously, at every microsecond of every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every year of every century. If we let God equal the Big Bang, then God occurred a long, long time ago; however, it is increasingly more apparent due to quantifiable data that the universe is expanding, and will eventually stop expanding and reverse itself; ergo, God contradicts himself. Eventually, the universe will collapse down to a point similar to its original state... but the law still stands, so that energy goes somewhere:  into a NEW Big Bang. God is created again; the universe is created again; most cultures have some form of belief that explains the world we live in now is not the first version, but a later one. This can be extrapolated as a metaphor for the universe at large.

(By the way, anyone balking at this should really take a good long look at their own beliefs, and see if they are any less ridiculous. After all, this is only a theory, not gospel.)

SO, since the universe must begin and end, then it could happen at any time; since it ever happened, it always happened. Look closely at that statement: "No one knows..." There is, apparently, no way to be sure when it will all end. Therefore, we have to accept this as meaning that we could go at any time, any where.

Therefore, the universe just ended. And again. And again. And again.

It is infinitely possible that at every second, the universe is ending, so by concentrating on it, we do not simply verify it but validate it:  the world MUST end, or else we are wrong. If the world does not end, it means that chaos holds sway, and so there are many people who cannot comprehend a world like that.

Instead of seeing it as a day to come, we should see it as an instantaneous crisis: a never-ending perpetual destruction that looms over us and has loomed over us long before we even evolved.

The message is this:  Instead of worrying about when the last day will be, treat every day as your last. Do the best you can, whatever you can, for yourself and the ones dear to you, and cherish every second like it is your final one. Don't worry who will go where, but where we will all go, together, from moment to moment, and concentrate on the here and now, rather than the future or the past.

Now that is a Rapture I can get behind. I hope others can see it that way, too.