Do You Take This Judgment Day Warning Seriously?

When we lived in Northern California we had a big metal garbage can filled with survival supplies: flashlights, PowerBars, blankets, water purification tablets, bottled water, Ramen noodles, a tent, some tarps, sturdy shoes, a weather radio, batteries, a shovel and various other emergency gear.

We felt a bit silly checking the thing every six or so months to make sure the flashlights still worked and mice hadn't gotten into it. Mostly because we had just two small tremblers the whole time we lived in California, but … you never know.

We never had to break it out and while the 9/11 attacks happened just a month before we moved back across the country, the East Bay was, thankfully, spared from any terrorist action.

I ran across that metal can the other day in the garage after reading yet another scare story about today's doomsday prophecy and I had to laugh. I thought about all the people scrambling to make their own Rapture kits to prepare, just in case 89-year-old Oakland-based minister and Family Radio Network founder Harold Camping's calculations about the end were right.

After all, despite being way, way off in 1994 in predicting the Armageddon (he blamed it on bad math), plenty of people were buying his warnings this time around, with some even quitting their jobs, cashing in their life savings and getting their affairs in order. In the months leading up to the fateful day, there were billboards all over the country and in some foreign countries, pamphlets handed out on street corners, RVs plastered with warnings and plenty of websites banging the apocalyptic drums of death.

Think of it as the whole Y2K computer scare scenario, but with more fire and brimstone instead of just laptops flashing frowny faces. Now, of course today was just supposed to be the Rapture, which is the kick off to Judgment Day, which will reportedly last five months, so there's still technically time to pack your over-every-night-from-now-on kit.

Not everyone was taking Camping seriously. Least of all the founders of a Facebook page dedicated to "Post Rapture Looting," in which some posters were bragging that once everyone was gone they were going to pick up "some sweet stereo equipment and maybe some new furniture" for the mansion they planned to squat in.

Hell, even Tim LaHaye, the author of the "Left Behind" series isn't buying it and he's sold 63 million books about the Rapture.

"Coming from a two-time loser on date setting before, I’m not overly anxious. He’s an engineer, not a theologian," he told the Daily Beast. "He’s got a very meticulous-type mind, and no one can tell him everything. He knows everything. He’s got his mindset that it’s going to be this way, but he’s just flat-out wrong. He violates a very, very important statement of Jesus in Matthew 24: 'Surely I say to you this generation will by no means pass way until all these things be fulfilled… but that day and hour knows no one in the angels of Heaven, but my Father only.'"

LaHaye, went as far as calling Camping a "false prophet."

That seems pretty clear to me, and since when does God telegraph his actions with billboards and media appearances?

Camping's tub-thumping is just another example of a preacher whose pulpit is never big enough, so he tries to expand it by threatening to burn a Koran, or claims to be the "real" Jesus Christ, or a math whiz who has calculated the end of days.

Tina Dupuy said it best in The Atlantic: "Doomsday prophets are religion's going out of business salesmen."

Either way, I have my trusty can in the garage and if it really is the end of times at least I got that spring load of mulch down and I fixed that gimpy trellis that was leaning over for two years. And if it truly is the end, well, I can finally stop worrying about how we're going to solve this deficit problem.

Are you worried about judgment day?