I did wonder whether there was any point in filing my column this week. After all, if Harold Camping, the 89-year-old head of a Christian broadcasting group, was right and the world came to an end in an apocalyptic inferno on the weekend, I could have spent my time doing something I really, really wanted to do instead.
To be fair to Camping, what he actually said was that at 10pm on Saturday, the rapture would occur when all the believers would be taken up to heaven. The heathens and godless tarts would be left behind, to cool their heels until October 21 during which time they would be ravaged by floods and natural disaster before being consigned to a fiery hell.
Which is pretty much what HAS been happening over the past few months anyway.
Camping's believers, and surprisingly there are several thousand, cancelled insurance policies, decided not to book holidays and ate the cupboards bare in preparation for their leaving this mortal coil - so they'll be busy getting their lives back into order tomorrow.
Still, they see it as better being safe and saved than sorry.
I didn't miss out on all the spiritual hoo-ha entirely. I had my own version of rapture happen yesterday where I was taken from Mosgiel and returned to Auckland by Air New Zealand. That's about as rapturous as I'm going to get.
To complicate matters for believers, the world's most famous cosmologist, Stephen Hawking, said this week that there was no heaven anyway - that the concept was just a fairy story for people afraid of death.
So in the face of conflicting information, I decided to file on time and bypass a night of hedonistic bliss with my bloke. In my world, a wrathful editor is more scary than a wrathful god.
To be fair to Camping, what he actually said was that at 10pm on Saturday, the rapture would occur when all the believers would be taken up to heaven. The heathens and godless tarts would be left behind, to cool their heels until October 21 during which time they would be ravaged by floods and natural disaster before being consigned to a fiery hell.
Which is pretty much what HAS been happening over the past few months anyway.
Camping's believers, and surprisingly there are several thousand, cancelled insurance policies, decided not to book holidays and ate the cupboards bare in preparation for their leaving this mortal coil - so they'll be busy getting their lives back into order tomorrow.
Still, they see it as better being safe and saved than sorry.
To complicate matters for believers, the world's most famous cosmologist, Stephen Hawking, said this week that there was no heaven anyway - that the concept was just a fairy story for people afraid of death.
So in the face of conflicting information, I decided to file on time and bypass a night of hedonistic bliss with my bloke. In my world, a wrathful editor is more scary than a wrathful god.
