Anniversary

We're going out of town this weekend for our anniversary, and I am going to be unbelievably pissed if the world ends while we're gone.

source: Wikimedia Commons

We had planned to leave the kids with Uncle Stu and Aunt Kathryn, but Ian has spent the bulk of this week fighting off a nasty tummy bug, so instead the girls are going to chill here with Grandpa Bob.

We stopped at the grocery store tonight and grabbed a few things, and I asked Dad, "Is there anything else I can do to make this weekend easier on you?"  He replied, "Yeah, don't go!"

Aw, Dad, you'll be fine! Jack will be with me, so the #1 thing they fight and/or get into trouble over will be gone. Give 'em Angry Birds and the occasional juice box, and they'll be great.

But God help you if the power goes out during the apocalypse. No iPhones? No videos? Yikes!

I get so aggravated with this "the sky is falling!" crap.  When I was a kid (13, to be precise) some mental giant decided that the world was going to end on June 7, 1989 at 01:23:45 am, because it would be 01:23:45 6/7/89.  Obviously it didn't (or if it did we all missed the memo), but it was very disconcerting to me at the time.  I mean, I still remember it 22 years later, so it made an impression.  There were the Hale Bop people, the Y2K people, there have been other Nostradamus "predictions" since then, and it's all b.s.

Every culture for the last 2000 years, at least, has thought that the world would end in their time - and so far they've all been wrong!  And this crap about the Mayan calendar ending in December of next year.  You know what?  The world ended for the Mayans a LONG time ago.  When was the last time you met a freaking Mayan?

And it's not going to end based on some coincidental lining up of the numbers on the calendar or the clock (11/11/11 or whatever) because those numbers are arbitrary!  They're numbers that we assigned!  There's no cosmic alarm clock out there past Jupiter that's going to go off because all the numbers lined up in some magical pattern.

Personally, I think the whole thing is a sick trick used by immoral people to manipulate weak, desperate people. Reading about people selling their homes or paying an atheist to care for their pets in the event of rapture makes my blood pressure rise.

The other part of it that gives me an ulcer is the unbelievable arrogance of the people who believe they're one of the "chosen."  It's pretty well accepted in these end-times cults that only 144,000 people are good enough to go to heaven. 

Let's break this down mathematically.  The population of the planet is estimated to be around 6,775,235,700 (2009).  So, if only 144,000 of the people living today were "saints," that would mean that each person has a 0.002125% chance of being one of those 144,000.

You're far better off playing the lottery.

But that's not what the good book says!  It says that 144,000 people are getting in.  Period.  This website estimates that 106,456,367,669 people have ever lived on earth.  Therefore, your chance of being one of the special 144,000 is actually 0.0001352%.

Nice.

I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure that I'm not in the top 144,000 people out of 100 billion.  Not even close.  I'd be happy to fall somewhere in the top billion.  I'd also be shocked if that were the case.

Yeah, yeah, I know, not by good works, but by grace alone....  Well, apparently God's grace is pretty darn limited. 

I'm going to go ahead and take my chances that the world will continue to spin, and that there will be a bunch of disappointed people running around making excuses, Sunday, for why their prophecy didn't come true.  Again.  And in the meantime, I'm going to enjoy the jokes, and our anniversary trip.