This is the way the world ends.  Not with surprise, but with billboards.  According to a series of billboards, May 21 will be the day the world ends.  As always with any apocalyptic billboard, your mileage may vary.  Still, the series of billboards, across the US and Canada, has some folks worried, even if the radio station organization itself isn’t asking for any money or attempting to solicit donations from apocalypse-frightened listeners.

“When they’re not doing that [asking for money from believers up front] so blatantly, it worries me more, because I think they really do believe it and they can convince people who may end up in fact doing things like … quitting their jobs, selling their house, not necessarily to give the money to this group, but simply to divest themselves in light of Judgment Day,” said Richard Ascough, a professor in the School of Religion at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.  ”We’ve seen that happen in groups before, and then people are just wiped out, not just emotionally because it didn’t happen, but financially.  Some people, it’s led to them taking their own lives when they realize what they have done.”

The billboards are funded by Family Radio, a group of 66 Christian radio stations that produces and distributes Christian content around the world.  According to Family Radio, their president Harold Camping discovered the date of the apocalypse during a reading of the Bible.  Upon further study, he decided that his math was right and that May 21 would be the date Jesus returns, with the earth’s final day (when the earth is destroyed and the last survivors killed in their luxury bunkers) being October 21, 2011.  Camping previously predicted the world’s end in 1994.

I really hope the earth doesn’t end on May 21; I’ve got concert tickets and no access to survival suits or a zombie-proof house-fortress!

Tags: Family Radio, Richard Ascough, May 21, world to end on May 21, apocalypse, Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada, world to end billboard dates, May 21 apocalypse, Harold Camping, billboards, unusual billboards, apocalypse billboards

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