Two months ago, I tuned into “Coast to Coast AM.”  Normally hosted by George Noory or Art Bell, this late-night broadcast features experts on all things bizarre and fascinating, from UFO’s to Bigfoots to 9/11 conspiracy theories to shadow people and aliens who live beneath our planet’s crust.

God so ordained things that Harold Camping himself, the aging prophet of the coming apocalypse and the lone predictor of today’s end of the world, should grant us the privilege of warning us, well ahead of time, of disaster.

Reminded that he’d predicted the same thing in 1994, Camping guaranteed that this time, the calculations were incontrovertible.  Asked whether he’d come back again for a second interview “just in case” the world didn’t end on May 21st, he insisted, “I won’t be here.”  None of those raptured will be on hand for an interview, he repeated.  No discussion, end of conversation.

But the 89-year-old attention grabber has kept the conversations going as he seeks, no doubt, to go out with a sensational bang.  What more could a man ask for, now too elderly to accumulate wealth or properties, or to push for a following he might never be able to sustain?  If the world comes to its end, he’ll shine forever in glory as the angel of the apocalypse, having won the sudden conversion of millions who harkened to his warnings and gave their lives in faith to Jesus, perhaps even contributing to Camping’s cause.

And if the whole campaign should fall flat on its proverbial face, the old visionary of things-to-come will have captured innumerable souls in the tightly-woven web of his spiritual psychosis and “Family Radio” franchise.

The good thing is that we’re all thinking about the final things to come: Death, Judgment, Heaven or Hell.  The bad thing is that all this hubbub is a huge distraction and is founded on erroneous evangelical notions about a coming rapture in which the elect will be raised up to friendlier skies, while the rest of us “left behind” will endure the tortures of the great tribulation.

To me, it’s just plain embarrassing on too many levels. First of all, a great variety of religious sects having been predicting the world’s demise for centuries.  Not only have they left their devotees penniless, homeless and looking like fools, but have led them into spiritual deception and bondage.

Tragically, some groups who began this way are flourishing in today’s hot competition between rival doctrines and agenda-driven interpretations of scriptures taken out of context and corrupted to fit a narrow philosophy.

Regarding rapture interpretations based on the Great Flood, Jesus himself made it abundantly clear that the ones “left behind” were those whom God had chosen to be the survivors (see Matthew 24:38).  The evil ones were those who were “taken”, swept away by the raging waters of judgment.

To the Thessalonians, Paul puts it clearly: “Indeed we tell you this, on the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will surely not precede those who have fallen asleep.  For the Lord himself, with a world of command, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God, will come down from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first.  Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.  Thus we shall always be with the Lord…” (I Thess. 4:15-18).  Please note that Paul refers to the elect two times as those “who are left”, which perhaps explains the fact that most Catholics don’t get bent out of shape when someone tells us that we will be among those who, in the “rapture”, will be left behind.

In the end, as the International Business Times points out in “Doomsday: Is it May 21, 2011 or Dec. 21, 2012” (an over-view of end-of-the-world scenarios from the perspective of science and a variety of religions or ancient cultures - B. Seshan): all the popular scenarios have been debunked.

What remains is the Great Commission: we are to be about preaching the Gospel, building up the Kingdom, showing God’s compassion and mercy to a despairing humanity, caring about - not escaping from - current events that are unfolding miracles and tragedies before our eyes, and “working out our salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 4).  With the last of our Space Shuttles already up there in heaven, we ought to listen to the voice of its commander, Mark Kelly, whose wife Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords has just marked another milestone in her remarkable recovering, while he gazes over this beautiful planet and wonders why we all can’t get along.

The ongoing instability in the Middle East, the stubborn inflexibility of Israel’s refusal to concede territory to its captive Palestinians and the global convulsions caused, not by earthquakes but by economic and political crisis everywhere, ought to challenge us to embody the true teachings of Christ.

He told his disciples to get their butts off the mountaintop and to dedicate themselves to the business at hand.  None of them ran off looking for cheap escapes from their share of the Cross.  In fact, the blood of Christian martyrs would flow for centuries, so that the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God and Prince of Peace, might gradually be established.