If the signs are to be believed, the end of the world starts on Saturday. About 20,000 billboards have popped up around the globe, including in major Canadian cities, proclaiming May 21 as Judgment Day. "Cry mightily unto GOD for HIS mercy," says one of the mounted signs from Family Radio, a California-based sectarian Christian group that sent one of its four travelling caravans of believers into Vancouver and Calgary in the past week.
Family Radio's website is blunt in its prediction of Judgment Day and the rolling earthquake that will mark the beginning of the end, taking true believers to heaven while others are left to be consumed in the total destruction of Earth by Oct. 21. "The Bible guarantees it!" the site proclaims, under a passage from the book of Ezekiel, which says "blow the trumpet … warn the people."
Richard Ascough, a professor in the School of Religion at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., has been watching Family Radio's campaign, and fully expects life as we know it to continue on Sunday.He has seen other apocalyptic predictions come and go, but Family Radio's differs in a notable way: it isn't accompanied by a bold, up-front request for money. And that's worrisome, in his mind.
"I think they really believe it's going to happen," Ascough said in an interview earlier this month. (read more)
