Averting Doomsday

As many of you may be aware, Harold Camping of Family Radio Worldwide in Oakland California has calculated that tomorrow, May 21, 2011, is judgment day. This is not to be confused with the prior calculations in his book “1994?” which predicted the end times would be sometime during September of that questionable year (it is largely believed that doomsday did not happen in 1994). While many have mocked Rev. Camping’s followers, billboards, and snazzy windowless vans currently touring the country until approximately armageddon, it seems that in an age marred by fanaticism and violence with a religious twist that the very serious, very harmful component to this man’s movement has gone unnoticed. That harmful element, if not addressed and prevented, has the capacity to undo civilization as we know it and wreak havoc on all that Americans know and love. You see, Rev. Camping Calculated when the end times would be – he used numbers – Made up squiggly lines – to determine something that is going to happen in real life. Reverend Camping has, at his disposal, the most harmful element of society since the dawn of time. That element: Mathematics.

As a former mathematics major, I know firsthand the dangers of things like “the z-axis,” “partial derivatives,” and “sine curves.” All of this “math” is nothing more than a thinly-veiled disguise used by fat cat mathematicians to usurp the American way of life and make all Americans live in accordance with their code of conduct – the Pythagorean theorem. The plan of these “Mathies” is simple, and yet, has gone undetected for too long due to the seemingly innocuous nature of their silly beliefs. But failing to take seriously the message of Mr. Camping is exactly what these calculatorheads want us Americans to do. They want to lull us into a sense of complacency – “oh, they are just mathematicians, what harm are they going to do? They just have little numbers and charts and stuff, they don’t pose any real threat.” False. My friends, Mathematicians are dangerous, Mathematics is harmful to American society, and Mathematics – and the spread of Pythagorean law – must be stopped.

I know what you’re thinking: Mathematicians are 99.9999% harmless. But what about that .0001%? What about that 1 out of every 1000000 Mathematicians like Reverend Camping who attempt to disrupt society with a complicated application of the quadratic formula? They are dangerous and I will not allow them to run rampant in society without speaking on behalf of good, honest, God-fearing Americans anymore. What Mathematics does is provide a lens through which to view the world - a certain type of epistemology that, while mostly harmless, can lend itself to violent extremism given the proper blend of socioeconomic hardships, political unrest, and lack of economic opportunity – especially when thrown in with an unquestioning atmosphere of fanaticism and groupthink and a perceived incapacity for self-determination. In order to stop extremist groups like Family Radio Worldwide, we must stop the root cause of their extremism: Math. Only if we, as Americans, take a stand against Math – the one sole cause of extremist thought like Harold Camping’s – we will never be safe from this overwhelmingly friendly portion of the world’s population. We must stop this one cause – Mathematics – from informing the worldview of millions of peaceful, caring, endearing individuals who love their families, countries, and neighbors in order to preserve our way of life in the face of dangerous wayward mathematicians like Harold Camping.

Happy Doomsday.

Thanks for reading.