Richard Dawkins and the End of the World May 21

We have had the loony Atheist billboards and bus advertisements telling us that God does not exist, that Christmas is a myth and that all religions are scams. Silly? You bet!

We had some tit-for-tat signage that Christmas was real and that God did exist. Silly? You bet!

Now we have 2000 billboards up all over the country telling us that the Judgment Day is May 21st. This is the big day, according to preacher Harold Camping, on Family Radio. It is going to happen at 6:00pm.  It isn’t clear if it going to happen all at once or if it is going to be a rolling event by time zone. Hopefully it will begin at Greenwich, England – not that I have anything against the Brits but they get to claim that GMT is where all time zones emanate from. If CNN is up to the task, we should have several hours to fall on our knees and repent before it happens here in New York. California, which because of its particular weirdness, gets three more hours and Sarah Palin, who needs all the time she can get, gets five extra hours.

The Washington Post asked several people to comment on this. I must say that among all those who responded, Richard Dawkins gave the best answer:

Why is a serious newspaper like the Washington Post giving space to a raving loon? I suppose the answer must be that, unlike the average loon, this one has managed to raise enough money to launch a radio station and pay for billboards. I don’t know where he gets the money, but it would be no surprise to discover that it is contributed by gullible followers — gullible enough, we may guess, to go along with him when he will inevitably explain, on May 22nd, that there must have been some error in the calculation, the rapture is postponed to . . . and please send more money to pay for updated billboards.

So, the question becomes, why are there so many well-heeled, gullible idiots out there? Why is it that an idea can be as nuts as you like and still con enough backers to finance its advertising to acquire yet more backers . . . until eventually a national newspaper notices and makes it into a silly season filler?

But wait. Didn’t Dawkins raise and spend countless sums of money to put signs on the sides of busses? Is this not a case of the loon pot calling the loon kettle black?

Pictured: A London bus, Dawkins and two goddesses. Oh, wait, wasn’t that some other loon?