Okay okay I admit it...I like this site...now let's see if I can rationalize why.

So even if you're not a holy roller, biblical scholar, or familiar with The Rapture episode of The Daily Show you probably know that Christians believe that there will (someday) be a second coming of Christ that marks the end of the world. I'm not positive, because it certainly wasn't covered in my Sunday school, but a lot of apocolyptic prophesies predate the New Testament. This site is an excellent resource for all of your apocolyptic needs. Myself, I'm not super-confident that God is going to wipe us out anytime soon, but I think tracking analytical markers is a good idea. Engineers like to stick numbers on things (we call it quantitate) and I think an Apocolyptic Index is a fine idea. This year that had a major disaster immediately after Christmas and Easter (Tsunami and Earthquake). How many consecutive religious holidays does it take to become statisticallly viable? More than we've seen, but if we go 4 in a row the scientist in me will start to worry.

Then there's the rhetorical question of when would you wash your hands of mankind? I was pretty worried after I read this article about Liberia two years ago:

Taylor added his own brand of brutality, assembling what he called his Small Boy Units _ youths as young as 9 years old who were armed, given illicit drugs and turned loose to massacre and mutilate whomever they wished.

Many of Taylor's fighters in what he called the National Patriotic Front of Liberia donned women's wigs, painted their fingernails and even wore wedding dresses as they marauded, often accompanied by the blasting of songs by the Temptations and Aretha Franklin. They sometimes anchored decapitated heads on the license plates of their vehicles.

I read those sorts of things and think, yeah maybe there's something to this apocolypse idea after all. Anyway, I encourage the concept, but for shear entertainment, check out the scoring:

29. Liberalism It's not just a part of the democratic party. liberalism is what I would call the "true conspiracy." The liberal media is 100 percent control by the forces that bow to this humanistic ideology.

Fourtunately, liberalism is currently downgraded to a 1 of 5. Well, I do have to agree that the Liberals aren't in danger of destroying the Earth anytime soon (cough, cough, more than I can say of others). In addition to dangerous things like liberalism, the index tracks national objectives (or maybe global ones) like

Unemployment
Inflation
Interest Rates
The Economy
Oil
Supply/Price
Debt and Trade
Financial unrest

Hardly Biblical issues. Can we get some justification for those? Indeed.

8. Oil Supply/Price Oil remains an economic and a
political issue. We fought The War in the Gulf because of its
strategic importance. The final battle of Armageddon may also
involve a dispute over oil.

Now. Do we call that policy, or just speculation?

I'm not too stoked that the authors (I'm guessing Baptists) have tried to finger the papacy as the most probable ascendance for the anti-christ. Why not the Dali Lama, or the President of U.N.? Rupert Murdoch?