Ex-subway worker sinks $140,000 life savings into campaign advertising the end of the world
A retired MTA employee has pumped his $140,000 life savings into an ad campaign warning that the world will end on May 21.Robert Fitzpatrick, a follower of the notorious California Evangalist Harold Camping, has posted his Doomsday message on 1,000 subway car placards and at bus shelters throughout New York city.
The foreboding advert reads: ‘Global Earthquake! The Greatest Ever – Judgement Day: May 21,’ above a night time Jerusalem skyline and a clock ticking towards midnight.
Speaking to the New York Daily News, 60-year-old Mr Fitzpatrick said:‘I’m trying to warn people about what’s coming.
‘People who have an understanding [of end times] have an obligation to warn everyone.’
The Doomsday merchant began his campaign in 2006 after hearing the ‘End of days’ message from well known Armageddon promoter Harold Camping.
He also outlines the wacky theories in a book, appropriately titled, ‘The Doomsday Code’.
Mr Camping, along with his Family Radio road show, travel the country spreading the end of the world message.
According to the predictions of the Family Radio ministry, on May 21 a massive earthquake will shake the world apart, littering the ground with ‘many dead bodies’.
Despite his conviction, Camping has predicted the world would end before – on September 4 1994.
That, he says, was a mistake, a misreading of the biblical codes used to decipher the exact date of the ‘rapture’.
In order to get the warning out in time he fudged his calculations, a mistake he maintains he did not make this time.
Despite this, Mr Fitzpatrick is adamant the beginning of the end is starts next week.
He said: ‘It’ll start just before midnight, Jerusalem time: It’ll be instantaneous and global.
‘There are too many scriptures talking about ‘sudden destruction.’
The message is based on a series of bizarre biblical calculations.
According to them, Noah’s great flood occurred in the year 4990 B.C., ‘exactly’ 7000 years ago.
At the time, God said to Noah he had seven days before the flood would begin.
Taking a passage from 2 Peter 3:8, in which it is said a day for God is like a thousand human years, the church reasoned that seven ‘days’ equals 7000 human years from the time of the flood,making 2011 the year of the apocalypse.
In its second ‘proof’ the exact date is revealed by working forward from the exact date of the of the crucifixion – April 1, 33 AD.
According to their reasoning, there are exactly 722,500 days from April 1, 33 A.D. until May 21, 2011 – the alleged day of judgement.
This number can be represented as follows: 5 x 10 x 17 x 5 x 10 x 17 = 722,500.
The church then argues that numbers in the bible have special meanings, with the number 5 signifying atonement or redemption, the number 10 signifying ‘completeness’ and the number 17 equalling heaven.
Those who believe in Jesus will be carried into heaven, while the rest of humanity will endure 153 days of ‘death and horror’ before the world ends on October 21.
‘Project Caravan’, as it has become known, is made up of members of the Family Radio network all of who have given up jobs, families and all their possessions to join this final mission.
Calling themselves ‘ambassadors’, the church members point to their baffling biblical codes to demonstrate their reasoning.
Leafleting around the country, the group have drawn quite a following.
But in his devotion, Mr Fitzgerald has financed the entire New York ad campaign with his own money, adding that he wants to take as many people with him as he can.
Others, however are not so sympathetic.
Speaking to the paper, David Silverman, of the American Atheists group, said: Doomsday cults are money-making enterprises.
‘I wonder what is going to happen on May 22 when people no longer have their possessions or their savings and we are all still here and they don’t have their rapture.
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