Some folks in Houston plan to party like it's the end of the world today.

• International Business Times has posted Doomsday clocks showing how much time has passed since "the end."

After all, it might be if the Rev. Harold Camping is right. The 89-year-old California religious leader has pinpointed the human race's expiration date with mathematic exactitude: 6 p.m. May 21, 2011.

In honor of that pronouncement, more than 200 people have signed up for tonight's "Rapture party" at the Fox and Hound English Pub and Grille on Westheimer, hosted by the Texas Free Thought Convention.

A table will be set up where people who expect to disappear in the Rapture can leave behind their possessions, such as car keys and bank account numbers.

"We'll make sure their stuff is in good hands," said Paul Mitchell, president of the Texas Free Thought Convention. "And if Camping is right and the Rapture does happen, we want to make sure we have a really good time beforehand, so we can say we partied like rock stars as the world came to an end."

Guests are urged to bring canned food that the organizers plan on donating to the Houston Food Bank; supplies will be needed, no doubt, if the predicted end-world earthquakes ensue.

"God has given so much information in the Bible about this, and so many proofs, and so many signs, that we know it is absolutely going to happen without any question at all," Camping said in an interview with New York magazine, acknowledging that flawed number crunching led to a failed prediction in 1994. "I would be absolutely in rebellion against God if I thought anything other than it is absolutely going to happen without any question."

Yearning for purity

Camping maintains not only that the Rapture will occur at 6 p.m. today, but the world will end on Oct. 21.

He's not entirely alone in his Judgment Day anticipation. According to the Pew Center for the People and the Press, 41 percent of Americans believe Jesus Christ will return to Earth by 2050.

Those who survive the initial earthquakes that are supposed to sweep the globe, believers hold, are in for five months of misery.

For a preview, grab a copy of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel, The Road. (Then again, with the few hours remaining, you might want to watch the movie instead.) In it a hapless father and son push a shopping cart through a blighted landscape populated by dying trees and marauding cannibals.

Even the Pentagon has urged people to buckle up for the bumpy road ahead.

A study unofficially released by military leaders in 2004 predicts that sudden climate change could usher in a new era of anarchy as countries rush to develop a nuclear capability to defend dwindling supplies of food, water and oil. "Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life," the analysis predicts. "Once again, warfare would define human life."

Assuming you're willing to forgo his wildly skewed timeline, in some ways Camping's predictions are spot-on.

"It's easy to take these as unusual and eccentric groups, but at the heart of these kinds of predictions is often a desire for purity and goodness and a sense that justice isn't happening in the world," said professor Steve Friesen, who teaches a course on apocalyptic literature at the University of Texas at Austin.

On the first day of class, Friesen gives his students a list of failed apocalyptic movements over the last 200 years or so, which tops off at around 80. "At the core this is a utopian movement," he said. "There's something at the heart of this that is appealing to people and that's something to ponder."

'We live in perilous times'

Friesen said there is some evidence to suggest that "end times" movements peak during periods of conflict. What makes Camping unusual, he noted, is his strongly pessimistic theology surrounding the organized church. Many mainstream Christians have denounced Camping's predictions and argued that his message undermines their own credibility.

"I can understand why people gravitate toward these things," said Dr. Alex McFarland, an evangelical minister who co-hosts the nationally syndicated radio program Explore the Word. "Politically, economically, on the international front, we live in some perilous times. These sort of pronouncements can seem like an island of stability."

pete.holley@chron.com