The US / Denis Staunton: Hurricane Wilma's angry progress towards the Florida coast this weekend is a sign for some Americans that the worst hurricane season for years is heading for a violent end.
Many blame the storms on global warming caused by burning too much fuel, although meteorologists say there is no direct link between this year's hurricanes and climate change.
For a growing number of Americans, however, Wilma, Rita and Katrina are signs of something much bigger - the end of the world as we know it and the Second Coming of Christ to rule Earth for a thousand years.
For such believers, the earthquake in Pakistan, avian flu, the tsunami in southeast Asia and the worldwide wave of terrorist attacks since September 11th, 2001, are all signs that the End Times are at hand.
Very soon, true believers could be carried off to heaven in the Rapture, leaving everyone else behind to endure seven years of tribulation as a "faithful remnant" battles with the Antichrist for control of the world.
The Rapture Index, an online barometer that matches biblical prophecies with current events to predict the imminence of the end of the world, stands at 159. Any figure higher than 145 means you should "fasten your seat belts", according to the website.
Pat Robertson, the controversial TV evangelist and former presidential candidate, believes that recent natural disasters look "suspiciously" like the start of the End Times.
"These things are starting to hit with amazing regularity . . . If you read back to the letter of the Apostle Paul with the church of Thessalonia, he said that in the latter days, before the end of the age, the earth would be caught up in the birth pangs of a new order," he said.
Another prominent evangelist, Jerry Falwell, is more cautious about interpreting recent events, although he is convinced that the Second Coming is imminent.
"It is very wrong to set dates," he told CNN. "I have no way, nor does anyone else, of knowing that the tsunami or Katrina or Rita or this terrible thing in Pakistan or the outbreak of terrorism, all these things that have come upon us so quickly, have anything to do with the Lord's soon return."
Waiting for Armageddon is not confined to a handful of religious fundamentalists but is part of mainstream belief in America.
A 2001 survey by the Barna Research Group found that four out of 10 Americans believe that "the physical world will eventually end some day as a result of some type of supernatural intervention"; 50 per cent disagreed, and 10 per cent didn't know.
According to a 1999 Newsweek poll, 40 per cent of respondents and 71 per cent of evangelical Protestants said they believed the world would end in a battle at Armageddon between Christ and the Antichrist.
The 2001 poll was commissioned by Tyndale House, publisher of the phenomenally successful Left Behind series of apocalyptic blockbuster novels. The books, which are set in the days after the Rapture, have sold more than 70 million copies and regularly top the New York Times bestseller list.
Written by Jerry E Jenkins and Moral Majority founder Tim LaHaye, the books portray a world dominated by the Antichrist (the secretary general of the United Nations) and his false prophet (a Catholic cardinal). The resistance, known as the Tribulation Force, is led by Tsion Ben-Judah, a rabbi and former Israeli politician who embraces Christianity.
Left Behind: World at War, the third feature film based on the novels, produced by Sony Pictures Entertainment, opened last night on 3,200 screens across America.
The film will not be seen in a single cinema or multiplex, however. Instead, it is being screened in churches throughout America, including 150 mega- churches which seat thousands.
Sony's decision to ignore conventional cinemas reflects corporate America's discovery of the Christian marketplace, with its distribution network of 330,000 churches, as an excellent place to do business. As the Rapture Index rises, so, too, could the market for millennial movies, although few in Hollywood can entertain any serious hope of being themselves gathered up in the Rapture.