From Central Michigan life http://www.cm-life.com/2011/10/24/column-harold-camping-the-worlds-worst-prophet/
By David Oltean || October 24, 2011
For Harold Camping, Friday’s rapture wasn’t exactly what he expected.As far as I know, God’s wrath didn’t destroy the universe entirely.
Camping’s predictions for the apocalypse may not have brought death and destruction to the world, but rather to his career and the legitimacy of Family Radio, Camping’s radio network.
I can’t possibly fathom how individuals of any faith could manage to take Camping or his organization seriously after the four failed predictions by the 90-year-old Christian broadcaster, whose math skills may have dwindled with age when it comes to predicting apocalypses.
Camping’s lunacy first became evident in 1988, when he first predicted that the world would be engulfed in chaos.
If I, for one, were ever to predict the destruction of the world as we know it, I’d be awfully ashamed if it turned out to be untrue.
But one strike didn’t stop Camping, or his second failed prediction in 1994 or the supposed apocalypse earlier this year on May 21, which received significant attention.
After the prediction for an apocalypse this past Friday, I don’t understand how Camping isn’t ashamed of himself for his never-ending nonsense.
The real shame is the man has had Family Radio at his fingertips to advocate his ideas, because without the medium, his predictions would seem more like senility in his old age. The only thing that sets him apart from your average homeless apocalypse prophet seems to be his radio station, and the millions of dollars available to post warnings of the Rapture on thousands of billboards throughout America.
The troubling part with Camping’s predictions is that individuals have actually taken this mad prophet seriously in the past, and several suicides and deaths resulted from his prediction in May.
Yet despite the multiple deaths caused by the prediction earlier this year, Camping continued to work on his math for the date of the rapture as if he simply botched the equation, which deals with numbers that symbolize atonement, completeness and heaven; variables that any mathematician could approve of.
Camping justified his latest prediction on the Family Radio YouTube video for Friday’s apocalypse, citing the May 21 prediction as the beginning of a five-month judgment period.
“Indeed, on May 21 Christ did come spiritually to put all of the unsaved throughout the world into judgment. But that universal judgment will not be physically seen until the last day of the five-month judgment period, on October 21, 2011,” the description said.
The only judgment that should have been made in the past five months is that this old man is completely off his rocker.
Hopefully, we’ll only have to endure the 2012 Mayan calendar’s supposed prediction of the end of the world once.
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David Oltean Recommend88
It's worrying, isn't it? These kind of episodes shock us and grab newspaper headlines, but actually a fear of the imminent end of the world has been present within the Christian movement since its origins. Some of the writers of the New Testament, I am sure, thought the end of the world would arrive within their own lifetime.
ReplyDeleteOne of my concerns is that people who think the end of the world is imminent will not be bothered about doing the things we need to do *now* to make the future of our planet better. eg. why worry about environmental problems when the world is going to come to an end soon anyway?