I just read this online…
Harold Camping, the California preacher who used his evangelical radio ministry and thousands of billboards to broadcast the end of the world and then gave up public prophecy when his date-specific doomsdays did not come to pass, has died at age 92.
Camping's most widely spread prediction was that the Rapture would happen on May 21, 2011. His independent Christian media empire spent millions of dollars — some of it from donations made by followers who quit their jobs and sold all their possessions — to spread the word on more than 5,000 billboards and 20 RVs plastered with the Judgment Day message.
When the Judgment Day he foresaw did not materialize, the preacher revised his prophecy, saying he had been off by five months. The preacher, who suffered a stroke three weeks after the May prediction failed, said the light dawned on him that instead of the biblical Rapture in which the faithful would be swept up to the heavens, the date had instead been a "spiritual" Judgment Day, which placed the entire world under Christ's judgment.
But after the cataclysmic event did not occur in October either, Camping acknowledged his apocalyptic prophecy had been wrong and posted a letter on his ministry's site telling his followers he had no evidence the world would end anytime soon, and wasn't interested in considering future dates.
"We realize that many people are hoping they will know the date of Christ's return," Camping wrote in March 2012. "We humbly acknowledge we were wrong about the timing."
You know, I'm sure Mr. Camping did a lot of good for people during his life. I'm sure he also lived very well off donations. And I'm sure that selling people on this end-of-the-world nonsense did more damage than an awful lot of the evils he preached against.
I'm well aware of the values of most religious teachings but when you're trying to convince people that you have a direct pipeline to God, you're not much different from Sylvia Browne, telling people that she can put them in touch with dead relatives…and all it will cost is your common sense and most of your money. Atheism is on the rise in this country and I don't think it's because of people like Harold Camping. The people who followed him will always follow someone like that.
But religious folks who have a little healthy skepticism left look at a man like Camping…and then they look at their own religious leaders. A friend of mine named Cindy left her church because the officials there took a kind of "no comment" approach to Camping's tales of the impending Rapture. They didn't want to criticize him…and to Cindy, it looked a lot like a matter of professional courtesy. She didn't see enough difference between them and him to have any faith in that church.