Radio host says Rapture actually coming in October

I guess this belongs in "nation & world" seeing all the publicity this loon got.....
Radio host says Rapture actually coming in October

Quote :

9:46 p.m. Monday, May 23, 2011

OAKLAND, Calif. — California preacher Harold Camping said Monday his prophecy that the world would end was off by five months because Judgment Day actually will come on October 21.

Camping, who predicted that 200 million Christians would be taken to heaven Saturday before the Earth was destroyed, said he felt so terrible when his doomsday prediction did not come true that he left home and took refuge in a motel with his wife. His independent ministry, Family Radio International, spent millions — some of it from donations made by followers — on more than 5,000 billboards and 20 RVs plastered with the Judgment Day message.

But Camping said that he's now realized the apocalypse will come five months after May 21, the original date he predicted. He had earlier said Oct. 21 was when the globe would be consumed by a fireball.

It's not the first time the independent Christian radio host has been forced to explain when his prediction didn't come to pass. He also predicted the Apocalypse would come in 1994, but said it didn't happen then because of a mathematical error.

Rather than give his normal daily broadcast on Monday, Camping made a special statement before the press at the Oakland headquarters of the media empire that has broadcast his message. His show, "Open Forum," has for months headlined his doomsday message via the group's radio stations, TV channels, satellite broadcasts and website.

This is my favorite.....

Quote :

When the Rapture didn't arrive Saturday, crestfallen followers began turning their attention to more earthly concerns.

Jeff Hopkins had figured the gas money he spent driving back and forth from Long Island to New York City would be worth it, as long as people could see the ominous sign atop his car warning that the End of the World was nigh.

"I've been mocked and scoffed and cursed at and I've been through a lot with this lighted sign on top of my car," said Hopkins, 52, a former television producer who lives in Great River, NY. "I was doing what I've been instructed to do through the Bible, but now I've been stymied. It's like getting slapped in the face."

Cheer up Jeff.....I know it's not as good as predicting the apocolypse,but I predict you'll soon be getting your 5 minutes of fame via late night comics.

Rescheduled already? Christians make stupid rapture predictions all the time, and in the lead up to this one, I couldn't figure out why this one was so publicized considered it was such a small group. I didn't realize until after their failed prediction that the publicity came largely from them - full page adds in newspapers, billboards everywhere, poor schmucks like Jeff above driving around with signs.

I really want to laugh at this whole fiasco (and I do if I don't think about it too closely), but mostly I just feel sad... Life savings blown on this? Maxed out credit card debt? Suicide? Ruined lives, all around. Meanwhile, Camping is still raking in millions and has said he's not returning any of the money donated in anticipation of his failed prediction.

Heretic wrote:

I really want to laugh at this whole fiasco (and I do if I don't think about it too closely), but mostly I just feel sad... Life savings blown on this? Maxed out credit card debt? Suicide? Ruined lives, all around. Meanwhile, Camping is still raking in millions and has said he's not returning any of the money donated in anticipation of his failed prediction.

People who solicit your money,promise things and don't deliver are nothing more than con artists,whether it's a shady contractor,or a guy dressed up in some crazy get-up,and preaching from a pulpit. Organized religion should not be exempt from prosecutions. I truly despise them

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/267939/rapture-wasn-t-dennis-prager

May 24, 2011 12:00 A.M.

The Rapture That Wasn’t

Religious doomsdays that don’t pan out harm only the doomsayer. Leftist ones also harm scientists, and science.
It appears that The Rapture leading to the end of the world predicted by a Christian radio broadcaster for this past Saturday, May 21, did not take place. And the failure was covered worldwide. A Google search on Saturday evening yielded over 32,000 articles — in English alone — in the world media.
The secular, especially the anti-religious, Left enjoys these spectacles of religious foolishness. They seem to confirm not only how absurd these end-of-days predictions are, but how absurd religion is in general.
But the Left should not laugh too loudly. The religious world has far fewer doomsday predictions than the Left does. At least every few years, the secular Left frightens itself — and tries to frighten everyone else — about another doomsday scenario.
The most obvious current example is, of course, global warming. For years now we have been told by the world’s left-wing media that scientists are united in predicting that there will be worldwide catastrophe as a result of global warming caused by manmade carbon-dioxide emissions. Oceans will rise so high that they will drown many of the world’s great coastal cities; entire island-countries will disappear; vast areas of the world will dry up; and countries will fight one another for the little remaining fresh water.
Compared with the global-warming scenario, I’ll face the Rapture — and I’m not even Christian.
Of course, none of these global-warming predictions have materialized. For example, last month Der Spiegel reported: “Six years ago, the United Nations issued a dramatic warning that the world would have to cope with 50 million climate refugees by 2010. But now that those migration flows have failed to materialize, the U.N. has distanced itself from the forecasts. On the contrary, populations are growing in the regions that had been identified as environmental danger zones.”
As a result of so many such false alarms, and because so many places have experienced record cold temperatures, global warming has been renamed “climate change.”
But global warming is only the most recent doomsday scenario offered by the Left. Here is a small sample of some others:
Recall the Time and Newsweek cover stories about how heterosexual AIDS would become a national plague — since “AIDS doesn’t discriminate.” Skeptics who said at the time that heterosexual AIDS in America was largely a scare story were called “anti-science.” But Michael Fumento, the science writer who wrote “The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS,” first in Commentary magazine and then as a book, turned out to be right. In America it was a myth.
At the Democratic National Convention in 2000, five children ages about five to eleven were featured; they recited lyrics about the doomsdays they could look forward to as they grew up in America. The first child, for example, said this: “When I grow up . . . Will I be able to see a rainbow in a smog-filled sky? Will there be any trees alive?”
In his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich wrote: “In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”
Another doomsday prophecy from the Left: Two prominent feminist writers, Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf, wrote in their bestselling books, Revolution from Within and The Beauty Myth — and the news media reported — that 150,000 girls and women a year die of anorexia nervosa. The number is actually fewer than 100.
There is one major difference between leftist and religious doomsday scenarios. The religious readily acknowledge that their doomsday scenario is built entirely on faith. The Left, on the other hand, claims that its doomsday scenarios are entirely built on science.
That there is little truth to the left-wing claim is not as important as the fact that these doomsday scenarios have undermined the status of science. How many scientists have been compromised by their joining the research-money and fame bandwagons of left-wing apocalyptic predictions? And how has this affected the public’s perceptions of science and scientists when it comes to contentious issues?
The Left had its laugh this past weekend, but only because it’s a lot easier to laugh at religious doomsdays than at leftist ones.

Isn't he the same guy who said the world was gonna end Saturday, but left the 70 million he made off his prediction, from his followers, in the bank just in case it didn't ??

Penguin wrote:

Isn't he the same guy who said the world was gonna end Saturday, but left the 70 million he made off his prediction, from his followers, in the bank just in case it didn't ??

Yep. Many of his followers gave him their life savings.