Readers amused or bemused by the radio preacher Harold Camping’s predictions that the world will go pear-shaped tomorrow may want to read Meghan Duke’s amusing and insightful Save the Date. She reviews some previous failed predictions, as well as the more widely respected secular versions, and then explains what Christians actually believe about this.
Friday, May 20, 2011, 4:15 PM
May 21st, 2011 | 7:19 pm
I still want to know if Ms. Duke’s brother got married.
May 21st, 2011 | 9:08 pm
So I started noticing Harold Camping last year or as the amazingly old man who occupies one of the most obscure channels on my cable system. Then I heard the May 21st prediction. Wow, this was around November so my interest grew, will he make it to May and if he does what will he say afterwards. To my delight, it seems like the whole world discovered him with the media picking up the story and running with it.
Not for nothing but I admire the man for being true to his beliefs. He does strike me as someone who really believed the end was coming and wasn’t doing it for the money or fame. As wrong as I think he was, he carried on humbly doing what he thought was right. I find myself oddly concerned for him, hoping he isn’t too disappointed or depressed.
I’m also aware, though, that this little thing wasn’t entirely harmless. There’s been some stories of parents who stopped saving for their kid’s college, blowing money on fancy vacations and such because there would supposedly be no need to worry about bills after 5/21/2011. But at the same time I think those people are responsible for that. In all fairness Camping didn’t advocate anything like that. But I think it illustrates where your prioirities are. It’s the last day on earth would you really live it up? Would you help others? Would you just enjoy the earth?
That’s what I’ve been thinking about. While some of his followers blew it, I think many will actually find this a positive experience. I half imagined he was going to be right (less because I buy his system of thought, more because I suspect God does like a laugh and having Camping be right really would be a hoot) and I really appreciated today. I suspect at least a few of his followers really appreciated life over the last few days and now that it all hasn’t come to an end….well so much the better then….
May 21st, 2011 | 11:11 pm
Maybe we should call this H2K–the second great folly of Harold Kamping.
We knew he was a false prophet after 1994, at least when we understand scripture plainly, as Joe Carter does. Namely, here is Deuteronomy 18:20-22 in Camping’s favorite translation, the KJV:
“But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods, even that prophet shall die. And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the LORD hath not spoken? When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him. When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him.”
Since we don’t stone false prophets anymore, we’ll just have to wait for God’s judgment. Until then, we can pray for him. Maybe the IRS will audit him in the meantime and find out what he’s doing with the $104 million in assets his ministry reported in 2009.
May 21st, 2011 | 11:44 pm
Technically I think a prophet claims to have received direct communication from God. Camping, for all his faults, simply claimed to be doing nothing more than reading the Bible.
May 22nd, 2011 | 12:06 am
Also there’s something that kind of irks me about charging Camping with deception here. He put up his reasoning in great detail. If anyone bothered to really look at it and think critically about it they would see what is basically simple math coupled with rather unjustified assumptions.
Many who really believed Camping, I suspect, weren’t decieved, they cheated. They didn’t bother to really read what he did, do the math and think about it. They just assumed he was right….which is really odd because if you think this is so vitally important should you double check the work yourself??? What they did, then, is roughly analgous to copying the test answers from the kid sitting next to you in school. If you get an F because the kid is a screw up is that really the kid’s fault or yours?
May 23rd, 2011 | 1:19 am
There are 3 points that I would like to make for people to think about.
1. I read in the Associated Press that people emptied their retirement funds to help put up $5000 billboards. They poured the money into Campings bank account and did he take a cut? I read that he has over $1M in stocks, bonds, etc. You would think that he would have liquidated those monies and invested in saving the lost?
2. What happens to the people that spent all their money and even sold their homes to get the message out? Will we see suicides?
3. Is this one more excuse for Atheists throw stones? Will this encourage the Agnostic that there is a God? Does this strengthen the faith of the Christian or shake their faith?
Bill
May 23rd, 2011 | 7:42 am
Taking in reverse order:
#3: Yes probably so. Although Christians can always point that Camping himself set himself up against all mainstream Christian churches by declaring the ‘age of the church’ was over.
#2: It wasn’t entirely harmless. On the other hand, from what I’m reading his idea was based on some rather implusible and shoddy mathematically reasoning. If you had a nice bank account, 401K and other assets to give away you should have enough ability to have ‘checked the math yourself’. Most of the Campingites I’ve seen simply seemed to take his word for it. Why?
(The ‘why’ is the most important question IMO. It’s a fascinating psychological experiment done in real time right in front of us testing our ability to reason rationally versus our ability to ditch reason and just ‘go with the group’)
#1. I still think Camping is sincere in his beliefs. I don’t think this was some elaborate ruse for him to boost donations. It’s a bit too easy to just write him off as a televangilist type person just out to build a fortune off of talking poor old ladies out of their social security checks. That said if he has saved millions of dollars personally he should do something to try to atone for the harm done, not sure what though. He is, after all, nearly 90 and as stubborn as a mule.
May 23rd, 2011 | 6:52 pm
Well, Boonton, the simple fact of the matter is that there are, and always will be, a significant number of people in society who are looking to find something, and aren’t interested in exercising critical thinking that might bust up the illusion that they’ve found it. They tend to be disaffected or dislocated in one way or another, but they will always be with us. I’m of your mind that an actual thinking person should never have fallen for this stuff, but the world will never be limited to those who think things through rationally. So they probably deserve our charity nonetheless, because while some people are just willfully that way, others feel themselves to have been so betrayed by normality and rationality that they don’t see much percentage in trying to do it “right.”
And I agree with you — I think Camping was quite sincere, but it’s possible to be sincere in the sense that you’re not in it for personal gain, but still quite evil in the sense that you sacrifice the morality you are supposed to be upholding in order to pursue something dishonestly because you want the “something” more than you want integrity.
May 23rd, 2011 | 10:43 pm
Well he has come back to TV. Now the date is Oct 21….which was originally the date for the world to be destroyed (May 21st was supposed to be the beginning with the saved people being saved and everyone suffering a massive earthquake and then 5 months of escalating diasters till the whole thing blew up). Now I guess it’s going to be sunshine and happiness until Oct 21 then poof all gone….
You define him as evil but I’m not quite sure. I think some of his followers were quite entranced by what Slate.com called ‘CNN diaster porn’….they were just itching to hear horror stories about the massive rolling destruction right before God gave them their ticket out of here. In some ways I think the believers were lucky in that their characters were tested. Did they ditch their families? their jobs? their bills? Did they ‘live it up’ on vacations and fancy cars as some employees of Family Radio were said to have done? Or did they follow the Bible (or Camping’s reading of it) which said that the ‘saved’ would be doing nothing special or different up until the day? Is the evil located in Camping or outside of him?
May 24th, 2011 | 11:41 am
So is anyone still paying attention to him? It sounds like his ‘revised’ prediction is that May 21st was a ‘silent judgement’ day where God decided who was saved and who wasn’t. Now we wait until Oct 21 for the judgement to be carried out.
So does this mean he’s still preaching? Why? Supposedly it does no good to those who weren’t in the right on May 21st? If you’re already saved can you loose it? (Which, BTW, on another thread I asked the question of what happens if a person who ‘chooses’ hell changes their mind….the flip side is just as valid, suppose a person who is in heaven as ‘saved’ ‘changes his mind’ and decides to oppose God? Can someone loose heaven after they get it? )
All in order to avoid saying he was just totally wrong he seems to have created a theology that’s as confusing in its predestination than the last two Matrix movies!
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