Today, the world ends. For real this time, says radio evangelist Harold Camping. He’s predicted that a cataclysmic event will today destroy the globe and take 200 million Christians to heaven on Oct. 21, 2011.
“I do believe we’re getting very near the very end,” Camping said during a podcast recorded earlier this month and posted on his Family Radio website. “Oct. 21, that’s coming very shortly, that looks like it will be, at this point, it will be the final end of everything.”
Camping previously said the Rapture would happen on May 21, but later revised that date because of what he calls a mathematical error. This time, he says, he’s got all the prophetic numbers tallied correctly. Today is definitely the last day before most of the world’s 6.5 billion people burn in hell. Make it a good one, everybody.
Fortunately, not all evangelicals are going along with Mr. Camping and his crusaders at Family Radio International. Pointed criticism has come from fellow evangelical minister Robert Jeffress, the pastor of Dallas First Baptist Church.
“The Bible says that if someone makes a prophecy that doesn’t come true he is to be considered a false prophet and stoned to death,” he told the Christian Post. “Harold Camping has made at least three false prophecies about the day of the Rapture. And so, if he’s not going to be stoned to death, he at least needs to be muzzled.”
Over at The Washington Post, Alexandra Petri helps explain our fascination with the Rapture:
Life is, generally speaking, somewhat anticlimactic. It was once solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Now, for most of us, thanks to advances in medicine, it’s just the first four. And there are a minimum of eight more Republican debates to go.
No wonder we’re eager for the apocalypse.
Here at The Christian Science Monitor, we’ve put together a slide show of five failed end-of-the-world predictions.
