October 21, 2011, the Rapture "May" Be Coming: Harold Camping Hedges His Bets

In case you missed the big news the first time around, this is a reminder that Harold Camping’s prediction for the end of the world is set for tomorrow – that is, if you haven’t already been raptured back on May 21st of this year – but beware: the pastor is now hedging his bets.

Harold Camping, 90, of the evangelical Christian Family Radio, made a much bigger splash with his May 21st prediction for the end of the world earlier this year. A small but vocal army of supporters joined in his call to alert and convert the world before the calamitous event would send non-believers to hell and put an end to life on Earth. Camping’s followers had given away their life savings to the enterprise, which included the purchase of advertising billboard signs and vans painted with the message. This was largely due to their prophet’s unwavering certainty – his declarations were unapologetically unqualified, leaving absolutely no doubts. He – and his supporters – may not be so sure this time.

After the May 21st rapture refused to materialize, Camping said he was “flabbergasted.”

This time around he sounds like a man who might have been scathed by the slightest whisper of doubt. Although he now believes that the end of the world will happen on October 21st, 2011, he has amended his language – and his interpretation of the failure of the demise on May 21st. "We've learned that there's a lot of things we didn't have quite right," he acknowledged during a podcast recorded earlier this month.

On June 9 Camping suffered a small stroke, which kept him from the airwaves for two months. He has now characterized May 21st as a "tremendous event" that unleashed a spiritual judgment day, just not the material one that he expected. The material Armageddon, he maintains, has been set for tomorrow.

Still, his tone is clearly altered, with an introduction of previously forbidden words such as “probably” and “maybe”. On his podcast he now says that “he believes” (as opposed to “it will happen”) that we are getting very near the very end. "Oct. 21, that's coming very shortly, that looks like it will be, at this point, it will be the final end of everything.”

He adds, however, that the end will come “very, very quietly” and that there will be no big display of any kind. People, he says, will not suffer, even if they have strayed from God. The end will come stealthily in the night.

It does seem that Mr. Camping’s brush with his mortality earlier this year has helped him to grapple with death in a more realistic tone. For Armageddon predictions are nothing but a veiled preoccupation with our finitude, and death does frequently come “very, very quietly,” especially for those of advanced age, as is the case with Mr. Camping.

Camping is a former civil engineer with a penchant for numbers, and he has made his predictions using supposedly secret number codes embedded in scripture. His biblical prognostications are based in the ancient divination practice called numerology. Although Camping is a biblical fundamentalist who does not welcome any “extra-Biblical” teachings or revelations on his show, it would be to his benefit to research numerology as a pagan practice which was very common in antiquity. He might even discover a little pagan within.

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