MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

False teacher Harold Camping — who is predicting that the ‘rapture‘ will happen on May 21, 2011 and that millions of people will die — has a track record of being 100% wrong 100% of the time, and come ‘Judgment Day’ on Saturday 5/21/2011 he will certainly retain that abysmal track record, both on paper and in the court of public opinion.  Though his prediction will prove to be false yet again, it will serve nothing but to damage Christianity in the minds of millions by handing fodder to late night comics, water cooler loiterers, and your average everyday scoffer.

Not only is Harold Camping’s ‘math’ off, so is his spelling.  Here’s my prediction: There will not be a world-wide rapture on May 21, 2011 where millions of people will die, but rather a world-wide rupture where millions of people will die … laughing.  For some of those who believed him, it will be their faith that is terminated, not millions of people around the world.  And for a small number of others who have been deceived — some of whom have quit their jobs and sold all of their possessions — there is a serious risk that some will be so disillusioned that Mr. Camping may end up with blood on his hands.

To those who may have fallen for Camping’s shenanigans, I say this to you:  Do not lose heart, do not lose hope.  Spit out the bones that you have been given, but keep the meat and hold fast to that which is good.  The lies of Harold Camping were anything but.

Update 5/22/2011:  ‘Rapture’: Believers perplexed after prediction fail – “Followers of an evangelical broadcaster who declared that Saturday would be Judgement Day are trying to make sense of the failed prediction… the evangelist at the centre of the claim, Harold Camping, has not been seen since before the deadline.

… The Washington Post reported that suicide prevention hotlines were set up in case believers fell into depression after the apocalypse failed to happen.

A group from the Calvary Bible Church in Milpitas, California, organised a Sunday morning service to comfort believers in Mr Camping’s preaching, the New York Times reported.

‘We are here because we care about these people,’ the newspaper quoted James Bynum, a church deacon, as saying. ‘It’s easy to mock them. But you can go kick puppies, too. But why?

…US atheists held parties to celebrate the failed prediction, while a group of non-believers gathered outside Mr Camping’s Family Radio International headquarters in Oakland, California, as the deadline passed.

‘It was probably one of the saddest things that I’d ever read, the idea that there’s kids out there whose parents spent their college savings funds, who sold their homes,’ one woman told the BBC.'” Read more.

NY Mag, May 11 -“We’ve followed with interest the Christian movement that believes Judgment Day will occur on May 21 — ten days from now. They’ve put up billboards, they’ve handed out fliers. Some of them have even burned through all of their savings, so convinced are they that the world is going to end on May 21 and they’ll no longer need it. That’s the most incredible part of this bizarre story — that these people are so sure about something so incredibly unlikely. How can that be? To find out, we went right to the source: Harold Camping, the gravely voiced, 89-year-old founder of Family Radio; the man who pinpointed May 21 as the exact date of the Rapture based on clues sprinkled throughout the Bible. He is very confident in his prediction.

‘God has given sooo much information in the Bible about this, and so many proofs, and so many signs, that we know it is absolutely going to happen without any question at all. There’s nothing in the Bible that God has ever prophesied — there’s many things that he prophesied would happen and they always have happened — but there’s nothing in the Bible that holds a candle to the amount of information to this tremendous truth of the end of the world. I would be absolutely in rebellion against God if I thought anything other than it is absolutely going to happen without any question.'”  Read more.