NostraDumbASS Harold Camping Fails To Predict Apocalypse a 3rd time

The third time was not a charm for Harold Camping, dubbed the NostraDumbA$$ False Prophet of 2011, who had predicted that the world would end today, after having notably failed to predict the Christian Rapture back on May 21st, 2011.  He had also previously predicted the world would end on September 7th, 1994.  However, NostraDumbA$$ may be laughing all the way to the bank, having raised $100 million of his follwers money to advertise the failed May 21st apocalypse, and another $80 million in donations between 2004-2009 on behalf of his "Family Radio".  Thus, Mr. Camping has managed to blow through $180 million dollars of his followers money, all based upon laughably bad preaching and predictions that seem to have no grounding in reality.  What do you want to bet that this charlatan will try for a fourth or a fifth time.  After all, the man is 90 years old.  What does he have to lose besides other people's money?

Sorry NostraDumbAss, The World Won't End October 21st, 2011

You may recall that the NostraDumbAss False Prophet of 2011, Harold Camping, proved that he was totally full of cRapture, when he predicted that the long-awaited Christian Rapture, would occur on May 21st, 2011.  Of course that date came and went, so NostraDumbAss did a  Bible Backstroke, and claimed that the world ended in a "spiritual sense" back in May, but that it would end in a physical sense in October 21st of this year.  Interestingly, this remarkably bad prophet was able to do a backstroke, but was unable to predict his own real stroke a month later.  And this is not the first time that Harold Camping has wrongly predicted the end of the world.
Given his total record of failure, and the 0% success rate of apocalypse predicters, in general, there is excellent reason to believe that he will continue to have a 0% success rate tomorrow, on October 21st, the new and improved date that he predicted the world would actually end. I would advise that you don't sell your house or spend your life savings this time like the NostraDipSh1ts who gave Harold Camping and his Family Radio $100 million to advertise the end of the world back in May.  God knows that is the safest bet you'll find anywhere in the universe tomorrow.

NostraDumbAss Harold Camping Sez World Still Ending Oct 21...yeah right.

Harold Camping, annointed the 2011 Nostradumbass False Prophet of the Year, for his failed prediction that the world was going to end on May 21st of this year, later did a Bible Backstoke and claimed that the world ended in a "spiritual sense".  However, Nostradumbass also claimed that the ACTUAL "non-spiritual" end of the world would be October 21st.  Of course this same prescient individual failed to predict his own stroke a month later.  Yet, he is reportedly still sticking to his revised timeline, claiming, that, this time, the world will end quietly, with a whimper, rather than a bang.  People lost their life savings believing Harold Camping last time.  Some people reportedly even committed suicide in anticipation.  My question is who wants to wager even 5 cents that this demented lunatic could possibly be right this time.  The unfortunate answer is that there are a couple stupid bible-beaters who still listen to "Family Radio" who are too clueless to have figured out that this guy is a collosal fraud.

Nostradumbass fails to predict his own stroke

Harold Camping, the octagenarian false prophet of Family Radio fame, who goaded his followers to spend $100 million promoting the incorrect view that the world would end on May 21st, 2011 apparently failed to predict something else today -- his own stroke. Camping, the front-runner for the 2011 Nostradumbass Award from this site, has padded his lead for that accolade by failing to foresee a comparatively easy to predict event in his own immediate future. After all, even a medical examination probably would have given some indication of an impending stroke. You don't need to count up all the jots and tittles in Leviticus and divide by the square root of Bible pi (you know, 3) to figure out that that you're probably going to have a stroke if your blood pressure is through the roof. Of course, it should go without saying, which means that I'll have to say it anyway, but I certainly don't wish any ill health upon Mr. Camping. Some religious types, however, are a bit more judgmental, and will likely see this as God's clear and direct punishment of Camping for his obviously bogus teachings, and his transparent attempts to lie about it afterward, insisting that he was (1) not wrong and (2) not responsible for misleading his followers into spending their life savings on his bogus predictions.

It might be possible that his own guilty conscience is responsible for some of the stress that lead up to this event. However, again, this is hardly impossible to predict. Even I, with no divine powers whatsoever, predicted that Camping would use ridiculous apologetics to explain away the failure of his prediction and I also predicted that he was banking on the possibility that he would not be alive in few months when he has re-predicted the end of the world. He is on track to fulfill that prophecy with this latest incident, which will be too bad, because I would like him to live long enough to see that prophecy fail too and perhaps even to be sued or indicted for the scam that he perpetrated.

By the way, I hope this guy doesn't go to the hospital for treatment, because the Bible teaches that faith-healing is sufficient to fix you right up. This guy should have the courage of his convictions, and show us whether he really believes the swill he's slinging by refusing to use modern medicine. If he is miraculously cured, that might help to rehabilitate his reputation.

People died because of Harold Camping's BS

According to news reports, an obviously mentally disturbed believer named Lyn Benedetto attempted to cut the throats of her two daughters to spare them from the "apocalypse". The same report claims that an elderly Taiwanese man jumped out of a building to his death, believing that doomsday was near. Of course Harold Camping did not force these people to drink his Koolaid. However, his poisonous rhetoric, obsessed with the glorification of divine violence, was toxic enough to scare clearly unstable people into harming themselves and others.

Yet for Harold it is all just a game. He hasn't apologized, and instead of admitting that he was wrong, he has retreated back into infantile apologetics, claiming that God's judgment was spiritual and metaphorical, instead of literal. But the spiritual and the non-existent look very much alike. One wonders how Camping can tell that an invisible, spiritual event took place at all. The answer is, of course, that he cannot. He is lying like a five-year-old caught with his hand in the cookie jar, his face smeared with chocolate and cookie crumbs. Blaming the invisible ghost of Cookie Monster for the stolen cookies isn't likely to convince too many parents. His equally ridiculous religious excuses shouldn't persuade even the most eager of Christian believers.

Just remember that, after laughing at Camping, that some of you still believe that the "invisible Substance" of the Eucharist (in a non-detectable, non-physical, spiritual sense) becomes the "body and blood of Christ". The whole idea of the "soul" was invented when people realized that physical bodies just aren't durable enough to last forever, and certainly a physical body couldn't burn forever in hell. Think of all the completely undetectable things you believe in, including God himself, while you having your little chuckle at Harry Camping for being such a nut.

Harold NostraDumbAss Camping Says Judgment Was Spiritual

Just as I predicted, the False Prophet Harold Camping claimed that the World was Judged on May 21st, 2011, but only in a spiritual sense. Yeah, that's the ticket. I had already suggested that he would claim that christians were invisibly raptured and replaced by exact look-alikes, to fool us, so unbelievers would think it didn't happen. God is apparently really sneaky like that. This is the same logic that anti-evolutionists use to argue that God and/or Satan planted phony fossils with phony radio-isotopic dating to "fool us" into thinking that the Earth is billions of years old. Sorry, Harry, even many of your gullible followers won't be fooled again.

Hey, I've got another BS line you can use. When you said "May" 21st, you really meant it "may" or "may not" happen. Oh yeah. That's a good lie, isn't it. The funny thing about bible "literalists" is that every time they get caught in a lie they say, "Aw shucks, I didn't mean that *literally*. I just meant it figuratively/spiritually." Yeah right. I guess Adam and Eve and Noah and Jesus can't be taken literally. They are just figurative. Hey, maybe the whole apocalypse thing is "figurative". How does he know it's real when he admits that the rapture is only "spiritual". What a fraud this Camping guy is.

Harold NostraDumbAss Camping Says Rapture Coming in October

Well Harold Camping has finally spoken out his NostraDumbAss and, rather than apologizing, and admitting his error, he has done what so many fanatics do instead. He has doubled down and re-predicted that the Holy cRapture will occur in October of this year. Webs of lies have ways of getting thicker and thicker. His current failed prophecy has lead him to now make another one which is almost certain to fail and which is based upon absolutely no credible evidence. The most notable recent evidence against is the fact that he called it wrong two days ago. He now wants to continue to terrorize the world with his religious extremism and his extermination of human life fantasies. This is truly sick, but it is also something that I predicted. See, I have a better record of prophecy than Camping, but perhaps that is because I do not rely upon the stone age nonsense which comprises the majority of the Bible. You know the saying that one of our former presidents struggled mightily with, "fool me once....."

Camping to speak out of his Nostradumbass tonight

Reports now indicate that Harold Camping is planning to put out an official statement today, and has given brief comments to several news organizations, promising to tell them more in his "open forum" later tonight. It doesn't sound like it will amount to much. After all, he still believes this event is imminent, and he still apparently believes that the time of its occurrence can be determined from the creative interpretation of various bible passages. So, he is really only sorry about being wrong, in all probability, he is unrepentant and will give it another shot in the future, though it's likely that most people will find his message even less credible than before.

One (not so) creative excuse from Family Radio employee Michael Garcia for the "delay" or LAPSE in the apocaLAPSE is that god is doing it to separate those who have faith from those who don't. However, it's not clear how such a delay would accomplish this. People from Family Radio undoubtedly had FAITH, even though it was MISPLACED faith that turned out to be completely FALSE. Other people without FAITH in this prediction turned out to be correct. Why should god punish people for not believing Camping's falsehood, when that is, in point of fact (not faith), the correct position to have taken. How would it make us better people to have believed Camping's lie?

Family Radio finally shuts up but no apology

So far, Harold Camping and his Family Radio have stayed silent about the the FAUXpocalypse they predicted for this past Saturday, May 21st. According to news sources the radio station is just playing lame music and giving out canned platitude advice about life. Camping finally seems to have nothing to say, or perhaps is meeting with focus groups, lawyers, and other like-minded Christian "apologists" to come up with excuses and look for ways to weasel out of his claims. BTW, I have said this many times in other forums, but it bears repeating here, especially among the iPhone generation. As much as I wish it were the case, Christian Apologetics is very definitely not about apologizing for all the things they get wrong on a regular basis. Instead, as one would expect from extremists, it is actually about the exact opposite. It is about making up excuses so that they do not have to apologize. Unfortunately, the English word "apology" means something rather different than the Greek term "apologia", which actually means defense, which anyone studying Plato would surely know from the trial of Socrates, for example. I realize that I am going out on a limb here with my own prophecies, but I predict that there will be little or no actual apology in the English sense of the word and plenty of "apologia" or defensive rhetoric from Camping and his followers, with at most Camping falling on his sword because....duh....he is the primary person to blame here. My own personal definition of "Christian Apologetics", BTW, is "how to lie like a five-year-old and sound less convincing". We will definitely see a lot of that on display in coming days.

The only Judgment that got passed....

It was Judgment Day on May 21st, for Harold Camping and his Family Radio freakshow, who were judged to be charlatans and fools in the eyes of the world for confidently promoting the falsehood that the world would end. Some people are claiming that they spent in the neighborhood of $100 million on their media campaign promoting their silly ideas. However, one wonders how much they made as well. These individuals did attempt to cash in, in various ways, selling t-shirts, and other merchandise, as well as soliciting donations. While I doubt that they broke even, I suspect that some, especially at the top, profited from false prophecy. Harold, I think you know that the Bible doesn't look kindly upon false prophets. Was it really worth it to throw your credibility away like that...or what you had left of it, since you made similar predictions in 1994? I guess time and IRS tax returns will tell.

Let the Bible Backstroke Begin

Now that Harold Campings false prophecies about the world ending on May 21st, 2011 have been proven false, one can expect the Bible Backstroke to begin. In this Olympic sport, the objective is swim around words and verses so quickly that believers can deny that anyone ever made a mistake. As I've pointed out already, fundamentalist christians believe 99% of what Camping does. They simply are too cowardly to step out from behind vague language and put their money where their mouthes are like Camping did. Sure Camping was a nut for thinking that he could do it, but a lot of you people think the same nutty things and just don't have the courage of your convictions. Remember that as you are having a nice hearty laugh with your minister as he feeds you another load of nonsense this sunday.

So full of cRapture about the Rapture

We witnessed yesterday a classic example of religious hype and hyperbole. Harold Camping and his minions at "Family Radio" spent an estimated $100 million promoting the utterly false claim that the world would end on May 21st, 2011. For that reason, I proposed nominating Camping for my 2011 NostraDumbAss False Prophet of the Year award.

Yet, already this story is going down the memory hole. It was all over top news sites yesterday, but now people have conveniently lost interest on Sunday, and are going back to their churches for more helpings of Harold Camping style nonsense. Tomorrow, there will be new preachers and self-appointed "prophets" trying to feed us a new load of cRapture about the Rapture. Try to remember this when you sit in your pews listening to your preacher who thinks he has it all figured out, but likely doesn't have the first clue what he is talking about. No, you'll say, my preacher, priest, etc is a great (yet humble) guy who admits that he doesn't know all the answers, and it's just all those other people out there who are crazy. Camping's followers thought the same thing about him. Most crazy people insist they are NOT CRAZY. We all think we are being reasonable, all the time. We all think that our own beliefs are well justified and it's everyone else who is the looney tune. But the fact is that, if you are a Christian, or especially a fundamentalist christian, you believe in at least 98% of all the same things Camping does. You still believe in the load of cRapture called the Rapture. You and your church simply doesn't have the courage to attempt to predict a precise date. You simply hide behind vague prophecies that are more difficult to prove wrong because the wording is so slippery that you can contort them to mean whatever you want. The fact is that many devout christians have been predicting the same thing as Camping for 2000 years and have never been right. You yourself probably believe that this nonsense event of the Final Judgment will happen in your own lifetime. It's not politically correct for Christians to martyr themselves like they used to do and like they still do more fashionably in the Middle East. However, they can fantasize about the whole world burning up in horrifically violent events, just to gratify their own egos and allow them to say that they were right. We Camping wasn't right and neither are you. And don't tell me that the sun will one day burn up the Earth or that we might get hit by an asteroid. That has absolutely nothing to do with armies of angels fighting a final battle between good and evil and god judging you for eating pork or working on the sabbath.

Harold Camping projected winner of the 2011 NostraDumbAss Award

In a previous post I proposed the creation of a "Nostra-Dumb-Ass False Prophet of the Year Award", to recognize the tireless work for failed doomsday prophets. Note that, while I have used the term "Nostradumbass" for years, a websearch will reveal that many others have likewise used the pun, which is why I have added the additional titles, which might be variously abbreviated "NDA (Nostra-Dumb-Ass)" or "NdaFPotY"

In any event, while there have been many through the centuries and millennia, such as Nostradamus himself, this is a new award, so it would presumably start with people from the year 2011 and on. Therefore, I think Harold Camping, who predicted that the world would end today, on May 21st, 2011, would be a shoe-in for this year's prize. But I don't think that Harold alone deserves the full honor of this prize. After all, what about the thousands of people who sheepishly hang on his every word without thinking for themselves. Who is worse, a person who tells a transparent falsehood, or the people who uncritically lap it up, refusing to take responsibility for their own thinking and do their own homework. Of course, there is still time for someone to come up with a more outlandishly over-the-top kind of "prophecy" that will "out-crazy" Camping, et al.

Perhaps there should also be a special procedure for inducting historical figures. However, at present, I think the focus should be current or modern figures, since there are many of those. The historical figures could be inducted honorifically, without the same amount of fanfare.

0% success of doomsday prophecies

Faith is false certainty, pure and simple, and nowhere is more false certainty on display than in the actions of doomsday cultists. Every year, and often multiple times a year we hear about groups, large and small, arrogantly insisting that they have the all-important knowledge that the world will end. Of course, it always turns out the opposite, and we like to see such blatant arrogance fall upon its face. By its very nature, they can only be right once, so, in some sense, it might even seem unfair to point out that they have a 0.0000000% success rate at predicting the end of the world. However, in a more general sense, we do use trends to predict many other future events. Geology and Astronomy tell us that the Earth has existed for billions of years. Even our distant, caveman ancestors probably feared the world was ending every time an eclipse or a severe storm, earthquake, or volcano ravaged an area.

In the relatively short time that humans have been making up stories and pretending they were true, which is the basic role of religion, the predictions of final battles and supernatural cataclysms have been fulminated fast and furiously. The fact that none of these claims have even been close to correct might give us reason to question the fundamental premise of whether an immediately impending, supernatural doomsday is a justified belief at all. Sure, there might even eventual, natural phenomena that cause a global catastrophe, but what non-faith-based reason do we have for believing that non-natural world-ending events are even remotely reasonable?

In almost all cases, doomsday predictions are not just a little wrong, but starkly, dramatically wrong these days. That is, they are not even a little bit right. There isn't even a little event, like a moderate earthquake, or a respectably-sized hurricane, which frightened our caveman ancestors. We get a perfectly unremarkable day of mostly sunshine and clear skies. Of course, since true believers ignore evidence that contradicts the fictional narrative they enjoy telling to themselves, this has little effect. Yet, as alluded to above, we are actually worse off than our caveman ancestors in terms of our predictions, because now we can't even predict supernatural cataclysms based upon some kind of evidence that nature gives us.

I am suggesting that we should start counting, and why not arbitrarily decide to start counting now, when doomsday turns to dudsday. After all, the media devotes considerable hype and attention to these kinds of stories, if for no other reason than the human interest angle. Camping has been wrong before, and yet, people go on believing him anyway. However, for that matter, Pat Robertson also predicted that the world would end in the early 1980's and few people seem to hold that error against him. Shouldn't there be some kind of consequence for making a false prediction of this magnitude, which is at least as severe as a parking ticket or jaywalking? It would not infringe upon religious belief either, any more than current parking tickets infringe upon your ability to worship on a sunday morning. Saying that any minister who publicly predicts a current time frame for the end of the world, and then ends up being wrong should have to pay a symbolic fine of $50 would hardly seem excessive.

In any event, we certainly seem to have different standard for religion leaders than almost any other kind of leaders. If our political leaders screwed up in major ways like this, we would see considerably more ridicule. If a football coach bet everything on a play and lost then there would be massive scorn heaped upon him (or her). However, religion makes it against the rules to ridicule it, even when it produces ridiculous claims. Why is it that we have declared it off limits and in poor taste to ridicule the ridiculous, as long as a person declares the ridiculous statement to be religious?

Those who did criticize Camping often did so with kid gloves. Some religious people expressed their own religious certitude that Camping was wrong because of their different beliefs. Some have pointed out that Jesus himself declared that nobody except "the Father" knows when doomsday will happen (Mt 24:36). What is less well remembered is that Jesus also had his own failed doomsday predictions, and in many ways was the father of the Christian cottage industry of doomsday prophecy, claiming that the high priest caiphas would live to see Jesus return at the second coming (Mk 14:62).

The point is that it is not clear why we should feel any more comfortable with other religious beliefs using their whacky claims in an attempt to counter the whacky beliefs than Camping. Why should we believe their counter claim any more than Campings, when both are just going on unsupported claims? What got us into this mess, in the first place, was accepting, uncritically, whacky religious claims, and it would seem that the solution should be to reject them up front, or at least not give them so much deference and attention as we see today.