Tag Archives: harold camping

Psst! Wanna Hear a Secret?

Posted on June 5, 2011 | Leave a comment

If the Da Vinci Code taught us anything — and it did, it taught us many, many things, most of them wrong — we say, if Dan Brown’s rollercoaster-iffic Da Vinci Code and its pre-clone Angels & Demons taught us anything, it’s that humans love solved codes. Love to feel they are (a) smarter than other people, and thus (b) have secret saving knowledge dumber people do not.

As we ponder the recent failed prophecies of Family Radio’s Harold Camping, we are reminded that this attraction to secrecy and special knowledge has been a part of Christianity (and Judaism) for centuries.

Orthodox Christianity was in some ways a reaction against this impulse, as apparently widely-held beliefs were declared “heresy” after the fact by Church Fathers like Irenaeus of Lyon. (Brown got this part right.)

Irenaeus’ special target was a loose group of sects known as the Gnostics. The Greek word “gnosis” means “knowledge,” and these groups were known to emphasize certain “secret teachings” (see the opening of the celebrated Gnostic “Gospel of Thomas“), which are highly coded and revealed only to the elect. In fact, it’s secret knowledge which saves, not anything so ordinary (orthodox) as faith or grace or going to your First Communion.

Gnosticism shares some family traits with Zoroastrianism, Jewish Kabbalah, Greek philosophy, even modern New Age spirituality. And — in its emphasis on being an insider, on knowing the Secret Truth — with modern Evangelicals like Hal Lindsay, Pat Roberts and, yes, our old, old, old friend Harold Camping. (Did we say old?)

Here’s how the Gnostic vibe is described by Fr. Brian Daley, S.J., in his groovy series of lectures on “Early Christianity and the First Christians” –

Gnosticism is, says Daley:

“Religion for the enlightened insider. Religion that is based on information and revelation that isn’t generally available to the wider population — but which comes from a group and from a founder and is communicated to those who seek it out.

“Gnostic religion is essentially revisionary thinking — the kind of thinking which enables … someone who learns the tradition to see that much of the ordinary concerns of their contemporaries are in fact based on illusion.”

Gnostics purposely oppose the mass market:

“Turning a good deal of it on its head, devaluing some of its practices and seeing that the core of a person’s welfare and salvation came from knowing things right, getting things right.”

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Posted in Early Christianity, Gnosticism, harold camping

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No Man Knows the Day or the Hour (Except Me!)

Posted on June 3, 2011 | Leave a comment

Waiting for the Rapture?

Every tin-pot prophet who would predict the End of Days comes up against what would seem to be a highly problematic text:

“No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.“

Jesus — the Big Banana, Jr. himself — makes this statement about the coming of the Kingdom in identical language in Matthew 24:36 and Mark 13:32. (Such verbal identity, by the way, is used as evidence that Matthew had Mark in front of him when he wrote his Gospel.)

Since it comes from Jesus, Christian fortune-tellers who would like to predict the “day or hour” of the coming Kingdom need to explain it away.

And they do. But how?

Edgar Whisenant, author of the infamous bestseller “88 Reasons the Rapture Will Occur in 1988,” dealt with it directly. In fact, rebutting Jesus’ statement makes up Reasons #1 and #2.

Reason #1: There are 24 time zones on our planet and always “two days existing on the earth at the same time,” Whisenant points out. So any singular Rapture event will happen at 24 different times on two different days at once. But “the faithful,” he says, can know “the year, the month and the week of the Lord’s return.” Ah, of course. Jesus lets us know the week!

Reason #2: Quoting a Joe Civelli of Pensacola, Florida, Whisenant focuses on micro-parsing the Greek word “know,” which he and Joe claim has two different meanings. They convince themselves (if not us) that the passages use the word (“oida“) in such a way that “no one knows” actually means “no one knows easily but if you try hard you can know.” Thus is black, precisely understood, actually white.

Our old, old friend Harold Camping is less insulting, if rather more tortured. His free pamphlet “No Man Knows the Day or Hour?” takes this passage by the balls.

Camping takes the original position that, in fact, it was impossible for Christians to know the “day or hour” until the late 20th century. In Acts 1:8, Luke has Jesus say that “the Holy Ghost is coming upon you.” Camping takes this to mean that gradually, as the Kingdom nears, its dates emerge — but only to Camping and his followers.

His theology is complicated but essentially privileges his own sect. In fact, Camping believes the Church Age ended in 1988 and God stopped saving people. This fact is why he enrages so many other Evangelicals, whom he believes to be damned. (It does, however, confirm my theory that Millennials are Satanic.)

Sounding like any good 2nd century Gnostic or member of a Greco-Roman mystery cult, Camping concludes:

“It is the true believers who know the time (the hour) and much about Judgment Day (the day).” [!!!]

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Posted in Evangelicals, Inerrancy, Religion in America

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It’s Not Me, It’s You

Posted on May 31, 2011 | Leave a comment

Rapture-Ready Kitten

Last Monday, 86 year-old “humble Bible teacher” and millionaire failed Doomsday prophet Harold Camping emerged to say he wasn’t wrong, after all.

His cognitive dissonance lasted precisely one day (Sunday) — a “very difficult time,” he admitted, when he “was wondering, ‘What is going on?’”

Not, apparently, a mistake, blunder, faux pas, outrageous misreading of Scripture or insulting and irresponsible display of arrogance. No, “what is going on,” he concluded, was that “God brought Judgment Day to bear” — it’s just “we didn’t see any difference.”

Say what? What about all those earth-shattering catastrophes he’d predicted as recently at last Friday? A kind of technicality.

Camping dug into his Bible on Sunday and found a text that let him off the hook, for now.

Revelation 9:4 continues a sci-fi vision where “locusts” are said to appear out of a smoke cloud and:

“… they were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any plant or tree, but only those people who did not have the seal of God on their foreheads.”

And in 9:5, we are told these locusts “were not given power to kill them [people without the seal], but only to torture them for five months.” During which time we — the unelect — will suffer “agony” like the “sting of a scorpion.”

Now, this passage certainly contains the key phrase “five months.” No doubt. Camping takes his literally. But what about the rest?

No “locusts” I can see — so they’re symbolic. Of what? Unclear. Although recent bad weather was taken to be a sign of impending Rapture pre-5/21, this passage would seem to preclude it. But near my house in Northeast Minneapolis last week, a tornado most definitely DID “harm the grass” and a whole bunch of “plant[s]” and “tree[s],” in direct defiance of Scripture.

So the locusts are unruly. What about the “agony” of the unelect. Notice any more pain than usual, sinners?

And then there’s that crucial “five months.” Camping’s original Rapture date required interpreting Noah’s “seven days” of warning as 7,000 years. So those “five months” should be equivalent to at least 150,000 years, right?

Perhaps October 21st won’t be so bad after all.

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Name That Failed Doomsayer!

Posted on May 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

Welcome back, sinners! It’s Memorial Day weekend — so let’s play “Name That Failed Doomsayer!“

Match the Pseudo-Prophecies below to their Pseudo-Prophets and win valuable (spiritual) prizes!

Here are three actual calculations for the END TIMES that were widely believed by tens of thousands of credulous Americans:

  1. Daniel 8:14 says the “sanctuary” will be “cleansed” after “two thousand and three hundred days.” This cleansing is the Second Coming of Christ. 2,300 days = 2,300 years. When do we start our clocks? When the Jerusalem Temple was rebuilt. Ezra tells us this happened in the 7th year of the reign of King Artaxerxes I of Persia, which was 457 B.C. Add 2,300 years to 457 B.C. and you get: 1843! (Later revised to 1844! because this prophet — like so many — forgot there was no calendar Year 0.)
  2. In Matthew 24:32-34, Jesus says that a fig tree “puts forth its leaves” in summer. Then he makes his famous apocalyptic statement that “this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.” Now, the “fig tree” = Israel. The modern state of Israel put forth its leaves (= was founded) in 1948. One generation = 40 years. 1948 + 40 years = 1988! (Later revised to 1989! because this prophet forgot there was no Year 0, apparently not noticing the error does not affect this particular calculation.)
  3. Jesus was crucified on April 1, 33 A.D. The Bible has three highly symbolic numbers — namely, 5, 10 and 17. Number 5 = atonement, demonstrated by the phrase “five shekels” in Numbers 3:47. Number 10 = completeness, shown by Revelation 20:2 where Satan is described as being “bound 1,000 years” (10-cubed is apparently even more “complete” than plain 10). And 17 = “Heaven” as revealed by the 1980′s New Wave power trio Heaven 17, I mean, by Jeremiah 32:9 where the prophet is told to buy a field for “17 shekels.” And of course, the Bible often repeats things for emphasis. So we see that (5x10x17) x (5x10x17) = 722,500. Add 722,500 days to the date of the crucifixion and you get … May 21, 2011! (Later revised to October 21, 2011! for reasons we’ll get into tomorrow.)

These publicly failed prophets are:

  1. William Miller, founder of the Millerites, a sect whose direct offshoots include Seventh Day Adventists and Branch Davidians.
  2. Edgar Whisenant, NASA engineer and million-selling author of the pamphlet “88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Occur in 1988“.
  3. Howard Camping, unrepentant Doomsayer who has reached millions through his long-running radio ministry.

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Posted in Evangelicals, Hoaxes, Religion in America

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Camping in the Wild

Posted on May 27, 2011 | 2 Comments

Now that Harold Camping has pushed out the date for the Rapture until 10/21, we can pause for a Satanic second here and ask ourselves: Just who is Harold Camping? How can he singlehandedly turn America into a country where some polls showed 10% of us seriously considering the world might end last Saturday?

Camping is a radio evangelist and founder of Family Radio, a 300-person 501(c)-3 non-profit based in Oakland, California. It has 66 stations in its network but does not appear to own most of them. As Christian radio goes, the network is middle-of-the-road rather than righty or lefty.

A few years ago, Camping’s network seems to have been worth about $150 million and be fishing donations of $15-20 million per year, according to MinistryWatch.com. An employee ratted to the Christian Post this week that Camping raised most of his $100 million Doomsday ad budget by selling off two stations. So it’s possible Family Radio is down to about $50 million net worth.

Funny aside: Camping’s Doomsday billboards directed people to a website called WeCanKnow.com which asked for donations. For what? The world’s going to end! The link was disabled about a week before 5/21, perhaps by someone who connected these dots (or an overloaded server). It’s back up this morning — still proclaiming “Judgment Day-May 21, 2011” and offering free downloads of terrifying eBooks such as “Woe to the Bloody City” and “I Hope God Will Save Me!” (p.s. He won’t).

Clinically speaking, Camping is older than dirt. A teenager in the Great Depression, he grew up in Colorado and became a Civil Engineer, married, had seven children. Devout all his life in that old-fashioned Reformed American way. He started a construction business in California and was a popular volunteer Bible Studies teacher at the First Christian Reformed Church of Alameda for years.

By the late 1950′s, he had a non-profit radio ministry on the side and in the 1960′s started his live “Open Forum” radio broadcast on weekends. Camping sold his construction business in the ’70s and “Open Forum” became a very, very long-running call-in show where he handled Biblical questions unrehearsed Monday-Friday for 90 minutes in the evening. It’s still on the air with the 89 year-old Camping as a one-man show.

“Open Forum” is a wonder. Truly. Camping is an absolute master of the Biblical texts and the conservative Protestant tradition. I used to listen to it on my way back into the City from consulting engagements in New Jersey — by accident, really, since I was not then a practicing Christian. He took any question at all from anyone, paged through to the relevant text, and gave intricate, plausible, cross-referenced responses in his extraordinarily deep, almost God-like voice.

Rarely have I heard such intellectual mastery of a single topic from anyone. It doesn’t happen. He knew the Bible’s million words all but by heart. He stressed “humility” in listening to “God’s Word.” And in his non-apology to listeners last Monday, Camping continued to insist he was just a “humble Bible teacher” with no responsibility for anything he says.

People can delude themselves, of course, but it takes a very special person to delude thousands of others. Having been in construction during the California real estate boom and sold at the peak, Camping is undoubtedly a multi-millionaire. How can someone so smart be so wrong?

I recently ran across a very good definition of “cognitive dissonance” in the Washington Post, quoting Mark Vrankovich, head of Cultwatch, a pro-Christian anti-cult group:

“You invest a lot of your emotional energy or put money into it. So no matter what the evidence you want to keep on believing. The alternative is that you’ve wasted your time and money, you’ve wasted friendships and burned bridges — people don’t want to face up to that.”

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Posted in Evangelicals, Inerrancy, Religion in America

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Camping Out

Posted on May 26, 2011 | 3 Comments

We’ve been joyously rubbernecking the pile-up of Harold Camping’s latest failed Rapture prediction in the pages of the Christian Post. Lest our short term memories fail us, this time last week two reasonable polls showed 3% of respondents thought the world would end last Saturday and another 10% thought “maybe.”

Why? Point thumbs at Harold Camping, girls. The 89 year-old founder and resident prophet of the 66-station Family Radio network seems to have spent almost $100 million on billboards and broadcast spots predicting The Rapture would occur at 6pm on May 21st.

A very practiced Biblical hyper-reader, Camping based his date on a text in Genesis saying Noah had a 7-day warning of the Flood. In an exponential leap beloved of doom-sayers, he turns 7 days into 7,000 years, adds that to his own date for the Flood (4990 B.C.E.) … and here we are!

Or not.

The week before the faux-Rapture, Camping delivered an inadvertently insulting letter to the 300 employees of his California-based 501(c)-3 non-profit:

“As I bid you farewell,” he wrote, “may you steadfastly continue to stand with us to proclaim the Gospel through Family Radio.”

Why insulting? Camping believed the truly elect would be snatched up before the Tribulation. But not, apparently, his employees, who would remain on Earth with the rest of us to suffer Hell-on-Earth, still “steadfastly” clinging to the airwaves.

Hours after the non-Rapture, evangelicals tripped over themselves to denounce Camping and his calendar. Some of this was just good business: a rival Christian radio outfit self-righteously said, “Do not lend your ears to anything from Harold Camping.”

And Left Behind series author Tim Lahaye excoriated him as being “not only wrong but dangerous,” since, of course, a Tribulation would be a disaster for sales of apocalyptic fiction.

How did Camping himself react?

Although repeatedly saying he wouldn’t give interviews, he seems to have had some trouble keeping his mouth shut. A reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle went to the door of his Alameda mansion and got him to admit he was “flabbergasted” and was having a “really tough weekend.” An IBTimes reporter got him on video saying “I’ve got to think it out.”

So he thought. Didn’t show up to work Monday morning.

That same day, an apparently disgusted Family Radio employee gave an interview to a Christian Post reporter so revealing it makes us wonder how much control Camping really has at the network.

Among other things, the employee said Camping raised the $100 million 5/21 advertising budget by selling a TV and FM radio station. He painted Camping as a lone crazy man in an office that didn’t believe him. He’d made ten previous Doomsday predictions, most of which were not publicized. Family Radio Employees didn’t trust him anymore. Donors were openly told not to sell their homes.

Monomania? Megalomania? Something worse, perhaps. Camping’s brother “said he has always been like that since he was a child,” said the employee.

Monday night, Camping had emerged. Thought was over. Utterly unrepentant, he said the Rapture had occurred but was “silent” and pushed out the date of ultimate destruction to October 21st.

We’ll have more to say on Camping and this fascinating non-event. But for now, let’s point out that while many of his followers may indeed have experienced classic “cognitive dissonance,” the prophet himself had a different response.

He failed to feel any dissonance at all.

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