What a relief. Turns out we still have five months to go before the end of the world.
Harold Camping, who got us all excited thinking last Saturday would be the end, now says May 21 was just a “spiritual” Judgment Day, and the real apocalypse will come October 21.
Camping relied on some complex numerology, along with some word/number associations (did you know that the number 17 = “Heaven”?) to come up with the May 21, 2011 date for the Rapture. This was corrected from his earlier prediction of a date in 1994, which even he now admits was mistaken.
Now, as many of us now realize, his May 21 prediction also turns out to be wrong.
Need proof, other than the fact that there were no major earthquakes Saturday? Here’s a scholar who says Camping was wrong because, well, the Bible tells us so:
Although, the biblical fact is that God said He would never again destroy the world by flood (Genesis 9:11), Harold Camping is basing a lot on his inaccurate calculation of when he claims the flood was.
He wrote the following in his We are Almost There! booklet:
There are exactly 7,000 years from the flood of Noah’s day, which destroyed everything on the earth in 4990 B.C., to A.D. 2011 (p. 30).
According to the Bible and pretty much all biblical scholars, Noah’s flood was centuries less than 5,000 years ago, not nearly 7,000. The best calculated estimate that I have seen places the flood closer to 4,336 years ago.
(Italics mine, because, you know, you can’t out-calculate those biblical scientists.) That comes from this page, which has enough delusions-disproving-delusions to make your head spin until the actual Apocalypse. Whenever that is.
For my part, I’m not too worried. But I’m ever mindful of the sports calendar. The World Series traditionally begins right around October 21. If the Cubs make the playoffs and advance toward the Series, that might lend some credence to all of this end-of-the-world talk…
