Does this sound familiar?
Harold Camping: May 21 was 'invisible Judgment Day,' the REAL Rapture comes on October 21
The California preacher is back to - once again - insist that the Rapture is coming.
Harold Camping wasted little time in telling his followers Monday that while he's falsely claimed the world will end twice, this time it'll happen.
The 89-year-old now says the real Day of Judgment will occur on October 21, and that his claims that the Apocalypse was last Saturday was really just a misunderstanding.
"We've always said May 21 was the day, but we didn't understand altogether the spiritual meaning," the one-time civil engineer said at the Oakland headquarters of his Family Radio network.
Camping, who stated unequivocally for months that May 21 would be the end of the world, now claims it was just the day when God decided humanity's fate. But it won't be until October 21 that we are sentenced.
"God again brought Judgment on the world," the prognosticating pulpiter said during a 90-minute speech aired on his radio stations and online.
As a result, humanity now has five months before "the whole world will be destroyed."
Camping added that his network will no longer post billboards about Judgment Day, and his radio network will only play Christian music and programs.
"The world has been warned," he said. "We don't have to talk about this anymore."
When Camping predicted the world would end in 1994, he was forced to find a reason for being wrong then. At the time, he dismissed his error as a simple mathematical miscalculation.
However, his excuses this time did not exactly inspire faith in some who have so eagerly believed in his claims.
"I've been mocked and scoffed and cursed at" for believing in and promoting Camping and his prediction, said Jeff Hopkins, 52, a former television producer who lives in Great River, N.Y. "Now I've been stymied. It's like getting slapped in the face."
"I thought he would show some more human decency in admitting he made a mistake," said Josh Ocasion, who works the teleprompter during Camping's live broadcasts in the group's threadbare studio. "We didn't really see that."
Camping did admit Monday that he was not "infallible," and that his false prediction caused him to re-examine "all of the proofs, all of the signs and everything."
"If people want me to apologize, I can apologize yes," he told reporters after his speech. "I'm not a genius."
The preacher also added that while so many of his followers donated money, in some cases everything they owned, to his ministry in belief that the world would end last Saturday, they won't get it back.
"Why would we return it?" Camping said, arguing that the world is still going to end in October.
With News Wire Services
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