... when you go on for more than a year, railing about how the world's going to end, fool hundreds of people into giving up everything for you, build a multi-million dollar organization off of donations, and than find out the world didn't come to an end after all?
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It's hard to feel bad for someone whose doomsday predictions caused so much anxiety, but 89-year-old Harold Camping's recent admission that he's "flabbergasted" the world didn't end last weekend sounds somewhat pitiful.
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Most people I talked to thought the story were angry at Camping and his followers and thought everyone involved was just a screaming retard.
From the very beginning I've thought this was a very sad, sad story.
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"It has been a really tough weekend," Camping said Sunday, after emerging from his Alameda, California home for the first time to talk to a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle. "I'm looking for answers ... But now I have nothing else to say," he said, adding that he would make a full statement today.
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Don't worry, I'm sure you just forgot to carry the 1 or something. You'll be back in about 17 years or so with a new date.
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Camping's PR aide, Tom Evans, told the L.A. Times that the group is "disappointed" that 200 million true believers weren't lifted up to heaven on Saturday while everyone else suffered and eventually died as a series of earthquakes and famine destroyed the Earth.
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Bolding mine. I really wish I could say the Harold Camping camp (lol) were the only Christians in the world that thought this way.
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But the false prediction might not be so easily effaced from the lives of Camping's followers. The L.A. Times writes that Keith Bauer, a 38-year-old tractor trailer driver, took a road trip with his family to see the Grand Canyon before the world ended.
"With maxed-out credit cards and a growing mountain of bills, he said, the rapture would have been a relief," the paper writes.
But Bauer is not angry at Camping for his false prediction. "Worst-case scenario for me, I got to see the country," he told the paper. "If I should be angry at anybody, it should be me."
Robert Fitzpatrick, who spent $140,000 of his life savings to advertise the rapture in New York, said he was dumbfounded when life went on as usual Saturday.
"I do not understand why ...," he told Reuters while awaiting the event in Times Square. "I do not understand why nothing has happened."
An NPR reporter talked to two Camping followers on Sunday. "One man, his voice quavering, said he was still holding out hope that they were one day off. Another believer asserted that their prayers worked: God delayed judgment so that more people could be saved, but the end is 'imminent,'" she reported.
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Evans, Camping's PR aide, told NPR he hopes Family Radio will reimburse followers who spent their savings in anticipation of the rapture, but that he can't guarantee it.
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Translation: Harold Camping would really, really like to give all those poor people their lives back, but that throne of money he's made is
sooooo comfy.
A lot of people are hoping that now that the doomsday prediction has been revealed as the fraud it always was, the people who joined Harold Camping are going to see him as the Snake-Oil Salesman that he is and leave him. Sadly, I suspect this won't be the case. Throughout history, whenever a bunch of people start following a doomsday prophet like Camping, they tend to stick around long after the proposed day of judgement comes and goes without event. Actually, several churches have been founded this way, and early Jehovah's Witnesses built a lot of their beliefs around predicting the day of the end.
They'll just tell themselves that they made a minor mistake, or the world was saved through their faith, anything to protect their belief that their lives are in some way cosmically significant, and they have a deep, powerful connection to an omnipotent deity.
