I’m Fixing to Issue Another Warning

I’m fixing to issue another warning.

According to radio preacher Harold Camping, tomorrow, October 21, is supposed to be the end of the world. If you remember, I reported back in the spring that Camping was predicting that May 21 would mark the beginning of the end marked by hourly earthquakes to be followed by months of horrors on Earth for everyone who wasn’t Raptured (taken up into Heaven), and that the final end would occur tomorrow.

In spite of none of that happening, Camping recently announced on his Radio Network web site that he was standing by his prediction that the end of the world was tomorrow, and that the reason his earlier predictions hadn’t happened was that God had shook mankind with fear instead of shaking the earth with hourly earthquakes, and that God had accomplished exactly what he had in mind.

That’s what failed doomsday predictors do, claim that their predictions were actually true but just misunderstood. Now he claims that the end will come quietly tomorrow without any fanfare from God.

The preacher is at home recuperating from a stroke he had in June. Maybe he got his message from God confused in that it applied only to him and not everybody else. I don’t wish him any bad luck, but maybe he should be concerned about himself and not all of mankind.

He’s not the first doomsday predictor, and will probably not be the last. A splinter group from a major religion predicted the end of the world would come on October 22, 1844, and when nothing happened they switched to more vague prophecies and claimed that Jesus had shifted things around in Heaven to accommodate his return to Earth.

A group called The Seekers, in the 1950s, claimed that their claim of the end of the world didn’t happen because their devotion had saved everybody. Another religious group made claims of the end coming in the early 1990s, but then switched to more vague and minor prophecies.

These predictors of the end of time all remind me of some politicians in that they make claims, promises and calculations that never seem to come to pass. Maybe doomsday preachers and promising politicians should get together and make a prediction they both would disappear. That would be something which would make the world better off, if that actually came true.

Normally if someone makes outrageous predictions that never come true, they are discredited and nobody pays any attention to them anymore. But that’s just not the case with doomsday preachers and promising politicians. For some reason they just keep getting away with it. The only other profession I can think of that gets away with it is TV weather people. They can say it’s going to rain or snow. Then if it doesn’t happen they use some type of metrological term to say this prevented that from happening.

I’m not much for making predictions, because I know a much higher Power is in charge. But I’m going to go out on a limb here, and predict that tomorrow will just be another day. I sure hope so, because I would sure hate to miss the football game tomorrow night.

Just in case, I think I’ll be fixing to have a good dinner tonight.