Harold Camping Oct. 21 Rapture: Bible Preacher's Employees Not Given Day Off

By Ray Downs, Christian Post Reporter Friday, October 21, 2011

It appears that Harold Camping’s Family Radio employees have not been given a day off on what the radio preacher has said will be the world’s final day.

A call to Family Radio for information about how employees are coping with the impending rapture was answered by an employee. The receptionist who answered the phone said she had no comment. However, she answered the phone.

Family Radio is also operating, with music and prayer advice from preachers being broadcasted just like any other non-apocalyptic day.

The humdrum response to Camping’s rapture warning might be due to the fact that most of Camping’s employees do not believe his doomsday predictions.

"I don't believe in any of this stuff that's going on, and I plan on being here next week," a receptionist at Family Radio's Oakland headquarters told CNNMoney during the May doomsday prediction.

In fact, the receptionist said at the time that 80 percent of her co-workers do not believe in Camping's predictions.

Camping has been wrong about his end of the world dates twice before. The first time came in 1992, when the lanky preacher predicted that the world would end sometime between Sept. 15 and 27 of 1994. Camping even wrote a book about it, 1994, which sold over a million copies.

However, after the earth did not quake and God did not make his final judgment, Camping blamed his mistake on tricky math.

"Apparently, I was incorrect," Camping told Christianity Today (CT) on Sept. 28, 1994. The doomsday broadcaster and former civil engineer told the magazine that he misunderstood the importance of the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles, which led to his miscalculations.

Approximately 15 years later, Camping announced a new, mathematically-improved end of the world date: May 21, 2011.

As Camping became a topic of discussion and punchline of late-night jokes, his Family Radio broadcasting network raised millions of dollars in donations, and Camping was able to bankroll a $100 million advertising push that included billboards, pamphlets and even painted cars to warn people that the end is coming and that they better repent – or go to hell.

When May 21, 2011, came and went, Camping's excuse was that there had been a "spiritual rapture" which had to happen before the "physical rapture" on Oct. 21. Therefore, he was still right, according to is calculations.

His first excuse was mathematical, his second excuse was metaphysical, so what will his excuse be when Friday's judgment day prediction fizzles? Camping already owes those in Australia an explanation, as it is currently Oct. 22 there and no rapture has yet occurred.