FAMILY RADIO HAS NEW JUDGMENT DAY

Camping Picks New Rapture Date of Oct. 21

California preacher says May 21 was only “an invisible judgment day.”

By Josh Voorhees and Ben Johnson | Posted Tuesday, May. 24, 2011, at 12:06 AM EDT

UPDATED Monday (May 23) at 11:35 p.m.: Harold Camping isn’t ready to concede defeat just yet.

Sure, Saturday came and went without any signs of the apocalypse he promised, but the California preacher said Monday that was only because, until now, he had been a little fuzzy on the timeline that he had prophesied. Turns out May 21 was only an “invisible judgment day” and that the actual end of the world will occur five months after he had been predicting.

“It won’t be spiritual on October 21st,”Camping said on a 90-minute special broadcast of his radio show, adding that “the world is going to be destroyed all together, but it will be very quick.”

UPDATED Monday at noon:  Looks like the International Business Times managed to catch Harold Camping on camera briefly.  "Give me a day, no interviews at all today – sorry," Camping said in the video taken Sunday. "You know this is a big deal, big deal, and I've got to live with it and I've got to think it out. So no interview."

UPDATED Monday at 8:52 a.m.: Harold Camping opened his door briefly Sunday to speak with reporters, telling them that he was “flabbergasted” that his end-of-days predictions did not come true.

“It has been a really tough weekend,” the 89-year-old fundamentalist radio preacher said, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “I’m looking for answers.”

He added that he’d “be back to work Monday and will say more then.”

Original Post on Sunday at 1:03 p.m. by Ben Johnson:

If a doomsday prediction dies in the forest, does its creator make a sound?

Followers of Christian radio mogul Harold Camping are scratching their heads this morning, after the Family Radio president’s longtime prediction of the apocalypse beginning yesterday doesn’t appear to have come true. Also troubling for those who mortgaged their lives to help his cause of spreading the word: Camping isn’t around to admit he was wrong or make another prediction.

Reuters reports the Family Radio’s network headquarters remained shuttered, and no one answered the door at the broadcaster’s house in Alameda, Calif., after his 6 p.m. deadline for death and destruction passed.

Camping, whose radio network reaches 66 U.S. stations as well as international affiliates, said he predicted the end of the world with the help of Bible verse. He also claimed believers would be sent up to heaven as various time zones hit 6 p.m. on May 21, as the planet was engulfed by giant earthquakes and other disasters, until its final destruction Oct. 21.

“May twenty second will be the second day of judgment,” Camping told a caller on his radio program in 2009. “We don’t know what’s going to happen to Family Radio on that day or to the banks or to anybody else. But it’s going to be horrible. Millions of people will die on that day and every day after.”

This isn’t the first time the radio host’s biblical math seems to have failed him. He previously predicted Jesus Christ would return to Earth in 1994. For those who bought into Camping’s latest predictions—followers and Family Radio reportedly accepted donations and spent millions on 2000 billboards and other advertising to get the word out about the apocalypse—the lack of rapture seemed to offer few answers.

“I don’t understand why nothing has happened,” retired transit worker and New York City resident Robert Fitzpatrick told Reuters. The 60-year-old retired transit worker had spent $140,000 of his savings to help spread Camping’s warning of the approaching Judgment Day.

Source: slatest.slate.com