Harold Camping Lost Me

Because it was fish-in-a-barrel easy and because it was being done so amateurishly and with too much invective, I intended to urge mercy for a guy who goofed. Harold Camping appeared to be just a confused ninety year old guy with no friends strong enough to tell him he left the house without his pants.

I planned to point out that for every religious doomsayer, Adventist, Jehovah's Witness, jihadi or garden variety TV evangelist there has a been a secular prediction that also fell flat: Though journalists wept, New Orleans did not devolve into total anarchy, mass rape and cannibalism. Even after those hideous Democrats/hideous Republicans got their claws on power the catastrophic nuclear, financial, immigration, moral or compassion meltdown guaranteed by the talking heads never materialized. Mentioning Y2K once produced anxiety, night sweats, dire predictions and hoarding all those tasteless, high fiber foods. Grunting and eye rolling is all it gets you now. That bottle of iodine put in all the West coast medicine cabinets following the nuclear problems in Japan will set there until Jesus comes. With such a staggering list of Armageddon predictions that never materialized - secular and sacred - and the fact that Camping's was only one more, all topped off  with the monotony of half wits' unfunny jokes, I was leaning toward a "leave the guy alone" approach.

Camping's ramble following the May 21 fizzle changed all that. After The End Is Near became The End Was Near, I expected him to come out of his undisclosed location with some sort of apology, evidencing that rare humility born of a very goofy and very public error. Instead we got a dissembling tap dance. No apology for the millions misspent, for scaring the bejeebers out of the gullible and giving occasion for every underoos clad Mencken wannabe with a keyboard  to casually lump clowns like him with good guys like me. It got personal, see.

His Monday night flight into broadcast fancy resembled the much despised slippery lawyer who, with zero regard for the law, contorts it to fit his situation. If the confidence men are right in saying no one gets conned unless they also find the something-for-nothing game alluring, then the Camping faithful who surrendered their critical faculties before they surrendered their cash share some responsibility for being duped. The lion's share of blame however surely goes to Camping - despite his press conference deflections and self serving retreats into scriptural esoterica. Camping was trying to save his own dirty Dutch neck and assumed the rest of us were the stupidest people in the room. That makes him a bad guy.

Here's another way he successfully retains his Crook of the Month status: his claim to champion the Bible is a lie. Do not mistake Camping for a fundamentalist. What he says about the Bible is very different from what he does with it. No different than LDS and others, the Bible for him is correct only insofar as it is correctly translated. Such statements are made most often by those who insist theirs, of course,  is the correct translation. His loud and frequent pronouncements to the contrary, Camping has very little regard for the Bible or the authority of scripture. His performance before the eager press makes clear that he and his screwball interpretation - not the Bible - is his ultimate source of authority. The naked emperor, now exposed,  insists we believe him and not our lying eyes. History, experience, scripture, worthy tradition, genuinely good and godly lives, dedicated scholars - all are to be abandoned and only Camping embraced. That clanging bell and crossing arms descending mean anything to you?

Not hard to see why most believers turned away from Camping with his first failed prediction in September 1994. I almost got suckered into feeling sorry for him. Anybody who sends him a dime is a a dope. It's time to ignore him not because he's deranged or delusional, but because in his malignant arrogance he's dangerous.