Well I'll be damned. Or maybe not: Six p.m. has come and gone in one of the last times zones to meet the appointed doomsday hour with nary a massive earthquake or cloud-bound cluster of ascending faithful.
One of the many interesting aspects of today's End of Craze is that whoever programs Family Radio, the Oakland-based Christian radio network founded by Rapture prognosticator Harold Camping, seems to have completely ignored the boss's famous prediction. Tuning in to KEAR 610 AM, where Camping has been waxing apocalyptic for many years now, not only have I heard no sort of, "whoops, our bad!", I haven't even heard a Judgment Day mention. Even though the now non-event is still trumpeted on the station's web site, has attracted worldwide attention, and -- despite all the fun people are having at the expense of the faithful -- may yet result in some negative outcomes. That is, if an untold number of people significantly altering their lives because of their belief in one man's strange obsession cannot already be described that way.
But on Family Radio today, it's just been music and what seems to be the regular slate of programming: a feature on how to approach marriage, a non-eschatological recitation from a Christian-themed book, something about finances...
With all this talk of doomsday, the scariest thing I've actually read lately can be found in this Contra Costa Times article, called "An insider's look at Family Radio and its leader Harold Camping":
Camping began predicting Judgment Day would be Sept. 6, 1994 and wrote a book outlining his theory."He dogmatically thought all evidence pointed to that date, so he mixed Bible interpretation (with) numerical interpretation," (former Camping Bible school Dean Gabriel) Otero said.
When the world continued, Otero said, Camping stayed mostly quiet about his miscalculation but told Otero that the Lord did return to Earth on that date -- in a mystical way -- taking the Holy Spirit back to heaven.
Otero expects another excuse come Sunday. "I'm very sure he's going to come up with another date. "... He'll say we need to refine the study here and there."
Oy.