Harold Camping's rapture: Friday, October 21 is Judgment Day (probably)

GlobalPost

Poor old Harold Camping. The radio host and preacher predicted the rapture would come on May 21, 2011. It didn't. 

Now Camping says the real day of judgment will be October 21, 2011. "Probably."

Camping, 90, has admitted that his previous prediction of a May 21 apocalypse was wrong due to an error in calculation. He also previously said the end of the world would come in 1994. When that date came and went, he said he made a mathematical error.

In a recent audio statement, Camping predicted the October 21 rapture with a little less certainty than in his previous proclamations, according to the Washington Post.

Camping said “the end is going to come very, very quietly probably within the next month ... by October 21. Probably there will be no pain suffered by anyone because of their rebellion against God,” he said, according to the Post.

“We can become more and more sure that they’ll quietly die and that will be the end of their story.”

More from GlobalPost: Harold Camping's "real" rapture, October 21, is upon us

In June, shortly after revising his apocalypse prediction, Camping suffered a stroke, and he has since been playing a less prominent role with the Oakland, California-based evangelical Family Radio network.

Camping told the San Francisco Chronicle he was "flabbergasted" when the predicted End Times did not materialize on May 21.

He decided that May 21 was actually "an invisible judgment day" in which a spiritual judgment took place, and the real apocalypse will take place October 21, he said in a radio broadcast.

"We've always said May 21 was the day, but we didn't understand altogether the spiritual meaning," he said, according to the Associated Press. "May 21 is the day that Christ came and put the world under judgment."

More from GlobalPost: Harold Camping: October 21 will be real apocalypse

In May, Camping told his followers to prepare for the rapture on that day, when believers would go to heaven and the heathens would be left on Earth to die by horrific natural disasters.

Instead of the apocalypse, Camping's followers were left on Earth to contend with maxed-out credit cards and massive hotel bills.

More from GlobalPost: South African rapture believers stuck with huge hotel bill

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