Camping Gone

Harold Camping predicted the end of the world. He was sincere in his belief and in his calculations.

And he was wrong.

But so have the others who have been predicting the end of the world for over 1900 years. This must be a devastating blow to him. But it's more of a blow to the people who believed what he preached and planned to get rid of all their worldly goods by May 21st. They are now homeless and without jobs I imagine.

Supposedly 1/3 of them will lose faith in the person who preached it. 1/3 will have stronger faith in the doomsday prediction, but not know when it will happen. And 1/3 will be in the middle. If it was me, I'd bang on that guy's door and want reimbursement for the money I had gotten rid of following the charlatan. And then I'd never buy into a load of shit like that again.

Predicting the end of the world is a good business for charlatans. But if you are selling that load of crap to your flock, you never pick a date. Because that would be the end of the gravy train. This is the reason I think he believed his own prophecy. If he was just in it to make money, he would never pick a date. Everyone else who has picked a date in the past has been wrong.

In a history class in college I learned that people generally stopped building large things around 950 AD because the church said that Christ was coming back after 1000 years. 900 had already passed, so why work on a large multi year project? So big things stopped. Around 1050 they started building things again because, well, Christ was late, and you need to build stuff.

With interest I watched the news yesterday to see if there was a wave of earthquakes circling the globe. Nope. There was a quake in New Zealand. Probably a aftershock of the one that hit Christchurch a couple months back. And a small one near San Francisco. But if you look, there are small quakes all over the globe every day. Oh, a volcano in Iceland erupted. But no end of the world. How disappointing must that be? If you put all your stock in something like that and then it doesn't happen?

Luckily, I don't think the world will end that way. It will be in maybe a few billion years when the sun is old and expands to gobble up the solar system. Or an asteroid hits like the event that killed the dinosaurs. It ain't gonna be Christ coming back.

But if it is him, try to look busy.