Twenty-One Things to Know about Harold Camping, the Dude Predicting the End of the Universe

Harold Camping, the head of Family Radio and wannabe prophet, says the Rapture is happening tomorrow at 6 p.m., to be followed in October by the eradication of the universe. Jason Boyett, author of The Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse and an all-around excellent and bright dude, provided us with a list-style breakdown of the Camp Man.

I would mock the guy if he didn't just break my heart. 

Anyway, here are 21 Things to Know about Harold Camping, via Jason Boyett. 

1. Harold Camping is not a trained Bible scholar. He has a BS in civil engineering from UC Berkeley. He has not been to seminary. Of course, neither have I, and that doesn’t stop me from saying Camping is wrong. So I can’t fault him for thinking he’s right.

2. But Harold Camping does describe himself as a Bible scholar. In this interview at Killing the Buddha, he said: “I am a Bible teacher, a Bible scholar. For the last 50 years, I’ve made the Bible my university.”

3. Harold Camping doesn’t have much patience for theologians or trained Bible scholars. Later in the same interview, he states, “…instead of having to go through the screen of theologians who have tried to understand the Bible, I found that it was far more efficient just to study the Bible itself.”

4. Harold Camping doesn’t describe himself as a pastor, either. “I’m not a minister. Not a pastor,” he told KtB. “I am a servant of the Lord, declaring what I have learned from the Word of God.”

5. Harold Camping likes math. This comes from his analytical engineering background. In fact, his declaration of May 21 as the date of the Rapture isn’t based on any divine audible revelation from God but from Camping’s unique mathematical approach to the Bible as a code to be cracked. I couldn’t begin to walk you through it — or understand it myself — but as far as I understand, it has to do with Camping’s estimated date of the biblical flood (May 21, 4990 BC) and the verse in 2 Peter about one day being like “a thousand years” to the Lord and how, back then, God warned Noah that he would destroy the earth “seven days from now” and therefore, Saturday is the 7000-year anniversary of the first drops of the biblical flood. So clearly that’s when Jesus will come back. Never mind that I’ve never heard anyone but Harold Camping say the flood began on May 21, 4990 BC. And I think Peter was using the “thousand years” as a metaphor, rather than announcing a mathematical equivalent.

6. The May 21 events will kick off with a worldwide earthquake which starts at 6 pm at the International Date Line and rolls through every single time zone on the planet, every hour on the hour at 6 pm. Totally not making that up. This comes from Camping’s reading of Jeremiah 25:32about disaster spreading from “nation to nation.” He gets the earthquake part from Revelation 16:18. Not sure where the 6 pm comes from, but that’s what he says.

7. This isn’t a recent prediction. He mentioned its possibility in his book 1994? in which he suggested the rapture might occur on September 7 of that year. But if it didn’t, he said, then it would definitely happen on May 21, 2011, due to a difference in calculations. So give him credit. He’s got quite a few years invested in this prediction

Read the rest of the list at JB's blog here.