Well Heck.. Guess we're all screwed.

[Jim147]

Wait. That's over a week away.

I hate waiting around.

jim

[HankB]

I wonder if their preparations for May 21 involve purple cloths or Kool-Aid . . . 

[lee n. field]

WOnder what they will have to say after the fact, when nothing happens.

This sort of thing has happened a lot of times.  What happens is that some of them will go back to their old churches, some will bail out completely, and others will just recalibrate the model and soldier on.

Harold Camping, the guy behind this particular enthusiasm, has actually called it wrong before.

I don't know what's hard to comprehend about "no man knows the day or the hour". 

I wonder if their preparations for May 21 involve purple cloths or Kool-Aid . . .

They don't strike me as that sort.

[AJ Dual]

I don't know what's hard to comprehend about "no man knows the day or the hour". 

Then all we need to do is get everyone on earth to guess a different day and hour, (world population 6.5 Billion... approx) and we're good for at least 741,517 years...

HA! GOTCHA GOD! 

[Perd Hapley]

That massive earthquake in Japan must make them feel like they're really on to something. 

[lee n. field]

Harold Camping, the guy behind this particular enthusiasm, has actually called it wrong before.

I don't know what's hard to comprehend about "no man knows the day or the hour". 

A bit more about Harold Camping's history. 

It looks like Mr. Camping dates the "end of the church age" to the date of his own censure and removal as teacher:

When Camping’s first prediction failed, claiming miscalculation, he then began to reinvent his scheme with the idea that God ended the church age. “Sometime earlier” wrote Camping, “God was finished using the churches to represent the kingdom of God.”[3] In his book “We Are Almost There!” we find that Camping chose the date of May 21, 1988 for the end of the church age.[4] Why this particular date? In an obscure time scheme combined with strange mathematical formulas, Camping was able to secure this date as the end of the church age. The common answer heard over the Open Forum was that around thirty-five years ago God began to open the true believer’s understanding to know the entire timeline of history—a justification based on an obscure interpretation of Eccles. 8:5, and other detailed and often confusing studies in numerology.

What Harold Camping conveniently chose not to reveal is that May of 1988, reputedly, was the month the Alameda CRC began censuring Camping from teaching the adult Sunday school class.[5] Though, according to bulletin records, the official announcement of the reorganization of the Sunday school class without Camping as the teacher was made public in the Sunday bulletin on June 5, 1988, the controversy climaxed in the weeks prior to this date, on or around the May 21 date. After a summer of conflict, church visitors were sent to assess the situation and turmoil in the congregation, and supported the Consistory’s decision to deny Camping the privilege of teaching. The official date the elders took over the adult Sunday school class was September 11, 1988.  [/size]

A touch of megalomania, perhaps, in the notion that he himself has eschatological significance?  I know, correlation isn't causation, but "it sure does wiggle it's eyebrows suggestively".

[Perd Hapley]

Mock all you want, Lee, but it's beginning to seem he's not far off.     

I have no use for Camping, but it is looking scary out there recently.

[lee n. field]

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?