Friday, Oct. 21: The End of the World [POLL]

May 21, 2011 was a beautiful day in Westborough, and somewhat at odds with the end of the world prognostications that faced it. 

No fire rained from heaven. No planes crashed to earth. There were no mass disappearances. In fact, very little was different from what it was the day before. 

This was just fine with the billions of people across the globe, save a small group led by radio evangelist Harold Camping who had slotted Saturday, May 21 as the end of time. 

And like every other doomsday prophecy throughout history, the May 21 rapture promised by the Oakland-based Family Radio network owner never materialized. The 90-year-old, self-styled prophet now claims the world will end by this Friday and not with a bang, as previously predicted, but rather with a whimper, said a report by the Huffington Post.  

"The end is going to come very, very quietly probably within the next month...by October 21st," said Camping in a radio address delivered earlier this month, reported the Huffington Post. "Probably there will be no pain suffered by anyone because of their rebellion against God...We can become more and more sure that they'll quietly die and that will be the end of their story." 

Though many Christians believe that Jesus Christ will indeed return someday to rapture his Church, few in the mainstream agree with Camping who originally had designated the Oct. 21 event as the day God would destroy the earth subsequent to the May 21 rapture. 

“To tell you the truth, I didn’t even know about it,” said Fr. Mike Foley of in Westborough. “You are definitely giving me some news.”

He said that no one in the parish has expressed concern about the new predication and he referenced a passage from the Gospel of Matthew which reads, “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only.”

“It’s like trying to take from God the powers that are God’s,” he said.

The Huffington Post gave a rundown of Camping's numerology here. Camping explained his reasoning in some of his writings. 

“Holy God is showing us by the words of 2 Peter 3:8 that He wants us to know that exactly 7,000 years after He destroyed the world with water in Noah’s day, He plans to destroy the entire world forever,” Camping wrote before the May 21 prediction. “Because the year 2011 A.D. is exactly 7,000 years after 4990 B.C. when the flood began, the Bible has given us absolute proof that the year 2011 is the end of the world during the Day of Judgment, which will come on the last day of the Day of Judgment.”

After May 21, Camping offered a variety of explanations for the day seemingly having come and gone without a flap. And while he said he was "flabbergasted" when May 22 rolled around and everything remained essentially unchanged, a post on Family Radio's website explains why the previous prediction only seemed like a bust, said the Huffington Post. 

In the weeks and months since May, Camping has suffered a stroke and has lost much of his following, many of whom had sold all their worldly possessions in full expectation that they were going to be raptured. 

Camping—whose network is reported to be worth $100 million—has been preaching that Jesus will make his return to earth in 2011 for several years now, but this year is not alone is his prognostications. The evangelist has a long history of unsuccessfully predicting the end times, having preached that the world was going to end in 1994, and released a book titled 1994? on the subject, said the Huffington Post.

The level of media attention has also dwindled between the two predictions, though the Facebook page "Post Rapture Looting" has seen a jump of several hundreds of thousands of attendees, upping the total to 833,696 confirmed as going as of Wednesday evening. 

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