He's the fellow who spent years crunching numbers in the Bible, coming up with various dates for the Rapture. The best-known of those dates was 21 May 2011, in no small part because Camping took out a lot of advertising for his prediction.
It's not nice to speak ill of the dead, but he was a putz.
His arrogant certainty that the world would end led many in his credulous radio audience to ruin their Earthly lives in preparation for a heavenly one. Yet when his "Rapture 2011" prediction failed to come off, did Camping make restitution to those of his listeners who overturned their affairs because of him? Of course not.
Yes, those snookered listeners were foolish, but Harold Camping took shameless advantage of them in the name of religion.
By the way, how egotistical do you have to be to claim to have cracked the Almighty's secret code singlehandedly — multiple times?
Did even a scintilla of doubt ever cross his mind? Maybe a trace of, oh, I don't know — humility?
I suppose it's kind of hard to walk back the consequences of such hubris. That's why false prophets are reviled.
If you arrogate to yourself special insight into the divine will, you, too, can count on being reviled — like Harold Camping.
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