A letter of apology from apocalypse-predicting nonagenarian radio preacher Harold Camping was released yesterday on his Family Radio website. "Yes, we humbly acknowledge we were wrong about the timing," Camping writes, and he even goes so far as to call his prediction "incorrect and sinful."
He adds, "We tremble before God as we humbly ask Him for forgiveness for making that sinful statement."
See, it turns out that God
didn't plan to destroy our world on May 21, and the whole thing was one of those misunderstandings that are bound to happen when you spend a lifetime thinking that you yourself have it within you to understand the plans and whims of all creation. Whoops!
From Camping's my-bad:
"God has humbled us through the events of May 21, to continue to even more fervently search the Scriptures (the Bible), not to find dates, but to be more faithful in our understanding."
Note that when he writes of the "events of May 21," Camping is referring to the opposite: the pleasant non-events of May 21, when the world just kept on keepin' on.
Camping being Camping, Family Radio's expensive campaign to warn the entire world of its demise isn't exactly a failure:
In the months following May 21 the Bible has, in some ways, come out from under the shadows and is now being discussed by all kinds of people who never before paid any attention to the Bible. We learn about this, for example, by the recent National Geographic articles concerning the King James Bible and the Apostles.
So, he's got that going for him.
Camping's letter alternates between that of a sinner "trembling" before God, and that of an upbeat, do-no-wrong favorite son who even in this colossal public cock-up managed a triumph: bringing the bible to millions who, somehow, had not heard of it before and apparently did not take away the message "Here's that book that is so beloved by that fellow who is wrong about everything!"
