Free Republic

The radio preacher who sparked an international media frenzy by predicting the end of the world last month has suffered a stroke. Harold Camping was rushed to hospital from his Alameda, California home on Thursday night. The 89-year-old has survived the stroke - but there are fears that the gravelly, famous voice he used to make his predictions to millions around the world will never be the same.

Eighty-nine-year-old religious nut Harold Camping prophesized that the world would end on May 21, 2011, at 6:00 p.m. local time. A woman who believed him wanted to get a jump on Armageddon and avoid the horrors of fire and brimstone. So she slit her 11- and 14-year-old daughters’ throats with a box cutter and then slit her own. The Rapture did not occur. The world didn’t end. The two daughters and mother survived. The mother is in jail where she belongs. Camping, sadly, also survives and is free to cause the world more grief. Camping promoted his prophecy through his...

It is clear that we are an utterly failed species. Left to our own devices, all we do is embrace the profane, the untrue, and outright evil.In only a few decades, I have seen America START as a world leader in industry; a world policy maker; and a world instructor in how to be free and a functional representative republic. I have seen America FINISH as a second-rate financial has-beenl a country ridiculed on the international stage; and a nearly-complete Police State where SWAT kills with impunity and political 'crimes' abound.Russia, too, attempted to throw off the chains of Communism,...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The evangelical Christian broadcaster whose much-ballyhooed Judgement Day prophecy went conspicuously unfulfilled on Saturday has a simple explanation for what went wrong -- he miscalculated. Instead of the world physically coming to an end on May 21 with a great, cataclysmic earthquake, as he had predicted, Harold Camping, 89, said he now believes his forecast is playing out "spiritually," with the actual apocalypse set to occur five months later, on October 21. Camping, who launched a doomsday countdown in which some followers spent their life's savings in anticipation of being swept into heaven, issued his correction...

It appears that The Rapture leading to the end of the world predicted by a Christian radio broadcaster for this past Saturday, May 21, did not take place. And the failure was covered worldwide. A Google search on Saturday evening yielded over 32,000 articles — in English alone — in the world media. The secular, especially the anti-religious, Left enjoys these spectacles of religious foolishness. They seem to confirm not only how absurd these end-of-days predictions are, but how absurd religion is in general. But the Left should not laugh too loudly. The religious world has far fewer doomsday predictions...

Climate change is now critical, says the Climate CommissionMalcolm Holland, Padraic Murphy From: Herald Sun May 23, 2011 12:00AM "THE atmosphere is warming, the ocean is warming, ice is being lost from glaciers and ice caps, and sea levels are rising." This is the dramatic conclusion of scientists who say climate change cannot be denied, and carbon offsetting is not enough to stop it. The findings are included in the first report by the Government's newly created Climate Commission. It warns people are to blame for rising temperatures, with the last decade the hottest on record. "The biological world is...

Well, Harold Camping's prophesied Judgement Day has raged through Europe and is headed here to NY... with no sign at all that Mr. Camping's devoted little band of followers will be vindicated. A lot of those people spent thousands of dollars spreading Mr. Camping's false teachings. Some of them left jobs and lost families. It's sad, and it's a situation made much worse, in my eyes, by Camping's billboards and messages about May 21, 2011 that "The Bible Guarantees it!" - it does no such thing. Mr. Camping guaranteed it. Mr. Camping's cultish insistence that his followers leave their churches...

It's the end of the world as we know it. Apparently. Harold Camping, the man behind the May 21, 2011, judgement day "campaign" is thoroughly convinced that the day marks the beginning of the end. Then again, he did get it wrong once before. Their "Undeniable" Proof- (the Caravan reads "The Bible Guarantees It") By Emily CheeverI’m not going to lie to you guys but doing this research was less fun and more confusing.  Confusing because most of the infallible proof that they had revolved around numbers.  Numbers, it seems to me, that were just made up to prove fact. ...

On the rare occasion that New Yorkers talk about farming, it's usually something along the lines of what sort of organic kale to plant in the vanity garden at the second house in the Adirondacks. But on a recent afternoon, The Observer had a conversation of a different sort about agricultural pursuits with a hedge fund manager he'd met at one of the many dark-paneled private clubs in midtown a few weeks prior. "A friend of mine is actually the largest owner of agricultural land in Uruguay," said the hedge fund manager. "He's a year older than I am. We're...

Throughout human history and especially in recent centuries, cults of all kinds have predicted the end of the world. You’ve probably noticed that they’ve all been seriously wrong. The latest such silliness has come from 89-year-old Harold Camping’s Family Radio network of 66 stations. Based on his study of the Bible, Camping calculates that doomsday will be on Saturday, May 21, 2011. Christianity is particularly prone to such nonsense. After all, the Book of Revelation is all about doomsday, though with details from a clearly delusional mind. The “son of man” appears out of the clouds with a two-edged sword...

Throughout human history and especially in recent centuries, cults of all kinds have predicted the end of the world. You’ve probably noticed that they’ve all been seriously wrong. The latest such silliness has come from 89-year-old Harold Camping’s Family Radio network of 66 stations. Based on his study of the Bible, Camping calculates that doomsday will be on Saturday, May 21, 2011. Christianity is particularly prone to such nonsense. After all, the Book of Revelation is all about doomsday, though with details from a clearly delusional mind. The “son of man” appears out of the clouds with a two-edged sword...

An Irish American man has spent almost $150,000 in preparation for what he believes is the beginning of the end. Robert Fitzpatrick, 60, spent what he called his "life savings" on bus and subway advertisements throughout New York City in preparation for May 21, 2011 – or Judgement Day as Fitzpatrick has referred to it. Fitzpatrick, a recently retired MTA engineer, is so convinced that the fast approaching date is the end of the world, that he published a book titled "The Doomsday Code." In an interview with the New York Post Fitzpatrick reasoned that his book provided "proof that...

A devastating earthquake strikes Japan. A massive tsunami kills thousands. Fears of a nuclear meltdown run rampant. Bloodshed and violence escalate in Libya. And U.S. companies selling doomsday bunkers are seeing sales skyrocket anywhere from 20% to 1,000%. Northwest Shelter Systems, which offers shelters ranging in price from $200,000 to $20 million, has seen sales surge 70% since the uprisings in the Middle East, with the Japanese earthquake only spurring further interest. In hard numbers, that's 12 shelters already booked when the company normally sells four shelters per year. "Sales have gone through the roof, to the point where we...

Most people like to push thoughts about the end of the world to the back of their minds, hoping that the apocalypse, if it ever comes, will be a long way off. But for one group of not-so happy campers, doomsday is a lot sooner...May 21 to be precise. According to the predictions of the Family Radio ministry, on that date a massive earthquake will shake the world apart, littering the ground with 'many dead bodies'. I think this is Harold Camping's group again ...

A US firm says thousands of people will book their place in post-Armageddon Britain HUNDREDS of people have signed up to book a place in Britain’s first underground nuclear bunker, as a growing number fear the world will end as early as next year. Now a search is under way for a suitable location to build the secret shelter, which will have filtered air, its own water supply and a prison in case of unrest in post-Armageddon Britain. The complex will also have tight security to stop desperate survivors getting in after a nuclear strike or natural catastrophe. US doomsday...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: To Melrose Park, Pennsylvania, this is Mark. I'm glad you called, sir. Hello. CALLER: Mega dittos from ice-bound southeastern Pennsylvania. RUSH: Well, thank you, sir, very much. CALLER: Rush, I wanted to remind your audience that we just passed a very important anniversary. Your website has an Algore doomsday clock that's been counting down a prediction of his that we had ten years left to save the planet from a scorching, and last week we reached the halfway point on that countdown. RUSH: That is exactly right. I was afraid you were gonna tell me we've gone...

Jellyfish are taking over the oceans: Population surge as rising acidity of world’s seas kills predators Britain’s beaches could soon be inundated with records numbers of jellyfish, marine experts warned today.Scientists say the number of jellyfish are on the rise thanks to the increasing acidity of the world’s oceans.The warning comes in a new report into ocean acidification – an often overlooked side effect of burning fossil fuel.Studies have shown that higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doesn’t just trigger climate change but can make the oceans more acid.Since the start of the industrial revolution, acidity levels of...

Janine Zacharia, the Washington Post's Jerusalem correspondent, spins a fanciful, sky-is-falling doomsday scenario for Israel: if you don't hurry up and bend over backwards to get a peace deal with Mahmoud Abbas on almost any terms, then get ready for a Hamas takeover of the West Bank and a third intifada that will rock the Jewish state to its foundations. ("Warnings in Israel of need for peace deal -- West Bank Crisis Feared -- Some in military foresee Hamas rise to power" Nov. 17, page A8). Zacharia attributes her dire warning to a couple of unidentified senior Israeli military and...

The New York Times devoted a big chunk of its front page one day last week to noting that much of the spilled BP Deepwater Horizon oil has "dissipated." Most of it, in fact. And to scant noticeable ill-effect -- at least so far -- relative to the apocalyptic rhetoric attending weeks of televised video footage that showed oil rushing from the ocean floor. It's not clear how much oil actually spilled; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute expert Dr. Judy McDowell estimates that between 96 million and 184 million gallons made its way into the Gulf before the leak was capped...

Ominous reports are leaking past the BP Gulf salvage operation news blackout that the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico may be about to reach biblical proportions. 251 million years ago a mammoth undersea methane bubble caused massive explosions, poisoned the atmosphere and destroyed more than 96 percent of all life on Earth. [1] Experts agree that what is known as the Permian extinction event was the greatest mass extinction event in the history of the world. [2] 55 million years later another methane bubble ruptured causing more mass extinctions during the Late Paleocene Thermal Maximum (LPTM). The LPTM...