End of the World

Harold Camping was even more skeptical about his own doomsday prediction for Oct. 21 than he seemed during the only radio broadcast on the subject, a church member told The Christian Post.

The Sunday before Oct. 21, Camping, the Oakland, Calif.-based minister and radio host, expressed doubt that the rapture would happen on the said day, according to Brandon Tauszik, a member of Camping’s church, who spoke with the Bible teacher in person.

"He told me: 'I’ve done the best I can," Tauszik told CP Sunday in a phone interview. more >>

For nearly 53 years Harold Camping has been a prominent figure in Christian broadcasting. On Monday The Christian Post was exclusively told that the 90-year old was no longer able to lead his storied Family Radio ministry, and would be retiring.

Camping and his wife began the ministry with a consortium of evangelical broadcasters in 1958. The group first purchased radio station KEAR in Oakland, California playing "Christian Gospel" programming and by 2006 became the #19-ranked radio chain in the country.

During the last several years the Family Radio network has suffered operating losses and two of their stations, WKDN in Philadelphia and WFSI in Annapolis, Maryland covering the Washington, D.C. area, are being sold, tentatively to CBS. more >>

For the past five months, Harold Camping's Family Radio website had posted on its main page an "explanation" of why the world did not end on May 21 and why it would truly end on Oct. 21. Four days after Camping's failed doomsday date, however, that explanation has been removed, suggesting that Family Radio may be out of the rapture prediction business.

The move comes soon after Brandon Tauszik, a documentarian who has been attending Camping's Oakland, Calif., church for eight months, confirmed with The Christian Post in an exclusive interview that the Bible preacher has informed those close to him that he will effectively retire.

Additionally, Tauszik told CP that Camping has changed his views about the possibility that one can know the exact date of the end of the world, a notion that Camping has maintained for at least 20 years; the doomsday prophet made his first public end of the world prediction in 1992, claiming the world would end in 1994. more >>

Harold Camping, who predicted Oct. 21 to be the day Christians would be caught up to heaven and that God would judge the world, said on Oct. 16 that he is no longer able to lead Family Radio Stations, Inc. or his ministry, and his wife has confirmed that the 90-year-old radio evangelist has retired, a documentarian close to Camping told The Christian Post in an exclusive interview.

Camping also said in a private conversation that day that nobody could know exactly when the time of the apocalypse would come, according to his interlocutor. That statement constitutes a radical change in his teachings, as Camping used to claim that the date of the end of the world is encoded in the Bible, and that he had found the way to read it through studying it closely for many years.

Brandon Tauszik, a documentarian who has been attending Camping’s Oakland, Calif., church for eight months told The Christian Post Sunday that he spoke with Camping in person on Oct. 16, only a few days before the second coming of Christ was about to occur, as predicted by the Bible teacher. more >>

Despite Harold Camping's insistence that the world would come to an end on Oct. 21, it has been business as usual for his Family Radio network, with employees working, programming remaining unchanged and donations still being requested.

The lack of changes comes as a surprise since the president and founder of the radio network told the world's residents that they would be quietly raptured to heaven or annihilated, depending on their standing with God, on Friday. Camping's Oct. 21 prediction came just five months after his second wrong end of the world prediction, which the radio evangelist had claimed was the start of a "spiritual" judgment, a prelude to the "physical" judgment he predicted would come, now three days overdue.

An unidentified host on Family Radio mentioned the lack of an apocalypse the day after Camping's failed doomsday date, telling listeners on Oct. 22 who might have been saddened at not having been raptured, not to lose hope. more >>

Despite Oct. 21, 2011 coming and going with no rapture taking place, Harold Camping has yet to respond to his latest failed prediction.

Camping's latest doomsday claim marked his second false prediction of the year. The radio preacher originally said the world would end on May 21, 2011.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you, but we at Family Radio have been directed to not talk to the media or the press,” Camping’s daughter Susan Espinoza told the Associated Press Friday. more >>